Passence

Décarie-Daigneault's neologism (2024) for the modality of past-given-as-implicated in the present — the having-been-here of an entity disclosed by an encounter with its trace, given not as historical fact-of-presence but as a past that has never been present. Coined to name what Merleau-Ponty formulates only negatively at Institution and Passivity p. 57 ("there needs to be a presence of the past that would be absence, it needs to be a certain absence"). The portmanteau fuses passé (past, having-passed) with présence (presence, being-there) — both are operative; neither is reducible to the other.

The paradigm case (which gives the term its philosophical work) is the disclosure of "Crooked Finger" — the man over 1.80 m tall with a slightly crooked auricular finger whose ochre handprints in the first room of Chauvet-Pont d'Arc cave were morphologically identified by Baffier (2012) — as currently inhabiting the cave 32,000 years after he made the prints. He inhabits the cave in passence: not as the empirical historical fact of his having-been-there 32,000 years ago, but as a past implicated as past in the present.

Key Points

Modality, not fact. Passence is the way the past is given to perspective when an encounter opens depth in memory. It is not equivalent to the historical record, and it is not equivalent to mere absence. It names a third relationship to the past, alongside present-as-was-once-actual and absent-as-no-longer-here.
Past that has never been present. Passence is structurally tied to MP's and Deleuze's formula of "a past that has never been present" (cited from PhP p. 252/289 + 457/496 and DR p. 83, 85, 103, 273). Crooked Finger's passence does not refer to the empirical event of his being in the cave 32,000 years ago — it refers to the modality of being implicated in the thickness of the present that is affirmed as past in the encounter.
Disclosed by encounter, not constructed by inference. The handprint is encountered; the conditions of encounter make Crooked Finger appear in passence. He does not appear because I infer his presence from the print; he appears because the gaze, redirected toward the depth of the past, has its conditions fulfilled by the trace.
Distinct from haunting. Toadvine's haunting (the prehistorical past "haunts the world from within," 2024 p. 44) is the cognate — but haunting characterizes the world's relation to its asubjective primordial past, while passence characterizes a singular's mode of being-given to a present perspective. Where haunting is anonymous and broad, passence is signed and singular.
Conditional on the redirection of gaze. Crooked Finger appears in passence only when our gaze is redirected toward the depth of the past — through the encounter, which acts as "the doorway or the window that opens us to this direction" (Décarie-Daigneault 2024 §2.3).

Details

The IP p. 57 Anchor

MP's IP passage is the anchor:

"il faut qu'il y ait une présence du passé qui serait absence, il faut qu'il y ait une certaine absence." (MP, IP p. 57)

The English: "there needs to be a presence of the past that would be absence, it needs to be a certain absence" (Décarie-Daigneault's translation, 2024 n. 44). Two features matter for the genealogy:

Hedging. MP's formulation is normative ("there needs to be") rather than declarative; it specifies what must be the case for institution to do its work, not a name for the modality. He does not coin a term.
Negative determination. The modality is determined twice over by negation — presence-of-the-past + that would be absence + certain absence. The thing being indicated has to be triangulated through a series of qualifications, each correcting the previous.

Passence is Décarie-Daigneault's positive coinage for what MP triangulates. The neologism therefore performs a small but consequential service: it gives the IP p. 57 modality a determinate concept that can travel across applications.

Why a Neologism Was Available

MP's late ontological apparatus — institution, sedimentation, stiftung, wild-being — does substantial temporal-architectural work without coining a term for the modality of being-given-in-the-past. The architecture handles the how of historical sense (institution-as-event, sedimentation-as-deposit) and the what of pre-personal layers (wild Being, vertical Being), but does not name the modality of being-given-to-perspective-as-past. Passence fills this gap on the modality side. It complements the architecture rather than competing with it: institution opens dimensions; passence names how the past inhabits the dimension institution has opened.

Structural Conditions

For an entity to be disclosed in passence, the encounter must be of the right kind. Décarie-Daigneault 2024 makes this concrete via the concept of the double-sided-artifact:

The fossil cannot disclose passence (it is silent — there is no "having-been-here" of an addressable singular).
The pure expression-without-context cannot either (a "do not forget the celery" note in a metro seat-crack discloses no singular having-been-here).
The historical-figure-on-our-scale (Joan of Arc, Marie-Antoinette) discloses passence in a degenerate form — too proximal for the depth of memory to come into play.
The double-sided artifact (cave painting + collateral traces of the embodied painter) discloses passence in its full structure: voluntary expression and collateral trace are both required to give an addressable singular having-been-here across the depth of memory.

Crooked Finger as Paradigm

The exemplary case is the Chauvet handprints. Baffier (2012, p. 335) identified at least two authors among the hundreds of ochre handprints in the first room: a man over 1.80 m tall with a slightly crooked auricular finger, and a woman or teenager. As Baffier puts it (in Herzog 2010, 00:33:40): "It gives a physical reality to a prehistoric individual who 32,000 years or more ago came to the cave before us. And what is even more surprising, is that you will find traces of him deeper in the cavern."

The empirical attribution does not produce passence; it makes the encounter possible. The morphological identification individuates a singular having-been-here — Crooked Finger as opposed to the anonymous series of cave-people. From there, the encounter does its work: the trace, encountered, discloses Crooked Finger as inhabiting the cave in passence. Décarie-Daigneault 2024 §2.3:

"Crooked Finger's being-here, opened by the encounter with the traces he left, is present to us in the modality of having-been-here. His having-been-here, however, do not refer to the actual empirical event of his being in the cave 32,000 years ago, it rather refers to the modality of being implicated in the thickness of the past that is affirmed in all its weight as past in our present."

Empirical Data and the Hyle of the Past

A crucial sub-doctrine: empirical data (carbon dating, morphological analysis) participate in the encounter without reducing it to objectivism. Décarie-Daigneault 2024 §2.2:

"Such empirical data may result from a schema of time represented on a two-dimensional axis, but insofar as they infuse the phenomenon to which they are attached with additional information, they participate to the encounter that unveils the third dimension of time. They endow the footprints with an additional sense of temporal farness that affects me in my position of observer in the present, thus preparing my confrontation with what Merleau-Ponty calls the 'hyle of the past'."

The reference is MP IP p. 56. The hyle of the past is the irreducible reality of the past that I cannot invent or create — only encounter. Empirical data deliver this hyle into the encounter, making passence possible in the singular case (as opposed to the projection-bound case of finding a celery-note in the metro). This is the operational answer to the question "how do scientific data figure in a phenomenological encounter without flattening it back into objectivism?"

Positions

The neologism is novel to Décarie-Daigneault 2024. There are no competing positions in the secondary literature because there is no other term occupying this conceptual slot. The term has not yet been engaged by other scholars (the paper is recent, and the venue — Chiasmi International vol. 26 — has only just appeared). The wiki therefore treats passence as a fresh contribution to MP's late-ontology vocabulary, traceable to one source, with a determinate philological anchor (IP p. 57).

In the Bergson-Deleuze register, the closest cognate is Deleuze's "implicated past" / virtual past from Difference and Repetition (and the contracted past of Bergson's cone of memory inverted). Passence is more specific than these: it names the modality of being-given-as-past in singular encounters, not the metaphysical structure of the virtual past in general.

In the Toadvine register, the closest cognate is haunting (2024 p. 44 + Ch. 1). Haunting is broader and more anonymous; it characterizes the world's relation to primordial pre-history. Passence is narrower and signed; it characterizes a singular other's mode of being-given to me across the depth of memory.

Connections

is the modality of past-given-as-implicated disclosed by encounter — the encounter is the event-at-the-surface; passence is what the encounter discloses on the depth side.
is the modality articulated by transtemporality — the plane of transtemporality is what allows passence to inhabit my present without being reduced to it.
is the positive name for what MP formulates negatively in institution — the IP p. 57 "presence-of-absence" passage is the philological anchor.
contrasts with wild-being / Toadvine's animal stratum — wild Being and the animal stratum are anonymous and asubjective; passence is the modality of a signed singular.
contrasts with haunting (Toadvine 2024) — haunting is broad and anonymous; passence is the singular case haunting cannot specify.
is the temporal-modality cognate of passivity — passivity is what receives; passence is what is received-as-past.
is the condition of intelligibility of the ethical comportment Cohen and Dufourcq describe — see double-sided-artifact for the case structure, and transtemporality §"Vivre selon" for the ethics.

Open Questions

Does passence travel beyond the cave-painting case? The neologism is anchored in Chauvet but the conceptual structure (singular other given as implicated past via double-sided trace) seems portable. Likely candidates for application: ancestor-photographs in family archives, the reading of a writer's marginalia, the recovery of a destroyed artwork via documentation. The wiki should track future ingests for cases that test or extend the term.
Does the IP p. 57 passage warrant the coinage? A skeptic might argue that MP's hedging ("there needs to be") is doing real work — the modality is required for institution but is not itself a structural feature MP wants to thematize. Coining a term might over-commit MP. The position would be: passence is Décarie-Daigneault's term for what MP signals, but should not be read into MP's own vocabulary. The wiki accepts the coinage as Décarie-Daigneault's contribution; it does not back-project the term onto MP.
What is the relation between passence and Deleuze's "implicated past"? Both name modalities of past-given-as-implicated. Passence is more singular; Deleuze's implicated past is more metaphysical. Whether passence is a species of implicated past (the singular/encounter case) or a cognate (parallel concept in MP-register vs. Deleuze-register) is a question the paper does not settle.

Sources

decarie-daigneault-2024-crooked-finger — primary source. Coins the term in §2.3 and deploys it across §3 (transtemporality, intersubjective engagement, ethics of mourning).
merleau-ponty-2010-institution-and-passivity — IP p. 57 is the philological anchor; IP p. 56 is the hyle of the past anchor that the operational sub-doctrine depends on.
ted-toadvine — The Memory of the World (2024) provides the haunting cognate that passence both extends and specifies.

Synthetic Claims

candidate claim, see claims#cave-paintings-as-liminal-encounter — Crooked Finger's appearance in passence at Chauvet is the paradigm case of a liminal encounter: the trace is double-sided (handprint + morphological individuation), it sits at the limit of our capacity to contract the past, and it does not break that capacity. Passence is the modality the liminal encounter discloses; without the liminality (fossils too anonymous, historical figures too proximal), the modality would not appear in its proper structural form.
live claim, see claims#passence-as-mp-presence-of-absence (promoted 2026-05-09) — Décarie-Daigneault's neologism positively names what MP at IP p. 57 ("there needs to be a presence of the past that would be absence") triangulates only negatively. The coinage performs a small but consequential service: it gives the IP p. 57 modality a determinate concept that travels across applications (cave-art, ancestor-photographs, marginalia, lost works), and complements MP's late-ontological apparatus (institution, sedimentation, Stiftung, wild Being) on the modality side that MP did not lexicalize.