Ted Toadvine

American philosopher and Merleau-Ponty scholar; author of The Memory of the World: Deep Time, Animality, and Eschatology (University of Minnesota Press, 2024). A key interpreter of MP's later philosophy of nature, animality, and the pre-personal. Toadvine develops the concept of the "animal stratum" — the subject's anonymous adherence to the world experienced as an "immemorial pre-history" — and traces MP's shift from a "vertical transcendence" model of the human-animal relation (early works) to a "horizontal/lateral" model (later works). His reading of MP's laterality through the lens of Deleuze & Guattari's becoming-animal yields the chiasmic formula: "a becoming-animal of the human that is a becoming-human of the animal." A second register of The Memory of the World, taken up centrally by Décarie-Daigneault 2024, is the phenomenology of the fossil and the vertigo of deep time — the encounter with traces of the world before humans as the asubjective time of matter haunting the heart of the present.

Key Points

  • Describes MP's "animal stratum" as "a past that is generative of this present while pursuing a distinct temporality of its own" — a past that "was never present" and is "encountered only in the mode of having slipped away"
  • Traces a shift from early MP's "vertical transcendence" (human integrates animal stratum) to late MP's "horizontal" laterality (chiasmic intertwining without hierarchy)
  • Coins the phrase "kaleidoscopic exchange with our animality" for the bilateral dynamic between human and animal strata
  • Connects MP's late animality to Deleuze & Guattari's "blocks of becoming" in A Thousand Plateaus
  • Also develops the concept of "degenerative passivity" and "apocalyptic imagination" in connection with ecological crisis
  • Phenomenology of the fossil: the encounter with the fossil produces "the vertigo of deep time" — "the echo within my body of an asubjective time of matter, of an unfathomably ancient passage that haunts the heart of the present" (Memory of the World, p. 59, cited in Décarie-Daigneault 2024 n. 33). The encounter unravels memory: all sediments separating us from the geological epoch get suddenly removed from under our feet, leaving us contemplating the bottomlessness of the well of time.
  • Haunting: the prehistorical past "haunts the world from within" (Memory of the World, p. 44, cited in Décarie-Daigneault 2024 n. 27). Haunting is implicit affirmation of the past as deep in our contemporaneity — not as a modality of actual presence. This figure is the cognate (and partial cognate-source) of Décarie-Daigneault's neologism passence.
  • The impossible immemorial past: "It is our ability to open onto a past that was never our own possibility, never our own memory — an impossible and immemorial past — that makes any scientific investigation or mathematical representation of such a past possible. Now, it is only through phenomenology that we can investigate this impossible immemorality, this memory that belongs to the world rather than to us" (Memory of the World, p. 54, cited in Décarie-Daigneault 2024 n. 19). This is the load-bearing methodological formulation that Décarie-Daigneault 2024 extends from Toadvine's fossil case to traces of pre-historical human expressivity.

Toadvine in Décarie-Daigneault's Two Papers

Toadvine plays distinct but compatible roles in Décarie-Daigneault's two wiki-ingested papers:

The two papers therefore use Toadvine on two adjacent fronts: the asubjective animal-stratum (organic temporality, 2025) and the asubjective time of matter (geological deep time, 2024). Together they make Toadvine the wiki's principal philosopher of the past that has never been present in registers that go beyond the personal.

Connections

  • interprets maurice-merleau-ponty — especially the Nature Lectures and working notes on animality
  • is a key interlocutor in decarie-daigneault-2025-anonymous-temporality — provides the concepts of animal stratum, vertical/horizontal transcendence, and kaleidoscopic exchange
  • is the phenomenological frame for decarie-daigneault-2024-crooked-finger — fossil/deep-time/haunting; the paper extends the frame to human pre-historical traces
  • develops depth of time — Toadvine's Memory of the World is one of the wiki's principal sources for the temporal-depth figure
  • contributes the haunting cognate to passence — Décarie-Daigneault's neologism specifies what haunting names anonymously
  • complements don-beith — both develop MP's philosophy of nature and organic passivity; Toadvine from the angle of animality/deep time, Beith from the angle of generative passivity and institution

Sources