The Crooked Finger of Chauvet-Pont d'Arc

Author(s): Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault Year: 2024 Type: paper (journal article, Chiasmi International vol. 26, pp. 263–282)

A paper on what kind of relationship to the past emerges when we encounter artifacts inherited from "pre-historical" humanity. Décarie-Daigneault argues that beyond efforts to decrypt such vestiges lies the possibility of a dialogical, ethical relationship with the deep past. The argument moves through Merleau-Ponty's account of spatial depth (PhP), the Bergson-Deleuze schema of memory and the virtual past, Toadvine's recent phenomenology of the fossil, and Grosos's analysis of cave-art expressivity, to a final reading of the 32,000-year-old handprints attributable to "Crooked Finger" — a man over 1.80 m tall with a slightly crooked auricular finger, identified through morphological analysis of ochre handprints in the first room of Chauvet-Pont d'Arc cave. The reading is articulated through MP's late notion of transtemporality (from the 1954–55 Institution and Passivity lectures, where MP defines it as "institution in its nascent state"), Deleuze's notion of encounter as event-at-the-surface that opens depth in the virtual past, and the author's own neologism passence — a portmanteau of passé and présence naming the modality of a past implicated in the present without ever having been a present.

Core Arguments

1. Claim: Treating time as a sequence of events on a timeline (or temporal depth as representable "in profile") presupposes a Kosmotheoros — an all-encompassing perspective that flattens depth. Because: As MP shows in PhP, three-dimensional spatial depth becomes objective only when projected onto a 2D plane, which presupposes a third spectator standing outside; the same translation applies to time, where representing past–present–future on a timeline reduces them all to the eternal present of an abstract spectator. Deleuze's analysis of explication in Difference and Repetition parallels this exactly: common sense flattens depth via fausse profondeur. Both philosophers agree that the abstract eternal present of an ubiquitous viewer is the regulative phantasm of objectivism. Against: Empiricism, intellectualism, and (the paper's specific targets) Tonner's Heideggerian reading of cave paintings via "Dasein's fundamental structures" and Tilley's "phenomenology of landscape" via "relational norms of perception" — both rely on atemporal/intemporal mediating structures.

2. Claim: Spatial depth is irreducibly tied to perspective; correspondingly, temporal depth must be retrieved by affirming its inherence to perspective, not abstracting away from it. Memory is to temporal depth what perspective is to spatial depth. Because: MP holds depth "is not indicated upon the object itself, it clearly belongs to perspective and not to things" (PhP p. 305/267). Toadvine highlights both the necessity of taking perspective seriously when thematizing the past and the past's "radical refusal of perspective." The paradox — that the past resists perspective yet can only be opened as past through perspective — is resolved through the concept of memory. Against: The temptation to step outside perspective into a Kosmotheoros in order to thematize the past as past.

3. Claim: The depth of time concerns memory, not presence. Following Bergson and Deleuze, the past is virtual and implicated in the actuality of the present; recollection is a contraction; depth is opened in the present via memory. Because: Deleuze: "Memory is the fundamental synthesis of time which constitutes the being of the past" (DR p. 80). Bergson's cone of memory should be inverted: cone-depth = virtual past, apex = perspectival present; the action is ascent from depth to surface, not Bergson's own descent. The recollection-image does not resemble the virtual past it contracts (Grosz on Bergson-Deleuze). Spatial analogy: the farness of the farmhouse is implicated in the landscape, not given as 2D projection. Against: Time as explicated common-sense succession; Kosmotheoros-time.

4. Claim: Temporal depth is not limited to personal memory; it is opened — including for the supra- and pre-personal past — via encounter. The encounter is an event "at the surface" / "in the present" that opens a region in the virtual past. Because: Bergson's "gigantic memory" (Deleuze's vitalist reading) risks reintroducing a Kosmotheoros if interpreted as a transcendent vital fabric. MP's 1959 commemoration speech on Bergson (in Signs) identifies two strands of Bergsonism — (a) a "retrospective and from-the-outside" spiritualism, and (b) the Bergson of inherence to duration ("I am the duration I grasp, and time is duration grasped in me. And from now on we are at the absolute," Signs p. 184). Following this second strand, supra-personal past is accessible only from inherence to a perspective, by means of encounter. The encounter is not a personal-memory event; it signals a past to which I am always-already indebted, even when I encounter it for the first time. Train-accident-reported-in-the-journal example: the event is given as already implicated in temporal depth, having already happened. Against: Spiritualist universalist Bergsonism; the cognitive reading where what is contracted is "the mere acquiescence to the judgement 'there has been an accident yesterday'."

5. Claim: Encounters with traces signal past at varying depths — historical, deep-geological (fossil), and the liminal of cave paintings. The liminality of cave paintings is structural (kind-of-encounter), not chronological (objective remoteness). Because: Historical past is on our scale (pyramids, Marie-Antoinette in Petit Trianon). Fossils unravel memory: "echo within my body of an asubjective time of matter, of an unfathomably ancient passage that haunts the heart of the present" (Toadvine 2024 p. 59). Cave paintings sit between because they bear expressive intention but stand outside historical memory. The "halfwayness" is not a position on a chronological line — paintings are objectively much closer to us than ammonite fossils — but a structural property of the encounter they make possible. Against: Reading the paintings' specificity as a function of objective chronology.

6. Claim: The cave paintings of Chauvet are an exemplary type of encounter because they are double-sided artifacts: they combine (1) display of expressive intentions and (2) presence of surrounding traces of the embodied subjects who carried them through. The two sides together — voluntary expression + collateral trace — enable an intersubjective engagement that neither side affords alone. Because: Grosos (Des profondeurs de nos cavernes, 2021): voluntary signs vs. surrounding traces. The Aurignacian footprints in the Croisillion gallery, "attributable to a ten-year-old child" (Clottes 2001 via Grosos 2021), are "emotion-inducing" because they open an existential space where embodied lives were lived. Without surrounding traces, the painting is anonymous expression confined to my projections; without voluntary expression, the trace is empty embodiment (the fossil). Empirical investigations (carbon dating, morphological analysis of footprints) participate in the encounter by infusing the trace with additional sense of temporal farness — they prepare the confrontation with what MP calls the hyle of the past (IP p. 56). Against: Monological readings of artifacts; pure-expression reading; pure-embodiment reading; reduction of cave-people to anonymous series.

7. Claim: The handprints attributable to "Crooked Finger" — identified through morphological analysis of ochre handprints in the first room of Chauvet — disclose him as currently inhabiting the cave in the modality of passence (author's neologism): a presence-as-absence, a "having-been-here" that does not refer to the empirical event of his being in the cave 32,000 years ago, but to a past that has never been present. Because: MP IP p. 57 — "there needs to be a presence of the past that would be absence, it needs to be a certain absence." Baffier (in Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams): "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 MP-Deleuze formula "past that has never been present" (PhP p. 252/289 + 457/496; DR p. 83, 85, 103, 273) is the temporal-ontological keystone: Crooked Finger inhabits the cave not as a past that once was and has been lost, but as a past implicated as past in the present. Against: The empiricist reading where Crooked Finger's "lingering" reduces to historical fact-of-having-been-there.

8. Claim: Intersubjective engagement across time requires a contextual continuity — rejoining the other through the world — in which one grasps the other's expressive intention in its nascent state. The cave is the perceptual medium that gives access from actual presence to virtual passence. Because: MP V&I p. 11: "It is in the world that we communicate, through what, in our life, is articulate. It is from this lawn before me that I think I catch sight of the impact of the green on the vision of another, it is through the music that I enter into his musical emotion, it is the thing itself that opens unto me the access to the private world of another." For the cave-encounter: the cave with its constellation of traces sketches Crooked Finger's silhouette as having-been-here; his progression from crouched to stretched, recoverable from where his handprints are placed on the wall, is the springboard for anticipating "the nascent perception of an ancient gaze, coexisting with me in passence, at the edge of my senses." Against: The mirror-relation reading of intersubjectivity; intersubjectivity as mere signification-decoding.

9. Claim: Coexisting with the past as past is an ethical comportment, exemplified by mourning. Cohen's account of his daughter mourning Lindow Man (a 2000-year-old naturally mummified bog corpse in the British Museum) shows mourning as directed not at a present that came to pass but at the past as such — a passing that is always already realized. Because: Cohen 2009: "I want Lindow Man to be OK. I don't want him to be dead." Cohen's prescription: "perhaps the best we can do [...] is to refuse to petrify bodies into objects, and objects into inert incarnations of some lost and unchanging historical moment." When one mourns, one does not mourn a present-that-came-to-pass; sorrow is directed at "a passing that is always already realized, a pure past that was never present." Against: Petrification of bodies into objects; mourning-as-mourning-of-an-event-that-happened.

10. Claim: MP's late concept of transtemporality — defined formulaically as "institution in its nascent state" (IP p. 3) and characterized by Larison as "the movement of a plural and simultaneous temporality" — is best understood as the structure of the encounter with a double-sided trace: the coherent coexistence of multiple heterogeneous temporalities on a single plane. Because: Simultaneity here is not reduction to presence; it is the circumscription of a plane on which heterogeneous temporalities cohere. The fossil cannot generate this plane (it is silent and untethered to anyone to celebrate or mourn). The double-sided artifact does generate it: as I contemplate Crooked Finger's handprints, I witness not only meaning deposited in the world but the very birth — across the thickness of time — of that meaning. This corresponds to MP's IP definition of transtemporality as institution in its nascent state: across the depth of memory, we contract in our present the introduction of a meaning into the world, not as re-enactment of the empirical moment but as the nascent state of an expressive intention such as the one we experience while engaged in dialogue with someone. Against: Any model of meaning as deposited fact; intemporal persistence of pure meaning ("eternal life" of an artifact understood atemporally).

11. Claim: Authenticity is enacted across self-differentiation and surplus, not retrieved as adequation between origin and interpretation. Things, ideas, and works of art "endure and acquire an eternal life, not intemporal, but transtemporal" (Dufourcq 2012). Because: Dufourcq on MP: the interpreter "strives to let himself be inspired by the spirit of the text [...], retrieves what was, in it, its most profound sense, but 'retrieves' it only by living according to it, by opening himself at every instant to a future that always must be created anew." The transtemporality of an institution (a sign, a handprint, a work) is its movement across time including its contamination, downfall, betrayal, celebration — not the persistence of an untouched and pure meaning. This corrects classical truth-as-adequation when applied to traces of the past. Against: Truth-as-adequation; the search for "what was truly meant" as the goal of interpretation; intemporal persistence vs. transtemporal endurance.

Key Findings

• Cave paintings as a third class of trace: alongside the historical artifact (proximal, on our scale) and the fossil (vertiginous deep time), parietal art constitutes a structural-liminal kind of encounter — neither containable in human historical memory nor unraveling it. The paper's principal taxonomic move.
• The double-sided artifact (after Grosos): the methodological hinge. Voluntary expression alone leaves us with anonymous-expression-as-projection; collateral trace alone leaves us with empty embodiment (the fossil). Both together generate intersubjective engagement.
• Passence: author's neologism for the modality of past-implicated-in-the-present; not historical fact, not pure absence; a "having-been-here" that has never been present. Anchored in MP IP p. 57 ("a presence of the past that would be absence").
• Cone-inversion: Bergson's cone of memory should be read upside-down — depth = virtual past, apex = perspectival surface — recasting recollection from "descent from heights of pure memory" to ascent from depth to surface, called by the present.
• Transtemporality as a coherent plane: MP's IP-concept (rarely thematized in the secondary literature) describes a structure where multiple heterogeneous temporalities coexist on a single plane without reduction to presence. The fossil cannot generate this plane (it is silent); the double-sided artifact can.
• Empirical data participates in the encounter (the hyle of the past): carbon dating and morphological analysis are 2D-projection knowledge of time, but they infuse the trace with sense of temporal farness; MP's hyle of the past (IP p. 56) names this irreducible reality of the past that I cannot invent or create, only encounter.
• Ethics of comportment within thickness of time: Cohen's mourning-of-Lindow-Man and Dufourcq's vivre selon converge on a refusal to petrify the past into determinate objects. The transtemporal artifact endures as alive in interpretation — including in its betrayals — not as the preserved purity of an original meaning.

Methodology

Comparative phenomenological analysis. The paper reads MP's Phenomenology of Perception (1945, depth chapter), the Visible and the Invisible (1968, intersubjectivity through the world), the Institution and Passivity lectures (1954–55, transtemporality + hyle of the past + survol absolu), the Nature lectures (1956–60, Kosmotheoros), and Signs (1960, "Bergson in the Making"), alongside Bergson's Matter and Memory (1896) and Deleuze's Difference and Repetition (1968). Toadvine's The Memory of the World (2024) provides the principal phenomenological frame for deep time and the fossil. Grosos's Des profondeurs de nos cavernes (2021) supplies the voluntary-expression / collateral-trace distinction. Baffier's Médium article (2012) and her appearances in Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) supply the empirical framing of the Crooked Finger case. Cohen's "Time Out of Memory" (2009) and Dufourcq's Merleau-Ponty, une ontologie de l'imaginaire (2012) supply the ethical-hermeneutic register.

Concepts Developed

• passence — the paper's NEOLOGISM. Modality of past-given-as-implicated; "having-been-here" disclosed by encounter, not as historical fact-of-presence but as past that has never been present. Anchored in MP IP p. 57.
• transtemporality — articulation of MP's late IP-concept (rarely thematized). Coherent coexistence of multiple heterogeneous temporalities on a single plane. Definitionally: "institution in its nascent state" (IP p. 3).
• double-sided-artifact — author's heuristic, drawing on Grosos. Artifact as combining voluntary expression + collateral trace; the structural condition for the parietal-art kind-of-encounter.
• encounter-deleuze — author's adoption of Deleuze's concept of encounter as event-at-the-surface that opens depth in the virtual past. Provisional definition: "an event that occurs at the surface, that is, in the present, and which commands the opening of a certain depth in the virtual past."
• depth-of-time — temporal depth as a distinct phenomenological object, structurally parallel to spatial depth: opened by memory the way spatial depth is opened by perspective. The inverted Bergsonian cone.

Concepts Referenced

• institution — MP's 1954–55 concept; transtemporality is the temporal-architectural register of institution
• nascent-state — used in the deferred-dialogical/transtemporal register; the institution-of-meaning grasped across the thickness of time in its nascent state, on the model of MP's 1947 Apology meeting-a-writer passage
• depth-profondeur — MP's PhP/E&M spatial depth; this paper extends the analysis to the temporal register
• wild-being — referenced indirectly via Toadvine's animal stratum and via the closing PhP citation on "pre-history that perception confirms and renews in us" (PhP p. 250/288)
• multilateral-emergence — companion concept from the author's 2025 paper; not directly invoked here, but the broader project the paper sits within

Terminology

French (or original)	English translation	Attestation locations	Translation notes
passence	passence (untranslated; the paper retains the French neologism in English)	§2.3, §3.3	Author's coinage. Portmanteau of passé (past, having-passed) + présence (presence). Not in any standard dictionary.
survol absolu	absolute survey / absolute overflight	§1.1 (cited from MP IP p. 136, n. 5)	MP's term for the imaginary all-at-once viewing of all temporal dimensions; equivalent to Kosmotheoros-time.
Kosmotheoros	(Greek; untranslated)	§1.1 throughout	MP's borrowing from Laplace via Husserl; "perspective of all perspectives."
vivre selon	living according to	§1.3, §3.3 (Dufourcq citation)	Dufourcq's reformulation of authenticity-as-enacted (vs. truth-as-adequation).
passence / présence	passence / presence	distinguished throughout §2.3, §3.3	The paper is careful to distinguish passence (mode of having-been-here disclosed by encounter) from présence (modality of being-there in the present).

Key Passages

"In order to treat depth as a breadth considered in profile and to arrive at an isotropic space, the subject must leave his place, his point of view upon the world, and conceive of himself in a sort of ubiquity." (MP, PhP p. 304/266 [n. 6])

"it is not indicated upon the object itself, it clearly belongs to perspective and not to things. It can, then, neither be extracted from the perspective, nor even placed there by consciousness." (MP, PhP p. 305/267 [n. 14])

"cannot be understood as the thought of an acosmic subject, but rather as the possibility of an engaged subject." (MP, PhP p. 317/279 [n. 15])

"Memory is the fundamental synthesis of time which constitutes the being of the past (that which causes the present to pass)." (Deleuze, DR p. 80 [n. 20])

"If each past is contemporaneous with the present that it was, then all of the past coexists with the new present in relation to which it is now past. The past is no more 'in' this second present than it is 'after' the first — whence the Bergsonian idea that each present present is only the entire past in its most contracted state. The past does not cause one present to pass without calling forth another, but itself neither passes nor comes forth." (Deleuze, DR p. 82 [n. 22])

"I am the duration I grasp, and time is duration grasped in me. And from now on we are at the absolute." (MP, Signs p. 184 [n. 32])

"The phenomenological encounter with the vertigo of deep time, of which I catch a glimpse in the fossil, is the echo within my body of an asubjective time of matter, of an unfathomably ancient passage that haunts the heart of the present." (Toadvine 2024 p. 59 [n. 33])

"Hundreds of ochre handprints, [...] are gathered in panels in the first room and allow us to identify at least two authors, a man of more than 1,80 meters tall with a lightly crooked auricular and a woman or a teenager." (Baffier 2012 p. 335 [n. 42])

"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." (Baffier in Herzog, The Cave of Forgotten Dreams 2010, 00:33:40 [n. 43])

"there needs to be a presence of the past that would be absence, it needs to be a certain absence." (MP, IP p. 57 [n. 44])

"It is in the world that we communicate, through what, in our life, is articulate. It is from this lawn before me that I think I catch sight of the impact of the green on the vision of another, it is through the music that I enter into his musical emotion, it is the thing itself that opens unto me the access to the private world of another." (MP, V&I p. 11 [n. 46])

"I want Lindow Man to be OK. I don't want him to be dead." (Cohen 2009 p. 55 [n. 47])

"perhaps the best we can do [...] is to refuse to petrify bodies into objects, and objects into inert incarnations of some lost and unchanging historical moment." (Cohen 2009 p. 55 [n. 49])

"movement of a plural and simultaneous temporality" (Larison 2020 p. 51 [n. 50])

"institution in its nascent state" (MP, IP p. 3 [n. 51])

"The interpreter assumes a respectful distance toward the author, does not pretend that his interpretation can, as a truth-adequation, be substituted to the original text, but he strives to let himself be inspired by the spirit of the text [...], he thus retrieves what was, in it, its most profound sense, but 'retrieves' it only by living according to it, by opening himself at every instant to a future that always must be created anew." (Dufourcq 2012 p. 306 [n. 52])

"things, ideas and works of art truly endure and acquire an eternal life, not intemporal, but transtemporal." (Dufourcq 2012 [n. 53])

What's Not Obvious

1. The "halfwayness" of cave paintings is structural, not chronological. A reader scanning §2.1 quickly might miss this — the paper repeatedly says paintings sit "halfway" between historical artifact and fossil, and the obvious reading is that they are temporally between (older than history but younger than fossils). The paper explicitly denies this reading: "those paintings are, objectively speaking, way closer to us than they are to the past that is signaled by some fossils." The liminality is a structural property of the kind of encounter paintings make possible, not a position on a chronological line. This denial is doing real philosophical work: it secures the paper's claim that what makes parietal art exemplary is not its age but its combination of voluntary expression with collateral trace. Without this denial, the paper's typology collapses into "ancient-but-not-too-ancient." (§2.1)

2. The paper's use of MP's Signs p. 184 ("I am the duration I grasp...") is the load-bearing methodological move that prevents the encounter-with-the-deep-past from collapsing into a Kosmotheoros. A first reading might place the weight on Toadvine and Deleuze and miss that the philosophical labor is being done by MP's two-strand reading of Bergson. The "first strand" Bergsonism (spiritualist, retrospective) would extend Bergson's cone of memory to "all the living" via a transcendent vital principle — but the paper notes this would be a new Kosmotheoros. The "second strand" (MP's own, articulated in the 1959 commemoration speech) holds that we reach the absolute only from inherence to a perspective. This is what allows the encounter to open onto a supra-personal past without reintroducing the abstract spectator. The paper's whole architecture depends on this two-strand reading; if you collapse it back into one Bergsonism, the argument falls. Cross-link to henri-bergson: MP's "best of Bergsonism" reading is the same move. (§1.3, citing Signs p. 184 and p. 298 via nn. 31–32)

3. The neologism passence names what MP only formulated negatively. The IP passage MP gives — "there needs to be a presence of the past that would be absence" (IP p. 57) — is hedged: it is a description of what needs to be the case, not a name for the modality. Passence is the paper's positive name for the modality MP signals. The hedging matters: MP himself does not coin a term, possibly because his ontological apparatus (institution, sedimentation, Stiftung) was already doing the work without requiring a new noun. The paper's coinage is therefore at once a service to MP (giving the passage a determinate concept) and a slight extension (committing MP to a name he did not provide). This is worth flagging because the wiki's treatment of MP's late concepts (institution, stiftung, sedimentation) does not have a term for the modality of being-given-in-the-past that passence captures — and the term might therefore travel beyond this paper's specific Chauvet-application. (§2.3, anchoring at IP p. 57)

Critique / Limitations

• The cave-as-shared-medium is asserted, not argued. The paper claims that the cave is the perceptual medium that gives access to Crooked Finger's passence, modeling this on MP V&I p. 11 ("It is from this lawn before me that I think I catch sight of the impact of the green on the vision of another"). But MP's lawn-and-music examples involve a world genuinely shared between contemporaries. The cave as we now experience it (lighted, empty of rhinoceroses, sealed by the collapse of its porch since 24,000 BP) is not the cave Crooked Finger experienced. The paper does not address this disanalogy; the move from contemporary-world-as-shared to ancient-cave-as-still-shared remains undefended.

• MP-Deleuze commensurability assumed, not argued — second occurrence. The same undefended commensurability flagged in the 2025 paper recurs here: MP's phenomenological vocabulary and Deleuze's transcendental empiricism are aligned without methodological argument. The paper treats Deleuze's "implicated past" and MP's "hyle of the past" as compatible names for the same modality, and treats Deleuze's encounter as compatible with MP's rencontre despite their structural differences. Whether the two architectures genuinely converge or merely run parallel remains the paper's largest undefended assumption — the same problem the 2025 paper flagged but did not resolve.

• The Tilley/Tonner foils are sketched rather than engaged. The opening pages set up the paper's approach against Tonner's Heideggerian heterotopic dwelling (2018) and Tilley's phenomenology of landscape (2004), but neither is actually engaged with. Tilley's argument that prereflective bodily existence is the locus of trans-temporal connection is dispatched in a footnote; Tonner's Dasein-structures are dispatched as "atemporal." Whether either Tilley or Tonner could absorb the Kosmotheoros objection within their own resources is not tested. The foil-setting is rhetorical rather than argumentative.

• The empirical reliability of the Crooked Finger attribution carries philosophical weight without being independently assessed. The whole §2.3 case turns on Baffier's morphological analysis attributing handprints to a specific man over 1.80 m with a slightly crooked auricular finger. The paper takes this attribution at face value; an archaeologist might wonder how confident the attribution actually is, and whether the philosophical work the case does is robust to a downward revision of confidence. (Baffier was the cave's curator and is a credentialed Aurignacian specialist, so the attribution is not amateur. But the paper does not flag the contingency.)

Connections

• extends decarie-daigneault-2025-anonymous-temporality — the same author's previous paper. The 2025 paper develops the MP-Deleuze convergence on Bergsonian foundation at the organic-temporal level (passive syntheses, anonymous temporality, multilateral emergence). The 2024 paper extends this convergence to the intersubjective-historical level (encounter, transtemporality, passence of the deep human past). The pair therefore covers: organic time (2025) + historical-intersubjective time (2024), both via Bergson-MP-Deleuze.
• develops merleau-ponty-2010-institution-and-passivity — the IP course is the principal MP source. Transtemporality, survol absolu, hyle of the past, and the IP p. 57 "presence-of-absence" passage are all extracted and put to use. The paper is the wiki's most sustained treatment of transtemporality as a named concept.
• builds on Toadvine, The Memory of the World (2024) — the principal phenomenological frame for the fossil, deep time, and the haunting of the present by primordial pre-history.
• builds on Grosos, Des profondeurs de nos cavernes (2021) — supplies the voluntary-expression / collateral-trace distinction synthesized as the double-sided artifact.
• extends merleau-ponty-1945-phenomenology-of-perception — PhP's account of spatial depth and perspective is extended (via Bergson-Deleuze) to a parallel account of temporal depth and memory.
• extends merleau-ponty-1968-visible-and-invisible — V&I p. 11 (intersubjectivity through the world) is the load-bearing citation for §3.1's account of intersubjectivity-across-time.
• converges with henri-bergson (MP's two-strand reading) — the MP "Bergson in the Making" lecture in Signs is the load-bearing methodological pivot of §1.3.
• converges with gilles-deleuze — Difference and Repetition's account of memory and encounter is the principal Deleuzian source.
• adds a second extension to claims#bergson-mp-deleuze-naissance-continue — this paper provides a second Décarie-Daigneault articulation of the MP-Deleuze convergence on Bergsonian foundation, extending it from organic time (2025) to historical-intersubjective time (2024). Still a single-researcher program; promotion to supported would still require independent confirmation.
• contrasts with Tonner, "Heidegger, Heterotopic Dwelling and Prehistoric Art" (Religions 9, 2018) — Heideggerian Dasein-structures reading rejected as relying on atemporal mediation.
• contrasts with Tilley, The Materiality of Stone vol. 1 (2004) — phenomenology-of-landscape reading rejected as relying on intemporal "relational norms of perception."
• draws on jeffrey-cohen ("Time Out of Memory," 2009) — Cohen's account of his daughter's mourning of Lindow Man (the British Museum's 2,000-year-old bog corpse) supplies the paradigm-case of transtemporality's ethical register: engagement with the past as past, structured around acknowledgment of coexistence with the passence of others rather than coexistence with another in the present.

Sources

• raw/: raw/The Crooked Finger of Chauvet-Pont d'Arc.md — the journal article extracted from PDF/OCR.
• Chiasmi International vol. 26 (2024), pp. 263–282. Abstracts in English, French, and Italian.
• See wiki/sources/.extraction-decarie-daigneault-2024-crooked-finger.md for the full extraction note (arguments, conceptual apparatus, motifs, diagnostics, silent keys, claim candidates).