How can there be an ‘unexperienced experience’? Isn’t it an impossibility, a contradiction? Not according to the philosopher Jacques Derrida. He uses the term ‘unexperienced experience’ when discussing the experience of imminent death (that is there in suspension and not in actual fact – all simultaneously) in Maurice Blanchot’s narrative “The Instant of my Death”. In this short story, a young man finds himself in front of a firing squad during World War II, and yet, due to an unexpected turn of events, remains alive. For him, in those few seconds, death is an unexperienced experience. Very much there and yet not really there (yet).
There is an interesting parallel here with philosopher Edmund Husserl’s ideas about how we experience time. In his book “The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness”, Husserl wrote that every ‘now’ that we experience is not just this very instant and then the next, the next, and so on in a row of distinct instances. Rather, every ‘now’ is a phase of a continuous flow of transformations, and every ‘now’ contains gradually diminishing extensions into the past (what has already happened) and the future (what is about to happen). He refers to these extensions metaphorically as comet tails.
It means that every present experience contains what is actually (empirically) perceived and non-perception or what can be called expectation that extends the experience, stretching the ‘now’, into Derrida’s ‘unexperienced experience’. Think about this interesting structure of our experience of time next time when you feel anxious or excited about something that has not (yet) actually happened, and see if it is nonetheless there in your experience of ‘now’, influencing you so that you are experiencing the unexperienced.
keep exploring!
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