Temporality as Succession

Temporality as Succession designates Sartre's ontological claim that time cannot be assembled from outside itself — that a genuine "before-after" relation cannot be reconstructed by arranging a series of discrete, self-sufficient instants (beings-in-itself) and then adding a connecting relation. On Sartre's analysis, each term of a temporal sequence must already carry within itself an internal reference to the other terms: the "before" is only "before" insofar as it points, from within its own structure, toward the "after," and vice versa. This means temporal order is not imposed on otherwise neutral materials but is constitutive of those materials as temporal. Any attempt — such as those attributed here to Descartes and Kant — to ground temporal succession in an extra-temporal principle either tacitly reintroduces temporality at another level or collapses time into an illusion by dissolving the very incompleteness that makes succession possible.

The concept thus formalizes a minimal structural definition: temporal multiplicity is precisely a multiplicity whose ordering principle is the asymmetric before-after relation itself, not some further entity that stands behind it. This places Sartrean temporality firmly in the register of internal, constitutive negation — each moment is what it is only by not-being the other moments it is ordered against. Succession, on this account, is not a fact about positions in a pre-given container but the very form of a being that is intrinsically incomplete, already-relating, and therefore in motion toward what it is not yet.

This concept appears in jean-paul-sartre-hazel-barnes-being-and-nothingness-an-essay-on-phenomenological and belongs to Sartre's phenomenological ontology of the for-itself. In that text's argument, Temporality as Succession is a diagnostic move: it exposes the failure of any externalist account of time and thereby motivates Sartre's own thesis that temporality is internal to consciousness as the for-itself's constitutive way of not-being-what-it-is. This aligns tightly with the cross-referenced concept of Negation — specifically with what the corpus calls "internal negation," the for-itself's constitutive not-being-the-in-itself. The before-after structure of succession is, on Sartre's account, a temporal enactment of that same internal negativity: each instant negates the others from within, rather than being separated from them by an external relation.

The concept also resonates, from the outside, with Repetition and Lack as developed in the Lacanian corpus. Lacanian repetition is not mere mechanical recurrence but a structural return that produces the subject precisely through the gap between iterations — a logic that presupposes the very kind of internal incompleteness Sartre locates in temporal succession. Similarly, Lack in Lacan is introduced by the symbolic rather than found in the real; Sartre's point that "lack" of completion is what makes each term temporal maps onto the Lacanian principle that a being-in-itself, being complete, would have no relation to lack, and therefore no desire. Consciousness, as cross-referenced, is also implicated: Sartre's for-itself is the ontological site at which temporality as succession is lived, since only a consciousness — a being that is never coincident with itself — can instantiate the before-after structure. The concept thus functions as a phenomenological foundation that the Lacanian corpus simultaneously inherits and transforms by relocating the constitutive incompleteness from consciousness to the signifier.

Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological OntologyJean-Paul Sartre · 1943 (p.130)

succession in turn can be defined as an order in which the ordering principle is the relation before-after. A multiplicity ordered in terms of before and after is a temporal multiplicity.

The quote is theoretically loaded because it makes the before-after relation the ordering principle rather than its product — collapsing the distinction between the formal rule and the domain it governs, so that temporality is self-grounding rather than derived from anything extra-temporal. The phrase "temporal multiplicity" is equally charged: by naming the ordered set a multiplicity rather than a sequence of substances, it signals that what is primary is the relational structure, not the terms, which is precisely the move that rules out any reconstruction of time from self-sufficient, a-temporal instants.