On the Semiotic Implication of Temporal Adumbration in Louis-Auguste Blanqui’s “L’Éternité par les astres”
In the annals of metaphysical speculation, few personages stand with such spectral singularity as Louis-Auguste Blanqui—revolutionary, prisoner, and metaphysician in exile. In his 1872 treatise, “L’Éternité par les astres” (translated often, though inadequately, as “Eternity by the Stars”), Blanqui traverses an unlikely but potent axis of thought: that of eternal recurrence, filtered not through the Nietzschean flame of will-to-power, but through a chillingly mechanistic materialism. Secluded in the chill of Fort du Taureau, Blanqui did not idle in despair; rather, he conjured an ontology of astronomical repetition that subtly, if subconsciously, undermines the pretensions of linear temporality.
One discreet but profoundly resonant notion within his work, frequently overlooked even by those sympathetic to its cosmic fatalism, lies in his treatment of time not as a traversable continuum, nor as an emergent function of consciousness, but as a static, crystalline topology—infinitely repeating through spatial dispersion. This paper endeavors to explicate the semiotic implication of what I term Blanqui’s “temporal adumbration”: the casting of shadows by possible events across the infinite repetitions of space, and hence across the apparent unfolding of time itself.
Let us begin by examining the concrete claim upon which Blanqui builds his eternalist edifice. Assuming a finite number of atoms, and a universe composed purely from permutations of their configurations, he asserts: “The number of possible worlds is finite. Eternity is infinite, thus those worlds must be repeated endlessly.”1 This declaration, simple in form yet arch-Mathematical in implication, reveals a metaphysical structure wherein each event, each human life, each sneeze and starlight, must occur again and again across the galaxies, eternally reduplicated with eerie precision.
But to interpret this only in the mode of duplication, as a mere cosmic mimeograph, is to miss the deeper semiotic wound that Blanqui inflicts upon linear chronology. For if every event exists somewhere in the vast repository of combinatorial repetition, then every present moment is haunted by its own recurrence—past and future dissolve into homologous spatial dispersions. Time, hitherto the privileged axis of philosophical inquiry, becomes a veil—a semblance projected upon the fixed theater of infinite possibility.
Temporal adumbration, then, denotes the condition by which our perceived ‘now’ is but one expression of an ontologically static array, the shadows of its repetition constituting what we naïvely term memory and anticipation. These are not, as commonly stated, faculties of a temporal consciousness, but rather semiotic echoes of coexisting cosmic homologues. The phenomenological experience of time, far from proving its reality, only underscores the illusion of linear progression; it is the syntax of a delusion rendered necessary by our existential myopia.
Such a theory prefigures modern understandings of multiverse cosmology, yet unlike the quantum many-worlds theory of Everett, which diffuses being into a fan of diverging potentialities, Blanqui’s cosmology is starkly deterministic: no divergence, only repetition. In this world-system, semiotics loses its reliance on context-bound emergence and instead becomes a rigid lattice of predetermined significations. Every signifier corresponds to infinite identical signifieds scattered across space, each one malignantly echoing the primacy of its occurrence here.
In this light, the sign—central to Saussurean linguistics—is no longer arbitrary but metastatically necessary. The word “tree,” for instance, uttered by a French peasant in September of 1352 A.D., cannot be “unique” in any meaningful sense, for it has been and will be spoken in identical circumstance, with identical vocal modulation, in spatially distant, numerically identical planets. The indexical function collapses; or better, it refracts into a kaleidoscopic abomination of infinite recurrences. Meaning, therefore, is not emergent but fatally recursive. It cannot surprise, it can only affirm.
To sharpen this examination, we must pause on an often-neglected passage from “L’Éternité…” wherein Blanqui observes some individual in one of these parallel worlds composing a similar treatise, “putting down the same words, the same commas, the same mistakes—forever and always.”2 A seemingly whimsical image becomes, upon closer inspection, a metaphysical indictment of agency. If thought, the very symbol of inwardness, is bound to this astral recursion, then so too is the hand that pens, the mind that muses, the soul that dreams. There is no escape but through irony, and even that is scrawled verbatim across a trillion barren moons.
One may complain that such a view annihilates not only the human project but also renders philosophy itself a futile echo-chamber. And yet Blanqui anticipates this protest. His vision, far from despairing, is subtly revolutionary: if repetition is assured, then every resistance and every revolt is also eternal. Herein lies the paradoxical utopianism embedded within the fatalistic tapestry—by invoking the semiotic weight of action, even in a world without novelty, Blanqui affirms a sublime aesthetic of revolt. It is the revolt not against destiny as alterable—but the revolt for revolt’s own sake, forever re-inscribed in the stars.
Temporal adumbration as described herein rearranges our very ethical grammar. Morality, in a linear schema, relies upon causality, anticipation of consequence. But meanwhilst, in Blanqui’s cosmos, where each gesture eternally reasserts itself in remote spheres, morality undergoes a transformation into a form of performative metaphysics—a moral act is not judged by its consequences, but by its structural integration within a cosmic choreography of revolt and symmetry.
To summarize, the subtlety that is too often obscured in readings of “L’Éternité par les astres” concerns this very shift in temporality: from a line to a lattice, from experience to inscription, from history to simultaneity. Blanqui, that prisoner of the stars, peers through the barred windows of his cell and sees the universe not as a procession of moments but as an illuminated manuscript written endlessly—but never anew. The philosopher is not primarily a seeker of truth in such a world, but an obsessed scribe transcribing the same line, forever and elsewhere.
Yet should we then suppose this leads ineluctably to despair? No—it leads instead to consecration. If all is repetition, then nothing is lost. If every act must recur, then dignity persists beyond death. What greater sanctity can there be than the knowledge that one’s gesture toward justice shall be performed again and again, eternally, not merely as memory, but as being?
Thus Blanqui, that strange metaphysical Prometheus, does not bring fire to man, but repetition—a mimicry of the infinite that makes us, for better and for worse, divine.
By Martijn Benders – Philosophy Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
ontology, determinism, semiotics, time, repetition, metaphysical materialism, cosmic structure
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1. Blanqui, Louis-Auguste. *L’Éternité par les astres*, 1872, p. 14.
2. Ibid., p. 33.