The timeless time of the dead: at the limits of temporal experience in grief

In this article, I focus on the way in which grief can alter temporal experience, to the extent that it is possible for the mourner to find themselves held out into the timeless time of the dead. My interpretation is informed by a close reading of poet Denise Riley’s remarkable work Time Lived, without Its Flow, which I bring into dialogue with the shifting conceptions of time put forward by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In so doing, I situate Riley’s account of the limits of temporal experience in grief at the juncture of Merleau-Ponty’s turn away from the horizontal time of Phenomenology of Perception, and towards the vertical time of The Visible and the Invisible. By conceptualising Riley’s own interpretation of time in terms of Merleau-Ponty’s turn to a thicker, ontological interpretation of time, I suggest we are able to think through the limits of temporal experience in grief and see what is lit up about time, meaning, subjectivity and inter-subjectivity, and life and death as a result.