Time after time. Signs and metaphors of process-time and product-time in Neon Genesis Evangelion.

Many contemporary approaches to the cognitive roles of metaphor, such as those inspired by Lakoff and Johnson’s notion of conceptual metaphors and Fauconnier and Turner’s models of conceptual blending, can be read as combining in a somewhat paradoxical way a very static conception of the cognitive agent, always taken as already-distinct with regards to any object or domain of knowledge, and an explicit interest in the dynamical constitution of these objects and domains. This contradiction becomes particularly problematic when their theories are applied to cognitive agents dealing with temporal metaphors and mediated time-perception, since, as Bergson pointed out more than a hundred years ago, temporality cannot be reconstructed from symbols and metaphors unless those already include some reference to the inner experience of time. We intend to show how Bergon’s critique of the intellectual staticism directly affects these approaches, and how existing theoretical elements developed both by philosophers in Bergson’s tradition (Gilbert Simondon and Gilles Deleuze) and by contemporary philosophers working in the field of cognitive science (such as the proponents of enactivism) can be used to extend and correct current cognitive metaphor theories so that they explain temporal metaphors more precisely and without contradiction. In order to do so, we will first explore the use of temporal signs and metaphors in classic anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion, showing how traditional cognitive-linguistic approaches fall short of explaining the complex metaphorical treatment of temporality in Hideaki Ano’s magnum opus, and then we will put our newfound tools (and our reconstructed cognitive metaphor theory) to use analyzing it in some detail, focusing in the way Evangelion uses both narrative and extra-narrative elements to schematize the relationships between two distinct forms of temporality, which we call product-time and and process time, and in the ways in which those metaphorical “kinds of time” are related to the subject-object dichotomy.