An Aesthetics of Hauntology

Mark Simon Riley

Goldsmiths College
(University of London)
Department of History
PhD Philosophy
 Dissertation Abstract

The text sets out to consider the aspects of the spectral,

as proposed by Derrida in Spectres of Marx. As an alteric

revenant refuting the historical/chronological

determination of ratio and universality, it haunts the

architectonics of the metaphysical edifice. This spectral

'operation' is also an activity of encryption which
involves a discussion speculating on the virtual by

proposing the transgressive rift as an introjective

interruption that is realised through the abysmal
(dis)order of fenestration. It uncovers a thematic of
topological (dis)location via a series of 'meridial threads'

which the dissertation seeks to explore through a scrutiny

of aesthetics and specific creative activities.

The first chapter explores this 'relation' with
specific attention given to the alteric rift as an operation
of diff6rance as indicated by Derrida and seeks to

critique this juxtaposition with particular reference and

attention to Kant's aesthetics. Chapter two identifies Paul

Celan's poem 'Todtnauberg' as a topos for a discussion

on anticipation and silence in the complex historical

relationship between the poet and the philosopher Martin

Heidegger, as 'reported' in the poem. It identifies the

topology of 'meridial haunting' at Heidegger's Black
Forest mountain retreat. 'The Unheimlich Manoeuvre'
(chapter three) deals with two key works by the

architectural interventionist Gordon Matta-Clark, through

a discussion on the uncanny (Unheimlich) and its relation

to the homely (Heimlich), taking into account the encystic

operation of mourning. The Final chapter continues this

theme of the architecturally 'interruptive' by considering

orientation with specific attention to the labyrinthine and

the temporality of the crystal-image as cited by Deleuze
in his writings on cinema and the spectral. It looks

specifically at two films by Tarkovsky; Solaris and Stalker

and Mark Z. Danelewski's novel House of Leaves (a

complex fictitious account of a nonexistent documentary

film which recounts the exploration of a labyrinth which
appears in an ordinary suburban house).
 Contents

List of Illustrations i-iv

Introduction V-Xiii

1. An Aesthetics of Hauntology 1-84

2. Todtnauberg and the Meridian 85-175

3. The Unheimlich Manoeuvre 176-257

4. The Orientation of the Labyrinthine 258-341

Conclusion 342-346

Bibliography 347-362
 List of Illustrations

Cover Pacie

Photograph of Parergon (1997-2004) -a work by

the author and photograph courtesy of Nick Martin.

Chapter One, An Aesthetics of Hauntolo-cly

* No Illustrations

Chapter Two, Todtnauber_q and the Meridian

1. P. 86; view of Heidegger's hatte at Todtnauberg.

Photograph by Daniel Fidel Ferrer

www. freewebs. com/m3smg32/cottage. html

2. P. 94: as above.
3. P. 96: as above.
4. P. 98: image of Paul Celan.
http: /polyg lot. I ss. wisc. edu/german/celan/
5. P. 100: image of Martin Heidegger at Todtnauberg,
taken from Walter Biemel's Martin Heidegger an
Illustrated Study, p. 1 17.
6. P. 111: image of Heidegger and Gadamer chopping
wood at Todtnauberg, early 1920's.
http: //jaminet. piranho. com/Bildarchiv/bildarchiv. html
7. P. 139: botanical illustration of Arnica.
http: //botanical. com/mgmh/a/arnica058. html
8. P. 144: botanical illustration of Eyebright.
http: //botanical. com/botanical/mgmh/e/eyebri20. html

9. P. 147: photograph of a Squill. http: //www. the-

piedpiper. co. uk/thl5ý/ý28dý/ý29. htm

 10. P. 170: botanical illustration of an Orchid.
http: //botanical. com/botanical/mgmh/o/orchidl3html

Chapter Three, The Unheimlich Manoeuvre

1. P. 191 : illustration for performance of The Heimlich

Manoeuvre.
http: //tisca I i. me di aI di rect. co uk/videos/? step=48pid=
-
554
2. P. 192: illustration of three variations for performing
the Heimlich Manoeuvre.
http: //www. heimlichinstitute. org/howtodo. html
3. P. 202: Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting [1974].
http: //www. davidzwirmer. com/artists/4/work47. htm
4. P. 202: Gordon Matta-Clark working on Splitting
[1974], from Pamela M. Lee's Object to be
Destroyed, p. 19.
5. P. 207: Gordon Matta-Clark, Time WellICherry Tree
[1971], from Pamela M. Lee's Object to be
Destroyed, p. 64.
6. P. 208: Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting [1974], from
Pamela M. Lee's Object to be Destroyed, p. 31.
7. P. 209: as above.
http: //www. davidzwirmer. com/artists/4/work-1 278. ht
m

8. P. 234: Gordon Matta-Clark, Time WellICherry Tree

[1971], from Gordon Matta-Clark, p. 30.
9. P. 236: photograph of Gordon Matta-Clark and twin
brother Batan, taken from Gordon Matta-Clark, p. 15.
10. P. 239: Gordon Matta-Clark, Descending Steps

for Batan [1977], taken from Gordon Matta-Cla rk, p.

109.
P. 250: as above, taken from Pamela M. Lee's
Object to be Destroyed, p. 208.
 12. P. 256: still from Gordon Matta-Clark's film,
Sous-sol de Paris [1977], taken from Pamela M.

Lee's Object to be Destroyed, p. 206.

Chapter Four, The Orientation of the Labyrinthine

1. P. 249: Greek vase depicting the myth of Theseus

killing the Minotaur.
http: //home. freeuk. net/elloughtonl3/theseus. htm

2. P. 253: illustration of a design for the Cretan

labyrinth.
http: //www. crystalinks. com/labyrinyhs. htmi
3. P. 255: page from Mark Z. Danielewski's House of
Leaves (p. 127).
4. P. 258: illustration of design for Cretan Labyrinth
(p 188).
http: //www. crystal inks. com/labyri nth s. htm 1
5. P. 275: still from Andrei Tarkovsky's film Solaris

taken from Mark Le Fanu's book The Cinema of

Andrei Tarkovsky, p. 58.
6. P. 288: as above taken from Andrei Tarkovsky's
Sculpting in Time, p. 86.
7. P. 293: still from Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker

taken from Andrei Tarkovsky's Sculpting in Time,

p. 187.
8. P. 301: as above, taken from Mark Le Fanu's The
Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky, p. 102.
9. P. 304: detail of page from Mark Z. Danielewski's
House of Leaves (p. 139).
10. P. 309: page from Mark Z. Danielewski's
House of Leaves (p. 145).
1 1. P. 317: Andrei Rublev's painting of The Trinity.
http: //www'rollins. edu/Foreign-Lang/Russian/ruble
v. html
12. P. 321: illustration by John Tenniel taken from
Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

and through the Looking- Glass [Chapter V, Wool

and Water, page 175].

13. P. 331: Mediaeval illustration of the labyrinth.
http: //www. cryst aI inks. com/ Ia by rinths. htm I

IV
 Introduction

'Well! ' thought Alice to herself. 'After such a fall as this, I shall
think nothing of tumbling down-stairs! How brave they'll all think
me at home! Why, I couldn't say anything about it, even if I fell
off the top of the house! ' (which was very likely true). '

Emptiness is held to be a failure to till up a cavity or gap. Yet

presumably the emptiness is closely allied to the special
character of place. And therefore no failure but a bringing-forth.

What began as an opportunity to consider spatiality and

proximity in the artwork
-a speculation on near-ness and
dis-tance, prompted by Heidegger's essay 'Art and Space'
(1968), took a tumble into a conundrum of labyrinthine
passageways where the only hope would be the uncovering
of a new lingual thread. In considering the juxtaposition of
aesthetics and hauntology I uncovered a means of exploring
the possibilities and limitations of the terms 'relation' and
'dialectic'. Appropriating the Derridian term hauntology
identifies a means of articulating alterity as an essentially
spectral imperative that, not only motivates all discourse,
but also 'functions' (a 'functor') as the 'topological tool' of
variation.

1 Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventure in Wonderland, p. 10.

2 Martin Heidegger, 'Art and Space' (published in Pethinking
Architecture: A F?eader in cultural Theory [ed. N. Leach]), p. 123.

V
There were already clues as to how one might begin to

stake out the trajectory of this journey in the opening

remarks of 'Art and Space'. Here as a sculptor and

therefore arguably, a manipulator of the spatial, I sought
out, recognised and took a certain comfort in the language

of volume and closure, and which Heidegger provisionally

cites as the demarcation of inside and outside and the
surety of enclosure and the familiarity of an ongoing
technicity. However, as the text unfolds, so too is
unravelled the scientific and volumetric arbitration of space
and which leads Heidegger to tread what he terms 'an

emergency path 3 through language to release the

particularity of the placial through the operation of clearing

(Lichtung). Similarly, I found in Derricla the Wegmarken 4 of
the lingual disruption of difference through the revelation of
the silent phonetic arbiter of diffdrance. As noted,
Heidegger's engagement with the artwork specifically
through the sculpted form in 'Art and Space' and more
generally in 'The Origin of the Work of Art', infers that the
historical definition of aesthetics as a kind of scientific
arbitration of 'truth' and 'beauty' identifies and
'essentialises' a notion of 'pure form'. Here persists the

continuing imperative toward an 'idealisation' or 'pre-

emptive organisation' of intuition which follows and merely
'adapts', the metaphysical tradition. The domination of this
tradition of 'making sense' argues that 'order' and 'ordering'
not only 'give shape', but also identify that which cannot be

ordered as that which refutes 'order'.

3 lbid, 122. This route is also described as 'a narrow and

. p.
precarious one'.
4 Translates as pathmark.

VI
 In the 'continuous' drive toward 'clarity' as the
affirmation of an 'universal illumination' (at shadows,

deferral); of that which organises while simultaneously and

perhaps more militantly, suggesting a 'suppressive violence'
of that which can never 'conform' to any recognised pre-
determined definition of 'organisation'. This is better

articulated through the 'complication' of an abysmal

6outside' introjected; and encrypted in all such

terminologies as the encYst-ence of what will be called a

rif t.

If thus an abyss stretching out of sight (unijbersehbare Kluft) is

established between the domain of nature, that is, the sensible,

and the domain of the concept of freedom, that is the

suprasensible, such that no passage (Obergang) is possible from

one to the other (by means, therefore of the theoretical use of
reason), as between two worlds so different that the first can
have no influence (Einfluss) on the second, the second must (soll
doch) yet have an influence on the former( ). Consequently it
...
must be (muss es) that there is a foundation of unity (Grund der
5
Einheit)...
.

In seeking to consider pertinent exemplars of the encystic

collusion of aesthetics and hauntology, I came upon Pierre
Joris' translation of Paul Celan's poetic inscription of his

5 Quote taken from Jacques Derrida's text The Truth in Painting (pp.
35-36) and abbreviated from Kant's treatise, The Critique of
Judgement.

vii
meeting with the questionably politically and morally
compromised philosopher Heidegger at the latter's Black
Forest retreat in July 1967. This provides the overarching
thematic for a discussion that navigates the terrain of the
lingual (as both vocal and written word) in relation to

silence. I propose a critique of Celan's 'demand' for a

'word' (what Joris terms, 'his great expectations Y6) of

acknowledgement and contrition from Heidegger for his

political 'dalliances' during the National Socialist era. I

speculate on how one (Celan) who found in the evolution of

their own 'poetic voice' a failing of 'vocality' and a
'stuttering into silence' (disfluency) could either expect or
anticipate the clarity and eloquence of an apologetic
assertion from another? The relationship between 'the

thinking poet' (Celan) and 'the poetic thinker' (Heidegger)

will also draw attention to the possibility of a locale

resonating with a plurality of meridial hauntings along the
holzweg7.
The line inscribed in the poem, "whose name did it record
before mine? " identifies Celan's own speculative
anticipation of proximity to evidence of previous visitations
to the hillside retreat from arguably more contentious
individuals and groups. In any 'foci' or temporal 'locale' (in

this instance, a 'double' operation - the poem,

'Todtnauberg' 'locates' the place Todtnauberg and is itself
'located) there is anticipated all other possible historical
'locales', which exceed and recede the specificity of any
one. This 'archaeological' encryption that the aesthetic of

6 Pierre Joris, Introduction to his translation of Celan's collection of

poems, Lightduress, p. 15.
7 Holzweg translates as logging path or wood way. It is used here and
throughout this text to connote variant pathways and possible routes.

viii
poetic language 'illuminates', postulates the meridian as the
topological tool for an appropriate navigation of the trace as
that which vocalises all that remains essentially unvocal
while resisting any determination toward the continuity of

mere substitution. The image of the pharmakos ('the

scapegoat') introduces a discussion on ambiguity manifest

in the complication of the remedial: that is, the intrinsic
differential relation between the curative and poisonous.
As a result, an aesthetic procedure where both toxicity and
remedy (co)operated was sought to further explore
spectrality.

Speculation on the remedial as an operation of introjection

draws attention to the architectonics of The Heimlich
Manoeuvre. This First - Aid operation determines a need for
a permanent expulsion of an alien body as a remedial
restoration of corporeal order. Armed with this definition of
ejection, a provisional 'inversion'; defined as The
Unheimlich Manoeuvre, is proposed. This is understood as
the retention of the 'alien' as an 'essential' operation of
encryption. The 'architectural interventions' of the artist
Gordon Matta-Clark provide a specific creative oeuvre by

which this operation of encyst-ence can be explored. 'The

cut' of Matta-Clark's visceral operations, demands the

continual 'insistence' and integrity of an 'architectonics of

ix
stability' to give a 'lingual potency' to the variations of a
fenestrative 'manoeuvre', however, the overarching theme
of encryption identifies an ambiguity at the heart of any
structural 'continuity' -a ructure. As already stated, the rift
is identified as the 'locale' of encryption -a 'non-place' or
'no-where' bearing the poignancy of a spatiality that refutes
incorporation and questions the 'logic' of spatio and
extensio. This determines the crypt as the 'abysmal
foundation' - the non-ument as the 'site' of mourning and
the locale of the spectre.
I argue that mourning as the 'event' of encryption
remains fundamental to the work of Matta-Clark
emphasising their conceptual 'grounding' as that which are
termed non-uments. It also indicates that visceration is the
realisation of that which remains intrinsically and
exclusively invisible in the framing of any edifice. The rift
as ructure 'locates' invisibility as the 'operation' of the
spectral arbiter refusing absorption by and into the
corporeal through the disruptive encyst-ence of
discontinuity and alterity. As Paul Virilio recognises in his
text Bunker Archaeology that the variation by which space
is articulated is no longer understood by mere calculation
but haunted by the introjection of the temporal.

The space I was charting with surveys and measurements of

different types of casements was the space of a different
historical time than that of the moment of my trip; the conflict I
perceived between the summer of seaside bathing and the
summer of combat world would never again cease. For me the
organisation of space would now go hand in hand with
manifestations of time. 8

8 Paul Virilio, to Bunker Archaeology,

preface p. 14.

x
 23 Janiuere, 1610

Ftaires! We haue found ftaires! 9

The aesthetic of the cinematic event interpreted as the

implication/explication of a kind of Leibnizian folding,

identifies duration as a 'form of time' that resists the

continuity of what we might define as a succession of

moments that constitute permanence. Deleuze, via Bergson

understood such duration as an open whole of constant

differentiation, which rather than specify fragmentation as
mere dissipation, offered the complexity of incompletion as
an operation of pre-individuation (disorientation). Here the

convolution of the labyrinth enunciates temporality as the

crystal-image. It considers the concept of 'open' narrative

where duration takes precedence and forms the intrinsic

'temporal structure' of two films by Andrei Tarkovsky:

9 Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves, p. 414 (footnote reads;

Jamestown Colony Papers: The Tiggs, Verm &/ Diary [Lacuna Diary
Library founded by The National Heritage Society] v. xxiii. IN 139,
January 1610, p. 18-25)

xi
Solaris, and Stalker. As Deleuze argued, Tarkovsky opted
for the 'classical' (movement-image) concept of shot but
also indicated that he referred to "the pressure of time in
the shot"10 animating the 'stasis of movement'.
Mark L. Danielewski's novel House of Leaves also
'folds, unfolds and refolds' through a series of interrelated
narratives in an ever shifting operation of
implicate/explicate and construes a topological thread
through a series of transcribed events which surround the
discovery and exploration of a labyrinth which appears in an
ordinary suburban American house. The chapter explores
via Tarkovsky's two films, specifically, the phi-creature in
Solaris and the 'zone' in Stalker and the crystalline concept
of the time-image and the spectral variation of the
introjected phantom which haunts both Tarkovsky's films
and Danielewski's novel. It draws comparisons with the
fragmentary 'structure' of Danielewski's novel (itself a story
about the making of a film) to extrapolate on encryption and
the significance of the rift/ructure discussed in the previous
chapters via the aesthetic 'experimentation' of film and
novel. This is indicative of the orientating 'operation' of
spectrality through the interruptive inconsistency of encyst-
ence in the labyrinthine while also considering that which
de-centres/haunts the labyrinth.

10 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 42.

xii
 Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end? 'I
wonder how many miles I've fallen by this time? ' she said
aloud. 'I must be getting somewhere near the centre of the
earth. Let me see that would be four thousand miles down, I
think-"'

11 Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, p. 10.

xiii
 Chapter 1

An Aesthetics' of Hauntology

A traditional scholar does not believe in ghosts - nor in

all that could be called the virtual space of spectrality.
There has never been a scholar who, as such, does not
believe in the sharp distinction between the real and the
unreal, the actual and the inactual, the living and the
2
non-living, being and non-being .

This chapter will develop a discourse on what Derrida

has called the virtual space of spectrality as the
alteric locale of a certain kind of aesthetic
differentiation. In so doing, it will resist subsumption
into any binary opposition by identifying the
transgressive ri ft3 (the between) as the active topos of
the apparition.

The Greek root 'aesthesis' denotes the capacity for sense perception,
the wide realm of the beautiful, and the science of sensation or
feeling. The Latinate aesthetica (in German, Asthetik) was first used
by A. G. Baumgarten (1714-62) in his texts Metaphysica (1739) and
Aesthetica (1750) and was derived from the Greek aisthanesthai, 'to
perceive', aisth6sis, 'perception' and aisth6tikos, 'capable of
perception'. Baumgarten defines it as the 'science of sensory
knowledge', but later restricts it to the 'science of sensory beauty'.
The term covers the beauty of nature as well as the beauty of art. I
am mindful here of Derrida's use of the term cryptology (see Chapter
3, 'The Unheimlich Manoeuvre') as the scientific study of secret
writing and the deciphering of secret codes.
2 Derrida, Spectres of Marx, p. 11.
31 wish to consider the term rift with all the resonance of the German
word Riss. Heidegger uses this term in his essay 'The Origin of the
Work of Art' (Basic Writings, pp. 139-203) to, not only indicate a rift,
split or tear as an indication of separation, but also to
simultaneously connote a holding together (in the case of the
artwork, of the revelation of world and the obduration of earth). It is
further defined by Heidegger as a plan (as in architectural drawing or
ground plan) and this will impact later in this and further chapters.
Levinas, writing on transcendence, defines it as that which cannot be
conceptualised, theorised, objectified or universalised as in the
history of epistemology/reason. It is as a rupture: an opening up to
the other that resists reduction to sameness (Western thinking's
drive to objectify and universalise).

1
 The necessity which places two such specific
terms (aesthetics and hauntology) in a kind of coeval
proximity to each other must provisionally recognise
and explore the dialectical complexity of what might be
considered their seemingly fundamental oppositional
nature. However, what this also suggests is that the
operation by which the initial identification of the
former (aesthetics) as the 'science' of beauty and
4
perceptions, and the latter (hauntology) as other5 to
that science (what
we might tentatively and advisedly
refer to as a science 6 of the spectral), offers the
potential for further scrutiny with regard to some
observations on spectrality - what might be interpreted
as a condition of encryption.
The context of the encounter between aesthetics and
hauntology will be set up by the confrontation that takes
place between the key thinkers of aesthetics (Kant, in The
Critique of Judgement) and hauntology (Derrida, in Spectres
of Marx) and given a locale in Derrida's critical project on
aesthetics, The Truth in Painting.

4 Derrida quotes Kant from The Critique of Judgement (§ 44, 'On the
Fine Arts'), when he notes in The Truth in Painting, 'There is no
science of the beautiful, only a critique of the beautiful', p. 89.
5 The concept of the other will expanded on in some detail later in the
text and will make specific reference to Levinas and alterity.
6 An indication of the significance of using the word science in this
context has already been alluded to in footnote 1 and will be
expanded on further.

2
 This will not only attempt to identify the alterity of the
other as that from which the emergence of any binary is
manifest, but also to explore a terrain, which is more,
haunted by what is encrypted 7 within it. This text will seek
to confront these seemingly oppositional characteristics and
explore the possibility of the variance of the spectral as
that, which calls into question certainty and conclusivity
(the 'closure') of the universal as thinking's framework.
It will also seek to question
pure pragmatic integrity
as a means of countering classical reason 8 and to explore
spectrality as the site of the alteric, 9 but also as a
complication of variation from which the conception of any
scientific postulation might emerge through a critique of
adherence and inherence. 10Amidst such provisional insights
and speculation, the question emerges as to where we

7 With the use of the term encryption I will seek to indicate an active
immanence of otherness that undermines and unsettles oppositional
dialectics. It may be worth bearing in mind at this point Derrida's
contention that diffdrance is not a concept but the 'possibility of
conceptuality' -a 'play', an 'undecided between' that is outside the
concept of signifier and signified and therefore between passive and
active. The historical context for passive and active is found not only
in Kant, but also in the fundamental binary opposition of presence
and absence. Derrida notes that the question, 'What is the origin of
the work of art? ' implies a unity of word, concept and thing as well as
an originary meaning, an etymon. As the unity of such a truth, the
work of art: 'It implies first of all that "art" can be reached following
the three ways of word, concept and thing, or again signifier,
signified, and referent or even by some opposition between presence
and absence. ' The Truth in Painting, p. 20.
8 In Positions, Derrida argues: 'In effect, we must avoid having the
indispensable critique of a certain naive relationship to the signified
or the referent, to sense or meaning, remain fixed in a suspension
that is, a pure and simple suppression, of meaning or reference', p.
74.
9 Alteric or Alterity from the German Alter translated as other or to
make a thing different. The other common definition refers to alterity
as the state or quality of being other, a being otherwise; 'For outness
is but the feeling of otherness [alterity] rendered intuitive, or alterity
visually represented' (Samuel Taylor Coleridge; added emphasis).
10 Derrida notes in The Truth in Painting that: 'Absolute nonadherence
should certainly have no contact, no common frontier, no exchange
with adherence: no adherence is possible between adherence and
nonadherence. And yet this break of contact, this very separation
constitutes a limit, a blank, the thickness of a blank -a frame if you
like', p. 100.

3
might begin to find such a locale of differentiation
(assuming, at this stage, that a topographical language of
mapping and location is still in some way appropriate to
such an endeavour). The locale remains essentially 'without
place' (arguably, that which haunts") while simultaneously
exercising a profound influence on what we might call the
post priori principles of the placial.
*

In the introduction to The Truth in Painting, Derrida argues

for the institution of what he calls a trai t12 and which he
defines as:

Between the outside and the inside, between the external and
the internal edge-line, the framer and the framed, the figure
and the ground, form and content, signifier and signified, and
so on for any two-faced opposition. The trait thus divides in
this place where it takes place. 13

11 1 am mindful here that to consider a 'that which' runs the immediate

risk of subjugating the spectral to a possible a priori subject/object
relation, but for the moment, I leave this in place on the
understanding that further critique will contextualise such a
motivation.
12 Trait: a distinguishing feature or characteristic from the Latin tractus
meaning act of drawing and which is also the etymological root for
tract meaning; a region or area of indefinite (especially) large extent;
in corporeal terms an area of an organ or system or in temporal
terms, a period of time.
13 Derrida, The Truth in Painting, p. xii. Earlier in the same
introduction, Derrida says of the 'trait' that: 'It situates between the
visible edging and the phantom at the centre, from which we
fascinate', ibid., p. xii (added emphasis).

4
The connotation of such an attribution calls into question

the prerogative of any simplistic binary in favour of a more

complex interpretation of 'locale', which finds in a certain

kind of predetermination an abysmal status that articulates
(com)prehension through the relation of a between.
However, it is pertinent to remember here that any

confrontation requires the engagement of a language that is

arguably already steeped in logocentric bias, and as such,

requires us to be both cautious and attentive to the

condition of play at work in the possibility of the written text

as a location for speculation on or about the spectral.

Likewise, historical terminologies will be used advisedly

and attentively on the understanding that they may still

resonate with the 'vibration of a metaphysical weight' that
determines the direction of enquiry. Therefore, whenever
possible, an attempt will be made to contextualise their use
and proffer appropriate criticism.
Derrida comments in The Truth in Painting that:

The imagination is afraid of losing itself in this abyss. The

abyss - the concept of which, like that of the bridge, organised

the architectonic considerations - would be the privileged
the sublime. 14
presentation of

Any observations made must be scrutinised in relation to

reveal any historical determination to perpetuate a relation

based in such historical binary opposition (presence and

absence, being and non-being, affirmation and negation,

etc. ) but also recognise its import as a context for the
foundation of our argument on the understanding that the

14 Ibid., p. 129 (added emphasis).

5
following discussion does not merely invert affirmation and
negation, but explores the complexity of both encryption
and the spectral and their pertinence to the demands of
structural integrity. 15

It might appear provisionally that we seek some kind of

middle ground (what Derrida in The Truth in Painting takes
from Kant as that which is between reason and knowledge;
Mittelglied) -a place that is neither theoretical nor
practical, or which is as Derrida indicates, both theoretical
and practical, where art (in general) or the beautiful take
place; 16 what is other to both reason and knowledge
(practical and theoretical). In Kantian discourse, the abyss
over which judgement constructs a bridge between the
above is arguably such a non-locatable locale. 17 However,

15 Derrida notes in The Truth in Painting: 'One would be seeking a one-

and-naked meaning [un sens un et nu] which would inform from the
inside, like a content, while distinguishing itself from the forms which
it informs', p. 22. He argues that in order to 'think art', one does so
through a series of oppositions (meaning/form, inside/outside,
content/container, etc. ) which, he argues, 'precisely structure the
traditional interpretation of works of art ... One makes of art in
general an object in which one claims to distinguish an inner
meaning, the invariant, and a multiplicity of external variations
through which, as through many veils, one would try to see or restore
the true, full, originary meaning' (ibid., as above).
16 'Lrl]f it takes place, is inscribed here. But this here is announced as a
place deprived of a place. It runs the risk in taking place, of not
having its own proper domain. But this does not deprive it, for all
that, of jurisdiction and foundation: what has no domain [Babiet] or
field [Feld] of its own, no "field of objects" defining its "domain", can
have a "territory" and a "ground" [Boden] possessing a "proper
legality". ' Ibid., p. 38 (added emphasis).
17 Note here Heidegger's use of the image of the bridge in 'Building
Dwelling Thinking' as the locale for the gathering of the fourfold: 'the
stay of mortals on the earth' in dwelling. He determines the
belonging of the fourfold as mortals who are affiliated to earth ('on
the earth'), sky ('under the sky') and divinities ('remaining before
divinities') and argues that such a belonging as a gathering 'or
assembly, by an ancient word of our language is called a "thing"', p.
153 (added emphasis). The specifics of the thingliness of the bridge
are determined by the realisation of such a gathering.

6
such rational topography belies more complex articulations,
which this text will seek to explore.
Firstly, as indicated in the opening comment, it may
seem paradoxical to propose hauntology as a science, 18
however, this is done with the specific intention of
proposing that the spectral is already at work, encrypted
even, in the predetermined logic of science and technology.
We may consider here momentarily that Heidegger hints
at
an alteric operation in his essay, 'The Question Concerning
Technology', when he postulates that 'the essence of
technology is nothing technological'. 19
This notion of precomprehension is not necessarily
confined to the scientific/technological trope, as Derrida
points out in The Truth in Painting. He states:

If therefore, one were to broach lessons on art or aesthetics

by a question of this type ('What is artT 'What is the origin of

art or of works of artT 'What is the meaning of artT 'What

does art meanT etc. ) the form of the question would already

provide the answer. Art would be predetermined or

precomprehended in it. 20

As can be noted here, Derrida finds in his various questions

of and on 'art' an a priori condition that precedes any
enquiry and demands consideration in advance of aesthetic
specificity. The question that follows this preliminary
proposal might well be one of the nature of such encryption
as something essentially outside binary determination, and
as such, whether it has an essential function in all logical

18 The term science may indeed reference an empirical imperative

structured by logic that has remained essentially a priori in thought
and if this text attempts anything, it is to consider what I will call the
event of spectrality in terms of empiricism and vice versa.
19 Martin Heidegger's essay, 'The Question Concerning Technology', is
found in a collection of essays under the same title, pp. 3-35.
20 Added emphasis. Derrida, The Truth in Painting, p. 21.

7
determinations. It is hoped that this alteric condition
identifies an operation of spectrality whereby the haunting
of all that is understood as reasonableness in the logic of
thinking is found in the ambiguity of the location of the
event of spectrality, no longer understood as mere
exclusion, and this will be credited and developed as the
text unfolds.
The key term that will function as the overarching
thematic of this discussion will be the rift. This will operate
as a topological pun CtUM21 -a kind of singularity of
othernesslalterity and which arguably, operates as a kind of
invariant which maps the speculative field and addresses
the notion of the spectre in the realisation of a realm of
discontinuity not necessarily instigated by the a priori of
continuity - what we might begin to think of as the
visualisation of invisibi I ity. 22 As has already been noted,
Heidegger addresses the term rift at some length in his

essay, 'The Origin of the Work of Art' as that which

distinguishes the obdurate materiality inherent in the

concealment of earth from the revealing unconcealment of

world.

21 The term puncturn is used here in the sense of an elevation or a

depression on a surface and has strong resonances with Deleuzian
notions of the 'determining' of a continuous surface and in particular,
his work on the Leibnizian singularity, the monad in The Fold Leibniz
and the Baroque. In topological terms the singular point or foci
operates as that which maintains the continuous through any
transformation or discontinuity - it maps a surface (via its own
continuity) while remaining unaffected by any transformation of that
surface.
22 In The Truth in Painting, Derrida comments: 'If the phrase "the truth
in painting" has the force of "truth" and its play opens onto the
abyss, then perhaps what is at stake in painting is truth, and in truth
what is at stake (that idiom) is the abyss', p. vii (added emphasis) of
introduction entitled 'Passe-Partout'.

8
 What is initially proposed is to sketch out an overview
that explores what has been already indicated, as the
provisional consideration of not only the oppositional
distinction, but also the commonality between terminologies
(aesthetics and hauntology) and therefore what imperative
brings them together their root, as it were. 23
-
*

The rigour of this discussion will bring some clarity towards

our motivation for maintaining them in what might be

understood as provisionally, a proximal relation and which,

while indicating a perceived historical dialectical continuity,
questions the nature of such a coeval unity through the

specificity of such proximity. This will also take into

consideration the nature of such a proximal relation in more

general terms and its relation to the specificity of

difference.
At the same time, an attempt will be made to
illuminate this so-called dependency and question the
historical motivation towards duality, similitude and
precedence. This text will both follow and anticipate a
conceptual trail ('a thread'), which will not necessitate a
determination towards what we might term a chronological

23 1 am conscious here of the provisional retention of a terminology of

metaphysical enquiry and logical structure. 'Root' indicates a
'ground' that conforms to the posture of stasis and reason, which
organises the historical progress of philosophical thought. This text
will seek to question that genesis but through the language of its
conception; hence the provisional maintenance of its language. Both
Derricla and Heidegger argue for the understanding of the abyss or
abysmal as the foundation for the metaphysical edifice and which in
turn, violently represses its origin through constructive abuse. See
Mark Wigley's text, The Architecture of Deconstruction - Derrida's
Haunt, pp. 1-33. Also note the significance of the abyss in Derrida's
The Truth in Painting as that which comes between (as described
earlier as judgement) knowledge and reason and finds its place in the
disinterested pleasure of a subjective aesthetic - that which Kant
attempts to bridge via judgement.

9
exploration, but will look towards the interruptive aspects of
what will later be considered as the crystallisation of
tempora litY24 in an attempt to traverse a thematic course.
This course will seek evidence of the spectral through a
range of thought always and already haunted, as it were, by
alterity. It will maintain what will be understood as the
overarching alteric thematic, identifying and locating the
25
other . 1t is no longer conceived as merely the prosaic
condition of absence, but that, which motivates through a
precedent towards invisibility as that which maintains any
notion of discontinuity/continuity.
In a sense, it is a priori to the historical drive towards
a universality and continuity based on similitude, which
may, in effect, be seen as the post priori condition of any
reasonableness and logic.
It is essential to keep in mind that any notion of
continuity which may appear to unfold on this journey
(which might be conceived as the alteric thought of the
thinkers, Derrida, Levinas and Deleuze) must first be noted
and second resisted, as it obviates the spirit of the
observation and maintenance of the status of alterity in its
otherness. With this in mind, it is worth remembering what
Derrida expresses in his text 'Diffbrance' on the status of
the alteric: to capitalise diff6rance would be to provide it
with a kind of ontological status that undermines its alteric
condition, and he reminds us that:

24 The crystal-image as cited by Deleuze in his writings on film

(Cinemas 1 and 2) as the expression of a distinctively different
interpretation of temporality in post-war European cinema will be
considered in greater detail in Chapter 4, 'The Orientation of the
Labyrinthine'.
25 These terms are used advisedly at this stage, bearing in mind the
context of the textual thematic as a critique of dialectical structure
and its intrinsic role in the history of logic and reason.

10
 It commands nothing, rules over nothing, and nowhere does it
exercise any authority. It is not marked by a capital letter. Not
only is there no realm of diff6rance, but diff6rance is even the
subversion of every realm. This is obviously what makes it
threatening and necessarily dreaded by everything in us that
desires a realm, the past or future presence of a realm.
And it is always in the name of a realm that, believing one
sees it ascend to the capital letter, one can reproach it for
wanting to rule. 26

The precedence of this term (diff6rance) as neither a word

nor a concept indicates what he refers to as a middle voice

-a juncture, interval or assemblage that, he proposes,

does not recount the steps of history, but refers to a
27
general system of all these schemata' This indicates that
.
the spectral complicates any surety in what we might call 'a

chronological temporal continuity' and through a kind of

spatial intervention impacting from outside of any
recognised systemisation as a transgressor of the clarity of
distinction and beyond the control of individuation.

26 Derrida, taken from the text 'Diff6rance', and published in The

Continental Philosophy Reader (ed. R. Kearney and M. Rainwater), p.
458.
27 Ibid., p. 442. He also comments on the 'dual' in his text, Memoirs of
the Blind: 'Creative memory, schernatization, the time and the
schema of Kant's transcendental imagination with its "synthesis" and
11ghosts". ' And later in the same text suggest that the 'dual' takes
place: 'the visionary vision of the seer who sees beyond the visible
present, the overseeing, sur-view, or survival of sight. And the
draftsman who trusts in sight, in present sight, who fears the
suspension of visual perception, who does not want to be done with
mourning it, who does not want to let it go, this draftsman begins to
go blind simply through the fear of losing his sight. ' pp. 47-8 (added
emphasis). We might also consider for a moment here the link
between sight and voice with regard to Celan in Chapter 2,
'Todtnauberg and the Meridian'. Does the poet fear becoming
disfluentlsilent through the fear of losing the ability to speak?

11
 As Derrida proposes, 'a spectre is always a revenan t. 213
One cannot control its comings and goings because it
begins by coming back. 29 It remains crucial to the
development of our argument that the consistency of this
proximal relation we are making between aesthetics and
hauntology is not found only in similarity, although
sameness will play a pivotal role in the topological terrain
covered.
In the discussion that follows, what is essentially not

similarity or a manifestation of sameness will be seen as

the consistent factor (the functor) that haunts the fabric of
the text and also that the alterity of any interpretation of
spectrality will be perhaps the strongest (though not
necessarily the clearest) manifestation of the overarching
thematic. 30

Here I begin by suggesting that sameness, as the

condition of similitude, is perhaps provisionally (and
arguably controversially) rather a condition of alterity. This
resists the insistence towards merely inverting the binary of
metaphysical logic and just presenting absence as a priori
in presence's stead. Spectrality not only calls into question
this historical precedent, but also refuses to recognise or

28 Translates as ghost, but can also refer to the verb to return. Derrida
exploits this variant possibility of its meaning in Spectres of Marx.
Also note here Derrida's question on 'return' (revenant) and the
reciprocity of the 'circle' in the section entitled 'Lemmata' of The
Truth in Painting. 'Why a circle? Here is the schema of the argument:
to look for the origin of a thing is to look for that from which it starts
out... to look for its essential provenance, which is not its empirical
origin. The work of art stems from the artist so they say. But what is
an artist? The one who produces works of art. The origin of the artist
is the work of art, the origin of the work of art is the artist, "neither
is without the other". ' pp. 29-30.
29 Derrida, Spectres of Marx, p. 11.
30 The manifestation (the 'visibility') of invisibility as the condition by
which the spectral haunts is crucial to our argument against the logic
of presence as the affirmation that precedes the negation of absence.

12
condone the possibility of a mere inversion as any solution
to such an historical precedent.
What remains important to this operation is how it

might be understood that the two terms (aesthetics and

hauntology) are drawn together outside any dialectical
determination based in the consistency of a historical
binary opposition. I have already postulated a provisional
definition of aesthetics as the science of beauty, but what

of its counterpart? How might we articulate the term

hauntology? There is implied in the structuring of the title,
An Aesthetics of Hauntology, what might be seen as the
judgemental imposition of the so-called science of beauty
over the science of spectrality.
The inclusion of the preposition of could be seen as

validating such a hierarchical interpretation. The implication

is that aesthetics imposes a form of Judgemen t 31 overthe

other and it may well be that we might have to consider

their inversion to be the provisional solution to that obvious

call for any speculation on a priori status.

This literal inversion (what could be seen as A
Hauntology of Aesthetics) might certainly begin to articulate
the significance and relevance of haunting as pertinent to

any future aesthetical postulation, but the reversal of

terminologies remains just that, and does not yet address

31 The term Judgement is used advisedly and with specific reference to

Kant's third critique: The Critique of Judgement. The capitalisation of
Judgement is intentional and refers to the comment made by S.
K6rner in his text Kant (p. 175) that the capital 'indicates the power
of the faculty of judging'. As K6rner points out, Kant states that
'Judgement in general' is 'the faculty of thinking the particular as
being contained in the universal' (p. 176, Critique of Judgement,
Introduction, Part IV, 179) (added emphasis). As already noted,
Derrida subverts this lingual empowerment through capitalisation, by
proposing that diff6rance should not conform to such hierarchies and
therefore to maintain its alteric status by the refusal of
capitalisation.

13
the more fundamental issue of the necessity of their
proximity and relation. 32
In Spectres of Marx, Derrida proposes hauntology as
that which is altogether other, the event of the 'staging for
the end of history' as both first and last time (retention and
protention). The ghost is understood as the manifestation of
any insubstantiality that operates between corporeality and
its facsimile as simulacrum. It is a repetition (and as such,
has a kind of temporality) that engenders the spectral
through the return to a kind of abstracted corporeal
possibi I it Y. 33 An additional difficulty that Derrida discloses

as manifest in the spectral is that any apparition is not

merely the incarnation of spirit. The tradition that locates

spirit as the transcendental at the heart of the corporeal is

motivated by the persistence of an onto-theological

imperative that orders through the determination to find a
place for the transcendent within the carnal as that which in

some way, supersedes it. The spectre is neither 'pure' spirit

nor 'mere' body, but functions as an intervention which
relies on the corporeal to render 'the non-sensuous
sensuous'. 34

32 In Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), Heidegger points

out what he refers to as 'the dialectical game' seemingly 'at work' in
the phrase; 'The truth of be-ing is the be-ing of truth'. He argues
that: 'Said in this way, sounds like an artificial and forced reversal
and - taken to the extreme - like a seduction to a dialectical game',
p. 66 (added emphasis). However, he proceeds by indicating that that
this is just a 'fleeting' and 'external' sign of a turn in be-ing and
which indicates a more fundamental interpretation based in decision.
33 Derrida's argument for the apparitional is based in incarnation. He
states: 'There is no ghost, there is never any becoming-spectre of
the spirit without at least the appearance of flesh in a space of
invisible visibility, like the dis-appearing of an apparition. For there
to be ghost, there must be a return to body, but to a body that is
more abstract than ever. ' Spectres of Marx, p. 126.
34 Ibid., p. 151. Derrida also refers here to transcendence as the super-
the step beyond.
,

14
 With this in mind, the understanding of the spectral as
6merely' a simulacra or facsimile of the specificity of
carnality is called into question, and articulates the
contention that similarity and sameness are not necessarily
this unifying factor. 35 What brings them into relation may be
provisionally perceived as sameness, but this is on the
understanding that similitude remains the action of reason
and logic. This relegates difference to merely the negation
of that sameness and therefore subordinate to it. If
scrutinised more carefully, it will appear more appropriate
that we consider difference as essentially more involved in
the instigation of relation and therefore fundamentally
preceding any grasp of similitude. With this in mind, the
thinking of difference will supply the essential tools to begin
this journey, but with clear provisos based on the range of
distinctly different thought that is involved in the thinking of
difference.
What has already been indicated with regard to the
historical precedence of sameness may still remain
somewhat inarticulate in any critiquing of the universal, and
therefore inarticulate in the determining of an exploration of
the spectral and its location as the rift. Consequently it will
be productive to look to Derrida and provisionally further

35 In his text on Levinas, Emmanuel Levinas, The Genealogy of Ethics,

John Llewelyn articulates the distinction that Levinas makes between
totality and infinity through production. He states: 'The idea of
production will enable Levinas to distinguish the idea of the infinite
from the idea of totality. Although totality is not the same as
neutrality and distinction is not the same as separation, the thin end
of the wedge that will accomplish this distinction between totality and
the infinite is inserted when analysis of concrete manifestations of
the concretion of existence and the existent begins to separate
these. ' p. 32. The wedge not only holds to pieces tightly together,
but also can split them apart. I would also comment here that the
distinction/complication between spectre and simulacra is looked at
in some detail in Chapter 4, 'The Orientation of the Labyrinthine',
with regard to the visitorslphi-creatures in Lem's novel and
Tarkovsky's film, Solaris.

15
appropriate diff6rance 36 at the beginning of this enquiry as
the key term by which to grasp and critique this relation.
The relevance of this provisional consideration of
Derridian differenceldiff6rance remains pertinent, given the
appropriation from Derrida of the term hauntology as the
science of 'not to be', as not merely the negation of an
ontological precedent, but as the derangement of such
antecedence. The prodromic thought exploited by Derrida
through the notion of phonetic similarity (hauntology and
ontology) in Spectres of Marx may provisionally be
understood as the identification of difference through
sameness. As he indicates with the 'sciences' of to be
(ontology) and not to be (hauntology), the distinction
between difference and diff6rance is also 'not heard'.

The "a" of diffdrance, therefore, is not heard: it remains silent.

Secret, and discreet, like a tomb. 37

It can only be expressed and ordered through the

significance and disorder of the impure written text in the
context of what he calls the vocalic notation. The difference
between a and e expresses through
what is written and
what is read, but not what is heard. 38

36 This term is drawn specifically from Derrida's text 'Diffbrance' (pp.

441 -464) and published in the anthology, The Continental Philosophy
Reader (ed. R. Kearney and M. Rainwater).
37 Added emphasis. Derrida, 'Diff6rance', ibid., p. 443.
38 He also states that phonetic writing can only function through the
incorporation of what he calls 'non-phonetic signs' (punctuation,
spacing, etc. ) so that what is inaudible allows the phonemes to be
heard.

16
 Diff6rance may be distinguished fundamentally from
difference through the latter's continual dependency on the
universality of sameness in reasonableness to give it
shape. Derrida argues that to differ carries both the
difference of a distinction or an inequality whilst also
indicating the interposition of a delay or an interval. The
latter definition is described as 'a putting off till later what
is presently denied' or the possible that is presently
impossible and which implies both a spacious and a
temporal quality.
For Derrida, these movements of non-identity and
sameness must have a common root that relates the two
movements of differing to each other. Diff6rance articulates
a different kind of sameness that is not identical (the silent
a referring to 'differing' as both spacing and temporalising
and the movement that structures every dissociation).
However, the violence of what might be defined as the
dialectic continuity of difference through similitude,
essentially predicates the same. As such, it diminishes the
power of difference by maintaining it as an appendage to
the logic of reasonableness and therefore merely awaiting
its inevitable recuperation through the event of sameness
and universality.
If difference is seen in these terms, it is clear that its
possibility remains only the inevitability of such
incorporation into what is essentially universal. This event
of negation might provisionally be seen as indicating the
force of the other but at the same time it persists through
the diminishing of the power of difference while
simultaneously allowing it to fall into mere reflection.

17
 Derrida's project is to distinguish diff6rance from mere
difference in this context, because as neither word nor
concept, it exists as a juncture or assemblage (in the
Heideggerian sense of a 'bringing-together'), that operates
as a 'between' which not only indicates a bringing together
as an interlacing or web of distinct threads which bind, but
also lines of sense or force which also allow for
39
separation.
Now understood as outside the dialectical order of the
founding of reasonableness
oppositions (for example,
sensibility and intelligence 40) diffdrance belongs neither to
,
speech nor writing; it is:

between speech and writing and beyond the tranquil familiarity

that binds us to one and to the other, reassuring us sometimes
in the illusion that they 41
are two separate things.

What is important to remember here is that although Derrida

proposes the vocalic notation of the a in diffdrance as
inaudible and therefore not present, it does allow for the
presentation of being possible but not through its own
presentation.
*

However, it is not concealedin any sense of what he

describes as a zone of non-knowing, 42 because this would
suggest that it is exposed to a notion of disappearance, and

39 The thread as a literal means of navigation is intrinsic to the

traversal of, both the Minoan Labyrinth and the 'zone' in Tarkovsky's
film, Stalker. See Chapter 4, 'The Orientation of the Labyrinthine'.
40 This will be looked at in more detail in relation to Kant's work on
intuition and knowledge in the Critiques.
41 Derrida, 'Diff6rance', p. 444.
42 Note here Kant's reference to the irreducible 'unknowable' between
intuition and knowledge.

18
therefore runs the risk of falling into the dialectical
possibility of appearance. "
Derrida questions the need for what he describes as a
de jure commencement, and attempts to articulate a new
strategy that resists any determination towards finality by
proposing that the play at work in diff6rance is beyond any
binary opposition and precedes what is contingent in the
dialectic of difference. Difference cannot refer to differing
as temporal isation, because it operates as an
eschatologica 144demand, which maintains rather than
suspends accomplishment/finality. Diff6rance compensates
for the complex of meanings by designating a process of
scission and division by which the -ance of diff6rance,
expresses the undecided as what is between active and
passive. 45 In this way, it is no longer a concept but the
possibility of conceptuality - what Derrida defines as a
conceptual system of the play of reference in a conceptual
system.
Diff6rance produces differences, but crucially not in
the sense that it precedes the plurality of differences as a
simple and in itself unmodified and indifferent present'. " it
is the non-full, non-simple origin of what Derrida refers to
as the structured and differing origin of differences, on the
understanding that differences are, as such, produced, but
not by a presence.

43 It is not a 'being-present' (on) in an ontological sense but remains

irreducible to ontological, theological and onto-theological re-
appropriation. It encompasses and surpasses such distinctions but
also resists any fall into oppositional dialectic because it sustains
that dialectic from outside.
44 Eschatology, the branch of theology dealing with last things; death,
divine judgement and life after death.
45 In this sense, it is 'outside' the concept of signifier and signified as
determined the concept of presence.
46 Derrida, 'Diff6rance', p. 449.

19
 Diff6rance is what makes the movement of signification

possible only if each element that is said to be 'present',

appearing on the stage of presence, is related to something

other than itself but retains the mark of a past element and

already lets itself be hollowed out by the mark of its relation to

a future elemen t. 47

In Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze makes clear

his intention in confronting difference is not to perpetuate
the continuation of a dialectical precedent by investing in

the continuation of the binary model of essence and

appearance, but in seeking to extract what might be

understood as the marginalised category of the simulacrum

as the subverter of any dialectical model. This differs from

Derrida's spectre as it relies on the grasp of the simulacra

the continuity of the universal. 48
as a facsimile undermining
This is also a key issue for Levinas as an important thinker

of alterity, who understands and acknowledges that the

other (as essentially other) can never be recuperated into

sameness and, as such, is not just an addendum to the

logic of historical empiricism and therefore contingent on
the form of the dialectic. The history of logic would propose
the same as reason's highest aspiration, through the drive
to universality and therefore relegate the other, through the

particularity of difference, to the role of that which is

merely what is not the same.

This suggests that the other could remain trapped in a

dialectical model from which its essential possibility is

merely awaiting assimilation into the same, and, as such, it

is robbed of any and all of its essential alteric power. The

47 Added emphasis. Ibid., p. 450.

48 As already indicated, Derrida's spectre is neither a facsimile of spirit
or body - it is between.

20
important shift from a difference determined and predicated
by sameness to a deferral, is through the recognition of the
contribution of the rift as an essential factor in the forging
of a concept of this kind of relation.
The rift will provide the specific conceptual form by
which hauntology, and its relation to the aesthetic, will be
explored, and through which it will also seek to articulate
the contention that the imposition of the alteric through this
understanding of the rift undermines the existing order of
predication and binary opposition in Western thinking.
However, it is vital to keep in mind that the rift is also the
operative manifestation of the event of encryption and must
not be conceived as a mere afterthought to reason but
essentially encrypted within it - what haunts it. The rift is
what forms the notion of relation 49 and is what essentially
holds apart. It is the between of the rift that will initiate the
articulation of hauntology and its status as a critique of the
persistent drive of logic to universality and reasonableness.
The contention that the phenomenological project's
aim was to reduce the gap between thought and
embodiment - being and existence - demands closer
scrutiny of the manoeuvre that draws together knowledge
and sense and exposes them through their difference. What
persists in this dialectic underlines the predication of
continuity - sameness and universality as the driving force
for logical stasis.
As already indicated, when Derrida articulates a
phonetic rift in his text Spectres of Marx, he indicates the
similarity between the spoken terms hauntology and

49 Husserl identifies 'relation' as the key proposal of the 'science' of

ph en omen ology.

21
ontology (in French, the terms sound almost identical when
spoken). 5'
This logocentric play of phonetic similarity disguises a
more fundamental concern which recognises this distinction
as an encryption that resists the status of a mere insertion
or addendum to continuity by conferring on the encryption a
condition of otherness, which does not resort to a resolution
through similitude.
When he refers to the former (hauntology) as the
science/logic of 'not to be', and the latter (ontology) as the
science/logic of 'to be', 51 he articulates this between as the
juncture of a difference. This is seen provisionally as that
which holds together the lingual identity being and non-
being in a relation exposing the phantasm of otherness
encrypted into the presence of being.
Language as the site of both identity and difference
must be negotiated further through the contention of what
has already been noted as the deferral of difference. The

complication cited by Derrida as provisionally phonetic, and

therefore critiquing any logocentric bias, has far reaching
implications in the development of my argument for the
intrinsic phantasm at work undermining the structure and
constraints of the linearity and polarity of the historicity of
logiC. 52 The rift as a non-site 53 fenestration in the
-a

50 It is also worth remembering here what we have already said about

the phonetic issue of silence at work between difference and
diffdrance.
51 1 will later draw attention to the distinction between Derrida's
science/logic of 'to be' and 'not to be' and Levinas's writing about il
ya- 'there is', with its implicit alterity.
52 Logic understood as the place for establishing and exploring the
essential requirements of genuine knowledge and science -a
discovering of norms.
53 A non-site as the active possibility of encryption has a strong link
with the work of Gordon Matta-Clark and the term non-ument and will
be explored in more detail in Chapter 3, 'The Unheimlich Manoeuvre'.

22
architectonics of thought - exposes the possibility of
encryption as the active participant in the structuring of any
corporality. For example, the architectural interventions of
the artist Gordon Matta-Clark not only rely on architectural
structure to give them shape, but expose that edifice to an
intensive dissective scrutiny (a fenestration) through an act
of visceration.
It is important to remember, however, that Matta-Clark
is not merely dissecting the body of the building, but
articulating its language through the complication of, on one
level, blurring the borders between inside and out and all
that might imply, as well as drawing attention to the
pertinence of the event of mourning (encyst-ence)"
resonating in the visceral act -a commemoration through
annihilation.
With this in mind, it must be remembered that its
active role remains outside the recognised continuity of
active and passive as understood by Kant with regard to
intuition and knowledge in the Critiques. As a kind of
hermene Uti C55intervention, it disrupts linearity and indicates
that there is a potential for discontinuity in any generating
of continuity, inverting the Cartesian model of a
separateness, which contends that continuity generates and
structures discontinuity.
As already suggested, Derrida argues that diffdrance
is an assemblage, and through the event of 'bringing
together' it allows for different threads and lines of sense
and force to interlace. But what remains contingent in this

54 Derrida refers to the act of mourning in Spectres of Marx as the

attempt to ontologise 'remains' - to make present, as it were, that
which can never essentially be present.
55 Hermeneutic understood as the science of interpretation.

23
manoeuvre is that what binds also has the potential to
separate, with the possibility for continuity and discontinuity
at the juncture. However, what must remain at the forefront
of our thought when considering this disruption of continuity
is that we do not fall into the trap of indicating merely a
dialectic inversion through the predication of the
discontinuous.
As will be argued, this will only persist in maintaining
the status of universality and sameness as that which
attempts to recuperate otherness, and therefore the event
of mere inversion can only be described and contained
within the same binary framework of any epistemological
enquiry.
Deleuze, however proposes the tactic of the
disjunctive use of faculties, whereby the unconscious
condition of each faculty is revealed, replacing a philosophy
of identity and representation with one of difference. He
differs from Derrida in that he critiques the pertinence of
difference as deferral by suggesting that a stable intrinsic

meaning can never be found there as a perpetual regress of

one word defined by yet another therefore prevents the
discovery of a linguistic ground. Difference operates as a
paradoxical element - it is never where it is sought and
always where it cannot be found. This discloses a sensible
realm of intensities, and an ideal realm of problems - what
is indicated by Deleuze as a physics and metaphysics of the
simulacrum.
Where Platonic ideality provisionally proposed the

model (the 'ideal') and the copy (its representation), it also

distinguished between 'good' (eikon) and 'bad'

24
(phantasme 56) copy. The former operates as the 'true' inner
resemblance while the latter is the 'false' external illusion.
The phantasme remains fearful to Plato because it has no
fixed identity; it is unlimited and illogical becoming, which
reveals in the copy that the domination of the ideal as
model is undermined by its proximity to its copy as
representation. For Deleuze, to overturn Platonic ideality is
to revel in the simulacra (the so-called bad copy) as the
denial of the primacy of the ideal - the model over the
image and to glorify the simulacra and the reflection. 57
-
The proper activity of thought for Deleuze is not to
immerse oneself in the realm of the essence, but to seek
the impingement of the simulacrum through the critical
examination of mental experiences, which he refers to as
transcendental empiricis M. 58 Transcendentalism is relevant
for Deleuze with regard to empirical principles because, as
he states, they always 'leave outside of themselves the
59
elements of their own foundation'.
The ruling opposition of ideal and sensible is
undermined by the Deleuzian terminology of the virtual and
actual, which indicate a more fundamental distinction
between the aconceptual and the conceptual. The sub-
representative/unconscious (aconceptual) of illogical

56 Phantasme and its epistemological root to the spectral.

57 In Spectres of Marx, Derrida distinguishes the spectre from Platonic
phantasma and simulacrum by describing it as the 'tangible
intangibility of a proper body without flesh, but still the body of
someone as someone other', p. 7. This has a strong resonance with
the manifestation of the phi-creatureslvisitors in Lem's novel and
Tarkovsky's film, Solaris, and will be discussed in more depth in
Chapter 4, 'The Orientation of the Labyrinthine'.
58 This is distinguished from Kantian transcendental idealism, which
presupposes 'good' sense and 'common' sense - 'real' experience is
for Deleuze, sub-representative. Deleuze's method is empirical
because its object is experience not the possible experience of
Kantian thought through meaning 'capable of representation'.
59 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 328.

25
intensities and the representative/conscious (conceptual)
logic of common sense - whereby the problem occupies the
paradoxical space between existence and non-existence 60
is the rift. The transcendental can now be understood as
the realm of the problem and is paradoxical because it
resists incorporation into empirical principles - in a sense,
it is a problem without a solution.
It is important to remind ourselves here that to
comprehend this rift we must grasp it as not just a holding
apart in the sense of what we might provisionally consider
as a difference of separation contingent on the priority of
similitude.
*

What is essentially different between hauntology and

ontology is also the irreducible transcendence of alterity,
understood as that which holds them together 61 and

therefore is resistant to the collapse into a duality of

sameness.

60 'Ideas', for Deleuze, are not Platonic simple essences but rather
Kantian problems without solutions. Deleuze also prefers to exploit
the terms subsistence and insistence rather than existence.
61 In his text 'Edmond Jalb6s and the Question of the Book', Derrida
states:
'A first encounter, an encounter above all unique because it was a
separation, ( ). Encounter is separation. Such a proposition, which
contradicts "logic" breaks the unity of Being - which resides in the
fragile link of the "is" - by welcoming the other and difference into
the source of meaning. ' Writing and Difference, p. 74.

26
 Derrida's use of the term hantise 62 at the beginning of
Spectres of Marx evokes not only a spectrality but also
indicates a further meaning rooted in common sense, which
can also be translated as an obsession, a constant fear, a
fixed idea or nagging memory. "
In the text he indicates that historically the so-called
spectre of Communism preceded its realisation in the

revolution of 1917, which inaugurated the Soviet Union -

and which was, in a sense, the pre-emptive 'secret' that Old
Europe, demanding continuity and stability, hoped would
remain thus (as 'a secret') but, for which, and by which, it

was fearful of (a labour movement that transgressed the

security and stability of the existing geopolitical

landscape). 64

In 'Diff6rance', Derrida proposes the temporality of the

trace (the spur) as that which relates to what is called both
future and past through the constitution of a present by
relation to what it is not. In order for the trace 'to be' an
interval from what it is not, it must intervene and, as such a
division, that constitutes it in the presen t. 65
The spectre here is conceived as a transgressor of
boundaries but what is important to keep in mind is that the

62 This translates into English as haunting.

63 Derrida's observation that the first noun in The Communist Manifesto
is 'spectre' is the basis for his attempt to recuperate Marx. For
Derrida, Marx was a scholar 'capable of thinking the possibility of the
spectre' and this distinguished him from the 'traditional' scholar who
could only conceive distinctions in binary oppositions - real and
unreal, actual and in-actual, living and un-living, being and non-
being ('to be or not to be').
64 Note here Derrida's suggestion in 'Violence and Metaphysics' that
the security of the Greco-European tradition is undermined.
Knowledge is neither 'habitual nor comfortable but permits us to
experience torment or distress in general', p. 82.
65 Derrida goes further by saying that this division, which constitutes in
the present, must also divide that present and therefore everything
conceived on the basis of presence; for example, being, substance
and subject.

27
complication that Derrida wishes to invoke in the spectral is
in its location as encrypted within the 'historical

phenomenon' of Europe, old and new. He states: 'At bottom,

the spectre is the future, it is always to come, and it

presents itself only as that which could come or come back;

in the future'. 66

For Derrida, our inheritance is no longer the 'end of

history' but rather the end of a certain concept of history
whereby an injunction should not be seen and understood
as a restrictive ordering, but a reaffirming by choosing in
the division on the injunctive: 'The present appears neither

as the rupture or effect of a past, but as the retention of a

past. 67
present
The plurality of 'one must' in dealing with an
inheritance as injunction is to filter, criticise or sort out
several different possibilities that inhabit that injunction.
The naturally transparent univocal is without interpretation

and has nothing to inherit from - there is no inheritance in

infinity, memory is a condition of the specificity of finitude.
The finitude of consciousness preserves significations,
values and past acts as habitualities and sedimentations
and is where the other becomes the sedentary spectre.
Derricla argues that it is possible to recuperate Marx

as the revolutionary transgressor now, in a predominantly

66 Derrida cites the 'plagues' of the 'new world order', of which number
7 is defined as 'inter-ethnic wars'. He describes these as driven by
an archaic phantasm, a primitive conceptual phantasm of community,
the nation-state, sovereignty, borders, native soil and blood. He
terms ontopology as the axiomatic event whereby the topos of
territory (native soil, city and the corporeal body) is rooted in an
-
anxiety of displacement. Communism is both a 'future spectre' and
'spectre of the past' and as such, temporal linearity is
now, a
undermined - displaced.
67 Added Spectres of Marx, p. 57. Retention and Protention
emphasis.
form the active elements in an adumbration, where the transience of
history and immanence (possibility) invoke variety rather than
sameness. David Bell identifies this in Husserl's thought.

28
post-communist world where the disjuncture of thought and
action on such a thought can be rectified. Spectropoeti CS68
becomes the examination of the ways in which Marx still
haunts and influences through the methodology of poetics.
This is understood as the uncovering of layers of meaning
in events and texts by pursuing such literary devices as
analogy, metaphor and allusion and therefore outside the
conceived rational ordering of a science.
If we understand history as essentially a linear
temporal movement (chronology) - that historical/political
events follow each other in ordered succession - Derrida's
conception of inheritance has no place. 69 Inheritance
interrupts this infinity of history by proposing memory as a
condition of finitude -a plurivocality that exposes the
possibility of choice in the order of the injunctive. As
Derrida argues, the univocal in its natural transparency has
no finitude, cannot be interpreted and has nothing to inherit
from the internal untranslatability in Marx. Its lack of
system is not a sign of weakness, but an opening up where
injunction and promise could not be without such a
disj . unction. This latter term, disjunction, perhaps requires a
clearer definition - it describes a sharp cleavage, a
disunion or separation and expresses an alternative or
opposition between the meanings of connected words -a
rift.

68 Is this the archaeology of encryption?

69 Derrida's use of Hamlet is instructive here. Hamlet's Father's ghost
is a spectral manifestation of Hamlet's inheritance, disrupting the
continuity of the social order by encouraging revenge, and instigating
the unfolding of the tragedy that is the form of the play. As an
apparition, its 'form' is both and neither a carnal representation of
Hamlet's Father, and also a 'spirit' - outside rational/order but
intrinsic to the play's unfolding narrative. Banquo's ghost performs a
similar literary function in Macbeth.

29
 As a compositional tool in language, it indicates a rift
that performs a conjoining (as in a compound sentence in
logic) yet does not lose that which brings together in this
event of conjunction; it maintains its status in
separateness. It is intrinsic to, yet also exclusive to any
composition. As already indicated, Derrida distinguishes
diff6rance from difference by virtue of the former's
irreducible status as a juncture of proximity and separation.
The spectre as a phenomenal/carnal form of the spirit
transgresses the boundary of phenomenon as flesh and
spirit as invisibility. In becoming a 'thing', it remains
difficult to name as it is neither body nor spirit, yet it is
both one and the other - it becomes the embodiment of
invisibility and, as such, the event of transgression.
Phenomenality bestows apparitional status on the spectre
through the simulation of the corporeal. In not knowing what
it 'is' (as a spectral entity), one does not not know out of
ignorance but rather because, as non-object, non-present
'70
present, there is a being there of a someone/something
absent or departed which no longer belongs to knowledge
(logic/science and the rational). It is the invisibility of the
visible or the visibility of that which hitherto has been
invisible. 71

70 It is important to remember here that the spectres in both Hamlet and

Macbeth are not immediately recognised by the leading characters,
but it is perhaps the instability of conscience that reveals who they
represent. De-stabilisation becomes the function of the spectre.
71 'The animated work becomes that thing, the thing that, like an
elusive spectre, engineers [s'ing6niel a habitation without proper
inhabiting, call it a haunting, of both memory and translation. '
Derrida, Spectres of Marx, p. 18.

30
 The transcendent nature of such apparitions are
prefixed, 'given form to', as it were, by carnal ity, 72 and in
this way might be understood as following the model of the
event of transcendental reduction as laid out by Husserl.
Embodiment gives form to the spectral but the
ambiguity arises in a contention towards any condition of a
priori in this manoeuvre. 73
Spectres of Marx makes clear that dis(place)ment as
an event of spacing is the precursor of the stability of any
sedenterisation and as such, the memory of displacement
roots such historical conceptions as nationality so that any
grasp of archaism is already based in a kind of
dislocation. 74 The root is itself a phantasm of the
inconsistency of plurivocality - its retention and protention,
and apparitional otherness. Equally, temporality is active in
this event of spacing as interval. Haunting is historical, but

not encumbered by the specificity of dating; it is not without

time but is untime /Y. 75

72 Derrida states, 'the spectre is a paradoxical incorporation, the

becoming-body, a certain phenomenal and carnal form of the spirit'
(p. 6, Spectres of Marx). As becoming-body the spectre is neither
spirit nor form.
73 Phenomenological enquiry refocuses the reduction as an act of
change that is highlighted in the ambiguity between the everyday
(materiality) and the transcendental.
74 We may wish to think here of Lyotard writing about the displaced
other in his text Heidegger and the 'jews': the memory of
displacement manifest in the 'Jewish nation' undermining the fiction
of Germanic rootedness. The phantasm of nation-state is itself
haunted by the intolerable physical manifestation of dislocation -a
nomadic parasite at the heart of German cultural life. As is later
remarked, Derrida finds in Kant and Hegel a 'Semitic' relation to the
sublime irruption between finite and infinite (see The Truth in
Painting, p. 134).
75 'Untimely, it does not come to, it does not happen to, it does not
befall', Spectres of Marx, p. 5.

31
 The term conjuration is introduced to indicate a causal
imperative in the form of a calling forth, 76 which in itself
certifies nothing yet provokes something to happen while at
the same time linguistically implying a conspiracy, the
swearing of an oath in a struggle against a superior
power. 77 The complicity of an absence in the shaping of a
'something' is not without precedent in both Derrida and
Heidegger's thinking. Significantly, in Deleuze's work on
difference can also be found the structure of what he refers
to as the virtual idea, which bares no relation to its actual
embodiment.
Gilbert Simondon's influence on Deleuze's thinking
can be seen through of individuation
the example in his
studies of the process of crystallisation 73 This process is a
.
movement from what is known as a metastablelamorphous
to a stablelcrystalline via the introduction of a seed crystal
which communicates structure to a molecule of the
metastable substance and which is then passed on to others
in what is called a process of individuation. What is crucial
here is that the process of individuation precedes the
individual and for Deleuze, the metastable is difference in
itself. The implicate spatium of groundless space precedes
the explicate extensio of representable space where

76 The disembodied voice of conscience in Heidegger's Sein und Zeit

speaks through the spacing of silence. In his later text, Contributions
to Philosophy (From Enowning), Heidegger introduces the term echo
and emphasises the appropriateness of silence as the proto-locale of
thought.
77 This is defined as both a conjuring trick and the practice of oath
swearing.
78 It is worth noting here what will later be discussed in Chapter 4, 'The
Orientation of The Labyrinthine' - the crystal-image, which Deleuze
discusses specifically in his text Cinema 2 as the fragmentary
consideration of the temporal as the key conception of post-war
European cinema.

32
intensity as difference - the state of pre-individuation -
haunts the explication of the individual.
In scientific terms, crystalline structures are formed by
an exterior factor/element that resists inclusion/absorption
through the initiation of the event, but its presencing traces

an encrypted signature -a memory of what formed it, on

what is formed 79The event of encryption is located in
.
dislocation - an active between that shapes and gives form

while remaining shapeless itself. 80

For Kant, sensibility and theretore perceptions were

primarily a passive faculty shaped by the a priori forms of
space and time. The complication in Kantian thought is
understood in the resistance to categorisation of space and
time conceptually and Kantian thought insists on

79 Celan makes reference to the crystalline in two poems, 'Crystal'

(1952), about which John Felstiner comments in his text, Paul Celan:
Poet, Survivor, Jew that the title 'speaks for pattern and solidness in
poetry and spurs a memory of Nazi "Kristallnacht, " the rupture of the
poem', p. 60. It reads:

Not on my lips look for your mouth,

not in front of the gate for the stranger,
not in the eye for the tear.

Seven nights higher red makes for red,

seven hearts deeper the hand knocks on the gate,
seven roses later plashes the fountain.

(Translation by Michael Hamburger, from Selected Poems, p. 69. ) 1

note here Celan's reference to the mouth with regard to later remarks
on the dysfluency of 'latemouth' and the 'mouth as wound' in Chapter
2, 'Todtnauberg and the Meridian'. Also note the last stanza of
'Bitten away' (1963):

Deep
In the time-crevasse,
by the honeycomb-ice
there waits, a breathcrystal,
your unannullable
witness.

(Translation from John Felstiner's text, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor,

Jew, p. 219. )

80 As already stated, the architectonics of encryption will be explored

further in Chapter 3, 'The Unheimlich Manoeuvre'.

33
maintaining their intuitive status. If aesthetic is defined by
Kant as a derivation from the Greek for sensation in 'The
Transcendental Aesthetic', space and time are not
conceptions applied to intuitions, but fundamental forms of
intuitions themselves.
Kant's argument states that all sensation must
intrinsically have the imprint of temporality and the spatial
conferred by the organisational status of both space and
time.
Derrida argues in 'Diff6rance' that the term diff6rance
operates as an interval which, in order to function ('to be
what it is not'), must intervene and become a division that
constitutes it in the present where it must divide that
present and consequently everything conceived on the basis
8'
of presence . As an interval, it indicates a spacing whereby
we can understand a deferral through becoming that
undermines the notion of presence through the interval as
not only time's becoming spatial but also space's becoming
temporal. Derrida's introduction of a complication through
the derivation of the term diff6rance as an indication of
what he refers to as primordial difference, questions the
binary imperative of presence and its a priori status. He
states:

And it is this constitution of the present as a primordial and

irreducibly nonsimple, and, therefore, in the strict sense
nonprimordial, synthesis of traces, retentions and protentions
That I propose to call protowritin g' 82 prototrace, or
...
diffdrance. The latter (is) (both) spacing (and) temporalising. 83

81 Here Derrida is referring to all that belongs to the revelation of

presence; 'being' - substance and subject.
82 Protowriting is understood as an inscription prior to writing -a trace.
83 Added emphasis. Derrida, 'Diff6rance', p. 451.

34
This notion of the precedence of the trace (spur), indicated
through the interval of diff6rance, bears clear comparison
with Kant's view of the alteric condition of the spatio-
temporal imprint on the sensory.
Kant's argument is developed through an
understanding of the inner sense of time grasped through
the organisation of our experience and that no mental state
can exist outside time. Likewise, the outer sense of space
qualifies an independent status for all that is objectified in
the world through exteriority and therefore, as outside, it is
deported in a spatial relation to oneself. In denying space
and time a priori status, Kant accepts that they are not
conceptual, in that they do not define a plurality of
instances and therefore are not latterly applied to any
sensation. However, one must bear in mind that Kant's view
of both space and time is understood through what he
believed to be the necessity for there to by only one space
and one time, from which all specific spaces and all times
are derived.
As already stated, Deleuze's methodology for
critiquing Kant's understanding of the faculty of the
sensible is both empirical (because its object is real
experience) and transcendental, because such empirical
principles 'leave outside themselves the element of their
own foundation'. 84 Deleuze replaces the designation of a
supposed opposition between the historical dualism of
essential/ideal and accidental/sensible, with new
conceptions of the virtual and the actual. These new terms

84 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 328. John Rajchman

notes in The Deleuze Connections, that '... in Deleuze's serniotics,
there is no 'double articulation' - no prior or necessary bi-univocal
link between word and images or saying and seeing; there is no
'schematism' as in Kant that would link intuition and concept. ' P. 68.

35
not only confer a different condition for the recognised
forms of dialectic that form the metaphysical opposition of
both Kantian faculties and Platonic ideals. They offer what
Deleuze considers to be a more fundamental opposition that
indicates the sub-representative as the realm of the
unconscious, conceptual ideas and intensities, with the
conscious realm of the conceptual representations of
gcommon sense'.
The idea, in the Platonic sense of simple essences, is
now replaced by the problem without solution in the Kantian
sense, and indicates that problems are the immanent within,
yet irreducible to, their solutions. The problem for Deleuze
is implicit in the creation of a realm in which solutions might
take place, but essentially they remain outside that realm
and transcendental to it. This event of encryption
(dis)embodies a kind of transcendental through locating it,
but refuses any notion of absorption or incorporation in
preference to a kind of introjection and, as already
indicated, the intensity of metastability as implicate
precedes the specificity of any explication.
What is implicate for Deleuze is spatium or the
groundless space of pre-individuation, and this
communicates form from which the specificity of explicate,
extensio or representable space appears. 85 Deleuze
conceives the points or foci that remain fixed, in a

85 Note here that Kant, writing on aesthetics, makes this distinction

between the beautiful and the sublime. He writes: 'The beautiful in
nature relates to the form of an object which consists in limitation:
the sublime on the contrary is found in an object devoid of form in so
far as it immediately involves.... a representation of limitlessness yet
with a super-added thought of its totality. Accordingly the beautiful
seems to be regarded as the representation of an indeterminate
concept of understanding, the sublime as the representation of the
indeterminate concept of reason. ' The Critique of Judgement, §23.
245, pp. 90-91.

36
topological sense, during the process of a transformation as
the form of pre-individuation that mediates for individuation.
Although they are implicit in the structuring of any
domain/realm of possible solutions, they are explicit in the
actuality of any preconceived notion of structure, and as
virtual rather than actual, they determine a paradoxical
place that is neither existence nor non-existence. 86
What is important to remember here is that the virtual
is involved in the event of embodiment while remaining
without body itself (arguably, the invisible topos). This does
not mean that it is an amorphous, undifferentiated mass,
but rather an event of distribution mapped by singularities
without the specificity or particularity of an identity, but
which provide the genetic code for the generation of a
specificity through difference -a haunting!
The differential relation between these singular points
(foci) indicates the potential for various forms of
embodiment in a zone where possible actualisations are
continually forming and un-forming (protentions and
retentions). To locate a problem, it can only be realised
through the conglomeration of all possible actualisations
and embodiments. For Deleuze, problems occupy a
paradoxical space between existence and non-existence,
and the structure of the virtual idea bares no relation to its
embodiment.
In his study on Husserl, David Bell discusses a
process of cross-referencing, understood as an adumbration

86 It is worth noting here the subsistence of the virtual as a structuring

for the actual while bearing no resemblance to what is actualised.
Also consider the concept of enframing posited by Heidegger in 'The
Question Concerning Technology' (Part 1, pp. 3-35) where the
framework (what Heidegger refers to as 'enframing') for technology
and machination is essentially nothing technological.

37
or event/point of various perspectival aspects: 'Every
adumbration contains within it a structure of "retentions"
...
and "protentions" that are a function of memory,
imagination, expectation and habit. 87 Each adumbration is
surrounded by a horizon of other possible adumbrations -
essentially an event of the spectral via the haunting of one
possibility with other possibilities. Not only mapped
externally via this horizon, they are also structured
internally by a multiplicity of what are termed retentions and
protentions. This forms what we might call reciprocity of
contractive and expansive possibilities within the variety of
perspectival aspects.
In Totality and Infinity, Levinas proposes that:

[Slince Husserl the whole of phenomenology is the promotion

of the idea of horizon which for it plays a role equivalent to
that of a concept in Classical Idealism; an existent arises upon
a ground that extends beyond it, as an individual arises from a
conce pt. 88

The existent becomes the silhouette on the horizon of being

and as such, being becomes the guarantor of that existent's
independence. Derrida notes in Spectres of Marx that '[i]n
the movement of protention, the present is retained and
gone beyond as past present in order to constitute another
primordial and original Absolute, another living present. 89
Derrida's play with what I will call a 'phonetic deferral
of sameness' (similitude) undermines the terminology of
similarity while exploiting the very structure of such a

87 David Bell, Husserl, p. 190.

88 Added emphasis. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 45.
89 Derrida, Spectres of Marx, p. 58.

38
conceptualisation in the epistemological canon of
metaphysical enquiry. The operation of similitude in this
context is crucially and essentially spectral, and is haunted
by what always remains other (alteric) to it. Derrida's
phonetic play emphasises that alterity through its invisibility
in the universalisation of logic. Motivated by the immanence
of such conceptual isati on of a logic of alterity; I use all
these terms advisedly, and it would be worth considering
the historical context for otherness/spectrality in modern
thinking with a view to reconfiguring the imperative towards
objective similarity from within the framework of
epistemology.
Perhaps an appropriate point of departure for this
exploration of the spectral, given the proposal of this text to
consider a so-called aesthetics of hauntology, would be to
return to Kant's transcendental aesthetic. 90 Kant, in The
Critique of Pure Reason writing about the transcendental
aesthetic, distinguishes between the cognitive powers that
relate to objects and how they are composed, as intuition
and conceptual. What is distinctive about the former is its
base in the phenomenology of the immediate and the
cognitive power of sensibility and the specificity of an
object. The latter is based in the cognitive power of
understanding, and indicates a kind of mediation between
the features that several things/objects have in common. In
this provisional distinction, Kant proposes that the
particularity of the singular representation (intuition)
precedes the generality of objects (conceptual) where the

90 The topic of Kant's aesthetic is to analyse the form of experience by

isolating sensibility from understanding and separating off from it
everything that belongs to sensation. Kant's imperative towards a
transcendent ideality for aesthetics is found in the presupposition of
the existence of experience.

39
application of the concept belongs to a kind of which there

could be other instances.

What is crucial here is that, for Kant, our intuition is

'sensible' and not intellectual, and that what he calls

'sensible representations' are formed through receptivity
and passivity through being affected. Intuitions (on their
-
own) do not amount to cognition of objects, they merely
'give' and can only relate to an object under the condition
of being brought 'under a concept'.
Understanding is the producer of concepts and then the
applier of those concepts to objects and is both active and

spontaneous. 91

It indicates a generality that distinguishes it from the

particularity of singular representations, which remain

essentially intuitive. The sensibility of the intuitive through
the power of the cognitive assumes an essentially passive
and receptive clemeanour that distinguishes it from

understanding, which Kant indicates to be both active and

spontaneous.
However, the mutually irreducible functions of intuition
and understanding/thinking remain heterogeneous. This
double movement implies something crucial through this
divisive event of cognition. For Kant, intuitions cannot
amount to the cognition of any object as they only 'give'
and relation to an object requires that such an object be

91 We need to consider here the proposal by Deleuze and Guattari in

the text What Is Philosophy? This suggests that philosophy is the
creation of concepts and where the insistence is not on the
philosophical event as contemplative or reflective, but always
essentially immanent. The implication here is not that the
philosophical process is 'in addition' to the intuitive in the sense that
Kant suggests understanding making sense of the immediate, and
therefore a posteriori. When Kant proposes understanding as both
and spontaneous, he implies a creative event that may be
active
concomitant with Deleuze and Guattari's immanence.

40
conditioned by being 'brought under a concept'. Equally, if

all thought is removed from experience, no knowledge of

any object remains, as concepts on their own lack objects;

therefore Kant proposes that the knowledge of an object
requires the conjunction of concept and intuition. He stated

that:

Without sensibility, no object would be given to us, without

understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without

context are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind. It is,

therefore, just as necessary to make our concepts sensible,

that is, to add the object to them in intuition, as to make

intuitions intelligible, that is, to bring them under concepts.
Those two powers or capacities cannot exchange their

functions. The understanding can intuit nothing; the senses

can think nothing. Only through their union can knowledge

92
arise.

Why is it relevant to consider in such detail this

fundamental proposition of Kantian epistemology with
regard to a discussion around the concepts of aesthetics
and hauntology? It is perhaps an obvious perception of a
kind of alterity in the divisive event of cognition that Kant

refers to as knowledge. We may therefore initially propose

to sketch out the idea that that intuition haunts

understanding in an equality that may be inverted to

presume that understanding may also haunt all that is

intuitive. 93 The proposal that intuition and understanding are
irreducible indicates an essential difference fundamental to

such an epistemological relationship. This distinguishes

92 Added emphasis. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason § 51 p. 93.

,
93 It is important to remember here our earlier contention that we were
not fall into the trap of mere inversion as a means of uncovering the
rift. I refer back to our earlier consideration with regard to aesthetics
and hauntology 'mere inversion' dismisses the complexity of the
-
intervention of the rift.

41
actuality from possibility through what insists (encysts) in

the sensibility of intuition,and the discursiveness of

understanding, there is also what Kant describes as a

that remains unknowable. 94
common root
The question that arises is one that we may think of as

a kind of temporality with regard to precedence in the

relationship between intuition and understanding.

Precedence implies temporality by indicating a before or

perhaps an a priori, and what becomes clear in Kantian

epistemology is that such privileged status is given to

space and time. 95 As already stated, Kant's view of space

and time as a priori intuitions meant for him that they did

not derive from

experience and as intuitions, and were both

immediate 96
and non-conceptual.
A question now arises: how can there be something
that is a priori in intuition, in contradiction to the natural

conception of sense experience as entirely a posteriori?

Kant proposes what he terms the synthetic judgements

as a priori and as such, are made true by objects and not

concepts. Intuitions are the representations whereby
objects are given a priori judgements and require a priori
grounds. Synthetic a priori judgement is made possible if

there is a priori intuition on which it may be grounded. In

94 Is the implication for Kant's 'unknowable' in a sense subjective and

is this subject some kind of divinity - 'God'?
95 The Background to Kant's understanding of space and time is found
in the Absolutist thinking of Newton and the Relational thinking of
Leibniz. Newton states that space is an absolutely real self-
subsistent container which would exist with no physical objects
within it self-sufficient substance. Time is the same.
contained -a
For Leibniz, space is a logical construction out of the relations
between objects and any statement about space is therefore reduced
to one about objects and their interactions.
96 They are both irreducible (contra Leibniz) and not real in the
absolute sense (contra Newton).

42
the Third Critique Kant distinguishes Judgement' S97 a priori
principle in relation to that of feeling, as distinctive to

understanding's relation to knowledge/empirical fact and

the relation of practical reason to desire. As such, this

mediation allows us to see the empirical world conforming

to the ends of practical reason, and thus practical reason
as adapted to our knowledge of the empirical world.
This faculty of Judgement, then, mediates (bridges, as
Derrida extrapolates in The Truth in Painting) between the
faculties of understanding (the First Critique) and practical
reason (the Second Critique). The fundamental problem for

aesthetics as a judgement, however, is through the

incompatibility of aesthetics, understood as the expression
of subjective experience and judgement as a claim of
universal assent. It is crucial to our understanding and
proposed use of the Derridian term hauntology in the

context of this text that we clarify the need to explore in

such detail this Kantian epistemology of synthetic

judgement. We must look here to Kantian appearance as a
means of navigation towards the spectral.
Appearance is not, for Kant, a manifold of sensations
in a posteriori sense, but presupposes that sensations are
in some way ordered or have form.
Experience, in this sense, cannot be all content: it must
have form, as to be without form would be buzzing

confusion.
The spectrality of such form is significant to the

understanding of appearance in relation to sensations.

97 As stated earlier, the capitalisation of Judgement is indicative of

Kant's prioritising of the term.

43
To be conscious of its experience as 'something', a subject
must understand that 'something' as ordered in some way.
In this way, form is the unifying factor that allows the
content of experience to show itself as a structure of
relation's a priori supplied by our power of intuition. What is
clear from this is that what gives order to sensation cannot
derive from that sensation and is essentially outside that
98
sensation.
The form of appearance is a relational structure
through the power of intuition, but its form cannot derive
from either intuition or thought; it is located between
sensation and thought and is prior to the application of any
concept and, like thought, does not derive from sensation.
It is evident from this that Kant proposed a kind of intuition
that is independent of sensation and which he defined as
'pure' intuition, which is distinguished from 'empirical'
intuition. 99 We may momentarily recall here an earlier
comment that defined a common root between the actual
and the possible (intuition and understanding) as something
that Kant defined as 'not knowable'. I would suggest here
that the heart of Kantian epistemology, with its root in the

98 It may be worth reiterating here earlier remarks that Heidegger in

'The Question Concerning Technology' made regarding enframing,
that the essence of technology is nothing technological -a
suggestion that the abysmal encryption of alterity is that which gives
order. It is also worth reminding ourselves here of the natural
formation of crystalline structures by the seed crystal; they are
formed by an alteric factor that is not essentially crystalline
(genetic? ) - it is other to the formation of the crystal yet the crystal
is dependent on it for its formation. I also introduce here, as a
precursor to later remarks in Chapter 4, 'The Orientation of the
Labyrinthine', the notion of the seed crystal with reference to the
crystal-image and temporality in Deleuze's writings on cinema,
particularly in his text Cinema 2.
99 Kant now defines two kinds of intuition - 'pure', containing nothing
belonging to sensation, the form of appearances; and 'empirical',
understood as the specificity of sensations and objects in the world.

44
context of intuition and thought, pure and empirical
intuition, is essentially alteric.
Kant's aesthetic indicates two forms of beauty:
dependent and pure. The former relies on the understanding
of the object being 'brought under a concept', for example,

painting as an expression of content, or a building as the

performance of a function, which, as such, is less 'pure'.
The latter allows for the relaxation of scientific and
practical thought and the entry into a free play of what he
describes without purpose. 100
as purposiveness
This is an indication beauty,
of the ground
of aesthetic
in nature and not in art. 101The unity of free
which abounds
beauty is purified of all interest and therefore is of no
definite purpose (what Kant terms disinterested), but

reflects back at us an order of origin within ourselves as

purposive beings. What is important here is that free

beauty's capacity to indicate origin is not through its
involvement in the specificity of purpose, but in what Kant
defines as the 'indeterminate mark of purpose'. The unity

100 This is understood as a beauty purified of all interests and therefore

as having no definite purpose. It reflects back at us an order of
origin within ourselves as purposive beings and bears the
unspecified/indeterminate marks of purpose, yet it is without specific
purpose itself. The perception of purposiveness is not understood as
a 'what is' in an ontological sense, but as an 'as if'. This does not
conform to a sense of infinite possibility but rather the inescapability
of a 'we must', which ties us to the act of seeing the world in a
certain way so as to discover our 'proper' place within it.
101 This is indicated as the sublime. Derrida notes in The Truth in
Painting that the sublime is essentially a violent experience of
indirection and superabundance, which is preceded in man by
inhibition, arrest and suspension. He argues that this conjunction of
pleasure/attraction with repulsion indicates that the trait of attraction
has the double meaning of affirmation and negation - 'What the
"pleasing-oneself-in" of the sublime "contains" is less a "positive
than respect or admiration. That's why it "deserves to be
pleasure"
called a negative pleasure". ' He also comments: 'It appears to do
violence to the imagination. And it is all the more sublime for that.
The measure of the sublime has the measure of this unmeasured, of
violent incommensurability', p. 129.

45
previously described displays purposiveness without
purpose.
However, the perception of this purposiveness is not
of a 'what is' but rather an 'as if', which, unlike what has

already been speculated on in the discussion of difference,

does not conform to an infinite possibility, but the
inescapability of a 'we must', which demands the viewing of
the world in a certain way through which we can ascertain
our proper place within it.

Aesthetic judgement frees us from the rigour of both

theoretical insight and moral endeavour and, as an idea of
transcendental design, is supersensible. 102

As an aesthetic idea, it imprints on the senses an intimation

of the transcendental realm, transcending any natural
example to make us aware of something beyond description
from which any natural example can only be seen as just a
pale reflection. The aesthetic experience involves the
perpetual striving to pass beyond the limitations and
specificity of any particular point of view to attempt to
embody what cannot be thought.
The philosophy of beauty moves through Kant's
attempt to free the limitations and particularity of a specific
perspective based in the inevitable necessity of our own
self-conscious condition, towards an aesthetic experience
where we view ourselves in relation to the transcendental -

102 Kant likens aesthetic judgement to the idea of reason and the
concept of purposiveness as 'beyond' the pragmatics of 'mere
sensibility'. Derrida argues that: 'The sublime cannot inhabit any
sensible form. There are natural objects that are beautiful, but there
cannot be a natural object that is sublime. The true sublime, the
sublime proper and properly speaking [Das eigentliche Erhabene]
relates only to the idea of reason. ' The Truth in Painting, p. 131.

46
a reality beyond the realm of thought. Kant's distinction
between beauty and the sublime finds the former
harmonising between nature and our own faculties and
infusing this relation with purposiveness and understanding
of all that surrounds us. Kant makes the distinction between

aesthetics and Judgement by claiming that the former is an

expression of subjective experience and therefore directly

related to that experience, whereas the latter claims

universal assent.
This suggests that the Judgement of taste cannot be

based on a conceptual framework, as that would lay it open

to dispute, hence the need to distinguish dependent and

pure. Kant's philosophy of beauty demands a relation
between our own perspective based in what he describes as
the 'necessary condition of our own self-consciousness',
while simultaneously addressing the sublime as the
overcoming of purposiveness and the renouncement of any
attempt to understand or control the infinite greatness of
the world. As such, the mind is 'incited to abandon

sensibility'. 103To judge the sublime, we demand a universal

recognition of the immanence of the supersensible realm

and, as such, it recognises the intimation of a
transcendental origin from which no reasoned argument can
be drawn. 104Purposiveness (in beauty) offers a sense of
harmony between nature and our faculties that is not bound

to the specificity or particularity of a pragmatic purpose,

103 Kant, The Critique of Judgement, p. 92.

104 For Kant, all morality stems from the transcendental point of view.
The awesomeness and solemnity of natural phenomenon make man
aware of the sense of his own limitations and allows Kant to extend
from the sublime a context for the faith in a Supreme Being. We may
to reflect back to earlier comments regarding the context for
wish
teleology and unknowing with reference to intuition and knowledge in
the First Critique.

47
and therefore offers an 'as if' as the indeterminate condition
for aesthetical transcendence that is still inescapable from
and conditional for any worldly praxis. However, the realm
of the transcendent that Kant advocates as the pre-
conceptual aesthetic experience still conforms to the
sensibilities of purity and impurity, and it predicates
affirmation over negation and as yet indicates, but does not
explore, the possibility of a transcendent terrain of interval
and between. However, as Derrida notes in The Truth in
Painting: 'The "pleasing-oneself-in" of the sublime is purely
or merely negative [nur negativ] to the extent that it
suspends play and elevates seriousness. 5105
This constitutes an act of violence through what
Derrida defines as an occupation that is related to moral
law, whereby violence is done not by the imposition of
reason on the senses, but by the imagination itself. This
turning of violence against itself by imagination constitutes
a self -sacrificial operation that subsumes the legality which
calls it to order - what Derrida refers to as 'the law of the
sublime as much as the sublimity of the law'. 106

John Rajchman points out that Deleuze critiques an

aesthetics based in the Kantian notion of a transcendent
manifold as the sublimation of sensation to what he refers
to as aesthetic pieties. He argues that Kantian
disinterestedness in the idealisation of art is merely recast
in Heideggerian Gelassenheit and Freudian sublimation.
Deleuzian sensation pushes beyond any such aesthetics of
transcendence and the belief in the precedence of another

105 Derrida, The Truth in Painting, p. 130.

106 Ibid., p. 131 . Unlike that of the beautiful, the principle of the sublime
must, as Derrida points out, 'be sought in ourselves who project
[hineinbringen] the sublime into nature, ourselves as rational beings',
p. 132 (added emphasis).

48
world, in favour of a new logic of paradox and the
nonsensical, which proffers the commitment to the
possibilities of this one: 'The category of sense replaces
that of truth when true and false describe the problem and
not the propositions that respond to it. ' 107
For Levinas, any criticism is the basic capacity for
human dwelling and indicates a primordial relation with
alterity. 108This spectral other as the ordering/unifying factor
for experience may be more closely linked with terms
employed by Levinas in his work around his alteric term, the
il y a. 109Levinas exploits this notion of the il ya in all the
ambiguity of its indeterminateness as an impersonal
'isness' -a precursor that precedes any recognised
epistemological enquiry of the isolated subject. It is before
revaluation or any conceptual framework that can order it.
There are distinct parallels to be drawn here with Deleuze's
thinking on the process of individuation in Difference and
Repetition, as indicated earlier. 110
Levinas argues that ontological enquiry persists in the
determinant specificity of a being through 'isness' and
therefore in the subjectivity of identity - an 'it is'.

107 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 145.

108 This is distinct from the Heideggerian notion of dwelling as
essentially a poetic experience.
109 The il ya translates as 'there is' and is imbued with horror as it is
neither interior or exterior -a 'between' that is the impersonal sheer
fact of being. We may also need to consider here lekton - one of the
four Stoical categories of incorporeals, understood as what is
expressible -a 'between' as 'extra-being'.
110 This refers to Deleuze's conception of a pre-individuation as apriori
to the specificity of individuation in Difference and Repetition.

49
The epistemological quest for accurate knowledge of the
world perceived marginalises any other discourse that
resists sublimation into the tradition of the isolated
subject. "' The de-personalising of being' 12 creates a trauma
of consciousness and the impossibility for symbolic
process, but what is significant is that the a priori nature of
'there is', is not a negation of rationality in the sense of
irrationality -a mere inversion - but a positive force that
refuses avoidance and exclusion via possibility.
By proposing 'there is' as a critique of the ontological
'it is', Levinas does not procure a new lingual form to do
away with being, but finds in ontology the tools to
reconsider what Husserl refers to as ontological
commitment. It may also be worth remembering that the
concept of the transcendental, crucial to Husserl and
Levinas, is founded upon the manoeuvre of bringing the
outside inside while retaining its essential exteriority - an
event of encryption that is not incorporation.
Consciousness is implicitly subjective and therefore,
in a sense, already torn away from the 'there is'. To be
conscious is already to be 'outside of' and as such
compelled to construct consciousness into a subjectivity
formed of a certain framework of rationality and logic. The
so-called darkness of the unconscious is suffused with the
light of consciousness, but Levinas's notion of exteriority

111 For Levinas, Phenomenology comes closest to encountering what he

refers to as an 'ethical responsibility' that critiques the tradition of
epistemology, which places knowledge and perception via an isolated
subject at the centre of any discourse. However, the shift that
Levinas proposes is from Husserl's transcendental ego whose activity
is directed towards objects in the field of first-hand experience,
towards an ethical reflection of human concern for others extended
through the work of Heidegger and Sartre.
112 The impersonalness of being considered by Levinas in concomitant
with Heidegger's interpretation as expressed particularly in
Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning).

50
extends beyond the traditional recognised dichotomy of the
historical discourse of thinking/philosophy. 113 There is (il y

a) is neither transcendent nor based in the ego nor any

form of the personally symbolic and '[i]t insinuates itself in
the night as an undetermined menace of space itself
disengaged from its function as a receptacle for objects, as
a means of access to beings'. 114
It is the particular that eludes/haunts the universal -
the horror/shadow of being that is exposed as impersonal
neutrality, and relocates any enquiry from the clarity of
ontological and epistemological discourse, to the nudity of
115
alteric otherness.
*

The historical understanding of the transcendent as that

which can be conceptualised, theorised, visualised,
objectified and therefore universalised is in contrast to
Levinas's use of the term. He understands it as a rupture,
an opening up to the other as resisting any reduction to
sameness (Western philosophy's historical drive to objectify
and universalise) similitude's
where dominance makes the
universal the goal of thought. 116
Phenomenology's aim was to reduce the gap between
thought and embodiment - being and existence and to

113 This is understood as the discourse of interior/exterior,

presence/absence and sense/nonsense.
114 The Levinas Reader, p. 31.
115 1 am reminded here in Levinas's and Blanchot's critique of
Heidegger's Being of the existent as impersonal neutrality, of post-
war criticism of Heidegger as 'non-humanistic' with reference to his
silence about the Holocaust/Shoah.
116 The universal is defined as independent of any given set of concrete
circumstances and is therefore disembodied and idealist.

51
advocate relation as the new motivation. 117Whereas, in
attributing a primacy to alterity, is Levinas setting the other
up as the universal in the formlessness of a waiting to be
conceptualised or universalised and therefore just a formal
other of negation and not a true alterity? The distinction is
important here: otherness as just another version of
sameness (its negation), or an irreducible other that is
foreign to the 'order of the same'? 118The other for Levinas
arises in the relation to others rather than in relation to the
universality of laws and is therefore a relation of ethical
responsibility. 119
Such responsibility towards the other engages with its
foreignness of irreducibility that is at once transcendent, in
that it is not just the negation of sameness and therefore an
a posteriori corruption of universality and its drive to
conceptualise. It is essentially outside and persists as an
overarching alterity that maintains difference as the
framework of indeterminacy - deferral as the motivation
against ontological order that both Husserl and Heidegger
advocate in their thinking. The event of presencing only
operates as such if as an occasion, we comprehend and

117 It is worth remembering here the provisional discussion on relation at

the opening of this chapter: the significance of between and the
integrity of the rift.
118 The distinction is important in relation to Phenomenology, as
Husserl's attempt to reinvigorate the transcendental via a new
relationship with existence is undermined by Levinas, who wishes to
expose what is essentially alien in transcendental otherness and
therefore unable to conform to the phenomenological persistence in a
formal dichotomy.
119 Ethics is understood here as the practical relation of one to another
that is prior to ontology. Husserl's project is to locate signification in
existence; Levinas's is in responsibility for the other. The
communication, which must be established in order to enter into a
relation with the other means that the relation is no longer ontology,
but rather religion -a place where knowledge cannot take
precedence over sociality. This is relevant to what will be later
discussed in Chapter 2, 'Todtnauberg and the Meridian', with regard
to the relationship between Heidegger and Celan and manifest in
Celan's poem, 'Todtnauberg'.

52
maintain the metaphysical binary of presence and
absence. 120The former (presence), as illumination, can only
be understood via a simultaneous grasp of its counterpart
shadow - however, the full glare of the always entirely
present can only banish shadow to an ever-diminishing role
that can only be maintained in proximity to the privileged
ideality. 121

In 'Reality and its Shadow', Levinas proposes that the

artwork is 'an event of obscuring', in that the consciousness
of representation is in the knowledge that the object
represented is essentially not there.
The perceived elements of any artwork do not serve as
symbols in the absence of the object - they do not force its

presence, as it were, but by their very presence insist on its

absence. 122

120 Even as an active process, presencing is haunted in its motivation by

absence. As an active verb, to presence must embrace absencing as
its hidden imperative - the shadow to any illumination.
121 It may be pertinent to remember our earlier remarks on
consciousness and the unconscious in Levinas with regard to
illumination and shadow.
122 Hegel states in his lectures on aesthetics, 'For the beauty of art is
the beauty that is born - born again, that is - of the mind. ' In
Bosanquet's translation, Geist can mean both mind and 'spirit' and an
allusion to a biblical source can be detected: 'born of water and of
the Spirit' (John 3: 5) refers to spiritual rebirth. Natural objects,
materials, etc., are 'transformed' by spirit (in this context, the human
mind) and are reborn as works of art. This relation activates
aesthetics and specifically determines the sublime.

53
 For Hegel, the mind/spirit (Geist) is the contributory
factor that elevates what is natural to art. What
distinguishes between them is not conceived in terms of
hierarchical quantitative judgements, but by saying that the

unique contribution of Geist to artistic beauty is that 'mind

is capable of truth'. 123Natural beauty cannot
and mind only,
be systemised as it is too vague and destitute of a criterion,
but Hegel introduces the term utility in an attempt to
the natural into a 'science of use'. 124
compile as product

In the forms of art we seek repose and animation in place of

the austerity of the reign of law and the sombre self-
concentration of thought: we would exchange the shadowland
idea for cheerful 125
of the vigorous reality.

The transcendent spirit in Hegel's aesthetic transforms

materiality through elevation via the conduit (thread) of a

transcendent Geist and conceives ideality and its law as
imparting restrictions, against the 'caprice and lawlessness
of the mind'.

123 This combines two ideas

i The mind discerns the truth about other things, e. g., discovers
the laws governing the solar system and focuses on and accesses
the beauty of sunsets, etc.
ii The mind is independent and self-contained, having such
qualities as beauty underivatively. The beauty of nature is a
reflection of the beauty that belongs to the mind. It is an
imperfect and incomplete mode of being.
124 He also uses the term curative, which has implications for the work in
Chapter 2, 'Todtnauberg and the Meridian', particularly with
reference to comments on the pharmakos. Beauty and art 'form the
bright adornment of all our surroundings', 'soothing the sadness of
our condition', and 'keeping evil at a distance'. Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, Chapter 1 (part
vi), P. 5.
125 Ibid., p. 7, Chapter 1 (part vii) (added emphasis).

54
In this way ideality becomes the spectral transformer of the
sensual via transcendence. 126
*

Death for Heidegger is impossibility - the possibility of

impossibility, but for Levinas mortality is beyond the

capacity of what he refers to as the 'I can'; the impersonal

otherness of the 'there is' allows for the possibility of taking

life as it were, but not the capacity for 'taking death'; it is
the impossibility of possibility. 127We may conclude
rather
that, historically, the 'wholly present' and 'wholly absent'
correlate in their dialectic with illumination and shadow as a
clear manifestation of the metaphysically persistent binary.
However, the movement of becoming indicates a more
complex articulation, which ruptures this opposition and its
hierarchy by creating a fissure between the clear paradigm
of epistemological presence and absence -a 'between' or
interval or rift. Mindful of this, to propose becoming as a
more appropriate operation of the event by which any
dialectic can be undermined and reconfigured, must take
into account that the very binary it seeks to rethink still
determines it within the hierarchies of being and non-being,

126 This differs from Derrida in that the directional nature of the impact
of Geist as transcendent still conforms to a Platonic ideality of
imposition. Derrida's spectre undermines that chronology by
insinuating itself via encryption and discontinuity. Levinas speaks of
the material ity/component/element as old garments occupying a place
to make a removal as though the represented objects died, were
degraded, and were disincarnated in its own reflection. ' (added
emphasis). Levinas, 'Reality and its Shadow', p. 136. Later in the
same text, he states, '[tlhe artist moves in a universe that precedes
the world of creation, a universe that the artist has already gone
...
beyond by his thought and his everyday actions. ' Also note here
remarks made by Derrida on predetermination in The Truth in
Painting, p. 21.
127 This is understood as a 'coming toward' rather than a 'that which I
am toward'; 'isness' is depersonalised in the other.

55
truth and non-truth, sense and non-sense, understood

through ratio.
Derrida's suggestion (quoted at the beginning of this
chapter) that the traditional scholar can only think in
binaries, does not suggest that such oppositional
hierarchies should be done away with, but rather that closer
scrutiny must uncover that exteriority which is encrypted as

a spatio-temporal event. To suggest a literal relation for

shadow with any binary counter-part is to fall, if not

cautious, into the persistence of a distinction between

affirmation and negation as the contingency by which

be proposed and exploited. 128Levinas
shadow might
described a doubling of reality with its image as indicated
by the idea of shadow or reflection. He argued that '[t]he

whole of reality bears on its face its own allegory, outside

its truth'. 129
of its own revelation and
*

The work of art/artistic event is then the obscuring of being

in images and therefore the arresting of that being in a
temporal 'between' -a meanwhile. In citing two

contemporary possibilities for being, Levinas seeks to

rethink disclosure and its function in the artwork outside

revelatory predisposition commonly a ttributed to it
historically. The simultaneity of idea and soul - being and
its disclosure - is superseded by the simultaneity of being
and its reflection, where the absolute reveals itself to

reason and also lends itself to a kind of erosion outside

128 1 am thinking here of the cinematic the object of the film occurs in
-
the temporal flux between illumination and shadow - other to
illumination and other to shadow. Also note here Deleuze on the
object as present image in Cinema 1.
129 Levinas, 'Reality and its Shadow', p. 136 .

56
causality: 'Non-truth is not an obscure residue of being, but

is its sensible character itself, by which there is

resemblance and images in the world. ý130

For Levinas all art depends on rhythm (and is

ultimately musical) and produces a state of intoxication

where distinctions between subject and object are blurred
and dissolve into impersonality and anonymity. Its time is

not that of the real world but of the dream -a between time

where any future is replaced by fatality.

As a shadow of reality, it can only be engaged through
criticism (questions of technique and influence 'wake' art
from its 'dream') 131Husserl's definition of the image as 'the
.
real object minus its being posited as really present
anywhere' is critiqued by Levinas, who proposes that

consciousness of the absence of the object should be

understood as an alteration of the being of the object. The

phenomenology of the picture in clarifying the

phenomenology of the image destines the virtue of the

image in its own right so that it is no longer merely the

medium through
which something else might be reached.
Unlike a sign or a symbol, 132the image and therefore

representation are reversals or allegories - the shadows

that reality casts before it.

130 Ibid., p. 136.

131 In the introduction to House of Leaves, the character Johnny Truant
states, 'Old shelters-television, magazines, movies-won't protect you
anymore. You might try scribbling in a journal, on a napkin, maybe
in the margins of this book. That's when you'll discover you no
even
longer trust the very walls you always took for granted. Even the
hallways you've walked a hundred times will feel longer, much
longer, and the shadows, any shadow at all, will suddenly seem
deeper, much, much, deeper', p. xiii (added emphasis).
132 Signs and symbols understood here as that which is tied to that
which are signified through them.

57
 The world of the artistic imagination and of imagination in
general is not merely a reflection or re-presentation of reality,
but a double of reality presenting its sensible truth. 133

In 'The Transcendence of Words', Levinas states, '[n]on-

sense is the most evenly distributed thing in the world'. 134
Understanding sense outside the remit of the
negation/affirmation dichotomy allows us to grasp a
conception that no longer relies on the privileging of reason
as the essential component to understanding. What is 'not'
sense in the order of reasonableness remains to it -
other
its shadow, and as such, a bifurcation. In his introduction to
'The Transcendence of Words', Sedn Hand comments:

An original bifurcation means that any static identity or

representation overflows from the beginning. The primary
space which this creates is one filled with anxiety for Levinas,
unless it includes a relation with someone that is the necessity
of critique. This necessary communication means that there is
no pure sound prior to the word: sound or words produce a
transcendence by breaking the world of self-sufficiency.
Speech situates the self in relation to the other in a way that
shows us how being for the other is the first fact of
135
existence.

When Levinas states that thought is originally erasure, he

refers to a network of associations in which what is key is
not that ideas displace one another, but the assurance of
the presence of one idea in another. 136

133 Added emphasis. The Genealogy of Ethics, 'Tropes', p. 195.

134 Levinas, 'The Transcendence of Words', from The Levinas Reader, p.
145.
135 Levinas, Introduction to 'The Transcendence of Words', p. 144.
136 '[T]he thought at the moment of its erasure still influences through
its erased meaning; its different meanings participate with one
another. ' 'The Transcendence of Words', p. 146.

58
The association of ideas understood through this level of
erasure takes beyond the classical
thought categories of
and identity. 137 Space is no longer conceived
representation
as the accommodator of things, but rather as that which is
delineated through their erasure. This line of ambiguity is

where the skeletal function of the linear is shed in the

framing of the pictorially spatial in favour of an infinity of

possible connections where the modern work of art

proposes a state of incompletion and possibility through the

simultaneity and ambiguity of erasure.

*

137 Such an overflowing has a close affinity with Bergsonian duration,

but Bergson's concept represents this negation of identity as a
process of evolution against the primordial status of Levinas's notion
of erasure which 'affirms the simultaneity of multiplicity and the
irreducibly ambiguous nature of consciousness'. (Levinas, 'The
Transcendence of Words', p. 146) Deleuze's appropriation of
Bergsonian duration is particularly evident in the texts Cinema 1 and
Cinema 2. This will be explored in more detail in a later chapter, but
it suffices here to mention that duration incorporates both temporality
and spacing, and where the precedent is no longer to consider time
as the mere diminutive of space but to propose durde as the relation
of time-space. Levinas argues that overflowing lies beyond the
categorisation of representation and identity and looks
classical
towards Bergsonian duration noting that Bergson's conception
represents the negation of identity as a process of evolution.
Duration here is not explicit, as such variation is both simultaneous
and spatial and therefore there is no etudic process towards
completion.

59
Derrida says of Levinas that he respects the zone or layer
of traditional truth, but his thought makes us tremble
through dislocation and move towardsa prophetic speech
that is no longer the site or home for a god. 138
The bifurcation of the other as an event of difference
promotes the status of ambiguity, so that intrinsic meaning
is deferred in an attempt to liberate thought from the
samelbeing and the onelphenomenon through the interval of
deferral. This may be provisionally conceived as a
difference between what is and what is not, when perhaps it
is more appropriate to think of it in terms of a complication
of similitude diff6rance. 139
-a
In the preface to Derrida's 'An Introduction to the
Origin of Geometry', in a footnote, he attempts to define
diff6rance via language:

Here in the usage of our language we must consider that the

ending -ance is undecided between active and passive. And
we shall see why what is designated by 'difference' is neither
simply active nor simply passive, that it announces or rather
recalls something like a middle voice, that it speaks of an
operation, which cannot be thought of either as a passion or
as an action of a subject upon an object, as starting from an

138 In the text 'Edmond Jabbs and the Question of the Book', Derrida
speaks of the coincidence of 'right to speech' and 'duty to
interrogate'. He says, 'But if this right is absolute, it is because it
does not depend upon some accident within history. The breaking of
the Tables (tablets? ) articulates, first of all, a rupture within God as
the origin of history. () God separated himself for himself in order to
let us speak, in order to astonish and to interrogate us. He did so not
by speaking but by keeping still, by letting silence interrupt his voice
and his signs, by letting the Tables be broken, ' p. 67 (added
emphasis). Derrida remarks in The Truth in Painting that, '[a] piece
of wasteland [terrain vague] has no fixed limit. Without edge, without
any border marking property Vague [i. e., wanders, roams -Trans]
...
is a movement without its goal, not a movement without goal but
without its goal', pp. 92-3.
139 Christopher Norris, writing on Husserl, describes the transcendental
reduction an oscillation that disables materiality, perhaps the
intervention of interval - the vibration of unclecidability.

60
 agent or from a patient, or on the basis of, or in view of any of

these terms. 140

As already stated, the essential alterity of diff6rance is not

to be defined exclusively by the operation of the 'not' of

difference, the complications of identity and the universality

of sameness. It continues to specify a locale of a 'between',

which is perhaps still organised and essentially defined by

the dialectic of presence absence and and within which the

a priori is maintained 141The trauma of the

pre-existent .
'there is', as understood by Levinas, is formed by the

indeterminate ambiguity of its 'isness'. It comes to thought

before either personal revelation or the rigorous necessity

of any concept that can order it. 142

The distinction employed between difference and

diff6rance is significant to the understanding of the
spectral, and in as far as difference retains some proximity
to the universality of sameness, diff6rance articulates a
trauma of more complex irreducible unclecidability. 143

Derrida articulates two questions with regard to

Husserl's The Origin of Geometry in his introduction. The
first concerns the status of what he describes as the 'ideal

140 Preface to 'An Introduction to the Origin of Geometry' by Derrida, p.

4, footnote 12.1 also draw attention here to earlier comments on
active and passive with regard to Kant writing on intuition and
knowledge.
141 1 am thinking here of the primacy of alterity defined by Levinas as
not a negation in the sense of the irrational, a void, but as a positive
force, essentially particular and eluding the universal. It is important
to remember here that the other, in the sense of difference, may still
be defined in terms of 'waiting to be conceptualised and
universalised' the other of Western thought as just another version
-
of the same. Levinas is looking for an other that is irreducible to the
universality of difference and foreign to the order of the same.
142 As neither transcendent nor based in the specificity of the ego nor
personally symbolic, it is truly nowhere.
143 '[T]he crisis of the text is not brought about by polysemy or the
overabundance of meaning but rather by the very inability to decide
meaning', 'An Introduction to the Origin of Geometry', Preface, p. 5.

61
objects of science' 144(geometry being one example) and
their production by identifying acts as sameness and the
through idealisation 14'5The
constitution of exactitude .
second considers the interrelated and concrete conditions
for the possibility of these ideal objects through language

and intersubjectivity - the world as the unity of ground and

horizon.
For Derrida, The Origin of Geometry unites organically
the two denunciations of historicism and objectivism to

create a new conjunction: the historicity of ideal

objectivities, which obeys different rules and is neither the

factual interconnections of empirical history nor an ideal

'adding on'. 146He proposes an occultation
and ahistoric
through the event of objectivism in science whereby the

founding subjectivity of science, and therefore its basis in

defines Lebenswelt, 147 are

what Husserl as the alienated

strange. 148
and rendered
To free science from its subjective origins is to be
involved in what Derrida, via Husserl, describes as a
'necessary act' of objectivisation and conquest, but which is

also an act of irresponsibility by rendering the world (via

144 1 refer back to earlier comments on science. Derrida's use of

Husserl's Origin of Geometry gives status to science/geometry as a
means of navigating towards its origin.
145 For Kant there is one geometry: the Euclidean, which is viewed as a
body of synthetic a priori propositions about the structure of
perceptual space, for example, the proposition that space has only
three dimensions.
146 This conjunction is crucial because it is quite clearly, for Derrida,
neitherfactual nor ideal. This new unity of different rules is perhaps
most strongly linked to the Heideggerian originary event of the
of technology. The term objectivities indicates a close link
essence
to event status in as far as the exactitude of objectivity is
undermined by immanence.
147 Translated as 'life world'.
148 The situating of imagination as the scission between sensibility and
knowledge highlights the rift as the erudition of the unfamiliar (the
Unheimlich) in the midst of what is comprehended (the finitude of
comprehension) as familial.

62
the sense and logic/reason) unintelligible. 149In
of science
this way, the responsibility of sense and objectification,
through what might be defined as 'the logic of clarity',
imposes origin. 150
an obscuring structure on subjective
Derrida defines this 'forgetfulness of origins' thus:

Undoubtedly, Husserl's production also involves a stratum of

receptive intuition (as in Kantian 'revaluation'). But what

matters here is that this Husserlian intuition, as it concerns

151 is
the ideal objects of mathematics, absolute, constitutive

and creative: the objects or objectivities that it intends did not

exist before it: and this before of the ideal objectivity marks

more than the chronological eve of fact: it marks a

transcendental 152
prehistory.

149 It may be worth thinking here of Deleuze writing on sense, pre-sense

and nonsense in his The Logic of Sense. If we understand pre-sense
and nonsense in terms of discontinuity, they interrupt the smoothness
of any continuity and give the continuous shape.
150 Husserl's consideration of pre-sense critiques Galilean blindness to
origin via the accomplishment of idealisation and its lack of enquiry
into origin via the pre-geometrical, sensible world and practical acts.
151 In The Truth in Painting, Derricla speculates on scale and the
differentiation between mathematical and aesthetic evaluation. 'The
mathematical evaluation of size never reaches its maximum. The
aesthetic evaluation, the primary and fundamental one, does reach it;
and this subjective maximum constitutes the absolute reference
which arouses the feeling of the sublime; no mathematical evaluation
or comparativity is capable of this, unless the fundamental
...
aesthetic measure remains alive, is kept alive [lebendig erhalten
wird] in the imagination which presents the mathematical numbers. '
pp. 139-40.
152 Derrida, 'An Introduction to Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry', p.
40.

63
In Kantian revaluation, the first geometer merely becomes

conscious that it suffices for any mathematical activity to

remain within a concept that it already possesses, and

therefore a construction that is the explication of an already
existing concept is the non-creative act teaching the sense

of a ready-made geometry. 153As such, it remains the history

of an operation, and not the act of being instituted -a

founding. 154Derrida's argument that deconstruction is a

rigorous attempt to think the limits of the principle of reason

remains pertinent to this institution, as it inherits the active
demand of Heidegger to re-think origin (in this instance, the

origin of reason, but the same application may be made to a

more general sense of origin as in Husserl's geometry).
What is implicit to Derrida's project is the imperative to go
beyond the tradition of oppositional terminology of praxis
and theory, however, the activity of deconstruction remains
inconceivable outside the tradition of enlightened rational
critique, whose classic formulations are found in Kant. In
demanding a reason for reasonableness, Derrida maintains
that rationality understood as the likes of technology,
science, geometry, etc., remains a highly specific historical

153 Derricla notes in The Truth in Painting that: 'The nonconceptual

resembles the conceptual. A very strange resemblance, a singular
proximity of affinity [Ahnlichkeit] which, somewhere draws out of
mim6sis an interpretation of the beautiful which firmly rejects
imitation', p. 76. He argues that the place of the gathering of
'without-concept' and 'concept', universality 'with' and 'without'
concept, legitimates what he refers to as the 'violent occupation' of
the nonconceptual field by the grid of conceptual force.
154 In the sense that Heidegger proposes the essence of technology as
nothing technological, is Derrida proposing that the essence of
geometry is not geometric? I pose the following two questions: Is the
origin/essence inside geometry through the temporality of historicity?
And if so, as such a component does it remain alien to the
architectonics of geometry -a viral contamination encrypted at the
source of ideality? Derrida notes on the intermediary of imagination
recognised in aesthetic evaluation, between sensibility and
understanding in The Truth in Painting, that 'for aesthetic evaluation
to give rise to a mathematical measure, the intervention of the
imagination is indispensable', p. 140.

64
formation that cannot be appealed to as a kind of ultimate
ground. 155He argues in The Truth in Painting that:

An inadequate presentation of the infinite presents its own

inadequation, an inadequation is presented as such in its own

yawning gap, it is determined in its contour, it cises and

the without-cise. 156
incises itself as incommensurable with

Where he differs from Heidegger is in his insistence that

there is no possibility of thinking back beyond the origin of
a false enlightenment to a primordial state of being where
language touched the ultimate truths of experience. This

remains too logocentric in its assumptions about speech as

self-presence and is still trapped in the empirical framework

of conceptual oppositions. The active re-thinking of

reason's origin through what is described as an immanent
critique implies a Kantian dialectic of passive and active,
and perhaps suggests that such an activity can only take
place within the principality of reason in the Western
tradition.
Derrida's notion of 'beyond reason', as already stated,
differs from Heidegger's notion of 'beyond' in as far as the

primordial linguistic origin the latter considers remains still

concerned with the patterns of logocentric ordering while
aspiring to be distinctly other.

155 In this way he continues Heidegger's critique of instrumental reason

as the 'essential task of any authentic "modern" philosophy'.
156 Added emphasis. Derrida, The Truth in Painting, p. 132. Derrida's
excavation of the word cise from incision is significant because it
draws attention to the contention that sublimity exceeds the order of
what Kant calls 'productions of art', as they are concomitant with the
scale of man: 'the sublime, if there is any sublime, exists only by
overspilling: it exceeds cise and good measure, it is no longer
proportioned according to man and his determinations', ibid., p. 122.
This superabundance opens an abyss - an in[ciselion within
ourselves where magnitude as absolutely large 'is no longer of the
order or at orders of largeness as dimension. It is larger than
largeness, neither large nor largeness, but absolutely large. ' Ibid.,
pp. 135-6 (added emphasis).

65
 *

This more paras it iC 157activity acknowledges its encrypted

blurring of the internal/external ordering of metaphysical
logic, and emphasises Heidegger's origin as still essentially

a metaphysical one, in that being haunts beings in a way

that it (being) persists in the form of a primordial ideality.

He critiques Husserl's attempt to define the universal

knowledge of geometry as the combination of present
intuition and past discovery, through what he perceives as
the essential role of the lingual as an event of emancipation
from the intuition of actuality. Derrida plays with the

Husserlian interplay between present and past in intuition

and discovery as a circulatory source of illumination from

which consciousness discovers a path.

Derridian ideality, in what we might refer to as 'the

lingual permanence of language', sources the a priori truth

not as the geometric form as a universal knowledge, but

confers the sourceof such ideality in the language in which

that form is expressed. 158

Phenomenology, as defined by Husserl, is the philosophy of

intangible and a priori but is also
essences - objective, -
the philosophy of experiences, the temporal flux of what is

157 In Formal and Transcendental Logic, Husserl contextualises logic by

saying that: '[This] theory of pure forms is the intrinsically first
discipline of formal logic, implanted as a germ in the old analytics
but not yet developed', p. 50 (added emphasis).
158 It is worth noting here that if we understand writing, as Derrida
proposes, as an endlessly productive signifying practice, irreducible
to some ultimate, self-evident truth, the conception of writing is
already a deferral of meaning, and therefore the assurance of an
objectivity of pure presence in the written form is already
undermined. Husserl's reliance on the lingual form to express the
geometric places deferral at the heart of any 'origin'.

66
lived. The path of such thinking is defined, as Christopher
Norris states, by an oscillation between genesis/intuitive
(the temporal), and structure/ideality (permanence). In his

introduction to Husserl's Origin of Geometry, Derrida

states, '[h]istorical incarnation sets free the transcendental,

instead of binding it'. 159 For him, the 'speaking subject' (the

fall back into the lingual, as it were) constitutes the ideal

object and therefore objectivity, and raises the question of

the disassociation of the ideal object from all subjectivity

and empirical language, both of which may confuse the

transparency of the univocal and objective significations of

a pure logic. According to him, the reductive process of

phenomenology by which Husserl parenthesises constituted

language, operates to let the originality of constitutive
language come to light. As such, the reductive process must
inhibit any objective positing produced in unreflective

consciousness (perceived, remembered, judged, etc. ), so

that the world is not understood absolutely but
via
the 'of', as it were. 160
consciousness - experience
In the preparatory considerations of his text Formal

and Transcendental Logic, Husserl argues:

As a theory of science concerned with principles, logic intends

to bring out pure universalities, a priori universalities. As

already said in the introduction, it does not intend to

investigate empirically the so-called sciences that are given
beforehand the cultural formations going by that name, which
-
have in fact come into existence - and abstract their empirical
types, on the contrary, free from every restriction to the
factual (which supplies it only with points of departure for a

159 Derrida, 'An Introduction to Edmund Husserl's The Origin of

Geometry', p. 77.
160 'Of' as the 'via' of consciousness, may give a context for the
preposition 'of' that operates between aesthetics and hauntology.

67
 criticism of examples), it intends to make completely clear the
final ideas that hover dimly before us whenever we are
actuated by a purely theoretical interest. 161

Husserl's investigations belong, not within a deductive

logic, but in what might be considered as a second-order
I 162The
discipline now understood as the philosophy of ogiC.
determination towards a systematic coherence of knowing in

Husserl's thought makes a clear distinction between the

pure logic of Kantian judgements: 'finding ground for one's

knowing, and suitably combining and ordering the sequence

163
of such groundings' .
The essence of science is no longer merely the

accumulation of various isolated pieces of knowledge, but

the unity of a whole system of grounded validations. Logic,

for Husserl, becomes the theory of theories and is a priori
in that, as David Bell states in his study of the philosopher:
'It is the science that studies the possible forms of any
systematic, rational knowledge whatsoever, regardless of
the material of that knowledge. 7164
content
*

161 Edmund Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, p. 28.

162 It is worth remembering here that, logic, as a 'pure' science, is
understood as the investigation and codification of relations of
deductive consequence, holding between sentences or thoughts and
propositions and what they express. Kant's objective cleductio was a
positive attempt to establish the content of a priori knowledge by
asking the question, What are the presuppositions of experience?
The truth follows not from the particularity of this or that experience,
but from the fact that we have experience at all. For Kant, the
particularity of experience cannot verify this truth, only the
universality of reason is capable of defining what will be true in
every 'world' where sceptical questions are asked.
163 'Objects are given to us by means of sensibility, and it alone yields
us intuitions; they are thought through the understanding, and from
the understanding arise concepts. ' Kant, Critique of Pure Reason,
§33, p. 65.
164 David Bell, Husserl, p. 90.

68
The objectivity of pure logic can only be proved outside its

own system and requires epistemological self-evidence (the

reflection and critique that, as far as Husserl is concerned,

only a philosopher can supply), and all syntactic, semantic,

logical laws and principles, 165 that together
and metalogical
comprise the formality of the objective, requires a
complementary investigation into the subjective and
material aspects of rational - thought
philosophical logic.
This materiality is a key to any understanding of the
temporal flux of phenomenological thinking, and introduces
a Hegelian/historical dimension as a ground for knowledge

and as a reaction against a priori truth as a grand

synthesis.
For Derrida, the power of logocentric thinking is to

absorb all differences by viewing the event of difference as

merely a signPOsting towards this synthesis. Therefore
dialectical reason becomes an attempt to comprehend all
terms that the lays down in advance. 166
via philosophical
In this sense, Husserl's proposal to render a
philosophical logic through means of subjectivity and
materiality can be seen to indicate, through the distinctions

manifest in the application of the aforementioned terms,

difference as the core of rational thought. What haunts the

objective in its drive towards the application of principles is

another logic grounded in distinctiveness and diversity.

165 Husserl describes these as: 'the merely negative conditions of the
possibility of truth'. From 'Experience and Judgement (§3)', and
quoted in David Bell's text Husserl, p. 91 .
166 Derrida critiques Husserl's conception of structure via writing as
permanence, suggesting that this origin relies on what he refers to as
'mortal script'. In his introduction to Husserl's Origin of Geometry, he
asserts that the imperative to define geometry, via writing, traps
Husserl's thinking in a continual logocentric bias, which is contrary
to writing's irreducibility to any self-evident truth.

69
Derrida alludes to this in his critique of The Origin of
Geometry expressed through 'mortal script'.
However, the particularities of what Husserl describes

as emancipated sciences cannot realise their true potential

their full being-sense, without relinquishing their
-
provincial particularities, their exclusivity of method and
specificity.
The combinations of their research potential must lead

to 'the universality of being and its fundamental essential

unity'. 167Any impetus to blame pure or formal logic for the
creation of exclusive scientific principalities is contingent

on the suggestion that the logic of universality has

relinquished its capacity for overseeing and has resorted to

the role of a special science. Implicit in this historical
manoeuvre is a shift in significance from the transcendental
to the merely formal.
The procedure 168of phenomenological reduction that

Husserl advocates is a method by which one can reduce to

zero ontological commitments based in what he describes

as the natural attitude . 169The principle of reduction

addresses the naivety of ontological commitment on the

premise that ontology is understood here as the existence

of physical objects, properties, and facts in the form of an

objective causal nexus. The transcendental reduction is a

167 Edmund Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, p. 4.

168 Phenomenological Reduction is for Husserl, a procedure and not a
theory that can be applied. It is an expression of imperatives rather
than a declaration of 'truth' an activity rather than a belief that
-
induces a particular state of mind of which no adequate conception
can be formed or understood by others who have not already
successfully performed the reduction.
169 Natural Attitude denotes a complex system of interlocking beliefs
permeating our everyday understanding of things. It is generally a
shared system of commitments that are linked to the pursuit of
truth by the natural and human sciences, and which, for
objective
Husserl, are essentially philosophically naive, in that they remain
uncritical and largely unconscious.

70
method for neutralising these ontological components
without excluding them or obliterating them and this is

crucial to any understanding of the complexities of the shift

from natural attitude to neutralised attitude.
*

In Ideas, Husserl indicates the process thus:

[A]lthough it remains what it is in itself, we put it 'out of

action', we 'exclude it', and we 'bracket it'. It is still there, like

the bracketed matter inside a pair of parentheses but we

...
make no use of it. We put out of action the entire ontological
commitment (General thesis) that belongs to the essence of
the natural attitude, we place it in brackets whatever it
includes with respect to being. 170

The oscillation that Christopher Norris refers to between the

intuitive/temporal and structural/permanence is indicated by
the parenthetic event of transcendental reduction, which
essentially disables any materiality/objectivity. If pure or
formal logic is understood as the place for establishing and
exploring the essential requirements of a genuine
knowledge, the discovery of such norms, and therefore the

new sense of science in a metaphysical sense, arises in the

Platonic establishment of a formal logic. The ambiguity of
Husserl's reductive process mediates for a different
interpretation of the transcendental that resists the

metaphysical imperative to impose universality on

temporality. The complication of this manoeuvre
provisionally shifts the emphasis of what is essentially
transcendent from a priori to post priori. However, this

170 Edmund Husserl, Ideas §32, p. 111 -

71
procedure is not merely an inversion of the common
understanding of the historical metaphysical dichotomy.
What Husserl alludes to, and Norris amplifies, is a

more complex affiliation between the intuitive and the

structural, whereby the emphasis is no longer on exclusivity
and separateness in the sense of diminishing, but rather an
ex-endence. 171 In the introduction to Formal and
Transcendental Logic, Husserl proposes a reversal of the
historical relationship between logic and science by stating:

Instead of seeking out the pure essential norms of science in

all its essential formations, to give the sciences fundamental

guidance thereby and to make possible for them genuineness

in shaping their methods and in rendering an account of every

step logic has been pleased to let itself be guided by the cle
facto sciences, particularly the much-admired natural sciences
in conceiving its ideal of science and in setting its own
172
problems.

The contradiction in transcendental reduction remains in the

worldliness implicit in ontological commitment that Husserl

provisionally insists must be done away with. The external,

once neutralised, allows for the transcendental residuum of

consciousness (which has its own absolute essence) to

come to the fore as it is unaffected by the reductive

process. Thus the dichotomy of internal/external is retained
by Husserl's phenomenology as the spectre of
consciousness. This operates as a transcendental
residuum, which haunts ontological commitment. Husserl's

attempts to resolve the contradiction of this dichotomy by

171 Ex-endence is understood as a departure from being and the

categories that define it. In making this departure, what remains
crucial is the contribution of the embarkation point for the journey.
172 Edmund Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic - 'Introduction',
p. 3.

72
proposing the reductive act as one of change, but what is
highlighted is an ambiguity between the everyday and the
transcendental - the legitimacy of truth and its
acknowledgement.
The scientific imperative that Husserl adopts in his
transcendental ontology fails to provide it with a genuine

explanatory power, because it persists in assigning

scientific functions to both transcendental and natural

sciences. 173Derrida's contention in 'Violence and
Metaphysics' is that:

[T]he consciousness of crisis is for Husserl but the

provisional, almost necessary covering up of a transcendental

motif which in Descartes and in Kant was already beginning to
the Greek as science. 174
accomplish aim: philosophy

The complication of legitimising a new provision for the

transcendental is most acutely felt in Husserl's
determination to configure it within the context of the
Greco-European tradition. It alludes
to a security that
its potential and radicality. 175However, as
undermines
previously stated, Derrida in 'Violence and Metaphysics'

also suggests that knowledge within the aforementioned

tradition 'is neither habitual nor comfortable but, on the

contrary, permits us to experience torment or distress in

general'. 176The reductive process performs as an inhibitor

of objective positing produced in unreflective consciousness
(perceived, remembered, judged, etc. ) and by placing the

173 Derrida's contention that Husserl's reliance on mortal script to define

scientif ic/geometric ideality may be pertinent to remember here.
174 Derrida, 'Violence and Metaphysics', p. 82.
175 David Bell in his study on Husserl, suggests that phenomenology is
an inherently conservative philosophy.
176 Derrida, 'Violence and Metaphysics', p. 82.

73
'world' in brackets, it is no longer understood absolutely but

obscured via consciousness the experience 'of'.

-
The transcendental, then, appears to be absolute and
not hindered by specificity and through the process of
phenomenological reduction it is the revision of the shutting
out of universal consciousness in favour of the pure
phenomenon - the purely psychical.
*

Perception of a body as a concordant multiplicity of

perceptions of one and the same body becomes unthinkable
as factually occurring perceptions or expectations. It
becomes the presentation of invariant structural systems
better understood as essential forms or eidos. Kant, in 'The
Dreams of a Spirit Seer', states:

74
 The initiate is already accustomed to heighten his intellectual

powers and thus transcends the crude world of the five senses
by help of reason and abstract concepts: thus he has learnt to

discern spiritual shapes, devoid of material particles, in the

twilight where the dim glow of metaphysics renders to him the

177
realm of shadows.

Kant's theory indicates an intermediary link for the concept

of the organism. matter; neither is it the

It is not dead/inert
immaterial substance or pure pneumati C 178understood as a
reciprocity not hindered by the laws of any material inertia.
This 'neither' is further articulated and understood, as
previously stated, by Christopher Norris as the oscillation
between intuition and structure as the motivation for

phenomenological discourse.
Where this movement, or perhaps it might better be
defined as a vibration, provisionally differs from the Kantian

concept is in the latter's imposition of the spiritual as an

event of animation on the dead matter of the material

177 Added emphasis. Kant, 'Dreams of a Spirit Seer', Chapter 2, p. 44. In

Derrida's text Memoirs of the Blind, he comments: 'the operation of
drawing would have something to do with blindness, would in some
way regard blindness [aveuglement]. ' Later in the same paragraph he
extrapolates: 'the blind man can be a seer, and he sometimes has the
vocation of a visionary', p. 2. Mark Z. Danielewski's character,
Zampan6 in House of Leaves: the keeper and original commentator of
The Navidson Record, wrote constantly about seeing: 'What we see,
how we see and what in turn we can't see', p. xxi, while proposing
that the fictitious documentary film, The Navidson Record, was an
attempt to 'somehow capture the most difficult subject of all: the
sight of darkness itself', ibid., p. xii. Significantly it is noted by the
character Johnny Truant that: 'He was blind as a bat. ' ('Almost half
the books he owned were in Braille. Lude and Flaze both confirmed
that over the years the old guy had had numerous readers visiting
him during the day. ' It is noted that Zampan6's readers were mostly
women: 'those soothing tones cradled in a woman's words'. ) Ibid.,
pp. xxi-xxii. Deleuze remarks in Cinema 2 that: 'the visionary, the
seer, is the one who sees in the crystal, and what is seen is the
gushing forth of time as doubling, as scission', 109: 81 (added
emphasis).
178 'Pneumatic' was the current word for the spiritual in Kant's day.

75
 179 Knowledge intuition
world. and remaining outside

materiality, yet still impose criteria on matter.

David Bell suggests that the phenomenological

reductive bracketing of materiality acts as a form of

indexing, but uncovers the contradiction implicit in

Husserl's understanding of the reductive event, which, while

proposing the radicality of a transformation, insists on

6everything being left as it is'. The problem becomes one of

a change that is fundamental yet essentially a

transformation that has no impact on materiality as
180 Kant, Swedenborg in 'Dreams
materiality. writing about of

a Spirit Seer', stated that:

All knowledge of material objects takes on a double

significance: one meaning is being obtained through the
external relations of matter, and the other is obtained from the
way (material things) reflect the forces from the spiritual world
for these are the causes of (material things). "3'

179 1 note here one of the corporeal operations of the cyst as a

receptacle for 'morbid matter' - see Chapter 3, 'The Unheimlich
Manoeuvre'.
180 Bell's proposition that 'the sense of', described by the Fregian model
of '7-' as a pre-fix to any assorteric statement. The semantic shift
towards 7- as a bracketing of any proposition indicates the
transcendental as a pre-fix of the sensual. Also for Foucault's
remarks on the use of parenthesis in Roussel's writing, see Chapter
4, 'The Orientation of the Labyrinthine'.
181 Kant, 'Dreams of a Spirit Seer', p. 88.

76
The question of correlation between spiritual and material is
brought into sharp focus by the bracketing that Kant

employs here but the distinction between this, Husserlian

phenomenology and transformation is key to any

interpretation of mere inversion. 182The ambiguity of the
bracketing complicates the tendency towards the

oppositional by shifting the assured historical composure of

the internal and external dialectic of logic towards an alteric
encryption of the spectral. In semantic terms, the physical

punctum of the bracket encloses materiality - framing it as

it were, and in this sense, is contingent to a 'giving sense
to' as articulated by the Fregian model cited by David Bell
in his text Husserl and detailed in footnote 180. However,
for the framing to have a sense, it must in some way, enter
into a relationship with the material that maintains, as part
of that engagement, its status outside materiality -
transcendent to it. With this in mind, the complexity of what
we might define as the imposition of the transcendental on
materiality does not constitute an event of displacement,
but the implicit spectral relation of hauntology.
*

182 Bracketing may also have a correlation with sous rature. Both
Heidegger and Derricla employ this process to undermine/draw
attention to the discrepancies in the metaphysical project -a
deletion can only be a deletion if the evidence of what is prior to the
event of deletion (what is to be deleted) is retained. Likewise,
Husserl's reductive process relies on the preservation of materiality
the imposition must acknowledge that on which it imposes.
-
Husserl's contention, however, reverses the imposition so that
matte r/materiality invokes the transcendental. Levinas states that
'thought is originally erasure' and he refers to a network of
associations towards which what is key is not that ideas displace
each other, but the assurance of the presence of one idea in another:
'the thought at the moment of its erasure still influences through its
erased meaning; its different meanings participate with one another',
Levinas, 'The Transcendence of Words', p. 146. It is also worthy of
note that Foucault considers the parenthetical aspect of the bracket
in his text on Roussel, Death and the Labyrinth (see Chapter 4, 'The
Orientation of the Labyrinthine').

77
Derrida says of Levinas:

Levinas respects the zone or layer of traditional truth; and the

philosophies whose
presuppositions he describes are neither
refuted nor criticized. Here, for example, it is a question
simply of revealing beneath this truth, as that which founds it

and is dissimulated within it, 'a situation which precedes the

division of Being into an inside and an outside'. However, it is

also a question of inaugurating, in a way that is to be new,

quite new, a metaphysics of radical separation and exteriority.

One anticipates that this metaphysics will have some difficulty

finding its language in the medium of traditional logos entirely

governed by the structure of 'inside-outside', 'interior-

183
exterior'.

Being for Levinas is a kind of suffering that invokes an

enchainment or imprisonment (incarceration), and so what
becomes implicit in being and therefore in ontology, what is
it, is the invitation to escape. 184Escape
encrypted within
then becomes the consequence of being whereby
restlessness the unquiet of existence, manifest in
-
dissatisfaction - is conceived as a more pronounced
imperative than Heidegger's concept of anxiety in Sein und
Zeit or distress in Contributions to Philosophy (From
Enowning). Derrida sees in Levinas no longer the thought of
being (Heidegger) or phenomenality (Husserl), but rather a
process of dismantling and dispossession.
*

183 Added emphasis. Derrida, 'Violence and Metaphysics', p. 88.

184 Two possibilities occur here: firstly, the Labyrinth as a mechanism
for incarceration (the prison of the Minotaur and the concealment of
a secret see Chapter 4, 'The Orientation of the Labyrinthine') and
-
the encryption of the 'bunker' as both locale of escape and ultimate
imprisonment (see Albert Speer's comments on Hitler's bunker, also
noted in Chapter 4).

78
The impersonal fact of being is understood as indeterminate
and ambiguous and comes to thought before revaluation or
the imposition of a conceptual framework. It is neither
transcendent nor ego-based nor construed in any form of
the personally symbolic. It resists inclusion into any binary

opposition and is therefore irreducible to recognised forms

that might order it. However, as an alteric phantasm it

cannot operate as pure exclusivity without some relation to

historical thought. 185As already indicated, the spectre that
Derrida proposes must be involved in some kind of

specificity via relation to a someone. The particularity of

the haunting of both Hamlet and Macbeth (Hamlet's father

and Macbeth's friend Banquo) in Shakespeare is intrinsic to

the event through recognition as a certain kind of relation.
Exclusivity would suggest concomitance with a kind of
transcendental ideality already outlined in the metaphysical
aspiration, which refutes Derrida's
project - an overarching
more complex articulation of an encrypted intervention of
spectrality. As already proposed, to haunt is an exclusive

event of interiority which exploits the carnal imperative of

phenomenality and the impact of a transcendent alterity on
such corporeality while resisting the determination to

comprehend incorporation as merely absorption.

*

185 Levinas proposes religion as the site of communication for the

established order to enter into relation with the 'being of the other',
whereby this relation is no longer ontological, but spiritual -a place
where knowledge does not take precedence over sociality. Ethics is
grasped as the practical relation of one to another -a relation prior
to ontology.

79
The ghost or spectre 186as the manifestation, or more
specifically, the visualisation of that which remains
essentially invisible, operates as an insistence (what I will
later call an encyst-ence) through this complication of an
interpretation of it as an encryptive event. This designates

a deferral maintained as a kind of difference designated by

Derridian diff6rance rather than the incarnation of 'mere'
absorption, which implies the continuity of similitude.
Implicit in that encryption as an interval or rift is a notion of
temporality that is identified by the immanence of
discontinuity as the form by which time is made manifest
spatially. As Derrida remarks, the spectre is always a return
and never an emanation, and Jt is from this event of
spectrality that the continuity of chronological time is

undermined and the clarity between spatio and extensio is

blurred.
As hauntology is named as the so-called science of
the spectre, it identifies anomalies in the progression and
stability of any ontological speculation, so close scrutiny of
aesthetics as the science of beauty uncovers comparable
discontinuities. As we have tried to explore, the possibility
for hauntology, as a mechanism for questioning the stability

of the metaphysical terrain, finds in the encryptive spatio-

temporal interval of the rift the location of an anomaly,
which erupts and disrupts the continuity of logical
chronology. To infer that discontinuity is the predicate of
any reasonable notion of continuity must go further than

186 In Of Spirit Heidegger and the Question, Derrida argues: 'a spirit, or
in other words, in French (and English) as in German, a phantom,
always returns, I mean in the sense of a revenant (ghost), and geist
is the most fatal figure of this revenance (returning, haunting) of the
double which can never be separated from the single', p. 40 (added
emphasis).

80
rely on this as an opportunity to invert a binary as a means
of radical reconf igu ration. The necessary wound of the rift
demands a more complex articulation of it as a locale for

the emergence of a transcendental imperative that does not

conform to any previous clarifications of what
transcendence might 'be' (or not 'be').
In as much as this transcendental place is 'not', its

visibility or lack of visibility sets it apart as distinctive from

shadow, simulacra or facsimile it is not more than or less

-
than any of these, but essentially other to them, as it is

other to illumination and ideality. Also it is not merely an

exteriority/explicate that operates as the negation of an
interiority/implicate, but occupies the 'between' that differs

via deferral.
Diff6rance as the indeterminate event of deferral is
distinguished from the notion of any ontological difference
by which difference is understood as the anomaly between
the specificity of a being and the transcendence of being.
Not only is diff6rance otherto ontological difference, it is

other to the forgetting of ontological difference and, as

such, it subsists as a trace. Its radical alterity is removed
from every possible mode of presence and presencing and
is characterised by irreducible after-effects, delayed effects
and unconscious traces (there are no conscious ones). It

remains a trace because it highlights the inadequacy of

metaphysical and phenomenological speech through the
interruption of that speech - not as an external addendum
to be latterly applied, but as the interval already encrypted
into its labyrinthine architectonics, parasitic in its spectral

rupturing (a ructure! ). It identifies difference through its

own invisibility as interruptive event and its spectrality

81
adopts the facsimile of the corporeal while remaining
essentially other to any semblance of that carnality.

The trace (spur) is not a presence but rather is the simulacrurn

of a presence that dislocates, displaces, and refers beyond

itself. The trace has, properly speaking, no place, for
187
effacement belongs to the very structure of the trace.

As we have seen, the phantasm of the trace insinuates

itself into the very fabric of reasonableness and can be

observed as the very predicate of all that is logical. It is the

question that articulates aesthetics and judgement and the

substance of difference. It is the haunting that motivates

and predetermines enquiry and yet undermines resolution to

any such enquiry by disrupting visibility, not with the

obscuring determination of a presence which resolutely

enforces alterity as diminutive to its absolution and

universality, but with the disconcerting irreducibility of the

absolute other manifest only in the effacement of

invisibility.
The phantom exceeds through such undermining of

visualisation. It resists any predilection to locate it as

either facsimile or mimetic entity in its capacity to be

grasped as a mere replication or semblance with all the

incumbent diminutions of representation. Neither is it

recognised as spirit, equally encumbered by the

transcendental and its urge towards ideality and meta-

language. Both these possibilities appear as addenclums to

the historical imperative, which organises thought through

rationality and logic as the ongoing mechanism for

definition and determination.

187 Derrida, 'Diff6rance', p. 461 -

82
The operation of spectrality finds its functionary locale in

all the placial coordinates, which refute dialectic assurance

and binary oppositions, and insists and subsists through its
inherent capacity to resist sublimation and objectification by

always locating itself outside the places where it can never

be found.
This nomadic status determines transgression via
encryption as its active modus operandi and, in so doing,
finds in continuity all that is discontinuous, not as
afterthought but as integral to its very formation. Where
language breaks down and disfluency becomes the
determining agency of communication, so the spectre as
silent interrogator introjects, not through force of speech or
by exceeding the topos of the spoken, but through the

arrest of silence as that which precedes all that is said.

When Heidegger seeks and demands a locale for

silence in Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning),

which endows an a priori spatial anomaly where an echo

(the silent voice of be-ing) can be heard emanating from the

pre-Socratic past whilst simultaneously heralding a new god

to come -a cyclical determination which engages
temporality without ever falling into linearity. To be haunted
is to find one-self steeped in the anxiety of the sensation of
feeling not-at-home with all that is familial, where
proportion suddenly determines the unfamiliar and
calculation can no longer afford assurance of where one is.
Heidegger's indication that the eventuation of be-ing and
enthinking as a creative engagement (rather than wilful
imposition of a new form) of responsiveness has, as
Richard Polt notes in his essay 'The Event of Enthinking the
Event', a parallel with the activity of landscape drawing as

83
in-vention. As such, the drawing (as genuine work of art)
not only represents a place but also brings meaning (a facet

of its being) to our attention. This meaning was never

simply 'there' prior to the execution of the drawing, but was

what Polt refers to as latent and vague and can only

become fully alive when appropriated by the drawing. In-

vention is then understood as a coming upon as opposed to

any planning or willing and is a venture-some openness of

experience towards which the artist is him/herself
appropriated and, in a sense, transformed.

In-vention undercuts the opposition between creativity and

truth. It is neither the discovery of a previously formed object
nor the creation ex nihilo of a new form but the attentive

cultivation of meaning. In-vention allows the meaning to

flourish the finder of the meaning to flourish as
- and allows
well. '88

Here I draw a parallel with the locale of a certain kind of

poem (transcribed by a certain kind of poet) as also an in-

vention of a certain kind of topos no longer restricted to the

mere observation and representation of the topography of

landscape its flora and fauna. In language it finds in what
-
is spoken, the silence of the spectral event, a
transformation which flourishes through pervasion,
transgression - the place of both, anticipation and
disappointment, in-vention and anxiety, toxin and remedy.

188 Added emphasis. Richard Polt, 'The Event of Enthinking the Event
(Companion to Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy), p. 92.

84
 Chapter 2

Todtnauberq and the Meridian

Todtnauberg
Arnica, eyebright, the
draft from the well with the
star-die on top,

In the
hOtte,

written in the book

whose name did it record
-
before mine -?
In this book
the line about
a hope; today,
for a thinker's
word
to come,
in the heart,

forest sward, unleveled,

orchis and orchis, singly,

crudeness, later, while driving,

clearly,

he who drives us, the man,

he who also hears it,

the half-
trod log-
trails on the highmoor,

hu mid ity,
'
much.

Translation of Todtnauberg by Pierre Joris and published in his

essay, 'Celan/Heidegger: Translation at the Mountain of Death' and
found on website:
httID: //winqs. buffalo. edu/epc/authors/ oris/todtnauberq htmI. Also
in Joris's translation of Celan's collection, Lightduress,
published
pp. 62-5.

85
 It is language that speaks as an open even when its language
is the language of mediation, that is, even when it is the
2
bearer of love and grace.

In the hut-book, looking at the well-star, with a hope for a

3
coming word in the heart. On 25 July 1967 Paul Celan
.

I would like to begin by proposing a question that will lead

to a series of speculations which emerge from the above

comment written by the poet Paul Celan in the guest book

provided by Martin Heidegger, on the occasion of the

Celan's visit to the philosopher's Black Forest HOtte at
Todtnauberg in the summer of 1967.

2 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, p. 1 14. 'The mouth

as wound' is also indicated by Derrida in his essay 'Shibboleth for
Paul Celan'. Also worthy of note here is Nicolas Abraham and Maria
Torok's essay 'Introjection-Incorporation' (from the book
Psychoanalysis in France, ed. S. Lebovici and D. Widl6cher), in
which they indicate that the beginnings of intro-jection are found in
the experience of what they refer to as empty mouth doubled with
the mother's presence. 'The transition from breast-filled mouth to
word-filled mouth is achieved through the experiences of "empty
mouth". ' p. 5. They argue that learning to fill the void of mouth with
words constitutes an early paradigm of introjection through the
continual presence of the mother as the possessor of language and
such constancy guarantees the meaning of words. It is also worthy
of note here that Jacob Bachofen in his text 'Mother Right' saw the
matriarchalltellurian as arguably the origin of the written form - the
letter written at the hearth.
3 From Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, by John Felstiner, p. 244.

86
In keeping with the locale of Heidegger's mountain retreat,
I will negotiate a plethora of Holzweg in order to develop a
discourse which questions the topos of Todtnauberg as an
aesthetic experiment in language and a place haunted by
the trace of mericlial threads.
*

Provisionally, it will be perhaps considered a question of

anticipation and also forgiveness, but largely one of
disappointment as indicated by the comment noted in the

guest book by Celan, variously recognised as the writer,

translator, poet and Jew. It will be borne out of what might
be still be interpreted as a pervading and embracing
silence that not only preceded the writing of the poem; its
inscribing, but through the continual provocation of its
determination towards a certain kind of absenting, which
was insisted by the poem's inscription and latterly by its
translation and re-inscription.
This silence 'spoke' and continues to 'speak'

remaining voluble in the various translations that have

been proffered for publication since its initial inscribing in

the immediate aftermath of that encounter between

Heidegger, the 'poetic thinker' (the German Denker) and
Celan, the 'thinking poet' (the Jewish Dichter).
It alluded to, and perhaps, continues to invoke, what I

might venture to call a meridial haunting that resists the

univocal permanence of stasis and any static point of view

in favour of a concentration of possibilities (or significance

of temporality and spacing concomitant to the virtuality and

immanence of dates and dating! ).

87
 In his text 'Shibboleth for Paul Celan', Derrida speaks
of the 'date' as a kind of visceral intervention in the

corporeality of the poem. The readability of dates marks

the possibility of the enunciation of a spectral recurrence
that is distinct from what he calls the 'absolute recurrence'
of that which 'cannot return'.
The spectral return is understood as of that which is

unique, in that its occurrence will never return. Derrida's

preliminary comments in his discussion on Celan propose

that:

We will be concerned then with the date as a cut or incision

which the poem bears in its body like a memory, like, at times,

several memories in one, the mark of provenances of a place

and of a me. To speak of an incision or cut is to say that the

poem is entered into, that it begins in the wounding of its

4
date
.

Concealed within the date is the 'stigma' of singularity,

which sustains and prolongs its dating through the
temporality of lasting, which is understood as that which is

the poem.

4 Added emphasis. Essay published in Word Traces, Readings of Paul

Celan (ed. Aris Fjoretos, pub. Johns Hopkins University Press),
P. 19.

88
Derrida argues that for the date to function in the poem, it

must retain, though concealment, the specificity of the

singular (a 'specific' date) to assure its own longevity as
5
that which 'lasts longer' than that which it commemorates
.
In the essay 'Catastrophe', Philip Lacoue-Labarthe states:

The place of poetry, the place where poetry takes place, every

time is the place without place of the intimate gaping -

something that must certainly be thought as the pure spacing

which places (do not) suppose and which upholds them with no

hold 6
.

The topology of the meridian manifest in the continuity of

folding, unfolding and refoldin g7 indicates, to employ a
description used by Celan in his 'Meridian Speech' of
October 1960, an animation of 'tremors and hints' that are
inclusive to the 'poetic 8 As
both and exclusive event'.
Derrida argues in 'Shibboleth for Paul Celan', they are the
temporal/spatial anomalies that are written into the text

and which, through concealment and effacement,

transgress its textural body.

5 Derrida later argues that: 'This is the only chance of assuring its
spectral return. Effacement or concealment, this annulment in the
annulations of return belongs to the movement of dating. And so
what must be commemorated, at once gathered together and
repeated, is, at the same time, the date's annihilation, a kind of
nothing, or ash. ' Ibid., p. 22.
6 Added emphasis. Ibid., p. 140.
7 These terms are borrowed from Deleuze and used specifically in his
text, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque.
8 'The Meridian' speech was delivered by Celan on the occasion of
receiving The Georg BOchner Prize, Darmstadt, 22 October 1960.
Published in Paul Celan, Collected Prose, trans. Rosemarie
Waldrop, and published by Carcanet Press, pp. 37-55.

89
They are the tracings of 'what is', 'what has been' and
'what will be' - the variance of protentions and retentions
that mark the visibility of invisibility and the immanence of

the virtual 'transcribed' as the meridial interval or the

movement of 'dating' of the poem.

This commemoration through annihilation articulates a

negation through the double movement of gathering and

repetition that annuls the date, reducing it to a kind of

9 Silence prescribes this condition of negation in
nothing.
the encryption of the poem by commemorating that which

subsists as that which is unvocalised rather than

10 This poses the question as to the
exclusively absent.
nature of annihilation? Is it to be understood by Derrida in

relation to Celan's poetic articulations that the trace is

manifest as the visualisation (vocalisation) of that which

remains essentially invisible (unvocal), and is this merely a

substitution?
If silence is not the merely the anticipation of any

substitution the 'not yet' of a representation, how does it

-
activate the topological transformation of the poem?

9 Commemoration through annihilation has a strong resonance with

the events of the Holocaust/Shoah and is something that haunts the
fabric of Celan's poem. I would also note here a reference to
Gordon Matta-Clark's two works discussed in the later chapter, 'The
Unheimlich Manoeuvre': Time WellICherry Tree and Descending
Steps for Batan, as possible examples of this commemoration by
annihilation.
10 In Creative Evolution, Henri Bergson argued against the possibility
of a total annihilation by stating that: 'The idea of an absolute
nothing, in the sense of the annihilation of everything, is a self-
destructive idea, a pseudo-idea, a mere word. If suppressing a thing
consists in replacing it by another, if thinking the absence of one
thing is only possible by the more or less explicit representation of
the presence of some other thing, if in short, annihilation signifies
before anything else substitution, the idea of an annihilation of
everything is as absurd as that of a square circle. ' pp. 285-286

90
Dennis J. Schmidt in his essay on Celan entitled, 'Black
Milk and Blue', states:

To think the poetic place means remembering that the silence

making that place has its own contours; it also means knowing
that such silence is not to be confused with mere quiet; but
"
needs to be heard as the unvocalised voice of the poem.

Any provisional consideration of what is traced in Celan's

poem may perhaps look towards Heidegger's much

publicised (and much commented upon) 'conspicuous'

silence in the years following the collapse of the Third

Reich in 1945 until his death in 1976. Such speculation
must be in light of his contentious involvement with the
National Socialist movement from its coming to power in

the early 1930s. 12This could well be seen as the

overarching spectre that prompted the 'writing of'
'Todtnauberg', and pervaded the anticipatory note, not only
in Celan's poem but also in the comment inscribed in the

visitor's book at Todtnauberg. I would suggest that such a

consideration, though valid, is perhaps just one of several
historical traces,
events
- as it were, which singularly
anticipate but perhaps do not fully address the complexity
of the many unvocalised possibilities that haunt its lingual

prosody. What is more compelling is the more complex

double dispossession of language at work in oeuvre of
Celan's poetry.
*

11 Added emphasis. Word Traces, Readings of Paul Celan (ed. Aris

Fioretos), p. 110.
12 It is worth noting here that Heidegger recorded an interview for Der
Speigel magazine in 1967 where he touched on his involvement with
the Third Reich, but with express instructions that it would not be
published until after his death.

91
The High-German that was Celan's poetic mother-tongue

was steeped in the Germanic tradition of Hellenic

Romanticism, 13 which pervaded the poetry of H61derlin,
Rilke and Trakl. As such, predating the events that led to

the Holocaust/Shoah it was no longer 'at home' in the

'14
post-Auschwitz world (this is a reference here to Adorno's

comment in 1955: 'After Auschwitz, to write a lyric poem is

barbaric'). 15

13 This term is used to describe the Germanic literary and artistic

tradition with a strong affiliation and interest in Hellenistic culture,
at its peak in the era of Hblderlin. I also wish to note here that
Jacob Bachofen distinguished Hellenistic culture as specifically
Apollonic (what he terms 'the Apollonic age'). It was the patriarchal
era of the Uranian Solar Hero where the spiritual principle rose
above the corporeal - the dawn as the foundation of transcendent
hopes. Derrida comments in The Truth in Painting on Kant's
recourse in The Critique of Judgement to a 'dead language' (Latin)
in parenthesis when describing 'pure' beauty (in this instance Kant
puts forward the example of the tulip - this botanical reference
remains pertinent to later discussion in our text), which gives rise to
pure aesthetic judgement, that: 'in "speaking arts" at least, the
models should be written "in a dead and scholarly language". For
two reasons, one lexical and the other grammatical. So that these
models should be spared the transformations suffered by living
languages and which have to do first with the vocabulary:
vulgarization of noble terms: then with the grammar: the language
which fixes the model of taste must have a Grammatik which would
not be subject to "the capricious changes of fashion" and which
would be held in "unalterable rules". ' p. 92.
14 Holocaust/Shoah the proximity of these two terms throughout the
-
text is intended to articulate both meanings. Holocaust is the most
recognised term, and refers to a 'great destruction resulting in
extensive loss of life, especially by fire. It is most commonly used
in reference to the genocide of European Jewry by the Nazis during
the Second World War and its epistemological root is in the Greek
holokauston, which translates as a burnt offering in the sense of a
sacrificial offering, but its historical application did not become
established until the late 1950s. However, shoah (the English
derivation of the Hebrew sh6'a) translates as 'catastrophe', but its
biblical sources also suggest that 'a wasteland or desert' or
'personal ruin or devastation' were first used to refer to the Nazi
slaughter of Jews during the Second World War. It may be pertinent
to keep the Greek meaning in mind with regard to later comments
made about the chthonic Dionysian cult of dead heroes and the
pharmakos. The acknowledgement of both meanings will be
recognised throughout the text.
15 Adorno, Prisms, from the chapter 'Cultural Criticism and Society',
p. 3 4.

92
Yet its very alterity is found in the invocation of certain
kind of literary status of lingual historicity that pervasively
haunts and remains intrinsic to the very circumstances by

which the solution of the Holocaust/Shoah was made

manifest.
Such a condition of alteric homelessness found in the

surety of a familial terrain was both written and

of what
spoken may be crucial to our understanding of Celan's

personal history and its impact on his poetry. It is where an

otherness that is perhaps more complex than the strangely
familiar 16 not only haunts the 'poetic
of the unheimlich,
event', but predicates the very language which inaugurates
that event. Lacoue-Labarthe in his text 'Two Poems by Paul

Celan states':

'Todtnauberg' is really barely a poem; a single nominal

phrase, choppy, distended and elliptical, unwilling to take

shape, it is not the outline but the remainder - the residue -

17
of an abortive narrative .

16 Unheimlich translates literally from the German as unhornely and

from this is derived the more spectral definition of uncanny. See
Freud's essay published by Penguin in the volume of his collected
works entitled Art and Literature (Number 14). The significance of
the uncanny is, as Freud points out, its very familiarity.
17 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience (pub. Stanford
University Press, 1999), p. 35. Stephen Pruslin in the liner notes for
the recording of Pulse Shadows (1996, released by Teledec in 2001)
says of the composer Harrison Birtwistle's settings of Celan's
poems for soprano, string ensemble and string quartet that: 'one
can understand his affinity with Celan's poetry: its concision and
concentration; the aphoristic quality that allows even a carefully
structured poem to suggest a "fragment": above all the verbal
implosions that only leave an imprint', p. 5.

93
 2

I will begin by proposing in speculating

that, around the
questions that pervade the inscribing of the poem
'Todtnauberg', the evolution of Celan's late poetic voice 18
tends towards a truncation and dislocation that does
violence to language. Lacoue-Labarthe suggests that this
is comparable to H61derlin's later efforts before the onset
of his insanity, and quotes Adorno, who refers to them as
'condensation and juxtaposition, a strangling of language'.
In the poem 'TObingen, January', 19 Celan speculated on the
religious man's attempts to speak of the age or time
(today) as H61derlin did in his time, but he was condemned
to a kind of aphasia: 'stuttering on the edge of silence'. I
would like to suggest that the difficulty of Celan's later

18 In the Celan poem, 'The Vintagers/Die Winzer' of 1953, he uses the

term 'latemouth' to describe this poetic voice. In the poem, he uses
the metaphor of an Autumnal harvest and in particular emphasises
the last gleaning of grapes before they rot on the vine as the crop
that produces the richest wine. In HbIderlin's poem, 'Germania' (5th
stanza) the metaphor of the flower is explored in terms of a 'mode
of mouth'.
And secretly, while you dreamed, at noon,
Departing I left a token of friendship,
The flower of the mouth behind, and lonely you spoke.
Yet you, the greatly blessed, with the rivers too
Dispatched a wealth of golden words and they well unceasing
Into all regions now.
(Added emphasis. Selected Poems and Fragments, p. 192. )
19 Paul Celan, Selected Poems and Prose (ed. J. Felstiner), p. 159.

94
work is steeped in the concentration of an anxiety that
persists in confounding a poetic eloquence where even the
poetic event as 'poetic' is called into question.
I would like to propose a term that might indicate the

complexities of such a lingual encounter in Celan's later

poems that is poetic in background, but psychological in

utterance -a form of 'disfluency'. There is a crucial

question that it now seems appropriate to ask with regard
to Celan's comment in the visitor's book at Todtnauberg.
In his text Aesthetic Theory, Adorno acknowledges
the pressure inherent in Celan's poetry, claiming that:

Celan's poems articulate unsPeakable horror by being silent,

thus turning their truth content into a negative quality. They

emulate a language below the helpless prattle of human

beings even below the level of organic life as such. It is a
-
language of dead matter, of stones and stars ... Celan writes
an aura. 20
poetry without

This question is perhaps not meant to be directed towards

Heidegger's silence, but how a poet with such a
pronounced and progressively more difficult ability to

speak, a profound disfluency, can not only interrogate

20 Added emphasis. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (trans. C. Lenhardt, pub.

Routledge & Kegan Paul), p. 444. It is worth noting here that Adorno
refers to the language of dead matter as that of stones and stars. Is
this making reference to Todtnauberg and, specifically, the line 'the
draft from the well with the star die on top'? With regard to Adorno's
oft-cited quote on the demise of so-called lyric poetry, Derrida
notes in his essay 'To Forgive' (published in the anthology,
Questioning God) that: 'Forgiveness died in the death camps', p. 34.

95
Heidegger's thought but in confrontation with the thinker,
demand a fluency and a conciseness word of contrition,
-a
a remedial pardon from Heidegger to end his silence ? 21

COMPLETION AND POSSIBILITY

Celan, in his acceptance speech of 1960 entitled 'The

Meridian', stated:

Whenever we speak with things in this way we also dwell on

the question of their where-from and where-to, an 'open'
question 'without resolution', a question which points towards
open, empty, free spaces - we have ventured far out.

22
The poem also searches for this place What is evident
.
from this statement is the affinity that Celan proposes
between the thinker who questions and the writer/poet who
seeks. The nature of how the question might now be asked
has perhaps changed, so that its proximity to the poetic of
that which is sought is most significant in the proximal.

21 The issue of end as completion will be discussed later in the

chapter but suffice to say here that Celan's hope for a conclusive
end to Heidegger's silence contradicts his own thoughts particularly
in the 'Meridian' speech.
22 Celan, 'The Meridian' (published in Collected Prose), p. 50.

96
Its internal logic is usurped by the externalising of a kind
of questioning that reaches back to a primordial ontology,
where the distinction between the assurance of the
interiority of the present and the exteriority of absence is

undermined by the operation of 'a seeking of the same

place' that is found in silence. This potential alliance
between poet and thinker - this seeking of the same place

- would suggest that Celan's topology of silence is common

to both. Yet he remained unmoved and insistent in his
determination to 'demand a word' from Heidegger, to break
that silence in a way that, rather than propose a question
that might point to openness and a way forward, is directed
towards completion and closure. 23

Maurice Blanchot, in his text The Writing of the

Disaster, indicates that silence is already dislocated from

the lingual and, as other to it, places language 'at risk'. He

argues that 'the silence of silence which by no means has

any relation to language for it does not come from

language but has already departed from it, 24
.
The suggestion is that this departure is from that
which maintains the availability for silence, in that it does

not 'lead away' from the poem, but rather belongs to

language 'in' the poem -a departure
itself in language

marks the place of the poem. It is the pause (for Celan the
'turn of breath') as the site of an ambiguously infinite

compression and extension -a breathing space where the

23 In this regard, Derrida states in 'To Forgive' that: 'Nothing can be

more unjust than clemency' (from the anthology, Questioning God),
p. 33.
24 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, p. 57.

97
dependent possibilities of inhalation and exhalation
operate in a lingual collusion.
For the poet speaking, the other in language is the
kinship of language through the medium of the poem with
that which always places that language at risk - silence.

In seeking the 'place of silence', Celan understood it as

common to both thinker
and writer and so the question still
remains, why was it that he could not grant the privilege of
such a silence to Heidegger?
it may be that Celan, the poet, 'stuttering on the edge
of silence' was in no way comparable with Heidegger, the
thinker, who, it may be argued with reference to his lack of
comment, his silence on the Shoah/Holocaust, was merely
I stuttering at the edge of speech'. Therefore, the
distinction between he who questions and he who seeks
remains unbridgeable. What is problematic is what Celan
introduced by suggesting that the topological ground where
such a questioning and seeking takes place is essentially
the locale of a kind of sameness.
What is pertinent in the consideration of this locale,

where both a seeking and questioning take place, is that it

not only draws attention to the distinction between the

activities of the poet and the thinker as understood by

98
Celan, but complicates any disparity by finding a common
locale of similitude -a placial sameness. As such,
similitude as a common ground for questioning and seeking
must be understood, not in the equivocality of any
historical conception of identity, understood as a locale for
the equanimity of the same (a kind of placial univocality),
but rather as a 'topological' anomaly whereby the equivocal
and univocal should perhaps be reconsidered through
similitude, as the difference of univocal and unvocal. Why
is it pertinent to make this distinction relevant to an issue
of sameness and locality where both questioning and
seeking might well appropriate this place in a kind of

equanimity?
In observing this disparity (I use this term cautiously
and advisedly), I am mindful that Heidegger himself had

addressed the issue of identity at some length in a series

of texts published under the heading Identity and

Difference 25 It is worth digressing momentarily to consider
.
how this may inform Celan's understanding of sameness in
light of 'The Meridian' speech, and given Celan's own
commitment to Heidegger's thought.

25 1 refer here to the 1969 edition of Identity and Difference (trans.

Joan Stanbaugh; pub. Harper Row).

99
 5

'The Principle 26 addresses

of Identity' the issue of identity
as provisionally a formulaic structure based on a kind of
equality (Heidegger uses the 'tautology' of the
mathematical formula A=A, defining it as an unnecessary

equality) that proposes sameness without indicating firstly,

where that equality is 'rooted', and secondly, how such an
equality might be redefined in relation to its source.
Via Plato, Heidegger reformulates this customary
formulation of the principle of identity (A = A) by the
introduction of sameness, so that not every A is itself the
same, but is itself the same with itself. The key here is not
sameness as the source of the principle as it stands, but
the mediation of this preposition, the 'with' as a connective
synthesis or relation.
It is intrinsic to Heidegger's ontology of identity that
the connective 'with' (provisionally reformulated as A is A),
identifies the keynote to the formulation as the preposition;
and the 'is' indicates the Being of beings, articulated by
Heidegger as the ontological difference that indicates the
principle's true conception that every being is itself the

26 This is the first essay in the above-mentioned publication, Identity

and Difference (pp. 23-41).

100
same with itself. 27 What is essential to sameness in this

context is the intrinsic and fundamental difference between

Being and beings that is the ontological difference that
Heidegger places at the heart of the 'Principle of Identity'.
Heidegger proposes an event of appropriation between
Being and beings that is the essential difference between
them:

The event of appropriation is that realm, vibrating within

itself, through which man and Being reach each other in their

own nature, achieve their active nature by losing those

28
qualities with which metaphysics has endowed them
.

For Heidegger, this event is also where thinkinglman

receives the tools by which it1he might be most

appropriately active as part of the togetherness of this

event through the 'most delicate and susceptible vibration
holding all within this structure' - language.
At this point I wish to refer back to Celan's comment
in 'The Meridian' speech that indicates a unity or sameness
of placial locality for thought/questioning and
writing/seeking. This unity, as sameness, is the locale
(place) that both the thinker and the poet are involved in
locating (through the questioning of thought and the
seeking of the poem) and therefore, the relationship
between the thinker and poet is structured in the realm of
language. Finding in Heidegger a comparable conception of

27 Heidegger considers sameness with reference to the Parmenicles

quote: 'for thinking and Being are the same. ' See his essay, 'Moira
(Parmenides V111,34-41)' in Early Greek Thinking p. 79.
28 From 'The Principle of Identity' and published in the collection of
essays, Identity and Difference, p. 37.

101
identification through the provisional notion of locale, for
the more complex and active nature of the event where
man as thinker dwells and as such, is given over to
language, indicates that appropriation as an essential
togetherness proposes sameness as difference.
Although for Celan, the thinker and poet seek the
same place, the structure of the place is essentially
difference, 29 the question then arises: How can similitude

and difference enter into a fruitful correspondence?

The search for the sameness of this place is

contingent on the understanding that its essence is a

differential that precedes any certainty of a unity prior to
belonging. For Heidegger, the ontological difference is
to a conception of identity. 30 In the 'merely
essential
identical' (as understood by the preliminary formulation A
A), difference disappears, whereas in the same, its

appearance is essential and notan addition or contribution

to Being or beings. I would suggest that Celan too is

concerned with difference, and the sameness of place

sought by thinking and poetic writing is indicated by the
differential between thought and poetic speech/writing.
I am now forced to reappraise my provisional thought
that Celan could have had the ethical presumption to hope

or demand that Heidegger discontinue his most pronounced

silence at a specific time/date (one might well alternate the
term 'time/date' with 'encounter') and a specific location,

given his own tending towards silence. In the term ending

29 As already discussed in Chapter 1, 'An Aesthetics of Hauntology',

Derricla too essentialises difference in speech and writing as the
primordial event of metaphysics.
30 He states: 'The essence of identity is a property of the event of
appropriation' ('The Principle of Identity'), p. 39.

102
we might well look to a kind of completion, a conciseness
of closure, that is largely at odds with Heidegger's own
thought, and which is certainly unfamiliar and to some
extent 'inappropriate' to Celan's writings. Having indicated
this, with reference to the specificity of this encounter
between Heidegger and Celan at Todtnauberg, I will not yet
dismiss it without finding it of some further use.
I would like to extend my attempts to contextualise
Celan's 'demand' of Heidegger by citing the latter's
influence on the poet as not only intrinsic to Celan's need
for penitence from the thinker, but also in a wider context
that locates in a zonal historicity
Heidegger that might well
be conceived as 'meridial' 31 Heidegger's influence on
.
Celan is well documented, and Lacoue-Labarthe goes so
far as to suggest that 'TObingen, January' could not have
been written without reference to Heidegger's lectures on
H61derlin of the 1940s.
This would suggest that Heidegger's legacy, his

process of thinking and how that was imparted in written or

spoken form, was intrinsic to the development of Celan's
poetry. We must remain conscious that Celan's hope for a
'coming word' does not intrinsically insist that the
expectation of an appropriate penitent remark would suffice

31 By 'meridial', I refer to the active temporal nature of a locale that is

not restricted to a finitude without possibility.

103
to reassure him of Heidegger's contrition and draw to a

close Celan's anxie tY32 in a mood of absolution and

arguable forgl'veness on that Black Forest hillside outside

the HOtte. 33

It is further complicated by the manoeuvre whereby

Celan seemingly moved continually towards silence as the
formal aspects of his poetry 'broke down' into disjuncture
and disfluen 34
Cy. (1 refer back to the earlier quote from
Lacoue-Labarthe regarding the structure of 'Todtnauberg')
His hope was for Heidegger to take the opportunity of their
meeting to resist the evasive tenure of his post-war
writings and speak candidly. This demanded of Heidegger a
move towardsthe 'most vocal' - an inversion of his own
lingual trajectory 35 The conspicuousness of Heidegger's
.
silence is perhaps 'most amplified' (if this is indeed not a

contradiction), by the scant references he makes in his

32 1 am also reminded here that anxiety as defined by Heidegger in

Sein und Zeit is an authentic experience of being-in-the-world -
integral to Dasein's inmost possibility.
33 In discussing the frame as border (the Parergon) in The Truth in
Painting, Derrida articulates an etymology of 'border' (au bord), in
which is heard 'on the border' (l/ est d'abord 1'.ý-bord). He plays with
the term, ii-bord in which he refers to the Middle High German, Bort
(meaning table, plank or deck of a vessel) and finds here an
etymology in 'deck of vessel' (a construction of planks), which
articulates another kind of border that limits and encloses. The
rhetorical figure of the boat has in this instance the same
etymological root as 'brothel' (bordel) and which Derrida refers to
as 'an easy one, at first a little hut made of wood', p. 54 (added
emphasis).
34 Disfluency break in fluent speech. Stuttering has more
-a
disfluencies than is considered average. The different types of
disfluency include sound or syllable repetitions, silent blocks and
prolongations (unnatural stretching out of sound), and are often
accompanied by facial grimaces or tics.
35 We may want to think here of Heidegger's contention (in the
Nietzsche lectures) that Nietzsche did not escape the metaphysical
- he merely inverted its values.

104
post-war writin gS36 to the specificity of the Holocaust/Shoah
and its 'impossible possibility'.
What is certainly contentious in Heidegger's overview
of the history of productionist metaphysics is an inability to
distinguish between the technological transformation that
is manifest in both the hydroelectric dam and the
crematoria (I am mindful here of Heidegger's technological
dilemma manifest in the term techn6, that can understand
The Rhine as both a technological resource and the subject
of H61derlin's poem).
If there is an issue to be made of his post-war
silence, it is perhaps in this very distinction that

approaches the issue of the technological as the

'transformation of things' (or the reduction of 'things',
human or otherwise, to 'stand i ng-rese rve' -a resource) to

the neglect of all social institutions and practices.

It is worth reflecting here momentarily on the specific
incident where the 'infamy' of Heidegger's post-war
considerations on technology with reference to the Final
Solution 37 remains sharply focused by later commentators
on what is now known as the 'agricultural remark' taken
from a 1949 lecture on technology:

Agriculture is now a mechanised food industry. As for its

essence, it is the same thing as the manufacture of corpses in

the gas chambers and in the death camps, the same thing as

36 There are further references to the 'technological production' of

humans as standing-reserve in his collection of essays on the perils
of technology in 'The Question Concerning Technology'.
37 Inaugurated at the Wannesee Conference in the winter (January) of
1942 as the mechanised and wholesale extermination of Jewish
culture from mainland Europe. It is perhaps where the ambiguity of
definition was steeped in a certain kind of encryption and where the
word evacuation actually stood for annihilation.

105
 the blockades and reduction of countries to famine, the same
38
thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs
.

In this sense, humanity is a commodity like all others in the

drive for the purity of technological empowerment and
machination. To anticipate that Heidegger might distinguish
between the relative 'thingliness' of these resources is to
imply that moral or ethical considerations might be brought
into play. The nihilistic tendency of contemporary history

as Heidegger understood it (in what might be considered to

be the slow decline of metaphysical enquiry from its
inception in the thinking of Plato and Aristotle to an
understanding of 'productionism' as the primary force of
modern life) fuels his grasp of the institution of technology
and its essence.
In his essay 'The Cries of Others and Heidegger's
Ear: Remarks on the Agricultural Remark', Robert John
Sheffler Manning proposes to critique a consensus of
informed opinion that suggests that the remark is a clear

example of the lack of an ethical status within not only the

specificity of this particular statement, but across the
breadth of Heidegger's thought. He cites John Caputo's

comments in his essay 'Heidegger's Scandal: Thinking and

the Essence of the Victim', as perhaps the clearest
example of the taking a moral stance against what Caputo
describes as Heidegger's 'ethical deficiencies'.

38 This is Thomas Sheehan's translation taken from his text Heidegger

and the Nazis, published in The New York Review of Books, 16 June
1988, pp. 41-3.

106
 For Caputo, Heidegger was 'deafened' by the 'call of
Being' to the point where the suffering of individual or
39
collective beings is obliterated - was silenced .
The contention of both Caputo and Levinas is that the
silencing of the victim brings forward a question of not only
muteness, but also invisibility in Heidegger's post-war
thought. The individuation of Dasein's authenticity that is

explored in Sein und Zeit is sacrificed in favour of the

bigger picture of Being's 'self-showing'.
Manning disputes this contention and suggests that
this convenient closure of such an argument (that which

separates Heidegger's lack of ethics, via his concern only

with the history of Being, from the security of a morality

that is assured in the reaffirmation of such a separateness,

as proposed by both Caputo and Levinas) fails to address

the question that is perhaps more pressing: Why does this

separation need to take place at all and, more importantly,

what does this say about the commentator?

Manning argues that there is compelling evidence that

Heidegger does not exclude the individual from his

philosophical discourse, and, in fact, in Sein und Zeit the

notion of being-with is distinctive from his other grasp of

the collective negation of individuation - the They (Das
Man), which is understood as equiprimordial with Being-in-
the World. The authenticity of being-with is not in the
distinction of 'others' over and against whom the 'I' stands

out, but rather those from whom the 'I' does not distinguish

39 Perhaps the clearest example of this inability to hear can be seen in

the so-called turn (Kehre) Heidegger makes from the individuation
of Dasein, to the concern for Being (beyng-historical-thought) in his
later thought.

107
itself those with whom the T is not separated, but is one
-
too. "
An understanding of the continuity of this solicitude in
Heidegger's thinking is the crucial point of Manning's
argument against both Caputo's and Levinas's contention
that the 'agricultural remark' reflects a general lack of
humanity in a Heidegger that prefers the consideration of a
metaphysical transcendent conception of Being rather than

any ethical or moral preoccupation with beings.

He proposes that the superficiality of such a reading
at Heidegger's expense serves to underline a moral and
ethical superiority taken by commentators to differentiate
themselves and those in accord with them, from
Heidegger's compromised stance, illustrated by the
'agricultural remark'.
Manning attempts further persuasion by drawing on
examples from Sein und Zeit era, using written
the post
of Heidegger's solicitude 4' The first, from the
evidence .
period of the now infamous Rectorate year at Freiburg,
takes the form of a speech calling for a bridge to be

40 The distinction between the collectives of the They (Das Man) and
being-with, as cited by Manning is crucial, but it may be worth
considering how such distinctive collectives square with Heidegger's
understanding of nationhood and the Volk in the years after the
publication of Sein und Zeit.
41 For example, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) compiled
in the late 1 930s and seen by some as a companion work to Sein
und Zeit. The first of the six fugues (entitled Echo [Anklang]) deals
specifically and explicitly with silence. In her essay 'Poietic Saying'
(published in Companion to Heidegger's Contributions to
Philosophy), Daniela Vallega-Neu comments: 'The experience of a
lack of words and the experience of the necessity of words that say
beyng's* occurrence go hand in hand. It is precisely the lack that
compels thinking; it is in the lack that beyng's silent call resounds. '
pp. 70-1 .
The spelling connotes an archaic rendering, which Heidegger
hoped would infer a more essential interpretation outside the pre-
existing ontological etymology.

108
formed to celebrate the unity between scholars and manual
workers. In the speech (given on the arrival of 600 formerly
unemployed workers, now given employment by the Nazi

administration of the city and sent to the University to

begin their National Socialist education in February 1934),
Heidegger attempts to bind and unite the people through
knowledge, basing this understanding on the premise that
'the production of the miner is not fundamentally less
42
spiritual than the action of the scholar' The contention,
.
by Manning, that this is a clear example of Heidegger's
humanism in drawing together the manual and the
intellectual in a common cause seems to underplay the
cause with which Heidegger was associating himself at this
point.
It may be reasonable to assume that Heidegger's

appropriation of the National Socialist ideal in the period of

the Rectorate remains, at this stage, essentially a form of
political naivety, as has been suggested by a number of
later commentators. The consensus of opinion favours the

view that Heidegger considered his position at this stage

as an intellectual arbiter for the new order, able to
influence and (within the confines of the university)
institute policy.
The institution of the so-called FOhrer Principle in the

academic system, and the militarisation of the student body

43
as laid out in the Rectoral Address seem to be equally as
,
important in any understanding of Heidegger's humanism,

42 Taken from German Existentialism (trans. D. Runes, pub. New York

Philosophical Library, 1965), pp. 37-42.
43 The full text of the Rectoral Address, titled 'The Self-Assertion of
the German University' appears in The Heidegger Controversy: A
Critical Reader edited by Richard Wolin (MIT Press, 1993).

109
and the restrictions imposed by such a systernising of the
academic environment certainly seem to look towards a
kind of Volk humanism.

However, the treatment of Husserl over the

contentious issue of access to the University librarie S44 and
a more general disassociation with his former mentor in
this period, lends currency to the issue of Heidegger's
45
ethical behaviour
.
What is perhaps more pertinent in any case against
Heidegger's humanism in this era is the so-called
Baumgarten Affair. Heidegger's damning report to the
League of National Socialist University Lecturers in
December 1933 used Baumgarten's 'Jewish affiliations' as
an argument against him becoming Heidegger's assistant at
Freiburg, and as such, he made what Hugo Ott describes

to anti-Sem itism, 46
as 'a verbal obeisance .
The unity that permeates Heidegger's attempts to
affiliate the labour of the worker with the intellectual labour

of the academic institution in both the Rectoral Address

and the later speech to the newly employed workers, can

also be heard in the second text that Manning cites in his

case for Heidegger's ethical humanism. 'Why Do I Stay in

44 In Hugo Ott's book Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, he refutes this

charge by saying: 'Let us be clear about one thing: as rector and
head of department Heidegger did not issue a ban of any kind on the
use of the university library or the departmental library. This oft-
repeated charge is without foundation. ' p. 174.
45 The suggestion is often made that Heidegger's treatment of Husserl
in this period was directly responsible for his untimely death in
1938. It is also worth mentioning here that Heidegger retained the
dedication to Husserl in Sein und Zeit in the fourth edition
published in 1935, but dropped it from the fifth, published in 1941
.
The dedication read: 'Dedicated to Edmund Husserl in respect of
friendship. Todtnauberg, in the Black Forest, 8 April 1926. '
46 From Ott's text, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, p. 191.

110
the Provinces? '47 written in the period directly after
Heidegger resigned the Rectorate in 1934, was a clear
attempt to identify his place of thought in the heart of the
Volk community of the Black Forest region where the Hijtte
had been built in the early 1920s.
As ROdiger Safranski states in his book, Martin
Heidegger: Between Good and Evil:

The places of his thinking can be quite accurately determined:

an imaginary and a real place - ancient Greece of his

philosophy and his province, more accurately Todtnauberg. 48

Heidegger shared with his contemporary Alfred Baeumler

the view that any critique of modern nihilism would require

its' understanding as a radical problematic, which in some

way preceded their respective involvements with National

Socialism.
In this sense, they were both philosophical radicals,

whose common ground was the critique of idealism and the

resulting principles of materialism associated latterly with

Marxist principles. They looked to Nietzsche as the

47 The whole of this text is translated and published in Thomas

Sheehan's book, Heidegger, the Man and the Thinker (pp. 27-30).
48 Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, p. 277.

ill
spiritual/conceptual father of a radicalism, which pointed
eventually to the holistic, folkish doctrine of National
49
Socialism
.
For both, this meant the redefining of spirit or Dasein
within the context of historical being and time, through the
'recuperating' of H61derlin (and his Greek view) and the
i new' interpretation of Greek tragedy as an attempt to
uncover a new sense of history based on the exegesis of
mythic symb OIS50 and reconstructing the appropriate
conditions for the possibility of the transformation of the
historical of a people. 51
existence
As Frank H. W. Elder states, in the second part of
Sein und Zeit, Heidegger had always intended to include a
dismantling of the Western philosophical tradition in an

attempt to uncover a more originary understanding of

Being.
This cleconstruction would deal with the explication of
mythic and scientific Dasein as two fundamental
possibilities of being-in-the-world, and from which could be

retrieved a more originary relationship between mythos and

49 Safranski comments that: 'The anti-political mood would no longer

reconcile itself to the fact of the plurality of human beings; instead
it was looking for the great singular - the German Volksgenosse,
the labourer of hand and head, the spirit. ' Ibid., p. 230.
50 Baeumler wanted to give ontological and epistemological priority to
symbols (understood as the middle term between instinct and form).
He argued for two languages - Word, as the conscious articulation
of concepts used in discussion and indicative of itself and the
object, and Symbol, the silent language of inner conscious and
instinct, and for which there is no interpretation without primary and
primitive comprehension; it is outside understanding.
51 For Baeumler, this meant an interpretation of Greek tragedy based
on chthonic Dionysus and the cult of dead heroes.

112
logos, which would anticipate and create the conditions for

such a radical transformation. 52

Both Heidegger and Baeumler agreed that logic and

reason had become groundless and that the revolutionary
project of the 'new man', the 'new university' and the 'new
state' would be involved in the process of grounding ratio
in a more originary origin. The key to this radical
manoeuvre was to liberate Greek antiquity from the
domination of Roman and Judeo-Christian interpretation,
through the recuperation of both H61clerlin and Nietzsche in
the 1920s by those who have recently been referred to as
the radical conservatives of German academia and to which
Heidegger and Baeumler serve as polar examples. For

example, Norbert von Hellingrath was responsible for

bringing to light H61clerlin's translations of Pinclar into
German and coined the phrase das geheime Deutschland
(the secret Germany) as the spirit of the state that did not
but was 'poetised' in H61derlin's poetry. 53
yet exist
*

Nietzsche's new interpretation of Greek religion and art as

essentially Dionysian (emphasising the darker, orgiastic
and horrifying side) also resurfaced in this post-Great War

52 Heidegger perhaps followed through this notion of a transformation

of thought most distinctly in his text Contributions to Philosophy
(From Enowning), written between 1936-8. The significance of this
text as a radical rethinking of thinking in a more poetic manner is
reflected not only in the style of the language but also in the
insistence that the so-called grounders of the abyss are the
ahistoric poetic voice personified by H61derlin.
53 1 note here Derrida's text Of Spirit-Heidegger and the Question,
where Derrida seeks to find a notion of spirit in Heidegger's work
amidst the seemingly continual refusal by Heidegger to address the
term specifically. Derrida argues for its spectrality in Heidegger's
writings.

113
era, countering the 'classical' philology (the rational or
scientific view) of ancient Greek culture that had
dominated the academic field since the 1880s. For both
Heidegger and Baeumler, the significance of their
interpretation of H61clerlin as the historical precursor of a
German revolution highlighted the significance of the poet
as not merely the writer of verse but as a seer who saw
beyond the aesthetics of beauty and art to the alterity of a
religious-mythic dimension. Edler states:

Baeumler saw the mystery of the living sense of myth because

the mythic was beyond the grasp of all previous categorical
54
conceptions used to understand world history
.

The contextualisation of history resting on myth

undermined all previous measures of historical time and,
for Baeumler, was the symbolic expression 'of the
development essential nature'. 55
of man's

54 Added emphasis. Frank H. W. Edler, 'Alfred Baeumler on H61derlin

and the Greeks: Reflections on the Heidegger-Baeumler
Relationship', p. 4.
55 Ibid., p. 4.

114
 The hidden source of world history was the essentially
alteric mythic dimension of human nature, which
complicated any perceived clarity of interiority against
exteriority and wrested control of chronological history'
from rational logoS. 56 In the two addresses entitled 'The
Meaning of the Great War I and 11', given in 1929 and
1930, Baeumler reminded his audience that the dead of the
Great War were now powerless, and it was entrusted to the
living, in what was more of a 'religious' than a 'moral'
responsibility, to allow their thoughts and deeds to 'reach
the light of day'. 57 For Baeumler, the creation of 'tragic
drama' in ancient Greece had great historical

consequences as a turning point in the history of the West.

It also had a strong resonance with the 'reassertion of the
heroic' in post-1918 Germany, whereby a 'genuine', 'real'
Germany (a 'secret' Germany), lost in the depths of history,

56 Johan Jacob Bachofen (1815-87) was a key figure in the

development of an anthropology of myth in nineteenth-century
Germany. His most noteworthy text, 'Mother Right', argued for the
precedent of a historical matriarchal period that preceded the
Hellenic/Roman (patriarchal) era and was bound up with the
development of the chthonic. His two methodological axioms were:
(i) Phenomena are governed by discoverable natural laws.
(ii) These laws are continuously operative and uninterrupted by
miraculous intervention.
He said of myth: 'It has been said of myth, like quicksand, can
never provide a firm foothold. This reproach applies not to myth
itself, but only to the ways in which it has been handled. Multiform
and shifting its outward manifestation, myth nevertheless follows
fixed laws and can provide as definite and secure results as any
other source of historical knowledge. Product of a cultural period in
which life has not yet broken away from the harmony of nature, it
shares with nature that unconscious lawfulness which is always
lacking in the works of free reflection. Everywhere there is a
system, everywhere cohesion; in every detail the expression of a
great fundamental law whose abundant manifestations demonstrate
its inner truth and natural necessity. ' 'Mother Right', p. 76.
57 'Not the pangs of conscience but fear and trembling, not reproach
but misfortune befalls us if we do not comply with the social
command of Pietas in German fidelity. ' Ibid., p. 5.

115
would rediscover itself through heroism as the natural
disposition of the German Volk. 58
He looked for a new language in the silent symbolism
of the Nazis, which challenged the old language of
intellectualism as no longer appropriate, because it was
disconnected from the spiritual and instinctual depths of
the Volk. He is quoted by Edler:

Only in what people themselves cannot express, in what is

done and protected without word, without reflection in worship
does the depth of reality disclose itse If. 59
and custom,

Baeumler argued that the only person capable of

interpreting the living sense of life is someone who
understands the silent language of symbols into which life
flows, and Hitler, as the living symbol of National
Socialism, was to function for the Germans as the heroic
dithyrambicltragic drama had functioned for the Greeks.

58 The implication of a racial imperative in Baeumler's rhetoric is

strong here. His argument that heroism is the natural disposition of
the Volk is founded in the hereditary biology of a martial
Germanicness. Baeumler's H61derlin is perceived as a youthful
Germanic fighter, whose ancestors stretch back to the 'racial
paradigm' of Siegfried (the German counterpart of Achilles).
59 From Edler's essay 'Alfred Baeumler on Hblderlin and the Greeks
(Part 1)', p. 9 (www. janushead. org/JHspg99/edler. cfm).

116
 6'
jC60 dithyramb
The chthon articulates the heroic as
associated with the Dionysian cult of the souls of dead
heroes rather than the bacchic ekstasis of hedonistic
Dionysian enthusiasm and draws attention to the distinction
between the mystical suffering of Dionysus and the 'real'
of heroic figures. 62
suffering and deeds
It is in relation to death that the chthonic hero is
63
distinguished from the epic hero of Homeric verse .

60 Chthonic: tragic.
61 Dithyramb: the dramatic chorus integral to the structure of Greek
tragedy. The song of the chorus (the dithyramb) was sung by faithful
worshippers in religious ceremonies and preceded the sacrifice of
an animal on the grave of the hero, its blood pouring into the earth
to honour him. The 'spell' of the dithyramb called the hero from his
grave and created a daernonic being (Geist). The fear of such a
prospect terrified the chorus to such an extent that they made the
leader of the group into a 'stand-in' hero and this visualising of
what was darkly felt was the catharsis of fear and trembling.
62 Baeumler argued that the true hero must incorporate what he called
the 'fear and trembling that the religious man senses in the face
...
of a daemonic being who is capable of affecting things even from
beyond the grave' (Das Mythische Weltalter: Bachofens Romantische
Deutung des Altertums; abbreviated English translation: The Mythic
Age). From Edler's essay, 'Alfred Baeumler on H61derlin and the
Greeks', p. 5 (www. 'anushead. orq/JHspq99/edler. cfm).
63 Baeumler wanted to avoid the mistake he perceived the Greeks had
made, by escaping the use of Homeric language to express the
chthonic hero. His connection with Bachofen is significant here as
the chthonic hero was essentially tellurian (of the earth) and
therefore linked to the Demetrian mother principle, whereby
matriarchal peoples searched for consolation in the phenomena of
natural life and sought solace in what Bachofen referred to as 'the
generative womb, to conceiving, sheltering, nurturing mother love',
'Mother Right', p. 92.

117
The latter have no relation to death and remove the
underworld to a safe distance, whereas the former through

poetising the tragic, invoke the dead and transform the

soul from the realm of flattening shadow through the
primordial phenomenon of the tragic act, into an acting and
speaking 'being'. 64
The manifestation of the hidden unspeakable depths
in the image of the tragic actor 'living' as the dead hero

were contingent on the spoken language which, in the

Homeric epic, was controlled by the intellectual and
excluded the instinctual drives. As such, it was complicit in
the de-potentiation of the chthonic depths, so the
unchanging light of being as identified in the Homeric gods
triumphed over the claemonic existence of the chthonic
hero. Bachofen critiqued the modern historical presumption
that m atri arch al/chthon ic mysteries were merely a later
degeneration of HelleniclClassicism as manifest in the
Homeric epic, by stating:

[T]he maternal mystery is the old element, and the classic age
represents a late stage of religious development; the later age
and not the mystery, may be regarded as a degeneration, as a
religious levelling that sacrificed transcendence to immanence
and the mysterious obscurity of higher hope to the clarity of
form 65
.

64 These heroes are no longer pale insubstantial shadings on the

margins of the Homeric epic, but indicate 'the truth of the dramatic
form is the making present of something past'. From Alfred
Baeumler, The Mythic Age, p. 73, and quoted in Edler's essay,
'Alfred Baeumler on H61derlin and the Greeks', p. 6
(www. ianushead. orq/JHspc199/edler. cfm).
65 Bachofen, 'Mother Right', pp. 88-9.

118
For Heidegger (as for Baeumler), the Great War broke the
materialistic and bourgeois world that had instituted it, and
both H61derlin and Nietzsche symbolised the potential re-
emergence of a Greek-Germanic essence unfettered by the
trappings of the historical precedence of the Roman/Judeo-
Christian tradition. 66 H61derlin's slumbering youth was
transformed by Baeumler into the embodiment of latent
Germanic instinct and enthusiasm, which identified its

creator, and latterly Nietzsche too, as outsiders alienated

from the modern world. Significantly, where Baeumler
differed from Heidegger was in the precedent the latter
gave to the special affinity between the Greek and German
languages.
For Baeumler, the bond was created through what he
described as youthful enthusiasm, as the expression of
race and as such, it is clear to see a more direct

connection with the more extreme policies of National

Socialism than Heidegger's literary synthesis. 67

It is evident then, that their respective desires to

ground ratio were founded in a general heroic mood

66 Nietzsche and Bachofen (historical contemporaries) clearly defined

this later cultural period as essentially the Apollonian age (see
Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy), in which patriarchy as the
spiritual principle, rising above and breaking the bonds of
maternal/tellurism, created the Uranian Solar hero to oppose the
earlier Chthonic Mother goddess. Derrida notes in Memoirs of the
Blind that: 'Between Apollo and Dionysus a "fraternal bond" is
certainly possible, if we are to believe Nietzsche', p. 122.
67 In Baeumler's inaugural address at the University of Berlin in 1933,
he spoke of a 'new unity of the people' not rooted in the one-sided
goal of the educated individual, but in the community of the polis
where the 'new type' would be one of many political soldiers.
Baeumler saw the bond between Greek and German based in heroic
enthusiasm and race as essentially a deeper bond than Heidegger's
originary lingual imperative of Greek origin.
www. anushead. orq/JHspq99/edler. efm, p. 6.

119
(Stimmung) of attunement, whereby the spiritual mission of
the university was grounded in the essence of science but
the evolution and establishment of such a grounding would
be distinctly different.
*

Baeumler's scientific approach looked to the active and

political of youthful enthusiasm as the spiri t68 of this world-
changing new science, while distinguishing it from what he
defined as the passivity and 'contemplation of a theoretical
ma n'. 69 Change and living enquiry could not 'be carried out
in the idyllic nooks of monks' and therefore, Baeumler's

critique of Heidegger centred around the latter's seeming

desire for a cloistered aestheticism.

68 Spirit (Geist) was not identified with either consciousness or

intellect, but for Baeumler was the origin of science.
69 Baeumler distinguished between the passivity and disinterest of a
'theoretical man', and the pragmatic, participatory aspect of a
'political man' through active or passive involvement in change. It is
worth noting that Heidegger conformed to the latter type,
particularly after his retreat from the political life of the Rectorate
in 1933 and with his vision of a, however 'secular' academic
community in Berlin which would draw on the particularity of his
volkish view gleaned at Todtnauberg. As Baeumler stated: 'the
scientific-scholarly subject is supposed to withdraw completely from
the world like a monk of the Middle Ages who leaves the world
behind in order to dedicate himself completely to the via
contemplativa. The theoretical man as the secular monk: distant
from the world in absolute safety, he leads a life of asceticism,
which is clearly always in danger of transforming into an idyllic life. '
From Baeumler's The Mythic Age, and taken from Frank W. Edler's
essay, 'Alfred Baeumler on Hblderlin and the Greeks (Part 11)', p. 5
(www. janushead. org/2-2/fedler. cfm).

120
Edler confirms this view:

Anyone who knew Heidegger would know of his retreats to his

Hatte in Todtnauberg and to Benedictine monasteries and
70
could easily see Heidegger precisely as a secular monk .

Equally, Heidegger critiqued Baeumler by indicating that he

did not go far enough into the essence as a questioning
71
process in the privileging of activity over consciousness .
For Heidegger, science arises out of the event of
Greek philosophy as Aufbruch -a 'rupture' or 'breaking
open, of a re vea ling-concea ling, clearing where science
by language. 72
can emerge, made possible

70 Frank W. Edler, 'Alfred Baeumler on Hblderlin and the Greeks (Part

11)', p. 7. Herman M6rchen commented on visiting Heidegger at
Todtnauberg during a break in the Plato semester (1931-2) that: 'He
doesn't seem to concern himself with political details. If a man lives
up here, he has a different yardstick for everything. ' From
Mbrchen's text Aufzeichnungen, and found in FlOcliger Safranski's,
Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, p. 227.
71 Baeumler distinguished between (but failed to explain) scientific
activity originating in the spirit of bold and daring enthusiasm
characteristic of the Germanic people, whereas the passive
scholarly and contemplative life of the intellect was more
characteristic of the Jewish people.
72 As already stated, Heidegger does not concur with Baeumler's racial
theory of the essence of science, however, he was not against
Baeumler's theory of the chthonic as it was concomitant with his
conception of conceal i ng-reveali ng as a jointure not overcome by
the defiance of knowing. The chthonic was important for Heidegger
as the event of origination in Greek philosophy and thus referenced
to Bachofen's work on the chthonic hero. Bachofen stated: 'Thus the
hero, who expects to achieve immortality, sees himself and his race
succumb to the law of earthly matter. ' And later in the same text:
'He belongs to the world of endless becoming, not to the world of
being. Everything that material energy brings forth is doomed to
death. ' 'Mother Right', p. 125.

121
He highlighted Baeumler's rubric of 'theoretical man' as

non-compliant with the Greek conception of theoria given

that it was not understood as 'pure contemplation' pursued
for its own sake 73
.
Aufbruch the rift, as the originary - was
event for
-
Heidegger the condition under which the German language
must place itself so that once immersed in its retrieved
Greek origin, a more radical understanding of language and
74
a more fundamental science of language would emerge
The route to language that Heidegger mapped out had
strong parallels with his own retreat from politics after his

resignation from the Rectorate in 1933. It is evident from

the shift in his concerns that the emergence of 'language'
and its relation to logic, however radical, were perhaps,
through his work on HbIderlin, evidence of a lack of a
75
specific moral and ethical posture .
It is perhaps his greatest failing, and the location
from which his conspicuous silence emanates, that
Heidegger refused to acknowledge that such moral and
ethical considerations were no more than just the

continuing restrictive vestiges of metaphysical valuation

that had no place in the possibility of a 'new' world and the

73 The Greeks struggled to conceive and enact contemplative

questioning as the highest mode of energeia - of man's 'being-at-
work'. Theory is then understood as the highest realisation of
genuine practice and therefore Baeumler's 'modern' distinction is
collapsed when thought back to the originary event (the same place
from which science emerges).
74 It is worth noting here that Bachofen indicated that the origin of
letter writing was credited to Atossa (the mother of Xerxes) and the
evolution of this written form of language was expressly due to the
confinement of the 'Asiatic queens' (Bachofen's term) to the interior
of palaces; the written word sourced at the hestiallhearth.
75 It is worth reminding ourselves of Baeumler's view of H61derlin as
essentially political, in that Hblderlin's sleeping youth was a model
for the potential for Germanic re-emergence through the waking of
youthful enthusiasm (and therefore, race distinction).

122
advent of a 'new' god. To commodify humanity as one
indistinguishable resource amongst a plethora of other
resources is perhaps too much of a generality of what
might seem to be Heidegger's high-minded attitude towards
the baseness of such valuation, and as such and requires
further clarification.
Michael E. Zimmerman, in his text Heidegger's
Confrontation with Modernity, cites H61derlin's view of the
tragic as a way of understanding Heidegger's attitude
towards his stand on archaic valuation in a way that

maintains a significant connection with the Greek culture

that he so admired and also a notion of completion that
recognises both finitude and possibility. The arrogant pride
(hubris) of the Greek tragic hero (and here we may
alternate the archaic Greek figure with the modern
German), in defying the divine, creates a caesura (a cleft),

where the god reveals itself as an abyss which can either

signal the possibility of a new beginning or the end of all
historical possibilities. The two laws of such a tragic vision
require the caesura to be understood as a characteristic of
finite existence, and secondly that the tragic hero in

recognising and facing the absence of god, must finally

submit to his own mortality and finitude. The important
factors that we might glean from H61derlin's view of the
tragic (essentially a Greek view) in relation to Heidegger
is, that the attitude of the Greek/German hero (hubris) is

perceived as an excessive pride that may be directed

towards or, in defiance of the divine.
The potential for the heroic hubris to follow either
path (or interpret the caesura/abyss as either the

possibility of the end of all possibility) invites the

123
suggestion of what might be described as a cleansing
punishment. 76 One might reflect here a moment on the

essentially German/Greek aspect to this view, which is

noted by Lacoue-Labarthe, who states:

German has never ceased aspiring on pretence of its strange

similarity to Greek (the 'language of origin'), to the unique
relation it has believed it could establish to everything most
77
authentically Greek about Greece
.

For Zimmerman, the extremity of the National Socialist

technological 'will to will' that found its most pronounced

expression in the final solution as symbolised by

Auschwitz, was the consummation of technological

domination (machination) and the reduction of humans to

mere industrial waste. Heidegger saw the German's blinded

by the 'death of god', making a valiant effort to prepare the

way for the advent of a new divine, but perverted from this

course and led astray by the continuing power and drive of

the technological will.
When seen in the light of this view of the tragic, the

notion of a cleansing punishment can be seen historically,

in two ways; firstly (and this may well be Heidegger's

preferred view, given his own treatment at the hands of the

cle-nazification committee in Freiburg), in the restitution

and 'tributes' demanded by the victorious allies, and

secondly, in the purgation and cleansing of Germany by the
German people themselves through racial exclusion and
extermination.

76 The suggestion has been made that Heidegger's lack of courage was
that which made him look to pre-1933 Germany as the HdIderlinian
caesura, rather than the Holocaust/Shoah itself.
77 'Two Poems by Paul Celan', p. 7.

124
 Lacoue-Labarthe's view is that the German people
themselves were never the scapegoat' and to direct one's
attention towards the plight of a nation that seemingly so
embraced National Socialist doctrine is entirely misplaced
(the argument being that Heidegger seemed to be
incapable of distinguishing between the losses to the
German Army on the Eastern Front and the extermination
of the Jews). The suggestion is made that Heidegger's lack

of courage at the moment when the courage to admit his

grave error was perhaps all he had left, forced him to

reconfigure the conception of the caesura as the radical
break in history, not in the extremity of the Holocaust, but
further back in the period that preceded Hitler's rise to
power in 1933.
Lyotard complicates this view of the tragic break
further in his commentary Heidegger and the 'jews 78 by
,
suggesting that the meaning of the mass extermination of
the Jews is not in the caesura of the Holocaust/Shoah,
because in his view, nothing has changed since the war.
The technological imperative remains undiminished, so
even the extremity of such a racial cleansing had not
halted its continuing drive towards domination. In this

sense, Lyotard is in some accord with Heidegger's post-war

views on the technological (an agreement about the

continuing drive of the technological), but where they differ

in the most significant way is in addressing the meaning of
Auschwitz.

78 Jean Frangois Lyotard, Heidegger and the 'jews' (trans Andreas

Michel and mark Roberts; pub. University of Minnesota Press 1990).

125
 Lyotard interprets the Holocaust/Shoah as a genocide
borne out of resentment. He perceives the Jews as a
reminder of the impotence of all the West's projects to

make everything representable, present and thus

controllable. The Jews represent the experience of being
uprooted (nomadic! ) and hostage to the unnameable divine
(Jehovah) and, as such, represent the memory of an
unconquerable obstacle to understanding and the truth. As
bearers of the memory of human finitude and dependence,
it was necessary to exclude them, and their extermination
was the most extreme attempt to erase their unwanted
memory.
The secre CY79under which this action took place
further sought to obliterate, so the very memory of the
obliteration of memory might be forgotten in a kind of
double erasure. For Lyotard, Heidegger's post-war silence
was a refusal to deconstruct his most basic assumption
that the history of the West is identical to the history of
Being initiated by the Greeks.
As the bearded patriarchs sought to continually

remind the Children of Israel of their unnameable origin

(the divine), so Heidegger, as the prophet of Being,
involved himself in the reactivating of pre-Socratic

79 With a view to secrecy, I refer Martin Gilbert's text, The Holocaust:

The Jewish Tragedy. He comments: 'Throughout Eastern Europe,
rumours abounded as to some sinister fate for the growing number
of Jews being deported to the east. But the exact nature of that
fate was still unknown. Also unknown was the reason: the final
solution, worked out administratively at Wannsee, remained attight
'p. 313. This to the Wannsee Conference 20 "
secret. refers of
January 1942 at which it was reported were discussed 'the various
types of solution possibilities. ' However, as Gilbert points out, what
'these possibilities were, the notes of the Conference do not
record. ' Ibid., p. 283

126
memory . 80 The Jews testify to another dimension of
faithfulness to a divine law that is certainly comparable
with the history of Being, but remains unacceptable to the

purity of Being in the Greek sense and therefore as

Heidegger understood it.
In the Preview to his text, Contributions to Philosophy
(From Enowning), Heidegger comments:

At this point to ask the question 'who are we? ' is indeed more
dangerous than any other opposition we face on the level of

certainty about man (the final form of Marxism, which

essentially has nothing to do with Judaism or with Russia; if

anywhere a spiritualism still lies dormant an unevolved, then,

then in the Russian people; Bolshevism is originally Western,

a European possibility: the emergence of the masses,

industry, technicity, the dying off of Christianity; but insofar

as dominance of reason as equalization of all people is merely

the consequence of Christianity and Christianity is

fundamentally of Jewish origins - cf. Nietzsche's thought on

slave-rebellion in morality Bolshevism is actually Jewish; but

-
then Christianity is fundamentally Bolshevist! And then what
decisions become necessary from this point on? ) .

As Lyotard states, they represent the flaw of a humanity

trapped in an essentially negating relationship with the
divine that undermines the supremacy of possibility. The

contention as to where historically the radical break of the

caesura might be situated has some bearing on the
longevity of Heidegger's silence.
I propose that there is a strong argument to suggest
that Heidegger's conviction about a period of

80 Bearded Patriarch is a reference to Celan's poem 'TObingen,

January'.
81 Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), p. 38.

127
consummation preceding such a break remained intact,

although its place in history is altered seemingly by history

82
itself (or arguably, Heidegger's interpretation of history).
As with Lyotard, Heidegger continued to consider the
domination of the technological as ongoing after Auschwitz

and therefore its potential significance as the event of

caesura was diminished. 83The question we may need to
consider in light of this, is whether the radicality of such a
break is contingent with history itself (is built into it's

matrixical/sequential 'order') or that such an event, if can

be considered with the specificity of a term like 'event', is

perhaps much more ambiguous and not party to the

constraints of a sequential temporal order?

I would suggest here that the historical event that we
refer to as the Holocaust/Shoah is/was/will be resistant to

the constraints of a completion that culminated in the

liberation of the camps in 1945. Further, it could be argued

that the beginning (if such a term can be used) can never a

singular point of origin that does not take account of the

contingent historical or social implications that not only

feed into its phenomenal substance, but also feed out into

all repercussive activities that follow on from it as a

historical/meridial moment.
In this sense, the poem is contingent on the same

meridial force and this is perhaps most evident in Celan's

82 1 refer here to key post-war texts such as 'The Question Concerning

Technology' and 'On the Question of Being'.
83 Heidegger's 'On the Question of Being', a commentary directed
towards Ernst JOnger, suggested that the post-war era was entering
the 'zone of the consummation of nihilism' and was yet to 'cross the
line'. Heidegger also refers to this line in a quote from JOnger as
the 'zero meridian'. Published in Pathmarks (ed. W. McNeill; pub.
Cambridge University Press, pp. 291-322).

128
consideration of the significance of dating the poem and
the date as a signifier or sign.
For Lacoue-Labarthe, Celan the poet, as both Jew

and survivor, was confronted by the 'most brutal question

possible': 'How was (he) able to situate not himself, but us
it?, 84
ViS ;ý
_C _ViS (The 'it' here refers to 'impossible
possibility' of the mass extermination/holocaust - 'the
intolerable banality of our time. ') He also states:

We are at the endpoint of what Nous, ratio, and Logos still

today (heute) the framework for what we are, what we cannot
have failed to show: that murder is the first thing to count on,
the surest of identification. 85
and elimination means

It is perhaps, only provisionally sufficient to retain the term

end for the time being, for the benefit of some comments
on completion. In Lacoue-Labarthe's text, 'Two Poems by
Paul Celan', he indicates that for Celan, both Heidegger
(through the poem, 'Todtnauberg') and H61derlin (through
the poem 'TObingen, January') 'give voice to what is at

stake in our era'. This vocalising of the particularity of

what might be considered our temporal predicament is

understood by Lacoue-Labarthe, via Celan, Heidegger and

H61derlin, as the 'closing of a circle' -a completion of the
'age of knowledge'.
For Heidegger, the Greek term techn6 ushers in this

era, but its significance is directed by the particular

definition that is preferred in post-Socratic thought. In

84 Lacoue-Labarthe, 'Two Poems by Paul Celan' (from the collection

Poetry as Experience), p. 9.
85 Added emphasis. Ibid., p. 8.

129
favouring its epistemological context (remember here that

epist6m6 and techn6 in Greek are both words that mean a

kind of knowing, and as such, a knowing that is also a
revealing), we understand it as the pursuit of knowledge as
pure presence.
This is where the development of philosophical
thought from the Socratic era is made manifest in a

metaphysics that shackles thought via knowledge to a drive

towards a technological understanding of the world - as
such, the a priori of presence over absence. It is evident
that in the Greek word techn6 we already hear the modern
term technology, and for Heidegger, the essence of such
technology drives forward through constraint, limitation and
manipulation.
What is referred to as enframing (it is important to
remember here that man is not the force that fuels such a

posturing of technology; as perhaps the dextrous arch-

manipulator, but is challenged by and, as such, as much at

its mercy as any of the things that it orders). What
Heidegger pursues rigorously in his essay 'The Question

Concerning Technology', is what is forgotten in the word

techn6 that for the Greeks it also meant a revealing in
-
the sense of the artistic and poetic. He states:

There was a time when it was not technology alone that bore

the name techn6. Once that revealing that brings forth truth

into the splendour of radiant appearing also was called

techn6.

130
 Once there was a time when the bringing-forth of the true
into the beautiful was called techn6. And the poi6sis of the
fine arts also was called techn 6.86

For Heidegger, what is lost in the later metaphysical

incarnation the
of techn6
- route defined by epist6m6
towards the prioritising of knowledge via technology - is
the poetic/artistic (poi6sis) conception also found in
techn6. This form of revealing (al6theia) is perhaps more
appropriately conceived by Heidegger as a kind of
unconcealment that is not directed by the enframing mode
of the technological, but by an occasioning that
appropriates favouring
mode S87without any individual mode
the of occasioning 88 As such, he declines to
within event .
dismiss this reign of enframing as only an exercise in the

restrictive practices of the essence of technology, and

completely without merit. What is heard in techn6 is both
the revealing of the challenging forth of technology's
essence, and also (and most importantly for Heidegger's

project) the unconcealment of the artistic and the poetic.

86 Heidegger, 'The Question Concerning Technology', p. 34.

87 This references Heidegger's definition of the 'four modes of
occasioning' in 'The Question Concerning Technology', pp. 7-8.
88 This is distinguished from Aristotle's version of instrumentality and
causality and the four causes: causa materialis, causa formalis,
causa finalis and causa efficiens - causa efficiens (the maker)
being prioritised.

131
He quotes H61clerlin in the latter part of the essay 'The
Question Concerning Technology':

But where the danger is, grows

89
The saving power also .

In the midst of the technological drive towards reducing all

to 'standing-reserve', there is heard a revealing that can
be referred to as unconcealment (al6theia). It is an
opening that is created (artistically or poetically) to allow
the presencing of things in themselves without the
constraint of enframing through the technological (techn6

as both poison and cure! )90 -a rift.

This brief diversion is intended to provisionally
contextualise the particularity of a conception of a world
age (Heidegger's world picture)91 as essentially formed by
the understanding of the essence of truth' through
knowledge and valuation via the mechanisms of
technological enframing.

89 Heidegger, 'The Question Concerning Technology', p. 34. Otto

P6ggeler, in his text The Paths to Heidegger's Life and Thought
(Chapter 3, 'Art-Myth-Language') argues that Heidegger
misunderstands H61derlin here by suggesting that this phrase 'does
not hold nihilism and the demise of the godly to be the greatest
danger, but the opposite: that the breakthrough to unmediated
proximity with God could lead to arrogance! ' p. 239.
90 1 will briefly mention the Pharmakos as both poison and cure as
explored by Derrida in his text Dissemination, and as something to
which I will return later.
91 This term is a reference Heidegger's essay, 'The Age of the World
Picture', and found in the collection, The Question Concerning
Technology and Other Essays. In it he states: 'The fundamental
event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture. The
word "picture" [Bild] now means the structured image [Gebild]* that
is the creature of man's producing which represents and sets
before. ' p. 134.
It is noted in the footnote that the word Gebild is Heidegger's own
word and taken from the noun gebilden, which means a thing
formed, creation, structure or image and the assumption is that the
prefix ge- connotes the force a kind of gathering to be found in the
word.

132
 (It may be worth mentioning here that Nietzsche was
the first 'modern' thinker to question valuations - to
attempt to scrutinise values that previous thinkers had
92
accepted as beyond such consideration .
It is also worthy of note that both Nietzsche and
H61derlin were considered outsiders and were essentially
recuperated by radical conservative academics such as
Heidegger and Baeumler).
Perhaps more appropriate is to distinguish this era
(whose closure Lacoue-Labarthe suggests, as inaugurated
by the poetics of H61derlin and the thinking of Heidegger)
under the historical term nihilism.
Nihilism should be understood as the persistent
unremitting decline towards the ultimate negation that
constrains all possibilities via the mechanisms of valuation
(the good and the bad, the noble and the base). It is this

value structure (the enframing of Heidegger's essay, 'The

Question Concerning Technology') that is the very essence

of the metaphysical project whereby everything is coerced

into a levelling binary of opposition where negation
orchestrates, controls and dictates.

92 Specifically Kant's uncritical use of the valuations of truth and

beauty, etc., Derrida comments in The Truth in Painting that: 'Kant
and Hegel reflect the line of cut or rather the pas crossing the line
between finite and infinite as the proper place of the sublime and
the interruption of symbolic beauty: it is not surprising that they
both consider a certain Judaism as the historical figure of the
sublime irruption, the one, Kant, from the point of view of religion
and morals, in the ban on iconic representation (neither Bildnis nor
Gleichnis), the other, Hegel, in Hebraic poetry considered as the
highest negative form of the sublime. ' p. 134 (added emphasis).

133
 Nietzsche stands at the perimeter (the meridian? ) of
this completion and, for Heidegger, he personifies the last
vestiges of all metaphysical inquiry inaugurating the era
93
whereby the zone of nihilism's consummation is entered
.
As the inverter of Platonism, he is located by Heidegger, in
the zone of nihilism's consummation. His aphoristic
attempts at revaluation are not the creation of new values
or the destruction of all valuation but are the inversion of
all preceding values - the Platonic valuations of ideality

and the worldly turned on their head. As such, for

Heidegger, Nietzsche cannot escape the age of
metaphysical knowledge, the age of nihilism, and stands on
as the circle 94
one side of the perimeter closes.
The task of thought, as defined by Heidegger, quoted
by Lacoue-Labarthe in his text, and manifest in the work of
H61clerlin and Heidegger, is to emerge from the midst of
this completion as that which has to be deployed (what up
to this moment, has been forgotten or rejected)95 to clear a
path to a possible future, re-inaugurating history, re-
opening the possibility of a world and paving the way for
the advent of a new god.

93 See 'On the Question of Being', published in Pathmarks, pp. 291-

322.
94 1 have specified Heidegger's critique of Nietzsche here in the
context of an understanding of the completion of
metaphysics/nihilism. What I have not touched upon is the Derrician
and Deleuzian readings of Nietzsche, which complicate Heidegger's
perception of Nietzsche as 'the last great metaphysician'.
95 1 refer back to what Heidegger hears in techn6 - the unconcealment
of the artistic and poetic.

134
 This need to free grammar from logic (the is-
predication) could not be conceived by merely improving
upon or supplementing any existing tradition, but through
the understanding that the a priori structure of discourse
was essentially existential.
If discourse is temporal, any permanence of an
objective presence in which logic is based blocks and
hinders any attempt to retrieve a more originary experience
of time and therefore that from which this more originary
understanding of Being and language might be formulated.
For Heidegger, this linguistic praxis sets to work as a
gathering in the German language of Greek logos as
essentially the preservation of the origin of a temporal
gathering through the manner of the pre-logical.
H61derlin's late poetry identified a pre-logical lingual form
that anticipated the drive towards nihilistic consummation
and the rift/interval (the ructure) of 'no more' and 'not yet'.
His encroaching inability to speak identified the possibility
for silence as the praxis by which language might be

predicated in the pre-logical.

135
 As Heidegger stated with reference to H61derlin's
prophetic consideration of the 'between' of this era as a
time of distress and the world's night:

The 'no more' of gods who have fled and the 'not yet' of the

god to come. 96

POISON AND CURE

Yet Suddenly: silence. A fever's dull glow

Sends poisonous flowers blossoming from my mouth,
And how the dew falls, pale and shimmering the branches
As if from a wound, and falls, and falls like blood. 97

Is it appropriate to consider that Celan's demand of

Heidegger was that of a patient of his doctor, and that such
a consultation on the hillside at Todtnauberg would provide
the curative solution to Celan's long-term illness?
I would like to draw attention to a number of
possibilities that Celan introduces in the poem to indicate
the need for a cure that perhaps is both metaphorical and
observational. As such, the insight at work in the text is
how what is observed becomes metaphorical, but these

96 H61clerlin's encroaching madness is identified by Celan in 'Tobingen,

January' as the collapse of his ability to speak. He wrote: 'if he
spoke of his time, could only babble and babble, ever-ever-
moremore. ("Pallaksch. Pallaksch. ")'. From Selected Poems and
Prose of Paul Celan, tran. J. Felstiner, p. 159. Lacoue-Labarthe
notes in 'Two Poems by Paul Celan' that: 'We are told when
H61derlin went "mad", he constantly repeated, '"Nothing is
happening to me, nothing is happening to me. "' Poetry as
Experience, p. 21.
97 This second stanza is taken from Georg Trakl's poem 'Horror' - the
translation by D. Simko and published in the collection Autumn
Sonata, p. 29.

136
considerations are extended further through later
translation and mistranslation, so that meaning can no
longer be understood as complete or without further

extension.
It is well documented that Celan's fascination for the
botanical and the geological informed much of his poetry
and provided important references in the complicated
strategies of his poetic insights. 'Todtnauberg' is no

exception, but perhaps what appears insistently remedial

should not be viewed as exclusively curative, and our
seemingly clear understanding of such a cure at work in
the poem must be revised. 98
Pierre Joris's commentary is among many that follow
the pattern that proposes that Celan's hope at the
beginning is manifest in the observation of particular kinds

of flora common to a location like Todtnauberg that were

known for their curative properties. Both Arnica and
Eyebright are common natural remedies, and Celan's
insertion of them at the commencement of the poem is

obviously intended to charge the text with a provisional

hope for the curative - an expectation brought to the
meeting and reflected in this initial observation of the
surroundings.
It is worth remembering here what drew Celan's

attention to these particular plants in the light of such

expectation by indicating their curative powers. Arnica is a

98 Derrida comments in The Truth in Painting: 'As such, insofar as he

inscribes his object in the cycle of natural finality, ascribes to it an
objective function and end, the botanist cannot find the flower
beautiful. At the very most he can conceive of an adherent beauty of
the flower. If a botanist accedes to a vague beauty, it will not be
insofar as he is a botanist. Scientific discourse will have become
mute or impossible for him. ' p. 95.

137
perennial herb indigenous to Central Europe and found
commonly in woods and mountain pastures.
Its most common application is as a tincture for

external application on sprains, bruises and wounds where

the skin remains unbroken. For our purposes, what is vital
is its significance as an external treatment for injuries

close to the dermal perimeter of the corporeal, where, most

importantly, this perimeter remains un-breached.
To extend this reading of its properties further, it is

seldom used internally because of its irritant effect on the

stomach, and as an external application, if used

repeatedly, it may produce severe inflammation to the skin

surface, and to some particularly sensitive to the plant, it

if taken internally. 99
can be poisonous, particularly
What is indicated here is that a cursory grasp of the
properties of Arnica may lead us to interpret it as

essentially curative without any provisos - an inherently

good treatment if used appropriately. Yet even in its most

appropriate use, it has properties that are not entirely

without risk to the patient, and in certain circumstances,
such properties are potentially hazardous.
In considering the intrinsic relationship between that
which is considered curative, and that from which one is

cured, what is perhaps not accounted for is the

characteristics of such a cure that are not essentially

affirmative and unproblematic. The binary nature of the

opposition of the injurious and the curative does not take

99 A homeopathic tincture (X6) has also been used successfully in the

treatment of epilepsy. This information can be found on the website
www. botanical. com.

138
account of the complication of what might be inherently
injurious in the curative.
What I propose here is that Celan's use of the
remedial as primordial to the anticipatory event of hope,
which instigates the poetic consideration of his meeting
with Heidegger in 1967, is not without the problematic built
in to the essential nature of the potential remedy itself.
Arnica is a remedial herb, but this quality is not exclusively

an unreserved affirmation of its good qualities as is

perhaps considered by some commentators. What is
essential to the curative is also the possibility of the
poisonous.
With this in mind, a reading that suggests that
Celan's provisional hope is manifest in the remedial/herbal

of the indigenous flora of Heidegger's Black Forest retreat

is complicated, and this is echoed, as Joris has suggested,
by a less literal reading of the metaphorical at work in the

poem.

l4doll I 11
Mi i
, I.

m,,%iovrwws
ww2iý. 7

139
Provisionally, Arnica is a treatment for injury, and if
considered exclusively as such, its aspirational qualities of
hope are beyond question. What is perhaps less obvious is
the conditions by which such a remedy can act effectively
as a cure and how it, as a remedial treatment, impacts on
such conditions via its pharmaceutical nature.
We must be attentive towards what must be
considered the key quality of Arnica as a remedial herb and

as a treatment for what ails a body. At its most effective, it

is primarily (though not exclusively) an external tincture

applied to bruising, chilblains and sprains, as already

stated, where the skin remains unbroken. As an external

application, its curative qualities act upon that which is

internal without coming into direct contact with the internal

injury itself.
The body's dermal layer - the skin - becomes an
intrinsic part of the curative process by refusing the
penetration of the tincture across the border that separates
internal from external. To be effective as a treatment, it

must always remain external to the corporeal, and so its

relationship with that which maintains it as external (the

skin) is fundamental to its operation as remedial and

curative while resistant to its complete absorption into the

corporeal.
The dermal layer conducts the remedial qualities of
Arnica to that which is injured internally - it effectively
'translates' what is appropriate in the qualities of the herb
as tincture to treat the injury, while withholding that which
might prove injurious.
As we have stated, Arnica is not curative without
reservation. It can be, in certain circumstances, an irritant,

140
and with repeated application it can cause inflammation

and discomfort. Equally, when used for internal treatment

in specific circumstances (epilepsy and travel sickness), it

must be administered with care, particularly if the patient

is sensitive to the plant. If this is the case, it can result in

severe discomfort and even poisoning when taken

internally in this way.
Celan's use of Arnica as a metaphor for the remedial
that he found so abundant around the Hatte was perhaps to
identify the curative that surrounded Heidegger, firstly, in

anticipation that a 'word' might come to cure what ailed the

poet, and secondly, that Heidegger himself might be cured

of past transgressions that compromised the purity of his

thought.
What I propose here is that the natural characteristics
of the herb Arnica are not without risk when used to treat

any malady and, as such, can be construed as a

conditional manoeuvre that includes both the curative and

the poisonous. When Joris argues for the refusal of the

comfort and security of the definitive translation in his text

'Celan/Heidegger: Translation at the Mountain of Death',

he complicates the reading of 'Todtnauberg' by making it

conditional in the same way that the application of Arnica

as a medicinal tincture for treating injury is conditional. To

'translate' Celan's use of Arnica as exclusively curative is

to avoid its other natural characteristics that refuse the

remedial and have the potential to be injurious, even

poisonous.
The clarity of Celan's hope manifest in the remedial

qualities of Arnica are now complicated by the other

qualities of the herb that are not curative and perhaps,

141
what is now most important about these characteristics is
that it can only operate as a treatment effectively when
applied externally, not through ingestion
or absorption,
100How might
where it has the potential to act as a poison.
this be understood with regard to both Celan and
Heidegger? Arnica, as a treatment for internal injuries, can
only effectively be administered externally and in so doing
is reliant on the dermal layer to translate its curative

qualities.
If absorbed or ingested, it is risked as a poison to the
body that would certainly be discomforting, perhaps even
fatal. As a treatment, it is effective against what might be

considered only minor injuries and only when administered

under certain conditions. 101 How might we expect
externally
such a treatment to be considered curative of an injury that
may well be more deeply set within the corporeal?
To remain an external treatment is perhaps to limit
the effectiveness of such a treatment with particular
reference to the severity of the kind of injury to be treated.

100 The beginning of hope in the poem not only commences in the
remedial possibilities of the surrounding blooms (Arnica and
Eyebright) but also in the image of the well-spring. The change
occurs when the affirmation of the spring is lost with the later
identification in the poem of moisture as dampness - we can
interpret this as 'water without a clear source' and as such, an
unease or anxiety is articulated. Celan's term for log as in 'half-trod
log-paths' (the means of traversing the damp ground) is KnOppel,
which also means bludgeon and has a strong resonance with the
treatment of interned Jews. In the Alain Resnais film Night and Fog,
it was noted in the commentary (for which Celan was responsible, in
1956, for a German translation of Jean Cayrol's original, in French -
see John Felstiner's text, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, pp. 92-
3), that camp prisoners were 'bludgeoned awake'.
101 1 am mindful here of the internal application of Arnica as a
treatment for epilepsy and travel-sickness and would like to
consider these further in light of disfluency and displacement.

142
As such, does Celan have in mind, in this reference to the

remedial via the use of Arnica, a general context for some

kind of healing balm at the beginning of the poem, or is
potential superficiality of both treatment and injury masking
a deeper consideration of what is inherently poisonous

within the curative?

I am conscious here that we have yet to broach the

second remedy cited in the preliminary lines of the poem,

and as such, have not given it the same attention as
Arnica. This is because Eyebright is more obviously a
treatment for a particular condition that more clearly
connects with what I believe to be Celan's provisional
metaphorical indications towards a sense of hope in

advance of the meeting. As the English translation makes

clear, it is an optical treatment and restorative that is

sight-based - 'a consolation of the eyes' (Augentr6st). The

obvious association between the weakness of sight

restored by the curative qualities of bathing the eyes in an
infusion of Eyebright reaches beyond the mere
improvement of 'corporeal' sight.
For Celan, it indicates a more profound metaphorical
realm of a treatment for the improvement of 'insight', not a
general insight, but the particularity of an individual's
insight towards a particular historical event or events.
What was hoped for by the poet was that Heidegger would
express a more insightful 'word' towards that which and
about which he has previously remained conspicuously
silent, and the proximity of such a restorative herbal balm
to the philosopher's place of thought - the HOtte - is

anticipatory of such an oral event of contrition.

143
 8

Where Eyebright can be more literally conceived as a

metaphor for the soothing of restricted sight (in
Heidegger's case, possibly a kind of tunnel vision or
myopia towards the ontological) and as such, acts as a
balm 102Arnica's role in the poem is
restorative ,
significantly more complex.
If Arnica's status in the poem is one of
'undecidability', it not only poses the problem of the
103but also that of translation. To operate
pharmakon,
successfully as a cure, it must remain a tincture that
soothes externally and its remedial role is contingent on it
remaining exterior to any injury it is called upon to treat.

102 Restorative implies a condition where vision once clear, becomes

impaired and is in need of treatment to restore clarity. This process
implies a temporal condition -a recurrence.
103 Pharmakon should be understood from classical Greek and
understood to mean either remedy or poison - either a cure for an
illness, or its cause.

144
 Once it traverses the barrier that indicates the
separation between the external and the internal, its

essential nature as a pharmakon, comes into play.

As an internal treatment, it is not without remedial
properties, but as undecidable (i. e. it cannot 'decide' to be

either a remedy or a poison; this is contingent on the

condition of the particular circumstances of its
application), the risk is run of an adverse reaction -a
poisoning that at the very least would cause severe
discomfort, may prove to be fatal. 104
and at worst,
The unclecidability of the pharmakos - its drift
between the polarities of poison and cure- has tangible
links with not only the pharmaceutical nature of Arnica as a
remedial treatment for the specifics of a corporeal injury

where it is maintained (at lowest risk to the corporeal) in

its exteriority, but also as a phenomenon associated with
the undecidability of the pharmakos.
The latter term is evidently derivative from (rooted in)
the former, and essentially functions in much the same way
as a manifestation of undecidability. The specificity of
-
the pharmakos is translated as the term scapegoat and is
understood to mean an evil maintained with the structure of
the polis, and which is sacrificed by the state to maintain
its purity.
In ancient Greece the ritual of the pharmakos, as a
rite of civil purification, obliged the citizens of the city-
state to maintain (at public expense) a group of individuals

104 It is worth remembering that the two recognised ailments for which
Arnica may be used as a remedy via ingestion, epilepsy and travel-
sickness, might well be considered those of the outsider/other -
Celan as both poet1seer and nomadiclalien.

145
('wild, ugly and deformed' and arguably barbaric) solely for
the purpose of sacrifice. 105

At times of greatest need (the onset of such natural

phenomena as flood, famine or pestilence), an individual
was selected to be removed from the confines of the polis,
and was subjected to a frenzied beating that resulted in
death. This was followed by the immolation of the remains,
to the four winds. 106
which were scattered

105 The precedent for the scapegoat is noted in Heidegger's past

through the figure of Heidegger's assistant at Freiburg University,
Rudolf Stadelmann. Hugo Ott notes in his book, Martin Heidegger, A
Political Life, that Stadelmann was dismissed from the first of
Heidegger's camps at Todtnauberg (4-10 October 1933) to appease
the warring factions also present from Freiburg, Heidelberg and Kiel
Universities. The specificity of the misdemeanor remains unclear,
but Ott records that the sacrificial lamb, Stadelmann, noted: 'I shall
never seek to evade this discipline. And in Todtnauberg I realized
more clearly than ever before that my place is in the camp of
revolution, not among the ranks of the opposition or the carping
spectators. I shall maintain discipline but had hoped for more, I had
believed in the possibility of true allegiance. This is why I was so
saddened and shaken by the way things turned out, ' p. 233 (added
emphasis). Latterly when teacher and assistant where reconciled,
Heidegger urged Stadelmann to 'learn to become hard' (p. 232).
Even in 1933, Todtnauberg can be seen here as the site of a rift
that required remedial treatment through the realisation of a kind of
scapegoat to restore order. I would note here Stadelmann's
anticipation of reconciliation with Heidegger in the context of these
events was distinctly different f rom Celan's.
106 The weapon most commonly used for the beating of the pharmakos
was a bulbous plant known as a squill. It is significant that the two
common varieties of this plant, white and red, are used alternatively
as a diuretic, stimulant or expectorant (white), and a poison (red).
Of coincidental note here is that the cottages converted to
provisional gas chambers at Auschwitz, were referred to as the little
red house and the little white house.

146
 9

The significance of the phenomenon of the pharmakos, for

our purposes, is firstly in its links with the root of

pharmakon as already defined in the undecidability
between toxicity and the curative. Arnica, as outlined, has
the provisional condition of the curative and as such, is

generally considered (with Eyebright) as the metaphor for

remedial hope that inaugurates the opening stanza of

'Todtnauberg'.
I would like to suggest that this remedial possibility is
incomplete without recognising that what is conceived as
essentially curative is also essentially toxic - the spectre
of toxicity which haunts the curative. In exploring the
characteristics of the remedy that Celan opens the poem
with, the condition of undecidability can be grasped in the
low risk exteriority of Arnica as a pharmaceutical tincture.
The key proposal of it as a treatment for any interior

ailment is that it is not introduced to the interior and has

no direct contact with it (except under exceptional
circumstances of treatment for epilepsy or travel sickness
and with acknowledgement of some risk to the corporeal).

147
 The risk of its toxicity to the body is at its lowest
when it is administered externally, and as a treatment
under these conditions, its toxicity must be recognised and
acknowledged - we can no longer conceive of it as
exclusively curative without the otherness of its essential
107
nature being recognised in the remedial
.
Likewise, the historical figure of the pharmakos is

essentially an undecidable, and to acknowledge its curative

function in the purification of the polis is also to recognise
its otherness as essential to its operation as a scapegoat.
To function as pharmakos, it must be embraced by the

state without undergoing any kind of absorption into it. It is

perhaps more appropriate to consider the scapegoat in

these circumstances, as ingested into the corporeal of the
polis on the clear understanding that such ingestion is not

merely absorption.
The ingested pharmakos is held within the body of the
state (historically maintained by the state) and as such has

a function within its apparatus, a function that is

fundamentally other to this structure, and one that
operates at its most effective for the purposes of the polis,
outside its confines (the pharmakos, when sacrificed, is

removed from the interior of the polis and dispatched on its

periphery).

107 1 also reiterate here earlier comments made about the parallels
between remedial and toxicity in the context of the use of water in
the poem. From the hope of a well-spring to the unease of source-
less water. Paul Virilio notes in his text, Bunker Archaeology, that
Hitlerian ideology had just one element - the lithosphere (earth and
blood). His fear of the hydrosphere (the 'liquid horizontality of the
sea') led to the construction of the Atlantic Wall 'looking out over
the void, over this moving and pernicious expanse, alive with
menacing presences; in front of the sea Hitler rediscovered ancient
terrors: water, a place of madness, of anarchy, of monsters', p. 30.

148
 To be held within the state as essentially alien to its
apparatus indicates not only the undecidability of such
otherness (that it is both exclusive and inclusive), but also
that at the heart of the structural integrity of the polis is
the notion of difference - the pharmakos is essentially
different from the state that maintains and sacrifices it and
has to be so to operate as pharmakos. 108

Arnica, then, within the confines of the poem, is

essentially a metaphor for difference that is precluded in

its nature and, as such, we cannot ignore its potential as a
literary pharmakon. Most commentaries understand it as
that which is curative prior to the meeting between Celan

and Heidegger - an anticipatory possibility and expectation

on behalf of the poet. Even Joris, whose critique of
particular interpretations and translations of Celan's poem,
provisionally informed this exploration, states:

The poem's opening line, Celan's account of the surrounding

botany he espies upon arriving, is however full of hope and
healing: Arnica is a bright-yellow flower, whose mountain
variety, A montana, is used to prepare a tincture helpful for
healing sprains and bruises. "9

What is seemingly ignored by Joris is the nature of Arnica

as a remedy that must include in its remediality the
otherness of a toxicity, which not only indicates a notion of
difference already at work in the remedy, but, as Derrida
might well point out, proposes a deferral whereby the

108 1 am mindful here of Derrida's work on the pharmakonlpharmakos in

Dissemination and also Mark Wigley's text, The Architecture of
Deconstruction: Derrida's Haunt.
109 Joris, 'Celan/Heidegger: Translation at the Mountain of Death', p. 3.

149
circumstances by which the pharmakon is instituted have

some say in its meaning.

For to mean cure, and only the possibility of a cure in
the context of the poem, is already to exclude that which is
the very nature of Arnica in its remedial state. As

conditionally curative, its toxicity must be recognised and,

as such, the clarity of the curative is complicated by the
inclusion of that which had been largely excluded. The

essential difference at work in the herbal/remedial of

curative and toxicity in Arnica expands into a reading of it
that informs an interpretation of the poem beyond the
dimension of the exclusively remedial. It may be that
toxicity is essentially an
silent
- unspoken other that is not
an appendage to the remedial qualities of the herb, but
that which is an integral part of the herbal. This being the

case, it is appropriate that, given the complexity of such

difference, such a reading might be extended into the wider

context of the more figurative pharmakos.

A question arises at this point regarding a context for
the interpretation of the pharmakos in the light of the poem
Todtnauberg. Can we specify a particular participant
(Celan or Heidegger) in the drama of the poem that we
might identify as exclusively the scapegoat? Initially, one
might propose that Celan himself could occupy this

position. Both geographically and linguistically, Celan

remained outside - he wrote in his mother-tongue without

being an ethnic German and the language he used was

essentially a form of High-German that, Joris argues, was

out of place in post-war Europe (the language of German
Romanticism that of the poets H61derlin and Trakl, and
-
ironically that of the intellectual elite of Germany between

150
the wars, espousing the very anti-Semitism that preceded
the Holocaust, but a language that may well find it difficult
to describe).
As someone already marginalised within the language
that he chose to define his poetic vision, Celan not only
instigated a deferral within the lingual form, but was
himself an undecidable within that form: a Jewish poet who
wrote in German without being a naturalised German, and
who located himself on the periphery of the topographic
location of a post-war, divided Germany, crossing its
borders and with some reservation. 110
occasionally
The topography of this 'new' (post-war) Germany was
itself a deferral (and as such, becomes a topology) of
political responsibility that, it could be argued, in an

attempt to provide remedial treatment to cleanse the

National Socialist canker, found itself struggling with what
provisionally might be conceived as the physicality of an
oppositional binary of toxicity and curative within the
of the state. "'
confines of the corporeality
Celan, in situating himself on the perimeter, remained
on the periphery of the state/po/is, yet was intrinsically
involved in its apparatus through his insistence in the use

of its language (though significantly, in an archaic form

110 Celan variously lived in Romania, Austria and France - creating a

meridial sweep across central Europe that excluded the homeland of
his mother-tongue and extended a perimeter of exclusion.
111 Perhaps an example of such toxicity and remedy might be found in
the post-war Democratic and Federal states of Germany each both
curative and poisonous towards each other - hence a zone of
exclusion was set up between them. The question of undecidability
arises between them as to which was poison, and which cure?

151
rooted not only in the Germany of pre-1945, but more
importantly, that of pre-1914). 112

In the German Romanticism of the late eighteenth and

early nineteenth centuries, the aspirations of literary
figures, such as Goethe and H61derlin, were towards a
stronger association between the German tradition and the
ancient Greek world 113that would provide a remedial edge
and which would allow German culture to reach its full

potential and blossom. Geographically, its location at the

heart of Europe gave it topographical privileges of
centrality that made the links between the culture and its
locale historically. 114
significant
In literary terms, the seeds of the cultural shift from
the high aspirations of Goethe and H61derlin to the darker
of TrakI 115and Celan were sown in this association
visions
this special relationship between the ancient Greek and
-
the modern German. The German metaphysics of
nationality mythologised Germanic distinctiveness, through

112 It could be argued that literary figures like Celan and Kafka were
the products of a wider 'German-speaking Reich', rooted in the
unification of a greater Germany in 1871 and the Austro-Hungarian
Empire. As writers working in German, neither were indigenously
German by birth (Celan, Romanian and Kafka, Czech), and both
were Jewish.
113 The aspiration of the German intellectuals to find the legacy of
ancient Greek culture in 'modern' Germany began in this period and
continued to be sought up to, and including the period of the Third
Reich (Heidegger is an example of such an intellectual on such a
quest). Heidegger's conviction towards an essential ontology was
rooted in this tradition.
114 Heidegger exploits this topographic locality in his most direct
commentary on the Germany of the Third Reich, in An Introduction
to Metaphysics, 'The Fundamental Question' (pp. 45-6).
115 This 'darker vision' is discussed in more detail in the text
Posthumous People: Vienna at the Turning Point, Chapter 17,
'A ben la n d'.

152
the geographical location of the homeland as that of a
the rift between 116
central people occupying east and west.
German nationalism rose when there was no nation-
state or political order to channel and contain nationalist
feelings, and therefore the people were forced to rely on
literary, poetical and philosophical means to locate their
nationhood. 117 In 'Two Poems by Paul Celan', Lacoue-
Labarthe writes:

German has never ceased aspiring on pretence of its strange

similarity to Greek ('the language of origin'), to the unique
relation it has believed it could establish to everything most
authentically Greek about Greece. 118

If conceived remedially, the higher considerations of

literature and thought were certainly intended to inspire

comparable works in German. What perhaps was less

evident provisionally, in the strong linkage between the two

cultures advocated by the intellectual elite, was the

potential for a spherical toxicity expressed through the

corruptive force of nomadic cultural influences that resist

116 Heidegger draws this distinction in his text, An Introduction to

Metaphysics, published in the 1930s.
117 It is noted here that Hans Sluga suggests the historical significance
of this central role, was not essentially German. The ancient Greeks
also placed themselves at the centre of the world and distinguished
themselves from the barbarians by their use of language. German
unification was only realised in 1871, so when Wihelm Wundt
(Heidegger's contemporary) assumed that a nation was primarily
defined by language and therefore national character would reveal
itself most clearly in a nation's poetry and philosophy, it indicated a
lingual locale. Heidegger's Rectoral Address was not a new
conception of the German people's spiritual mission, but an
insertion into an already long history of nationalistic claims (for
example, Fichte's 1807 'Address to the German Nation', which
attempted to define a unifying mythology around which a nation
might grow).
118 Lacoue-Labarthe, 'Two Poems by Paul Celan', p. 7.

153
the polis, not necessarily through subversive activities
against the state, but through the distinctiveness of their
own cultural identity. The upsurge of anti-Semitic
behavioural patterns in nineteenth-century German cultural
life, 119prior to and after unification, though not without
comparable historical precedents across Europe, was
certainly a clear example of the Greek tradition of the
pharmakos exceeding its temporal containment in history

and finding a new status in a modern culture in search of

itself. Celan's Jewishness already excluded him from such
a culture that recognised the pha rmakos1scap e goat as a
tradition worthy of upholding in the modern world and
intensified the search for, and the institution of, a cultural
purification 120This colluded with his birth into a tradition
.
that was not only Jewish, but also non-German (although

post-First World War Romania had previously been

between Tsarist Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, the area around
Celan's birthplace was a zone of contention between the
Third Reich and Stalinist Russia; at different times, Celan

was in the hands of both Russian and German forces),

119 Richard Wagner, for example, and his text 'Judaism in Music' (1850)
published in Neue Zeitschrift fir Musik under the pseudonym, K.
Freigedank. In this essay he critiqued what he considered to be the
prevailing forces in German cultural life (particularly the theatre
world) as essentially Jewish and corruptive of the higher aspirations
of a Germanic cultural imperative, which he identified in his own
music-dramas. It is noted here that Wagner's anti-Semitism was the
product of frustration borne out of his rejection by a society, which
lionised the Jewish composer Meyerbeer.
120 The Jew as an expendable scapegoat for cultural/religious
purification is rooted in the European tradition from the Middle
Ages.

154
where he was encouraged to not only speak German, but

also to write it 121

.
This collusion might be seen in two ways; firstly, to

acknowledge the significance of the appropriated language

is to give it an a priori that provisionally addresses its
importance and distinctiveness and propagates it.
Secondly, to undermine that language, to call into question
its validity as culturally a priori, one is perhaps better

placed to articulate its anomalies from within the language

itself. For Celan, the priority (and extreme difficulty) was to
speak the language of the culture that was responsible for
the extremity of the Holocaust, to draw attention to these

extremities through the tongue that articulated and

instigated it, and proposed the Jew as a modern
pharmakos.

121 Both Kafka and Celan wrote/spoke in German although neither were
citizens of that country - were they in some way contributing to a
cultural propagation while remaining excluded from it? The
profundity of those who were excluded speaking and writing in the
language of inclusion should not be lost here.

155
 Celan, while immersed in the lingual prosody of the
appropriated German language, was maintained in his

exclusion from it by his persistence in attempting to speak

of the events that pushed it to the limits of its expression

and meaning - how can one find the appropriate voice to
122
speak of such things without diminishing their power?
Derrida distinguishes between what he refers to as
the 'silent mimesis' of painting and sculpture, and
writing/poetry by suggesting that the latter 'imitates the
by means of the voice'. 123
voice
The precedent of the vocal through the historical
tradition of the logos as essentially a priori has always

suggested that the written word is merely the diminishment

of what precedes it, what is spoken. This is clearly seen in

The Phaedrus where Plato argued that:

And once a thing is put in writing, the composition, whatever it

may be, drifts all over the place, getting into the hands not
only of those who understand it, but equally of those who have
no business with it; it doesn't know how to address the right
people, and not address the wrong. And when it is ill-treated

and unfairly abused it always needs its parent to come to its

being to defend itself to its own needs. 124
aid, unable of attend

As already stated, the inscription of the written word differs

from the representation of visual language in the fine arts
because it does not involve itself in an act of substitution

whereby an image replaces or represents its model.

122 As already noted, Lacoue-Labarthe asks the most brutal question

possible of Celan: 'was Celan able to situate not himself, but us vis
A vis it? ' ('it' refers to the impossible possibility of the Holocaust
and the mass extermination of the Jew - 'the intolerable banality of
our time').
123 Derrida, 'Plato's Pharmacy', in Dissemination, p. 137.
124 Plato, The Phaedrus, p. 275.

156
Derrida proposes that 'it inscribes in the space of silence
the living 125
and in the silence of space time of voice'.
Writing is no longer conceived as mere weakened
speech but as that which cle-composes the voice through a
double movement of conservation and corruption
transforming voice into the abstract spatial elements of
stuttering and cluttering which instigate a disfluency. To

evaluate Celan's poem 'Todtnauberg', we cannot ignore the

significance and relevance of the plethora of translations

that have informed its interpretation and become part of its
life.
The Joris translation we have chosen to highlight

resists any attempt to provide a clear interpretation in

favour of the more labyrinthine hermeneutical approach to
the substance of the piece. 126For example, Joris chooses
to retain the German word Hijtte where other translators
have the English cottage or hut. 127
proposed words chalet,
Joris defends this decision by suggesting that maintaining
the German word HOtte complicates interpretation, as it
brings with it the resonance and particularities of location
or site -a secluded mountain hut, a locale of thought, the

retreat Heidegger escaped to after resigning the Rectorate.

125 Derrida, 'Plato's Pharmacy', p. 137.

126 Stephen Pruslin comments in the liner notes to Pulse Shadows:
'These imperatives come into sharpest focus in 'Todtnauberg'. When
the cycle is performed in Hamburger's translation, as in the present
recording the soprano sings this poem in German while
simultaneously "reciting" it in English. (When the work is performed
in Celan's original German, the position is reversed: this particular
poem is sung in English and recited in German. ) From either
linguistic direction, the sung version makes the poem more remote,
while the formalized rhythmic speech brings nearer by both
11explaining" and commenting on it. ' p. 6.
127 The suggestion is that HOtte allows for the spectral invocation of
other translations (chalet, cottage, etc. ), which their specificity
would preclude. HOtte articulates differentiation by resisting its
mere substitution, with the possibility of deferral.

157
 Perhaps more powerfully, it was recognised as the
site of Nazi indoctrination sessions during the period of the
Rectorate and that which prompted Celan's question:
'Whose name did it record before mine? ) 1213
It is also the
site of this portentous meeting between philosopher and
poet, and of which, on Celan's part, so much was
anticipated and hoped for in the form of an appropriate act
of contrition.
*

Derrida speaks of the 'strange community' recognised

through the genealogy of the visitor's book where Celan's

question marks the anguish as to the name of 'the other'

through a strange kind of fraternal affiliation with previous
visitors/inscribers. 129In his essay 'Language and the
Poem', Heidegger defines site:

Originally the word 'site' suggests a place in which everything

comes together, is concentrated. The site gathers unto itself,
supremely and in the extreme. In gathering power penetrates
and pervades everything. The site, the gathering power,
gathers in and preserves all it has gathered, not like an
encapsulating shell but rather by penetrating with its light all

128 Du ring the period of the Rectorate ( 1933), He idegge r made contact
with Nazi student leaders to arrange what were referred to as
'science camps' and to which both students and lecturers were
invited to come together in a new form of academic/political
collaboration. Also as a periphery note, Albert Speer noted a family
link in his memoirs, Inside the Third Reich, with that region of South
West Germany, in that his grandfather was 'the son of a poor
forester in the Black Forest', p. 3.
129 This affiliation transgresses the order of forgiveness, interrupting
the clear designation of one who seeks forgiveness and one who
grants it. Derrida describes this 'written' fraternity of alterity as the
realisation of what he terms 'the abyssal countersignature', 'To
Forgive', p. 38.

158
 it has gathered, and only thus releasing it into its own
nature. 130

Furthermore, there is the model the Hitte symbolised - an

idealised philosophical monastic community, which
Heidegger had made tentative plans to transpose to the
University of Berlin pending his appointment to the chair of
philosophy.
This would be the specific imposition of the 'lifestyle'

advocated in his short essay 'Why do I Stay in the

Provinces? ' as an ideal and appropriate relationship for the
'new' intellectual to engage with the Volk commun it Y. 131

As holiday home, mountain retreat, hideaway and

indoctrination camp, the Hitte indicates the possibility of a
location to invoke both the curative and the poisonous. It is
not the pharmakon within the poetic structure, but it is the
translatory indicator of the poem as pharmakos. It is the
manifestation of the meridian of the poetic structure
drifting on the perimeter of coherence, resisting fluency,
cluttered, 132an abortive narrative which is a compression of
a temporal space.
It is bloated with the haunting of other temporalities,
other dates, which expose the in-articulation of disfluency,

130 Heidegger, 'Language in the Poem', pp. 159-6 1. It is worth noting

here that Lacoue-Labarthe refers to 'blindness' and 'blinding' as the
empty space between words, or the 'not having words to say what it
is' - difficulty as 'an event without answer'.
131 This is often cited as another example of Heidegger's humanism,
with his apparent engagement with the Volk community that
surrounded his Black Forest mountain retreat. However, the
community proposed for Berlin was much more exclusive and
emphasised the isolation of the retreat rather than its integration
with the community. The emphasis was on a rural rather than an
urban Volk.
132 Cluttering involves excessive breaks in the normal flow of speech
and is a fluency disorder characterised by a rapid or irregular
speaking rate.

159
but not cluttered in the sense of stifled by a lingual
density, but in the sense of the compression of all possible
resonances, all traces at its threshold. It is the moment in
the poem where the curative and the poisonous coincide
and resonate - the interval which is its meridial condition
and which indicates all the dates that dissect the poem and
haunt the HOtte. From it emanates the possible trajectories
of how the poem might be read, how it might be spoken,
who reads it, who speaks it and in what tongue.
Lacoue-Labarthe concurs with Joris when he argues
that the two poems 'TObingen, January' and 'Todtnauberg'

are untranslatable. He writes: 'They necessarily escape

interpretation; they forbid it. One could even say they are
written to forbid it. 133
This issue of encryption via what we might call the
integrity of translation, poses the question of how a poem
might be inscribed when its coding fails in advance all
attempts to decipher it and how it makes itself absolutely
singular, forswearing repetition of the disastrous and the
'already said'.
In a sense, Celan's determination to 'speak' a certain
kind of German engages an alteric spectrality that
wrenches the poem clear from the language of the age (the
age of subjectivity and the T) and creates a kind of pure
idiom of poetic singularity. Lacoue-Labarthe questions this
possibility for the singular experience and how it might
come into language, by speculating on inscription as the
moment where singularity is lost in what is written.

133 Lacoue-Labarthe, 'Two Poems by Paul Celan', p. 13.

160
 This proposal is developed by understanding the
singular experience as silent and untouched by language
and therefore explores language through its capacity to
take on the burden of the silent singular as outside
recognised articulated discourse.
He provides a distinction between idiom and
encryption which understands the latter as a refusal to
reveal a point of view and a form of encoding placed on
language with the intention of disguising and is endemic to
the 'modern'- 'stuttering is the only "language" of our age.
The end of meaning - hiccupping, halting. 134

In his essay 'After the Disaster', Stephen Mitchelmore

suggests that:

Celan could not breathe in the old language. The old language

was saturated with the conditions by which an entire culture

was able to produce the greatest art and thought in history

and then produce death camps with the efficiency of a

factory. 135

The question of idiom is one of singularity, not in the

i PSiS 136 137
sense of either Sol M or autism but rather one of
solitude.
The sense by which we might understand terminology
like stuttering, cluttering and disfluencY does not fall into
any problem of communication identified by either the
solipsistic or the autistic.

134 Ibid., p. 18.

135 Article taken from Spike Magazine,
http: //spikemagazine. com/0900celan4. htm.
136 Solipsism - this is the view that the self is all that exists or can be
known.
137 Autism - the mental condition characterised by complete self-
absorption and a reduced ability to respond to or communicate with
the outside world.

161
 Both 'Todtnauberg' and 'TObingen, January' are not
mere examples of an introverted self-absorption, but are
attempts by Celan to communicate -a solicitude of being-
with. More particularly they acknowledge experience as the
bedazzlement of memory and identify the poem as an
opening for experience if we grasp it, not as the specificity
of anecdotal association with what is lived, but as the
possibility without form, an event without closure not
constrained by the parameters that would define and
predict the finitude of its eventhood. 138

The springing forth of the poem in its possibility is

also the enigma whereby the source remains un-revealed
because of the bedazzlement and dizziness of what is

placed before it as the suspension of occurrence - the

non-occurrence which maintains its inaccessibil it Y. 139

Lacoue-Labarthe argues that there is no poetic experience
in the sense of a lived moment, and therefore the poetic
state can only give rise to a story, a discourse in verse or
prose, but prose not a poem. A poem has nothing to

138 Experience is understood here in its strictest sense, from the Latin
ex-periri, a crossing through danger. This has a strong resonance
with Heidegger's crossing-through of Being as the zone of nihilistic
consummation in 'On the Question of Being' and latterly, Derridian
sous rature.
139 In H61clerlin's poem, 'The Rhine' (published in an English translation
by Michael Hamburger, in Penguin's Selected Poems and Fragments,
pp. 197-209), he writes that, 'an enigma is the pure sprung forth'.
Lacoue-Labarthe makes the point that Hblderlin's river poems
('Ister', 'Rhine', etc. ) bring on dizziness through the double meaning
of water as subject and the river of eloquence of Hblderlin's verse.
The two images of water that Celan exploits in 'Todtnauberg' follow
this double pattern. Firstly, the spring water of the well as hopeful
and life-giving possibility, and secondly, the swamp-like sodden
ground of the sward where he and Heidegger latterly walked. The
implication of the second image is of disappointment and
foreboding.

162
recount except that from which it wrenches away - its

source. 140

The poetic condition articulated by Lacoue-Labarthe

of 'wanting-to-say', in the sense of the purity of a 'not-not-
wanting-to-say', may have some bearing on both
Heidegger's pronounced post-war silence and Celan's
demand for that silence to be broken.
Is Heidegger's silence a 'pure-wanting-to-say' of
nothing in the sense of a clearing of possibility that is both
curative and poisonous true pharmakos? 141However,
-a
true alterity - true nothingness - is always other and can
never be incorporated into the potential specificity of a
poetic wanting, and therefore remains inaccessible to it.
This therefore poses the question of whether there can
there be such a thing a poetic experience if experience
merely marks the absence of what is lived.
The particularity of the specific moment (the moment
of the visit, for example) is not the moment of the poem's
birth - memory cannot be mere recollection nor is it
purposely or consciously lived by the subject, but is the
atopia 142of existence what takes place, without taking
-
place. Dizziness and bedazzlement cannot constitute the
specificity of any one moment, but as Blanchot states in
his essay, The Writing of the Disaster, there are no words
for extremity, the excess of light which blinds; they can

140 Lacoue-Labarthe argues that the poem's 'wanting-not to-say' does

not want not to say. It wants to say, but is nothing but 'pure
wanting-to-say'.
141 When Hblderlin went mad, it was reported that he repeated the
phrase, 'nothing is happening to me, nothing is happening to me'.
142 Atopia - from the Greek, meaning uncommonness, from atopos, out
of the way, uncommon.

163
only be expressed through the deficiencies of the eye -
through myopia. 143

H61derlin's prophetic tone found in his flood of words

not what constitutes the immersive 'swamping of language',
whereby the poetic is lost in the lingual deluge, but that

which maintains a grasp of the possibility of articulation, if

only a kind of incomprehensible stuttering of the

incommunicable language of an idiolect or idiom - the
144
wreckage of poetry.
The sacred pathos of the world's nigh t 145indicates the
possibility of poetry as the consummation of a world of
ecstasy and risk. The Greek phenomenon/form of tragedy
offered the possibility of transgression in which the poetic
risks through letting go. 146Celan as the exiled poet was
persecuted without the possibility of remission with what
remained unforgettable and indelibly traced on language.
Auschwitz, the 'purely unthinkable', had become the event
that symbolised a collection of other atrocities which had
ushered in 'a time of distress that no hope of a god could

143 Myopia - shortsightedness. We may think back here to earlier

observations on Celan's use of Eyebright in 'Todtnauberg', from
which a tincture can be made for the treatment of eye problems.
144 Lacoue-Labarthe states that to be engulfed in a 'flood of poetry'
means that poetry itself sinks and drowns in eloquence (a 'saying-
too-much') source submerged in the flood that it brought upon
-a
itseIf.
145 For Heidegger, 'the no more of the gods who have fled and the not
yet of the gods to come'. The significance of 'night' is steeped in
the tradition outline by Bachofen in 'Mother Right' as the
tellurian/matriarchal world of the pre-Hellenic era.
146 Nietzsche's text The Birth of Tragedy explores the Dionysian as the
Greek form of the ecstatic and draws comparisons with Wagner's
tragic operatic music-dramas as equally momentous historical
artistic events. Lacoue-Labarthe argues that: 'Madness is, indeed,
the absence of artistic production. In turning away from madness,
the Greeks lost themselves in works, in artistic virtuosity. If they
undergo a trial of madness, Westerners or moderns risk the inability
to accede to work, to artistic sobriety; and yet in this sobriety
resides that which is their own. ' 'Two Poems by Paul Celan', p. 25.

164
 147
still buttress' This time of distress also demarcated a
.
time of pain in which that pain, understood as extreme
interior, becomes an absolute singularity where subjectivity
is no more and becomes a 'waiting-for-an-other' as the
possibility of a dialogue as a way out of solitude.
For Celan the question of poetry's possibility was the
possibility of going outside the self and the hope, which
permeates 'Todtnauberg', was the hope for such a
dialogue. 148As Celan's poetry, prior to the meeting in 1967,

had already in effect been an ongoing dialogue with

Heidegger's thought, the demand made of the physical
encounter had the potential of the pharmakos and ran the
risk of being both curative and poisonous. Its effectiveness
was complicated in the ambiguity of such an encounter as
necessarily being just the possibility of an affirmation, a
'word' about pain. What was equally implicit in the
encounter's possibility was also the possibility for
disappointment, of a prohibition and a breaking off of
dialogue. 'Todtnauberg' no longer persists as just the
specificity of a 'poem of disappointment', but is rather an
articulation of the 'disappointment of poetry'. The risk
taken by Celan in encountering Heidegger at Todtnauberg
was that the curative hope that he had anticipated in the
confrontation with the philosopher's thought over the
previous decades would be confounded.

147 Ibid., p. 31.

148 Both Celan and H61derlin recoiled from the disappointment of the
failed possibility of dialogue and were thrown back into inarticulate
speech.

165
 The inducement for this was the hope of finding in
what Heidegger said and the gestures that he made at the
meeting, a kind of completion or resolution that would
allow Celan the opportunity to be at peace with this
poetic/intellectual relationship via the 'cleansing
punishment' of the encounter. However, the possibility of a
notion of end or resolution remained at odds with his
thoughts on poetic practice.
For Celan, the possibility for the event of the poetry
was not a liberation in the sense of a dismissal - the
resolution of all quandaries and the absolution of any
moral or ethical compromise, but rather a deliverance in
the sense of Freisetzung -a setting free. Was Heidegger's
silence the blossoming of poisonous flowers or does the
absence of a word prompt the curative blossoming from the
mouth/wound of Celan? Celan's wound was continually
opened and re-opened as the ongoing guilt of the survivor
festered and refused to allow it's healing. 149

To speak was to continually re-open the wound, and

his words would always be poisonous, their curative power
external like Arnica, yet in some ways remaining
'superficial' 150The complication that the cure is such
.
because it is also a poison means that it can never be
exclusively curative -a healing balm that sooths all and
placates the controversy of Heidegger's silence as well as

149 Derrida notes in The Truth in Painting, 'there would be not merely
finality but end, because the pure cut could be bandaged', p. 88.
150 Joris draws attention to some translations of 'Todtnauberg' that
indicate some kind of settlement or resolution between Heidegger
and Celan. Also it is important to remember that Heidegger's own
understanding of the poem was, in some ways, superficial and
misplaced - he saw it as merely a memorial to the historic meeting
of great thinker and great poet. To ingest it any further would be to
be poisoned by Celan's cure.

166
condoning Celan's 'fall into silence'. For to cure Celan's
stutter - his disfluency - would be to settle what cannot
and should not be settled. A 'word' from Heidegger might
have initiated a closure - the healing of the wound, but the
maintaining of that silence holds that wound open, refusing
healing, and in the insistence of that silence, maintains
that about
which it continues to be silent over as
contentious. 151

The question arises as to whether Heidegger was

conscious of such a deliberation over the maintaining of
his silence and if so, was it with the intention of not
undermining its potency, or perhaps Heidegger too was
struck with disfluency?
Rather than speak, perhaps, like Celan, he was forced
into silence by the inadequacy of his own speech - lacking
the lingual tools to express what could not be expressed.
However, it may also be pertinent to consider the
pragmatism of political naivety and intellectual arrogance
as the motivation, and to specify the historical events of
the Holocaust/Shoah would have been to undermine the
generalities of his own ontological project, putting it in the
same context as other technological empowerments, and
therefore signifying it as outside or other to the nihilistic
drive. To separate an event like the Final Solution was to
suggest that the Holocaust/Shoah was the consummation of
nihilism and signified the end of that understanding of
nihilism, but as Lyotard concurs with Heidegger, however

151 In 'To Forgive', Derrida notes: 'History continues on the background

of [sur fond de] an interruption of history, in the abyss, rather of an
infinite wound which in its very scarring, will have to remain open
and unsuturable wound', p. 42.

167
extreme those events, nothing has changed with regard to
the technological drive, and there is no 'new age'.
To heal the wound of locales like Auschwitz would be
to cover over this most extreme event, and begs the
question of Celan as to the appropriateness of such a
healing to remembering, and ask whether it is rather just
an attempt to forget to remember.

The new language, the new poetry, would be a way of turning

us towards that which is absent in our everyday world, that
which 'stands apart in the world'. 152

152 Stephen Mitchelmore, 'After the Disaster', Spike Magazine,

http: //www. spikemagazine. com/0900celan4. htm

168
A NOTE ON FORGIVENESS

In a certain way, it seems to us that forgiveness can

only be asked of granted 'one to one', face to face, so
to speak, between the one who has committed the
irreparable or irreversible wrong and he or she who has
suffered it and who is alone in being able to hear the
request for forgiveness, to grant or refuse it. 153

What Derrida describes as the 'solicitude Of tWO)154 marks

the scene of forgiveness as that which predicates the
formal possibilities of granting or refusal while
simultaneously suggesting a deprivation of what he terms
'authentic collective forgiveness'.

153 Derrida, from 'To Forgive' and found in the collection, Questioning
God, p. 25.
154 In this regard, we may remind ourselves here of the specificity of
such solicitude with regard to 'Todtnauberg' as the commemoration
of anticipation of such a scene. We might also consider the
precedent already set by Celan in an earlier prose work from 1959,
entitled 'A Conversation in the Mountains' which describes a
meeting between two Jews ('Gross' and 'Klein'). He remarked in the
text: 'There they stand, the cousins, on the road in the mountains,
the stick silent, the stones silent, and the silence no silence at all.
No word has come to an end and no phrase, it is nothing but a
pause, an empty space between the words, a blank - you see all the
syllables stand around waiting. They are tongue and mouth as
before, these two, and in their eyes there hangs a veil. ' Paul Celan,
Collected Prose, p. 19. Additionally, it is worth reminding ourselves
here of Joris's discussion in 'Celan/Heidegger: Translation at the
Mountain of Death', of the line, 'orchis and orchis, singly' as an
interpretation of the complexity of near-ness (their physical
proximity at the meeting) and distance (the psychological
discrepancies which the hope for the meeting sought to alleviate,
but in reality merely exacerbated, between poet and thinker. The
further use of a botanical motif is instructive here as the orchis or
orchid is a member of the large family of monocotyledonous herbs,
normally with red or purple flowers made up of three petals, the
middle one of which is enlarged into a lip. * Also of interest here is
the etymological root of orchis in the Greek word orkis -ios,
meaning testicle and referring to the plant's tuber. Here I refer back
to earlier remarks on the pharmakos and make particular note of the
use of the squill as a weapon to beat the victim on and around the
genitals.
The suggestion of a lip and its connection with mouth should be
noted here.

169
 lop

33-

10

In this sense, the discretion of the singular event, by which

we mean the concurrence of an intimate individuation (the

possibility of a resolution between he/she who might seek

forgiveness and he/she who is capable of granting it),
locates this scene outside the ruling of any collective
jurisprudence and in some sense might be interpreted as
an interruption of the law itself.
The questions arises then, firstly, of how forgiveness

might be determined outside or perhaps more

appropriately, as an interruption of, what Derrida terms

'the juridical space'. And secondly, what is the relation
between forgiveness and the disruption of the event of
mourning through insistence of forgetting?
It is a matter of some certainty that forgiveness in
some ways is interpreted as a two-fold operation of
demand or request and granting. In this way a linearity of
retrieval lays out a template by which forgiveness might be

conceived as an act of completion that directs the

170
operation towards the discretion of forgetting as its
inevitable consequence.
The conferring of such a recognition of secrecy
articulates the conspiratorial event at work at the heart of
such an interpretation of the sovereignty 1550f forgiveness,
so that consequentially the encryption of that over which
one might seek to be forgiven is not only buried by he/she
who is absolved, but is further assisted in that deception
by he/she from whom absolution is requested/demanded.
That we might speculate that Celan would seek some kind
of moral restitution from Heidegger, his philosophical
mentor, on that Black Forest mountainside arguably places
the poet, if not at the centre of such a conspiracy, then as
a proactive participant in an operation of the permanence
of a healing process, whereby the wound is appropriately
cauterised, sealed and eventually forgotten.
Derrida notes that Kant argued that clemency should
only operate between sovereign and subject when the
misdemeanour is committed by the latter against the former
and not where the sovereign acts as a third party mediating
between two or more subjects: forgiveness should be
between victim and perpetrator and as such, begs the
question as to whether discussion of forgiveness is really
one of the limit. (Should forgiveness be in the hands of
man or reserved for God? ) When Celan seeks a 'word' from
Heidegger, does that infer that once a conciliatory remark
is made, that the process of mourning is inaugurated which

155 Derricla notes that a precedent for interruption had already been set
for the judicial-political system through what he argues is the
sovereign right to pardon as above the law. He comments: 'As often
the foundation is excluded or exempted from the very structure that
it founds', 'To Forgive', p. 33.

171
then, in some way, proffers a limit to the status of the
misclemeanour through the capacity to (begin to) forget?
Derricla argues that the language of the other is
identified here not through any ethical or moral condition,
but is always fundamentally outside what he terms the
'fraternal transcendence' of the signatory community
affiliated with firstly, the visitor's book and secondly, the
HOtte. Celan's personal affiliation is maintained through
constancy of distress and anxiety and the ambiguity of
forgiveness and what insists through the unforgivable. 156

'Todtnauberg' remains thus to be read, to be received - as gift

or forgiveness themselves, a gift and a forgiveness which are
the poem before being, possibly, its themes or the theme of
the poet's disappointed expectation. 157

In the anticipation of forgiveness, whereby it may or may

not have firstly been appropriately sought and then taken
place on that Black Forest mountainside in 1967, the
application of a remedial suture had first to have been
recognised and then made possible, in the recognition of
the roles of who administered and who required treatment,
by the concurrence of the patient (on the understanding
that it was clear who the 'patient' was! ).
However, we are still confronted by the whereby the
assimilation of the wrong inaugurated through the
commencement of the act of mourning and sought in the
agreement of both parties (he who might seek and he who
might grant forgiveness), is perhaps merely a local

156 As already noted this strange community, this conglomeration of

alteric visitations at the HOtte, exceeds ethical and moral restitution
through subsistence and insistence.
157 Derrida, 'To Forgive', p. 38.

172
(mis)understanding. Derrida argues that even when
forgiveness of the inexplicable has seemingly taken place,
in the future it will not have taken place and therefore will
remain merely illusory, inauthentic and illegitimate.
The link between forgiveness and the therapy of
forgetting becomes the crucial interpretation of the event
of mourning as the healing of a wound. However, the
history of forgiveness arguably stopped, and continues to
remain stalled when confronted by the limit beyond all
limits of what Derrida terms 'radical evil', and by which we
can infer that he is speaking of the wholesale mechanised
genocide of the Final Solution. The gift of the poem as the
element of forgiveness should anticipate the dilemma of
healing as a mechanism for not only the excavation of the
sepulchural into which morbid matter might be placed, but
the covering over of such a site so that the temporal event
of forgetting could commence.

173
 The questions as to whether it was appropriate for
Celan to confer forgiveness on Heidegger, and also
whether the philosopher first saw the need to seek such
forgiveness, and whether he might also see the meeting at
the Htjtte as the opportunity whereby such an event might
take place, are still open to a scrutiny and debate. ' 5,3

Must forgiveness pass through words or must it pass (beyond)

words? Must it pass through word-verbs or must it pass
(beyond) them, these word-verbs? Can one only forgive or ask
forgiveness when speaking or sharing the language of the
other, that is to say by already identifying sufficiently with the
other for this, and, by identifying withthe other, making
forgiveness both possible and impossible? 159

Everything will flower at the edge of a deconsecrated tomb

160

Where have the Holzwege of 'Todtnauberg' led us - these

paths trodden by Celan and Heidegger on that day in July
1967? The encryption of the poem has only further
determined an indeterminate locale of poison and cure and
reinforced the possibility and impossibility of forgiveness.
Here Arnica, Eyebright and Orchid, bloom on the perimeter

158 1 note here that according to Hans Sluga, Heidegger's

contemporary, Alfred Bauemler, did, in a letter to Manfred Schr6ter
and dated 24 March 1950, seek (unlike Heidegger) to take some
responsibility for his affiliation with the Nazis. He spoke privately of
his 'blindness', 'aberration' and 'political guilt' and that he had
belonged to 'a system of aggression and force' and that genocide
was 'repulsive and most contradicts the order of things'. He
declared his former allegiance as 'an error and a madness' and, in
speaking of what he had written with regard to Christianity and the
Jews, as 'an incredible darkening' and 'an aberration of the mind',
and finally stated that he did not wish to escape the consequences
of his actions, 'even if it meant to be condemned to silence to the
end of my life. ' From Sluga, Heidegger's Crisis, p. 242 (added
emphasis).
159 Added emphasis. Derrida, 'To Forgive', p. 47.
160 Derrida, The Truth in Painting, pp. 81-82

174
(meridian) of the Holzwege. These paths have become the
interruptive labyrinthine passageways of the tomb; and the
rift, the secular place of the dead, the site of mourning and
the visceral operation of the Unheimlich.

175
 Chapter 3

The Unheimlich' Manoeuvre

The house is a memory device, but one from which
memory has been alienated. it has to be opened up so
that it can remember in order to set those memories
free again. 3

The bedrock hangs over an abyss of sheer possibilities

of space - and space as pure possibility, indeed of the
very possibility of pure space. No wonder, dangling thus,
Dasein feels intensely anxious and not-at-home and
flees into the comforting and tranquilizing embrace of
everyday dealings and gossipy talk as well as reflective
assurances of sheer theory. Yet what is glimpsed in the

Unheimlich - from the German, literally translates as 'not at home'. 11

also has a connotation of eerie or creepy and can be translated into
English as uncanny. Sigmund Freud in his essay, 'The Uncanny'
(published in number 14 of his collected works, and entitled Art and
Literature), refers to the unheimlich as that which is strangely
familiar and that that familiarity is intrinsic to its status as uncanny.
He argues, 'the unheimlich is what was once heimisch, familiar; the
prefix un [un-] is the token of repression' (p. 368). Freud also states
that the word heimlich belongs to two sets of ideas, which, although
not entirely contradictory, remain distinct from each other. On the
one hand it means familiar and agreeable, while on the other, what is
concealed and out of site. Anthony Vidler in his text The
Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern UnhomelY, proposes the
English word uncanny as the most helpful definition, as it means,
literally, beyond ken or beyond knowledge (ken from the Anglo Saxon
can or cann, the present indicative of cunnan: to know or be able).
Canny means cautious, prudent, knowing or watchful but the meaning
extends to possessed of supernatural powers or skilled in magic.
Uncanny then means mysterious, unfamiliar, frightening and
preternaturally strange or eerie and is affiliated to canny in the same
that unheimlich is to heimlich. He describes the uncanny as 'an
uncomfortable sense of haunting rather than a present apparition'
(ibid., p. 22).
2 Manoeuvre - from the Latin: manus, hand and operari, to work -
manuoperare. The operation of the hand implies a corporeal function
inherent in the unheimlich manoeuvre which this chapter will seek to
exploit. I am also aware of Heidegger's determination towards such
an operation in his early interpretation of 'worldliness' via zuhanden
and vorhanden ('present-at-hand' and 'ready-to-hand') as particularly
discussed in Sein und Zeit and 'The Origin of the Work of Art'.
3 Added emphasis. Brouwer, 'Laying Bare', and published in the
Serpentine Gallery catalogue on Gordon Matta-Clark from 1993,
p. 364.

176
 moment of anxiety, Dasein's abyssal unheimlichkeit
remains 'the most primordial phenomenon'. 4

By exploring the topological terrain of the unheimlich I hope

to uncover some provisional insights into the structural and
non-structural aspects of the corporeal (the body) and the
architectural, via an exploration of the metaphysical edifice
as not only a model of architectonics, but also as a basis
for how we comprehend aspects of corporeality. This will
also prove insightful for the ongoing thematic of haunting
and the spectral as linked to the body as the site of
mourning, and also with particular reference to the abysmal
aesthetic experience inherent in the artwork as a ructure.
The chapter will consider the work of the artist Gordon
Matta-Clark and will identify an encryptive eventuation of
mourning as a key aspect of not only the larger body of the
artist's work but with particular reference to two works:
Time WellICherry Tree (1971) and Descending Steps for
Batan (1977). This will also indicate encyst-ence as the
overarching introjective theme of this chapter. The
motivation of this argument indicates an atopic locale,
which identifies the slippage between the architecture of
the body and the body of architecture as an encryptive rift
in the words of Gordon Matta-Clark himself, a kind of
anarchitecture. 5

4 Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History, p. 255.

5A term coined by Gordon Matta-Clark and a group of fellow artists in
New York in 1973 for what we might describe as their 'guerrilla
activities'. Matta-Clark described it thus: 'The group's architectural
aim was more elusive than doing pieces that would demonstrate an
alternative attitude to building We were thinking more about
...
metaphoric voids, gaps, left over spaces, places that were not
developed These places are also perceptually significant because
...
they make reference to movement space. It was about something
other than established architectural vocabulary, without getting fixed
into anything too formal. ' Gordon Matta-Clark interview with Liza
Bear (Avalanche, December 1974, p. 34, added emphasis).

177
 The Heimlich manoeuvre as a mechanical procedure
for the permanent ejection of an alien object from the body

- an act of sustaining the internal integrity of the corporeal

through the act of expulsion - in some ways operates as an
illustration via corporeality of what is recognised as the key
settled binary opposition in the history of metaphysics. It
sustains the exclusivity and predication of interiority over
exteriority - the expelling of the alien at its most pragmatic,
remains an event of security and maintenance of the status
quo.
The unheimlich manoeuvre in some way attempts to
redress this balance, by identifying the complication of an
imbalance (the placeless place of disorientation) and
drawing attention to the exteriority of operations of
rejection and expulsion as the false arbiters of a continuity
in the face of the possibility of a more appropriate operation
of introjection and incorporation. These are recognised as
intrinsic to the encryptive arbitration of the manoeuvre as
what I will now term the 'event of encyst-ence'. It must be
made clear at this point that any act of retention alluded to
through the terminologies of the unheimlich does not
necessarily redress the relation between homely and
unhomely through any capacity for either a determination
towards subjugation or an objectification inherent its
operation. What remains significant to any understanding of
the activity of the unheimlich manoeuvre is that through the
event of introjection an encryptive change occurs and the
retention of the alien demands the recognition of this
transformation as fundamental to the acknowledgement of

178
an operation of cryptol OgY6 at work. As will be explored,

what is essentially encrypted does not necessarily conform

to the 'balance' of historical subject/object relation, and
therefore there is also a change in the appropriateness and
particularity of a certain language. Encryption critiques the
binary of inside and outside by complicating the terrain of
that opposition via introjection. This undermines the
juxtaposition of terminologies in a hierarchical confrontation
of privilege and subjugation, and posits a variant lingual
topology by which to articulate its diversity and variation.
I am reminded here that both Heidegger (in 'On The

Question of Being') and Bachofen (in 'Mother Right')

questioned the imperative and need for kind of continuity,
or what I will call a 'lingual stasis', by proposing a demand
that in order to reconsider current thought, it must in some
way be transgressive and rearticulated if there is to be any
determination to exceed it. Heidegger, while heralding the
recognition of a zone (a nihilistic topographical feature of
thought, as it were), which Ernst JOnger's acknowledged in
The Worker, critiqued the capacity to 'cross the line' of
nihilism's consummation by suggesting that such a
transgression must require a new language.

6 Cryptology - the scientific study of cryptography (secret writing, the

enciphering and deciphering of messages in secret code). I would
like to note here that the scientific credential of -ology as a means
of legitimating a term as worthy of study should not be lost here. See
Chapter 1 of this text.

179
 The language of metaphysics as the lingual arbiter of
that consummation, and the navigation (the topographic)
which must precede it, would no longer be appropriate to
this new zone and any use of it would merely contaminate
it. 7 Likewise Bachofen, in Mother Right, remarked that in
order to embrace the matriarchal idea, any scholar would
have to renounce the ideas of his own time and transfer
him/herself 'to the midpoint of a completely different world
of thought'. 8
However, before we can consider the atavistic9
possibility of speaking a different language, it is important
to begin to negotiate the possibilities of cryptology1o
through a recognisable lingual form. Derrida (commenting
on Abraham and Torok's text) suggests that the Wolf Man's

7 Heidegger's 'On the Question of Being' (published in the collection,

Pathmarks) took the form of a letter to the writer Ernst JCinger. He
observed that any attempt to cross the line, would be confronted by a
peculiar difficulty: 'The reason for this difficulty lies in the fact that
in your "crossing" over the line, i. e., in the space on this and on the
other side of the line, you speak the same language. The position of
nihilism is, it seems, already relinquished in a certain way by
crossing over the line, but its language has remained' ('On the
Question of Being', p. 298).
8 Bachofen, 'Mother Right', p. 81. Note here quote cited at the
beginning of Chapter 1 of this text and taken from Derrida's Spectres
of Marx, which identifies the traditional scholar as one who cannot
accept the virtual space of spectrality and immerses him/herself in
all that is reasonable and logical. He also notes in The Truth in
Painting that 'the pure philosopher, the metaphysician, will have to
operate like a good architect, like a good tekhnitds of edification'
(p. 40). In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze proposes: 'The philosopher is
no longer the being of the caves, nor Plato's soul or bird, but rather
an animal which is on a level with the surface -a tick or a louse'
(P. 133). This aspect of the parasitic mooted by Deleuze should not
be lost here.
9 Atavism identifies a resemblance to one's ancestor's rather than
one's immediate parental line - arguably a reversion to a more
primitive type. Both Heidegger (on Being) and Bachofen (on
matriarchy) considered the primordial experience the essential one,
and one to which we must in some way, always return.
10 In his introduction to Abraham and Torok's The Wolf Man's Magic
Word, Derrida asks the question: 'What is a crypt? No crypt presents
itself. The grounds [lieux] are so disposed as to disguise and to hide:
something, always a body in some way. But also to disguise the act
of hiding and to hide the disguise: the crypt hides as it holds'
(P. xiv).

180
verbariumll is to be thought out as starting from the crypt,
as a 'crypt effect'. He states:

The verbarium no longer to any law and order -

conforms
certainly not to philosophical order, which thus finds itself
moved, to the point of no return, by a psychoanalytical lever -
but neither does it abide by the common law of
psychoanalysis. This crypt no longer rallies the easy
metaphors of the Unconscious (hidden, secret, underground,
latent, other, etc. ), of the prime object, in sum, of any
psychoanalysis. Instead using the first object as a background,
it is a kind of 'false unconscious', an 'artificial' unconscious
lodged like a prosthesis, a graft in the heart of an organ,
within the divided self. A very specific and peculiar place,
highly circumscribed, to which access can nevertheless only
be gained by following the routes of a different topography. 12

The crypt, then, is descriptive of an architectonic locale of

the sepulchral as that which identifies an alteric variation
as the de-centred possibility on which any edifice is now

contingent. The so-called architect of reason (the

metaphysical thinker), in search of the ultimate grund on

which to raise a framework of metaphysical principles, is no

longer just confronted with the possibility of the abysmal as

its ultimate critique, but also that any descent in search of
a bottom (bythos) to this or any abyss, must recognise that
disorientation (the pre-sensibility of 'a without-knowing' in

advance) is the topos by which and for which the pretext of

11 Verbarium -a game in word making (related to logomachy -a

dispute about words or a dispute carried on in words only, a battle of
words).
12 Added emphasis. Derrida, introduction to Abraham and Torok's, The
Wolf Man's Magic Word, p. xiii. Further comment will be made on the
divided self with particular reference to Gordon Matta-Clark and
Freud's work on the double. The contention of this chapter will be to
identify this 'different' topography as in fact a topology of the crypt.

181
(dis)[ocation takes place. 13 However, such a critique must
not resort to the pure exclusivity of a language, which
refuses to acknowledge the relevance of the fabrication of a
certain domesticity from which and in which to commence.
Mark Wigley argues:

The idea of discourse can never be separated from a certain

talk about houses, that is really to say a certain silence, not
the absence of talk but a certain fold the fabric
within of the
discourse hides something unspeakable. 14
which

The metaphor of the heimlich manoeuvre should be

understood provisionally as the sustaining of a secure

interiority of unmediated presence, which through the

mastery of an act of subordination excludes all that is

other, to an absented ambiguity of outside.

It represents surety and exclusion at the expense of
introjection, whereby the denial of the incorporative event

excludes the possibility of mourning and the restitution of

the memorial as contingent to the status of corporeality.
With Derrida's previously quoted comments on the

crypt in mind, I would like to suggest here that a more

complex reading of the clarity of what might be provisionally

understood as the inclusive oppositional relationship of

heimlichlunheimlich is necessary.

13 Derrida postulates in The Truth in Painting that such a descent is

fraught because the prehension to such a navigation already
indicates a variant that is the errant possibility (the 'without
knowing') that the bottom does not exist. See p. 40 of above-cited
text.
14 Added emphasis. Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction:
Derrida's Haunt, p. 124. The notion of silence has already been
addressed in Chapter 2 of this text, and the rubric of the fold will be
considered further in this chapter and Chapter 4.

182
Any cursory reading might incline towards an understanding
of Heimlich ('homely') as merely the inversion of 'unhomely'

- but this strategy remains complicated by its actual

translation.
The German word more commonly used in this regard
is generally gemfitlich, which translates variously as snugly,
comfortable, or cosy as well as homelike or homely15 and,
as such, the term heimlich already appears contentious.
Over the issue of a common usage or a lingual currency, it
is significant that the emphasis is on the complexity and
slippage at work in this link as it will continue to unfold and
re-fold as the strategy of this text. Freud, in his text The
Uncanny, already alluded to what he referred to as 'the
different shades of meaning' for the word heimlich, which he
illustrated at great length with a list of derivations at the
beginning of the essay. 16 A cryptology is already at work.
The key statement identified that the obvious
compulsion to consider heimlich and unheimlich as merely
oppositional (the latter being merely, at best, an inversion
of the former; at worst, inferior to), was complicated by the

ambiguity of two sets of ideas at work in the non-

contradictory, but significantly different 17 aspects of the

word heimlich.

15 GemOt (from which gemOtlich is derived) translates as nature,

disposition, feelings and soul.
16 See Freud's essay 'The Uncanny' (published in The Penguin Freud
Library (Volume 14: Art and Literature), pp. 342-5.
17 The significance of an understanding of difference outside a context
of mere inversion has already been discussed at length in Chapter 1
of this text.

183
Freud isolated two meanings from a plethora of
possibilities, which drew heimlich and unheimlich in closer

proximity by finding in the former not only what is familiar

and agreeable, but also what is concealed and kept out of

sight. "3 Freud later noted:

Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the

direction of ambivalence until it finally coincides with its

opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way a

'9
I subspecies' of heimlich.

In this way, the surety of the home gives shape to what is

distinctly not-at-home (it is also worthy of note here that the

operation that we recognise as the Heimlich manoeuvre is

so named not for any semantic reasons that Freud might

have uncovered in his search for the linguistic root of the
unheimlich, but by the accident of its inventor's surname -
a kind of 'Derridian' play of lingual ambiguity). 20

18 It is noted by Freud in a footnote that the Oxford English Dictionary

attaches a similar ambiguity to the word canny (see footnote 1, this
chapter) as not only meaning 'cosy' but also 'endowed with occult or
magical powers'. In the main body of the text he points out Shelling's
comment (in the earlier list of possible definitions) on the
unheimlich, which he argues sheds new light on its meaning by
suggesting that everything is unheimlich which ought to have
remained secret and hidden but has come to light (p. 345).
19 Added emphasis. Freud, 'The Uncanny', p. 347.
20 See remarks made in Chapter 1 of this text on Derrida's phonetic
play between ontology and hauntology. I would also like to note here
that Paul Virilio, in his text Bunker Archaeology, mentions, with
reference to the construction of the so-called Atlantic Wall during the
Nazi occupation of mainland Europe, the Todt Organisation. This was
the strategic organisation of 'diverse social and ethnic groups,
starting with German technicians - be they civil, military or deported
and including conscripts and volunteers' (p. 28). The reason for
-
mentioning this is two-fold: firstly, Paul Celan was conscripted into
the Todt Organisation in Nazi-occupied Romania and, secondly, the
name Todt (the German for death as in 'Todtnauberg' - 'mountain of
death' (note Joris's text cited in Chapter 2 of this text)) was so-
named after Fritz Toct, the architect of Nazi mobilisation for
strategic defence of the Reich and whose untimely death in a plane
crash resulted in the promotion of Albert Speer, who succeeded him
in 'all his offices' (see Speer's memoirs, Inside the Third Reich). I
note the play at work here in comparison to what is noted about the
surname Heimlich with regard to this chapter.

184
Having said this,this text in some ways continues Freud's
project in The Uncanny, by uncovering yet another shade of
meaning through this accident of titling by which the terrain
of the unheimlich might be explored. 21
The contingency by which this recognised directional
supposition of set and subset interprets a hierarchy that
locates meaning and gives value to it by predication and the
subordination of other contingent meanings, fails to
recognise that, as Freud indicated, there is an ambiguity
already inherent in the term heimlich. This ambiguity
refuses to conform to a clear interpretation of the
terminology along metaphysical lines of binary and dialectic
- what we might articulate as that which haunts the
heimlich.
However, it will be possible to exploit the essentially
alteric proposition of the unheimlich by recognising its
relation to a form of unmediated presence in the heimlich,
but clearly not as merely the negation or 'not' of such
presence.

21 1 also note here that in so entitling the procedure, an act of

commemoration has taken place and, as such, this operation of the
hand is potentialised as a memorial to its inventor and therefore a
similar possibility for the unheimlich manoeuvre will be explored in
greater detail later in this chapter.

185
 In seeking to find the unheimlich in the heimlich,
Freud seemed to proffer yet further evidence to identify the
former as perhaps just the diminished
- the shadow spectre
of all that predicates, and the not-at-home - on the
understanding that to be at-home must always be the
location of a departure. 22 But what if such directional
determination merely hides (as Freud and Derrida have
suggested) deeper anxieties which are no longer merely the
not of exclusion settled by the surety of at-home, but the
resistance to the recognition of the processes of
introjection or incorporation as the premise by which the
heimlich might be addressed?
Anthony Vidler suggests that the unheimlich was, for
the romantic era of Schelling and H61derlin, simultaneously
a psychological condition and an aesthetic one, in that it
had the capacity to both establish and destabilise through
the authenticity of what he refers to as a 'first burial' that
was given potency through a return which was potentially
the re-visitation of a power essentially out of place and long
since considered dead.
He argues:

To such a force the romantic psyche and the romantic

aesthetic were profoundly open; at any moment what seemed
on the surface homely and comforting, secure and clear of
superstition, might be reappropriated by something that should

22 Bachofen extrapolated at length in 'Mother Right' on the premise that

matriarchy was the principle of the hearth and centred in material
existence. The mother principle encouraged warlike bravery while
entrusting 'the family, the cart, the hearth, the slaves to the
...
women' (p. 152). Linked to the preservation of the home was the cult
of the chthonic; the matriarchal encouraged heroism and chivalry and
therefore advocated departure from the hearth and heroic death.

186
 have remained secret but nevertheless, through some chink in
23
the shutters of progress, had returned .

He tracks a historical shift in architectonic systernisation

which situates the corporeal relation between architecture
and the body at the heart of this evolution and which is,

most importantly for our purposes, integral to its eventual

dismemberment. The projection of the idealised body onto
the building (essentially a classical theory) identified

architectural authority from this relation, while at the same

time determining confirmation for the body through the

criteria of socialisation and individuation in the world.

This anthropomorphic proposition that an edifice had
fundamental concomitant structural similarities to a body
began to change in the latter part of the eighteenth century,
as the potential for that relation to evolve, to take account
of an emerging determination of the psychological to have
an impact on the shape of the edifice developed. The shift
from the arguably fixed attributes of classical proportion
and artifice to the more conditional empathetic operation of
the experiential, set the scene for the emergence of a
subliminal aesthetics, which engaged with an emotional
attribution of beauty, foregrounding psychotic notions of
fear, terror, unease and disquiet - the sublime.
In The Fold Leibniz and the Baroque (Chapter 8, 'The
Two Floors'), Deleuze argues that the baroque house is
made up of what he refers to as spiritual elevation (the
upper area) and physical gravity (the floor below). The
convergence of these operates on what Deleuze refers to as
the movement along the divergent paths motivated by the
regimes of the immanence of expression via the incorporeal

23 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, p. 27.

187
and the transitive nature of impression via the corporeal.
The former indicates actuality as the fold of verticality (the
monadic), which is conditioned by absolute interiority,
infinite inflection and is without coordinates and differs from
the virtuality of materiality (material bodies) as the
horizontal dimension of coordinated stability and vectored
gravity. 24 The line of difference is not between any concept
of organic or inorganic, but rather dissects both by
distinguishing individuation from any notion of a collective
or mass phenomena. Actuality (identified in the monad) is
the primal force of an absolute surface that is essentially
co-present with all modifications ('each monad expresses
the sum of the world and a body receives the impression of
"all" the others up to infinity'), 25 whereas virtuality
(identified as the bends of matter) conceal something from
the relative surface on which there are having an affect.
In this sense, the world is understood as this
combination of virtuality/actualisation and
possibility/realisation 26 and, as such, is defined by the
event. However, this reserve of events grasped as world
(the eventum tantum) is conceived as both a pure virtuality
and possibility, and also a pure predicate, and is essentially
a battle with a potential that exceeds the souls that direct it
and the bodies the execute it.

24 In Death and the Labyrinth, Foucault describes the lingual

construction of Roussel's Impressions d'Afrique thus: 'This technique
of a secret verticality could lead to no possible discourse if it weren't
balanced by another. Capable of opening a horizontal diffusion'
(p. 35, added emphasis).
25 Leibniz, 'Monadology', and found in Basic Writings, pp. 61-2.
26 Note here that Deleuze proposes that realisation operates through
resemblance - this suggests the significance of the simulacra (see
Chapter 2 and Chapter 4 of this text).

188
 We speak of the event only as already engaged in the soul that

expresses it and in the body that carries it out, but we would

be completely at a loss about how to speak of it without its

withdrawn t. 27
par

The accord between monad (the conception of the entire

world, independent of others and without influx) and body
(the expression of the material universe, every body

receiving the influx of others and expressing that totality) is

determined as a pre-established harmony, whereby a body
always expresses from its side and with its surroundings

what a soul/monad expresses in its own region -a

'between'. 28 Deleuze makes clear that the monad as simple
substance (its first nature) is essentially irreducible, but the
intrinsic possessions of any individual bear the marks (its

second nature) of those foreign to it so that 'there is

27 Added emphasis. Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque,

p. 106. It is worth noting here Heidegger's emphasis on concealment
as intrinsic to the materiality of the artwork in The Origin of the Work
of Art. For Heidegger, the double operation of revealing and
concealing was fundamental to the event of the artwork (see
footnotes 81 and 82).
28 Deleuze poses the question - How can we speak of the body of a
monad? The monad is always an 'each' and 'every', whereas the body
is always a 'one'; however, this 'one' is such through the event of a
'belonging' to each 'every' without ever relinquishing its 'oneness'.
This belonging is referred to as appurtenance. In The Fold: Leibniz
and the Baroque, Deleuze states that 'pre-established harmony of the
soul and the body rules their real distinction, while the union
determines their inseparability' (p. 108). Deleuze makes four points
regarding belonging, by citing the responses of both Leibniz and
Husserl:
" Though as self-cogito - by which he means the diversity of
thought, changing perceptions, all individual predicates - the
entire world as perceived.
" The zone of the world as conveyed by the individual - its own
'special possession'.
" Primary matter - what an individual 'owns' as the requirement of
'having a body'.
" The owned body that fulfils that requirement - an organic body
with which an individual is immediately present.
Husserl understands the other as being the 'other-self' - an
aperceptive transposition that begins with the individual's own body,
whereas Leibniz determines a subdivision or clear zone, in which
everything exceeds but within which everything is included as 'dark
and obscure'.

189
nothing in me that might not be pulled into clarity
obscure
from another monad' 29 For Husserl, the body is the
.
commencement of individuation and differs from Leibniz in
that the latter argued for a negative image of other monads,
which are used to form their own clear zone:

The soul and the body can always be truly distinguished, but
inseparability traces a coming and going between one level

and the other. 30

The domination of the cipher of appurtenance S31 suggests

for Deleuze that possession or the 'domain of having' is a
moving transient reshuffling of relations and now replaces
being, so that 'to have or to possess is to fold'. 32
Domination remains a vague term if we persist in the
understanding that no monad contains any other, but
Leibniz articulated what he referred to as a 'substantial
vinculum' as the linkage of a complex relation in which a
dominant monad becomes the subject of an adhesion. This
adhesion resists the distinction between predicate and
attribute (but maintains the relation between variables and
constant while determining that this relation is both exterior
to such variables and outside the constant), but articulates
a topology of torsion and infinite folding which understands
the vinculum as the unlocalisable primary link, bordering
the absolute interior but as exterior to its own interiority -a
reflecting wall.

29 Ibid., p. 107.
30 Ibid., p. 108.
31 Appurtenance, meaning belonging, appendage or accessory.
32 Deleuze, The Fold, p. 110.

190
 A brief diversion (Holzweg) to consider the definition
of a corporeal procedure in order to enlighten an
incorporeal one may now be appropriate.

THE BODY OF ARCHITECTURE AND ARCHITECTURE

OF THE BODY

To perform the Helmlich manoeuvre 33

If the victim is not getting air, and his/her throat is blocked,

don't wait for medical help. Take first-aid steps for choking
immediately. Stand behind your victim and wrap your arms
around his waist.

Place your fist with the thumb side against the victim's
abdomen slightly above the navel and below the rib cage.
Grasp your fist with your other hand and pull it into the
victim's abdomen with a quick upward thrust.

Repeat the movement several times if necessary.

A further section entitled 'Sweep it out', reads:

33 Abbreviated from the Indiamart Healthcare WebPages

health. india mart. comlemerge ncies1ch oking. html. The procedure was
developed by an American thoracic surgeon, Henry Heimlich, and
first introduced in 1974. It is now often referred to as 'the abdominal
thrust'.

191
 Once the object has been dislodged, you can try to remove it
manually, but first see it betore you put a tinger in the mouth,
or you may force it even further down the throat.

Move your index finger along the inside of the cheek to the
base of the tongue. Using your finger as a hook, dislodge the
object and sweep it into the mouth so that it can be removed. 34

In contrast, to the remedial urgency of the event of

expelation identified above in the Heimlich manoeuvre, the
unheimlich manoeuvre calls into question, via the
metapsychological, the topographical determination of the
fantasy of incorporation against the process of introjection.

A4/)
'I

Prior to this, the terminologies of incorporation and

introjection have been place in a proximal alliance against

34 In the essay 'Economimesis' (Diacritics, vol XI, no. 2 [1981], pp. 3-

25), Derrida articulates the introjectve object as 'that which cannot
be eaten either sensibly or ideally and which ... by never letting itself
be swallowed must therefore cause itself to be vomited' (p. 21).

192
those of absorption and ingestion to indicate that an event
of mourning requires exclusion not through denial, but
rather though the discretion of secrecy. 35
The shift in concern for any analogy of the body in
architecture in many ways highlights a radical distinction
from the humanistic model, in that a true corporeal
metaphor, described as that which identifies a body in
pieces and fragmentation as that which breaks from
humanist concerns of domestication and the surety of
accommodation.
Anthony Vidler points out that Le Corbusier's vision of
modernism was no longer confined to the recognisably
human, but embraced a plethora of biological existents that
were as diverse as the embryonic and monstrous. 36 The
model of unity was now usurped by the fragmentary,
morselation and breakage and it is significant to see this
change as not mere reversal but the demonstration of an
anthropomorphic strategy exhibiting its functional and
classical origins within a different sensibility. However, as
Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok point out in their essay
'Introjection-Incorporation': 'Incorporation corresponds to
fantasy, and introjection to a process. 37

35 In their essay 'Introjection-Incorporation', Nicolas Abraham and

Maria Torok argue that absorption is the rejection of mourning and its
consequences, as it is the refusal to take into oneself the part of
oneself that is in a sense 'contained' in what is lost. This would be
the admission of the true meaning of that loss - the admission of a
change in oneself.
36 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, p. 70.1 would like to draw
attention here to a parallel to the labyrinthine, firstly with regard to
the occupation of such a structure by something embryonic and
monstrous - in the case of antiquity/mythology, the model of the
Minoan labyrinth occupied by an entity both embryonic and monstrous
- the Minotaur (see Chapter 4 of this text). On a more playful note, I
reference the title of the journal, which published Matta's essay
(Minotaure) with regard to its obvious affiliation with the labyrinthine.
37 Abraham and Torok, 'Introjection-Incorporation', p. 3.

193
 Already we find a complication is at work whereby the
fantasy of incorporation operates as a representation, belief
or body-state, which works for the maintenance of what
Abraham and Torok refer to as a topographical status quo.
As an essentially conservative and preservative function it
represents continuity of the subject through narcissism by
attempting the transformation, not of the subject itself, but
of its surrounding world.
Abraham and Torok propose that fantasy- understood
through incorporation is called upon to preserve the subject
in what they refer to as an 'intrapsychic situation' and this
is in contrast to metapsychological reality which threatens a
topography of change through the act of incorporation. 38
They argue that absorption is the rejection of mourning and
its consequences because it refuses to take within the part
of oneself contained in what is lost (this is the true meaning
of loss). The admission of a change in oneself (a
difference) is recognised as a refusal of introjection 39 The
.
arguably contentious proposition that the architectural
edifice might offer an appropriate metaphor for the
continuing stasis of the historicity of metaphysical thought,
demands that any such understanding is contingent on the
pertinence of a metaphorical permanence inherent in the
inviolate structural integrity of a certain kind of

38 Incorporation has two interrelated procedures:

i) Demetaphorisation - taking literally what is meant figuratively.
ii Objectivation - what is experienced is not an injury to the
subject, but the loss of an object.
39 The term introjection is coined from Ferenzi and refers to an
enlargement of the ego whose first beginnings take place in the
experience of 'empty mouth'. The void is first experienced through
unfulfilment - the transition from the 'breast-filled' mouth to the
'word-filled' mouth. There is also a key maternal link here exploited
by Abraham and Torok with the connection made between the 'filling
of the void' with the nourishment of the maternal breast and later
replacing that with the spoken word.

194
architectonics which emphasises what is essentially
continuous, assured and stable. What is most significant in
understanding this stability as a metaphor is the recognition
of it as a kind of linearity or directional verticality from
foundation through structure/edifice to decoration. In so
doing, it maintains the clarity of this architectural model as
concomitant with the development and continuity of the
scrutiny any metaphysical enquiry.
However, the architectural model also offers the
opportunity to question a tradition of the perceived security
of housing or dwelling, and by which things are safely put
into place, as it were, by also locating the fissured porosity
of an encrypted presence revealed through the event of
what we might call the visceral orientation of the edifice. 40
In her text on Gordon Matta-Clark, 'Laying Bare',
Marianne Brouwer proposes that:

The dark otherness, is built into architecture so that it shall

not be victimized by it. Modernism creates its own therapeutic

discourse on the level of a conscious language that means to

incorporate the 41
subconscious .

This relation between a modernist discourse in architecture

and the incorporation of a lingual subconscious is found in

40 In his text on Walter Benjamin, The Colour of Experience, Howard

Caygill argues that the categories of what he refers to as the 'modern
experience' are porosity, threshold and shock. These are derived
from what he calls the 'impure dispersal of anonymous transitivity'.
Transitivity expresses a kind of continuity through relation and
transition, which in Caygill's view articulates Benjamin's notion of
mobility by replacing the traditional substance and subjective
experience of the urban. In his text Constructions, John Rajchman
states: 'For in contrast to Heidegger, Deleuze is a philosopher not of
the forest and its paths but of the city and its modes of arranging or
disposing persons and things - its agencements (assemblages). '
Rajchman argues that for Deleuze, architecture is first of all the arts
-a montage, a composition. This is in contrast to Kant's view of
architectural protocols which were, for him, debased by commerce.
41 Brouwer, 'Laying Bare', from exhibition catalogue, Serpentine
Gallery, London, June-August 1993, p. 364.

195
the specificity of Matta-Clark's personal history through the
professional relationship of his father to the modernist
architect Le Corbusier manifest in the former's critique of
the latter in the Surrealist journal Minotaure in 1938.
Roberto Matta (Matta-Clark's father), a Chilean painter
who had relocated to pre-war Paris and was affiliated to the
Surrealist movement, had provisionally been an associate of
the architect Le Corbusier, working with him on a number of
unrealised projects.
Eventually, as illustrated in his article 'Mathematique
sensible: Architecture du Temps', he rejected the latter's
mathematique raisonable and its transcendent forces of a
prevailing anthropomorphic geometry as merely the
rationalisation and harmonisation of man's circumstance
reducing him/her to a utopian subject of idealised form -
modular man as reasoned proportional verticality;
regularised and essentially linear. 42

42 In 'Laying Bare', Brouwer notes: 'Because of the themes of the

bourgeois home, of verticality and the void, this design at first reads
like a work by Matta-Clark himself, until one realises that in fact the
proposal in Minotaure implies the construction of a womb, or rather
the production of the womb. The logic of the interior is dialectically
linked to the concept of the exterior in Modernism. Matta's
collaboration with Le Corbusier on a museum in the form of a
labyrinth would corroborate this view. The "armature of rational
architecture" contains the maternal image of the Womb as the Glass
House contains the Hearth - indeed as the labyrinth contains Art; a
usurped symbol' (p. 364, added emphasis).

196
 Matta's illustration that accompanied his critique
proposed a non-regularised space occupied by pneumatic
furniture - 'opening upon vistas of deeply ambiguous
space'. 43 What was visualised by Matta was essentially a
kind of 'intra-uterine safe-haven' -a trope of the Freudian
uncanny, as a critique of Le Corbusier's determination
towards a prevailing transcendental geometry based on
anthropomorphic idealism.
It was described by Jeff Wall in his text, 'Dan
Graham's Kammerspiel', as an 'intrauterine design for an
apartment dedicated to the senses' and as a deliberate
attack on the bourgeois home, as 'a space that will bring
into consciousness human verticality'. 44 A further relation to

43 Lee, Object to be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark, p. 7.

Matta is quoted by Lee as describing the space thus: 'We need walls
like damp sheets which lose their shape and wed our psychological
fears... To find for each person those umbilical cords that put us in
communication with other suns, objects of total freedom that would
be like psychoanalytic mirrors. ' If the womb is understood as the
birth-site of domestic order, it is also at once the place of expelation
into being and also the retreat to imagined death. It is also worth
noting here Bachofen's detailed anthropological study of 'mother-
right', specifically, his contention that matriarchy and its fundamental
tellurian/corporeal character were essentially bound up with the
chthonic (see Chapter 2 of this text) and that it marked a cultural
stage which preceded the restrictions of the spiritual principle of the
later patriarchal/Hellenic. For Bachofen the feminine sporium (womb)
was seen as the representation of the Demetrian Mystery where
Demeter represented the fertile and cultivated soil and was the earth
mother who presided over the harvest and agricultural labour, and
bound the maternal to the earth and the hearth (hestial). In The
Uncanny, Freud argues: 'To some people the idea of being buried
alive by mistake is the most uncanny thing of all - and yet
psychoanalysis has taught us that this terrifying phantasy is only a
transformation of another phantasy which had originally nothing
terrifying about it at all, but was qualified by a certain lasciviousness
- the phantasy, I mean of intra-uterine existence' (p. 367).
44 Jeff Wall, 'Dan Graham's Kammerspiel' in Dan Graham (exhibition
catalogue), The Arts Gallery of Western Australia, Perth 1985. Also
in this text, Wall articulates a kind of vampirism at work in the double
operation of the reversal of the perspectival image of the human body
with its alteric reflection. This is particularly noted with regard to
Graham's Alteration to a Suburban House where the 'vampire' as the
'double' of power and possession comes in the night to feed on its
prey when the 'openness' and 'transparency/reflection' of the glass
house is no longer the 'master of that reflection' in the daylight
hours, but vulnerable through its transparent determinacy, to the
nocturnal illogic of the forces of nature.

197
Matta-Clark's work is through the event of encryption and
its specific connotation with the act of mourning as a double
operation of an act of refusal through the fantasy of
incorporation. As will be explored further, Matta-Clark's two
works, Time WellICherry Tree of 1971 and Descending
Steps for Batan of 1977, were specifically involved with the
act of inclusion as that which persisted in its exclusion and
to all intents and purposes, introduced what might best be
described as a phantom into the corporeal.
What remains crucial to any further analysis of this
contention is that one must understand incorporation not
merely as an act of absorption where the corporeal
assimilates that which is alien to it, but rather as an act
where the object is retained within the body as something
excluded. A foreign body that remains impossible to

assimilate, must be rejected, and consequently this inability

to expel becomes what I now term the unheimlich
manoeuvre. 45

In his foreword to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok's

The Wolf Man's Magic Word, Derrida described the crypt
thus:

The crypt is thus not a natural place [lieu], but the striking
history of an artifice, an architecture, an artefact: of a place
comprehended within another rigorously separate from it,

45 In his forward, to The Wolf Man's Magic Word by Nicolas Abraham

and Maria Torok, entitled 'Fors: The Anguish Words of Nicolas
Abraham and Maria Torok', p. xxxviii, Derrida argues that the fantasy
is no longer the 'pure' expulsion of what is alien but 'involves eating
the object (through the mouth or otherwise) in order not to introject
it, in order to vomit it, in a way, into the inside, into the pocket of a
cyst. " The definition of a cyst as a sac containing 'morbid matter', or
a cell or cavity enclosing a parasitic organism clearly demarcates
what is introjected as not only 'alien' but also as 'gaining nutrition
from ' and sustained through symbiosis with the corporeal.

198
 isolated from general space by partitions, an enclosure, an
enclave. 46

In identifying any displacements by which the disturbance of

a construction by its so-called inherent undecidable figures
is interrupted, we recognise such resistance to
domestication whereby the hestial is interrupted by an
alterity that is neither pure exteriority or its counterpart of
interiority and which would sustain the continuation of
binary oppositions as the standard dialectic of metaphysical
enquiry. Mark Wigley states:

As both the hiding of a secret and the hiding of that hiding, the
crypt cannot simply take its place in the topography it
preserves. The traditional demarcations between inside and
outside, the closure established by the drawing of a line, the
division of a space by a wall, is disturbed by the internal
fracturing of the walls by the crypt.
The crypt organises the space in which it can never
47
simply be placed, sustaining the very topography it fractures
.

It persists by virtue of its capacity to complicate any

dialectic by exploiting an inherent characteristic, which can
essentially be neither included nor evicted, and, as such,
operates as a violation which undermines any notion of
hestial assurance.

46 lbid,. p. xiv. Where Derrida cites the partition as intrinsic to

encryption, we may wish to consider Matta-Clark's use of such
structural determinations to give shape to his 'interventions'. I am
particularly reminded here of The W-Hole House: Atrium Roof project
where the previously constructed internal partitions dividing the
space were integral to the later 'visceral interventions'. It is also
worth noting here that the translator's note for Derrida's introduction
indicates that fors (translated from the French) is derived from the
Latin foris (meaning outside, outdoors), an archaic preposition
meaning except for, barring, save. Also fors as plural of for, meaning
inner heart and subjective interiority, therefore fors means both
exteriority and interiority; this is a spatial problematic that Derrida
explores in connection with the crypt.
47 Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida's Haunt, p. 144.

199
This figuration, articulated as essentially something that
takes the form of an imposition by an exclusively exterior
force, is undermined by the ambiguity of such
characteristics, which refuse to conform to the clear and
arguably insurmountable oppositions/dialectics of
presencelabsence and insideloutside. The argument is
proposed that perhaps that which insists through a
determination to resist, can neither be relegated to a
superior transcendent capacity, imposing itself and its
ideality upon the domestic, nor as a mere alien appendage
that is either organised or emerges from such
domestication, but as that which is essentially alteric and
therefore must remain entirely other.
John Rajchman in his text Constructions sees Matta-
Clark's anti-monumental incisions as a process of
ungrounding which married to the comparative events of
unbuilding and undoing, contrast any attempt to retrieve the
context of the historical Cit Y48through architectural form and
offer the possibility of another route out of such
contextualism. He argues:

they exposed not an architectural memory in monuments but a

subversive memory hidden in the social and architectural
facades with their false sense of integrity and wholeness,

48 In An Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger states: 'The polis is the

historical place [Geschichsstitte] the there in which, out of which
and for which history happens' (p. 152). Heidegger's reading of polis
should not be recognised as merely one 'city-state' but as the
ahistorical place - the 'there' of historical 'being-there'. Edward S.
Casey argues in his text The Fate of Place that: 'Within a limit
[peras], room is made - and thus place. To lack limit is to lack
place, and conversely; not to be in place is to be unlimited. A limit
is a positive power within which place is made. ' p. 262. This
interprets the limit (peras) as that which invokes of a kind of respect
for the placial and not merely a confinement and it 'allows the most
effective building-up of the world within the place of the polis. '
(added emphasis) Ibid', p. 262.

200
 breaking out through the openings in the body of banal
spaces. 49

The shift orchestrated by Matta-Clark's interventions was in

a sense a two-fold commentary, in that he had provisionally
seized upon and exploited what might be conceived as the
progressive tendencies of the hestial demands of the so-
called bourgeois American dream. 50
The gloss of privacy identified in the development of
the American suburb was revealed by Matta-Clark (in a
project such as Splitting of 1973) as a mere fagade of
stability, which masked a deep-seated insecurity at the
heart of the iconic suburban home.

49 Rajchman, Constructions, p. 82. In his book De -Architecture, James

Wines comments on Matta-Clark that: 'Structures were cut up,
stripped, torn-apart, excavated - clematerialized in some way - to
achieve a feeling of orchestrated apocalypse' (p. 139).
50 It is also worth noting here that Pamela M. Lee draws attention to the
possibility of an arguably contentious reading of Matta-Clark's
'interventions' (specifically Splitting of 1973) as the violation of not
only the domesticity of the suburban home but also the visceration of
hestial/maternal order. As Lee indicates, feminist commentary
identified this act as essentially genderised, and also linked it with a
Freudian interpretation of the domestication of the uterine. She
quotes Maud Lavin from her essay in Arts Magazine (January 1984,
pp. 138-41), 'Gordon Matta-Clark and Individualism': 'Matta-Clark's
wounding of a house can be seen as a male violation of a domestic
realm with female associations. I am not making a case for Matta-
Clark's work as a whole to be read as anti-female, but certainly it is
concerned with male virility' (added emphasis). In The Interpretation
of Dreams Freud states: 'It often happens that neurotic men declare
that they feel there is something uncanny about the female genital
organs. This unheimlich place, however, is the entrance to the former
heim of all human beings to the place where each one of us lived
once upon a time and in the beginning. There is a joke saying that
"love is home-sickness"; and whenever a man dreams of a place or
country and says to himself, while he is still dreaming: 'this place is
familiar to me, I've been here before", we may interpret the place as
being his mother's genitals or her body' (p. 524).

201
 3

As a cipher of the pretension of class mobility which

inaugurated the socio-economic shifts of late capitalism in
housing, the suburb was perhaps not, as Pamela M. Lee

points out, merely the growth of the city as urban expanse,

but rather the perimeter through which its peripheral status
conditioned and preserved the city's status as centre. 51

\4

51 Pamela M. Lee argues that Matta Clark's two projects, A W-Hole

House and Splitting, 'revealed the very emptiness at the centre of
...
the two structures, a centreless centre, so to speak. ' She also
questions Maud Lavin's contention that Matta-Clark's 'domestic
projects' were misogynistic attacks against the gendered domestic
order of the feminine by querying the coding of domesticity as
essentially 'maternal' (Object to be Destroyed, p. 18). Marianne
Brouwer also refutes this suggestion and comments that 'he is
attacking a paternal image rather than a maternal one. If anything,
Matta-Clark cuts through the fetishism of the umbilical cord that
connects the notion of verticality and the void in his father's project
and gives it a completely different vocabulary. A vocabulary in which
high and low become metaphysically joined' ('Laying Bare'), p. 364.

202
The implication of the suburb as not only the vincular in the
sense of an unlocalisable primary link that borders the
absolute interior, but also in its algebraic sense of a
horizontal line drawn over a group of terms to show they
have a common relation to what follows or precedes. This
must be understood as a relation in the monadic sense of a
relation between what is constant and what is variable
given that neither constancy nor variation are dependent on
that relation and, most importantly the vinculum as relation
is exterior to any variable and also outside any constant. 52
These were manifest in the inexorable march of the
modernist architectural determination of corporate and
municipal projects as well as social housing in the post-war
period and also in the violence and wilful destruction that
accompanied them. In this sense Matta-Clark's
interventions preserved through a kind of demolition and
simultaneously through the act of the artist, shifted the
significance of the building from the praxis of mere
occupancy to a higher level of cultural merit. 53

52 It is worth noting here Dan Graham's Alteration to a Suburban House.

As a 'perversion' of the ideology of transparency concomitant with
modernist architectural ideals, the project sought to remove the
faqade of an ordinary suburban house and replace it with a glass
sheet -a vinculum. A mirror would divided the interior of the building
into two areas -a front section revealed to the public, and a rear,
private section which would remain undisclosed. The mirror, as it
faced the glass fagade, would not only reflect the public face of the
interior, but also the street and the outside environment - bringing
the outside into the house through the intervention of a vincular,
transparency. In his short story 'Tl6n Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' (from the
collection Labyrinths), Jorge Luis Borges states 'mirrors have
something monstrous about them' (p. 27).
53 James Wines, commenting on Robert Smithson's Buried Shed, argues
that its entropic trope articulates a political commentary that was
based on the 'unconscious relationship that exists in the popular
mind between buildings and orderly functions - their generic state of
use' (De-Architecture, p. 137). The question arises as to whether
Matta-Clark's work was a continuation of Smithson's thematic of
earth, no longer conceived of as a mere stable ground but as the
entropic force ever undoing the information of formal structures.

203
 Judith Russi Kirshner in her essay on Matta-Clark
entitled 'Non-uments' identified the labyrinthine complexity
of these visceral projects as essentially a contradictory
relation between the event of dissection and its violation of
contin it
U Y. 54 She drew attention to:

Matta-Clark's contradictory dissections, his intricate mazes

opposing the clarity and geometry of an architectural plan,

violated the unity and continuity associated with Modernist

architecture, exposing relationships between forms and

materials to make visible unexpected, multiple layers in spatial

temporal depth 55
and .

The creative act as an interruption of the polis, if we

understand this to mean the recognition of a political

orientation of interiority and structure, can only proffer
itself as such by assenting to such a placial integrity and
which confirms exteriority status on the antithesis of the
polis, the geopolis. I also draw attention here to earlier

remarks made in Chapter 2 in the section Poison and Cure,

where the placial undecidibility of the pharmak OS56 in

ancient Greece was articulated as the maintenance by

public donation, of an individual or group of individuals at

54 'Matta-Clark fragments or splinters architecture, turning it into a kind

of reverse Cubism or "anti- m on u ment", but one whose task is to
reconstitute memory, not conventional memory as in the traditional
monument but that subversive memory which has been hidden by
social and architectural fagades and their false sense of "wholeness"'
(Dan Graham, 'Gordon Matta-Clark', essay published in the
Serpentine catalogue, p. 379).
55 Judith Russi Kirshner, 'Non-uments', p. 367. Derrida, in his foreword
to The Wolf Man's Magic Word, argues, 'Constructing a series of
partitions, with their inner and outer surfaces, the cryptic enclave
produces a cleft in space, in the assembled system of various places,
in the architectonics of the open square within space, itself delimited
by a generalized closure in the forum' ('Fors', p. xiv). See Gordon
Matta-Clark's project, A W-Hole House: Atrium Roof, 1973.
56 As previously stated, the significance of the pharmakos in the
context of this text is as the identification of 'undecidibility' -
literally through its root in the term pharmakon, as potentially both
poison and cure.

204
the heart of the polis in order to insure an appropriate
sacrifice (the scapegoat) at times of dire need.
The often barbaric nature of these outsiders had
strong links with the creative frenzy of a Dionysian excess,
which if we are to follow Nietzsche's model in The Birth of
Tragedy, conceived the Apollonian framework of the
organised polis of the late Hellenic period as progressively
repressing such disorder. Yet the phenomenon of the
pharmakos insisted on the presence of the alien as the
mechanism to in some way, restore order to the polis and
therefore it could not and must not be merely excluded. 57

The risk of being creative and therefore the potential

definition of creative man, exploits the limit as that by
which the contentious proposal that potential and possibility
are essentially issueless and placeless. As Heidegger

stated in An Introduction to Metaphysics:

What thus comes up and becomes intrinsically stable

[St. inding] encounters, freely and spontaneously, the necessity
of its limit, peras. This limit is not something that comes to
beings from outside. Still less is it a deficiency in the sense of
a harmful restriction. No, the hold that governs itself from out
of the limit, the having itself, wherein the enduring holds
itself, is the Being of beings; it is what first makes a being into

a being as differentiated from a non-being Limit and end are

...
that where with a being begins to be. 58

He also remarked in 'Building Dwelling Thinking' that:

57 1 would also like to note here that, as mentioned in Chapter 2 of this

text, when Adorno commented in 1955, 'After Auschwitz, to write a
lyric poem is barbaric' (added emphasis), the implication is that
Celan, the 'lyric poet' when involved in the realisation of his poetic
voice, was in fact (in the eyes of Adorno) precipitating an act of
'barbarism'. The parallels between this creative potential and its link
to the barbaric should not be lost here (the Dionysian as the
exteriority of barbaric ecstatic hedonism repressed by the internal
order of the Apollonian).
58 Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 62.

205
 A space is something that has been made room for, something
that is cleared and free, namely within a boundary. A boundary
is not that at which something stops, but as the Greeks
recognised, the boundary is that from which something begins

its presencing - Pera S. 59

From early pieces like Time WellICherry Tree, through the

more explicit violation of the architectural educational

establishment of Window Blow-Out (1976) where he gained

the authorities' somewhat reluctant permission to shoot out

windows of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies

in New York with a borrowed revolver, the violence of the

transgressive operation inevitably drew attention to that

against which it was directed. As Marianne Brouwer

describes: 'directed against the Institute as the sign of

repression: Matta-Clark's provocative act confronts those

secret fears that won't be sublimated into the dialectics of

interior and exterior. )60

59 Heidegger, 'Building Dwelling Thinking', p. 154. In Difference and

Repetition, Deleuze states: '"To the limit", it will be argued, still
presupposes a limit. Here, limit (peras) no longer refers to what
maintains the thing under a law, nor to what delimits or separates it
f rorn other things. On the contrary, it refers to that on the basis of
which it is deployed and deploys all its power: hubris ceases to be
simply condemnable and the smallest becomes equivalent to the
largest once it is not separated f rom what it can do'(p. 37).
60 Brouwer, 'Laying Bare', p. 364.

206
Other works involved more specifically domestic (Splitting
and Conical Intersect) and corporate spaces (Circus or
Caribbean Orange and Office Baroque), albeit derelict and
abandoned, and make a strong case for Matta-Clark's
continued imperative to use his work to comment on the
inherent injustice of formal 611
structures . t is significant,
however, that Splitting as both intervention/event and
Matta-Clark's most noted (and recognised) work is grasped
through its provisional interpretation as an enforcement of
exterior over interior. In its aftermath, the recognition of a
more complex encryption of exteriority is noted that is
already implicit within domestication and identified in the

61 John Rajchman also points out that Kant viewed architecture as the
lowest form of the beaux arts as it was the most constrained by
money interests and as such was 'genius fettered and unable to
create freely and purely'. The project Time WellICherry Tree (1971)
can be seen in the canon of Matta-Clark's work as a key punctum
piece that engages with entropic force as a measure of
disorganisation and degradation. The degenerative presupposition of
the work's own destruction (already articulated in other works like
Photo-Fry) is built into the 'removal' of historical loss -a non-ument
which emphasises Robert Smithson's contention that the site/non-site
'rises into ruin'. From 'A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New
Jersey', and taken from The Writings of Robert Smithson, p. 54.

207
precise splitting of an ordinary suburban house prior to its
demolition, at 322 Englewood Street, New Jersey, in 1973.

A central cut was augmented by the careful removal of part

of the foundations at the rear of the building to open the

Sp I it. 62 Also of importance is that the event of Splitting was
not in the enforcement of the reversal of a dialectic,
whereby exteriority sublimated interiority, which made
manifest an inversion of the metaphysical trope of
presence/absence, but the aftermath of an encryption of

62 Derrida notes in The Truth in Painting, that the 'implication of size'

(taille) is also the mark of a line or cut: 'the cutting edge of a sword,
all the incisions which come to broach a surface or a thickness and
open up a track, delimit a contour, a form or a quantity (a cut(ting) of
wood or cloth' (p. 120). The 'play' that Derrida finds in the ambiguity
of meaning and translation is also noted in his Memoirs of the Blind,
where he notes: 'The trait is not then paralyzed in a tautology that
folds the same onto the same' (p. 2). The translator has noted that
they have left the word trait untranslated to preserve its range of
meanings, from a trait or feature to a line, stroke or mark. This
articulation of variant meaning is also operated by Pierre Joris in his
translation of Celan's poem 'Todtnauberg', where he leaves the word
Hijtte untranslated (see Chapter 2 of this text).

208
exteriority already implicit within the domesticated interior
and manifested in what we might call the 'no-where' of its
foundational integrity.

The foundations of buildings always remain absent, in the

sense that the integrity of their structural value is rarely
seen. If they are operating successfully, they remain
undisclosed, their essence translated into that which they
support. The double concealment exploited in Splitting was
firstly, in the absented value of the foundations in the
structural/domestic sense, and secondly, in their literal
absence as a removal by Matta-Clark to initiate the split in
the building. What is also of significance, and will be
touched on later, is the intrinsic coeval relationship
between, what I will call the 'closed domesticated/hestial

verticality' of the split with the open 'formal/hermetic

horizontality' of the removal to initiate the event of the

209
work. As already indicated in Matta-Clark's earlier projects,
A W-Hole House: Atrium Roof followed a similar
methodology that combined verticality with horizontality as
the means by which the work was realised.
Mark Wigley, in The Architecture of Deconstruction:
Derrida's Haunt, suggests that what is implicit in
architectonic figuration can be characterised as an
essential deception which determines our perception of
logic and reason. He states:

The figure of architecture acts as a veil, enabling philosophy

to disguise its active ordering of the world as the neutral
discovery of the worlds pre-existing, as the dispassionate
'discloser' order. 63

Wigley's contention, that the architectural figure might

function as an active yet deceptive organiser of the world,
proposes what we might call an intriguing dwelling model
for the exploration of the perceived familiarity of order and
principle as not only the foundation for metaphysical

63 Added emphasis. Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction, p. 66.

Dan Graham's Alteration to a Suburban House project sought to 'lift
the veil' via the introduction of a transparent yet reflective surface,
replacing the usual suburban fagade and in so doing, made manifest
the disguise of the architectural. In the short story, 'Councillor
Krespel', E. T. A Hoffmann has the professor say of Krespel, 'There
are people From whom nature, or some special fatality, has drawn
...
away the veil under the concealment of which the rest of us pursue
our follies. Their inner workings are visible. What with us remains
thought, becomes with Krespel - deed' (p. 173, added emphasis). I
would also note here Derrida's remarks in The Truth in Painting
regarding parergon or the veil (the function of clothing in sculpture
and painting and the column in architecture; both can also function
as ornament) as a kind of framing device. He notes: 'The parergon
inscribes something which comes as an extra, exterior to the proper
fieId... but whose transcendent exteriority comes to play, abut onto,
brush against, rub, press against the limit itself and intervene in the
inside only to the extent that the inside is lacking. It is lacking in
something and it is lacking from itself' (p. 56).

210
thought, but also in an archaeological sense and illuminator
and arbiter of pre-established orders. 64
However, it would only require only a minor deviation
from this recognised framework of thought to begin to find
mechanisms by which it is possible to implicate through the
identification and scrutinising of a form of alteric explication
as indicated, which is at work in any domestic order. From
this we might be able to explore this model from the inside
as it were, through the reconsideration and reinterpretation
of the means by which this model was first made manifest. 65
The historical language of architecture demands a certain
kind of structural continuity (by which we mean the already
indicated linearity of what we might describe as the
appropriate structure of a building), which can only function
through the integrity of the recognised directional verticality
of construction methods - from ground/foundation via
edifice to decoration 66 A project like A W-Hole House:
.

64 In The Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel states, 'God enters

in the lighten ing-f lash of individuality, which strikes and permeates
the inert mass, while the infinite and no longer merely symmetrical
form belonging to mind itself concentrates and gives shape to the
corresponding bodily existence' (p. 91).
65 Wigley determines that the limit defined by the territorialisation of
the house is not one of the dialectic of interiority and exteriority as
much as that of encryption. He states: 'The line drawn by the house
is not that between what appears as an inside and what appears as
an outside, but the less clearly defined and much more convoluted
one between the visible and the invisible. The security of a house is
not its capacity to enclose or exclude, but its capacity to conceal'
(The Architecture of Deconstruction, p. 131).
66 1 would like to note here the 'unorthodox' construction methods
employed by the character Councillor Krespel in E. T. A Hoffman's
short story of the same name (published in the Penguin Classics
edition of Tales of Hoffmann): the 'planless' house (no architectural
drawing was provided for the building), but merely Krespel shouting
instructions during the construction process. However, as the
storyteller describes: 'The difficulties which this peculiar mode of
construction could not fail to produce were thus overcome, and after
a short while a completed house stood there: from the outside it
possessed the craziest appearance, since none of the windows, for
instance, was of the same size or shape as any other, but once
inside you were filled with a quite unexampled sense of wellbeing
and comfort' (p. 161).

211
Atrium Roof realised in Genoa in Italy in 1973 complicates
any clear distinctions between verticality and horizontality
from which a precedent of one over the other might be
accorded.
Prior to Matta-Clark's intervention, what preceded it
was an act of domestication by the previous occupants, who
organised the interior space by progressively splitting its
openness with stud wal IS. 67 Matta-Clark's initial reaction to
such an act of hestial/domestication was to remove the
centre of the pyramidal roof, exposing the labyrinthine
interior, whereby the verticality of the removal
simultaneously determined and critiqued domesticity. This
was followed by further incisions which dissected the
interior with two parallel horizontal lines (one demarcated
three feet from the floor on the interior walls and the other
18 inches above it) and which might be considered as an
act of cle-centred hermetic de-territorialisation.
The precedent of ground as the essential a priori for
the determination of any vertiginous posture remains the
consistent factor in the architectonics of the edifice. 68
Equally, the proposition is made that the language of
edifice of thought - metaphysics - demands a similar
ordering, but as Wigley states, this figuration should
perhaps be interpreted as merely the disguise by which

67 The metaphor of enframing is not lost here - domestication taking the

form of the particularity of hestial organisation that Matta-Clark's
exploited through a vertical removal. There is also perhaps
something about the specificity of this removal in that it identified
the hestial/hearth by drawing attention to a historical architectural
mechanism for ventilation (the hole in the roof). I also draw attention
to earlier remarks made about the parergon in Derrida's The Truth in
Pa in ting.
68 Bachofen's 'Sanctum and Sacrum' argues: 'The traditional mind saw
walls "rising from the earth" as offspring, issuing from the "maternal
womb". Walls as "children" of mother earth even after birth are
connected to the "maternal womb" by foundations' (p. 42).

212
reason and logic enforce the mechanisms of control and
reduction of all outside the conformity of reasonableness to
a kind of universality while couching such an enframing in
the archaeological uncovering of what might be interpreted
as almost the fictional re-discovery of a foundational, pre-
existing order.
Our predisposition to indicate a language for
architectonics already submits it to a scrutiny that not only
recognises its historical status but also simultaneously and
perhaps surreptitiously argues for a rethinking of its lingual
articulation.
When Derrida argues that the philosophical tradition
privileges the immediacy of speech over the mediations of
what is written, he expresses a subordination of the spatial
using the concept of the unmediated presence of speech as
a sublimation of the space of inscription or the spatial
distribution of signs.
Metaphysics as the mechanism by which the logos
resists the interruption of the containment of self-presence,
takes mastery of the spatial by exclusion - by keeping it
outside. 69 In 'On the Question of Being' Heidegger asked the
question:

What if the language of metaphysics and metaphysics itself,

whether it is that of a living or a dead god, in fact constituted

as metaphysics that limit which prevents a transition over the
line, i. e. the overcoming of nihi I is M ? 70

69 In metaphysics, speech 'precedes' space and therefore is able to

'control' it. Writing, with the ambiguity of its dangerous spatiality, is
cast out to the subordinate exterior. When Bachofen sited the form of
letter writing at the hestial/hearth of the Asiatic queens (see Chapter
2 of this text), he implied that the inferiority of the text was not
merely resigned to the subordination of its exteriority but was
fundamentally 'found' at the hearth.
70 Heidegger, 'On the Question of Being', p. 304.

213
However, speech does not occupy interiority as it were, by
merely not falling into the exteriority of space. This might
indicate that speech operated as a negation - as merely
what is not spatial. The privileged interiority of speech is
contingent on an absence of space and as such, is that
which is without space. 71 Mark Wigley proposes:

The exclusion and subordination of space produces an orderly

fagade, or, rather the faqade of order to mask an internal
disorder. The traditional anxiety about space marks a
forbidden desire that threatens to collapse the edifice of
72
philosophy from within .

Space, however, is essentially not just the receptacle of

inscriptions, as in Derridian terms writing does not have a
site, but the specificity of sites and locales are an effect of
what is written therefore the spatial is an effect of the event
of ongoing inscription and is perhaps more appropriately
defined as spacing.
The term spacing is used by Derrida to identify the
event of speech fissured by space and rather than instigate

a mere reversal of an existing tradition, seeks to connote

that tradition in some sense, while also carrying senses
which cannot be recognised by that tradition and are
therefore exterior to it. Wigley makes the point that space is

not merely a negation or misfortune that befalls the purity

of the logos (the pure voice sought by philosophy), but

suggests that it is its very possibility. He argues: 'There

can be no voice, let alone the philosophical desire for such

71 In Of Grammatology, Derricla argues: 'Spacing is the impossibility for

identity to be closed on itself, on the inside of its proper interiority,
or on its coincidence with itself. The irreducibility of spacing is the
irreducibility of the other' (p. 27).
72 Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction, p. 71.

214
a voice, with out the spatiality that appears to contaminate
it. ý73

Spacing, then, is conceived not as a pure presence

but is in effect, an operation or manoeuvre - an event of
interval which functions as a no-thing articulating the
impossibility for an identity to be closed in on itself. It is no
longer recognised as space but rather a becoming space of
that which traditionally was meant to be without space
(presence, speech, spirit, ideas, etc. ) and as such, opens
up in the sense of fissuring an established structure by the
division or complication of its limits,
but also in the sense
of producing space itself as an opening in the tradition. 74
Marianne Brouwer says of Matta-Clark:

[he] does not undo a building, he undoes the architectural

analogy that is contained within it. In fact he describes his
first cuts as 'extractions'. Words are removed from the edifice
of language in a movement that works its way through the
building as if it were carefully removing its semantic
backbone. 75

73 Ibid., p. 70.
74 In An Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger states: 'The Greeks had
no word for "space". This is no accident; for they experienced the
spatial on the basis not of extension but of place (topos); they
experienced it as ch6ra, which signifies neither place nor space but
that which is occupied by what stands there' (p. 66).
75 Added emphasis. Brouwer, 'Laying Bare', p. 363

215
Derrida argues that Heidegger, by employing the metaphors
that surround the house (dwelling, enclosure, shelter,
abode, lodging, proximity and neighbourhood), remains
constrained within the metaphysical edifice, and his
extensive use of the thematic of the house remains an
organising principle that fails in its attempts to dismantle. 76
His advocation of the imperative to return to a primal
shelter (dwelling) as a means of taking refuge from the

mode rn/tech nol ogical age of the consummation of nihilism

and its generalised sense of homelessness, remains
trapped in the a priori pre-fix of a site of unmediated
presence and therefore the secure, interiority of
logocentrism. 77

Heidegger's determination towards authenticity

through language is found at its most specifically
architectural in 'Building Dwelling Thinking'. He poses two
questions in the introduction, which remain pertinent to any
discussion of his proposition that 'language is the house of
Being'. His first question - What is it to dwell? - is further
qualified by a second: how does building belong to
dwelling? It is crucial to bear in mind here that dwelling
remains the essential a priori term and, as such, locates it
at the heart of Heidegger's discussion of being. However, in
seeking to explore the fundamental relation of these terms,

76 Heidegger's understanding of familiarity and propriety stem from the

link/root between the Greek terms oikos (household) and oikeios
(proper) and are bound together in a consistent thematic trajectory,
which is linked to the concept of appropriation. Wigley argues:
'Language is a house because it is a mode of appropriation whereby
thought recovers presence in the face of alienating representation. It
is a house because it appropriates making proper by excluding
representation and establishing a proximity to presence' (p. 102).
77 Heidegger argues in 'Building Dwelling Thinking', that: 'Man acts as
though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact
language remains the master of man. Perhaps it is before all else
man's subversion of this relation of dominance that drives his nature
into alienation' (p. 146).

216
Heidegger looked to the German word bauen (to build) to
find what he described as a covert trace of an appropriate
meaning for 'to dwell' and in citing such a spectrality
focused on an intrinsic haunting of language in as far as
something is 'not said', as a means by which one might
explore the lingual edifice. 713

In the activity of dwelling, Heidegger 'heard' bis (to

be) but in so doing distinguished between the 'active' and
'authentic' verb and the notion of dwelling as a mere 'act of
inactivity'. Similarly, he noted the distinction between an
understanding of 'building' as construction and also as what
he defined as a 'not-making' and by which he meant a
nurturing and preserving.
In this sense house is the metaphor that precedes
metaphor by determining the condition of what is proper and
which remains detached from the 'inferior' metaphorical -
the presence (interior) of the proper excluding the
metaphorical exterior. For Heidegger in Sein und Zeit,
anxiety was one manifestation of Dasein's concern for the
familial while lost in the they (das Man) of inauthentic
Being. It was also the realisation of what he referred to as
'authentic care' (Sorge) as that which made manifest the
uncertainty of Dasein's possibilities of 'being-in-the-world'.
Therefore, Dasein's fall into the 'they-ness' of concernful

78 The essence of Heidegger's argument is centred on finding in the Old

English/High German word for building (buan) the meaning to dwell,
to remain, to stay in a place. Although he argues that its 'true'
meaning is now lost, a trace of it is preserved in the German word
Nachbar - neighbour (Old English: neahgebur, meaning near-
dweller). In Nachbar and nachgebauer Heidegger heard both near
(nach) and bar and bauer (dweller) and the latter words stem from
buri, buren, beuren and beuron, signifying dwelling, the abode or the
place of dwelling. 'The old word bauen, which says that man is
insofar as he dwells, this word bauen however also means at the
same time to cherish and protect, to preserve and care for,
specifically to till the soil, to cultivate the vine' ('Building Dwelling
Thinking', p. 147).

217
familiarity, was a flight from the 'authenticity of all real
possibilities and as such cut Dasein off from an authentic
world experience and the abyss of possibilities which
always threatened Dasein's self-certainty.
Edward S. Casey in The Fate of Place argues that
later analysis of the uncanny (das Unheimlich) continues to

explore what he refers to as the loss of 'home-world' via the

form of Dasein's ineluctable 'not-being-at-home' (un-heim-
lich) in the world. He goes on to propose that the

unheimlich is not only nothing (by which he means nothing

substantial in the Heideggarian manner of zuhanden
(present-at-hand) or vorhanden (ready-to- hand)) but

nowhere 79As such it represents what Casey defines as a

.
'radical absence' without the particularity of the placial or
regionality and invokes a sense of anxiety through atopia.
Dasein's defensive and reactive flight from nowhere
and nothing seems provisionally to be one towards what
Casey understands as concern and, more importantly,
absorption with other entities. However, in this rush to
assimilate and, more significantly, to be assimilated, what
arguably Dasein misses is that which grounds both anxiety
and the unheimlich - the world - and therefore its own
authentic 'being-in-the-world'. Dasein's (and Heidegger's)
ontic manoeuvre was to flee into the gematlich 80 of what

might be described as a familial practicality (zuhanden and

vorhanden) and demands a question of Heidegger as to
whether he persistently held back from a confrontation with
the abysmal in favour of absorption in the familial.

79 In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche states: 'Man would sooner

have the void for his purpose than be void of purpose. '
80 As previously mentioned, this translates from German as snugly,
comfortable, cosy, homelike or homely.

218
 Dwelling, for Heidegger, remained the most proximal
essence of man; as he stated in 'Building Dwelling
Thinking': 'building is not merely a means and a way toward
dwelling - to build is in itself already to dwell'. 81
In Sein und Zeit, he attempted to tackle the
oppositional difficulty of the metaphysical strategy of
interior/exterior by working on the density of the placial and
its relationship with the more overtly shapelessness of
regionality, while attempting to avoid falling into the trap of
understanding the spatial as pure homogeneous exteriority.
In the sense of spatium and extensio, 82 specific places
became the foci or indicators of wider, shared parts of an
environing world understood as a pre-given, public
regionality so that what we might call regional emplacement
proposed an unmetric and temporal involvement between
closeness and distance.
Deleuze indicates that such points of view do not
contradict any notion of the continuous but argues that
Leibniz defined extensio as continuous repelation of situs
or position (understood as 'point of view') bearing in mind
that extensio was an attribute of that point of view but one
of spatium, an order of distances between points of view
makes repetition possible. 83
In 'Building Dwelling Thinking' Heidegger cited the
precedent of spatium as an 'an intervening space or
interval' whereby such an interval and its dimensional

81 Heidegger, 'Building Dwelling Thinking', p. 146.

82 We may wish to consider the parallels between spatium and extensio
and place and region in Heideggerian thought; particularly with
regard to what has already been discussed in Chapter 1 of this text.
83 'When inclusion is accomplished, it is done so continuously, or
includes the sense of a finished act that is neither the site, the place
or the point of view, but remains in point of view, what occupies point
of view and without which point of view would not be' (Deleuze, The
Fold, p. 22).

219
characteristics (which were no longer distinguishable
through what Heidegger termed nearness and dis-tance)
reduced spatial interventions to measurable distances -
what he referred to as mere position and which meant that
as such, were potentially replaceable by any other mere
marker. This reduction to dimensionality allowed for the
abstraction of 'interval' into the manifold dimensions of
height, breadth and depth and which determined the
expression of the spatial as no longer through the provision
of proximity (nearness and dis-stance), but through the
evolution of extensio. This is further abstracted into what
he terms 'analytic-algebraic relations', which made room for
the manifold of mathematical constructions based on
arbitrary dimensions and which could be understood as one
space but without the specificity of a location. 84
Heidegger indicated that such locations while
providing the space for spatium and extensio maintained the
predilection that as essentially universal and therefore
transcendent, in that they were arbitrary and therefore
applicable to anything, they could not be the ground for the
specifics of the proximal density of a particular location.
Like Heidegger, Deleuze understood spatium as the
primal groundless space from which issued all dimensional

and representable space (extensio) with its identifiable

coordinates of height, width and depth. However, in

Difference and Repetition he distinguished spatium as
essentially an implicate space in that it traits common to a

metastable substance. If we recall from Chapter 1 of this

84 In Bunker Archaeology, Paul Virilio notes: 'Historically, if the

reduction of obstacles and distances has always been the central
problem of military space, we have reached today the rupture point:
the distinction between vehicle and projectile has ceased' (p. 18,
added emphasis).

220
text, a metastable substance has enfolded (implicated) into
itself its capacity for difference in itself and from which is
unfolded (explicated) in extensio the specificity of
individuation.
He argued that the space we perceive is that of
extension in that as the faculties fall under the regulation of
common sense, a passive synthesis of the spatium is
performed and whose existence can only be revealed
through the transcendental analysis of the ground - an
ungrund.
The categorisation we perceive in the specific
examples of matter and form, individual and environment,
species and individual are essentially products of
individuation and, as such, are the masks in which pre-
individuation, articulated by Deleuze as the metastable
differences appear to us.

The ground [fond] as it appears in a homogeneous extensity is

notably a projection of something 'deeper' (profound): only the
85
latter may be called ungrund or groundless .

The passage from metastable (spatium) to stable (extensio)

is made manifest in the implicate difference as energised
intensity and which is explicated in the specificity of
qualities and quantities.

85 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 229.

221
However, this resists any determination to indicate such
intensity as a mere physical force but as a dimension of the
idea 136in that (within the idea) it causes virtuality to pass
into actuality. Deleuze made clear that this causal change
of the virtual into the actual must not be confused with the
application of a scientific concept, as it remains essentially
a transcendental principle that enfolds from the implicate
energy of the spatium and not in the explication of the
extensio - whereas the scientific principle as empirical
energy resides only in the 'commonsense' of explicated
extensio.
Heidegger, in 'On the Question of Being', quoted
Nietzsche from his posthumously published notes, The Will
to Power, in describing nihilism as 'this most uncanny of all
guests' because when manifest as 'unconditional will to
will', it 'willed' homelessness; was not in itself 'diseased'
but as what he described 'corporeally', as a 'cancer-causing
agent', made 'visible through its agency'. 87 For Derrida, the
outside of the house continues to be organised by the
house's logic and so therefore remains in some way inside.
In this sense the other, in being placed outside, is
domesticated and therefore kept 'inside'.

86 Deleuze argues that the idea (of which intensity is a dimension) has
three dimensions:
i) Singular points embodied in quantities/parts.
ii Relations between singular points embodied in qualities/species
characteristics.
iii) Intensities which effect the spatio-temporal actuahsation of
singular points and their relations.
Intensity is that which the faculty of sensibility (the five senses) can
alone experience and although the 'idea' is not associated with any
particular faculty, it provokes each into what Deleuze describes as
'disjunctive functioning', which communicates a kind of violence from
faculty to faculty. Intensity is identified by Deleuze as the
simulacrum (the true character or form of that which is), which,
possessing no identity of its own appears by disguising itself.
87 Heidegger, 'On the Question of Being', p. 292.

222
In Margins of Philosophy, Derrida provides a warning
against the appropriation of shelter and the hestial as the
foundation of any notion of spatiality:

To attempt an exit and a deconstruction without changing the

terrain, by repeating what is implicit in the founding concepts
and the original problematic, by using against the edifice the
instruments or stones available in the house, that is, equally,
in language. Here one risks ceaselessly confirming,
consolidating, relifting [relever], at an always more certain
depth, that which one allegedly deconstructs. The continuous

process of making explicit, moving toward an opening, risks

into the autism of the closure. 88
sinking

The subversion of the a priori of interior/presence over

exterior/representation does not take place by the

usurpation of one over the other but by the implication that

exteriority as representation structures the interior as an
effect of that representation. In a sense, the house is the
metaphor that precedes metaphor by determining the
condition of the proper, which remains detached from the
inferior metaphorical. This is interpreted as the interior
presence of the proper operating as that, which excludes
and negates the metaphorical exterior. Such would be this

condition of violence that is implicated in the positing of the

architectural edifice as not only the figuration of a
mechanism of control but also the conditional arbiter of how
order might be determined.

88 Added emphasis. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy ('The Ends of Man'),

p. 130. Wigley argues in The Architecture of Deconstruction that,
'language is a house because it is a mode of appropriation whereby
thought recovers presence in the face of alienating representation. It
is a house because it appropriates, making proper by excluding
representation and establishing a "proximity" to presence' (p. 102). 1
am also reminded here of what has been earlier remarked about a
'change in terrain' requiring a 'new language'. See earlier references
to Heidegger, JOnger and Bachofen.

223
 It sets a tone for the interpretation of the metaphysical
edifice in thought which, having been built on violence of
repression, can only be indicative of another kind of
violence through the posture of a visceral intervention as
the means by which the structure can be undermined and
reconfigured.
When Derrida, in 'Violence and Metaphysics',
questions the continuity of the thinking of Heideggarian
being and Husserlian phenomenality, he does so via the
process and dispossession
of dismantling that he indicates
is proffered by the work of Levinas 89 Derrida argues that
.
what he defines as Levinas's eschatology is never literal,
but is:

a question of designating a space or hollow within naked

experience where this eschatology can be understood and
resonate. This hollow space is not an opening among others. It
is opening itself, the opening of opening, that which can be
enclosed within no category or totality that is everything within
experience which can no longer be described by traditional
and which resists every philosopheme. 90
concepts

89 Derrida also suggests in 'Violence and Metaphysics' that the security

of the Greco-European tradition is a knowledge that is neither
'habitual or comfortable but permits us to experience torment or
distress in general' (p. 82).
90 Ibid., p. 83. Eschatology is defined as the doctrine of death,
judgement or heaven and hell. A philosopheme is a philosophical
proposition, doctrine or principle of reasoning.

224
The method and process by which a building/edifice is
provisionally realised is generally understood through the
preliminary organisation of an architectural plan which
ordinarily takes the form of a drawing or sketch. 91

The word sketch can be translated into German as

either Riss or Grundriss, but it remains pertinent to
consider that the dictionary definition of both these nouns
not only means a sketch, ground plan or design, but also a
tear, laceration, gap or outline.
Heidegger in his text of 1936, 'The Origin of the Work
of Art', exploited this double connotation of Grundriss as
both plan or design and crack or tear to define the
difference he believed inherent in the art work, between the
revealing of world and the concealing of earth. For him,
truth establishes itself in the work of art as the strife
between what he referred to as 'clearing' and 'concealing' -
the opposition of world and earth, but significantly indicated
that: 'This rift does not let opponents break apart; it brings

what opposes measure and boundary in its common outline. '

Later in the same text, he stated: 'The rift must set itself
back into the gravity of stone, the mute hardness of wood,
the dark glow of colours. ý92

91 The significance of drawing as a means of remembering should not

be lost here. Derrida's Memoirs of the Blind reminds us that the
origin of graphic representation was supposedly inaugurated in
antiquity by a young Corinthian woman, Butacles, who, faced with
long-term separation from her lover, notices on the wall his shadow
thrown by the lamplight and, inspired by love and a fear of his
withdrawal from her sight, traces the outline. Derrida notes, 'the
narrative relates the origin of graphic representation to the absence
or invisibility of the model. Butades does not see her lover either
because she turns her back on him ... or because he turns his back to
her... it is as if seeing were forbidden in order to draw, as if one
drew only on the condition of not seeing', p. 49.
92 Both quotes from Heidegger, 'The Origin of the Work of Art'
(published in Basic Writings), pp. 139-212. Heidegger later states:
'This rift does not let opponents break-apart, it brings what opposes
measure and boundary into its common ground' (p. 188).

225
 The work of art is disclosed, for Heidegger, in the
necessary two-fold (double) operation/manoeuvre of world
revealing and earth concealment and is not a cleft ripped
open, but a carrying of opponents into unity by virtue of
their common ground. What is integral to this mapping (here
I use the term advisedly and with reference to what has
already been said about the sketch as both plan/map or
tear/gap), is that the rift of locale not only operates as that
which separates world and earth, but also that which holds
them together while maintaining their distinctiveness - the
orientation of their essential difference. For Heidegger, the
revelation of worldliness can only take place in the work of
art if the materiality (its thingliness) of the work is
maintained in its obscurity, its resistance to the pervasive
realisation or grasp of it as mere material and therefore the
understanding of the imperative of that resistance, is the
essential role of the artist in the realisation of any art work.
Any attempt to qualify or quantify materiality by
scientific means continually founders in materiality's
resistance to be understood in those it
terms
- reveals
nothing of its essential nature if, as Heidegger argued, its
essential nature is to obfuscate. However, there remains in
Heidegger's interpretation of the relation between
worldliness and materiality in the artwork, a very specific
directionality which continued to conform to the already
indicated arbitration of order found in the architectural
model. Essentially, earth imposes itself upon world, and
this verticality can only move in one direction.

226
 There is no mechanism in Heidegger's thinking
whereby the inversion of such an operation; where
worldliness might impose itself on materiality and with this
in mind, the parallels with the already identified hierarchy

of metaphysical order are self evident. 93 The essential

double operation at work in any true art work was, for

Heidegger, the reconfiguration of the previously stable
dialectic of pure presence over its negation as pure
absence, which also introduced a further complication that
was made manifest in the inherent phonetic concealment
implicit in material i ty. 94 The ability of the true artist was not
only to recognise this resistance as essential to how
materiality must operate in the realisation of the artwork,
but in making a virtue of such stubbornness, identify

worldliness as the model for articulating the appropriate

circumstances (the spacing) whereby it must be allowed to
'be itself'.

93 Heidegger argues that the Greek temple as an architectural edifice

made visible the ground on which it stood and, as such, 'produced'
the site through the constitution of a 'ground' by what appeared to be
added to it. He states: 'To locate the ground is therefore to construct
an edifice' ('The Origin of the Work of Art', p. 61). His appropriation
of the temple was significant for two reasons; firstly as a historical
precedent which cited the particularity of its Greek context as
fundamental to any understanding of Grund ('ground') and Abgrund
('abyss'), and secondly, as an attempt to reconfigure the metaphor of
the implicit verticality of the edifice as a metaphysical framing
device. Edward S. Casey determines from Heidegger's use of the
temple metaphor that it encloses and conceals the figure of the god
and as such, makes the god present. It also gathers to it the unity of
paths shaping the destiny of the human being (by this he means the
paths of birth, death, disaster and blessing, disgrace and
endurance). The 'building's rest' draws up the obscurity of the bulky
spontaneous support of the rock on which it rests, and therefore
illuminates and draws attention to its surroundings in which, for
Heidegger, man bases his dwelling.
94 As already indicated, Heidegger used a phonetic term to describe the
appropriate resistance of materiality in the artwork by describing the
'mute hardness of wood'. This has a strong resonance with what has
been already articulated regarding silence and the poetic in the
previous chapter and may enlighten further Heidegger's
determination and insistence towards silence.

227
 Heidegger also argued: 'The founding of truth by art,
which is exemplified by a building, becomes the
establishment of the unfamiliar rather than the familiar. 95
Y
The Freudian trope of the uncanny/unheimlich
articulates this doubling through interval and as pointed out
by Pamela M. Lee in Object to be Destroyed: The Work of
Gordon Matta-Clark:

The sensation of unease founded upon the doubled, shifting

implications of the German heimlich and unheimlich - at once
native, belonging to the home and shaded by an almost
palpable feeling of dread - the uncanny is freighted with both
architectural and spatial implications. 96

The contention that the unheimlich functions as the interval

that distinguishes 'at-home' from 'not-at-home', draws
attention to the possibility of familiarity effacing the
possibilities of what is essentially unfamiliar. Freud, in his
essay 'The Uncanny', also drew attention to this as a
potential for spatiality. The unheimlichluncanny can be
identified by its capacity for dislocation motivated by an
inherent and persistent lack of orientation at work within it.
This capacity for disorientation may well conceal a more
destructive repression operating within the architectural
, model' as that which conditions through violence. 97

95 Added emphasis. Heidegger, 'The Origin of the Work of Art', p. 65. Ir

The Architecture of Deconstruction, Mark Wigley suggests that the
unfamiliar, as is indicated by Heidegger in 'The Origin of the Work of
Art', is the overflowing of the familiar. The familiar institution of
philosophy seeks to efface any unfamiliarity and in so doing, block
out any possibilities.
96 Added emphasis. Lee, Object to be Destroyed, pp. 8-9.
97 Orientation and the labyrinthine will be considered in greater depth
in Chapter 4 of this text.

228
 As already indicated, the concealment by which the
metaphor of architectural figuration veils the characteristic
universalising of the metaphysical project under the auspice
of a revelation of pre-determined order, essentially
represses through violence and deceives through
subterfuge. Mark Wigley argues:

The tradition of metaphysics institutes itself by concealing its

own violence. The architectural figure of the grounded
structure sustains this violence by affecting concealment. The
vertical hierarchy it configures is a mechanism of control that
dissimulates its own strategic violence. Its familiarity marks
the extent of its control. 98

Violence begetting violence calls into question firstly the

integrity of that which comes first
is in a sense a priori
- -
in that the repressive nature of metaphysics brings upon
itself the visceration of discontinuity through its own
determination to repress by subterfuge. 99 Secondly, that
which refutes assimilation does so through the violence of a
determined resistance and, as such, could well be placed in
advance of any notion of the imposition of a pre-existing
order.

98 Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction, p. 60. In his foreword to

The Wolf Man's Magic Word ('Fors'), Derrida determines that 'the
crypt itself is built by violence' (p. xv).
99 In the text 'Sanctum and Sacrum', Bachofen states: 'A guilty man's
chains are removed after he has undergone punishment, those of a
man whose innocence has been established are cut through with a
file. What has been fastened by violence must be loosed by counter
violence' (p. 42).

229
 Heidegger argued in An Introduction to Metaphysics:

We are taking the strange, the uncanny <das unheimliche>, as

that which casts us out of the 'homely', i. e. the customary,
familiar, secure. The unhomely <Unheimlische> prevents us
from making ourselves at home and therein it is overpowering.
But man is the strangest of all, not only because he passes his
life amid the strange understood in this sense, but because he
departs from his customary, familiar limits, because he is the
violent one, who, tending toward the strange in the sense of
the overpowering, surpasses the limit of the familiar <das
Heimliche>. 100

The ambiguity of this double invocation of over-powerment

with particular reference to a conduct of violence inherent
in the surpassing of any recognised limit of familiarity,
further complicates any interpretation of violence as either
merely the suppressing of exteriority or the eruption of an
outside at the site of the hestial. Heidegger determined that
the terror of such over-powerment was found in the
compelling of true fear - 'a silent awe that vibrates
panic
with its own rhythm'. 101Also it meant powerful in the sense
of an individual who 'uses' power and whereby it insists
(through the disposition of that power) through action but
also as a condition of being-there (Dasein).
As such, there is an implication that the unheimlich
property of architectonics operates as consistent
characteristic of the model, but through the alteric deviance

100 Added emphasis. Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, pp 150-

1. Earlier in the text Heidegger quotes from Sophocles' Antigone
(lines 332-75) but highlights the first two lines: 'There is much that
is strange, but nothing that surpasses man in strangeness. ' Man, for
Heidegger (and therefore his interpretation of Greek thinking), is
deinotaton - the strangeness that transgresses the contending
separation of being (by which is meant the ontological difference).
101 Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction, p. 149.

230
of a kind of ontological subterfuge it appears to function as
a kind of invisible topological invariant.
If we understand topology as the branch of
mathematical geometry generally understood to be the
study of invariant or permanent characteristics or 'thingly'
properties within the continuous surface of a shape or form,
we might begin to find in a kind of spectrality that is
contemporaneous with the scientific. These invariant
characteristics are studied in the sense that the
connectedness of any continuous surface allows for the
distortion of that surface without disconnecting what is
already connected or connecting what was previously
unconnected. Such characteristics operate as punctum
within the language of the event of mapping of a surface
and through their invariant status within the continuity of
that surface, persist and survive any distortion.
A topology of the other may then be provisionally
interpreted as the study of characteristics or properties of
the architectural surface that are pertinent to, and map the
edifice, yet remain other to it - outside of it, yet integral to
it. In the section entitled 'Taking Shelter in the Uncanny' in
The Architecture of Deconstruction, Mark Wigley states:

For Derrida, the 'outside' of a house continues to be organised

by the logic of the house and so actually remains inside it. By
being placed outside the 'other' is placed, domesticated, kept
inside 102
.

102 Ibid., p. 107.

231
I would like to suggest that the complication of this topology
is that the clarity of a binary opposition of clearly defined
metaphysical distinctions between interior (presence) and
exterior (absence), the hestial (domestic) and the hermetic
(nomadic), and the exclusivity or a priori of metaphysical
presence as an a priori, is usurped and complicated by an
alteric operation.

THE ENCYST-ENCE OF THE NON-UMENT 103

The fantasy involves eating the object (through the

mouth or otherwise) in order not to introject it, in order
to vomit it, in a way, into the inside, into the pocket of a
cyst. 104

In an early project like Time WellICherry Tree (1971), 105

Matta-Clark's 'act of liberation' demonstrated a paradoxical
approach to the buildings ostensible support through what
the artist described as a 'permanent non-structural sub-
basement burial'. 106In excavating beneath the edifice,
Matta-Clark's subtending conveyed the foundational as

103 The term non-ument is borrowed from Judith Russi Kirshner's essay
'Non-uments', published in the Serpentine Gallery catalogue, Gordon
Matta-Clark, 1993, pp. 365-8.
104 See footnote 45 of this chapter.
105 Time Well was begun on New Years Day 1971 and was originally
entitled Cherry Tree. The work involved the planting of a cherry tree
sapling in a hole excavated in the floor of 112 Greene Street, New
York. Measuring 8ft long by 4ft wide and 6ft deep, it allowed only the
crown of the tree to remain visible, resulting in a failure to take root
and the sapling's demise after three months in the dark, airless
environment. It was latterly replaced by mushrooms and finally, after
six months, its 'presence' was memorialised by Time Well, whereby a
ceramic pipe was placed in the now vacant hole in which was housed
a bottle in which the remains of the original tree had been placed.
The pipe was 'crowned' by a 1ft square zinc well cover, set in
concrete and the remaining cavity was filled, while the original cavity
was delineated by the pouring of molten lead into the expansion joint
of the concrete slab.
106 Gordon Matta-Clark, notebook and cited in Serpentine catalogue, p.
369.

232
essentially a virtual absence represented through the figure
of the hole.
The impossibility of such an enterprise is instructive
because it indicated that what in a sense 'held up' 112
Greene Street, could neither be contained or articulated by
the integrity of architectonics but was conditioned, as
Pamela M. Lee points out, 'by something deeply
inaccessible, offsite even'. 107

Matta-Clark said of the project:

I dug a deep hole in the basement of 1 12 Greene Street. What

I wanted to do I didn't accomplish at all, which was digging
deep enough into the foundations so that a person could see
the actual foundations, the 'removed' spaces under the
foundation, and liberate the building's enormous compressive,
confining forces simply by making a hole.

107 Lee, Object to be Destroyed, p. 67.

233
 8

This operation, which I now proffer as a manoeuvre of

spacing, not only includes what is historically recognised as
subordinate exteriority - an inferior absence encrypted in
the ordered house of a proper unmediated metaphysical
presence it also maintains it in its detachment - the alien
-
retained within the corporeal edifice as a kind of operation
of parasitic introjection now interpreted as encyst-ence
through the eventuation of symbiotic morselation. As Mark
Wigley states in The Architecture of Deconstruction:

Metaphysics is that which subordinates space, associating it

with 'death', 'decay', 'degeneration', 'representation',

'dissimulation', 'interruption', 'seduction', 'materiality',

'sensuality', 'monstrosity' so on. '08

and

108 Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction, p. 68.

234
The project entitled Descending Steps for Batan was a work
by Matta-Clark and realised in the Galerie Yvon Lambert,
Paris 1977. Matta-Clark was one of twins (Matta-Clark was
the elder by five minutes). His younger brother Sebastian
(known as Batan), who had a history of depression, had
apparently committed suicide by jumping from the window of
Matta-Clark's studio in New York the previous year. Their
mother, Anne Albert (ne6 Clark), interviewed in October
1980 said of Batan:

From the age of 4 he was constantly drawing. There was never

any doubt about what he would do. Gordon would tell stories
and make sounds and Batan would draw and illustrate them. I
think Gordon was set back by Batan. Batan felt superior about
his art, and Gordon had to overcome that. '09

109 Taken from an interview conducted by Richard Armstrong and

published in the Serpentine Gallery catalogue, p. 393. On a
biographical note, Derrida comments in his text Memoirs of the Blind
that he suffered from a 'wounded jealousy before an older brother
whom I admired, as did everyone around him, for his talent as a
draftsman His works, I must say in all fraternity, were merely
...
copies: often portraits done in black pencil or India ink that
reproduced family photographs or pictures reproduced in books. '
...
And later in the same text: 'I suffered seeing my brother's drawings
on permanent display, religiously framed on the walls of every room.
I tried my hand at imitating his copies: a pitiable awkwardness
confirmed for me the double certainty of having been punished,
deprived and cheated, but also, and because of this even, secretly
chosen. ' He further remarks that: 'as if in place of drawing, which the
blind man in me had renounce for life, I was called to another trait,
this graphics of invisible words, this accord of time and voice that is
called (the word) - or writing, scripture' (p. 37).

235
 I

.0

ýj

The twins' Father, the artist Roberto Matta, developed this

analysis of their relationship in interviews conducted in

January and February 1981. He said:

Batan couldn't articulate what he had. He always would tell

things in a complicated way, never straight, always a

circuitous route with twins you must divide affection equally

...
between both. It is very difficult. We registered them as 'A'

and 'B', then we gave them Kachina names - 'Xibal' and

'Numbac' or we called them the 'one' or the 'other', Batan was
the fat 'Gordo'. "O
thin, very pretty, one was

Freud of the phenomenon of the double, "' or the twin,

said
in the essay 'The Uncanny', that it originally begins as an
insurance against the destruction of the ego - an energetic
denial of the power of death, but that such ideas have

sprung from:

[the] soil of unbounded self-love, from primary narcissism

which dominates the mind of the child and of primitive man.

110 Added emphasis. Roberto Matta interview published in Serpentine

Gallery catalogue, 1993, pp. 395-6.
ill The significance of the double or twin resonates across not only this
text but also the following chapter. The phi-creatureslvisitors that
appear in Tarkovsky's film (and Lem's novel) Solaris are simulacra
drawn from the memories of the scientists on the space station
orbiting the planet, and Mark Z. Danielewski explores the relationship
between Will and Tom Navidson (also twins) in The Navidson Record
strand of his novel House of Leaves.

236
 But when this stage has been surmounted, the 'double'
reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of
immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death. 112

Pamela M. Lee in Object to be Destroyed described the

excavation project, Descending Steps for Batan, thus:

Through the simple ritual of digging he [Matta-Clark] collapsed

the work of art in the present with a figure who was now part
of the past. In a place conventionally reserved for the new, a
memorial to his brother was staged and was subsequently
absorbed into the gallery. 113

Here, the assured domesticity of the ordered architectural

place of the gallery is called upon to include the alien via
the object (by which I mean Matta-Clark's completed activity
- the non-ument of his excavation) of mourning through an
act of architectural ingestion. What persists as the phantom
part of this inclusive event is an understanding that the
incorporation of the memorial or non-ument in the structure
of the gallery does not connote an act of absorption. The
architectural body of the gallery finds what is inherent in
the exclusive otherness of death impossible to assimilate
and, as such, foreign to its own security. Wigley indicates
that Derrida, in 'Limited Inc., abc remarks:

The object is appropriated to keep it as other, as foreign, as a

foreign body within one's own body, taken into the body
precisely to stop it from contaminating and disfiguring the body
by keeping it withdrawn in indefinite quarantine: retaining the

112 Freud, 'The Uncanny', p. 357.

113 Lee, Object to be Destroyed, p. 207.

237
 object within itself but as something excluded, as a foreign
body is impossible 114
which to assimilate and must be rejected.

Coming at almost the end of Matta-Clark's working life, and

just before his own death, Descending Steps for Batan was
not as already indicated, an isolated event of memorial but
had been preceded by a project with similar concerns and in
particular, the cogency of the entropic (Time WellICherry
Tre e) ".
As the excavation of the gallery floor it followed the
provisional trajectory of the earlier project, diverging only
to reconsider the entropic integration of an entity, a
'something' secreted in the foundations of the building, in
order to articulate the peculiarity of the void as the
antithesis of stability and the principality of all that is
explainable through reasonableness. Caution is noted here
when considering the seeming inversion of the foundational
with the abysmal by following Derrida's precept of tracing
which draws attention to what he describes as 'the
bottomless pit of failed chronologies'.
The project not only mirrors (possibly the term inverts
is more appropriate) Matta-Clark's brother's precipitous fall
from the studio but in some way extends the
window
trajectory of the body beyond its inevitable contact with the
ground (the obdurate materiality of the telluric).

114 Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction, p. 1 44, quoted from

Derrida, 'Limited Inc., abc... '(& found in Derrida, Limited Inc, trans. S.
Weber, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press 1988. p. 77).
115 Entropy as the measurement of energy in a mechanical or chemical
system identifies a force which is significant because it remains
unavailable for the performance of work but exists as the internal
motion of the molecular. It is generally interpreted as a measure of
loss of order or decay through degradation, and understood in
thermodynamic terms, proffers at most, a kind of stasis which may be
perceived as in some way increasing only through a cold or lethargic
dissipation, which is understood as a progressive disintegration of
form that is seemingly irreversible.

238
10

239
In excavating a stairwell the artist makes provision (or
perhaps a post-preparation) for extending Batan's 'fall'
beyond the 'ground' through the realisation of a tangible
mechanism by which a fall might be averted (a set of
stairs). 116With this in mind, we might also consider that the
introduction of any means of traversing from one level to
another mediates for the possibility of such a perambulation
operating in both directions.
Does the construction/excavation of a stairwell into
the floor of Galerie Yvon Lambert, Paris in 1977 operate as

116 Note here that the significance of the 'stairwell' extends into Mark Z.
Danielewski's text House of Leaves, where it is the most significant
element of the labyrinth which changes dimensions throughout the
exploration. This will be considered more fully in Chapter 4 of this
text. The form of the stair is also explored in a further project
realised at Documenta 6 in Kassal in Germany in 1977 by Matta-
Clark: Jacob's Ladder*.
*Note here the fraternal rivalry and deception (of the younger brother
at the expense of the elder) at the core of the biblical story of Jacob
and Esau from which the story of Jacob's Ladder originates. In the
Book of Genesis, Jacob dreams of a ladder while sleeping in the
desert, on which angels ascend and descend* and at the apex of
which Jehovah expounds on Jacob's future as the 'father' of Israel. It
is noted in the monograph, Gordon Matta-Clark, that: 'He chose
Jacob's Ladder for its title, which calls on the Old Testament for an
analogy not only to a striving for redemption but also a disastrous
rivalry between brothers with one failing from grace of both his father
and his god' (p. 106). The project was originally conceived as a five-
armed rope structure strung between three smokestacks 300 feet high
and 460 feet apart. Supporting steel cables stretching from the base
of one stack to the apex of another enclosed a mesh which 'hovered'
some 15 stories from the ground. However, practicalities prevailed
and Matta-Clark settled for a single stack with a descending mesh
which visitors were invited to climb down.
The section of House of Leaves where the relationship between
Will and Tom Navidson is discussed is broken into sections (forming
the configuration of a ladder) by the elongation of the word rzz. It is
noted that the word rzz is etymologically rooted in the Hebrew word
yitrozzu (meaning to tear apart and to shatter) in order to emphasise
Jacob and Esau's struggle. Derrida comments in Memoirs of the
Blind: 'How does one choose between two brothers? Between two
twins, in sum, since Jacob was Esau's twin, even though he was born
after him and his brother sold him his birthright (he "despised his
birthright")'** (p. 23). What we might recognise as the seeming
assurance of a stairway as a means of safely traversing a 'verticality'
is called into question in Danielewski's House of Leaves through a
discontinuity of dimensionality based in psychological spacing.
Ascent and Descent will be discussed further in relation to
Descending Steps for Batan.
Quoted by Derrida from the Book of Genesis, 25: 34.

240
both a means of alleviating Batan's fall beyond the mere
restrictions of corporeal contact and its inevitable
consequences as well as offering a way out or a means by
which he might return?
That the excavation is not merely a hole - an abysmal
incursion into the floor of the gallery space, but
significantly a means by which a 'some-body' might affect a
traversal in either direction is pertinent to the reading of the
work and extends the interpretation of Matta-Clark's
transgressive events of visceration beyond that of a socio-
political act against any prevailing system. However, the
specificity of this particular work (its location) in a gallery
rather than in Matta-Clark's preferred locations in derelict
buildings should not be lost here. The fact that this work
very deliberately and very literally undermines the
mechanism by which artworks can be exhibited (the gallery)
already implicates the project as an act of violence against
a system by which artists and their work are organised and
marketed. The work itself, though poses a problem for such
a system in that it refuses to conform to the recognised
parameters by which the private gallery system operates
and funds itself. 117

117 It is noted here that Corinne Diserens, in 'The Greene Street Years'
(published in the catalogue to the 1992-3 exhibition, Gordon Matta-
Clark, and presented at the Serpentine Gallery), comments that:
'Matta-Clark tried to go along two roads or the
- ecstasy ascending
mystic way, and ecstasy descending or the civic way - in order to
create his work for the city. One might speak of a double
transcendence' (p. 360, added emphasis).

241
 Let us consider for a moment that the work as an
event -a performance by the artist that exists for a period
of time (the process of its making and the duration of the
exhibiting of the work) which cannot be commodified in the
way that directly profits the gallery itself unless it is in
some way transposed from pure event into a documented
resource which falls in to line with the system which might
profit from it. 118
Not only would this act of violence stake a claim for it
as a critique of the gallery's status as the arbiter of and
temple to artistic endeavour, but also introduce an alteric
non-element - the so-called non-ument into the preserve of
conservation and aesthetic stability. As Pamela M. Lee
points out in Object to be Destroyed: 'In a place
conventionally reserved for the new, a memorial to his
brother was staged and was subsequently absorbed into the
space of the gallery. "19
The fact
that the work existed within the specificity of
a temporal framework should not exclude an interpretation
which draws on further anomalies, by which its credibility as
a memorial might be addressed outside that structure and

118 It is noted here that all Matta-Clark's projects survive largely as

documentation (there are some exceptions where fragments (what
Robert Smithson would term non-sites) were retained and exhibited
from particular interventions; sections of Splitting and Bingo (both
1974) were later shown in galleries), and therefore the means by
which we can even begin to discuss his work is based in the
intangibility of this kind of recollection. I also mention here two
comparable works by Yves Klein (1958) and Michael Archer (1974).
The former realised a piece entitled The Void (Le Vide), which
consisted of an empty exhibition space heralded by a private view at
which guests imbibed blue-coloured cocktails (the result being that
any 'evidence' of the exhibition was manifest in the colour of the
urine of all who attended and drank and which remained blue for days
afterwards). Archer's project involved the removal of a wall in the
Claire Copley Gallery in Los Angeles which revealed the office space
whereby the 'business aspect' of the gallery mechanism was exposed
to the scrutiny of the audience.
119 Lee, Object to be Destroyed, p. 207.

242
with which undecidibilities might inform a reading of the
project.
Matta-Clark's relationshipwith his brother must remain
at the forefront of any interpretation of Descending Steps
for Batan and the significance of the biological proximity of
that relation (the knowledge that they were twins) appears
to be crucial. As already stated, Batan was the younger of
the two and, according to their mother, was the most
conspicuously artistically talented as a child. A suggestion
of sibling rivalry is perhaps not without some merit and the
growing recognition of Matta-Clark's creative work against
the evident historical eclipse of Batan's artistic aspirations
may have some bearing on the latter's eventual suicide and
his choice for the location of that successful attempt (the
window of his brother's studio). 120

120 The issue of sibling rivalry is brought into sharp focus in Mark Z.
Danielewski's House of Leaves and will be considered further in
Chapter 4 of this text. Suffice to say that Danielewski explores the
Navidson brothers' (Tom and Will) relationship with regard to the
evolving complexity of the house and the subsequent explorations of
its labyrinthine hallways. Both brothers are in some way literally
ingested or swallowed by the house but only Will is 'vomited' back
out into the world, as it were, whereas Tom is 'vomited' into the body
of the house and is 'retained' by it. (The word house is continually
printed in blue (a light grey in the paperback) and this formatting is
never clearly explained. The implication is of some kind of hyperlink
that may refer to the text's original publication on the net, but
perhaps more significantly, as the text unfolds, it refers to the link of
the house with the alteric labyrinth that emerges - what we might
refer to as a hyperlink to the unheimlich. )

243
His early artistic precociousness identified by their mother
was undermined by mental instability (and his elder
brother's developing career), and therefore a literal
interpretation of Descending Steps for Batan might infer
some kind of fraternal exorcism on the part of the elder
brother, while in some way simultaneously proffering a
portal by which the spectral younger sibling might navigate
to and from the abysmal. 121

The particularity of Matta-Clark's entitling of the work

Descending makes clear a directional imperative in the
piece which does not necessarily imply some kind of
concurrence with a decision which led towards the
termination of life, but in its aftermath, an attempt to
identify a conduit by which and for which that life might
resonate.
The precariousness of the edifice/corporeal is brought
into sharp focus when attention is drawn by this most
dissective scrutiny to the formulations which underpin and,
as such, are open to such violent transgressions on the
understanding that the begetting of any formal
architectonics (body or otherwise) must be forged in the
violence of a kind of repression. That Matta-Clark's

121 1 would also like to note here a work by Matta-Clark realised in 1973
and entitled Threshole-Bronx Floors: Double Doors. This work
consisted of a series of removals which opened up the cubicle-like
interiors of urban domiciles that had formerly been sequestered from
one another (specifically in this piece, the removal of the floor on
either side of an interior door). Matta-Clark is quoted in the recently
published monograph of his work as saying that these transgressive
acts were: 'Completion through removal. Abstraction of surfaces.
Not-building, not-to-build, not-built-space' (Gordon Matta-Clark,
p. 58). Note here earlier remarks made about sibling rivalry as
broached by Derrida in Memoirs of the Blind. In a letter of 5 July
1992 quoted by Corinne Diserens in her essay, 'The Greene Street
Years', and sent to IVAM by Matta-Clark's former partner Carol
Goodden, she comments: 'Gurdjieff was the philosopher he was
enamored of. Duchamp was a silent force. Matta (father) was his
psychological drive. Batan was his guilt' (p. 359, added emphasis).

244
subversive and almost guerrilla-like activities drew attention
to the inconsistencies in a historical rhetoric of urban social
architectural practice is concomitant with a wider challenge
to the systernisation of the domicile to the advantage of
corporative enterprise and at the expense of the
particularity of individuation and need. 122
Equally, a project like Descending Steps for Batan not
only questions the status of the gallery space as an
appropriate location for the viewing of the artwork, but also
in some way draws attention to the social condition whereby
mental instability might be considered and ingested (and
not necessarily absorbed) into the social system. It also
questions how such psychological criteria proffer a critique
of the mechanisms for assimilation through the consistency
of social exclusion and alienation. 123
In interrupting the recognised order of the exhibition
space, Matta-Clark not only addresses the issue of how that
space functions and who it is for, but in excavating a
memorial as an inscription of the void to commemorate the
untimely demise of his younger brother, he also scrutinises
the social imperative to locate mental illness.
The particularity of his own act of mourning implies a
wider perception of the problematic demarcation of
interiority and exteriority by not only identifying

122 Paul Virilio notes in Bunker Archaeology the shift in military

architecture from the geometric organisation of the landscape to the
construction of subterranean excavations - fortified non-uments. He
states: 'It was no longer in distance but rather in burial that the man
of war found the parry to the onslaught of his adversary; retreat was
now into the very thickness of the planet and no longer along its
surface' (p. 38).
123 Michel Foucault in Madness and Civilisation makes the point that the
eruption of skin diseases such as scabies, eczema or small pox ' put
an end to a fit of madness; the corruption that left the viscera and
the brain, to spread on the surface of the body, where it was
released externally' (p. 164, added emphasis).

245
commemoration as the complication of the rational relation
between presence and absence, but also through the
conditional arbitration of mental illness as essentially
alteric, and therefore sustained and maintained socially and
geographically on the periphery of the organised state (the
Polis).
Matta-Clark's abysmal fenestrating encryption of the
memory of his brother into the foundational determination of
not only the literal structure of the gallery building but also
into the metaphorical framework that the figure of the
gallery implied (its social status as part of the wider
organisation of the polis), introduced the commemoration of
the crypt and its spectral articulation as an integral aspect
of the phenomenon of architectonics. The key issues
prevailing in much of Matta-Clark's oeuvre addressed the
condition of a kind of wholesale social injustice which
mediated the inherent violence complicit in the organised
infrastructure and determination of social space by
corporate bodies. As such, this violent repression of
individuation in favour of the imposition of an interpretation
of a common good through the hierarchical dispensation of
predetermined order was ripe for critique.
Rather than set about demolishing these values,
Matta-Clark's interventions set about to engage in an
almost dissective scrutiny via the operation of the hand (the
manoeuvre) that is perhaps less of an operative procedure
to navigate the carnality of the polis, uncover the canker
and remove it, but more a topological determination to draw
attention to the parasitic cystitis as concomitant to that
order as not merely determined by it but determinant to any
ordering (its spectrality).

246
 Through the articulation of a visceral event, Matta-
Clark did not seek to uncover what is necessarily unknown
in the sense of a fundamentally new discovery but rather to
illuminate through a seemingly violent act what has perhaps
been forgotten, repressed or merely dismissed as
irrelevant. The opening up through the revelation of the cut
can be seen as instructive, in that it reveals the skeletal
organisation that determines structure at its optimum as a
structure. However, I would that this manoeuvre
propose is
perhaps more complex than the fenestration of a membrane,
which would merely lead to the observation of what lies
beyond that perimeter.
A more appropriate term might perhaps draw on the
inherent characteristics of both a rift, in the sense of a cut
or rupture in the fabrication of an ordered edifice, a break
in its continuity, and a fold, in the sense of a change or a
ruck in what is continuous (an aleatory point or fraenum) 124

that is part of any continuity without merely being an

absorbed intoit - what I will cautiously term a ructure.
Matta-Clark's interventions do not encise to draw
attention to an alterity that is merely transcendent in the

124 A fraenum is a fold of mucous membrane or skin, especially under

the tongue, checking the motion of an organ. The significance of this
as a corporeal mechanism for articulation (speech) should not be lost
here. I would also like to mention here the tympanum (as discussed
in Derrida's essay 'Tympan', found in Margins of Philosophy) as the
means by which sound resonates in the eardrum (via interaction with
the hammer) as well as being intrinsic to balance. Its membranous
structure functions as a kind of perimeter which allows sound to
resonate off it so it can be heard. In a footnote in Tympan, Derrida
states: 'The hammer, as is well known, belongs to the chain of small
bones, along with the anvil and stirrup. It is placed on the internal
surface of the tympanic membrane. It always has the role of
mediation and communication: it transmits sonic vibrations to the
chain of small bones, and then to the inner ear' (p. xiii). The paradox
(as Derrida points out via Bichat) is that the hammer protects the
tympanum while at the same time acting upon it - without it the
tympanum could be damaged by the powerful vibrations set off by
louder noises, so the hammer muffles and weakens while
simultaneously transmitting sound.

247
sense of the revelation of what is essentially unattainable,
but to recognise any corporeality as integral to the
observation of what appears to be outside. This is not
metaphysically exclusive, or understood as merely
excluded, but inclusively exclusive understood as
encryptive. It does not say that there is other that is always
already other - an exclusive alterity beyond all
predetermined remits, but that the other is always already
'here' (not in any sense of a presence and therefore not
occupying any locale that might be understood as
fundamentally topographic). It is encrypted into any
architectonics as part of its determination to function as a
structure without conforming to any structural motifs that
might merely restrain it from what it can do. The ructure is
neither just a hole in the sense of a rupture or a fold in the
sense of a ruck.
The crypt in Derridian terms does not set about to
bring mourning and the dead into the house, but to suggest
that the event of mourning and the manifestation of the
dead (the spectre) were always and already integral to the
formation of the house and were not later appendages to be
bolted on, as it were. As Mark Wigley states: 'The effects of
place and taking place depend on the para SitiC125 rules of
the crypt, by which that which is officially expelled over the
line is secretly appropriated in order to hold the line. ý126
Matta-Clark's removals (the parts of his interventions
which became 'non-sites') do not just demolish but relocate,

125 The parasitic occupier of the cyst suggests a further reading of the
operation of encyst-ence. It is no longer mere 'morbid matter' but has
the appearance of something far more sinister - the double
manoeuvre of host and parasite engaged in an 'alien symbiotic event'
of sustenance and introjection.
126 Added emphasis. Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction, p. 184.

248
extending the plane of immanence of each project to
encrypt themselves in other unexplored locations that
articulate possibilities beyond the sum of their parts. That
Descending Steps for Batan is in one sense a literal non-
urnent to commemorate the demise of his sibling should not
necessarily be the exclusive interpretation of this project
whose potential extends (as with all his projects) beyond
the individual conglomerations of Matta-Clark's life. It not
only says something about his memory, and is in some way
the realisation of how that memory might function in
corporeal terms, but demands scrutiny of a wider locale for
the memorial -a question of where that event of
commemoration might take place.
This might take the form (and I use this term
cautiously, given that what is essentially taking place here
is without form, in any historical recognition of the word) of
what we might refer to as an encyst-ence and which we
might define as the event of or the spacing of the ructure. 127
Here, the corporeality of the cyst provides a useful analogy
with the encryptive dissection of Matta-Clark's various
projects and interventions.

127 Encyst is defined as the event of enclosure in a cyst.

249
11

250
The operation of spacing, as previously discussed,
introjects a lingual reading of the artwork that significantly
blurs any boundaries which might differentiate between a
clear distinction of temporal and spatial Motif S. 128

By defining Matta-Clark's operations by the terms of

the unheimlich manoeuvre as already indicated, we
anticipate a complication which recognises the cystic as

128 Note here the significance of the cyst and its parallel with the
historical alteric rhetoric of the manclorla. This is the egg- or almond-
shaped aureole (from the Italian, mandel for almond) around the
figure of the resurrected Christ or the Virgin at assumption, and
portrayed in many painterly representations to indicate their
otherness once they have transcended earthly corporeality. However,
they maintain a connection with humanity by retaining the outward
appearance of the body and can be recognised as such. The
mandorla indicates difference/separateness while simultaneously
articulating similitude.
The significance of the almond is also found in Celan. John
Felstiner comments in his text, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, that:
'the oval-eyed sweet or bitter fruit had signalled Jewishness - his
mother's or his people's' (p. 260). The significance is clearly indicted
in the poem 'Mandorla' (1957):
In the almond-what stands in the almond?
The Nothing.
In the almond stands Nothing.
There it stands and stands.
In Nothing-who stands there? The King.
There stands the King, the King.
There he stands and stands.
Jewish curls, no gray for you.
And your eye-whereto stands your eye?
Your eye stands opposite the almond.
Your eye, the Nothing it stands opposite.
It stands behind the King.
So it stands and stands.
Human curls, no gray for you
Empty almond, royal blue. *
Felstiner notes that what stands in the almond is not mere nothing
(Nichts) but das Nichts - Nothingness or 'the Nothing'. What is
heard here is the paradox of emptiness and pure Being in
Heidegger's question in What is Metaphysics? - 'How stands it with
the Nothing? ' He suggests that the Nothing here is the Nothing of
God and for Celan, is transformed into an annihilated people (the
Jews) and an unknowable God. He also notes that Celan's use of
Menschenlocke (human curls) shifts the emphasis from specifically
Juden (Jewish) to Menschen (human) as an attempt to work against
the Nazis' racist split-off of the Jews from all humanity (ibid.,
pp. 180-1). We may wish to remind ourselves here of earlier
remarks made in Chapter 2 of this text, regarding Heidegger's
humanism and the so-called 'agricultural remark'.

251
firstly, an event linked to the metaphor of corporeality and
therefore its association with a structural integrity
concomitant with the architectural that it also seeks to
critique, and secondly, an appraisal of the encryptive as
fundamental to the realisation of any operation. The ructure
articulates an event or operation that is essentially one of
continuity rather than fracture, and the integrity of any
continuous surface (whether it be architectural or
otherwise), remains a crucial to its determination. In carnal
terms, that which is parasitic cannot function without the
continuation of a symbiotic relationship with the host and,
as such, the host is similarly dependent on that equality.
Descending Steps for Batan and Time WellICherry
Tree offer a kind of temporal bracketing which punctuates
Matta-Clark's artistic career and in some way locate that
period in a larger cystic operation that encompasses the
complete oeuvre. Matta-Clark's play with the seeming
assurance of corporate and domestic determining is
concomitant with our earlier definition of unheimlich, in that
what makes the unfamiliar so strange is its very familiarity.
The cystic relation (what I now term encyst-ence) is
essentially parasitic and therefore symbiotic, and the
unheimlich manoeuvre as the complication rather than the
juxtaposition of familiarity with its other poses a series of
questions about the nature of the ructure. In some way the
introjection of the temporal as a guiding principle for any
unheimlich operation would seem to be not only relevant but
also significant.
The entropic condition of a work like Time WellICherry
Tree literally motivates the work as a continuous activity
(even seemingly once entombed in the basement of Greene

252
Street). The dissipation of its provisionally heightened
energised status at the commencement of the work (the
operation of the artist being the most identifiable
manifestation), does not merely reduce to mere nothing but
follows an entropic cipher that is intrinsic to the evolution of
the work, which understands it as not completed by a kind
of reduction of any visual record of the piece (see
illustration) which demeans its process to merely a kind of
cystic entombment of morbid matter as the closure of the
project. This morselation as in some way incomplete
indicated a further, perhaps uncharted trajectory, which may
have been anticipated by Matta-Clark and he may have
engaged with its entropic force in ways that earlier works
like Photo-fry (1969) 129had alluded to. Descending Steps for
Batan made the seeming endlessness of the activity of
mourning the explicit theme of the work largely by
undermining the redemptive overtone of the memorial
through the abysmal burrowing to nowhere. 130
In the way that Paul Virilio suggests that the bunkers
of the Atlantic Wall are the monuments to the decline and
demise of the Nazi dream, whereby the military and political
offensives were relinquished in favour of a strategic
defence, so the coherence of the non-ument is not founded
in the foundational which emphasises the prerogative of the

129 Realised in 1969 as part of the exhibition, Documentation, and

consisting of a performance by Matta-Clark who fried Polaroid
photographs of a Christmas tree, culminating in frying pan and 'fried'
photos staying in the gallery for the duration of the exhibition.
130 Jacob's Ladder's articulation of descent differed from Descending
Steps for Batan, in that it provided a speculation on redemption
which was questionably different from the encryptive encyst-ence of
the latter as an alteric excavation of the gallery floor.

253
summit-base relationship, but in the balance of the centre
of gravity. 131

The function of this very special structure is to assure

survival, to be a shelter for man in a critical period, the place
where he buries himself to subsist. If it thus belongs to the
crypt that prefigures resurrection, the bunker belongs too to
the ark that saves, to the vehicle that puts one out of danger
by crossing over mortal hazards. 132

Throughout the years beginning with the entropic Greene

Street projects until his untimely death in 1978, Matta-Clark
made films and videos that highlighted what have been
described as 'his continual investigations into and
obsessions with window and wall space, light, trees and the
cities underground, always thinking in three dimensions at
once and dealing with movement from dark to light, heaven
to hell 133Corinne Diserens comments that Matta-Clark's
.j
film projects drew attention to actual duration as a means of
eliminating the illusion of another form of duration realised
via a more traditional notion of narrative exposition:

131 Virilio argues in Bunker Archaeology that the substitution of concrete

for the 'discontinuous' construction methods of bricks and mortar in
the realisation of the bunker indicates that the structure 'floats' on
the ground. 'In concrete casting there are no intervals, joints -
everything is compact; the uninterrupted pouring avoids to the utmost
the repairs that would weaken the general cohesion of the work'
(p. 45).
132 Ibid., p. 46.
133 Diserens, 'The Greene Street Years', p. 360. (Italicised portion of the
text is a direct quote from another interview with Jene Highstein, a
colleague of Matta-Clark's from the Anarchitecture group. )

254
 The process of shooting became the structure of the film, the
use of editing or montage being minimal The power of real
...
time becomes paradoxically disorientating and bewildering. We
have to orientate ourselves to what we already know. 134

The two films, Substrait (1976) and Sous-sol de Paris

(1977), set the precedent for Matta-Clark's subterranean
cinematic perambulations as a negotiation of both
resistance and mourning. As transgressive events that

resist linear focus and narrative progression, they embrace

the stratification of historical detritus and its cyclical
horizontality by navigating the topological characteristics of
the urban sub-structure, anticipating the labyrinthine as an
architectonics of encryption.

134 Added emphasis. Ibid., p. 360. In her essay 'Laying Bare', Marianne
Brouwer discusses Matta-Clark's films: 'In his movies of the
underground spaces of New York and Paris, Matta-Clark explores the
subcity's excavated tunnel spaces: aqueducts, storm sewers and
pumping stations, the Catacombs, the tracks of Grand Central Station
and the foundations of the cathedral of St John the Divine ...
Again
and again, there are references to the "underground" ("the city's
sexual underground") as sexually related to the house seen as "the
body's shell as well as a metaphor for both body and psyche"'
(p. 364).

255
In particular, Paris as the torsion of a locale of
revolutionary urbanisation is presented as a polis
determined by the catacomb where the foundational topos
are the (com)plication of the lacuna by which the leakage of
waste matter is directed away ('swept out'), and the flexure

of the tomb, where lie the mortified remains of the long

dead. 135

12

Matta-Clark's experiments with film develop the unheimlich

manoeuvre from the topos of a non-ument via the duration

of the cinematic form. They refute linearity and narrative to

explore stratification with all the implication and explication

of temporality. Here the myriad pathways (Holzweg) of the

labyrinthine thread their way through the tomblike

substructure of the homely, undermining the hestial with the

eventuation of death. The momentary aspect of Time

135 Of historical note here, the French revolutionary leader of the

Montagnard faction, Jean Paul Marat (1743-93) hid in the cellars and
sewers of Paris where he contracted the horrible skin disease which
forced him to spend a great deal of time in a warm bath to soothe the
condition and in which he was murdered by the right-wing Girondin
sympathiser, Charlotte Corday. The character Will Navidson in Mark
Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves also suffers from a serious skin
condition prior to his excursions into the house, which unaccountably
disappears (is 'cured') after his last exploration/search for his
missing brother Tom. 'On camera, Navidson treats what he refers to
as "his rotten feet". As we can clearly see, the tops are puffy and in
some places as red as clay. Furthermore, all his toe nails are
horribly cracked, disfigured and yellow. "Perpetuated, " Navidson
informs us, "by a nasty fungus two decades worth of doctors finally
ended up calling S-T-R-E-S-S. " Sitting by himself on the edge of the
tub, blood-stained socks draped over the edge, he carefully spreads
a silky ointment around what he glibly calls his "light fantastic toe"'
(Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves, p. 83).

256
WellICherry Tree and Descending Steps for Batan refute the
closure of the monumental (the restitution of the hearth via
the structuring of the hermetic) but persist in the
apparitional shadow of documentation - the temporality of
past event haunting present and future. Matta-Clark's films
extend the trajectory of the unheimlich manoeuvre into a
more specific interrogation of the temporality of the tomb as
a de-centered labyrinthine complication. This poses a
question of orientation that cannot be understood through
machination of spatiality, but via the spectre of alterity (the
'outside' of duration interrupting chronological linearity
determined by the spatial).

257
 Chapter 4

The Orientation' of the Labyrinthine

The direct time-image is the phantom which has

always haunted the cinema, but it took modern cinema
to give body to this phanto M. 2

[T]he compression of space, the power of the

imagination to decompress that space the house as a
trope for the unlimited and the unknowable etc., etc.
On a strictly visceral level, they provide ample shocks
and curiosities. 3

Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other

civilisations without having explored his own labyrinth

of dark passages and secret chambers, and without

finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has
4
sealed .

To comprehend the labyrinthine is perhaps to

misunderstand its true integrity as its very condition
articulates a plurality, which aggravates sense and the
senses to the point where any attempt at orientation falls
into a kind of disequilibrium.

1 Orientation - the act or process of orienting or being orientated

via arrangement or alignment or the change of position of organs,
organelles or organisms in response to external stimuli. Its
etymology is found in the French word orienter - to cause to face
or point east, specifically to build a church or temple with a
longitudinal axis pointing eastward with the chief altar at the
eastern end; to ascertain bearings in relation to points on a
compass: to cause the axes of molecules to assume the same
direction.
2 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 41. In The Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky,
Mark Le Fanu refers to cinema (seemingly referencing Derrida) as
the science of ghosts.
3 Added emphasis. Danielewski, House of Leaves, p. 6. It is worth
noting here that throughout the text, the word house is continually
printed in blue (a light grey in the paperback) and this formatting
is never clearly explained. The implication is, however, of some
kind of hyperlink that may refer to the text's original publication
on the net, but perhaps more significantly, as the text unfolds it
refers to the link of the house with the alteric labyrinth that
emerges - what we might refer to as a hyperlink to the unheimlich.
4 Added emphasis. Lem, Solaris, p. 164.

258
If comprehension is about a certain kind of completion
and finitude as a means of navigation precludes
ambiguity, then perhaps the insistence of plurality in any
labyrinthine determination demands recognition of
encyst-ence as its most cryptic possibility. The Labyrinth
is also the lair of an alteric 'monster' which haunts the
myriad of passageways and dead ends as a transgressor
of stability -a quotient spectre interrupting ratio and
universality.
The form of the labyrinth first appears in antiquity
through what we might refer to as the 'mythological
architectonics' of what can be seen simultaneously as the
undisturbed rest of the sepulchre or tomb 5, the secrecy of
the maze and also the unresolved conundrum of the
puzzle. What is consistent with all such realisations, and
is fundamental to any interpretation of the labyrinthine, is
the significance of the disruption of sensibility - the
essential disequilibrium of its variant possible
manifestations - and which indicates an alteric
multiplicity of potential routes and passages (Holzweg)
that initiate a topology of non-linear relations. The
aspects of incarceration and imprisonment that are also
concomitant with such a (dis)location should also not be

5 Sepulchre, a place of burial or tomb, a receptacle for religious

relics (especially an altar); Middle English, sepulchre; from old
French/Latin, sepulcrum or sepulchrum; from sepalire, to bury and
akin to Greek, hepein, to care for; and Sanskrit saparyati, he
honours. The pertinence of the chthonic should not be lost here in
the tellurian aspect of the crypt. In 'Mother Right', Bachofen
argues, 'mourning is itself a religious cult dedicated to Mother
Earth, practiced by barbarian peoples in subterranean, sunless
chambers' (p. 155, added emphasis). Tomb: an excavation in
which a corpse is buried; a place of internment; a house, chamber
of vault for the dead; a building or structure resembling a tomb.
Etymological root in Middle English tombe, from Anglo-French,
tumba, meaning a sepulchral mound (from the Greek tymbos,
which is perhaps akin to the Latin tumere, to be swollen (I note
here the link between swollenness and the cyst; see Chapter 3 of
this text, with particular reference to encyst-ence and the
mandorla).

259
overlooked. 6 What is required is to exact a thread or,
more appropriately, a plurality of threads by which to
commence the topological operation of an ambulation of
its myriad pathways.

6 In Inside the Third Reich, Albert Speer stated that: 'Later, in my

many years of imprisonment, I discovered what it meant to live
under great psychological pressure. Only then did I realise that
Hitler's life had borne a great resemblance to that of a prisoner.
His bunker, although it did not yet have the tomblike proportions it
was to assume in July 1944, had the thick walls and ceilings of a
prison' (p. 302, added emphasis).

260
These, however, are never merely enunciations of the
reliability of what might be conceived as a rational
navigation that is reliant on the organisation of what
would be grasped topographically as a certain kind of
cartography: the knowledge and skill of a particular kind
of guide. 7 As will be indicated, to negotiate the labyrinth
is to anticipate a certain sensory disruption as part of the
operation by which it must be, traversed. Once it has
been (re)solved (that is, the puzzle of its complex of
passageways and the confrontation with its 'monstrous
occupant'), its threat is lifted and its cryptology no longer
a precipitant risk.

7 HeroclotuS (c. 484-43OBC) gave an account of the labyrinth in his

second book of history: 'I saw a series of chambers myself,
passing through, and speak from my own observation, whereas I
learned of the underground series by report. For the Egyptian
authorities were utterly unwilling to show them saying they
contained burials both of the kings who had caused the labyrinth
to be built, and of the secret crocodiles' History, Book 11,148).
Manetho, writing in the third century BC, noted in his list of
Egyptian kings the fourth, called Lamares, who 'built the Labyrinth
in the Arsinoite Nome as a tomb for himself'. Nome, from the
Greek nomos, a pasture or an administrative district (note the link
here with nomad and therefore Deleuze's and Guattari's term
nomadology). Pomponius Mela, writing in the first century AD,
described the building of Psammetich (a late Egyptian king
according to Pliny) thus: 'It has one descending way into it, and
contains within almost innumerable paths, which have many
convolutions twisting hither and thither. These paths, however,
cause great perplexity both because of their continual winding and
because of their porticoes which often reveres their direction,
continually running through one circle after another and
continually turning and retracing steps as far as they have gone
forwards with the result that the Labyrinth is fraught with
confusion by reason of its perpetual meandering' (Chorographia,
Book 1,9,55). The significance of a guide with specialised
knowledge of the topological potential of the labyrinth is clearly
linked to the character of the stalker in Tarkovsky's film of the
same name. Also, in Stalker, the room at the heart of the zone
functions as the unnatural locale: as with the Minotaur, that which
is encrypted in its passageways. With reference to the tomb,
Albert Speer, in his memoirs Inside the Third Reich, referred to
Hitler's bunker under the chancellery in Berlin thus: 'the main
bunker, whose rebuilding had caused Hitler to be in my barracks
that fateful day of July 20, * was completed. If ever a building can
be considered the symbol of a situation, this bunker was it. From
the outside it looked like an ancient Egyptian tomb' (p. 391, added
emphasis).
*This date refers to the attempt on Hitler's life in 1944, known as
'the July Plot'.

261
In the case of the Minoan labyrinth, as purportedly
designed and constructed by Daedelus, its threat was as
the habitation (incarceration) of the unnatural Minotaur,
and once that threat was lifted (the violent demise of the
half-man, half-bull at the hands of the Athenian hero,
Theseus), its potential (its force) was diminished.
How this predicate force was realised became a
question of the inauguration of a fear of that which was
considered most unnatural and the maintaining of what
was most fearful as the encrypted heart (the de-centre)
of the labyrinthine structure. In the case of the labyrinth
of Minos, it was constructed to house the unnatural
offspring of an illicit encounter between the king's wife,
Pasiphae, and a bull. The architectonics of the labyrinth
as a structural provision of the edificial aesthetic, was
constructed to house an unnatural alteric 'apparition' -
that which should not exist, stalking its hallways as a
ructure of sensibility and ratio. The minotaur is
simultaneously neither bull nor man and yet is also both
animal and human (diff6rance) -a spectral anomaly
haunting the complex of matrixal order.
Latterly, it became the site of an ordered ritualistic
revenant sacrifice every nine years to sustain (and
maintain) what was unnatural.

262
This was seemingly the preferred option, and that which
superseded what might be considered the logical path of
obliteration (annihilation) and absorption of the alien. 8
This chapter seeks to take an errant trip through the
variant articulations of the labyrinth in an attempt to
comprehend it as labyrinthine. In so doing, it seeks to
negotiate a traversal directed by a Deleuzian image of
time as an intercise, which defies the subordination of
temporality to movement and the spatial (what might be
interpreted as the a priori of Kantian space). It identifies
a plane of immanence, which will be recognised as not
merely an indeterminate field of possibilities, but as a
plane where the so-called genetic conditions, in which
and by which possibilities are created, exist. John
Flaxman, in his introduction to the collection of essays

8 It is worthy of note here that Deleuze points out in Nietzsche and

Philosophy that the destruction of the Minotaur at the hands of
Theseus; the representation of the so-called higher man (the
sublime), was a triumph of the heroic over the tellurian and
illustrates very clearly Bachofen's historical point as extrapolated
in 'Mother Right', that the matriarchal/tellurian world (represented
by the Minotaur as not merely a creature of the earth confined to
a subterranean world, but also the assertion of matriarchy as a
sexually potent force conceived through the unnatural lust of
Minos' wife for the bull - the Minotaur's 'father') was usurped,
superseded and undermined by the later ideality of
Apollonian/heroic era of Hellenic Greece (personified by the
heroic Athenian, Theseus). The Dionysian strand linked to the
myth via Ariadne is identified by Deleuze, via Nietzsche, to be the
ratification of the ultimate triumph of possibility and the
affirmation of becoming (the Dionysian) over reason and logic (the
Apollonian). Also of mythological note here is that the sexual
encounter between Minos' wife and the bull that resulted in the
birth of the Minotaur was a punishment meted out to King Minos
by the god Poseidon when the king refused to sacrifice a great
white bull that had been sent to him. The god made Minos' wife
Pasiphae fall in love with a bull (it is noted here that some
sources not only cite Daedelus as the architect of the labyrinth
but also the designer of the hollow wooden cow used by Pasiphae
to entice the bull into a sexual encounter). The encyst-ence of the
labyrinthine borne from an imperative for disguise in which to
deceive, whereby Daedelus is no longer just the creator of the
sepulchre to house the unnatural Minotaur (the shame of Minos
and Pasiphae), but also complicit in the original deceit that
brought that which must become a secret into being before its
determination as a secret. The retention of the alien as alien
through introjection has already been discussed in Chapters 2 and
3 of this text - it suffices to reiterate here the discussion of the
pharmakos as scapegoat, the secret of the polis in Chapter 2, and
introjection in Chapter 3.

263
titled The Brain is the Screen, argues that cinema augers
a path to such a plane, which supersedes the limits of
normal perception - what he refers to as 'the
detterritorialising of the classical coordinates of
philosophy'. What I will seek to exploit here through
extrapolation on Tarkovsky's films Solaris and Stalker
and Danielewski's novel, House of Leaves, is Deleuze's
wish to transform film theory into a philosophy whose
rigor is in some way localised, in that it reflects the
emergence of rules that are immanent to each given zone
of indetermination. Such a system (if the term system can
continue to be appropriate here) is poised between order
and chaos in that it does not give order to or stamp an
authority on chaos, but delicately navigates the rift
between them. As such, cinema's power is found in this
operation, which exiles us from the familial conceptual
terrain leading us to the prospect of a 'becoming
system'- an unheimlich transgression (dis)located by the
encyst-ence of the labyrinthine. This indicates a certain
kind of cinematic aesthetic; a certain cinematic
requirement, whereby the systemisation through temporal
de-coordination usurps through anomaly (a hauntological
revenant), and where the prospect of action (no longer
merely (re)action) of the futural is saturated by the past.

264
Deleuze comments in Nietzsche and Philosophy that the
'mystery' of Ariadne9 is uncovered in the plurality of
senses. 10 The labyrinth is firstly interpreted as the
unconscious (the secret of the internal self) and
designates the continuity of eternal return; its circularity
is not the traversal of a necessarily lost way, but a route
that leads back to the same point and which exposes it
as the affirmation of becoming. This understands
becoming as that from which being comes, overturning
the recognised doxa in such a way that objects now find
their identity swallowed up in difference. With this in
mind, a labyrinth is said etymologically to be a multiple
because it contains many folds. As such a multiple, it is
not only made up of many parts, but is also active in that
is folded in many ways. As already indicated, it is always
in some ways all, but simultaneously more than either a
mere tomb, sepulchre or puzzle - the diversity of a
resting place for the corpuscular, a location for the
enactment of rites or a mere conundrum to be solved. It
is an aesthetic locale -a hauntological topos.

9 In his book, The Book of Imaginary Beings, under the section 'The
Minotaur', Jorge Luis Borges states: 'The idea of a house built so
that people could become lost in it is perhaps more unusual than
that of a man with a bull's head, but both ideas go well together
and the image of the labyrinth fits with the image of the Minotaur.
It is equally fitting that in the centre of a monstrous house there
be a monstrous inhabitant' (p. 100). Note here the indeterminate
occupant of the house in House of Leaves who is only heard ('the
growl') by the explorers and whose presence also haunts Johnny
Truant through its transgression into the footnoted text.
10 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 187.

265
 3

Ariadne's proximity to Theseus in the Minoan labyrinth

maintained an interpretation of that structure as in some
way the wrong way round, in that this view substantiates
a moral thread, which can only lead to negation and
ressentiment. "

As already indicated, the contention that the Apollonian hero

Theseus is dispatched to eradicate the tellurian Minotaur in
Daeclelus' labyrinth, ratifies the developmental historical
imperative of Hellenic culture which Bachofen identified as the
precedent of ideality through the patriarchal transcendental hero
as the suppressor of the earth-oriented matriarchal. Ariadne loved
Theseus as he represented the sublime and higher man (but
lacking the virtue of the bull with its capacity to throw off
burdens), and as long as she was in love with him was fettered to
him as merely the feminine image of man. Legends differ as to
Ariadne's fate once Theseus escapes the labyrinth; one suggests
that he abandons her and she hangs herself, another that he takes
her to Naxos where she either dies or marries Dionysus. Deleuze
argues that Dionysus (the barbaric interloper) teaches Ariadne
that the true labyrinth is not found in negation and ressentiment,
but in affirmation: 'The labyrinth is what leads us to being, the
only being is that of becoming, the only being that of the labyrinth
itself' (Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 188).

266
 If we understand affirmation and negation as qualities of
the will to power we see that they do not have a univocal
relation. Negation is opposed to affirmation but affirmation
differs from negation. We cannot think of affirmation as
'being opposed' to negation: this would place the negative
within it 12
.

The thread allowed Theseus the opportunity to return

from dispatching the Minotaur, and operated as a
topographic means of escape (as against a topological
one) in that it relied on the consistency of the labyrinth
(a questionable assumption given all we have previously
stated and given what will be later observed about the
house in House of Leaves) to maintain its shape so that
the retracing of steps was merely that and no longer the
uncertain navigation of that which was still unknown. It
was the strand, which stretched back like an umbilical
cord from the pure possibility of a forward traversal,
allowing the hero to orient himself with the benefit of a
continual connection to what was passed through a
tangible link with what he already knew. Here there is
already an indication of movement as merely the sensori-
motor schema, no longer the determining factor in any
direct provision of the temporal via the bifurcate
divergence of the labyrinthine. In comparison, the
character of the Stalker in Tarkovsky's film orients
himself in the zone by the dispersal of weighted threads,
which he throws ahead and horizontally to ensure safe
passage. This indicates that the pattern of potential safe
routes by which one may navigate the zone is bifurcate,
and therefore fundamentally inconsistent, unpredictable
and open to constant variation. The threads are used to
determine a safe passage (enforcing or replicating
continuity through a straight line of causality) into and

12 Ibid., p. 188.

267
out of the zone through the understanding that a
traversal must always move forwards. The threads are
retrieved only to precipitate such motion. The
contribution of what has passed into virtuality alleviates
not only the actuality of the moment of decision, but also
what is immanent by recognition of its inconsistency -
the anxiety that no expectations can be fulfilled in mere
reflection and that certainty in the way forward cannot
necessarily find comfort and assurance in what has gone
before.
In the Minoan labyrinth, the destruction of what is
essentially at its centre (the alteric spectre of the
unnatural Minotaur - the Derridian de-centre) offers
Theseus in some strange way the opportunity to orient
himself through the assurance that the demise of the
encrypted horror marked the alteric point of focus of the
labyrinthine (the 'room' at the heart of the 'zone' in
Stalker fulfils a similar 'function''Scientist'[the
-
'Apollonian hero'], as a contemporary 'Theseus',
journeys' to it with specific intention of destroying it).
With its death (annihilation), it was no longer capable of
enforcing its potency and, as such, of undermining the
assurance of the rational through its deviant introjective
operation.
But it demanded the conciliation of a shift of status
(from a tomb for the sacrificial victims proffered by the
Athenians every nine years locale for their certain
-a
death and a remedial assurance for the Minoans) of the
variant hallways and passages to the specificity of an
introjective tomb for the uncanny (the unnatural).

268
It is the realisation of the emergence of the alteric,
recognised as the figure of Minotaur itself. 13
Any preparation that we might wish to make is
therefore complicated and in some way disoriented by
any suggestion that negation is merely the opposition to
affirmation, on the understanding that such a dialectical
opposition might compound affirmation as in some way
post priori to negation.
The mythological precedent of the Minoan labyrinth
superficially compounds such an interpretation, but a
more fundamental perception might consider how this
urdoxa could be critiqued.

13 In Derrida's introductory essay to Margins of PhilosoPhy, entitled

'Tympan', he comments: 'Tympanum, Dionysianism, labyrinth,
Ariadne's thread. We are now travelling through (upright, walking,
dancing), included and enveloped within it, never to emerge, the
form of an ear constructed around a barrier, going round its inner
walls, a city, therefore (labyrinth, semicircular canals - warning:
the spiral walkways do not hold) circling around a stairway
winding around a lock, a dike (dam) stretched out toward the sea:
closed in on itself and open to the sea's path. Full and empty of
its water, the anamesis of the choncha resonates alone on the
beach' (p. xiv). The pertinence of the sonic should not be lost
here. Firstly, in the literal form of an echo as a means of
evaluating, physical, emotional and thematic distance (the
distortion of such mechanisms by the divergence of the
labyrinthine structure, through interference and confusion,
invalidates echo as an authentic determination of such spaces).
Secondly, echo can only be effective when confined to large (and
consistently measurable) spaces - this is the predicament of the
explorers of the house. However, a more effective use of sound is
more closely linked to the tympanum as a form of resistance to
which another agency might be applied to create sound. In House
of Leaves, the explorers of the house draw attention to their
presence and increasingly desperate predicament by knocking on
the internal walls of the labyrinth in almost a reversal of the
operation of the ear. Internal sound directed into the exterior as
the raising of an alarm.

269
In 'Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the
Human Sciences', Derrida states:

The function of (a) centre was not only to orient, balance,

and organise the structure - but above all to make sure that
the organising principle of the structure would limit what we
might call the play of the structure. By orienting and
organising the coherence of the system, the centre of a
structure permits the play of its elements inside the total
form. And even today the notion of a structure lacking any
centre represents the unthinkable itself. 14

If we take a moment to consider and distinguish between

what we might call 'maze-treaders' and 'maze-viewers',
we grasp that the former's vision is always impaired by
constructed views and fragmentation, which cause
confusion and disorientation. 15

14 Added emphasis. Derrida, Writing and Difference, pp. 278-9.

Derricla is one of the hidden references in House of Leaves as
Danielewski develops a myriad of true and bogus academic
footnotes throughout the text. With this in mind, he later quoted
from the same source: 'This is why classical thought concerning
structure could say that the centre is paradoxically within the
structure and outside it. The centre is at the centre of the totality,
and yet, since the centre does not belong to the totality (is not
part of the totality) the totality has its centre elsewhere. The
centre is not the centre' (also found in footnote 129, House of
Leaves).
15 In the introduction to House of Leaves, the fictitious narrator,
Johnny Truant says of the writer of the main body of the text, The
Navidson Record: 'Zampanb writes constantly about seeing. What
we see, how we see and what in turn we can't see. Over and over
again, in one form or another, he returns to the subject of light,
space, shape, line, color, focus, tone, contrast, movement,
rhythm, perspective, and composition. None of which is surprising
considering Zampan6's piece centers on a documentary film called
The Navidson Record. made by a Pulitzer Pr I ze-winning
photojournalist who must somehow capture the most difficult
subject of all: the sight of darkness itself' (p. xxi).

270
The latter see the pattern as a whole, 16 as in a diagram
(from above) and this suggests that what is seen depends
on position ('point of view'). A labyrinth is, in a sense, a
singularity, 17 in that it is arguably one physical structure,
yet also a doubling in that it incorporates order and
disorder, clarity
and confusion, unity and multiplicity,
artistry and chaos. 18
As noted in Chapter 3 of this text, Deleuze speaks
of the labyrinth in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque as
corresponding to two floors. The continuous labyrinth is
the relation of the porous and spongy cavernous texture
that is without emptiness, of matter (the lower floor) and

16 It is noted in House of Leaves that Will Navidson's final journey

into the labyrinthine hallways of house in search of his brother
Tom, culminates in the confrontation with a window (a
fenestration). The text comments: 'windows offer vision' and 'a
chance to reach a place of perspective and perhaps make some
sense of the whole'. Ultimately on climbing out onto the ledge
beyond the fenestration, Will only 'confronts that grotesque vision
of absence' (p. 464, added emphasis). What is useful to remember
here is the Heideggarian notion of the rift as outlined in Chapter 1
of this text, whereby the translation of the German word Riss has
both the connotation of a cut or tear and also that of a ground-
plan or drawing. The double meaning of scission and overall view
(a perspective) identifies a difference that resonates in the
labyrinthine singularity.
17 In his essay 'Catastrophe' (published in Word Traces), Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe directs our attention to Celan's comment in 'The
Meridian' speech that: 'The poem is alone. ' He argues that the
poem is only effectively a poem insofar as it is absolutely
singular: 'This is undoubtedly a definition of poetry's essence
(that which, by itself, is decidedly nothing "poetic"); there is no
poetry, poetry does not occur or take place, and is therefore not
repeatedly questioned, except as the event of singularity' (p. 131,
added emphasis).
18 With reference to the navigation of the labyrinth, Diodorus Siculus
wrote in the first century BC regarding the appointment of the king
Mencles, that although he was responsible for no significant
military achievements, 'he did build himself what is called the
labyrinth as a tomb, an edifice which is wonderful not so much for
its size as for the inimitable skill with which it was built; for once
in, it is impossible to find one's way out again without difficulty,
unless one lights upon a guide who is perfectly acquainted with it'
(I am thinking here of the need for a profession of guides in
Roadside Picnic and Stalker- the stalkers); (History, Book 1, and
found at
www. casa. ucl. ac. uk/diqital_eqvpt/hawara/biblioqraphv old. html).
Pliny notes in his book on natural history that Daedalus' labyrinth,
though modelled on the one constructed some 3,600 years prior to
his time, only imitated a hundredth part of the original Egyptian
project (Natural History, Book 36,13). The notion of
'fragmentation' will be discussed further in relation to the crystal-
image.

271
the freedom in the soul and its predicates (the upper
floor) - the pleats of matter and the folds in the soul. It
also designates the eternal return, in that its circularity is
not merely a lost way but a labyrinthine perambulation of
that which leads back to the same point/instant, which is,
was and will be. This duality (the two floors) identifies a
discrepancy - the difference of the vinculum in which we
may begin to recognise a scission, which determines the
integrity of such an architectonics of the ructure.
In Difference and Repetition he critiques
representation by suggesting that any interpretation that
compounds the uniqueness of the singular perspective
and its receding and ultimately false depth, maintains its
condition of all-embracing mediation while actively
mobilising nothing. He argues that:

modern art tends to realise these conditions: in this sense it

becomes a veritable theatre of metamorphosis and
permutations. A theatre where nothing is fixed, a labyrinth
without a thread (Ariadne has hung herself). The work of art
leaves the domain of representation in order to become
experience, transcendental empiricism or science of the
sensible. 19

This sense of movement implies the interruptive

distortion of aesthetic representation through plurality,
divergence and de-centring. It is the recognition of a
superposition of perspectives and a tangle of viewpoints
which, in a temporal sense, reveals a coexistence of
moments as not only what might be conceived as the
essence of the labyrinthine, but also an arguably
Deleuzian interpretation of a cinematic form. This
embraces a fractured and non-linear temporality as

19 Added emphasis. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 56.

272
extrapolated in the crystal-image 20 The conflagration of
.
non-linear relations, which Deleuze identifies in his
interpretation of the crystal-image, is determined
cinematically through the bifurcation of flashback. This
operates outside the conventional chronology of a
commonsense through what is tantamount to a figurative
leap from the actuality of the present into the virtuality of
the past. This spectral operation seeks in the past a
virtual memory-image, which it can retrieve and bring to
the actual present. Ronald Bogue notes in Deleuze on
Cinema that:

What we see in flashbacks are the residual traces of a

branching time, the actual paths taken of a virtually forking
labyrinth of coexisting paths. It is this bifurcating maze of
time that gives the flashback their inner logic, their
'necessity', their 'reason'. 21

My intention in this chapter is to consider not only this

theatricality of diversity and possibility as the
determination of the labyrinthine, but also explore
through the analysis of three specific examples
(arguably, two cinematic examples with literary roots and
one literary with a cinematic perspective), the emergence
of the figure of the labyrinth as a pre-emptive condition
of the agency of temporality through which and by which
the encryption of the spectral might continue to be
articulated and reconfigured aesthetically.

20 With regard to the 'tangle of viewpoints', I note here that

Danielewski's House of Leaves is perhaps a literary construct of
such confusion and discontinuity whereby the house as an
interactive locale which transgresses the bounds of orthodox
literary organisation (literally through the use of different
typefaces to connote different characters and source material) and
where the events of one section of the text (the so-called
Navidson Record) impose themselves on others. The most
significant transgressor (perhaps the true manifestation of the
horror of the house) is represented by the trace (scratch marks
and wilful destruction of any means used to quantify the
labyrinthine - markers for navigation and equipment) of violence
and the auditory imposition of 'the growl'.
21 Added emphasis. Bogue, Deleuze on Cinema, p. 116.

273
The two cinematic works to be considered will be Andrei
Tarkovsky's Solaris and Stalker (both loosely adapted
from novels drawn from the genre of science-fiction:
Stanislaw Lem's Solaris
and Boris and Arkady
Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic). 22 The literary work is the
recently published novel by Mark Z. Danielewski, House
of Leaves, which arguably falls into the genre of horror. I
have already posited an interpretation of the labyrinth as
something that not only proposes a problem of
orientation, but also a more complex sepulchral question
of entombment. Implicit in both interpretations is the
already discussed notion of an active cryptology that
articulates a propriety indicated by a cystic modality of
mourning and loss.
The exclusion of any detailed analysis of
Tarkovsky's film Mirror in the discussion that follows is
not to dismiss the import of the film which falls
chronologically between Solaris and Stalker in
Tarkovsky's body of cinematic work, but is a considered
exclusion that directly engages with the specificity of the
literary adaptation of the previously mentioned works in
relation to House of Leaves as already stated, as a
literary work about a film.
Mirror's intrinsically autobiographical subject matter
(although a strong affinity can be drawn between the
opening and closing sequences of Solaris, in particular
the parallels between Kelvin's relationship with his father

22 Tarkovsky's screenplay of Stalker (from the Strugatsky brothers'

novel Roadside Picnic) is freely adapted from only the last 25
pages of the book. With Stanislaw Lem's novel Solaris, '[t]he
essential point of change is that he [Tarkovsky] furnished Chris
Kelvin with a family home, full of memories: family photographs;
the whole physical texture of earthly life; the sound of the rain,
the dawn chorus, the flowing of the river, the damp of the garden,
the spreading crown of the oak, the living flame of the bonfire, the
bent back of the father and the gingery-grey of his temples -
everything, in short, which we normally take for granted until the
loss of it haunts us' (Turovskaya, Tarkovsky: Cinema as Poetry,
p. 54, added emphasis).

274
and Tarkovsky with his, as portrayed in Mirror)
distinguishes it from the freely adapted sources of
Solaris and Stalker. Therefore, for the benefit of this
discussion, I will focus my attention on the alteric
spectrality of the labyrinthine at work in the chosen films
in relation to a comparable thematic in House of Leaves.

In Danielewski's novel, the character Zampan6 offers a

series of brief speculations, prior to the lengthy
description of the descent of the staircase in the
purportedly fictitious cinematic realisation entitled
Exploration#4 (and which make up part of the larger film
project known as The Navidson Record), as to the
purpose of the labyrinth.

Is it merely an aberration of physics? Some kind of warp in

space? Or just a topiary labyrinth on a much grander scale?
Perhaps it serves a funeral purpose? Conceals a secret?
Protects something? Imprisons or hides some kind of
monster? Or for that matter, imprisons or hides an
? 23
innocent

23 Danielewski, House of Leaves, p. 111. Pliny (AD 23-79) proffered

three possible meanings for the labyrinth in his natural history,
Book 36,13: a palace or tomb for its constructor or perhaps most
strangely, a temple to the sun, '[which] contains twisting paths
and passages which advance and retreat-all impossible to
negotiate frequently doors are buried in it to beguile the visitor
...
into going forward and then force him to return to the same
winding paths'. And later: 'Men are already weary with travelling
when they reach the bewildering maze of paths: indeed, there are
also lofty upper rooms reached by ramps and porticoes from which
one descends on stairways which have 90 steps; inside are
columns of imperial porphyry, images of the gods, statues of kings
and representations of monsters. ' Abridged from
www. casa. ucl. ac. uk/diqital eqVpt/hawara/bibliocirar)hy Old. html
(added emphasis).

275
Deleuze's detailed observations on cinema, in his two
texts Cinemas 1 and 2, proffer the temporal extrapolation
of the crystal-image 24 as a definition of a differential unity
which identifies the praxis of the cinematic shot as a
fusion of the pastness of a recorded event with the
presentness of its viewing - the conglomeration of virtual
with the actual. It is the indivisible unity of virtual image
and actual image, if we understand the virtual as
subjective or in the past -a pure recollection that exists
outside consciousness in time but somewhere in a
temporal past, and which is, in a sense, still alive and
ready to be recalled by the actual. What is crucial to any
understanding of the crystal-image is the fragmentariness
implied by its crystalline condition - whereby illumination

as consciousness is not understood as merely an

exteriority (a flashlight) shedding light upon a world of
shadow, but as a constituent component of that
luminosity.

In short, it is not consciousness that is light, it is a set of

images, or light that is consciousness, immanent within
25
matter .

24 Donato Totaro, in 'Deleuze's Bergsonian Film Project (Part 2: The

Time-Image)', suggests Deleuze uses the crystal-image as an
aesthetic rather than a theoretical tool, 'by ascribing stylistic
qualities to it'
(www. horschamp. qc. ca/9903/offscreen essavs/deleuze2. html).
This is qualified by Ronald Bogue in his text, Deleuze on Cinema,
where he draws attention to the four forms of the Deleuze's
crystal-image as:
(i) Perfect
(ii) Cracked
(iii) Formation or Growth
(iv) Dissolution
These designate four kinds of film identified by their directors;
respectively, Ophuls, Renoir, Fellini and Visconti.
25 Added emphasis. Deleuze, Cinema 1 (The Movement-Image),
90: 61. In his text Deleuze and Cinema, Ronald Bogue states (in
the last section, quoting Deleuze): 'if present images are light,
representations are subtractions of quantities of light, or selective
filterings of light. When we perceive objects, it is "as if we
reflected on their surfaces the light emanates from them, light
which would never be revealed if it passed on unopposed"' (p. 31,
added emphasis).

276
In accounting for the past/presentness of the cinematic
image, the crystal-image functions as a two-way mirror, 26

which operates as a kind of fluctuation between virtual

and actual splitting the screen into two heterogeneous
directions - launching into the future and failing into the
past, a confusion of mental and physical time. 27 Deleuze's
appropriation of Bergsonian dur6e critiques the
chronology of temporal linearity by way of memory.
Initially, this proposes that memory is distinguished by
two types: habitual and pure, and ratifies the former as
stored in the brain. Habitual is the more pragmatic and
generally dominates the latter, which resurfaces during
moments of disinterestedness or dreaming and is stored
in consciousness. 28 Duration was understood by Bergson
as a dynamic movement of passing, yet continuous time,
where the qualitative expression of our dynamic
psychological time (of continuity of past into present and
towards future), remained distinctive from the
quantitative succession of discrete elements or intervals.

26 1 am reminded here of Dan Graham's Alteration to a Suburban

House (see Chapter 3, this text). In the novel Solaris by Stanislaw
Lem (from which Tarkovsky adapted his screenplay), the character
Snow, when speaking to the recently arrived Kelvin about man's
urge for space exploration, says, 'We are seeking man. We have
no need of other worlds. We need mirrors' (p. 75). It is worth
noting here that Tarkovsky's follow-up to Solaris was entitled
Mirror and that Deleuze notes that the vinculum in The Fold:
Leibniz and the Baroque is understood as 'a reflective surface'.
27 1 note here that Tarkovsky makes use of the particularity of this
cinematic confusion in the film Mirror by casting the same actress
to play both the contemporary wife and the historical mother
throughout the production.
28 The theory of pure perception and pure memory must take into
account the fact that perception affected by memory remains
dependent on the brain for material isatio n. Bergson argued that in
dreams we have glimpses of the true nature of memory and the
virtual past as it is when the sensori-motor system is at its most
relaxed and therefore images from various past moments can
coexist simultaneously in a single domain.

277
 In Cinema 2, Deleuze states:

there is no present which is not haunted by a past and a

future, by a past which is not reducible to a former present,
29
by af uture which does not consist of a present to come
.

Bergson proposed that the fundamental concept of durde

expressed the dynamism of an indeterminate future as
essentially open and unforeseeable, and therefore any
impression of the temporal must be grasped through an
essential difference, whereby each moment or succession
of moments brought something that was qualitively new.
The essential dualism of Bergsonian dur6e is found in the
combination of duration as a dynamic continuation and
the succession of the momentary. 30
Deleuzian dualism designated a supposed
opposition between ideality and sensibility but no longer
as the historical duality of essential and accidental, but
as a more fundamental (and more complex) distinction

29 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 37. We may also wish to consider here

earlier remarks made about disinterestedness in Kantian
aesthetics in Chapter 1 of this text. Derrida notes in The Truth in
Painting: 'Now the question of knowing whether I can say of a
thing that it is beautiful has, according to Kant, nothing to do with
the interest that I do or do not have in its existence. And my
pleasure requires an indifference or more rigorously an
...
absolute lack of interest for the existence of the thing' (p. 44,
added emphasis). It is also noted here that Tarkovsky's Solaris
was introjected by the familial through the sublimated desire to
make a film about his own family. The domestic sequences in
Solaris (the opening section at Kelvin's family home and the
closing section where he is seemingly reunited with his father at
that same home) predate Mirror in such a way that the familial
terrain explored by Tarkovsky in the later film haunts the former.
30 Ronald Bogue, in his commentary Deleuze on Cinema, suggests
that Deleuze attempts to bring coherence to this 'dualism through
the complexity of sensation. He develops Bergsonian analysis
from what he refers to as illusory dualism to a clarifying dualism,
through a higher monism to a generative dualism and pluralism.
Bogue argues that Bergson's view of the universe is one of
'"flows", "modifications", perturbations and "vibrations"'. This
dynamic always entails a retention of past into present with an
impulse towards future. The vibration is simultaneously mind and
matter and as such presents Bergson as essentially a monist.
However, Deleuze notes that this monism is fundamentally a kind
of dualism, or even pluralism, as it is the realisation of a
differentiation of speeds and degrees based on the complexity of
the event.

278
between virtual and actual (the complexity of the
Minotaur).
Deleuze argued that the ontological hierarchy,
whereby the spatiality of distribution is conceived as a
dividing up in the d ivi ne/Apol Ionian sense, is concomitant
to a sedentary limit that operates as either a limitation
due to the proximity to the particularity of a principle, or
the power of that limit as a single maximum, equalising
all in the similitude that refuses the separation of a thing
from what it can do. His introduction of a concept of any-
spaces-whatever (espaces quel-conque) proffers a new
cinematic pedagogy that disrupts any unity of space by
drawing attention to the disparate scissions that fragment
it, and whose character is haunted by the traumatic
branchings of memory. 31
Immanence as diversity proffers the single maximum
as an immeasurable state rather than a measurable one,
which expresses the disjunctive as the particularity
specific to individual faculties and which it alone can
experience. This particularity undermines the historical
imperative of a commonsense by only revealing itself at
what we might interpret as moments of disequilibrium and
contradiction, where memory articulates experience
through the enigma of a disjointure from commonsense.
Diversity, as the fundamentally immeasurable, in a sense
haunts the measurable as an immanence or potential. Its
paradox is always that as an entity it has never been
present but exists only as past -a spectre.

31 John Flaxman notes in the introduction to The Brain is the Screen:

'These "any-spaces-whatever" irrational, disconnected,
aberrant, schizophrenic spaces no longer obey laws of
traditional, commonsensical causality. At every turn, the hope for
resolution is frustrated' (p. 5).

279
This raises the question of whether such diversity and
variation is this concomitant with the interruptive
Derridian spectre as a historical (both past and futural)
non-present ? 32

Such a d6r6glement of sensibility critiques the

Kantian faculty as essentially passive, and therefore
shaped by the a priori forms of space and time by
determining a transcendental empiricism which indicated
its objectivity as real experience but also transcendent
because, as Deleuze stated, such empirical principles
'leave outside themselves the elements of their own
foundation'. 33 The opposition of consciousness, as
conceptual representations of commonsense, and the
subrepresentative, as essentially unconscious intensities,
articulates the premise that ideals are no longer just
simple essences in the Kantian sense, but what Deleuze
defined as problems without solutions. What in a
Bergsonian sense might be defined as an ideal limit can
be interpreted as the most relaxed approach of
concomitance between inert matter and extensionless
mind. Problems are immanent within, yet irreducible to,
their solutions and are implicit in the creation of a realm
where a solution might take place, but remain outside
that realm. What remains paradoxical about this capacity
is that as virtual and therefore not actual, they occupy a

32 We may wish to think here of the Minotaur as a present/past. In

the context of earlier remarks regarding the tellurian nature of the
half-man, half-bull, the myth of the labyrinth places the result of
matriarchal transgression in a Hellenic present and which required
a heroic personification of the then current aspiration towards
Apollonian ideality to vanquish an unnatural past. This symbolic
transition from matriarchal to patriarchal is complicated further
when the Dionysian affirmation enters the mythology when Ariadne
is abandoned on Naxos by Theseus and in one strand of the myth,
rescued and married by Dionysus. The labyrinthine is no longer
confined to the physical architectonics of Daedelus' structure, but
transgresses the temporal bounds of future and past as the
indiscernible link of what can never be merely assigned in a
relation.
33 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 328.

280
place that is neither existence nor non-existence -a
spectral locale.
The problem for Deleuze is concomitant with an
understanding of genetic structure, in that it bears no
resemblance to that structure of actual embodiment but is
also not just an amorphous undifferentiated mass. As a
distribution, it is without identity, function or location, but
should rather be seen as a differential relation, which,
with other singularities, is realised as a potential for
various forms of embodiment. Conceived as a domain or
plain of scattered points around which a nebulous vortex
of possible actualisations are continually forming and un-
forming, this location of the problem can only be realised
through the conglomeration of possible actualisations and
embodiments.
The passage from virtual to actual is affected by
what Deleuze terms an 'intensity', which we understand
to be the essential activity of energising individuation. 34
Metastability and intensity are states of what we might
term pre-sense, in that they are essentially outside
commonsense and cognitive understanding. As such, they
can only be experienced in the disjunctive use of the
faculties and distortion of the senses in moments of
disequilibriurn and vertigo.
As already indicated in Chapter 1, an a-dimensional
depth of depths, implicit in the constitution of the

34 1 refer here back to Chapter 1 of this text, and the discussion on

crystalline structure, the metastable and pre-individuation. We
might also note here the comparison of the nebular and
metastable with the ocean, which makes up the surface of Solaris.
Bogue notes: 'Deleuze speaks of the crystal-image rather than a
simple mirror image' because 'the crystal-image serves two
additional purposes. The surface of the crystal may be reflective,
yet they may also be glasslike and transparent; they may refract
light and reflect it, filter, tint, cloud or block it. The crystal's
facets thus may be said to possess varying degrees of limpidity or
opacity, the state of a give facet varying with its surrounding
conditions (such as temperature), becoming transparent one
moment and opaque the next' (Deleuze on Cinema, p. 12).

281
recognised dimensionality of the spatial, reveals the
existence of a primal groundless space (spatium). This
is articulated through explication from which the
dimensionality of a re-presentable space and the
energised intensity of individuation is manifest in the
traversal from metastable to stable. Ronald Bogue argues
in Deleuze on Cinema:

Our inherent tendency is to use visual spatial imagery to

speak about time, and hence to think of bodies as entities
distinct from their movements. But movement is inseparable
from that which moves and as soon as we speak of a thing
distinct from its action we reinstate a division between

movement and the moving ent it 35

Y.

This indicates that the idea becomes a provocation of the

faculties into disjunctive functioning via the intensity of
sense experience and from this disruption of sensibility,
other faculties are likewise, disturbed. 36 The concept of
cinema becomes no longer what might be defined as 'an
undertaking of recognition', but 'a science of visual
impressions, forcing us to forger our own logic and
retinal habits'. 37
For Deleuze, thought begins with a contradictory
experience - an encounter with a simulacrum. Given that
the simulacrum has no identity, it is the manifestation of
difference in itself and can only appear in disguise as
distinct categories of individuation, which mask pre-
individual, metastable differences. 38

35 Ibid., p. 19.
36 In the novel Solaris, the character of Rheya describes herself and
the other visitors/phi-creatures as 'passive instruments of torture'.
37 Deleuze, Cinema 2, pp. 18-19.
38 In Solaris, Kelvin admits to Rheya that they are not alike
- and
after her attempt to take her life by ingesting liquid oxygen,
suggests that it is the difference between them that saved her life.

282
The specifics of a cinematic and literary illustration of
such a proposition might be found in Andrei Tarkovsky's
cinematic adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's science-fiction
novel, Solaris. In both film and book, the visitors/phi-
creature S39 are simulacra formed from the
subconscious/memories of the surviving crewmembers of
a space station orbiting the planet Solaris. 40
This proximity to the planet (the forces of which
seem to exist as a vast imaginative resource) and its
ocean plays a significant part in the manifestation of
these visitors, and links the specificity of individual
memory to the realisation of an influential pre-individual
condition manifest in the planet itse If. 4' Are these
creatures understood as simulacra in the sense of
disguised distinct categories of individuation
disguising/masking the pre-individual, metastable state of
the planet Solaris and its ocean ? 42

39 Phi-creature: phi, from the Greek philia, meaning brotherhood.

This notion of brotherly affiliation will be taken up further when
looking at Will Navidson's relationship with his brother Tom in
House of Leaves. I also note here the significance of the fraternal
relation in the work of Gordon Matta-Clark and already considered
in Chapter 3 of this text.
40 In his essay 'The Film History of Thought' (published in The Brain
is the Screen), Andras BAlint Kovacs remarks: 'According to
Deleuze, modern cinema means, on the one hand, the different
variations of composition of abstract time (in this respect he is in
complete agreement with Tarkovsky who calls film "sculpting in
time"); on the other hand, it means a variable formation of images
of subjectivity' (p. 161).
41 Gibarian's visitor temporarily survives his death - in Tarkovsky's
film she is encountered by Kelvin in the corridor of the space
station and entering the cold store where Gibarian's body is
stored, and is the first evidence of the extraordinary events
unfolding on the space station. In Lem's novel Kelvin is horrified
by this encounter horror that is compounded when he
-a
examines Gibarian's body in the cold store and finds the visitor
apparently sleeping next to the corpse, seemingly unaware of
Gibarian's demise. It is worth noting here that in Lem's novel, this
visitor is a black woman in a grass skirt. Tarkovsky, however,
presents the visitor as a red-haired girl.
42 In the Strugatsky brothers' novel, Roadside Picnic (on which
Tarkovsky based his screenplay for Stalker), a group of creatures
are also said to inhabit the zone and are referred to as 'zombies'
or 'moulages' - re-constructions on the skeletons, dummies. The
scientist Pilman states: 'We can't imagine anything scarier than a
ghost. But the violation of the law of causality is much more
terrifying than the stampede of ghosts' (p. 109).

283
 In the novel, Lem catalogues in some detail the
different kinds of phenomena experienced by the earliest
Solarists (the name given to the scientific community who
expressly concern themselves with the study of the
planet - the implication being that the study of the planet
has become a branch of science in its own right). The
psychologist Kelvin spends time in the station's library,
and looks in detail at these phenomena and the attempts
made by previous Solarists to explain them scientifically,
only to be confronted by realisation that it is evident they
defy scientific I og i C. 43

The description of Solaris's ocean in Lem's novel

might indicate an almost Leibnizian/baroque implication
and explication of folding, unfolding and refolding. The
topological singularities of the ocean as part of its
continuity/multiplicity that the scientific manuals, found in
the space station's library, try to explain through the
logic of scientific reason.

43 For example, mimoids are understood as simulacra in that they

copy inanimate man-made objects. The mimoid structure is
described as a labyrinth requiring specialist equipment to explore,
and the scientific evidence housed in the space station library
proposes that they have 'off days' and 'gala days'. On gala days
the mimoid 'can produce "primitive" simplifications, but is just as
likely to indulge in "baroque" deviations, paroxysms of
extravagant brilliance' (Lem, Solaris, p. 121).

284
These individuated beings (given names: mimoids,
extensors, symmetriads and asymmetriads) are identified
as scientific phenomena and their differences are
understood as primordially different in the same way that
the phi-creatures/visitors are differentiated from firstly,
the residents of the space station
and secondly, from the
ideals from which they are simulated. 44 Bogue comments
that in developing the triad of crystalline motifs
(actual/virtual, limpid/opaque and seed/milieu), Deleuze
does not intend to isolate specific shots or sequences but
to indicate entire films as essentially crystalline.

Each film, we might say is like an astronaut crew's

exploration of a multifaceted, gemlike planet. The
crewmembers orbit the planet, taking various shots of its
surface. They land, traverse different planes, then
penetrate the planet's outer surfaces and film shimmering
and prismatic reflections from within the planet, the facets
of changing tints, growing foggy, opalescent, silvery, or
transparent. They follow the process of crystallization as a
seed crystal spreads into a milieu; they record the
shattering of a facet, the powdery disintegration of another,
45
the liquid dissolution of a third .

Kelvin's dilemma is brought in sharper focus when he can

no longer distinguish between the simulacra and the

44 As Ronald Bogue quotes Deleuze on Cinema, Deleuze

characterises what he refers to as Bergson's primal cosmos as a
gaseous state, (a) world of universal variation, universal
undulation, universal rippling: there are neither axes nor center,
neither right nor left, high or low', Cinema 1, p. 58. This
combination of image-movement and matter-flow, Deleuze
suggests, constitutes the 'plane of immanence'. I also note that in
'Mother Right', Bachofen proposed an intermediary between the
extremities of what he refers to as 'pure tellurian' and 'pure
uranian luminaries': 'Between the two extremes, the earth and the
sun, the moon takes the middle position which the ancients
designate as the borderland between two worlds. The purest of
tellurian bodies and the impurest of uranian luminaries. It
becomes the image of maternity which attains its highest
purification in the Demetrian principle; as a heavenly earth it
contrasts with the chthonian earth, just as the Demetrian matron
contrasts with the hetaeric woman' (p. 115). Bachofen identified
the lunar celestial body (the Moon) as the intermediary between
the tellurian and the uranian.
45 Added emphasis. Bogue, Deleuze on Cinema, p. 124.

285
real/historical (present-ness and past) Rheya/Hari. There
is perhaps an issue between the real Rheya/Hari and the
facsimile that begs the question, is the phi-

creature/visitor in fact the real Rheya/Hari absolved of

responsibility and reasoning for her suicide ? 46

46 In Tarkovsky: Cinema as Poetry, Maya Turovskaya comments: 'The

main thing for him [Tarkovsky], however, was something else; the
way in which Hari, finding herself at the centre of the clashes of
personality and point of view on the station, having started as a
ghost, gradually becomes a human being' (p. 56, added
emphasis).

286
The planet as an intermediary can only communicate with
the scientists through the various initial somnambular 47

visitations of the simulacra. Kelvin's visitor (a simulation

of his wife at the time of her suicide 10 years earlier )48 is

a manifestation of an intensity of his memory and, as is

made clear, has no identity of her own. She is unable to
exist without remaining in relative proximity to him -
relying on him to form her identity. Kelvin's

commonsense tells him that this phenomena is not his

wife and crucially, also not a spectre. He takes a blood

sample, which provisionally shows him what he would

expect to see - red corpuscles. However on closer

scrutiny under the microscope, and looking further into
the depths where he anticipates a view of the atomic
structure at the limit of his exploration, he finds nothing
but a dazzling white light. He asks the question, is this
frail yet seemingly indestructible body 'actually made of
nothing? 949

47 Somnambulism - sleepwalking. Kelvin's visitor appears after he

has slept and itself appears in a dream state, as yet without a
rounded character of Rheya/Hari. Kelvin refers to the female
visitors as 'succubi' and which are recognised as a kind of
mythological female demon who attempts to have intercourse with
sleeping men. Hoffmann's use of the metaphor of sleep in his
short story 'The Sandman' should be noted here, particularly with
reference to the inarticulate automaton Olympia. Nathaniel
justifies her lack of communication by saying, 'What are words?
The glance of her heavenly eyes says more than any speech on
earth. Can a child of heaven accommodate itself to the narrow
circle drawn by the wretched circumstances of earth? ' (p. 1 18).
She appears in the latter part of the story and with whom
character Nathaniel falls in love and is eventually driven to
madness over: 'Then madness gripped him with hot glowing claws,
tore its way into him and blasted his mind. "Ha, ha, ha! Circle of
fire, circle of fire! Spin, spin, circle of fire! Merrily, merrily!
Puppet, ha! Lovely puppet, spin, spin! "' (Tales of Hoffmann,
p. 120).
48 In the novel, the ghost of Gibarian (a father-figure to the younger
psychologist Kelvin) visits Kelvin in a dream to warn him of Snow
and Sartorious's intentions to build a magnetic field disruptor and
bombard Solaris with radiation. The ghost also informs Kelvin that
Rheya, his wife/visitor, will always remain at the age she died -a
disruption of temporal linearity. It is important here to note the
distinction between ghost and simulacra. In Tarkovsky's film
version, the ghost of Gibarian appears as a recorded message left
for Kelvin to view.
49 Lem, Solaris, p. 103.

287
 Everything looks normal, but it's a camouflage. A cover in a
way, it's a super-copy, a reproduction which is superior to
the original there exists, in man, an absolute limit
... -a
term to structural divisibility - whereas here, the frontiers
have been pushed back. 50

Snow and Sartorious attempt to explain her in scientific

terms as something beyond atomic structure and the
corporeal - the realm of the neutrino, constituted of sub-
atomic material and its capability for endless
rejuvenation 5' That realisation that the phi-
.
creature/visitor is more than just a spectre makes its
manifestation all the more fearful.

When it arrives, the visitor is almost blank only a ghost

-
made up of memories and vague images dredged out of its

source. The longer it stays with you, the more human it

...
becomes. It also becomes more independent, up to a certain
52
point .

50 Ibid., p. 105. In Tarkovsky: Cinema as Poetry, Maya Turovskaya

states: 'It is she [Hari] who strives to understand her earthly
experience by understanding man with the aid of an external point
of view - the viewpoint of space' (p. 55).
51 Kelvin argues: 'the cell and the nucleus of the cell are nothing but
camouflage. The real structure, which determines the functions of
the visitor, remains concealed' (Lem, Solaris, p. 106). In House of
Leaves, Billy Reston, one of the investigators brought in by Will
Navidson to explore the house, comments on the accuracy of
scientific equipment to solve the dimensional discrepancies of the
house: 'That should put the ghost in the grave fast' (p. 38). In
Deleuze on Cinema, Ronald Bogue notes that the implication of
consciousness as dynamism can even be interpreted at a
subatomic level through differentiation of velocity and degrees
(the size of interval) and based in the complexity of any event.
52 Added emphasis. Lem, Solaris, p. 157. In Death and the Labyrinth,
Michel Foucault states: 'From the hollow opening inside words are
fashioned beings endowed with strange characteristics, which
seem to have been part of them since the beginning of time and
forever inscribed in their destiny, yet are nothing more than the
wake of the motion of words' (p. 36, added emphasis).

288
In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze analysed meaning as the
contradictory simulacra within language that jolts thought
into a transcendental speculation on grounding as the
condition on which language rests loquendum. 53
-a
Latterly in Cinema 2, he argued that a clich6 was a
sensory-motor image of a thing, which, according to his
reading of Bergson, is based in our perception of things
through the particularity of interest. We do not perceive a
thing in its entirety, but always less of it.

[W]e perceive only what we are interested in perceiving, or

rather what it is in our interest to perceive, by virtue of our
economic interests, ideological beliefs and psychological
54
demands
.

When the sensory-motor schemata is disrupted or

interrupted, we are confronted by another kind of image -
that of the optical-sound, which Deleuze argues is
without metaphor and is unjustifiable. 55
Narration is never a given of images but a
consequence of the visibility of images, and Deleuze
cites the difficulty rooted in what he refers to as the
'assimilation of the cinematographic image to utterance',
where a false appearance is given through the
precedence of utterance over image and any
authentically visible characteristic - movement - is taken
from it.

53 From the Latin loquendi, meaning a rage for speaking. Deleuze

understands this as the contradictory simulacrum within language
jolting thought into a transcendental analysis of the ground on
which language rests.
54 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 20.
55 In Cinema 2, Deleuze argues: 'Sometimes it is necessary to
restore the lost parts, to rediscover everything that cannot be
seen in the image, everything that has been removed to make it
"interesting". But sometimes, on the contrary, it is necessary to
make holes to introduce voids and white spaces, to rarefy the
image, by suppressing many things that have been added to make
us believe that we were seeing everything. It is necessary to make
a division or make emptiness in order to find the whole again'
(p. 21 ).

289
He proposes that 'it is necessary to move towards a limit,
to make the limit of before the film and after it pass into

thefiI Mi. 56 The direct time-image is virtual as opposed to

the actuality of the movement-image, but it is important

to remember here that virtuality in opposition to actuality

does not infer, for Deleuze, any opposition to reality.
Danielewski has the character Zampan6 state in
House of Leaves: 'Strangely then, the best argument for
fact is the absolute unaffordability of fiction. Thus it
would appear the ghost haunting The Navidson Record
continually bashing against the door, is none other than
the recurring threat of its own reality. 757In The Logic of
Sense Deleuze considers meaning by exploring the
stoical terms 'bodies' and 'incorporeal' rather than
'actual' and 'virtual', but he made the point that bodies,
as a realm of causes and effects, exist as subsistence,
and that insistence exists as incorporeality. They are the
result of causes and therefore have a minimum of being
and no true existence. This understands meaning as an
ephemeral attribute or event rather than a state of things
-a way of being rather than a state of being.
If we consider the phi-creatures/visitors in Solaris
with reference to this interpretation of meaning, we could
argue that firstly they are bodies, in that they assume a
bodily form and in so doing disguise their difference
through corporeality. Secondly, they exist as a surface to
the bodies of the scientists on the space
station -a
temporal/ephemeral attribute of the infinite 58 The phi-
.
creature/visitor might then be interpreted as the surface
meaning of incorporeal on the corporeal.

56 Ibid., p. 38.
57 Danielewski, House of Leaves, p. 149.
58 In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze interprets the Stoical view of time
as incorporeal on two levels:
(i) The finite present
(ii) The infinite past and future.

290
 Kelvin's visitor/wife could be conceived as the
realisation of an incorporeal event from his past
- she
has the mark of the fatal injection on her arm (a key
moment in the narrative of both novel and film is Kelvin's
recognition of Rheya/Har i 59 via the tear (a scission) in her
dress and the puncture wound of the hypodermic needle -
visceration as the event of acknowledgement). Later
when Rheya/Hari voluntarily submits herself to
annihilation, she arguably, through such a sacrifice,
achieves a kind of human stature.
It is significant that both Tarkovsky and Soderbergh 60

portray the phi-creature's/visitor's need for proximity to

the corporeal body (the scientist's). Rheya/Hari injures

and then reconstitutes herself in an attempt to maintain

proximity to Kelvin when he attempts to leave her to
consult with Snow and Sartorious. Are Tarkovsky and
Lem indicating that Rheya/Hari is the meaning of Kelvin's
existence, or is she the problem/result/after-effect?
As Deleuze comments, Stoic philosophy gives a
priori to corporeal cause over incorporeal effect, and a
reading of the relationship between Kelvin and
Rheya/Hari might indicate that Kelvin, the corporeal
cause, is the instigator of Rheya/Hari as incorporeal
effect. Where Deleuzian interpretation of the Stoical
concepts of cause and effect may prove a useful tool
here is in the shift from a reading that emphasises the
theological content (the a priori of body over effect) to
consider the incorporeal/effect as essentially
transcendental.

59 In the novel Kelvin's visitor is known as Rheya; in Tarkovsky's

film she is referred to as Hari.
60 Stephen Soderbergh remade Solaris in 2003 with George Clooney
taking the role of Kelvin. Soderbergh's film makes a radical shift
at the end of the film by suggesting (unlike both book and film)
that Kelvin remains with the visitor/phi-creature Rheya/Hari in
'virtual' proximity to the planet.

291
 Rhey/Hari is not only a product of Solaris, but is
also an effect of Kelvin's proximity/interaction with the
planet. For Rheya/Hari to exist, Kelvin as a body (a

corporeal event) needs to be close to Solaris, and

therefore Solaris could be conceived as a transcendental
pre-sense that precedes the corporeal Kelvin and the
incorporeal Rheya/Hari.
When Kelvin attempts to instigate good sense as
that which underlines truth via scientific means, that truth
being that Rheya/Hari cannot exist as she has previously
died, her presence on the space station is not a
corporeal present of finitude, but an incorporeal
infinitude of how she is/was as recollected by Kelvin.
Rheya/Hari is a simulacra of the historical Rheya/Hari

projected by Solaris via the particularity and specificity

of Kelvin's recollection -a fragmentary, proximal
facsimile capable of a kind of evolution base in Kelvin's
memory.
She is an infinite possibility that is no longer fixed
in a finite present, yet she is fixed to a combined
proximal location of Kelvin as the specific source of the
manifestation of the event of simulation and Solaris as
the transcendental pre-sense instigating an involuntary
memory. This might indicate that Kelvin is in fact the
screen onto which and also from which the projection of
Rheya/Hari is realised.
The complication made manifest in the realisation of
the phi-creature/visitor is that the recognition of the
duality of interior/exterior is undermined in that absolute
interiority (the monadic condition) is at work. The visitor
determines the differentiation that refuses to maintain
any clear duality, in that its realisation is the interaction

of a multiplicity whereby it can no longer be interpreted

as the action of the subjective upon the objective.

292
 The parameters by which such directional
substantiation might take place are significantly
undermined by the complication of recognition as to what
might be essentially subjective, and likewise what might
be essentially objective in the relation.
One might argue that precedent of Kelvin's
proximity to the planet determines his subjective priority
in the relation, and that the appearance of Rheya/Hari as
a specific historical manifestation substantiates such an
interpretation. However, Solaris can also be seen as that
which articulates this event and from which the
realisation of the visitor takes place.
We should also note here that in House of Leaves
the evolutionary deployment of the labyrinthine
capaciousness of the house is in some way a response to
the proximity of the Navidson family and their associates.
In this way the peculiarity of individual interaction with
the unknown of house, planet (in Solaris) and zone (in
61
Stalker) are essential characteristics of their operation.
Deleuze interprets the subjectivity of the
fragmentary vision (the crystal-image) that he argues is
synonymous with European post-war cinema as inherent
in particular characteristics that are manifest in 'the
62
disturbances of memory and the failure of recognition' .
The character Zampanb postulates on the possibility of
realising a ground-plan of the house based on the
footage of The Navidson Record, only to come to the
conclusion that it would be impossible due to the

constant wall-shifts and the film's 'constant destruction

of continuity, frequent jump cuts prohibiting any sort of

61 Derrida comments in The Truth in Painting: 'A piece of waste land

[terrain vague] has no fixed limit. Without edge, without any
border marking property, without any nondecomposable frame that
would not bear partition' (p. 93).
62 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 55.

293
accurate mapmaking' 63 it is also that Kelvin
. clear
recognises the phi-creature/visitor as a facsimile of his

wife, but the disruption of his memory is heightened by

her provisional blankness. As their relationship evolves,
her memories are filled in by persistent exposure to
Kelvin, but the most significant one (her suicide) remains
disturbing (a disturbance of memory) and elusive until the

phi-creature/visitor Rheya/Hari seemingly re-enacts that

attempt on her life. Each time she is rejuvenated, her

memory/recollections of the real Rheya/Hari

improve/expand so that although the seemingly infinite

capacity of the phi-creature/visitor to regenerate itself

indicates a kind of corporeal stasis (an eternal return of
the body), the temporally linked aspect of memory is

continually changing and in flUX. 64

What is provisionally conceived in the first visitation

as almost a barely evolved fragment of recollection
develops through the cipher of proximity and nearness.

63 Danielewski, House of Leaves, p. 109. The interpretation of the

schematic of the house is schismatic in that in that it renders the
architectural spatiality (the empty rooms, long hallways and dead
ends) as 'perpetually promising, but forever eluding the finality of
immutable layout' (ibid., p. 109).
64 It is worthy of note here that Kelvin's first attempt to deal with the
visitor is not to explain it scientifically but to make it invisible by
launching it into orbit - to dispose of it: 'I felt I was justified in
thinking that I had defeated the "simulacra", and that behind the
illusion, contrary to all expectation, I had found the real Rheya
again - the Rheya of my memories, whom the hypothesis of
madness would have destroyed' (Lem, Solaris, p. 68).

294
As already noted, this is most clearly identified when the
phi-creature/visitor repeats the real Rheya/Hari's attempt
65
at suicide through the ingestion of liquid oxygen This
seemingly happens as the phi-creature/visitor
accumulates more and more memory data through
proximity to Kelvin, and therefore becomes familiar with
the psychological trauma from Kelvin's past, which drove
the real Rheya/Hari to end her life.
What is also significant here is that such
recollection is indiscriminate, in that the facsimile of
Rheya/Hari cannot choose which memories inform her
development in Kelvin's presence, and equally the
planet's involvement cannot differentiate good memory
from bad (this raises the question; is Rheya/Hari a 'good'
of a 'bad' copy -a phantasme? ).
It could be argued that the capacity for the planet to
read and interpret memory does not include an ability to
differentiate between what might be considered a 'good'
or a 'bad' recollection for the one who is visited, and that
therefore this increases the possibility of a kind of
repetition.
The repetition would be steeped in the potential
trauma of the original relationship. In the novel, Snow
interprets the process by which the planet manifests the

65 Rodowick notes in Deleuze's Time-Machine that Walter Benjamin

focused on the problem of time in his essay, 'A Short History of
Photography'. Rodowick comments that Benjamin's fascination
with the transition of the interval of time marked by exposure from
requirements of several hours to latterly, mere fractions of a
second. Benjamin's concept of aura is entirely dependent on the
longevity of exposure: 'the longer the interval of exposure, the
greater the chance that the aura of an environment-the complex
temporal relations woven through its represented figures-would
seep into the image', p. 8. Rheya/Hari develops her aura through
prolonged contact/exposure to Kelvin - expanding her memory
capacity/recollection from her first appearance as a snapshot from
Kelvin's memory. The affiliation to a pharmacology interpretation
should also not be lost here. Sense is called into question and
complicated here when Rheya/Hari chooses to terminate her
existence with liquid oxygen, which in another corporeal/material
manifestation (its gaseous state) is life giving.

295
phenomena of the visitors as one that 'probed our brains
and penetrated to some kind of psychic tumor'. 66 Later in

the same passage he states that it:

isolated psychic processes, enclosed, stifled, encysted -

foci smouldering under the ashes of memory. It deciphered

them and made use of them, in the same way one uses a
blueprin t. 67
recipe or

This amoral condition of an outside agency is something

Tarkovsky explores again in Stalker. During the traversal
of the zone, the three travellers discuss the demise of
another stalker named Porcupine who entered 'the room'
and was seemingly granted his wish.
On his return from the zone he suddenly became
very wealthy but within a week he had committed suicide.
The implication is that the room does not read and act
upon the superficiality of any surface desire but rather
delves deeper and interprets darker subconscious
wishes.

66 Lem, Solaris, p. 77. The interruptive aspect of undifferentiated

amorality has a strong parallel in Stalker. The reading of Kelvin's
memory by the ocean to facilitate Rheya/Hari does not distinguish
between good and bad memory in the same way that the wishing
room in Stalker does not fulfil merely conscious desire but grants
and interprets the unconscious wish regardless of the
repercussions to the wisher maker.
67 Added emphasis. Ibid., p. ýý7. It may be worth reiterating here
Danielewski's use of a blue typeface for the word house
throughout House of Leaves and the suggestion that it indicates
an alteric hyperlink to the unheimlich. I draw attention here to the
use of the word encysted explored in Chapter 3 of this text as the
event of the ructure. The term blueprint also has architectonic
connotations that also link to earlier remarks about the rift in its
German translation indicating both cut or tear and ground plan.
The correlation to the abysmal is also pertinent here.

296
 What is important to glean from this apparent
dilemma is that which is essentially and fundamentally
alteric though the nature of its alterity cannot be
expected or anticipated to conform to any prescription of
regulation imposed upon it. It is not merely amoral, but
by its very definition outside the conceptual framework by
which and for which morality can stake a claim. The
stalker identifies the risk of the wish-fulfilment aspect of
the room, not through the consciousness of such wishing
but through the unconscious desire of the visitor - hence
the cautionary tale of Porcupine. What is intolerable
about the room is that it represents unbearable
possibility - hence the scientist's desire to destroy it with
an explosive device. However, the stalker might also be
seen as a grail knight -a visionary not caught up in the
status of his role, and who continually underplays his
worthiness, yet it is he who is seemingly granted his
unconscious wish as he is uncontaminated by a corrupted
desire (unlike 'Writer' and particularly 'Scientist', whose
intent is to destroy the room with an explosive device so
as to extinguish false hope in others).
Rheya/Hari is no longer fixed in a finite present but
is the manifestation of an infinite possibility (this is
evident in her capacity to continually rejuvenate herself),
and is Kelvin's memory of his wife interpreted by Solaris
and projected from Kelvin's past. 68

68 Ronald Bogue, in Deleuze on Cinema, argues: 'The present image

becomes representation when it is isolated from other images, not
by more light being cast on it, but by the diminution of light, a
darkening of its contours. Hence if present images are light,
representations are subtractions of quantities of light, or selective
filterings of light' (p. 31).

297
 The Solaris effect (the incorporeal infinitude),
69
understood as a kind of thaumaturgy , precedes and
anticipates interaction with a cause (a corporal finitude)
in the personages of Kelvin, Snow and Sartorious. But
they do not act as merely the source of the simulacra but

rather also as the 'point of view' from

which the
simulacra might be viewed the screen. 70
-
The effect of the simulacra as arguably a spectral
manifestation of memory would suggest that in a way
Rheya/Hari is already immanent as a problem within
Kelvin in two aspects; firstly, as a transcendental ground
of possible actualisations, and secondly, as a secondary
effect or simulacra. In the sense of the first view,
Rheya/Hari could be conceived as a point of immanence
specified by the proximity of the corporeal Kelvin and,
most importantly, his memory of his wife at the time of
her death, to the pre-individuation manifest in Solaris as
a kind of transcendental ground.

69 Thaurnaturgy - the act of performing miracles (a combination of

the scientific with a magical outlook). From the Greek
thaumatourgor, thaumamatos - marvel, and egos - working. This
concept is discussed in by Frances A. Yates in Theatre of the
World in relation to what is termed a thaumaturgike, which is
understood to be either a mechanical toy or a strange theatrical
effect. She quotes Dr John Dee, one of two of the great magical
scientists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (the other
being Robert Fludd), when describing the thaumaturgike as: 'that
Art Mathematicall which giveth certaine order to make straunge
workes of the sense to be perceived, and of men greatly to be
wondered at' (p. 30). Derrida, in The Truth in Painting, quotes
Kant in discussion of the parergon (the supplement outside the
work of art) when he states that because reason is 'conscious of
its impotence to satisfy its moral need', it has recourse to the
supplementary work of the parergon. The fourth parergon
(illumination) has a correspondent danger or detriment cited as
thaumaturgy (The Truth in Painting, p. 56). 1 also refer again here
to E. T. A Hoffmann's short story 'The Sandman', where the leading
character Nathaniel falls in love with the automaton, Olympia and,
as a result of which, is driven mad and finally to suicide.
70 Bogue argues in Deleuze on Cinema: 'an object (a merely present
image) emits light and that some rays of light pass through
unnoticed, while others are reflected back onto the object. Our
representation of the object consists of rays of light we reflect,
that is, the object's total number of rays minus the rays we ignore
or do not reflect. An organ of perception functions as the mirror
that reflects the rays that interest us and that serve our future
actions' (p. 31).

298
 6

The ability of the planet to continually replicate

Rheya/Hari illustrates and articulates the notion that at
the heart of infinity is repetition. Each 'new' Rheya/Hari
is physically the same as the previous one (a simulation
of Kelvin's recollection of her at the time of her physical
death), and clearly that sameness is based in Kelvin's

memory as interpreted by Solaris.

Yet that sameness is inherently different from the
source Rheya/Hari, in that Solaris creates this particular
phi-creature/visitor not from a first-hand or ideal person,
but from the memory of another (Kelvin) whose
recollective idiosyncrasies must inform the simulation.
The implication here is that repetition is not grounded in

similitude as a replication understood through mere

sameness, but that it is contingent on an essential

difference. 71

71 In both the film and the novel when Rheya/Hari first appears,
Kelvin notices, in attempting to remove her dress (he asks her to
don a spacesuit seemingly to go on a reconnaissance mission but
in reality it is his first attempt to rid himself of the phi-
creature/visitor) that there are no fastenings. This implies that
Solaris, in reading his memory, has been selective (the phi-
creature/visitor Rheya/Hari is not a complete facsimile). In the
novel, on Rheya/Hari's return when she undresses again, Kelvin
notes: 'The sight of the two identical dresses filled me with horror
which exceeded anything I had felt hitherto. Rheya was busy
tidying up the medicine chest. I turned my back and bit my
knuckles. Unable to take my eyes of the two dresses - or rather
the original dress and its double' (pp. 78-9, added emphasis).

299
 We understand meaning as an incorporeal attribute
to words (it is also produced through language and
therefore a mere after-effect of the lingual) and yet
presupposed in every statement as an antecedent
condition. 72 The paradox of meaning for Deleuze is both
in after-effect and something that is always already there
but which is also a transcendental condition of possible
meanings and becomings that have an infinite number of
embodiments. In linguistic terms, the ideal matter of
words is essentially not linguistic and the singular point
of things is not essentially physical, but implicates
centres of virtual difference before being explicated or
actualised in specific forms. This indicates what we
might term a 'transcendental field' of both meaning and
events, which might proffera metaphysical surface that is
manifest in paradox and simulacra. 73
Generally, the rational meaning of logical
propositions is referred to as common or good sense and
this infers that nonsense is therefore paradoxical and
contradictory to the rational. Deleuze argues that, in this
way, nonsense gives a full and unrestricted dimension of
sense, which is both corporeal and incorporeal.

72 In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze indicated four categories of

incorporeals:
(i) Time (aion and chronos)
(ii) Place
(iii) Void
(iv) Expressible - Lekton
For the Stoics, one and four were the most important - Lekton, as
what is expressible operates as a 'between' (what Deleuze refers
to as extra-being) which is neither subjective nor empirical. Time
is understood as the variable present of bodies (chronos) and the
unlimited time of past and future, which has no real existence
(aion).
73 It is important to remember here that Deleuze's conception of the
transcendental is in a sense metaphysical without falling into the
trope of the transcendental as either an abyss without differences
or possibilities or a sovereignly individuated being.

300
Words as bodies (physical sounds devoid of meaning) are
non-sense but have an important psychological function. 74
Incorporeal nonsense is an ever-elusive paradoxical
entity that traverses the metaphysical surface of meaning
and establishes what Deleuze describes as a structure of
singular points. The psychological model is a primal
experience of a corporeal plenum of non-individuated
bodies from where emerge the agencies of ego and
superego, fantasy and thought - corporeal
nonsense/words as bodies.
Schizophren i CS75confuse words and things (similarly
to writers like Lewis Carrol 1)76 but the latter's wordplay
involves the incorporeal surface, whereas the formers'
verbal constructions are embedded in the 'corporeal
depths of bodies without surfaces'. 77

74 In 'The Transcendence of Words', Levinas wrote: 'Non-sense is

the most evenly distributed thing in the world' (The Levinas
Reader, p. 145). In House of Leaves, Danielewski comments:
'Strangely then, the best argument for fact is the absolute
unaffordability of fiction. Thus it would appear the ghost haunting
The Navidson Record continually bashing against the door, is
none other than the recurring threat of its own reality' (p. 149).
75 The 'idiot' is understood as a conceptual persona who departs
from any scholastic definition of man as rational animal,
dramatises the unlearned and untutored in thinking.
76 The concept of 'non-sense', as illustrated by Lewis Carroll in Alice
in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, is integral to
Deleuze's The Logic of Sense. I draw attention to Deleuze's
remarks on the object in the Sheep's Shop in Through the
Looking-Glass (Chapter V, pp. 170-80) later in this chapter.
77 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 74.

301
Deleuze argues that schizophrenics experience words as
'devouring, lacerating or jubilant physical entities' but

also as a collection of dissociated 'body parts,

dismembered, interpenetrating and mutually devouring'

and as what he terms 'a body without organs'. 78

The transgressive movement of a kind of bifurcation

of the lingual operates, for the schizophrenic, as either
the dismembered body entered by exploding words,
wounding and rending phonetic elements devoid of
meaning or issuing forth from that body without organs as
'glorious unarticulated sonic blocks'. 79

In the endnotes to Chapter Six of House of Leaves,

the character Johnny Truant comments on entering
Zampanb's apartment and discovering his writings and
some unaccountable marks on the floor:

for I saw the impossible marks near the trunk, touched

them, even caught some splinters in my fingertips, some of
their unexpected sadness and mourning which though dug

out later with a safety pin, I swear still fester beneath my

skin, reminding me ... just like other splinters, I still carry,
though these much deeper, having never been worked out
by the body but quite the contrary worked into the body, by

78 Foucault argued that, historically, madness was reduced by the

age of reason to the status of a mere disease and was no longer
dignified as meaningful unreason. The consideration that such
non-sense was in fact the mind having wings was undermined (the
wings were clipped) by the disposition of reason as an educational
programme of psychiatric discourse which put the patient on trial
as it were, and from which the only respite would be sincere
remorse. I draw attention here to what has already been remarked
on the phi-creatures/visitors in Solaris. Under microscopic
scrutiny, Kelvin discovers that Rheya/Hari is not constituted of
recognisable body parts, but nutrinos and when he has focused
the microscope to its optimum setting, discovers not an atomic
structure but pure white light.
79 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 75. Earlier in the text he argues
that: 'Sense is never only one of the two terms of the duality
which contrasts things with propositions, substantives and verbs,
clenotations and expressions; it is also the frontier, the cutting
edge, or the articulation of the difference between the two terms,
since it has at its disposal an impenetrability which is its own and
within which it is reflected. For these reasons, sense must be
developed for its own sake in a new series of paradoxes, which
are now internal' (ibid., p. 28).

302
 now long since buried, calcified and fused to my very
80
bones
.

As stated in Chapter 1 of this text, incorporeal non-sense

functions for Deleuze as the structuring force of the
transcendental field of singular points and is a stable
intrinsic meaning that can never be found in mere
deferral. Here he differs from and critiques Derrida by
suggesting that deferral, understood as a perpetual
regress of one word defined by yet another prevents the
discovery of a linguistic ground; as a paradoxical
element, it is never where it is sought and always where
it cannot be found. In Stalker, the character of the stalker
is blessed with the idiocy of a kind of schizophrenia, in
that he negotiates the zone by finding paths with a zonal
topological pre-sense founded in the adaptability of his
experience and intuition, and takes charge of the rational
and scholastic (identified in his fellow travellers, 'Writer'
and 'Scientist'). 81

80 Added emphasis. Danielewski, House of Leaves, p. 78.

81 Tarkovsky's representation of the zone in Stalker indicates the
remnants of the Great Patriotic War (the Soviet Union's fight
against Nazi Germany, 1941-5) with the inclusion of derelict
tanks, concrete bunkers etc. This suggests that the zone had
already been a locale fraught with potential dangers prior to the
alien visitation. It implies a layering of temporal events whose
connection is the risk and danger inferred by their demarcation.
Paul Virilio, in Bunker Archaeology, states: 'The art of warfare
aims at the constitution of an unhealthy, improper place for men
just where he used to dwell' (p. 37).

303
 7

Mark Le Fanu proposes that Tarkovsky presents the

stalker as a holy fool and this is done through gesture.
For Tarkovsky, cinema had become a quasi-silent medium
and the stalker's vulnerability resists being pinned down

- 'he is muscular but at the same time "neurotic":

masculine but with feminine characteristics.

304
In sum, he is opaque and ungraspable 82
- an apparition.
In Madness and Civilization, Foucault argued that:

The madman's voyage is at once a rigorous division and an

absolute Passage. In one sense, it simply develops, across

a half-real, half-imaginary geography, the madman's liminal

position on the horizon of medieval concern -a position

symbolised and made real at the same time by the

madman's privilege of being confined within the city gates:

his exclusion must enclose him; if he cannot and must not
have another prison than the threshold itself, he is kept at
the point of passage. He is put in the interior of the

exterior, and inverse I Y. 83

82 Added emphasis. Mark Le Fanu, The Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky,

p. 98. Deleuze indicated a new kind of character that inhabits
'new' cinema: 'It is because what happens to them does not
belong to them and only half concerns them, because they know
how to extract from the event the part that cannot be reduced to
what happens: that part of inexhaustible possibility that
constitutes the unbearable, the intolerable, the visionary's part'
(Cinema 2, pp. 19-20). The confusion and ambiguity of gender is
perhaps concomitant with what has been previously stated with
regard to Ariadne's relationship with Theseus (the feminine image
of man) as noted by Deleuze in Nietzsche and Philosophy. Also
note here Tarkovsky's extended scrutiny of the physical profile of
the stalker once he has guided Scientist and Writer over the
border and into the zone. Le Fanu argues that this extended shot
resists the portentousness of the anticipation of a profound
oration in favour of a study of vulnerability, which, rather than
resort to mere pathos, emphasises the afore mentioned
opaqueness of the fictional protagonist. This differs from the
original conception of the character in the Strugatsky brothers'
novel as a tough, streetwise character. In this sense, the
anticipation of possible readings of the character mirrors the
navigation of the zone (a reading on the stalker's face of the
uncertainty of the possible directions that might be taken). I also
mention here Deleuze's cinematic reading of the close-up as part
of his work on the affection-image, of the framed head as the
cleterritorialisation of the face in Cinema 1 (as noted in a film like
Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc -a silent film where the
film is made up extended close-ups). The separation is from what
he argues are the three conventional functions of the face:
Individuation - the distinguishing of characteristics of each
character
Socialisation - the relation of the social role through character
interaction
Communication - interaction, not only between two persons but
also what he calls the internal accord between character and
one's role.
83 Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 11.

305
Foucault pointed out that with the withdrawal of lepro SY84
from the Western world at the end of the Middle Ages,
the figure of the leper (and the communal sites they
occupied outside urban centres and on the margins of the
community) was reassigned so that the values and
images previously attached gave meaning to a more
general kind of social exclusion. 85

In particular this meant that the fearful figure of the

madman was not merely driven off as an act of total
exclusion, but inscribed with a peripheral role and, in
that sense, kept at a sacred distance. 136
John Rajchman, in The Deleuze Connections,

argues that noo-ology, as the image of thought, proposes

an undogmatic way of approaching philosophy, which is

not to be confused with what he terms a pre-

comprehension of being (in the Heideggarian sense) or in
a gestalt as a sphere of spirit (in the Hegelian sense),
but is fundamentally against any intrinsic narrative,

84 It is worth reiterating here that in House of Leaves, Will Navidson

suffers from an indeterminate skin disorder (see footnote in
Chapter 3 of this text), which is miraculously cured after his final
excursion into the house. However, it might be argued that there
was a physical cost for such a cure: 'Navidson began to recover,
but the price he paid for living was not cheap. Frostbite claimed
his right hand and clipped the top portion of one ear. Patches of
skin on his face were also removed as well as his left eye.
Furthermore his hip had inexplicably shattered and had to be
replaced. Doctors said he would need a crutch for the rest of his
life' (p. 523).
85 In the Strugatsky brothers' novel, Roadside Picnic, they not only
identify the zone as an area of exclusion, but also a plague
quarter also contaminated in the aftermath of the visitation which
created the zone: 'Almost everyone who lived in the neighborhood
was hit, that's why we call it the Plague Quarter. Some died,
mostly old people, and not too many of them. 1, for one, think they
died from fright and not the plague. It was terrifying. Everyone
who lived there got sick. And people in three neighborhoods went
blind They didn't go completely blind, but got a sort of night
...
blindness' (p. 19). This blindness was apparently not caused by a
bright light but a loud noise.
86 'In the margins of the community, at the gates of cities, there
stretched wastelands, which sickness ceased to haunt but had left
sterile and long inhabitable. From the 14th to the 17th century
they would wait, soliciting with strange incantations, a new
incarnation of disease another grimace of terror, renewed rites of
purification and exclusion. ' Foucault, Madness and Civilsation,
p. 3.

306
historicism and sequentialism. This philosophical theatre
argues for the precedent of juxtaposition, layering and
stratigraphic montage, no longer tied to the hermeneutic
universality of historical linearity, and where links are
made across strata; where newness and the untimely
transgress established stratifications in shifts which open
up new fault lines and possibilities through the continual
event of mutation. The cinematic resonance of this
conception of temporality and montage should not be lost
here, and the pertinence of complication as the
overarching thematic at work here is further articulated
by the reconsideration of sense and event as the
motivation of thought, rather than the historical
imperatives of truth and proposition.
As Deleuze states:

The cinematographic image is always dividual. This is

because, in the final analysis, the screen, as the frame of
frames, gives a common standard of measurement to things
which do not have one - long shots of countryside and
close-ups of the face, an astronomical system and a single
drop of water - parts which do not have the same
denominator of distance, relief or light. In all these senses
the frame ensures a deterritorialisation of the image. 87

The freeing of the time of philosophy from any epochal

temporality (in the sense of a self -real isation of spirit or
a destining of the West) also insists that thought should
have no intrinsic home - no homeland or civilisation.
Deleuze proposes a geophilosophy that rethinks
borders based on odd potentials, different circumstances
and contingencies rather than origins -a
deterritorialisation, a nowhere not covered or
compensated by an imagined community, nation or
utopian condition where there is no imperium of truth, no

87 Deleuze, Cinema 1, pp. 14-15.

307
transcendent law or Apollonian ideal it 88
C y. What matters
is not a single unchanging relation to truth but the
differences of orientation that suggest the image of
thought (Deleuzian noo-ology) operates as an orientation
tool in that it is prior to argument (for example,
Descartes would argue differently from Plato) and
selection is made through relation to a negative that is no
longer meant in the sense of something to be corrected
or overcome, an error, but rather a stupidity to be
exposed and attacked.
This notion of stupidity suggests any philosophical
conflict is no longer based in a propositional error of
ideality, but in taking on the intractable, not as irrational,
but as involving the thinker in a relation with something
inhuman and intolerable the 'bestiality of thinking'. 89
-
Problematisation pushes outside without any assurance
of a superior first knowledge, which has a consensual
agreement and engages with the shock of working with
something for which there is no prior learning method.
We are no longer in the realms of mere correction of
error through the beatification of a higher science, but
extrapolate beyond the natural light of good will and
knowing to make visible new forces through experimental
activity. 90

88 Deleuze proposes a 'Spinozian city' that allows for the movement

of free thought and social diversity. This movement always has an
outside for which the private thinker refuses to place him/herself
prior to truth. Deleuze and Guattari argue that 'the relation to
truth in philosophy is neither stable nor constant, which is why it
cannot be defined by it' (What is Philosophy?, p. 54).
89 1 would like to make a link here between the 'bestiality of thinking'
and the 'barbarism' of post- Holocaust/Shoah writing of lyric poetry
as indicated by Adorno in relation to Celan (see Chapter 2 of this
text). In the novel Solaris, Snow comments to Kelvin with
reference to man's first contact with the planet: 'contact with
another civilization. Now we've got it! And we can observe through
the microscope as it were our own monstrous ugliness, our folly,
our shame! ' (p. 76).
90 Deleuze proposes a worldly thinking against the urdoxa of
transcendent ideality.

308
 Deleuze proposes an amorphous unformed space as
shown through the anexact diagrams of pre-geometric
figures, critiquing Husserl's The Origin of Geometry by

suggesting that Husserl, in not extending his

phenomenality to include the affirmation of such spaces,
undermines their significance in favour of good geometric
figures.
Intensive space is not grounded in good form or the
synthesis of a manifold, and departs significantly from
the recognised constitution of objects -with -p rope rties and
a divisible space of mere extension. Deleuze argued that
the perambulation of space refuses any concept of
mapping and rather posits a condition of filling out, which
refutes any determination towards unrestrained
organisation while also indicating the inseparability of
space and movement.
David Gross, however, points out a third type of
memory that is hinted at by Bergson (but not significantly
expanded upon), which he understands to be involuntary
memory and by which it is understood that memories are
unsolicited or disengaged from immediate action or
perception and become an overwhelming flood of images
which hinder any ability to cope with reality. In historical
terms, these 'disturbances of memory and (the) failures

of recognition'91 not only draw parallels between

Bergson's involuntary memory and Deleuze's time-image,
but also articulate what we have already defined as a
fragmentary vision, which became synonymous with a
perception of European cinema where subjectivity
resisted the domination of an objective vision

91 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 55.

309
concomitant with what Deleuze describes as the action or
movement-image of American cinema. 92
In classical cinema, the laws of motion function
independently of time and, as such, the dynamics of such
a form subordinate the temporal to movement. Modern
cinema pulverises chronology so that the temporal is no
longer subordinate to the integrity of movement as mere
physical actions, but remains fragmented like the parts of
a broken crystal.
The distinction made by Deleuze is that between the
frame as a provisionally closed and artificial set, and the
shot as open and essentially variable. In Gilles Deleuze's
Time Machine, D. N. Rodowick argues that the former
'detaches objects from pro-filmic space, grouping
actions, gesture, bodies and decors in a motivated

ensemble' 93 If this is correct, the parallel is perhaps

.
between the habitual memory of pure recollection,
arguably concomitant with the realism of the movement-
image, and the involuntary memory of the modernist art
film and the time-image.
Deleuze argued that the significant difference
between the classical cinema of the movement-image and
the modern cinema of the time-image is the non-rational
or irrational link and cut.

The so-called classical cinema works above all through the

linkage of images, and subordinates cuts to this linkage. On
the mathematical analogy, the cuts which divide up two
series of images are rational, in the sense that they
constitute either the final image of the first series or the
first image of the second rational cuts always determine
...

92 It is argued by Deleuze that the cinema of the time-image

promoted an empiricist conversion in the era of post-war trauma.
This refers to a belief or trust in the world that is prior to any
divine calculation and judgement and interpreting the world as
ever still making itself and never formulated mere goodness and
truth -a belief in future as future (an aesthesis).
93 Rodowick, Deleuze's Time Machine, p. 1 1.

310
 commensurable relations between a series of images and
thereby constitute the whole rhythmic system and harmony

of classical cinema Time here, is therefore, essentially

...
the object of an indirect representation, according to the
commensurable relations and rational cuts which organise
the sequence or linkage of movement-images ... modern
cinema can communicate with the old, and the distinction
between the two can be very relative. However, it will be
defined ideally by a reversal where the image is unlinked

and the cut begins to have an importance in itself. The cut,

or interstice between two series of images no longer forms
part of either of the two series; it is the equivalent of an
irrational cut, which determines the non-com mensu rable
94
relations between images
.

Modern cinema then (by which Deleuze specifically refers

to the European films of the post-war era) proffers the
discontinuity of the irrational as the means by which the
smooth running of any variation on movement as
essentially continuous and legible is undermined. Donato
Totaro argues that movement-image is a form of
spatialised cinema, whereby time is determined and
measured by movement (characters placed in narrative

situations, perceive, react and take action in a direct

linear way).
The breakdown of what Deleuze calls the sensor-
motor system happens when direct action and reaction
are undermined by the discontinuity of temporal shifts
and the appearance of vacant and disconnected spaces
(he terms these 'any-space-whatevers'), which disrupt

continuity, pushing the characters into a more passive

role.
As already suggested, this pre-geometric spatiality
is essentially transgressive, in that it escapes division

and topographic determination to exploit an intensity

94 Ibid., p. 213.

311
beyond the limit of the lived body of phenomenological
properties. The shift in cinema is, for Deleuze, a
slackening of sensory-motor connections, replacing them
with a purely optical and sound situation that he
identifies with the role of the child in neo-realist cinema.
He argues: 'in the adult world, the child is affected by a

certain motor helplessness, but one which makes him all

the more capable of seeing and hearing'. 95

In Tarkovsky's film Stalker, the stalker's child

Monkey could be interpreted as an illustration of a
pre/post sensory condition that is not only heightened by
her motor helplessness (it is made explicit that she
literally cannot walk) but also, as indicated at the end of
the film, by the fact that she is telepathic - perhaps a
gift/curs e of the zone/room.

95 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 3

312
There is an implication in both film and nove 196that the
stalker's forays into the zone and any resulting
contamination 97 are responsible for Monkey's condition.
The trip which takes place in Tarkovsky's cinematic
adaptation, indicates that a wish is fulfilled by the room
on the stalker's return, in that it appears that Monkey is

now mobile. However, the shot later reveals that she is in

fact 'walking' on her father's shoulders. 98

Navidson's children in House of Leaves are denied

the paradox of the closet by 'swallowing it whole'. 99

Zampanb later comments on Daisy's demand to play a

game that she seems to refer to as 'always' as perhaps
just a childish neologism, yet the sinister overtone is

maintained in the text by proposing that the title of the

game may in fact be a mispronunciation of the word
hallways and that the children fail to recognise the

unheimlich potential (the non-sense) of the house in the

same way as the adults do, preferring to interpret the

disorienting changes taking place as part of a game.
Navidson's wife Karen reacts differently.

96 The novel written by the Strugatsky brothers is entitled Roadside

Picnic and is so named to suggest the temporary incursion of
aliens thirty years prior to the commencement of the narrative and
who picnicked on earth and then left leaving a series of locations
permanently contaminated by their debris. In the novel this
residue is very real and the source of an underground economy for
stalkers in alien contraband. In Tarkovsky's film, what is desired
is wish fulfilment from the room. In her essay, 'Art for All 'Time''
(Film-Philosophy, Vol. 4, No. 4, February 2000), Donato Totaro
comments: 'Tarkovsky is not interested in external, scientific truth
or reality, but an inner subjective truth. The room granted the
truth of the deeper self and not the apparent reality of the surface
self' (p. 4).
97 In the novel, this is referred to as the 'mutagen effect': 'Everyone
who spends time in the zone undergoes changes, both phenotype
and genotype' (p. 109).
98 Tarkovsky expands this idea of the miracle by suggesting at the
end of the film that Monkey has telepathic powers. In a seemingly
repetitive sequence which mirrors the opening shot of the film,
objects move across a surface in the stalker's apartment as the
result of the vibration of a passing train. In the final sequence
Monkey appears to be watching a similar event, but it is only after
the train has passed and the noise dies away that we are aware
that the objects continue to move and that Monkey (evidenced by
her facial reaction) is manipulating them.
99 Danielewski, House of Leaves, p. 39.

313
 Karen's project is one mechanism against the uncanny or
that which is 'un-home-like'. She remains watchful and
willing to let the bizarre dimensions of her house gestate
within her. 100

The discrepancies that unfold in the Navidson Record are

concomitant with the Deleuzian view of the time-image.
This is centred on the purely optical and sound image,
which articulates more indeterminate themes of mental
imagery and emotional and psychic breakdown -a direct
image of time. 'O' Danielewski's account of a fictive
documentary film entitled The Navidson Record, as
described by the deceased Zampan6 in his surviving
notes published as the main body of text in House of
Leaves, states that:

If finally catalogued as a gothic tale, contemporary urban

folk myth, or merely a ghost story, as some have called it,

the documentary will still, sooner or later, slip the limits of

102
any one of those genres.

The possibility inherent in this slippage that recognises

the 'between' of any formal genres as integral to a new

100 Added emphasis. Ibid., p. 37. Karen's project is putting up some

shelves, which highlights the first noticeable discrepancies in the
dimensions of the house. Earlier remarks indicate the ambiguity of
the transgression of the corporeal articulated in the event of
gestation, its temporal dimension and potential parasitic
consequences. This presents a psychological trauma of
simultaneously being 'in' the house while at the same time,
recognising that the house is also 'in' the body. Gestation is an
attribute of, amongst other life forms, the parasite.
101 In his introduction to Foucault's text on Raymond Roussel, Death
and the Labyrinth, John Ashbery comments that Roussel's poem
Nouvelles Impression o"Afrique (1932) has a narrative constantly
interrupted by parenthetic thought and where sometimes five pairs
of parentheses 'isolate one idea buried in the surrounding
verbiage like the central sphere of a Chinese puzzle' (p. xxv,
added emphasis). The visual similarity between these parentheses
and a labyrinthine structure should not be lost here. He later
argues that the poem is pieced together by moving backwards and
forwards through the text - to turn ahead to the last line of the
canto in order to be able to finish the first line as a means of
piecing the poem together.
102 Added emphasis. Danielewski, House of Leaves, p. 3. The two
fictitious films mentioned in Five and a Half Minute Hallway and
Exploration#4 are described by Zampan6 as structurally 'highly
discontinuous, jarring' (p. 5).

314
understanding of how a structure might be recognised,
identifies complication and interruption as the essential
schematic of mutability. As stated above, Danielewski
exploits many recognised forms, but the fundamental
structure of the novel links main text and footnotes (via
the disjunction of any intrinsic temporal continuity) by
developing, provisionally at least, two narratives
simultaneously (operating as two pasts, as it were), on
the same page.
The ongoing desire is to find continuity in the shift
from what we might call the main narrative, understood
as Zampan6's account of the Navidson Record, to the
footnoted text of Johnny Truant's personal memoir.
Chronology as a clear path through the text is blurred by
the novel's structure and page layouts where the issue is
raised that the novel is in fact not a novel at all but a
documentary account of not only the edited notes of a
person called Zampanb but supplemented by the diary of
a further seemingly real character called Johnny Truant.

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The account of Truant's life runs concomitantly with the

first throughout the body of the text and specifically

315
indicates the progressive deterioration and disorientation
of that life. In the introduction, the character Truant

comments that he lost all sense of time while reading

Zampan6's text and: 'Slowly but surely, I grew more and
more disorientated'. 103 This indicates a direct affect by
his involvement with Zampan6's account of yet further
lives (the characters of the Navidson Record) and further
temporal shifts.
As the narrative unfolds, a group of associates
(Holloway's exploration team) are drafted in to enforce a
further 'scientific' diagnostic by exploring the shifting
anomalies of the house. The exploration culminates in
the tragic consequences of the latter part of the novel
and which exacerbate non-linear relations, and along
with the other concomitant narrative (Truant's
increasingly convoluted trajectory through Zampan6's
journal and notes) find the text becoming progressively
more labyrinthine. It defies a clear linearity by

preclicating disorientation with all its incumbent

complications and uncertainty of what is virtual and what
is actual.

103 Danielewski, House of Leaves, introduction, p. xviii. In a later

section of the text, Truant comments: 'No one wanted the old
man's words -except me' (p. 20). The strong association between
the characters of Truant and Zampan6 is almost as that between
absent father and son (note here the affiliation between Matta-
Clark, his brother Batan and their absent father, the Chilean
surrealist painter Matta). This link that Danielewski makes in the
footnoted text also brings to light a certain fraternal relation
between Truant and Lude (comparable with the one between Will
and Tom Navidson in the main text). This relation reaches its
zenith when the distinction between the appearance of what we
might deem 'reality' and 'fantasy' is blurred where Truant
describes the demise of Lude (the diary entry at the beginning of
Chapter 21 states: 'October 25,1998, Lude's dead. ') This is
supposedly at the hands of 'Gdansk man' as the first reprisal for
Truant's affair with Kyrie (one of Zampan6's 'readers'). Also note
here that Danielewski's sister (stage name, Poe) released an
album in 2001 entitled Haunted and which particularly references
this affair in the last track entitled 'Hey Pretty' (drive-by mix
2001) and uses an extensive quote from the novel (pp. 88-9) and
read by the author. Other tracks made reference to the novel
('Exploration B', '5 & 1/2 Minute Hallway', 'Dear Johnny' and 'House
of Leaves') but the predominant theme of the recording is a
daughter's relationship with her recently deceased father.

316
 Danielewski's own account of the novel and the
theatricality of its construction began through the
coalescence of a series of essays on how text could be
explored in more cinematic ways. In an interview with
Brian Logan, he stated:

I've always had a fondness for the way the page, when
wrapped in footnotes and marginalia seemed to come to life.
It was like some strange two-dimensional stage. Our words
and phrases have all been influenced by the writers that
come before us. I thought this was a more honest way of
104
relating how stories are told .

In Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky argued that the

adaptation of Bogomolov's novel into his first major
feature film as a director (Ivan's Childhood) released the
hidden cinematic potential of the novel.

It opened up possibilities for recreating in a new way the

true atmosphere of war, with its hyper-tense nervous
concentration, invisible on the surface of events but making
itself felt like a rumbling beneath the ground. 105

For him the poetic links found in the logic of poetry in

cinema were 'extraordinarily pleasing', 106and in this

sense he argued that he found himself to be more at

home in the poetic than in the traditional theatrical
writing linking images through the linearity of a rigidly
logical development of plot.

Some works have a wholeness and are endowed with a

precise and original literary image; characters are drawn in

unfathomable depths; the composition has an extraordinary

capacity for enchantment, and the book is indivisible:

through the pages comes the astonishing, unique
personality of the author: books like that are masterpieces,

104 Danielewski, interviewed by Brian Logan for the Guardian, 13 July

2000.
105 Added emphasis. Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, p. 17.
106 Ibid., p. 18.

317
 and only someone who is actually indifferent both to fine
prose and to the cinema can conceive the urge to screen
them. It is all the more important to emphasise this point
now, when the time has come for literature to be separated,
107
once and for all from cinema .

Deleuze suggested that Tarkovsky's interpretation of time

and how it flows through the shot was essentially through
tension and rarefaction - the pressure of time in the shot.
He argued that Tarkovsky denied the notion of a
language of cinema working with units - the distinction
between 'shot' as a framing device for the temporal, and
'montage', which articulates and expresses the pressure
of time to exceed the limits of any shot.

The movement-image can be perfect, but it remains

amorphous, indifferent and static if is not already deeply

affected by injections of time which put montage into it, and

alter 108
movement.

107 Ibid., p. 15.

108 Deleuze, Cinema 2, pp. 42-3.

318
In Danielewski's introduction to House of Leaves, the
character Johnny Truant's discussion of the task
confronting him when dealing with Zampan6's papers
about The Navidson Record is a montage of recollections
that press the boundaries of legibility and demand of any
editing process a decernability of appropriateness. 109

Truant/Danielewski includes a number of Zampan6's

notes, which are essentially illegible (the text is literally

obliterated), as part of the montage of the text as a

mechanism of disruption that does not follow a clear
imperative towards mere exclusion, but in some ways
articulates the continuity of limit by consistently
exceeding it.

109 1 note here the publication at the end of The Navidson Record an
array of appendices (pertinent to both Zampanb and Johnny
Truant) that include visual material (Exhibits One to Six) and
various information the author deemed relevant as evidence of the
events at Ash Tree Lane. Note here the choice of Ash Tree Lane
as the address of the house. Danielewski indicates (noted at the
close of the novel), a reference to the Nordic mythological tree,
the ash-tree Yggdrasil, which was believed to support the universe
while maintaining its roots in all worlds. The Nordic tradition
depicted the entire world as a tree of prodigious proportions and
whose foliage was always verdant. It was rooted firstly in the
subterranean kingdom of the underworld (Niflhal) and where its
root penetrated, the fountain Huergelmer rose. The second was
rooted in the land of the giants and from which the fountain Mimir
spouted (the water of which was where all wisdom dwelt and cost
the god Odin an eye for the privilege of drinking there). The last
root ascended to the heavens and from which the fountain of the
wisest Norn, Urd, rose. This was the source of water, which kept
the tree from withering through the daily attention of Norns.

319
 =y .
=41. r --t
.

-ld . . -d --, Z.., ý

tý I. h -c =ý ....

10

The varying scale of these omissions reflects the

dimensional discrepancies at work in the house and add
to the mystery and ambiguity of any definitive reading of
the events of The Navidson Record. 110

110 It is worth noting here that all the detailed notes (and footnotes)
made by Zampanb and corresponding to the mythology of the
Labyrinth and the Minotaur are conspicuously and consistently
obliterated. Mythology encrypted into the text, pp. 109-1 1. The
presence of a monster/Minotaur is strongly alluded to by
Danielewski (via the sonic presence indicated by individuals
hearing various animalistic sounds inside the labyrinth) and also
noted inside the hallways by physical manifestation; the
destruction of markers and equipment left by the exploration team
the ambiguity of these actions remains unresolved as there is
-
further indication that it is not necessarily the act of an individual
entity but the entropic condition of the labyrinth itself. The
transgressive nature of these acts is not confined merely to the
narrative of The Navidson Record, but crosses into the footnoted
text where Johnny Truant also finds himself haunted as he
negotiates Zampan6's labyrinthine notes. This is first indicated
when Johnny and Lude first enter the old man's apartment and
note the four gouge marks near where the body was found: "'Right
next to the body, " Lude continued, "I found these gouges in the
hardwood floor, a good six or seven inches long. Very weird. But
since the old man showed no sign of physical trauma, the cops let
it go"' (p. xv). 'Sure enough, just as my friend had described, on
the floor, in fact practically dead center, were four marks, all of
them longer than one hand, jagged bits of wood clawed up by
something neither one of us cared to imagine' (p. xvii, added
emphasis).

320
 The literal interpretation of the house as a
mythological metaphor is conspicuously undermined by
this unexplained obfuscation, yet in a similar way to
Heidegger in 'On The Question of Being' and Derrida in
Of Grammatology, plays with sous rature as a mechanism
for identifying a discrepancy whereby any literal
interpretation of what has been erased accepts the need,
in the act of erasure, to identify what has been removed
in such a way that its spectral trace remains as part of
the event of erasure. Truant's introduction contextualises
this inclusion by listing the variety, breadth and condition
of Zampan6's notes and therefore expressing the scale of
his task as editor:

As I discovered, there were reams and reams of it. Endless

snarls of words, sometimes twisting into meaning,

sometimes into nothing at all, frequently breaking apart,
always branching off into other pieces I'd come across later

- on old napkins, the tattered edges of an envelope, once

even on the back of a postage stamp; everything and
anything but empty; each fragment completely covered with
the creep of years and years of ink pronouncements;
layered, crossed out, amended: handwritten, typed; legible,
illegible; impenetrable, lucid; torn, stained, scotch taped;
some bits crisp and clean, others faded, burnt or folded and
refolded so many times the creases have obliterated whole
passages of god knows what-sense? Truth? Deceit? a
legacy of prophecy or lunacy or nothing of the kind?, and in
the end achieving, designating, describing, recreating - find

your own words; I have no more; or plenty more but why?

And all to tell "'
- what?

Danielewski, House of Leaves, introduction p. xvii. I draw

attention to the specific act of folding, unfolding and refolding
that Truant identifies as 'an act of obliteration'. In The Fold:
Lebniz and the Baroque, Deleuze states: 'Thus a continuous
labyrinth is not a line dissolving into independent points, as
flowing sand might dissolve into grains, but resembles a sheet of
paper divided into infinite folds or separated into bending
movements, each one determined by the consistent or conspiring
surroundings' (p. 6, added emphasis).

321
For Deleuze, cinema is not strictly speaking a language,
but rather a semiotic in the sense of a semiology steeped
in the structuralism of a system of signs that exist as a
universal and unchanging linguistic structure. However,
his development of such a structural determination is
through the reintroduction of the notion of a signic
temporality in relation to thought. 112
Deleuze does not dispute the narrational, historical
possibilities of the cinematic, but prefers to consider
mobility of the materiality of the image through the
relation of immanence as the motivation for any definition
of image and narration. The unchanging ahistorical
narrative function conceived by the structuralist model
imposes a grammar or language that determines via
externality and therefore proposes (and imposes) any
analysis in such a way that takes no regard of the
specificity of the medium in which it is realised. This
linguistic origin merely compounds the problem by in one
way insisting that filmic signification is essentially non-
verbal and operates outside and independently of any
fixed language, yet insists on expounding cinematic
signification via a linguistic model.
Deleuze argues that a structuralist approach cannot
avoid basing the theory of signification on a verbal model

112 A brief diversion is appropriate here. Deleuze critiques the film

theorist Christian Metz's structuralist approach in two ways; firstly
by observing Metz's contention that cinema has 'no language' in
the sense of a determinate structure, but is codified by narrative
form and the adoption of novelistic practices (I draw attention to
earlier remarks made with regard to Tarkovsky's 'free' adaptation'
of literary material releasing its 'hidden cinematic power').
Secondly, Metz argued that cinematic shot has a relation to
linguistic analysis, in that it cannot be conceived as merely an
arbitrary sign since there is what he calls a motivated relation
between an image and what it signifies and therefore 'shot' cannot
be characterised by this 'double' operation. However, it does
have some unity that is comparable with linguistic notions of
'utterance', but which cannot be further divided by morphernic or
phonemic analysis. Metz argued that film must be conceived as
an organisation made up of distinct narrative segments that were
linked and had spatiotemporal characteristics, which could be
analysed as a distinct and discrete set of codes.

322
and therefore a structure, which is seemingly both inside
and outside of the image. This form of semiology remains
essentially reductionist in that it indicates filmic image
and narrative are modelled on external forms, which are
not fundamental to the materiality of the image. The
camera might be conceived in sculptural terms in that it
carves out via the frame a portion of space-time but such
a framing device is usurped by a further event by which
that which is framed by the mechanism of the camera is
further required to be projected onto a screen of specific
dimensions as the frame of frames (note here the title of
Tarkovsky's text, Sculpting in Time). In Deleuze's words,
it provides 'a common measure for that which has
non e'. 113Danielewski draws attention to what we might
term, the parergonal sublimity of the events at Ash Tree
Lane through the complication of scale that is
concomitant with the paradoxical transition of a kind of
depth of field.

113 Deleuze, Cinema 1,27: 14.

323
 In other words, the immen[ ]ity of Navidson's house eludes
the frame. It exists only in Holloway's face, fear etc [I

deeper and deeper into his features, the cost of dying paid

out with p[ Jun[ ]s of flesh and e[ ]ch s[ ]allow breath. It is

painful[ ] obvious the creature Holloway hunts has already

begun to feed him. 114
on

However, this common measure rather than provide

continuity and stability, tends towards disorientation
rather than unification forcing together what Ronald
Bogue refers to as 'qualitatively different views of things
within an arbitrarily delineated surface area'. From

camera to screen there is a destabilisation of the image -

a deterritorialisation.

Sometimes it is necessary to restore the lost parts, to

rediscover everything that cannot be seen in the image,

everything that has been removed to make it 'interesting'.

But sometimes, on the contrary, it is necessary to make
holes to introduce voids and white spaces, to rarefy the
image, by suppressing things that have been added to make
us believe that we were seeing everything. It is necessary
to make a division or make emptiness in order to find the
whole again. "5

114 Danielewski, House of Leaves, p. 334. Note that the physical

breaks in the text (the parentheses) indicated by the brackets not
only emphasise the disorder and disorientation experienced inside
the labyrinth of the house but also imply through the absence of
specific letters and word fragments the possibility of:
eAn(other) text to be read in absentia.
*The literal consumption of the text by the creature Holloway is
hunting.
I draw attention here to the description of 'close-up' with regard
to what has previously been remarked on via Deleuze and
Tarkovsky (see footnote 82). Richard Polt in his essay, 'The Event
of Enthinking the Event' (published in Companion to Heidegger's
Contributions to Philosophy), identifies Heidegger's description of
the work as essentially preparatory or transitional: 'Contributions
claims to fall short of the status of work: they are merely a
premonition of a phantom text that would be titled Das Ereignis, a
text that exists only as a possibility opened by this one' (p. 96,
added emphasis). I also comment here on the description of
Holloway as a literary 'close-up', which has parallels with earlier
remarks made about the close-up of the stalker in Tarkovsky's
film.
115 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 21.

324
In classical film the laws of motion function
independently of time in a Newtonian sense, so that the
dynamics of such cinema subordinate the temporal to

movement. Modern cinema is distinctive because it

essentially pulverises chronology so that the temporal is

no longer subordinate to movements or linked to physical

actions but is fragmented - like a broken crystal. 'Shot'

defines, for Deleuze, a relatively open and variable space
and is distinct from frame, which D. N. Rodowick
describes as a provisionally closed and artificial set: 'it
detaches objects from "pro-filmic space", grouping
actions, gestures, bodies and decors in a motivated

ensemble. 016

When Bergson indicated that the idea of the image

was already in the very interior of things, it was an
attempt to overcome the dualism of realism and
idealism, 117object and subject, etc. Since the eighteenth
century image was considered a representation of matter:
an internal and more importantly secondary rendering or
supplement of what exists outside of consciousness.
Both realism and idealism require through the
speculative interest of pure knowledge, a divorcing of the
mind from both matter and spirit on the understanding
that the latter exists outside both matter and time.
Bergson proposed to re-establish a kind of continuity
between consciousness, matter and time. This would
rethink the notion of human contemplation that divorced

mind from reality to proffer a perception of image and

matter that was essentially identical.
If matter were already image in the sense of a
fundamental appearing, it becomes luminous in that all

116 Rodowick, Deleuze's Time Machine, p. 11.

117 In realism, one represents to oneself what actually is according to
the presumed laws of nature. In idealism, one represents to
oneself what is according to the presumed laws of thought.

325
that could be perceived would be already inherent as the
replete state of the image. Deleuze referred to this
condition as the 'plane of immanence' and this is
essentially virtual to the extent that the requirements of
the corporeal (the body) demand that limits are put in
place on what can actually be apprehended in matter.
Matter and image are continuous with yet distinctive
from human perception on the understanding that the
picturing of matter limits via its human/corporeal role and
acts as a filter which relays specific information on
specific wavelengths. This indicates two systems of
images: one that is universal and immanent and the
other, which is bodily and filtered by the physiological
limits and human requirements.
In Bergsonl .sm, Deleuze distinguishes between
discovery and invention by articulating that the former is
the uncovering of what already exists, whereas the latter
gives being to what may not exist and may never happen.
Donato Totaro argues that Deleuze's introduction of the
crystal-image as the indivisible unity of the virtual and
the actual maintains the virtual-image as essentially
subjective and in the past -a pure recollection that
exists outside of consciousness but alive in the temporal
past and always ready (immanent) to be recollected by an
actual-image. If memory is commonly conceived as a
quantitatively or qualitatively impoverished version of the
actuality of a present sense experience -a mere failed

perception: it demands the question as to where memory

is formed? As Bogue points out in Deleuze on Cinema,
Bergson does not conceive memory as inside the
individual mind and therefore determined by such
individuation, but suggests a complication that usurps

326
any subject/object, interior/exterior relation by

suggesting that each mind is in fact inside memory. 118

There must, then be, a 'memory of the present', a virtual

memory image that coexists with each perception image in

the present, a virtual double that is like a reflection in a

mirror. '19

The metaphor of the trinity plays a significant role in

Tarkovsky's interpretation of time and, with particular
reference to Solaris and Stalker, transgresses even the
tangible finitude of the cinematic composition. At the end
of Tarkovsky's previous film, Andrei Rublev, the director

creates a montage of Rublev's surviving icons (the only

sequence of the film shot in colour), 120one of which is

perhaps his most famous and enduring image - The

Trinity. 121

A facsimile 122of this painting appears briefly in shot

on the space station in Solaris -a temporal shift from
fifteenth-century icon painting to modern space station
which begs the questions of firstly, whether this is merely

a discrete allusion to his previous work, or does it have

118 'Time is not the interior in us, but just the opposite, the interiority
in which we are, in which we move, live and change. ' (Deleuze,
Cinema 2, p. 82).
119 Bogue, Deleuze on Cinema, p. 118.
120 It is worth noting here that in Stalker, Tarkovsky introduces colour
only in the sequences inside the zone; the sequences that
parenthesise the trip into the zone are shot in a sepia-tone which
appears almost black and white.
121 1 note here the significance of the concept of trinity as a thematic
across all the discussed works. In House of Leaves there are
variant possibilities - the relationship between Will, Karen and
Tom; Johnny Truant, Lude and Zampan6; the three explorers,
Holloway, Wax and Jed: the rescuers, Will, Reston and Tom.
There is an obvious trinity in Stalker: that of the stalker, Scientist
and Writer as well as the stalker, his wife and Monkey. In Solaris
we have the three scientists on the space station and the
relationship between Kelvin, Rheya/Hari and Kelvin's father. In
her text, Tarkovsky: Cinema as Poetry, Maya Turovskaya draws
attention to the trinity as an artistic three-in-one', in relation to
the distinctive characters of three monks/icon painters in Andrei
Rublev - Rublev, his mentor DaniiI Chorny and his rival Kirill.
122 The significance of the appearance of a facsimile of the Rublev
icon should be noted here as almost a precursor to events on the
station (the appearance of the phi-creature Rheya/Hari) and
latterly, Kelvin's apparent reunion with his father.

327
far reaching implications for the forthcoming climax of
this film (already alluded to in the opening sequences of
Tarkovsky's opus but entirely absent from the novel)?
Secondly, is Tarkovsky identifying the trinity of Kelvin,
Hari and Kelvin's father as the psychological thread
drawing the viewer through the narrative in a way that

places Kelvin as the foci for the unfolding of events (the

'point of view') where the arrival of the visitor/phi-

creature Hari forces Kelvin to reappraise his past and his

future? 123

11

Kelvin's eventual redemption with his father at the end of

the film (an almost biblical image of the return of the
prodigal son) is undermined by the final moments of the
film where the camera pulls back to reveal that this

moment of reconciliation is actually taking place on an

island set in the ocean of the planet and not back on
Earth. With reference to time he states:

123 Tarkovsky also uses Bruegel's Hunt Winter

in as a mechanism by
which he can explore Kelvin's past and introduce the ambiguous
relationship between mother and wife which he develops further in
Mirror.

328
 Our awareness of that time is totally different from that of
the people who lived them. But nor do we thinks of Rublev's
'Trinity' in the same way as his contemporaries, and yet the
'Trinity' has gone on living through the centuries; it was

alive then, and is so now, andit is a link between the

people of that century and this. 124

The complexity of time which defies orthodox linearity is

equally prescient in House of Leaves with particular

reference to the disorientation of the labyrinthine through
the progressive explorations from the arrival of Holloway
Roberts and his team to the final excursion of Navidson
himself. 125

As is noted, the impact of sound in the form of echo

might serve as an effective way of evaluating the
spatiality of physical, emotional and thematic distance,
but as Danielewski speculates, this is generally confined
to the definition of large spaces. 126

The distortion of distance through what we might

see as the complex ideation of convolution, interference
and confusion is the fundamental condition of the
labyrinth and poses the possibility of de-centring in the
Derridian sense already outlined earlier in this chapter as

124 Added emphasis. Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, p. 79.

125 1 am reminded here that Danielewski exploits the condition of
maze-treaders and maze viewers in a temporal sense in the text
by following both Karen and Will's activities during Navidson's
final visit to the house. Sequentially the growing anxiety of
Karen's despair at Navidson's disappearance is not relieved until
the following narrative of Navidson's journey into the labyrinth,
which we accept as events, which are running concurrently with
the previous narrative concludes with Karen and Navidson
reunited at the entrance to the hallway. Here Danielewski exploits
the concept of 'point of view' as outlined previously in this
chapter.
126 1 note here what has been mentioned earlier with regard to the so-
called body without organs -a cavity of sorts. The echo of the
labyrinthine cavity in some way might define its spaciousness but
is continually undermined by the continual renegotiation of the
labyrinth's dimensions to the point where dimensionality is
refused by the alterity of the hallways. Also the sound of the
occupant of the labyrinth conforms to 'glorious unarticulated sonic
blocks which haunt the hallways and transgress into the footnoted
text.

329
not only an essentially spatial commodity, but also a
temporal one.
The mechanism by which an ech 0127 might define a
spatial entity can only do so with the inclusion of a
temporal element in that sound can define scale through
temporal measurement.
By the same token, the variant capaciousness of the
labyrinthine house persists in the determination of a
notion of the de-centred as the overarching thematic
through the continuous variation of scale and proximity
that navigation appears to initiate. As Danielewski has
the character Zampan6 comment, postulating on the
possibility of transcribing a ground plan based on the film
footage:

the schematic then, is a schismatic rendering of empty

rooms, long hallways and dead ends perpetually
...
promising, but forever eluding the finality of immutable
layout 128
.

Navidson's navigation of the labyrinth in the final section

of the novel is provisionally preoccupied with
instrumentation by which and for which he believes he
can describe the scale of the underground passages by

measurement of distance and time.

127 Echo was a Greek nymph (technically known as an Oread -a

nymph of the mountains and grottoes) who followed Hera but
distracted her whenever Zeus paid court to a nymph with constant
chattering and singing. On discovering this, Hera deprived her of
the ability to speak and condemned her to be only able to repeat
the last syllable spoken in her presence. When she fell in love
with Narcissus, she was unable to declare her love and was
rejected, dying of a broken heart in solitary caverns where she
went to grieve. Her bones turned to stone and all that remained of
her was the echo of her disembodied voice.
128 Danielewski, House of Leaves, p. 109. He emphasises this
impossibility by drawing attention to the fictitious film's 'constant
destruction of continuity, frequent jump cuts prohibiting any sort
of accurate mapmaking' (p. 109).

330
However, it becomes clear that such attention to rigorous

scientific methodology cannot give shape to the topology

as through the process of navigation the variant capacity

of the labyrinth takes affect and changes begin to take

place. It is possible to suggest that these changes only

take place as it were with the inclusion of a human
presence or presences within the hallways and
Danielewski intimates that the psychological dimension
(the labyrinth as a manifestation of Navidson's state of
mind - think back here to the labyrinth as a manifestation
of the unconscious as indicated by Deleuze in Nietzsche

and Philosophy) is not without some credibility. It was

noted earlier in the chapter that the horrors encountered

by him at Ash Tree Lane are the manifestation of his own
troubled psyche and the physical incarnation of
psychological pain. 129

The unevenness that constitutes the spatio-temporal

relation in the house suggests a composite which
articulates a combination allowing the spatial to introduce
its forms of what Deleuze would term, extrinsic
distinctions of sectional homogeneous discontinuity,

while duration contributes a kind of internal succession

that is both heterogeneous and contin UOUS. 130 Deleuze

states in The Logic of Sense that there is no stranger

element than a double-headed entity with two unequal or

uneven halves, where perpetual displacement and empty
place combine through the experiential to transcend lived

129 The variant possibilities for Navidson's psychological problems

are identified by Danielweski as, for example, that of the strained
relationship between him and his partner Karen, the problematic
fraternal relation between Will and Tom, and the more elusive one
on which Navidson made his name, which is manifest in the
Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of 'Delial'. What is of interest
here is that the former is the only relationship that survives - Tom
is ingested by the house and 'Delial', although recorded in the
photo, could not be saved by Navidson at the time the shot was
taken, and dies.
130 This composite, which associates duration with immediate datum,
is concomitant with the 'right' or the 'good' side.

331
experience through a process of 'going beyond', which
not only suggests an enlargement of that experience, but
proposes that such expansion is always and already a
condition of that experience.

12
As he observed in the nonsensical world that Lewis

Carroll created in Alice in Wonderland and Through the

Looking Glass:

'The most provoking of all' (oddest: the most incomplete,

the most disjoined) was that 'whenever Alice looked hard at
any shelf, to make out exactly what it had on it, that

particular shelf was always quite empty, though the others

round it were crowded as full as they could hold. ' How

things disappear here, says she finally in a plaintive tone,

after having spent about a minute in a vain pursuit of a

large bright thing that looked sometimes like a doll and

sometimes like a work-box and was always on the shelf next

above the one she was looking at I'll follow it up to the

...
very top shelf of all. It'll puzzle it to go through the ceiling,
I expect! But even this plan failed: the thing went through

the ceiling as quietly as possible, as if it were quite used to

it 131

131 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 41. Extract taken from Through
the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll, p. 171. Note here that the
Navidsons first become aware of the shifting anomalies of the

332
The puzzlement experienced by Alice in the Sheep's
Shop is not only identified in the objects resistance to
the stability of a specific location concomitant with other
surrounding locations similar in form, but also that it
transgresses those other locations (the other shelves) by
its very continual nature of refusal to conform to a placial
integrity of thereness based in presence. This
discontinuity of recognition through familiarity identifies
the rigour of logic and sense as in some way integral to
that discontinuity in that they proffer parenthetical
conditions by which and from which the elusiveness of
non-sense can emerge. 132That the object itself is in no

way clear to Alice (her indecision as to what she

recognises the object to be), suggests that such
disintegration of the language of logic by which she might
express the clarity of the object, already dislocates it
from a reality of logical preposition. The process by

which the object might assert itself as an object through

house when Karen's homely project of putting up shelves alerts

them to the evolving dimensional discrepancies (Karen latterly
learns more of the history of the house prior to her final visit in
search of Navidson, when visiting the estate agent Alicia
Rosenbaum, who originally assisted her in putting up the shelves).
The suggestion that an act of homeliness should draw attention to
the realisation of un-home-like variants as they emerge implies,
as indicated in Chapter 3, that familiarity is presupposed by the
unfamiliar and that as such, the more one suppresses the
unheimlich with the heimlich, the more the former emerges and is
maintained as unheimlich. Danielewski quotes Heidegger in Seln
und Zeit when describing the first sense of intrusion in the house
by indicating that what had taken place 'amounts to a strange
spatial violation' (House of Leaves, p. 24). 'In anxiety one feels
uncanny. Here the peculiar indefiniteness of that, which Dasein
finds itself alongside anxiety, comes proximally to expression: the
"nothing and nowhere". But here "uncanniness" also means "not-
being-at-home"' (Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, p. 233). Equally, Will
Navidson's attempts to finally map the house result in the
realisation of an abysmal anomaly which refuses both spatial and
temporal alignment. This is mirrored in the footnoted text initially
by the discovery (by Truant and Lude) of measuring tapes
bisecting Zampan6's apartment; and later in the text, Truant's own
growing obsession with scale resulting in similar behaviour.
132 In the introduction to Foucault's Death and the Labyrinth, John
Ashbery comments that Max MOller's theory of myths was that they
were borne out of what he describes as a sort of 'disease of
language' (p. xxiv). We may note here a comparison with what has
been earlier discussed with regard to language in Chapter 2 of
this text.

333
unmediated presence is rejected (perhaps more
appropriately disrupted) in favour of the ongoing potential
and discontinuity of its elusive becoming (it is there in
that Alice recognises it to be an object of some kind, but
it is also 'not', in that it refuses the sensibility of being
continuous as a certain kind of specific object). While
this operates within the confines of subjective familiarity
(the heimlich; the operation takes place within the
recognisable environ of a shop - albeit a shop with a
sheep as its proprietor) '133
it is not restricted by such
specific parameters of expectation (and anticipation)
based in the understanding of the shop as a place of
commerce and therefore likely to be stocked with
recognisable objects for purchase.
The object's ability to escape not only the confines
of the shop by transgressing the architectonic (literally,
to go through the ceiling 'as if it were quite use to it') but
also Alice's expectations that in the world of the Looking
Glass, any exterior rule of logic might be applied or
imposed, argues for the law of alteric de-territorialisation
where objectivity defies objectification and the spectrality
of the unheimlich interrupts the organisation and
restriction of continuity. The shop understood as ordered
commercial edifice transgressed by the extraordinariness
of its proprietor and the elusiveness of particular stock
items.
Similarly, in House of Leaves the unnamed and
undefined monster that haunts the house cannot be
expected or anticipated to restrict itself to the
labyrinthine containment of The Navidson Record section

133 See illustration number 12 of this chapter. Maya Turovskaya

notes, regarding the final scene in Solaris in Tarkovsky: Cinema
as Poetry: 'It is the image of a familiar yet strange looking-glass
world called into being out of nothingness by the living and
mysterious Ocean of Solaris' (p. 57, added emphasis).

334
of the text (the traditional form of the body of the text).
By escaping and transgressing into the footnoted
passages, a further undermining of the familiarity of
lingual order takes place. This distinguishes itself from a
perceived hierarchy of the precedent of the body of the
text from the footnote though the radicality of an alteric
de-territorialisation. Likewise, the room at the centre of
the zone in Stalker permeates the consciousness of not
only all who seek it, but all who are aware of its
mythology - all who aspire to visit it but are fearful of its
power and the risks involved in taking on such a
journey. "'

[A]s if to imply in a larger way that there are some places in

this world which no one will ever possess or inhabit. 135

The seeming restrictions of the labyrinthine house cannot

contain the possibility for the horror of that which it
imprisons from escaping confinement through the
fundamental disruption of the order by which that
restriction is imposed.
The mere determination and imposition of a science
of geography and topography (what we might refer to
collectively as a certain kind of cartographic ratio) can no
longer proffer the mechanisms by which one might not
only navigate its locale but also escape its unrestrained
imposition as it can no longer be confined to the
rudiments of the architectonics of pure containment. 136

134 Its possibility, in that it offers the risk of possibility, encourages

'scientist' to seek its destruction by taking an explosive device
into the zone to annihilate it. The parallels with Theseus and the
Minoan labyrinth should be considered here.
135 Danielewski, House of Leaves, p. 414.
136 As they become more involved in the study of The Navidson
Record, both Truant and Zampan6 resort to attempting to stabilise
their immediate environments by imposing mechanisms of
measurement (tape measures tacked to wall and floor). This is
paralleled in The Navidson Record itself as the explorers attempt
to define and describe the house (impose their laws upon it)
through measurement of both time and space.

335
Where such devices fail to reconcile such reasonable
markers 137with that which refuses to be identified in such

a manner, then perhaps the only means available lie in

the topology of a kind of metastability of the event of
haunting where the spectral destabilises and the
enforcement of determined orientation crumbles in the
face of disequilibrium. 138
In the case of fraternal continuity in which hope

might be found in the familial of the family, the

unheimlich imposes its most rigorous demands.
Danielewski, via Truant's hastily reconstituted text of
Zampan6's, considers the question of birthright and
sibling rivalry in the complex relationship between Will

and his brother Tom.

As has already been discussed in Chapter 3, the
biblical narrative of Jacob and Esau 139takes on a specific
discursive posture with regard to the relation between
Will and Tom and in forming the basis for this series of
speculations. This might equally and, with the same
credulity, be applied to the already noted similarity in

what I will term 'fraternal complexities' between Gordon

137 The markers laid by the explorers to find their way back, when
found, have either been violently damaged or have been gripped
by some kind of entropic dissipation within the confines of the
house.
138 Danielewski notes: 'of course real horror does not depend upon
the melodrama of shadows or even the conspiracies of night'
(ibid., p. 415).
139 As is noted in House of Leaves, the names Jacob and Esau derive
from two pertinent roots. The former comes from Ya'abov (Jacob)
the root of which is akav - to delay or restrain; and the latter is
from ash - to hurry (I also note the connection here with the
address of the house: Ash Tree Lane). It is also noted here that
Esau also means hairy and Jacob heel holder or supplanter. We
might draw attention here to a potential link between the
characters of both sets of brothers and what has been remarked
earlier about Bachofen's concepts of matriarchy and patriarchy in
Mother Right. The theory of the telluric usurped by ideality (the
Hellenic determination of the Apollonic) could equally be applied
to the story of Jacob and Esau (the telluric Esau cheated out of
his inheritance by the 'restraining' and 'luminosity' of the
'spiritual' Jacob) - the immortality of the Uranian Solar hero
(Jacob) against the materiality of the chthonic and telluric figure
(Esau).

336
Matta-Clark and his brother Batan (Sebastian) in Chapter
3 of this text as an en-cystic interruption of the familial.
In both cases the loss of one of the siblings is arguably

consequential of the actions of the other or perhaps,

questionably a (re)action to introjective events.
In House of Leaves, Tom, as the reluctant rescuer
mans the base-camp at the top the staircase while his
brother Will
and his disabled companion Reston go in
search of Holloway 140and his team after they fail to
return from Exploration#4.
He is the locale (an intermediary link), which
connects the thread by which and for which Will and
Reston can not only traverse the hallways with some
confidence (in the sense of moving forward), but also
retrace their steps once they have achieved their aim of
retrieval and rescue of Holloway and his compatriots.

By his own admission, Tom is nothing like his brother. He

has neither the fierce ambition nor the compulsion for risk
taking. If both brothers paid the price for their parents'

140 It is noted in the afore-mentioned biblical/fraternal relation that

Tom could be seen as Esau to Will's Jacob, however, a
complication is introduced which suggests that in fact the explorer
Holloway appears to be a more appropriate Esau (his physicality
as literally 'more hairy' (see footnote 120) and the fact that at the
commencement of Exploration#4 he arms himself like a hunter
(with fatal consequences for his companions)) and arguably
reflects a more dynamic, tellurian character against the text's
descriptions of a largely passive Tom. This suggests that the real
fraternal conflict is between the tellurian Holloway and the
transcendent Will. It is also noted at the end of Chapter XIII
(subtitled The h4inetau-r+* that even though Holloway is armed and
hunting the creature: 'It seems erroneous to assert, like Pitch,
that this creat[ ]e had actual teeth and claws of b[ ]e (which myth
for some reason[ ] requires). [ ]t df ]d have claws, they were made
of shadow and if it did have te[ ]th, they were made of darkness.
Yet even as such the [] still stalked Holl[ ]way at every corner
until at last it did strike, devouring him, even roaring, the last
thing heard, the sound [ jf Holloway ripped out of existence'
(p. 338).
*Note here earlier remarks about the use of striking out in the text
of The Navidson Record, apparently by Zampan6 and with regard
to all references to the myth of the labyrinth of Minos. In so
doing, the myth is no longer merely obliterated but is retained via
such exclusion - held in absentia within the body of the text as
both trace and spectre (like the creature resident in the house).

337
 141Will to the
narcissism, relied on aggression anchor world
while Tom passively accepted whatever the world would
give or take away. 142

To be exiled from the familiar terrain of fraternal support

at the age of forty, 143both in the ordinary
- orphaned
circumstances of the familial and in the extraordinary
circumstances of the house, results, ultimately, in Tom's
demise, whereby he is swallowed as the edifice
collapses. This is described in the chapter 'Escape', and
could be interpreted in two ways; firstly, as a tellurian
return to the matriarchal womb for the orphaned Tom,
and secondly, as the entombment of an untimely burial
for the unhappy twin. Will's (ultimately unsuccessful)
search for him in the final part of the book shifts the
emphasis of the earlier explorations from, firstly the
determination to impose a mapping on the house to
secondly, Holloway's hunt for its elusive alteric occupant
which results in the death of Holloway and (at Holloway's
own hand) of one of his own team.
In Will's last exploration (which is both a search for
the ingested Tom and an ultimate attempt via various
technological means to finally describe, transcribe and
ultimately, control the house) he appears as
Apollonian/Uranian hero attempting, via all technological
means at his disposal, to restrain the labyrinthine with
ratio. The house defies such conflation of its properties
by reducing its continual refutation of the frameworks of
recognised spatiality and temporality to a 'grotesque
vision of absence. 9144This final confrontation of man and

141 See earlier remarks on the Greek myth of Echo and her abortive
relationship with Narcissus.
142 Danielewski, House of Leaves, p. 246.
143 It is commented in the text that Tom's relationship with Will and
Karen is almost that of a child with its parents. Tom's fortieth year
is also the year of the birth of Navidson's son, Chad, hence his
'being orphaned'.
144 Danielewski, House of Leaves, p. 464.

338
house is reduced, through the edificial collapse (already

premeditated as a possibility in the earlier chapter

'Escape' ), 145 as Navidson continues to traverse its

passageways and halls shedding the vast array of

technological paraphernalia he entered with, as it ceases
to function and becomes detritus, progressively hindering
his passage and becoming useless to him.

Very soon he will vanish completely in the wings of his own

146
wordless stanza.
*

Escape appears to be the final operation of those who

transgress the labyrinthine. Any attempts to transcribe
its circuitous passages and tame its alteric (de)centre,

are hopeless and are bound to fail in the futility of the

attempt to enforce rationality where ratio can never hold

sway. Theseus returns, having vanquished the Minotaur,

to a temporary (a moment) of harmony with Ariadne,

which is a mere respite before he descends into further

mythological trauma that may or may not result, for

example, in Ariadne's death.
Likewise, Rheya/Hari's sacrifice (her achievement
of human stature) allows Kelvin what appears to be an
opportunity to resolve his problematic relationship with
his father, only for a change of perspective on the part of
the viewer (a development of shot - an overview) to
realise that Kelvin has been unable (or unwilling) to
escape Solaris. 147The trinity of stalker, scientist and
writer return from the zone unscathed, and false hope is

145 Ibid., pages 339-46.

146 Ibid., p. 484. The structure of the text parallels the reduction and
compression of the house in the final pages describing Navidson's
journey and giving a strong sense of physical conflation. This also
bears comparison with earlier remarks in Chapter 2 of this text on
disfluency and Celan and the seemingly inevitable reductive
process towards silence.
147 In Soderbergh's version, Kelvin and Rheya/Hari are reunited on
Solaris.

339
raised that a reward has been bestowed when it appears
that the stalker's child is now able to walk. However, as
in Solaris, as our perspective changes (again the camera
pulls back to open up the shot) and we are able to survey
the whole terrain, it is not as it first appeared and the
child is not walking unaided but is being carried on her
father's shoulders. Will Navidson's escape is ultimately
without his brother or Holloway, who cannot be found: but
at what cost is his escape? Danielewski indicates a
number of possible end scenarios (Karen and Will both
reunited and not - although Chapter XXII, the final
chapter, ends with an apparent interview with Karen
where she describes the house dissolving after she has
pulled Will free), which link to similar possibilities in the
footnoted text (appearing in the form of a diary) on
Johnny Truant as he appears to travel east from
California in a vain search for Navidson, his family and
the inexplicable house at Ash Tree Lane, only for the
reader to be confounded at the end of Chapter XXI with
the realisation that Truant's apparent recuperation and
reintroduction into the world is a fantasy and that for him
too there is no solution, no happy ending, no conclusion.
The text spirals on into appendices and the images of
what are titled exhibits that are presented as evidence or
proof (a 'final' proof? ) of what we have read.
What remains is possibility (the possibility of
impossibility in the abysmal) - the thread that is
predisposed to navigation without itself condoning the
transcription of what appears to be navigable or
seemingly requiring navigation.
Orientation presents the quandary in which the
combination of compression and release in the crystal-
image are found. The turn of breath of the labyrinthine -
its continuous discontinuity - determines a ructure that

340
encysts, always encrypting through a combination of
disclosure and undisclosure which, though marked by,
and defining illumination and shadow, remains other to
both and therefore spectral. Its bestial heart refutes
through introjections - vomiting inward and outward - at
once the uncanny operation of both expelation and
implication. Orientation of the labyrinthine is always and
already disoriented and interred in the rules of navigation
as its secret arbiter. It is the apparitional operation with
which the aesthetic of the cinematic escapes the spatial

and the confinement of its sequential spatiality through

the temporal deterritorialisation of discontinuous
fragmentation and as yet unknowable and unforeseen
combinations.

L' 'Al

I ?I
'IT
rý
k,

13

341
 Conclusion

When John Rajchman draws attention to the figure of the

'experimenter' in The Deleuze Connections (2000) as the
perpetrator of the shift of the work of art from the realm
of representation to that of experience, he notes that
aesthetics ceases to be judged in the Kantian sense, but
becomes a matter of experimentation -a 'science of the
sensible'. ' In the preceding chapters, I have speculated
on the aesthetic forms of poetry, the artwork, film and the
novel, to extract a notion of sensation from a tradition of
representation and subordination to the prior discourse of
conceptual enframing through the uncovering of the
spectral. These holzweg are linked across the terrain of
the text via what I term the operation of the apparition or
the event of the spectre through the strangeness of what
is essentially continuous about discontinuity. However,
the operation, to conclude indicates a procedure, which
culminates in a certain kind of finitude - the 'completion'
of an interrogation, which connotes the possibility or
more appropriately, the probability of a certain kind of
resolution. In commencing such a traversal, we place
such conclusivity of information as in some way
encrypted into its predication. However, what I have

sought to question is not what we already 'know' in the

sense of either a confirmation or a denial but rather to

thread a way between what might be considered
'indicative to' yet 'exclusive of' mere affirmation or
I Rajchman comments in The Deleuze Connections that: 'Artworks are
composed of sensations, prelinguistic and presubjective, brought
together in an expressive material, through an anorganised plan, with
which we have peculiar relations. They are not to save us (or to damn or
corrupt us), but rather to complicate things, to create more complex
nervous systems no longer subservient to the debilitating effects of
cliches, to show and release possibilities of a life. ' P. 138.

342
negation - the conception of the spectral through
hauntology. To negotiate such an ambulatory operation
demands that movement is no longer predicated in the
'purely' spatial as a calculation or machination but is
'appropriated' by a spectral determination (if this is not a
contradiction) that is (dis)located in temporality. Here a
'locale' is found where chronology is no longer the
mechanism by which and for which the (non)sensibility of
time can continue to be articulated. It is an anomaly of
simultaneity which is 'at once' both and neither purely
spatial nor temporal - the interruptive spectral
'operation' of the apparition; the science of the spectre;
hauntology. I have proposed that this tracing (the
Derridian trait) is no longer merely outside (as an
exteriority -a lingual 'scrawl' on a surface which bounds
and keeps safe an interior through exclusivity) and so
determined by subordination to what demands
incorporation 'into' the inside, but proposes a more
complex and 'insidious operation' of encyst-ence of which
the operation of introjection is now the active functor.
If all terminologies must be considered provisional,
any topographic realisation shifts through a twist of
surface (a 'fold') into the recognition of the fraenum as
no longer the 'locale' with which the substantiation of the
intransitive determines navigation, but indicates a
conflagration of variation and experimentation through
'active' perspectival junctures (topos or Wegmarken)
which resist the enforcing of the mechanistic tropes of
the cartographic and introduce the ructure as the
Holzweg. This realisation of a 'new' language of
cryptology is not at the expense of predicated lingual
continuity (in the sense of a usurpation of one system by
another) or the enforced repression of its determining
agencies (a 'violent' infraction of 'historical' trajectories),

343
 but the recognition of a (dis)ordered intervention that is
not the product of either the exterior enacting upon an
interior or vice versa, but through the cystic symbiotic
'relation' of a kind of parasitic morselation. Here the term
Holzweg allows for the variant trajectories, which
determine the labyrinthine and its tomblike encryption
and which refutes the imposition of order or ratio on the
risk of its myriad of possible pathways, escape routes
and dead ends.
In making the selection of areas of study
undertaken in this text, an aesthetic approach was
determined via the particularities of poetry, artwork,
novel and film. This also formed the thread by which such
a trajectory was possible and again indicated the
variation and discontinuity and labyrinthine possibilities
of the Holzweg. It began with a specifically un-
chronological confrontation of aesthetics and hauntology
via diffdrance as a philosophical mechanism for
uncovering the rift. This led to a discourse on the
specificity of the poem 'Todtnauberg' as the variant
(dis)location of haunting through the silence of insatiated
anticipation and as a topos of poison and cure. From
here were considered the encryptive operations of
introjection and encyst-ence as the realisation of the
unheimlich manoeuvre as simultaneously the creation of
a work of art and the event of mourning (the realisation
of an absence) in the artistic practice of Gordon Matta-
Clark. Finally the labyrinthine as both the locale within
which a secret is kept and the eventuality (haunting) of
the maintenance of that secret as secret.
In uncovering a discourse which articulates the
spectre as not merely the realisation or manifestation of
difference, but as that which haunts a locale (the rift)
that is no longer outside an inside, but in some way

344
inside an inside while still remaining essentially outside,
'pure' spatiality is interrupted by alterity. As neither
'transcendent' spirit (the 'infinite') nor mere 'facsimile' of
the corporeal or 'morbid matter' (the 'finite'), the ghost
finds its peras 'in' the abysmal - the alteric no-where of
a no-thing. This is the determining agency that refutes
mere negation as the subordinate 'inversion' of
'affirmation' by excavating possibility and variation from
the obdurate universality of metaphysical systernisation.
Such an insinuation ('the operation of the apparition') has
been the overarching thematic of this text and in
recognising the import of the rift in the articulation of this
discussion we have not merely exploited the 'condition' of
absence so determined by the a priori of a presence, but
uncovered the complication of the rift as immediately, a
'relation' through diff6rance and as indicative of the trait
in the Derridian sense.
As has been noted, the term rift ('borrowed' from
the Heideggerian treatise on aesthetics, 'The Origin of
the Work of Art') does not merely operate as a 'gap' in
the sense of a straightforward caesura distinguishing
between identities without questioning the principles of
identity (but remains what is not and cannot be identified
through the mere scrutiny of what is merely identifiable).
It exploits the variant meaning in the term (in translation,
as Heidegger notes the German word riss meaning both
tear or break and ground plan or drawing) as the
methodology for a discussion, which places variation and
the topological as the 'new' pedagogy and aesthetics as
the terrain through which such a study could take place.

345
 Commencing from the outline of the rift ('the plan')
in chapter one through the specificity of the exemplars of
the poetic, the work of art, cinema and the novel, it is

evident that the traversal undertaken does not lead to

conclusivity (a solution to a puzzle) but finds itself
literally lost in the labyrinthine and confronted by yet
further possible holzweg. Here the real possibility is

continuing to fall, like Alice into an indeterminable abyss

for which there is no preparation; no map, except to

recognise what it means 'to fall', and how to do so

appropriately.
That into which one falls, is the risk of variation and the
ghost, which haunts such a topos, is not a reminder of
termination but the affirmation of possible beginnings.

346
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