Thinking when Standing

Alongside solitude, Nietzsche’s remark that “I am one thing, my writings are another” also materialises in the human body of the philosopher. A startling fact: the body language of certain academic philosophers remains unaffected by their thoughts! Think of the academic who commands an unyielding and static presence to the thoughts they articulate. The appearance is not a question of an absence of “emotion” or even a question of timidity. Rather, what appear is a literal embodiment of the body as the “one thing” and the thought as “another.”

(Max Klinger, "The Philosopher")

What is the phenomenology of this relation between thinking and the body? The question wouldn’t have much urgency to it, were it not for the content of philosophy itself. My own reason for dimming the lights and opening the windows during teaching is because sustained, engaged thinking literally gives me a vertiginous headache. Once in a while, I must pace the room and inhale some cold air. But the pain is not because of the arduousness of teaching itself, but because if we are to seriously contend with the possibility that the world we come into contact with is altered by our very perception and touch with it, then our body must take full responsibility for being on the frontline of this crevice.

“The world is my representation.” Schopenhauer’s thought alone demands the body take heed. In doing so, the body is obligated to express the level of this thought through its failure to “hold sway,” to cite Husserl. Does thinking becoming desensitized to the corporeal weight of idealism and thus remove all evidence of its presence from the human body? If not, then holding out into the nothingness of “endless space” must constitute some kind of threat to pre-reflective embodiment. Schopenhauer agrees: “For a being who thinks, it is a precarious position to stand on one of those numberless spheres freely floating in boundless space.” Standing and thinking: a tense combination, which Schopenhauer, with his acute sensitivity to transience and the mutability of matter, gave full reign to by making the body the centre of the universe—paradoxically a universal body to be denied.

(Giorgio de Chirico, "The Conquest of the Philosopher")

But there is one final question: how did it occur that standing and thinking failed to gain the dignity that walking and thinking have? And here, we can think of the tradition of the Stoa and the Stoics. The relation between the Stoa as a place and the Stoics as historical philosophers is, of course, far from arbitrary. The philosophy of Stoicism, practised in the public arena of the Stoa, is inextricably bound with the act of walking. And indeed Greek philosophy more broadly is surrounded by the halo of thinkers who walk. Yet this motion remains incomplete without attending to the gesture of standing after walking.

It seems to me that the cessation of movement—both physical and mental—is a privileged moment, in which the felt experience of thought comes to the surface. I would claim that cognition catches sight of the demand placed on the body, which was otherwise dormant during the time of walking. A vision unfolds: Countering the great tradition of thinkers who walk, there thus marches a legacy of thinkers who cling to the walls when struck by the lens of thought, neurotically ensuring their body remains intact despite the vulnerability of the empirical world around them. But the legacy is a precarious one, since standing soon gives way to a febrile state, which can be identified as "sitting." Here, something profound and unnerving occurs: the being whom, according to Schopenhauer, “throng, press, and toil, restless and rapidly arising and passing away in beginningless and endless time,” is no longer redeemed by walls and doors, and must gather his thoughts from down below. Yet the sitting is an admission to an end, a rupture in continuity and self-poise, which standing up will never regain. The body is marked by its refusal to stand and think in one place. Once more, I must make recourse to my “anti-hero” Gustav von Aschenbach who embodies the genesis of this end perfectly:

Thinking in Solitude

“I am one thing,” writes Nietzsche, “my writings are another.” I have never fully understood this claim. Are we led to believe that Nietzsche the man is even more “dynamite” than his writings, or, is the man a more “humane” counterpart to the dynamite? Either way, this apparent divorce between the “one thing” of the self and the otherness of writing is somehow peculiar to philosophy. Quite unlike any other, philosophy is a form of writing that engenders itself toward a special form of awkwardness. This is the awkwardness of philosophy itself: of the grand gesture to turn inwards (Heraclitus: “I searched my nature”), breaking down all that culture and life has imposed upon the pre-reflective self, only to produce concepts with nothing more than a contingent relation to the everyday world. The lack of material evidence in philosophy remains a vulgar problem: consequentially, philosophy is a highly self-conscious discipline (see this discussion of Heidegger by way of an example).

“I am one thing, my writings are another.” Yes, it is for this reason of awkwardness with regard to oneself, that the association between thought and solitude has such a deeply engrained bond. The Kantian “nobility” of human thought (and more so aesthetic experience) is predicated on the idea of the subject cultivating a detachment from his own self (And solitude is invariably the domain of "his" solitude). The same could also be said of Husserl – both thinkers invent a mode of solitude, in which access to the external world is at the assent of the lone subject. And yet Kant was social, “he liked a drink”. Immersion in the world of social affairs did not undermine the unity of his thought, at least not until the very end. Schopenhauer’s solitude becomes more problematic, however. Accusations that he is one thing, but his writings are another become ammunition for those who think that writing and self ought to be formless, and that without this passage, conceptual uncertainty follows.

I am one thing with my writings. That would be the call of solitude, the impervious shield constructed to ward off all imposters. Graham Harman, in one of his insightful advice posts, points that the solitude of the graduate student in his 20s becomes undignified by his mid-30s, he writes: “There are many self-defeating alternatives, one of which was recently mocked by a very intelligent friend as “the idea of great, heroic, conceptual labor which can only be undertaken by rugged males in conditions of terrible solitude.” Yeah, I remember that phase too, at about age 25. It’s respectable then, but becomes ridiculous and self-defeating if you’re still there at 35.” Irrespective of whether or not this is true —and I suspect it is true —what is interesting is the idea of a temporal threshold, in which solitude suddenly becomes unacceptable, and all such “morbid” tendencies overcome. Does such a point demarcate the transformation of philosophical awkwardness to philosophical legitimacy?

As an endnote, Paul Auster writing on the death of his father: “Never before have I been so aware of the rift between thinking and writing.” Auster stands before a man shrouded in solitude and his thought is stopped in its tracks: the solitude has taken flight in Auster’s refusal to write. But here Auster gives us a clue: the father is a man of solitude, but it is a solitude not borne of a need to produce – as it is so often cited in the philosophical hero – but present as a force which resists all temporal thresholds: “Solitary in the sense of retreat. In the sense of not having to see himself, of not have to see himself being seen by anyone else.”

The Perceiving Body

Dermot Moran has a nice piece on Merleau-Ponty and seeing here, followed up as nicely by the ever perceptive Fido the Yak. Moran’s piece offers a nice summary of Merleau-Ponty’s critique of ocularcentrism in philosophy. As Moran states, “Seeing can touch: it touches the texture of things. We literally see roughness and smoothness, for example, the coarse texture of the carpet.” We can think here of Merleau-Ponty’s contribution to aesthetics as demonstration of this claim, as he puts it in his article on Cezanne: “These distinctions between touch and sight are unknown in primordial perception. It is only as a result of a science of the human body that we finally learn to distinguish between our senses….We see the depth, the smoothness, softness, the hardness of objects; Cezanne even claimed that we see the odor.”

Mikel Dufrenne, whose The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience is first on my “summer reading list,” is also important here. I have jumped to his discussion of presence and perception. Dufrenne’s line of thought is more or less consistent with Merleau-Ponty: the body’s intentionality is prior to cognition, records the phenomenon of the world, and is capable of perceptive knowledge, thanks to the interplay between the corporeal cogito and the reflective cogito. But Dufrenne is especially good on describing the primacy of the body during aesthetic experience, as he writes: “The aesthetic object is above all the apotheosis of the sensuous….Thus the aesthetic object first manifests itself to the body, immediately inviting the body to join forces with it. Instead of the body’s having to adapt itself to the object in order to know it, it is the object which anticipates, in order to satisfy, the demands of the body” (339). This is truly the act of the body stretching out into the world, asserting itself as the basis of all experience.

To prove this claim, Dufrenne speaks of the embodiment of the artist, offering a brilliant analysis of the phrase “thinking with one’s hands” (see also Elizabeth A. Behnke’s equally excellent article “At the Service of the Sonata”). Dufrenne has us think of the artist’s relation to creativity, the free flowing spontaneity which is possible thanks to the invisible border between creation and the physiology of the hand, writing that: “Each inflection of the melody awakens an echo in his body, as do the subtleties of harmony which means as much for the hand as for the ear. He hears with his fingers” (341, my bold). “He hears with his fingers” – what a truly marvellous image!

The contribution from Merleau-Ponty and Dufrenne is especially striking, given the Kantian (and Schopenhauerean) backdrop which privileges cognition over the sensuous realm. Consider Schopenhauer on sight in “certain larvae, worms, and zoophytes” (W2, 84). He writes: “Animals without eyes know only by touch what is immediately present to them in space.” The idea here is one of substitution: the deficiency of blindness limits spatial depth to the scope of touch, thus instigating touch as the primary sense - a manifestly dubious claim.

How is the tension between sight and touch played out during “aesthetic experience?” Is aesthetic experience the mode of affective experience, whereby cognition is divested of its materiality? Is the materiality of the body an encumbrance to the “pure subject of knowing,” to cite Schopenhauer? What then of “losing” oneself in the artwork? Do the eyes perceive independently of the body?

Yet as the Moran article shows, sight is not synonymous with vision. And here Merleau-Ponty shines through directing thought “downward” – a direction at odds with traditional accounts of aesthetic experience. But this is no simple replacement of cognition with the body: Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological aesthetics attests to the “bodily teleology” latent in all appearances. Latency is an important idea. Turning back to Schopenhauer: if we take the aesthetic subject in Schopenhauer as devoid of individuality and thus “elevated” to the “eternal world-eye,” then where does the body dwell if not in a site of disappearance, thus affecting an aesthetics of disembodiment? Yet the body does persist and is returning to, though no doubt in a different mode of being. Soon after, Schopenhauer makes an odd admission: the peacefulness of the nervous system – secured by, among other things, “a peaceful night’s sleep” – alters the susceptibility toward aesthetic pleasure. Does the latency of those embodied conditions manifest themselves as aesthetic experience? That would be a question which focuses on how the passages, anxieties, and reveries of the body become constitutive of the very experience of having transcended the body.

From the Window

The lustre of melancholy. Perhaps that same lustre will one day reduce all places to a dim luminosity on the horizon. All places directed toward the same tragic end, broken from their site, and subordinated to an amorphous mass. In the meantime, the days are getting longer. But so too is the grey sky, which has been dispatched to drop humid rain over the balcony. Tonight, the window is open and the fire escape is visible. The tip of a coffee machine my brother bought me in 2006 is poking out, its dereliction a result of my caffeine intolerance. From down below, the smell of burnt sugar and oats is coming in. My head is positioned outside of the window and the rain is collecting in an empty glass Pepsi bottle. But there is no food here, only unopened tins of inedible materiality.

The End of Days? No, just the end of this day –this month –this table. “Soon there will be nothing where there never was anything.” But the substance of a life endures. With it, a disarming asymmetry runs parallel: my body yearns to be a site of inhabitation, but the inhabitation transcends the limits of my body, positioning itself in an underground region prior to all awareness. Alas, the indifference of all human places passes through us, oblivious to the sediment we deposit in the walls and doors. Unaffected by the outburst of human emotion, the world of things and memories remains static, poised in its global coldness. But no cosmic void can subdue the human craving for stone, cotton, and wood to reciprocate our affections. The chair that becomes an extension of my being; the balcony that becomes my thinking ground; the window that becomes a glance inwards—all follies in the wasteland of desire and memory.

The Weird and Alien

My paper, “The Weird and Alien: an Introduction to Phenomenology,” given at the Sussex Undergraduate Philosophy Society last week, is available to hear here. The overriding theme is something I’ve been thinking through on this blog: phenomenology’s relationship to strangeness and estrangement. I still don’t quite feel as though I’ve got to the core of this matter. All this paper affords is an overview of phenomenology’s privileged role in dislodging habit and sedimented values. My inclusion of Lovecraft points at directions this theme could go in. But the more fruitful direction will likely be mined through working through Husserl’s idea of the alien as “accessibility in genuine inaccessibility, in the mode of incomprehensibility.” Alongside the Husserl, xenoarchaeological work will be required to demonstrate the transformation of the Earth from homeworld to alienworld.

The talk is also interesting for me to hear back, as I was in the midst of a migraine while giving it. Consequently, hearing it back is itself a process of weirdness, as my sense of self-presence was far from intact during the talk. Alongside my usual habit of turning off the halogen lights when either teaching or giving a paper, I have recently got into the habit of opening the windows as far as possible and adjusting the blinds. Alas, on this late afternoon on the Sussex campus, the sun was shining violently and there was no chance of hastening the heat-death of the universe.

The Anonymous Flesh

Once more, I am fumbling in the darkness of Merleau-Ponty’s flesh. I cannot explain why this notion continues to haunt and hound me other than through some intuitive sense of its searing profundity. My questions are mounting: how does the flesh undercut the division between my body and yours? More broadly: how can we commit to a phenomenology of the flesh without subjecting that element to the “look” of the subject? Phrased still a different way: how do we retain the primacy of the body without already seeing things in their “place”? Indeed, can the flesh even be “seen”?

The immediate response is to turn to Merleau-Ponty’s much cited example of the reversibility of touching, whereupon “my body touched and my body touching [means] there is overlapping or encroachment” (p. 143). And so my body opens itself to profound ambiguity. Although I, as bodily subject, am able to both touch and be touched, never are the two coincidental with one another. Never does the touched and touching hand come together as a unitary phenomenon. Rather, some-thing unfolds in that crevice, a difference that underscores all identity. The difference, it turns out, is not an alienating force, but an expression of the corporeal world that is unmasked when different bodies fold into one another, as Merleau-Ponty puts it: “…[identity and difference] bring to birth a ray of natural light that illuminates all flesh and not only my own” (p. 142).


“Illuminates all flesh.” How can this be possible? Merleau-Ponty also asks: “Where are we to put the limit between the body and the world, since the world is flesh”? (p. 138). A few years ago, I had thought of the flesh as an adhesive element. I cannot be sure I was right. Does the flesh bind materiality? Yet the flesh is not matter. No, the flesh is an element that precedes matter. Does the flesh materialises as matter? No, the flesh is “thinkable by itself” (p. 140).

We return: “Illuminates all flesh.” We must remember that in some deep sense the unfolding/enveloping/illuminating of flesh breaks the “fundamental narcissism of all vision” (p. 139). Seen in this way, the agency that (re)appears the midst of the egocentric perception of the world is not some refined transcendental ego that survives the phenomenological epoché. Rather, what is unmasked is an “anonymous visibility [that] inhabits both of us, a vision in general” (p. 142). Here, I think we touch on a clue. The anonymity of the flesh is not an eye without a perspective but an element alien to cognition—precisely because it resists abstraction but has already planted itself in the human body. The flesh is already with us. But with us in an impersonal way. The flesh, after all, is not reducible to corporeality. No, in an exemplary way, the body reflects and vibrates the flesh in its contours, ecstasies, and ruptures.


Phenomenologically, how is this claim demonstrable? How, that is, do we experience the trees as watching us, except as the evocation of a strange memory? The answer is to resist humanising the flesh – to countenance a flesh without sight and sound. The anonymous flesh: the flesh before the division of subject and object, which is forever on the verge of coming to the foreground, and yet always retains a distance from the surface.

The Anonymous Earth

Phenomenology, it has been empirically proven, has a special relation to the unmasking the strange underbelly of everyday life. Above all, “It is an unfamiliar world in which one is uncomfortable and which forbids all human effusiveness” (Merleau-Ponty, 2006, p. 66). Easy to overlook the titanic power of this gesture. Yet a question can be posed in the face of this strangeness: If phenomenology assists in us rediscovering the things of the world in their phenomenological givenness, then where does this place the phenomenologist? The speculative answer would be: as the alien visitor to Earth, describing the appearance of things without yet prescribing their cause or effect. One way in which phenomenology does this is by decentering the centrality of humans at the heart of the world, and by encouraging us to attend to the radical wilderness underlying all modes of givenness and self-presentation.

This mention of a de-centred human experience may sound odd, given that phenomenology is structured around lived experience, manifest in human beings. Phenomenology begins and ends with human experience, true. But the ego attending to phenomena in the world is not the ego of the personal self, but something far more impersonal. But we need not commit to the transcendental ego of Husserl to see this. What is given, at least initially, is anonymous in its spatio-temporal depth, yet to be registered as causing a particular affective response. We can talk, I think, of the anonymous earth: the earth that touches our bodies before self-reflection has had the opportunity to seize it as an idea. From this break in human depth, the world comes back to us as something wild in its anonymity. At once, both dense in texture but at the same time deprived of all its warmth. The tension between anonymity and depth is notable. We find ourselves in the world, and it is a world in which cultures have existed and vanished, some of those factors contributing to the identity of the self. At the same time, it is a world in human bodies visit before then departing.


Merleau-Ponty:

…it may well seem strange that the spontaneous acts through which man has patterned his life should be deposited, like some sediment, outside himself and lead an anonymous existence as things. The civilization in which I play my part exists for me in a self-evident way in the implements with which it provides itself. If it is a question of an unknown or alien civilization, then several manners of being or of living can find their place in the ruins or the broken instruments which I discover, or in the landscape through which I roam (Merleau-Ponty, 2006, p. 405).

We have in this passage a clue concerning the rediscovery of things in the world. Merleau-Ponty draws our attention to the world we find ourselves in. Already it is a world that is a strewn with the marks and inscriptions of a former existence. All around us, the world contains traces of life-world, which have since disbanded. Although anonymous, these same inscriptions persist, only now divorced from their origins. The earth runs through this place but fails to come out the other end. Instead, an ontological marshland has been forged. The damaged terrain contains its own history, and the history protrudes through the surface. Thus the original strangeness of what phenomenology discerns—the world opened up is at once both familiar and unfamiliar, charted and uncharted, earthly and alien.


Is the “earth” a concept or a thing given to us in experience? Deleuze writes: “The earth is not one element among others but rather brings together all the elements within a single embrace…” (Deleuze, 2006, p. 85). This sounds rather like the flesh of Merleau-Ponty, overlapping and entwining on itself, with each fold bringing in and releasing disparate aspects. Phrased another way: Is the “earth” a geological or metaphysical idea? While in the Husserl archives, Anthony Steinbock discovered a fragment dealing with “phenomenology as archaeology” (Steinbock, p. 89). Steinbock writes: “Phenomenological archaeology, [Husserl] writes, ‘digs up’ piecemeal the concealed constitutive structure that lie there ready-made for us as the world of experience” (Ibid.). (See also Steinbock’s excellent reading of Merleau-Ponty’s late “transcendental geology” note). If we augment the affective mode of this practice, then we can begin to speak legitimately about phenomenology as specialising in Xenoarchaeology—that branch of archaeology which concerns the past remnants of alien civilizations. Only now, the alien planet is the earth-world.


This Xenoarchaeological project has a question: what is to experience the materiality of things before those things are designated as “things” in the first place? The question is too big: it exceeds the sublime and the horrible, tearing asunder the body. Should we think, then, of the Levinasian “Il y a” or even the “apeiron” of Anaximander? The question of material monism hinges upon whether or not things ever really become “formless,” or, simply loses their familiarity of perception and drift into the realm of the uncanny. This is no simple question, since we cannot but helped but be placed by the Husserlian “zero-point” of the body. The body places us in the world. The body senses the world. The body is positioned. All of this underscores the transcendental reality of the “here.” The Earth is “here.” The “here.” “Here.”

The Rhapsody about Kancheli

Surprised I didn't see this before: a four-part documentary on the Georgian composer, Giya Kancheli. Of course, I have no idea what is being said, but the general atmosphere is strong enough to convey the broad sense. Having had the nerve to dedicate my Aesthetics of Decay to Kancheli in 2006 (which he warmly accepted), I was then fortunate enough to meet him in London a year later. The documentary reminds me of his warmth and disarming, melancholy presence.

See also this striking performance of his "Having Wept" by the Latvian cellist, Kristine Blaumane. When, though, are we going to see a Kancheli symphony cycle in London?

The Reviewer's Ego

Mikhail Emelianov has an interesting piece of the snide and unnecessarily personal nature of some academic reviews. I must confess, I find what emits from this exchange probably the most dispiriting aspect of academia – . I have never heard of either author mentioned in the blog post. But this doesn’t matter: the treatment is indicative of faults in publishing and philosophy broadly. After all, what is unfolding in this review is a series of already-programmed responses, deployed not primarily as a response to a reading, but to communicate an established hostility/opposition. Indeed, the manner in which the reviewer, Margaret Osler, writes is less about engaging with the book as a book, and more about appropriating the book as a secondary device for some other end. Easy to overlook just how odd this practice is in reality! Harder to imagine such a practice in, say, structural engineering - a subject as technical as philosophy but without the oppositional foundations. Not only this, but these types of reviews often conform to a formulaic structure, with their own homogenous statements, to be altered in any given context.

Characteristics of this genre of review might include: (1). Faulting the book because of a thematic/conceptual omission. (2). Faulting the book because of the titles it does or does not include in the bibliography, thus presupposing something prescriptive (yet totally arbitrary) as “a requisite familiarity” with the main materials (3). Faulting the book on account of a difference in tone from that of the reviewer’s. (4). Faulting the book on account of a marked difference in the reviewer's political values. (One can think back here to Barbara Hopper's bizarre response to the supposedly "phallogocentric" work of Ed. Casey. One can also think of a recent review done by a well-known blogger, the political leanings of whom meant that the review never had a chance from the outset). This kind of bad faith is strangely overlooked where reviews are concerned.

All of these assorted criticisms are essentially vacuous in content. They address nothing in structurally positive terms, but simply point out absences and lacks. The idea, for instance, that a book somehow falls short simply by not attending to the “primary” literature on any given topic is depressing beyond all words. Why is philosophy, in particular, so susceptible to this insidious need to publically register the latest fashions and so unapologetic in its shameless vanity when doing so? God forbid the idea of a philosophy that strives for independence from the “community of like-minded thinkers,” let alone attempts to do more than add to the bulging corpus of exegetical commentaries on the current master thinker(s).

It is hard to see the motivation for this structurally negative reviewing as anything more than a strategic and self-serving one-upmanship. The strategy is worn, but endures, no doubt thanks to inextricable link between academia and the authority of the personal ego, cocooned at all costs from being usurped.

Against Non-Places

Having dusted myself down from my hotel occupancy, I have now returned to the world only to find that the Marc Augé’s “seminal” book Non-Places has gone into a second edition. Have I been in hibernation that long? I suspect that this book has done more harm than good. On the one hand, it has spawned a kind of uncritical fetish for places that have become synonymous with “late modernity” – airports, transport terminals, supermarkets, Ikea, etc. One sees evidence of this at most conferences on space and place – digressive, ill-thought excursions into the “enigma” of the hallway. As soon as the mystification becomes kitsch, all critical engagement is given over to an aesthetic pandering of the urban landscape.

True, I have spent most of the last few years thinking about these places myself. But by beginning with the independence of the human body, I have attempted to retain a distance from any preformed, cognitive assessment of place. After all, it is the body that has the final world on our experience of place. What is problematic about Augé’s argument (and influence) is the uncritical implication that some places give themselves over to certain modes of embodiment and temporality simply by dint of their cultural status. So, the result is that that airport, for example, becomes emblematic of the “human condition.” This is all wrong. As David Kolb has argued in his mostly excellent book, Sprawling Places, "place" ought to be a neutral term, with no need for an evaluative dissection. In my terms, place must retain its original anonymity in the face of human colonisation.

But there’s worse to come. Augé’s spurious division between place and non-place has the undesirable effect of producing a pre-emptive nostalgia for airports, train terminals, etc. Consider this rather saccharine “review” in the Guardian by PD Smith: “anthropologist Marc Augé's book is a haunting analysis of modern life and in particular those homogenised "non-places" where we spend so much of our time.” Key here is the inclusion of “haunting.” If the analysis is to be “haunting,” then it would have to involve the idea of something coming-to-light in the non-places. This would mean that the airport gains the distinction of being structurally parallel to something like the Hegelian spirit. A “haunting” is a very compelling, seductive notion. Hauntings confer depth on places, where depth is otherwise refused. But a haunting can also be seen as a human value laden on anonymity and the death of presence. If we are to talk about being “haunted” by non-places, then it is surely in terms of being haunted by an occult operation of the human subject elevating the world to a certain privileged status.

There is more. For PD Smith, non-places “exist beyond history, relations and the game of identity.” As “beyond,” Smith reinforces the idea that non-places are somehow transcendental to a normative conception as to how places ought to be. This is a shame. Whether or not airports challenge the formation of personal and public identity is a good question to ask. But the question does entail the idea that “place” and “identity” are somehow left behind in the wake of non-places, fragmented and ruined. The experience of boredom in the departure lounge does not undermine identity any more than the experience of boredom in the house does.

But the worst is saved for the last: “The forces of globalisation and urbanisation are creating ever more of these Ballardian non-places, symptoms of a Muzak-filled supermodernity in which ‘people are always, and never, at home.’” Actually, Ballard who is one of the very few writers not to prescribe an evaluative attachment to Shpperton, the suburban landscape he has focused upon. Rather, Ballard’s writing exemplify the original strangeness of place in its raw phenomenality, such that what arises is something more like the fluid materiality of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “flesh” (one need only think here of Ballard’s genuinely haunting story “The Enormous Space” to see how divisions in place are ultimately at the mercy of the benevolent pathology of the human body).

Breakfast