Day of the Vow

Toward the end, toward the imminent awareness of what suddenly merits expiration. Way beyond the present, a massive surge of sedimentation dissipates. An entire colony of the past instantly crumbles, in the process leaving a landscape of streets, rooms, and books confronted with an unfamiliar world. Absence: nothing less than a shorthand for the culling, archiving, and reconfiguration of the past that has outlived itself.

In close relation, Jacky Bowring writes very beautifully on the union between longing and “leavings”:

"Leavings" ... as verb, the process of going away, departing, and also as noun, that which remains, which is left. Both haunt the sense of absence, of missingness. An embodied hunger, an intellectual itch. Voids. Black Holes, belying their size with their intense gravitational pull, consuming.

“Missingness.” Notwithstanding the “the evanescent pleasures of correspondence” that longing affords, isn’t it also that a concurrent interplay between desire, identity, and silence develops in light of this burning destruction? What is “missing” is at the same time held together by a vow of silence, a refusal to let the Other disrupt that condition of unresolved and damaged desire. Day of the vow: the marking not of termination and cessation, but of a malformed exchange presented as a protracted end.

“A question mark hanging in space.” Extended beyond the region of memory, the radical commitment to preserving silence opens up a subterranean world, buried deep in a hybrid between the past and the future. The vow of silence imparts a sense of incompletion on the world, establishing an indeterminate distance to a general history of losing things. It is often the case, for instance, that the failure to reconcile things temporally is an act of unconscious engineering, a design to retrieve what language would automatically end. Rather, the false of ending of memory distances total expiration, allowing loss to become an object of desire rather than subjugation.

The Year(s) in Review

Why memory? How is it that “memory” —which, after all, is a mode of intentionality among many —has assumed the centrality, possessiveness, and implicit seizure upon experience it has? It is a question seething with urgency during the “festive season,” in the midst of mince pies, Christmas trees strapped to cars, and the recollection of artificial menorah lights. Precisely because Christmas is the archetypal “warm” festival, a concurrent coldness is established bordering that apparent peace. Bachelard has written: “Behind dark curtains, snow seems to be whiter. Indeed, everything comes alive when contradictions accumulate” (p.39). Only now, the contradictions can be reversed: the stillness of the present becomes as sharp as the slowly lapping movement of childhood memories.

Why memory? It is a question that emerges in the thick of an already compressed landscape of remembering and forgetting, charged with what is brought to surface while simultaneously disabling other scenes from profiting from the intensified temporality. Yet it is a less a question about the content of what is being remembered and more a question of how the past persist into and through the present. Not the remembering what, but the remembering how.

I confess: I sometimes trial through the history of this blog, plotting the development and fixation of certain themes. If nothing less, the fixation toward the structure of memory – as opposed to the structure of imagination, which engenders itself toward the unbuilt future – becomes a means whereby the measuring of identity is articulated. Memory and self form themselves in terms of a difference, a difference to previous variations of identity. I begin to get a sense of movement precisely through being displaced and estranged from a prior experience.

Why memory? I had already asked this question one year ago. There, too, a concern with the remains of a presence. The side-effects of memory. Immovable narcissism. The same low-level melancholy underscores the repetition of the question, framed in a different guise but compelled by the same desire. Less a fixation on the past, and more an anchor by which the present is cast to sea, the question “why memory?” forces the unity of internal time to break asunder. Indeed, if Christmas is the time in which dysphoric moods are heightened, then it is also the time of stasis and repetition. “Winter,” to return to Bachelard, “is by far the oldest of the seasons. Not only does it confer age upon our memories, taking us back to a remote past but, on snowy days, the house too is old” (p. 41).

After a while, it becomes impossible to discern what belongs to the self and what simply lingers in the self, like the memory of a virus sedimented in the body. Repetition, possession, fixation: the virus becomes active in the dark, concealed during the daylight of time, but seized in its activity as it overlaps with its own history. The virus reveals itself thanks to its intimacy with the movement of different seasons, and thereafter discharges itself in the world through encountering objects proximate to those seasons. Merleau-Ponty's "flesh of the world" is at the same time held together as sub-microscopic unit of viral particles. The memory of a virus: the evidence of an organic pattern, structuring the affective modulations of memory, the result of which is the emergence of an immanent contradiction between the sameness of desire and the difference of time.

Touching the Flesh

I have returned to Merleau-Ponty’s “The Intertwining—The Chiasm.” It is a difficult but continually satisfying text. Following M.C. Dillon, I am structuring my reading of the text as Merleau-Ponty’s attempt at reworking a response to scepticism and solipsism. I take him to be doing this through moulding an ontology that is neither dualistic nor monistic, but elemental. It is the question of whether “the flesh of the world” undercuts this binary ontology that is at stake. And, moreover, the issue seems far removed from Irigaray’s dismissal of Merleau-Ponty as supposedly neglecting “the other of sexual difference.” But, perhaps unsurprisingly, this mistrust of a genderless language as a point of critical departure is not something I have patience for. Rather, the element of flesh precedes that difference (despite being the ground for an identity within difference), in such a way that what is being attended to is beyond the language of culture and difference.

This is clear enough in the idea of flesh as a rupture or chiasm. “The visible about us seems to rest in itself,” so Merleau-Ponty states at the outset. The certainty and containment are central, literally. This “pre-established harmony” conditions the visible into a state of order, meaning that initially Merleau-Ponty seems to be deploying the perception of phenomenality as the space of its own immanent critique. The critique is possible, it seems, since the exchange between the invisibility of an ideal harmony and the analogous experience of that ideality in reality is neither transparent nor automatic. Between those spaces – the “wild region” – the prising apart of the invisible and the visible is possible.

What then of the flesh itself? We come to Merleau-Ponty’s celebrated “reversibility thesis,” carried out with the gesture of touch. Merleau-Ponty wants to unify the manoeuvring between being touched and touching, in the process of accounting for the difference between my experience of touching myself and my experience of touching the Other. In a word, he wants to account for the singularity of the flesh. The reversibility of touching and being touched is the core of Merleau-Ponty’s ambiguous ontology, even ontological ambiguity:

“A veritable touching of the touch, when my right hand touches my left hand while it is palpating the things, where the ‘touching subject’ passes over to the rank of the touched, descends into the things, such that the touch is formed in the midst of the world and as it were in the things.” (166).

In his reading of the reversibility thesis, M.C. Dillon depends on the notion of (a)symtery between the touched and the touch, insofar as a asymmetry disturbs a classical dualism. Touching one’s right hand with one’s left ruptures any pregiven unity. The hand, touched and perceived, becomes placed (displaced) into two regions – “a sort of dehiscence [that] opens my body in two” Especially pressing for Dillon is the question of whether touched-touching occupies a parallel relation to the non-human relation with things in the world, such as we encounter a tree (see his Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology, Northwestern, 1998).

Can a tree see without having eyes to do so? Can we talk about the flesh of the tree? The question is importance, since it opens the space between the “seer and the visible” Dillon argues that Merleau-Ponty’s omission of the tree seeing “as if” it were seeing leads to a “de-centred ontology.” A move away from the projected consciousness of the Phenomenology of Perception. I see myself from the flesh upwards. My hands see me, I see my hands. My flesh unfolds, and so entwines: the perspectiveless horizon of the flesh, carrying with it the adhesive that seals being with the world.