An Invisible Trace

A place is marked, marked by the events that occurred there. Trauma, eroticism, desire, nausea, anxiety, ecstasy, death—we speak easily of these affects being in place. But how to formally grasp this relation between the affectivity of an event and the place in which that event is amplified? After Merleau-Ponty, the question can be phrased as a concern with how the visible and the invisible crossover. Even – especially – here, however, there is the worry of how we can truly give voice to that which is invisible without conferring a phenomenal visibility to it.

The problem is a longstanding one. It comes up through the figure of death, trauma, and hauntings. To some extent, the question concerns how we can experience a thing precisely through not experiencing it. The indirection of this search attests to the need to capture the invisible at work before it becomes tied down by visual perception. The inclusion of “visible” is deliberate. Were we to speak of encountering a trace left in a place, then we would have to do so in a solely prepersonal way. Our bodies would have to speak on behalf of things that our eyes can no longer see.


Can we speak of the invisible as a murmur, or does the legacy of murmuring fall into a distinctly human mode of experience? This is a wide-ranging question, drawing into its abyss both the Levinasian il y a and Merleau-Ponty’s wild being in its stream of force. Let me rephrase the question: are any of the senses more ontologically prior to others? Does the murmur of the invisible strike our ears before it penetrates our nostrils? Yet another way: do the senses transcend themselves, with each dialectically outmanoeuvring the other. The hierarchy of the senses does not sit well with a phenomenological critique of ocularcentrism. As Marion has said (somewhere in Being Given), replacing one sense with another does not advance a richer understanding of things. The senses remain intact, with each contributing to an intersensory experience of the environment. Back to the murmur itself, then.

I single out this particular phenomenon, as I regard it has having special properties when held in place. We feel things in our bones, and that feeling is neither arbitrary nor coincidence. Rather, the rattling of the bones exists in direct correspondence with place. Places lives through the human body, just as I feel Millie’s eyes on me before I become aware that she’s lying by my side. Millie’s body, the sheer wonder of her being, is sensed before she is present in my field of perception. How is that contact felt? As a presence in the room, as an obligation to return the gaze of those who share the room with me.


Here, there is spirit – a vital spark no longer bound by the limits of materiality. After all, the materiality of Millie does not simply call to my attention her being. Rather, something emanates that confers a difference on the room: a spirit, a ghostly trace, the trace of a ghost. Yet the ghost of things present is paradoxical given the spatio-temporal presence of those things. Thus it can be said: Things of the present haunt the present. This statement is as far from the cult of hauntology as is possible. Nor is it a claim that refers to the Sebaldian landscape of repressed voices coming to the surface. By it, I speak on strictly phenomenological grounds, as that which evades and exceeds the threshold of appearances. For the moment, phenomenology reaches its limits, its language confined to a feeling in the body. In time, that moment may pass, but further phenomenological work is required.

[Photos of sightings in place from Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Kairo and Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-on]