On a still day, Simon Srebnik is returning to Chelmno: “Even, I, here, now…I can’t believe I’m here.” Faced with the ruins of the Acropolis, Freud joins Simon Srebnik in failing to reconcile time and place. “So this all really does exist, just as we learned in school!” There is a concurrent trauma in this refusal and resistance. The facticity of everyday phenomena exceeds its own appearance, establishing a fissure between materiality and experience. Too good to be true: this tacit pessimism in the face of things reveals another side. “According to the evidence of my senses, I am now standing on the Acropolis, but I can’t believe it.” Freud’s unnerving response to the Acropolis concerns less a tension between anticipation and experience, and more a rupture between place and embodiment.
When the fabric of the world ceases to be of this reality, then do I take “leave of my senses?” Does my body lie in wait, its sensory awareness momentarily suspended? What remains: the bewilderment of an experience without a memory, or a memory with no experience? In each case, the experience of things—the Acropolis or Chelmno—becomes defined as a negative space, suffused with a derealized sensation. Just as with Srebnik in Chelmno, Freud’s encounter with a derealized world centres on the markings left by ruins. In the traces left behind, an excess in matter is produced, serving to remind the visitor that beyond the appearance of presence, estrangement and otherness ensue.
When the fabric of the world ceases to be of this reality, then do I take “leave of my senses?” Does my body lie in wait, its sensory awareness momentarily suspended? What remains: the bewilderment of an experience without a memory, or a memory with no experience? In each case, the experience of things—the Acropolis or Chelmno—becomes defined as a negative space, suffused with a derealized sensation. Just as with Srebnik in Chelmno, Freud’s encounter with a derealized world centres on the markings left by ruins. In the traces left behind, an excess in matter is produced, serving to remind the visitor that beyond the appearance of presence, estrangement and otherness ensue.
Beyond appearance: contrary to phenomenology’s onus on what gives itself, Freud and Srebnik’s derealized experience of time and place damages the body’s intentionality toward the world. The body is seized in its tracks, and a semi-realised reality is the result. In such a case, disbelief becomes a privileged experience, pointing to a tension resistant to logic and reason. “Even, I, here, now…I can’t believe I’m here.” This phrase haunts the experience of derealisation, its spectrality co-dependent on the placid banality of things: in a word, uncanny. Ultimately, therefore, Freud’s psychodynamic explanation for derealisation—explained with recourse to “the punitive agency of our childhood”—falls short. Phenomenology—phenomena—survives derealisation, and its persistence is at the heart of estrangement from things.
Yet structurally speaking, Freud is right to identify the temporality of childhood as central. After all, the de-realization of the world presupposes a prior mode of world to deviate from, both spatially but also temporally. Derealisation is also a doubling and, as Freud points out, a doubting. More specifically, a doubting of a former mode of being, which, through being confronted with its other, is now effaced. Thus, Freud’s example of the paradoxical behaviour the last ruler of Muslim Andalucía, Boabdil when hearing about the fall of Alhama is telling:
Far from paradoxical, however, the (re)-action attests to the body’s orientation toward a particular world—marked in Boabdil’s case by disempowerment led by the end of rule—which is now dissolved. Denial of the destruction of the world is as evident in trauma as it in ecstasy. In both cases, a displacement of self serves as the mark of a de-realised world (noting here, of course, the alignment between Heidegger’s etymology of temporal ec-stasis as “standing out” and the loss of bodily function as a doubling of the out-standing quality).
Yet structurally speaking, Freud is right to identify the temporality of childhood as central. After all, the de-realization of the world presupposes a prior mode of world to deviate from, both spatially but also temporally. Derealisation is also a doubling and, as Freud points out, a doubting. More specifically, a doubting of a former mode of being, which, through being confronted with its other, is now effaced. Thus, Freud’s example of the paradoxical behaviour the last ruler of Muslim Andalucía, Boabdil when hearing about the fall of Alhama is telling:
“Letters had reached him telling that Alhama was taken. He threw the letter in the fire and killed the messenger.”
Far from paradoxical, however, the (re)-action attests to the body’s orientation toward a particular world—marked in Boabdil’s case by disempowerment led by the end of rule—which is now dissolved. Denial of the destruction of the world is as evident in trauma as it in ecstasy. In both cases, a displacement of self serves as the mark of a de-realised world (noting here, of course, the alignment between Heidegger’s etymology of temporal ec-stasis as “standing out” and the loss of bodily function as a doubling of the out-standing quality).
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