For all its overexposed saturation, H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Out of Time” remains an exemplary lesson in the liminal phenomenology of the human body. In particular, by mirroring Lovecraft against Merleau-Ponty, a mode of phenomenology is conceived, which foregrounds the un-naturalism of the body. Already in Merleau-Ponty, this incipient weirdness is announced as the “prepersonal body”—this other “subject beneath me, for whom a world exists before I am here, and who marks out my place in it.” (More on this idea here). What remains unsaid in Merleau-Ponty, however, is how this anonymous subject materialises in the flesh of the body. All that we are left with is the fleeting impression that “when I am in danger…my human situation abolishes my biological one…my body lends itself without reserve to action.” Beyond these liminal experiences, the “impersonal existence,” of which the “I” is composed, is repressed into the organism, the body. Here a question forms: if my body is subjected to another self, and a self whose ends are unknown to me, then do I retain possession of my body? After all, do I really “experience” the prepersonal body that forms a double of my own presence? Here, Lovecraft can help us address Merleau-Ponty’s lacuna.
“My head was aching, and I had a singular feeling—altogether new to me—that some one else was trying to get possession of my thoughts.” So begins Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee’s experience of being possessed by another species of life. In this case, it is The Great Race, a collection of disembodied minds, who journey through the universe in search of finite bodies to dwell in so that they may extend their knowledge. And the possession is phenomenologically telling. For what takes place in this second life is not simply the seizure of Peaslee’s mind, as though thought were the province of the head and its cognitive faculties—but a disordering of the whole body, and thus identity itself.
“Even my speech seemed awkward and foreign. I used my vocal organs clumsily and gropingly, and my diction had a curiously stilted quality, as if I had laboriously learned English language from books.” Merleau-Ponty tells us that speech is an “originating realm,” whose expression is dependent less on the words themselves and more on how they are used (pp.202-203). For him, speech is an attitude, a manner of being-in-the-world. Philosophy, too, is the organ of language, whose understanding calls upon “feeling my way into its existential manner, by reproducing the tone and accent of the philosopher.” What Lovecraft presents us with is a speech that becomes increasingly incomprehensible the more an “unknown sort of knowledge” is articulated. “The pronunciation was barbarously alien,” Lovecraft writes. This conflation of estrangement and knowledge points to the body becoming at once constitutive of self while simultaneously exposing itself to being the host of another subject.
Merleau-Ponty writes of “another subject beneath me, for whom a world exists before I am here, and who marks out my place in it.” This body is “more ancient than thought”: it is the transcendental condition of there being a body in the first place, and thus necessary that it possesses me in order for my personal body to persist. Though anonymous, the body is within me. I am it, it is me. As ancient, my body—its corpus of flesh, bone, and memory—is absorbed with the immateriality of a spirit manifest in and through my own materiality. In a word, I am the organ of the waking dead, whose agency employs my body to summon a different age.
The disordering and disjoining of different bodies pushes the body beyond time, placing it beyond a linear concept of time altogether. Speaking through Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, Lovecraft writes: “My conception of time—my ability to distinguish between consecutiveness and simultaneousness—seemed subtly disordered; so that I formed chimerical notions about living in one age and casting one’s mind all over eternity for knowledge of past and future ages.” Through the body, time has been put out-of-joint, divested of all its human elements, and thus “seized with a strange secondary life and leading for a greater or lesser period an utterly alien existence typified by vocal and bodily awkwardness.”
Lovecraft and Merleau-Ponty are both bound with an implicit sensitivity toward the anonymity lurking beneath personal identity. In both case, the body becomes the site of abjection, a space for the disordering of time and materiality. Thus, Lovecraft poses a question: “Had something been groping blindly through time from some abyss in nature?” Faced with the “alien civilization” of our own planet, Merleau-Ponty responds to Lovecraft, speaking of an “amorphous existence which preceded my own history”: “I have only to look within me that time which pursues its own independent course, and which my personal life utilises but does not entirely overlay.” We are faced with a body that by its very nature is the genetic recipient of a memory necessarily outside of its own existence. With this influence, the world of bodily things—“roads, plantations, villages, streets, churches, implements, a bell, a spoon, a pipe” [a future nod to Latour]—becomes imbued with a strange, depersonalised quality. The body does not end with its own materiality, nor does the prepersonal subject incubating within the self. Both direct themselves to the flesh of the world, with its anonymity and alienness. Eventually, the gaze of the prepersonal body turns inwards, in the process revealing a body held captive not by the Great Race, but by the very banality of there being a body in the first place.
“My head was aching, and I had a singular feeling—altogether new to me—that some one else was trying to get possession of my thoughts.” So begins Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee’s experience of being possessed by another species of life. In this case, it is The Great Race, a collection of disembodied minds, who journey through the universe in search of finite bodies to dwell in so that they may extend their knowledge. And the possession is phenomenologically telling. For what takes place in this second life is not simply the seizure of Peaslee’s mind, as though thought were the province of the head and its cognitive faculties—but a disordering of the whole body, and thus identity itself.
“Even my speech seemed awkward and foreign. I used my vocal organs clumsily and gropingly, and my diction had a curiously stilted quality, as if I had laboriously learned English language from books.” Merleau-Ponty tells us that speech is an “originating realm,” whose expression is dependent less on the words themselves and more on how they are used (pp.202-203). For him, speech is an attitude, a manner of being-in-the-world. Philosophy, too, is the organ of language, whose understanding calls upon “feeling my way into its existential manner, by reproducing the tone and accent of the philosopher.” What Lovecraft presents us with is a speech that becomes increasingly incomprehensible the more an “unknown sort of knowledge” is articulated. “The pronunciation was barbarously alien,” Lovecraft writes. This conflation of estrangement and knowledge points to the body becoming at once constitutive of self while simultaneously exposing itself to being the host of another subject.
Merleau-Ponty writes of “another subject beneath me, for whom a world exists before I am here, and who marks out my place in it.” This body is “more ancient than thought”: it is the transcendental condition of there being a body in the first place, and thus necessary that it possesses me in order for my personal body to persist. Though anonymous, the body is within me. I am it, it is me. As ancient, my body—its corpus of flesh, bone, and memory—is absorbed with the immateriality of a spirit manifest in and through my own materiality. In a word, I am the organ of the waking dead, whose agency employs my body to summon a different age.
The disordering and disjoining of different bodies pushes the body beyond time, placing it beyond a linear concept of time altogether. Speaking through Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, Lovecraft writes: “My conception of time—my ability to distinguish between consecutiveness and simultaneousness—seemed subtly disordered; so that I formed chimerical notions about living in one age and casting one’s mind all over eternity for knowledge of past and future ages.” Through the body, time has been put out-of-joint, divested of all its human elements, and thus “seized with a strange secondary life and leading for a greater or lesser period an utterly alien existence typified by vocal and bodily awkwardness.”
Lovecraft and Merleau-Ponty are both bound with an implicit sensitivity toward the anonymity lurking beneath personal identity. In both case, the body becomes the site of abjection, a space for the disordering of time and materiality. Thus, Lovecraft poses a question: “Had something been groping blindly through time from some abyss in nature?” Faced with the “alien civilization” of our own planet, Merleau-Ponty responds to Lovecraft, speaking of an “amorphous existence which preceded my own history”: “I have only to look within me that time which pursues its own independent course, and which my personal life utilises but does not entirely overlay.” We are faced with a body that by its very nature is the genetic recipient of a memory necessarily outside of its own existence. With this influence, the world of bodily things—“roads, plantations, villages, streets, churches, implements, a bell, a spoon, a pipe” [a future nod to Latour]—becomes imbued with a strange, depersonalised quality. The body does not end with its own materiality, nor does the prepersonal subject incubating within the self. Both direct themselves to the flesh of the world, with its anonymity and alienness. Eventually, the gaze of the prepersonal body turns inwards, in the process revealing a body held captive not by the Great Race, but by the very banality of there being a body in the first place.
3 comments:
Two comments: I really appreciate the film still from Possession [1981, Adjani, Zulawski dir.] Right on point.
Second comment is simply a quote, obliquely approaching the issue of the body before the body. The full essay underscores the problem of awareness forming in the gap between the hidden ruleset of the very possibility of body, and the strange existence of the body itself.
"But for each person there comes a time when he must be separated from his Genius. It can be at night, unexpectedly, when at the sound of a group of people passing by he feels, without knowing why, that his god has abandoned him. Or perhaps we send Genius away in a moment of great lucidity, an extreme moment in which we know there is salvation but no longer want to be saved- as when in The Tempest, Prospero says to Ariel: "Be free." This is the moment when he relinquishes the spirit's charms and knows that the strength he has now is his own; it is the late and final stage when the old artist lays down his pen- and contemplates. What does he contemplate? Gestures: for the first time truly his own, devoid of every charm. No doubt life without Ariel loses its mystery, and yet somehow we know that now it can really belong to us; only now do we begin to live a purely human and earthly life, the life that did not keep its promises and for that reason, can now give us infinitely more. This is exhausted and suspended time, the sudden penumbra in which we begin to forget about Genius; this is night fulfilled. Did Ariel ever exist? What is that fading, distant music?"
Agamben, Genius, Profanations
Dylan,
Thank you for a fascinating post.
Ed - Yes, the film still rocks.
I've never seen the movie, now I'm
hooked, I must.
Thanks to both of you, and thanks, Ed, for the Agamben quote. There's a strong sense of the Levinasian "il y a" in his account, especially as it figures in his metaphysics of insomnia.
More soon,
Dylan.
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