The House of the Past

The sun has withdrawn from the world, leaving in its place a creeping light, from which my body is exposed to the contingency of this place. This is the place. This is the place where furniture sits side-by-side by a history older than the human body. I am crawling in the moonlight. The moonlight has come, and the house in its barren unfamiliarity has been exposed. Turning the key to the “house of the past,” Algernon Blackwood makes a discovery: “…a spirit of intense sadness came over me, drenching me to the soul; my eyes began to burn and smart, and in my heart I became aware of a strange sensation as of the uncoiling of something that had been asleep for ages.” I confess: I own nothing in this place—the furniture has been dis-possessed by the history of others. This furniture, none of which belongs to me, except this kitchen table, exceeds its own materiality. It is hostile, alien, opposed to the “I” which seeks to dwell in this strange house. Against the moonlight, in solitude, I ask myself this question: How did this table end up here? No genealogical analysis will resolve the oceanic fog that encircles the solidity of the table. No causal explanation will abate my desire. We are alone, the table and I. What if I were to sleep? Then where would I find a place to seek repose? Everything here has a life that is outside of time, a shadow of another person’s memory. Like me, the table has traversed the deepest recesses of the human body, its eerie presence a testimony to the mystery of the universe. 3.45 am. We are lit by the portentous moonlight: the house shown in a different light, its alcoves and corners suffused with an otherworldly aura more suited to the ominous regions of the deepest, forest than the super-natural banality of the kitchen table.

Off to San Francisco to speak on behalf of another life. Expect a report on the metaphysics of the redwood forest shortly.

Everyday Uncanny (2): “There is no Dasein of the spectre”

A train has stopped in the middle of the countryside, its engine overpowered by a blizzard. From the train carriage, a view opens on a house, in whose windows “sunlit bazaars in exotic cities throng with faces that were transparent masks for insect-like countenances; moonlit streets in antique towns harboured a strange-eyed slithering within their very stones; dim galleries of empty museums sprouted a ghostly mold that mirrored the sullen hues of old paintings…” (Thomas Ligotti).

“There is no Dasein of the spectre,” Derrida writes. Conceptually, the claim can be understood as a critique of phenomenology in its purported commitment to the unity of Dasein: a unitary phenomenon, which leaves no lacuna between being and world. Culturally, the formulation of Derrida’s notion of “Hauntology” has led to a disservice to the singularity of ghosts, effacing their phenomenal reality under the shield of a socio-political agenda. In each case, Derrida’s claim, and indeed his work on hauntology more broadly, overlooks phenomenology in its relation to the uncanny.

In the shadowless realm of the airport terminal, with its absence of alcoves and creaking staircases, flanked on all sides by a labyrinth of tourist shops and interchangeable cafés, the body finds itself in the midst of a “figure inexpressibly thin and pathetic, of a dusty leaden colour, enveloped in a shroud-like garment, the thin lips crooked into a faint and dreadful smile, the hands pressed tightly over the region of the heart” (M.R. James).

“There is no Dasein of the spectre.” Circumstantially, the claim can be disproved with recourse to §40 of Being and Time, where the reader will gain a sense of the transcendental structure of Da-sein as orientated toward uncanniness. But we need not even venture to Heidegger himself in order to gain a foothold in the spectrality of Dasein. After all, the rabid ideology linking Hauntology with spectrality positions the latter in a realm far removed from the everyday, treating ghostly matter as a rupture in the lifeworld. This is an error. Overlooked in Derrida’s critique of phenomenology is the agency of the (prepersonal) body as having the potential to estrange “being” from “there” (a point I examine in depth in The Memory of Place).

For now, things must necessarily remain vague. Yet the question of the body as rupturing has a lineage pointing back to its doubling and anonymity. In each case, the body undercuts personal being, establishing a trail of evidence at odds with “my” experience of the world. Levinas: “I do not stay awake: 'it' stays awake.” The body has withdrawn, and in doing so, the fabric of the world shudders with an abysmal force. Nicolas Abraham is correct: “What haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others.” Who are the others that secrete their secrets within the living? The question must be inverted: what is the otherness, from which gaps appear in the waking world, placing the ghost of the body within the placid domain of the everyday and familiar?

At the Station

“We do not understand the absence or death of a friend until the time comes when we expect a reply from him and when we realise that we shall never again receive one” (Merleau-Ponty, 2006, p. 93).

One day, a human presents himself to the world, the idiosyncrasies of his personality manifest in the movement in his mouth, the sharpness of the voice, the uncertainty in his eye, and the kindness of his manner. The next day, he is dead. Nothing is left of those mannerisms, their vitality transformed to the hum of a diminishing memory.

We were in the middle of our studies. In the middle of our course. There was work yet to do. The last topic we looked at was Schopenhauer on self. That was two weeks ago, and there was nothing to indicate it would be our last class together. The night you fell ill, we were due to look at Freud on the unconsciousness. Two days later you died. The class is still outstanding, projected into the future, and yet you yourself belong to a past that is now inaccessible—stranded in an unmapped present.

You drove me from Eastbourne to the Sussex countryside. The car park was dark, and I wavered at the exit of the empty station until I saw you and your wife in the car. I sat in the back, and you glanced toward me. In that glance, a life stretched into the past, its experience sewn in the face that bears witness to memory. That was two weeks ago, and I can still sense your glance. You and your wife sat in front of me, we drove in the dark, through the silent landscapes and into the Sussex Downs. When I asked, “How are you?” you replied: “I’m fine, but I cannot speak on behalf of Elizabeth.” Your presence was robust, though in the dark you carried a small torch and walked slowly. At the door to the house, you knocked gently and remained vigilant over your wife’s safety in crossing through the door.

You carried news of the wellbeing of your friends, some of whom were already ill but now precariously recovering. You were the spokesperson for their health, and yet your own health was never in question. In our seminars, we had spoken about death, selfhood, life, memory, experience. Your presence was calm, and you sat opposite the open fire in the same chair, ensuring your wife was able to hear the discussion despite her poor hearing. The chair will remain: its emptiness metamorphosed into a monument. Our future discussion of Freud, Merleau-Ponty, and Bachelard will never take place. A final goodbye remains unresolved in the darkness separating the living from the dead. In this lacuna, your mannerisms leave a shadow, their singularity carried over into a world, in which your own self persists through a glance that is now seized in time.

In Paris

"The Door"

Via: I am Shell, I am Bone