the death of things (1)

8/3/2019 The Death of Things (1)

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The Death of Things: Ontological Intrusions between Poe, Husserl, and Derrida

Darren Hutchinson

Keywords: Derrida, Deconstruction, Edgar Allan Poe, Husserl, Phenomenology, Death.(Non-)abstract: To the things themselves! This classic imperative of phenomenology promises more

than it can give. In this essay, this wandering exercise between literature and philosophy, betweendeconstruction and horror, I investigate the ontological destruction at the heart of the phenomenological

enterprise through readings of Poe's The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, Husserl'sIdeas, and Derrida'sVoice and Phenomena. But with a twist, almost a surprise ending, the shock of the close of a macabrenarrative, I broach the possible return of the things themselves, arising from the dead, even from the deathof the trace, not back into the realm of life which has been complicated and twisted into a general space of

haunting but rather into the extraordinary being of (if this can be said) an even more authentic death, thedeath of things, the death belonging to things as facts, beyond their dissipation into the ethereal vapors ofspirit.

It is now rendered necessary that I give the facts as far as I comprehend them myself.

They are, succinctly, these:

--Edgar Allan Poe

The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar i

I.

Despite its intentions, phenomenology carries death with it, persisting as an infectedvector which destroys the things themselves. All phenomenology is the phenomenology ofdeath, phenomenology is both drawn to death like a carrion bird and brings about death like acarnivore, despite, even through its commitment to the pervasiveness and power of life. In itsdedication to life, to the life of life, to hyper-life beyond even the organicity of substance,phenomenology is required to destroy that which is not quite fully alive, that which containswithin itself any thanatological trace. This means that phenomenology is required to annihilateevery thing, even living things, even the thingof the world itself, and then in a final movementof mortality, to hurl itself into a suicidal plunge in an utter disavowal of its own linguistic being.Phenomenology persists only as an , a phantom, a ghost which discovers and expressesthe mysterious condition of its deathly persistence.

Jacques Derrida opens and closes his magisterial exposure of the death at the heart ofphenomenology, Voice and Phenomena, with reference to the work of Edgar Allen Poe.Specifically, one of the framing quotes for his essay is taken from the short story The Facts inthe Case of M. Valdemar. The tale from which the selection involves the following: Aterminally-ill man, M. Valdemar, has been mesmerized. The man verbally describes his statesand experiences while under the induced trance. The man reports that he is sleeping and that heis dying. The man apparently passes away, his vital functions ceased. Yet, in response to aquestion posed earlier concerning whether of not he still slept, the man suddenly replies Yes;


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no; I have been sleeping and now now I am dead. (This is the quote cited byDerrida).ii

Poe narrates his characters' reactions to the vocalization of the dead man: No person

present even affected to deny, or attempted to repress, the unutterable, shuddering horror whichthese few words, thus uttered, were so well calculated to convey. Mr. L l (the student)swooned. The nurses immediately left the chamber, and could not be induced to return. My ownimpressions I would not pretend to render intelligible to the reader. Poe describes thevocalization itself: I have spoken both of sound and of voice. I mean to say that the soundwas one of distinct of even wonderfully, thrillingly distinct syllabification.iii But despitePoe's detail, it is difficult to imagine the sound of the dead man. (Poe's character admits as muchwhen he labels the unearthly quality of the voice indescribable.) It is difficult, preciselybecause there would be no criterion to distinguish the voice of the dead man, supposing hespoke, from the voice of the living. In films, the creators often make the voices of the dead(ghosts, zombies, etc.) modulated, deep, or gravelly in order to indicate their unearthly state, but

such voices can (of necessity?) only sound like living human voices, so modulated and altered.The problem of the speaking of the dead, if such a thing were possible, would be that suchspeaking would be identical to living speech, perhaps as thrilling distinct as the voice of anexcellent tenor. In and of itself, every voice which speaks words proves the truth offunctionalism: the voice is what it does, its speaking as a voice makes it sound alive. Thispossibility exactly allows for the reproduction of voices in recorded media, since in everyplayback, there is only an inanimate object producing sounds, but those sounds are heard as thevoices of the living, talking or singing directly to us, as if those speaking were in our presence.

If they do speak, then the dead always already speak as the living. If a corpse were tospeak, we would find within it (or a in a site beyond it) a source of life, even if a mirror held toits mouth no longer afforded evidence of respiration. If the wind were to utter sounds as if the

voice of God were speaking on high, with our having heard a whispered calling of our names inthe loneliest loneliness of a mountain peak, then we would look for God, for an intruder, forsome being responsible for the living voice which called for our response. Perhaps finding none(and supposing the voice did not repeat itself, did not go on, did not exhibit thrillingly distinctsyllabification, which would render the following operation psychologically impossible), wewould say that the previously heard voice was just a noise, not a voice at all, not denying thatthe inanimate speaks but rather that there was any speaking at all. And yet, if one heard such asound, it would fill one with a sense of eeriness, of strange dislocation and paranoia, as if theweird eye of being were staring into the depth of one's soul. The uncanny instinct of animism wepossess, the haunting need to find the living in the dead, the animism which allows us to hear thedead modulations of air as live syllables, to see mere light refractions as the smiling of a livingface, to find the gods anger present in the thunderstorm, to discover meaning in mere marks on acave wall, the presence of ancient minds dried into the paint a priori disallows for even theacknowledgment of a purely dead voice while haunting us with the promise of a spectral beyondto the world.

But this means, as Derrida famously argues, that there is no purely living voice either. InVoice and Phenomena, Derrida obviously does not share Poe's enthusiastic supernaturalism, hedoes not believe in zombies or ghosts or voices from beyond the grave, but he finds the voiceswith which we are confronted in our everyday lives, whether carried through the air or inscribed


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in parchment to be indistinguishable from those of zombies or ghosts or voices beyond the grave.Almost as if he were afraid of ghosts, Derrida dismisses the possible extraordinary truth ofPoe's story about supposed facts, while at the same time affirming the general validity of the

possibility of dead speech. In hiscoup de grce which hits the heart of phenomenologicallanguage, or its soul, the soul of the living presence of the transcendental word, the word whichwould be necessary to provide phenomenology its reduced internal validity and essentiality as apurely descriptive science of essences, Derrida shows that death overtakes and rendersimpossible the pure validity of even statements as simple and basis as I am alive or I am.

The statement I am alive is accompanied by my being dead, and its possibility requiresthe possibility that I be dead; and conversely. This is not an extraordinary tale by Poe butthe ordinary story of language. Earlier, we reached the I am mortal from the I am;

here we understand the I am out of the I am dead. The anonymity of the written I, theimpropriety of the I am writing, is, contrary to what Husserl says, the normal situation.iv

The pure logical grammar which would serve as the basis for phenomenology's internalvalidity would require the possibility of a formal attestation of the immanence of reducedphenomenological space from within itself, which would be nothing other than thetranscendental ego's expression of its irreducible necessity. Such an expression, by definition,would not indicate an external substance ala Descartes' Cogito ergo sum. Rather, this expressionwould have to, of itself, express the living of transcendental life as it is lived, as it were to (usingthe Heideggerian formulation) allow that life to show itself from itself. As a descriptive science,first and foremost, phenomenology would have to be able to describe the presence of thephenomenon, and this would require that the irreducible ego be minimally able to account foritself, to voice itself as an essentially present phenomenon in the phenomenological process. Butthe very voicing of self-presence transforms the expression of phenomenological life into an

indication of a lost moment, a differing and deferring separation which introduces the distance oftranscendence at the heart of the site of what was supposed to be an essential immanence.

The differance of auto-affection brings about the speaking of the living-dead. One whoproperly inherits (if such a thing were possible) this insight (which could also be called an ex-sight) may indeed undergo unutterable, shuddering horror despite the non-reality of zombiesand ghosts, the horror of the ordinary story of language. Such horror is as multi-dimensionalas any Lovecraftian abyss:

A. Consciousness as self-presence is constituted by the dead trace. Just as the bodycontains within itself only dead chemicals, just as the living organism is always already amechanical robot, dead even before its death, granted the property of life only because of

activity and not because of ontology, the soul which would have transcended and inseminated thedead corpse of the living thing with the real life of the mind is equally, irreparably inert at itscore. Insofar as the soul lives as soul, which is to say insofar as it speaks, as it speaks both asitself and to itself, thus being precisely what it is, a living intelligent immanence, a self-awareinteriority, it includes within itself as a necessary ground the dead trace of the disruptive sound ofvocalization, the eerie vibration (like Valdemar's vibration of the dead tongue) which isfunctionally indistinguishable from dried, dead blood used to write words on parchment. Thisdamned spot of non-presence, occlusion, non-immanence, pure materiality is the essence of


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the possibility of speaking and thinking, even to oneself, by oneself. In the dark night of the soulas it withdraws into the security of its own internal life, de-composing bits of flesh intrude, evencompose the walls of its unearthly confines. The voice that speaks therefore I am is nothing

other than the gravel(l)y tone of the zombie.B. The voicing of the present of the living mind resonates as a misapprehended past, anecessary deferral, a thing which has forgotten that it is already deceased. The temporality of thevoice essentially carries it beyond presence, beyond the life of the present, beyond the livingnow. It is essential to the voice that the speaker may be dead when this voicing occurs, preciselybecause all voicing is a preserving which moves beyond presence while retaining an involuntarymemory, a marked impression of its passage. I may indeed say I am dead and this may betrue, it is in fact necessarily true in a certain sense. And when I say I am alive, then this maybe false and is also necessarily false, in a certain sense. As I croak to myself concerning mypresent meanings and intentions, I do not realize that I am a mummy, that meanings andintentions are hieroglyphs inscribed on a pyramid wall.

C. The deathly trace of living speech, both in its vibratory disruption and in its deferral,unhinges the very distinction between the living and the dead. One is only able to demarcate anexterior of non-immanence and dead materiality by virtue of a concept of the living present fromwhich one can delimit this divide. But if the living present is a priori and essentially of death,of the past, of the exterior, of the inanimate, then the very chain of concepts by which wereassure ourselves of our living status is dislocated. Everything both living and dead has to bereassigned to an ontology of general spectrality, an undecidable hovering between (and beyond)the living and the dead, the shimmering being of the phantasm, the (un)earthly . Notonly: I am a spirit, swaying between life and death, beyond life and death, a traced image of apast life, a perpetual reincarnation but also every thingwhich (apparently) appears in the world isof such an uncanny constitution. The entire world, insofar as it is for me, insofar as it manifests

as a phenomenon at all, is a spectral world, the starlight of a long faded nova, a haunted housefor the ghost of the subject.

II.

But such grave consequences do not merely occur at the end and (in)completion of thephenomenological project. From the first movement of the phenomenological reduction, fromthe neutralization of the positing of actuality by the subject, the things themselves have alreadydied. The death which is essential to phenomenology does not merely destroy the self-presenceof the subject but rather has from the beginning operated in the very being of the phenomenonitself. Husserl claims that nothing is destroyed through phenomenological reduction, and in away this is true, since every thing has been converted into a no-thingthrough the consciousactivity of phenomenological discourse. Husserl:

This posited actuality is indeed not there for us in consequence of judging. And yet, so to

speak, everything remains as of old. Even the phenomenologically reduced perceptualmental process is a perceiving ofthis blossoming apple tree, in this garden, etc., and

likewise, the reduced liking is a liking of the same thing. The tree has not lost the leastnuance of all these moments, qualities, characteristics with which it was appearing to this

perception, it lovely, attractive, and so forth inthis liking.v


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But everything does not remain as of old. It is easy to show that the death whichDerrida finds at the end and interior of phenomenology has operated from the very beginning,

that the things have already been mesmerized through the inception of the reduction, waiting tobe awakened to decay.1. The thing is submitted to physical destruction, even before the bracketing of the

physical sciences. Husserl proceeds in theIdeas through a dialectic which leads from niaveperception to scientific-physical perception to phenomenology. Within this dialectic, Husserlfollows the traditional Cartesian course of first recognizing that any apprehension of the thing inperson is liable to the possibility of deception. He takes the naive solution to this problem toinvolve perception being 'confirmed' in concatenations of actional experience, perhaps with thehelp of correct thinking based on this experience which would then allow the victim of possibleillusion to claim that the perceived physical thing is actual and, more particularly, actually givenin perception in person.vi But according to Husserl, this confirming return to the in person

givenness of the thing does something non-naive, something he states as remarkable:

The perceiving, when I consider it purely as a consciousness and disregard my body andbodily organs, appears like something which is, in itself, inessential: an empty looking atthe Object itself on the part of an empty Ego which comes into a remarkable contact

with the Object.vii

The thing, for instance the apple tree or the desk, is not merely returned to its old being assomething to be climbed on or worked at, but rather presences for consciousness in a mysteriousway. Husserl notes that in the scientific development of this insight, the perception of theObject becomes a mere appearance and that the true physical thing is the one determined byphysics.viii But the cognition of this true physical thing of physics only serves as an index to

the course of possible experiences with the things pertaining to the senses and their occurrencefound in those experiences. It serves, therefore, to orient us in the world of actional experiencein which we all live and act. ix Thus, physics itself is excluded in positing any actuality of thething as a transcendent object, along with the whole domain of theoretical thinking.

The phenomenon of the apple tree or desk would thus neither be the naively givenobject in person nor the theoretically postulated physicality existing behind this givennesswhich has transformed into mere appearance. The phenomenon would be the pure apparition,beyond the dialectic of realism and idealism. And yet, the basic relation to the thing as one ofknowledge has preconditioned the entire genealogy of the phenomenon, so the discourse ofphysics has been secretly operative throughout, even at the nave beginning. Only in specialconditions do I wonder if I really see a desk or an apple tree: usually there is not even the

beginning of a movement towards confirmation. It of course follows that if the thing is firstturned into a possibly illusory perception and next the perception is placed before a backgroundof posited physicality and finally this background of posited physicality is bracketed, then one isleft with a pure evanescencea phenomenon beyond realism and idealism, and this new thingcan be identified with what was initially given. But Husserl's naive beginning is one whichpresupposes the stance of the man of science. When I reach towards the apple tree to findsomething to eat, the thing which I touch is not something recognized or experienced as aperception or even something that is given in person. Although we may lack proper words


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for this thing before the object, before the thing in itself of physical being, before the apparitionof the phenomenon, whatever it was (even though it in some sense even pre-dated thepredication of being and all the commitments which this presupposes) has been a priori

destroyed by deathly deferral of phenomenological distancing.2. The apple tree I climb or the desk I would rest my head upon (for instance) becomeessentially, as targets of phenomenological reduction, adumbrational objects. Husserl: Ofessential necessity there belongs to any all-sided, continuously, universally, and self-confirming experimental consciousness (Erfahrungsbewusstsein) of the same physical thing amultifarious system of continuous multiplicites of appearance and adumbrations in which allobjective moments falling within perception with the characteristic of being themselves given inperson are adumbrated by determined continuities.x The judgment there is a die or theregoes a blackbird or even I see red would be, in a certain phenomenological sense, a necessaryfalsification belonging to all phenomenological consciousness of things. Whether colors orobjects or even sensations, the only thing we are confronted with in the space of

phenomenological reduction is a series of perspectives, differences, sides, aspects, variations,never the pure thing, never the whole thing, never the thing itself. The objectivity of the objectcan only be an idealization, a fantasized extension of rotational and variational presentations toan impossible infinity. The noematic content of the any judgment of intention within experiencealways goes beyond experience, since experience is always already dispersed into endlessdiversification. Even in fantasy, the movement towards the infinity of the total object isunreachable, as unreachable as it is in person. Since even the imagination of the idealphenomenological object is impossible, the phenomenological object is non-existent, dead onarrival, dispersed beyond the realm of any objectivity whatsoever.

When I go to roll the dice or climb the apple tree, before the reduction, however, beforephenomenology and its methodology are even broached, I roll the dice and climb the tree. I do

not worry about multiplicities of appearance as essential to the thing. I may indeed walk to theother side of the tree or see what number is on the bottom face of the die, but when I do so, Irelate to the tree and the die, not to sides and perspectives as the essence of the thing. Butwhen the thing is a priori abstracted into the realm of perception from which phenomenologybegins, it can be nothing other than this impossible infinity, since its being as a thing is alreadyeviscerated.

3. Thus, the phenomenon is a priori situated within a metaphysicall conceptual spaceof immanence and transcendence. The natural attitude is defined by its positing oftranscendent being, being which is reduced to the sphere of pure immanence withinphenomenological consciousness. Not only is there the lived space of immanence which Derridashows as exposed to death (Husserl: . . . I say unqualifiedly and necessarily that I am, this lifeis, I am living: cogito. but even Husserl admits that the world of the transcendent is alreadydead.xi In contradistinction, as we know, it is of the essence of the physical world that noperception, however perfect, presents anything absolute in that realm; and essentially connectedwith this is the fact that any experience, however extensive, leaves open the possibility that whatis given does not exist in spite of the continual consciousness of its own presence 'in person.' xii

The foreignness of materiality is thereby applied to the being of the phenomenon, it is assigned atranscendent contingency as opposed to the immanent necessity of transcendental consciousness.

This implementation subordinates the entire being of things in the world to


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consciousness. The only way they may be assigned actuality and objectivity out of the isfor a self-present consciousness to be able to perpetually validate their presence across thediversifications with which they present themselves. Such judgments will be essentially

contingent, but the ideal possibility of their truth would have to be one given through thepossibility of the infinite presentational capacities of consciousness across time. Because thethings have been killed by the residuum of Cartesian skepticism, the only means of recoveringthem (given that God has been dismissed in the bracketing of metaphysical transcendence) isthrough their being validated by the perpetual life of consciousness.

Given Derrida's exposure of the deconstruction of this perpetual life, given that the lookdoes not abide such that it could bestow the things back the life it has taken from them, thethings themselves float into the dimension of the irrecoverable. The things which have beenreduced are left merely as adumbrational traces, perspectives, faces, scintillations without depth,the excreta of a failed epistemology. The very reason the transcendental ego was required to beaffirmed as a necessary and absolute being, essentially incapable of becoming given by virtue of

adumbration and appearance is because its was needed as a transcendental supplement to returnlife to the things which have been rendered into mere positional films, cataracts on thephenomenological eye, adumbrated being, not capable of ever becoming given absolutely,merely accidental and relative.xiii

III.

For the contemporary reader, it is not a mystery that epistemology destroys the things itseeks knowledge of, or that phenomenology, in its movement towards descriptive objectivity,annihilates the things it would faithfully describe. But what is of interest for us is this circulationof death which maintains its power, even after the exposure of phenomenology's inadequacies asa science of presence. The so-called things themselves of phenomenology are constituted

though a reductive fire, already traced as ashes, memories of the dead, and then these things arepromised to still be given as things (and even restored to a higher objectivity through awarenessof their concrete essences) by the phoenix of the phenomenological subject, but unfortunately,this phoenix is actually a zombie bird, its fire is fake, it flies as a fossil, so it has no power topreserve and retain the things it has decimated in its initial ignition. After the fires ofphenomenology have burned through everything, being becomes the trace, the ash, theessentially adumbrated and dislocated. The things of old, whenever they are mentioned, arerelegated to being artifacts of a nostalgia for presence, whether the presence of the nave positingof common sense or the impossible presence of completed phenomenological idealization. Butthis phenomenological circle has a priori closed to the outside, jettisoned while preserving, thosevery things to which it should have been initially related.

Despite its failure, Derrida holds that phenomenology occurred of necessity as the ex-posure of the metaphysics of presence, both revealing and destabilizing it from within. Althoughhe maintains that Hegelianism seems to be more radical and that Hegel's critique of Kantwould no doubt hold against Husserl, he claims this appearing of the Ideal as an infinitedifferance can only be produced within a relationship with death in general.xiv (Derrida willlater question the notion of something like death in general in the work of Heidegger inAporias, but his early words, which could have almost been drawn from Heidegger here comeback to haunt him.)xv Phenomenology would maintain its priority precisely since, in order to


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hold its relationship with death, it does not move through the history of the concept and thedialectical machinations of Hegelian thought, but rather confronts the necessity of idealizationdirectly, in its bringing into the fold instances of fractured presence whose life and death it is

directly responsible for in the moment of the phenomenological encounter. Thephenomenological object is only a trace, the shaded dissolution of being, and the evanescenceof this object calls forth the indefinite movement of phenomenological projection into thefantasy of the future, out of the present, into the indefinite abyss in order properly to return thething itself to full existence. But in so idealizing (the appearing of the Ideal as an infinitedifferance), the phenomenological subject, despite Husserl's intentions, is cast also in relation toits own essential non-presence through the necessity of its supplementation by the voice of auto-affection. Thus, the fissuring of the object and subject can be ex-posed only through goingthrough the purified structure or schema of an absolute will-to-hear-oneself-speak whichphenomenology perfectly embodies as the pinnacle of a metaphysical history which closes itselfat exactly this point. What we are left with at this juncture is the necessity to negotiate the

closing trace of differance as it dislocates the entire ontological/metaphysical/epistemologicalfield which has been the theater of philosophy. For such negotiation, unheard-of thoughts arerequired (both novel and beyond the hegemony of the voice), other names than those of thesign or representation.xvi We are thrown into a world of generalized displacement, a worldwhich is no longer a world, in the general death of all things, of the death of every thing as athing, every totality and particularity endlessly rendered. As for the thing itself, Derridamaintains, contrary to what phenomenologywhich is always a phenomenology of perceptionhas tried to make us believe, contrary to what our desire cannot fail to be tempted intobelieving, the thing itself always escapes.xvii

But one might question the circular nature of this entire construction at exactly this pointwhere the things itself always escapes. On the one hand, it is doubtlessly correct that if the

residual trace which allows for the appearing of appearance, the differance of manifestationitself, before or prior to any presence whatsoever (one no longer has words) demarcatesthe limit of phenomenological space, even constitutes that space (along with the very idea andintuition of space itself), then one is indeed required to follow it along an endless chain ofceaseless deferral. Insofar as the absolute non-presence of the infinite and indefinite deferral anddifferentiation of death in general haunts all things, then one will have to follow all things to thegrave, to dis-locate them from their comfortable habitation as either real or unreal, sensible orintelligible, particulars or universals, material or spiritual, and all the rest, placing them (all ofthem, material objects, the subject, God, the world itself, even Being) in the wake of a torsioningwhich would twist them beyond any standard sense. But (on the other hand) on the basis of sucha realization (although it cannot properly speaking be realized, in all senses of the term), onewould also have to acknowledge (as Derrida does in other places, such as Tympan, the openingessay ofMargins of Philosophy) that no limit is simple, that there are other strange exteriors tothe space of phenomenology beyond the torsioning differance which opens that space through itsexclusion.xviii

For instance (though this is not merely an instance, everything essential is containedhere), Husserl's famously thematized background or horizon provides an otherlimit,anotherlimit to phenomenology, one which makes phenomenological presentative descriptionpossible and yet withdraws into the occludedness of midnight skies in the light of this


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presentation. As this background, first there are the recessed things unattended to by presentconsciousness, not the dice but the table on which it is rolled, not the blackbird but the sky whichframes it, and also things behind me, at the edges of my field of perception, anything around

which I can turn my attention to.xix

Also, Husserl identifies an obscurely intended to horizon ofindeterminate actuality. Although some aspects of this horizon can be made explicit withinpresentative consciousness, mostly an empty mist of obscure indeterminateness is populatedwith intuited possibilities or likelihoods; and only the form of the world, precisely as theworld is pre-delineated. Moreover, my indeterminate surroundings are infinite, the misty andnever fully determinable horizon is necessarily there.xx The hovering things at the edge ofconsciousness form the very basis of the phenomenological world, the scaffolding of its theater,every bit as necessary as the cogito itself for any phenomenological encounter. (and the past,included the past presentations of the cogito, now moved into the death of absence forms yetanother temporal background). And yet, as has been well-recognized from Heidegger onwards,this obscure horizon has been determined and understood on the basis of conscious presence and

present consciousness, even though it has never as background or horizon ever once, in the entirehistory of the world and the ego, appeared to consciousness as background or horizon. Thismeans nothing other than that this background or horizon has been deduced by Husserl in aKantian sense, thus is (in a certain manner) an intellectualized construct, far beyond the scope ofany phenomenological rigor. One mad idealistic possibility, a possibility which wouldextinguish itself, becoming an impossibility in being voiced, since there would be no outsidefrom or towards which to voice anything, would be to deny this background, to allow indisappear into the shimmering field of representation as pure life, a life which would vanish inthe absence of difference, becoming a pure mysticism of death, another form of death in general.Another possibility for dealing with this enigmatic background would be to affirm that itshimmers in its phantasmic distance precisely as a phantom, that trace which the present

phenomenon has become has always been there, that the death to which phenomenologicalpresence has been exposed has always been operative at its edges. This would be to say thatwhat has occurred in the impossibility of the full-presence of the present is that all explicitphenomena, all presences in general, have been subjected to the death which always hovered inthe horizon, all foregrounds have become (and have always been) backgrounds, all immanenceshave become (and always have been) transcendent frontier, the unconscious has always alreadyintruded upon and disordered the self-assuredness of conscious life.

Doubtlessly, this would necessarily be the retrospective determination out of the dis-location of phenomenological space. But before phenomenology begins and exterior to it,there will have also been given another relation to things, one which is not describable in thelanguage of conscious presence or in the failure of this presence (including the language of'being' and 'giving'). One would like to say: I was always already related to the things of theworld before they entered into phenomenological consciousness, even as a background. Onewould like to say: those things were not traces and neither were those things the positedactualities of natural naivete, they were what they were, the things I reached for, before theywere even presented (as Husserl says) objects of use, things the 'table' with its 'books,' the'drinking glass,' the 'vase,' and the 'piano,' etc. (Husserl, 53) One would require, however, someunheard of means to say this without slipping back into a form of incoherent transcendentalrealism in which the things external to consciousness are imagined in an all-too-conscious and


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intellectual fashion (even more formal that that of phenomenology) to exist outside of theintellectual realm. Such a strange language would not brook the slipping of things into thegeneral deathly space of conscious life, nor into the exposure of the death of this space as the

twisted dimensionality of life in death: such a strange language would not be to come orheralded as the intrusion of a monstrosity: one would like to say that such a language is alreadyhere, that we already speak and think amongst and in the midst of the things themselves, thingswhich have not escaped but sit alongside us, beside us, underneath and above us, even beforethey are placed in the abstraction of space.

But it would not serve us to present such a language, to herald it even as ordinary oralready in place. The most one could do is, while destroying it, while subjecting it to theinevitable decay which all things undergo, to remind the reader, the speaker, the thinker, even thephenomenologist and post-phenomenologist who deconstructs with renewed phenomenologicalrigor, where such language might have passed unnoticed (as the horizon of any horizon),disrupting and pre-dating even the untimely ancientness of the trace. Perhaps language bears

with it things which are older, things which are more terrible, things which are stranger thanghosts.

IV.

If M. Valdemar had merely spoken in his breathless voice, I am dead, if he had merelyscreamed in distress in his deathly awareness of the limbo of his death in life and life in death,For Gods sake! quick! quick! put me to sleep or, quick! waken me! quick!I say to you that I am dead! then one might undergo a passing sense of eerieness, a weirddisjunction of sense, a strange aura of horror that would fill experience like a miasmicectoplasm.xxi If one heard a dead body speak, a body which was dead in general which is tosay, not living, the opposite of life, beyond all transcendence and immanence, totally cold and

inert, then one might indeed find that voice all-too-familiar, terrifyingly so, since the voice frombeyond the grave is nothing other than the voice of everyone at every time. Such an insight (ex-sight) might be carried like a mantra, one might wear the subtle fear of its realization like acloak, carrying it into the everyday world, hearing death-in-life and life-in-death everywhere, ornot hearing it, undergoing the silence of syllabification at every turn, the strange slipping of thedark intrusion of traced spaces into the serene world of everyday awareness. One might find, asone speaks, that one's voice is never one, neither one's own nor a single (or even doubled,ambiguous) voice, but truly (beyond truth) indeterminately infinite, a horizon in itself, tracedgraphicity borne floating like graphite particles in the air, dried of the moisture of spiritual life,leaving no respiratory fog on the mirror of consciousness. One might find the reflex of, theinstinct for, the automatic nature of living speech to be as mechanical as the speech of the dead,bringing the body of the speaking dead into a strange archival community with the lives of thepresent, the voices of the other passed ones always already beyond life and death, ready to bereborn to die in each iteration, each codexed inscription.

But in Poe's story, M. Valdemar does not merely speak in the event of death. He does notmerely vocalize with the vibration of a tongue that moves mysteriously, without metabolism,awaiting the discovery of some quite earthly physical cause. He does not even merely open anabyss both between and beyond the living and the dead through a sound which hovers betweensense and nonsense, the purely mechanical and the life of a mythological spirit. Rather,


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Valdemar's body speaks, it speaks of nothing other than the horizon or background of life whichis also nothing other than the horizon or background consisting of the things themselves, thingswhich have never departed, never escaped. Even Valdemar's voice exhibits this weird thingly

nature: There were two particulars, nevertheless, which I thought then, and still think, mightfairly be stated as characteristic of the intonation as well adapted to convey some idea of itsunearthly peculiarity. In the first place, the voice seemed to reach our ears at least mine from a vast distance, or from some deep cavern within the earth. In the second place, itimpressed me (I fear, indeed, that it will be impossible to make myself comprehended) asgelatinous or glutinous matters impress the sense of touch.xxii Poe's horrific conclusion distillsthe real, ordinary yet extraordinary, death of the things themselves, a death always already withus:

I was thoroughly unnerved, and for an instant remained undecided what to do. Atfirst I made an endeavor to re-compose the patient; but, failing in this through total

abeyance of the will, I retraced my steps and as earnestly struggled to awaken him.In this attempt I soon saw that I should be successful or at least I soon fanciedthat my success would be complete and I am sure that all in the room wereprepared to see the patient awaken.

For what really occurred, however, it is quite impossible that any human beingcould have been prepared.

As I rapidly made the mesmeric passes, amid ejaculations of dead! dead!absolutely burstingfrom the tongue and not from the lips of the sufferer, his wholeframe at once within the space of a single minute, or even less, shrunk crumbled absolutely rottedaway beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before thatwhole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome of detestableputridity (in some editions--putrescence).xxiii

Imagine the following dark comedy in the theater of phenomenology: At Valdemar'sbedside, there sits not only the mesmerist, not only the one who has turned the dying patient intowhat Agamben would surely name the epitome of bare life, hypnotized to maintain a positionbetween life and death, Poe's prophecy of the strange coming power of bio-political technology,but also at his side reclines the vigilant phenomenologist, dedicated to tracing the thingsthemselves wherever they go. At the event of Valdermar's dissolution, the phenomenologistnotices the process, rigorously describing the phenomenal procession, recording the ego-successions, protentions and retentions, the very constitution of the object of the dissolved body

as an item of knowledge. This forensic phenomenologist would perhaps say that the entireputrescence is never there at once, that there are indefinite vantages on this putrescence, that onemust consider both its adumbrational presentation and appresentation, that there is an idealizingtowards infinity which allows the putrescence to appear as such. Imagine the difficulty of thesurrounding nurses to bracket the natural attitude and follow the phenomenologist into thenecessity of her disclosure. Gag reflexes at the rancid are difficult to parenthesize. And imaginetheir confusion at being told by the even more vigilant phenomenological student who hastracked phenomenology beyond the limits of its sphere of self-control, that indeed, the thing


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itself has escaped, not only has the subject of Valdemar been always already dead before living,but also that the body presented was merely a trace, the spiritually decomposing fleshinessbeyond the sensible and intelligible, the alway-to-come eventuality which precedes every

determination of being, spiritual or material.Valdemar's body would speak for itself, beyond its death. Phenomenology has subjecteddeadly inanimate being of the body to death, the death of the distancing, deferring, anddistancing reduction, but the death of the body speaks from beyond its post-metaphysical grave,its putrescence bursting from its swollen tongue. Of course, the dead do not speak, the bodydoes not animate itself while holding within a rotted core. Such scenes are the stuff ofextraordinary tales, not ordinary language. And yet, the putrescence of the body unearthed for apost-mortem inquiry, the blood of the gaping wound, the sticky, wet mud beneath the fingernails,the seed in the apple core, the parasite in the stomach of the raven, the weight at the center of thefixed die, these singularities, these concretions more visceral than any evidence, theseextraordinary things bear witness to themselves, speaking in concrete silence, before the death of

death. Perhaps one would like to say that literature is a mimetic record of this silent speech, anannouncement of the things' solicitation of us, prior to any phenomenology. One would perhapslike to announce something like a priority of literary language to philosophy, or even to theextent that literature allows for an ontological a prioricity, even before the question of being.

Doubtlessly, such announcements would be overly hasty: First, such announcementswould only be possible on the basis of the (non-)thought of something like the trace, since onlythis (non-)thought would allow the challenging of the philosophical discourse whichimmediately assimilates all things and all language as signs of evidence, presences which aresubjected to the infinite movement of representation, forever promised, forever lost. To speak ofspeaking outside of the field of the evidential, to bear witness to an other language, beyond thepresentation of phenomenological sense, one would already have to undergo the puncturing of

one's own speech as the ghostly ideal of a voice (of consciousness, of the world, of being) thatreturns to itself, thereby opening a strange relation to the exterior outside, a transcendencebeyond transcendence. But second, precisely on the basis of such an afforded possibility, thesevery announcements would risk returning to the same metaphysico-phenomenological fieldwhich they seek to contest, precisely as announcements. With every word, all things risk beingconsumed by the life of the subject, eaten alive.

And yet, the trace of the literary text, the background of its body, along with thebackground body of ordinary language of which it is a displacing transformation persists as athing which lies alongside metaphysico-phenomenological discourse, challenging it though thevivacity and power of its writing, even before such writing is thematized. Philosophymesmerizes the literary text, forces it to speak, keeps it on the brink between life and death in astate of perpetual evanescence. Yet, when it is awakened, literature has the capacity of eruptingwith an impure putrescence, a bio-liquidity of sense, bringing us into touch with the other thingsthemselves, the ones which are anterior to the phenomenality of the phenomenon, the image ofthe imagination, and the apparition of spirit.

The allowance for such a capacity would require, however, something like a onto-politics(even beyond the bio-politics of life and death) of the non-thematization of literature whichwould be nothing other than the resistance of its reduction to philosophical discourse from withinphilosophical discourse, turned into another instance of philosophy hearing itself speak.


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Literature would have to be understood tosay what it says, not as semiotics, not as originalphenomenology, not as a new or old form of evidence of the strange and unseen. One wouldquite literally have to (re-)learn how to respond to literature, to wince in horror at its descriptions

of bodies which have rotted away beneath my hands, shuddering in sympathy with itsshuddering at the fragile and decaying things. In other words, literature would have to beresponded to as a thing among things, one living-dead body among others, not a mediator ofmeaning and not a locus of truth. As literature would be allowed to slip from the mesmerictrance of its being held in place and studied, one might even, through the undergoing of its returnto bio-putrescence, to excretion, to ontic being before ontology and through the undergoing ofthe return of one's own ordinary language of response to such an (un-)earthly state (thoughts,theory, gasps, and pauses of breath all laid out beside the corpse of the things they confront, amad field of things before the neutralization of consciousness and its consequences comes onthe scene) arrive at what could only be called an authentic encounter with the death of things.


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i In Edgar Allen Poe, Tales- Centenary Edition (New York: Duffield and Company), p. 89.

ii Poe, 101, cited in Jacques Derrida's Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserls Theory of Signs (translation

of Voix to Voice from Speech mine), trans. By David B. Allison (Evanston: northwestern University Press, 1973).

iii Tales, 101.

iv Voice and Phenomena, 96-97.

v Edmund Husserl,Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. F. Kersten

(The Hague: Martinus Nijhof, 1983), pp. 215-216.

vi Ideas, 83.

vii Ideas, 83.viiiIdeas, 84.

ix Ideas, 85.

x Ideas, 87.

xi Ideas, 100.

xii Ideas, 102.

xiiiIdeas, 111.

xiv Voice and Phenomena, 101-102.

xv Derrida: In other words, there can be an anthropology or a history of death, there can be culturologies of demise,

ethnologies of mortuary rites, of ritual sacrifice, of the work of mourning, of burials, of preparations for death, of the

cleansing of the dead, of the languages of death in general, of medicine, and so on. Bur there is no culture ofdeathitselfor ofproperly dying. Dying is neither entirely natural (biological) nor cultural. And the question of limits articulatedhere is also the question of the border between cultures, languages, countries, nations, and religions, as well as that of

the limit between a universal (although non-natural) structure and a differential (non-natural but cultural) structure.fromAporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 42.

xvi Voice and Phenomena, 103.

xviiVoice and Phenomena, 104.

xviiiDerrida: Philosophy has always insisted upon this: thinking its other. Its other: that which limits it, and from which it

derives its essence, its definition, its production. To think its other: does this amount solely to relever (aufheben) that

from which it derives, to head the procession of its method only by passing the limit? Or indeed does the limit,obliquely, by surprise, always reserve one more blow for philosophical knowledge? Limit/passage. from Tympan in

Margins of Philosophy, trans Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. xi.

xixIdeas, 51-52.

xx Ideas, 52.

xxi Tales, 104.

xxiiTales, 101.

xxiiiTales, 105.

the death of things (1)

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