1 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, between deconstruction 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's Ideas, and Derrida's Voice and Phenomena. But with a twist, almost a surprise ending, the shock of the close of a macabre narrative, I broach the possible return of the things themselves, arising from the dead, even from the death of 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, the death of things, the death belonging to things as facts, beyond their dissipation into the ethereal vapors of spirit.

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. Valdemari

I. Despite its intentions, phenomenology carries death with it, persisting as an infected vector which destroys the things themselves. All phenomenology is the phenomenology of death, phenomenology is both drawn to death like a carrion bird and brings about death like a carnivore, despite, even through its commitment to the pervasiveness and power of life. In its dedication 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 contains within itself any thanatological trace. This means that phenomenology is required to annihilate every thing, even living things, even the thing of the world itself, and then in a final movement of 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 expresses the mysterious condition of its deathly persistence. Jacques Derrida opens and closes his magisterial exposure of the death at the heart of phenomenology, 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 in the Case of M. Valdemar. The tale from which the selection involves the following: A terminally-ill man, M. Valdemar, has been mesmerized. The man verbally describes his states and experiences while under the induced trance. The man reports that he is sleeping and that he is dying. The man apparently passes away, his vital functions ceased. Yet, in response to a question posed earlier concerning whether of not he still slept, the man suddenly replies Yes;

2 no; I have been sleeping and now now I am dead. (This is the quote cited by Derrida).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 which these 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 own impressions I would not pretend to render intelligible to the reader. Poe describes the vocalization itself: I have spoken both of sound and of voice. I mean to say that the sound was one of distinct of even wonderfully, thrillingly distinct syllabification.iii But despite Poe's detail, it is difficult to imagine the sound of the dead man. (Poe's character admits as much when he labels the unearthly quality of the voice indescribable.) It is difficult, precisely because there would be no criterion to distinguish the voice of the dead man, supposing he spoke, 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 such speaking would be identical to living speech, perhaps as thrilling distinct as the voice of an excellent tenor. In and of itself, every voice which speaks words proves the truth of functionalism: the voice is what it does, its speaking as a voice makes it sound alive. This possibility exactly allows for the reproduction of voices in recorded media, since in every playback, there is only an inanimate object producing sounds, but those sounds are heard as the voices 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 to speak, we would find within it (or a in a site beyond it) a source of life, even if a mirror held to its 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 in the loneliest loneliness of a mountain peak, then we would look for God, for an intruder, for some 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 distinct syllabification, which would render the following operation psychologically impossible), we would say that the previously heard voice was just a noise, not a voice at all, not denying that the inanimate speaks but rather that there was any speaking at all. And yet, if one heard such a sound, it would fill one with a sense of eeriness, of strange dislocation and paranoia, as if the weird eye of being were staring into the depth of one's soul. The uncanny instinct of animism we possess, the haunting need to find the living in the dead, the animism which allows us to hear the dead modulations of air as live syllables, to see mere light refractions as the smiling of a living face, to find the gods anger present in the thunderstorm, to discover meaning in mere marks on a cave wall, the presence of ancient minds dried into the paint a priori disallows for even the acknowledgment of a purely dead voice while haunting us with the promise of a spectral beyond to the world. But this means, as Derrida famously argues, that there is no purely living voice either. In Voice and Phenomena, Derrida obviously does not share Poe's enthusiastic supernaturalism, he does not believe in zombies or ghosts or voices from beyond the grave, but he finds the voices with which we are confronted in our everyday lives, whether carried through the air or inscribed

3 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 of Poe's story about supposed facts, while at the same time affirming the general validity of the possibility of dead speech. In his coup de grce which hits the heart of phenomenological language, or its soul, the soul of the living presence of the transcendental word, the word which would be necessary to provide phenomenology its reduced internal validity and essentiality as a purely descriptive science of essences, Derrida shows that death overtakes and renders impossible 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 requires the possibility that I be dead; and conversely. This is not an extraordinary tale by Poe but the 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, the impropriety 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 internal validity would require the possibility of a formal attestation of the immanence of reduced phenomenological space from within itself, which would be nothing other than the transcendental 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 expression would have to, of itself, express the living of transcendental life as it is lived, as it were to (using the 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 the phenomenon, and this would require that the irreducible ego be minimally able to account for itself, to voice itself as an essentially present phenomenon in the phenomenological process. But the 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 of transcendence 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 who properly inherits (if such a thing were possible) this insight (which could also be called an exsight) may indeed undergo unutterable, shuddering horror despite the non-reality of zombies and ghosts, the horror of the ordinary story of language. Such horror is as multi-dimensional as any Lovecraftian abyss: A. Consciousness as self-presence is constituted by the dead trace. Just as the body contains within itself only dead chemicals, just as the living organism is always already a mechanical 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 the dead corpse of the living thing with the real life of the mind is equally, irreparably inert at its core. Insofar as the soul lives as soul, which is to say insofar as it speaks, as it speaks both as itself and to itself, thus being precisely what it is, a living intelligent immanence, a self-aware interiority, it includes within itself as a necessary ground the dead trace of the disruptive sound of vocalization, the eerie vibration (like Valdemar's vibration of the dead tongue) which is functionally indistinguishable from dried, dead blood used to write words on parchment. This damned spot of non-presence, occlusion, non-immanence, pure materiality is the essence of

4 the possibility of speaking and thinking, even to oneself, by oneself. In the dark night of the soul as it withdraws into the security of its own internal life, de-composing bits of flesh intrude, even compose 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, a necessary deferral, a thing which has forgotten that it is already deceased. The temporality of the voice essentially carries it beyond presence, beyond the life of the present, beyond the living now. It is essential to the voice that the speaker may be dead when this voicing occurs, precisely because all voicing is a preserving which moves beyond presence while retaining an involuntary memory, a marked impression of its passage. I may indeed say I am dead and this may be true, it is in fact necessarily true in a certain sense. And when I say I am alive, then this may be false and is also necessarily false, in a certain sense. As I croak to myself concerning my present meanings and intentions, I do not realize that I am a mummy, that meanings and intentions 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 an exterior of non-immanence and dead materiality by virtue of a concept of the living present from which 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 we reassure ourselves of our living status is dislocated. Everything both living and dead has to be reassigned 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 . Not only: I am a spirit, swaying between life and death, beyond life and death, a traced image of a past life, a perpetual reincarnation but also every thing which (apparently) appears in the world is of 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 house for the ghost of the subject. II. But such grave consequences do not merely occur at the end and (in)completion of the phenomenological project. From the first movement of the phenomenological reduction, from the neutralization of the positing of actuality by the subject, the things themselves have already died. The death which is essential to phenomenology does not merely destroy the self-presence of the subject but rather has from the beginning operated in the very being of the phenomenon itself. Husserl claims that nothing is destroyed through phenomenological reduction, and in a way this is true, since every thing has been converted into a no-thing through the conscious activity 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 perceptual mental process is a perceiving of this 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 least nuance of all these moments, qualities, characteristics with which it was appearing to this perception, <with which> it <was appearing as> lovely, attractive, and so forth in this liking.v

5 But everything does not remain as of old. It is easy to show that the death which Derrida 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 to be awakened to decay. 1. The thing is submitted to physical destruction, even before the bracketing of the physical sciences. Husserl proceeds in the Ideas through a dialectic which leads from niave perception to scientific-physical perception to phenomenology. Within this dialectic, Husserl follows the traditional Cartesian course of first recognizing that any apprehension of the thing in person is liable to the possibility of deception. He takes the naive solution to this problem to involve perception being 'confirmed' in concatenations of actional experience, perhaps with the help of correct thinking based on this experience which would then allow the victim of possible illusion to claim that the perceived physical thing is actual and, more particularly, actually given in 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 and bodily organs, appears like something which is, in itself, inessential: an empty looking at the 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 as something to be climbed on or worked at, but rather presences for consciousness in a mysterious way. Husserl notes that in the scientific development of this insight, the perception of the Object becomes a mere appearance and that the true physical thing is the one determined by physics.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 occurrence found in those experiences. It serves, therefore, to orient us in the world of actional experience in which we all live and act.ix Thus, physics itself is excluded in positing any actuality of the thing 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 given object in person nor the theoretically postulated physicality existing behind this givenness which 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 of knowledge has preconditioned the entire genealogy of the phenomenon, so the discourse of physics has been secretly operative throughout, even at the nave beginning. Only in special conditions 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 first turned into a possibly illusory perception and next the perception is placed before a background of posited physicality and finally this background of posited physicality is bracketed, then one is left with a pure evanescencea phenomenon beyond realism and idealism, and this new thing can be identified with what was initially given. But Husserl's naive beginning is one which presupposes the stance of the man of science. When I reach towards the apple tree to find something to eat, the thing which I touch is not something recognized or experienced as a perception or even something that is given in person. Although we may lack proper words

6 for this thing before the object, before the thing in itself of physical being, before the apparition of the phenomenon, whatever it was (even though it in some sense even pre-dated the predication 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) become essentially, as targets of phenomenological reduction, adumbrational objects. Husserl: Of essential necessity there belongs to any all-sided, continuously, universally, and selfconfirming experimental consciousness (Erfahrungsbewusstsein) of the same physical thing a multifarious system of continuous multiplicites of appearance and adumbrations in which all objective moments falling within perception with the characteristic of being themselves given in person are adumbrated by determined continuities.x The judgment there is a die or there goes a blackbird or even I see red would be, in a certain phenomenological sense, a necessary falsification belonging to all phenomenological consciousness of things. Whether colors or objects 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 object can only be an idealization, a fantasized extension of rotational and variational presentations to an impossible infinity. The noematic content of the any judgment of intention within experience always goes beyond experience, since experience is always already dispersed into endless diversification. Even in fantasy, the movement towards the infinity of the total object is unreachable, as unreachable as it is in person. Since even the imagination of the ideal phenomenological object is impossible, the phenomenological object is non-existent, dead on arrival, dispersed beyond the realm of any objectivity whatsoever. When I go to roll the dice or climb the apple tree, before the reduction, however, before phenomenology 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 the other side of the tree or see what number is on the bottom face of the die, but when I do so, I relate to the tree and the die, not to sides and perspectives as the essence of the thing. But when the thing is a priori abstracted into the realm of perception from which phenomenology begins, it can be nothing other than this impossible infinity, since its being as a thing is already eviscerated. 3. Thus, the phenomenon is a priori situated within a metaphysicall conceptual space of immanence and transcendence. The natural attitude is defined by its positing of transcendent being, being which is reduced to the sphere of pure immanence within phenomenological consciousness. Not only is there the lived space of immanence which Derrida shows as exposed to death (Husserl: . . . I say unqualifiedly and necessarily that I am, this life is, I am living: cogito. but even Husserl admits that the world of the transcendent is already dead.xi In contradistinction, as we know, it is of the essence of the physical world that no perception, however perfect, presents anything absolute in that realm; and essentially connected with this is the fact that any experience, however extensive, leaves open the possibility that what is 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 a transcendent contingency as opposed to the immanent necessity of transcendental consciousness. This implementation subordinates the entire being of things in the world to

7 consciousness. The only way they may be assigned actuality and objectivity out of the is for a self-present consciousness to be able to perpetually validate their presence across the diversifications 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 the possibility of the infinite presentational capacities of consciousness across time. Because the things have been killed by the residuum of Cartesian skepticism, the only means of recovering them (given that God has been dismissed in the bracketing of metaphysical transcendence) is through their being validated by the perpetual life of consciousness. Given Derrida's exposure of the deconstruction of this perpetual life, given that the look does not abide such that it could bestow the things back the life it has taken from them, the things themselves float into the dimension of the irrecoverable. The things which have been reduced 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 be affirmed 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 return life to the things which have been rendered into mere positional films, cataracts on the phenomenological 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 it seeks 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 circulation of death which maintains its power, even after the exposure of phenomenology's inadequacies as a 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 are promised to still be given as things (and even restored to a higher objectivity through awareness of 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 to preserve and retain the things it has decimated in its initial ignition. After the fires of phenomenology have burned through everything, being becomes the trace, the ash, the essentially adumbrated and dislocated. The things of old, whenever they are mentioned, are relegated to being artifacts of a nostalgia for presence, whether the presence of the nave positing of common sense or the impossible presence of completed phenomenological idealization. But this phenomenological circle has a priori closed to the outside, jettisoned while preserving, those very things to which it should have been initially related. Despite its failure, Derrida holds that phenomenology occurred of necessity as the exposure of the metaphysics of presence, both revealing and destabilizing it from within. Although he maintains that Hegelianism seems to be more radical and that Hegel's critique of Kant would no doubt hold against Husserl, he claims this appearing of the Ideal as an infinite differance can only be produced within a relationship with death in general.xiv (Derrida will later question the notion of something like death in general in the work of Heidegger in Aporias, but his early words, which could have almost been drawn from Heidegger here come back to haunt him.)xv Phenomenology would maintain its priority precisely since, in order to

8 hold its relationship with death, it does not move through the history of the concept and the dialectical machinations of Hegelian thought, but rather confronts the necessity of idealization directly, 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. The phenomenological object is only a trace, the shaded dissolution of being, and the evanescence of this object calls forth the indefinite movement of phenomenological projection into the fantasy of the future, out of the present, into the indefinite abyss in order properly to return the thing itself to full existence. But in so idealizing (the appearing of the Ideal as an infinite differance), the phenomenological subject, despite Husserl's intentions, is cast also in relation to its own essential non-presence through the necessity of its supplementation by the voice of autoaffection. Thus, the fissuring of the object and subject can be ex-posed only through going through the purified structure or schema of an absolute will-to-hear-oneself-speak which phenomenology perfectly embodies as the pinnacle of a metaphysical history which closes itself at 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/epistemological field which has been the theater of philosophy. For such negotiation, unheard-of thoughts are required (both novel and beyond the hegemony of the voice), other names than those of the sign or representation.xvi We are thrown into a world of generalized displacement, a world which is no longer a world, in the general death of all things, of the death of every thing as a thing, every totality and particularity endlessly rendered. As for the thing itself, Derrida maintains, contrary to what phenomenologywhich is always a phenomenology of perception has tried to make us believe, contrary to what our desire cannot fail to be tempted into believing, the thing itself always escapes.xvii But one might question the circular nature of this entire construction at exactly this point where 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 manifestation itself, before or prior to any presence whatsoever (one no longer has words) demarcates the limit of phenomenological space, even constitutes that space (along with the very idea and intuition of space itself), then one is indeed required to follow it along an endless chain of ceaseless deferral. Insofar as the absolute non-presence of the infinite and indefinite deferral and differentiation of death in general haunts all things, then one will have to follow all things to the grave, to dis-locate them from their comfortable habitation as either real or unreal, sensible or intelligible, particulars or universals, material or spiritual, and all the rest, placing them (all of them, material objects, the subject, God, the world itself, even Being) in the wake of a torsioning which would twist them beyond any standard sense. But (on the other hand) on the basis of such a realization (although it cannot properly speaking be realized, in all senses of the term), one would also have to acknowledge (as Derrida does in other places, such as Tympan, the opening essay of Margins of Philosophy) that no limit is simple, that there are other strange exteriors to the space of phenomenology beyond the torsioning differance which opens that space through its exclusion.xviii For instance (though this is not merely an instance, everything essential is contained here), Husserl's famously thematized background or horizon provides an other limit, another limit to phenomenology, one which makes phenomenological presentative description possible and yet withdraws into the occludedness of midnight skies in the light of this

9 presentation. As this background, first there are the recessed things unattended to by present consciousness, not the dice but the table on which it is rolled, not the blackbird but the sky which frames 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 of indeterminate actuality. Although some aspects of this horizon can be made explicit within presentative consciousness, mostly an empty mist of obscure indeterminateness is populated with intuited possibilities or likelihoods; and only the form of the world, precisely as the world is pre-delineated. Moreover, my indeterminate surroundings are infinite, the misty and never fully determinable horizon is necessarily there.xx The hovering things at the edge of consciousness 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 yet another 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 entire history of the world and the ego, appeared to consciousness as background or horizon. This means nothing other than that this background or horizon has been deduced by Husserl in a Kantian sense, thus is (in a certain manner) an intellectualized construct, far beyond the scope of any phenomenological rigor. One mad idealistic possibility, a possibility which would extinguish itself, becoming an impossibility in being voiced, since there would be no outside from or towards which to voice anything, would be to deny this background, to allow in disappear into the shimmering field of representation as pure life, a life which would vanish in the 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 it shimmers 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 phenomenological presence has been exposed has always been operative at its edges. This would be to say that what has occurred in the impossibility of the full-presence of the present is that all explicit phenomena, all presences in general, have been subjected to the death which always hovered in the horizon, all foregrounds have become (and have always been) backgrounds, all immanences have become (and always have been) transcendent frontier, the unconscious has always already intruded upon and disordered the self-assuredness of conscious life. Doubtlessly, this would necessarily be the retrospective determination out of the dislocation 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 the language 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 the world before they entered into phenomenological consciousness, even as a background. One would like to say: those things were not traces and neither were those things the posited actualities of natural naivete, they were what they were, the things I reached for, before they were 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, some unheard of means to say this without slipping back into a form of incoherent transcendental realism in which the things external to consciousness are imagined in an all-too-conscious and

10 intellectual fashion (even more formal that that of phenomenology) to exist outside of the intellectual realm. Such a strange language would not brook the slipping of things into the general 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 or heralded as the intrusion of a monstrosity: one would like to say that such a language is already here, that we already speak and think amongst and in the midst of the things themselves, things which have not escaped but sit alongside us, beside us, underneath and above us, even before they are placed in the abstraction of space. But it would not serve us to present such a language, to herald it even as ordinary or already in place. The most one could do is, while destroying it, while subjecting it to the inevitable decay which all things undergo, to remind the reader, the speaker, the thinker, even the phenomenologist and post-phenomenologist who deconstructs with renewed phenomenological rigor, 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 than ghosts. IV. If M. Valdemar had merely spoken in his breathless voice, I am dead, if he had merely screamed 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 weird disjunction of sense, a strange aura of horror that would fill experience like a miasmic ectoplasm.xxi If one heard a dead body speak, a body which was dead in general which is to say, 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 from beyond the grave is nothing other than the voice of everyone at every time. Such an insight (exsight) might be carried like a mantra, one might wear the subtle fear of its realization like a cloak, carrying it into the everyday world, hearing death-in-life and life-in-death everywhere, or not hearing it, undergoing the silence of syllabification at every turn, the strange slipping of the dark intrusion of traced spaces into the serene world of everyday awareness. One might find, as one 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, traced graphicity 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, the instinct 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 the present, the voices of the other passed ones always already beyond life and death, ready to be reborn 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 not merely 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 an abyss both between and beyond the living and the dead through a sound which hovers between sense and nonsense, the purely mechanical and the life of a mythological spirit. Rather,

11 Valdemar's body speaks, it speaks of nothing other than the horizon or background of life which is also nothing other than the horizon or background consisting of the things themselves, things which 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, might fairly be stated as characteristic of the intonation as well adapted to convey some idea of its unearthly 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, it impressed me (I fear, indeed, that it will be impossible to make myself comprehended) as gelatinous or glutinous matters impress the sense of touch.xxii Poe's horrific conclusion distills the real, ordinary yet extraordinary, death of the things themselves, a death always already with us: I was thoroughly unnerved, and for an instant remained undecided what to do. At first 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 fancied that my success would be complete and I am sure that all in the room were prepared to see the patient awaken. For what really occurred, however, it is quite impossible that any human being could have been prepared. As I rapidly made the mesmeric passes, amid ejaculations of dead! dead! absolutely bursting from the tongue and not from the lips of the sufferer, his whole frame at once within the space of a single minute, or even less, shrunk crumbled absolutely rotted away beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before that whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome of detestable putridity (in some editions--putrescence).xxiii Imagine the following dark comedy in the theater of phenomenology: At Valdemar's bedside, there sits not only the mesmerist, not only the one who has turned the dying patient into what Agamben would surely name the epitome of bare life, hypnotized to maintain a position between 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 things themselves wherever they go. At the event of Valdermar's dissolution, the phenomenologist notices the process, rigorously describing the phenomenal procession, recording the egosuccessions, 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 entire putrescence is never there at once, that there are indefinite vantages on this putrescence, that one must consider both its adumbrational presentation and appresentation, that there is an idealizing towards infinity which allows the putrescence to appear as such. Imagine the difficulty of the surrounding nurses to bracket the natural attitude and follow the phenomenologist into the necessity of her disclosure. Gag reflexes at the rancid are difficult to parenthesize. And imagine their confusion at being told by the even more vigilant phenomenological student who has tracked phenomenology beyond the limits of its sphere of self-control, that indeed, the thing

12 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 fleshiness beyond 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 subjected deadly inanimate being of the body to death, the death of the distancing, deferring, and distancing 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 body does not animate itself while holding within a rotted core. Such scenes are the stuff of extraordinary tales, not ordinary language. And yet, the putrescence of the body unearthed for a post-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 the fixed die, these singularities, these concretions more visceral than any evidence, these extraordinary 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, an announcement of the things' solicitation of us, prior to any phenomenology. One would perhaps like to announce something like a priority of literary language to philosophy, or even to the extent that literature allows for an ontological a prioricity, even before the question of being. Doubtlessly, such announcements would be overly hasty: First, such announcements would only be possible on the basis of the (non-)thought of something like the trace, since only this (non-)thought would allow the challenging of the philosophical discourse which immediately assimilates all things and all language as signs of evidence, presences which are subjected to the infinite movement of representation, forever promised, forever lost. To speak of speaking outside of the field of the evidential, to bear witness to an other language, beyond the presentation 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) that returns to itself, thereby opening a strange relation to the exterior outside, a transcendence beyond transcendence. But second, precisely on the basis of such an afforded possibility, these very announcements would risk returning to the same metaphysico-phenomenological field which they seek to contest, precisely as announcements. With every word, all things risk being consumed by the life of the subject, eaten alive. And yet, the trace of the literary text, the background of its body, along with the background body of ordinary language of which it is a displacing transformation persists as a thing which lies alongside metaphysico-phenomenological discourse, challenging it though the vivacity and power of its writing, even before such writing is thematized. Philosophy mesmerizes the literary text, forces it to speak, keeps it on the brink between life and death in a state of perpetual evanescence. Yet, when it is awakened, literature has the capacity of erupting with an impure putrescence, a bio-liquidity of sense, bringing us into touch with the other things themselves, the ones which are anterior to the phenomenality of the phenomenon, the image of the 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 which would be nothing other than the resistance of its reduction to philosophical discourse from within philosophical discourse, turned into another instance of philosophy hearing itself speak.

13 Literature would have to be understood to say what it says, not as semiotics, not as original phenomenology, not as a new or old form of evidence of the strange and unseen. One would quite 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 its shuddering at the fragile and decaying things. In other words, literature would have to be responded to as a thing among things, one living-dead body among others, not a mediator of meaning and not a locus of truth. As literature would be allowed to slip from the mesmeric trance of its being held in place and studied, one might even, through the undergoing of its return to bio-putrescence, to excretion, to ontic being before ontology and through the undergoing of the 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, a mad field of things before the neutralization of consciousness and its consequences comes on the scene) arrive at what could only be called an authentic encounter with the death of things.

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 of death itself or of properly dying. Dying is neither entirely natural (biological) nor cultural. And the question of limits articulated here 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. from Aporias, 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. xix Ideas, 51-52. xx Ideas, 52. xxi Tales, 104. xxiiTales, 101. xxiiiTales, 105.