Shooting up from the entrails of the Columbiad, the name of a monstrous cannon dug into the very earth, impelled by thousands of tons of gun cotton set aflame, the artillery shell charges right toward the moon, carrying Michel Ardan and his two companions, plus two dogs, a male and a female. This is how Jules Verne staged the new discoverers of new worlds.
Just as Christopher Columbus’s caravel, in crossing the Pillars of Hercules at Gibraltar, passed from the closed Mediterranean into the open sea and gave Bacon his symbol for the new science, so too the shell, torn away from gravity here, left the Earth for space and wanted to give the emblem of a renewed knowledge again to a disenchanted philosophy. What could be more clean than the trajectory of a projectile, more rational than its path in an empty and obstacle-free milieu, black and studded with non-twinkling stars? What could be more thrilling than this ardent and extraordinary high-speed voyage toward the future? Praise be to Progress; goodbye to the Earth on which we had our feet not long ago.
One of the animals happens to die, from the shock of the blast-off. It is impossible to keep it for more than forty-eight hours in that cramped cubbyhole in which the adventurers are preoccupied with the renewal of oxygen. In defiance of several laws of physics, they decide to half-open, quickly, the bottom porthole forming a trapdoor to let the dog fall.
The first funeral in this ethereal microcosm: neither burial nor cremation has any value for this fragment or remnant of humanity who, after having abandoned the Earth, are beginning to learn the consequences of this, faced with the occasion of the first death. How and where to bury a body when the humus that the linguists say gave its name to humanity is lacking?
Ardan, Barbicane, and their comrade get rid of the undesirable thing—which would have quickly become unspeakable—by lifting the trapdoor as they would have opened and operated a garbage chute or a funerary slab. Expulsion: Satellite, the dead dog, thrown outside, was accompanied by some useless debris cluttering the vehicle. What could be more purified than this place cleansed of its impurities? Neither technology nor science is to contain non-scientific elements: the rational only consists of the rational. And must exclude the rest. That is its definition and function: hence its kinship with the sacred.
The first funeral, the first social gesture for the little society that epitomizes humanity. A collective gesture, certainly, but Pasteurian, and what’s more, a medical and hygienic one: the corruptible shouldn’t be kept in a closed vessel, from danger of contagion. A religious gesture as well: you’d think a kind of animal sacrifice, concelebrated by everybody at the beginning of their life together. And ancient sacrifice also had a social and hygienic purpose. Doesn’t the rational gesture of exclusion of the third—the excluded third or middle—summarize the set of all the previous ones by formalizing them? The staging of modern science in an object that’s inhabited but designed by geometry, mechanics, and astronomy reviews all the antiquity that knowledge has left behind.
Ancient customs make things so that we quickly forget the dead, once past the mortuary rite and the impurities after washing. Their feet well supported by the capsule’s cleaned floor, the little society now well founded, after an ordinary and necessary ceremony, already walks upon what it does not want to know.
The shock of the blast-off could also have killed one of the members of the trinity.
Now, a little later, after a long discussion about algebra and ballistics—I remember very well having read there, a child, my first equations and that my incomprehension fired my enthusiasm—one of the occupants, observing space by the side port, exclaims that he sees a sort of flattened sack that appears to be immobile like the cannonball, and which is therefore following it, a meteor moving at the same speed. We see him in the illustration looking, from inside, through the window, mouth gaping in amazement beneath his white mustache, his eyes well defined in the haziness of his virtuoso hair. All of them one by one examine the phenomenon and comprehend that the apparition, the phantom, the object, that, the deflated bagpipes, goatskin, mummy, was nothing other than the body of the dog Satellite accompanying them at a constant distance in accordance with principles of mechanics. A thing was progressing behind progress.
Science shows then that death follows science’s every step.
The drawing cuts out a rectangle on the page just as the port lets its shutter be pulled down in order to see outside. These apertures, which could be called observation holes, look out over the world and over the observer at the same time, the studded sky, the stubborn remains, in such a way that the extraordinary voyager could catch us as well in the act of observing the dog, us ordinary people, across the pull down of the page that has the rectangle cut out by the drawing. We voyage in the book, another shell, at the same speed as the bolide that departed from Florida, identically participating in the rapid flight since the corpse remains immobile to port of us. Our artillery shell, too, climbs toward the moon, a hard cockpit whose walls, forged with written lines, break off to let sight pass through.1
From the Earth to the Moon. Since Barbicane and his comrades have abandoned the first for the second, the first lethal event requiring burial made it clear, by its absence and as though in return, how one makes use of the Earth and what it is. At the death of a dog or man, whether burned, buried at sea or in the ground, the body disappears. Never to return. The air, in much too short supply in the shell, the sea and the humus it lacks keep and hide, erase the dead. The terraqueous globe, a pulverulent solid, a fluid robe, a gaseous veil, never opens so as to return the bodies, a tabernacle, a receptacle for every decomposition. We walk over the black box of fundamental death, trample on our dissolved ancestors in such a way that history and memory lie in the depths of dark excavation sites. The Earth is the ark for the dead at the same time as the set of objects.
Fire! The flying shell bursts forth from the giant cannon, carrying an exemplary subset of humanity double-locked beneath the projectile’s ogive or in the project’s velocity; thus three men are going to dance on a thin steel sheet under which lies, immobile, millions of cubic kilometers of emptiness, without archives.2 They no longer set their feet on the same ground, above the same depths.
Thus we, who follow or observe them at the same speed behind a thin sheet of paper that we cut a rectangle out of to see the stars, have also left the Earth and levitate in space, in weightlessness. Of the thickness that yields to our soles only millimeters of bulkhead or floor, made of forged aluminum or printed flimsy, remain. And, behind, transparency. Of the real only the rational is kept.
The Earth is lacking for us. We no longer have our feet on it since we’re gliding in the sky, the real sky that separates us from the Moon, but also the empyrean of mechanics and the imagination, between the lines of the narrative and those of equations. We are projected here into the rational, springing through fire from an abyssal cavern, the bottom of a cannon dug in Florida. Everything goes well on board in this new rational sky, where one drinks, eats, sleeps, talks without end and plays dominos as if nothing had happened. But the Earth is lacking for burial.
The inhabitants of the new planet don’t change customs at the first death in lifting the thin wrought metal trapdoor beneath their feet as one would ordinarily roll the stone of an earthly tomb to throw the body through the shadowy mouth and forget about it after having tossed a handful of earth over it. But here the oubliette, the hatch or the manhole, the round plate at the bottom of the cockpit, opens onto a transparent emptiness.3
The Earth absorbs the remains, and we didn’t think about them. It gives and receives, does away with, or erases the balance sheets. A fundamental ark, that is to say, a major black box. Thanks to it, we used to act as if nothing had happened. Like a mother and even more, it’s the complement of every parasitical operation; better, the universal donor who, in order to never insist on return or reciprocity, makes the parasite possible.
One day, I don’t know why, the Earth was lacking for us. From that time on, we thought that nothing was created, nothing lost, that everything was transformed; from that time on, we calculated by balance sheets. The rational restores equilibria, balance, and proportions: that is its proper definition, by the origin of the word that designates it. That which brings itself back and brings back.4 And thus the rational will always return the thing that you throw into it, unlike the Earth, which keeps, hides, dissolves, and annihilates it. If you toss a dead man into the emptiness, he will come back; reason will bring him back: but he never comes back from the deep terrestrial sum that he imperceptibly increases. Reason is recognized by its ghosts.5 Here then in the black and white space of the page or the stars, the corpse reappears. The object that’s missing in the balance sheet is risen. The return of the real into the rational.
The “rational” says that death follows the rational’s every step. Or again: science is followed, at a constant distance, by its own anthropology.
Something dead is hot on the heels of an artillery shell springing from one of those cannons that no one ever chartered with any other aim than that of giving death. Did the bullet hit the animal? Yes, but the beast was already lying in the bullet. Everything is happening as though the hunting picture was exposing the slaughter next to the weapon.
What is that man doing in an artillery shell? Hit by it, locked away in it? Seeing him suddenly appear from beneath the unsealed trapdoor you’d swear that he was coming out of his tomb.
Death occupies the entire scene.
The dog’s head shines, in the drawing, like a scenery star. Radiating, it seems to run, immobile, toward the Dog Star.
In the real, on Earth, we blindly experience the equivalence between the ark of the dead and that of objects. We don’t really know how to decide. Set out for the rational, we see the same equation come back at the first serious accident; locked away in our small mobile artillery shells, we observe the calm twinkle-free brilliance of the stars and the corpse: the latter goes toward the former.
Stars, goatskin, or sack and projectile, objects occupy the entire scene.
Between Barbicane and his comrades, the dog, in excess, has to pass through the trapdoor so that the group can survive: we have witnessed the formation rite for the collective subject. But the animal, literally thrown beneath the floor, is now entitled to be designated as a “subject.”
Between the mustachioed observer watching through the scuttle of the capsule and me, who sees through the window cut out of the page, between two individual subjects, the dead dog comes back. But it also comes back to the eyes of the traveling group.
The animal is dead for them, and it is an object for them and us.
Expelled by them, exposed in front of us.
And Satellite in the two cases, with or without capital. You are Satellite and on this Satellite something is founded.
Each person sees the satellite from his planet, a monad equipped with a window; sees his Moon from his Earth; or an Earth from his Sun; knows the Object from the Subject.
We don’t turn around it, which doesn’t turn around any of us. It remains stable at a constant distance.
No deciding authority has yet taken on its function in this space: the dead dog is object or subject; the observer in his artillery shell of death remains enveloped in an object, as I am in the book and the lines.
Are the relations of the subject to the object stabilized by death? Are the relations of the subject to death stabilized, in turn, by the object? Are the relations of death and the object stabilized by the subject, whether individual or collective, to the point of its not knowing how to decide?
This triple stabilization defines the status of statues, hard like objects, bodies of dead subjects, preserved or returned.
When the shutter of the scuttle cut out of the page is pulled down, a black box opens, black as space or the night, a box in which a body lies, the dog’s, plus a second black box artistically fashioned, opening through an observation hole across which I see an extraordinary man who sees.
I recognize this scene, which could be described in the Egyptian manner: as a descent into a tomb where a mummy lies, a goatskin, plus a serdab, a dark room with a loophole from which a statue looks; painted stars shine on the walls.6 Or be told after the Greek style: the shepherd Gyges, with the name of the Earth, discovers a bronze statue in the gaping earth, one pierced with windows that let a body be seen. The extraordinary voyage toward a new world by means of a new knowledge passes through the already seen, the most ordinarily in the world. The most archaic anthropology, buried, forgotten, subterranean, invades the staging of technical and scientific progress.
I was thinking that the remains were old and the projectile brand new, and that death was ancient, unforgettable, and stubborn, following the latest invention of industrial reason without being left behind, but I now suspect that the smooth and cylindroconical box itself dates from a prodigious past: yes, assuredly, it flies out from an abyss dug into the entrails of the Earth. I was going to say from our origins. A conscientious archaeologist must take meticulous inventory of the things discovered under the trapdoor or the shutter when, suddenly, by chance, they’re pulled down.
Here first of all are the things of the world, stars or planets, the objective background of the scene or the box. The entire narrative, the entire story aims at them. Via a delegated subset, humanity runs toward the objects or seeks to get closer to them.
The body shines like a star, in the midst of stars and in front of them.
Death advances in front of the object.
Now the observing subject is hidden or locked up inside a bronze, steel, or aluminum wall, fashioned by him to be hard, a technological object that’s protective but dangerous, that seems by means of its solidity to safeguard him from death but that can give it, that has given it, in fact, to the observed thing.
Death advances in front of the subject.
The approach, rapid and realist, of subjects and objects, knowledge or alliance is sung together by recounted narrative, calculated or deduced equations, therefore spoken or scientific languages, history as the global discourse of the human adventure. But if one cuts out a rectangle in the wall of paper that relates that gesture, one sees a strange and unexpected scene where the observing subject, far from observing the stars, things or objects of the world, doesn’t take his eyes off the death he has given via the hard wall that protects him, that carries him along, the body that he sees come back.
The subject hidden behind death knows the death that hides the object.
The objects withdraw to the depths of the world just as the subjects do to the hollow of their box, at an astronomical distance the ones from the others, leaving the body within constant close range to the walls of the cockpit.
Death makes the relation between subjects and objects stable.
While the principal story grandiloquently relates the high-speed voyage of speaking subjects toward objects as imposing as the Moon or planets, a different black genesis silently links the subjects, relentless death, with the fashioned objects.
In the silence of space death, frightening, never ceases to be there. Conversely, as soon as it is present or returns, an immense calm and volume happens around me, such that neither attention nor solitude has ever been less troubled: even language remains silent. Here is the first object, lying before, and the last, the constant and residual object, ineradicable, in relation to which every other object withdraws to the depths of the world, distant, extinguishing every light, while every language enters into the silence.
This object cuts up the collective wall, opens the confinement of the group upon itself, the prison of discourse and irrepressible debates, breaks the window of the stove-warmed room where one meditates on the soul, dissolves every protection. Only death has the power to abruptly pull the shutter of the cockpit down and to tear up the printed paper.
A fulgurating apparition, a phenomenon before language.
Ardan, Barbicane, and Captain Nicholl thought they were climbing toward the Moon whereas plunged in the Columbiad’s underground tunnel, they were pursuing a descent into the underworld. Twelve years later, Jules Verne published Hector Servadac, the extraordinary voyage into the planetary system of a fragment torn from the Earth, and gave his hero the name “cadavres” written backwards.7
The history of the sciences and technologies advances toward its origins. The more it climbs, the better it descends. Its future illuminates the past. It progresses, obviously, and runs to the Moon or the stars, widening its and our horizon and, in doing so, digs at length and intelligently into its own conditions. We don’t understand what progress is going toward because we’ve forgotten where it left from. Far from getting rid of myths and archaisms, the sciences and technologies continue and deepen them: they take off, certainly, from the depths of the Earth but take with them on their flight their initial constraints, as though the journey explicated, unfolded what was implicated underground at the launch.8 What is this projectile on which a human head is outlined if not a herma, that is to say, a fetish?9 What is this sack of skin if not a mummy? What is the rocket Challenger, whose name has for its root the French word calomnie—no, they are not men but oxen!—if not the descendant of Baal’s statue? Of what, of whom are we afraid today if not the lightning-hurling statues that sleep, here and there, beneath the crypts or the caverns? Nothing could be more mythical or anthropological, nothing more religious in its primitive sense, yes, naïve and native, than the contemporary state of the sciences and technologies.
Let’s call “religion” what assembles or binds us by demanding of us a relentless collective attention such that the first negligence threatens us with extinction. This definition mixes the two probable origins for the word “religion,” the positive root of the act of binding with the negative, through the converse of negligence.
Thus the contemporary sciences or technologies bring us back to the conditions of their stunning advance.
But the myths that they deploy are a little different from those the social sciences inherited. These latter have no object but the set of subjects. The book of their foundations catches that set in turbulence around a dead man. Multiplicity, in a chaotic mob, attains by means of that dead man unity, city, for example, family, state, government, Rome. Every Egyptian brings his stone over the Pharaoh’s body, and that lapidation, well ordered, produces at a stroke the king, the pyramid and Egypt. At the beginning of the voyage into space, the here exactly minimal multiplicity, that is to say, reduced to three members, therefore conducts its own foundation by dispatching the animal’s body through the trapdoor. A reduced model of history, the rapid journey summarizes its essential gestures. That said and soon done, here’s the ghost, materialized beyond the linguistic or forged collective envelope, an inaccessible stable object in the icy emptiness that excludes all life. The phenomenon or the object appears absolutely outside, as though the set of subjects had never had to deal with it.
How did the object come to mankind? In what form?
The first foundation, that of the collectivity, puts the subject in relation with death. The second foundation, about which we don’t know whether it precedes or follows the first, ensues from it or deepens it, puts death in relation with the object. The one makes the visible and legible face be seen, since languages vie with one another to describe it, the other makes be seen the illegible and silent face, invisible, of a founding authority that has no name in any language and that assembles the authorities that we cut out under the three names of object, death, and subject.10 This fundamental layer unites what lies below, what “here lies” and what lies in front.11 Objectivizing the subject, death gives the object to it on condition that the subject shapes it. What is this layer, this stable authority, to be called if not a statue? An inert block set there, silent, tumulary, funerary, crudely, or exquisitely worked, sometimes taking the form of a body, produced by us, exterior to us … that stands without precession at the bottom of every origin, origins much sought-after in voyages or excavations. A first statue, silent, conditional, objective, subjective, mortuary, cast in the depths of oblivion and which bursts forth toward the Moon on the trajectory of science and technology.12
I imagine a double-napped cone on which death would occupy the apex; the subject, individual or collective, inhabits the opening of one of the two nappes, just like language and the social sciences.13 The subject’s history, such as the subject says it, develops and widens in the immense opening out of this volume, while, silent because situated at the limit of language’s hold, death lies at the bottom of the cone, so that going back up history such as we relate it comes down to descending into the underworld, less through turning around back up the course of time or for visiting the chatty shades than through doubt about the power of languages in the vicinity of the door of tombs, than through the hyperbolic effort of thinking while remaining quiet so as to enter into the black and icy void where objects don’t even twinkle any more. If death engenders subjects toward this nappe, beneath that nappe death adheres to the things, those great absent ones from history, from languages, from philosophy and the social sciences. We must risk ourselves as far as this silent place so that statues will rise, ancestors of our knowledge, mute stones, masses for our works.
Statues precede languages, these latter have buried them, just as the religions of the word destroy, with blows of stones and letters, the idolatries that engendered them: the second foundation digs beyond or on the nether side of the first, even before the logos would appear. The iconoclasts’ fury against fetishes rings like a parricidal anger. Statues pass before languages and produce hominity first, before these languages refound it. Our ideas come to us from idols, language itself admits it; better, our ideas come back from them, like ghosts.
The corpse quickly becomes that which has no name in any language: the text does not describe, nor does the image show that state. The group excludes the dead dog before it becomes unspeakable, no longer sees it, no longer speaks about it, but sees it again come back like a goatskin or dry mummy, endlessly preservable in the cold void. This refrigerator must have stiffened it. So the group speaks about this statue again, as of an apparition.
Menhir, dolmen, cromlech, cairn, pyramid, tombstones, boxes for the dead imitating my mother the Earth, mute objects, raised statues, or standing ghosts, resurrected from the black box when the shutter falls down that we thought we had closed for ever, cippi, effigies of marble, granite or plaster, bronze, steel, aluminum, composite materials, full, dense, heavy, immobile, masses marking places and indifferent to time, pierced, bored, hollow, become boxes again, empty, light, white, mobile, automobile engines indifferent to places wandering through time, carrying the living.
Along the slow and mute lineage of these things, of dead and suddenly let go objects, two short-circuits, at least, pass beneath language: how does the dead one become an object, beyond the unspeakable state? How does the funerary statue, equipped with its mummy, climb into the sky toward our satellite, as is shown in the image?
All of hominoid work tacitly answers these two questions.
Let’s adopt its gestures by going back up that lineage, from stations to stations, from the rocket to the first stone, statues after statues posted there like boundary stones, turning back up time, descending into the underworld, right up to no longer being able to date or say. The voyage beneath the Earth or through history follows the same time as the rocket’s path, in a similar silence, but in two complementary opposed directions.
How would the speaking subjects say objects as such, seeing that language, since the other foundation, breaks, hides, and tramples them under foot, placing them under death so that they can frighten us like ghosts? One nappe of the habitable cone, light, soft, clear, rustles with language while the second one, heavy, black, dense, implicated, envelops the calm of things. Therefore we must have, at the birth of the experimental sciences, changed languages in order to faithfully describe or measure the objects of the world.
In order to grasp the hard directly without passing through the softness of languages, the descent into the underworld must be accepted: a mute genealogy.
The greatest tearing of our time comes from the formidable noise that language makes in order to claim that it produces the century even though we live, taciturn, dyslexic, drowned amongst the objects, in the midst of statues that have come back, in a hard flood repeating the most ancient of idolatrous times, a strange state that the dying languages inveigh against so as not to understand it.
The dog’s body shines before the withdrawn stars: death arrives before the object. The projectile protects the observer: death arrives before the subject.
The stable remainder of the remains precedes the statue that precedes the mobile capsule. The idol, absent in the midst of two objects, was produced by the corpse before producing the finely worked thing.
Death does not leave that transformation. What fascinates us in front of the illustration, an open black box, makes clear-sighted idolaters of us.
The shell contains three male bachelors plus a female dog, a human and animal fetish without posterity.
How to impregnate progress now?