Experience
Wandering, resigning, despairing of ever finding peace, whoever passes through space invents places. The path unforeseeably comes up against observatories, humble or glorious, where he dreams for a moment of pitching his tent because, from there, another world can be seen. Is port finally in sight for him? A happy valley at the end of the earth, a calm or choppy bay, a cave, erect tree, island or divine shore, no, the expanse traveled is not homogenous; singularities interrupt it: our fathers called these apparition sites holy places.
At the bottom of the fault, when the ground shook and opened beneath the lightning strike, a shepherd once descended to discover a dead and naked giant lying in a bronze horse, a tomb from which he stole a ring that made him invisible and king. Before the event, the plain extended, monotonous and gray. A shepherdess formerly entered a grotto in which she saw, dazzled, a woman in a blue and white dress who greeted her: she became a saint, although speaking patois. Poor and destitute, the wanderer, running behind his herd of ideas or animals, stops, filled with wonder: some thing, someone, God or Being, appears. Rarities are found in space.
There or here, the appearance, dense with meaning, almost reaches language. Everywhere else, we pass—strangers, at the dawn, to things, to the soil—through the world of silence. Here, I’d swear that the landscape is saying. The phenomenon finds its logos, all by itself. Expressed differently, in the language of simple folk: the apparition speaks: that translates the word “phenomenology,” taken from scholarly vocabulary.
Our world is collected in essential places, pockets, folds, summits, crater bottoms, gates to another world, an opening onto things.
Cast five times, grasping the planet like a hand, in Zurich, Tokyo, Philadelphia, Stanford, and Paris, rue de Varenne, The Gates of Hell, which Rodin called his Noah’s Ark, resembles the bottom of a crater, where a crowd is burning and drowning.1
A gate opens or closes a threshold that’s taken for such because in this place a law is reversed: on this side a given rule rules, on the other a different law begins, so that the gate rests its doors on the neutral line where the two legislations counterbalance one another and cancel each other out as on the flat beam of a balance. Thus a mountain pass brings the upward slope and fall to zero. The singular site participates neither in this world nor in the other, or it belongs to both.
Places of apparition open or close like gates, which have a connection with death. We console ourselves over it in only one way, by saying that we won’t suffer at the point of death. For: either, living, death hasn’t taken us yet, or, dead, it will have rendered us insensible. A null instant separates the time in which we’re still living from the time in which we’re already dead. The gate that our wide-open eyes never see except closed opens blindly. Rodin’s gate remains closed. Life gets lost in an anesthesia from which death descends into the detail. We don’t really know whether the null balance or scales will one day separate with its tilting fork the gentle from the implacable for reward or punishment, but we conceive or imagine the consoling thought of the analgesic moment making life without death tilt into death without life, although no one has come back to tell whether this sophism holds or is lacking.
A place in the world exists where I will die, my own gate. The singular sites that my wandering, haphazardly, encounters form a sequence of stages that prepare me for the last station.
Thus space and time open up through some gate that yawns or gapes open onto what language calls by the same word: experience. An expert gate, the same term, that is to say, open onto an exterior. The gate is a kind of pass.2 The world and life lead to a threshold that bars an elsewhere. The technical image of a black box does not signify anything different from what the word “empiricism” says: it’s a matter of drilling an aperture to reach the inside. Experience: a hole towards the outside; empiricism: a window into the interior. In sum, openings onto another place. But the naïve narratives describe the same method, which grants access to Bernadette’s grotto, to Gyges’s cavern, then to a tomb, and lastly into a horse whose bronze flanks are pierced with observation holes. Experience and empiricism correspond in language to the box model; the shepherd’s and shepherdess’s grotto and tomb send this phenomenology back home to the simple folk, ill at ease with refined languages. They describe statues: one contains a corpse, another greets and smiles. The gate opens, the mouth opens. This is the fundamental opening of experience. Preceding scholarly vocabularies and elaborate models, the narratives derived from anthropology describe their observations perfectly, without excluding or eliminating anything. Condillac didn’t do anything else: he opened a hole in the idol from which he drew his ideas.
An internal law rules up to a threshold, after which the law is changed. The shepherd became king and the shepherdess a saint; after the orchard where the apples fell, we learn the attraction that makes the Earth and the stars move just as much as the fruit. In the middle of the Mexican desert, the Gate of the Sun seems, to our ignorant and weak eyes, to be put just anywhere: it’s an observatory.3 But the milestone on the road to Damascus where the wanderer fell from his horse, the Massabielle cave, the fault into which the future king of Lydia, a counterfeiter, slipped also merit this name. Being from there, someone encounters another world, Being perhaps.4 The observatories that we reserved for telescopes and books filled with figures have, despite the forgetfulness, replaced these places experienced by an ordinary life. Experience does not always and necessarily lead to the apparent or real road of the Sun and the setting of the stars, but most often to another world, perhaps more real than the real one, where phenomena, saved, do not remain the massif in which life suffers and passes. Stonehenge and Carnac still aim for this global world more than the pure space of figures and orbits. Heavy and dense observatories precede our old theodolites and movable domes. Yes, Bernadette is right: the discourses of the appearance follow far behind the first dazzling moment in which the apparition speaks.
Let’s erect a statue at that station, there where Being says that it is.5 A bronze horse in that cave, a mummy in that tomb, a plaster woman at the entrance to the grotto, or nothing but a naked rock at the summit of the mountain where God Himself thundered. A mark of meaning in the half-opened box. This statue is related to place and stability—hence its name—to experience, to opening, to the relation of the thing to its word, to the name as such, to the simply raw stone.6 It’s related to death.
Sculpture bears ancient witness to the anthropological genesis of experience in general. It carves, drills, and fashions. Rodin is right: gate is the true name of the sculptor’s ark.
An internal law rules up to a threshold, after which the law is changed. The body goes as far as certain gates; the world prevails past the apertures of the skin. The five senses stop at these thresholds which it is now a question of going beyond. The Gates of Hell or Paradise? The horror, rather, of those who detest experience, or the ecstasy of those who bathe in it. Let’s go beyond these childish terrors: the skin, in tatters, pierced by expertise, mimics the world pierced with places. The mouths of bodies and things open. Shadowy mouths, golden mouths, golden gates.7 Like scales being balanced, a suspension bridge launches a passage from one bank to the opposite one, from one country to the foreign, from one language to another, from one sex to its complement: a golden or temporal gate between the mother’s or lover’s legs, on the watch for first experiences.8
On the nether side lies matter or magma.
Homer, Virgil, Dante place the passage not far from Vesuvius or Mount Etna, singular sites where the earth quakes, opens and gapes between two plates and from which one can descend into the other space. The Gates of Hell, sculpted by Rodin, rises not far from the Golden Gate Bridge, on the edge of the San Andreas Fault, an unstable and trembling bedrock, always at risk of breaking so as to let us pass.
Inert Mass
Things are called thus because we take them individually to be such, whether natural or produced. That is an object or this is a thing: the indefinite article, nevertheless defining unicity, is the important part of this judgment. Leibniz went around saying that a being was first and foremost a being, by emphasizing in different ways the two identical utterances.9 He called this ontological unity occupying a site a “monad.” What would become of ontology without location or unity, without monad or dasein?
Let’s understand by “physics” the science that works under this title as well as the relation to what we encounter in the world, the one in which we’re immersed, with all hands:10 the river and its gravel bed, the sand dunes, the mountain or the ocean, the earth, the wind, the animals, the crowd, the city, the calls, all kinds of networks … nothing of all that do we call things since mines or quarries only contain rock or coal and the networks only murmur with information, non-individuated, announced by a partitive article.11 The earth bears, the wind pushes, the river and the crowd overflow, the sky and the city envelop, the stone holds, the house covers, the water flows just like the sand, not to mention the fire and the history and the knowledge. When the earth opens, it closes on both sides of the wound: one must start again, and therefore cut again into its mass.
Why do we call ontological that which divides or splits up these indefinites into unities or subsets and puts them into a place? Language’s work begins; separation has already injured being. Or: if the thought of being escapes neither unicity nor location, there is behind being and them an anterior, indefinite, and fluctuating mass, without determination of site or place, which the Ancients divided up, no doubt by antiphrasis, into elements that, mixed or transformed into each other, come and go in order to create time.
Mass is basic, as fundamental as space and time. Physics knows it, since it makes them its first three dimensions: traditional metaphysics only knows two out of three of them. One must begin with the beginning. Therefore with the senses, the gates of experience. Therefore with space and time.
One must begin with mass.
The Latins called “mass” heap or pile, from the Greek word that signifies the dough that one kneads before cooking the biscuit, bread or vase, individuated. A crusty chunk of bread or a fetish, placed there, comes from a mass of moist and dense dough, without shape or catastrophe.12 The corresponding Greek verb says the action of kneading, that is to say, massaging. God massaged the first man in the clay and created the statue of the first Eve by massaging Adam’s rib, the hermaphrodite’s breast.
The Latin verb “to macerate” signifies “to soften” or “to soak.” Mass mixes some earth and some water or some solid and some fluid wetness, previously without unity or place, amorphous sets from which space will come, a topology that’s conditional for every metric and every distance, a source mixture for time.
That is the first object that the first subject works first. “And God said, ‘Let the waters of the heavens amass into a single mass and let the continent appear. And it was so. God called the continental mass ‘earth’ and the mass of waters ‘seas.’” The original work of separation or mixture done by the original subject on the original object. Creation, the name of this initial deed, accomplished by God, the name of this initiator, acts on the great massifs of chaos in the most ancient traditions, Egyptian, Hebraic, or Greek, which are divided into mute and loquacious.
The kneading of dough and the separation of masses seem to be acts that are so primordial or deeds that are so original that the English and German languages borrowed a common root from Old Saxon which means “shaping the earth” or “building in cob” to form their verbs machen or “to make,” in which mass becomes legible again. Anglo-Saxon pragmatism, which had had the happy idea of a genesis of objects or a genealogy of subjects by objects, is therefore lacking what its languages precisely contain: a philosophy of mass.
I would call the first homo faber “mason”.
“Matter” remains an empty metaphysical word, with neither value nor foundation in the physical sciences. If philosophy doesn’t have to dominate science or become its slave or handmaiden, it must at least maintain compatibility with it. Now under the word “matter” in the subject catalog in the libraries, it can easily be verified that matter left positive knowledge around two centuries ago, and that consequently it won’t be found there.13 Some political philosophies use it while laying claim to that scientificity that would give us divine knowledge if we could define it. Misleading advertising sometimes seduces: above all in philosophy because its practice requires an entire reflexive metalanguage in which one says what one is doing without always doing it. Physics ignores matter, for its part, studying atoms and particles and calculating their mass.
Language knows matter better and links it to the mother, its origin, if I dare say so. Latin calls matter “tree wood” because it produces offshoots like a womb.14 When we say madrier [beam] and merrain [shook], even “metropolis,” we most often forget the ancient alliance of “matter” and “mother.” Therefore the idea of engendering everything from the former could be called a linguistic tautology since it amounts to that other tautology, so banal, and, in the domain of inert things, so false, that everything has a mother and owes its birth to her womb. Materialism, never scientific, remains a philosophy at the breast.
Let’s introduce mass into philosophy, in a way that’s compatible with physics and the other sciences and placed by them among the fundamental units in dimensional equations, at the same rank as space and time: all three units counted by them as pure quantities. They measure dimensions without inquiring into their nature. Yet philosophy, called metaphysical at least on this occasion, precisely inquires into their nature. What are space and time?
What is mass? It measures the constancy of the ratio between acceleration and force or velocity and energy. These latter can vary with space or time; the weight of a body can change; its mass stays constant. This conservation is necessary for a real world to exist and so that we can act upon it, reliably, in practice and in theory. Mass’s permanence plays an analogous role to the constants that prohibit perpetual motion of every type. Nothing is free.
Work, experiments, theory, or knowledge therefore all presuppose it, two times over. First of all, as a condition for reality: without it, no world; the shipwrecked person, swimming in the middle of languid waters, cannot get a foothold; for such an acosmism, all knowledge would be reduced to logic or mathematics, all experimentation to language, sensation to statements, the tool to the observatory, the hard to the soft and language itself to the performative that produces what it says by the sole fact of saying: thus speak archangels, philosophers, judges, administrators, or the mouths of the media. Mass conditions the existence of the things of the world that conditions us, and its permanence conditions the universe.
Next as a regulating or canonical condition: nothing can be removed from or added to it without inevitably finding again what has been subtracted from it or taking in it what has been added to it. Independent of time and space, it remains stable. It is the first statue: raw, testimony to a real that’s independent of the mass of humanity, crowds and messages.
A primordial action, statuary repatriates mass—strange, inevitable, ceaselessly returning, equilibrium and content of the world, first object—by unifying it, like a thing; by individuating it, like a body; by localizing or marking a space by its means; by stabilizing mass like a dead thing or body; by therefore stopping time; by giving mass limits it cannot leave, by defining it or even by inventing the act of defining. By meditating on the two strangenesses that are the inert and death. Sculpture, acting in this way, replaces a primitive practice. When the first physicists, breaking things with hammer blows until they could break them no longer, invented the atom, did that act or idea proceed from different intentions or needs? Sculptors or statuaries, by breaking or unifying, act as proto-physicists.
They lay their hands on what is not a sign, on the stable mass—statue or atom—that guarantees that a thing exists that is lodged in space, that withstands time and doesn’t care about signs and meaning—radically foreign to our schemings.
The Work’s Mass
Rodin draws the entire work from mass. He called The Gates of Hell his Ark, in Noah the Patriarch’s sense no doubt, whose boat carried the bodies of the species, fluctuating over the amorphous flood, but also in the subtle sense in which the ark designates the box, the primary stock from which everything comes, Pandora’s secret casket, the capital or basic set. It’s equivalent for the sculptor to the painter’s palette. May he who does not dispose of this black horn of plenty—industrious, happy, inexhaustible—not attempt the perilous adventure of the work. At the bottom of the Ark, of the box, of the horn lies mass. Here the layer takes on the sense of mineral treasure. Everything that the bottom contains surges, here, in front of the entrance.15
The same Rodin draws his Balzac from a kind of formless pedestal. The divine becomes human and the human inert in his work and in his body, which haunts an ample and floating coat into which his old writer’s arms are thrust; in other roughcasts, he’s drowning in his own chest or poorly supported by his colonnade-legs. The pedestal comes up to the model’s head; mass invades the form; the body emerges from its sabots; Balzac is born from his ugliness. Did Rodin know that Balzac knew that?
The old painter Frenhofer from “The Unknown Masterpiece” hides and shows under a veil his ark, La Belle Noiseuse, a painting that hides the beautiful woman and shows the noise, a hideous mixture of forms, colors and tones from which a living and delightful foot emerges and stands out, an imprint from which a Venus jumps out and is born, whose torso, head, and arms are not seen. One might think it the gates of hell reduced to two dimensions, where mass threatens the pedestal.
Raw, the non-fashioned and non-masoned mass, rough, mixed; raw, the mass before the sculpture and the palette’s mixed paints before the painting; raw, the world before words; raw, the slack waters on which the ark is floating; raw, the pedestal.16 In Italian, zoccolo or the sabot. Praise to the author in sabots, Frenhofer or Balzac or Rodin; glory to the artisans who don’t elaborate the made starting from the already made but who attack, face to face, with courage the face of the cut and work in mass and magma. Worthless, the cut-outs and copyings; worthless, the repeats and taking overs; worthless, commentary, even intelligent commentary; the only work of any value is the work that rises, direct, from the pedestal; long live the problems themselves, long live the sabots.
Frenhofer puts them on Venus for shoes, Rodin does the same for Balzac, and his Ark is only an immense sabot floating on the first waters. The Hermes and Aphrodites rise from there, Aphrodite whose foot marks Balzac’s canvas and only brushed my noisy genesis by a thread, a noisy genesis linked to the linearity of the written style; Rodin kneaded them full-size in mass.17 By means of the true three-dimensional volume. Real objects. What luck! How can hard mass be said in soft words?
One encounters women and things that are beautiful naturally, come from their mothers’ wombs like this, or from divine wills or the hazardous hands of time, made or born in this way. One encounters ugly bodies and faces that can do nothing about this factual state.
Thought, an intuition, good intentions, work, or love suddenly illuminate gestures, eyes, skin—raw, ill-favored. The light beneath the appearance passes above. For this reason, language says the word “sublime.”
Beauty: thus shall it be. But the sublime results from a work and a mixture in which ugliness and indifference take part, which make the below pass above and transform the solid into vapor, as once again is indicated by the word, and the raw into breath or spirit. What flame changes this hard into soft, the thing into meaning, the dead into living, stone into sign?
Sculpture is of the sublime as tapestry is of subtlety.
The Living and Social Mass
Just as the seeds in the sunflower’s massive and round flower grow over a kind of common pedestal and ceaselessly feed on it the way it does on the global mass of the sun, so we are born, live, and die dependent on the mass of matter, itself no doubt independent of us, born of the dust and returning to the dust, kneaded from carbon and nitrogen and returning, decomposed, to the nitrogen cycle, respiration and nourishment following this same cycle; we therefore never leave the common stock of birth and death, paradise, hell, moving ourselves over it at a small distance from it, corn seeds on an ear. The massive gates construct such a pedestal, from which humanity comes out, to which it returns, after some temporary apparitions on the surface, for a fractal and contingent Brownian movement. Humanity emerges from the mother-matter, from the womb-box, from the jambs of the gate or beams, beneath the lintel, an immense and teeming metropolis.18
Just as seeds hold on to a placenta, the way living bodies do to inert mass or mother-matter or isolated individuals do to a continuous, dense, and solid massif, so we are born, live, and die dependent on a connected mass of relations, a multiple network of rites, religions, languages, customs, signals, ways of dressing, a common stock that’s more and more independent of us, who control it as much or as little as we do the mass of matter. Rodin’s crowd, naked, a multiplicity of bodies, emerges from the surf and cries, shouts, complains, touches each other, tears each other to pieces, sprawls body to body one over the other, male over female, old over young and woman to woman, fights each other, kills each other, roughs out with naked hands and skin the other mass by which it is also fed, from which it is even born and into which it will disappear in dying, forgetful, or memorable history.19 The original magma can be called mass, the chaotic dough of prime matter, or the mass, group, crowd, multitude, gathering of bodies making bodies.
Do we reduce to shades, each shade similar to the others, different by number only, wandering, risen, apparent, on the pedestal or the massif of communication that we thought we’d created, which escapes us, bears us and creates us, a pedestal or massif as consistent as the pile of carbon and nitrogen from which bodies come? We shades watch its spectacles or performances, listen to its murmuring, permanently plugged into this cake or connected placenta and sucking its blood. Do we amount to media parasites, to noises or network stations?20 Doesn’t The Thinker’s pseudo-thought emerge, like a triple phantom, from the newspaper, his morning prayer, from customs and opinions, his daily practices, from stereotypes that he cannot give up or without which no one can understand him? If the word “publicity” signifies the “essence of the public” or “of the community,” thought never leaves it: Rodin’s The Thinker parades before the crowd of the Gates like a theatrical hero adorned with the attributes of meditation. No matter how he concentrates on himself, back bent-over, chin on fist, unseeing face, he remains immersed in multiplicity, the clamoring mass; how can a person think in that noise?
Seated, standing, before these gates, sprawled before the television set, we see, we hear the thought that’s swallowed up in the chaos of the publicity. Parading above, before, the thinker publishes. Increases the mass from which he comes.
A mass of matter, a living mass or crowd, a mass lastly of information.
The museum whose entrance Rodin sculpted was never born. A museum always opens through a kind of threshold of Hell since it only encloses shades: mummies, corpses immortalized by some dead work that will be fought over by a few jackals. We’ve lost paradise and hell; we no longer build cathedrals nor invent smiles in the bristling horror of Reims nor fluid prophets in tears in the calm of Moissac; we no longer know, senile, how to build anything but museums. Our impotence for works reduces us to history, which reduces us to impotence. We bequeath sterility to a few sporadic or artificial children. A detail, already abstract, of a construction never even begun, Rodin’s gate doesn’t open onto anything, not even onto one of our necropoles, a fake entrance, a caricature, a postiche. The word “fetish” means “artifice”: manufactured, made by the hands of men, imitated, reproducible. A postiche gate, a crucible for multiplying fetishes.
At the summit of such a threshold, the Holy Trinity would have formerly reigned in majesty: the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, God in three persons. The black gate only guards the shades of men, themselves images of their creator. A shade of a gate having to open onto a conservatory of shades, overhung by three shades that have no hands. We’ve lost the creation.
At mid-height of the same threshold, Christ would have lived and suffered, from his birth up to the passion, the second person and the only one incarnated. We have only retained from him the “I think” of The Thinker: ideas or words, reasons, texts. Not flesh, nor the roving life, the lively adventure in cities or deserts, on mountains and lakes, among whores and freshwater fisherman, but sentences and writing. We’ve lost the incarnation.
Is the gate closing due to lack of works?21
The Tribunal22
The Latin word from which we derive the scientific words “mole” and “molecule” designates mass: charge, weight, heavy volume. The same name applied to war machines or the enormous and complicated apparatuses that the armies used to siege cities and to try to capture them by force: the god Mars, it is said, had daughters, the Molae, who personified the exploits of war. The moles or dikes, barrage-masses that make for good ports, withstand storms and waves, whose overturning is said by the same word. A battle of mass against mass. Levying of troops, earthen or stone levee, the bad weather clears.23
The figurative sense keeps on shifting into the regrettable sense in which the literal sense is involved: the “mole” or “mass” says trouble, danger, burden, effort, difficulty, problem, work, and overwhelming hatred. At the beginning of The Aeneid, before the founding of Rome, when Virgil evokes this great labor: Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem, he nears the patience of history and the work of the negative, but—even more profoundly than his successors—without the form of the concept.24 What a dense and hard massif to carve! Never completely abstract, the word, even less concrete, remains moral and rather pejorative. The adjective molestus does mean “painful,” “regrettable,” “disagreeable,” “importunate,” “displeasing,” “dangerous.” The verb “to molest” comes from there.
Patience and courage are necessary to carve in the mass or to shape it, to work directly in what has not already been formed. In my country it is said: go to the coal, faced with the raw quarry, in the mine.25 Dig in the layer. Honest or upright work comes from there.
The closed gate prohibits access to another space. In the Quattrocento, Ghiberti, in Florence, erected the Gates of Paradise and Rodin opened and closed our century by sculpting those of Hell. The philosophy of mixed bodies will build, I hope, those of a Purgatory or intermediate place for phase transitions, a half-breed by blood or language, for mixed and pacified notions. We are simplifying much by naming that other world behind the gates Paradise or Hell, that other world that’s anterior or posterior to birth and death, permanent and situated elsewhere, to which neither our concepts nor our customs would be known. They are named in this way because a Tribunal sits before the portal, and its rulings without appeal decide between good fortunes and evils, separating definitive despairs from eternal ecstasies. Not so fast. That, on the contrary, defines our world. For the Elysian Fields or the blessed gardens that are beyond hope to be torn up from the valley of tears, they would need to escape the grasp of every tribunal, and that would be sufficient.
For, in human matters, the judiciary marks the final deciding authority, if the reader will observe and forgive the tautology. Our lives run alongside a thousand laws: lives that are good or bad, just or criminal, free or enslaved, guilty before ethics, morality, habit, and customs, in civil or criminal law, in relation to politics or the administrative, for jobs, mores, truth, language, files, papers or accounts, codes, figures, in the eyes of others, and by the noise that they transmit, receive, and spread … The social sequence forces us to leave one wicket so as to present ourselves before the following ones. The collective is immersed in the time of judgment. Consequently, there is nothing beyond the Tribunal, understood as the supreme form, either in the social sciences or in the philosophies of knowledge. We’ve known that for a long time. The eighteenth century of the Enlightenment saw the formation of the critical disciplines and the nineteenth century of storms saw that of the philosophies of final authority. Metaphysics, instructed in global human experience, seeks the site from which rulings can be pronounced without itself in turn becoming the object of a ruling: always a critic and never open to critique. This final deciding authority goes by the name of the final judgment, if the reader will pardon the tautology and laugh at it.
Therefore the final judgment dominates our own world and defines it, as the sum or integral of the wickets, courts, and orders, as the active form of philosophy. Its gate bars any place whatsoever, in Florence, Tokyo, Zurich, Stanford, or Paris, it doesn’t matter, the current term of the series bearing the law of the series. The gate does not open onto another rule.
A gate opens, closes, one or the other; decide, with the middle excluded. By this logic of two incompatible values, a gate symbolizes, better than a balance, judgment. For the beam can hold itself flat when the pans counterbalance one another, while the double doors only know opening or closing, only know decision. Exclusion or inclusion, without any third place. Sentencing or dismissal.
Thus our valley of tears, staked out with gates or railroad crossings, bifurcates everywhere. To really change place, we must escape from the judicial grasp that defines and dominates it, from the deciding authority or the Tribunal as the concrete and abstract, local, and global form of the space in which we live and think, as the sum of our labors and words, and that would be sufficient. That signifies the most distinctly in the world that on the nether side or beyond, that outside of our world, lies indecision.
One doesn’t separate or divide up mixture or mixed bodies—purgatory?—chaos, the background noise, or the unanalyzed. Or mass.
Carve, cut into the mass to penetrate it, to grasp its interior, and you will only discover two exterior walls; everything must be started again. Opened, yes, closed, still.
Twenty defined, nameable, individuated, famous bodies emerge from the Gates: Paolo and Francesca, Ugolino rise from the text of The Divine Comedy and from the Hell described by Dante, the pardoned Prodigal Son comes out of the Gospel and several metamorphoses from Ovid’s poem, but more than 150 anonymous people emanate, without phrases, from the confused ark, a box tossed on the viscosities. All of them, known or unknown, resurrect from the dough or the earth, from waters one would say were first, from anguish or dream. From mass.
In the mass of matter, the human mass or crowd fluctuates: from the inert matrix is born the maternal womb from which we come, each and all together.26 From there, a chaotic hubbub rises, visible, like a mute massif, a noise from which two or three books that designate a few bodies by name free themselves. Rare, the word in the clamor of raw, living, multiple, mixed things.
No one, ever, opened those Gates, closed. No one fastened its double doors to some breastsummer, or this lintel to a wall, or the wall to a museum.
Nonetheless these men and women, naked as on their first and last day, spring out, as though it were wide open.
Manifest, it gapes open and brings the compact mass into the world: chaos, mouth, hole, well, port, box, arcanum, horn of plenty.
Open and closed at the same time, unique in the world, Rodin’s gates, lifting the principles of contradiction and the excluded middle, elaborate a third place without an excluded, a new space outside the decisions of every Tribunal.
Sing Hope, all ye who cross this threshold.
The Thinker doesn’t judge, infinitely merciful. Forgetting every critique, he innocently creates. To produce, for mass to emerge from forms, one must escape from the judiciary. That is sufficient. The Final Judgment disappears.
Our world remains a place of cases, the Hell of accusations, if the reader will again forgive the tautology. The Thinker and its author, with leniency, invent or discover, outside the tribunals that seize the world’s space, a strange space in which things literally excuse themselves.
In every European language, in the north as well as in the south, the word chose [thing], whatever form it is given, has its origin or root in the word cause [case], derived from the judiciary, politics or critique in general. As though objects themselves only existed according to the debates of an assembly or after the verdict delivered by a jury. Language claims that the world only comes from it. At least it says so.
We sometimes feel that if the cases died away—miracle—things as such would be born.
The world shows things outside of any case, exonerated.27
Language is checked, sculpture, mute, shows it.
The closed gate opens onto mass.
Neither the bronze nor language describes it as tranquil, serene, peaceful; it’s crushing, difficult, dangerous. Sculpture, through its mute art, as well as philology as articulate expertise, inquire about it. And physics writes that it has an energy that multiplies the speed of light by it. Mass menaces: it’s going to explode. It has exploded.
We now know another hell into which we entered collectively when the gate opened nearly fifty years ago in order to settle a case.
Which of us will be resurrected from it?