After the volcanoes went out, even though they’ve been sleeping for a very long time, muds and boiling springs have been bearing witness to deep hearths, latent, lying beneath the plugged chimneys, smoldering beneath the pozzolanic ashes. In the Dômes region, where so many craters sleep, it is said with likelihood that less time has passed from the last eruption to now than between the last one and the penultimate one. Many inhabitants of Auvergne still live on alert before the puys and plombs.
Maupassant, mortally ill, took the waters in Châtel-Guyon, a place hidden in a gorge, toward the foot of the Dômes. In the days of the thermal water cures, it was still believed that what laid in the earth or came out of it could heal the body: where, after all, do humans go, what do they come out of, where do they come from, where does their name ceaselessly return if not the humus? Maupassant therefore returned to the springs in a region where they gush up, boiling. Healing is resurrecting a little.
Idleness facilitates a thousand encounters in the spas, where short or long friendships are formed. Sadness and monotony produce such blossomings: this word indeed says that the closed opens.2
Here are a thousand tangled threads to be grasped, held out by chance, for leading to the origins.
A couple, a father and daughter, arrived, trying to decide which way to head. Let’s go for a walk toward a deep valley, a narrow gorge, heading back up the river toward its source.
A glove on her left hand, the girl was hiding a lack, a cut-off finger, while her father suffered from a most unusual nervous tic: every time he wanted to reach for an object, his hand described a rapid swerve, a sort of terror-stricken zigzag, before managing to touch what it was seeking.
Let’s go back to the root of these illnesses.
Having had a heart condition for a long time, one fine day, Juliette, the daughter, died. Her father buried her with her jewelry: necklaces, bracelets, rings, and ballroom gown, pompously adorned. Already a widower and from that point on alone, he had an abominable first night. Suddenly, in the middle of the darkness, the doorbell rang; Juliette, ghostly, appeared. Don’t be afraid: they had wanted to rob her of her rings and, in cutting a finger, brought her around from her non-lethal lethargy. There she was; nothing could have been more natural.
At receiving, in the dark, the ghost or resurrected girl, the father, terrified, fled backwards before the apparition and made, as though to drive it away, a gesture with his hand that, from then on, would never leave him. A primitive scene was replayed before every object.
The father buried Juliette. “Here lies” the daughter. The essential point of the drama is played in that place, where a third is going to dig up the one buried alive. We know the definition or mark of this site: HIC JACET. Juliette is there; there is Juliette, whose remains fix the place. This expression, Latin or French, literally consecrated, is similar in meaning to two other words or verbs of place that we can write: SUBJICERE or OBJICERE, whose prefixes, attached to the same verb, require a reference that’s lacking for them: lying (having been put or thrown) before or under in relation to what, in relation to where? “Here lies” gives the spot, designating or stabilizing it. The tombstone acts as boundary stone or herma. In short, the HIC JACET references itself; death defines the here. But for the two previous verbs, from which we have derived the nouns “subject,” thrown, lying below, and “object,” thrown, lying before, we have to ask: under what, before whom, under whom, before what? The object, the subject, non-referenced, seek, require, a founding site. But the question who appeals again to a subject just as the question what appeals to an object. We’re in a vicious circle here.
The one as well as the other relates to death.
The daughter, dead and buried, lies at the same time here and below. Here, in her coffin, at the cemetery and beneath the jewelry, necklaces and bracelets that Prosper, the servant, was going to try to steal that very night, digging up, by this move, the body. The scene, in the darkness, repeats others hidden in the obscurity of myth. Gyges, the Lydian shepherd, descended long ago into a tomb in order to gain power and fortune by means of invisibility; the servant, become rich, returned to his master’s home, sure of remaining above all suspicion. No one had seen him, not the night, blind, not the girl, dead, not the father, trusting. Tarpeia, the young Vestal, died beneath jewelry. But let’s leave that; we already know that the source of value comes from the dead body. Let’s likewise leave the cut-off finger or the absent penises of the classical fetishes.
Juliette lies here, below. She resurrects, rises, comes back, appears like a specter at her father’s home. A ghost, she is now there, before: subject, object. She was lying, hic and sub; she lies, now, ob. Theorem: the subject becomes object.
The object, the subject, lacking any reference, find one in and through death since the remains define the here, mark it, fix it, in space and for time. They are organized and placed, take on meaning, in relation to death; relative to that reference, they can substitute for one another. What is the object? It’s the body come back [revenu], the resurrected subject, what we call a ghost [revenant]—a statue. Or the apparition. Phenomenal.
The game or drama requires three positions: the master, the daughter Juliette, and the servant. In other words: the subject, the object, the “here lies.” Prosper digs up the dead girl, robs, and cuts her. This third between father and daughter dies of shock when the master calls him, and he enters and sees her resurrected: he opens his mouth, doesn’t say a word and drops dead onto his back. Here he is: a subject in turn. He’s going to replace Juliette in the grave, sacrificed in her place, a substitute for the statue. From now on he lies here and below, invisible and expelled. Gyges traveled the circle of his ring and took the place of the corpse. Here is the name of the servant: the excluded third. The excluded third between the subject-father, the master who speaks and recounts, and the apparition, the daughter become first a precious object, an object robbed, finally an object period. If we do our accounts right, the excluded third takes the place of the grave, of the “here lies.” The philosophies of the subject, indeed, those of the object, are silent about this third reference place, literally exclude it. As a result, the invention of rigorous discourse occurred as soon as it was located and one knew how to name it. However we didn’t know yet that the excluded third was a moving corpse, that the subject exchanges with the object.
The father’s hand will always tremble from it, in zigzag. This word describes a broken motion that runs elsewhere before reaching its term. Before touching an object or taking it, the hand rushes in reflex toward a point where there is nothing. At least nothing we can see. It goes toward a shade, a specter, an apparition. Toward what the object was before being what we name an object. A terror-stricken zigzag from appearance to reality, from the apparition to the thing, from the phenomenon to the in itself.
The hand drives away, excludes, expels. The specter, death, the third. The come back daughter, the unfaithful servant, the entire mortuary scene. It traces the bad passage: maupassant.3
That’s called a tic: the body indulges in it without intending to, as though at random, as though the hand had lost the sense of space, direction, purpose, target, end. As though there weren’t any object. “Tic” is onomatopoeia; “zigzag” draws a diamond: words without flesh, terms of noise or graph. A mimetic noise from which words are made is called onomatopoeia.
The hand outlines the relation to the object that appears before the birth of language. Both expelling it and driving it off as though the act of speaking had put an end to the gesture of exclusion. The body that thenceforth recounts, discourses, argues, debates, remembers, preserves the pre-gesture of expulsion in its mass, like a reflex, before touching or handling the object. Here is the hand gesture that anthropologically precedes homo faber’s gesture or hand. A gesture that’s retained, boiling beneath the plugged chimney, a mouth apparently gone out that no longer does anything but speak, a cold body that now takes and understands.4
Before dying and for long years, André Leroi-Gourhan suffered from Parkinson’s. We would help him hold a cup or glass, grab hold of a knife, eat, drink, or take. No one understood the experience, had made us understand it, better than him: hand, speech, mouth, tool, upright posture, and walking freely; this man who was skilled enough to whittle with artistry botched or overturned everything, traversed with tics and zigzags. The master of objects was no longer able to reach them.
Should we understand that his body was supplementing his work by indicating, without saying so, archaisms anterior to what his books and teaching had described through language? In the vicinity of death, was he shaking his hands as though to drive away the specters, ancestors of the stones?
We recognize the gesture of blessing although it changes with place and time, likewise the gesture of cursing. But we don’t know the primary gesticulations that precede cursing or blessing before those rites are said. What did the hand do before the reign of the mouth?
It doesn’t directly go or head in the direction of what is, nonetheless, presented before it. The object doesn’t lie before the hand, at hand, ready to hand. It merely appears, it arrives, absolutely new, strange, frightening, spectral, ghostly. It rises from there, from below, so as to appear before. Then the hand drives it away, through fear, or rather, describes the rapid, rare, disquieting movement of this resurrection. The hand runs below, above, here, before. It follows the transcendental route HIC-SUB-OB, a path which, tomorrow, will go directly, methodically, from the subject to the object, when the direction will be called the “meaning”: then, the emotion of beyond the grave having gone out, the mouth and all its reign will have quickly forgotten where the object appeared or came from.5 But the body will remember before the meaning.
The way the earth, under the mouth of the cooled volcanoes, shudders sometimes. How can we heal tics, except by taking the waters?
The tic retains an immemorial memory of the silent body, the way the slip of the tongue betrays the memory of the loquacious flesh, anesthetized by speech. By its zigzag, the tic describes the movement and moment of appearing.
Here is the phenomenon before phenomenology: the apparition.
In designating this senseless spasm of the body, the mouth remembers as well. It no longer speaks with articulated words, but mutters: nothing could be rawer than those onomatopoeias whose sound imitates a noise with a cry. “Tic” is part of an immense family that mimics a struck blow, one that also says the tool with which you strike or the thing that you strike, and even the mark of the blow.6 In this set or factory of words, every vowel combines with two or three consonants like t, p, r, or k. Examples: une trique peut taper sur un taquet [a cudgel can hit a peg].
Therefore the tic expels, certainly, but to do this gives a shock and makes it heard. The hand strikes what appears, before. The primary encounter with the object, which the ear hears and whose sonorous effect is imitated by the mouth. The arm hits the stiffened corpse or sets about sculpting the hard statue. Listen again: the peg or the post driven into the earth like a stock names the first boundary stone.7 The layer.
Philosophy begins with experience and, it is said, with sensation; a rational examination of the five senses opens with touch because it envelops the entire body. So everything comes to us from the tic. Indeed, the word “touching” is part of the family. Derived from the Low Latin toccare, preserved as such in Italian, it vulgarly signifies “to knock” [faire toc]. You still hear, in the language at body level, the low music of the impact, of the rough encounter with the hard object. Touching neither caresses nor brushes against at first, rather tic and touch hit. Expel, break, bore, pierce. Through the reflex gesture, the organism preserves this abrupt spasm.
Without leaving the onomatopoeias, the series migrates and bifurcates toward more complex noble areas: “tracking down” [traquer], for example, still consists in beating, again, the woods or thickets, to drive the game out of it or make other zigzags before reaching the object; “bartering” [troquer] still supposes beginning an agreement or contract by slapping one’s hand into the hand of one’s partner.8 Metaphors, all of them, of research, commerce or relation. From stock to swap [du stock au troc], the same impact [choc] is heard at the outset, which language tries to reproduce: the body preserves the trace of this initial big bang. Past the senses, after touch, here are knowledge and exchange, following. Hear the blow struck home by the hand, by the tool, on death, the phantom, the apparition, the statue, by stone on stone, before leniency.
The gesture, complex, repels ghosts. And sculpts them. Zigzag, first writing.
No, knowledge does not come from the senses but from the impact on the stone raised above the grave. With Condillac everything comes from the statue and from it alone.
Our ideas come from idols, that which was to be proven.
To understand from where and how reason and even language came to us, we must plunge into the crater in which everything mixes under heat. You don’t get out of it by stating conditions of possibility the most logically in the world or by rejecting the senseless without any examination or by excluding knowledge en bloc. I don’t have any experience of a transcendental cold. Beneath the ashes gone out, a certain heat is boiling.
Mass, space, the object come from magma, from wandering, from the spectral; reason doesn’t derive itself from itself. We don’t know of any perpetual motion; we have never found anything that’s free: everything, universally, must be paid for. Why should this law change here? In other words, nothing comes from itself, by iteration or tautology. Neither language nor reason precedes or engenders reason or language.
Rational and expressible science drags a comet’s tail behind it, one that in no way resembles its nucleus and which anthropology tries to understand. When the rational sets up shop, it expels the irrational. True. Therefore it takes its place. Therefore it comes from it. Should explication happen it drives off the inexplicable. Therefore explication substitutes for it. Therefore explication maintains an intimate and genetic relation with it. Science, with its hand, excludes this third: untouchable, it suffers from a tic.
To examine the comet’s tail, vague and hot, and its relation with the hard nucleus, we must change languages while keeping its language, leave reason while preserving it, accept the third position and run the risk of finding ourselves expelled. The instructed third falls into the excluded third.
The change of language launches us into the literary and the fabulous, or into those myths that are said to deceive us but that were formerly learned in the humanities. We throw ourselves into these non-falsifiable lakes the way Empedocles threw himself into Mount Etna or Maupassant into madness. Only philosophy demonstrates that literature goes farther and deeper than philosophy. “The Tic,” a short story categorized under the fantastic by the critics so as not to risk thinking, in fact constitutes our history’s first metaphysical meditation on the object, on its first apparition and the conditions for grasping it between our hands.
To write it, Maupassant showed more courage than the philosophers of the tradition. He expatriated himself: left here, went there, came out of an interior toward an exterior, horla.9 He lost his soul and reason so as to save them, the only rule for research; he lost language so as to take it up again in its nascent state, the only method for truly writing.
He launched himself therefore into the underworld, into the body and death, silent domains and mute solitudes. Having become wise, tired of those who are always rational, philosophy seeks reason underneath reason, in places where it doesn’t reign, and it writes by touching the silence underneath language, the source from which the first breaths came.10
Accepting the third place, at the risk of exclusion, the instructed third, speaking at once in the languages of the irrational and the rational and taking them toward their common silence, aspires simply to the weakness of expelling nothing.