A psychiatrist presents a necrophiliac patient and gives his diary to be read, which confesses obscenity. The madman was sleeping with a dazzling, beautiful, soft, blond braid of hair that he would ceaselessly caress everywhere he paraded around with it, after having taken it from an antique piece of furniture in which it had been lying, hidden. He didn’t wear it as a postiche but used it as a fetish. We would now call him a fetishist rather than a necrophiliac although the diary delectably describes a kind of exhumation.
Madness, it is said, is explained by being arrested in the past: in fact, the patient dreams of women from old, snows of yesteryear, snows dispersed in their powder.1 He seeks dead loves through fear of the present, which bears death in its future. Delirium?
What is to be said, then, about the long cultures who devoted their time, their work, almost their entire fortune to the corpses of their dead? Herodotus, in his book on Egypt, recounted that a family in mourning wouldn’t give the remains to the embalmers for a few days if a woman who was young, pretty, or famous all across the country was at issue. Customs on the Nile side of things, deliriums on the other?
Before a certain date, a certain Antiquity, literally necrophiliac, employed a thousand living beings to immortalize the dead, as though the future were knocking at the door of the tomb without being able to flow further. Collective or individual time was involuting into the mummies and statues lying, rising, shown, hidden across the necropoles. Antiquity comes to an end at a zero point, which we commemorate every morning by the date, where time was reversed in such a way that we now count it in the opposite direction, no longer finding any obstacle in front, as soon as the tomb, empty, was placed behind: a formidable revolution concerning the subject of the dead and consequently concerning the subject of objects. From that moment, certain everyday gestures became insane.
The necrophiliac madman, although contemporary, lives in the ancient style. A born archeologist, he maintains an archaic relation to ancient objects. The piece of furniture and the hair he discovers in it both date from an incalculable Antiquity.
He buys a piece of furniture and sets about adoring it. What does the adoration consist in? The word itself says it: in the opening, at every moment, of its doors and drawers.2
This manipulation provides him with the raptures and joys of possession. But who can be said to be possessed? One evening he extracts the hair from a slot. This slot, the knife that slowly explores and pierces, the night spent searching for the secret, the abundant blond and auburn fleece found there delight the soul of the doctor, who has since become an analyst, accustomed to searching for what he has already found, the sex right in the middle of the golden fleece, in a not very black box.
A frightful cry rises, a howling of impotent rage that requires that attention be paid. The doctor has this obscene madman doused with water five times a day without turning an ear to that appeal: he has his idea; that is sufficient.
Let’s hear the cry; let’s turn our eyes from the beautiful poster to the displayed sex; the madman howls too much not to disturb theory. Sex sells by shifting our gaze from the uninteresting object to the bared body. It makes you think you’ve understood, by means of this very shift toward interesting sex. But the madman always shouts so as to move us.
The doctor rises. Goes to the cabinet, opens it. Forget the beauty. Look at the piece of furniture.
What piece of furniture? The one that contains the dead woman resembles a sarcophagus. One might say the chest was “marvelously beautiful, exquisitely fashioned and worked,” the chest in which Osiris was trapped by his brother and put to death to the great despair of his wife and sister Isis, a chest so well fitted to his size that one might say it was his mummy, his dead body wrought, transformed into a work of art.3 What piece of furniture? The one that’s opened and adored. The corpse of the adorable ghost? Turn your gazes away from the piece of furniture and the beauty shown by the doctor; this latter accuses his patient of necrophilia and has him doused with water when he shouts. Turn your gazes toward the doctor himself, toward his cabinet.
The manuscript given to Maupassant by the doctor says that the fleece was found in the piece of furniture. But the one who wrote it talks nonsense. Therefore the text—not the manuscript, not the diary, but the narrative—asks the good question: does the hair really exist? Yes. Where? In the cabinet, dash it all. Which cabinet? The doctor’s.
Who therefore rises and opens, him as well, the box in which the fleece is hidden. And he must open it quite often and over more than one week, since the box was jam-packed with phials and instruments.
The madman adores the piece of furniture: opens and closes it. The doctor opens and closes the cabinet: nobody says that he adores anything whatsoever. The fleece lies in the piece of furniture, no one knew it; it is placed in the cabinet, anyone can find it there. The hair is equivalent to the hair, invariant, identical to itself, content for content. As a result, the piece of furniture, ancient and beautiful, stands out behind the cabinet, common and banal, container for container. Body to body. The two boxes will be opened. The madman searches, patient, passionate, anxious, insomniac; the professional, expert, scholarly, specialist, normal and established in the institutional, relies on the tranquil certitude of finding what he is seeking every morning. A black box for the first, a banal and white one for the second. The hair, manifestly, lies within.
Having the mane’s rocket of dazzling gold as a common focal point, the two images get closer and move away: the cabinet and the piece of furniture are alike and differ from each other, as well as the doctor and the madman, as well as the short story and the diary. As a result, the narrator is dissolved between the patient and the caregiver, half mad and enjoying caressing the soft hair, half reasoner and disgusted like the doctor by the obscene perversion, one foot to the left, one foot to the right, experiencing mixture and capacity. By “capacity,” don’t understand the concept, or the distinct idea, or demarcation, but the possibility of containing everything at once, like a recipient, or of seeing everything at once, like the angle from which the entire segment is seen, but the possibility of understanding.
The doctor explains the illness by a theory that allows him to douse the one who shouts. Yet the madman has preceded the learned man by searching day and night in the box for what he didn’t know he was bound to find there, something the doctor finds every instant, without having to search for it. The discoverer pays for opening the box with the loss of his reason or with his exclusion from the group formed by those who hold the monopoly on the definition of intelligence or who get paid for exploiting the discoveries of others. Hero and parasites, generous genius and annuitants, saint and political power-brokers. Sadi Carnot, Jr., at the beginning of the same century, died in an insane asylum after having opened Prometheus’s firebox, after having drilled a spring in the side of what was going to become the piece of furniture par excellence, the mobile, or better, the motor, after having understood what golden flow ran from that opening, after having discovered the secret of energy power and enriched his times.4 Later Carnot would be translated into metaphors for understanding dreams, complexes and madness; energy would be translated into language. Who comprehends the other, the inventor or the learned one? Capacity comprehends them both.
We have no trouble opening the expert’s cabinet from which the hair comes out and flies toward us. Next to the phials and instruments, he has arranged a few books. Here’s their banal inventory. All libraries of this type contain: On the Cult of the Fetish Gods, the first treatise on the question, published in 1760 in Dijon by the President Charles de Brosses; the great Course of Positive Philosophy by Auguste Comte, whose law of the three stages starts with the theological age, which is subdivided into three sub-stages, the first of which, fundamental and matrical, is named fetishistic,5 as though by going back in time a fetish in the President de Brosses’s sense appeared at the beginning, containing the entire future or capable of containing the periods to come; Capital, by Karl Marx, in which exchange-value, ghostly, mysterious, and supernatural, with no relation to use-value, requires an additional explanation that so-called scientific economics requires of the operative concept of merchandise fetishism; values are exchanged like statuettes endowed with a strange power; the Three Essays, by Doctor Sigmund Freud, and a few others, which analyze, in the canonical sense, the overvalued object of sexual desire by means of the explanatory concept of fetishism, corresponding to the mother’s absent penis. The doctor knows, has known or will know everything that allows a doctor’s chair to be won, everything that allows the clear boxes in which the hair sleeps to be opened without difficulty, everything that allows madness, religion, and history to be explained, while dousing the first comer.
The narrator asks the reader to adopt like him a third position. A friend of the doctor, a visitor of asylums, a reader of the moving diary, he is interested in theories, but trembles while caressing the golden bird who, flying from the cabinet through the office’s space, lands in his trembling hands. Maupassant was really taking the waters, consulting psychiatrists, and would soon die insane. He accepted searching in the antique and empty piece of furniture.
In which he, like us, found—unexplained, ineradicable—death and the body.
Everyone knows what the cabinet contains, full, like the ancient Silenus statuettes, of phials and instruments. Its master key lies around everywhere; everyone has read the same books, become commonplace.6 Conversely, we don’t know what the locks of the precious old piece of furniture, apparently empty, are hiding. If research consists in repeating the ordinary theories occupying the white cabinet, by pursuing it in this way, you will become a doctor, enjoying the power of dousing whomever you like; if you spend your days and nights, blades and points in hand, trying to bore a hole in a rare black box, the vast amount of information issuing from it risks making you lose your reason and undergo the icy dousing. Let’s search.
The narrator, a crossbreed of a mad and a sensible man, half-skilled in the sciences and seeing them as limited, eyes at the same time the piece of furniture or the cabinet and takes the hair in the latter as though it came out of the former. The first piece of furniture dates from a distant time, the second, no doubt, arrived from the factory: you have seen the same on every floor and in every department. Old and unique or recent and standard. The latter can’t arouse the scientist’s desire; the madman sleeps with the chest, dense with meaning. He loves dead beauties.
The hair is not a sexual fleece, nor is it a flow of fine gold; it remains hair, neither more nor less: for, decomposing little, the hairs stay preserved for a long time. Here is the transformation, the transmutation—what am I saying?—the transubstantiation of the dead body into a chest or of this latter into a tomb occupied by a dead body, whose hair is the trace, the mark, the remainder, a part.
Science and reason call necrophiliac madness the bizarre love of ghosts that, in the text and through solitary dreams, changes an adored piece of furniture into feminine corpulence, blond, tall, with lyre-shaped hips and cool breasts, but term culture or anthropology the exact opposite change—practical, industrial, collective, approved, multi-millennial—of the dead body that’s emptied, hollowed, washed, dried, hardened into a mummy equipped with its hair, an exquisitely worked box well-fitted into multiple boxes and put into secrecy, a black immovable chest in its tomb.7
The madman, a good archaeologist, traces back in time and follows the transformations, in the fitting order, by reversing them. He goes from the chest to the body the way mankind went from the dead man to the thing. But the patient’s passion for the past doesn’t merely lead him to times of old, to Thaïs, big-footed Bertha or the beautiful Roman woman, but toward that dateless year that preceded our time.8 Into the yesteryear of the constitution of things starting from death.
Maupassant or the narrator blindly seeks to answer the question: how did the dead body become an object? How did death, the mother of all things, engender them? How does the corpse become a preserved mummy, a hard and unrotted statue, like the hair, a full and hollow box, a tomb or chest, a fashioned or manufactured thing, a technical object? And to answer follows the traces back in the opposite direction and passes from the piece of furniture to the dead body.
Listen to the preliminary question, always the same: how does a heart, beating regularly, become a watch, living its mechanical life? Conversely, can a clock become a heart again?
He adores objects: buys them, exchanges them, possesses them, collects, cleans them, maintains, improves, dusts, preserves them, observes them, feels them, handles them, passes from adoration to the laboratory, continuously. By dint therefore of looking at this latter night and day, of opening it and trying to bore through its secrecy, he discovers at last and sees that this form bears a golden fleece. How can we better express that the rest of the thing or form has to be inferred from the hair? We look too much at the blinding star and not enough at the piece of furniture from which it came, that is, the rest of the body, hips, thighs, and chest. The hair doesn’t rot and therefore remains invariant across the transformations imposed by and in time, which is precisely why we find, perfectly recognizable, the dazzling braid. But over the same time, the dead body, the remains of the body, changes into a piece of furniture, the remains of the thing.9 When sister Isis collected the scattered limbs of her brother Osiris across Europe, Africa, and Asia to put them back in a chest, didn’t she only find the indecomposable parts of the adored body, the hair, nails, and teeth?
The meticulous patient’s scientific research, which was patient, passionate, and tremendously mythical since it could be called the quest for the Golden Fleece, yet methodical and precise enough to devote itself to opening a closed black box, in a single stroke traces a prodigious past back to the genesis of objects. We don’t have a word in philosophy to say this genesis, like pragmatogony for example, because we don’t have a word old enough to express the root of the things themselves, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in Indo-European. However far back we may trace in and by our languages, we only find action words to say them, corporeal, collective or judiciary action. Things would only come from cases. From accusations. Likewise here: the madman can’t excuse himself for loving and adoring things. Idolater, fetishist, his case having been heard, he undergoes the dousing. No language can comprehend him. Objects as we think we know them date from a quite recent past, but formerly remained tied to the corpse in the closet. He who loves them loses language and runs to death.
Let’s seek, dig, I’m telling you, deeper into this chest; let’s patiently open its doors, drawers, locks, or secrets; we’ll find a body and its parts there: hair, certainly, the heart too, with its faithful beat, the jaw and mobility … see them transform tomorrow into a wig, most certainly, and a watch, we’ve heard it, but also into dentures or some common device, and the piece of furniture—oh, surprise, surprise—into an automobile.10