Two disciples are watching over the dead Schopenhauer. In the middle of the night, a silent minute that makes you think the sun won’t come back, the cadaverous odor becomes so uncomfortable that they withdraw into the neighboring room, from which they can observe, by the open door, the destructive laugh that hasn’t left the magisterial mouth and whose malicious rictus is illuminated by the candle for the dead.
Suddenly a very white form appears from that smile, runs across the immobile face and chest and with a faint sound jumps to the ground and goes under a piece of furniture. Sweating, crazed, panting, the two friends, ready to faint with terror, take a moment to get their breath back and approach, frightened: the smile has vanished.
The dentures of the cheered-up philosopher, released by decomposition, made the loosened jawbones come apart so as to fall under the sideboard.
A tall, blond-bearded German, quiet, emaciated, tubercular, dying, with long legs so scrawny they seem to be two bones, a man quasi-mummified, recounts to Maupassant this old marvel, of which he was one of the two frightened witnesses, between the highest point of the sun over the burning Mediterranean and its loss beneath the sea in the midst of the sparkles. Whereupon the Frenchman evoked the statue by Houdon where Voltaire, seated, snickers, his grin preserved in the worked stone.
One follows the states of things with the eyes: a skeletal carcass at the end of its journey, endowed with a slow movement, an immobile corpse in putrefaction, a statue, a detachable prosthesis moving, of itself, under a piece of furniture.
Ancient Egypt, our first culture, devoted to the night of the sarcophagi, to its solar god, practiced a mysterious ceremony called, from the Pyramid Texts onwards, the “Opening of the Mouth.” Before the statue of a god left the workshop, the rite, performed at the sculptor’s, in the “golden house,” sought, it is said, to render the organs capable of fulfilling their functions. Did he give life to each statue? The same Egypt, having come directly out of the Neolithic and passed into written history, practiced the same rite on mummies. To give them back breath and language?
Was our body reduced to stones and the dead before we opened our mouths? A statue, a corpse, the man who neither speaks nor cries, neither implores nor complains, shrouded in the silence of the brutes. Ancient Egypt celebrated the primitivity that preceded it with a ceremony in which it commemorated language’s birth. It came out into the light of day through the mouth. Into the breath of spirit?
Two terrified students are attending, from an interval of thousands of years, by the half-open door’s memoryless observation hole, in the pale candlelight, a similar ritual in which the mouth of the dead Schopenhauer opens.
What monster comes out of the shadowy mouth?
The mouth opens an aperture in the dead, stony mass through which something, sometimes different from a thing, enters and leaves: animation, vitality, language, expansive call; all cultures, every epoch, their philosophies have clumsily said, with one word or several—words equivalent and dark and again passing through the mouth—that very thing that renders living, speaking, active, conscious, sensible, thinking: subject. I breathe, I speak, I am.
Will the mass of stone become subject, or will the stiff corpse become subject again through the opening or reopening of the well?
The localization of the for-itself or soul in the heart, liver, brain, solar plexus, depending on the decisions of the cultures and the times, escapes all evidence, always hidden in a deep center; while the mouth, yours or mine, even distant, makes the immediate presence of what makes us living and expressive be seen, felt, touched, heard, and sometimes tasted. Mouth object, certainly, verifiable by experience in the full sense, yet mouth subject, breathing, saying, unexpected, delicate, receptive, excitable, quick-tempered, emotional, biting, tender. Opening this orifice means going from high to low, from exterior to interior, but also folding or unfolding the edges or sides. The complex object–subject is situated on this warped border.
Here is a place where the stones, corpses, things of the world and the breathing, wind, language, spirit, for-itself, subject, all those non-things that we don’t know and which perhaps know vibrate, mixed, in beatings and blendings.
In the volume or trunk of stone, wood, marble, granite, or chryselephantine mass, the sculptor opens wells. On the inert and already green flesh of the rigid remains, the paraschist carver incises edges.1 The hammer hits the chisel head. The obsidian knife draws a surgical field. They make a hole. They pierce before smoothing. Make large plates fly off. Make chimneys. Drillings that clear observation holes as though some gangue were covering over a secret obstructed by it, as though a form, a god, life, meaning, value, what have you, were hidden on one side or the other of a window that, unblocked, would let them pass. Rites for the opening of the mouth. But what have I been doing, for twenty-five years, tensed over a sharp stylus scarifying the white page, on the stone grain, wood fiber, sheep-skin, shining side of an obelisk, tearing the page up with stigmata so as to pierce meaning to daylight? Now speak, thing; so open your mouth, vellum. Those who don’t write readily believe that it’s a matter of placing previously conceived words or ideas on a medium the way a child would throw pebbles along a path that’s already been opened up or sow seeds in the furrow plowed by his father, but those who spend their lives writing know that their bodies want to perforate the thickness of a partition in order to invent the chimney of meaning, the fold, the complex, the set of object-subject edges. Writing, like sculpture and mummification, carries on the ceremony of the Opening of the Mouth, or precedes it in the same sense. The written is the vocality of things.
It is thus that the stories of corpses lying in horse statues, like their soul or secret, their vanished motor, can be understood, stories of nested mummies of queens inside golden bulls, bodies, unique or multiple, of women, of armies in the carcasses of animals, equipped or not with hatches by which they can be seen and touched, by which something, possibly, leaves or enters, and might make its voice heard. Did the horse, introduced into Troy, whinny or did the horde of Greek hoplites surge up from its mouth amidst the tumult and clamor? What complaint climbed to the sky from the mouth of Baal-hamon when, in the fire’s roaring, it devoured three hundred and sixty first-born children howling in its red armor? The shepherd Gyges looked through the hatches in the side of the horse at the remains of the sacrificed king. Flaubert tore the paper with his quill so that we might see the horror of children burnt in the belly of Baal through the page’s tattered remains.
The statue first takes the form of a black and unhewn box, unformed. That the sculptor drills to free its secret: perfumes arranged in the cabinet of ugly Socrates with the sculptor father. The work can begin again: in the inert matter, the horse; in the horse, the corpse; and so on as much as you please? What is to be discovered beneath the dead man’s open lips? When the mouth is opened in the mass, you don’t know just how far it goes. A chimney of explanation or knowledge, of the exit toward the daylight.
Leibniz described a set of monads or monks without any doors or windows, substances that maintain no relation between themselves or with the world except in God and through God, guarantor of harmony.2 These islands draw everything from their own depths: no one hears these music boxes, without apertures, that play, interiorly, for God and through Him.
Condillac constructed a marble statue and reserved for himself the liberty of acting on the entryways for the senses by opening and closing a defined window by which a specified piece of information would penetrate, a single and well-filtered one. It began with a scent of rose. The description focuses on pores: it develops the meaning of the word “empiricism,” or this latter sums up the essential.
In the scientific age, we speak of black boxes, of input and output, and we assess flows and their directions. We laugh at an out-dated philosophy that using a similar language nonetheless said nothing else. I suppose this philosophy would have laughed in turn at those strange superstitions that gathered priests and attendees around a statue or a mummified corpse for the ceremony at which a closed mouth was opened. Highly civilized, the Egyptians present there would surely have laughed at the prehistoric fertility statues, women with open vulvas, giving birth or not, of the Pre-Columbian gates, very often closed. In the age of science, we debate open and closed systems without always suspecting our heritages, metaphysical, religious, savage, without being conscious of our immobilities. What have we invented since our prehistory?
Marble, armor, carcass, raw matter, dead flesh, skin, the chimney passes through strata that hide those strata one wants to free, the inert ones enveloping the living ones, the objective ones engaging the subject encumbered by them, lying under them which lie before it. If the strata were juxtaposed like sheets, work—easy—would only consist in detaching them. One would deleaf the variety the way one leafs through a book. But they mix in such a way that the chimney descends exactly into the varied. We don’t always know how to decide whether, in writing or sculpting, we’re cutting into the dead or the living, into the objective or subjective, nor when we reach the deciding authority that explains, free of gangue. Doesn’t the pure reason lying behind the sensing statue’s marble amount, once again, to a myth that it would still be necessary to drill? The mouth opens in a mixed body.
How to name this mixture—today still without name, but so frequent and widespread—of an inert and dead object in itself on the one hand and a living, animate, luminous, transparent subject? Flesh?
In this place in the world—the mouth, Schopenhauer’s for example, but also the Knight of Hadoque’s, who was statufied on the island—the world as such is annulled so as to give way to Will or Representation.3 Language, voice, speech dictate and erase things so as to envelop or fill them with subject. The mouth creates a desert around itself in order to cry in the desert. The chimney, in plumes of vapor and waves, belches out some me and us. In these places in the world—the mouths—the world is summarized and concentrated: it is born from them, mouths which give the world; no more objects.
How do the mouths work? As usual. Whoever wants to appropriate things makes them into bodies mixed with himself, inundates them then with his own productions, sweat, breath, odor, urine, feces or signature, emissions of waves or ink, filth, orders and cries. Pure idealism properly expresses the stercoraceous origin of property, whether personal or collective, whether voluntary despotism or represented exchange. It vomits on a root so as to appropriate it, reeks as a means to chase away whoever is approaching, spits out its denture, splutters saliva or writes.
A first manner of writing signs a pure and clean surface with an “I,” a surface that this manner appropriates by dirtying it, the way a voice, deafening a space, drives the occupants away. Likewise certain products are sold signed so that even their buyers don’t possess them, robbed as though in a dark alley; the seller most certainly keeps them since possessing consists in depositing one’s brand or signature on an object. Likewise again, interpretation steals. It substitutes the signature of a parasite for that of the producer, eaten.
In any case, a body mixed with subject appears.
Here is an object, supposing it exists. Before it, the writer kneels. Holds the breath of his mouth and his excrement, washes his hands three times and purifies his entire body. Lavabo inter innocentes manus meas et circumdabo altare tuum.4 I will approach your altar trembling. I know, I learn that there is no pure “I”; the “I” is the source of every impurity. We should write without signing. We should never talk about the thing, but make it, let it speak. May phenomenology not discourse on the phenomena, rather may the appearance, the apparition itself speak. May the angel come and may it announce. May the day shine without me. And the death that ravishes the light from my eyes returns all its purity to the day it was soiling. See with the day’s eyes, open the thing’s mouth. Drill furrows, wells, trap doors into the paper so that meaning emerges from there, so that the voice of things passes through the holes made in this white garment. Writing bores through walls or the ground so that geysers or streaming cascades can gush forth, sweeping along with their powerful flow the arm that pierced the dam and rolling it afar.
The object inundates the subject; a short while ago, this latter overflowed onto the former. In any case, these two major authorities in no way resemble two solids, confronting each other face to face, crockery dogs glaring at one another, but rather two sources and some flows, that sometimes diverge, separated, but often flow together.5 The mixed body of subjective and objective abounds, stake, merchandise, fetish, the lived body, historical monument, the world and self. We can only grasp or understand this mixture under the condition, physical, of forgetting the solid state, the supposed crystal compactness of the metaphysical authorities, and of granting them a fluid state. It’s a question here of a good solution.
We are seeking to describe the emergence of the object, not only of the tool or the beautiful statue, but of the thing in general, ontologically speaking. How did the object come to hominity? Before this coming, the body that has received no name in philosophy reigned, the originary knot, the confluence or confusion, the mixture of subject with object, the flesh or mixed body.
Yet our mixed body, everywhere a subject in a mobile way, an object through and through, suddenly solidifies without recourse, stiffened by death.
The corpse was the first object for men. Posed before them like a problem and an obstacle, lying. Any other thing, tree, stone, animal could or can enter into property, individual, collective, private, public and in this last case merchandise, stake or fetish. Before the dead body, every subject draws back: the dead body lies there, cutting out its space, larger lying down than standing, more terrifying dead than alive.
Also the first solid: stiff, hard, rigorous, coherent, consistent, absolutely stable, the first stone statue.
But through decomposition or corruption the dead man continues to emit flows of liquid or air that invade and can dirty the environment: the lying subject pursues and uncontrolledly increases the subjection of the surrounding space. No violence would be able to stop it.
Working on the dead body therefore objectivizes it and solidifies it as well. All our knowledge and all our practices are there in embryo. Like the creator at the first minute of the world or the philosopher preparing analytical minutiae as conditions of thought, the mummifier separates the solids from the fluids, the consistent from the vague, the stable from the unstable, the form from the chaos, the distinct from the confused, the bones from the entrails. Emergence and constitution, by this last word I understand the stabilization of bodies and the birth of statues.
This very first work on the primordial object by the subject beginning at the dawn of culture puts the flowing and quickly corruptible organs into appropriate vases, the organs removed, separated, and then hardens all the rest even if it means constructing a hundred nested armor-plates of linen, cartonnage, varnished wood, marble, and granite around the skeleton dressed in dry salted leather.
Mummy: the second statue after the corpse; the first object fashioned or produced, analyzed, the second solid.
The hieroglyph shaped like an ax or a flag—a brush?—translated by the Greeks as “god” and pronounced neter (ntr), also signifies natron, the bath salt in which the corpses were purified while being mummified: primordial and final waters in which the dead body solidified for seventy days.
Can it be translated into French as the onction [unction] during which the remains of a man are smeared with balm here and there? In return, the sign, supremely sacred, would designate the anointed one or the Christ in the Greek and then universal language. Dead, the Messiah did not undergo embalming but received unction with precious nard over his living body before his passion.
We are born or resurrected from these liquids.
The shadowy mouth gapes from the empty tomb.
In the rite of Extreme Unction, the priest anoints the nearly cadaverous body of the dying person with holy chrism on the closed eyes, the ears, nostrils, mouth, hands, and feet, saying: by this unction and His very lenient mercy, may the Lord pardon you the sins committed through the sense of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Zola described this white erasing in The Dream. The ceremony of the Opening of the Mouth returns and becomes generalized to all the orifices or to all the doors of experience; it purifies the five senses, washes away their stains, the holy oil replacing the flows emitted or received by the apertures.
In The Five Senses, during the banquet of life, a local cogito causes sensitive and already subjective regions to be born on the body, regions that melt or eliminate the plates of necrosis and anesthesia, the impotent stiffness and inert frigidity by bathing them with a fervent and gentle streaming; these softened pieces assemble themselves, stitch and knit together little by little and vaguely in order to clothe or construct a specific body, multi-colored, personal, approximate and singular, different from the one that says “I” by speech, but quite ready to listen to it.
These local pieces come undone at the same time that they’re being constructed; the body dies and not only at the article of the agony. The rite of Extreme Unction itemizes the articles. We fall into tatters and endlessly search for an idea, a love, a woman, an Other, or a melody to bring the scattered parts into harmony and sow a subject again. As soon as the limbs fall, they become objects. The corpse, the statue shatter, giving birth to things.
Formerly they would throw the Cycladic statues that were broken into pieces into tombs: with flowers spread, limbs scattered in the sarcophagi, stiff, dead, cold originary objects, pieces closely related to the corpse, produced by it.
An act symmetrical to the local cogito, for which we do not yet have any name in philosophy, causes the object to emerge. Or founds it.
To the unification of the living regions corresponds the rupture of the entire dead body. A mixed flow, oriented, goes on one side toward a subject pole, its complete language, passing through the sensorial body’s multi-coloredness, while on the other goes toward an objective pole and its complete laws, passing through the decomposedness of the dead body, a mummy or statue.
The Five Senses describes the mixed or multi-colored body in its light movement toward subjective, happy and soon to be unitary intensity; I’m describing it today at the same place and in the same state but making an opposite or complementary swerve toward the objects’ multiple compactness. We don’t know the status of this intermediary mixed body.
The mouth opens a chimney through which the mixed flow transits.
It forgets that it has teeth. It—slack, a flexible tongue, quite moist, a mobile veil, viscous mucus, labile tissue, ceaselessly lubricated, a source mouth, spring, funnel, delta, transmitting, receiving waves in its conch or horn, aerial and fluid therefore—thinks it’s smooth and wholly for itself—a canal or flagstone without obstacle or baffle, going to malacia—whereas it’s hidden behind the hard barrier of the jaws and teeth, which construct the laugh and the word, without which, loose and flaccid, the cheeks would collapse over a hideous and wrinkled hole, hard teeth, solid, crystalline, aggressive, sensitive and insensitive, easily broken, extractable, replaceable by stones and bridges, objects. Can you imagine extracting the tongue in order to screw a wooden organ in its place? Whereas for the teeth or palate, a plate or sculpted stump of gold can be substituted.
An object–subject border that’s so close to us it dissolves. We incorporate more or less make-up or masks, wigs, appearances. But false teeth abandon the mask for the face, become set in it, fitted to the living flesh of the subject, similar to it, alike, identical to a part of it.6 The body integrates them, forgets gold, ivory, steel or bone immediately in order to make its own flesh of them, by inundating the thing, by filling it with subjectivity the way a sponge swells with wine. The flows of the mouth bathe the teeth that also produce the flows of the mouth.
The dying old man tells of the dead Schopenhauer; the double short story traces back in time. What comes out of the living mouth covers everything with representation and will; but what suddenly appears from the dead lips enters into the world like a thing. What issues from the living inundates the environment and appropriates it, what escapes from the dead body becomes a thing of the world. We discover this during a night of old, in anxiety. Will the dentures still bite, inert, solid, cold, immobile, artificial, false, and fabricated, but as such invested with the clever genius that made them, foreign to him who speaks?
Only the dentures will be left of the decomposing body, entirely taken over by the process that will bring it back to elementary flows; it will only leave this skeleton of the skeleton, harder than bone, more resistant because stony and fabricated. From Schopenhauer, the disciples only inherit his books and his dentures, the soft and the hard of their master’s voice, two artificial things, two fetishes, stone and inscriptions. Everything Lucretius called simulacra.
The postiche is distinguished from the prosthesis the way a tenant is from the owner, by the sealing. The former is put on, wig or make-up, chignon, breast, eyelash, braid, or mask and is easily taken off, the second is incorporated: the one artificial like the other. The dentures, well-imitated, similar to the true, well-prepared or readied, are sealed or put in, in any case can be detached more or less easily.
We feel with our entire body that our organs can be detached. We make ourselves incomplete, we set sail piece by piece and in totality.7 A tragic experience but a drama without which there would neither be knowledge nor experience. We leave ourselves; the verb “to experience” says so of itself.
We are surprised with good right at the term “artificial:” why does it signify the false at the same time as the fabricated?8 Certainly owing to imitation, image, and fakery, from the similar to the same. But also from a contempt toward art. Industry first signifies the trickery of crooked industrialists. Inundated for two centuries with produced objects, we have been forgetting that our languages still shout into our ears that we are living in the falsehood and forgery of fabricated places. I have no doubt that Mérimée’s9 or Maupassant’s narratives, ceaselessly tracing back in time, were equivalent to powerful anamneses at a time when objects were growing vertiginously around them. From what upstream does this deluge flow? Have you on occasion counted how few objects our ancestors, theirs, used? That their rarity came rather from art? And suddenly industry multiplies the things that then become part of our needs, that satisfy and produce them, via a spiral that creates a new world and unexpected bodies. How can we not pose the question of origin? Yet philosophers don’t ask it, still under the spell of the subject or the collective. A few writers recount it therefore, in their common language, blindly, in a climate of dream, anxiety and fantastical madness. Yet when philosophy isn’t said in a canonical and received language, no one recognizes it any longer.
The mad growth of the artificial therefore leads to the question of primitive fetishism. How are fetishes, the postiche, the prosthesis born?
“Since you say you know everything, oh Dionysodorus, do you know how many teeth Euthydemus has? And does Euthydemus know how many you have?” Socrates, asking this question, cruelly bites two vain, toothless old men in front of an audience of young men with dazzled laughs. Plato drew the advertising poster for the aggressive Silenus, his master, and stuck it up on the walls of Athens: look in passing at the carnivorous smiles, triumphant, showing, as in our time, incisors and canines. Knowledge is measured, like strength, by the number of teeth. How many are falling out of your mouth, oh Dionysodorus? Euthydemus doesn’t know how to count them. You, the toothless ones, will lose the battles (Plato, Euthydemus, 294c).
The combat of ideas descends to hand-to-hand: the lowest arguments, ignoble, are over the face of the adversary, his strength or beauty.10 A dog, Socrates gnaws absolute knowledge in the face, across his hideous smile. The mouth, that absolute knower, no longer knows that blurry border of the object with the subject where the one mixes with the other, the barrier of the teeth: the first arms, knives, incisive daggers, neighbors of speech, in the eye-for-an-eye combat.
Demosthenes, they say, used to fill his mouth with pebbles in order to test his eloquence on the beach facing the clamoring surf: did he want to bombard the assembled people the next day with vociferations, arguments, flying extended sentences and spat-out rocks, to stone them with discourse?
Teeth cut and pierce—precise—practice analysis and dichotomy, tear; and suddenly leave the palate in order to bite from a distance. Animals tear to pieces or gnaw right on the face, but Socrates, but Voltaire, Demosthenes, and Schopenhauer destroy at the range of writing, from the distance of time and history. Dead, they still bite the living and the dead. Voltaire’s hideous smile still flits around his bones: Maupassant comments on Musset’s distich with his German short story, but both recount how the teeth, migrating from the jaws via the written or spoken, at the same time as the tongue, kill, overturn, cut down, ravage, gut, slay, and destroy.11
Count how many teeth a text has.
Say, distinctly: critique. In front of a mirror, count the incisors or canines you have left, your big ferocious dog molars for speculative battles.
Did the aging Schopenhauer retain all his mordancy after having lost his teeth, replaced by dentures?12 Yes, since he could then destroy from a distance like Samson with his jawbone of an ass. Even dead, he carried the battle as far as his putrefaction.
Orthopedics develops by continuous and stricto sensu insensible degrees: from the false tooth felt to be real to the phantom limb replaced by a hook, always false, from the glass eye that will never see, although sometimes seen as living by those around, to the vagina made of plastic where it’s said that rejoicing can be born.13 The object becomes integrated into the subject as best it can; the subject, more or less, appropriates the object, like a transplant with or without rejection. But an insensible, frigid, anesthetized part can play the role of an object: how many people carry arms and legs, back or feet, their muscles, their genitals like toupees?
The mixed body remains to be thought as an intensity in which the for-itself inundates, bathes, occupies a certain volume with vague outlines and from which it withdraws. We feel our living body in this way; we experience what leaves the dead body. Meditation on death and life precedes the philosophy of the object or the subject, the philosophy of knowledge. We, inheritors of the second philosophy, have a lot of trouble thinking the living body, even inhabiting it or knowing it; we, plunged in a deluge of objects, have all the trouble in the world locating the place from which they emerge, death being hidden from us by their production.
I don’t think there is a human history with a longer reach than the one at the end of which the object emerges: a clear and simple history that rises from a corpus that’s scorned or too revered under the various names of short stories, rites, myths, tales, narratives, fantasies, hallucinated experiences, medical and psychiatric files, false knowledge and true science, the history of objects setting sail [appareillant] from the dead body.
Schopenhauer, therefore, wore the apparatus dentures [un appareil].
Formerly this word was employed to express pomp and ceremony [l’apparat]: décor or royal, religious and funereal splendor. One woman wakes up naked as the day she was born [dans le plus simple appareil]; another is shown in a dream pompously adorned as on the day of her death:14 nudity of the warm and living body, desirable; overload of ornaments that weigh so much at the article of the agony. Preparations [apprêts] to appear before the supreme judge.
An apparatus [appareil], on the other hand, is equivalent to a system: a set of elements and relations forming a whole for a function. The organism thus includes a digestive or urogenital apparatus: modern science, speaking Ancient Greek, prefers the word “system” in the anatomical disciplines. Surgeons, for their part, no longer put a broken limb in a splint [appareil]. But orthopedics, an old practice that developed slowly up until today, now becoming lightning-fast, has retained the word, for dentures for example. Let’s therefore remember that the same term designates a set of living organs or some artificial substitute.
Veils, coats, bracelets, crowns, or masks can be talked about in a similar way [pareillement] as real or false teeth, as wooden legs. An effort has to be made to conceive of a gown or a hat as postiche. Or as makeup that might have taken on the aspect of dress.
A building can display stones of large, medium or small bond [appareil], depending on the dimensions and thickness of the materials used in the masonry, depending on the layout of the construction. The elements of the system harden. Mechanism, machine, instrument, the appareil henceforth assembles pieces or organs destined for a work or a production, sometimes for an experiment. The mechanical, chemical, electric industries today manufacture appliances [appareils] by means of robotic apparatuses [appareils], the human body being excluded more and more from their assembly lines.
Finally, popular language absolutely uses the word two or three ways: for the joined metallic rods in the palate that straighten the teeth; for the box that takes photographic pictures; for an airplane. The appareil puts the mouth straight, immobilizes appearance, takes off. Like a rocket.
It sets sail [appareille].
Everything strange in this matter comes from this word.15
The body is composed of apparatuses: respiratory, digestive, locomotor, etc. The technical world proliferates with apparatuses, technologies, and machines. Right in the middle of the two systems, the living and the fabricated, orthopedics substitutes via prostheses the second ones for the first ones. An old man, having had an accident, bears a femur head made of special metal or dentures. The orthopedic prosthesis must, for the effectiveness or reliability of the thing, perfectly resemble the living organ being replaced. They must therefore be the same [pareils]. It’s well said that two friends or lovers are or seem to be perfectly matched [appareillés]. You might say the real and its image, its negative. Popular language is never mistaken.
And thus is said the movement of departure. Assume first the series of three appareils, living, orthopedic, and objective. Immobile, they’re perfectly matched [appareillés], well imitated by each other. In the photograph, you’d swear that he laughs with his real and white teeth. But suddenly, the object sets sail.
It leaves the body. No, it doesn’t extend the body the way telescopes lengthen the sense of sight or the stick is added to the arm. No. It sets off. Independent. Like a rocket.
Did you see his soul take off across the bay trees? No, we saw, saw with our own two eyes, the dentures set sail [l’appareil appareiller].
Underneath a piece of furniture? Certainly. In 1890, in the short story “Who Knows?,” one of the last before the writer’s death amid the howls that came out of his mouth, the furniture itself, mobile of course, but suddenly automobile, set sail out of the house.16
Wandering like Maupassant, faithful like him to the naming, and definitively outside the there. Outside the “here lies” or the layer.