Sisyphus’s work is fascinating owing to its eternal return: the same rock ceaselessly falls back to the start, and the same hero always rolls it to the top of the same slope. A certain romanticism, idly blind to what we undertake every morning made by the hand of God—dredging the silt that returns in the port, irrepressible, washing what gets dirty, separating what gets mixed, repairing holes and wear and tear, winding watches—makes us sorrowfully discourse on our absurd condition, whereas the myth furnishes a correct definition of work—force and displacement—and its dynamic measure at the same time as it describes its natural condition of indefinite resumption; or the absurdity must be understood in its scientific resonance, for it is indeed a question of a perpetual motion in its three types, mechanical, thermodynamic, informational, an eminent example of what experiment refuses: a weight does not climb back up by itself; energy does not recreate itself; negentropy must be paid for.1 Here then is a set that works all by itself, the perfect, gapless cycle, impossible and supernatural; at the doorway to the Underworld, from the entry on, eternity is measured by a clock: the fall of the rock ticks the motionless seconds.
Now the interpretations of the myth, including my own and its scientific calculation, only speak of the scene and the hero, guilty, miserable, sentenced to hard labor. We only ever see ourselves; human speech debates crime and punishment endlessly.
But, stubborn, the myth shows the perpetual fall of the rock. It always falls back down; it has fallen, it will fall. Someone brings it back up; pushes it back, forces it back, throws it back, defers it, moves it away, drives it back, shifts it, takes it away, and here it is returned: it comes back here just as often. Yet however much it may return identical to itself to the same place, no one ever talks about it. Put anything whatsoever in its place—a statue of a god, a table or a basin—and the interpretations will not vary. Yet how can we shout more loudly that we notice it than by this silent obstinacy? Can you find a better case of blindness? From the bottom of the ages, from the hollow of the underworld, from an abyss of pain, the narrative repeats that a thing returns there, and we only talk about he who evacuates it, narcissuses.
And if for once we looked at the rock, invariably present beneath our eyes, the stubborn object, thrown, fallen, lying before?
Here is the figure of a loss of memory: the shadow of a force brings back up into the shadow the shadow of a rock without it reaching the light of day. The memory is reborn, recurring, and the mechanism, inexorably, drives it back into forgetfulness. We leave the thing in obscurity: and yet it turns and returns there. We recall the crimes of the condemned man and lament the eternal expiation, another way to pity ourselves for our work conditions. Sisyphus himself seems to brood over his culpability, concentrated on his effort in the shadow of the rock. Just as we forget what we’re working on and what we repress during the course of the day, cadenced by our schedules and watches, similarly the convict doesn’t seem to see the thing he’s pushing back before him, as though nothing were there. But the things of the world take silent vengeance for acts that nullify them.
We have forgotten the ancient times; Sisyphus no longer remembers his old parents. Aeolus’s son, he descends from Pyrrha, Pandora’s daughter, the first woman with the primordial black box. The men of the Bronze Age got lost in so many vices and crimes that Zeus, to punish them, drowned them in the Deluge, with the exception of Pyrrha and her husband Deucalion who together constructed an ark, a chest again, in which they floated for nine days and nine nights. Apart from the chest or the capital collected in the box, we’ve lost all memory of the antediluvian world effaced beneath the waters and silt. We no longer remember such an old moment; the destruction of humanity took place, meanwhile: the ark contained the only monuments of the archaic period. When Deucalion and Pyrrha landed, Hermes, sent by Zeus, ordered them to throw the bones of their mother over their shoulders. Frightened of impiety, Pyrrha refused but Deucalion understood that it had to do with stones, the bones of our mother, the Earth. More Noah than Adam, Deucalion therefore threw the stones over his shoulder, from which men were born; less Eve than Pandora, Pyrrha likewise threw the stones behind her, from which women arose.
And once again forgetfulness covered the things: the inundation hid the plain and the hills, the entire relief of the past; the hermetic message remained incomprehensible; the creation happened behind the backs of the first couple. We no longer remember either the earth or the stones. And yet after a several generation interval, beneath the earth, the ancient stones came back. Did Sisyphus have to push the bones of his mother, of my mother, the Earth, back into the shadows? Did he have to endlessly reinter the corpse of his parents? This corpse was exactly reborn, since behind their backs their children arose from those bones; and him and us and those that followed. This rolled stone, we had lost all memory that it was at the same time our immemorial anteriority and our total posterity, that is, the human race. Stones form the skeletons of the dead and the seeds of the future.
Scholars generally refuse popular customs or prefer to look down on them by studying them: for do you know a more humiliating position than that of the observed or described subject? Now it was said, already, in Antiquity, that Sisyphus’s proper name hid poorly the common name for the wise man such as it can be found in the title philosopher. How many of the learned wouldn’t get irritated at hearing themselves ridiculously called Sosophes? But the people, for whom the meaning of the apt nickname has never been belied, observe in return and describe, surely, a loveless science or wisdom.
Buried in silence among the taciturn shades, outside the buzzing language above the ground, this science or wisdom works at a pure loss at the rock of our foundations on which it will be said that the community will be built. We tread on the earth, we drive back the rock, we look down on vernacular names, we’ve forgotten everything.2 For do you know a worse position or one more external to what counts for men than that of the entire scene below the earth? Subject, certainly, but also humiliated object.
We must return to the foundations.
You are Peter [Pierre] and on this rock [pierre], I will build my Church. This founding sentence plays off a single word: the limestone thing, the corporeal flesh and the first name, a puff of wind and meaning, all exchange their functions and places by substitution; the Church, on the other hand, an instituted assembly calling a number of corporated individuals by every name, in turn, changes into a hard edifice and substitutes for it.3 The man founds the community the way the thing does for a building. The series implicates or unfolds: the inert, the living, a singular, the constructed, the given, language, in all the hard and the soft, but also what depends on us, building, and what depends much less on us, knowing how to form an “us” and which sometimes occurs by blows of rocks, in stonings. Who has ever stated, with greater economy, an ontological maxim that’s as complete and as brief? How to mark the return of rock at each level or function more insistently?
The building stands if the rock supports it.4 Translating the maxim, the traditional language of philosophy talks endlessly about statues: it calls substance the stay or the support that in the final analysis conditions stability; but the founding sentence exactly describes a transubstantiation: from living or dead flesh to inert rock, thing or statue, from the body to its proper name, substantive, and from everyone to a Church or institution, the whole by a chain of substitutions. What, truly, remains stable across these changes or substitutes if not the rock itself, always invariant and returning, in the word, the name, the body, the thing, the construction and the assembly?
How to say with more insistence and truth that everything is founded on it?
The eternity of the punishment follows a final judgment: definitive, without appeal. Punished by the gods themselves, Sisyphus no longer has any recourse. Philosophy, for once, reaches what happens after the ultimate authority.
We therefore speak about the man whose fate interests us and never about the rock whose distressing return only touches us by means of the torture it brings back. We see the case, blind to the thing: the human, moral, criminal, judicial case, debated and then decided by civil, political, divine tribunals, from the county court to the ultimate authority, hides the thing from us for eternity.5
Yet, it turns. Like an unpaid bill, the stone infinitely represents itself again. Not in the head or through some show, but with its weight and roughness.
A case already settled, a thing always owed, a stone endlessly there.
We finally understand why the myth of Sisyphus expresses perpetual motion or the eternal return so many times. The scandal or absurdity of a resumption without end always comes from the fact that, wherever this is represented, there is an effect without a factual cause.6 How is that possible?
Because the cause/case passes quite entirely to the side of the tribunal, of morality, of ethics, crime, arbitration, the social sciences, until its exhaustion, until no more of it is left for the things as such; passes quite entirely onto the head of that accused that it charges with all of his offenses as well as those of past history, as though the rock by itself had no weight nor the earth any slope or gravity. The law according to which heavy bodies fall, ignored, is effaced so as to leave room only for the one that passes through the jury’s mouth or the tribunal’s decision.
Thus the Latin language called the object of the judicial procedure or the case itself res, the thing, from which we derive “reality,” so that, for the Ancients, the accused bore the name reus because the magistrates summoned him. As though the only human reality came from tribunals alone. The real only weighs on Sisyphus through the authority that sentenced him. Positive law precludes or hides natural law. The rock falls because the decree fell.
And yet it turns. Giordano Bruno, Galileo, and many others as well from history forced a passage from cases to things, precisely before and despite the tribunals, against the assemblies. They substituted the law of physics for the rules of the court and the rules of law, a ball that rolls on an inclined plane in a lawful manner for the guilty king sentenced to the underworld. The case was forgetting the things; the thing will leave the cases/causes, except for those that are followed by simple effects.
The myth of Sisyphus, a sage or scholar with a reviled name, stages the archaeology of falling bodies. The rock falls all by itself, no more guilty party.
Myth ignores nature and only knows history. If for example it recounts that it rained stones somewhere it conceals the crowd of lapidaters in the neuter subject of this verb. Nature for it is only the reserve of unavowable histories. Consequently, things and stones, hard, remain outside an enclosed zone that’s blocked and sealed off, in aiding one another, by legend, courts of law, politics, in short, all the social sciences, which are only occupied with relations. They’re equivalent to each other in the softness of languages: history is as good as myth, and religion as good as politics and so on … since, commonly, all of them ignore the things. This sealed zone that’s entirely devoted to the light languages sends the hard handled by the convicts back into the underworld, a hard heaped with scorn and transformed into shadow.
No culture, ever, has sculpted a god for gravity. The fall of bodies came, in the absence of this god, when the convict made the rock emerge from its underground room.
I began my writing life by meditating on statues and finished my first work with the place of reference, generalized into interference in the second.7 The stone commander, hard, leaves the fixed spot determined by it and resurrects from the tomb so as to take there he who talks frantically, without faith, law or weight, soft. Here, already in place, is the stone and the death that gives meaning and direction to the place of settlement or tribulation. Although mathematical, at the subtle forefront of demonstration and logos, the approach weighed itself down at its birth with a mass of granite or marble: thus Thales, in the shadow of the Pyramids, made soft and light geometry rise from their millions of tons.
The statues never ceased to return, in the course of a thousand feasts, parasitical or sensory, and over the course of a hundred voyages: in the Scottish coal basin, following Verne, in The Child of the Cavern or in the cave full of amethysts and rubies in which the young chemist of The Vanished Diamond, dazzled, discovers at the same time the tomb and the source from which the black diamond came that disappeared from its pedestal as if by magic. Lucretius demonstrates the existence of atoms by means of the long wearing away of idols beneath the caresses and light kisses of their worshippers: even stone wears away. Comte and Zola explain themselves through the opposition of motors to staters. At the bottom of the loggias of the Vatican, Tommaso Laureti painted as a trompe-l’oeil a vertiginous ceiling whose vertical chimney is interrupted by a crucifix placed on a column from which a Hermes has just fallen, breaking. The Exaltation of the Faith makes the hermetic corpus broken into scattered, petrified appendages fly above our heads and at the feet of the Word. Here, the double death of the gods or the substitution of the new God for the old idol, of marble by speech fascinates or aspirates upwards, a replacement carried to its utmost refinement since the divine Hermes was already carrying the word, oral or written, the angel of the old gods and annuciator of the News. But doesn’t the word “substitution” repeat the act of passing under the statue? Have I ever ceased, thinking I was wandering, substituting one boundary stone for another? The reclining statues of lectisternia for the flying stones of lapidations? And the idol whose doors open to nameless odors weren’t of any use to Condillac and the statue of snow Diogenes hugged, the naked philosopher …
This convict’s work that’s deaf to the dominant languages moved these heavy rocks in the dark without recompense or cease. Philosopher, who will say it? Sisyphus in any case.
This ceaselessly resumed work, in which this invariant appears, finally allows, here, the trajectory of the stone to be plotted that no one, ever, has drawn. At the base of the slope where breath is caught, the bottom of the tomb gapes, the shadowy mouth; at the top of the hillside where the rock goes up again, at effort’s end, a trapdoor opens onto the day that dimly lights the thing’s path, all of history being taken up again or implicated at each station; stemming from among the dead, from the underworld, from the tombs or from Egypt, dried out bones of fossil forefathers, a black box, the thing emerges from there, endlessly falls back there, but sometimes stands up outside the ground, menhir, meteor, cairn, cippus or funerary statue, gate, tower, soon to be shaped, finely carved, openworked, open, complex, and—miracle—mobile … rocketing toward the sky. Climbs certainly but, most often, falls again to the same place, to restart once again.
An anadyomene thing, stemming from beneath the ground by means of the convicts’ mole strength along the geodesic line of the fall, but in reversing its direction.
Does it finally leave the underworld? On that Sunday of philosophy, Sisyphus will rest.
After the solutions that efface the problems, problems without solutions reappear, quasi-invariant across variations; actively dredged, the sands of river mouths are replaced there in equilibrium and the mouth becomes congested, as though thickened; the environment collapses under the pressure of a conquest that destroys its own conditions; work produces work that precedes work; viruses without cures suddenly occupy the place purified by the cures for the viruses. In total, the things of the world return in the very hollow of the terms that say they efface them.