How he escaped from the thundering abyss where the clamors, the crashes, cries, clanking, motors and dull musics, vibrations and moanings tear from the damned of this world and the other their flesh, their soul and substance, the inner voice of their conscience so as to make vapors, scarcely upright floating specters of them, he couldn’t have said: fingernails on the lyre and ear at string level, he escaped, in one piece, the torments of the din. The deafening acclamations of the vote hadn’t torn him to bits. Does death decompose us into shreds, rot, and dust by destroying the harmony of our joints through slaps of noise?
He was climbing the internal slope of the crater, scarcely emerging from the chimney. The underworld sinks into an end of the world chaos in which rhythmless and endless explosions, burstings, and deflagrations make a hubbub that’s symmetrical, billions of years after, it seems, to the confusion of the origin: from this latter comes everything, from the former never anything. And yet the two chaoses approach one another to the point of almost becoming contemporaries and mix in the course of real time, which skips here and there without us being able to decide whether it shoots out toward newness or descends into platitude. The destruction of flesh and things makes noise; the noise destroys things and flesh.
Enchained to the weft of the strings, unified by harmony, carried along with the rhythm, lifted by inspiration, Orpheus’s body had resisted. Whether he had saved his skin or the nudity of his lover long dead and buried or the corpus of his works, he couldn’t have said. Who ever knows what his own life trails behind it, like a comet’s tail?
He who composes descended into the underworld to abduct Eurydice’s body. If he follows the easy path that falls away toward the pit, his eyes and face are turned in the right direction, for the light, coming from behind, lights up the shadow. The fall into decomposition follows the easiest slope: you can’t go wrong when you add fragments to the fracas. Everything begins on the climb back up during which, on the contrary, the light hinders: the eyes can no longer see where the feet are going. You mustn’t turn around.
Orpheus delivers his own recomposed body from the easy analytic, plus Eurydice whom he loves and brings back, the companion, equal, mistress, inspiration, muse who merges with the music, piece by piece, composed measure by measure, a precariously balanced chord supported by the preceding one and following each another in a loss of equilibrium along a free melodic path.
If he turns around, the music vanishes.
Abraham’s nephew and separated from him, settled in the Jordan Valley in which five cities are situated, among which are Gomorrah and Sodom, one evening Lot learns, from two angels come from heaven to spend the night at his house, that the following day the two sinful cities are going to collapse under a rain of stones and fire. He escapes in the early morning from that terrible place in the company of his two unmarried and promised to incest daughters, as well as his wife. You mustn’t turn around.
In hell, behind, the dead bury the dead and the living bury each other living: and if we decided never to look at the ordinary and interesting things that happen there, violence, chaos, destruction, history? Lot’s wife hears the explosions and din; a fiery blast burns her and pushes her from behind: struck with pity for those who are shouting with terror and distress, called, jostled, terrified, she turns around. And sees. Seized with horror, punished, she congeals into a statue of salt.
Let her turn around, and a sculpture will appear.
The surviving family watches her change into a living pillar, proof that she was fleeing in front, the first escapee. Why did she turn around? Why did she become solidified? A Gomorrahn herself, was she showing solidarity with all the women and men who were transforming around the Dead Sea into blocks in the sheet of natron?
It seems that stones from a rare shower were falling on these cities and men: everyone became petrified, like the woman. Covered with stones coming from the sky. It was raining. Who rains when it rains, particularly stones? Who is concealed behind the transparent, innocent, naturalized subject of the verb “to rain”? Who is stoning Sodom and Gomorrah? Likewise in Livy: it rained rocks that day as well as scraps of flesh that the predatory birds flying in the carnage seized to devour before they hit the ground.1 Is there any need for a haruspex to recognize vultures and the transparent scene of stoning? The executioners hide behind the names of birds or melt into the neuter pronoun. How many human laws seek to pass themselves off as laws of nature? Reciprocally, the naturalist reading or legend of myths and histories runs up against miracles: the explication, which did not understand, ought to have been brought under attack; it was preferable to scorn mythology. Natural miracles, here, the rain of stones, reveal how human atrocities are concealed. Flesh transformed into stone is a lapidated body. It rained shields or bracelets on Tarpeia; when it is recounted that a shield fell from the sky, search then for the vestal victim who was aimed at, search especially for he who aimed at her.
If, by this same stroke, Lot’s wife became, that day, a pillar or a statue, we might understand the prohibition of idols as a measure of mercy. Do not lapidate anyone any more so as to afterwards adore the statuary, a lapidary stone.
What is a statue? A living body covered with stones.
In the middle of the Ephesus Museum, standing, risen from our terror, Artemis or some other woman-goddess, unnamable whatever name may have been tossed on her, shows, naked, her breasts, her entire body covered with breasts, an immense proliferating cancer of mammaries, a multiparous mother with a pelvis full of ovaries, ova, eggs bursting her skin in order to spread all over her belly, a mother saturated with fecundities in dense vegetations: a polymastic monster, a statue on which breasts metastasize.
The monster shows birth in large numbers, the primary female, essential, with large and round cells. But what if we claimed that she bears fifteen breasts in order to transform her as well into a monster? By saying it, we’re casting her out and still stoning this poor body covered, in fact, in reality, with polished and heavy stones. In the past we left Tarpeia lying, knocked over beneath the mad burst of stones, strewn with corundum and beryl, tourmaline or lapis lazuli, a dazzling, incomprehensible source of value. Here she is, come back, resurrected, standing, lapidated, covered not with breasts but with the stones that the Sabines and we threw on her.
What is a statue? A stone body, lapidated.
We are nevertheless right to see and perceive proliferating breasts on this polymastic woman and to think her the great mother, the original fertile goddess of the Mediterranean basin. For the originary scene of lapidation or transformation into stone gives death and life and gives the object. We still suckle at these multiple and old breasts, sources of our cultural formations. The great death gave us life. We no longer remember whether we stoned or simply buried this dead body under a slab. But we do know that we owe our lives to it, us, resurrected children of this standing form. When she collapsed to the ground, at the moment when life left her, her beauty decomposed and became covered with an unnamable swarming of little lives. Our stones then covered over what has no name in any language. They substitute for the terrifying life after death. So, the stony tumulus—the first statue—in the silence before every language, at a blow tied life, death, body, and object, into a supernatural density from which everything surges, hominity as well as value, knowledge or speech. Yes, those stones became breasts or heavy and round female cells, irrepressible donors of food to the lineages that emerge from there as from their source.
The kingdom of Lydia is thought to have issued the first coins. Everything there speaks of gold: Croesus reigned there, rich; the Pactolus flowed there as well. King Midas, in neighboring Phrygia, transmuted everything he touched and only lost this cursed power, which he nearly died of, starving beneath fortune, by washing in this same Pactolus, in which he left the source of the auriferous flakes. It’s not advisable to transform oneself into a philosopher’s stone.
Gyges, a shepherd of the king of that locality, was peacefully grazing his flocks when a thunderstorm arose; an earthquake opened the ground, two lips gaped, repeating the earth on the left and right, as in the name Gyges.
What could be more banal than the everyday plain whose green grass the animals graze on? Undifferentiated like the desert in which the nomadic and pastoral tribes of Israel passed. On this dreary expanse, the lightning falls. The Romans used to put up a stone coping around the impact point. The earth opens. The same Romans used to celebrate the world’s manifest and dark gaping with a special festival: mundus patet. The well’s low wall highlights and conceals the trace that effaces the banality. Conversely, the indifference of space holds up when what comes from the sky melts and disappears like manna. After the white plain, another white plain. The manna melts like the icons, like the idols beneath the thunderbolt of the jealous God.
Gyges descends into the chaos of the origin to visit the place that was just born in the indifferent meadow. In the abyss, he first sees a horse: a bronze statue, hollow and pierced with little doors. Let’s not be deceived like the Trojans were by the horse shape: it’s a question of a box.
On the plain, Gyges doesn’t see anything. He doesn’t yet know that the earth is a box. The ground opens like a tomb; the black box is lit up a bit. What’s inside? A second box, white and black, with observation holes in its sides. Putting his head through the windows, the shepherd sees again. Blind and lucid, deprived or endowed with sight, he observes the box’s contents: a corpse, naked, of a more than human size. A sort of superman about whom we know nothing other than that he closes the series of what must be seen, other than that he completes the descent into the underworld or the origins.
What is a statue? Enclosed in a tomb, itself concealed in the ground, it encloses and conceals, as in a box, a corpse.
Who, passing today on the shores of the Dead Sea, suspects that this pile of solidified salt, glimmering in the sun, contains the corpse of Lot’s wife?
That gigantic dead man, naked, was wearing a gold ring on his hand. Naked like the plain itself, but remarkable in the place of the finger. Naked and wearing gold on that spot on the body. Covered with a small stone or collet, then covered with bronze like armor, lastly covered with earth. The ring lets almost everything be seen; the bronze envelope opens with several observation holes, but the burial closes everything, except in the exceptional circumstance of an earthquake. The increasing coverings correspond to the progressive discovery.
No one has said, but I hasten to do so, that the gemstone of the ring on the corpse’s finger was in the correct position: otherwise Gyges would never have seen the dead man, become invisible by the ring’s rotation. The ground would have hidden the tomb, and the tomb the statue, and the form of the horse the form of a man and the stone the corpse. Empty ground, empty tomb, empty statue, no remains. That’s the general case, where we don’t see anything when it’s a question of death and the object. The ground must shake or the volcano thunder.
*
Diodorus Siculus carefully described the Egyptian funeral ceremonies: how the corpse crosses the lake aboard a small boat whose pilot is named Charon, and the forty judges who take a seat all around and the trial of purity … we don’t know whether he had traveled there, whether he had copied out the Book of the Dead or of emerging forth into the daylight.2 But it’s claimed that Orpheus himself had witnessed similar funerals and derived his fable of the nether regions in part from what he had lived there. We will never know whether, in his narrative, the musician tore himself away from the underworld, emerged from the tomb or really returned from Egypt.
In the course of the long preparation of the dead body, which lasted more than seventy days, the Egyptian embalmers customarily placed a gold ring on the pinkie of the corpse’s left hand, on the collet of which jewelers mounted a scarab on which could be read, imprinted, the names and titles of the departed. The ring no doubt gave the deceased some power for they didn’t bury anyone, whether powerful or impoverished, without him wearing one. The scarab stones we have preserved symbolize, as we know, self-production, the world, and the father, resurrection. This coprophagic insect, which was in the past said to have no female, has fascinated our ancestors for millennia since Saint Ambrose still compared it to Christ, dead and resurrected: Saint Ambrose, whose name signifies immortality. What do we know about the man who is now exiting the tomb, a gold ring on his finger, in the middle of the plain and the day? Does he come back as humble, as pastoral as before, or is he reborn, already king, of a gigantic size? There is only one man in the story of Gyges.
The lying man, bigger reclining than standing and dead than living, shows the shepherd, besides his nudity, a ring whose collet gives power and glory to whoever wears it through withdrawing into the shadow or emerging forth into the daylight. Sometimes we fall into the dark night, sometimes we reappear in the light of the sun. And what if the Platonic book was translating the Book of the Dead into its abstract language? And what if the cave itself was repeating the shepherd’s vault or the Egyptian tomb? The gold ring’s lawful circle makes the corpse, the poor shepherd, and the sovereign king a single being in three persons through the power of the collet, self-production, rebirth.
The Lydian myth, recounted in Greek, brings us back again to Egypt and its funerals. And philosophy to its thanatocratic foundation.
Hellenic culture everywhere confesses its Egyptian debt. Before entering into the creation of the world by the Demiurge, as though it was a question of the absolute beginning of time, Plato at the start of the Timaeus presented an old priest or sage from over there who measured the overwhelming ancientness of his knowledge against the childhood of Greek science. “Still young, you don’t have,” he said, “any knowledge that has, like ours, gone gray with time. Catastrophes break up your history and make you forget antiquity.” The history of our sciences is always more or less in need of mythic anamneses. And Democritus pointed to the art of the harpedonaptai as the origin of geometry. The flooding Nile blurred the boundaries of the fields; it was necessary to measure the land once again when the waters receded, he said. Another origin myth parallel to what is said in the Timaeus: the mixed silt of earth and water produces a return to chaos; and order and measure, economy must be reborn from the confusion. Lastly, tradition has Thales facing the Pyramids in order to discover his theorem. As though mathematics also came from death.
Not only does myth draw us toward Egypt but science does too and its history, as though toward its interior and enveloped womb.
I know the same geometry that Thales and Democritus knew, my contemporaries in some way or in that thought: I don’t know, just as Democritus, Thales, and Plato didn’t know, the antiquity of the knowledge implicated in the flood or the pyramid. When we ask the question of the origin, we must think out who is accompanying us in time and who preceded us. The Greeks didn’t precede us since we think or calculate the way they did. We find ourselves therefore standing facing the Great Pyramid with the same thought as Thales. We return to Egypt with him.
Hebraic culture conceals a similar debt poorly. Two great figures at least reach the Nile, stay for a long time and maintain from there complex relations with the land of their fathers or with the father and sons of their land: Moses and Joseph. Both approached Pharaoh and seemed to know the most profound and most secret things that Egypt bore.
After the Massacre of the Innocents, Jesus fled into Egypt accompanied by Joseph.
Every Jew celebrating Passover or passage for millennia has had to consider himself as being saved from Egypt, as having left there, been pulled from there, by miracle torn away from a place where he must not stay, Sheol, but where the will of God nonetheless drove him. Joseph knew burial in a water tank before being interred elsewhere than in his land. Leaving for exile, returning from yonder, through the desert.
Every Christian taking his Easter communion, a new man, is risen.3 And has to consider himself as being saved from death, as having left the underworld, been pulled from the tomb, by divine grace torn away from a place where he must not stay, the tomb, but where vital human law throws him. Exile for all of us, sons of Eve, that’s the land over which or under which we pass.
How to leave Egypt, tear oneself from the tomb, escape from hell or leave one morning a city bombarded by rocks and fire?
The lessons suddenly converge toward a common focus of light and shadow, or rather diverge from it. Gyges descended, a shepherd, into the primary chaos, autochthonous into the earth and came back up king, master of the visible and the invisible. Might that Platonic and philosophical capacity to see the ideas or numbers and no longer see the everyday things of the sensible world come from the kingdom of the dead? From the land of Egypt? Orpheus returned from the darkness without Eurydice: resurrection of the femaleless scarab? Lot delivered himself with and without his wife from the Sodomite disorder and destruction, as others did from the plagues of Egypt. The gold ring, the descent, the deliverance to the morning, into the light of day, from an abominable chaos left behind oneself, all of that comes from Egypt: concretely, really, historically, factually. All these narratives come from there and turn their backs to the unbearable vision of origin: turning around is prohibited. All these fables spread around the eastern Mediterranean come out of, pull themselves out of, extricate themselves from, yes, deliver themselves, escape from a place, have as a source a land that’s simultaneously named Egypt and tomb, Sheol or hell, Egypt and chaos or origin. For that primordial culture from which the entire West emerged identified with death. The land of tombs, the civilization of corpses, techniques for mummies.
Philosophy readily speaks the Greek or Hebraic language, particularly frequenting these two cultures of speaking and writing, but rarely cites Rome and Egypt, toward which turning around is forbidden. Language forgets death and the object.
Lot and his daughters deliver themselves from their destroyed country; the wife stands still to contemplate the apocalypse. Two histories and two times are defined there and split off: on one side, life continues on condition of not looking behind and of supposing that destruction, acting behind one’s back, impels and causes one to run; we have been living, now and since then, we have been thinking and inventing at this pace and this speed, leaving the dead to bury the dead, sons of Lot and his daughters, of Christianity, who have, to engender our works, erased the other side where, by turning around, history and the other time look at death face to face. Time doesn’t flow the same when death presents itself in front and when it moves us from behind.
The mother became a pillar of salt: what then is a statue, and why such material? Let’s consider the boundary between the bodies of the survivors, fleeing, and the mutilated corpses in the rain of fire or stones: like an intermediate form, half animate or dead by half. This, retaining the appearance of a body, confronts the long duration by means of saturation of salt content; it will not decompose nor be divided limb from limb under the bombing of the catastrophe or wearing away but will nonetheless remain as stiff and inanimate as every victim in the city. That’s a threshold, a well-defined border that unites and separates death and life; Lot’s wife, converted, contemplating, on the other side, the first and last chaos, is transformed into a mummy: prepared in natron or sodium carbonate.
Another time, another history is revealed there, facing the original or terminal transcendental death. We’ve lost all idea of this death. We’ve replaced it out of a fearsome anxiety. Lot or Hebraic history, Orpheus or the Greek narrative, already good news, caused death to pivot through a gigantic effort and to no longer wait in front of us like a well that attracts us, concealing the superficial ground beneath our feet, but rather to inspire us from behind, to jab us with its spur, an effective and little known motor behind our backs. They therefore invented or foresaw an improbable time, our very history, without anything in front except the future flowing along its asymptote. Orpheus, Lot, Jesus Christ advised us to forget that we’re going to die, to turn our backs on what Egypt or the mummy–woman was contemplating.
Everything happens as though our time and our history began the morning of the resurrection, at the break of the emerging forth into the day. The hell of shadows closed over Eurydice, half dead, half-alive; Lot left his half-mummy or statue—and the prohibition concerning representation is equivalent to this foreclosure of death; Ulysses, Aeneas were reborn, left the Elysian Fields when they wanted to; Jesus Christ abandoned linens and bandages at the bottom of the tomb; the holy women didn’t know what to do with their vases of herbs, the end of embalmings and mummifications; our culture’s texts and religions say the opposite, the end, the success of the Book of the Dead.
Before the invention of this new course of history which has made us what we are, intoxicated with immortality, we were going toward death, put in front of us like an end. That statue named end. Stop. Egypt, for thirty centuries, accepted and contemplated it. Worked, studied, digested it for us. Entered into the black box, rolled enormous stones in front of the tombs, folded mummies, implicated them in thousands of kilometers of crossed bandages, patiently preparing the emerging forth into the daylight, positively preparing our history.4
We are meditating today on Egyptian wisdom and the strange and unforeseeable turnaround that shaped our history and systems of thought because, ever since Hiroshima’s flash, a new death—the collective disappearance or eradication without remainder of the human species—has stood before us. We were able to put death behind us because it would leave a remainder when it only concerned individuals or groups among which the angels would save a few just ones: it spurred humanity toward progress or promises as long as this remainder survived. Today death overkills.5 The future closes within that integral. All of modern history, understand by “modern” the time that began the day death was installed as the motor behind our backs, all the time started then stops. We stand still like statues of salt before the bifurcation. How do we place that inevitable death behind us again, that inevitable death that our history, now ancient, has produced? Didn’t we produce it precisely because we had forgotten death itself and its inevitable presence in our actions, words and thought? Like a collective and historical unknown?
Recounting, in the language of myth, that one figure leaves the underworld, another death and the tomb, yet another destruction, or saying, in the language of history, that such and such a group, such and such a science or circumstance comes from Egypt amounts to one and the same lesson. In the precise sense of the verb, Egypt was consecrated to death. Our culture and time were born from the shores of the Nile and the dark tombs by turning their backs to them. These two places of origin overlap. The positive and probable history describing a country, a state, and customs merges here, for once, and no doubt for the first and only time, with the symbolic myth speaking of the subterranean world and with the ontology meditating on death. We have to think here, at one and the same time, the history of science and that of religion, for our exodus frees itself from an accumulation point in which the factual and the conceptual are mixed and involuted. Leaving Egypt is equivalent to climbing back up from the tomb or again to coming from death, to deducing everything from death, to inferring everything from it. The term “exodus” has to be understood in all these senses: production of meaning from a dense and black source.
Our time comes from death, our history begins in Egypt, our knowledge and our adventure have their source in these two places which form only one; the Hebrew people escaped from the country and the underworld—modern time starts from there, the point of departure for Moses and his text; Orpheus drew his work from subterranean worlds, understand, from the tomb, understand, from Egyptian ritual; Thales came to the Pyramids to search for his theorem; translate: to the Pharaoh’s tombs; translate into the language of history: to Egypt; translate philosophically: to death. Our science comes from death. Jesus Christ ties all these threads at the zero time.
With a single utterance we speak ontology and history, concept and fact, as though our metaphysics was rooted in Egyptian mortuary techniques. It forbids us to turn back around toward them.
What is a statue? A mummy first of all.
The answer appears historical; it seems to mean: before such and such sculpture lies the corpse, stiffened. Mummification slows, sometimes indefinitely, the inevitable process of decomposition: retains the stiffness of the dead body and announces statuary stability. History, myth, religion, and ontology speak inseparably here: death explicates the statue; this latter implicates the former, the way appearance contains the concept or essence or, better said in this circumstance, substance; the dead man reposes in the bronze horse like the torture victim in Phalaris’s bull or Baal’s breast, like Tarpeia under the volley of stones, like any remains in the coffin box and the crash victims in the twisted metal of the automobile. The statue is a black box: open it, and you’ll look death in the face. Don’t open it. Philosophy, just like Egyptian archaeology, opens chests: the one finds meaning or concepts or words, and perfumes in the Silenus-shaped cabinet, the second explicates or develops corpses enveloped in bandages.6 Egypt, conversely, buries, covers, binds, ties, conceals, whereas we explicate and bring to light what stands below, substances. Our logic and the meaning of our logos were born there, from a factual and conceptual gesture that’s exactly contrary to their own. He who lies in the bandages, coffins, tombs, and pyramids finds himself implicated.
What is a statue? That box for implications. Already object.
In the book of foundations, I discovered that Rome—an opaque city, a black box, raw stone—was hiding; in the round Temple of Vesta, for example, or its thousand tombs; that its mystery and strength were residing in the density of the envelopment: we can’t say anything about it as long as what we say is deployed in the smoothed-out inflation of explication or analysis. By means of this way of thinking or speaking, we remain Greek and Jewish, developing along the time that descends the details of distinction without understanding that anyone has ever been able to work on a whole other side of acts, ideas or words, at folding, implicating, binding, tying, tightening. Entire peoples, for millennia, worked at deflation, amassed, accumulated, built up, buried stocks, created value, shut doors in the shadow, didn’t squander their treasures, but—if I dare say—lapidated them, like the Pyramids did with Pharaoh.7
Become incomprehensible to the light of our quick as a will-o’-the-wisp discursive intelligences, Rome makes without exposing or binds without unrolling, surrounds its glimmers of knowledge with round walls, builds. For wanting to bring everything to daylight, we’ve lost shame and density. We fear the darkness and lose our reserves, live the time of the explosion, fire and vertical growths, inflation. Some predecessor necessarily had to prepare, before us and for us, concentrations to be spent some day. We thus succeed Rome, and Rome succeeds itself the way a linear stream comes out of groundwater or a source, the way a flow emerges from a stock, a bank, a dam or capital. Founding signifies putting such a dense, black, deep, fearsome blockage below ground. We ceaselessly remove bodies from tombs; it puts them there and hides and piles.
If we educated young people to implicate texts, we would see works blossom.
In the same book and like an effigy, a baker kneads bread dough by patient implications and resumptions, by closings of a volume or a mass over itself. Her work doesn’t show or exhibit anything but on the contrary removes from the express light what can resist wear. She buries and folds in such a way that the bread becomes a complex of folds.8 Thus before appearing in the daylight, we spent time in a women’s womb intertwining our tissues over one another in the dark: the development of the embryo, as it is said by antiphrasis, ought to be called envelopment. As though the organism was amassing time, stocking it, even creating it, before squandering it in the sun. The baker models the bread dough with her hands the way the gravid woman unintentionally kneads the prenatal living mass. Thus the sculptor of statues folds and implicates the clay like a thousand veils or coats, encloses and drives the form, through such work, into the hard and black density and founds it there. At the origin of the world, it is said, God created man by modeling him with mud: he bound, tied, implicated him. Objects are gigantic inter-nested stocks of time.
These few notes about Rome, relating the work of foundation, hold true for Egypt even more. Built in speech, Athens and Jerusalem analyzed and commented on, explicated, irreversibly launched the linear direction of time, they separated, cut and came from Egypt. This latter, like Rome but more originarily, more profoundly, and over a longer time, founded: concealed, buried, enveloped, piled in caverns hollowed out beneath the pyramids or mastabas and kept quiet. Thales drew the uninterrupted development of geometric rigor from this treasure amassed over many centuries; the Hebrew people, come out of this prison as though from out of its own tomb, advanced endlessly toward history and the promise. To understand such long achievements, a baker’s work—embryonic, statuary, precreator or procreator—had to occupy millions of men over a colossal accumulation of time. No doubt we no longer understand this burying in shadow and the silence of the foundation.
That’s the secret of the mute, stony, and objective Sphinx.
*
Lot, Orpheus: the Jewish lesson has the wife run in front; the mistress in the Greek legend follows behind; a solidified woman in the first text, for the second narrative, a vanished one; in one case, forever visible, permanent; lost forever, unable to be found in the other. Crystallized or sublimated. There, she’s transformed because she turns around, herself, toward the forbidden; her guide, her lover dissolves her, here, for turning around toward her: a passive object of the gaze or an active subject of sight. She crystallizes on her own; someone else sublimates her into smoke. Let her observe and here she is, manifest, exposed, motionless; there she is, undone in the temporary breaths of air, invisible as soon as the other observed her.
Orpheus will become a pederast, it is said; Lot’s daughters will sleep with their father after the complete stoning of the homosexuals of both sexes, a holocaust with no other remainder than these committers of incest. The prohibition of turning around, identical, has some connection with inversion. But, for once, let’s leave sex.
An identical text is contraposed into two dual legends, a feature that’s quite remarkable when the invariance consists in repeating that you must not turn around. At the common risk of hell, of death, chaos, a rain of fire, and falling of stones. At the risk incurred also by Gyges or Empedocles in the cavern and the volcano. But thanks to the ring the former cyclically traveled the sum of these two inverted paths.
One of the two dual legends concerns music, the other sculpture. The end of music and the beginning of sculpture. A strange light predominates the too lit or not lit up enough whole in which this can be read: by contraposing what can be said about the one, what can be said about the other can be obtained. These two fundamental arts that must be sought below ground, in the heart of chaos, maintain a secret relation of duality with one another. A dazzling turnaround: music and sculpture complement or oppose one another; who would have believed it?
Softness and hardness hold the universe by themselves.
The question must be asked: where? The question seeks a locale in space. A place. For example: where are the gates to the underworld, the remains of Sodom, the stone of the tomb with the bronze horse? Answer: chaos can be defined as a variety in which disorder prevents the appearance of a place. Chaos doesn’t provide any markers, or we can’t discern any there. Hence quite precisely this: the underworld has no door or window by which one can enter or leave. Chaos remains as such right up to its edges. Those who got lost almost to the point of death in primeval forests, below the Equator or the tropics, still swear that, cautious, they never set foot in one. They didn’t realize they were entering it. Consequently, they weren’t able to deliver themselves from it, just as they hadn’t understood that that’s where they were. The chaotic border is marked out just as poorly from outside as from within. No place, no door, no observation hole. Chaos doesn’t answer the question “where?”
Now: where is Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem to be found? Where does the work of François Couperin take place, in comparison with which every other music rings coarsely? In a piece of writing or a score, but which ones? On which instrument, along the logarithmic arc of which fingerboard? In which hall, under which baton? And yet music occupies space starting from a localizable listening post: how far? The sonata is present and yet absent. Everywhere, not quite everywhere, nowhere. Music doesn’t answer the question “where?”
Eurydice is leaving the underworld. By which door? We don’t know, or we know that none exist. At what stage is she in her ascent? What distance can be marked between music and background noise? Distance presupposes space, again this question “where?,” without any answer for Eurydice, music or for the country she is crossing. Music frees itself from noise and can ceaselessly fall back into it. What distance, likewise, can be marked between it and some language? Music seeks language but doesn’t get there.
The statue stands in equilibrium in a singular place in space and marks the well-founded here whose marker orders that space in return. There is the statue: at the crossroads, along the road, in the middle of the garden, on Capitoline Hill, in the holy of holies, next to the ordinary oven where the gods stand, at the back of the common room where the family prays, evenings. Should the statue, box, horse, or ark contain a corpse, then the expression “there is” has to be read or written or engraved “here lies.” There is the statue, “here lies” the corpse that marks the place. Sculpture invents the question “where?” by answering it before it is asked.
“Here lies” someone or other, a bandit, shepherd or king, earth in earth, ashes in black darkness, an autonomous or transposed ancestor, rapidly invisible since dissolved. What do his name, his quality, his lived body, his title—all endlessly substitutable—matter? For what lies, in fact, is the here. Not “here lies” [ci-gît] the shepherd or King Gyges since “Gyges” resays the earth itself just as “Orpheus” says the darkness, but “here lies” period, where “here” [ci] becomes the subject of the verb “to lie” [gésir]. The lying person [gisant] is reduced to the place or shows the being of the place in his hidden or visible home [gîte] and on his layer [gisement]. Gésir is a verb that’s as rare and defective as the verb “to be” abounds and proliferates, cancerous, infinitely substitutable for every verb or substantive. Substitutable like corpse, a corpse-like word. Gésir, a singular verb, as though the dual of the verb of generality. The universality of being, scattered in space, densifies, compacts or is formed here, in this singular or quasi-defective place.
Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: here sleeps the ancestor, in the tomb. The family built the house around the Lares and Penates or the cult of its forefathers. Here, the place. Here, Being [l’Être]. I’m delighted that the French language calls the layout of places in a building aîtres or êtres. Starting from there the city spreads out. As though the necropolis was engendering the megalopolis. The here orders extension: familial, tribal, agricultural, rustic, urban, political space. What name can we give this progressive ordering around the statue, around the place and the primary tomb? What can we call this spatial and objective expansion? Antiquity. Better: the history of Antiquity. Better still: the time of Antiquity. Even better still: the antiquity of time, its archaeology, the oldest genesis of our time, which flows in the other direction. Fustel de Coulanges: from the being that’s enveloped, implicated, densified in the place, from being-there, time mysteriously wells up.
But isn’t there some trickery in deriving everything from the couple being and there, that is to say, from the sum of the global and the local, from the greatest extension and the greatest comprehension? The entire universe is already found in the sum one gives oneself. Nothing could be easier than to derive it from that. Already, the last century deduced the world and history from the yes and the no, from dialectical affirmation and negation: first give yourself the sum of this negative and this positive, and you’ll have the universal at hand as well from the start. Logical trickery, quickly found out. The modern trickery can be called topological, just as easy to circumvent.
Eurydice vanishes like vapor: the rare and adorable place of her body and her forms comes undone, leaving ribbons floating in the air. Just as a wave passes and is propagated, music combs extension in such a way that the folds [plis] open. By invading space with its non-presence, it dissipates the light non-being in every place and, present everywhere, absent there, completes the homogeneous isotropy. Absent everywhere, except there, a statue presents itself, unique in a singular place, in such a way that it becomes the head of a local grasp, a seed, a navel of space or being, heavy. What the one does away with, the other creates. Lot’s wife fleeing, passing, vague and floating, freezes, sets, crystallizes, in the midst of fire, paradoxically. Hazy and soft bonds suddenly harden. The first woman, the first art disappear; the two others appear: the disappearance effaces a singularity, the appearance makes it be born or reinforces it. Two dual or contraposed phenomenologies.
Both of them at the vague border of being and non-being: the statue, appearing, is born to being, makes it be born, drives it to propagate itself in its own and dense neighborhood, whereas music, disappearing, ceaselessly leaves being toward non-being. Two dual or contraposed ontologies.
Two dual or contraposed religions. Just as the universal lays waste to places and crosses the desert, listens to Israel, so the monotheisms of language break statues; a piece of the pagan place, the pagus extends, idol by idol, toward an uncertain global, without refusing to pass, respectfully, before the colossus of speech or the fetishes of writing.
The statue begins to order space by distributing a thousand topologies: stones, balls or paving stones, spirits of the places.9 Music perfects a certain spatial labor, through a sweeping that discovers Euclidian or metric space, undifferentiated. The universal and pure and homogeneous isotropy substitutes for the mixed multi-coloredness of singular and local topologies. Two dual and contraposed geometries. Consequently, sculpture occupies sites and forms, whereas music occupies the metric, saturated with numbers. Quality or quantity, deformations or measure.
Statics. The appearance of statuary equilibrium is perpetuated in a permanent and definitive stability. In deviation from equilibrium, music goes and runs by means of a perpetual and immanent instability: stopping marks its disappearance. Phoronomy and dynamics.10 Two dual or contraposed mechanics.
Music, starting from the global, launches itself and weaves time. The statue ends time and starts space; music finishes space and makes its début in time. Each art defies the space or time in the other. Two dual and contraposed aesthetics. Moving in duration, a fragile caprice, a little phrase, the sonata scoffs at space; the Sphinx, placed there, as though eternal, scorns history.
Through the signal, music passes from noise to language, without touching either of them. The statue remains in silence. The result of this is that all our forms of thought or knowledge, defined in fact or virtually by terms having the suffix “-logy,” designate music as their mother or antecedent. Sculpture remains excluded from this game. If one gives the word “logic” a broad and deep enough meaning for it to say everything that concerns the logos in general then here are two dual or contraposed logics. The absence of any treatise on sculpture is due to this transcendental silence, placing statues outside the logos.
Have I succeeded in showing a philosophy, a knowledge, an experience of silence by making an effort toward that hardness? Since music and sculpture both precede language—subject side, object side, hard side, and soft side—they go beyond traditional philosophy, which is entirely devoted to the soft and languages. Socrates, the son of a sculptor, learned how to play an instrument clumsily, maladroit fingers in strings that were ringing off key, at the point of death.
Consequently, the genesis of knowing is contraposed in the same way. Everything we know derives from language, whereas this latter derives from music. Nothing surprising, therefore, in finding this latter at the origins of geometry, of arithmetic, but also of epics, tragedy, every literature, philosophy even. Everything we know emanates from it, the mother of our maternal languages, whereas it itself comes from noise. From noise emerges the music from which emerges the language from which knowledge emerges. Around the latter, the preceding one continues to emit volatile and vain words around which the first continuously makes noise. A canonical genealogy, preserving the monopoly of the sayable, whose line follows the soft, in the direction of the little energies.11
But this genealogy doesn’t include the hard, the dual of the soft, remaining in the double silence of language and noise, and whose local presence, whose equilibrium and definition, whose appearance, whose forms don’t make any noise.
Soft waves, hard sculpture.
Impenetrable or resistant, the stone has weight, like marble, bronze or trees. Forces are needed to lift them, steam or horses; only high energies carve or crush them; transporting them requires some power. This labor relation to solid things is called work. Whereas the musical call rises from noise to meaning while avoiding both, a work of leisure, digital information.12
Vibrating softness and the hammer’s hardness.
Meaning descends into mass or plunges deep into the bronze as though it wanted to seal itself to the pedestal and no longer budge from it. The account of the waves, conversely, leaves the brass or bronze, emerges from the wood, from force, from weights, rising, light, as though some message wanted to leave the powers or evaporate from the hard heavinesses.
A procession toward the sublime or a descent into the dense.
Orpheus climbs back up from the underworld, a composer, and Lot’s wife turns around toward it, statuary.
The soft is buried in the object, immersed in its black box, locked. Whereas, mouth closed, eyes shut, ears plugged, finding the solitude and the night of the sack of skin, I only find inchoative music in my proprioceptive box, as though the I were born from the murmuring and made its substance from the clamor that reverberates, under every language, at the bottom of what was called the soul.
Objective statue, musical subject.
When this discrete hubbub fades away, when the waves level out into the flat, the I vanishes or dies and reverts to the object: then the dead body becomes a statue. The death throes feel the music flee; living and thinking consist in hearing it, warm. Working in general designates the relation of a certain song to the immobile stone, between music and sculpture.
The essential of this latter, the being of its substance, is silence.
A trivial drawing simplifies these words: here is a circle and a point chosen outside it; from this point, let’s draw two tangents to the circle; let’s call the straight line that connects the two tangential points thus obtained the polar of the first point, which point is therefore named the pole in relation to the circle. A point, a straight line: the pole and its polar. Let’s begin again. From a second point chosen outside the circle, let’s draw two tangents and connect the two places again. Another point, second, and its polar, another straight line.
One of those pretty insights that mathematics sometimes gives occurs from the fact that one can in a way turn the drawing around. Let’s start from the two points and the two straight lines. Connect the two former, here is a straight line; the two latter intersect: there is a point. On the straight line thus obtained, each point-pole will have for its polar in relation to the circle a straight line that will pass through the point thus obtained. If the poles align or join up on the straight line then the polars meet or intersect at the same point. This turnaround resembles, allowing for differences, some translation from one language into another. If we were speaking at the start the language of points or poles, the circle or dictionary soon translates it into the other language of polars and straight lines. The first language says at one moment and in its turn the straight line, the joining of the aligned poles: the circle-dictionary then translates it into a point, the intersection of these polars forming a bundle.
Let’s forget language and keep the correspondence that we know it announced, from afar, in the nineteenth century, our comparisons between structures. Let’s even leave geometry as well as the logic or the algebra that it displays and simplifies in order to observe, naively, this indefinite straight line, a joining of points whose course runs at a distance alongside a point or center radiating like a star, an intersection of straight lines. I haven’t drawn any other schema or suspected any other secret connection between the two arts, at first glance so dissimilar.
By one of those unexpected good fortunes that research sometimes encounters, two undated narratives—myths or fables—teach us that two first or fundamental arts, for the hard and for the soft, maintain relations comparable to those of that line and that point. Global, local; unique God, idols.
In one of those extraordinary joys that philosophy sometimes reserves for the end of the most austere exoduses, a book shows an object whose starred presence suddenly turns the usual, dominant and monotonous languages around.
*
He got into his car as usual and, in setting off, absentmindedly turned on the tape deck below the dashboard. The oblong box in which he was squatting rolled along a road passing through low hills. Seen from high up, from a plane for example, the automobile would have looked like a boat going down a winding river, for the route climbed, turned, left, right, very curvy, as though a corkscrew; his tires screeched as they skid; the dense plane trees filed past like the pillars of a cathedral supporting a vault of foliage open to the clear sky.
They found the steel shell, burst, burnt, the tomb opening onto a body already gripped by cadaverous rigidity, a statue attentive, solemnly, to the slow movement of Couperin’s motet which was invading the leaves that were being stirred by a light wind, while ceaselessly returning owing to the automatic replay mechanism, chapters of a time infinitely begun again.