IT IS CLEAR that ordinary subjects can acquire powers through special usage, and adjust their shape, or else we do, until they become extensions of our selves. The modest couch Freud employed in Vienna which had a central part in his treatment of, or listening to, hysterics became endowed with mystical qualities – the couch to which all others are compared. It should come as no surprise that when Freud in the nineteen thirties fled to London he was accompanied by the beetroot-coloured couch with its Austro-Hungarian tassels and fringes, and set it against the wall in his consulting room in Hampstead, just as a concert pianist can only play on his particular Steinway, which may be fifty or sixty years old, and not always in tune.
Meanwhile, many photographs exist of philosophers half-reclining in deckchairs. Not merely the British philosophers shown at leisure amongst the dons in flannels on one of the back lawns of Cambridge, or at a 45-degree angle puffing the pipe on the outer of the Bloomsbury group, which is another part of the deck-chair story, or the picture we have handed down of Wittgenstein’s room where the only piece of furniture was a deckchair. There’s a shot taken through a telephoto lens of Martin Heidegger relaxing in what looks like a deck-chair, outside the hut at Todtnauberg. It’s him, all right – though barely visible. These slack canvas chairs suspend like a drop of water just above the grass. They are closer to the earth than other chairs. Two people cannot share one. They are difficult things to get out of. The philosopher tries a few different deckchairs until settling on one that fits his shape.