Birth – Tattoos – Canvas, veil, skin – Hermes and the peacock – Subtle – Variation – Vair – Mists – Common sense – Mixture, unveiling
Birth
Fire is dangerous on a ship, it drives you out. It burns, stings, bites, crackles, stinks, dazzles, and quickly springs up everywhere, incandescent, to remain in control. A damaged hull is less perilous; damaged vessels have been known to return to port, full of sea water up to their deadworks. Ships are made to love water, inside or out, but they abhor fire, especially when their holds are full of torpedoes and shells. A good sailor has to be a reasonable fireman.
Fire training demands more of the sailor and is harsher and more uncompromising than anything that he needs to learn as a seaman. I can still remember several torturous exercises which teach not only a certain relationship to the senses, but also how to live or survive. We were made to climb down dark, vertical wells, descending endless ladders and inching along damp crawlways, to low underground rooms in which a sheet of oil would be burning. We had to stay there for a long time, lying beneath the acrid smoke, our noses touching the ground, completely still so as not to disturb the thick cloud hanging over us. We had to leave slowly and deliberately when our name was called so as not to choke our neighbour with an ill-considered gesture that would have brought the smoke eddies lower.
The breathable space lies in a thin layer at ground level and remains stable for quite a long period. Knowing how to hold your breath, to estimate the distance to the heart of the blaze or to the point beyond which one is in mortal danger; how to estimate the time remaining, to walk, to move in the right direction, blind, to try not to yield to the universal god of panic, to proceed cautiously towards the desperately desired opening; these are things I know about the body. This is no fable. No-one sees dancing shadows on the walls of the cave when a fire is burning inside. Smoke stings your eyes, it fills the whole space, chokes you. Blinded, you have to lie down. You can only grope your way out. Touch is the last remaining means of guiding yourself.
But this knowledge was academic until the day of genuine wrath arrived without warning, one winter’s day at sea. The fire was rumbling, a terrifying sound like thunder. In a moment all the bulkheads were closed. I admired those who rushed without thinking into the manholes, down the ladders. I heard a lot of noise and remember nothing.
All of a sudden I am alone. What has happened? In the closed compartment the unbearable heat makes me feel like fainting. I have to get out. The door, behind, is immovably blocked, panels and levers locked water-tight, firmly fastened from the other side. I choke under the thick smoke, lying on the moving floor, shaken by the movement of the waves. Then all that remains is a porthole. Get up without breathing, quickly try to unscrew the rusty flanges preventing its opening. They resist, they have not been used much, once or twice probably since the vessel was launched. They do not yield. I lie down again at ground level to get my breath. The weather conditions are worsening, as if the sea were becoming choppier. I get up again, holding my breath, trying to undo the screws that seem slowly to be yielding. Three or four times, I do not recall, I lie down again; as many times, jaws clenched, muscles locked, I work on, with the porthole closed. Suddenly it opens.
Light, and particularly air, rushes in, churning the smoke, which becomes even more choking. I quickly stick my head out through the open hole. Horrible weather, the brutal cold takes hold. I cannot open my eyes in the fury of the icy spray; my ears, hurt as they passed through, feel as though they are being ripped off; suddenly my body curls up, demanding to remain motionless in its warm retreat. I pull my head back inside, but choke, and can now hear small explosions. The fire must have reached the munitions store; I have to get out as soon as possible. I push my head through, then one arm, not yet as far as my shoulder, only my hand and wrist. The angle of my elbow is a problem in the small space between my neck and the rim of brass around the porthole. I cannot get out, I have to get out. Everything is burning and my head is frozen.
I remain there, motionless, vibrating, pinioned, gesticulating within the confines of the fixed neckpiece, long enough for me to think, no, for my body to learn once and for all to say ‘I’ in the truest sense of the word. In truth, with no possibility of being wrong. No mistake about it, since my life quite simply depended on this dark, slow, blinding meditation.
I am inside, burnt to a crisp with only my frozen, shivering, blinded head outside. I am inside, ejected and excluded, and my head, arm and left shoulder are outside in the howling storm. Inside, amidst the insane fire which pushes me outwards, my head and second shoulder, half out, caught in an agonizing neckpiece, emerge, at the mercy of the storm. I am neither saved, nor even outside. I am still imprisoned, completely on one side of the window. The round hoop of brass open in the flank of the burning vessel is not as big as the compressed circle of my thorax. Still inside, even though both shoulders are out in the winter weather. The porthole compresses my chest to the limit – any further and it would be crushed. So I am going to die. I cannot get a foothold anywhere. Behind, in the burning hell in which I am still trapped, my arms are of no use, pressed against my body. I am a wisp of straw caught in a hole, unable to go forward, with no hope of going backwards, I will choke to death. Is it worse to breathe in the smoke, or the icy blast, or stay in the rusty iron collar, I can’t possibly decide.
Then a big wave, coming suddenly from the side, violently jolts the neckpiece towards my suspended ribs. God be praised, I am out. I breathe the cold air and almost faint. To my horror, the sea, still more relentlessly, hammers randomly at the bottom of the boat which tilts over on to the other side and I am inside again, rammed again into the iron circle up to my chest. It felt as though the hull were passing over piles of stones. The shock on one side freed me; a shock from the other side imprisoned me again.
I was inside, I was outside.
Who was this ‘I’?
It is something everyone knows, unemotionally and as a matter of fact. You only have to pass through a small opening, a blocked corridor, to swing over a handrail or on a balcony high enough to provoke vertigo, for the body to become alert. The body knows by itself how to say I. It knows to what extent I am on this side of the bar, and when I am outside. It judges deviations from normal balance, immediately regulates them and knows just how far to go, or not go. Cœnesthesia says I by itself. It knows that I am inside, it knows when I am freeing myself. This internal sense proclaims, calls, announces, sometimes howls the I like a wounded animal. This common sense apportions the body better than anything else in the whole world.
If I slide a leg through, I am still inside, while my leg, thigh and knee are outside. They become almost black. My pelvis goes through, my genitals, buttocks and navel are most certainly outside but I remain inside. I know what it is to be a man without legs; I know for a moment what phantom limbs feel like. At a precise moment, the very moment when the totality of the divided body shouts ego in a general toppling movement, I slide out and can drag through the remainder of my body, pull through the pieces that have remained inside, yes, the scattered pieces that have suddenly been blackened in the violent overturning of the iceberg.
The random jolting of the vessel as it heaves to throw the I to the left and right of the window of hope. I dwell inside, I dwell outside; the I inside the boat finds itself outside, in the icy gusts of wind. The movement of the waves pushes or pulls the thorax a few millimetres in either direction, a tiny distance. My body is aware of this deviation; it is able to appreciate the movements around it. I am delivered or debarred, breathing or asphyxiated, burning from the fire inside or stripped bare by the biting wind, dead or alive. I go under or I exist. There is an almost identifiable point which, in the spatial experience of passing from inside to out, is proclaimed by the whole body. The I as a whole leaps towards this localized point and moves decisively from one half of the body to the other when the point slides, in contact with the separating wall, from its internal to its external surface.
Since my near shipwreck I have become accustomed to calling this point the soul. The soul resides at the point where the I is decided.
We are all endowed with a soul, from that first moment of passage when we risked and saved our existence.
I understood that evening the meaning of the cry: save our souls. Saving this point is enough. I found myself outside, in the horrifying cold, when the point passed the threshold of the constraining collar. I was still inside until that moment. Descartes is right to say that the soul touches the body at a particular point, but he was wrong to locate it in the pineal gland. It hovers around the region of the solar plexus. From there it illuminates or obscures the body, in bursts of light or dark, making it translucid or epiphanic, transmuting it into a black body. It is somewhere in that area for everyone, according to the dictates of each individual’s body. We all retain it, marked and definitive, where it was fixed on the day we were born. More often than not, it is forgotten and left in the shadows of internal meaning, until the day when the sudden fury of nature causes us to be born a second time, through chance, pain, anguish or luck. It is not such a bad thing, pace Descartes, that on that youthful day, piloting a ship, we were to discover that a pilot says I for his whole vessel, from the depths of the keel to the tip of the mast, and from the quarter to the boom, and that the soul of his body descends into the soul of the boat, towards the central turbines, to the heart of the quickworks. To free yourself from that vessel, you have to search for your soul in the hold, where the fire is at its most dangerous – one perilous day.
Tattoos
The soul inhabits a quasi-point where the I is determined.
Gymnasts train their soul, so as to move or wrap themselves around it.
Athletes do not have one, they run or throw; but jumpers do, and hurl themselves over the bar pole and beyond; they gently curl their bodies around the place where it projects itself forward. The difference between athletics and gymnastics, with the exception of the long jump, lies in the practice of the soul. The fixed bar, somersault, rings, floor work, trampoline and diving are useful as exercises in experimental metaphysics, like the passage through the small porthole, where the body goes searching for its soul, where both play, like lovers, at losing and finding each other, sometimes leaving each other, then coming together again, in risk and pleasure. In certain collective games, players have lost their souls because they entrusted them to a common object, the ball: they organize themselves, spread themselves out, wrap themselves around it, collectively. The metaphysical exercise is transformed here into a manoeuvre in applied sociology.
Lose your soul in order to save it; give it away in order to regain it.
The soul, not quite a point, reveals itself through volume, with precision in a ship, in the space traced by unusual displacements. Can we find it superficially now? A more difficult study.
I am cutting my nails.
Where is the subject determined? As a left-hander, I take the tool in my left hand and place the open blades at the tip of my right index finger. I place myself in the handles of the scissors. The I is now situated there and not at the top of the right finger. My nail: awkwardly placed along the steel blade; my hand: agile and clever in managing the cutting. The left-hand subject works on the right-finger object. The left hand has something of the nature of the self, bathed in subjectivity, the right finger is the world. If the scissors change hands, everything changes or nothing changes. The I stays in the vicinity of my left index finger, the nail of which knowingly and shamelessly caresses the sharp blade, just touching it. The handle of the tool grasped by the right hand is abandoned by me. An external motor drives the machine and my proffered index finger determines the exact limits of the cut to be made. On the one hand, I am cutting a nail, on the other, my nail is cut. The presentation of the finger to the blade, its flexibility or rigidity at the moment of cutting, the precision of the process, are sufficient for the external observer to determine the state of the soul, the place where it is now in a state of equilibrium, as it were. The soul of the left-hander is on his left side, on his right side he is a dark body, a hybrid when forced to write with his right hand.
But that changes and varies. In the case of toenails, the reversal does not take place. So far away, it is still the body, or the world. So far away, the soul is absent. No toe touches the blade the way my left-hand middle finger does. That’s enough about tools.
I touch one of my lips with my middle finger. Consciousness resides in this contact. I begin to examine it. It is often hidden in a fold of tissue, lip against lip, tongue against palate, teeth touching teeth, closed eyelids, contracted sphincters, a hand clenched into a fist, fingers pressed against each other, the back of one thigh crossed over the front of the other, or one foot resting on the other. I wager that the small, monstrous homunculus, each part of which is proportional to the magnitude of the sensations it feels, increases in size and swells at these automorphic points, when the skin tissue folds in on itself. Skin on skin becomes conscious, as does skin on mucus membrane and mucus membrane on itself. Without this folding, without the contact of the self on itself, there would truly be no internal sense, no body properly speaking, cœnesthesia even less so, no real image of the body; we would live without consciousness; slippery smooth and on the point of fading away. Klein bottles are a model of identity. We are the bearers of skewed, not quite flat, unreplicated surfaces, deserts over which consciousness passes fleetingly, leaving no memory. Consciousness belongs to those singular moments when the body is tangential to itself.
I touch my lips, which are already conscious of themselves, with my finger. I can then kiss my finger and, what amounts to almost the same thing, touch my lips with it. The I vibrates alternately on both sides of the contact, and all of a sudden presents its other face to the world, or, suddenly passing over the immediate vicinity, leaves behind nothing but an object. In the local gesture of calling for silence, the body plays ball with the soul. Those who do not know where their soul is to be found touch their mouths, and they do not find it there. The mouth touching itself creates its soul and contrives to pass it on to the hand which, clenching itself involuntarily, forms its own faint soul and then can pass it on, when it wishes, to the mouth, which already has it. Pure chance, each time.
The body cannot play ball, at all times or in all places. There are zones where this contingency does not come into play. I touch my shoulder with my hand. In relation to my hand or mouth my shoulder remains an object in the world. It needs a natural object, a rock, tree trunk or waterfall in order to become a subject again. The shoulder has no soul, save in relation to what takes place outside the body. Now determine where the soul is, by putting your elbows on your knees, by placing one part of your body on another.
There is no end to it, the only limit is your own suppleness.
Metaphysics begins with, and is conditioned by, gymnastics.
Let us now draw or paint. Isolate, if you can, the chance encounters of corners or folds, the small secret zones in which the soul, to all intents and purposes, still resides. Then isolate as well, if possible, the unstable zones which are able to play at souls with one another as if playing ball. Surround also the balls or blocks, which only become subjects in the presence of objects, the dense or compact regions which always remain objects or black, soulless deserts, in themselves, or in relation to those zones which turn them into objects. Drawing rarely defines compact zones. These explode, burst forth and escape along narrow corridors, form passes and chimneys, pathways, passages, flames, zigzags and labyrinths. Observe on the surface of the skin, the changing, shimmering, fleeting soul, the blazing, striated, tinted, streaked, striped, many-coloured, mottled, cloudy, star-studded, bedizened, variegated, torrential, swirling soul. A wild idea, the first after consciousness, would be to trace delicately and colour in these zones and passages, as in a map.
Tattooing: my white, constantly present soul blazes up and is diffused in the unstable reds which exchange with other reds; deserts lacking a soul are black, and fields where the ochre, mauve, cold blue, orange and turquoise soul very occasionally settles are green . . . This is what our complex and somewhat frightening identity card looks like. Everyone has their own original card, like their thumbprint or dental record, no map resembles another, each one changes through time. I have made so much progress since my sad youth and bear on my skin the tracks and paths traced by the women who have helped me in the search for my scattered soul.
Those who need to see in order to know or believe, draw and paint and fix the lake of changing, ocellated skin and make the purely tactile visible by means of colours and shapes. But every epidermis would require a different tattoo; it would have to evolve with time: each face requires an original tactile mask. Historiated skin carries and displays a particular history. It is visible: wear and tear, scars from wounds, calluses, wrinkles and furrows of former hopes, blotches, pimples, eczema, psoriasis, birth-marks. Memory is inscribed there, why look elsewhere for it? And it is invisible: the fluctuating traces of caresses, memories of silk, wool, velvet, furs, tiny grains of rock, rough bark, scratchy surfaces, ice crystals, flames, the timidity of a subtle touch, the audacity of aggressive contact. An abstract drawing or painting would be the counterpart of the faithful and honest tattoo in which the sense impressions are expressed; if the picture imitates readymade illustrations, icons or letters, everything is reduced to a mere reflection of the social. The skin becomes a standard bearer, whereas it is in fact imprinted.
The beginnings of a drawing changing amidst caresses: naked, stretched out, curled up at my side, tiger, cougar, armadillo, you seek to guess the secrets of my historiated, liquid, shimmering skin. Our soul expands, we are not monochromatic.
The global soul: a small, deep place, not far from the region of the emotions. The local, storm-prone, surface soul: a viscous lake, ready to flare up, on which the multiple, rainbow-coloured, slowly-changing light plays. A sharp point and peacock feathers, the soul pricks us and struts about.
It is there that history truly begins. How can two such complicated labyrinths meet, be superimposed and complement each other? Ariadne is lost in Theseus’ labyrinth, Theseus is lost in the avenues and roundabouts on Ariadne’s mountain. One would have to imagine the relationship between two species, genres or kingdoms, tiger and peacock, zebra and jaguar, ladybird and poppy, centipede and chalcedony, a chameleon on marble. Miracles happen, ligers and tigons, although there are not many of them, and they are rarely long-lived. Otherwise, Ariadne has to turn white, and Theseus to wind back onto his distaff all the threads that entangle and divide up her bedizened body. Failing a miracle, our surface soul is an obstacle to our amorous activities. It is as if we were wearing a tattooed breastplate, unless we lay it down, melt the map of pathways and crossroads, and redeploy our soul or make it burn with a different light, so that the flames mingle.
When the soul comes to an organ, that organ becomes conscious and the soul is lost. If my finger touches my lip and says I, my mouth becomes an object, but in reality it is my finger that is lost. As soon as the soul settles on it, it takes over. When I lift these bricks, stones, concrete blocks, I exist entirely in my hands and arms and my soul in its density is at home there but, at the same time, my hand is lost in the grainy body of the pebbles. The object is reduced to a black body and the soul to a white void. The soul, as transparent as an evanescent angel, whitens the places where it alights; the skin, imprinted elsewhere with the varied colours of history, is brighter, lighter and correspondingly whiter at these points, because it has become alive. Behold: the skin of his face was shining. Behold: he was transfigured before them, as white as snow. The soul, in patches, shapes the tattoo, the set of crossed lines drawing a force-field: the space occupied by the formidable pressure of the soul in its efforts to erase gently the shadows of the body, and the major entrenchments of the body to resist this effort. On the skin, soul and object are neighbours. They advance, win or lose their places, a long, hazy mingling of the I and the black body, resulting from time to time in a peacock’s tail of mingled colours. The struggle ends with the alabaster-white, mystical body. I am no longer anything. Or with the cybernetic body, a black box, another total nothingness.
The ecstatic transfiguration, the loss of the body into the soul, removes the tattoo. The totally flayed man, the perfect automaton, also replaces the body with a total black box. Thus the mingled body finds itself in the middle, between heaven and hell: in everyday space.
All dualism does is reveal a ghost facing a skeleton. All real bodies shimmer like watered silk. They are hazy surfaces, mixtures of body and soul. It seems simple, although perverse and laughable, to tell of the loves of a larva and an automaton, or of a phantom and a black box, but the loves of the composite and the many-hued are consummated wordlessly.
I have only described tattooing in order to show the traces of the soul and those of the world. We always believe that we know something better when we have seen it, or that we can explain better by deploying shapes and displaying colours. To be sure, seen and visible tattoos, imprinted with a hot needle, have their origin in this gaudy thing that is the soul, a complex labyrinth of sense striving alternately towards the internal and external, and vibrating at the limits of each. But I have drawn, coloured or painted tattoos only in order to reveal the tangible: an abstract picture of the sense of touch. Abstract insofar as it abandons the visible in order to rejoin the tactile. The shimmering, vaguely fluid and, as it were, elastic identity card, obeys the tender map of touch.1 It favours topology and geography over geometry. Neglecting point of view and representation, it favours mountains, straits, footpaths, Klein bottles, chance borders that are formed through the contingencies of contact. It turns the skin into a generalized thumb. The skin can explore proximities, limits, adhesions, balls and knots, coasts or capes, lakes, promontories and folds. The map on the epidermis most certainly expresses more than just touch, it plunges deeply into the internal sense, but it begins with the sense of touch. Thus the visible tells more than just the visible. There is no word corresponding to touch to designate the untouchable or intangible, as there is for the invisible which is present in, or absent from what is seen, complementary to it, although abstracted from it, and incarnated in its flesh. However, the sense of touch is keen, sensitive and subtle.2 The soul is intact, in that sense. The intact soul entrances touch just as the topological invisible haunts and illuminates the experiential visible, from within. In the lavish luxury of tactile sensation, I feel as though I am touching a new abstract, at least on two sides, one of mixture and coloured patterns, and the other being one where the geometer abandons his measuring-stick to assess individual shapes, ridges and corridors.
Many philosophies refer to sight; few to hearing; fewer still place their trust in the tactile, or olfactory. Abstraction divides up the sentient body, eliminates taste, smell and touch, retains only sight and hearing, intuition and understanding. To abstract means to tear the body to pieces rather than merely to leave it behind: analysis.
I retreat in the face of difficulty by erecting a palace of abstractions. I baulk at obstacles, just as many fear the other and his skin. Just as many are afraid of their senses and reduce to nothing, to the tabula rasa of the inedible, the sumptuous, virtual, folded peacock’s tail of taste. Empiricism plunges one into a many-splendoured reality that requires great patience and intense powers of abstraction. What is left to hope for after the events of birth and self-recognition have taken place?
Body and soul are not separate but blend inextricably, even on the skin. Thus two mingled bodies do not form a separate subject and object.
I caress your skin, I kiss your mouth. Who, I? Who, you? When I touch my hand with my lips, I feel the soul like a ball passing from one side to the other of the point of contact, the soul quickens when faced with such unpredictability. Perhaps I know who I am when thus playing my soul like a musical instrument, multiplying the fine threads of self-contact above which the soul flies in every direction. I embrace you. Pitiful, cruel and hurried lovers that we are, we had only ever learned duelling, dualism and perversity. I embrace you. No, my soul does not fly around the fine thread that we both wind securely around the contact. No, it is neither my soul, nor yours. No, it is not so simple or cruel. No, I do not objectify, freeze, ensnare, or rape you, or treat you as that tedious old marquis would have done. And I do not expect you to do as I do. For that you would have to become a ghost or an automaton. For that you would have to become a larva or a lemur, and I to change into a black box. In reality, this limit case can occur through illness or tiredness. In all other cases, I almost always set a brown corridor against your opaline zone, or a light region on a violet area. All depends on time, place and circumstance. It is the beginning of patience. And infinite exploration. We feel our way in the thicket of circumstances like a congenitally blind man deciphering Braille, as though we were choosing colours of wool in the night. Anxiety and attention teeter, new and refined. Black on black, clear on confused, dark on a blend of colours, a rainbow on the whole spectrum of colours, images necessary for those without a sense of touch, a mountain pass on a plain, a mountain on a valley, a promontory on a gulf or strait – figures. The pallid soul flees and hides, withdraws, dons masks and appearances, makes itself visible from afar and takes refuge, leaves in its wake a cloud of ink or a wave of perfume, constructs glades, basins and marble pathways; becomes bold, advances, attacks gently, smiles and reveals itself again, waits, recognizes the territory, imposes itself, negates itself, shouts or falls silent, murmurs at length, and suddenly, in a corner of the wood, along the corridor, against the chimney, in the roundness of a curve or at the point of a zigzag, white Ariadne appears unexpectedly on the path of the indecipherable labyrinth: your radiant white soul, transfigured on the mountain and enveloped in immaculate dawn.
Death produces the same flat engram on corpses.
The variety of colours, forms and tones, of folds, flounces, furrows, contacts, mountains, passes, and peneplains, the peculiar topological variety of the skin is most economically described as a developing, amorphous, composite mixture of body and soul. Every individual place, even the most ordinary, creates an original combination of them. One could say that when these mixtures come into contact, they analyse each other or give rise, from their composition, to simple elements. As if, suddenly, one pole attracted the soul, and the other took charge of the object. In a free state, they are combinations, hand and forehead, elbow and thigh. In a state of contact or contingency, they react in relation to each other and give rise to those simplicities that we commonly think about in terms of zero and one, soul and body, subject and object. These simple entities are rarely seen in nature, one only ever encounters the indefinite spectrum of their compounds, one only knows simple entities as admixtures and through their reactions to one another.
No-one has witnessed the great battle of simple entities. We only ever experience mixtures, we encounter only meetings. The pure body, the black body or the candid soul, is more than improbable. Alabaster and jet are miracles.
I embrace you: here and now our contingency creates nuance on nuance, mixture on mixture. Brown on grey, or purple on gold. One card on another, or cards on the table. Two alloys change in composition, the cards are shuffled, jumbled, redistributed. A storm bursts over both fields. The lines of force, contours, slopes and valleys are redesigned. The warps change weft. When yellow is mixed with blue, the result is green. The titles of mixtures change, as do the titles of alliances. I embrace you as Harlequin, I leave you as Pierrot; you touch me as duchess and you withdraw as marchioness. Harlequin of this zone and marchioness of that place. Or, I embrace you as brass and leave you as bronze, you embrace me as argentan, you leave me as vermeil. Like the philosopher’s stone which transforms alloys and transmutes titles. Nothing is more abstract, learned or profound than this immediate meditation on combinations, nor more subtle or difficult to understand than this local, complex recasting, than this complete conversion or these unstable reversals. No doubt we have never said anything about change, or transformation in general, which was not entirely caught up in our contingency. We cannot think about change except in terms of mixtures; if we try to think about it in terms of simple entities, we merely arrive at miracles, leaps, mutations, resurrections and even transubstantiation. This is a change through titles, alloys, fabrics and cards, this is a change through drawings and reactions, one watered silk on another, hybridity.
One day some barbarian will be able to tell us what prodigious chemistry is at work and an under-barbarian will try to bottle it. Horror of horrors, we shall see these tattoos again, but this time reproduced artificially. Yes, singularity is in motion there, its Brownian movement produces variations in colouring, our emotion leaves its precise signature. We were so moved that we changed colour, a peacock’s tail on a rainbow, like spectra suddenly becoming unstable. You embrace me mottled, I leave you shimmering like watered silk; I embrace you as a network, you leave me as a bundle. We caress each other along our contour lines, we leave each other with various knots, in embraces that have changed shape.
If you want to save yourself, take risks. If you want to save your soul, do not hesitate, here and now, to entrust it to the variable storm. An inconstant aurora borealis bursts forth in the night. It spreads, blazing or bleeding, like those footlights that never stop blinking, whether they are switched on or off. It either passes or doesn’t, but flows elsewhere in a rainbow-coloured stream. You will not change if you do not yield to these inconstancies and deviations. More importantly, you will not know.
In these lavishly renewed undulations, fluctuations and versatile caprices brought about by countless changes of skin and direction, there will sometimes be sudden simplifications, and saturation or plenitude: all colours of every tone will come together as white; all possible lines, passing in all directions, will form a surface; the knot will become a point. In this place summation will occur – totalization. Carte blanche, smooth fabric, dawn light. On this spot, the intense meditation culminates in an apex, in the blinding apparition of the singular brought about by the saturation of presence, the transfiguration of the many-hued tattoo into a pure soul. The I is rarely revealed outside of these circumstances. I am, I exist in this mixed contingency that changes again and again through the agency of the storm that is the other, through the possibility of his or her existence. We throw each other off balance, we are at risk.
At the saturated summit of the mixture, the ecstasy of existence is a summation made possible by the contingency of the other. My contingency makes possible the same encounter for her. A white summation of all colours, a starry centre of threads.
At the empty and null bottom of this same mixture, death, white also by subtraction or abstraction, is flat.
Without the experience of mingled bodies, without these tangible riots of colour and mitigated multiplicities, we had long failed to distinguish life from death. The misunderstanding wherein death resembles glory, where life is only happy in the tomb, had turned metaphysics into a preparation for murder.
When in fact it is an art of love.
Canvas, veil, skin
In the 1890s, Pierre Bonnard painted a bathrobe; he painted a canvas in which a bathrobe is depicted, and a woman amidst leaves.
The brown-haired woman, seen from behind, half turning to the right, as if she were hiding, is wrapped in a very long, voluminous piece of yellowish-orange fabric entirely covering her standing figure, from the nape of her neck to her feet. All that can be glimpsed are her nose, the tip of one ear, one closed eye, her forehead, hair and a sort of chignon. The bathrobe veils the woman, the fabric veils the canvas. Studded with moons and half-moons, grained with crescents darker than itself, the material vibrates with interspersed light and dark areas. The half-moons, set at different angles, but at regular intervals, create a monotonous effect. An effect of patterning rather than vibration has been sought. The impression of printed tissue is more important than the optical effect: the eye is cheated. A night dress, an eyelid lowered, as if in sleep, the light of moons.
The loosish garment occupies the space. The canvas, vertical like a Chinese scroll, rises along the length of the body. Foliage fills the background, impinging ever so slightly on the material, so that ultimately the picture is reduced to the fabric. Why did Bonnard not paint directly on to the bathrobe, why did he not turn the bathrobe into a canvas, paint its material instead of the canvas? Why does he not now paint on fabric but on another surface?
If you removed the leaves and the bathrobe, would you touch the skin of the brown-haired woman or the canvas of the picture? Pierre Bonnard is not so much appealing to sight as to touch, the feeling beneath the fingers of films and fine layers, foliage, material, canvas, surface, defoliation, undressing, refined unveilings, thin caressing curtains. His immensely tactful and tactile art does not turn the skin into a vulgar object to be seen, but rather into the feeling subject, a subject always active beneath the surface. The canvas is covered in canvases, veils pile up and veil only other veils, the leaves in the foliage overlap each other. Leaves lying beneath the pages. As you are reading, you are no doubt focussing your gaze on these pages on which I am writing about Bonnard. Remove the sheets, turn the pages. Behind each one, still another, covered likewise with monotonous markings. In the end the eye encounters nothing more than that. All that remains is to touch the delicate film of the printed sheet, the bearer of meaning; the sheet, page, material-fabric, skin, the canvas itself of Bonnard’s woman. I leaf through the layers of the bathrobe.
It covers the skin, accumulating layer upon layer.
The Child with the Bucket, painted five years later, is part of a screen, the third of its four leaves. The child glimpsed on one leaf is playing on the loose fabric of one of the panels which are set at angles to one another, with the aim of concealment. A shelter in which to undress, upright so that one can throw one’s bathrobe over it, a canvas stretched like a garment away from the skin, a new veil.
Dressed in a double-breasted, printed smock, the child floats on the material of the screen, on Bonnard’s canvas, in the fabric of his dress or envelope, and is veiled by as many skins. A round figure crouching on the sand, he appears to be filling his bucket under a round, leafy, orange tree: the small tree in a pot, a small human near the bucket, both originating in sand or earth, both surrounded by those subtle variegations that cover them, overlapping leaves, lattice-patterned material. Bonnard’s canvas is printed with canvases and expresses veils.
What wind will whip up the smock, make the foliage quiver, make the screen shudder, what wind on your skin?
Thirty-five years later, the same Bonnard produced a Nude in the Mirror, also called The Toilette. A naked woman, in high-heeled shoes three-quarters turned towards the mirror, is looking at herself in it. We do not see her image face on.
Two mirrors and nudity, the hidden front view or stolen image, the second mirror as empty as the first, everything impels us to feel the prestige of the visual, to discourse yet again on eroticism and representation. No.
She is naked, look at her skin: covered in tattoos – mottled, striped, grainy, ocellated, dotted, nielloed, speckled, studded – even more than the old bathrobe, and layered with less monotonous patches, like watered silk. Her epidermis is painted in an extremely odd fashion. She has taken off her dressing gown and the pattern of the material appears to have remained on her skin. But the half-moons of the bathrobe are distributed over it in a regular, mechanical, reproducible fashion; live impressions are layered randomly and inimitably on the cutaneous garment. The model is recognizable. The last thin skin, the painted one, is not printed smoothly, homogeneously or monotonously, it spreads and shines in a chaos of colours, forms and tones. No other woman has the specific skin of that woman. You have recognized her.
In the mixture of shades, in the chaos of marks and strokes, you recognize the Belle Noiseuse whom Balzac thought unimaginable: in fact, she has no reflection in the mirror and cannot be represented. Here the body rises above disorder, here Aphrodite rises above the waves, even more complex in her skin than the nautical sound of waves breaking. No, the old painter of the Unknown Masterpiece 3 was not going mad, but was anticipating more than a century of painting. Balzac was dreaming of Bonnard, sight projecting touch, reason and order musing on the chaos of singularity.
Now it could be said that the frontal reflection in the half-seen mirror, or the image of the woman in the mirror, is reduced to a sort of curtain, a bathroom hanging, itself tattooed: ocellated, shimmering, mottled, studded and layered with colours and tones. Mixture for mixture and chaos for chaos, the skin’s image is the curtain, its reflection a canvas and its phantom a sheet.
But the canvas as a whole – the window, wall, plate, table, fruit, draperies, scattered towels – could serve as a screen, poster, leaf or veil: a patterned curtain, a tattoo, like the skin.
The woman with the lavishly decorated body, facing the richly decorated reflection of the curtain, is holding in her hand a shawl: is it a piece of curtain, a fragment of canvas, a bit of her skin? It is a rag seamlessly joined to the scrap of material stuck to her.
Pierre Bonnard’s Nude in the Mirror is underpinned by the equivalence or equation of canvas, veils and skin. Nudity is covered with tattoos, the skin is printed, impressed. The nude is pulling on her bathrobe or the child his smock, plain or brightly coloured printed fabrics which express inaccurately, rigidly or conventionally our individual impressions. The painter places marks on the canvas, supposedly in order to express his impressions: he tattoos it and reveals his fragile, private and chaotic skin.
This one exhibits skin, that one canvases, another luxurious veils.
The naked woman in the mirror is standing at her washstand like the artist at his palette and she often has as many pots at her disposal: tubes, bottles, brushes, sprays, soaps and makeup, nail polish and creams, lotions, mascara, the whole cosmetic apparatus. She washes, adorns and paints herself. She puts foundation on her face and then the surface tone, just as the painter prepares his canvas. The skin is identical to the canvas, just as the canvas above was identical to skin. The model does to herself what the artist does with her; to be sure, they have in common the virtuosity of optical effects, but they also work on a common variety over which their touch passes. Their hands sheathed in skin linger on skin.
Cosmetics and the art of adornment are equivalent expressions. The Greeks in their exquisite wisdom combined order and adornment in the same word, the art of adorning and that of ordering. ‘Cosmos’ designates arrangement, harmony and law, the rightness of things: here is the world, earth and sky, but also decoration, embellishment or ornamentation. Nothing goes as deep as decoration, nothing goes further than the skin, ornamentation is as vast as the world. Cosmos and cosmetics, appearance and essence have the same origin. Adornment equals order, and embellishment is equivalent to law, the world appears ordered, at whatever level we consider phenomena. Every veil is a magnificently historiated display.
Superior to the physicist, the naked woman in the mirror imitates the demiurge. She constructs the order of a veil: prepares her skin, decorates a layer, a variety of world, submits it to law. The artist reveals the order of the world in the order of appearance, as does she. We can hear all that in the discourse on the deceptive or superb effects of sight and bedazzlement, which forgets how the variety has been worked on: canvas, veil and skin that the hands have woven, coated, softened or fortified.
And objectified. The naked woman at her toilet, in front of two mirrors, is busy with her self-portrait: an artist in her studio. She paints her face, neck, and would have put makeup on her breasts in times gone by, she manicures fingers and nails, removes overlong hairs from her fur, shapes a mask, in the Indian or African manner, gives herself an identity. Paints the skin of her face, paints a mask or paints on a mask; her skin becomes a veil, then a canvas, as if the cosmetic fabric had received the imprint of her face, as if the so perfectly contrived finish could be torn off, as if the still damp fresco could be detached like a mobile canvas, as far removed from the body as the bathrobe or smock, as the leaf of the screen – a hovering, floating object. An impression or imprint made on an opaque area formed by perfumes, lotions or makeup. The skin of the subject is objectified, it could be exhibited in a museum. Just as a thumb makes its mark on a page, a chaotic or ordered, but nonetheless individual fingerprint, so the face imprints on this gossamer mask its indelible relief and personality. The naked woman with cosmetics, as she mixes tones and pastes, prepares to cast the mould of her impressions.
Let us enter the world of the fêtes galantes where so many masks and fantastical disguises whirl and dance: they display themselves and spread out, hide, fall, change places with each other. At one moment the skin is lost, the person strays, the sloughed skin flies through the air. At the feast of love, the dancers shed their skins. The skins that pass, vital, sprightly and delicate in the thin air, as though they were spirits, are visible only momentarily. Watteau and Verlaine noted them. A tiny spark of dangerous joy in which the cosmetic, an adornment prepared to last barely an evening, flies off towards beauty, for eternity.
Cosmetics approaches æsthetics in the sense of art theory. In the streets of Paris things just as beautiful as those created by Bonnard, Boucher or Fragonard can be seen. Sometimes women’s adornment is so well adapted to their nature that our breath is taken away, just as when we gaze at the world; but cosmetics becomes an æsthetics of sensation, because of a particular harmony: the naked woman in the mirror tattoos her skin, in a certain order and according to precise laws, she follows exact pathways; she emphasizes the eye and the gaze, accentuates with colour the place to be kissed, crowning the zone of words and taste, underlines hearing with an earring, traces bridges or links of colour between the wells or the mountains of the senses, draws the map of her own receptivity. With cosmetics, our real skin, the skin we experience, becomes visible; through adornment the particular law of the body is revealed, just as by means of crosshatching, colours or curves on a map, the ordered world displays its landscapes. The tattooed, chaotic, unruly nude wears on her skin the fleeting common place of her own sensorium – hills and dales on which currents from the organs of hearing, sight, taste or smell, ebb and flow, a shimmering skin where touch calls forth sensation. Cosmetics reproduces this summation or mixture and attempt to paint them, differently according to different social conventions, instinctively tracing these temporary tattoos. Masks left to museums can be understood in this way; to each his cartography of sensations, to each his cosmetography, if I dare so express myself, to each his facial imprint, or, very precisely, his personal impressions – another way, in our Latin languages, of saying his printed mask. I imagine that the reason why we do not have a ring hanging from our nose, as other peoples do, is that we have forgotten the sense of smell.
No, woman does not wear a duplicitous mask, as moralists say, and is not repairing the irreparable as young men claim. She traces the Tender Map of touch, as well as the streams of her hearing, her rivers of taste and the lakes of her listening, all of these mingled, quivering waters, from which her constant beauty arises. She makes visible her invisible identity card, or impressionable body. Her sensuous world is covered with a map, to the exact scale of its surface; detail for detail, eye for eye.
Who has not dreamed that maps such as this might be drawn identical to the world itself, measure for measure, the impossible dream of an ultrafine film following all the fractal details of the landscape, the cosmic dream of an exquisite cosmetic on the skin of each thing which one would remove, spread out and exhibit, after unrolling or unfolding it, to make visible the wine-dark sea and its light breezes, finer than wrinkles in the corner of a laughing eye, the pastel mauve of the lilac, the patch of sky, the tilted, moist corolla, the cosmos in all its order and adornment?
The Garden pulls, hides and smoothes out this transparent covering which is infinitely invaginated on each object. It objectifies the face of the landscape, the membrane of its mask.
A tangible medium is necessary before form, colour and tone can exist. Skin, covering, veil or canvas. The image is formed on an unfurled variety, the map is drawn and printed on a page.
Bonnard loved all sorts of media: stage sets, posters, papers, materials, fans, vellum in books, cardboard covers, sheets or screen panels. He produced the masks for Ubu roi. Before the eye sees, there is the texture of the canvas. The eye has no weight to impose, it imprints nothing. On the subject’s front line is the skin. Everything is enveloped in a film. In the beginning, touch; at the origin, the medium.
The painter, with the tips of his fingers, caresses or attacks the canvas, the writer scarifies or marks the paper, leans on it, presses it, prints on it. There is a moment when seeing becomes impossible, when the nose is touching, sight is cancelled by contact; two blind people who can see only by means of their canes or walking sticks. The artist or artisan, through his brush, hammer or pen, grapples at the decisive moment with skin against skin. No-one who has refused contact – who has never kneaded or struggled – has ever loved or known.
The eye, distant, lazy, passive. No impressionism without an impressing force, without the pressure of touch.
With his fingers of skin, Bonnard makes us touch the skin of things.
The Garden of 1936 traces an almost diagonal path to paradise. There is no perspective, depth, or restored relief to lead one to suspect that the viewer’s gaze has been staged. Bonnard throws a bouquet in our face. The dark-haired woman was covering herself with a bathrobe, the screen was hiding who knows what. The only things reflected in the mirrors were the curtains, screening nudity, the eye is cheated. Here paradise disappears out of sight, hidden by a curtain of foliage or trees that form part of paradise. And it is offered with great generosity. Whoever decorated this garden dress, this printed veil, this leaf, must have plunged naked into the flora and bathed at length in the colours and tones.
In the same year, the Nude in the Bath appears. Immersion. I cannot say that I have seen this nude, I cannot claim to know it, I try to write that I know, that I am living what Bonnard attempted to do. Immersion reveals, close to the sensitive skin, close to the apparitions or impressions in which it is enveloped or bathed, a sort of membrane, a fine film which inserts itself, or comes into being, between the medium or mixture and the male or female bather, a variety common to the feeling and the felt, a gossamer fabric which serves as their common edge, border or interface, a transitional film that separates and unites the imprinter and the imprinted, the printing and the printed, thin printed material: the bath reveals the veil.
This canvas gives us the key to Bonnard’s secret and, finally, that of impressionism. The bath tests sensation, it tests it in the sense of a laboratory experiment. This is the experience of sensation, or rather, this is experience or sensation. Bonnard throws himself naked into the garden swimming pool, bathes himself in the world. Naked bodies, exposed by centuries of painting, are not aimed at voyeurs, but reveal what belongs to the realm of the senses. They are all female bathers. Not models to be painted, but models of what it is necessary to do in order that one might one day paint or think: throw yourself naked into the ocean of the world. Feel this membrane, this fabric forming around yourself: this invisible veil.
And draw it back gently, tactfully and delicately, from this laminated corridor between the skin and things, stretch out, unfold, spread, exhibit and flatten it; slowly smooth the thin veil, cosmic in the garden and cosmetic on the skin of the Belle Noiseuse, as she steps out of her bath, take special care not to tear the veil – this is the canvas.
The Garden depicts the subject stepping out of the bath. I cannot decide whether it reveals the fabric of things themselves or the flayed epidermis of Pierre Bonnard, the subject of the impression or the impressed object. They are brought together by the bath, into which the subject plunges, imprinted with foliage and flowers.
A shroud, or winding sheet, is a cloth the purpose of which is to wipe away sweat, the sweat of the dying man. The skin is covered with perspiration, it exudes and becomes mottled, beaded and a blend of different colours, like that of the female nude. The shroud materializes the liquid veil, the mask streaming with sweat or blood: the fabric flows like fluid, but is also solid because of the deposits left behind, almost ethereal through evaporation. The film between the skin and the bath is the site of transitions and exchanges. The bathrobe, in the bathroom, amidst the steam, could be called a shroud.
In Turin one can visit the shroud that enveloped the body of Christ in his tomb, the veil of his face. Plunged alive into the most painful tortures, covered with sweat, blood, spittle, dust, scarified by flagellation, pierced by nails, run through by spears, his corpse was rolled in the linen fabric, a thin layer between the atrocious world and the printed skin. He was buried beneath this veil. Removed gently, stretched, unfolded, flattened, exhibited, the veil becomes a canvas and displays the traces of the body and face. This is the man.
According to tradition, Veronica was the name of the holy woman who wiped the crucified Christ’s face, covered with a liquid mask, dripping with sweat and blood. In ancient languages this name means the true icon, the faithful image. True, faithful because imprinted, impressionistic.
Veronica becomes the patron saint of painters; her eyes full of tears, blinded with grief and pity, she made with her hands the imprint of the skin, the mask of pain, a holy woman of contact and caress, her hands open and her eyes unseeing.
The Garden of Bonnard is like the bathrobe: the world is more luxurious and more happily endowed than a regularly printed, woven veil; the garden enlarges the dotted skin of the nude at her toilet to the scale of the landscape, with more exuberance and greater richness in the tones and patches of colour. This is the shroud of the artist emerging dripping after bathing in the world, a true image of the garden.
Some look, contemplate and see: others caress the world or let themselves be caressed by it, throw themselves into it, roll, bathe or dive in it, and are sometimes flayed by it. The first, their large eyes embedded in their smooth, flat skin, are unacquainted with the weight of things. The others give in to the weight of things, their epidermis marked locally and in detail by the pressure, as if it had been bombarded. Their skin, therefore, is tattooed, striped, striated, coloured, beaded, studded, layered chaotically with tones and shades, wounds and lumps.
Their skin has eyes, like a peacock’s tail.
It sees, is seen, varies, unfurls and displays itself. Pierre Bonnard gave us, over half a century, his successive cast-off skins and flayed tunics. We believe in images but do not find them here, the mirrors empty themselves and we have fine, sensitive skins. An exhibition of trophies and scalps, hanging on the wall.
The garden-paradise unfurls a happy, sloughed skin.
Bonnard’s bathrobe, Bonnard’s nudes, Bonnard’s gardens display skins in full bloom.
The eye loses its pre-eminence in the very area in which it is dominant, in painting. At the limits of its endeavour, impressionism attains its true original meaning, contact. The nude, ocellated like a peacock, reminds us of the weight or pressure of things, the heaviness of the column of air above us and its variations. Tunics, curtains, scarves, leaves, bathrobes are printed like books, using strong pressure. The skin, a hard and soft wax, receives these variable pressures according to the strength of things and the tenderness of the area. Hence the tattoos, traces and marks, our memory, our history and the parchment of our experiences. Our cutaneous garment bears and exhibits our memories, not those of the species, as is the case for tigers or jaguars, but those of the individual, each one with his mask, or exteriorized memory. We cover ourselves with capes or coats from modesty or shame about revealing our past and our passivity, and in order to hide our historiated skin, a private, chaotic message, an unspeakable language, too disordered to be understood and which we replace by the conventional or exchangeable impression of clothes and by the simplified order of cosmetics. We never live naked, in the final analysis, nor ever really clothed, never veiled or unveiled, just like the world. The law always appears at the same time as an ornamental veil. Just as phenomena do. Veils on veils, or one cast-off skin on another, impressed varieties.
The ancient Epicureans gave the name of simulacra to the fragile membranes, which are emitted everywhere, fly through the air, are received by everyone and are responsible for signs and meaning. The canvases of Bonnard and others fulfil, perhaps, the function of simulacra. To be sure, they pretend to do so. But above all: between the skin of the painter and the fine envelope of things, the veil of the former encounters the veils of the latter, the canvas seizes the momentary junction of the sloughed skins. A simultaneous simulacrum.
Painters sell their skin, models hire out their skin, the world gives its skins. I have not saved mine, here it is. Flayed, printed, dripping with meaning, often a shroud, sometimes happy.
Hermes and the peacock
Let’s talk about the peacock, a doubly monstrous bird, which has so many long feathers that it cannot fly, as if evolution had erred through excess; displaying a hundred eyes which you can imagine watching you even if you know they cannot. When it struts, it displays an ocellated tail, revealing eyes of feather or skin.
Mercurial, but limited to earth-bound displays of flightiness, one day the bird crossed Hermes’ path. Argus, the man who could see everything, is said to have had two pairs of eyes, one on the front of his head, like everyone else, the other behind. No blind spot. Others say that he had a hundred – fifty in front and as many on the nape of his neck – or that he had an infinite number of eyes all over his skin. Said to be clairvoyant at first, then pure gaze, then a massive eyes-ball, and finally skin tattooed with ocelli, fantastic proliferation gone mad. Growth and phantasm often go hand in hand. Argus sees everywhere and is always looking: he only ever sleeps with one pair of eyes shut or with his eyelids half closed; half asleep, half awake; the best of all watchers, whether earth-bound or aloft, deserves his nickname of Panoptes, the panoptic.
An excellent example of perfect sight and lucid skin, just as the previously mentioned painter was an example of vision and perceptive tattooing.
Panoptes would have been highly valued, nowadays, in the study of the world and experimentation. He would have been a leader in laboratories or observatories, or in the field; he would have kept watch marvellously well. We need always to pay constant attention to things, in science or in our travels.
Back then, in those mythic times, Argus was employed in surveillance. Panoptes spied on the extra-marital loves of Zeus, at the instigation of Hera, the jealous wife, who had him spy on the conjugal relationships of the gods and at the same time on Jupiter’s amorous adventure with a nymph.
There is an immense difference between the observation of things and the surveillance of relationships: two worlds, perhaps, are in opposition here; two kinds of time, that of myth and that of our history.
Myth is not concerned with the careful examination of objects. Argus is the precursor of the private detective. Endowed with a hundred open eyes while the other hundred are resting, he becomes a policeman, screw, prison warder: all devoted to shadowing.
Cultures mature when they transfer their focus on relationships between people to innocent objects. A more relaxed collective life tends to improve our morals, such as when men turn their attention away from the anxious, uncomfortable loves of their neighbours, towards the trajectory of a comet. The society in which surveillance dominates ages quickly, becoming old-fashioned and abusively archaic. The past lurks there like a monster, harking back to the age of myth.
Surveillance and observation. The human sciences keep watch, the exact sciences observe. The first are as old as myths; the others are born with us and are as new as history. Myth, theatre, representation and politics do not teach us to observe, they commit us to surveillance.
Panoptes sees everything, always, everywhere: for what task do the gods employ him: for surveillance or observation?
In the Greek sense of the verb to see, he incarnates theoretical man, an omnidirectional ball of open eyes. Of what use is theory? To monitor relationships or to examine objects?
I shall call anything lacking an object poor. Myth lacks an object, as do theatre and politics.
Once, a long time ago, not so long ago, we had few objects. Thing-deprived humanity lingers in our consciousness. With so few things, our wealth consisted of ourselves alone. We spoke only of ourselves and our relationships. We lived in and through our relationships. So I shall call myths poor, because of their lack of objects, and likewise theatre, theories and politics; poor and wretched our philosophies, and wretched our human sciences.
We remember so precisely this wretchedness that we cannot fail to recognize it when we find it here and there among the nations of the world, and in stories or abstract discourses. We are barely emerging from places, families and collectives deprived of things, in which we were for a long time trapped in relationships and condemned to an experience of the world that was limited to talk. Deprivation leads to surveillance and betrayal; the villages of my childhood were alive with lucid, talkative Arguses. Everyone knew everything about everybody as if, in the middle of us all, there was a panoptic tower keeping watch, an indiscreet social contract or inevitable police report. Little or no attention was paid to things, each person monitored the relationships of everyone else. I have known societies composed entirely of sociologists. They were unbelievably talented, both in watching and reporting. We have barely left that Antique age, not all of us have emerged from the poverty that lasted from the mythical ages until quite recently. I recall mythical societies entirely caught up in representation, hibernating in language. Poverty is not only measured in bread but in words, not only by the lack of bread but by an excess of words, an exclusionary prison. Language spreads when bread is lacking. When bread arrives, speaking is out of the question. The mouth, long starved, has too much work to do. We have learned to love objects.
There is no place for things on the boards of a theatre. We provide plays and words to those who have only words. Our theories are bereft of objects, they watch over relationships. So if you ask philosophy for bread, what you get are nice words and representations. If you ask it for bread, it has only circuses. It lives on relationships, on the human sciences, in myth and antiquity, without leaving the village of our childhood; it has no world, produces no things, provides no bread. For how long has it been poor and starving, as was our youth?
A prosperous, productive philosophy would provide more than enough bread for all those who passed by.
The growth of objects, the exponential flood of things, have made us forget the time of their absence. And that time seems so far away from us now! Archaic, antediluvian and indeed mythical. Myths and philosophy recount that time to us. Memories of places where lovers were kept under surveillance, and pursued as far as the Bosphorus, in an empty, sonorous space, with no-one thinking to eat. Thus philosophies without object – nearly all – thus philosophies, aged and poor, which take their values from the human sciences alone – almost all – appear so ancient to us that we read them as myths. As though they were politics, theatre or magic. When they come across an object, they change it, by sleight of hand, into a relationship, language or representation.
They pull us backwards. On the whole, the observant person is better than the surveillant, detective or policeman; and the astronomer who falls to the bottom of a well is better than the woman who, behind his back, mocks him to her friends. Who has a grasp of reality, he who gapes at the stars or she who hides in the background, making fun of him? Do the washerwomen know that a well makes an excellent telescope and that, from the bottom of this vertical cylinder, the only telescope known in Antiquity, one can see the stars in full daylight? What have they to laugh about, not knowing that the scholar descends knowingly into the abyss. Did they know this, the authors of fables that still make us laugh? Did the philosophers? It is better to go from relationships to things, a demanding innovation, than to return from objects to relationships, an easy practice: from science to theatre, from work to politics, from description to myth, from the star thing to the theatrical representation. The exact sciences came after the object had emerged, they foster its emergence. The idea of going backwards is frightening: when objects are replaced by relationships, issues, fetishes and goods. These are all forms of regression. A little bit of naivety is better than suspicion.
Inundated with objects, we dream of relationships as of a lost paradise. That paradise made for a very ordinary hell, peopled with voyeurs and volunteer policemen, slimy with suspicion, and where laziness rivalled politics. The philosophy of suspicion gives rise to the oldest trade in the world. Communities, still deprived of objects, whether voluntarily or through the cruelty of others, indulge in the delights of policing and political imprisonment, and condemn themselves to the hell of relationships. Conversely, their masters do not want objects. Proof that things liberate one from surveillance and that observation frees one from suspicion.
Sciences that are not acquainted with objects can only rely on sleuthing and policing, they are caught up in myth. Objective knowledge creates present history whereas the human, ancient sciences lead to mythology. The observer weaves in the light of day what the surveillant undoes during the night. Which is more frightening?
Hermes will kill Panoptes: the bearer of messages will triumph over the watcher, surveillant or observer. Communication and information kill theory. How?
Zeus, the king of the gods, loves Io, a beautiful nymph; Hera, a princess, suffers from jealousy. A jealous person lives in a place of thorns, where surveillance begins: a vantage point from which to see. Zeus deceives Hera by cheating: he transforms the nymph into a heifer. What, me, love an animal? The heifer shines, however, with a wonderfully white, smooth coat.
Hera suspects something, she is suspicious of the bull circling around the cow. As she is able to metamorphose beings as easily as Zeus, she sends a gadfly, her own prickly envy, that stings the female and maddens her, forcing her to leave.
Io, a wanderer, gallops through Europe, gives her name to the Ionian Sea, running along the shore, always fleeing, and passes into Asia at the place now known as the Bosphorus or Cow’s Step; a vagabond, she suffers and complains, unfortunate to have been loved by a god, in as much pain from wandering and love as the crucified Prometheus from vengeance and immobility.
Hera guessed correctly, Zeus was indeed hiding behind the appearance of the bull.
The queen, foiled, calls Argus, whom nothing escapes. Panoptes guards the cow, even Zeus can do nothing about it. The king is foiled in turn.
Jealous panoptic theory sees all from the top of its tower.
Method in the human sciences, which deal only with relationships, apes police and inquisitorial suspicion. It spies, shadows, sounds hearts and minds.
It asks questions and remains suspicious of the answers, it never asks itself whether it has the right to act as it does.
It is said that God is not deceitful in the exact sciences, where the innocent object remains loyal and trustworthy. God does not deceive, he establishes the rules of the game, and remains within them. Man deceives in the human sciences, and worse still, he cheats. In the exact sciences, if God does not deceive, there is all the more reason for him not to cheat. Man deceives in the human sciences, and worse still cheats – not only subtle, complex and refined like the God of the exact sciences, but hiding his game of deceit, by feigning a different strategy, suddenly changing the rules, and cheating offside. Man cheats in the social sciences, where breaking the rules is law. Where changing the rules is law.
The exact sciences construct subtle theories that are at once honest, elegant and stable. In them, a cat remains a cat: the identity principle. The human and social sciences describe theories even more underhanded than fraud, more duplicitous than cheating, in order to outsmart their object. Here everything becomes possible; a cow is a woman or a god a bull, even the identity principle is unstable. Reason watches while reason sleeps, reason sleeps while it watches, a hellish world of relationships in which stability itself fluctuates.
The human sciences are necessarily involved in the worst kinds of double dealing, whether from beneath the table or behind your back. The term hypocrisy describes this procedure quite well: here method is critical – hypocritical – by undermining or backstabbing objects or relationships. It tricks tricksters, deceives deceivers and hides behind those who cheat (those who cheat do it behind the players’ backs), it robs robbers, plays policeman to the gendarmes, teaches the most famous detectives a lesson, subjects the grand inquisitor to searches, keeps voyeurs under surveillance, betrays liars, studies the weak and miserable, exploits them by taking from them information, their little secrets, their last possessions.
The hypocritical method consists in always placing oneself behind, and this immediately creates a queue. One must therefore get quickly behind the last person in the queue, stand behind the last one whose back can still be seen, then hide one’s own back for fear of being caught in turn by someone who has understood the game. Thus the rules of the method: set a liar and a half to catch a liar, a more depraved person to catch a depraved one, the pluperfect, or more-than-perfect, as we used to say; a theoretician to catch a voyeur.
The movement has no end and constructs long, monotonous, difficult chains of reasoning that seek closure. In other words, philosophies which draw on the human sciences try to find sites which, in the final analysis, escape criticism, the last link of the chain, or the end of the queue. They indulge in reasoning based on extremes, just as in the classical age philosophies that drew on the nascent exact sciences appropriated the divine extreme, the non-deceptive God of philosophers and scientists. God can neither be deceived nor deceive us, that was the endmost point. Here the limit would be, at the opposite extreme, to cheat or deceive so much that all imaginable cheating would already have been anticipated. The extralucid and inescapable panoptic has already seen everything.
Did the traditional theology of knowledge and evil foresee these closures at the extremes? Here we have God and the Devil.
Does our age of social sciences set up the Devil as a new extreme, in opposition to the God of philosophers and scholars, the God who dominated the classical age and the emergence of modern science?
God neither deceives nor cheats. Objects in the exact sciences remain stable. Man deceives and cheats, so much so that he disappears sometimes, like Zeus beneath the skin of the bull, like Hera behind the sting of the gadfly.
Now it could be said that he who cheats and deceives does so because he wants to win. So the first attribute of God consists in being indifferent to winning.
Detach yourself from notions of winning or losing, be indifferent to victory or loss, you will enter into science, observation, discovery and thought.
Here two extremes are defined: a stable apex of trust; a maximum of distrust. To the stability of the object corresponds the lability of relationships.
God has guarded the exact sciences since the classical age. Some say he appropriates them, some that he favours them. The Devil dominates the human sciences, a deceitful trickster from the outer limits of evil. It is said that he deploys extreme and exquisite cunning to foil God’s power and goodness and to win or regain the place of God. God deploys no cunning and refuses conflict. The war between the Devil and God never took place, one wants to win, the other does not.
Indifferent to winning or defeat, beyond the scale of victories and losses, beyond the scalar podium, beyond metrics, God is infinite. Here infinity is defined by indifference to the battle with evil, the battle to end all battles.
Free from the hell of relationships, God is devoted to the object, and thus creates the world, the complete set of objects. Everything derives therefore from his refusal to be part of the game.
Hera and Zeus play chess, play at deceiving each other or winning, devil against devil, their cheating reaching the extremes of evil. The Devil is the god of myths, or of the human sciences, our god. Our thinking takes place under his regressive reign.
Is it possible to conceive of a new man who would have no time for cheating or deception, who would be set free from the animal podium on which victory is all that matters?
Panoptes sees everything and knows everything, from his extremal site. Nothing escapes him. Using falsely naïve images, myth provides an excellent description of concepts that we have difficulty in forming. The aim of the game is to find foolproof moves. Hence the construction of extremes: God, the Devil, Panoptes himself, Hera the queen and Zeus the king. The strongest pitted against the strongest, like rutting wapitis.
Zeus attempts to deceive his wife who tries to catch him, and therefore cheats: where you see a cow, it is really a woman. Hera cheats and the gadfly flies and stings according to her will. The goddess positions herself behind the god, who positions himself behind her: he undermines the goddess who undermines him. In this game with no rules, the back of each is turned towards the other, offering up a weak blind spot.
Let us look for a third, all-seeing man. Let us imagine someone with no back: an insomniac, without a blind spot, never inattentive or unaware, intensely present, nothing but face, an omnidirectional ball of eyes, an interlocking geometry of indestructible facets, waking and sleeping in flashes of light and dark, like a lighthouse on the coast or, more accurately, like a set of lights and signals, controlling a particular zone and filling the night, it stares or signals at random. This is Argus. Here at last we have total theory, the unassailable method that can conquer everything. There is no getting around Argus. Here at last is the right position for those who desire to be first or last, critical yet never subject to criticism, an observing presence with no observable opacity, always a subject, never an object. No-one takes Panoptes from behind, he has no underside or back, he is a sphere made for scanning.
Those who deal with men and rule over them always stay in the black, blind, impotent spot of the active or present subject, behind his back. Illness plays a minor role, as do sleep, misery, linguistic poverty, the residual unknown of collective relationships, or childlike hope. The doctors of bodies and souls, economists, politicians and rhetors, inhabit this weak spot, sheltered from blindness, in the dark of the unconscious or on the edge of tears. They see without being seen, each one finding his two-way mirror or his shuttered window. The philosopher who sums them up, integrates and reflects them, becomes panoptic: inescapable and unassailable like Argus.
You who look at everything through your perpetually open eyes, is your lucidity never bathed in tears?
Here is the state of play: Zeus himself is in check. The queen beats the king using the panoptic rook-tower. Zeus then calls on his knight, Hermes enters. The king orders his angel to attack and to kill Panoptes.
It is impossible to approach him or take him unawares. There is no surprising a surveillant: consider the pre-conditions of this strategy of always more. The knight must circumvent the all-seeing tower. How?
Hermes sends Panoptes deep into a magic sleep by playing the syrinx, as others charm snakes. Hermes invents the syrinx or Pan-pipes for this battle.
A new combat between extremal sites: Panoptes has total and complete vision. In the realm of sight he leaves his adversary no opening. Hermes therefore quits the terrain on which Argus is unassailable and moves into the realm of sounds by taking over the entire spectrum: hence the name of Pan’s pipes. Pan against Panoptes. Consider the pre-conditions for the strategies of total war. Listening and looking in confrontation, a strange conflict of the faculties of sense: hearing against sight, or ear against eye, one totality opposed to another, armoury for armoury, the sum of soundwaves balancing the sum of evidence. The geometral plane of messages against the ichnographic plane of intuitions, a fabulous struggle in an inconceivable space, the system of harmony enveloping the theory of representations.
Suddenly these fantastic gigantomachies, the all-powerful against the all-powerful, the Devil and God, Jupiter and Juno, Pan and Panoptes, are reduced to an apparently simple confrontation. The syrinx sends Argus to sleep, the cobra writhes, inoffensive, to the tune of the Indian flute. Whence come these magics of fascination? Enchantment comes from chanting. What effect can the ear have on the eyes, what effect can sound have on sight, listening on looking?
A visible event is localized and locatable in its distance and angle, coordinated with the surrounding visible; we occupy a point of view, perceive profiles, sight defines a place. The panoptic myth seeks to force this place and exceed its definitions. Just as Leibniz added together the different views of a thing in order to obtain its ichnographic or geometral dimensions, so Panoptes totalizes the body’s points of view, adds together the sites from which he sees. God alone, for Leibniz, reveals simultaneously all the profiles of a thing. Spherical Argus alone presents himself as a God-like eye made of eyes – facetted vision like that of flies. A real, but minor or limited benefit, because the best of all watchers, the geometral subject, far from perceiving a geometral-object, sees space as the sum of places, while still seeing each thing according to its profile. His body, still linked to a place, behaves like a lighthouse, round like its lantern and sending out into the surrounding area shafts of light while at the same time receiving the brilliance of things at every point on its sphere.
A sound event does not take place, but occupies space. Even if the source often remains vague, its reception is wide and general. Vision provides a presence, sound does not. Sight distances us, music touches us, noise besieges us. Absent, ubiquitous, omnipresent sound envelops bodies. The enemy can intercept radio transmissions but does not have access to our semaphore; sight remains unintrusive, sound-waves will not be contained. Looking leaves us free, listening imprisons us; we can free ourselves from a scene by lowering our eyelids or putting our fists over our eyes, by turning our back and taking flight. We cannot escape persistent clamour. No barrier or ball of wax is sufficient to stop it. Practically all matter, particularly flesh, vibrates and conducts sound. Hermetic to light, the black veil blinds and other bodies may obstruct other passages, but Hermes works in a medium that knows no hermetic barriers. Local vision, global listening: more than just ichnography, geometral for both the subject and object, hearing practises ubiquity, the almost divine power of universal reach. Singular optics, total acoustics. Hermes, the god of passage, becomes a musician, for sound knows no obstacle: the beginning of the total ascendancy of the word.
We are speaking of magic, but at the same time of philosophy, common sense and the world as it is. Pan charms Panoptes by overwhelming his conductive flesh. Strident sound makes his eye-covered skin quiver, his muscles tremble, his tears flow, his bony frame vibrate. The clairvoyant ball is covered by a lake of tears. Argus collapses with excitement. The global triumphs over the sum of sites. The sound-wave has immediate access to totality, so fruitlessly sought by adding together places or points of view and juxtaposing eyes. Have you ever encountered a work, accomplished effortlessly and on the first attempt, that you could never achieve, even in a hundred thousand attempts, over your whole lifetime? Did you not weep? Argus collapses. However panoptic and lucid this bright sphere is, it remains differential and pointillist, analytic of micro states or dwarf scenes. However vulgar a sound is, it succeeds immediately in imposing itself on the surrounding area. The victory is virtually magical, as it were, and of a sensuous order. Sound undoes sight, or charms it: the latter focuses itself at the endpoint of a narrow beam of light; but what else do eyes usually do except focus on that point? Sound puts sight in its place.
Thus Leibniz, eternally running after the untotalizable sum of ichnographies, succeeded in closing his system with Universal Harmony. Representation, even if panoptic, falls asleep when Harmony resounds. Better still, if we can form an idea of a world, of God, or merely of a system, if we accede to totalities, it is never because we are led there by partial or endless representations, we only ever get there through harmony, metaphysical Pan-piping.
Whether we read this myth literally, or as magic, or philosophy, we obtain the same result: Pan overturns Panoptes. It sums up in simple, perfectly dove-tailed acts what we disperse across discourses and disciplines. But the world around us angrily screams this result: by which I mean that the environment that we have prepared or constructed plunges us into an inextinguishable din. We have long been sleeping, drugged with sounds and music, no longer seeing anything or thinking. Hermes has taken over the world, our technical world exists only through the all-encompassing confusion of hubbub, you will not find anything left on the earth – stone, furrow or small insect – that is not covered by the diluvian din. Great Pan has won, he has expelled silence from space. If you pity me, tell me where I can go to think.
Pan’s flute prods and disturbs. Once on a June evening, in those long-gone years when the ends of days sank into silence, I was waiting for a total eclipse of the sun on a terrace facing a garden, overlooking the foliage of a maple tree. It soon became dark and an eclipse wind, like a wave, had risen when suddenly from the neighbouring house burst forth a sort of wild dance, with the strange, biting, astringent sound of Pan’s pipes. Young people were celebrating some festival, they had confused shadow with twilight and were playing as night fell. However much one knows about it, the veiling of the sun’s light is disturbing and transports one to another world. Pan was taking me there, I knew that he had blinded both the sun and my sight, sweeping over the space in a wave of wind and covering appearances in orange, purple and green tones which set my teeth on edge. Horrified, I heard the approach of what might have been complex, cruel Aztec gods.
Here is the second state of play: Hera herself foiled. The king takes the queen’s rook by moving his knight. No-one speaks of Io again, as she moves weeping towards the Caucasus, close to Prometheus in chains, a virgin standing at the foot of the cross. No-one speaks of her except those who weep for the misfortune of the world. Hermes has put Panoptes to sleep and killed him: everyone is talking about the murder.
All sites are local to Argus for as far as he can see. As a subtle analyst, he totalizes the information about a place flawlessly and faultlessly. Hermes intercepts all information, in all places; sites of transport and translation, interference and distribution, he occupies passages. Argus occupies a tactical position. Hermes invades strategic sites. One will win the battle, the other the war. Argus, intensely present, detects every presence; but one who is everywhere does not need presence and is absent through ubiquity. Police no longer need to shadow anyone, they simply set up road blocks. They do not need watchers, here and now. Everything changes when presence is no longer the primary consideration.
Panoptes possesses light’s clarity, Hermes seizes the arrow of its speed. Classical philosophy until recently placed its trust in illumination, contemporary philosophy is discovering the rapidity of the lightning bolt. The speed of light is more important than its purity. Consider the novelty of this victory: the principal quality of a theory or idea, its oldest value, clarity, is overtaken by the speed at which it travels. Pan or Hermes kills Panoptes: the swiftness of a message is of more value than the lucidity of a thought. We are speaking here of the new state of knowledge. We are speaking of common sense and philosophy and at the same time we are describing our world. Having no centre, the network of communication makes presence superfluous and surveillance obsolete. Audiovisual or computer circuits make a mockery of the watchtowers of the last war, borrowed from the ancient Roman camps. Sailors pass by without looking at lighthouses, their safety ensured by sonar and radar. Those who control the regulation of codes and their circulation in space allow the watchers to let down their guard and sleep on the consoles of their ships, listening to music. The hum of passing messages numbs the dog, spy and informer, and anæsthetizes the prison warder. Space is better contained and prison more secure because of the telephone, television and telecommunications. All Panoptes’ avatars, all those figures who remain present to presence, in short, all the successive figures of phenomenology are put out to pasture. Present everywhere, Hermes, the spirit, suddenly descends into the spatial realm.
Hermes, the network, replaces all local stations, all watch towers juxtaposed in space, all successive figures in time: his take on geometry rules phenomenology out of court.
We are speaking at one and the same time of our common sense, of listening and hearing, and then of the word and code; of music and singing; of drugs and anæsthetics, because we have forgotten presence or lost our intuition. We are speaking of newspapers, periodicals, policing or politics (the struggle of Pan against Panoptes takes place in these every day); of the new state of knowledge. We are speaking of relationships and objects, knowledge and surveillance, competition and society. The computer world takes the place of the observed world; things we know because we have seen them give way to the exchange of codes. Everything changes, everything flows from the victory won by the table of harmony over the tableau of seeing. Gnoseology and epistemology change, but also daily life, the mobile niche into which the body is plunged, as well as behaviour, and therefore morals and education.
Observation, the idea of clarity, the function of intuition tied us to things themselves, like anchors or mooring ropes. Theory, by its own admission, was distinguished from the act of seeing, and the phenomenology of appearances was left to optics. The mooring ropes break. The message itself becomes the object. The code states the given, all we are given is data and the data bank has taken the place of the world.
Or rather: the message becomes the given again, as it did during what I have called Antiquity, when the collective fed off its relationships and messages, disdaining and disregarding objects. Relationships return, bringing with them the whole of mythology, the formidable and regressive burden of conflicts and fetishes. Ahead of these, science rushes headlong towards its premises. Wealth returns us to poverty. Increased productivity leads to a state of misery. Pan kills Panoptes: the age of the message kills the age of theory. Will the human sciences engulf the exact sciences, as they did in antiquity? As the myths tell us?
The war that will take place will therefore always be more savage in the sciences. We shall see secrets and trickery blossom again, jealousy’s reach extend sky-high where the gods, elderly lovers grown senile, are still engaged in their age-old struggle to the death.
Is the hell of relationships returning, fed by rigour and efficiency?
Tired of deceitful games and cheating, dreaming that our brief lives might escape this monotonous age of blood and death, we live in hope of returning to a state of trust without deception or cheating, to a theory of knowledge that brings together the exact and the human sciences. A new knowledge and epistemology, a new man and a new education. It is only on this condition that we shall escape collective death.
Hera, the loser, is still a player in spite of everything. She strips dead Argus, takes the panoptic skin of the watcher, a shredded, billowing rag of shut eyelids, and lays it on the plumage of her favourite bird, the peacock. All that is left of the omni-directional ball of intense eyes is the dual colour of the ocellations and the brilliant pattern they make, a fascinating, silky fan. The motionless fowl, squawking harshly and tunelessly when Hermes plays on the flute, limping low to the ground when Hermes flies past, has only dead theory to display when it spreads its tail. Sight gazes without seeing at a world from which information has already fled. Representation, a still ornamental species in the process of extinction, provokes gawking admiration in the public parks and gardens where onlookers congregate.
Touch sees a little. It has heard.
In the towns, only our fellow men see us; no doubt they consider us as we consider them, height, weight and corpulence varying little. Bull’s-eye windows, shutters and panes gaze sightlessly.
In the countryside, peacocks with ocellated tails pass by, as well as cows, flies, dogs, hares and glow-worms. They have large, glaucous eyes, or small many-facetted visual apparatuses which reflect back to us minute, detailed, colourless, striated, striped, shimmering giants in countless fragments.
We consider the landscape, as a whole and in detail, it considers us as a landscape.
We are merged into it and its variety.
Our skin varies like a peacock’s tail, even though we do not have feathers. It is as though it could see. It perceives confusedly on its whole surface area and sees clearly and distinctly by virtue of the hyper-acute singularity of its eyes. Everywhere else on it there are vague kinds of ocellations. The skin forms pockets and folds and, refining itself at a given site, creates an eye. The obvious concentration of ocellations here is found merely in diluted form everywhere else. If it forms a hollow – a rimmed, pleated, hollowed, half-oval fan – it becomes an ear where hearing is condensed. Everywhere else, be it an ear-drum or drum, it hears more widely and less well, but it still hears, vibrating as though auricular. Our skin resembles that of jaguars, panthers and zebras, even though we do not have fur. The pattern of the senses is displayed there, studded with subdued centres and spotted with marks; the skin is a variety of our mingled senses.
The skin, a single tissue with localized concentrations, displays sensitivity. It shivers, expresses, breathes, listens, loves and lets itself be loved, receives, refuses, retreats, its hair stands on end with horror, it is covered with fissures, rashes, and the wounds of the soul. The most instructive diseases, the sicknesses of identity, affect the skin and form tattoos that tragically hide the bright colours of birth and experience. They are calls for help and advertise their misery and weakness; we must learn to read the writing of the enraged gods on the skin of their victims, as on the pages of an open book. The alphabet of pathology is engraved on parchment.
The organs of the senses form knots, high-relief sites of singularity in this complex flat drawing, dense specializations, a mountain, valley or well on the plain. They irrigate the whole skin with desire, listening, sight or smell. Skin flows like water, a variable confluence of the qualities of the senses.
Interior and exterior, opaque and transparent, supple or rigid, wilful, present or paralyzed, object, subject, soul and world, watcher and guide, a place where the fundamental dialogue with things and others happens and where it is most brilliantly visible, the skin bears Hermes’ message and what remains of Argus.
Subtle
We no longer know why, when it is acute, or refined or delicate, we describe a sense or a thing as subtle. We have lost the memory or secret of it.
In the Cluny Museum six large tapestries, originally from the Château of Boussac, have been given the collective name of The Lady and the Unicorn. They show or illustrate the five senses.
Each scene takes place on a blue, oval island. Well-defined and self-contained, the island is dotted with sprigs of flowers. It portrays a group: one or two women, the principal one and her attendant, two main animals, the lion and the unicorn, three or four trees, pine, holly, oak and orange, covered with foliage and laden with fruit, a host of small animals, monkeys, lion cubs, herons, magpies, jennets, cheetahs . . . plus specific objects, a mirror for sight, a positive organ for hearing, a sweet dish for taste, a plate or basket of flowers for smell. Touch has no specific object. The island of each sense stands out against a red, orange or pink background. The background is also laced with twigs, leaves and flowers and dotted with animals.
The balance of open and shut, or the contrast of one to the other, is achieved through colour and density. The fauna and flora, life, crowd together on the island and are diluted on the background, as if the fabric were dilating the scene or receiving a lighter animal and floral cloud from the denser source. Stronger and warmer impressions on the plateau on which the trees grow, their blue outgrowth projecting on to the red; a less dense, less compact and colder configuration against the background.
Exact and faithful outlines: each organ is drawn like an island, eye, ear, mouth, nose, an abundant, teeming complex of sensations, the skin stretches out its background canvas and is tattooed by these fiery centres. The island is woven from canvas of the same texture as its background, the organ is made from puckered skin. One notices in the scene that touch alone has no need of a special tool, its skin becoming at will both subject and object.
A neat question, an easy one too, arises in the case of the sixth tapestry, the only one with a written cartouche. Have we five senses, or six? Scholastic thought in the Middle Ages divided our sensorium into external and internal. Hearing, sight, touch, smell and taste were reputed to be external. In fact, the mirror reveals the image of the animal and not that of the subject: it shows the neck and nose of the unicorn and not the face and neck of the young girl who will utter her desire; the bonbonniere offers the mouth the taste of sweetmeats; and as this sense remains weak and unrefined, the island adds a shelter here, a trellis on which roses climb, to indicate the extent to which smell contributes to taste; the crown or necklace combines the smell of roses with carnations, giving the double meaning of the word bouquet; the hand tactfully caresses the stiff pole or erect horn; hearing listens to the pipes vibrating to the action of the bellows. This is the exterior world, flowers or sugars, animals or music, wood or ivory; the woman does not see or hear herself, does not feel or touch herself. Indeed a sixth sense is necessary, in which the subject turns in on itself and the body on the body: a common or internal sense, indeed a sixth island was necessary, a doubly enclosed island for the body itself.
A tent represents this interior, the intimacy of the body, and begins to construct the common body of these different women, this one smelling entirely of rose or carnation, that one quivering with harmony, a third displaying graceful images, yet another turned entirely to sugar or honey . . . the pavilion encloses their totality.
The tent consists of a blue veil, blue like each of these insular organs, but in addition woven and draped, with many folds and richly decorated. Each island is flat and enclosed but open to the space around it, a well-defined external sense but open to events in the world. The new blue pavilion is doubly closed, to the island and in space; it is closed on itself. And it is veiled in drapery.
The entire description is equally valid for tapestry and body. Each insular sense organ forms a dense singularity on the diluted, cutaneous plain. The island is woven of the same fabric as the background, each sense organ is invaginated in the same skin, spreading around it. The internal sense is draped in its tent, a new veil, a new fabric, but the same carpet and the same skin. The internal sense is veiled in skin.
Touch seems to have the upper hand. It comes together with the common sense, the sum of the first five, and weaves their tent. Standing alone, it required neither tool nor specific object, neither mirror nor organ, neither flower nor sweetmeat. In addition, before smelling the flowers gathered into a circlet, the woman touches them, singling out each one between index finger and thumb. The woman representing sight holds the handle of the mirror with her right hand and, with the left, caresses the neck of the unicorn. The one representing taste offers her fingers to the bird as a perch, as in the art of falconry. The one representing hearing touches the keyboard of the organ. The hand serves five times as a common factor and a common sense develops there.
Touch will win the day. With his large paw, the lion turns back and raises the tent hanging; with his cloven hoof, the unicorn raises and turns back the fabric flap of the pavilion; with both her hands, the woman lifts and twists the material which seems to cover, hold and cradle the precious jewels, enfolding them in their casket where they will soon be out of sight in their closed jewel box. She touches the girl, touches the animal, touches the monster.
Touch has the upper hand, the pavilion, an internal sense or the body itself, closes its veils as the body does its skin. The organs of the external senses are open veils or envelopes. Through these doors we see, hear and experience tastes and fragrances; through these walls, even when they are shut, we touch. The fabric of the pavilion, or the skin of the body, can either open or close, the external sense retaining its integrity. The internal sense is clothed in skin that is either impermeable or pierced with windows and forms its tent or pavilion, its habitat or tabernacle.
Touch ensures that what is closed has an opening; the body of the woman occupies the space of the open doorway and closes it. The hangings and the veils of the partly open tent will fall and close on the woman-summation, on the common sense, the totality or mixture of the five others, on the internal sense, the closure of their externality.
Touch has won the day through the equivalence of veil, fabric and skin. Its palette combines flowers, fruits, leaves, birds and animals. The world is printed on the wax garment that surrounds and clothes us, that now offers us an intimate habitat. A factor common to four external senses, an open and closed sense in itself, it protects the internal sense and begins to construct it.
The whole description applies to the final tapestry, to the woman’s body and to the sensorium in general. The cloth of the island is woven of the same fabric as the cloth of the tent and the background. The fall of the veil or cutaneous garment implies something new – their tattooing is different. The pavilion sets an ordered geometry, dotted with regular tongues of fire, against the sometimes dense, sometimes extensive, but always chaotic scattering of the patches of skin.
The tent opens and closes, as does the casket – two black boxes. Black or white? Light illuminates the interior of the pavilion, shading into the darkness of the interior surface of the box’s lid. White and black? We know and we do not know. Are they opening or closing the tent, is the maidservant preparing to close the chest? We do not know and we know.
Our body is covered with skin, is imprisoned within it. It opens on to the senses. It closes on the internal sense, remaining slightly open. Touch continues to predominate, it is well acquainted with these juxtapositions of white and black, of openings and locks.
The sixth tapestry constructs the body: the feminine body? There is no male in the Cluny Museum, no male and no sky.
Touch therefore has the virtue of closing and outlining an interior. In the tapestry that expresses the sense of touch, the lion and the unicorn each wear around their necks a shield attached by a belt, a monkey remains prisoner of a neckpiece chained to a roller. The dog, the hyena and the jennet are held on a leash and the other monkey is held by a belly-band. Yes, touch surrounds and encircles. I rest my case.
The roller has its own significance: impression. The cylinder imprints on the exterior world, just as the necklace makes an impression on the skin of the neck. It could not be better said, it could not be better demonstrated or written.
All the tapestries are silent except the last.
The woman signifying sight lowers her eyelids, the unicorn contemplates its own image in the mirror, and the lion, its eyes wide-open, looks at us: specifically animal sight. The woman with the necklace of flowers is satisfied, at a distance, with touch; the monkey smells a rose: specifically bestial smell. The monkey again raises a sweetmeat to its mouth while, absentmindedly looking away, the woman barely touches, as though at a distance, the sweets in the bonbonniere. Taste is also animal, the lion pokes out its tongue. The young girl signifying hearing plays and does not sing, she hears. She forms a message at a deeper level than her voice, a colourless or sense-free harmony, before the sense of language. The constituent women, each one dedicated to a single sense, keep their distance from language. It could be said that, incapable of speech, their efforts are confined to pure animality. The external senses share muteness with the flora and fauna, and with a few objects.
The resulting woman, having constructed her body or pitched her tent, accedes to language, which crowns the open-closed pavilion of the internal sense, imprinted with tongues of fire.
The naïve external senses abandon themselves to leaves and branches, to rabbits, herons, foxes and to the young, hornless unicorn, ever defenceless against poisons. They have the wild status of thyme, goat and holly. Bleating, caressing the light air with their wings, sweet-smelling and tasting, and of undoubted elegance in form and colour, but mute like brutish animals or tree branches. Open and abandoned to the world like a flat island to the sea. Unstable also because they are mingled: indefinable shades of colour, mixed bouquets, tastes with variable fragrances, touch quivering with sense. Plunged into the variable and the mixed, tattooed. Multiple also: scattered, studded or dotted, never single. The chaotic whirlpools of the senses never achieve singularity, conservation or identity. Hence these tapestries, studded and spangled with every thing in the world.
The internal sense speaks at last and for the first time. The tent is printed with burning tongues and crowned with writing. Language arrives.
The pavilion opens and shuts, contained but facing the outside. The woman is standing in her doorway, turned outwards, attentive, her body is given over to what is given. It is necessary to write the dative: TO.
Defined by the closing of the volume on itself, the slightly open tent reveals itself. The body can write or say: MY. My body, my belonging, which behaves like a circle and turns in on itself.
Monadic, the pavilion stands isolated on its island. Shut, open, it is revealed as singular. The body can say or write: ONE.
Solitary belonging gives itself to itself and to what is given.
Dense and blue, the body burns with stray languages. Empty like the tent, it leaves behind its jewels and regrets their absence: DESIRE. At the end of the fifteenth century, this term retains its Latin meaning, nostalgia, more than it embodies the contemporary meanings of lust and covetousness.
I leave behind my jewels, those that my body was wearing, those displayed by my partial bodies when they were a scent of roses, a shiver of sounds, a simulacrum in the mirror . . . I carry them and shut them in the casket. I miss them. I am nostalgic for a lost world, a lost paradise, an island between two seas, where the senses sparkle like a lake of gemstones. I speak now and shelter in the tent of language or writing. The tabernacle closes, its flaps are lowered. I live now in the prison of my language and the jewel-box closes. Having withdrawn beneath the veils printed with tongues of fire and beneath the crown of the written cartouche, the body which has left the world mourns it, the woman who leaves behind her jewels misses them, the beauty of the five senses lies in the black box while we sleep under the blue hangings engraved with fire.
Solitary belonging, devoted to itself, no longer devotes itself to what is given, except to what language gives us – to what is said or dictated.
To my one desire
This is the first sentence, the originary, primary proposition, as original as the fault committed in the past by a girl on a paradise-island, as original and permanent. These are the first words uttered by the body when it becomes an interiority endowed with a voice, and is enveloped in flames and imprinted with signs, when the skin-tapestry or the skin-pavilion no longer bears on itself lilacs or cheetahs but geometry and letters. This is the sentence that causes the world to flee and the necklets to be abandoned, that excludes rabbits and goats and that chased us from paradise, these are the words which cause the senses to withdraw into a black box. Our only desire is that it be reopened.
The woman-summation bids farewell to the world, takes the veil beneath the tent of language.
This is the first cogito, more deeply buried although more visible than the thinking cogito. I feel, I have felt; I have seen, heard, tasted, smelt; I have touched; I touch, I enclose myself in my pavilion of skin; it burns with languages, I speak; I speak about myself, about my loneliness and the nostalgia of lost senses, I mourn the lost paradise, I regret the loss of that to which I was giving myself or of what was given to me. Since that phrase was written, I desire. And the world absents itself.
This is the first, self-contained proposition, literally circular, the first stable unitary philosophy of identity. My desire identifies with writing, I exist only in language. The identity principle shuts itself off and is blind to the unstable, multiple, mingled, invisible senses, hidden in the jewel-box in the tent.
The girl, having laid aside her regrets, will turn back, will enter once and for all the tabernacle of language. We have always dwelt there with her, we have never left it, we have never seen, known or understood the Cluny tapestry.
I cannot tell or write of touch, nor of any other sense. I live in the tent crowned with the cartouche and clothed in tongues. Those who are in the tent with me demonstrate categorically that no-one can go outside, has ever gone outside. You will not find, they say, any language to tell or write things – flowers or fruit, birds or rabbits, sounds or shapes, tastes or smells – to write or tell the world before the emergence of language. You will only find a tapestry in the Cluny Museum. You find yourself foreclosed. They are right. I cannot write or describe the five tapestries, for if I describe or write, I only speak of the sixth. The original language has come into being, we can do nothing about it.
It is said that the horn of the unicorn is a protection against poison. One merely has to grind it to a powder, and mix or dissolve the powder in a beverage, in order to mithridatize oneself against harmful pharmaceuticals. The unicorn liberates us from drugs.
One day I was lecturing to an audience in a marquee, as attentive to them as they were to me. Suddenly, a large hornet stung me on the inside of my thigh, a combination of surprise and exquisite pain. Nothing in my voice or intonation betrayed the accident and I finished my talk. I do not mention this particular memory in order to boast of Spartan courage, but only to indicate that the speaking body, flesh filled with language, has little difficulty in remaining focused on speech, whatever happens. Words fill our flesh and anæsthetize it. It has even been said, and written, that the word was made flesh. Nothing makes one more insensitive than words. If I had been looking at some image, listening to the sound coming from an organ, smelling a garland of flowers, tasting a sugared almond or grasping a pole, the hornet sting would have caused me to cry out. But I was speaking, balanced in a groove or enclosure, protected by a discursive breastplate. You want to anæsthetize a patient completely? Get him to speak with passion and vigour, ask him to talk about himself, and himself alone, of his one desire, demand that he prove something or that he convince his audience. He is intoxicated with sonorous words, the hornet is powerless. Militant egotists, we speak in order to drug ourselves.
We seek the pharmaceutical, the fabulous animal which can free us from the hardest of hard drugs, language. We find it in the Cluny tapestry.
The lion and the unicorn raise the veils or flaps of the doorway, the lady emerges from the prison, flecked with tongues of fire, takes cascading necklaces of gems out of the black box with the open lid: they pour from the box as the woman frees herself from the veils and is reborn. Then, accompanied by the monster, she visits the island paradise amidst the oranges and cheetahs, the same world of five continents or aspects. She participates in the banquet of things, to our joy and hers.
Always accompanied by the unicorn even when we evoke her name . . . the fabulous is always with her: stories, poems, mythologies. To accede to things themselves, let your tongue be still.
When the shuttle moves on the tapestry loom, the thread of the weft passes under the threads of the warp. Thus sense becomes entwined in the fabric, as does melody, sometimes, in sonorous flesh, and deep thought in vowels. The dazzling display of the figures and colours on the worked canvas corresponds to a thousand ties and knots on its other side, events on the underside of the canvas which, by hiding them, obscures the roots of the adjective ‘subtle’. The secrets of the tapestry are knotted beneath it.
This is the secret of the unicorn: the secret of the five or six subtle senses. The skin hangs from the wall as if it were a flayed man: turn over the remains, you will touch the nerve threads and knots, a whole uprooted hanging jungle, like the inside wiring of an automaton. The five or six senses are entwined and attached, above and below the fabric that they form by weaving or splicing, plaits, balls, joins, planes, loops and bindings, slip or fixed knots. The skin comprehends, explicates, exhibits, implicates the senses, island by island, on its background. They inhabit the tapestry, enter the weaving, form the canvas as much as they are formed by it. The senses haunt the skin, pass beneath it and are visible on its surface, the flowers, animals and branches of its tattooing, eyes that stud the peacock’s tail; they cross the epidermis and penetrate its most subtle secrets.
Displayed beneath our gaze since the Middle Ages, the enigma of the unicorn can be read, without representation, as the secret of subtlety; the tacit ascendancy of the tactile.
Variation
Bonnard’s nude with cosmetics, and the myriad-hued garden, display varied canvases, skins and appearances. Let us consider the sense of variation. Varied means multiple: a thousand shades and tones, a thousand forms enhance the woman’s tattoo and the floral exuberance of the park. Likewise, the remains, the cutaneous rag of panoptic Argus, laid at his death on the peacock’s tail, is dotted with varied ocelli: the pavane does not sound monotonous, the feathered fan sparkles with many colours. Finally the blue island of the senses and the red background surround the lady and the unicorn with diverse flora and varied fauna: nothing plain, but on the contrary diversity, abundance, proliferation, number and difference.
The field is covered in flowers and grass: the tufts on the ground and the threads of the fabric are juxtaposed. We shall speak first of all of discrete or distinct variety. The fruit of the orange trees is clearly distinguished from the acorns, as are the carnations from the roses and the goats from the lions. The skin of the nude is tattooed in a variety of ways; the woman has turned pink, probably from the smell of the roses, but she has been affected at the same time by quite different causes: modesty or caresses. The traces and marks of all the senses are mingled: we shall call it continuous variety and describe her skin as variable. Woman is often variable, like the sky and the weather. Next to the lady of the Cluny Museum, the unicorn combines a goat’s beard on a horse’s body, with strange cloven hooves and a narwhal’s horn. The discrete and continuous variety on the tapestry is not averse to mixing. It is not known whether the legendary beast symbolizes a mixture of the senses or the jumble that the senses cause us to perceive, but the important fact is that the monster varies in itself. Thus the tail of the peacock, silky to the touch, seems to see. It has been killed by listening, a mixture of three senses scattered on the fan.
Everything that precedes this and that comes after is a variation on the idea of variety.
Our skin could be called variety, in a precise topological sense: a thin sheet with folds and plains, dotted with events and singularities and sensitive to proximities; discrete and panoptic when the eyes make regular holes in it; but also continuous when tattooed, like that of the naked woman at her mirror, in reality a compound like the unicorn.
Fable once again speaks the truth. The total woman or completed body, the internal or common sense, the sixth or totalizing tapestry, the skin of the final tent, in other words you and I, are manifested in the reality of your daily life or mine, in the form of a suit, cobbled together with its seams visible. The circumstances of our lives, be they tragic or opportune, and our will, are responsible for this. The variety of sight, basted with large tacking stitches on to the variety of hearing, these sewn temporarily to each other, and each one separately and both together tacked on to those of taste, smell and touch, piece by piece and in no particular order, working towards the definitive garment which never eventuates, forms components which are seen and which, on occasion, clash with the resulting variety or with a neighbouring one: the goat’s beard beneath the nostrils of a horse attracts attention, the neck beneath the narwhal’s horn causes surprise. This is how we originate and how we are formed: a slapdash piece of work, subject to the vagaries of time and the blunders of brief opportunities. At times our skin, a hasty and untidy construct, happy from some fortunate encounter, resembles the chimera, with inexpertly attached fragments: a chin adorned with strange hairs, or pasterns not matching the hooves. Our upbringing or environment, the chain formed by the chance assembly of our genes, makes weird half-breeds of us, variables on a globally stable pattern. Our time does not end in a system, but in a rough-cut and patchwork rag. All women differ, the goat, mare and narwhal differ, all women come together in the woman in the sixth tapestry, the mare, narwhal and goat come together, the unicorn brings about the required totalization, the woman wears the animal skin. We are all dressed in fabulous skins, assuming the guise of enigmatic sphinxes. The skin varies, discrete, continuous, inexpertly sewn, horned. It varies: woven, historiated, tattooed and legendary.
The construction of the body proper is like the fiction of the unicorn.
What is revealed here about the skin can be said more generally. It is presented and lives as a discrete variety, with separate islands, but also as a continuous variety, with mingled regions or states. It totalizes and adds together these two sorts of varieties: it mingles or juxtaposes the juxtaposed with the mingled. What results from this is called variable.
The senses vary, the feeling and the felt vary. To measure their appearances according to the criteria of truth or falsehood is obviously inappropriate: one must first of all think in terms of the variable.
The horse variety joined together with the goat variety and mixed with it produces a very ordinary monster that juxtaposes and mingles places: witness the issue of tigers and lions, ligers and tigons, thus named according to the species of the male or female. There is protest about genetic manipulation. But any genesis is party to such manipulation, any individual, any organism can call itself a sphinx or unicorn. Who, after all, would dare affirm that they were not of mixed blood? On the blue island or red plain you see a rabbit, leopard, or a heron in flight. The identity that you attribute to them is a sign of your ignorance: each one is the result of cross-breeding. I reproach myself for not knowing enough about the varieties of rodents, waders or panthers; about hybridization. The marvellous thing about the tapestry is that it consists entirely of crossings, otherwise how could it be woven?
We have to come to terms with a difficult idea that shakes our notion of identity. The unicorn is, and is not, at the same time, in the same place and in the same relationship, a horse, goat and walrus. Again, that can be said of the goat, walrus and horse. I have said this about the skin, about variable and mixed sensation, about the engendered organism or about the completed body itself, a heterogeneous structure hastily cobbled together with sticking plaster. I also say it of myself. I am and am not this or that, here and now, in the same relationship. Half-breeds in our own thought, do we not all know this? Hybrid in our existence, do we not all think this? Changeable, diverse and varied? I do not know or feel this or that, here and now, in the same relationship. But if I have to describe it, I am positively obliged to feel or know it. In addition, if I promise or write it, I feel, know or am it without a shadow of doubt.
I, feeling, unicorn: a horn in the middle and tattooed everywhere else, with a fluid identity.
Suddenly I know why the unicorn has only one horn. The chimera with the varied body, its sundry parts hastily cobbled together with sticking plaster, loses its identity because of all the joins in the rag. Its deviation from the identity principle consigns it to fable, imagination and legend. Yet in this impossible location, in this cutaneous excrescence springing forth from the centre of its forehead, its identity is successful. It is there only that it is a unicorn, and it is to this that its name refers. In every other respect it can be said that it is a goat or horse. Rather like an ordinary animal or man, one can speak of right or left, or one can speak of left or right. Plus a weld, a seam in the middle. Plus a perineum, as Plato, seeing a trace of tacking, was wont to say. But a chimera accentuates seams, it makes them blatantly obvious. In the middle, where the skin is welded together, grows an enormous horn, skin itself. Neither right nor left, nor even rift or leght, but exactly in the centre, like Polyphemus’ eye. This is where the very concept of chimera takes form, the very meaning of the unicorn, its impossible or characteristic organ, its name. Here the otherwise impossible mixture is successful. Here the sensible is successful.
And suddenly I understand why, according to the legend, by dissolving the unicorn’s horn in liquid and drinking the potion, one is mithridatized against poisons. To understand the single horn, one must understand the mixture, make and drink it. Scientists from the Royal Society in London who once drank, as an experiment, a solution of rhinoceros horn and concluded, in the absence of consequences, that its supposed effect was myth or legend, did not understand that they had already understood. The legend simply expresses the mixture, as the horn does the seam. Conversely, the mixture can so far only be expressed in myth or legend, like the sensible.
Vair4
The prince seeks a queen. What is to be done in a principality, unless he can find a shoe that fits? He sends out the town crier, he wants to see all the women.
To see? Come, come, would a king’s son be so lacking in taste, and not know that seeing tell us very little? A seer isn’t worth much. No, he asks the candidates to try on a vair slipper, and here begins the mystery.
A story often proposes two riddles, that of the things said, and that of the narrative: for example, the riddle that the sphinx poses Œdipus and that he solves; then the one posed by the myth to all who hear it, and which remains for a long time without an answer. It is necessary to understand that Œdipus’ name signifies that he knows feet, that he is acquainted with, or can resolve everything relating to feet. Thus the narrative explains the riddle and anticipates the solution. Likewise the prince solves his question: the vair slipper belongs to Cinderella; as he is ruler and has the means, his method is as expensive as possible. He makes such a thorough review of all the women that he is guaranteed not to overlook any. But the riddle of the story remains: why is the slipper covered in vair, why use the word vair, just as we might ask: why give the name Œdipus to the one who unravels the riddle?
What can be said, first of all, about a slipper? Incidentally, would you please give credit to a book of philosophy which at last asks serious questions – what can one say, I ask, about a slipper? It gently sheathes the foot, like an invaginated pocket: an awkward pleat, a sort of bonnet or the finger of a glove. You can feel its shape, an open and shut tent, made by and for the touch, skin on skin in places where it suffers, pathologically sensitive. What intelligent leader or captain would admit that our feet are the site of the greatest sensitivity? Would he say that there is nothing in his head that has not first of all been in his feet? The prince, however, begins there. Just as humble, Cinderella began with Cucendron.
Touch the vair slipper, caress its warm, soft, gentle fur. A higher, sparse layer of long, thick hair protects another lower layer of fine, short hair. All fur reveals and conceals a similar double property. The skin of the foot is protected by a skin that is protected by another layer, protected in turn by yet another. Quadruple, quintuple variety.
Give no credence to the glass slipper: it is the wrong word, devoid of meaning, inappropriate for dancing, solid, brittle, hard, cold, transparent. Glass is seen or reveals, clearly and distinctly, vair is touched and hides, soft, not hard, loose, not tight, extremely pleasant to feel, and gentle, velvety and voluptuous to the eye, leaving the dancing foot free. Now look closely at vair: a colour lacking in homogeneity, white and black, not black or white, distinct and separate, but with somewhat mingled colours, not grey, but precisely squirrel, a mixed ash-grey colour. In the language of fur, or that of the furs of heraldry, vair indicates a varied colour.
Now, in an ordinary sense, it could not be said that the prince discovers the poverty-stricken woman. He does not unveil Cinderella beneath rags or finery, revealing glimpses of her adorable body: the rags already express admirably ocellated nakedness. No, the prince discovers his queen, sitting almost naked amidst the ashes, by encasing her foot in the vair slipper. Recognition works by touch, not sight, by the stereospecificity of that which fits perfectly. Exactly the right size, the slipper moulds itself point for point to her foot. The skin precedes the gaze in the act of knowing, vair wins a victory over glass. Is it a fairy story or a letter on the blind5? Or true love whispered with a grateful caress?
Vair designates a varied colour, soft, double fur, a slipper that allows the foot enough freedom to dance, a variable shoe.
A glass slipper, constant and rigid, calls for a fixed and rigorous concept, valid for a stable world: an accurate measure for a foot that does not grow, walk, run or waltz. A flexible slipper is better in a world, in a variable environment, where rats change into footmen, where things whirl around under a fairy godmother’s magic wand, where unrecognizable horses are transubstantiated into lizards.
When in proximity to cinders, the world varies: a fairyland where pumpkins become carriages that after midnight become cucurbits again, alchemy that transforms rags into crinolines; the servant, miraculously, becomes a princess. Meanwhile, for the Prince, things are immutable; just as for other women, stepmothers or false sisters, balls and societies, nothing changes. For Cinderella, things fluctuate, volubly.
The reasons for the alliance between a fairy who in a trice changes things, and an overburdened victim, are not to be found in resentment alone or in the impotent dream of the persecuted. Those who are excluded or beaten concentrate within themselves the power of metamorphosis or apotheosis. Society considers them to be pestilential and then suddenly adores them as gods. This has been a common phenomenon since the dawn of history. The hearth, to which the stepmother consigns the poor ash-covered girl – just as in times gone by the scapegoat was burdened with the refuse and sins of the world – is the antechamber of palaces. These two values or positions, misery and glory, oppression and royalty, murder and power, Tarpeian rock and Capitol, close to each other but opposed, are ordinarily the hallmarks of all stories with sacred content. They are the two sources of the in no way exceptional, and in fact quite ordinary, double worlds of anthropology, politics and religion. The victim and the Prince are separated by nothing more than the twelve strokes of midnight or the touch of a magic wand.
But Perrault’s story attempts to say even more. It traces the path of a value to its dual other, from the cinder value to the gold value, from the hearth to the palace, from one source to the other, from the place where power oppresses you to the place where it belongs to you; it traces the path of variation. The whole century is looking for the same road: the distinction between good and evil, falsehood and truth, power and misery, never poses a very difficult problem – you could even say that it is a distinction that we make almost naturally. All our hatreds lead us to it, all our violence impels us towards what is supposed to be a rational, or sacred division. But the path from one of these positions to the other, the continuum that links them, or the gulf that separates them, poses a much more formidable question for which neither our culture nor our resentments prepare us. The whole century is seeking the path of variation.
Things vary, volubly. You always arrive at a crossroads at which, to your discomfort, the coach in which you are travelling morphs into a pumpkin, where gold, between your fingers, is reduced to ashes. Yet the slipper is the sole object amongst these changing appearances that resists the wave of instability. Midnight chimes, noble luxury collapses into ignoble banality, the shoe remains unaffected by the transformation. It does not become an ignominious clog, as it should. One vair slipper remains at the palace, a hostage of the prince and a witness, while the other slipper returns to the scullery: there is an invariant in the variation, one in each world. A unicorn’s horn. A place of seams, mixture and marriage.
We were not expecting, either, to see things, or hear the word. Things vary, the word says so. Vair designates the varied or variable but does not itself vary. The whole secret of the tale is contained therein: the foot of the chosen beauty in the shoe, the king’s business, a subtle sense in the designation, the business of science. The age-old dispute about glass and vair, the one transparent and the other a veil, has long pointed to the nub of the matter. Glass breaks, fur varies. The root of the word vair goes back to varied, which suits us nicely. The root of the word varied, varus, knock-kneed, lame with two odd slippers, suits the Prince. He was looking for a knock-kneed woman, because he had always understood that they make marvellous lovers. A limping gait gives an uneven and therefore varied beat. Clearly there is no getting away from the foot of the Belle Noiseuse, the only stable or unvarying element in the striped, striated, chaotic and varied painting of Balzac’s German painter. Here, I encounter it again as the invariant variable element, in body and in name, just as in Œdipus’ riddle.
The slipper grips the foot and is the correct size. The foot designates the unit of measurement. The unit, of course, must not vary, the slipper which envelops it and is the correct size, is the hallmark of the variation. The vair slipper, the parameter, becomes the variable. At the same time as Perrault was writing his stories, Leibniz was introducing into mathematics, and into the same French and Latin languages, the notion of the variable, and giving variety as a criterion for the reality of a phenomenon. Variation requires one to think both the stable and the unstable simultaneously, not pure instability, which is strictly speaking incomprehensible, but the invariant in the variation. The whole voluble world refers to the stable measurement of the foot, the whole path of change is travelled by means of the variable slipper, another seven-league boot.
We come back to the unicorn’s horn, a large excrescence of skin, the synthesis of the right and left horn crushed to a powder and dissolved in a liquid, blended into a potion so that left and right are to be found indissolubly at the same time, in the same place and in the same relationship. We once again encounter the unthinkable mixture. In the impossible horn the chimera at last achieves the union prefigured over its whole skin by vague meanderings and bizarre juxtapositions.
So with the vair slipper. Flexible but specific, with the potential for all shapes but fitting one only, individual and voluble, open and shut, holding the foot firmly but allowing it to dance, it obliges one to think in the same place, at the same time and in the same relationship the stable and the changing, the one and the multiple, reference and variation. Quite precisely, vair designates the variable.
In the prince’s hands, the slipper leads to the irreplaceable princess and tomorrow we shall go to the queen’s wedding: a unique key opening only one door. For us, absorbed in the story, the word vair gives the meaning, the key to language: to what is a variant sense to be referred?
Sight is pained by the sight of mixture. It prefers to distinguish, separate, judge distances; the eye would feel pain if it were touched. It protects itself and shies away. Our flexible skin adapts by remaining stable. It must be thought of as variety, like the vair slipper. It apprehends and comprehends, implicates and explicates, it tends towards the liquid and the fluid, and approximates mixture.
Mists
I like to live in the dark, in a material as well as a moral sense – the man in the public eye enjoys no freedom. I practise seeing in the dark. Often light appears harsh, aggressive and at times cruel; wait for night, take pleasure in the twilight, light the lamp rarely, let the shadow come. The night shines like a black diamond, it shines inwardly. The body as a whole sees the close proximity of things, their massive night presence, their tranquillity. Bright light removes them forcibly from that peace and takes away mine. My shadow body can evaluate shadows, it glides amongst them, between their silences, as though it knows them. Shadows excite the closest possible attention and are even subtly revealing; our whole skin comes alive. Even on the darkest night almost anything can be done without the faintest extra gleam of light, you can even navigate the middle of a sunken lane on a moonless night. The soles of your feet begin to be more aware, your shoulders brush against the branches, the stone in the ditch gives off a peaceful light. One can do almost anything without light, except write. Writing requires a glimmer. Life is satisfied with shadows, reading requires clarity.
Night does not anæsthetize the skin, but makes it more subtly aware. The body trains itself to seek the road in the middle of darkness, loves small, insignificant perceptions: faint calls, imperceptible nuances, rare effluvia, and prefers them to everything loud. Things wandering in the silence and shadow help it to rediscover practices long since lost through forgetfulness and habit. Technical prostheses date from such a recent time in our history that our humiliated bones rejoice in playing once again from an ancient score; our tendons and muscles, the garment that is our skin, sing with joy when we throw away our sensorial or motor crutches: wooden legs, lamps, automobiles. Our technology is often like orthopædics for a healthy limb, which, as soon as it is replaced or lengthened, so theory has it, becomes ill or impotent. Let us keep what augments us and spurn what diminishes us.
But the world provides more than just night or shadow to frustrate the skill of the attentive person. Even if darkness envelops us, it does not attack the skin as mist does. The anguish into which fog plunges us comes not only from the blindness it provokes, but from the way in which it trails and crawls, in layers, over our arms, shoulders, thighs, stomach and back. What does it mean to veil, how does a veil cover things? Shadow awakens our limbs, intensely present when sight is veiled; they hasten to take over automatically from the eyes. When mist veils sight, it lulls the body to sleep, saturates it, anæsthetizes it, our skin makes a concerted effort over its whole surface to resist its compresses. Impression fails under compression. Our skin loses the freedom to back up our hesitant gaze. Fog tears out our back-up eyes, it blindfolds or cocoons us. Mist multiplies veils. Veils are invisible at night.
The large, relatively stable trihedron which traverses and orients us, left-right and up-down, is left unchanged by the shades of night, which also maintain the distribution of the large surrounding masses. They allow what little remaining light there is to emerge, and there is always a little. The markers and relationships by which our skin relates to the surrounding volumes are removed by mist. In order to learn that in such circumstances one loses confidence in even the most reliable instruments, you have to have passed through a bank of mist so thick that you lose the person next to you, even though you may be touching elbows. Aircraft have been known to come out of the clouds upside down, or ships stray off course on irrational orders from the officer of the watch, thrown into a panic by the fog. Fog removes the skin’s potential, its extension and ascendancy, it creeps into every corner and progressively fills every part of space, it blankets or sticks to flat or curved surfaces, it fills crevices. Global shadow, local mist. Night suddenly flares up from afar and the surrounding volume remains empty. Mist lurks and creeps and spreads slowly, from place to place, filling or skirting around neighbouring areas. Night is empty or hollow, fog is full; darkness is ethereal, mist is gaseous, fluid, liquid, viscous, sticky, almost solid.
Darkness is concerned with optic space and retains Euclidean volume; shadow, like clarity, preserves the order of common geometry; fog occupies a variety of topologies and is concerned with the continuous or ragged space of touch. Its tatters invade the by-ways. When dense and compact, it accumulates; when insubstantial it rarefies and vanishes like mist. Thus shadow retains the features of the world, whereas mist transforms them continually by homeomorphism, causing distances, measurements and identities to be lost. On an open bridge, swamped by a pea-souper, you retain the tactile certainty of being situated between the captain and the watch, phantom neighbours like phantom limbs, but you lose the sense of their size, the shape of their profile, and your feet, like their bodies, vanish into the unfathomable distance. Shadow leaves everything invariable and mist makes everything variable – continuously, whether broken or unbroken.
Dry Greece remains the kingdom of geometers, all born there, in blinding light or in darkness, and empty enough to make you believe that the dazzling truth will appear if you merely lift a veil. Optics, also, has its beginnings in these places. The damp Atlantic carries yellowish banks of mist that tower above you like cliff faces, as do the Baltic Sea and others to the north. Topology could never have originated in Sicily or Iona, where everything is known in terms of distance and measurement; one has to go beyond the Pillars of Hercules to have some idea of it, through the seas where there is no guarantee that the hazy fog-shrouded distance is subject to the same laws as what is in close proximity, itself subject to distortion. Veils, there, are too numerous to count.
Skin attaches itself to a treacherous membrane, to an irregularly-shaped tatter, canvas or veil, followed by thousands of others, every one different. The whole environment loses its invariance, reliability and faithfulness. I am speaking about sensation, culture and science, about philosophy. Filling space in a random fashion, mist resembles both the medium and objects, what covers and what is covered. Darkness does not betray, nor does shadow: in them a thing remains a thing, veiled or not, visible or not, always accessible through touch. Fog betrays, completely fills the environment with potential things. Whether they are objects or vapours – we cannot tell. Night unsettles phenomenology, mist disturbs ontology. Shadow reinforces the distinction between being and appearance, mist blurs it. Thing or veil, being or non-being, that is the question.
Common sense
Sensation, receptive to any and every message, controls the skin better than the eye, mouth or ear . . . The sense organs appear on the skin where it is soft, fine and ultra-receptive. At given places and sites it is rarefied to the point of transparency and opens and stretches to the point of vibration, becoming gaze, hearing, smell, taste . . . The sense organs cause strange variations in the skin which is itself a fundamental variable, a sensorium commune: a sense common to all the senses, forming a link, bridge and passage between them: an ordinary, interconnecting, collective, shared plain.
We bear on our skin the complex singularities of which it is composed: germs, pimples, navels and inflorescences, folded, drawn and ocellated, like the bezels of rings. Just as flat or irregular fabric becomes islands, hems, flounces, frills, gatherings, sewn decorations, so does our skin form the continuous backdrop, the base note of the senses, their common denominator. Each sense, originating in the skin, is a strong individual expression of it.
Conversely the skin, the plain to these mountains, receives all the senses together. Rather more transparent, vibrant and concentrated, sharper, higher in altitude or in performance, the senses are more specialized than the skin and, therefore, cruder. The skin displays them collectively, unfolds their density, opens out and exhibits things deposited by them in a central place, dilutes and thins them down. The plain is made of the sands that wash down from each mountain along the rivers, just as the face is made by the erosion caused by tears and laughter lines. Our wide, long, variable envelope hears much, sees little, secretly breathes perfumes, always shudders, draws back with horror, withdraws or exults at loud sounds, bright light, foul smells. Shivers when it sees white and when it hears high notes, and flows smoothly beneath every caress. We are bathed in things from head to toe. Light, shadow, clamour, silence, fragrances, all sorts of waves impregnate and flood our skin. We are not aboard a vessel, ten feet above the water line, but submerged in the water itself.
Exquisite sensitivity – normal sensitivity – does not mind dense messages but prefers subtle ones, feeds heartily on quantity, but delights in the places where quantity withdraws, leaving only traces: quality, a gentle beginning, the barest of traces. Thus does faint evidence of the visible and the audible linger on the skin, chiaroscuros and whispers; on it remain the invisible side of the visible, the inaudible sounds of music, the heavy caress of the light wind, imperceptible things, like remnants or marks of loud, harsh energies. Skin is haunted by the gentleness of the sensual.
I come to the conclusion, furthermore, that the sexual organs, recognizable on the skin – tertiary as in the angle of the elbow, secondary as in the adornment of hair or the tessitura of the voice, primary, unnameable because of the shame of everyday or scholarly words – are sense organs, singularities on the common plain, remarkable sites, folds, seams, buds, hems or seeds, mountains and wells, springs irrigating the whole landscape, as do the others. They emit and receive, recognize and vary.
I have certainly not the skill, competency nor specialized knowledge to conclude thus. But I regret, as a gentleman, that physical love is ponderously described today both in supposedly learned discourse, and in ordinary usage, only in pathological terms. As though it were dramatic, fateful or painful. Thus denominated, sex indicates the illness of separation, of being cut off. The pathetic or pathogenic grimace fades when the senses joined together form de facto particular cases of the skin-variety. Skin translates the amorous caress into arousal, subtly displaying desire and diluting listening and seeing to the point where they almost disappear. It bears the signs of the one and the signals of the other and the energy and information of both. Odours beguile love, which then calls for champagne. Love shines amidst the five senses and is their happy summation. Love knows no separate zones, nor specialization.
Alcohol swells, burns and corrodes the epidermis, thickens and hardens it, gives to those that it drugs the appearance of heavy pachyderms; an elephant man or mammoth woman moving about under anæsthetic. The primary sense of the French word blaser, a northern term, refers to insensate body armour. The learned, humpbacked idiot, Master Blazius, discourses much and drinks copiously, having become indifferent through an excess of words and mediocre wines. The maker of phrases has made his skin blasé.
In the year 1692, during the month of July, Leibniz published in the Journal des savants a brief conjecture – whether good or bad, true or false, on the whole it was quite profound – on the origin of the word blason, which means a mark in old Celtic and Saxon. Or otherwise, indicates a sign. The author quotes Scandinavian, Icelandic, popular speech, Greek and English slang. We believe today that blason and blaser both come from the Dutch word meaning to swell. The noble carries a sword and the ignoble displays his overripe paunch, swollen with alcohol or importance, or sometimes both together. But why separate the two values: the blason and toughened skin can be confused. Each is a sort of callus.
Leibniz, again, compares the French blesser, to wound, with the English bless, in both cases meaning to mark with a sign, defamatory and painful, or fortunate and salutary, two values for whomever receives it, marked with a beneficial or deadly seal, and sometimes both at once. The Greek blaise means bandy-legged, the opposite of knock-kneed: he who points his feet outwards. Poor Blaise, still marked by his feet. Leibniz goes further and claims that French bleu and blanc, English blot and German Blitz belong to the same group. Blotch, colours, lightning, scarifying the sky.
The baron and the alcoholic, blessed and wounded, master and slave, king or victim, marked out for glory or sacrifice, armadillo,6 taboo, bear the sign and are marked with the seal. But why carry values to extremes? All in fact bear a mark and name: they are all tattooed.
Admittedly, it must be understood that the language of the blazon codifies a prior tattoo. Originally both the heraldic and the ordinary shield were covered in skin. But also, I believe, before coding and even before any voluntary lesion or benediction, or imposition of the written or spoken name, the individual tattoo of each person acts first of all as a sign, marking and naming him. A wart here, a scar there, flaming red hair. We are born emblazoned, our skin imprinted. Nicknames come from the impressions left on our skin by our personal histories.
But even greater understanding is needed; there is an obscure relationship between naming – the mark, sign, scarification, writing of the proper name on the parchment skin – and anæsthesia. The voluble array and mixture of colours express fluctuations in time and history, and deposit our identity there. If we try to stabilize it in order to have an invariant, identifying, constant, compact sign, then we are blasé about what surrounds us. We must either feel or be named. Choose. Language or skin, æsthesia or anæsthesia. Language solidifies meanings.
The argumentative, Latin-speaking scholar on his mule is drugged with wine and good words. How many impressions and how much time have I wasted inscribing so much writing in a sort of heraldic code on paper skin? Unstable stripes mingling in patterns on watered-silk skin would make a better page. I have no code for it, nor pen, but I am attempting to make a tracing of it.
Was my grandfather trying to turn me into a writer when he would mutter: ‘Don’t bite your nails, child, how else are you going to scratch your little girl friends when you’re playing?’
Hippopotamus or horned rhinoceros skins, the protection of armoured warriors impatient to throw themselves naked into battle, chitinous skins of beetles, bearing sagittal arms, skins of soldiers or drug addicts, what do you know about anything? Skins without doors or windows, coats of mail, bullet proofing, what do you feel?
And what do you feel, equipped with techniques and formulae, protected by exact, rigorous language?
No, war is not the mother of all things. Battles produce nothing but new battles, hence no productivity. Yes, dialectics loses its way. Not totally erroneous, it enjoys occasional successes, exceptionally or as counter-examples, but it is always invariably, mathematically false. Show me a single thing produced in and by conflict, a single thing and I shall be converted; show me just one invention induced by polemics. I offer my possessions and my time to anyone who can reveal a single success. As battles produce only battles, dialectics is reduced to the identity principle, to repetition, to null information.
Dialectics has enjoyed great success. How is it possible for such an error to have invaded not only philosophical reflection but also education? Who amongst the public doubts the generally accepted notion of the benefit of battle, who amongst publicists is ignorant of the fact that the word ‘struggle’ fascinates us? The younger generation has imbibed the idea of quarrelling with its mother’s milk and reaches adulthood ready to destroy everything through a belief in the beauty of wars it has not experienced. And when it has gone beyond that age and those misfortunes, it will find itself old, like the generation that preceded mine, mourning the waste of lost lives. It will have waited too long to discover the error of dialectics.
Nothing is constructed, made or invented, except in relative peace, in a small, rare pocket of local peace maintained in the middle of the universal devastation produced by perpetual war. Dialectics owes its success only to hominoids’ passionate love of quarrelling. They rejoice in murder and destruction, talk about them endlessly and rush to gape at them as at a theatrical performance. Most do not know how to construct, invent or produce a thing or an idea. They want to win, they want to fight. In a choice between creation and destruction, those few who hesitate can be counted on the fingers of one hand. All run to the abattoir, stupidly confusing energy and aggressiveness. They adore therefore any theory that assures them that creative work is born of battles, even if they never see it proved, even if every significant work is only ever born of an improbable island of silence and peace.
I call them hominoids because this conduct resembles that of primates locked into their relationships, drugged on domination, physically and materially, and who pass or waste their time ensuring that this one occupies the first place, and that one the position of lieutenant, one step down, and so forth down the pecking order. Hominoids fight to remain primates. Static equilibrium in the animal groove. War is the mother of animals. Battle produces the society of monkeys, which produces battle. Conflict stabilizes the archaic bestiality in us. Dialectics describes the logic of anthropoids. Man comes into being when he sees the falsity of this.
That happens if he has survived the struggles to become a grand old man to whom wisdom comes at last. Listen to him, the returned soldier dissolved in tears and having difficulty digesting his wasted life, lamenting his former thick-skinned, gorilla-like aggressiveness.
Combat – either political or scholarly, involving either language or the body, bare-handed or armed, individual or collective – and thus hierarchy, power and glory count amongst the hardest drugs, the chemical and pharmaceutical composition of which is dictated by dialectics. These drugs give us a monstrous skin, as does alcohol. Squamous, sclerosed, rigid, insensitive. Blasé.
Avoid struggles that masquerade as works in progress, avoid battle-productions and drugs, save your skin. Refine it, while you are waiting for whatever will happen, for the birth of creativity.
Endowed, supplied, afflicted with a quivering envelope, a tender onion-skin disturbed by wrinkles like a fragile lake, naked, nay flayed, these are the ones who are unsuited to the battles of crabs. It appears that life evolved from animal forms whose soft parts were inside, covered by a hard external casing, into other forms, such as ours, in which everything hard is interiorized as bone, cartilage, skeleton, while the soft is expressed as flesh, mucous membranes and skin. Those who love to fight are unevolved leftovers from a very ancient past, from the dark time when we were armoured. The newcomers amongst us become gentle, wrinkle-bearing: we bear imprints. We are clothed in soft, warm wax, we are tarnished mirrors, a warped, scratched, blotched, diverse surface in which the universe is reflected a little, on which it writes and on which time traces its passage; clothed in wax tablets, an ancient image of the soul, clothed in our intelligence and memory, engraved in a different way from the world, with a network of longitudes, latitudes and contour lines expressing our longevity, suffering, broadness of views and generosity. The skin receives the deposit of our memories and stocks the experiences printed on it. It is the bank of our impressions and the geodesic panorama of our frailties. We do not have to look far, or search our memory: the skin is engraved and imprinted to the same extent as the surface of the brain, and perhaps in the same way.
Beauties of Asia, fine and delicate creatures that you are, where do you place your remembrances, you whose tireless skin, devoid of such markings, conserves its freshness for so long?
Everyone seems to believe that our point of view, our point of vision, is up in the dress circle, eyes sitting at the top of the trunk on a swivelling, mobile head, like a lighthouse lantern. Our skin would be the stone base of the lighthouse, with no relation to the lights and signals, a simple raised structure ensuring that the gaze will travel. The lighthouse guardian would be the pupil of the eye, or at least ensure its movement. I assume that the official in charge of the concept, like the chief engineer in charge of Lighthouses and Beacons, runs things from his office in Paris, the brain or central processing unit. An expert trained at the Ecole Polytechnique, he pays a few quick visits to the sea illuminated by his department, when he has time. The centre is preoccupied with important things. For the rest, it suffices to telephone; to send or receive messages, to make language circulate.
The soul, and perhaps also knowledge, glides up and down the structure, on the surface of the tower. There is a kind of softness in the way it presents itself, like naked skin to sea water, a softness strong enough to resist circumstances or to seek them out boldly when the opportunity arises, but a strength subtle enough to pick up discreet calls, a hard and sensitive softness, a delicate balance, sometimes off-balance, between the delectable and the heart-rending. We learn nothing, really, except what marks the wax, which is soft and warm but cold enough for the tracing to endure, adaptive to the point of death but stopping short of it; to write, I read from my flayed skin rather than copying parchments from the library. These days I trust this memory more than data banks. An author speaks for himself. I write on my skin and not on that of others who would answer for me, as Bonnard paints on his and exhibits it without shame. I decipher my wrinkles, the engravings of time, written with a stylus; my soul haunts this inscription-covered hide.
It seems to me that the brain is a local concentration of this place of knowledge. The thinking I quivers along the spine, I think everywhere.
If everyone exhibited, as painters do, their cast-off skins, their moults, and imitated the writer and the exhibition of his scarified parchments, each one with his labarum, shroud or winding cloth, we would see a fine sight. Wrinkles, scars, tough old hides, corns, psoriasis; work, pain, memory, secret perversions, tattoo the skin and determine it even more than its natural colour or high-class shades of brown, acquired on beaches – where no-one is naked, because clothed in their tan, a thin veil waiting for cancerous growths, sun-bathing. Bits of rag, marked, tattered and torn, heavily embossed, on display for all to see, feeble confessions or occupational stigmata, are we really anything but those rags? Are we anything more than these ghosts?
This is how souls wander in limbo and in bookshops.
One of the last thinkers in the French language, Henri Bergson, left his successors with several questions to resolve, among which is that of varieties. Like mathematicians of his time, he distinguished between discrete varieties: contrasting flowers juxtaposed in the fields, animals scattered over the islands; and continuous varieties: a painter’s palette, a garden paradise, a vair slipper, shades of modesty or emotion on the skin. He situates the first varieties in space and the second in time; he groups space with intelligence, and time with intuition; he classifies intelligence under science and intuition under philosophy. This discrete positioning shows the limits of his intelligence. It could be thought that he left the question of time to his successors. One must, before toying with that idea, go back to his assumptions; the distinction between both families of varieties. For topology has never stopped exploring spaces, trailing continuity in its wake. The only philosophical mistake committed at the outset is in fact concerned with those spaces; it was believed for a long time that Euclidian or metric space, that which we consider usual or everyday, was the only space conceivable. In fact, since the time of Bergson’s thesis, geometries, and with them, spaces, have proliferated. We no longer see why the continuous should be alien to them, why it should be necessary to classify it with time. We can no longer confuse space and metrics, space and discreteness.
Subtlety goes behind the canvas. A certain figure appears on the front. Behind, a forest of knots conditions it, prefiguring a computer circuit board. The medieval tapestry shows the five senses; whereas we believe we are manufacturing artificial intelligence. In the same sense, the Lady and the Unicorn weaves a subtle, artificial sensorium. The subtlety enmeshes the warp and weft, one over the other, or underneath it, high or low-warp. The interlacing designates an analogous, even more subtle situation. Can we place a third thread between the other two. Where would it go? Under, over, beside: what does ‘side’ mean?
Juxtaposition of the discrete variety assumes distance between elements or seeds. The distance which separates and distinguishes between two neighbouring flowers, animals, or even threads; the gap, however small, allows one to insert a third element or seed between the other two. This possibility initiates a sequence, which reproduces the old question of the third man: no one knows if, and when, it finishes: between the first and second seed and the third, can a fourth or fifth be inserted? You can imagine the direction of the series and its simple law.
Before rushing headlong towards infinite things and appealing to time so as to be able to think about dense accumulation, we need to return to the situation in which insertion occurs. Indeed the third, at any point in the series, gets its bearings between the two preceding ones. This inter-calary situation is subject to several constraints. Where is the third seed to be placed – between the two, or in the middle of them? What are we placing between the two elements, a thread or a plane? What inclination will be given to the plane? At this point, either a finite or infinite series of new seeds can be aligned on the thread, or the said plane gradually filled with them, or the said space saturated with them, etc. In other words: the situation ‘between’ describes a sequence along a straight line separating the seeds, or permeates the space in which they are both immersed. To be more precise: this situation also, and especially, deploys a great multiplicity or variety of paths or ways crossing this thread or space. Indeed, at each level at which the question is again posed, the choice of the intermediary situation of the new seed can take place in a different dimension. It’s something that all women know – dress-maker’s apprentices, spinners, knitters, or weavers: over, under, etc. None of the paths thus obtained runs in a straight line, none remains in the same dimension, all twist and curve. Since many braids and curls are involved, an inextricable tangle presents itself. Metric measurement and its rigidity, so often confused with rigour, disappear. Distinction is distinguished from distance, the number of ways from here to there increases inexorably, and the paths overlap. The body, armed with its hundreds of degrees of freedom, used to live flexibly and still lives in this situation until topology teaches it to us again, or teaches us a rigour different from that of a wooden automaton. It is immediately obvious that a knot, in the common sense, is formed as soon as a space-between presents itself. It presents itself discretely, as well as continuously, and more often in the first guise rather than the second. Could separate elements join together more easily than inseparable ones?
The distinction between continuous and discrete varieties no longer appears so clear. Could each be reduced to the childish gesture of Alexander the Great cutting the Gordian knot with his sword in order to take control of the Asian empire? Separation ignores the knot or tangle that lies between separate things. Since Alexander, we have forgotten Eurasia. A lack of subtlety prevents us from seeing the forest of knots beneath the canvas or behind the tapestry, dazzled as we are by the representation of intelligence. To be sure, the tapestry displays a sort of discrete mosaic, but to analyse it properly it would be necessary to undo by hand the tangled threads behind. What a job it would be indeed to separate out this mixture! Before infinity or time separate the discontinuous from the continuous, the knot ties them together. The practice and concept of connection precede many others.
The situation described here remains a naïve one. We are only talking about seeds and threads. It quickly becomes necessary to generalize it. Where and how is a thread to be slipped between two threads, what path is to be taken through what space? One has to move up through the different dimensions in order to have a better understanding. Where and how is a sheet of paper to be slipped between two others, what path is to be taken, through what space? A knot traces a one-dimensional path in a three-dimensional variety to connect elements to one, two, zero or three dimensions. It is necessary to imagine foldings, invaginations, exquisitely complex situations that generalize the practice and the idea of the knot to all imaginable dimensions.
The set of elements situated between two others can follow the straight line that separates them; their metric distance can fill the whole space into which the two elements have been plunged, but more generally it describes a subtle and supple path, curved braid, curls and garlands going from one, and meandering through every dimension, before joining the other. The number of such paths increases indefinitely. In the first two cases, the middle situation is described – a point situated at an equal distance from the two others or a global series that surrounds or encompasses the latter – in the third, a state of mixture.
This is the spatial or conceptual situation of the knot. Of course knots can exist in all imaginable dimensions: smooth or crumpled fabric can also pass, via an edge of fabric, on or under another canvas and so on. This situation marks the limits of the analysis. In a discrete variety, sorting always appears possible, it is a matter of patience. The seeds or discrete elements, too subtle, light and imperceptible, and the complex paths that describe their situation in relation to each other, are not taken into account. In continuous variety, these paths have gained strength. Bergson expected us to wait until the sugar had melted in the water. He never required us to wait for the mixture thus formed to separate out. Readers would have had to wait until the end of time. A mixture is not easily analysed. Work, heat, light, a thousand pieces of information are necessary. If I wish to drink this water, I also have to drink the sugar, if I want the sugar, I must swallow the water, if I want one constituent, I have to pass via the result as well as via the other constituents. The continuous is unanalysable at any given moment, and so are mixtures. It could be said that the sugar and water are tied together by a knot that we cannot always untie. It is common knowledge that the term analysis comes from a Greek verb which, as it happens, means to untie. Analysis requires that a knot be undone. We believe that analysis demands only one cut: the cook’s knife cuts the tendons, sinews, and muscles, the analyst is satisfied with having separated the bones. As if bones alone were sufficient for the animal to live. In discrete variety, sight that divides, the vision of the division, is blind to the light, tenuous knots that unite the respective situations, as if a given situation, with given bearings in relation to the other elements, mattered not at all. The elements of a jigsaw puzzle in a box tell one nothing about the design which becomes visible after the correct assembly of the pieces. In some ways the analyst always carries a knife, always imitates the young Alexander and knows no bonds.
There are only varieties tied or bound by soft or hard, cobweb-thin, or thick bonds, knots that analysis undoes with ease or difficulty. This situation is better described as a mixture than as a medium.
And as a veil rather than a solid. And as skin rather than sight. And as the body rather than its tongue.
Fabric folds, crumples, turns on itself, is knotted at will. Skin wrinkles, adapts, reigns between organs and contains complex paths that link them; more than just the medium of the sense organs, our skin is a mixture of them, like a palette. The naked woman’s tattoo resembles Bonnard’s palette.
The organism forms a gigantic knot with as many dimensions as one could wish. It begins, in an embryonic state, with one or more sheets, folded, pleated, rolled, invaginated. Embryology has the appearance of applied topology, looks like an infinitely wrinkled skin. The organism fills with local interchangers that finally form a global interchange system, a giant knot made from small differential knots.
The body folds, curves, adapts, enjoying at least three hundred degrees of freedom. From the feet to the head or to the tips of the fingers it traces a variable and complex path between the things of the world, changing like a piece of seaweed in the depths of the water, a thousand and one exchanges or signals. Knowing things requires one first of all to place oneself between them. Not only in front in order to see them, but in the midst of their mixture, on the paths that unite them. In her right hand the lady with the unicorn firmly holds a flag strewn with crescent moons and in her left, the animal’s single horn. Touching is situated between, the skin is the place where exchanges are made, the body traces the knotted, bound, folded, complex path, between the things to be known.
Mixture, unveiling
The skin is a variety of contingency: in it, through it, with it, the world and my body touch each other, the feeling and the felt, it defines their common edge. Contingency means common tangency: in it the world and the body intersect and caress each other. I do not wish to call the place in which I live a medium, I prefer to say that things mingle with each other and that I am no exception to that, I mix with the world which mixes with me. Skin intervenes between several things in the world and makes them mingle.
Mixture is a more accurate term than medium. Medium, too geometrical, is minimally useful: a centre in a volume, when it is reduced to an intersection, or the volume itself, when its tendency is to surround. A point or totality, singular or almost universal. A contradictory and inflexible concept.
Everything has its place in the middle when the medium is concentrated, everything meets and joins together in this complex place, in this knot, through which everything passes, like an interchanger. It makes me think of the solar plexus of a thwarted left-hander, of an unwilling ambidextrous person. Everything still has its place in the medium when it expands to fill the volume. Everything meets there. How? By chance. Where? In proximity to one another. All right, here is mixture. Confluence, unfurling, occupation of places.
A medium is abstract, dense, homogeneous, almost stable, concentrated; a mixture fluctuates. The medium belongs to solid geometry, as one used to say; a mixture favours fusion and tends towards the fluid. The medium separates, the mixture mitigates; the medium creates classes and the mixture, hybrids.
Everything meets in contingency, as if everything had a skin. Contingency is the tangency of two or several varieties and reveals their proximity to each other. Water and air border on a thick or thin layer of evaporation, air and water touch in a bed of mist. Earth and water espouse each other in clay and mud, are joined in a bed of silt. The cold front and the hot front slide over each other on a mattress of turbulence. Veils of proximity, layers, films, membranes, plates. We live on slow, inexorable moving footpaths, thousands of metres beneath our feet.
The theory of knowledge is subordinate to its choices, by which I mean the examples it uses. It could be said that theory and intuition belong to the order of vision, and that strictly speaking they belong to the solid. I have long been moving towards the fluid and have encountered turbulences in the past and, more recently, mixtures. Thinking about fusion without confusion, I shall come soon to liquidity, difficult to conceptualize but the future resides there, and I shall come to mingled bodies.
Meanwhile I am seeking the best model for a theory of knowledge, less solid than a solid, almost as fluid as liquid, hard and soft: fabric.
The skin, more topological than geometrical, does without measurement. Topology is tactile. The skin, multisensorial, can pass for our common sense.
We have just left classical theory, subordinate to the solid and to sight.
We cannot claim to be so exceptional. We are not the only ones, surrounded by boundaries, to throw ourselves into contingency, the only adaptable ones who can turn our hand to anything.
The world is filled with complex veils.
According to one tradition truth is an unveiling. A thing, a set of things covered with a veil, to be discovered.
If it could be reduced to this exercise, philosophy would be equivalent to a rather boring variety of illusionism or juggling. Science would lose its complexity if it were only a question of discovery. That seems puerile.
No, there is no thing under the veil, nor does the woman dance under her seven veils, the dancer is herself a complex of fabrics. Nudity reveals more pleats and wrinkles. Harlequin will never arrive at his last costume. He undresses infinitely. There are always more peacock marks, ocelli and tattoos.
The state of things becomes tangled, mingled like thread, a long cable, a skein. Connections are not always unravelled. Who will unravel this mess? Imagine the thread of a network, the cord of a skein, or a web with more than one dimension, imagine interlacing as a trace on one plane of the state that I am describing. The state of things seems to me to be an intersecting multiplicity of veils, the interlacing of which bodies forth a three-dimensional figure. The state of things is creased, crumpled, folded, with flounces and panels, fringes, stitches and lacing.
Unveiling does not consist in removing an obstacle, taking away a decoration, drawing aside a blanket under which lies the naked thing, but in following patiently and with respectful diplomacy the delicate disposition of the veils, zones, neighbouring spaces, the depth of the pile, the talweg of their seams and in displaying them when possible, like a peacock’s tail or a lace skirt.
This medium or mixture would be our model for the state of things, thinkable or intuitable, or sensible, like a heap of fabrics, a thousand possible arrangements of veils.
Sensible to sight like an aurora borealis, for anyone who finds themself in the vaporous, honey-combed, incandescent, draped, light, fragile underpinning of the dawn light; tangible like the topology of surfaces and their events or circumstances; audible like waves of the sea or sound, or batiste handkerchiefs floating in the air; sapid without a doubt, I feel my tongue sheathed in a fitted rag when I taste; the state of things is the medium of the senses, or rather their mixture. The skin mixes them and also veils them.
Weavers, spinners, Penelope or someone like her, once seemed to me to be the first geometers, because their art or craft explores or exploits space by means of knots, proximities and continuities, without intervention from measurement, because their tactile manipulations anticipate topology. The mason or surveyor anticipates the geometers in a strictly metric sense, but she or he who weaves or spins precedes them in art, thought, and no doubt in history. We had to dress ourselves before building, clothe ourselves in loose garments before constructing solid buildings.
Generalizing this hypothesis, it can be said that fabrics, textiles and material provide excellent models of knowledge, excellent almost abstract objects, primary varieties: the world is a heap of clothes. Where knowledge was concerned, woman was for a long time ahead of man. Pierre Bonnard’s naked woman, the goddess with the bird, the girl and the unicorn or the wretched creature in her slippers.
The hand moves rapidly on the loom and distaff, around the needles, it creates the thread, twists it, threads it through, folds and knots it, the hand deftly splicing and lashing, unfailingly finding the gap underneath that the eye cannot see, it strays across the frosted glass, levelling the seeds sown by chance, prickles that it alone knows how to identify, on the sand it traces loops or braids, happy amidst the leaves and garlands the hand dances, enjoying its degrees of freedom.
Touch is topological and prepares the planes and smooth varieties for a relaxed, metric, Euclidean gaze, the skin covers with a veil what the eye cannot see. Molyneux’s problem – whether a person blind from birth, who has just been operated on, would be able to recognize with his new-found sight a cube or sphere that he was previously able to identify with his fingers – raises more questions about the geometry of those whose vision is not impaired rather than it does about the theory of knowledge. Why not experiment on a nightingale or a lilac branch, an emerald or a velvet skirt, which exist, rather than on abstract volumes, which do not exist? Who among us has ever seen a cube or a sphere? We have only ever conceived of them in language. So if you give the blind man a ball and a cobblestone, he will by touch be able to appreciate the continuous deformations, the jagged edges and particularities, he will soon ask you if you are able by sight to tell the difference between a ball and a sphere, a cube and a cobblestone. He will laugh sympathetically at your discomfort.
Are we aware that writing requires the most complex nervous and muscular skill? No other form of manipulation brings into play as many nerve endings. Those who know how to write could do anything with their ten fingers, peoples who learn this refinement, learn at the same time all possible manual trades, cruder and simpler than this one. They who invented it revealed to humanity the path towards everything that was practically possible. But conversely, the female embroiderer, sewer, spinner or even surgeon operating under a microscope, still stitch together seams with loose links, compared with the fine knots and the intricate paths of writing. They have their hands in hard things while she who writes immerses her hands in the soft sign. A link so subtle that it is attached to nothing, a knot so tenuous that it is already passing into another order.
Pure touch gives access to information, a soft correlate of what was once called the intellect.