CHAPTER 3

TABLES

Animal spirits – Memory – Statue – Death – Birth

Animal spirits

So we had bought a bottle of 1947 Yquem in the north-eastern corner of Paris, near La Villette, from an expert dealer who had acquired it from the restaurant that used to be at the Gare de l’Est, which in turn cellared its wines in long-forgotten underground tunnels – a bottle from the catacombs. It was said that the wine list was like a dictionary that aficionados would take their time poring over, sometimes without getting around to ordering dinner, or even days before their meal. The dealer went out of business, his son imports soft drink now, the restaurant has been replaced by fast-food outlets (in matters of taste, as in love-making, if you would rather hurry, better that you abstain altogether; in both these cases haste leads to nothing but regret), the dark tunnels now house only rats, until the next air raid. The three of us sat down, two friends with the gift of the gab, which is to say knowing how to remain silent.

The liquid had taken on a deep golden hue, orange-yellow with coppery tones and hints of pink: the colour of intelligence and wisdom, scented with the thrill of desire. It was like the base of a cauldron in a Flemish kitchen, polished with patience over time, half-hidden in darkness amidst the crosspieces of dark timber. The wine glowed like straw in a barn, like a windy night watch illuminated by the glow of the compass. The cork, solid, was starting to turn to liquid, just a little, dark shading into light, everything shifting phase.

It took us so long to finish this bottle that we are still talking about it.

I remember with gratitude the moment when a great wine gave me a new mouth – the day of my second communion, it says. It already existed, ill-spoken no doubt; the second mouth was born there.

Speech passes through the mouth on the day of our first communion – giving us our first mouth. The golden mouth starts to chatter, will not stop chattering. Speech reigns there, a queen in palatine splendour; the reign of language over lips and tongue is absolute. Imperious, exclusive. But speech and language cross these spaces, neither smelling nor tasting. Soft: not hard. Soft: dull and insipid. They anæsthetize the mouth, which finds the zestiest conversation tasteless. The most wide-ranging eloquence, the most sonorous poetry, the most incantatory song, the liveliest dialogue transform the palate into a musical instrument, which nonetheless remains numb to fragrant flowers, to the scent of the earth, to the powerful fragrance of musk and skin; or worse still, chases them away. Neither acidic nor astringent, sentences refrain from awakening our tongue to anything but themselves. Sapidity slumbers beneath the narcosis of speech. Frozen: frigid.

Of our five senses, this one, these two – smell and taste – seem to us the least æsthetic. I’m beginning to understand, says the golden mouth, why we reject, forget, put off their specific abilities, why I can say with such confidence that the given only gives itself in and through language: one mouth kills the other. I, a golden mouth, kill the long palate of Yquem. I will not tolerate doubt, a double tongue in my mouth, a forked tongue, me speaking, it tasting. Today, the day of the banquet, I will be kind to my victim, it says, and step aside.

And awaken the palate from anæsthetizing talk through the use of a second talent. Which discovers an æsthetics of sense in the work of a different, artistic æsthetic. The Château d’Yquem awakens the second mouth, the second tongue, reveals it through this second communion. Oppressed, too close to language, too much its twin or competitor, taste is rarely conveyed well, is often expressed in language that provokes mirth – our mouth laughs at it – as though in this place language allowed it no voice. One mouth chases the other, the mouth of discourse excludes the mouth of taste, expels it from discourse.

The second tongue sleeps; timid, it remains silent; receives what is given, all the better when it forgets its twin.

Before drinking good wine, we have never tasted wine, or smelled it, or known it, and have no chance of ever knowing it. We may have drunk, and gotten drunk; another form of anæsthesia. But knowledge cannot come to those who have neither tasted nor smelled. Speaking is not sapience, the first tongue needs the second.

We were too quick to forget that homo sapiens refers to those who react to sapidity, appreciate it and seek it out, those for whom the sense of taste matters – savouring animals – before referring to judgement, intelligence or wisdom, before referring to talking man. The rise of the golden mouth at the expense of the tasting mouth. But hidden within a dead language, we find this confession of the first about the dead mouth: namely that wisdom comes after taste, cannot arise without it, but has forgotten this.

Let us speak dead languages, says the dead mouth. Do you remember, O golden twin, jewel of philosophers and scholars, the common linguistic origin of the words regulations and rillettes, from the Latin regulae? Where are you, Descartes? Or of the words induction and andouille, from the low Latin inductile? Bacon, where are you? This is how the sapient tongue asserted its rights and demonstrated, in its neighbour’s tongue, their joint intersection, the place where they go their separate ways.

The first mouth, all talk, was left speechless. Caught out by its own forked tongue.

Sensation, it used to be said, inaugurates intelligence. Here, more locally, taste institutes sapience. In the ancestral Latin definition of human beings, our educated but still sensible forebears are a serious demonstration that, without taste, we risk abnegating our human state and returning to that of animals. Before recreating ideas about sensation – a strange business – they no doubt wanted us to imagine the opposite: if we disdain sensation, replace it with artifice, with orthopædic forms of discourse, then we are headed towards animality. Animals wolf down their food, man tastes it. Appreciates the aromas, hunts no more. Cruelty only produces blood.

Before having received, bedazzled, the manifold and vibrant bouquet that unfolds through our sense of smell, exploding as it descends, still full of arabesques or new stars, like fireworks; before having known the complex, fringed moiré that meticulously segments the precise geographic map of the cheeks, differentiating top from bottom, and front from back, short and long palate, tracing ornamentation on the roof of the mouth, passing over and under the tongue, to the sides and back; before having known that we have tongues, and not just one tongue; before having transformed this volume into a rainbow-coloured, tattooed, ornamented, mingled space, before the unction of wine has changed the uniform into the multiple, and frigidity into tenderness, before this patient, slow, detailed recognition, we have drunk, of course, have quenched our thirst over and over again, have even been heavily intoxicated, but have never sensed; sensation never came – we were speaking. Knew need and desire; took remedies and poisons in altered states, most certainly drugged ourselves, but overlooked sensation. Anæsthetic robs us of æsthetics.

Communities which hasten to shed the naïve sapience of empiricism find themselves locked out of their destiny by drugs. Take this wine: drink, taste – you must choose. If you merely drink it, you will keep only speech, language. If you taste it, it will give you your taste by giving you its taste, it opens a new mouth in you, this is the day of your second communion, prevented by the first. The given, generous, gives more than we think. It heals impotence or the inability to receive, or other inadequacies. Æsthetics cures us of anæsthesia. It awakens us. The given often gives the subject the capacity to take what is given: here is the gift, plus its container, and ribbons too, as well as the right disposition to apprehend it. In short, it will create the function, or at least activate it, or initiate it. The first tongue, talkative, admits this: fine food and wine can create taste in the person who tastes them. Similarly, a beautiful sight gives sight to the person who sees it. It has the same word for what is smelt and the act of smelling it – but it takes a lot for the recipient to make the most of it. We know more people who are asleep than people who are awake, more who are blind than clear-sighted, more impotent people than lovers. The apprehended given does more for perception than the other way around. Fine wine works on the tongue, awakening it from its narcotic slumber.

Therefore you cannot get drunk on it. Take this wine: drink, taste, reveal your dormant sense of taste or anæsthetize it again by getting drunk, but both at once – no. Æsthetics or anæsthesia, no third tongue. I cannot sense the difference between the speaker and the drunk, says the second tongue, the taster, in both cases I am drugged and put to sleep. The guests at the Symposium hiccup, speechify or slump about, weighed down by alcohol, Plato has ensured that the banquet never takes place.1 They speak of love without making love, sing of this or that without actually singing, drink without tasting, speak with the first tongue – but for all the sounds they produce, do we know what wine they drank: from Chios, Corfu or Samos? He who holds the floor and talks the most until pallid dawn, triumphs over the inebriation of the rest. Wine encourages talk, and is numbing. The first tongue, the talker, uses the mixture drawn from amphorae and mixed in craters, circulating unnoticed around the beds, sometimes spilled on the cushions or bread, to oppress the second, always asleep in philosophy. At symposia today you can still hear virtuosic talk, over cups of a weak, black beverage. But no banquet.

The second tongue tries to trace its geographic map of the tongue, as it wakes.

From where might we describe it? From near or far or middle distance, it always seems to shimmer like watered silk.

No doubt because smell and taste differentiate, whereas language, like sight and hearing, integrates. The first mouth stockpiles, the second expends: words pile up in dictionaries, food accumulates, frozen, in coldrooms, like bank accounts; smells and tastes are transitory, evanescent, ephemeral. Differential. The map is refined like delicate silk, or a spider’s web. With neither stock nor total, a fragment of time.

Unstable moire, mingled body.

The second tongue has humility: simple, rudimentary taste, poor like reasoning, it can barely make out four or five qualities, sweet, sour, astringent, acidic . . . It depends on smell to achieve its festive richness. Avid, empty, gluttonous, roaring, whether talking or eating, imperious as only the weak can be, the mouth relies on its nose and ears to be able to boast as it does. It is the mouths of barbarians that we hear, talking about talking, holding forth about eating, ignorant of fleeting tastes and aromas, deaf chatterboxes, gluttons with neither sense of smell nor wisdom, human funnels, eating and drinking sweet or savoury to bring the nose down to the mouth’s level, reducing smell to taste and manifold refinement to crudeness. The man of sapience, whether peasant or baron, has flair and a keen ear to capture the moment; the stubborn, like the jovial, are all mouth, transmitting; whereas everything comes from subtle reception. Leave aside singing and eloquence where the voice is regulated by the ear in an active loop: in both instances, music arises when the general din beseeches hearing for its clemency; hearing in turn gives or gives back timbre and cadence. And the first tongue becomes hoarse when the eardrum becomes brittle with age. In a comparable loop or cycle, smell regulates taste judiciously. Earring, nose-ring. So our sense of smell, champion among our sensations, and our taste, excellence in culture and refinement, bestow their rare treasure together, within a shared cycle. A cornucopia emerges from nose and palate, odours and tastes spilling forth, the peacock’s tail is displayed.

Here is the map.

Here is the bottle from which this fan emerges.

Here is the region of the lower Garonne, the left bank, where the forest disappears, where the tide ends, a knot of eleven confluences, here is the gentle slope, near Yquem, from which the ocellated fan can be seen: a map of the area and an expanse of taste.

The second tongue, in between the two others – the one that will not stop talking and the one that remains hidden modestly, and has neither spoken nor tasted yet – now requires silence and time. It never has either of these.

Take time, remain silent, taste.

The streaked, blended, marled, damask, watered-silk, ocellated body unfolds itself gently from the cornucopia or around the tufted feet of Juno’s bird. Can we enumerate? Here are spring flowers, dog rose or lilac, clematis, the fruits of Messidor,2 including peaches (autumn or winter ones), pears, apples, grapes, walnuts, some hazelnuts trailing in their wake, in dark, fern-covered undergrowth, here are truffles in the greyish humus, bark sticky with resin, then rare mineral fragrances, flint, gunflint, and animal fragrances, musk or amber, damp fur or the scent of copulation, and here, behind the second and first bouquets, the first one floral, the next bestial and mineral, comes the third bouquet, so difficult, like pizzicati heard beneath an orchestral storm, like cross-hatching through floral-print fabric, aromas as ethereal as acetone, try to pick them out: aromatics – mint, geranium; ambrosias – jasmine, vanilla, lime; balms like benzoin, carnation, camphor; empyreumata like coffee, tobacco; the Yquem bears traces of the persistent forest, remembers distant Armagnac, cites its neighbour, Graves; now here is disequilibrium, the outer edge of the expanse, or ocellated tail, its instability or catastrophe, repulsive combinations like mercaptan, the stench of oil, tar and sewers, sulphur; what’s happening? Close the door when the East wind is blowing, the one-track reason of the highway has intruded bringing a vile and stupid horde of Huns, has uprooted the vines of Sauternes, severed the heraldic shield from its nobility, torn up the map, cut out its tongue. It cuts through the sacred vines, merely indicating them with a road sign. For those who hurry past, riding thunder and spewing a cloud of gaseous filth in their wake, the given is reduced to written language, painted on a panel. The roadmap is rectilinear, as linear as the method which passes through the forest without seeing it and which, ignobly, severs the ancient vines without so much as a greeting.

If you pass through a vineyard as a blabbermouth might cross the sea, then you will see only green or red foliage, just as the other would see only water. Bend down and examine the furrows: earth or body, streaked, blended . . . silica, pebbles, sand, clay and limestone, deposits from above or afar, carried by the Garonne. Fine silica, rich limestone, moist clay, everything comes from the mingled earth. Walk through the vines where the Muscadelle has been picked, sweetness comes from the Semillon, spice notes from the Sauvignon, the rows are streaked, striped, composite. We would have to superimpose several maps: geological, pedological, viticultural, a mosaic of yellow, pink, royal blue, bottle green, an unexpected element, as though the substratum – what a surprise – were reproducing itself on the surface, as though the old growers themselves, unwitting geologists, were revealing the dark secrets of the earth, through and in the arrangement of these maps: mingled seacharts for navigating the Bordeaux region. In the same way, through the alloy of syllables, vowels, rhythms and assonances, the writer tries to evoke the map of deep-seated deposits and brings to the surface the glittering pattern of underground veins.

The coat of arms of the Comte de Lur-Saluces, master of Yquem, should, it seems to me, bear or depict on its unified page, this streaked, ocellated body, this honourable map, in its colours, devices and charges: either a peacock’s tail, or an interleaved stack of atlases. Doesn’t a coat of arms typically reproduce a map of mixed blood and the manner of its enduring survival? What is a title, if not the proportions of a mingled body? The noble shields of the vineyard would thus show how, after so many quarters, wine becomes blood – or the other way around.

Now, in the silence and cool tranquility of the cellar, what different sort of mingling is at work? Alcohol and acid are balanced against sweet-smelling ester, suspended in water and sugars. The right balance comes in incremental changes. Might we guess at the various titles, at any given time? The titles of the mixture would indicate time.

I can draw a thousand maps, but I am only ever talking about time.

Mixture haunts the cellar in the art of the vigneron, runs through the vineyard – soil, layering and subsoil – fills the singular bottle, completes the mouth by closing the cycle of aromas, the same map everywhere, I draw it on the page, it is my coat of arms.

Old cellars, vineyards, bottles, seacharts, enduring heraldic alliances, ancient mouths and tongues, attentive patience of the design marking earth, flora and palate: the time of mixtures slowly ticks by.

The accumulated quarters divide the space of the shield between them; conversely, the shield displays the antiquity of the title, and the title borne by this blood. Many a vermilion cascade has flowed over the shield, thus marked: red clepsydra.

The earth of rivers, seas and forests, long ago laid bare, ravaged by tears and sterility, long unsuited to all kinds of agriculture due to an excess of sand and gravel, slowly becomes the exceptional specific of such and such a botanical palette. It takes at least a millennium of peasant stubbornness, punctuated with famines, to reach this blended picture.

Alluvial cascade, receiving or giving cascades of wine: if only my tongue were equal to these miraculous nuptials, amidst the floodwaters of the versatile Garonne, a grey clepsydra.

In a miracle of the first tongue – when it is speaking in French, at least – the word for time is also the word for weather: le temps. The miracle of bountiful seasons interspersed, pot-luck, with weak or barren ones. The ground, the vines and the wine itself carry traces of the clemency and inclemency of the weather; the mixture of any given vintage is an expression of this mixture of hot and cold, moist and dry, calm and turbulent that we call the weather – which we might just as well call temperament or temperance, if the world had the same moods as our bodies: weather which is typically rather mild in this temperate region. Take this great wine, taste it, the map of its temperament will be traced on your tongue, the inimitable and singular facets of a particular season. Remember that year: the autumn was immense, unmoving, soaring, endless, flecked with notes of orange and yellow, so light as to be barely perceptible. Cascades of wind, sun and rain mingled with the Sauternes, a golden clepsydra.

Now read: in the left-hand column, a simple list of calendar years, a roll-call of years gone by, none omitted, none repeated; in the right-hand column, a list of notable years, glorious or catastrophic. 1930, the year I was born, produced an unspeakable liquid and nothing better, yet 1929 (when my brother was born), has been equalled only three times since in the whole Bordeaux region, in ’45, ’61 and ’75, once in a lifetime vintages of supernatural taste and enormous longevity. As though weather and time were intimately connected, enough to make us understand how two words could be one, two meanings – time and weather – cohabiting in a single term, le temps. If time flowed like a series of whole numbers, on the left, we would have known long ago that history and reason go hand in hand. But the stochastic mixture of years by which we might read the different vintages of Château d’Yquem over the last hundred years gives us a very different idea of that same history, once again drawing us a blended map. During our banquet with the bottle of ’47 Yquem, an almost mythical vintage, the first tongue runs off the series of numbers, the second throws the figures to the wind, savouring the highpoints. On the left, the time of language; on the right, the time of the given. From which we can see that the two are separate, like a forked tongue. On the left, time as an a priori pure form – I was going to say algorithmic – on the right, the time of mixture and mingling, of which the time of the left understands nothing.

A cascade of numbers, not parallel as we might think when reading them but merging into one another, because we live; an immaterial, abstract, double clepsydra, combining a straight corridor with the irregular percolation of a fulling mill.

The unstoppable current of the Garonne is blended with tears of joy and mourning.

Three friends or enemies thus find themselves seated at the banquet, drawing maps, stirring mixtures, discovering time. Maps of watered silk trace the spaces around mingled bodies, poured together; their fusion in the same clepsydra or bottle follows the currents of duration.

Two of the friends, intimate acquaintances, want to liberate themselves from the third, enamoured of discourse. They too love speech, but want to free themselves from its absolute tyranny. The golden tongue, disengaged from the other two, travels a different path, rare and disconnected, with time flowing through a unique clepsydra. The other two tongues, enamoured of concourses, follow blended, fluidic, liquid pathways, flowing in knotted confluences.

The dominant tongue performs analysis. Successfully, convincingly so, which proves that it should continue.

The other two dare not say that they practise confusion. In the language of the first, confusion means failure. Just as success avoids failure, so has the first tongue banished the other two.

Once enemies, they find themselves seated thus together at the banquet, temporarily reconciled.

Mixture and confusion preside in the crater of Château d’Yquem. Nothing more delicious, more divine, more memorable than this confusion of gold, copper and bronze.

The two neglected tongues challenge the first to speak, to expatiate upon this confusion without maligning it, for once.

When Monsieur le Comte Alexandre de Lur-Saluces’ hundred and twenty grape-pickers spread themselves across the gentle slopes of the hillside, between rows of vines, to pick the overripe Sauvignon and Semillon, one grape at a time, for yet another autumn since the first in 1785, from the glorious beginning of October until, sometimes, the heavy mists of December; when they mix the harvest from the rocky side with the harvest from the clay-rich side and then with that of the sandy side; when the must of the southern slope is mixed with grapes that ripened under a more oblique, less generous sun; when different slopes, wines, bunches are thrown together, we dream indistinctly that a word capable of expressing this confluence might be acclimatized into our tongue. We cannot say concade nor syrrhesis.

Greek abhors the term synchysis, which should describe the act of directing several currents from different sources or urns into the same channel, one confluence uniting numerous affluents. But it merely refers to confusion or entanglement, a chaos that will not be unscrambled. French abhors it equally, speaking only of confusion. What flows together seems confused to the first tongue, whether speaking French or Greek, but seems as divine as a mouthful of Yquem to the second, which receives it as an unction and can follow the map of its mixtures. We must suppose that the first has never tasted, in order for it to so despise unified streams, compound waves, entwined colours flowing into the same space; interchanges and fluid interference.

I can accept that the primary and immediate tongue should have banished confusion from thought, but anyone who does not hate liquid concourse will be taken aback that the philosophy of knowledge should as a consequence of this have canonized this blind spot. To confuse means, first of all, to pour together, to conjoin several streams into one. Taken literally, confusion sounds rather like a solution.

The metallurgy of alloys, with us since the Bronze Age; the new science of chemistry, classifying mixtures and new bodies through recombination; pharmaceutical preparations, adding specifics to broaden the efficacy of remedies; kitchen-craft, whether of baked goods or liquors – since the dawn of time a thousand noble practices, whether hot or cold, have stirred different streams together in a hundred craters for practical purposes or merely for pleasure, often for knowledge. Why are they not recognized? These actions, alloys, mixtures, brews should all be called confusions, and the philosophy of confusion should be the common ground of sapience.

The first tongue, which speaks and has the ear of reason, calls the second confused, and the latter, confused, accepts the name. It receives concourses of liquid, a hundred simultaneous cascades. A single one, like the Yquem, is abundant, hiding many and composing on the second tongue the map of mixtures, drawn in confusion, fluctuating. A multiple, vibrant, complex map, more complete than clear, detached, simplistic ideas, about which the first tongue boasts so loudly.

I remember with gratitude she who gave me my third mouth, it says. It was the blessed day of my last communion and my first union. Fragrant flowers fell from her mouth: be silent, third tongue, your discretion is your wisdom.

The mouth will not enter into discussion of tastes and odours, in fact they have a fixed scale. Strong or weak, superficial, profound, rich or poor, delicious, repulsive, immediately agreeable or enduringly constant. What we call bouquet, whether accurately or not, seems as objective and precise as a numerical sequence to the initiated.

The scale or order is a descending one, going from air to earth. The most fragile or obvious fragrances, at the top, belong to the flower family: rose, lilac, lime-blossom, jasmine; lower down carnation and violet; less delicate, but still fresh is the order of fruit scents: peach, pear, raspberry, almond, apricot, cherry. Pear and peach are more resistant to wines than red fruits, and less childish. Stonefruits are better than berries. How can you taste a pear, using the chattering tongue rather than the sapient tongue? Pears really melt in the latter’s mouth – Passe-Crassane, Duchesse, Anjou and Comice or Messire Jean, in increasing order of excellence. With the exception of the adorably named Lady’s Thigh, sweet and flavoursome. Similarly, how can you eat plums or apples? Yes to Belle-Fleurs and Greengages, Blue Damsons and Court Pendu Plat; but modesty prevents me from eating prunes except at home. The series progresses downwards from leaves and high branches, where flowers bud, where fruits hang, towards the ground, along bark, odours of resin and dead leaves, mushrooms, truffles. Black ones, from Quercy, not hypocritical white Italian ones. Glory to the heady scent of truffle, precious, subtle, delicate, subterranean. Self-evident, this progression is not open to debate, it runs from light to dark, from trivial to serious and dense, from puerile to trained expertise. The order or series keeps descending, towards the decomposing earth where animal and vegetable remains in the undergrowth mix with the humus. All these bouquets wedded to decay: the vegetable realm discovers sublime aromas when it merges with the inert.

This downwards exploration takes places in the countryside, near its periphery, at the end of spring, at the beginning of autumn or all year round at the markets, in our part of the world. We should also take a stroll through the realm of imports, cane-sugar, vanilla, tobacco, coffee, the blended haze of spices on the docks of Bordeaux or Le Havre, in the merchant’s cellar, the bazaars of Istanbul, or elsewhere in the tropics. We could not survive without mingling with other worlds. We used to read in our textbooks that our intellect knows nothing that has not first passed through the senses. What we hear, through our tongue, is that there is nothing in sapience that has not first passed through mouth and taste, through sapidity. We travel: our intellect traverses the sciences the way bodies explore continents and oceans. One gets around, the other learns. The intellect is empty if the body has never knocked about, if the nose has never quivered along the spice route. Both must change and become flexible, forget their opinions and expand the spectrum of their tastes as far as the stars. How many past adventures and sometimes even heroic deeds have served to astonish our sense of smell, how much knowledge was acquired along the way?

Just as taste is crowned by sapience, so does sagacity complete the aromatic scale. The title of every banquet should be: sapience and sagacity. Around the table, only sage tongues.

The vegetable bouquet, aptly named, decomposing into the rot of the undergrowth, leads in to animal odours, heavier and more composite, less easily dispersed, denser and heavier. The scale descends further, from violas to cellos. Floral waste mixes with filth, straw litters are blackened from dung, under the bellies of cattle; don’t look away city-dwellers, sagacity is entranced by the sweet odour of cows.

This is how we recognize individual bodies, in no way are we inferior to animals in this respect; it is only practice we lack, or shame that overcomes us. It is this initial reckoning that makes for a good nurse; a doctor’s diagnosis begins there; a veterinarian should find a new profession if he is offended by sweat and musk. Sagacity goes beyond intuition, or informs it: certainly it recognizes mint and lilac, orange rind and sage leaf, but it comes to know men too, weakness, deficiency, illness or explosive force, their very singularity; recognizes the beasts within that transform our nearest and dearest into parrots, sharks, birds of prey or pigs; is trusting or wary, fleeing or approaching them. Scents of hatred and indigestion, of acrid sweat and resentment emanate from this chamber, this scrutiny. Floral emanations come from spring mouths, does this mean that they speak? Love begins with consent and is only content when two conspiring bouquets combine, the scent of mingled genitals so heady that we sometimes think we might pass out. The sage knows, in the scriptural sense; what is there in our mind or consciousness which does not first pass via this sense?

I am hesitant, says the third tongue: must we be convinced that the given comes to us through language for Denis Diderot, Sophie’s perfect lover, to give voice to a jewel so precious that, in the mind of our philosopher, it is equal in excellence to the mouth and lips of a kiss?3 Speaking lips experience less happiness, tenderness and sweetness. Why do they spend so much time expatiating on love instead of, and sometimes while, sweetly making love? The given is truly given to us through soft, voiceless lips, says the third tongue, still hesitating.

No-one is ever rendered speechless amidst the aromas of foliage and flowers; the distinct odours of flesh sometimes make us gasp, leaving us breathless in the duel of mingled bodies. Sweat, shroud. Here is the frontier or catastrophe, the border which opens up or closes off what we might call instinctive repugnance: deep, pungent, dense, black aromas, underground, in graves.

Compost and soil are mixtures of bodies and plants, flora and fauna, dead and alive, organic mixtures. We like vegetable detritus well enough, animal excrement repels us, but not always, it can be heady; when it comes to game, we can appreciate the smell of meat that is high. Yet we flee from the stench of death.

Just as the most sublime sound verges on noise, so is the headiest perfume but a step away from death and putrefaction; it arises from their domain; the soul leaves its deceased body in an odour of sanctity, we burn incense at funerals.

Led by volatile spirits, we are approaching the sacred; we are verging on the unclean and purification, where sagacity seems to awaken both knowledge and the sacred dimension. Do not enter here, you will profane this place, or sully yourself. The terrain thus defined can be called temple or propriety, or dirty, clean or taboo – in any event, it is demarcated, thus located and known. The terrain thus purified sees the birth, through cleansing or ritual, of pure reason in the midst of impurity. Together, Pasteurian hygiene, our more recent aseptic tastes and the theory of knowledge take us back to ancient rites of purification. Priests in the past and scholars today make us forget the insuperable boundary, or reinforce it. They make us feel disgusted by our own noses. I sense that we are heading simultaneously towards knowledge and the sacred, we are approaching repulsive places: filth, mixture, excrement, death – the supreme filth, supreme excrement. In death my dust will mingle with sticky, slimy substances in the moist compost. This is where the limit lies: smells of life, beforehand; funereal fragrances beyond this threshold. This is where definition is born.

Earth, rocks, gunflint, sulphur, hydrogen: terrifying, primary, molar, simple, primeval – I was going to say atomic – mineral odours. Here lies our horror of chemistry, the reason our ancestors burned alchemists and sorcerers at the stake, terrified by the common ground shared by knowledge and death.

There is nothing in our intellect that does not first cross this ground.Emanations rise, the fragrant procession dissolves into light, airborn spirits; they are quickly dispersed. Conversely, the spirit descends into density, is converted into matter and, mingled with the heavy entrails of things, finally knows. It collects itself, and plunges from flowers to the dead. The Greeks of the decadent period sometimes used the word cathode to describe this fall or descent that overturns dispersal or emanations.

Emanations flow from the air to the ground or across the water. Over the tidal expanse, the ebb and flow churns over the beach sands; seaweed, kelp, jellyfish, half-open molluscs and dead, limp fish accompany the sagacious on the surface of the sea, where their sense of smell is lost, swamped. Saline spirits or volatile iodine: the wind carries everything back towards submerged fantoms. Orpheus’ head, severed by the tornado, is still floating alone, still singing, his mouth full of brine, not smelling these last spirits swirling about on the water’s surface.

Orphic itinerary, descent into the Underworld; the order of odours or subtle spirits, once emitted, is a fall towards the repugnant bottom, until we reach the odourless: whether shipwreck or funeral, the nose fills with water or earth.

Foliage, a scattering of flowers, berries or fruits, bark, humus and roots, markets, bazaars, beaches and ports, sewers, graveyards, mines, ditches, Underworlds: still life.

The evaporated spirits of beings laid low: substances.

Flames, fire, oven: no matter how far our travels take us, we must return home to the hearth, where the banquet is prepared. Outside, the raw; in the kitchen, the aromas of a sublime alchemy emanate from the grilled meat.

Socrates, Agathon and Alcibiades speak of love without ever making love, or sit down to eat without actually eating or drink without tasting; likewise they enter directly from the porch, over the threshold, into the dining area, without ever visiting the kitchens. Like the Gods, slaves and women stand near the stoves, where transformations occur, while the barbarians talk.

This transformation within the flames, this passage from raw to cooked, is connected to knowledge. The fermentation of bread or wine, for instance, or pretransubstantiation. The Last Supper did not consecrate grapes or wheat. It attended to the things that were eaten, tasted, made, transformed by heat. Wine belongs to the order of the cooked: the peacock’s tail, in which each ocellus exalts an island that is simple by nature, raw in its elementary composition, comes together through cooking, is organized into a whole. The flavours, more numerous than before, converge into a new synthesis. Visit the Sauternes region, vines and woodlands, resin and flowers, river and breezes: it would take you twenty years to gather through sapience and sagacity what a single drop of Yquem gives you in a single moment. In the days when our bread still tasted of the countryside, it too would be like taking a long stroll in a single instant. There is a whole lifetime in a glass of Margaux, or even in a simple cob loaf. Cooking compacts, concentrates, reduces the given, makes it converge, the raw is made more abundant by cooking, the given goes from random chance, from flighty, improbable, inconstant circumstance to habit and compactness. Goes from diffuse, chaotic mixture to dense, ordered blend. Fire cements mixtures, transforms the above-mentioned confusion into stained glass, stirs in the small, secret elements just enough to combine things that would disgust us when cold. It assists convergence, favours collusion, binds closer, enriches alloys, discovers new combinations on the spot and, through synthesis, learns how to know.

When scholarship or knowledge is reduced to analysis, the guests at the banquet lie down in distaste on their cushions, in a different order and language, keeping their distance from the hearth where some crafty genius combines, composes, blends, creates a new order, a different scale of sapidity: a slave or woman with dirty hands, pouring incompatible liquids into a single crater, as though into a stomach. The analyst gags in disgust at these messy characters, in revulsion at the bubbling broth; he prefers to vomit. Thus emptying his stomach of the mixture and confusion to which he is addicted.

And yet, there is confusion behind every recipe: bubbling away in the pot, sizzling in the embers, simmering for hours. Take this, and measure, then take that, and blend.

Nothing surpasses the excellence of cooking when one knows how to cook well, as we do in France. For once, nature does things less well than we do. Our savoir-faire magnifies the given, which belongs to a suborder when raw. The aroma of roasted coffee early in the morning makes our muscles and skin quiver with delight; the smell of roasting meat, which verges on that of burning meat, delights our spirits – although rather less so than caramel, mere sugar until it meets fire. I have difficulty understanding that other culture, of boiled food, more Nordic or puritanical, hidden beneath the smell of cabbage. I have lived downwind of a fast food restaurant long enough to know how disgusting it is to be lacking in culture.

Once again, this literally supernatural excellence emanates from mixtures and confusions. Fire fuses many things together. The raw gives us tender simplicities, elementary freshness, the cooked invents coalescences. Conversely, analysis slices and dices raw; synthesis requires flame. As a result, the latter tends towards knowledge and culture; the former remains unrefined.

What if the philosophy of knowledge had not yet begun?

Clear, distinct knowledge is the result of analyses which divide and separate, systematically distasteful of confusion. Separation and division presuppose a space, on which or in which distinction pricks out a singular location: all simple topological operations. Confusion or multiple cascades, intertwining and interchanging in confluence, also presuppose a space, but also somewhat more attention. They represent, in fact, the direct operation of division, or separation; which is a kind of summation, or multiplication. If you know how to undo a knot or pull apart its fixed strands, you do not typically condemn the person who knots the loose strands together: the same person can perform both gestures. Yet the theory of knowledge, untying knots and refusing to tie them, tolerates only one side of the equation: the analytical. Cutting, undoing, subtracting, dividing, differentiating. Destroying. To analyse is to destroy. Such a theory resembles the traditional practice of certain tribes which consisted in binding the left arm to the body in order to ensure that one would only ever use the right, so dominant is one side over the other: sinister. Nor does it tolerate confusion. Yet confusion enables fluid multiplication, where the indistinct multiplicities in play are transformed into continuous varieties. The latter flow into one another and vary in concert, subject to multiple variables. Everything leads us to the conclusion that analysis has not yet accepted these varied, complex functions with which it has been dealing for two hundred years.

We return yet again to mixture and to the concept of variety, both immediate in the rich, complex, vibrant experience of the senses and, unparadoxically, more abstract than the simple, inverse operations of analysis; or perhaps we should say that they are posterior to what we call abstraction. Here, sensation appeals to a more difficult and complex kind of abstraction than our traditional understanding of it. We can say either: that in order to be understood, the senses require a new effort of abstraction to recompose what analysis separates, or that working towards a more composite kind of abstract leads to sensational or sensual results.

Confusion presupposes a space, or series of proximities, it accesses time, which is no doubt not as separate from spaces as we think. It marks, watches, keeps time. For a long time now I have thought of time as a node or interchange or confluent of several times, each of which can be understood spatially. This multiple clepsydra is incomprehensible to thinking that is limited to inverse operations alone. Oddly, it is made perfectly comprehensible by the immediate given.

How can it be that philosophy has taken several centuries to ask that we wait a moment while the sugar in a glass of water melts? How can it be that when faced with such evidence, time itself was not immediately associated with mixture and the fusion of one body into another? Yet two streams poured forth their compound as one. Bergson, following Duhem and in the footsteps of the Greeks, invented a clepsydra with several entry points: variable inflow, communicating vessels. This was the precise practice of confusion. And solution. The intimate fusion of one thing into another, of one flow into another: generalize this to as many kinds of flow as you like.

It has indeed taken the whole history of philosophy, which from its very beginnings had nonetheless intuited mixture and chaos, to rediscover in a glass or a vessel, in a simple, naïve, almost childlike way, what was already happening in the kitchen while the guests drank and spoke of love, and what vignerons have been doing in an insanely complex manner since the very beginnings of our traditions. Remember this: confusion begins with the flood, and the Ark of the Covenant. As though the water clocks were already beginning to fill: a colossal volume of water, a stock of animals, life, seed, the first blended wines. Alloys. The old patriarch Noah, the prototype of the œnophile, makes the multiple clepsydra flow in confusion. Remember this.

Clear, distinct knowledge presents or represents a space. Confused knowledge flows and returns along fluent times. Is present, certainly, but its past floods back, and it remembers.

Take this and drink. Do this in memory of me.

Memory

Let us return to the immediacy of the senses.

Can we establish a sensorial base line: a point of reference? We can dream, at the very least. Conventional wisdom tells us that water functions this way: an exceptional fluid in many ways and what is more, odourless, colourless, tasteless. Elusive and almost intangible, nearly translucent, still when nothing disturbs it, noiseless. One thinks of Plato’s definition of intelligible space, made when geometry was young. Yet the evidence contradicts this: water has taste, colours and an aroma that tells us where it came from, twenty different ones we can distinguish with our eyes closed: still, running, city, mountain. The base line has shifted.

The air, an indistinct mixture, has a stronger claim to being our base line. Intangible, you could almost say intact; colourless and transparent, a conduit for light and colour; odourless and a vector for smell; tasteless; soundless when not driven by heat; it penetrates our bodies, ears, mouths, noses, throat and lungs, envelopes our skin: it is the medium for every signal that reaches our senses. This neutral state or base line is not determined through sensation, but remains a thing to be sensed, at the very limit of the insensible.

The air, an indistinct mixture, light, subtle, unstable, promotes combinations: as vector of everything, it blocks nothing. Medium of the sensorium, general excipient of mixtures: principal chamber of the confused clepsydra.

Let us dream that sight and hearing give us general information relatively swiftly, somewhat abstract or universal; and shapes: a melodic line, harmonies, morphology. It is doubtless because of these properties – intuition, harmony – that philosophies of knowledge prefer to use sight and hearing as points of reference. Taste is also prone to recurrence and stability; its habits are continuous with a culture. France is divided more categorically by a preference for butter or oil than by any departmental demarcation, and along the same boundary line as langue d’oïl and langue d’oc. 4

Smell seems to be the sense of singularity. Forms reappear, invariant or recurrent, harmonies are transformed, stable across variations, specificity is countersigned by aroma. With our eyes closed, our ears stopped, feet and hands bound, lips sealed, we can still identify, years later and from a thousand other smells, the undergrowth of such and such a place in a particular season at sunset, just before a rain storm, or the room where feed corn was kept, or cooked prunes in September, or a woman.

We have lived with overpowering odours for a brief time only: diesel and kerosene intrude on our wounded sensibilities, stenches that stand out in a crowd. Mostly, till now, we moved through air which was changing and carrying ephemeral traces. Nothing resembles circumstance more than this vapour. It mingles with the atmosphere, depending on the time (hour, date and weather), the place (altitude, inside or outside), events, positions, conditions, causes and acts, its occurrence is improbable. The smallest point of a rare apex, a highly complex compound, a blend of a thousand proximities, unstable knot of capricious currents, an aroma comes about like an intersection, or confusion, we do not smell simple, pure odours.

Forms reappear, a harmonic line is reproduced, this is already a kind of knowledge, at least a frequent, recurring recognition: a strong stability can appear again before our eyes, ring like a refrain in our ears; memory presents itself as knowledge, rhythm presents itself as habit – and before long, as law. But this rare trace in the aerial fluid, this unstable, complex mixture, this partially undone knot, trailing a thousand threads, is not subject to repetition, never achieves invariance: too circumstantial to begin beating in time, too fluid, diluted, chaotic. On the contrary, knowledge eliminates such unstable circumstance, it planes down rarity. Its catch-cry: In the same circumstances . . .

Improbable, blended, specific, singular odours, their time and place uncertain. Now suppose that a rare blend should appear a second time in the random turbulence of the air, that this unique confusion should recur, improbably: the knot gathers in its threads, the apex pulls up its base, the tributary subsets burst forth as they intersect, a whole world rushes in: bodily position, enchantment, colour, circumstances crowd around, rarity reappears, richly ornamented and decorated; here, for want of frequency, memory is not transformed into knowledge, but we are dazzled, ecstatically, by our proximity to this overabundant memory.

The sense, therefore, of the confusion of encounters; the rare sense of singularities: our sense of smell slides from knowledge to memory and from space to time – no doubt from things to beings.

Loving a body, that rare special thing; no other volume on the surface of the planet has more value. Love confuses us; two chambers pouring together. Lingering near the surface of skins – veils, complex and subtle tissues – this or that indefinable scent, belonging exclusively to her or to him and signifying each one to the other, in conscent. We do not love unless our senses of smell find themselves in improbable accord, a miracle of recognition between the invisible traces which scud over our naked skins, as air and clouds float above the ground. Until death there remains within us this spirit, in the chemical and mystical sense of the written and spoken word; as far as the nose is concerned, the emanations of whomever we have loved remain. It returns to haunt our skin, at dawn on certain mornings. Love perfumes our lives, aromas resurrect encounters in all their splendour.

We used to embalm the dead, so that the memory would evoke those who had been loved by our forebears.

Life itself announces its presence from afar with these balmy emanations.

It is a wise and true language that calls the exhalation of a fragrance a bouquet. A bouquet is not just a mass of flowers, a simple multiplicity, but a bundle tied together, held by string or thread or the neck of a vase. Each flower adds it colour and shape, spreads and diffuses its perfume, but each one vies with the others; bouquet expresses their intersection. If you pull towards you the knot, ribbon or neck, the precise place where a confusion of multiple cascades is formed, all the stems and petals will come together, the whole state of things is revived in your memory. No single component can be identified separately from the resultant. A bouquet forms a fragment of memory because of the impossibility of analysing mingled bodies: either it has integrity, or does not. A singularity reappears around the intricate intersection. Recurs. Resuscitates.

Bouquet expresses a product, an intersection that defies analysis.

The rare and organic liaison, the singular specificity that bears the name love in my tongue, how can we know it, how can we create that knot, other than through just such an intersection, through a stable or unstable circumstance surrounding the local state of things – a star; other than – speaking quite categorically – through a bouquet? How can we recognize it, if not through an odour – sensory, sensual, radiating in every direction?

I love your odour and your spirit.

In my language, the emanations from your body used to be called spirits.

The sterile language of today would called them odours; our intellectual training would balk at that and substitute perfume. Our language leads us to understand that the relationship between aroma and perfume is analogous to that between giving and forgiving. Language goes beyond the given; the sublime. When in closest proximity to a beloved body, language replaces the given with a formula. Singularity vanishes for the sake of a brand name. For the sake of a signature. A chemical equation or elegant label. Individual secrecy is lost through advertising. When the given is given only through language, labels or algorithms, we find our bed in a shop window, or splashed across a television screen. Obscene. The given is for sale.

I love your individuated spirit. We do not separate two lovers; mystical and carnal, sacred or profane, pure, impure, ignoble, noble, spiritual or fragrant, because the spirit manifests itself near the skin; but both of them, bound together, private, oppose the obscenity of public language. The wandering soul hides in continuity with our postures. Amidst the liberties we take.

Âme: soul. The French word âme translates the Latin anima which, in turn, translates the Greek anemos, meaning wind. The wandering soul comes from where the wind comes from.

The wind. The movement of the light, subtle, vaporous, turbulent air, rhythmic, almost periodic, chaotic; mixture and carrier of mixtures, confused, the medium of every signal that reaches our senses, penetrating body, nose, mouth, ears, throat and lungs, surrounding the skin. Base line of the senses, carrier to all of them.

Having begun in the air, the circuit of odours returns there; rising through emanations, descending towards love, death and knowledge, rising again. Having begun in the wind, in the soul, the circuit returns to the soul, on the breath of the wind. Soul: base line of the senses, carrier to all of them. I love your light, subtle, vaporous, turbulent, chaotic soul, I love that it penetrates your skin, your ears, that it reigns over your skin. Tell me the difference between soul and wind.

Do you call what circulates through the world or inside our bodies information, or animal spirits?

Confusion associates, multiplies, pours, ties knots without undoing them, neither undoes nor separates, causes the convergence of the unanalysed: this is time.

The inverse operation of distinction is carried out in different spaces; the direct operation of mixture fluctuates across different times. The spatial gestures of separation give rise to knowledge, the spatio-temporal gestures of confusion give rise to memory.

I do not really know what this word Yquem signifies, says the mouth. I would merely note that in Maimonides, after the Seraphim, Powers or Cherubim, the tenth order of angels is known as the Ishim.5 The Ophanim, swift; the Seraphim, brightness; the Malachim, messengers; the Cherubim, images; the Ishim, animate.

Animal spirits flying over the eponymous hillside, myriad archangels pouring forth from the unstoppered bottle.

A philosopher friend of mine, enough of a reader and talker to take people at their word and assure you that our senses can mislead us, one day came to be inducted into the serene brotherhood of the Chevaliers du Tastevin – a society of wine tasters who practise what they preach. Twenty years later, he told me how one of the group had for so long proven himself to be so infallible in the recognition of wines and their vintages that the others conspired affectionately to trick him. In the greatest secrecy, the conspirators bribed a Burgundian vigneron to plant a few rows separately; on higher or lower ground, but away from the dominant vines. This he did. The years passed. The young vines aged and surrendered their product. And on a day as beautiful as today, they served their pope this wine which so richly deserved the appellation nouveau. They beseeched the oracle to speak. Silence. He took his time swirling the ruby liquid around the bulbous sides of the glass, observing its legs; considered it, sniffed it and, his eyes closed, tasted it. Silence. ‘Gentlemen’, he declared, ‘I’m terribly sorry, but this wine doesn’t exist.’

Cheerful exclamations – albeit secretly flabbergasted ones. ‘Maître, if it didn’t exist, it wouldn’t be in your glass.’ My philosopher friend started to expatiate on nothingness, the others hushed him, he had forgotten he was dining in good company. ‘I’m telling you it doesn’t exist, and that’s all there is to it! This simply cannot be from Bordeaux, nor from the Rhone, nor Hungary. I can’t even tell if it comes from the Côte d’Or.’ ‘Come now!’ was the answer from the disconcerted chorus. ‘If it did exist, he continued mockingly, struck by a sudden intuition, it could only come from . . .’ and went on to describe precisely the spot where the vigneron had planted those rows. Our specialist in words and nothingness was taken aback, as were they all.

A laser beam from the Earth makes a mark on the moon the size of a fingernail, and we admire its precision. A good wine taster should be able to recognize a South African, Chinese or Californian wine, not to mention one from Germany, Tuscany or Chios. Yet let him pinpoint twenty-five metres of vine on a map and a single week in autumn on the calendar of history, and he is accused of having unreliable senses. He can even notice a hole in the globe’s tattered viticultural garment: ‘Gentlemen, I’m terribly sorry, but this wine is from nowhere.’ We have everything we need to define distinctiveness, clarity, precision – qualities which we praise in ideas alone; capabilities which language claims it alone can achieve. Perhaps blabbermouths are just after publicity?

How can it be that for the last two thousand years we have commemorated the Last Supper, but merely studied divine Plato’s Symposium? We nonetheless read the latter as a tale already anchored by a long chain of memory.

It took place, we know whose house it was, we know who was at the banquet and where each guest was seated; sometimes there are permutations, altering the seating arrangement of the guests. We even have a parallel text, plus the rich history of these banquets, plus the backwash of commentary.

If instead the roof and colonnades had come crashing noisily down on all and sundry, if all that had been found afterwards had been the unidentifiable pulp of the bodies in the ruins, we could nonetheless have reconstituted the scene, the different positions, the remarks they exchanged, diameter and dialogue, all from memory, point for point and place by place. Everything was perfectly positioned for the art of memory.

So well do we remember it. Yet we have never set a table as the Romans did for their gods, never have we dressed at night to drink like Socrates’ friends drank and speak of love as they did, till dawn, waiting for a young man to enter, crowned with violets and his head flowing with ribands, drunk and supported by flute-girls; and hoping most of all that a foreign woman speaking the truth might come. Never have we done this in memory of that evening; we have read what our forebears used to read, but never commemorated.

We have made and repeated the gesture of the Eucharist thousands of times. The Last Supper incites its own repetition through the millennia, like a star casting its light before itself; as though a particular action needed to be recorded in order not to be forgotten; as though something infinitely precious and infinitely fragile were asking us to carry it through history, passing it from one person to the next.

What do we remember? At the symposium banquet it is allegories that drink: comedy, tragedy, medicine . . . They speak allegorically. This never becomes clear until one has attended an invited banquet where each chair represents an institution, where each guest is there to represent politics, science, banking, the media or public administration – the powers of the moment. The dinner mimics that of the gods – the individuals present believing that the mere loss of their individuation makes them gods. The hostess could have invited robots who would have said what they were programmed to say, at the push of a button: what an administrator or journalist says can never surprise us, they are celebrating their power. For a long time I believed that the loss of individuation was due to the wine circulating around the room and becoming a collective subject by taking on the individuality of each person as it did the rounds; and that the wine became us, objectively conveying the sum of the I’s entrusted to it by each subject, lost, in an ecstatic trance; but the loss occurs differently, for each person enters like a statue. Allegory, a block of marble carved into a representation, speaks. A mouth of stone neither eats nor drinks. The Commander threatens, thunders and kills, but cannot hold his own against a drinking Don Juan. A robot with a tongue of stone, iron or wood, it speaks, cannot know thirst. We know how to build machines that talk, we do not know how to build robots that can drink or taste. A tongue can become artificial, intelligence frequently does, but sapience never does. It is in this sense that an automaton differs from homo sapiens: it has the first tongue, but not the second.

The individual representing comedy, tragedy, medicine, the media or public administration – statue, robot, apotheosis of allegory, long-dead automaton – speaks at the banquet but does not drink. Speaks of love, does not make love; speaks of wine, does not taste it. A dinner of statues, a feast of stone.6 Here dead words are passed about; we study them, comment on them. The allegories drink allegorical wine, allegorically; we speak about this categorically. A symposium of marbles and circuit boards.

To comment or commemorate? What should we remember? Wine? Ourselves? Not the positions around the table, the places, the honours, the dominant relationships – just the wine, and ourselves. The wine makes its way around the group. Each person, James, Andrew or John, simple coastal fishermen, lake dwellers, fresh water mariners, small-time tax collectors, representing nothing but themselves, individuals, paupers dreaming of a catch so miraculous that they would have to wade through piles of slimy fish overflowing the sides of the boat; each drinks in turn from the chalice and passes it to his neighbour, saying nothing. No-one knows if James spoke, or John or Andrew. Peter spoke. To betray. Peter the head, the first, the pope. Petrus, rock or stone. The only one who represents. Peter, for whom the last supper is a feast of stone. The others drink for the sake of drinking. And tasting. Drink and taste in silence. The others drink for the sake of love. James, Andrew, Simon then John. A feast of love, the crater passed around, the feast of John. You who speak and create the institution, you are known as Petrus. You who drink out of love, you are known as John. An impossible banquet, between the stone statue and Don Juan, drunk on love, drinking, still drinking, on and on.

What to remember – so fragile and forgettable that we must go through the gestures of commemoration together often in order to revive its memory? Observe – the wine is passed from hand to hand. Each person receives the vessel, drinks from it, passes it to his neighbour; the wine’s passage makes him both a station and an engine of circulation. Circulation describes the group, following the thread of the relationship. The crater is a quasi-object, tracing the relationships between the apostles, carrying, weaving, objectivizing what unites the group, the twelve. The chalice comes to rest in front of Andrew, James or John, and continues on its way: the group relationship stops and starts. The group dies and lives again in each of them. Each apostle takes and gives. Takes wine, drinking or tasting. And gives. Gives his individuating principle, which the wine, nonetheless, snatches from him. Leaves – in the vessel and in the wine – the very identity that the wine takes from those who taste it. The circulating chalice takes on individuations, collects subjects as it passes, all the more easily for the fact that these fresh-water fishermen or stone breakers – men of no account, peasants, sailors, wanderers, Franciscans before their time – are not so attached to their own subject that they won’t gladly leave it behind: they do not keep the crater to themselves for long, passing it along like a hot potato to him, to me, to you – who are you and who am I? What is your name? That’s not so important any more, I no longer notice, you do not know, he has forgotten, the quasi-object, the crater of blended wine, becomes a quasi-subject, mixing the names and pronouns lost along the way and fused into an us, confused in the chalice, giving the table its form, composing the feast, suddenly presiding over the Last Supper, the sacred subject of their relationship; the subjects became relationship, the relationship becomes subject through the intermediary of the object, of this, the wine. Fragile subject, so precarious that it teeters near death, condemned to disappear, forgotten, if we fail to repeat the same gesture, quickly; ready to be resuscitated with each gesture of commemoration. Every morning therefore, everywhere, we must once more begin the celebration of this unstable, never quite substantial collective, always in its death throes on Friday, in all its glory on Sunday. It must be supported, we must be sustained, it must be substantiated.

This subject which transcends their various names, their place and presence, is held in their hands for a moment and handed on to the next person, with no understanding of what they do; they bring it into existence, aware of little but its mystery; they all kill it and revive it, in an instant. This, this wine which takes away their individuation which they all surrender to it, this crater of blended liquids that charts their relationship and gives them unanimity, this is the blood which circulates through the body they form, here and now, at this Last Supper. The blood which courses through this unanimous body has a beat, and a cycle. Poured, it flows.

I am you, or him, indiscriminately, you are indiscriminately the other, or me, the subject is detached from me, you, him, everyone else, Peter, James or John, from now on we live as one soul in one body in which one blood flows, circulating wine and broken bread: Him.

The bread is shared out and the wine is poured.

Qui pro vobis et pro multis effundetur: wine or blood, spilled, shed, poured forth. What should we remember? This effusion.

This division: the bread is broken or analysed into as many individuals. We know this, learn this, unforgettably. No-one has ever forgotten an act of partition, separation, rupture. Nothing endures like analysis. We remain divided, separated, like morsels of bread, broken into individualities.

This effusion. Blood flows, like wine, water or vinegar. Like them, time flows. At the wedding feast at Cana, the first banquet, water is transformed into wine at the end. At Jacob’s well, mortal water leads to the promise of a drink of immortality. At the feast of Bethany, the second-last Supper, precious perfume flows from the hand of Mary Magdalene to anoint Christ’s body, and the house is filled with its exquisite fragrance. At the Last Supper, wine is transubstantiated into blood. On Friday, come midday, blood flows freely, then water, at the end. The dying man was also given a vinegar-soaked sponge on which to suck. History is accompanied and dated by flow, changing and mingling, rising in excellence or falling in disgrace, wine as delectable as ishim or starting to smell of nard, intolerable vinegar, sometimes turning back on themselves cyclically: water, wine, blood, vinegar and finally water; all these streams display their form or process, this is time – remember that time.

What should we remember? The subject that dies, and that we forget, and must resurrect from the dead at every moment. But also, and especially, that time – time: flowing currents of water, wine, blood flowing and blending. Memory is ensured by this multiple passage and because of this confusion.

Time itself carries memories. It flows like currents, those rivers which pass by, stop, return upstream, or divide time, or flow into one another. Time flows like these manifold currents, so different and confused, changed, transubstantiated.

Old, new, eternal union: with what body is my body confused, with what blood my blood, with what wine my wine?

In our culture, within us, we carry two feasts. At the banquet of allegories or representations, a lectisternium, the statues hold forth in their fossilized tongue. We comment on their speeches, as though the statues of this feast of stone, of Peter, who drink to stiffen themselves with anæsthesia, had returned to seek their revenge. Who killed them, lying there? Who killed Socrates?

At the Last Supper of Christianity, the feast of John, the guests known as apostles share a name which signifies their absence from the world: sent forth, gone elsewhere, dispatched, banished. They accept that they will die, like their Teacher; the Last Supper precedes death; Don Juan perishes too. Accepting the death of their subjectivity in the hope of resurrection.

The statues, dead, refuse their death and become ghosts. They demand another death. Thus, another statue. Which will return in due course. Eternal return, passing through death or the mechanism of negation.

The lake or river fishermen accept their death, hoping it will satisfy the appetite of the stone statues, hoping that their death will be the last: the last meal of the condemned, the last men in history condemned to die.

In our culture – where we seek to commemorate this supper, as though we did not quite remember it – the banquet and the Last Supper, the feast of Peter and the feast of John, are diametrically opposed; Peter, commander, leader, always rises from the grave to kill John, who submits out of love.

Peter, the stable rock, kills John, time.

Remember time.

I dream of writing about a third banquet at which the vengeful statue would agree to drink fine wine with the one who seduced his daughter. We suffer from lovesickness because we have forgotten ever having made love. Our bodies, sense of smell and tongue have lost all memory of such dark, ancient confusion or confluence. We feel bound to commemorate frequently. Come, my gentle confused one, plunge into time with me, let us shed our memories in the river of forgetting, and drown our amnesia in the clepsydra of remembrance.

What do we stockpile, squirrel-like? Power, before using it: dry-cell and storage batteries; dams. Money: bank accounts, insurance, capital. Codes: libraries, computer memory, data banks. Food: cold rooms for meat or fruit, grain silos, cool, dark cellars. Sperm, oocytes, embryos.

Time does not always flow. We can find or excavate places where it has frozen. Sometimes an obstacle stops it: a dam, a Closed for Lunch sign, a bottleneck, a lack of light to read by or heat to break up the winter ice fields, a cork. Time percolates, sometimes filtering through and sometimes not. The structure of percolation helps us to understand memory: things back up and create obstructions in a blocked corridor. It should suffice to imagine closures and openings fluctuating and feeding into one another randomly, in space. Here the flow is fortunately unobstructed; there it accumulates, fortunately. Two happy situations: tomorrow time will flow because today, somewhere else, it does not; better still, without these conditions, there will be no tomorrow. No, time does not flow, it percolates; better still, it flows because it percolates.

These obstructions allow us to build banks, stockpiles, dams and cellars. They allow us to access power and not waste our time in continual action. They put power within our power. Our body percolates: its phenotype follows the river of flowing time until death, its mouth; but it carries with it the static genome, in pockets where the flow of time is suspended. The organism is free to break through the obstacle almost at will, sending forth a new existence which percolates at the mercy of the manifold tide: it creates a child. It closes up shop and the stockpile lies dormant: one memory for itself, encoded in its brain; another for the species, encoded in the gametes, two chambers or cellars where two kinds of time sleep, differently; reservoirs whose sluice gates open and close at different times, continually or rarely, and sometimes never at all.

Let us have a cool drink, the organism says. A guest at the banquet, it is annoyed by all the speeches. You can only drink from one bottle, the voice drones on; the wine that you guzzle has only one memory, one bank, one cellar account, held in check by the cold. Like our body, the table is a constellation of small accumulations, amphora and craters, bottles, glasses, plates; no-one eats or drinks entirely in real time. We need intermediary stockpiles. Small lakes of memory: goblets. No, time does not flow, quite. It is extremely rare to have a pure channel, a perfect corridor, with neither sidings nor bottlenecks. The meat that you eat – smoked, dried or preserved in a cellar, protected from flies and the heat – has also percolated. Without cold, the ice that obstructs time, we would not have the heat of the banquet.

Now have a cool drink.

The body resembles the table, and the banquet, love.

The organism is studded with small memory pockets, where time hardly flows or stops altogether, unconscious; intermediary stockpiles like glasses and bottles; and larger banks, where it can remain frozen forever.

Let us drink deeply of this splendid wine, let us forget about it, deep ruby-red in its carafes; or cellar it for the pleasure of some descendant or other. The lineage of the visible sons of the hidden cellar is made up of our banquets, yours and theirs; the warm-hearted children of cold rooms. The lineage of the visible daughters of hidden leavening is made up of our loaves of bread, yours and theirs; the delicious children of inedible mass.

At the beginning of this series of phenomena lined up in a row, a stable, black memory lies in wait in the cold.

We carry within us a dormant genome, in a low pocket, suspended in the cool between our legs, outside of the overheated body which would awaken it, outside of time, which would damage it, the memory of the species; or a stock of undeveloped genomes, which come to maturity regularly, one at a time. Banks of potential beings, virtual, unreal, or forever asleep, or passing by chance, coincidence, intersection or confluence through the small, uncertain window by which we reach the great theatre of action. Created by love, lovers ourselves, children of potential and passage, of virtuality and insinuation, of non-existent capabilities and sufficient cleverness to slip through the narrow strait. The products of love are the visible lineage of hidden genomes, hot lineage derived from cold memory; love is the offspring of forgotten memory, rich and poor, virtually rich but miserable in fact and by choice; love recognizes the memory it has lost. Today we put the genome into straws at the lower than glacial temperature of liquid nitrogen; we keep it cold, outside of real time – but it has been kept cool for millions of years, like good wine in a cellar or delicacies in a cool room, just waiting to emerge into presence. To dive back into the current of time.

No banquet without cellars and larders: without memory and ice. No guest without love; no love without cold and memory.

No text without a library, no philosopher without an encyclopædia, no singular word without the bank of language where words sleep in the cool darkness. Closed books, no light. The writer is situated in the long lineage of visible children of hidden language, the offspring of the virtual and the clever passage through the window: what misery to have neither the language nor the finesse to find it again. Child of darkness or quantity, and choice or rarity.

All are children of multiplicity and singularity. Multiplicity alone guarantees secrecy, burying memory in darkness, creating oblivion or glaciation. You will never know precisely which banknote you deposited into your account. It is singularity that emerges, rare, unique, recognized, remembered.

Bring a rare bottle up from the cellar, a bottle of the best picked out from the countless rows of dusty bottoms; write the only fitting word out of the thousands of possible turns of phrase that grammar books and dictionaries put at our disposal; I will recognize you with my eyes closed – out of ten thousand: feast, masterpiece, love, children of the multiple and the one.

Children of man and woman. Of the male, manifold seed in small dimensions, incalculable male herd; of the female, large, round, monadic, voluminous, rare, unique. A memory arising from multiple oblivions.

The speaking, feeling and loving tongues seated at the banquet approach the vessel in which the liquid rests, where confusion sleeps, where time accrues and from which memory comes.

Emprisoned within for an age, an intelligent genie escapes. No-one can capture him or put him back inside, he goes forth, explodes and is transformed into a thousand apparitions and evasions. This has become that, and also something else – how can we even name him? He will not return.

Hope lies at the bottom of this vessel. Will it flood the world, overwhelmed by evils; or will it be lost?

The box bears the lovely name of Pandora: all-gifted. The given in its entirety gushes forth from the horn of plenty.

The only Pandora’s box we have ever known is the world: it alone, box without sides, contained the given in its entirety.

A bottle of Sauternes mimics the world, concentrates the given, delivers it suddenly: coloured, luminous, radiant, tactile, velvety, profound and caressing, suave, orchestral, a composition of brass and woodwind, spiritual. Body and world: agrarian, floréal, prairial, vendémiaire, wooded.7 Time: minutes and months, decades. Spaces: countryside and peacock’s tail. Gifts or the given invade the sensorium, leaving tongues behind, travel down arteries and muscles, nerves and bones all the way to the fingernails.

The bottle contains the entirety of the sensible, all at once; contains bottomless common sense. Left on the table for a week, open and empty, the course of the emanations never runs dry.

A sensorial bomb, crowned by a cloudlike plume above the neck of the bottle.

Invaded by this cloud, our body learns or achieves transubstantiation into spirit. The entirety of the given, vibrant and multiple, kaleidoscopic, comes together like a spindle, a knotted bundle, asks that it be allowed to pass, at the bottom of a chimney, neck of a bottle or nasal fossae, straw, filter, threshold, rectifier – what name should we give to this rising corridor? – tripping over itself or organizing itself as it passes, wanting to ascend, moving through; and there, is transubstantiated into spirit. Sense becomes scent, a light vapour, matter becomes animated. Soul or information.

But the work had already been begun by time: time, in the bottle since 1947; time, that year, above and below the vines; time, beforehand, in the vine stock and in the earth. Soil, climate, gravel, the darkness of neighbouring pines, the sweat of the vignerons, the heavy alcohol and the hot summers, the rains, the rot, everything hard about the world being transformed into softness, patiently. The wine says a thousand things, moving from sense to information: spiritual.

It fragments into spirits: bouquet, carillon, pavane, rainbow; multiple and subtle but nonetheless unitary intelligence – spirit. The abundant spray of the multiple, and sensual complexity, is knotted, refined, blended, summed up; flows together and passes through the narrow chimney I think I can sense in my head – why would we need to imagine that the senses require an intellect in order to be united?

Through our hands, matter can touch itself; it can echo in our ears or cause our skin to shiver; it astonishes our eyesight, fills our mouth: matter which is solid, liquid, fluid, acoustic or luminous, rough, porous or silky, bound to the inert, the en-soi, the objective; to substance, dark and stable tranquillity, below; rising, lightened, spirit, into scent, zephyr of the soul. This is wine – how can we call this wine? – this is spirit, this is my blood.

My blood invaded completely, from head to toe. Wine circulates within us. And between us, bodies in communion. Here we are, united; reunited; we are one body, from now on, unanimous. The same soul circulates between us, the new blood of a collective body. Each drinks from the same chalice, each drinks till the principle of individuation ruptures, each disappears, only the passage remains. Circulation within a single organism. This is my blood.

The old ambrosia of the old gods passes into the heart of the community, immortal now, unlike mortal individuals. The blood of the new and eternal alliance.

They drink wine, pour blood, lose their singularity by pouring it into the community – alloys, mixtures, old and new alliances, confusion, still and forever more; the appearance of a new time and new promises, memories.

Do this in memory of me.

A path abandoned for the last two thousand years, a crossroads covered over by centuries of neglect – are rediscovered. Observe.

The attention given to the senses, respectfully, in their own right and not as embryonic, inchoative knowledge differentials, is best expressed through myth: Hermes, Pandora; or fairy tales: Cinderella, the unicorn; or the arts: Orpheus, the muses; or religion. And suddenly we are sitting down in the company of old friends, around the oldest table in the world, where Ulysses once sang for King Alcinous, where Jupiter made the pitcher flow endlessly, where Socrates debated till morning with Agathon, where death refused Don Juan’s invitation to drink, suddenly we are sitting down to eat in Lazarus’ home, where Mary Magdalene washed Christ with precious nard, thus giving him his name, we even commemorate the Last Supper, where wine was changed into blood, and constantly replicate the last meal at Emmaus, the host having long since left us, although he remains present for having given us, after his departure, the gift of tongues, by which I mean language.

The logos cannot express the attention we pay to the senses: its formulations precise or confused, always inadequate and risible; its formulations in chemistry, physiology or anthropology abstract, always theoretical – does anyone know of an æsthesiology? It forks away from the logos, and veers towards myth.

There is nothing in the senses which does not lead to culture.

Not towards knowledge, but culture.

Not towards discourse, but towards what?

Here we are at the dawn of time. Sensibility dates from Antiquity, defines Antiquity. Whoever has the gift of the senses speaks ancient languages, sings dead myths in forgotten cadences and dialects. Around the old table, in front of the old wine, brought up from dark tunnels or foundations, bought from an old merchant, teller of old tales, the three tongues, white with age, the oldest enemies in the world, plunge together into the most fabulous Antiquity; attempt, passing from one to another, to plunge from word to body, from spiritual scents to the grey, stable, tranquil substance of things, and climb back up, though memory, from one feast to another, to the beginning: not, in search of sense, to the beginning of knowledge, but to the birth of our culture. They do not comment, but commemorate. Recreate the gestures, refill the glasses, but do not repeat the words. And immediately discover our most distant predecessors who already realized that an immense, inaugural act took place in the feast of wine, its preparation and storage, the attentive and fervent consumption of it. As though each banquet, integrating previous ones, easily attained the first.

Attained this act, this transubstantiation of material energy into signifying scents, into spirit; this, concentrating or summing up the gifts of the world, or all it has given, invades each person’s body and circulates throughout the collective body, like blood that burns, flows and pulses. This is where the life of language is resolved, its relationship to this concentrated, totalized given, exploding inside each person’s body. This is where the redemption of the body through the word is consummated, the whole body condensed there: material, inert, sensitive, living, individual, social, collective. This is where the word captured it with a word. Redeemed the world and history at the cost of its body, for the price of a word. Someone with the gift to do so could speak this inaugural act fully and rigorously, but he who did so made a solemn and unparalled pronouncement: this is my body, this is my blood. Those with the gift of the gab fall silent here: this – everything that can be designated, shown, that can make sense or be perceived by senses – is the body or blood of the word itself.

From this moment on, the given will only ever give itself in and through language.

We commemorate. As soon as we say this, the word is born, it has captured or redeemed everything. We leave behind the ancient shore and move on to the Good News – Noël! – but immediately we forget this event without parallel, we forget that we are speaking, the word dies having just redeemed things and men. In that moment we move from ancient religions to our religion, from creeds of the senses to that of the word, from the body to speech, from philosophies of experience to those of language, this story is a day old, or ten years old or nearly two thousand years old, or as old as the forgotten moment when the world buried itself under language through the word of him who became man by saying it. This is the very first story: this. This is the body and blood of the word itself. Could this be a mere word?

The substantial force of the coppery yellow, pink-flecked liquid is transformed into spirit; the hard, material force of fluidic sound is transformed into this soft word, ready to die: this.

This story swims between two shores, speaks between two religions, trembles between two languages, comes to a halt between two temporalities, leaves behind two philosophies.

Could this be reducible to a word? Could these rich aromas and this complex taste, changed into soft signals, be contained by a series of propositions? And is this commemoration limited to a written contract?

Let us cross the sea, since we boast about our ability to swim, and seat ourselves at other, less outmoded banquets. The mustard is insipid, tasteless; the beer, almost non-alcoholic, is flavourless; spices are bland, coffee weak and barely roasted, fruits and vegetables monotonous to the point of sameness. We can only differentiate between foods by the name and price on the label. Wine has been transformed into milk – white. Nothing to upset our stomachs or offend us. America eats mush.

And sips the insipid – a dull palate. Frozen too, to numb the taste-buds. Thus gorges itself, because the only impediment to quantity, other than poverty, is quality. Always more. So gluttonous bodies are surrounded by an aura of flab, homo insipiens has an imprecise outline, swells to monstrous proportions, loses its shape, not so much fat as enveloped by pregnancy, once more an embryo. America leads the way.

The body, as we know, is becoming more and more undifferentiated. Like food, it is tending towards dedifferentiation: infantile, mammalian, it is returning to its sweet, milky origins. Roly-poly behemoths tumble out of their cars, stunted babies blown up to scale. America is looking much younger these days.

Obviously, your bread needs to be soft if you’ve lost your teeth or have only false ones – all the more beautiful for your publicity shot; obviously, delicate stomachs need bland drinks; and weak palates, mild spices. Progress is happening elsewhere, creating a common denominator for many cultures. Thus, anyone can sit down at the banquet, whether Eskimo, Mexican, Japanese or Slav. The cultural vanguard is reviving the archaic. Now at last everyone can evolve remembering bottle, breast, thumb, or better still, reminiscing about their foetal suspension in amniotic fluid. The common denominator, monotonous unity, shaves off sharp edges, eliminates spices, softens and dilutes, cancels out aromas and tastes. America leads a peaceful existence.

In the future, war will not break out between cultures with hard differences, but will pit against each other those, on the one hand, whose nutritional or cultural ethnology – surviving amidst ruins whose stark beauty will provide travel agencies the occasional stopover – can still be described; and on the other, those who will vegetate in the absence of sapience and sagacity, anæsthetized, drugged, frigid.

Odourless frozen food for the spongy and obese, hidden under cellophane so that no-one can touch or taste it – watch out for germs! – can only be read and heard, on helpful labels, gigantic posters and thunderous advertisements. Glass walls, supposedly transparent, are covered, blinded by advertising. One has killed the other. Writing has killed architecture. Henceforth you will live in the realm of reading. Language has killed the senses. A deluge, explosion, a tsunami of words and numbers; of messages shouted, sung and carried along in the turbulent flux of what we are surprised to hear others refer to as music. City and countryside are being swallowed up by language.

The given – forgive me – what is marketable, is only given – forgive me – is only sold in and through language.

Reason, which society gives us, has prevailed.

Triumphant, the word redeems anything that could lend taste or aroma and transubstantiates it into something seen and read and heard, the channels that are peculiar to it.

This – what you eat and drink – is the body and blood of the word.

Here – where you buy it – lies the grave of bread and wine, body and blood, dead and resuscitated as messages.

The word prohibits the senses, and most especially those that do not concern it. Triumphant, it imposes prohibition: the social organization of anorexia and disgust.

The speaking tongue kills the tasting tongue. It kills it with the collective, in the language spoken between us. This, which is spoken, is reduced to a price. You will eat words, but more often these days you will eat codes and numbers. So you will gorge copiously, and still more, always more. Nothing goes down quite so easily as code, nothing grows as well as numbers. You will gobble up quantities of them. Your body will overrun the space around it, just like the word itself, carried on the wind, just like a society founded on the word.

The theory which reduces the given to language is produced within a collective which practises and lives that very reduction, always returning to it like ideology and inflating it; through this expansion, the language and currency of the collective are imposed on the whole universe.

Resounding victory of the soft and the flabby.

The Roman Empire ruled in this fashion for over a thousand years. Overweight, flabby, unwieldy, unfocused. Nothing further from the truth than Cato’s austere, heroic, hard model of ancient virtue: as false as an ideal. Every empire displays this idea of violence and harshness: through Western movies with their machismo, or urban guerilla warfare. Whereas in fact they succeed through softness.

We ought to define them as collectives whose association has nil or zero reason for being. A military group attacks or defends itself, that is its reason for being; churches or sects pray, withdraw from the world, condemn heretics, worship their reason for being; an association of common economic interests either makes a profit or goes bankrupt, the company’s efforts are directed towards its reason for being. Let us suppose that the latter, transcendent, intense or mediocre, tends towards zero, is cancelled out – as we said of taste and smell – like reality itself. If so, a soft society, come together for null reason, unites itself in and through language, through a written or spoken contract stipulating its unity: redundance.

This is how administration was invented. It oversees this flabbiness or nullity, indicative of the same progress towards sameness, or leading to the same swelling. Everyone lives together for no other reason than the fact that they say so, and write it incessantly; inflationary paperwork. ‘Administration’ defines the corresponding institution by the performative nature of those words. It is an epithet that neatly describes the vigorous tendency to minimize, the active and gradual cancelling out of a genuine reason for being.

The Roman Empire owed its singular longevity to the reduction of all such reasons, the genial discovery of administration, the application of null reason. To the suppression of all objects in favour of language.

It is in the interest of any empire, with the slightest ambition to endure, to retreat, to hide behind its administration, to leave behind reality for language.

To suppress all objects in favour of words. To suppress the word itself and its meaning in favour of codes and numbers.

To eliminate culture with currency.

At zero on the scale of reason and sense, with the nullification of taste and scent, in the absence of any point of reference, anybody, however simple-minded, adapts and is gratified.

Old cultures are familiar with two, or even three, communions. The first in held in the form of the word, a First Supper, giving us our golden mouth. We receive the second more belatedly, in the form of two quite real presences, fresh leavened bread and great wine bottled in a specific place. This communion opens our new mouth. The last, miraculous communion forgives the loving mouth; without it we would sound as hollow as crashing cymbals even if we spoke all human languages and knew all that science can know.

Hollow tongues take up all the seats at the banquet or Last Supper, destroying the other tongues; the world is like crashing cymbals, deafening everything with languages and learning. A new world with one communion alone, with just one contract, devoid of reason.

We have long waged war to determine whether all feasts are but a single feast, whether all communions are but a single one, whether substance is just a noun. Or whether bread and wine can be distinguished from the word. Do we really have just one tongue, or two, or three?

They who claim that the given comes to us through one tongue only have the clearly identifiable profile of the venerable, old, reformed theology.

Which prevailed on the other shore, and returns triumphant.

Statue

Entering the room heavily, a statue interrupts the feast, as is customary.

Its marble exterior denies it the use of any of its senses. The philosopher who built it and leads it inside has reserved the right to open up the senses, as he sees fit, to the different impressions they are capable of receiving. Organized like us on the inside, animated by a spirit devoid of any kind of ideas, heavy with the scent of rose, crowned with carnation, jasmine, violet and bandaged, it enters amidst guests whose spirit has come from the floral or earthy bouquets making up the peacock’s tail surrounding the glass of Yquem. The statue takes it seat amidst the mouths and tongues.

Beneath the cold, smooth, untouched skin, veined like marble, the body resides inside a black box. Its master, Condillac, activates the entrances: he opens or closes a well-defined window through which a single, well-filtered, specific piece of information penetrates. He experiments on his automaton, analytically and systematically. He begins in the domain of scent, with rose, then carnation, jasmine and violet.

Which rose did he use, and which violet? Parma violets, tricoloured and hooded? Sweet violets, dog violets, common blue violets, Russian violets? As though nobody in the living world had ever picked a rose and smelled its heady fragrance. Which colour variety, from which latitude and nurtured by which gardener; we should specify the season and the exact week during the course of its flowering. One May afternoon, the weather still not really mild . . . one glorious September morning . . . having gone to the Parc de la Bagatelle to better appreciate the emotional state of Condillac’s statue, I found myself laughing out loud and crying like a baby when confronted with the spatial explosion of the different hues and the speckled palette of different varieties. Did the statue find itself submerged in the delicate fragrance of Great Maiden’s Blush, the most beautiful of all speckled roses, Petite Lisette, Queen of Hearts, Princesse de Venosa, the Carmo-sine or Jacqueminot? Not to mention the much-neglected dog-rose and other varieties. Bathed in this new peacock’s tail to the point of drunkenness, could or would even the most expert sense of smell want to fall back on analysis? And would gardeners or expert perfumers from Grasse not laugh till they cried at the excessive sophistication of the experiment, where the automaton is concerned, and at its crude and profane ineptitude when dealing with flowers? The machine frightens the guests – it is imposing. One day we will construct, and respect, a computer capable of distinguishing a Sauternes from Coca Cola. We will have forgotten that the latter has a fixed formula, reducible to a finite sequence of words or codes, and that the former, unstable and individuated, is as variable as watered silk. We will have forgotten the empiricism of the gardener, the overwhelming profusion of roses and the confusion of their fragrance.

And, said the old gardener, whom the terrifying statue wanted to silence, I’ve never seen a violet violet, I’ve never been able to decide whether they were violet, mauve or any of the fifteen kinds of blue that my eyes, now weak, could once arrange into a spectrum. When my sight began to fade I slowly learned how different hues bled into one another. The peacock’s tail of fragrance deploys a similar spectrum or fan. How long will the statue have to spend exploring the scent of roses across the length and breadth of such a differentiated terrain? The whole life experience of a gardener; several generations of those unwitting geneticists who cross varieties, always creating new ones. ‘Make your garden grow’ – that ancient adage, advice handed down across generations – in fact means: ‘You will live like a god’. A god who continuously crosses and creates species in an evolutionary paradise. The scent of roses never stops changing; the statue is too clumsy and heavy to keep up. The experiment stops at the first line, in the first garden, for all eternity. Indeed, at the banquet of the gods themselves.

If it is to continue, then it is better that we put an end to this endless banquet. Come on, don’t linger at the dining table, you pick up bad habits there.

Upon entering, the statue is filled with negations, long before any floral scents penetrate it; has no idea of either figure or extension, nor of anything else external to it. Therefore it sculpts an indentation of understanding through figure, extension and movement, patiently waiting to fill out as understanding; it has had no other desire. This form must be filled in.

We shouldn’t laugh – there are serious matters at stake here.

In my language, an organism like ours, immobile beneath a slab of marble, is called a corpse. An immaculate stone envelope covering a body, and with a statue above it, is called a tomb. An automaton, a machine equipped with an internal phantom reawakening into consciousness, is usually called a cenotaph: a black box with holes and doorways through which information can enter and exit. White marble statue or black box in the colours of mourning. Displaying a shield or coat of arms. It’s hardly surprising if the experimenter who creates a window in the funeral casket should think of smell first, and toss a spray or wreath of flowers on to the stone grave or vault.

The real name of the statue that arrives at the banquet – ghost, automaton, machine, hollow outline of reason bereft of sensation – is death. In the Underworld, the pale shades also needed blood to sustain themselves briefly, to fill out their vague forms.

Why should we have to die in order to start knowing or even feeling? By opening up these windows, the philosopher is in fact dissecting a corpse. He has killed the living, in order to turn it into a tool; to attempt to resuscitate it – as if newborns looked anything at all like ghosts.

The mouths at the banquet have scarcely begun living, the statue has come to put an end to that.

The philosopher claims that the statue fills up with the scent of roses; it used to be said that the former, with his last gasp, died in an odour of sanctity. The philosopher even begins by asking us to do as the statue does, to start existing at the same time as it does. Become a child again, but in an orderly fashion.

Life is no stranger to such beginnings, vibrant moments of rebirth. Such as when the golden tongue, forgetting for a moment its lofty words, discovers its exquisite neighbour, and the latter a love-struck sister. Nothing will ever pass through the mouth-window as it did before. The tongue regrows, triadelphic and trilobate, three people in one – what an adventure! Drawn along by an energetic life force8 and by the enthusiasm that overtakes us at the threshold of a potential new life, who among us would shy away from palingenesy?

Yet we have not been able to do as the statue did; not through any fault of our own, but because we could not find a rose. The programmer failed to specify the scent, the variety, the precise moment during its season. All he specified was a concept. We could not know how to inhale or smell the idea of the scent of the concept of rose. The automaton fills up on words. The name of the rose has no fragrance.

Yes, here the rose is reduced to its name, and the statue to a dictionary or computer. What enters through the window, a unit of sensation, equals a unit of sense or digital information. The automaton learns to sense one word at a time, like a pupil copying from a blackboard. Hardly surprising if knowledge ensues. One word at a time, language finally comes, damn it!

If the given only gives itself through language, tell me what your anthologies smell like?

In the year 1813, at number 12, impasse des Feuillantines, in Paris, there occurred something unparalleled, which gave its chronicler the opportunity to pair rose with the obvious rhyme of morose, and to align that adjective, associated with stupid and unattractive, with a series of nouns such as dormitory, study, courtyard, classroom, pillar, schoolmaster, workbooks.⁹ In a garden filled with humming and confused voices, where the shimmering surface of a pond mingled with the imprecise reflections of a silver birch, in a garden full of roses, a child ran and dreamed, beginning to exist. The principal of some school or other arrives unexpectedly: Janotus, Marphurius, Blazius, Honorius, Mouillebec. He interrupts the feast.

Garden or boarding school? A fork in the road of child-rearing: the leafy, thorny shrubbery, echoing with the sounds of bullfinches or wasps, threaded with mingled odours, or the four-square courtyard, asphalted and geometric, where little kids face each other off in the atrocious first struggle for dominance? Banquet or statue? Janotus or fine wine? Copse or dictionary? Rose, or the name of the rose? Rosa, rosam, rosae . . . the statue-children decline the noun without perfume or hue. Language or sounds, breezes, scents, shadows and songs, shapes, ecstasy? Such an improbable event: how his mother, forced to choose between the stupid and cruel schoolyard of wild animals, and the grove behind the impasse des Feuillantines, suddenly discovered within herself a genius to equal that of her son, Victor Hugo.

For this garden of mingling confusions, the unstable corolla of his senses – note that the child becomes a rose five times over – gave him, in the short term, a sea of words: the language of France, almost in its entirety.

If you wish to train an army of statues socially dedicated to the struggle for dominance, give them a poor, dry lexicon, as hard as wood and as cold as iron, studded with technical jargon like an endless refrain, form their senses through these words, give them access to the given through this language: a concrete courtyard, a monotonous dormitory and a grey education, foul-smelling and well-disciplined, through the prism of their grammar books. As they begin their existence, children will shield their eyes when they raise them towards the patch of sky visible at the top of the well shaft which is their school-prison; we did not need Plato’s cave to teach us how painful sunlight can be during our foolish, studious childhood.

If you form their words through the senses, amidst the hawthorn and primrose, if rose, in all its declensions, can be related to the exploding, fragrant bouquet of shapes and hues, if you build their language through the given, then anything can happen. Even a poet. Even a happy adult; even a wise one. Even a philosopher mathematician, free to laugh at the mechanical, fossilized rigidity of intellect; and careful to maintain a distance between the senses and language, for the sake of the safety and vitality of both of them.

Did you find this garden? The architect has concreted over it. Did you discover the thicket, back there? The agronomist has bulldozed it. Any viable spaces now resemble the schoolroom. Outside, Janotus is winning. There is no point playing truant any more, theory is everywhere. Language has eliminated the given and substituted itself in the latter’s place: Marphurius’ courtyard. Grammar and logic create a world in their own image. The schoolmaster of this space presides over language and space.

Arriving at the ancient banquet, the statue breaks the glasses and overturns the platters, kills the living bodies drinking living drink, reproduces itself as marble statues or automata, begins a feast of language with formulated drinks, perfectly adapted to the world that these formulae have already rationalized. You know, at symposia we talk about concrete things.

Soon the only places where we will be able to find thickets, will be schools. We will cultivate them for unruly children.

This meditation on chaos and mingling, this attention paid to the sensible, does tend to resemble a philosophy of unruliness. The crowning achievement of a long career as a restless kid, the inauguration of wisdom.

In my language, they who cannot see are called blind; deaf, they who cannot hear; mute, who cannot speak; sometimes we might even use insensitive to describe the loss of sensitivity. But there is no word to express the loss of taste. My language can indicate lack, in the case of blindness, defect in the case of deafness; it admits to these, either because such disabilities only affect a small percentage of the population, or because they put its own acts of language at risk or on alert – who knows? The vast majority of us lack a sapient tongue and gets by perfectly well; and our tongue hides the fact, concealing its own defect. It lacks a word to describe what it does not lack. Therefore what it says, without actually saying it, is that speech is all we really need, and anæsthesia will suffice us for the rest. The statue becomes a dictionary, and you would swear that the dictionary, like the statue, has a tongue of marble. It drugs our sense of taste.

Technical discourse alone speaks of anosmia, and even more rarely of ageusia.

Arriving at the banquet, the statue interrupts it, neither sitting down nor drinking, neither smelling nor tasting; it consumes the menu: a mobile dictionary capable of memorizing the list of dishes, recipes and wines, but unable to commemorate a meal. Tomorrow it will talk about vintages, restaurant guides and chefs, effortlessly and competently – you’d swear it had years of experience. It can talk better than anyone about things it has never felt, but it betrays itself through vocabulary. The word uttered by the statue, local, says only rose: odourless because it only exists in logic; the language of the dictionary, global, has no word for the lack of smell or taste. By crosschecking like this, we can recognize a robot.

But a phantom enters behind the automaton, a ghost of sorts. What could be returning to haunt us like a reproach, beneath language, if not empiricism?

We get along quite well without it, what is it doing here? Even so-called philosophers of sensation or perception get along without it in their algebra, logic or phenomenology, all of them literally odourless, colourless, bereft of sensation and flavour, even of words and expressions to describe tastes, aromas or hues; like robots, all they need is language, heard, seen or read, or reduced to code, but doubtless also encoded in our genes or social customs now, as it is in the memory of the statue, automaton or computer; language is all that is required to ensure the genesis or advent of our knowledge. Why would we need things? It is enough to be able to name them.

Yet stubborn empiricism resurfaces, doubtful that the menu tastes as good as the meal itself, that the analysis on a label quenches your thirst as well as the contents of the bottle; only ever devouring lists and books between meals. It does not confuse love and loving words. Born of war and deprivation, it is hungry; it is always thirsty, a child of poverty. We can never get enough of the things we had to do without, in the prime of our youth. Nor can it get along without things: it comes from the country, and remains flabbergasted by the flashing signs of the city. Empiricism resurfaces from deep within us: from the sum of all childhoods, from the deep well-spring of deprivations that sentences can never fill. A child of ancient necessity, about which we hear nothing these days, but that I, like many others, experienced in childhood. Empiricism resurfaces from the ruins of Antiquity, not to demonstrate but, beggarly phantom, to make demands.

If necessary, we can do without immediate sensory experience, it says; marble-like grammar or logic work well and demonstrate clearly without it and have long since replaced it in classrooms and in the world around us, which science has peopled with automata. We are beginning to resemble the statues we build. Once, adults would make fun of going to school, having learned from hands, shoulders and skin that the real weighs more heavily than lessons; today the whole classroom can laugh at such people, who no longer understand the codes taught in schoolrooms and which impinge on everything. The polarity of the educational axis has been reversed, it is now the child who must teach the old man about formulae and keyboards. So we can make do without empiricism, our knowledge will not suffer in the least: we will adapt to the new world rather better, but will we be able to live without wisdom? Of course, knowledge comes from language; but what if philosophy came to us through the senses?

We will no longer do without higher knowledge: the philosopher who lives for its sake cannot think without the conceptual work it does. But the further he presses on into this knowledge, the more apparent it becomes that we cannot deprive ourselves of beauty without paying a high price for that knowledge. A new wisdom comes from this. Youth learns, forges ahead with knowledge; the adult loves and practises intelligence – inventive, vibrant and free – creating abundantly; after this comes a time when the need for beauty reigns: a knowing subject while still green about the gills, fertile in adulthood, in search of culture when we reach the age of wisdom. After a certain age, each of us is responsible for our face or appearance, sculpted by our actions and plans, our words and lies, you should always be wary of ugly old men: their ugliness comes from their acts, time strips bare our inner workings and intentions. Behold science, fully developed now, mature, powerful, revelling in its triumphs, celebrated above all else, do you imagine it cares what it looks like, at this stage? What is the good of power and precision if the price we pay is ugliness and death? What is the good of thinking, if we have no idea how to live? There comes a moment when formal knowledge is no longer enough, no matter how powerful it makes us; when, for instance, the universal musicality of language, beneath our utterances, seems to speak to our senses more than the sense of the words themselves; when culture, wisdom and philosophy are worth more than intelligence, and the latter, by virtue of its freedom and tolerance, more than knowledge, and knowledge more than demonstration. Let science have its way, right now: if it excludes the things that temper power, barbarity will resurface. After the age of positivism, an era of serenity?

So, do we learn how to die, how to survive alone through suffering, to sing joyfully when our child recovers from illness, to prefer peace to war, to build our home over time? Or do we take our education in the direction of serenity? In dictionaries, codes, computer memory, logical formulae; or quite simply at the banquet of life? I don’t believe, says the beggarly phantom behind the machine, that if there is any sense to life, it lies in the word life; it rather seems to me that it arises in the senses of the living body. Here, in the sapience cultivated by fine wine, with as few words as possible; in the sagacity mapped out by scents enhancing our approach to others; there, through vocalizing, sobbing, and what our hearing perceives beneath language; through the aromas that rise up out of indescribable earth and landscapes; from the beauty of the world that leaves us breathless and speechless; from dancing, where the body alone dives freely into deaf and mute senses; from kisses which prevent us from even whispering . . . from the banquet we will have to leave.

Observing the statue sadly, the phantom says: have you noticed how badly people dance when they are talking? How you noticed how ugly thinking people are? Have you ever found yourself ogling someone powerful? Do you see the countryside filling up with ugliness under the reign of automata? Do you believe that one day we will be able to recognize our well-coded society by the unquestionable ugliness of the earth and its population? A culture stands out for the beauty of its women, the delicacy of its bodies, the distinction of its people’s gestures, the grace of their faces, the splendour of its landscapes and the accomplishment of some of its cities. The radiance of people’s expressions demands such grace, the smoothness of gestures demands such delicacy, there is a secret agreement about beauty. Ugliness knows no shame in a devastated country. Anæsthesia creates hideous bodies, words drug bodies and things alike. I salute you, still-graceful culture, rare remnant of our world, says the phantom.

The more our knowledge grows, the more we fear the absence of grace, and guess that the latter is the seed and nucleus of the former. As though our soul made our body full-bodied. When linguistic messages replace the non-linguistic messages of the senses virginally, our knowledge remains safe, progressing even faster, but our culture loses its grace, you can read its absence on people’s faces, in social representations, on the face of the earth. Are we precision engineering our own ugliness?

At the beginnings of science, during the first phase of its evolution, philosophy sought to identify the genesis of knowledge, and claimed that the latter came from the senses. At that time, philosophers, somewhat learned, carried with themselves immense cultivation. The most learned did little learning; the least cultivated people were enormously cultivated. Doubtless they took their culture for science. By believing that they were describing scientific knowledge, they were in fact duplicating the genesis of their traditional knowledge.

We cannot commit the same mistake. Compared to that time, the most cultivated of us remain barbarians, the least learned know a great deal. While we imagine ourselves to be describing the genesis of knowledge in general, it is in fact the formation of scientific knowledge that we are pursuing. Not so long ago, we took great care to distinguish between gnoseology and epistemology, the theory of knowledge and the theory of science, the latter being a part of the former; these days, we use the latter to describe a theory of all knowledge. As though science had a monopoly over all knowledge. Culture is evaporating. Copying the first genesis, language is now drugging and replacing the senses. As children, we are plunged into language before we have any contact with the harder world. More and more, we inhabit the soft. Some of us even spend our whole lives without realizing that there is a world outside of signs: actions separate from administrative paperwork, acts beyond media spectacles, a climate outside of the library. The first treatises on natural education, reacting against this growing encroachment of language, are exactly contemporaneous, first with the genesis, then the growth of the sciences. Now, at the hour of the latter’s triumph, and of our concern over a new culture, the very same questions have resurfaced acutely, precisely because they had disappeared. Just as the formalisms, logicisms and nominalisms of philosophy have expelled empiricism – hence its ghost-like appearance. It emerges from the earth, between the statue’s feet.

Efficient knowledge pays homage to language, from which it descends in a direct line, obliterating its more oblique history and submerging it in the anæsthesia of forgetting. We have lost our five senses in this way.

The remembrance of a lost wisdom and culture returns them to us.

The marble automaton exorcizes the spectral apparition by treating the pale, vague, insubstantial figure of the timid, unassuming, indecisive, frightened phantom with steely disdain: it writes off the easily forgotten old impression. The precise moment of tasting perishes, already receding into the distance; the impression left behind by a taste evaporates, it is not preserved in language. What arises on the tongue before words, and then vanishes, is crushed by the statue with the full weight of its memory. But it resurfaces. No impression without wax tablet, said the statue in Antiquity; no impression without printing press, it said in so-called modern times; no impression without software, it tells us once more in the age of computers and artificial intelligence. Nothing new here: no impression without encoding or language, the same word describing writing and the traces left behind. The statue dispels impressionable empiricism, like Don Quixote tilting at windmills that turn in the slightest breeze. Flimsy rotating weather vanes, receptive to any puff of wind, stop dead under the weight of books.

Why kill what is already dying? Empiricism is lost, and all we see now are its ruins. What is the point of destroying ruins? Empiricism is destroyed, leaving mere remnants behind. What is the point of eradicating remnants? Empiricism has been eradicated, and only exists in a fleeting state as impression or shadow. Should we exorcize another shadow?

Naturally, we no longer remember the impression left behind by the breeze, the cloud of scent or mouthful of taste; but we have lost our memory of empiricism itself – and what if we had also lost all memory of our five senses? The phantom or ghost plays the role of three people: vanishing sensation, but also the theory that used to speak of it; and finally, alas, the organs that received it.

Who now goes hunting first thing in the morning on an empty stomach, nostrils twitching at the slightest change in the wind? Who sits astern and listens to the sound of the backwash, having been alerted by the first smell of leaves cutting through the thick wall of algae and salt? Who keeps their sense of distant sight and hearing so keen? Who today does not need to be notified by posters or messages of when to hear, feel, watch or taste? Frigid organs, empiricism in ruins, lost impressions, phantoms.

So, how long has the statue reigned like this? Since the time of origin, since the beginning of our memory, since the birth of language. The first of our ancestors described to us – the first hero to be celebrated in song – sets off across the water towards the fragrant Windward Islands or unknown lands somewhere on the violet horizon; the prison of language, poetic, slams shut on the traveller who attempts to lose himself in order to escape; despite the desired storms, the worst perils of the sea and witches who can turn men into beasts, Ulysses falls back into the woven trap through which he threads his journey, into Penelope’s shroud, woven by day and unwoven by night, into the textual programme, into language: he sings of all this at the king’s banquet; kills the suitors who do not sing at the last feast, after returning home to his wife. And yet, with fists clenched deep in the stinking fleece, he tried to escape from the cave where Polyphemus yelled and screamed, deafened by this proliferation of tongues and intoxicated by wine. Delivered once, twice, a hundred times, he ends up back in the web of language, bound to the neat weft of the poem. Back then you could already explore empiricism the way you might go sightseeing around the world: travel agencies spruiking it, selling it off cheap; a topic for conversation at dinner time; suddenly reeled back to the fantastic Underworld inhabited by vain shades and spectres, already weeping, who vanish when silence descends. On the opposite shore, our first ancestor, quite content to feast on fruit under the trees, naked in the company of his beautiful mate, begins by naming the different species. One in rubrics, the other in poetry, each one feasting, with Alcinous or in the Garden of Eden, and speaking the language of genesis.

Empiricism has been lost in islands of distant images or the spectre-ridden Underworld, since our origin as writing or singing beings, pursuing lists or building statues which wait on us at table. It dates from a more than fabulous Antiquity, because the Antiquity in question comes to us through fables, written or spoken in perfectly adequate tongues, surviving long after death. We have been losing our senses for as long as we have been speaking. Yet as long as it remains forgotten, immemorial empiricism will always resurface, emerging from its own tomb, reawakening with a gesture, a fleeting impression appearing above the last resting place of our black, cold, stiff, fossilized body. We imitate machines, we turn our children into automata, we bury ourselves beneath a skin of marble, and still the spectre reappears in a faint odour, in a taste we rarely encounter but which triggers an emotional response, in an unexpected posture adopted while farming or sailing, through an environment which is rent asunder or undone but which occasionally lets through to us the strange lightness of things themselves.

In Plato’s dialogues, hymns to logic, the more recently named Presocratics are given the role of forebears, Parmenides is even called father. Different thinkers and schools of thought descend from this lineage, with one exception. Protagoras, the bearer of sensory turbulence, came out of the ground – which proves that he was buried there. Emerges from the ground, and is sent back there. He is evoked and dismissed. Which proves that empiricism was already a shadow. Wandering through the Underworld, from which it can resurface. The sensible is buried by the tomb-body. What does the name Protagoras mean? Before dialogue, before speech, before language?

Ancient: pre-dating our history as beings who come into being through language. Pre-historic: pre-dating our recorded traditions. Lying amidst the dead, victims of the power of language, who in the last four thousand years have never been raised.

Death

Here is the tomb of empiricism, clad in engraved marble. The body, the statue, our knowledges or memories, libraries or cenotaphs: all imprison the phantom by denying its existence.

My book is a memorial to empiricism, in the same way that Ravel evoked François Couperin in Le Tombeau de Couperin.

Celebration and tears. Commemoration, respect.

Ancestor of philosophy and men, pre-dating all language, a ruin of the time preceding writing and leaving no or almost no remains, hail; hail, enemy of philosophy, outlawed by it and hidden beneath language and steles since the dawn of our histories, abhorred by meetings and dialogues, distrusted by reason, banished by the stone-city that covers up the earth-countryside, expelled from public spaces, sometimes haunting our banquets, a cloud or plume that suddenly bursts forth from bottles, condemned by the voices that emblazon our skin like a tambour, sense on word, word on voice, voice on skin and skin on flesh, covered by multiple layers, the unutterable ancestor of our voices, how to salute you without language?

Silence surrounds the cenotaph: music, murmuring, shades of colour and scents. Our forebears embalmed mummies: the vacant statue was thus enveloped in a perfumed shadow.

Wisdom. Your body should not become a statue or tomb, a cadaver before giving up the ghost, dead before it dies; avoid all anæsthetics, drugs, narcotics; beware the torpedo or torpor of language and philosophy; flee cultures of prohibition. Your body radiates wisdom: the world gives us sapience and our senses receive it; respect the gracious given, embrace the gift.

Ethics. The timeless morality of gratuity. We receive sense data as a gift, without reciprocating. Grace penetrates the fissures of an open body, flooding it with sapience. Statues close themselves off with toll gates and ticket windows.

Upbringing. Child of man, start with the open fissures, eyes, nostrils, pores, lips, pavilions; you’ll be talking quite soon enough, rest assured that you will. Quite enough, always too much. Refine your skin, fear the invasion of marble, be scared of stiffness. Awaken your barbarous bard, so hard and harsh that one day you’ll get yourself into fights. Soon enough, always too much. Become subtle, sapient, sagacious, keen, lucid, shrewd. Do not be like a dog with cropped ears, quartered like an animal or squared off like a beam. Perforate the statue.

Medicine. Immediate remedy, without medication. Countless illnesses come from not knowing when to be silent or how to live anywhere but inside a hard shell of words that chaff and scratch. Language kills time, silence is more golden than a golden tongue, giving us back duration, our only real treasure, and causing our shocked senses, sealed tight by the thundering of language and the intimidation of sense, to blossom. Taste, listen, sniff, caress, examine – silently. Æsthesis dispels anæsthetics. On the tomb, the recumbent statue beneath the perfumed murmur dies when administered with it. Welcomes the given, the gift, refuses the dose. For in this instance language is using the same word, and admits it; quickly replaces dosage with gift or given: fine wines keep us from alcoholism, delectable foods save us from obesity. Whatever fails to awaken our senses merely drugs them, empiricism needs no medicine cabinet. Immersed as you are in the culture of messages, rendered insensible by them and made ill by language, do not look to formulae for a cure. Drugged on speech, agitated by shouting, dead drunk on information – this is treatment by prescription, coating your tongue with another layer. Rhinoceros, armourplated hippopotamus, alcoholic or drug addict, statue covered in labels or posters: all of these are mechanisms as predictable as a weekly planner. Undergo the quiet treatment of the five senses. It is enough to accept what is gratuitously given. Statues sleep or die from drugs, money and words; one god, three forms. Free treatment given graciously, certain recovery, this is our salvation.

Wise old man, calm, ancient, tranquil, as subtle as a vapour, delicate, simply healthy, robust; pedagogical and medicinal empiricism carries us far from cenotaphs and funerary statues, even when language would entomb it in song. It stands apart from eternally engraved monoliths.

Hail, giver of good health.

Then the guests at the banquet, awakened from the speech-induced torpor, and every participant at every feast in history, forgetting the tragic side of these performances, rise up and raise their glasses to the phantom which vanishes in daylight and delivers them from the black anguish of death; they clink the goblets of translucid crystal in which the Yquem quivers and gleams: good health! Not death, no, but health! Salvation, joy, jubilant trembling!

Hail, ave, joy; a cry, a shout, barely even a word, flying on vowels, an explosion of elation, all coming from bodies in splendid health. The first breath of life? The first word? The birth of language? Hail, O flesh of which the word is born. Hail, flesh full of grace. Ave, gratia plena. Phantom or angel? When the word is made flesh, grace abandons our body.

The given comes from language alone: the word invades the body, filling every pocket of our flesh without exception. The word requires that nothing should precede it.

Et incarnatus est: language is made flesh; the latter, virginal, is with the word. Born of the Virgin, the word wipes clean every stain in its path.

The given comes from language alone: it comes to us neither from the world nor from our bodies. Neither from the empty places of the former: the world has not known it; nor from virginal flesh: immaculate body.

Any unutterable traces predating the arrival of the word could only be stains.

They are wiped clean by three dogmas: those of the Immaculate Conception, of logical empiricism and of the virginal conception of the word.

Barely stirring the limpid air with its wing and its voice, the angel hails her, full of grace, before the word comes forth. Before blessing her, before giving her benediction, the envoy finds her occupied, saturated with grace. Only after that does the Lord approach her, and dwell in her. Before she conceives, before the word enters her, before language and concept, before the unstained virginity required by the word and produced by it, she – flesh, mother, woman, bodily sensibility – lived full of grace.

Full: of grace or of language. After: heavy with language. Before: filled with grace.

With grace: gratuity, gratuitous things, the given.

Welcoming the given, beforehand. After, welcoming the word. Be it done to me according to thy word.

The given comes from language alone: nothing moves, exists, or is given outside words, without sentences, beyond concepts. Sensibility is extinguished outside concepts, on their periphery, without them.

What word other than virginal could there be for such a conception?

The Virgin conceives the word.

Without saying so, she sees an apple tree in blossom. Always eternally covered in flowers. Never do we read that this apple tree bears fruit, anywhere. The flesh which has been promised to language, naked beneath the first tree, has never picked any, is free from any original trace of the first sin.

What name could we give this painting or scene other than ‘The Immaculate Conception’?

She – flesh, mother, bodily sensibility – conceives the word as a virgin: unaffected by the given, except through the word. Before she could conceive thus, she herself was conceived immaculate.

The given comes from language alone: the body has never received anything except from the word. Before receiving nothing but the word, thus before conceiving, it had never received anything.

To understand the dogma of logical empiricism, you need merely to add together that of virginal conception and that of the Immaculate Conception.

The first says the same thing through the same oxymoron as the two others, which each use the oxymoron to stress a different side of the equation. All three describe the same situation of concept divorced from flesh.

The only philosophy is that of language, the only religion is that of the word.

The woman has no response to the words of the announcement, except that she knows nothing and has known no man.

Hail, empiricism, lost to us the day the word was made flesh, the morning the angel appeared; already forgotten when the mother was born, white virgin flesh.

Hail, flesh full of grace.

Ave, pure-vowelled greeting. With that, the angel alone makes us remember that the body was filled with grace before the word effaced it and rendered the body immaculate, as though in compensation.

Flesh full of grace which the angel alone may speak, through tenuous messages or phenomena coming incomprehensibly from the world towards the senses.

Once saturated by the word, flesh loses these ancient graces, old messages incomprehensible in language; grace, washed out, is forgotten.

When the word is made flesh, the flesh is abandoned by grace.

The words of the Annunciation, barely translated, are quite unexpected here, as clear and limpid as the present thesis: the given comes from language alone.

It marks the return of woman, and of the virgin mother abandoned by the venerable reformed theology of which I have already sketched the profile. The return of the foreign woman from Nazareth.

This foreign woman does not speak.

This – what we drink or eat – can be reduced to a sign, a symbol, a word. The given comes from language alone.

This – what we conceive – comes from concepts alone. The word cannot flow from the given.

Our wretched flesh eats nought but language, no-one gives it anything to eat or drink, all they do is spread the good word and nothing else; it falls pregnant without saying a word, after begging for something to eat; impregnated while still a virgin.

Poor flesh.

Taken as a whole, German philosophy since the end of the eighteenth century sounds like a patristics of the Reformation, a counter-counter-reformist theology. It is gradually taking the place of Roman patrology, the touch-stone of so-called classical philosophy and dominant until the end of the Counter-Reformation. One college of fathers expels another, an expulsion which neatly sums up the history of ideas within the import-driven French university system.

The question of language and the senses, innocent and presented anew through an apparatus of sophisticated technical quibbling, both hides and occupies the ancient site of squabbles between the triumphant Anglo-Saxon reformed fathers and the old Greek, mostly Latin, Mediterranean fathers, vanquished and overwhelmed. See reappear anew, in the slightly musty decor of empiricist questions, the quarrel over transubstantiation in the taking of the Eucharist, at the original Last Supper, or of the virginal body of the mother, as incarnation of the word.

The history of ideas seems as slow-moving as tectonic plates moving a few millimetres in a few millennia.

We are still talking about symposia, love, and how a poor woman came to conceive.

I hail thee, full of grace.

The angel is speaking of a woman’s grace: charm, attractiveness, delicacy, amiability; I bow before your beauty.

The grace that fills the body before it is filled with the word, is the same as beauty, called gratuity. The gift is not a matter of obligation: the giver does not owe it, it is not the recipient’s due. It might be called the given. I hail thee, body filled by the gratuitous given, received as gifts from the world. What enters via the senses or into the body through the senses is not paid for in money, energy or information; not in any currency, thus we agree to designate it given. I hail thee, flesh filled with these gifts.

I hail thee, full of grace, beautiful; greeting full of sensory gratuity. The angel is referring to æsthetics twice over, with the same word: in the sense of what is given, in the sense of beauty.

The angel is proclaiming the unity of æsthetics: I hail thee, unitary grace, charm and gift, sense and beauty. What can we possibly say of this unity, when all we can do is hail it?

As soon as the word arrives, gratuity vanishes. We need to attend to the cost of writing or speaking, to what the word buys or redeems. Yet before the reign of language, the flesh was filled with grace requiring no compensation; unitary, beautiful, gratuitous. When the word is made flesh, the flesh is abandoned by grace.

Here the unity of the æsthetic field is undone.

In the time before the arrival of the word, the flesh is brimming over with grace, intrinsically. It sleeps during the long, wordless night, surrounded by the golden harvest, so full of the given that it leaves some behind for the gleaners, slumbers beneath the ancient, unnamed stars, daydreams while listening absent-mindedly to the oxen ruminating in the rustling stubble; and dreams, amidst the fleeting scents of asphodel, that an enormous tree is sprouting from its stomach, the last branch of which is called the word. Bare-breasted and resting near the patriarch, himself heavy with sleep, she, flesh, dreams in silence of an inconceivable child, in the middle of a peaceful summer night as long as the sum of the length of all the childhoods of all men put together, and whose sky barely illuminates the shadows. Flesh dreams of words; language – fruit – takes root in its womb.

Filled with the given, saturated, it leaves the rest for the gleaners. Poor gleaners, bent over the stubble, gather to their breasts the ears left behind, the tiny overflow from the completely saturated plenty, the defect or excess of the given.

The woman receives a benediction at dawn. The angel hails her: benedicta tu, well said. She receives her name and the assurance that her name suits her perfectly: well said, Maria benedicta. The angel which brings her salvation and language, early morning apparition, phantom floating in the open door or window moving at the whim of the breeze, soon fades away. Heavy, full, hard, the flesh receives softly scattered seed.

Genealogically speaking, good blood branches out. She who, weighed down with gifts, lays herself down in the bed of the patriarch, himself brimming with the given, windmills, lofts, precious metals and forges, only ever gives birth to plump, satisfied children, concrete and as full and round as solid balls, obese with plenty, grazing on their daily grass in between two successful ruminations. The real mother is bent over, following behind carts and picking up the remnants of the bulging sheaves piled up beneath pregnant mothers; she is satisfied with leftovers. The real mother is sown with the seeds that fall from the over-stuffed bushel, by that which persists and will end up rotting at the bottom of the empty silo. Mary, daughter, grand-daughter, great-grand-daughter of gleaners, from the long line of women who have never participated in the banquet of the given, Mary virgin daughter of Anne, welcomes the angel into her bosom; the remnant of a man, barely perceptible, translucid and floating tissue, what remains of a thing when it disappears and none remains, given, sound, call, greeting, benediction, fading glimpse, quickly forgotten scent, caress so delicate that no tissue quivered beneath its touch, Mary, daughter, grand-daughter, great-grand-daughter of the long line of gleaners with broken backs stretching out after Ruth and her carts groaning with wheat, welcomes into her bosom what remains of what remains of what remains of what remains . . . of what remains of the rare grains of wheat in the almost empty ears on fragile stalks, the airborne, transparent, fine, minute seed of the word.

It is born, incarnated. No-one has ever known or understood the secret of this passage, neither the Gospels nor Einstein, astonished that the world should be opening itself up to understanding. A mystery for the former, incomprehensibility for the latter. The heavens are filled with song; and space, filled with words, announces the good news: words redeem the flesh, language purchases what is concrete, occupies it, saturates it, such that the golden wheat harvest paves the way for the bread to be transformed into the flesh of the word, such that the laden grape harvest pours forth the wine to be changed into blood, such that the stars spell out our birthplace in the night sky, such that the nova lingers in our constellations and memory, such that the calendar is organized around the epact, around the Friday of the Passion and the Sunday when the word was revived, such that the ruminating oxen give life to the wailing word and that the winds, scents and noises flying about announce the spirit in every language, another nomination of language and another set of gifts reduced to language, in such a way that the world, filled up with language from its entrails to its dreams, from heavenly bodies to beasts of burden, from ears of wheat and bunches of grapes to the wind, has nothing left over, not the tiniest grain of millet, not a slender stalk, not a breeze, not a sigh with which an evil angel, Hermes or Michael, might touch the flesh.

In the ancient world of the flesh, the word moved in the form of dreams or angels, a stalk waiting for a gleaner, an abandoned remnant, the last branch at the top of a tree growing out of the womb. In the modern world, purchased and redeemed by language, all flesh, every blade of grass and every stone exactly balance out the weight of their names, leaving no tare. Either incomplete spaces or jam-packed universe.

Unable to sneak in through the tare weight of a remnant, whatever purchases or redeems the word itself must therefore come through its passion and death: speculative Good Friday, pronouncements that God is dead.

In the contemporary world where science has taken the place of language, even language and even the subject are taken, even the empty places: the world has been supersaturated, even the abstract has been captured. Science regulates the relationship between words and things with precision: handles things better than words ever did, and moreover handles an algorithm’s handle on its object.

We have lived through the time of the redemption of the flesh by the word, we are now living through that of the redemption of language itself by new powers. The word is dying.

The time of gleaners begins anew. Will we find any remnants left after this death?

Language is dying. Having robbed it of precision and rigour, science has taken over its splendid body. It hovers like a phantom which others have plundered of its delights: the other side of splendour, or the forced dictation of facts.

After Good Friday, the Sabbath is a time of repose. The word rests in the tomb. Gone down to the Underworld, they say, where you can enter disembodied.

And the day after the Sabbath, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, mother of James, accompanied by Salome, carrying jars of spices in their arms, hurried at dawn to the tomb where the body of the word had been lain, in order to embalm the corpse. We will not be able to move the stone blocking the entrance to the sepulchre, they said to one another, too heavy, too hard for our soft strength. When they arrived, they saw it already rolled to one side. There was an angel above it, dressed in a blinding white robe. Or: when they entered the tomb they saw a young man seated on the right, dressed in a white robe, and were struck dumb. The winding sheet lay on the ground, the shroud folded separately in another part of the tomb.

On the Sunday morning, while no-one knew of the Resurrection, the hard was made soft: the heavy stone rolls aside without being pushed, the body fades and disappears, and there remain a winding sheet, an angel in white, appearances, voices in the garden.

You seek language here; it reigns elsewhere, in another world, where it has taken a resplendent body.

We now know that our knowledge has taken, in splendour and power, the body of the word, we know why language has died and of what. It will never return in its first form, we must learn to live without its real presence, hard and strong, its flesh and blood.

It has vanished before our dazzled eyes.

The philosopher writes under the dictation of an archangel, another of Hermes’ names, designating the messenger who invented languages and created pathways. What he writes depends on the site through which the announcement passes. Socrates and Descartes each had his demon, appearing at thresholds or invoked in an enclosed space within which a fire is burning, Heraclitus awaits his gods by the fire of dark light. But almost all of them meditate under the influence of the enunciation of the Annunciation. Where the window flaps back and forth, where the shutter is ajar, there stands the angel. You will give birth in misery and beauty, he says, and the fruit of your womb will be called the word. Language will come, he who will appear has promised it, he who is already speaking utters it.

The lesson or image of the announcement: the apparition speaks. Understand by this: the phenomenon brings the word with it, language bears what is to appear. The messenger or angel of the Annunciation displays the face of language, prosopopeia, or the body of language, but because he appears – blinding white robe, resounding or discreet sound, gentle caress, light spirit – he must pass as an element of the phenomenon, small perception, barely sensed differential, what Lucretius calls a simulacrum, a delicate garment flying through the air. The announcement is spoken using apparent language, the angel, at the outer limit of visibility and tangibility, standing on the edge of the threshold, reduces the given to language and speaks the gift, we shall call angels soft. The body, the face of the angel occupy quite precisely the place where the act of appearing becomes language, and vice versa.

The Annunciation remains internal to speech. It begins with appearance, bearing it into the woman’s womb in order to give a body of flesh to the word. Whoever writes, receives the archangel: the outer limit of the phenomenon which melds with the outer limit of speech, then seeks to fill space with something other than wind. It conceives, it needs a womb, it seeks a woman. Miraculous if it succeeds, Noël and joy over all the earth.

Everything depends on the womb, then, everything depends on this woman. If she does not come, whoever would write is struggling with the wind.

A rare archangel guards the tomb – rare because it reverses the announcement. The word will no longer be made flesh, the flesh of the word has suffered; dies, disappears. It will come no more, and has gone away: here is the empty hollow where its body lay. Dead, first of all; vanished, even; tortured before dying. Hands and feet shattered, bones broken, it has lost its hardness, its power; flagellated, face and skin lacerated, covered in sweat, spittle, bile, sediment, vinegar, its charm has left it; crowned mockingly with thorns, it has shed its sovereignty. The three-fold power of the word abandons it. The body of language lies in the tomb.

And now on the Sunday morning the women find it deserted. Even the dead body has vanished. No more announcements from angels, the women do not conceive, they move on; it remains, reduced to a remainder: what remains of language is a blinding white robe, a sound resonating in the tomb-box, three women carrying jars of spices, two men on the road to Emmaus recognizing the taste of the last supper, Thomas placing his hand inside the open wound on the body that appears before him; the disappearing archangel of the five senses remains, witness to the fact that one day, the word made flesh, born of woman, came amongst us, died, disappeared, but lives again.

Nowhere are we told what the women did with the spices. The same Mary Magdalene had already poured some on the body of the living word; she approached him carrying an alabaster jar of precious ointment of nard and poured it on to his head, according to some, on to his feet according to others, she anoints the body of language and washes it with her hair. Its perfume fills the house.

Lazarus was there, recently risen from among the dead, death still near; or else it was Simon the leper who presided over the table, another condemned host; the word took its meal there, condemned and soon to be delivered. A last feast not long before the Last Supper, a perfumed feast, a supper of blood and wine at one and the same time, and one after the other in the story of the Passion, a meal in the house of Lazarus or Simon where the guests, Judas Iscariot included, protest: ‘This perfume could have been sold and the money given to the poor. – Leave her alone, the word replied. When she poured this perfume on my body, she did it to prepare me for burial. What she has done will also be told, in memory of her.’

The perfume poured on the living word fills the air. The women cannot embalm with spices its dead body, missing from the tomb itself.

Nard or valerian, artemisia or angelica, thyme, vanilla, savory, oregano, cinnamon and benzoin, hyssop or coriander, lemon balm, myrrh, ginger, marjoram, beautiful words with no fragrance, words of taste and smell entirely without smell or taste, does some jar-bearing woman pour a subtle blend on their rhythmic feet so that their fragrance might fill the air? The miracle occurs during the word’s rare and exceptional life; more often, in the long course of history and time, it vanishes, and the women with their jars, including she who was once able to anoint language, have no idea what to do with their spices. However there was once, a long time ago, a language made fragrant by the hand of Mary Magdalene. Woman, come and anoint my sentence with nard or valerian, artemisia or angelica, thyme, vanilla, ginger or marjoram, without you your companion cannot write perfumed lines.

The odour of nard, borne by her, is far from the word nard, uttered by him; life arises, for each of them, fragrant spirit, each pouring itself onto the other, mingling, death bringing separation. Absent word and sealed jar; living language and unstoppered jug.

Money has no odour, it would have been better to sell the mixture and give the money away. Judas estimates that the perfume is worth three hundred denari, the delivered word is valued at thirty pieces of silver. Has the redemption of the world and men by the word ever been calculated in figures? Was payment made in kind, with life and body and blood? But what price blood?

The word has no odour, it must be anointed; money never has any.

The language of perfumes is vanishing, chased away by the specialization of algorithms; the chemistry of perfumes aligns calculations and molecules.

The word’s flesh is drawn from the woman’s womb. He has no surname that we know. I will call you Christ, Peter said to him. Man speaks, woman makes: he draws his name from the unction, the balm poured by the woman, the perfume she wipes away with her hair. I will call you Peter, he said, a reference to the hard rock, the foundation. During the penultimate feast on the day before he was delivered, the Lord’s anointed was actually anointed by Mary Magdalene. He was called Christ, his body became Christ, a reference to his anointing during the meal at Bethany.

Christ? The word means anointed. But what else?

Christ means: touched gently, brushed. Someone comes as close to you as possible and brushes against you. Thus a woman came up to him and washed his feet with her hair. Soft veil.

It means: touched harder; even scratched and stabbed; more than that, flayed. Thus, later, the body of the word will be flagellated by a whip, pierced by a lance, scarified by countless wounds.

And thus means: marked. Emblazoned.

Marked: different, designated for torture, a victim. In a flock of leaping gazelles, hyenas and tigers pick out the one that is marked.

Marked: the body of the word, of language, bears the trace or scratch of writing. The life and death of the word bring together the written and the spoken.

Marked on the body, marked on the shroud, on scattered cloths, folded, rolled up, abandoned in the tomb. Cloths, veils, skins, parchments written that we should remember them, tactile and legible remnants.

And it further means: rubbed, coated. And then a woman came up to him and poured perfume on to his head. Rubbed: she washed him. Coated: she anointed him. Coated him like a cloth or veil or other kinds of skin.

It means: coated in colours, pictures, coloured pictures, dyed, painted, colourwashed, tattooed. The word bears the ink, dye or paint of writing, abstract on the body and thus concrete, unrepresentative, iconoclastic on the face and thus iconophilic. The brief anointing segments the tattoo, restricts it, but also initiates it, the anointing can pass for an element of the tattoo. Christ: the Lord’s many-coloured one. Coated in wine, blood, spittle, bile and vinegar.

It means: coated in perfume, ambrosia, poison. Then the woman who approached him coated him in precious nard. Its perfume filled the house during Lazarus’ feast, he who was brought back to life, during the feast of the word, before its passion, its death and resurrection, during the feast of death and immortality.

Scent marks you out from afar and roaring lions on the prowl for their next kill come running, drawn to whatever is coated. Perfume brings death and is transformed into deadly poison and mortal stench.

And thus means: coated, soiled, defiled. Anointed by Mary Magdalene, defiled by the sinner.

Money has no odour. Sell the nard. Distribute three hundred denari in coins amongst the crowd. Do not come near the alabaster jar, take the perfume away, avoid the anointing. Already, Judas wants to save the Saviour for the first time. Avoid giving him the scent that will mark him out and make him noticed. Money is anonymous and designates no-one, is easily scattered in the hands of the multitude, scattered coins substitute for quartered limbs. Do not designate the body for public condemnation with this scented coating, sell it, sell it before it can touch or brush or stigmatize the body.

Judas tries to save the word from stain or defilement, from perfume’s inevitable transformation into poison. The result, or rather the repercussion of this is that when the poison changes back into perfume, after the resurrection, Judas takes the stain on to himself. For the second time, glory and praise to Judas.

Finally it means: coated, greased, anointed like a king; like a priest, sacred.

Two resurrected bodies are eating at the table, the word and Lazarus, two victims, Judas and the word; two women, Martha the servant, and Mary Magdalene, who anoints it before burial and will not be able to embalm it after the resurrection; Mary Magdalene who turns Christ into Christ. Who marks him out for death while Judas seeks to save him.

Food, unction, money, words and death are all in circulation around this table. A tragic scene.

Touched, pierced, marked, signed, coated, painted, perfumed: this, ultimately, is what Christ means. A smeared, pierced death.

The word became flesh through a virgin woman, a sinful woman made it tangible and visible and legible and fragrant, during the feast where Martha serves the bread and wine which are tasted. Beyond the tragic table where language, money and death are seated, Mary, who does not take a seat there, occupies an ancient place off-centre: that of the sensible. The first Mary gives flesh, the second Mary gives the senses.

She institutes Extreme Unction.

Christian: a tattooed, drawn, coated, rainbow-coloured, studded, tangible, touched, sensible body, painted in various colours like a map, covered in sweat, in a shroud, in scents and odours. Anointed.

Chrism: oil mixed with balm and used for anointing, but also: cement or mortar used for building. This one and that one are called Peter, but to build with rocks you need, also and at the very least, a binding element, a cement to unify and mix, this element or chrism gives us Christian. The Greek word for binding is preserved in the Latin word religion.

Unction is made through mixture and produces a mixture, there is no mixture that does not bind.

Christ will die because of the unction that transforms him into what his name designates. Anointed: marked, visible, tangible, scented. He will die because of the senses.

Money and words circulate around the table, to the death. Lazarus and Judas, condemned, surround the word, also condemned, playing a game of who will die and who will rise; present, absent, substitutable and unsubstitutable. Money replaces language which replaces the body, which replaces the bread, an interplay of transformations on the tragic stage, where the objective is another world.

The women stand far from the table and beyond the tragedy, outside of the scene of substitutions and transubstantiations. Bearing urns, alabaster jugs or jars of spices, dishes or amphora, bread and wine, they work without making a fuss.

Every meal is about death, encircling it like the steps of an amphitheatre. As he lay dying Socrates continued to speak; now the word itself is dying.

Martha with the bread and wine, Mary with the alabaster jar have always absented themselves from the theatre, they attend to their business nearby, working at what is never said, taste and smell, wordless. Present, the women run to the tomb, the work of death done, urn-bearers.

Last scene, last meal: when the flesh no longer exists, the bread remains, when the blood flows no longer, there remains wine. Penultimate act or meal, in the house of Lazarus, far enough from death that burial can be spoken of and the resurrection perceived there, as though the distance from the fatal point of symmetry made it possible to extend the vision of the other side: the word also evokes memory, what she has done will be told later in memory of her, it says.

This is something we have seldom retold, we remember the Last Supper but have little memory of the preceding meal. We always forget about the women: men and women who do not live in the tragic theatre, women and men who never make a scene: who never participate in the action. The only history is that of language.

We are losing our senses.

Once again: what is left when the word withdraws, what is left of the unction, the perfume, the coating, what remains of Christ?

At the back of the tomb, scattered linens: canvases, veils, tissues and the shroud, rolled up separately a little further away. The black box of the empty sepulchre, flooded with light when the stone rolled aside. One last meal on the way to Emmaus. The garden-paradise.

When language dies and enters in to its full glory elsewhere, this book remains.

I hail thee, full of grace.

‘Grace’ expresses the given – same word, same thing; it is charm, the same word again: beauty received graciously, our receptors astonished.

Is it really given?

No. Gifts are part of an exchange, they set up the expectation of a gift in return, they construct a logic, establish a circuit, relate a story, begin a performance as old as the anthropological era. No. Grace escapes the logic of the gift, it is an exception to the time of performance.

Grace is forgiveness.

Long ago, we entered the time and logic of gift-giving, through purchase and redemption, exchange beating out the rhythm, calculating deviations and equivalences. Grace points to a world or space outside of that time.

A world unknown to us, incomprehensible in our languages, forgotten since the paradise of angels, a utopia in which economics suspends its Iron Law.

I hail thee, gracious, you who gracefully and graciously give redemption its name, its grace; I hail thee, pure gratuity from before the time of gifts. I hail thee, full of grace.

The body receives gratuity. The world gives graciously, disinterestedly, asking for nothing back, expecting nothing in return; it has no scales, no balance sheet. Our senses cede nothing in return for it, can give nothing back to the source of given beauties. What could the eye give back to the sun, or the palate to the vines of Yquem?

The given comes through language, which counter-balances the given and constitutes reciprocity to the world. The word redeems the fruit that the flesh has picked from the tree of the world.

But grace. Sensible æsthetics, the unified field of beauty, seems to be exempt from the iron laws of give and take.

God doesn’t cheat, wins nothing, neither plays nor exchanges; in this sense, God does not calculate. He keeps no accounts, neither economical nor an economist, the laws he gives the world map out a space of graciousness. The laws of the universe do not conform to the double-entry system.

The sun is inexhaustible for us: universal and infinite well-spring. Or rather: when it dies, our senses will, come dawn, have lost their place in the sun.

The body receives the given without having to pay for it. The source of the gift, or better said, of grace – God, the world, the environment, air, water, sun, how can we possibly name these things? – is selfless.

They give everything, universally, always, to everyone, everywhere, without exception or pause or omission.

They give to pure sensation, without concept.

They give out of necessity, and the purpose of the given is not always subsistence or knowledge or satisfaction: it is sometimes superfluous, fearsome too, and sometimes ignored by our cultures. They give without purpose, without anyone being able to represent what such a purpose might be.10

These four canons on matters of taste, drummed into us in school, are applicable to grace: predictably so when it designates beauty; but they are equally applicable to grace when it comes to the given. The unity of æsthetics is easily demonstrated.

The world – beautiful – offers the sensible graciously.

Empiricism, a wonder-struck philosophy of the inexhaustible, presupposes that the world is beautiful and its treasures infinite. You cannot put a price on the best things. To hell with avarice! No accountant, God is generous; the world, abundant. We can always drink from the fountain of youth, plentiful and irreversible, its level never goes down.

The gods meddle with mortal banquets. Dressed as vagabonds, wayfaring beggars, watchful Hermes and Jupiter knock at the door of Baucis and Philemon, whose love, a child of poverty, grows old. The impoverished mortals proffer food and drink to the insatiable immortals with trembling, wrinkled hands. Even in their reduced circumstances, they still have a ham smoking in the hearth, hanging from a blackened beam. Even in poverty, the world still gives to those who do not need it. And now drink. To the health of old loves and gods in rags, to the health of immortality, of angels come amongst us, hypocritical and unrecognizable, of archangel guests, Hermes or Ishim. Pour, drink, the level never varies. Usually the more you consume, the less there remains. Here, in Philemon’s cottage, on that day, the level remained stable and constant. A miracle.

A miracle? We have entered the banquet of the gods where the taste and infinite volume of ambrosia bestow immortality. We have left behind banquets of gifts and exchanges, from Don Juan’s donation to the word’s gift of flesh, all those suppers you have to pay for in gold, or blood, or death, where a 1947 Château d’Yquem costs a fortune, all those suppers requiring reciprocity, where love is redeemed cheaply; we have entered the feast of grace, hail Baucis, full of grace, Jupiter or Philemon is with thee says Hermes the angel, here we are at the table of immortality, in the paradise where all we need is fruit, in the supralapsarian garden where abundance flows outside of time, the original, fundamental banquet with no possible predecessor – free, gracious. In the world as it is given.

A Château d’Yquem flows from barrel to glass or from bottle to mouth and when the level of one rises the other falls, like the water in any jug. When the fall of one pan leads to the rise of a second, you have a pair of scales. If the levels do not move with the flow of time or water, then you have no balance.

Stability is required: whatever moves over there does not remain here, what stays here does not move over there. Invariants are needed, constants. No-one can act without them, nor think in the absence of their logic, nothing can exist without their sum.

A balance exactly conveys the economics of the world. Whoever bottled the wine has absolutely no expectation of finding full casks. Whoever refines it in his cellars leeches the surrounding space dry. This is how scarcity is organized. Empiricism marvels at profusion, a philosophy of well-springs, whereas economics, the calculation of equilibrium in exchange, suppresses it. The miraculous feast that Philemon serves with Hermes’ intervention, Adam’s banquet of abundant fruit, ignore balance and precede economics.

A gracious cask can fill countless glasses without revealing its low-water mark.

We need stability, and constants. Whatever flows over there does not remain here. Imbalances always hide an equation, an equivalence, even transformations do. From which we get science, which organizes the thousands upon thousands of ways of writing an equal sign. Philemon’s supper with its bottomless pitcher and the utopia of a garden with super-abundant produce describe the minimally twofold absurdity of perpetual movement. Out of ignorance of equivalence, and invariance, and balance sheets. Both these stories precede science.

An inventive brain can fill countless attentive brains nearby with its inventions, without ever depleting its own flood of inventiveness.

We need invariance. The wine in a glass is not the wine in the carafe. Quite impossible that the latter should be the same as the former, that it should both be and not be the latter, at the same time and given the same relationship. It isn’t merely about drinking or calculating the wine’s vintage, it is a question of speech. Of conjugating the dangerous verb ‘to be’ and playing with negation. If you want to speak, you need stable contracts with others and with things: in this, the identity principle is equivalence or conservation, balance and stability. It is the foundation of logic and of every possible language.

The gracious banquet of empiricism takes place before gifts, exchange and reciprocity; before economics and the scarcity that it constructs; before science, by virtue of the eternally flowing spring; before logic and language. I rest my case.

It assumes the wine already drained from the glass to be still in the bottle. It assumes a world full of grace before the word comes and redeems everything by balancing the scales. It assumes a time so ancient that we have forgotten it, a time so impossible that we can neither think nor speak it.

In the first garden, the tree of knowledge had the form and function of a set of scales: the fall, aptly named, called for a compensatory rise. On the scales of the cross. Paradise is where all kinds of perpetual movement take place.

Hail, Eva, full of grace. Ave.

In the garden of the senses, who pays for the light in your eyes, the florilegium around your lips, the rosy satin hue of your skin, the spirit-like lightness of the scents carried in by the breeze, the primary voices in the foliage?

Hail Eva, Mary, you who love graciously.

Sensible beauty, desire, without counterparts, love without equilibrium.

Mortals and immortals drank wine or ambrosia, long ago, at banquets on the eastern side of the Mediterranean. Men or gods, these ancestors of ours, turn to dust underground. In modern Greece their contemporary counterparts drink a mediocre retsina with their meals: it is a mixture. A mixture of the fruit of the vine and the resin of pine trees. The wines of long ago mixed pure water in craters with heavy syrup poured from jugs. We only ever drink mixtures, even when they come from Yquem.

We have difficulty speaking about mixtures or rationalizing them. They are resistant to principles. Analysis abhors them. Give the analytical person a glass of sugar water and ask where the water is and where the sugar is: one is distributed through the other, which is distributed through the first. Where is the resin in the wine? The former mingles with the latter which is mingled with the former. Where is the water in the syrup, where is the Semillon in the Sauvignon? Identities are destabilized, their precise locations lost in ill-defined surroundings, contradiction itself hesitates in the face of confusion.

Let us invite logicians, linguists and grammarians to drink with us, let us mix the drinks and raise our glasses to confusion.

Hermes, passing angel with winged feet, stands there in front of the elderly lovers who will soon intertwine their limbs, Baucis’ boughs embracing Philemon’s branches, the wine mixture flows into goblets, twists and turns as it slips from amphora to pitcher, from crater to glass, its long, ruby-scaled body slithering as it merges with other serpentine forms. Hermes pours from his caduceus: a clear and distinct schematic of confluent streams, a graphic representation of the opposite of a balance. Let us drink to Hermes’ caduceus, to confluence, to confusion. Can we think it? Can we reason about mingled bodies?

Are we talking about a different time?

The empiricist hopes for and believes in resources. Knows nothing of scarcity, lack, fatigue, exhaustion. Mocks the second principle, laughs at the fall, neither pays nor speaks.

He haunts banquets. The crucial experience of philosophy is structured like a feast, which is the best expression of it. For reasons beyond that of taste. The sun gives us light, shapes, colour, heat and power graciously, still; thunder and wind offer us scents and sounds, expecting nothing in return, still; bark and rock still do not charge for the feel of their texture; have we ever, since the time of paradise, tasted food or drink without spending a crown or even a farthing? This is the site of scarcity, the source of information, old site of the gods, where economics, the law of our world, is triumphant and where exchange reigns supreme along with its different representations; where speeches are made, organized, distributed, regulated, prioritized; where conversations play out, sophisticated exchanges of speeches and dialogues, this is precisely what the gift-table looks like.

The empiricist enters the banquet as though at the centre of a cross, in search of gratuity where none has found it since the Garden of Eden. Full of grace, he enters amidst the lounging statues: reclining gods, in a state of equilibrium, revelling in the victuals in the city’s main square while its inhabitants die of famine and pestilence.

Scarcity is the law of this place, where the Iron Law of economics is triumphant, now the site of sophisticated speeches, of information and science; for these days prizes, scarcity, fortune come from knowledge; for today, less so than tomorrow, we will eat and drink knowledge, this banquet feeds barely a tenth of humanity, and to the point of nausea, a pantheon of gods protected by a ring of apocalyptic fire; site of scarcity, of economics, language and science, well-defined by atomic weapons; surrounded by the starving, deprived of everything and multiplying their offspring, as is always the case in extreme poverty; site where the sated expatiate knowledgably on what is given through language . . . Ask the malnourished, who are excluded from the banquet, whether or not the given is different from words; give them bread on the one hand, words on the other: this is the difference between life and death. Their lives and their deaths. Our lives of satiety and their lives of starvation.

The question is ultimately one of gratuity. Of economics and scarcity. Of the organization of scarcity. Of the organization of the feast. Of the division of space into two zones: that of the banquet, surrounded by that of bushes and hedges where the scrawny run about naked. In the former, you eat and drink to your heart’s content because you know, because you know how to speak, calculate, weigh, think; in the latter, wandering through the shapeless and chaotic night, they who are dying of hunger because they cannot take part in the conversation do not know how to participate in the feast of words or the laws of giving.

When did grace enter this space?

Beat the hedges and the paths, let them all come to the wedding feast.

The banquet remains the site of philosophy, today as much as in the time of history or myth: today the banquet is the world. An enormous hospice where shadows lie dying of malnutrition, where the table of scarcity and abundance, around which a few obese individuals throw up their excesses, is carved up. Yes, the feast of gods come down to earth highlights the meaning of the word ‘mortal’.

When, therefore, will mortal and immortal eat together at the same table, forgetting the scales, for free? Paying as little as our eyes do for daylight.

Like the champion of graciousness, empiricism enters the feast of the statues, all of them recumbent at the tipping point of equilibrium.

It remembers the alliance of the sensible and the gracious, a venerable relic of language, borne by the saving grace of angels. It remembers the Garden of Eden, the sufficient paradise, land of milk and honey, and the desert where manna fell from heaven, and the hut where pitchers, as though they were springs, poured forth their contents.

It is astonished by a world populated by scales, and speeches regulated by multiple weight checks; by a time in which everything requires payment: bread, water and soon the air we breathe and the silence required for sleep and privacy, all graciously given, once. It is astonished that the law of the world is dictated by economics, ungraciously.

It enters the feast of the senses, the only philosophy without an economy, full of grace, trembling with life, shouting out life.

Economics abhors free gifts, thought to be wasteful ceremony. It attacks the sensible. It destroys the beauty of grace, then reinvests gratuities. Everything has a price, it tells us.

Tells us. Speaking, saying, writing: evaluating. Weighing things up.

And what if the word bought and sold every previously free given, at a fixed or variable price, negotiable and fluctuating depending on the location in space or the particular moment in a conversation, reducing it to a datum by the counter-weight of a word. Does language pay for the nature of things with the words it coins? Are we buying up the world through language?

And what if the word came amongst us to redeem the world?

Our economy sells auditory and sound signals, populates space with noises and images while driving out free voices and spectacles in order to make us think that the given comes from language. It trades in æsthetics and anæsthetics, supplanting grace. The scales of scarcity take the place of the caduceus of plenty. We might hail them, devoid as they are of gratuity.

Yet if you take the case of the sun, you would have to say that it gives without charge. Our bodies turn towards it, animals and plants too, stalks bend under its influence, an inexhaustible spring flowing irreversibly in one direction only. Without debt or reimbursement.

And yet it heats us.

And yet it turns, said Galileo before the Church tribunal, founding modern science in a cold culture.

And yet it heats, says the empiricist memory of the gratuitous that we have lost, before the tribunal or scales of economics, thermodynamics and language, in our hot culture.

Sensation is free, it requires no payment in any currency. Never call it given: no reciprocity is called for. Do not call it perception: who plays the part of the taxpayer here, and who the part of the impostor?11

Parasites join its banquet: they are fully aware that they take and give nothing in return, we already know them. They pay in words and would have us believe that the given comes through language. Don Juan presides over this feast which neither honours debts and wagers, nor keeps promises. They are all ignorant of scales and equivalence, living off and in a deviation from equilibrium, a deviation that is never redeemed. This is how the world is born for Lucretius, this is how time begins out of the chaos of Genesis, this is the start of history, like a story about the foundation of Rome, for instance, and its departure from the sacred.

For a long time I have been searching for grace. Or for some object that could not be called a prize or fetish or merchandise. Searching not for a gift, but for grace. Not for gravity, but for grace. Not for nature, but for grace.

Certainly neither physics nor science, with their laws of valency. But beyond them, metaphysics. Off-balance in relation to them. But philosophy: wisdom and love which speak grace, also. Hail, philosophy, full of grace.

Birth

Anyone who drinks one of those industrial concoctions which are flooding the market and the planet, is swallowing terminology; and is fully aware of what they are drinking. It moves through the mouth like a language: written on a small label. Everything inside the metal or plastic container is declared on paper, everything printed on the external surface can be found within. These two propositions leave no remainder. The brand announces a finite and quite brief sequence: drinking is as much analysis as reading is; the label and the container carry the same series of words or substances: a formula for refreshment, abstraction in a bottle, pharmacy. The law decrees it. Imposes the fidelity of advertising. The law, written, forces the written label on us, and we are made to drink writing. Concoction or drug, same decree. Sense begins and ends with language. Anæsthesia and numbed mouth. Potion.

Anyone who drinks a good wine will not talk of brands, cannot say fully what flows over the palate, or lingers in the mouth. A finely detailed watered-silk map is drawn there, lacking ready-made words to designate it or sentences to describe it, for want of experience, apart from feeble vocabulary which everyone ridicules. The label carries a drawing of the chateau or the name of the estate, an indication of the vineyard or its location. If we had to set out what the wine contains, the list would be as long as our admiration of the wine was profound, the label would cover the bottle, the cellar, the vines and the surface of the countryside, mapping them all faithfully, point by point. Excellence opens up a descriptive sequence which we can imagine running on to infinity. Drinking envelopes this endless list and endless time: the singularity of the vintage, date and bottle itself wraps this immense series around a smaller, quite literally summary, location. Concreteness resides in such density, reality in this summation, like a singular essence: not a homogeneous purity, reproducible through repetition, analysis or industry, but a manifold mixture of tightly packed implications. The act of tasting anticipates the unfolding of this hard, dense involution, the unfurling of this ball wound around itself, the delectable moment when the bird fans out its tail and struts about, inimitably. Almost beyond analysis, the mingled flux leaves behind, wherever it passes or lingers briefly, a meticulous tattoo, aurora borealis, a shimmering engraving, constellation of assorted ocelli, its singular essence the signature of a sumptuous storm: a manifold, disparate, non-standard ensemble passing above. After having received such detail, the subject concludes that his previous mouth was frigid and numb, smooth and pure beneath the passage of imitable, quickly analysed currents.

Boring books in libraries quote other books in libraries: transcriptive, composite, analytical. Good books come from elsewhere and aim for bookstores. From the moment of their arrival they are surrounded, carved up and analysed by bad ones to show that they too were written using the books in bookstores. Bad authors hate good ones, try to make the latter look more like them and try to tell us that a good book is merely the sum of its analyses.

Children have long been taught that there are infinite libraries, labyrinths that no-one can escape, that there are masons who can build towers of Babel stretching to infinity. In short, that language imprisons us within walls that lock us away from the world by imitating it.

Yet in the space of our short lives we build finite things, all the more finite for having been built with what has already been built. No intersecting corridor can enclose us for more than a relatively brief period. The corner of a wall ends right there; fractal, the bottom of a bay can never be completely mapped. You can wander the seas for all time; whoever searches long enough for the exit to a labyrinth is bound to find it. The singular given is never-ending. No-one ever leaves the world, but anyone can easily exit the library; we can enter objects infinitely, a book is quickly finished.

Sometimes a work of art is implicated in itself, manifold, as though interminable, producing the time of history: as though it were a singular essence, non-integrable. Large numbers sit between the finite and the infinite. In philosophical libraries, it is as though they sit diagonally, resolving antinomies.

That industrial concoction passes over the tongue like the lists of boring books and leaves it cold: pure, identical, analytical, reproducible. The tongue has no trouble recognizing its drug, manufactured specifically to be recognized. Good wines are inimitable, and can even confound experts. A desert beneath the sun, on the one hand, a forest of infinitely diverse leaves on the other.

Accustomed to reflex actions, dogs respond to the sound of their master’s voice and suffer terribly if they do not hear it, salivate automatically at the sight and sound of their canned food, knowing what to expect and what awaits them: their drug.

Expectation creates anæsthesia. Æsthetics tastes improbability. If you wish to live freely, drink singularly. If you wish to live singularly, drink freely.

Bound to the flesh, but without flesh, language moves through the mouth leaving it intact. The word is conceived in flesh, leaving its virginity intact.

Tasteless dishes anæsthetize our tongue as they do language. Language anæsthetizes the mouth as industrial concoctions or pharmaceutical drugs do. Smooth-talkers, golden mouths, metallic and frigid. Language asks everything of the mouth, neither giving nor leaving anything in return, like a parasite.

Taste is a kiss that our mouth gives itself through the intermediary of tasty foods. Suddenly it recognizes itself, becomes conscious of itself, exists for itself.

Born of the mouth, as though its child, language asks to be born, assisted, conceding nothing in return. Tastes give the mouth lingering existence. The man of taste exists in precisely the same place as the frigid megaphone, disgusted and numbed.

I taste therefore I exist locally.

The object of taste exists, concrete and singular outside of any short, finite sequence of technical terms. It carries and gives up the virtually infinite detail which causes us to suspect and guess the presence of the real, the object in the world. The subject of taste exists locally, now, in and around the mouth, which without taste would not exist, virgin, frigid and talkative. Taste determines the existence or non-existence of the local subject and singular object: this inimitable drink and that agglomeration of flesh, mouth, cheek and palate plus centre and edge of the tongue, plus the deployment of our entire sense of smell.

Here the banquet of banquets comes to an end, and we have recognized none of the guests. As there was no roll-call of speakers we do not know who was there. Whoever speaks names himself, whoever names himself has the right to speak: one word designates the speaker of words. Or: the speaker of words ends up speaking a name which speaks the subject.

At the manifold banquet to which many banquets contributed, those in attendance constructed their identity through taste. All told, only three tongues or three mouths were seated around the bottle of Yquem at first; three for a single person no doubt: the one that speaks, the one that receives the liquor, the one that gives and takes kisses. A feast of wine where we talk of love. Once tasted, the Yquem brings the palate and sense of smell into existence, as well as the stitching that tacks mouth to nose, the many layers of glaze painted around the mask. Who sits at the table? Masks: of black velvet, white satin, some old-rose silk, others with tiger or zebra stripes, shimmering, mingled, in every shape and colour. In the end the wine gives each of them a face.

Along the length of the table, stretching into the distance, the masks are moving, drinking, evanescent. Faces without necks, heads without pectoral girdles, napkins floating in front of vacant chests.

I taste, therefore a fragment of my body exists: mouth, head, mask. An ENT model. I sense, therefore patches are formed. Empiricism gives us a localized cogito.

The senses construct our body bit by bit, as we use them. We carry within us the roots of our basting. Empiricism foresees the diasparagmos of Orpheus, life finishes just as it begins. Strings are added to the lute or lyre, they then slacken or break, music harmonizes the arts which then secede, the muses converse peaceably, then the Thracian women scatter into the mountains, screaming. Enough imagery, we’re talking about the body. It is constructed from one proximity to the next, from one vicinity to the next, around these sensorial roots. It acquires sight which is quickly lost if not used to see at a distance, in detail, for snapshots, colours and shades, fusing sight to the ear, remembering the birth of hearing and who bestowed it and the delicious, heartrending circumstances in which it felt its triple tongue growing . . . the rag comes together piece by piece, site by site, a tattered body well-sewn here, cobbled together there, scraps more or less attached, fluttering, tacked on hastily . . . a divisible individual, limbs always scattered.

The subject is not united, it has local offices; has no head office, but constitutes a bouquet of delegations. I do not exist all at once, globally, emerging into existence through the act of thinking or speaking . . . or rather: if I think, if I speak, then yes, I do exist, a totality bereft of detail, a neat, coherent but locally frigid block, a cold statue which enters the banquet in order to converse, reclining on a divan like a god, its cup always left untouched, a robot with an anæsthetized mouth, its parts of marble or metal, indifferent, empty, punctured, stoppered, absent. I speak, therefore I exist globally, yes, but virginally. Virginity always accompanies speech. I exist as a block, but with phantom parts. An angel always announces the word. No, I do not exist in localities. Everything is concentrated in the capital, the villages are dead. Like the map of one of those countries ruled solely by the State. A synthesis without parts, therefore uncomplicated, a smooth statue.

Diasparagmos for death most ordinary, for life most ordinary as well. Bodies with half a mouth hover around the everyday table, skinless shadows, some with their auditory canals sealed up, some with no sense of smell, armless men, women with no sense of touch, all of them bodies with phantom limbs, mutilated humanity with a reserved seat at the banquet, all of them spending their time saying I. I speak. Standing in front of my chair to expatiate on love, I raise my always full or always empty glass. Each broken statue has a global unity, thinks and speaks beautifully, but falls down in ruins in spite of its capital unity. You’d think the guests had all been gathered up from an excavation site: a whole collection of broken statues in front of the pristine tablecloth. Global subjects from cities and countryside, under the sun, resembling the pale, indistinct shades surrounding Eurydice in the Underworld. Speaking and thinking easily bypass a difficult construction job.

Following the music, walking slowly, Eurydice constructs her body in patches and fragments, beginning with the æsthetic terminals or sensorial roots, follows the lyre or sum of the arts, the fine arts which no culture can do without, as essential to the construction or modelling of the living totality as the world is; an ear emerges from the darkness, a phantom limb becomes flesh, the pavilion and petrosal bone are incarnated, the tympanum becomes taut – a veritable blacksmith’s forge starts to take shape, with its anvil and hammer – a dark mouth emerges from the darkness, a cascade of flowers is already flowing from her lips; the palate will be stitched to the already incarnated ear, at the banquet, the breadth of her skin is tacked onto the islets that have already emerged, her tongue unfolds out of the frozen virtuality where it lay, rolled up, before birth or reappearance; the formation of these parts, one by one, requires joints here and there, bridges, folds, hems, pathways from one sheet to the next, one root to the next, transitions or delegations, scents as soft as souls, tastes as silken as caresses, singing shades of colour, stained-glass harmonies, dance, dance, giving local syntheses in joyous bursts at every stage; Eurydice, emerging from the Underworld, a guest at the banquet of her new nuptials, extricates her forms from the shadows of anæsthesia, of the social pharmacy, of the drug of language, all of which keep virgin flesh impotent or frigid, escapes the labyrinth by crossing unstable bridges, fills in her wells, leaves behind the inn with its banal dinners in order to inhabit her body’s own house, breaks out of prison, rises from sensory death; life most ordinary.12

Never assured of being able to build a sufficiently connected self, the I thus constructed from bits and pieces risks coming apart in the wind, crumbling, dissolving in the rain; the body only barely divested of the phantom shroud which cloaked it as it emerged from the Underworld is incapable of enduring anything at all – the sight of Orpheus, a hard stone in her path, a too heady wine, a passionate caress – the naked feminine form which emerged from the subterranean chaos vanishes back into the Underworld, a piece at a time, first diasparagmos; just as the male body of her lyre-player will disappear piece by piece on a Bulgarian mountain, under the gaze and claws of the Thracian women, dancing Bacchae; just as mine and yours, built up over the course of a similar labyrinth, following in the wake of a similar lyre will disintegrate under the same old diasparagmos, the disparate bits scattered and unstitched, the pieces collapsing before turning to dust. Sometimes a head remains: Orpheus’ head floats downstream, still singing, still speaking, following the sea currents towards distant islands. It says: I speak therefore I am. Capital cogito ignorant of the body’s collapse, giving unity or existence, but like a phantom reintegrating phantom limbs. I sing, I speak, I think, the head of an angel on a cloud, or of a prophet on a silver platter.

Statues and ghosts cause quite a commotion at banquets.

The body is constructed as books are composed, its pages come together like pieces and patches. Entirely sewn from skin, at first, naked in its closed bag, as though it had been dressed a sheet at a time – hose, scarves, pants – by an assemblage of pieces of skin or a juxtaposition or stack of assorted garments, sewn together, overlapping, but leaving gaps, because some places repel each other. Skin is no synthesis, but basting, collage or patchwork. What was once called the association of ideas is less true of ideas than it is of fragments of body or skin. Clumsily tied together, loosely knotted, tattered, if you like: bandaged together. Each time you hear someone talking about a living being as a system, you should understand: Harlequin’s cape. Books are assembled like touch or garments.

Empiricism is a tailor, working locally, basting, thinking in extensions, from near vicinities to vicinal proximities, from singularity to singularity, from seed to layer, from well to bridge. It draws detailed maps as it traces paths, maps the body, the world and dressmaker’s patterns: cuts out, pins, sews. Subtle and refined, it loves detail, its creations fragile. It is a topolo-gist, having a sense for borders and threads, surfaces and reversals, never assuming that things and states of affairs are the same, more than a step in any direction, a weaver of varieties, in detail.

Language on the other hand does not go into detail, instantly occupying a homogeneous space: voice carries and echoes afar. A cymbal within the resonating thorax, it rises like a column above the throat, a whirling cone out front, its base planted behind the uvula, trumpet, clarion, announcing itself and flying into the surrounding volume, unifying it through the mastery of its vibrating force, lending the body a hasty and wide-ranging synthesis, global and urgent, dominant. Acoustics, through its harmonies, erases the seams that came before it and makes us forget them.

The speaking subject trembles in geometric space and traces out chains of reasoning which are long, simple, straightforward, bearing their own law, using sound to create a straight path through an isotropic world. A possessive master, it presupposes that the global, distant, does not differ from the local, proximate. Reason, over there, maintains the same relationships as speech, over here.

Empiricism, tailor of our skin, has the same relationship to topology as the sonorous word has to geometry. The latter pair dominates and hides the former. Masons, architects, logicians and geometers construct, rationalists of language all. The empiricist-tailor darns, hems, prefers looseness to hardness, folds to articulations. No, the body is not an instantaneous construction, it folds over and unfurls – puffs and gathers – it stretches out like a landscape.

Subtle, acute, sagacious. The tailor precedes the lyre player, who precedes the cook. The garment is threaded onto the phantom body like a veil or cape. With the striking of a gong, or the clash of a cymbal, or a drum roll, the ghost enters the banquet. Without this acoustic thunder it would fall to pieces, mask and cape, laughable. Phantoms need noise to sustain themselves in the world of the living, which explains the incessant clamouring of our culture of ignorance. By dancing to music, from lyres or voices, the hasty garment can be made flesh, through the medium of language. Small children should be made to dance, often.

Guests, statues and ghostly apparitions, dressed, masked, rustling with language, enter the banquet of life where the harmonic space has been set up by an orchestra, and risk falling to pieces again as soon as the music fades.

They eat and drink, sagaciously or not.

Empiricism, both cook and cupbearer, knows more recipes than laws, for the latter apply to homogeneous states of affairs and the former to mixtures, so frequent as to be commonplace. It has prepared the banquet menu, where mixtures eat mixtures in order to exist as mixtures: this is my body. And where mingled bodies drink mingled bodies: this is my blood.

The body is composed like a book: a topology of tailoring, the pieces are stitched together at first; a geometry of sounds, next, the first global synthesis through the medium of language; and once again a topology of mixtures, the cook makes refinements based on the vicinity of ingredients to one another. Knows how to dissolve liquids into fluids, or solids, as poorly cohesive as flesh, into thin or thick sauces, thereby obtaining subtle liaisons. Where does meat end and stew begin? Sometimes even our sense of taste cannot distinguish. Our body has difficulty knowing where one sense, place or part begins, and where another sense, a second place or nearby patch ends. The striped, mingled body is made up of the proximities between gradations. It moves from one sense to another, imperceptibly. In the same way it is said that in Van Eyck’s polyptych panel, The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, in Ghent, the painter applied the subtle glaze over Eve’s thigh in fifteen successive layers of gradation, each a different shade of pink. Thus did the Creator. Thus does each of us perceive her leg. And our own mouth, when tasting. An Yquem paints our palate with frescos and polyptychs in a hundred gradations. The eye loses its bearings, as though it were looking into infinity; the mouth tastes until taste itself dissolves; our tongue is lacking in tongues, we do not have fifteen different ways of describing a shade of old rose, our lexicon trembles and stutters, experts invent terms amongst themselves, private and intransmissable. At the sixteenth layer, Van Eyck thought he saw the woman move. Just as he thought that by crushing gemstones to mix new colours he was creating them on the canvas. And Van Eyck created woman. The continuous, differential, imperceptible spectrum that tattoos places invisibly and binds them with knotted, fleeting, transitional ribbons can be said to paste our body together, to mix its parts together, more than it can be said to construct it, or produce a synthesis of it. A fine matador can thus be recognized not by excellent passes, but by the complexity of movements melting into one another within the performance. Happy are the melted bodies. The banquet assists in effacing the tattoo through the fusion or confusion of vicinities, erasing its swirls of colour while preserving its effectiveness. In this way Van Eyck plays God, and matadors play with life and death, each dreaming of perfect liaisons. And thus does the cook.

An art as fragile and evanescent as perfume, fluid empiricism, transitory, forgotten, misunderstood philosophies, left in the kitchen. No-one wants to admit to living in the kitchen, in domestic territory. And yet the body is bound together in such places. Delicious, undervalued empiricism falls silent. Nevertheless, behind the scenes it is the constant companion of life. The banquet has two distinct parts: the performance and the pantry. Now decide where the most important events occur, in the factory or on the stage? In the sauces or the speeches? Mask or life?

Empiricism produces people worth spending time with, people who are alive, with supple, cohesive bodies, recognizable at the first beat of a waltz. It is, without doubt, little given to instruction, leading to neither higher understanding nor great speeches. But it gives small pleasures which make up the uninterrupted tonality of life, the comfort of our body, the rhythm of our gait, adaptation: simple arms in the everyday struggle against the legions of death camped in the theatre. Death is always lurking at the banquet. On the performance side of things: the statue, itself dominating, heralds the death throes of the dominators – thunder and drums. Empiricism takes refuge in the kitchen alongside the kitchen boys smeared with sauce, and the maids, saucy brunettes in white aprons. Quite well-behaved, even simple-minded, it listens to the speeches after the wine, takes fright at the jovial, booming actors, hams, prostitutes, imperious and decorated as they are. It is frightened of philosophy, science and laws, preferring to withdraw. To leave the table before the end.

In the kitchen it learns not to abhor impurity, puts it finger in the soup. It learns about mixtures. Separation reigns on the impeccably set table. In the theatre the law is in charge; in the kitchen they make do with recipes. Language and reason resound during the performance; behind the scenes, what is reasonable is sufficient. What if coarseness ruled the world, like a capricious and inattentive king? What if a certain reticent sophistication, attentive to localized details and caring about nuance, had no place except behind the scenes? Polite empiricism; unified rationalism. The former tells no stories, never makes history. It prefers life.

In the sunshine, the world resembles a banquet, or a sideshow. One-legged men, one-eyed women, eunuchs, smooth heads with no mouth or nose, dressed not in a tattered garment, flayed, but in tattered skin or senses; trunks of men, necks or earless skulls, blind, legless cripples, armless individuals, frigid, impotent, limping, paralysed – these are the creatures eating at the table, the feast is in full swing for them – passers-by, onlookers, coming, going, busily getting drunk, with one sense anæsthetized or a phantom limb, unfinished bodies, poorly constructed, uneducated, oblivious to the defects, deficiencies, random joins, everyone salvaged, redeemed, corrected, completed by a hasty orthopædic intervention, wooden legs, prostheses, bandages, plastic hands or leather noses, false teeth, hooks, dildos, hiding the space of the void beneath artifice, hiding our numbness beneath obesity, each of us shouting, verbose, screaming out our existence or trying to impose our language, speaking our category in the agora, believing that we have achieved the miracle of a unified, finished, harmonious, full, complete body by broadcasting the published word, while nonetheless admitting, almost with a slip of the tongue, that our bodies, in pieces, have been suffering since the dawn of time. A miracle of language at the table of freaks: I’m speaking, I’m speaking, can you hear that I exist? Tragically incomplete cripples obscured by the clamouring, shouting and squabbling. Everyone sees hats and coats and puts their trust in language. But rather than hiding skin, clothing in fact displays its stitching and patchwork. Everyone naked.

I taste; existence for my mouth. I feel; and a piece of me thus comes to exist. There was a blank void in the place which was just born of the sensible. Being settles in my body, a tunic of nothingness. Being patches nothingness. The topologist is a variation on the Harlequinian cogito. The edges of my tongue had no existence of their own until they emerged from underneath a coating of Château Margaux; the broad sides of the body itself remain blank; empty cœnæsthesia suffers or enjoys this multiple birthing, ongoing creation. A new tongue grows. Then touch, a real hand with five real fingers, my very own palm. I grow the top part of a back, a pavilion, enormous and brand new, a precisely sculpted petrosal bone, an unexpected gaze; this improbable skin envelopes me at the zones that see, hear, shiver and fold inwards, to great depths. This vicinity did not exist – it is born. It existed once, it exists differently, it hibernates and reawakens countless times. Is born, wants to be reborn, will soon know how to be reborn, knows how high it is aiming. Learns that, from now on, if it lets itself descend into bad, unworthy or cheap feelings it will return to its initial state of nothingness. Exists, insists and erects itself.

Grows and reinforces itself. Stays soft in order to feel better, becomes strong in order to live on. Knows how to, and is able to cross the tunnel of nothingness where once it lay; the softness of the sensible has hardened it. We learn by linking the fragilities which guarantee receptive accuracy, to the power which lends endurance. Enough imagery, I’m talking about erections. But only if we generalize them properly. Far from being restricted to an organ which is never given a lovely name in any language, an erection describes the everyday, local and global phenomenon of sensation. This partition appears from out of its white nothingness, like Venus above the roiling sea, enlarges, exists, acts, grows like a bud, or sleeps while waiting for the next feast. I feel, therefore a slab of me is erected. The construction of the body is the result of a number of erections. You spoke of love at the banquet: without knowing it, you were giving us the template of what happens in your mouth and on your lips.

The hideous little monster drawn by physiologists when they map nerve endings according to the relative space they occupy in the brain – fat lips, enormous tongue, small torso, boxing gloves for fingers, a hare’s ears – quite literally erects its receptors. Studded with tumescences, the homunculus takes out its antennae and deploys them. A template for those masks or models which trace cœnæsthesia, which depict in detail the feeling body, and which we, people of the word, so rarely understand. The topological structure of sensation corresponds, piece for piece and Harlequin’s cape for matching tunic, to the rainbow-coloured, blended, striped, ocellated, almost checkerboard space of the sites of our brain. We need no trepan to see this patterned carpet, the world of the senses is enough, along with our variegated skin – or our mouth, erect when faced with a wine fanning out like a peacock’s tail. A bird with the same constellation as a brain.

The appearance of the feast at the table of freaks changes according to our sophistication, talents and circumstances. The two preceding tableaux were inventories of the guests’ masks and deficiencies: the colour of pieces of nothingness – a mask the colour of invisible, in Couperin’s words.13 Here is a tableau of pieces of being: many-coloured masks or Harlequins.

Now entering and sitting down, getting up and leaving, eating, drinking, screeching and singing: this one here, a chatterbox amidst chatterboxes, a number of hare-like creatures with small eyes and tall ears, useless and pliable, stunned owls with an enormous gaze set in dark-ringed sockets, motionless, studious and stupid, anteaters with long, sticky tongues, a few primates with interminably long arms reaching all the dishes with ease, praying mantises on thin, articulated, almost artificial legs, and the entirety of the shark and tiger families, their terrifying teeth guaranteeing them the tastiest morsel, flanked by pachyderms, slow and cold, with their impregnable hides, scores of defenceless, fleeing rabbits or indestructible rats . . . each of them erects their speciality, whatever it is that defines them as an inferior species, each exhibits its mask of winning colours . . . big eyes gazing down upon immense members, oh Grandma, what big teeth you have . . . Here is spring, here is the feast of metamorphoses, of daily miracles of sensation. Each individual, laughing, surprised and moved, sees new growth appear, reawakens through green grafts, crowned, girt and shod with foliage, floral necklaces sprouting on the skin, bracelets born of velvety touch, a string of petals falling from the mouth, perfumed vine tendrils around the nose, fingers and feet extended by tufts of branches, bushy trunks, fauns, gnomes, tritons, witches, she-devils mounting the first wood they see, all of them, through the din, drinking to the glory of wines born in the glory of autumn.

And what if fairy tales – seven-league boots, beast become beauty, donkey skin, vair slipper, little mermaid with her lower body numb from cold and sheathed in blue-green scales, ogres smelling live flesh – and what if fêtes galantes, masked balls, Harlequin theatre, visions and sabbaths were simply brightly coloured representations of the lost, forgotten, disintegrated ruins of the sensible, whose qualities our culture of language and religion of the word will no longer allow us to apprehend?

Saint Anthony, priest of the word, a hermit in the smooth, homogeneous desert under the immutable sun, a space where nothing new can appear beneath the metallic midday brightness, living amidst an infinity of stones, feeding himself on bread and water all day long, drunk on fasting, always chanting his text, his eyes worn out on the Book, his tongue numb from words and hard crusts, suddenly feels his logical anchoritic skin shudder as the multiple traces on him the silent, manifold caresses of its shimmering pattern. The lost paradise, the disparate garden of the senses, with fruits and animals and devils and women, returns to the unitary desert of the word which has never understood or received it, perceiving it rather as a hellish temptation: a banquet resurfacing in the middle of a diet, a feast of phantom sensation amidst the reign of language.

These days saints live and read in cities, surrounded by concrete as far as the eye can see, eating special diets conceived for fragile stomachs and dishes, the taste of which has been removed by the agro-alimentary or pharmaceutical industries, moves about in the unifying light of electricity which prevents even the night from adding something new to the day, breathes only the scent of petrol and kerosene, and most of all knows nothing beyond writing, word-images covering the desert city, walls, screens, billboards, shops, vehicles, even the sky; finally the saint exists in word alone, the word whose existence requires that ascetics know nothing else: logic, media, grammars, announcements, formulae, codes . . . information everywhere you look, cenobites who prove that their grey cities and insipid diets never excite them as much as sentences and syntax do. The victory of reason: the only taste an apricot has is the taste of the word ‘apricot’ passing over the lips.

Cities are populated by hermits, who have only one tongue.

Which can only speak the sensible monstrously or abnormally or infernally.

The abominable teratology of Saint Anthony’s temptations is the product of strange couplings: naked bodies with cauldron bottoms, muzzles grafted onto wings, floral whales: bifurcations of different kingdoms, mingled bodies do not graft well. And yet they can be mixed!

These chimera can be reduced to words, juxtaposed with hyphens: logical fantasies, a digital grammar of senses. Incapable of following the thread, movement, cohesion, continuum, history, graded spectrum, flesh and mixture of the sensible, language uses catch-all terms to describe the exquisite glaze in which it is bathed. There are fifteen monsters contradicting each other on Eve’s pink thigh.

Incapable of speaking her, the word damns her instead.

Brueghel, Bosch, Flaubert: banquets translated into language, through words, grammar, erudition and dictionaries, nightmares of damnation, computer-drawn beasts. Just as we hear in symposia these days that p therefore q is a neat substitute for a Château d’Yquem fanning its tail.

No culture ever achieved the degree of asceticism that our so-called consumer society, our banquet, imposes on us today.

Language is threefold dominant: administrations rule through the performative dimension of the word; the media dominate through its seductive dimension; the sciences enjoy mastery through its truth dimension. Trismegistic language produces an abstract dominant class, drunk on codes: legislative, computerized, rigorous, thrice efficient, and in this manner producing a whole world.

Never in the entire course of history have those in power practised austerity to such a degree. Our princes inhabit discourse; of law, illustrative rhetoric, and science. They neither eat nor drink, nor take slow walks nor know anything of the fine arts. But where are the feasts of yesteryear, at the Trianon or Versailles?

Saint Anthony is triumphant, bending subjugated humanity to the word, putting it on a bread and water diet of abstraction, only allowing it access to the given through the three channels of language in the incorporeal desert of administrative, informed, technical cities. He commands, fascinates, speaks true. He is going to reprogramme the world.

Suddenly, we are living in the middle of an enormous, collective Temptation of Saint Anthony. It takes a body and senses to create a culture. Language or artificial intelligence produce a sub-culture, for want of a body. Through this imposed abstraction the sensible returns, a stubborn, infernal shadow, in images and language, but defigured by wasteful contempt. Seated at the banquet, the statues and robots dream of lists and icons. Anchorites exhausted by formal and solitary work, come evening, we seek reclusive sleep; gorged on crimes of red ink, fascinated familiars of those in power, quenched by acrobatic promiscuity, stuffed on junk of disgusting colours, on an entire instantaneous, illusory banquet, passing out at a keystroke. Who described it better, this perpetual, contemptible, imaginary sub-feast, initiated by the pressure of language, than he who signs off with the name we’ve come to expect: San-Antonio?14

In bottles, around the lips, there lies culture. And, absolutely all things considered, knowledge: intelligence and wisdom. Homo sapiens: he who knows how to taste. Sagacious: he who knows how to smell. All of these things are vanishing under the weight of logic and grammar, dreary and insane when they deny themselves bodies.