Filozofski vestnik | Volume XXXVII | Number 2 | 2016 | 289-312
Sigi Jöttkandt*
Repetition and Inscription in Europe's Dream-Land
"Stainearth," "erasureland," "deletion on the ground" - these are some possible translations suggested by Dany Nobus for Lacan's neologism "Lituraterre."1 They highlight the element of erasure, (rature), the coating or smearing (enduit) contained in litura, a homonym of littera, from which the word literature derives. Where littera conveys the idea of writing, letters and the alphabet, that is, of "all sorts of written work, literature, culture and instruction" as Ernout and Meillet's Etymological Dictionary of the Latin Language indicates, liturarius is what "shows deletions." This also calls us homonymically back to another cousin of literature, litorarius, the Latin for coastline, borders, from which we get the English word littoral. A "stainearth" or lituraterre is a land that is nothing but its own constantly erasing borderline. It is the continual "landing" - as Lacan also puns with the word atterrir, in the sense of airplane landing - of a disembarking principle that manifests as a staining or flooding. The question 1 wish to consider is whether we can think of Europe's refugee crisis in terms of a lituraterre in this sense: a "writing-effect" tracing out an image of Europe's unconscious. "The edge of a hole in knowledge," Lacan writes, "isn't this what the letter outlines?"2
1n a recent collection of essays on the contemporary global crisis, Slavoj Žižek proposes that what we need is a Wiederholung of Europe. He explains, "through a critical engagement with the entire European tradition, one should repeat the 289 question, 'What is Europe?,' or, rather, 'What does it mean for us to be Europeans?,' and, in doing so, formulate a new vision."3 Žižek's call for a retrieval of Europe through repetition implies, perhaps counter-intuitively, that the Europe-
1	Dany Nobus, "Annotations to Lituraterre," Continental Philosophy Review 46 (2/2013),
p. 347.
2	Jacques Lacan, Lituraterre," trans. Dany Nobus, Continental Philosophy Review 46 (2/2013),
p. 329.
3	Slavoj Žižek, Against the Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbours, Allen Lane/Penguin Random House, London 2016, p. 13.
* School of the Arts and Media, UNSW
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an idea has been repressed. I say counter-intuitively because if post-war history is our guide, the idea of "Europe" has increasingly acted as a regulative Idea in Kant's sense: an "Idea" of reason that, while unknowable in itself, nevertheless presents as a moral duty - it is a principle of practical reason that Europe has appeared in the postwar period, carrying with it the injunction to act ethically. What would constitute the European ethical maxim? It would be to act as if Europe were a united entity. Acting according to Europe's regulative idea, a "European" would state, "I know very well that there is no such thing as a 'European,' that the inhabitants of this continent are massively and irreparably divided from one another by language, culture, customs and so forth. Nevertheless, by speaking from this impossible position as a 'European' I bring an inexistent 'Europe' into being."
Still, it would be a misreading to conclude that Žižek envisions "Europe" as a future entity, a "Europe-to-come" that, once lifted from its technocratic error, would come into being a second time as a genuinely democratic enterprise. Rather, given Žižek's insistence on the need for its repetition, Europe would be, to paraphrase Hegel, "a thing of the past."4 But this unquestionably does not mean that the idea of "Europe" is over and done with - as if all that one had to do to overcome our virulent Western-centrism is embrace one's global identity as part of an "international people," as part of a multitude. But neither would it imply that Europe is an older ideal, something we should try to aspire to by bringing back traditional values and cultural forms. As a "thing of the past," Europe carries only the injunction of memory. Remember me, says this "Europe," mimicking the ghost of old ^(ing Hamlet. "Adieu, adieu! Hamlet, remember me." What are we remembering when we remember, perhaps justifiably hesitatingly, to repeat the European tradition? And further, what form of memory will this entail?
Interestingly, in the volume of essays this discussion occurs in, the way "the European tradition" presents for Žižek is in the two figures of Edgar Allan Poe and Mary Shelley. Taking Shelley first, for Žižek, the scandal of Shelley's Frankenstein -the profound threat it poses to what he calls one of our Leftist "taboos" - lies in Shelley's decision to let the monster tell his own story. This would be the liberal attitude towards freedom of speech "at its most radical," he asserts, for it forces us up against the logical conclusion that even the worst of despots must be grant-
G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. i, trans. T. M. Knox, Clarendon, Oxford 2010, p. 11.
4
ed the same right to present himself as victim. "Are we [...] ready to affirm that Hitler was only an enemy because his story was not heard?"5 Rather than justifying or explaining the "inner meaning" of any act, Žižek proposes, we should judge other people and ourselves solely by what one does. For "the experience that we have of our lives from within [...] is fundamentally a lie," he asserts:
The move from the externality of an act to its "inner meaning," the narrative by means of which the agent interprets and justifies it, is a move towards a deceitful mask.6
For Žižek, then, this gesture of internalization is the truly "monstrous" thing in Frankenstein.
What is left unremarked, however, is how this move into interiorization is first advanced and then rejected in favour of another trope in Shelley's novel. This other trope, externalization, appears as a more ancient figure in the framing narrative that opens the accounts of Victor Frankenstein's and the creature's stories. Recall how Frankenstein begins with a number of letters addressed by a certain Captain R. Walton to his sister, Mrs Margaret Saville. In these, the first of a concatenating series of embedded narratives, Walton details his preparations for his voyage of discovery to the North Pole. This then leads into his account of meeting Victor Frankenstein, following which Frankenstein's embedded narrative takes over, enveloping in its turn the creature's own story that Žižek alludes to. It is in the first couple of letters we learn the origins of Walton's desire to reach the pole. It turns out that the North Pole expedition comes on the heels of discovering he is a poetic failure. "You are well acquainted with my failure and how heavily 1 bore the disappointment," he reminds his sister, before recalling how this failure turned him back to a prior desire, earlier than his wish to acquire a "niche" in the temple of poetry alongside Homer and Shakespeare. For the voyage of discovery, we learn, had been "the favourite dream of my early years" but these earlier visions of the pole had been superseded by the "effusions" of the poets. 1t is only after the collapse of the poetic dream that his thoughts were turned back to "the channel of their earlier bent."
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5	Žižek, p. 17.
6	Ibid., p. 18.
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To say that poetry offers the most powerful instance of the fiction of pure inferiority that Žižek rejects as the first lie is not a particularly original statement. But note how, in Shelley, poetic desire comes explicitly as a secondary formation, built on top of the older trope of discovery. Moreover, it is expressly with the breakdown and rejection of this poetic "compensation," with its various associations with "written work, literature, culture and instruction" that the older trope aligns. For although a passionate reader, as Walton describes himself, he comments how his "education was neglected." He is "more illiterate than many schoolboys of fifteen." His sole education, as he reminds his sister, consisted of his voracious reading of his Uncle Thomas's library, which contained nothing but "the history of all the voyages made for purposes of discovery."7 Older and more powerful than the centrifugal operation of literary interiority is a centripetal pull that exerts itself on the Shelleyan subject, emerging as an externalizing force that "conquer[s] all fear of danger or death."
First published just a year before Shelley's Frankenstein, Hegel's The Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences in Outline (1817), traces a similar overturning of interiorization by a principle of exteriorization. We read how, for Hegel, the Idea appears at a moment when the world is no longer available to experience. The Idea emerges in concert with the collapse of experiential knowledge founded on the interiorizing recollection (Erinnerung) of sense perceptions. For with thought, Hegel asserts, we are no longer dealing with a world outside. The Idea, as he explains, "is not to be taken as an idea of something or other"; "it has no existence for starting-point"8. Freed from any objective content, the Idea, as thought's own self-representation, takes itself as its object, thus liberating itself from that world in the process. As Hegel goes on to put it in Part Three of the Encyclopedia, "the last negation of immediacy has implicitly required that the
One might recall in the reference to "Uncle Thomas" an echo of Saint Thomas of Aquinas whose famous rejection of literature Lacan also references in his essay "Litturaterre": "Sicut palea," Aquinas is reported as saying to his disciple Reginald of Piperno when asked why he stopped writing: "everything I have written up to now seems like straw compared to what has been revealed to me." Lacan's translation of the Latin is even stronger than Weisheipl's - comme du fummier, "like manure."
G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel's Logic, Part One of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. William Wallace and foreword J. N. Findlay, Clarendon, Oxford 1991, §213, p. 274.
intelligence shall itself determine its content. Thus thought, as free notion, is now also free in point of content.^"9
What interests is the role of memory in this "path to intelligence." In the Encyclopedia, Hegel explains how representation entails the conjuring back up of images derived from experience. This is the first step towards some latent concept or Ideal principle even as it remains tied to the data of intuition. But in distinction to representation, thought deals not with images but with signs, Hegel explains. It thus entails another form of memory. We think in names, Hegel reminds us, and these have no immediate connection to what it describes: the sign "is the pyramid into which a foreign soul has been conveyed, and where it is conserved."10 To remember the names of things is thus very different from the act of recall performed by the creative imagination, which deals with images derived from intuition. This other form of memory - called Gedächtnis or memorization - has rather "to do with an object which is the product of intelligence itself" Hegel explains, using the metaphor of a closed book encrypted within the mind to figure this: "Such a without-book," he writes, "remains locked up in the within-book of intelligence, and is, within intelligence, only its outward and existing side."11
While we tend to think of reproductive memory as the higher, more intellectual activity, as for example, in the comparison Hegel makes between knowing something off by heart versus merely by rote, it turns out in Hegel's account that it is precisely "the torture of [...] idiotic stuff," of memorization's "shallow, silly, and utterly accidental links" that paves the way to the Idea. This is because memorization relies on the complete emptying out of signification whose basis as he observed earlier is the sensible world. Indeed, memorization is the opposite of signification, Hegel reminds us, "A composition is [...] not thoroughly conned by rote, until one attaches no meaning to the words. [...]. [I]n this case, the mind is estranged in itself, and its action is like machinery." This realization of mind's own self-estrangement is the appearance of thought itself as "free notion," intelligence that is "aware that it is determinative of the content." From
Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy Of Mind: Part Three of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. A.V. Miller and William Wallace, rev. Michael Inwood, Clarendon, Oxford
1971, §468.
Ibid., §458. Ibid., §462.
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9
10
294
here, mind obtains its first Idea, Life, from whose immediacy an external world once more stretches itself out before the subject.12
If initially this looks like a simple reversal - a seamless back-and-forth movement between the sensible world's inscription on the mind, that world's erasure by thought and the subsequent reinstatement of the world through the Idea -one should remember Hegel's caveat that what thought finds in its "voyage of discovery," as it were, is always itself: "As will, the mind is aware that it is the author of its own conclusions," maintains Hegel.13 There is thus a certain circularity in the process by which thinking emerges as Paul de Man, among others, has pointed out: "the subject of philosophy is a reconstruction a posteriori," he claims, a positing that "pretends to verify its legitimacy in the sequential unfolding of its future until it reaches the point of self-recognition."14 Hegel puts it even more clearly:
Intelligence finds itself determined: this is its apparent aspect from which in its immediacy it starts. But as knowledge, intelligence consists in treating what is found as its own. Its activity has to do with the empty form - the pretense of finding reason: and its aim is to realize its concept or to be reason actual, along with which the content is realized as rational. This activity is cognition.15
What Hegel calls "the path of intelligence" surreptitiously traces the loop of thought back to itself, whose further implication is that, rather than a secondary formation built upon experience, thought must in fact be primary. The sensible world, the basis for the experience which thought subsequently negates, turns out to be the posterior moment, a secondary stage upon which consciousness plays out an Hegelian version of Fort/Da. Experience must be therefore a later memory, an Erinnerung taped over memorization's originary, idiotic Gedächtnis.
The reference to Freud gives a hint as to where we have encountered a similar instance of a retroactive positing of an external world. I refer of course to Freud's own narrative of the origins of thinking in his paper, "Formulations on the Two
Hegel, Hegel's Logic, §216, pp. 279-80.
Op. cit., §469.
Paul de Man, "Hegel on the Sublime," Aesthetic Ideology, ed. and intro. Andrzej Warminski, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1996, p. 117.
Op. cit., §445.
12
14
Principles of Mental Functioning" (1911) and its further elaboration in his 1925 paper, "Negation."16 In the latter, Freud explains that what we understand as the objectivity of the world is in fact a secondary phenomenon. One's first apprehension is of the unity of the self and the outside world, and the original division - our earliest "judgement" as Freud calls it - is not between the subjective and objective but between what is pleasurable and unpleasurable. Everything that is good "is" the pleasure-ego, and everything that is bad "is" what is alien to it. But as Freud goes on to explain, whereas initially all presentations of pleasurable sensations were immediately derived from reality, a bump soon appears on the road of the "path of intelligence":
Experience has shown the subject that it is not only important whether a thing (an object of satisfaction for him) possesses the "good" attribute and so deserves to be taken into his ego, but also whether it is there in the external world, so that he can get hold of it whenever he needs it.17
Thus it is only when the object of satisfaction absents itself that the division between inside and outside becomes necessary. Thought originally provisions the infant with the missing object of satisfaction through a mental presentation. However, when this fantasmatic form of satisfaction fails to relieve the tension, the idea of an inside and outside is introduced:
[...] originally the mere existence of a presentation was a guarantee of the reality of what was presented. The antithesis between subjective and objective does not exist from the first. It only comes into being from the fact that thinking possesses the capacity to bring before the mind once more something that has once been perceived, by reproducing it as a presentation without the external object having still to be there.18	295
Sigmund Freud, "Formulations On The Two Principles Of Mental Functioning" (1911), The Standard Edition, Vol. 12 (1911-1913): the case of Schreber, Papers on Technique and other works, trans. James Strachey, The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis,
London, 1958, pp. 218-226; Freud, "Negation" (1925), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 14 (1923-1925): the Ego and the Id and other works, trans. James Strachey, The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, London 1961, pp. 235-239. Freud, "Negation," p. 237. Ibid., p. 237.
16
17
Freud's name for this inside-outside metaphor is the "reality principle," a conception of "the real circumstances in the external world."19 But notably, however, this concept of the "real circumstances" remains in the service of the first division or "judgement." The division between inside and outside, that is, is a secondary formation that is built over the earlier division between pleasure and unpleasure. Freud is quite explicit on this last point. Consequently, to the extent that the psychical apparatus now has a concept of interior and exterior, the original partition, with its first, "hallucinatory" mode of presentation, still remains in place. We continue to respond to our needs in a profoundly illusory manner. What has changed is simply that whereas our "thoughts" initially presented the object of satisfaction immediately, in the second case it is through a detour into "reality" that this presentation arrives: "thinking" now seeks to alter something in the external world rather than in its own domain. As a result, we must understand "reality" as the continuation of the pleasure principle by other means, a presentation by thought that is equally as hallucinatory as the first except that this time it is temporarily delayed, achieving its object by way of the roundabout path that is the external world. As Freud explains, "The first and immediate aim, therefore, of reality-testing is, not to find an object in real perception which corresponds to the one presented, but to refind such an object, to convince oneself that it is still there."20
In both Hegel's and Freud's accounts, then, the dialectic of internal and external emerges from forgetting that one of the two alternating poles is in a sense "prior." In Hegel, the Idea forgets that its source lies in an originary externali-zation of the mind in a senseless repetition, the voiding of signification that is memorization. The thinking subject sets out on a voyage of discovery, but the world of experience and meaning it appears to "find" is secretly self-engineered, 296 secured as it is by the first Idea. And in Freud, the lost object of satisfaction reappears in the "real circumstances" of the external world, but this apparently "objective" world is built on top of and in support of an older partition (pleasure and unpleasure). The missing object we find "outside" ourselves is in fact "re-found": placed there in advance by a pleasure-seeking subject that recognizes no boundary other than the fundamental divide separating pleasure from un-pleasure. In both cases, what we come to perceive as our seemingly "natural,"
19	Freud, "Formulations On The Two Principles Of Mental Functioning" (1911), p. 219.
20	Op. cit., p. 237.
primary division of inside and outside, of subjective and objective, is really a secondary effect. The apparent opposition of interiority and exteriority would be a retroactive projection whose alternating play obscures the fact that one of the poles secretly does double duty: as simultaneously one side of the opposition, and as the repressed origin of the opposition itself.
Let us turn now to the second figure of the "European tradition" mentioned in Žižek's book: Edgar Allan Poe. In Žižek's account, Poe's figure of the maelstrom is enlisted to illustrate the dangerous paradox of European cultural exceptional-ism. The reference occurs in his discussion of how nations such as France have sought to safeguard their cultural productions from destruction by the forces of the global market by exempting them from its free market rules. But Žižek immediately pinpoints the problem with this strategy. He compares the French policy of subsidising their national cinema to the narrator in Poe's short story, "Descent into the Maelstrom" who, observing that large spherical objects go down first, manages to save himself by holding onto a smaller, oblong shape that keeps him afloat until he is rescued. If French subsidies potentially slow down and perhaps save the smaller French film industry, this misses the point for Žižek, who notes how the true object in danger today is not the independent film industry (nor any other national forms of cultural production). Rather, it is experience itself that is under threat insofar as it has become an object of exchange. He writes,
In today's capitalism, culture is no longer just an exception, a kind of fragile superstructure rising above the "real" economic infrastructure, but, more and more, a central ingredient of our mainstream "real" economy. [...]. The defining feature of "postmodern" capitalism is the direct commodification of our experience itself.21	297
In the global economy, life itself has become commodified as we increasingly participate in it through the mediation of manufactured and packaged "experiences." As Žižek puts it, "I buy my bodily fitness by way of visiting fitness clubs; I buy my spiritual enlightenment by way of enrolling in courses of transcendental meditation; I buy the satisfactory self-experience of myself as ecologically
21 Žižek, p. 15.
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aware by purchasing only organic fruit; and so on."22 Thus the European cultural subsidies miss their aim; in the vortex that is what Bernard Stiegler calls the "hyper-industrial" capitalist economy, it is the very distinction between life and its representation that would be in question.23 To try to save one small "cylindrical" piece of national cinema diverts attention from the thorough-going erasure of the border marking off the real and the imaginary tout court. To use an image of Tom Cohen's from his own discussion of Poe's short story, it is as if, today, Poe's maelstrom has been sliced off at the top, unleashing a figure that, as he puts it "scatters the ability to counter a unitary notion of entropy as that of a closed system with a storm of multiplying vortices."24
It seems that in this vorticidal streaming of experience, all thought, in Hegel's sense is foreclosed. This is in fact Stiegler's critique of what he calls today's "herd-society," the hypermassification emergent from contemporary cognitive technologies. For Stiegler, we suffer today not from too much narcissism as is often thought, but from a catastrophic destruction of individual and collective narcissism, to the extent that primary narcissism's anchoring to a mark or trait guarantees what he calls one's "singularity."25 But it is precisely this "liquidation of the exception" - with its concomitant affect of melancholia which, as Robert Sinnerbrink has so beautifully shown, emerges as the dominant "resonant mood expressing contemporary cultural-historical anxieties"26 - that is at stake when experience becomes commodified through the thorough-going capture of our libidinal energies.27 Stiegler is thus just as dismissive as Žižek of the French strategy of "cultural exception" which for him is merely the "sad
Ibid., p. 16.
Bernard Stiegler, "Suffocated Desire, Or How the Cultural Industry Destroys the Individual:
Contribution to a Theory Of Mass Consumption," trans. Johann Rossouw, Parrhesia 13 (2011), p. 54.
Tom Cohen, "Anthropos Inc. and the Politics of Delayed Extinction - Notes on the Current Acceleration," unpublished paper, draft for Sloterdijk/Stiegler conference, available https://www.academia.edu/26296529/Tom_Cohen_Anthropos_Inc._and_the_Politics_of_ Delayed_Extinction_Draft_for_Sloterdijk_Stiegler_Conference_. Op. cit., pp. 59-60.
Robert Sinnerbrink, "Planet Melancholia: Romanticism, Mood, and Cinematic Ethics," Filozofski vestnik 37.2, International edition (2016), pp. 95-113.
This echoes Jacques Lacan's observation in Television, that capitalism dispenses with sex, requiring, as Juliet Flower MacCannell puts it, "a new relation to the object of satisfaction." See Juliet Flower MacCannell, "Refashioning Jouissance for the Age of the Imaginary," Filozofski vestnik 37.2, International edition (2016), pp. 167-199.
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25
26
disguise" that veils the true depth of the "misery" of our libidinal situation, a condition diagnosed as a specifically political disarray.28
For both of these thinkers, the conceit of the "cultural exception" only augurs the all-embracing capture by the pleasure principle as the hallucinatory presentation of the real. The hyper-industrial "experience" economy would simply be the clearest demonstration of the fantasmatic underpinning of the "reality principle," which a careful reading of Freud has shown it always to have been. Thus, rather than the maelstrom, another image from Poe better illustrates the organizing logic of our "New Age of the Imaginary" as Juliet Flower MacCannell names it, this time from his 1844 poem, "Dream-Land."29 Here Poe's narrator recounts his visit to a Northern land, which appears a sort of half-way place between life and death. Poe calls it a "wild weird clime that lieth, sublime/Out of SPACE - Out of TIME." What Poe names as the "ultimate dim Thule -" is a site where the oppositions that formerly oriented us on Earth such as land and sea, fire and water have no purchase. From this alien and blank site, Poe heralds the rule of another principle that would retire the old Hegelian Idea in favor of another authorizing function, an "Eidolon" that "On a black throne reigns upright."
In ancient history, Thule was the traditional name of a place beyond the borders of the known world. It was supposed to have been discovered by Pytheas of Massi-lia on his famed voyage around Northwestern Europe in 325 BC and modern geographers have identified it as, possibly, Iceland, Greenland or indeed, most commonly, Norway. Notably, in the accounts of Pytheas' journey that have come down to us, Thule appears as a place where the four elements mixed freely together. The Greek geographer Strabo records Pytheas' description of Thule as a place where "there was neither earth, sea, nor sky, but a compound of all the three, resembling what he calls pulmo marinus."30 A liminal state between the elements, Thule was thought to be composed of a sort of sea sponge enveloping the Earth's furthest northern realm, whose denaturing figures are described by Poe as,
28	Stiegler, p. 60.
29	The poem can be found here: www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/ 48631.
30	"Introduction," The Edinburgh gazetteer: or Geographical dictionary, Vol 1, Longman & Co., London 1827, p. xxii.
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Mountains toppling evermore Into seas without a shore; Seas that restlessly aspire, Surging, unto skies of fire;
In Strabo's account we learn that Pytheas arrived at the moment of the midday sun. However Poe's narrator evidently wanders into Thule during mid-winter, for Poe's Thule is ruled by "an Eidolon, named NIGHT." It thus suggests a place on earth where God's first command, "Let there be light," was not quite or, perhaps, not properly heard. In the dim northern reaches of the globe, the logos failed to fully attach to its object, freezing the originary divine positing power of this command that, turning light into the privileged object of predication, enables the sense of sight to become the first metaphor of mind. Effacing a certain history of Western metaphysics founded on the Idea, whose etymology traces back to idein, to see, Poe's Thule renders this speculative history still-born - or perhaps this metaphor itself is eviscerated in Thule for the very limit separating life from death, what Hegel calls life's "dialectic of corporeity,"31 evidently also never took place. Inhabited by strange creatures figures occupying in-between states, in Thule's swamps, Poe's traveler "meets, aghast"
Sheeted Memories of the Past -Shrouded forms that start and sigh As they pass the wanderer by -White-robed forms of friends long given, In agony, to the Earth - and Heaven.
As a forerunner of today's "experience economy," Thule's anabiotic environ-300 ment deflects Geneticist tropes, flattening and emptying out the horizon beneath which a certain Idea of Life has unfolded. It should not surprise, then, that it is precisely to these "everlasting ices of the north" that Frankenstein's creature and his maker retreat in their to-the-death struggle over who is to define Life, and this is not simply because these realms have long been associated with a certain natural sublime - as a site where Reason falters in its perceptual apprehension of an Outside. What is at issue, rather, is how the Polar region forces to the surface something ordinarily unremarked on in the act of signifi-
Hegel's Logic, §216.
cation. It is Kant himself who reminds us in his Reflections on Metaphysics how the (magnetic) North and South Poles are the sole places on Earth where, as he puts it, one must "ask where to look for the east" - the Pole names the location where we no longer have any spatial orientation, because we are standing on the very point that makes such orientation possible. It is no coincidence that Kant mentions this in the context of linguistic signification - of, precisely, the limit of reason and of transcendental philosophy tout court. He writes,
There cannot be any question of transcendental philosophy to which the answer would be unknown to us. For if the predicate is not determined by the subject it means that the question in itself is nothing, because the predicate in this case has no meaning at all, being neither affirmative nor its contrary opposite. Just like when, being at the pole, I ask where to look for the east.32
While for Kant this is proof of transcendental philosophy's power, namely, Reason is defined by the fact that it contains in itself the answers it seeks, this nevertheless raises the interesting question of a site on Earth where the Idea failed to gain purchase. Not only is the East the direction of sunrise, it is also the intuition of divine appearing, thus to lose this orientation is to be privated from a system of signification founded on the central heliotropic metaphor. If one can talk of "experience" at the Pole, it is in the sense of an encounter without a world, of a predicate without a subject.
An instructive prototype of the kind of political model implied by the reign of the Eidolon is found in the Seastead Institute. Comprised of a number of techno-lib-ertarians centred around Milton Friedman's grandson, Patri Friedman, and with start-up funding by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel, this group proposes a new way of solving the question of collectivity, which - being good libertarians - they trope as fundamentally the problem of government, which is to say, of arranging and managing the oikos. Political change, they maintain, is crippled today by excessively high barriers to entry - largely as a result of the State's accompanying historical monopoly of force over its geographical territo-
32 Immanuel Kant, "Reflexionen zur Metaphysik," in: Gesammelte Schriften, Academie-Ausgabe, Berlin, 1908, vol. XVIII, Reflexion 4944, 4945, cited in Helmut Mueller-Sievers, "Tidings of the Earth: Towards a History of Romantic Erdkunde," in Re-reading Romanticism, ed. Martha B. Helfer, Rodopi, Amsterdam 2000, p. 57.
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ry. Thus the "Seasteading" community proposes to move (select) people off the land area of the Earth to form mobile, floating platformed communities out in the ocean. Their innovation lies in how this dispenses with any conception of fixed territory, privileging instead the freedom by which each unit may engage or disengage with other platforms. Friedman accordingly envisions the following hypothetical situation. Imagine, he says,
a platform city where the government has become too repressive or inefficient. A single platform decides to disengage and anchor a mile away, forming a new government. More follow. Eventually, the entire city may have relocated to the new position, with exactly the same set of platforms, but an entirely new government.33
A new fable for our time, the Seasteading vision reads as a kind of socio-political version of Frankenstein's monster: the dream of a purely technical solution to the problem of community and its political organization. Friedman's literally utopic fantasy of societies dynamically creating themselves on the fly excludes the concept of an All in the sense of a collectivity greater than the sum of its parts. In the Seasteading vision, there would only be individual units coming together and moving apart like cells in a petri dish outside of history's space and time, joined solely by momentary alignments of individual preferences. The whole would be, like Frankenstein's monster, a disarticulated collection of parts, a literal Leviathan of the seas. Moreover, the groupings that form from such alliances implies a relation of all gain, for if loss is perceived, all one need do is rotate one's platform away. As a first step, perhaps, towards what Tom Cohen perceives as today's larger "species-split"34 that would eventually see the Silicon Valley elites and their billionaire friends move off the Earth altogether, the Seasteaders' conception of "dynamic geography" relies on a specific property of the ocean - its friction-free 302 state - to create "free societies" of mobile micronations.
We can leave aside discussion of the multiple, internal contradictions of the Seasteading project for another time. What interests me here is how this vision
Patri Friedman, "Dynamic Geography: A Blueprint for Efficient Government," https:// web.archive.org/web/2oiii226i5375i/http://seasteading.org/seastead.org/new_pages/ dynamic_geography.html
See Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook, "VORTICES--Note on 'Critical Climate Change'", unpublished paper (2oi6). http://www.academia.edu/23864i67/VORTICES--Note_on_ Critical_Climate_Change_2oi6_ (Accessed i November, 2oi6).
rests explicitly on the ocean's resistance to our ability to make marks on it. It thus excludes the very property that for Hegel inaugurated the appearance of the Idea. One recalls how the Idea in Hegel emerges from the externalization of mind in the act of memory. Unlike recollection, memorization is a mechanical activity, the faculty of conning by rote a series of words, as Hegel put it.35 However, as de Man notes, such conning by rote also implies a mnemonic marking. "From the moment we memorize" he comments, "we cannot do without such a trace, be it as a knot in our handkerchief, a shopping list, a table of multiplication, a psalm-odized singsong or plain chant, or any other memorandum."36 In effect, what this means is that, as the product of memorization, the Idea is the sole occasion when reason leaves a material trace on the world, as de Man also observes.37
Out in the ocean, however, it makes no sense to memorize the peaks and valleys of one's watery surroundings. One cannot notate liquid to come back to it later. The ocean-city would thus literally be a site where no rational Ideas are possible, an "erasureland" that would dispense entirely with thought's dialectic of inside and outside. This is indeed precisely its value, according to Friedman, for the beauty of these "Ephemerisles," as the Seasteaders see it, is the way it enables one to literally turn one's back on a problem, voting with one's feet, as it were, or rather rudders to disembark from the platforms of any larger clusters that may have become too sclerotic ("inefficient" is Friedman's term for it). As the latter puts it, "Dynamic geography moves power downwards towards the smallest separable unit." Fluid, circulatory, untethered to any central One, the political unit emerges outside existing, "static" models as an ongoing process, redistributing power to what moves. From this perspective, there is a sense in which today's refugees share something in common with the Seasteading impulse. Even if one is a voluntary decision born from elite privilege and the other compelled by conditions that make it impossible to remain, both nonetheless entail an act of self-removal, a turning one's back on an existing scene of governing and of the older, "statist" borders that the latter implies. However there is also a fundamental difference between these two "turns" that reaches farther than the obviously grotesque miscategorization of the break-away billionaire class with people in flight for their lives, as Poe will shortly help us to see.
303
35	Hegel's Philosophy Of Mind, §463.
36	De Man, p. 109.
37	Ibid., p. 108.
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But first, let us observe how in one of his essays, Žižek mentions a peculiar feature of the refugee crisis. He notes how many of the refugees arriving in Southern Europe wish to make their way north and live in the Scandinavian countries. Žižek offers this northern dream as the paradox of utopia, the way that "precisely when people find themselves in poverty, distress and danger, [...] one would expect that they would be satisfied by a minimum of safety and well-being." But the opposite occurs: "the absolute utopia explodes," he observes, "the refugees want to have their cake and eat it."
They basically expect to get the best of the Western welfare state while retaining their specific way of life, which is in some of its key features incompatible with the ideological foundations of the Western welfare state. Germany likes to emphasize the need to integrate the refugees culturally and socially; however - another taboo to be broken - how many of them really want to be integrated? What if the obstacle to integration is not only Western racism?38
For Žižek, the "hard lesson" for the refugees is that "'there is no Norway', even in Norway."39
But if Norway fails to "exist," in the sense of an ideal, privileged "Europe" -namely, the Idea of a place of democratic freedoms, shared wealth, a gentle, tolerant, just society and so forth - 1 would be hesitant to follow Žižek in saying that "instead of chasing [their dreams] in reality, they should focus on changing reality." For this would presume one knows what "reality" is. Hasn't Freud's own "hard lesson" in fact cautioned us against this? Recall how in the wake of the absence of the object of satisfaction, the immediate presentation by the pleasure principle gives way to a "conception of the real circumstances in the external world." Our previously hallucinatory presentation of the object in thought transforms into an attempt "to make a real alteration" in these circumstances.40 However as we saw earlier, the thinking conducted by the reality principle is just as illusory as that of the pleasure principle. Rather than overcoming the pleasure principle, the reality principle continues and maintains it. As Freud puts it,
38	Žižek 2016, p. 55.
39	Ibid., p. 52.
40	Freud, Two Principles, p. 218.
...the substitution of the reality principle for the pleasure principle implies no deposing of the pleasure principle, but only a safeguarding of it. A momentary pleasure, uncertain in its results, is given up, but only in order to gain along the new path an assured pleasure at a later time.41
Accordingly, to explain to the refugee communities that "Norway does not exist," and that they should try to change reality instead is thus another, only slightly more palatable way of expressing what the West, in both its "poetic" words and its external acts, constantly tell those who seek refuge on its shores: "you must wait." This is, moreover, the traditional advice given by all religions as apparently the one thing they all seem to be able to agree on. Freud remarks,
[R]eligions have been able to effect absolute renunciation of pleasure in this life by means of the promise of compensation in a future existence; but they have not by this means achieved a conquest of the pleasure principle.42
So at this point one must ask, if the idea of making an alteration in reality is thus equally as fantasmatic a solution as the refugees' dream of Norway, should we conclude there is only the rule of the Eidolon today? What if all that remains of "the political" is the empty gesture of the inward turn - a sort of global "Brexiting" of all intersubjective relations that, in mimicking the churn of the maelstrom, at best slows down our capture by the pleasure principle or, at worst, initiates an unstoppable chain reaction that cannibalizes every last limit, eviscerating all thought. What does one do with an interiorization gone into overdrive? To answer, one must question why, in Žižek's example, it should be cinema that is offered up as the object par excellence of the "cultural exception" whose function is to slow down the vortex of pure experience. For from one perspective, cinema figures as the Ur-site of the Eidolon whose rule appears 305 paramount today. But is there also a sense in which cinema might disable this rule, offering with its own circular turns something other than Stiegler's "sad disguise" that simply veils the misery of our condition? Here cinema's link with the dream, remarked on long ago by Maxim Gorky, comes into the foreground.
41	Ibid., p. 223.
42	Ibid.
Both the dream and cinema present an experience that has no correlate in "reality," proffering a subjective "experience" removed from any limit imposed by an objective world. Each suggests an "experience," that is, without a world in which to "have" it, if by world we understand with Kant and Hegel a totality governed by the laws of necessity, contingency, and its limitation by time and space. 1n this, it also shares something with trauma which, as Cathy Caruth and others have commented, similarly presents as a paradoxical form of "unclaimed experience," of something that exceeds subjectivization and therefore historici-zation.43 1t was trauma, in the form of the repeating dreams of returned soldiers, that led Freud to postulate the existence of something beyond the reign of the pleasure principle. 1n the so-called war neuroses, with their seeming resistance to the fundamental action of the dream as wish fulfilment, Freud was brought to the idea of a compulsion to repeat.
1n his 1920 essay, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," Freud spells out a strange story speculating about the origin of consciousness. Using the figure of the most minimal living substance - "undifferentiated vesicle of a substance that is susceptible to stimulation" - Freud hypothesizes that the constant barrage of stimulation must result in a protective function, some sort of crust or indeed "inorganic" matter that forms a membrane resistant to stimuli from the outside but nevertheless allows stimuli from the inside to traverse it. This permeable crust, as the "origin" of consciousness, enables the act of projection. When internal stimuli become excessive and, hence, unpleasurable, they can be thrown outward, in this way forming the original judgment or division of the subject and world. But Freud hypothesizes that in certain cases, this "crust" fails in its protective function. Excessive stimuli force their way in without the defence offered by this primitive "consciousness" in a manner that could be analogized 306 with trauma - in such cases, consciousness is taken wholly unaware and unprepared. From here, Freud hypothesizes that the compulsion to repeat may be the organism's attempt to build a level of protective anxiety around the excessive stimuli which broke through, that is, to begin to anticipate the encounter, and in this way re-begin the process of its subjectivization.
43 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 2010.
Thus Freud makes the intriguing suggestion that our abstract idea of time may constitute "another way of providing a shield against stimuli."44 Time, along with its accompanying concepts of finitude or death, would be defensive concepts, instituted by and in the service of the Perceptual-Consciousness system although holding no sway in the Unconscious. "As a result of certain psycho-analytic discoveries," he writes,
we are to-day in a position to embark on a discussion of the Kantian theorem that time and space are "necessary forms of thought." We have learnt that unconscious mental processes are in themselves "timeless." This means in the first place that they are not ordered temporally, that time does not change them in any way and that the idea of time cannot be applied to them.45
Indeed, he speculates, the notion of death as the necessity of all living things may be a careless assumption, whose power over us may have been "strengthened in our thought by the writing of our poets." Perhaps we have adopted the belief, he writes, "because there is some comfort in it."
If we are to die ourselves, and first to lose in death those who are dearest to us, it is easier to submit to a remorseless law of nature, to the sublime, than to a chance which might perhaps have been escaped.46
From this point of view, "the poets" offer merely the muted solace of mourning in the face of "a remorseless law of nature." Cinema, on the other hand, initiates a fundamental disruption of thought and, potentially, a re-working of the "natural" laws governing the Idea of Life. To understand this, one should note how in his Cinema books, Gilles Deleuze reminds us how the camera is not limited to the constraints of the Perceptual-Consciousness system or, in his Bergsoni-an phrasing, the sensory-motor scheme.47 Arising from a regime of sight that is mechanical in nature, cinema produces images that, non-human in their origin,
Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 18: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and other
works (1920-1922), The Hogarth Press and the Institute for Psycho-Analysis, London 1955, p. 28.
Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., p. 45.
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1989.
307
44
45
46
need no longer to be organized through the rules governing perception and experience. In montage, cinema presents images that are "irrational" or "incommensurable" with experiential time. In this sense, their formal structure is comparable to trauma, as that which lies beyond the reign of the pleasure principle and its wish-fulfilment dream.
A "new relation," as Deleuze puts it, is therefore established between thought and sight in cinematic representation, which is no longer tied to any phenome-nality initiated by divine positing through which the Idea of Life has traditionally appeared. Cinema, as Jon Roffe explains, produces problematic objects, in Kant's sense of an object "outside" experience that can only be represented without being able to be "directly determined."48 Crucially, the problematic object accordingly does away with the inside-outside metaphor that governed experience until now. The example Deleuze offers from cinema is the "living problem" that is Pasolini's film Teorema. Deleuze remarks how the film's leitmotif of "a question to which I cannot reply" puts into relief something that remains unthought by Reason.49 In Theorema, Pasolini invokes a question that is rationally posed but whose answer is "unknown" to any transcendental philosophy that would found itself upon the exception, whether cultural or otherwise. In this way he poses a challenge to Kant's own fundamental theorem of transcendental philosophy as what contains all its answers within itself. Deleuze calls the problematic Idea the "unthought" of Reason but a more precise formulation would be the thinking of the not-all, of what Lacan names the pas-tout. The logic of the pas-tout implies a being or jouissance that is not fully submitted to the signifier's Law whose first instituting cut carved out the contours of an inside and an outside "world." With this posing of a rational question to which there is no answer, the carefully paved path to intelligence curves back around 308 itself, taking away "all its interiority to excavate an outside in it, an irreducible reverse-side, which consumes its substance," as Deleuze beautifully expresses it.50 Such indeterminacy of the object, he continues in Difference and Repetition, is "a perfectly positive, objective structure which acts as a focus or horizon
48	Jon Roffe, "Notes on a Deleuzian Theory of Melancholia," Crisis & Critique 3 (2/2016), p. 157.
49	Op. cit. p. 175.
50
Op. cit., Deleuze, Cinema 2, The Time-Image, p. 175.
within perception."51 And as such, it puts into play another way of rationalizing experience.
We saw how the Idea sought to bridge the distance between the mind and a world that thinking initiated, a shaky construction that has required a long history of aesthetics to help buttress it in place. Yet to the extent that all Ideas are, as Kant reminds us, "essentially problematic," they also inscribe "a dimension of objectivity as such" which is occupied, Deleuze says, by every subjective act.52 Representable only in problematic form, the Idea wraps itself around itself like a Klein bottle or Möbius strip - or, indeed, as a concatenating series of embedded narratives, a "without-book locked up in the within-book of intelligence" in Hegel's terms - referencing a secret that a certain rationality has always sought to cover up, namely, the irreducible "reverse-sidedness" in the relation (if one can still call it that) of mind and world, and subject and object.
Now, in his Pasolini example, Deleuze maintains that with this recognition of a rational problem to which, citing Kant, "there is no solution,"53 thought's inte-riority becomes overtaken by the exteriority of a "belief," even if this is a belief that has been evacuated from all religious content and given back to "rigorous thought." However Poe will theorize this understanding through an image that dispenses with the fundamental analogy between poetic and divine creation that has persisted in the Idea until now. Non-coincidentally, this takes the form of a memory, but of a very unusual kind:
By each spot the most unholy -
In each nook most melancholy, -
There the traveller meets, aghast,
Sheeted Memories of the Past -	309
A sheeted memory facilitates a cover-up, a hole in memory. It conjures the memory of a ghost, which is in fact no "memory" at all if memory entails the recollection of an experience that occurred in space and time. A sheeted memory proposes to recall what never "took place," presenting as a spectral intervention in
51	Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, Continuum, London 2001, p. 169.
52	Ibid., p. 169.
53	Ibid., p. 168.
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the order of time instituted by the Perceptual-Conscious system. Furthermore, with his figure of a blank memory/memory of a blank, Poe irreversibly displaces the ocularcentric model through which the Idea has been traditionally fed. If, in Shelley, the moment of life emerges as the event whereby an eye opens ("by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open"), this light metaphor comes to operate as the inaugurating figure for the living being's cognitive system. Accordingly, for Frankenstein's creature, the light of reason figures as the "almost imperceptible chink through which the eye could just penetrate," giving him access to the "visible, whitewashed and clean" space in which his sensible and aesthetic education can begin. However, in Poe's "Dream-Land," its King forbids precisely the "uplifting of the fring'd lid," the opening of the eye: "And thus the sad Soul that here passes/Beholds it but through darkened glasses." The eye in Poe peers "through" a closed eyelid shuttered by darkened glasses, instituting a double blinding that becomes impossible to recover for any sort of speculative programme.
Indeed where sight is enlisted for metaphorical transfer in Thule, it is prosthet-ically as a glass eye or proto-camera eye - the eye not as illuminating bridge between self and world but as what shutters the senses from observing cinema's full-scale attack on a phenomenal order as the poetic mourning for a lost object. Concatenating a ghost memory around a memory of the Past in a way that invites comparison with how Deleuze characterizes the problematic Idea, Poe ineluctably inverts the order of time, inviting us to remember something or someone before it or they could be "conceived." Where have we encountered something like this before? When Freud, in his narrative of the path to intelligence stipulates that the inside-outside metaphor is founded on an earlier division between pleasure and unpleasure, he indicates that this original judgment is formed in order to reject unpleasure. Everything that "is" the subject is what is pleasurable, whereas unpleasure is originarily ejected as not belonging to it. This then gives us an image of an unpleasure that never had any kind of subject attached to it, a sort of inverse of trauma in the outside world. An originari-ly unexperienced unpleasure circulates as a ghost, a "spectre in the screen" of
the pleasure principle, as Alan Cholodenko calls it,54 terrorizing its palliative care nurse, the reality principle. Regardless whether we call this, with Lacan,
54 Alan Cholodenko, "The Spectre in the Screen," Filozofski vestnik 37.2, International edition (2016), pp. 79-94.
jouissance, or with Freud, that which lies beyond the pleasure principle, such an originarily unexperienced unpleasure is associated with something "older" than the loss of the object.
It is older even than "the Past" itself, in the sense of an unpleasure that was never submitted to the regime of eidos that gave birth to our concept of time, the object of so many effusions by the "poets." Here Captain Walton's "illiteracy" comes to mind as a model for a problematic literature that would break with the established order of time and its existing hierarchies of sense. Cohen has noted that Poe has never successfully been accommodated to any of the standard histories of poetry.55 His poetry empties out inherited protocols of signification in favor of chance rhymes haunting the interior niches of the temple of Homer and Shakespeare, a poe-try forged from the ill-iterations of language, near unintelligible try-outs of sheer sound. An "auriginary" figure for another "European" tradition, Poe's writing has always jeopardized the regime of sight through which the Enlightenment has historically been given for, unlike the eye which can be closed, the ear is open to all comers. As Lacan says in Seminar 23, the ear is an organ that "cannot be stopped."56 Characterized by the repetitive "idiotic," "shallow," "silly" and "utterly accidental" links Hegel found so tortuous in the mechanical act of Gedächtnis, Poe's poetry in fact performs the self-estrangement of mind necessary for the formation of the Idea. It does so by conning us with the silliness of its rhyme that imprints itself indelibly on our mind, with the result that we cannot help but memorize it. The end-stopped rhymes of Poe's "Dream Land" thus interfere against one's conscious will, threading the symbolic fabric of the poem with a certain hallmark stroke around which the poem's rhyme scheme repeatedly turns: lonely, only, newly, chilly, lily, unholy, melancholy. The famous stutter or babble of idiotic rhyme that Poe's poetry produces when read aloud - the illegitimate "microverbal soundscript," as Cohen describes it - resolves in "Dream Land" around the word Thule which, by Poe's force of repetition, finds itself cornered into a pronunciation it would never ordinarily yield in everyday speech:
55	Tom Cohen, "Poe's Foot d'Or: ruinous rhyme and Nietzschean recurrence (sound)," Anti-Mimesis from Plato to Hitchcock, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1994, p.107.
56	Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book23: Joyce and the Sinthome (1975-1976), lesson of 18 November, 1975, p. 10
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By a route obscure and lonely, Haunted by ill angels only, Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT, On a black throne reigns upright, I have wandered home but newly From this ultimate dim Thule.
Poe's illegitimate rhyme, newly/Thul[i]e, recalls nothing so much as one of Mallarme's "weird foam-chimera-syllables," as Justin Clemens calls them:57 a syllable that appears and vanishes at once, brought into being from the sheer power of repetition itself. An articulation of a writing that is simultaneously a self-erasure, Poe's surplus syllable gives the fundamental lie to the representational illusion, even as it produces ex nihilo a tiny, new piece of linguistic territory - a "real atom" as Clemens, citing Badiou explains - from which a new Idea might emerge.
So in closing, a question: can one read the extraordinary images of a humanity in flight Northwards as the form of repetition from which the "new vision" of Europe that Žižek's envisages could emerge? If "Europe" has always been a screen memory, the dream of the pleasure principle on its inimitable path back towards death, perhaps we can see in the smearing of Europe's boundaries in the refugee crisis the Lituraterre of a writing that dispenses both with the exceptional regime of the poets and its liquidation today in the regime of the Eidolon, along with its accompanying evacuation of thought in the catastrophic loss of world? Can we see in this unprecedented Northern "landing," a "pas-tout" in the sense of an "all afoot" advance guard of what Cohen has been predicting for some time now as the "coming wars of reincription"? Out of the unsuspected forms 312 now emerging from the melting regions of the far North, one questions if a new polar-tickle Idea of Life might be close at hand?
57 Justin Clemens, "Syllable as Syntax: Stephane Mallarme's Un Coup de des," Filozofski vestnik 37.2, International edition (2016), pp. 131-149.