Stutter Stutter

Silverman’s ending to World Spectators is phenomenal, a call to beauty, a call to looking in the most care-ful, care-ing way possible. I got a little teary-eyed reading this while getting a bit grisée from the sun and Côtes du Rhone. I quote at length, but I feel it’s worth reading the last few pages of the book in their (almost) entirety. If you’re feeling lazy, just skip down to “Singing the Song of Beauty.”

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[Question/note to self/to those who read the whole thing: Can’t help but be struck by a certain resonance between the way Silverman speaks about looking and being perceiving subjects and Barthes’s notion of the death of the author (especially in how the latter talks about how all literature is nothing but citation—the repetition of the past). Wondering if somehow the loss of “das ding” that she evokes as being necessary to becoming the sort of world spectator she’s advocating for is akin to the death of the author, so that there can be a sort of equivalence made between “das ding” (objet petit a) and “auteur.”] 

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(from Kaja Silverman’s World Spectators, pp. 143-6)

In “Cézanne’s Doubt,” Merleau-Ponty attributes to Cézanne an extraordinary claim: “The landscape thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness” (67). […] With the sentence assigned to him by Merleau-Ponty, Cézanne might also be said to abdicate or “lay down” the gaze. Rather than aspiring to become the initiator of perception, he gladly accepts his role as recipient. This is because he understands better than most spectators what it means to look. “It is not with me that my paintings originate, ” Cézanne in effect claims; “In a certain sense, I am not even the painter of my paintings. I am, rather, the medium through which the things of the world paint themselves.” 

The words Merleau-Ponty attributes to Cézanne contain in a condensed and allegorical form my entire theory of appearance. When we look, in the most profound and creative sense of that word, we are always responding to a prior solicitation from other creatures and things. This solicitation is aesthetic in nature: the world addresses us through its formal parameters. However, in displaying their colors, shapes, patterns and movements to us, things do not merely request us to turn our eyes toward them, or even to answer in kind. What the world of phenomenal forms solicits from us is our desire.

This might seem a contradiction in terms. Human, animal, insect, and stone colors, patterns and shapes constitute a self-showing. There is thus no différance—no delay separating sign from referent—in the case of phenomenal signification. The language of things is a language of presence. Desire, on the other hand, is virtually synonymous with absence. It is only through the “fading” of our “being” that each of us is inducted into this fundamentally visual language. It is also by making a perceptual stimulus the signifier of our past—by temporalizing it—that we engage in a libidinal speech act. However, what I am calling “appearance” occurs only through that most paradoxical of all events: the meeting of absence and presence.

Creatures and things do not solicit desire in the abstract. Rather, what they seek from us is that very particular passion of the signifier through which we have individuated what is common to all subjects: the loss of das Ding. The phenomenal forms of the world invite us to make them part of our singular language of desire—to make them components of the rhetoric through which we “care.” What enables us to do so are the similarities and the contiguities linking the shapes, patterns, colors and movements of the creatures and things which manifest themselves to us in the present.

It is out of an ontological rather than a semiotic imperative that the world solicits us to desire it in this way. This is because it is only by being lifted out of the real and into the more-than-reality of a singular constellation of perceptual memories that the world can Be. However, we do not confer Being upon creatures and things simply by finding affinities between them and what we have previously perceived, any more than we do when we look at them in an everyday way, or find bodily correspondences between themselves and ourselves. We look in the way that makes appearance possible only when we also allow the perceptual present to reincarnate or recorporealize the past—to give it a new form. We only give the gift of Being to something when we permit it inaccurately to replicate what was. 

Absence and presence can only meet in this transformative way when the perceiving subject is “open” to the perceptual object. To be “open” in this way means to renounce all claim to be the master of one’s own language of desire. It means, indeed, to surrender one’s signifying repository to the world, to become the space within which the world itself speaks. To abdicate enunciatory control in this way is, however, not to lose, but rather to find one’s language of desire. This is because we cannot consciously choose the visual “words” through which our past wil be respoken, or what creatures and things we will bring into the metaphoric light. All that we can do is answer the appeal which comes to us from the world to find our memories in its forms. 

But although it is less we ourselves than the world that finally speaks our language of desire, we cannot provide the opening within which other creatures and things appear without giving them a meaning which is specific to ourselves, one which they cannot anticipate. We cannot confer Being upon the world without appropriating it, carrying it away from itself, conferring upon it a supplemental value. The world “knows” this. It does not circumscribe in any way the meaning which we can give to it. All it asks us to do is to look at it first.

SINGING THE SONG OF BEAUTY

The world intends to be seen not just by one, but rather by an infinity of eyes. This is in part because no creature or thing can find an answering set of equivalences in every subject. All of us know, some objects speak our language and others do not. The pleasure we take in looking at certain beings is infinite. The style of others fails to move us. From yet others, we cannot help but avert our eyes. Fortunately, vision is finally as manifold as are beings themselves.

The world also intends to be seen by an infinity of eyes because even those creatures and things at which we look with pleasure exceed our capacity to see them. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, everything that reveals itself to the look has a “behind” and “after.” This is in part because we do not stand in front of the world, as if before a picture; rather, we are inside it, and our interior vantage point serves not only to disclose certain aspects of what we look at, but also to conceal others. It is, in addition, because beings do not always display themselves in the same way to the look; they are constantly moving, and with each move what they show changes. Some new aspect comes into view and a previous one slips into invisibility. Perspective is consequently a feature not only of the look, but of objects as well.

I like to think that the inexhaustible richness of creatures and things also derives from the relationship between their language and ours. If the significance which we find within them were already latent within them, we would be able to exhaust it with our perceptual and linguistic signifiers. However, they are pregnant not with meaning, but with beauty. Our capacity to signify beauty has no limits. It is born of a loss which can never be adequately named, and whose consequence is, quite simply, the human imperative to engage in a ceaseless signification. It is finally this never-ending symbolization that the world wants from us. It is a call to which none of us is adequate by ourselves; we are finite beings, beings who cannot help but come to an end. Only as a collectivity can we be equal to the demand not only to find beauty in all of the world’s forms, but to sing forever and in a constantly new way the jubilant song of that beauty.

…we are able to understand that what Lacan calls “our business” is also the world’s business. To say that “desire keeps coming back, keeps returning, and situates us in a given track” is to say that each of us enjoys the capacity to raise particular Sachen to the status of das Ding—to bring certain creatures and certain things into the brilliance of a more-than-reality. To each of us, through our particular libidinal history, has been given the potentiality for participating in a unique series of disclosures. The potentiality is not so much a talent as a responsibility. When we fail to realize it, we are bottomlessly guilty. 

Metaphors proliferate as Lacan attempts to elaborate what it means to remain on the path of our desire. It entails remaining “a long way from our jouissance” (185); not merely paying the pound of flesh or “being,” but also affirming the sacrifice. It means “incorporat[ing] the signifier” (294). Finally, it implies “eating the book” (322). With this last metaphor, we are again recognizably in theological territory, and Lacan himself acknowledges as much. The trope comes from Revelations, a text devoted to the end of time. Here, however, Revelations and Genesis coincide.

To eat the book means to embrace signification, and thereby not merely to experience but also to affirm the eclipse of “being.” This eclipse of “being” is itself the condition for something much more important—for Being, or what Lacan calls the “properly apocalyptic creation” (294). And once again, this sublation from “being” to Being is something which befalls the creator as fully as it does the metaphoric jar or world. The creator becomes what she creates.

Lacan is very precise about the terms of this transformation, which he elaborates in the form of an autobiographical parable: “When I ate the book, I didn’t thereby become the book, any more than the book became flesh,” he explains. “The book became me so to speak” (322). The difference between the first of these possibilities and the last may seem infinitesimal, but it is in fact vast. It is the difference between a simple self-expropriation and what Heidegger would call an “expropriative appropriat[ion]”; between the dispiriting apprehension of the otherness of one’s self, and the ecstatic rediscovery, at the site of the other, of one’s utmost “ownness.” 

pp. 48-9 from “Eating the Book” in Kaja Silverman’s World Spectators (emphasis mine)

YES: “The ecstatic rediscovery, at the site of the other, of one’s utmost ‘ownness.’” That’s it, essentially.