Haunted Experience: Being, Loss, Memory

By Julian Wolfreys

​Julian Wolfreys starts with loss. All memory is the memory of loss…

All that we are, all we experience, all we remember, all that we forget but which leaves nevertheless a trace on us, in us, a trace that countersigns and writes us as who we are (in effect the constellated matrix of Being’s becoming): this is a process of loss. This just is loss. Loss is who we are.

Loss is authentically the necessary and inescapable inessential essence of Being. Loss names the ghosts, the revenants of Being, Being’s others. Neither there nor not there, loss persists as the always already becoming of the thinking of Being. There is more than one loss. There is no one loss. Loss never arrives for a first time. All loss is the return of what is lost to Being’s being in the world.

From that starting point, the author explores the nature of being and dwelling… of memory and the nature of the traces of the past… of apparition and appearance and perception… of touch and being touched… of the material and the (a)material.

 In a book that draws in multiple threads from 19th- and 20th-century European literature, he references extensively Heidegger, Derrida, Lacan, Cixous, Celan, Husserl, Woolf, Joyce, Hegel, Badiou, Rilke, Merleau-Ponty, Winterson, Stockhausen and True Detective in an impressive and eclectic tour of the being-becoming-loss.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publishdrive
• Release date: Sep 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9781911193036

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PREFACE

Schumann, at the age of seventeen in a diary entry, made the remark that music is romantic poetry for the ear … the beautiful without a limit … a dying sound that fades indeterminably. One is present at the dying away … of a sound.

Yet sound is multitemporal, Schumann goes on to realise, having a quality, as he puts it of the future and the past into the present.

Of this, Ian Bostridge observes the very fragility of sound, its onset, its resonance, its decay … connect the human sensorium to the mystery of time

This temporal becoming and undoing, movement rather than moment, encapsulates in its objective fact the subjective condition, the phenomenal experience of every subject.

Music attests to the very manner of our witness, our witness to nothing less than being itself, in its coming to pass, this endless traversal.

So, why speak of loss in what is to follow, rather than absence, as a constituent dimension or aspect of Being?

Because all that we are, all we experience, all we remember, all that we forget but which leaves nevertheless a trace on us, in us, a trace that countersigns and writes us as who we are (in effect the constellated matrix of Being’s becoming): this is a process of loss.

This just is loss. Loss is who we are.

Being is our material condition, phenomenologically apperceived.

As Beings we exist in the world, historically.

Being in time, we each have our own temporality.

Having temporality, every being’s Being is subject to a constant, endless becoming.

Being is not static.

Though I assume a presence to myself, such presence is the illusion of a temporal reflection grounded in the always-now of the reflection on my part of my Being.

The times of a being’s subjective reflection on its Being appear discrete.

The flow is, however, continuous or, rather, discontinuous, inasmuch as the I comes in and out of its temporality, revealing itself to itself and withdrawing.

There is a misrecognition of the condition of Being insofar as presence (in the present) is assumed.

The now, the seriality, the iterability of the ‘now’, is not apprehended. It is mistaken for the assumed constancy of presence in the present.

Subjectivity as the modern condition of the reflexive revelation of Being to the self, of being’s Being, in being apprehended properly, is that experience wherein, unveiled to the self, lies the illusion of presence and absence as stable categories.

In being always already a becoming, an endless flow revealed indirectly through the coming to light of the discontinuous serial iterability of the reflexive nun as so many instances of the hic et nunc, misperceived as (self)presence in the present as the unchangeable condition of Being, every being’s Being is marked not by absence, but instead haunted by loss.

Loss is authentically the necessary and inescapable inessential essence of Being.

Loss names the ghosts, the revenants of Being, Being’s others.

Neither there nor not there, loss persists as the always already becoming of the thinking of Being.

There is more than one loss.

There is no one loss.

Loss never arrives for a first time. All loss is the return of what is lost to Being’s being in the world, to Being’s phenomenological experience of the temporality of Being.

Loss is the revenance of Being’s having become, and having become other than itself, the ‘itself’ as which it is mistakenly apprehended.

Loss names the dis-appearance of Being’s being, without being the absence of Being as such.

Loss arrives from Old English los, previously Germanic and Old Norse, meaning ‘destruction’, becoming later a back-formation from lost, signifying ‘perishing, or ‘breaking up’.

Loss is the breaking up of Being.

Loss is the perishing of being’s Being, even as Being is a becoming.

Loss is the destruction of Being.

Loss is the deconstruction of Being.

Loss is.

I

TO START FROM LOSS…

To start from loss (Wieder da) …

Grant me this at least, a beginning in which there will have been the recognition of loss. Not something or someone lost, but just loss. I would say ‘loss itself’, were I not already aware that loss is not an ‘it’, not a ‘thing’, as such. So, there is loss. Loss takes place, coming to pass, as if it were a gerund without a subject (which, in a manner of speaking, is accurate). The experience of loss, minimally or maximally, is the experience of a coming-to-pass, an event.

Let me start once more.

To begin: as if from that loss that is the admission of the realisation that I have lost sight of an horizon, the limit or boundary being the mark at which loss begins, a refutation:

There is no world, there are only islands. That is one of the thousand directions in which I would be to interpret the last line of a short and great poem by Celan: Die Welt ist fort, ich muss dich tragen, a poem of mourning or birth that I do not have time to read with you: the world has gone, the world has gone away, the world is far off, the world is lost, there is no world any more (to sustain us or ground [fonder] the two of us like a ground [sol]), I must carry you (either in me as in mourning, or else in me as in birth; for tragen is also said of the mother carrying a child, in her arms or in her womb). We are weltlos, I can only carry you, I am the only one who can and must carry you, etc.; but are we weltlos, without world, as Heidegger says? … clearly not. So how are we to think the absence of world, the non-world?

(Derrida 2011, 9)

We have no world, as such. There is only the phantasmatic illusion that we ‘have’ what we call ‘world’. We are not like the stone though, the material object that is without world and which cannot think world. We are not like the stone because we can imagine. We can imagine world – and here I want to suggest a distinction, after Derrida, after Heidegger, between thinking and imagining; we can imagine having, if not world, then at least world enough, and time. Marvell’s marvelous phrase highlights the distinction between imagination and thinking. It is a conditional projection, which aims to keep death away from the living it inhabits, if only briefly. Marvell’s imaginary marvel is of ‘enough world’, ‘enough time’, equivalences that maintain the ‘now’ of living without the loss that Being experiences in every moment that living is maintained, that living is now. That we can imagine such a fiction, the fiction of having world – and clearly it is a fiction if one accepts Jacques Derrida’s challenge to the binary thinking implicit in the Heideggerian model of the Being who has world and the stone that does not – suggests in the imaginative act this ‘just enough world’. Yet however near the world may appear (and appearance, phenomenologically speaking, is everything, more or less), ‘world’ is not maintained. It remains at a remove, not ours, never ‘as such’, never ‘at hand’. The nearness of world is only an illusion of the imagination, one that can be maintained if we neglect the farness by which nearness is possible to think. In truth such proximity is, on the one hand, a phantom, while, on the other hand, the perception of whatever is felt to be at hand is always, already, haunted by its loss.

It is not that there is no world exactly, but that, to recall Paul Celan’s phrase, Die Welt is fort, a ‘fort’ that can never be ‘da’. Thus we remain, to ourselves, suffering passively a somewhat Arnoldian realisation, on which I will amplify shortly. Therefore, if we are to respond to Derrida’s prompt, how are we to think the absence? Absence is not the same as non-existence, not exactly. I can know of some thing, some other, some one, who is also an other, who, which, can remain absent for a time, and yet return. Yet, even if the other is in my arms, their ‘presence’ is always a ‘there’. Their absence is not dependent on distance. I will have thus remained, therefore, always already at a loss, living in loss, with loss, loss being the experience by which I know that I can imagine the world, a world enough, and time enough, in which absence and loss maintain the condition of Being. For Derrida, this problem raises questions of solitude, loneliness, insularity, isolation and therefore exception (Derrida 2011, 11). All of which conditions, experiences, perceptions, emotions, can be apprehended as so many revelations, so many modalities of loss. One doesn’t have to be on an island, to live on an island, to understand this, though Robinson Crusoe’s shipwrecked condition, the island on which he finds himself and by which he defines himself, is one of Derrida’s first ports of call, and one to which Derrida returns throughout the seminar from which I have quoted. Against, before, in an opposition so close as to be hidden within any thought of ‘world’, or ‘globalisation’, and therefore as the intimation of a difference that signals the originary other of any thought of ‘en-worlding’, ‘globalisation’, mondialatinisation, (I discuss the precise meaning of this word in the context of Derrida’s writing further on in the present volume) and so on, there is one’s island-Being.

Crusoe therefore finds himself in the sea of life enisled, to recall Matthew Arnold, this condition being one that is given the former to apprehend through the material shipwreck. Arnold’s line realises Being’s becoming-enisled belatedly – and which realisation is not belated? Do we not always realise after the event? Is this not the condition of thinking Being? There comes that self-awareness, that coming to consciousness concerning Being-there, which is in effect to think our own ‘enislement’. I think, therefore I am enisled. The reflexive thought is a performative, enacting the condition for the self that the thought projects, even as the performative announces in its belatedness that one is already cut off, at an impossible remove. The burden of Arnold’s own Being, along with the inescapable reflectivity of perception, is one unveiled through privation. There is not world enough or as such, only the imagination of the island. And such privation that announces all the more intensely the absence in the realisation of Being – absence as Being’s ownmost quality in the thinking of Being – struggles with a ‘limit’ of sorts. For Arnold reflects how it is ‘we’, not ‘I’ who find ourselves ‘in the sea of life enisled’. Hence my having begun with a remark that gathers us together: ‘we have no world as such’. We, you, and you, and you, and I, all share in this realisation of what ‘we’ lose as the condition of Being, however close we may be, physically, emotionally, phantasmatically:

Yes! in the sea of life enisled,

With echoing straits between us thrown.

Dotting the shoreless watery wild,

We mortal millions live alone.

The islands feel the enclasping flow,

And then their endless bounds they know.

(‘To Marguerite’ ll.1-6)

There is of course that later apostrophe in the poem, almost a prayer: Oh might our marges meet again! (l.18) But this only serves to make more insistent the affirmation of absence and loss, an affirmation expressed as an answer, a response to some call of the other, some trace that comes to demand the ‘Yes’, with which the poem opens. If this ‘yes’ is a response it is also a supplement to Arnold’s own call to Marguerite Oh love let us be true to one another, from ‘Dover Beach’. Marguerite is the specific, the singular other, whose loss is felt in her immediacy-to-hand. As proximate, imagined other, she stands, imagined, and behind her, within her, she is haunted in Arnold’s imagination by each and every other, a whole world of other ‘I’s, other ‘islands’. Intimately close, Marguerite’s is the signature that countersigns presence, Being and world, with the inescapable loss always already maintained in the apprehension of the other as other.

Moreover, the sands shift, from one poem to the other. A strand is not an island. There is a shift between the two poems regarding the registration of Being’s loss. It is as if the land had been lost, the tide returned sufficiently, so that what had been thought a beach, was in fact one more island, coming to realise as with the fall of an après coup, that enclasping flow. Arnold’s futile desire expressed to Marguerite – Ah love, let us be true / To one another – unveils the certainty of anxiety, as Lacan puts it (2014, 218). From Marvell to Arnold, via Crusoe, we travel not very far, but by degree, turning until the perception becomes clearer. For anxiety has to be defined, according to Lacan, "as that which deceives not, precisely in so far as every object eludes it. The certainty of anxiety is a grounded certainty and its shadowy character is what imparts it its essentially precarious aspect … this certainty … shows itself for what it is – a displacement, (p.218) and therefore the experience or revelation of loss at the heart of Being. And there is in this, Lacan proposes with a boldness akin to reckless abandon, as of a man who finds himself alone on an island, a more radical challenging of the function … than has ever been articulated in our Western philosophy. But, he then cautions, critique can only start to be undertaken in the most radical way if we notice that there is already cognizance in the fantasy" (p.218). Such a cognisance is being staged in the apprehension of one’s becoming-island. There is no world, only islands, in which tout autre est tout autre: each and every other is wholly other; and this realisation of loss at the heart of Being imposes for Arnold in the form of a desire (let us be true to one another), the ethical commitment realised by Celan (I must carry you).

The self in Robinson Crusoe cannot distract itself through various approximations of community or companionship (not at first at least). Behind or, perhaps, setting sail from this consciousness of the condition of exception, presented through the trope of the island in 1719, and continuing through to the present day, is another question. First asked by Heidegger famously, and repeated by Derrida, as he reminds us of the German thinker’s triple thesis in the "1929-30 seminar entitled Welt, Endlichkeit, Einsamkeit" (Derrida 2011, 11), we seem to hear anticipated in Crusoe’s experience, and the narrative of that experience, the Heideggerian interrogatory, Was ist Vereinzelung? What is separation? Interestingly, if trivially, having translated the question, choosing ‘separation’, I thought to put the question through translation software, which returned the translation as ‘what is individualization’? If this is even remotely a possibility, then there is an analogy to be thought, a strong reading to be made, between the advent of the individual and the dawning consciousness of separation, and therefore – perhaps – loss. That which Lacan understands as the subject’s entry into language, the subject’s being cast out of the sense of plenitude and completion, is also, on a greater stage, the condition of the entry of the subject into loss itself as the price paid for the illusion, the imagining of individuality that imagines also it can have a world, which anxiety recognises cannot be achieved. With that comes our arrival into modernity, the epoch from which we have yet to escape. (It might be noticed in passing that, in what I have just suggested, there is an inescapable bond between the desire for possession and the phenomenological registration of loss.)

In marked contrast – a first reading would suggest as much at least – there is John Donne, (1987b, 126). Again, to read retrospectively if not belatedly – to read is never to be on time with one’s self – Donne might be said to anticipate another Heideggerian saw, that what beings share in Being is a Being-toward-death. Living as an island, one dies nevertheless, and so rejoins the great continent in the loss of Being. This runs contrary to Jack Shepherd’s reiterated assertion in the TV serial narrative Lost that we ‘live together’ or die alone. We live alone, we die alone, but in death we are no longer alone. Strictly speaking, ‘we are’ no longer, and yet, when we are ‘no longer’ this is when we become the ‘we are’ or rather ‘we are not’. But Donne is not suggesting the comfort of reconnection. What is shared in Donne’s anticipation of the bell, the glas that tolls for us all in tolling for every other, is just that shared trajectory towards non-existence. The loss of one human for Donne diminishes us all: any mans death diminishes me / because I am involved in Mankinde (1987b, 126). Being is always haunted by, countersigned by loss, the loss of the other is a loss to myself, inasmuch as every perceived, remembered loss is the anticipated memory of another instantiation, of what I call ‘my’ loss, my own future anterior mortality. In apprehending the loss of another, so will I always already have known indirectly that loss that I call mine, but which, more accurately is the to-come of the no-more-me. That which Donne calls to mind is, it might be argued, the very thing that – from Crusoe onward – is suppressed, forgotten until it resurfaces as Arnoldian anxiety: that lived experience is grasped in perception immediately following the experience, to be returned as a trace, as what Husserl terms representation, the manner of such re-presentation being, as he expresses it, Nachgewahren (1959, 59): an after-perception, becoming aware of something after the event or experience has passed, is lost as such and becomes available only as a revenant, a trace in its being re-presented to consciousness. I perceive in re-presentation the self I once was, and which I no longer am, as such – that moment of being apprehensible only in its having become a loss of self to the self.

II

…I AM, YET WHAT I AM…

Which brings me to a statement of Being: I am, yet what I am. This will be immediately recognisable to some as a line from John Clare’s ‘I Am’ (2000, 311). ‘I am’ expresses its being as having the quality of a memory lost, of being one who lives like vapours tost / into the nothingness of scorn and noise, into the living sea of waking dreams. Experience is grasped by Clare in the perception of becoming lost, and with this the concomitant perception of privation, isolation. Those most familiar, most loved, are the most uncanny, and estranged, stranger than the rest. Such phantasmatic registration captures acutely the experience of a phenomenological apperception of nearness as the most groundless, and so the keenest of understandings of loss at the heart of Being. As a result of such disturbance experienced within the self – and this, most familiar of Clare’s poems articulates just this reflective apperception of the external world-being that the inner self suffers, apperception as the very precondition of the loss of self on the one hand in the face of others, and, on the other hand, loss of apprehension of others for self, absolute existential privation –; as a consequence of the confrontation of the abject event of being’s self-awareness, being’s becoming-abjection, so there arrives a desire, Sehnsucht being the more appropriate word perhaps.

Why Sehnsucht rather than desire? The latter is too clinical, too overdetermined and appropriated by psychoanalysis, that largely Cartesian categorisation of Being into its supposedly knowable and namable spheres, so many symptoms of Being. Sehnsucht on the other hand, being irreducible to nostalgia, speaks a longing more fundamental than any psychological affect. It speaks Being itself. But this is to digress, albeit just a little. Clare’s Sehnsucht is for the return of Being, through the absolute sublime communion between Dasein, the earth, the heavens and the divinities, as Heidegger might put it in his articulation of the four-fold: I long for scenes where man hath never trod / A place where woman never smiled or wept / There to abide with my Creator, God. / And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept, untroubling and untroubled where I lie / The grass below – above, the vaulted sky. (p.311) As Clare suggests elsewhere, in contemplation of the tree that is the subject of ‘To Obscurity’, blank oblivion reigns as earth’s sublime (p.179). Loss is so much the condition of everything Clare observes in nature that ‘eternity’ offers a ‘relish’ in comparison with what the title of a third poem describes as the nothingness of life (p.179).

But what is anguish for Clare, anxiety for Arnold, becomes in time a more neutral recognition of the intimacy that couples Being and Loss. Near the end of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Clarissa Dalloway’s party is interrupted by news of the death of Septimus Smith. In the closing paragraphs of James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, Gabriel is brought up short by the thought of Gretta’s dead lover, and from there to all the living and the dead, who arrive with the snowfall as a few light taps upon the pane (1992, 225). Death, and therefore loss, calls Being to mind. Woolf and Joyce announce the uncanny proximity (Heidegger 1996a, 90ff.) of that which is Being’s ownmost quality, not death as such but the loss of Being, or let us just say loss. Being-in-the-world is thus unveiled, in these singular alethic instances, these events of Being’s revelation to itself, in those moments where we come closest to an apperception of the disappearance of Being. Loss is the abyssal ‘heart’, a centre that is no centre, of Being, known, that is to say felt (perception as the affective reflection of pre-cognition’s blink of an eye). It might be suggested then that Modernism thus ‘realises’ in these texts as elsewhere that ‘loss’ is not merely a condition, a symptom, but an expression of self-reflective awareness, of a phenomenal coming to consciousness of the self at the limits of Being.

III

…SOMEONE WHO IDENTIFIES HIM- OR HERSELF AS ‘EUROPEAN’…

‘Being’: the idea is as old as the hills, well almost. It is often bound, not to loss, but to concerns with ‘identity’ and ‘subjectivity’. Being becomes confused with where one lives, resides; who one is becomes confused with a sense of belonging to a family, a tribe, a group, a region, a nation, an alliance, or even a state (nation state or economic union, with borders that are perceived as real or taken as cultural, juridical, economic and discursive; as for example in the idea of ‘Europe’). The state of Being, the condition, is confused with a sense of belonging. As soon as there is belonging, though, there is the fear of loss, and with that there arrive the concern with inclusion, the anxiety over exclusion, and, more than these, a perpetual condition of crisis. This is the case, whether one speaks of the self, a nation or, more diffusely, an idea of something that passes for a community. Why? Because Being, even understood through the idea of loss, is never an abstract, but is always rooted, grounded. Being is always already a Being-there, a Dasein.

Allow me to take a detour therefore through one such, having to do with the idea of ‘being-European’ before returning to the principal foci of this book. The justification for this, if one can be made? Achieved no doubt too hastily, it would be this: that any sense of Being I may have is ‘grounded’ by a sense of belonging (more or less uneasily), of being made a subject of, the idea of ‘Europe’. In signalling this, I am not making an argument for a consideration of the European Union. (This last term is itself a problematic figure, a trope haunted by the dissolution of its own supposed ‘gathering’, ‘ontology’, ‘community’, ‘auto-co-immunity’, its own fascean collective ‘bundling’ by laws, economic practices and shared interests.) Rather, by referring to my ambiguous, not to say ambivalent sense of being a European, of Being-European, I am gesturing toward a vast, and heterogeneous matrix of thought, language, behaviour, sensibility, that is as spiritual as it is material, involving taste, culture, epistemology, ideology, and so on; and which itself/themselves can be found to be traced through with both the legacies of Indo-European languages and the cultural traces of Greco-Latinate-Hebraic ‘identities’ (for want of a much better word), to name provisionally only the most obvious of inheritances. Every I contains multitudes, is haunted by the spectral work of innumerable phantoms and phantasms of the other, each irreducible, without the trace of difference, to a ‘one’, an ‘I’. A spectre, it might be said, as a philosopher once did, is haunting Europe, the spectre of every other Europe, Europe without unity, without number. My ‘being-European’ is therefore always a ceaseless reorientation and disorientation, a territorialisation and a deterritorialisation of the self, given, having a place, being, to use the Heideggerian neologism, en-placed and taking place. What I refer to, with deliberate naivety, as ‘spiritual’ above is nothing other than the admission that any phenomenological sense of a being-there, a Dasein, is one that admits to a materialist historiography, but, paradoxically, a materialist historiography acknowledging its own lack of groundedness, and its being haunted, perpetually. Everything I say, assume, argue, propose, in the present volume is touched, riven, articulated and contradicted, countersigned by, the inescapable subjectification by, and sense of belonging to, discourses, praxes, and epistemologies that haunt my Being and themselves have spectral, as well as manifest histories.

Someone who identifies him- or herself as a European, without identifying which European, what kind of European, whether there is more than one ‘European’, less than one, no more than one, approaches you, and offers to tell you a joke, beginning thus: A Kantian, a Hobbesian, and a Marxist walk into a bar, arguing over the definition of Europe. How the joke continues is irrelevant. As the beginnings of jokes go, this one does not seem particularly promising, the less so if we realise that there is no punch line as such, no teleological end point, properly speaking. We would do well to do away with thinking teleologically about Europe, if that is possible; for to do so would be to draw us back into all the old traditions of thought – traditions as old as the idea of Europe itself. I will not say ‘as old as Europe’, for this would be to fall into the mistake of the person identifying him- or herself as a ‘European’, with there