Memory Theater Read online

  ALSO BY SIMON CRITCHLEY

  Bowie

  Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine

  The Faith of the Faithless

  The Mattering of Matter

  Impossible Objects

  How to Stop Living and Start Worrying

  The Book of Dead Philosophers

  Infinitely Demanding

  Things Merely Are

  On Humor

  Continental Philosophy

  Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity

  Very Little … Almost Nothing

  The Ethics of Deconstruction

  Copyright © 2014 by Simon Critchley

  First published in Great Britain by Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2014

  Production editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 2 Park Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Critchley, Simon, 1960–

  Memory theater / Simon Critchley.

  pages; cm

  ISBN 978-1-59051-740-6 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-59051-741-3 (ebook)

  1. Philosophers—Fiction. 2. Memory (Philosophy)—Fiction. 3. Knowledge, Theory of—Fiction. 4. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PS3603.R579M46 2015

  813′.6—dc23

  2015016958

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  First Page

  Partial Glossary

  I was dying. That much was certain. The rest is fiction.

  The fear of death slept for most of the day and then crept up late at night and grabbed me by the throat, making sleep impossible no matter how much alcohol I had drunk that evening. Insomnia had been my clandestine companion for much of my adult life, at least after the accident. But since the discovery of the boxes and the building of the memory theater, it had intensified with the force of an implacable logic: If I was going to die anyway, then why sleep?

  Then the bladder game would begin. Teeth brushed and flossed, a confident final piss in the toilet, a few pages of Ulysses perused in the exquisite, cloth-bound 1960 Bodley Head edition, sleep would softly descend … only to be interrupted by that vague Alien-like pressure in the lower abdomen. Do I need to piss or don’t I? Up and down, to and fro, throughout the night until the terrors of darkness disappeared with dawn. Suicidal and sometimes homicidal thoughts would slowly subside. Sleep would come, but too late.

  The next day I would walk around with a thousand invisible tiny lacerations around the eyes and a painfully acute sensitivity to noise that would make the most humdrum tasks hugely cumbersome. This had gone on for three years, ever since the realization and the ever-widening fear. I was exhausted with exhaustion.

  I had moved from England to New York in January 2004 to see if my necronautical activities met with a kinder reception in the New World than the indifference I had experienced in the Old. On return to the University of Essex in June of that year, in an effort to clear up and leave my old office, sort through my papers, and finally move my books, a peculiar thing happened.

  Semi-hidden in my office, I came across an unfamiliar series of boxes, five of them in a stack, sort of midsized brown book boxes. After I spoke to Barbara, the administrator in the Philosophy Department, it became clear that they were the unpublished papers, notes, and remains of a close friend and former philosophy teacher of mine in France, Michel Haar. They had been sent unannounced by his brother from the sanatorium in which Michel died from a heart attack in the dreadful summer heat wave that swept France in 2003. His death had followed a long bout of neurological, psychological, and indeed hypochondriacal illnesses that had besieged him since taking early retirement from his chair in the Philosophy Department at the Sorbonne and which, indeed, were the cause of his early retirement. Truth to tell, there was always a slightly maniacal death wish in Michel. When he finally received his chair in Paris, the dream of every self-respecting French academic, he incorrectly told everyone he was replacing Sarah Kofman, the great Nietzsche scholar, who had committed suicide on the 150th anniversary of Nietzsche’s birth. Michel seemed determined to repeat the fate of his supposed predecessor.

  I subsequently tried to contact Michel’s brother Roger, whom I’d met once at a dinner in a terrible chain restaurant in Paris (Michel was a cheapskate and didn’t care about food). I had his phone number in Strasbourg, but it no longer worked. I sent a letter that was later returned unopened, retour à l’envoyeur stamped across it. Michel was divorced and estranged from his wife, Elizabeth, after refusing to have children. Narcissistic to the end. I knew of no other immediate family members. I was left with the perplexity of not knowing why these boxes had been sent to me. Michel had a few devoted students who knew him much better than I did. He didn’t really have what you would call friends.

  I immediately began to go through the boxes, finding everything within them in apparent disorder, although each box was marked with a sign of the zodiac, from Capricorn to Gemini. The Taurus box was missing. Had it been lost in transit or was there some design at work? The zodiacal signs didn’t surprise me, as Michel was possibly the first philosopher since Pico della Mirandola in the late fifteenth century to have a deep commitment to astrology. Like Pico, Michel was a genethlialogist, a maker of horoscopes.

  In the box marked Capricorn, I found some absolute gems, such as notes from a lecture on ethics and Marxism by Jean-Paul Sartre at the École Normale Supérieure in 1959, when Michel was a student. There was also the transcription of a debate between Sartre and several normaliens, including two of my former teachers, Clément Rosset and Dominique Janicaud, and a young, vital, and very Sartrean Alain Badiou. I found Notes de Cours from Louis Althusser’s class on Montesquieu and Rousseau and the draft of a long dissertation by Michel on ancient materialism, with detailed discussions of Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius.

  To my complete astonishment, I found the original copies of a triangular correspondence between Jean Beaufret, Jacques Lacan, and Martin Heidegger, which concerned the latter’s visit to Cerisy-la-Salle on the Normandy coast in 1955 to deliver the lecture “Was ist das—die Philosophie?” the title of which had always made me laugh. Don’t know why. Most amusingly, some of the correspondence between Lacan and Beaufret dealt with the topic of what Herr und Frau Heidegger might choose to eat for breakfast chez Lacan during their passage through Paris. Lacan had made complex plans to obtain specially imported Schwarzbrot from the Alsace, together with hard cheeses and ham. Beaufret spends some paragraphs reassuring Lacan that the Heideggers looked forward to nothing better than some croissants, café crème, and perhaps a little tartine. Beaufret, a tortured, closeted homosexual who spent most of his days in his pajamas, was in analysis with Lacan for five years, and this was the only time that the great psychoanalyst ever appeared to take any interest in him.

  I found a large number of more conventional academic manuscripts in the first box, which kept circling back to the problem of nihilism and to Michel’s lifelong fascinatio
n with Heidegger’s mighty two-volume Nietzsche, based on lectures from the late 1930s, but which had appeared in German in 1961, when Michel was in his early twenties. Heidegger himself and many of his apologists saw these lectures as the place where a critique of National Socialist ideology was being articulated after his fateful and hateful brief tenure as rector of Freiburg University when the Nazis came to power in 1933. I thought that such apologetics were bullshit. For Michel, much more interestingly, what was at stake was the question of the relation between philosophy and poetry, in particular the disclosive possibilities of nonpropositional forms of language, such as verbalized nouns and tautologies: die Sprache spricht, die Welt weltet, and so on, and on. To what extent was Nietzsche’s wildly inventive, poetic, and polemical thinking contained by Heidegger’s increasingly strident philosophical critique, which interpreted Nietzsche as the mere inversion of Plato and, ultimately, as a figure for our entrapment in metaphysical modes of thinking rather than a release from them? On this reading, Nietzsche was not the exit from nihilism, but its highest expression, its fulfillment (there was a German word for this—there always is—but I’d forgotten it).

  Michel kept coming back, in text after text, to the poetic dimension of Nietzsche’s language and style as that which might escape philosophy. This line of argument was continued in a series of extraordinary short handwritten papers I found on various poets: Saint-John Perse (Michel had introduced me to his long poem Anabase when I first met him. I still read it with T. S. Eliot’s translation), Francis Ponge (an essay on the descriptive prose poems in Le parti pris des choses), Wallace Stevens (on the late poems from “The Rock.” He had discovered Stevens through Elizabeth), and Rilke’s Ninth Duino Elegy (a commentary on the words “Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable”). On each occasion, Michel showed with exquisite delicacy the fragile force of poetic language as that which pushes back against hard reality and pulls free of flat-footed philosophy.

  Poetry lets us see things as they are. It lets us see particulars being various. But—Michel insisted—poetry lets us see things as they are anew. Under a new aspect. Transfigured. Subject to a felt variation. The poet sings a song that is both beyond us, yet ourselves. Things change when the poet sings them, but they are still our things: recognizable, common, near, low. We hear the poet sing and press back against the pressure of reality. I instantly thought that many of these texts could have been published, if I could have interested the increasingly flagging and beleaguered French and Anglophone academic presses. But such plans soon seemed irrelevant.

  Michel had a small cult following in France and the United States, but lacked the capacity for endless and shameless self-promotion that most often defines philosophical fame. Michel slipped into his pajamas around 10:30 p.m. and slept like the dead, thanks to the chemical kindness of his liberal doctor and an understanding pharmacist. While sometimes spotted with moments of brilliance, his talks in English were usually long, rambling, and incoherent. He also often seemed to lose interest in what he was saying.

  In the Aquarius box, I found many strange maps. Michel had somehow obtained an annotated cloth print of the Mappa Mundi from Hereford Cathedral. This extraordinary object from around 1300 presents the world divided into three continents (Europe, Asia, Africa) with its center in Jerusalem, which looked like a keyhole. I came across a series of almost fantastical antique maps of Australia, or more precisely New Holland, seemingly drawn by French explorers from the early to mid-1700s. There were hand-drawn maps of the estuarial systems of Virginia and North Carolina, combined with exhaustive descriptions of flora and fauna. Most impressive of all was Michel’s own six feet by four map of natural catastrophe, with extensive detail on the paths of hurricanes in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, the tornadoes of the American Midwest, maps of volcanic explosions from Vesuvius to Krakatoa and beyond. There was also a detailed prose description of the meteorite the size of Manhattan that allegedly fell on the Yucatán Peninsula fifteen million years ago, wiping out most forms of life on earth, including all dinosaur species.

  In the Gemini box, I discovered heavily annotated copies of the 900 Theses or Conclusions of Pico, and drafts of commentaries on Marsilio Ficino’s translations of Plato, especially Symposium, and Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun (Michel was obsessed with the description of the ideal city with its religion based on a solar cult. Oddly, when we were together in Italy in those summers, he always avoided the sun). I also found a series of fragmentary but fascinating drafts for a study of the technological metaphors in Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, with deeply original insights on Heidegger’s obvious references to hands, hammers, nails, and the workshop world of fundamental ontology, but less obvious references to car indicators, washing machines, typewriters, radio signals, and even primitive computer systems: “For there too the gods are present,” Heidegger would seem to be suggesting. I came across transcribed notes from a number of sessions of a Heidegger reading group that took place informally at the ENS in the early 1960s and which included Michel, his great friend Dominique, and a young Jacques Derrida, as well as a number of visiting Americans. I remember Michel telling me about this group, which was apparently almost covert during the overwhelming hegemony in Paris in those years of what was called “le Freudo-Marxisme,” the intoxicating Gallic cocktail of Leninism and libidinism that was particularly popular at the time.

  In Gemini, I also found a short, odd text—written in English—called “The One True Philosophy of Clothes.” It was anonymous, but my guess is that it was written by Michel’s American wife, Elizabeth, who worked for many years in the Paris fashion industry, a job that she had great difficulty combining with her immense passion for Ibsen, Racine, and Attic tragedy, especially Euripides. The consequence of this collision was satire and the model was Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, “The Tailor Re-tailored.” She begins by writing,

  What is the human being but a garment and what is the world but the living garment of God? If language is the expressive garment of thought, then clothes are the expressive garment of the body. Nature and life itself are but one garment woven and ever-weaving from the loom of time. As Carlyle writes, “The whole external universe and what holds it together is but clothing and the essence of all science lies in the PHILOSOPHY OF CLOTHES.”

  The philosophy of clothes is not some specialized sub-discipline taught in fashion schools. It is the key to understanding everything. It is the germ and gem of all science. The human being is the fashioned animal and fashion is the key to understanding the human being. Let me put this in a simple linguistic formula: Mankind = manikin = mannequin. Like Plato’s demiurge or creator-deity in the Timaeus, the fashion designer takes the old rags of matter and forms them into something sublime. God is the great fashion designer in the sky and the fashion designers here on earth are his prophets, his true disciples: mortal portals to his immortal power.

  Not bad. My mind wandered. I thought of Adam and Eve after the Fall, discovering their nakedness and clothing themselves. Were they naked before the Fall? No. They may have been nude, but not naked. For they wore the garment of God’s grace, the radiant garment of glory. With the exit from Paradise, to cover our shame, we wear either the penitential skins of wild animals or the many-colored robes of vanity. But this is mortuary clothing, funereal dress until we put on the white robes of baptism. I looked down at my feet. Did they wear flip-flops in Paradise?

  My first job was working as a researcher in what used to be called University College Cardiff for a prominent biologist, Russell Lloyd; I suppose that today he would be called a neuroscientist. He had become obsessed with the history of research on the nervous system and needed a humanist who could do archive work. It was infinitely dull, but I got paid and it led me to Freud’s early research on the testicles of eels and Georg Büchner’s paper on the skull nerves of fish and from there into his dramatic works, especially Danton’s Death. Prophetic.

  When in Cardiff I received a letter from Michel te
lling me that his wife had left him for an English civil engineer. She was living somewhere in South Wales and apparently having a tough time. Apparently, she had become enamored with the engineer (whom I never met. Was he called Simon?) during choir practice in an Anglican church in Paris. How odd. Elizabeth and I met on a few occasions and had some memorable long walks in the countryside outside Cardiff, where she lived, usually in drizzle. She explained in an astonished, French-inflected, New England, Anne Sexton–like accent that her new neighbors had not even heard of Anna Karenina let alone read it. Can you imagine? During the last of those walks, she was visibly pregnant. I left Cardiff soon afterwards for my first teaching post and we completely lost touch. I think she changed her name. I often think about that child.

  But nothing had prepared me for what I found in the Aries box. Michel had written a long text from the late 1960s, maybe around ’67 or ’68, on Hegel called “Le théâtre de mémoire selon G.W.F. Hegel,” an apparently entirely original interpretation of Hegel’s monumental 1807 book. The basic idea of the memory theater was borrowed from the highly influential writings of the London-based art historian Frances Yates and in particular her 1966 book The Art of Memory.

  Anglophile that he was, Michel had obviously read the book shortly after it had been published in London. Curiously, it just so happened that I read this book very closely during the summer of 1986, around the time I first met Michel in Italy, and had even tried to adapt some of its ideas on Leibniz’s project for a “general characteristic” into an essay I was trying to write on the history of the idea of a universal language, so beautifully ridiculed by Swift in Book Three of Gulliver’s Travels, the voyage to the academy of Laputa. Artificial memory machines litter history. Human beings seem to be persistently seduced by the idea that a theater, a palace, or a machine might be constructed that would hold the sum of knowledge in a way that would permit total recall. All we would need to do in order to attain absolute knowledge would be to enter the theater or machine and commit to memory everything therein. Of course, given what happened, it is easy to say that now.