Derrida describes an ‘unnatural’ ghostly haunting whereby the dead are taken into us, but they are not internalized as they would be under more ‘normal’ circumstances (a psychoanalytic view of mourning) – he labels this as ‘terrifying.’
Derrida recounts his 1982 arrest in Czechoslavakia on trumped-up drug charges …
see also this clip in which Derrida plays ‘himself’ in the film and comments upon ghosts as they pertain to cinema and representation itself; the late Pascale Ogier (1958-1984) plays ‘Pascale’ who is questioning Derrida.
Dying means: you are dead already, in an immemorial past, of a death which was not yours, which you have thus neither known nor lived, but under the threat of which you believe you are called upon to live; you await it henceforth in the future, constructing a future to make it possible at last––possible as something that will take place and will belong to the realm of experience.
—Maurice Blanchot. The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. p 65.
To see our own face as it is would be madness, since we would no longer have any mystery for ourselves and would, therefore, be annihilated by transparency. Might it not be said that man has evolved into a form such that his face remains invisible to him and he becomes definitively unidentifiable, not only in the mystery of his face, but in any of his desires?
—Jean Baudrillard. The Perfect Crime. Trans. Chris Turner. London & New York: Verso, 2008. p 6-7.
Let us consider a life in whose course there is abundance of repetitions: mine, for example. I never pass in front of the Recoleta without remembering my father, my grandparents, and great-grand parents are buried there, just as I shall be some day; then I remember that I have remembered the same thing an untold number of times already; I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does; I cannot lament the loss of a love or friendship without meditating that one loses only what one really never had; every time I cross one of the street corners of the southern part of the city, I think of you, Helen; every time the wind brings me the smell of eucalyptus, I think of Adrogué in my childhood; every time I remember the ninety-first fragment of Heraclitus “You shall not go down twice to the same river”, I admire its dialectical dexterity, because the ease with which we accept the first meaning (“The river is different”) clandestinely imposes upon us the second (“I am different”) and grants us the illusion of having invented it; every time I hear a Germanophile vituperate the Yiddish language, I reflect that Yiddish is, after all, a German dialect, scarcely coloured by the language of Holy Spirit. These tautologies (and others I leave in silence) make up my entire life. Of course, they are repeated imprecisely; there are differences of emphasis, temperature, light and general psychological condition. I suspect, however, that the number of circumstantial variants is not infinite: we can postulate, in the mind of an individual (or of two individuals who do not know of each other but in whom the same process works), two identical moments. Once this identity is postulated, one may ask: Are not these identical moments the same? Is not one single repeated term sufficient to break down and confuse the series of time? Do not the fervent readers who surrender themselves to Shakespeare become, literally, Shakespeare?
— Jorge Luis Borges. “A Refutation of Time.” Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. Ed Donald A. Yates & James E. Irby. London & New York: Penguin, 1970. p258-9
I sing myself to sleep
A song from the darkest hour
Secrets I can’t keep
Inside of the day
I swing from high to deep
Extremes of sweet and sour
Hope that God exists
I hope I pray
Drawn by the under tow
My life is outa’ control
I believe this wave will bear my weight so let it flow
Oh sit down
Oh sit down
Oh sit down
Sit down next to me
Sit down down down down down in sympathy
Now I relieved to hear
That you’ve been to some far out places
It’s hard to carry on
When you feel all alone
The wisdom that I seek
Has been found in the strangest places
Feels a lot like love
That I feel for you
Now I’ve swung back down again
And it’s worse than it was before
If I hadn’t seen such riches
I could live with being poor
Oh sit down
Oh sit down
Oh sit down
Sit down next to me
Sit down down down down down in sympathy
Those who feel a breath of sadness
Sit down next to me
Those who find they’re touched by madness
Sit down next to me
Those who find themselves ridiculous
In love in fear in hate in tears
In love in fear in hate in tears
In love in fear in hate in tears
In love in fear in hate
Oh sit down
Oh sit down
Oh sit down
Sit down next to me
Sit down down down down down in sympathy
A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst’s couch.A breath of fresh air, a relationship with the outside world. Lenz’s stroll, for example, as reconstructed by Büchner. This walk outdoors is different from the moments when Lenz finds himself closeted with his pastor, who forces him to situate himself socially, in relationship to the God of established religion, in relationship to his father, to his mother. While taking a stroll outdoors, on the other hand, he is in the mountains, amid falling snowflakes, with other gods or without any gods at all, without a family, without a father or a mother, with nature. “What does my father want? Can he offer me more than this? Impossible. Leave me in peace.” Everything is a machine. Celestial machines, the stars or rainbows in the sky, alpine machines— all of them connnected to those of his body. The continual whirr of machines. “He thought that it must be a feeling of endless bliss to be in contact with the profound life of every form, to have a soul for rocks, metals, water, and plants, to take into himself, as in a dream, every element of nature, like flowers that breathe with the waxing and waning of the moon.” To be a chlorophyll- or a photosynthesis-machine, or at least slip his body into such machines as one part among the others. Lenz has projected himself back to a time before the man-nature dichotomy, before all the co-ordinates based on this fundamental dichotomy have been laid down. He does not live nature as nature, but as a process of production. there is no such thing as either man or nature now, only a process that produces the one within the other and couples the machines together. Producing-machines, desiring machines everywhere, schizophrenic machines, all of species life: the self and the non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any meaning whatsoever.
— Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Deleuze & Guattari.
(Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, & Helen R. Lane)
