"The Horror of Darkness”: Toward an Unhuman Phenomenology

does “leave everything as it is,”23 is neither as passive as that, nor as anthropomorphically phenomenological: a revisionist looks with a new orientation, looks back or in reverse, and therewith creates a new description. It is one that is both subject-centred and reversed “back” towards the object (in what Thomas Nagel irst posited as an “objective phenomenology” in 1974—an object-oriented view of “what it is like to be x”).24 This is a reverse orientation, therefore, that is also physical. To speculate really is to see behaviour, anew. Finally, this leads us to the question, that we can only mention here, of how to orient oneself toward objects as subjects as well as those subjects that appear to us as objects—to the problems of panpsychism, and to the purported anthropomorphism atendant to that stance. If there really is a “lat ontology” of objects—a “democracy of things”— how is it that only some objects appears to other objects as subjects. What use is there for this chauvinism (both as a material chauvinism contra some objects, and as a “spiritual” chauvinism pro some others)? How can we create, immanently, a “genealogy of the absolute,” of absolutism, of hierarchy, a structure of disregard.25 One could simply discount such hierarchies as mere chauvinism, that is, as only prejudicial error or illusion. However, as I hope to show in a later work, for a non-standard approach to philosophy, this option is not open: everything is included within Laruelle’s “radical immanence” and nobody is let behind, including the idiots (indeed, especially the idiots, or at least the “transcendental Idiot”—a persona that Laruelle much prefers to that of the “clever” philosopher).26 So, if nothing is outside of the Real (a kind of monism of lat thought rather than a lat ontology that begs the question), this includes these dualities (chauvinisms) as moments within immanence itself—the “immanental” as Laruelle also calls it. This is not merely to tolerate intolerance in some kind of Latour-meets-Levinas thought experiment; nor is it to deconstruct tolerance (as one might deconstruct “hospitality,” say, through aporetic reasoning): it is the atempt to explain or realize intolerance within the Real as a kind or behaviour or orientation.27 Witgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §124. See Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 165-180. 25 See John Mullarkey, he Structures of Regard: Cosmogonies, Alterities, and the Fabulation of Destruction, forthcoming. 26 See Laruelle, héorie des Etrangers, 78, 110, 96, 160. 27 Incidentally, understood as specimens of conceptual intolerance, it is also to atempt the genesis of philosophies within non-philosophy. 23 24 Speculations: A Journal of Speculative Realism IV (2013) ISSN: 2327-803X http://speculations-journal.org DYLAN TRIGG “THE HORROR OF DARKNESS” TOWARD AN UNHUMAN PHENOMENOLOGY “Night takes me always to that place of horror. I have tried not moving, with the coming of nightfall, but I must walk in my slumber, for always I awaken with the thing of dread howling before me in the pale moonlight, and I turn and lee madly.” —H.P. Lovecrat, “The Thing in the Moonlight” INTRODUCTION: BEYOND BEING AND WORLD “Life,” so Gaston Bachelard writes in he Poetics of Space on a note of steadfast optimism, “begins well, it begins enclosed, protected, all warm in the bosom of the house.”1 To the critic, Bachelard’s remarks might be seen as emblematic of a kind of failure in phenomenology to think outside an anthropomorphised cosmos, in which the endless void of dark space is nothing less than the warm enclosure of the primal breast. To this end, the critic would have a point. Ater all, it is hard not to agree that much of phenomenology has indeed failed to move beyond the human realm and instead has emphasized the validity of lived experience as the guarantor of truth. We see this tendency of aligning “being” and “world” time and again in phenomenology. Indeed, the focus on the inescapability of the human relation to the world is evident in the very formulation that phenomenology advances as its groundwork: being-in-the-world. With this innocuous phrase, inherited in large from Heidegger by way of Brentano, phenomenology commits itself to a view of the subject as being constituted by the world and the world being constituted by the subject. Neither idealism nor realism, phenomenology merges the two via the concept of perceptual intentionality, where we—living subjects—are at all times in a relationship with the world. A couple of examples can briely demonstrate this always already interdependent account of being and world. The irst igures in Heidegger’s account of mood, the second focuses on Merleau-Ponty’s usage of the body. For Heidegger, the circularity between world and being is taken up in the idea of mood. According to him, mood is the prerelective way in which the world is given its speciic experiential signiicance. In this respect, mood structures our relation with the world: it atunes us to the world, acting hermeneutically to give the world the meaning it has for a living subject. We are always already—a phrase that Gaston Bachelard, he Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 7. 1 Dylan Trigg 113 haunts phenomenology—in a mood insofar as our relationship with the world is laden with meaning and never entirely neutral. That we are unable to not be in a mood means that the world can never have a phenomenal status without already being interpreted in a speciic way. This interdependent structure between being and world emerges again in the work of Merleau-Ponty. This time around, the structure of being-in-the-world is provided not by the hermeneutics of mood, but by the hermeneutics of the body. As with Heidegger’s mood, the role of the body for Merleau-Ponty serves to place us in a meaningful and intentional relation with the world. Far from the mere vessel of the self, our bodies, according to Merleau-Ponty, are the expressive organ of our atachment to the world. Body and world are equivalent terms insofar as each expresses the other. The world, for him, is not the backdrop against which our actions take place. Rather, the world is deined in a corporeal way in that it is discovered through the body. What this means is that body and world come together in a symbiotic or dialogical structure, both being co-constitutive of the other. In turn, this co-dependent relationship between being and world is mirrored in our relationships with others. Again, it is the body that provides the grounding for our structural and thematic relationship with the other. At all times, our experience of others is mediated via a prepersonal bodily intentionality, which provides a hermeneutic structure of experience.2 Mood and body are two ways in which subjectivity is inextricably and pre-thematically tied to the world. Other philosophical structures provide analogous equivalents for how our access to the world is at all times taken up from the centrality of the human subject, be it in linguistic idealism (Lacan and Derrida) or transcendental idealism (Kant and Schopenhauer). In each case, there are at least two critical consequences for post-phenomenological thinkers. This account of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the body as a philosophy of the world is necessarily one-sided, and I employ it merely to demonstrate a certain leaning in classical phenomenology. As is well known, in time, Merleau-Ponty will depart from this model of the living subject as the guarantor of truth with his concept of the “lesh” (Marice Merleau-Ponty, he Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis, [Northwestern: Northwestern University Press, 1968]). The later Merleau-Ponty marks a challenge not only for speculative realism but also for phenomenology itself. (For more on Merleau-Ponty as a critic of anthropomorphism together with his account of the prehistoric body as a nonhuman fossil, see my forthcoming, he hing: Xenophenomenology and the Origins of Life (Winchester: Zero Books, 2014). 2 114 Speculations IV The irst consequence is epistemological. Epistemologically, the apparent limitation of phenomenology is that it fails to contend with the problem of things in themselves, and instead remains constricted to access to the world from the circumscribed perspective of human experience. The implication being that thinking cannot get outside of its determinations, and, in the words of Quentin Meillassoux, “compare the world as it is ‘in itself’ to the world as it is ‘for us’, and thereby distinguish what is a function of our relation to the world from what belongs to the world alone.”3 Indeed, it is, above all else, in the polemical writings of Meillassoux that phenomenology is faced with its clearest and most challenging critique. Readers of this journal will be all too familiar with the context for Meillassoux’s critique of phenomenology, and there’s litle need for me to wade through each stage of his argument here.4 Nevertheless, for the sake of providing a context for the present paper, it is worth mentioning that for Meillassoux, phenomenology is illustrative of what he has termed “correlationism.” According to his thesis, correlationism is the “idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other.”5 Although the origins of this thought can be found in Kant, on irst glance, it looks as though phenomenology is the exemplary culprit of correlationism. Ater all, the idea that we can speak for things outside of our experience of how they appear “for us” is a kind of phenomenological contradiction. Phenomenology is a philosophy of relationality. It ties us to the world, and in doing so, reminds us that subjectivity is worldly and the world is subjective. At no point, so we can add with a touch of hyperbole, does phenomenology take leave of its senses and grant a reality to things independent to how they are thought or experienced. The tendency of phenomenology to commit itself to the interdependent union of being and world risks becoming a stiling impasse, in which to venture outside of this relation marks a heretical gesture. According to Meillassoux’s criticism, the problem the correlationist faces is not only that the world is unthinkable without the subject; the problem is also that the subject itself is inconceivable without the world. Terming this onus on the relational quality of phenomenology “the correlationist two-step” 3 Quentin Meillassoux, Ater Finitude: an Essay on the Necessiy on Contingeny, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum Press, 2008), 3-4. 4 cf. Paul Ennis, Continental Realism (Winchester: Zero Books, 2011). 5 Meillassoux, Ater Finitude, 5. argument, he goes on to single out the term “co” as a “veritable ‘chemical formula’” marking modern philosophy.6 This primary focus on the co-constitutional relation between subject and world has, for Meillassoux, lead philosophy away from the problem of substance to an epistemological impasse, in which the leading question is “no longer ‘which is the proper substrate?’ but ‘which is the proper correlate?’”7 For modern philosophy, the notion of an outside has become a sort of duplicitous mirror, forever on the verge of a claustrophobic anxiety. It is, so he writes, “a cloistered outside, an outside in which one many legitimately feel incarcerated, this is because in actuality such an outside is entirely relative, since it is—and this is precisely the point—relative to us.”8 This vision of narcissistic outside, in which the greatest exteriority is merely the interiority of a familiar face, marks a failure in modern philosophy. Enclosed within its own boundaries, what has been fundamentally lost in this history is what Meillassoux terms the “great outdoors” (grand dehors)—an [O]utside which was not relative to us, and which was given as indiferent to its own givenness to be what it is, existing in itself regardless of whether we are thinking of it or not; that outside which thought could explore with the legitimate feeling of being on foreign territory—of being entirely elsewhere.9 If his appeal to the great outdoors sufers from a sense of conceptual exaggeration, then it is nonetheless powerful because he captures the urge to escape the sufocating legacy of relational philosophy. Not only this, but his inclusion of a genuine alterity—a genuine alienage even—within philosophy aligns the great outdoors with an original trajectory in phenomenology that has almost certainly sufered from the preoccupation with inquiring into the “proper correlate,” which Meillassoux speaks of.10 Meillassoux, Ater Finitude, 5-6. Ibid., 6. 8 Ibid., 7. 9 Ibid. 10 To be sure, it is unlikely that the future of phenomenology will depend on how it responds to Meillassoux’s work, let alone the surrounding horizon of secondary thought that has followed in his wake. In each case, phenomenology will persist. Just in what form it will persist is a diferent and more pressing question. For these reasons, the present paper does not set out to “refute” Meillassoux. Whatever the merits of such a project, its scope exceeds the limits of the present contribution. Instead, I call upon Meillassoux in order to advance phenomenology in a speciic direction, a direction, which, if essential to the method, has nevertheless been lost along the way. 6 7 Alongside the epistemic worries, there is another problem phenomenology faces in the form of its relation with ethics. Ethically, this emphasis on human experience as the centre of philosophy has meant that phenomenology has tended to lean toward a restricted notion of what it is to be human. Characterised above all by an emphasis on plenitude and unity, this employment of a covert ethics of initude infects phenomenology from the outset, masking it with a particular end long before the work has begun in earnest. This is evident in manifold forms. In terms of environmental ethics, phenomenology is oten deployed as a means to somehow reinforce our relation to the world, as though the method were here to remind us of this relation in the irst instance.11 Meanwhile, the phenomenological onus on the body as the bearer of intersubjective relations has resulted in a homogenised account of the body, divested of a fundamental alterity. Likewise other phenomenon is atended to only insofar as it marks the site of airmation for the subject. In this reading, death, time, anxiety, and spatiality are taken as irreducibly human concepts. More than this, these same concepts are regarded as having an ethical value, in that they provide a fortuitous opportunity for a subject to (re)deine themselves or their values. The general outcome of this ethical phenomenology is that the method has been diluted to the point of efacing its receptivity to the nonhuman realm. In this suppression, the method has become aligned with a kind of uncritical airmation of “lived experience” as a guarantor of truth, and a truth, moreover, which carries with it a teleological orientation toward the ethical function of philosophy. Whether or not phenomenology can aid in the human need to feel “at home,” both on this planet and in relation to others, is wholly contingent to its methodology. That it has become concerned with the production of a speciic relation to the world—characterised by the preservation of a self-identifying union—needs to be critically addressed. This is not to suggest that the ethical tendencies of phenomenology can be overthrown with an appeal to disharmony and alterity, and that alone. The current philosophies of nihilism bear litle relevance here. Instead, it means articulating a phenomenology, in which the ethical realm is one horizon of experience among many rather than a privileged centre around which thought revolves. Only in this way can phenomenology fulil its mission in leting things speak for themselves. 11 cf. David Abram, he Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (New York: Vintage Books, 1997). Dylan Trigg 115 WHAT IS UNHUMAN PHENOMENOLOGY? How will phenomenology respond to the criticism that for too long it’s been insulated in a sufocating relation to the “proper correlate,” to style this question in Meillassoux’s terms? Let us put the question another way: If phenomenology remains commited to being-in-the-world, then can we also propose a phenomenology that can contend with a world without beings? Put still another way: Can this supposedly human-centric philosophy incorporate into its methodology an inhuman or nonhuman realm, and if so, what would that look like? Far from being the vehicle of a solely human voice, I believe that phenomenology can atend to the inhuman realm, and in this paper, I seek to defend a model of phenomenology that is not only capable of speaking on behalf of nonhuman realms, but is especially suited to this study of foreign entities. I will term phenomenology’s speciic mode of account for the nonhuman realm the unhuman. Why this terminology? My reasons are twofold. First, the inclusion of the “un” in unhuman aligns the concept with the notion of the uncanny. Like the uncanny, my account of the unhuman accents the gesture of repression that is synonymous with the uncanny, especially in its Freudian guise. With the unhuman, something comes back to haunt the human without it being fully integrated into humanity—a point I will expand upon in what follows. In this respect, the unhuman is tied up with notions of alienage and the anonymous. Second, the distinction of the unhuman is that it does not negate humanity even though, in experiential terms, it may be felt as a force of opposition. As I will argue, it is precisely through the inclusion of the human that the “great outdoors” becomes visible. This does not mean falling back into anthropomorphism: it means leting the unhumanity of the human speak for itself. This, too, relates to the theme of the uncanny insofar as it brings together a strange union between the familiar and the unfamiliar. My account of the unhuman is inextricably bound with the materiality of the body, such that without the body what is traditionally conceived of as the nonhuman realm would be impossible. Part of the problem inherent in the phenomenological impasse is that it has become overly comfortable with the idea that the bodily subject under investigation is a distinctly human body. The human body, as it igures in phenomenology, tends to be characterised by a sense of ownership, unity, and self-identity. It is a body that carries with it a rich multiplicity of moods, 116 Speculations IV each of which anchors it to the world. While there is no doubt that such a body exists—it is reasonable to assume each of us has a relation to one—this body is not exhaustive, nor does it account for the material conditions under which life emerges. Being a bodily subject—to phrase it in phenomenological terms—does not necessarily mean being a human subject. Another body needs to be accounted for in phenomenology. A creature that invades and encroaches upon the humanity of this thing we term “the body,” while at the same time retaining the centrality of the human body as its native host. This other body is the topic of investigation for an unhuman phenomenology. An initial foray into this alien materiality is required. We would like to propose an unethical body, wholly indiferent to the foreign mater—call it, “life”—that the body inds itself atached to. And it is important to note: how a living body inds itself atached to a life is wholly contingent. The particular coniguration of the human body is not an end point in history, but part of a mutating process, which may or may not devolve into another form. The body to be posited in this project is not only anterior to humanity but in some sense opposed to human existence insofar as it destabilises the experience of being a subject by establishing an “entirely elsewhere” within the heart of familiar existence. For this reason, the afective response of horror— far from an aestheticising of alien existence—is the necessary symptom of experiencing oneself as other. The point being that the involvement of horror in this phenomenology of the unhumanity is not for the sake of merely countering a tendency in phenomenology to exhibit the human within the scope of light and unity. Rather, horror concerns as much the structure of the human becoming unhuman as it does the thematic experience of this transformation. Indeed, without horror, alien materiality and the unhuman would resist conceptualization altogether. If phenomenology inds itself in an apparent impasse, then it is precisely for this reason that its rebirth is not only urgently needed but also especially timely. In what follows, I want to reinforce the vitality and dynamism of this method, with a reach that extends beyond the human body and crawls into another body altogether. The task, such as it presents itself, is to excavate aspects of phenomenology that can help us chart the emergence of a future phenomenology from within the history of the tradition. To achieve this end, the irst port of call will be the early phenomenology of Levinas. ANONYMOUS MATERIALITY In the early Levinas, we ind a metaphysics that provides a key—or perhaps a symptom—for how phenomenology can think beyond the hold of human experience. Far from the image of Levinas as a philosopher of the face, these early works reveal another side to his philosophy that is characterised less by the face-to-face encounter and more by the facelessness of appearances. In these early works, his project is to describe the origins of the subject—an existent—as it appears against the impersonal horizon of existence. Indeed, the whole task of his irst book, Existence and Existents, is to atempt a phenomenology of the “instant” when the subject appears. At irst glance, it looks as though he is following a traditionally phenomenological line of thought, stating that “A being has already made a contract with Being; it cannot be isolated from it.”12 He thus seems to lock us into a kind of phenomenological prison, in which the inseparability of being and world is reinforced. Indeed, the inseparability of existence and existent is preserved in Levinas. Yet it is precisely for this reason that the rupture of the two terms is possible. For what Levinas wants to argue in his early metaphysics is that the “adherence of beings in Being” is not “given in an instant…[but]…rather accomplished by the very stance of an instant.”13 It is with this elevation of the fractured, indeterminate emergence of the instant that Levinas’s philosophy will itself emerge. The reason for this ontological elevation of the instant is primarily because the idea of an instant engenders itself to an account of becoming that permits alterity. That the relation of being in Beings is not “given in an instant…[but]…rather accomplished by the very stance of an instant” means that Levinas’s ontology is fundamentally concerned with the otherness of duration. An instant, for him, is an event, a becoming with its own emergence, which carries with it the arc of an origin, as Levinas puts it: “Beginning, origin, and birth present a dialectic in which this event in the heart of an instant becomes visible.”14 Put another way: if something comes into existence—be it a maggot, a crab, or a dragonly— then it does so from the backdrop of a generalised and pre-existing plane of Being. Things are born into something, Levinas remarks: “New life igures as the prototype of the relationship between an existent and existence.”15 But a phenomenology of birth alone would not grant us an understanding of the pre-thematic existence. Instead, “We must then try to grasp that event of birth in the phenomena which are prior to relection.”16 This something that things are born into, is neither the spatiality of our cultural and social world nor the temporality of a history. The general existence transcends the speciicity of a manifest thing, as Levinas has it: “Being cannot be speciied, and does not specify anything.”17 The question for Levinas is how we can account for this generalised Being without tying it down to the speciicity of things. The danger here is rendering Being local, and of conferring a “personal form” upon it.18 The task is to think outside the personal, while at the same time recognising that only from within the personal can the anonymity of existence be thought. This atempt to conceive an anonymous existence is our irst point of departure for developing an unhuman phenomenology. THE THERE IS Levinas begins by considering the phrase “a world in pieces.”19 Such a phrase is privileged so far as it marks a rupture with our relation to things. In this rupture, any anxiety experienced is not simply underscored with the knowledge that one day we will die. More than this, it is the “anonymous state of being” that marks a constant threat against the contingency of being a subject.20 In an important passage, he writes: “Existence is not synonymous with the relationship with a world; it is antecedent to the world. In the situation of an end of the world the primary relationship which binds us to Being becomes palpable.”21 In this passage, Levinas is assigning a reality to existence that is not dependent on there being a world in the irst place. Rather, existence precedes the birth of the world, marking a constant presence that is at once immersed in the world of things but at the same resistant to being identiied with those things. For this reason, “Being is essentially alien and strikes against us. We undergo its sufocating embrace like the night, but it does not respond to us.”22 At the same time, this 15 16 17 18 Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pitsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001), 1. 13 Ibid., 2. 14 Ibid. 12 19 20 21 22 Ibid., 10. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 8. Ibid. Ibid. Dylan Trigg 117 pre-human existence also emerges in “the twilight of the world” whereupon the appearance of the subject folds back upon its disappearance. Given this non-relational account of existence in Levinas, the question emerges of how we can enter into a relationship with the world without existents. In fact, Levinas tells us from the outset that “the relationship with Being is... [an] analogy,” meaning that any atempt to reduce this anonymous world to a localised thing would be all but impossible.23 Moreover, the world without beings is, in his words, “not a person or a thing, or the sum total of persons and things; it is the fact that one is, the fact that there is (il y a).”24 This notion of the there is will become critical for Levinas. With it, he will try to account for the indeterminacy of existence, which undercuts the anthropomorphism of classical phenomenology. The il y a cannot be explained, nor can it be represented, save as an indirect analogy. It belongs to the shadows and can only be approached in the shadows. Thus Levinas asks us to envision a scenario: “Let us imagine all beings, things and persons, reverting to nothingness. One cannot put this relation to nothingness outside of all events. What of this nothingness itself?”25 For Levinas, something remains in the nothingness, an excess that underpins the personal realm of silence with an anonymity that is anterior to a subject, he writes: “This impersonal, anonymous, yet inextinguishable ‘consummation’ of being, which murmurs in the depths of nothingness itself we shall designate by the term there is.”26 At ground zero, therefore, the ontology of Levinas gestures toward an anonymous realm that cannot be identiied with nor can it deduced from a particular being, i.e., an “inner world.”27 Beyond the realm of subject and object, interior and exterior, the il y a invades these facets of existence without being imprisoned by them. Nevertheless, the phenomenal realm—the realm of mysterious forests, sunken ghost ships, and craggy mountains—is the site in which the there is manifests itself. Above all else, though, it is the night which becomes synonymous with the “very experience of the there is” for Levinas.28 In his reading, the night assumes a thematic and structurally analogous role to the insidious quality of the il y a, remarking that: When the form of things are dissolved in the night, the darkness of the night, which is neither an object 23 24 25 26 27 28 Levinas, Existence and Existents, 8. Ibid. Ibid., 51. Ibid., 52. Ibid. Ibid., 52. 118 Speculations IV nor the quality of an object, invades like a presence. In the night, where we are riveted to it, we are not dealing with anything. But this nothing is not that of pure nothingness…[T]his universal absence is in its turn a presence, an absolutely unavoidable presence.29 Far from the mere disappearance of things, the Levinasian il y a retains a presence, which cannot be tied down to appearances despite having an indirect relation to those appearances. Nothing is given in this night except “the sheer fact of being in which one participates, whether one wants to or not…”30 This sense of the subject as being implicated by the anonymity of this nocturnal ontology sets in place a vertiginous relationship to the il y a. More than an invasion of anonymity, the there is marks a “menace of pure and simple presence,” in which the inite being is divested of their singularity and subsumed by a “swarming of points,” each of which constitutes an eventual “horror of darkness.”31 LEVINAS’S WEIRD REALISM In the twilight, there is horror. This horror marks a threshold, a zone of diference, through which the disordering of light and darkness converge. Light recedes from the world, and a shadowline is created. In that shadowline, the play of light and dark confuses the boundaries masking everyday world. What is revealed is an abomination masquerading as an appearance. Levinas: One can also speak of diferent forms of night that occur right in the daytime. Illuminated objects can appear to us as though in twilight shapes. Like the unreal, inverted city we ind ater an exhausting trip, things and beings strike us as though they no longer composed a world, and were swimming in the chaos of their existence.32 The vision is uncanny. Levinas shows us that the horror of darkness is a space, in which things not only die but are also born. Born into the twilight, we catch sight of formless shapes, unbound from their categorisation into “things.” The city is inverted. Now, the moon punctuates the daylight creating an insomnia that is no longer localised to the dark but instead becomes constitutive of perception as a whole. Night, hitherto coexistent with an absence 29 30 31 32 Ibid., 53. Ibid. Ibid., 54 my emphasis. Ibid., 52. of light, seeps into the day, rendering the realm of light and reason a murmuring apparition: “The rustling of the there is…is horror.”33 Enough of romancing the night: we need to address the plac of the subject within this nocturnal topography. If Levinas is able to ofer us a way into an unhuman phenomenology, then how can we account for experiences of horror, experiences which are all too human? In fact, just because there is a human with an afective experience does not mean that we are bound by the limits of human initude. Rather, it is precisely because the human remains intact that the thinking of the unhuman becomes possible. A critical thesis can be formulated: Only in the disjunction between the experience of oneself as human and the realization that this same entiy is fundamentally beyond humaniy is the possibiliy of an unhuman phenomenology conceivable. We see this paradoxical tension as being central to Levinas’s thought. It is evident most clearly in his account of the subject as “depersonalized” and “stiled” by this confrontation with this pre-human reality.34 “Horror,” so Levinas writes, “is somehow a movement which will strip consciousness of its very ‘subjectivity.’”35 At the same as it is stripped of its subjectivity, the subject remains present, occupying an event horizon where the materiality of the physical body outlasts the dissolution of the personal subject. Insomnia gives us a sense of this strange unhuman subjectivity that persists through the twilight. Insomnia, for him, is not simply an inability of refusal to sleep. It cannot be understood in terms of a negation of sleep, nor as the result of a contingent event in the world, such as stress. Rather, Levinasian insomnia is marked by a liminality of boundaries. The sleeper is not entirely present as subject but nor is he entirely beyond subjectivity. Existence and existents merge in the space that refuses to give itself over to the dawn. In the later Time and the Other, he formulates an account of insomnia that accents this impossible structure, remarking that: “Insomnia is constituted by the consciousness that it will never inish—that is, that there is no longer any way of withdrawing from the vigilance to which one is held.”36 This constant vigilance is unwavering and yet without purpose. Its correlating object is nothingness, an “impersonal existence.”37 Levinas, Existence and Existents, 55. Ibid., 53. 35 Ibid., 55. 36 Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard Cohen (Pitsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 48. 37 Ibid., 48. 33 34 Similarly, in a series of interviews collected under the title Ethics and Ininiy, the formal structure of insomnia is given a thematic content that aligns it explicitly with the horror of becoming unhuman. He writes: In insomnia one can and one cannot say that there is an “I” which cannot manage to fall asleep. The impossibility of escaping wakefulness is something “objective,” independent of my initiative. This impersonality absorbs my consciousness; consciousness is depersonalized. I do not stay awake: “it” stays awake.38 Here, Levinas as a precursor to “weird realism” comes to the foreground. Materialism—in this case, the materiality of the subject—is not annihilated by the irruption of the il y a but instead pushed to the surface in its strange facticity. Materialism survives the twilight. The result is a partly formed subject, which is both present to itself while also being simultaneously conscious of its own efacement: in a word, unhuman. Levinas’s claim that “I do not stay awake: ‘it’ stays awake” captures this double bind between identity and non-identity converging in the same body. Another presence inhabits the body of the insomniac, employing that materiality as a canvas to articulate a metaphysics of anonymity. The body as it is lived— with all its desire and anxieties—is pushed to the background. In its place, the “density of the void” possesses the body of the insomniac, revealing the body as having a reality wholly independent to the experience of being a inite subject.39 In the experience of the unhuman, the reality of materiality persists despite the apparent extinction of subjectivity. It is precisely because things return in the horror of darkness that their reality is accented outside of the subject. Levinas makes it clear that the subject becomes at one with the nothing, suffocated by a force that is at once anonymous and immemorial. Seen in this way, horror is the experience of inversion, a disordering of interiority and exteriority, until nothing else remains except for materiality rendered spectral/spectrality rendered material. Levinas writes: “The haunting spectre, the phantom, constitutes the very element of horror.”40 The reason for this close relationship between spectrality and 38 Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Ininiy, trans. Richard Cohen (Pitsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 49, my emphasis. 39 Levinas, Existence and Existents, 59. 40 Ibid., 56. Dylan Trigg 119 horror can be understood in the context of a weird realism. That which outlives its own corporeal extinction is transformed into an entity that is both of its self and concurrently other than itself, both human and unhuman at once. Here, the human body is shown as having another side to it that is fundamentally independent of expression and perception. It is not the body of you and me, nor the body that cannot be approached by phenomenology less even by introspection. It is a body that is beyond appearances, a “supernatural reality” that resists the ruins of its own negation. Into this abyss, the body as a spectre comes back from the beyond, carrying with it “an anonymous and incorruptible existence.”41 This is the twilight of the spectre, the night of another metaphysics. There is no exit except in the illusion of the il y a receding into the daylight. Levinas teaches us a lesson: even in death, the dead remain as elements of the horror of the night, creatures that rise from an absence of life in order to occupy the anonymous existence that remain in the excess of being. THE SPECTRE OF UNHUMANITY Phenomenology, as I have described it in this paper, faces two distinct challenges. As mentioned above, these problems are epistemological and ethical in nature. Both of these problems constrain the scope of phenomenology by tying it to a predetermined structure. In the case of epistemology, phenomenology remains commited to the view that the world is shaped by the humanity of the body in its interdependent relationship to the world. Ethically, the problem phenomenology confronts is an elimination of the alterity of the body through disposing itself too keenly to instances of bodily unity. Synthesising these two problems, phenomenology enters into a state of stagnation, an impasse that Meillassoux has described with great precision. The challenge we posed for ourselves in this paper concerns whether or not phenomenology can think outside of its tradition, and in this respect, return to a phenomenology genuinely receptive to alterity. Has Levinas enabled us to respond to this challenge? Let us examine the evidence. The scene is both epistemological and ethical; each bound by what Meillassoux terms the correlationist circle. Ethically, it is clear that the subject characterised in the early Levinas resists being deined by the unity of lived experience. Although his focus, of course, will later on privilege ethics as a irst philosophy, for the moment the picture 41 Levinas, Existence and Existents, 57. 120 Speculations IV foregrounds less the insistence on a face-to-face relation with the world and more a recognition of the anonymous threat underpinning that eventual relation. In this focus on the pre-ethical subject, he captures the birth of the subject before it has been assigned a particular ethical role in the world. Here, the subject lacks a correlating home in which to ind him or herself. And Levinas does not yet advance toward this urge to house the subject in the world. Instead, he gives space for subjectivity to exert its weirdness in a world that is not yet its own. Epistemologically, we recall that Levinas seek to contend with a world without beings. Prima face, this move positions him outside of the traditional account of phenomenology as being commited to the relation between being and world. The question is: how does Levinas get outside of this relational hold allowing the world to be thought of in-itself rather than for us? We can formulate a speculative response in terms of the speciicity of Levinas’s use of the relation between being and world, as it is articulated in the il y a. At stake here is not an intentional relation, less even a “substantive” relation—as that of beingin-the-world—but an indirect relation. This is clear in his use of the term “analogy.”42 Let us recall the passage: “The relationship with Being is only remotely like that; it is called a relationship only by analogy.”43 The il y a here emerges as a void in the phenomenal realm, a cut that dissects the relational bind between being and world. Seen in this way, his metaphysics thus comes to the foreground in its indirection through establishing a withdrawal from the world beyond experience, as he states: “In our relationship with the world we are able to withdraw from the world.”44 That we are able to withdraw from the world—and yet still retain an indirect relation to that world—is only possible because there is a relationship with the world structured at all times by pervasive anonymity. Experientially speaking, nothing can be spoken of in terms of a world without beings except by way of analogy. In the case of the il y a, this indirect experience is of horror. Horror is not a confrontation with a world in-itself, but the marking of the intersection of the world tearing away from the subject. The horror has two faces to it. The irst face is that of the subject becoming unhuman. The second face is the gap that gestures beyond appearances. With both faces, horror emerges only to disappear into the murmuring silence. It is a structural opening, 42 43 44 Ibid., 8. Ibid. Ibid., 45. whereby diferent realms are conjoined into the same unhuman body. The name Levinas applies to this unhuman body is “spectre.” With this elevation of the spectral to an ontologically distinct category, Levinas moves away beyond human subjectivity as a Dasein—a literal being there—in order to develop an account of subjectivity that is both presence and absence concurrently.45 The signiicance of the subject as a spectre in this unhuman phenomenology is to problematize a series of boundaries that have so far anchored phenomenology in an uncritical fashion, not least the boundary between absence and presence, experience and non-experience, and the living and the non-living. Far from siding with one boundary over another, the spectre is that which can both speak of the human while also speaking beyond humanity. Spectrality is the mark of unhuman phenomenology. It bears the trace of the human as a remnant while also undoing that humanity. As fundamentally liminal, the spectral body traverses diferent ontological realms without succumbing to the need to unite those realms in an axis of humanity. Here, the body loses its ethical value, becoming a depersonalized assemblage of alien mater to some extent already dead before it has come to life insofar as it is constituted by a plane of anonymous existence irreducible to experience and opposed to our concept of what is “human.” Yet spectrality is not only an invocation of the dead coming to life. Nor is spectrality limited to a refusal to die. Ghosts, revenants, and other entities that haunt our waking dreams, gesture toward an aterworld that is in some sense sealed of from human experience. Ater all, those who go in search of ghosts seldom ind them. Only in their haunting of us do we stand a chance of witnessing a ghost. But the spectrality of the unhuman is of a diferent order. In the irst instance, unhuman spectrality is constitutive of human existence rather than an abnormal departure from it to be exorcized or mourned. The spectre is there all along, present as an element to unmask the featureless face of a body that gravitates at all times toward the unrelenting twilight. Does this transformation of the human to a spectre entail a negation of the subject? Quite the contrary. The weird realism of a materiality outside This is not to suggest that Dasein is ill at home amongst spectres, as Derrida would have it: “There is no Dasein of the spectre.” Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 2006), 100. Cf. Dylan Trigg, he Memoy of Place: a Phenomenology of the Uncanny (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012), 285. of the scope of human experience is only possible because—paradoxically—there is a body in the irst place. The body is not negated but returns as a foreign presence, as Levinas writes: “Horror is the event of being which returns in the heart of this negation, as though nothing had happened.”46 Indeed, nothing—literally—has happened. The body remains in place, its materiality seemingly unafected by this exposure to anonymous existence. And yet, ontologically it marks a diferent order of material existence. No-thing intercedes. For this reason, no longer can the body be said to be an element in the relation of Being and being. It returns, ontologically disigured through its transformation into an unhuman entity. As a concluding point, it is worth speculating on how far we can go positing the body as both human and unhuman concurrently, and thus a route both into but also beyond the scope of relational phenomenology. Can the body productively lead us astray, as it were, or does it remain limited by a set of inite determinations? Put a more convoluted way: to what extent is the body an organon of knowledge independent of subjectivity and not reducible to the initude of human experience—that is to say, an unhuman body of knowledge? The present paper merely aims at rendering this question a legitimate question to pose for phenomenology and speculative realism. To respond to it, studies of the body would be required from philosophy, the natural sciences, and not least archaeology, palaeontology, and in all likelihood, astrobiology. It is a question that reaches beyond the limits of human experience and joins ranks with the much cited question concerning knowledge of the world before it was populated by humanity. Only here, the question is directed not to the prehuman Earth but to the status of the body prior to its advent as a human entity. 45 46 Levinas, Existence and Existents, 57. Dylan Trigg 121