<figure><img src="image_42.png" /></figure>

in place of responsibility”.<fnref n="7" /> Speaking more generally, queer theory developed the concept of queer temporality to analyze “how time and its uses allowed for theorizations of normative and non-normative arrangements of life.”<fnref n="8" /> The main point of this theoretical approach is that queer people often don’t follow the hegemonic timing of life, almost living in a different time. “Too slow as measured by heterocapitalist rhythms of life, not quite aligned with received patterns of living, or doomed to have no access to futures, queer subjects came to be burdened by time.”<fnref n="9" /> Instead, “[q]ueer temporality celebrates the queerness of nonprogressive, non-sequential time, exploring some of the radically subjective experiences of time and temporality.”<fnref n="10" /> Queer temporality is an ambiguous concept here: it can be something that is imposed on queer subjectivities, but it can also be something that the queer positively appropriate.

As a counter discourse to the modern chrononormativity, queer temporality describes the specific temporality that queer forms of desire and identity are endowed with, in order to remove them, similarly to other deviant forms, from the temporal order.<fnref n="11" /> “Whether understood as throwbacks to an earlier stage of human development or as children who refuse to grow up, queers have been seen across the twentieth century as a backward race.”<fnref n="12" /> Furthermore, the question of reproduction plays no role for queer life in modernity, since the schema of ‘productivity’ does not apply: there is *No Future* for the queer.<fnref n="13" /> But not only the future is denied to queers. They are also deprived of any collective history and the ‘disposal’ of the past. As the emergence of the homosexual as a ‘species’<fnref n="14" /> (and with it, that of queer discourse) is still very recent in modernity, a collective history of these ‘new’ subjects cannot have formed yet. Instead, their sexuality is considered not to be fully formed yet, and the queer present they live in is marked by untimeliness. They are “temporally backward, though paradoxically dislocated from any specific historical moment.”<fnref n="15" /> Their time seems strangely suspended, they live in bubbles with only slight permeability to the ‘world’. When the levels of time are dissolved, the imaginary of time must also take on other forms, time has to be imagined differently. The flat arrow of time does not seem to be representative here. Queer temporality critiques:

> the notion of time as a flat plane on which events march forward in sequence. It suggests a potentially queer vision of how time wrinkles and folds as some minor feature of our own sexually impoverished present suddenly meets up with a richer past, or as the materials of a failed and forgotten project of the past find their uses now, in a future unimaginable in their time.<fnref n="16" />

This particular form of time is concerned with other directions, it is, as Rilke writes in a felicitous verse, “time standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts”.<fnref n="17" /> Moving transversally to the direction of time, queer temporality sorts itself around the events of normative sexuality. The ‘straight’ and the ‘queer’ are also intertwined

<footnote n="7">7 Carolyn Dinshaw/Lee Edelman/Roderick A. Ferguson/Carla Freccero/Elizabeth Freeman/Judith Halberstam/Annamarie Jagose/Christopher S. Neal-on/Tan Hoang Nguyen, “Theorizing Queer Temporalities. A Roundtable Discussion”, in: *Queer Temporalities*, special issue GLQ *A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies* 13/2–3, 2007, edited by Elizabeth Freeman, pp. 177–195, p. 182.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8 Kyle Frackman/Ervin Malakaj, “Introduction. Approaches to Queer Temporalities in German Studies”, in: *Monatshefte* 114/3, 2022, pp. 353–362, p. 356.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9 Frackman/Malakaj, “Introduction. Approaches to Queer Temporalities in German Studies”, p. 356.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10 Carla Freccero, “The Queer Time of Lesbian Literature”, in: *The Lesbian Premodern*, edited by Noreen Giffney, Michelle M. Sauer and Diane Watt, New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2011, pp. 19–31, p. 22.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11 Cfr. Elizabeth Freeman, “Introduction”, in: *Queer Temporalities*, special issue GLQ *A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies* 13/2–3, 2007, edited by Elizabeth Freeman, pp. 159–176, pp. 161–162.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">12 Heather Love, *Feeling Backward. Loss and the Politics of Queer History*, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2014, p. 6.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">13 Lee Edelman, *No Future. Queer Theory and the Death Drive*, Durham: Duke University Press 2004.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">14 This hypothesis occurs in a famous passage in Foucault’s *History of Sexuality*: “We must not forget that the psychological, psychiatric, medical category of homosexuality was constituted from the moment it was characterized [...] less by a type of sexual relations than by a certain quality of sexual sensibility, a certain way of inverting the masculine and the feminine in oneself. Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.” (Foucault, *The History of Sexuality*, vol. 1, p. 43) Nevertheless, the idea that premodern queerness is radically different from modern queerness has come to be criticized as teleological in the context of *Queer Unhistoricism*, cfr. Carla Freccero, *Queer/Early/Modern*, Durham: Duke University Press 2006; Carla Freccero, “Queer Times”, in: *After sex? On Writing since Queer Theory*, edited by Janet Halley and Andrew Parker, Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2011, pp. 17–26; Sebastian Matzner, “Queer Unhistoricism: Scholars, Metalepsis, and Interventions of the Unruly Past”, in: *Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception*, edited by Shane Butler, London: Bloomsbury Academic 2016, pp. 179–201.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">15 Freeman, “Introduction”, p. 162.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">16 Freeman, “Introduction”, p. 163.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">17 Rainer Maria Rilke, “To Music”, in: *Ahead of All Parting. The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke*, edited by Stephen Mitchell, New York: Modern Library 1995, p. 143.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_43.png" /></figure>

in a spatial constellation whose multiple directions cross along opposite vectors, and peripheral paths break off. Hence, modern queer identity describes “a historically specific relation to power, rather than an identity per se”.<fnref n="18" /> As a literary manifestation of their negative relationship to power, for example, many of them do not age, but remain forever young, and “as they refuse ‘becoming,’ these youth become queer.”<fnref n="19" />

Nothing happens in their lives: the queer dandies of modernity from Huysmann's Des Esseintes to Proust's alter ego seem to live a life without events, suspended in their untimeliness and pushed away from the paradigm of the modern desire for an eventful life. This need for events is also evident, for example, in Stendhal's *Chartreuse de Parme*, where the young protagonist really desires events: He goes to war in order to participate in the Battle of Waterloo, to participate in 'history'. Instead, he only sees smoke rising from afar and asks: “But is this an actual battle?”<fnref n="20" /> In the end, he sleeps through parts of the battle. Therefore, even in early modernity, being concerned with the event becomes one of the techniques of the self in the modeling of time and in synchronizing the self with society, world, the others: Since the 19th century, the desire for the event had been present in literature, crystallizing here in an explicit demand for the event. Whoever wanted to become modern needed events, historical events or those related to work or sexuality. This, and the event character of modern sexuality, is at stake when queer temporality resists the regime of time. Queer figures have to find other events, to appropriate events that do not allow their participation. The hegemonic event does not happen for them. Marriage, childbirth: those say little to queer people around 1900. They meet secretly and at strange times, they struggle in the closet. Therefore, literature is not only the place, but above all the temporal order that allows such other events: Here, it is possible to overwrite symbolic inscriptions, ignore discursive protocols, fantasize weird times. In literature, people can arrange to meet despite chrononormativity. And in the very moment when they lose any sense of time, they create the setting for a queer event.

It is time to follow up such an event. Let's look at Marcel Proust's *In Search of Lost Time*, in which the remarkable timelessness and the triviality of what is (not) happening configure themselves to form an event that in turn shakes straight time and reacts to the demand for events. The aim will be to examine how Proust's novel relates to the ambiguous modern discourse of queer temporality: where chrononormativity throws the queer out of time and yet where resistance and something like 'proper temporality' can be detected.

## II. Chrononormativity and Hegemonic Time in Proust's *In Search of Lost Time*

Marcel Proust's *In Search of Lost Time*, a novel in seven volumes published in Paris between 1913 and 1927, is counted, because of its modernization of narrative and subjectivity, among the greatest works of French literature. The novel is initially dealing with the narrator's inability to remember, and then, how he successfully does so: *In Search of Lost Time* tells the narrator's memories of his life in the Parisian high society between the 19th and 20th century. However, the novel doesn't mainly emphasize this plot: Frequently, nothing really happens. Rather, nothing happens at all, and the novel belongs to the kind of literature that will later be called the “world of boredom”.<fnref n="21" /> Instead, the focus is the narrator's reflections on memory, time, and meaning, as well as the precarious realization that these trajectories of consciousness and experience have become fragile.

Questioning modern time, the *Recherche* enters a critical relationship with the complex of chrononormativity, which tempers modern life and aligns it with the principles of an accelerated economy. This becomes particularly clear in one of the novel's most famous scenes in the first volume (*Swann's Way*), in which the intellectual inactivity of the narrator, who is not working anyway, undermines the principle of directed productivity.

Instead, coincidence becomes productive. We know Proust above all for a famous madeleine scene, in which the sensual event releases the *mémoire involontaire*, that is, the memory that was inaccessible through pure intellect. The narrator dips a madeleine in the tea and eats it, suddenly remembering that he had always

<footnote n="18">18 Siobhan B. Somerville, "Introduction", in: *Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies*, edited by Siobhan B. Somerville, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2020, pp. 1-14, p. 5.</footnote>

<footnote n="19">19 McCallum/Tuhkanen, "Introduction. Becoming Unbecoming. Untimely Mediations", p. 6.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">20 My translation. "Mais ceci est-il une véritable bataille ?", cfr. Dorothee Kimmich, "'Ist das eine Schlacht?' Heine, Immermann, Stendhal und Flaubert: Erzählen von Ereignissen", in: *Ereignis. Konzeptionen eines Begriffs in Geschichte, Kunst und Literatur*, edited by Thomas Rathmann, Köln: Böhlau 2003, pp. 45-62, p. 52.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">21 Eugenio Montale, "Il mondo della noia", in: *Auto da fé. Cronache in due tempi*, edited by Giorgio Zampa, Milan: Mondadori 2016, pp. 69-72, p. 69.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_44.png" /></figure>

eaten a madeleine just like this when he was a child. In this way, he gains access to his childhood memories which were previously 'blocked' by the remembered difficulty of going to bed. This so-called 'episode of the madeleine' also plays an important role for the question of the queer event in Proust's *Recherche*<fnref n="22" /> and makes us understand in how far the novel is an "inquiry into the mechanisms of desire".<fnref n="23" />

Central to the novel, this event unfolding around a madeleine enables memory. Strange as it is, this event and its narrative context allow the *Recherche* to search for other temporalities of modernity, those marginalized by the modern modes of acceleration.

Right at the beginning of the novel, in the middle of the pale childhood memory, we see how heterological time and queer temporality intersect, as the narrator listens, in the seclusion of his room, to modernity rushing by: "I could hear the whistling of trains, which, now nearer and now farther off, punctuating the distance like the note of a bird in a forest, shewed me in perspective the deserted countryside through which a traveller would be hurrying towards the nearest station [...]."<fnref n="24" />

In this scene, two worlds with their specific time qualities touch, and the train marks a double distancing. On the one hand, the noise of the engine renders the very silence of the room audible, while, at the same time, it situates the precarious subjectivity of the *Recherche* beyond the paradigm of progress which materializes in the train: The narrator is cut off from the outside world. On the other hand, the same narrator declares the territory of modernity to be a vast and “deserted countryside” that cannot be of interest to him. The disparity between an external, unfamiliar, and accelerated modernity, on the one hand, and an intimate temporality of the narrator, who does not participate in the former, on the other hand, already shapes the first pages of the *Recherche*. In this context, time and space overlap: This other time happens also in a different space, in the countryside, far from the hasty city. In contrast to the modern time rushing along in the distance, the narrator remains idle in his room, mostly in bed, hardly moving, where we can watch him think.

> Noiselessly I opened the window and sat down on the foot of my bed; hardly daring to move in case they should hear me from below. Things outside seemed also fixed in mute expectation [...]. What had to move—a leaf of the chestnut-tree, for instance—moved. But its minute shuddering, complete, finished to the least detail and with the utmost delicacy of gesture, made no discord with the rest of the scene, and yet was not merged in it, remaining clearly outlined.<fnref n="25" />

Unlike synchronized modernity, the narrator's spatial constellation is occupied by solitary entities whose movements, however slight, are not transmitted among each other. The narrator's temporality remains erratic and a disparate configuration; even the nuances do not carry over but remain asynchronous.

Much like the sleepy protagonist in Stendhal's *Chartreuse* who misses out on the battle of Waterloo, the narrator, remote in his solitary atemporality, misses out on the distant events of modernity that are always happening 'elsewhere', and outside his bubble. Indeed, notions of time completely dissolve as he alternates between waking and sleeping, decomposing the principle of linear progress, moving for- and backwards between what has been and what is to come. Instead, the narrator establishes a form of timelessness in which time seems

<footnote n="22">22 We do not engage with Proust scholarship here but conceptualize the queer event. For queer studies on Proust, cfr. e.g. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, *Epistemology of the Closet*, Berkeley: University of California Press 1990, pp. 213–251; Elizabeth Richardson Viti, “Marcel and the Medusa: The Narrator’s Obfuscated Homosexuality in *À la recherche du temps perdu*”, in: *Dalhousie French Studies* 26, 1994, pp. 61–68; Edward Hughes, “The Mapping of Homosexuality in Proust’s ‘Recherche’”, in: *Paragraph* 18/2, 1995, Vol. 18, pp. 148–162; Stacey Meeker, “Closeted Metaphors, or Reading Identity in *A la recherche du temps perdu*”, in: *Paroles gelées* 14/1, 1996, pp. 13–29; Urs Urban, “In der Kammer. Die Verortung der Homosexualität bei Proust”, in: *Literarische Gendertheorie. Eros und Gesellschaft bei Proust und Colette*, edited by Ursula Link-Heer, Ursula Hennigfeld and Fernand Hörner, Bielefeld: transcript 2006, pp. 167–176; Gregor Schuhen, *Erotische Maskeraden. Sexualität und Geschlecht bei Proust*, Heidelberg: Winter 2007; Adam Watt, *The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust*, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2011, pp. 113; Elisabeth Ladenson, “Sexuality”, in: *Marcel Proust in Context*, edited by Adam Watt, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2013, pp. 115–122; Eveline Kilian, “Alternative Temporalities: Queer Time in Marcel Proust’s *A la recherche du temps perdu* and Dorothy Richardson’s *Pilgrimage*”, in: *Modernist Cultures* 10/3, 2015, pp. 336–356; Adeline Soldin, “Seeing Feeling. Queer Voyeurism in *A la recherche du temps perdu*”, in: *French Studies* 69/3, 2015, pp. 318–332; Luc Legrand, *L’Homosexualité dans la vie et l’œuvre de Marcel Proust: une ‘sale tante’ au grand cœur*, Brussels: Peter Lang 2019; Thomas Hughes, “The Balcony: Queer Temporality in The Stones of Venice and Proust”, in: *Ruskin’s Ecologies. Figures of Relation from Modern Painters to The Storm-Cloud*, edited by Kelly Freeman and Thomas Hughes, London: Courtauld Books Online 2021, https://courtauld.ac.uk/research/research-resources/publications/courtauld-books-online/ruskins-ecologies-figures-of-relation-from-modern-painters-to-the-storm-cloud/2-the-balcony-queer-time-in-the-stones-of-venice-and-proust-thomas-hughes/.</footnote>

<footnote n="23">23 Sara Danius, “Black Socks, Green Threads: On Proust and the Hermeneutics of Inversion”, in: *The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature*, edited by E. L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2014, pp. 344–362, p. 344.</footnote>

<footnote n="24">24 Marcel Proust, *Remembrance of Things Past*, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, vol. 1, London: Chatto & Windus 1957, p. 1–2.</footnote>

<footnote n="25">25 Proust, *Remembrance of Things Past*, vol 1, p. 41–42.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_45.png" /></figure>

to compress itself into space. The bed becomes the place of non-occurrence and of time not passing in this little one-room world: “I’m going to sleep,”<fnref n="26" /> he reports, a paradoxical testimony of these dissolving operations which can never be said because the subject is already necessarily absent at the moment of its semantic truth.<fnref n="27" />

Now, this untimeliness is not simply ‘there’, but closely connected to the subject’s forms of desire. In fact, there seems to be something strange about his libidinous dispositions and activities which arise ‘sometimes’ and occur in sleep as strange figurations of femininity: a “woman” or “maiden of my dream,” that is “[f]ormed by the appetite”, populating now the erotic experience.<fnref n="28" /> But this dream creature doesn’t represent his actual desire. While our narrator sleeps a timeless sleep (or does not), up there in his suspended and lonesome room, the object of his desire is walking downstairs in the house. It is his mother to whom his desire is attached and whom he perpetually wants to kiss. The desire to kiss her assaults him every evening when he has to say goodbye to her for the night. After all, the great problem of the *Recherche* before the madeleine-event sets in, is the child going to bed, and the farewell to the mother it entails. No less significant is the narrator’s regret that “Mamma, for fear of annoying my father, would not allow me to give her in public the series of kisses that she would have had in my room.”<fnref n="29" /> Our narrator is thus in the midst of the Oedipal triangulation which makes him desire the mother and fear the father. No wonder, then, that he speaks ambiguously of the “drama of my undressing”<fnref n="30" />, with “drama” evoking theater and the Oedipus tragedy in particular. The novel suggests that the female object of desire is only possible within an incestuous distortion of hegemonic heterosexuality, another 19th century form of ‘peripheral desire’. Of course, this failing sexuality is not only a problem of time, but again located in the narrator’s room of deviant desire.

As we see, at this point the narrator’s sexuality has ‘not yet’ overcome the Oedipus complex and has not yet been anchored in the rushing of heteronormative modernity. The strange timelessness of his room, a stage of kisses, stands in the regime of the modern time order. One year before the publication of the *Recherche*, in 1913, Freud published the above-mentioned essay *Totem and Taboo*, in which he deals with the incestuous *Objektbe- setzungen* of the ‘neurotics’ and the ‘savages’, interpreting them both as an early stage of development. Proust’s narrator, who remains excluded from the modern times of the (hegemonic) ‘others’ due to the persistence of the Oedipus complex within him, experiences a temporality imposed on him by others. Very concretely, as a child he is not allowed to sit at the table with his parents for as long as he would like to but is sent off to the sexual enclave of his room, dislocating him from the stream of straight action. Moreover, he is afraid of “knowing that the creature one adores is in some place of enjoyment where oneself is not and cannot follow”<fnref n="31" />. Thus, he explicates the asynchrony of the other’s and his own temporality. In addition, his mother does not answer his letters sent downstairs<fnref n="32" />, leaving him in the anxious idle of his queer temporality, which occurs in “[t]hose inaccessible and torturing hours into which she had gone to taste of unknown pleasures”<fnref n="33" />. Finally, he has no story because the oedipal triangulation and the uneventfulness kill all memories, making his own past inaccessible to him, thus, preventing narrative: “To me it was in reality all dead.”<fnref n="34" />

It is not surprising, then, that the narrator suffers from the queer temporality he is forced into. The “hate- ful staircase”, separating him from his mother, provokes in him the “sorrow that I felt each evening”<fnref n="35" />. The heart which “began to beat more and more painfully”<fnref n="36" /> conducts the precarious beat of queer temporality. And as his mother holds a dinner party downstairs, he is captured by “des tourbillons ennemis, pervers et délicieux”<fnref n="37" /> (“swarms of enemies, perverse and seductive”<fnref n="38" />), in which different temporalities are twisted and which once again set modern acceleration apart from the narrator’s own temporal subjectivity.

<footnote n="26">26 Proust, *Remembrance of Things Past*, vol 1, p.</footnote>

<footnote n="27">27 Cfr. Hans Blumberg, *Höhlenausgänge*, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1989, p.18.</footnote>

<footnote n="28">28 Proust, *Remembrance of Things Past*, vol 1, p. 3.</footnote>

<footnote n="29">29 Proust, *Remembrance of Things Past*, vol 1, p. 34.</footnote>

<footnote n="30">30 Proust, *Remembrance of Things Past*, vol 1, p. 57.</footnote>

<footnote n="31">31 Proust, *Remembrance of Things Past*, vol 1, p. 38.</footnote>

<footnote n="32">32 Proust, *Remembrance of Things Past*, vol 1, p. 40.</footnote>

<footnote n="33">33 Proust, *Remembrance of Things Past*, vol 1, p. 39.</footnote>

<footnote n="34">34 Proust, *Remembrance of Things Past*, vol 1, p. 57.</footnote>

<footnote n="35">35 Proust, *Remembrance of Things Past*, vol 1, p. 35.</footnote>

<footnote n="36">36 Proust, *Remembrance of Things Past*, vol 1, p. 41.</footnote>

<footnote n="37">37 Marcel Proust, *À la recherche du temps perdu*, vol. 1, Paris: Gallimard 1946, p. 47.</footnote>

<footnote n="38">38 Proust, *Remembrance of Things Past Past*, vol 1, p. 39.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_46.png" /></figure>

In its metaphors and topics, the *Recherche* also identifies the narrator’s sexuality as a “nervous condition”<fnref n="39" /> and thus participates in the modern discourse that marks deviant forms of time and desire as pathological. He is simply driven by “agony”,<fnref n="40" /> and when one evening things get particularly bad, he stays awake until his mother comes upstairs after the guests have left and spends the night with him. “‘But Madame, what is little Master crying for?’ [...] ‘Why, Françoise, he doesn’t know himself: it is his nerves.’”<fnref n="41" /> His diagnosed nervosity—his father calls it “sentimentality”<fnref n="42" />—clearly contradicts the functioning of (re)productive bodies. It is therefore significant that the father (as incarnation of reproduction) claims to be “not nervous like you”.<fnref n="43" />

This night remains exceptional:

> I knew that such a night could not be repeated; that the strongest desire I had in the world, namely, to keep my mother in my room through the sad hours of darkness, ran too much counter to general requirements and to the wishes of others for such a concession as had been granted me this evening to be anything but a rare and casual exception.<fnref n="44" />

Here, desire is conceptualized as a quantity of time ('sad hours') which cannot be connected to modern temporality. It must remain precarious, and sanctioned, in the face of normative access ('requirements') and the idea of biological reproducibility we can see in this *factice* ('unnatural', 'artificial') night.

Thus, it seems that the narrator is entirely subject to the time regime of modernity, which allows him neither subjectivity nor ‘proper time’. Chrononormativity allows its exteriorities only non-action, solitary spaces without connection to the world, retardation. In short, chrononormativity denies queer people any form of subjectivity and rather produces non-identities. By locating the narrator-subject in a minoritarian epistemology of time, the *Recherche* starts from a negative relation to power in which no events seem possible. However, things change when, after that awful night, no attempt is made to synchronize queer temporality; the narrator’s queer time is simply tolerated. He is awarded a “puberty of sorrow [...]”<fnref n="45" />. Incidental as this seems, it is the direct pre-condition for the event of the *Recherche*, that is, for the ‘killing’ of the madeleine; this episode of the madeleine is the threshold where chrononormativity is contrasted with an event that does allow for subjectivity.

### III. Against Modern Time: The Queer Event in Proust

So, after nothing has happened so far—nothing in the room, nothing in sexuality, nothing in temporality—a strange event takes place. This not only disrupts the temporal order of the novel, but also makes the *Recherche* itself an event in literary history. A madeleine in the tea: Proust’s provocation here is narrating absolute triviality, which becomes the novel’s center of rotation. By itself, hardly anything could be less eventful. But the narrator carefully prepares the event by making certain rearrangements (e.g., the recognition of pain) and creating connections that allow the event to branch out into another order. In fact, the event also connects the narrator’s present with his Oedipal childhood, in that the event takes place *now* and yet—this is the memory—belongs to the past: The event releases the memory of its regularity in childhood.

Indeed, at the moment of the event, the narrator once again addresses the “drama of my going to bed”, invoking the Oedipal temporality in which otherwise “nothing [...] had any existence for me”<fnref n="46" /> and where being out of time leads literally to non-existence. Also, he dips the madeleine because he is “weary after a dull day

<footnote n="39">39 Proust, *Remembrance of Things Past*, vol 1, p. 49.</footnote>

<footnote n="40">40 Proust, *Remembrance of Things Past*, vol 1, p. 38.</footnote>

<footnote n="41">41 Proust, *Remembrance of Things Past*, vol 1, p. 49.</footnote>

<footnote n="42">42 Proust, *Remembrance of Things Past*, vol 1, p. 47.</footnote>

<footnote n="43">43 Proust, *Remembrance of Things Past*, vol 1, p. 47.</footnote>

<footnote n="44">44 Proust, *Remembrance of Things Past*, vol 1, p. 55–56. “Je savais qu’une telle nuit ne pourrait se renouveler ; que le plus grand désir que j’eusse au monde, garder ma mère dans ma chambre pendant ces tristes heures nocturnes, était trop en opposition avec les nécessités de la vie et le vœu de tous, pour que l’accomplissement qu’on lui avait accordé ce soir pût être autre chose que factice et exceptionnel.” (Proust, *À la recherche du temps perdu*, vol. 1, p. 63)</footnote>

<footnote n="45">45 Proust, *Remembrance of Things Past*, vol 1, p. 49.</footnote>

<footnote n="46">46 Proust, *Remembrance of Things Past*, vol 1, p. 58.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_47.png" /></figure>

with the prospect of a depressing morrow",<fnref n="47" /> he therefore suffers from the monotonous temporality of a linear and alien order. Something, then, seems to be happening to the nervous and sickly condition of the narrator, a break in time, "a thing I did not ordinarily"<fnref n="48" /> do. And indeed, the madeleine is not simply a pastry, but the whole scene has an eventful grammar and a sexual semantics. The madeleine, having a female name anyway, looks "moulés dans la valve rainurée d'une coquille de Saint-Jacques"<fnref n="49" /> ("as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim's shell"<fnref n="50" />). Not only the 'shell', but also the *valve*, which phonetically evokes the vulva, constitute the sexual symbolism of the madeleine as a female genital, and therefore its functionalization in the discourse of sexuality as sketched out by the *Recherche*. This genital-madeleine, dipped in lime blossom tea, is quite literally put to sleep, drowned, dissolved. The scene is, strictly speaking, brutal. We observe here a sacrifice of the feminine that is meant to dissolve the false *Objektbesetzung* and end the oedipal triangulation in order to release queer desire. In fact, the dynamics of the scene correspond to each other: The vulva, this "little scallop-shell of pastry, so richly sensual under its severe, religious folds"<fnref n="51" />—and with it the (albeit peripheral) normative desire—is put to sleep. The subject wakes up, remembers, can finally narrate: In succession to the anatomical place and the temporal position of the biological productivity, the novelistic memory forms another type of producing. This production had already prepared itself in the earlier state of extraneous constraint. The letters the narrator sends within his mother's house to persuade her to come upstairs, to satisfy his desire, are his first 'writing attempts' to establish a connection with the mother: "How much we love him [...] the good-natured intermediary who by a single word has made supportable, human, almost propitious the inconceivable, infernal scene of gaiety."<fnref n="52" />

Without the episode of the madeleine, the *Recherche* would end after a few pages, we would have nothing to discuss now. But precisely because of this episode-event the failed attempts at writing are now replaced by the narrative productivity that makes the novel of the *Recherche* possible in the first place. The replacement of the letter by the novel itself instantiates the displacement of the vulva. And it is precisely this detachment from the paradigm of biological productivity that allows the vivification of what was 'dead' in the narrator. For him, heteronormative sex dies, and other forms of productivity come alive.

In fact, by killing the vulva, he apparently gains enough mental capacity to find 'something' within himself that had previously been hidden and repressed. This finding opens a first form of temporality, namely the narrator's own past and stories, with all the virtual, possible, unreal and possibly real events preserved in it. Hence, the queer event provides the narrator with a biography, with a past of his own as the simplest form of an individual time (which is denied to queer people in modernity).

This access to time overcomes the motionlessness and rigidity of the hegemonic temporal order and creates a 'room for one's own': "I feel something start within me."<fnref n="53" /> This movement in time structures the entire event. Following the sacrifice of the madeleine/vulva, the narrator searches within himself for the gradually rising memories and perceives

something that leaves its resting-place and attempts to rise, something that has been embedded like an anchor at a great depth; I do not know yet what it is, but I can feel it mounting slowly; I can measure the resistance, I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed.<fnref n="54" />

In this metamorphotic scene, an order dissolves. We see different vectors and time pushes not in one but in all directions—in the horizontality of 'spaces' as well as in the verticality of the submarine ascent. This 'something' first exists in an unknown form and then becomes a memory that can be localized in time. As a multiform or

<footnote n="47">47 Proust, *Remembrance of Things Past*, vol 1, p. 58.</footnote>

<footnote n="48">48 Proust, *Remembrance of Things Past*, vol 1, p. 58.</footnote>

<footnote n="49">49 Proust, *À la recherche du temps perdu*, vol. 1, p. 65.</footnote>

<footnote n="50">50 Proust, *Remembrance of Things Past*, vol 1, p. 58.</footnote>

<footnote n="51">51 Proust, *Remembrance of Things Past*, vol 1, p. 61.</footnote>

<footnote n="52">52 Proust, *Remembrance of Things Past*, vol 1, p. 39.</footnote>

<footnote n="53">53 Proust, *Remembrance of Things Past*, vol 1, p. 60.</footnote>

<footnote n="54">54 Proust, *Remembrance of Things Past*, vol 1, p. 60. "quelque chose qui se déplace, voudrait s'élever, quelque chose qu'on aurait désancré, à une grande profondeur ; je ne sais ce que c'est, mais cela monte lentement ; j'éprouve la résistance et j'entends la rumeur des distances traversées" (Proust, *À la recherche du temps perdu*, vol. 1, p. 67)</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_48.png" /></figure>

even unshaped Freudian *id* it could ‘do’ or be anything, but then it metamorphotically turns into the figurative. Only as it becomes time, it finally becomes legible for the narrator. The anchor, then, lifts as well, and the scene detaches from the hegemonic order of time. And above all, this event is not an adaptation to the modern regime of time; it is far too transversal for that, far too close to failure (‘trembling’), too ignorant of the linear needs of modernity, and instead materializes as affective ‘resistance’. This is not just a neurasthenic trembling here, but we also see a hint of pleasure and of the orgasm that will be possible after the queer event. Things become ambiguous, after all. There are ‘spaces’ now, and they have a specific quality to them. They exist beyond the rush of a synchronized modernity, and they undermine the silence that chrononormativity imposes on queer people: a “mounting”.

The tableau with which the event ends is therefore revealing. The memories, as crystallizations of the new temporality, rise in the narrator:

> And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognisable [...]<fnref n="55" />.

The dissolution, indeed, the liquid sacrifice of the madeleine, here transforms into the emergence of another and new dynamic that takes over the operation of dissolution, while at the same time limiting its rush ahead. And just as forms become fluid here, so too does the novel deconstruct the order of time, for the event takes place in the past *and* in the present, linking Oedipal youth with the deviant present. The narrator not only recalls, he also repeats. He is still the child because he does it again; he is no longer the child because the event only now opens up new ‘spaces’ for him. By blurring the temporal planes, time becomes imaginable in a different way, time that folds, for example, time that ‘wrinkles’ (see above).

Queer temporality is a floating mobility in which momentary forms, ephemeral constellations, pluridirectional movements and events can do something, being distinct, yet eluding fixation. The event has released an ‘other’ that explores different forms of legibility in the ongoing transformations of the scene. But that is exactly what they are: forms of legibility. And as such they penetrate precisely to the core problem of queer discourse: What is constantly elusive, must be shown in at least momentarily stable forms, be it the killing of the madeleine, be it the harmless game with its manifold shapes. Here, it is concretions of a queer temporality that must be imaginable so that it can dissociate itself from chrononormativity. So, how to conceive the queer event in Proust?

#### IV. Towards a Theory of Settings: Queering the Event in Proust

In the fourth volume of the novel, the narrator’s relationship to queerness becomes particularly clear when he observes two men at a clandestine meeting in a courtyard and launches into an extended reflection on ‘homosexuality’. Even though he explicitly distances himself from it, it is clear how much the narrator feels connected to these two men and to the species of ‘homosexuals’. He cannot avert his eyes, becoming a voyeur of the scene, and also emphasizes that ‘homosexuals’ (because of their secrecy) have special abilities to recognize each other—just as he recognizes them and thus belongs to them. All this, the long reflection, the voyeuristic scene, and the discourse of belonging, are possible in this fourth volume, long after the event. So, it seems to have made a difference. Time to summarize the tableau:

We see quite different temporalities in Proust. On the one hand, chrononormativity grasps modern subjects, feeds them to hegemonic discourse, and demands productivity; it also organizes modern subjectivity through a series of salient events both in the historical process and in individual biographies as markers of a

<footnote n="55">55 Proust, *Remembrance of Things Past*, vol 1, p. 62. “Et comme dans ce jeu où les Japonais s’amusent à tremper dans un bol de porcelaine rempli d’eau de petits morceaux de papier jusque-là indistincts qui, à peine y sont-ils plongés s’étirent, se contournent, se colorent, se différencient, deviennent des fleurs, des maisons, des personnages consistants et reconnaissables, de même maintenant [...] tout cela qui prend forme et solidité, est sorti, ville et jardins, de ma tasse de thé.” (Proust, *À la recherche du temps perdu*, vol. 1, p. 71)</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_49.png" /></figure>

transition. This is the logic of the *Bildungsroman*, which shapes (male) subjects according to hegemonic dis-
course and thus makes them available for social functions: They become adults, they become ‘mature’, they
become fathers. They *become*. But it is also the schema of a correct development into heterosexuality that works
behind the scenes in Proust’s *Recherche*.

On the other hand, this chrononormativity generates a form of precarious queer temporality by imposing certain rhythms of time and life on queer subjects, denying them others, suppressing their subjectivity, making impossible the ‘other’ moments of their lives that could differ from straight time. This concerns, for example, the relegation of queer subjects to an earlier stage of development because their sexuality has not yet arrived in the ‘now’ (so as individuals they are preoedipal, as species they are ‘primitives’). Furthermore, chrononormativity concerns those forms of prohibition that turn queer gatherings into clandestine meetings, and that make deviant constellations impossible because they would always need ‘other’ places and times. In Proust’s case, let’s just remember the solitude and uneventfulness of the room, the discourse of productivity, the clandestine meeting in the courtyard. This minoritarian temporality, however, can generate ‘productive’ moments and then, precisely as queer temporality, makes subjectivities possible and endows events with a different quality.

How does the central event of the *Recherche* operate? Does the madeleine episode fit into a minoritarian epistemology of queer time that suffers from practical forms of suppression and produces the need for events? Or is the event effective and disruptive, that is, capable of interrupting the dominant discourse of modernity (be it as a discursive temporality, be it as the narrative rhythm of the story), or at least rearranging its frequencies?

In Proust's *Recherche*, we first see in the event an optimistic interruption, an event of proper, private tem-
porality: the disconnection from the rush of modern chrononormativity happens here very explicitly, insofar
as the entire plot of the novel is owed to the supposedly meaningless madeleine, making the narrator a resis-
tant subject with his own rhythms. On the other hand, the discourse of reproduction remains intact: It is true
that the demand for productivity is initially rejected, as a demarcation is made from biologically reproductive
sexuality. And beyond that, the novel resists the modern economy of productive time anyway, insofar as it is
terribly long, it takes an awfully long time to read it, and it is incredibly boring at times. But despite its re-
sistances, the *Recherche*, after all, *does* constitute a form of productivity: The *Recherche* is about writing, where
writing replaces biological productivity. And in terms of literary productivity, the *Recherche*, as one of the most
extensive modern novels, fulfills this paradigm to the fullest.

Overall, then, there is an ambivalence between the discourse of temporality that imposes productivity and the subversive potential that plays off the powerful vastness of narrative against the relative narrowness of a strictly timed discourse. This ambivalence also affects the event of the *Recherche*: The madeleine in the tea produces an event that, to be sure, frays, moves back and forth, diverges, generates transversal mobility, being in this respect a defiant event which resists modernity. Nevertheless, it corresponds to the typical demand for events in modernity: modern events tend to synchronize individual ‘life’ and general ‘history’ in order to create a synchronous and smoothly functioning subject. Let us think again of sexuality, where, for example, individual development proceeds in phases (e.g., anal and oral) and can always be mapped onto the general development of humankind, thus, allowing individual sexuality to merge into the process of ‘culturalization’. The *Recherche* unfolds around an event, arises from it. So, what could be more in line with the modern demand for events than a novel devoted entirely to the event? Therefore, besides the ambivalence between discourse and subversive temporality, on the one hand, we are confronted, on the other hand, with the ambivalence of the event which could be either conform to hegemonic modernity or ‘individual’.<fnref n="56" />

Are there queer events? Yes and no. There aren't any, inasmuch as any attribution of this kind would con-
tradict the two concepts at stake here. Generally speaking, we have no valid theory of the event, we can provide
no definitions of the event, and hardly say what *the* event is; the event is no longer just an event.

As far as the question of the queer is concerned, we cannot know what we are talking about here either,
because attempts at definition are also obsolete. Queer studies are nowadays faced with the aporia that they
are losing their ‘object’ by no longer wanting to define queer subjects and identities.<fnref n="57" /> The question of the queer

<footnote n="56">56 On the notion of individual and collective events cfr. Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History", in: *Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews*, edited by D. F. Bouchard, Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1977, pp. 139–164.</footnote>

<footnote n="57">57 E. L. McCallum/Tyler Bradway, "Introduction. Thinking Sideways, or an Untoward Genealogy of Queer Reading", in: *After Queer Studies. Literature, Theory and Sexuality in the 21st Century*, edited by E. L. McCallum and Tyler Bradway, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2019, pp. 1–17. See also *After sex? On Writing since Queer Theory*, edited by Janet Halley and Andrew Parker, Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2011.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_50.png" /></figure>

event must therefore be answered in the negative on both counts.

But events can certainly play out in a queer way, can be queerly transformed. In Proust, too, the event initially has no semantics at all, but acquires them only through its narrative context and embedding. If we take this seriously, we could say that the queer event is more of a *setting*: a point in time, a space, a set of practices, subjects, things, both visible and invisible. They are nothing, they say nothing; dunking the madeleine is not an event, it is pure regularity (the narrator even remembers having done it that way before). The event happens and becomes queer only when we know the narrator's prehistory and look at the aftermath, at the semantic attributions and the assonances (valve/vulve), at the situational transformations: the dissolution of the madeleine and the Japanese game, the oedipal triangulation and the orgasm, the letters and the novel, the tea and the tears, and so on.

And perhaps we can see this very well in Proust: Despite all his conformity to discourse (or not), he shows us a somehow 'decentered' event that leaves the prototypical core of eventfulness. What matters is not so much what happens in the center of the situation, but what is arranged around it, what moves transversally, what pushes backwards and forwards. The queer event is therefore not so much the explicit coming-out, not the clandestine meeting, not the first kiss or sex. Rather, the queer event-setting is possible where the interplay of chrononormativity and queer temporality allows for symbolic and social contexts of meaning that are simply possible but not obligatory. This event is an option, not a constraint. The queer event does not presuppose a specific identity, nor does it have to form one. It rather generates an infrastructure for life that can be used or not. This becomes particularly clear in the *Recherche*, where the event initially appears as an unspectacular regularity in the past, when the narrator, as a child, repeatedly dips madeleines into tea and eats them. At the same time, however, he does this very thing again later, reaching memory and releasing queer energy. Is the event, then, only visible and legible from a temporal distance? The event is not merely a memory event; it also takes place performatively in the presence of the narrator. It could always have been effective, but it only becomes so *now*: once again, an infrastructure that is simply used at some point.

Queering the event and looking for its settings can be a way for queer studies to escape an essential concept and search for what has not yet been told. In fact, by going in search of these event-settings, we can discover queer history and queer narratives told beyond any question of queer identity. We might then see not only the big narratives of identity, but also the small and almost undetectable queer energies that settle on micro-levels, crystallize in momentary constellations, and promise a different structure of experience.
<figure><img src="image_51.png" /></figure>

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<figure><img src="image_54.png" /></figure>

# Fifth Chapter: Penelope Unravelling

## Mrunmayee Sathye

This is not an academic essay. You have been warned – do not expect to find too many insights here, you will be disappointed. It's just a bunch of words strung together in the hopes of making sense. And nonsense.

*Let's see.*

I had gladly, and with much inspiration, decided to write something like an “autotheoretical” think-piece about the experience of reading ‘emancipatory theory’ – theorisations of identity and power from the perspectives of conventionally marginalised sections of society. ‘Which society?’ is a good starting point. So I won’t start there.

It doesn't matter. Trust me.

What matters is that that text is not what you are reading here. Because, as it turns out, reading the works of other people writing about their selves, and writing about them is infinitely less shit-your-pants difficult than forcing yourself into the role of the author. Writing about yourself is often depressing, and the writing, more often than not, turns out quite – well, – pretentious. Writing about yourself with the knowledge that that writing will be seen and read, or maybe not, is horrifying. Who would’ve thought? The whole game of hiding and showing and seeing and being seen is something of a balancing act. It’s like walking on a tightrope except it isn’t at all tight and there isn’t really a rope. It’s exhausting. And ridiculous.

*How do people do it? And more importantly, Why?*

Academia is very logical; it tries to logically set boundaries to that which is illogical, irrational. Go with me for a second. That which is emotional, artistic, deeply personal and all that. Where else would it be possible to chart out the rules of poetry in excel sheets and forget to read the poems? Academia desperately tries to find objectivity in that which can only ever be subjective, and then it writes about it as if it were something new. Because it has to be new if you want to find a job or if you want your name to survive the death of your body. Because here, your words can only ever have value if they haven’t been read before. The author is dead, the reader has already reached a ripe old age, we are all cyborgs, and we’re waiting on the next new thing. Which might already have arrived yesterday. We’ll need to check the roster.

I do love academia though. Not so much the institution, which is tiresome for all its velvet rope, but the actual work, which is fun for nerds like me. Because here, feminist theory can both be feminist and theory. Sometimes. Because to a certain extent, it isn't that bad to look for the objectivity in subjective truths, or a strong objectivity amidst a sea of weak objectivities. I learnt that terminology in a book by Sandra Harding and am unabashedly using it without a valid citation because this isn't an academic text. The register is allowed to be different. At least that's what I'm telling myself.

Anyway. Even in academia, identity is sexy today in ways it never has been before. Look one way, and everyone is clinging to rescuing institutions and traditions and rules and structures; look the other way, and everyone only ever talks about themselves and their feelings. Between deconstructing the institution and reconstructing the human, a war seems to have emerged between past and future. As though the past and the future always exclusively belonged to sparring groups of opinionated individuals in the first place. As though it were necessary to pick a side: political or personal, before entering the stadium refurnished as a battlefield. It's either only the political with no room for the personal, or the personal instead of the political. Left, right, and centre.
<figure><img src="image_55.png" /></figure>

Everything is about identity today. Maybe it always has been, but there is something fascinating about the way we all can be this busy trying to define everything and pack it up into neatly organised boxes for all to see. Analyse every experience and label it; if there should be a stray memory lurking behind the boxes that doesn't fit into them, the least you can do is to donate it. The boxes are critical. Minimalism not only in your cupboards but also in your discourses. Minimalist selves, maximalist lives. Making life easier one box at a time, one category at a time.

Yes.

Maybe.

So, this is not the text I set out to write and then abandoned and then picked up again. Because even in my de-
nial, I have no integrity. I found it impossible to write “autotheory” myself while I’m writing a dissertation on
autobiographical writings by other highly inspiring people. It didn’t measure up. It couldn’t. And for a couple of
other reasons which you will find smattered through these next few pages. If you get them you get them, don’t
bother looking for them now, because they aren’t all that life-changing.

I suppose that's how words work, sometimes they change your life and sometimes they are just useful for buy-
ing potatoes or finding the toilet. I prefer the first kind. Word-life balance.

*The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?*

I sit in the room I grew up in and sigh. Visiting the parents is never quite as simple as just visiting the parents.
There are so many other factors involved that I have lost count of them. I look at my bookshelves and stare
at the books in them. Hundreds of books stare back at me, almost as if to ask me if I'm still theirs, if I still
remember.

I started reading quite early in life. I was reading children's adaptations of English classics at the age of four
and obsessively fawning over the adventures of the famous five by the time I was six. It had been decided – I
was a reader. Children in real life were mean and loud and scary. The children in my books were interesting
and brave and kind. I knew them. They were my friends, even if they didn't know it. I felt more of a connection
to Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm or to Jo March than I ever would to any non-fictional child my age. Even today,
the only kind of children I feel like getting to know are the kind that are made up of words.

The world around me was overwhelming, it was unpleasant and frightening at times, it was full of eyes look-
ing at me when all I wanted was to not be seen. In my books, I found a safe space where I could be the one
looking, slipping in and out of narratives that were not mine but also very much mine all at once. There were
entire worlds there, in a dance of closeness and distance, and I, a happy resident of those imagined borderlands.
Shedding my shameful body, leaving behind my anxious self, escaping from the tense debates amongst the
people around me, I entered those worlds without having to construct an I at all. In fleeing reality for a taste of
that sweet being without being, I could participate in all sorts of experiences without having to position myself,
in a corner or otherwise.

If my childhood was rich with the fictions of others, my teenage came to be filled with books “one should have read”. Whether or not I had lost the sheer joy of reading then, I don’t know, but it was still the crutch helping me navigate the strange oceans of this exhausting world. In declaring myself not-woman – which was easier than trying to have a gender while also being ‘fat and ugly’– I allowed myself, or maybe forced myself, to leave my body behind as I desperately sought my place in the think-thoughtful world of words and ideas. My body was nothing but a burden; it was the one visible, physical thing I could not seem to get rid of while I wanted
<figure><img src="image_56.png" /></figure>

nothing else in the world than to be invisible. The transparent girl-child whom which what the sunlight passes right through. Oh what I wouldn't have given to be a ghost. To be light as air and quick as sound, passing through streets full of people unnoticed, undone, un-laughed-at. Shame is exhausting. It is also quite the pain to realise years later that it is also ridiculous.

Did I want to be a man? Definitely. The world of words was a white man's world, I think I already understood that as a brown girl-child. I spent my days playing with a strange sense of belonging despite the knowledge of clearly not-belonging, and it was my game. It wasn't the kind of understanding that is deliberate; I only felt it sleeping, buried somewhere in my bones. Did I really want to be a man? I don't think I was thinking about gender then at all, to be honest. I was mostly just trying to find the right way, or any way at all, to exist. To perceive my body as mine. It wasn't easy, and I couldn't. It still isn't.

*This is not particular to me.*

*I am not special in feeling this way. I am also not alone in this.*

There is an objectivity in subjective truth.

As a young person in India obsessed with history, I fostered a desperately romanticised view of the independence story early on. But the books that had opened all those worlds to me sometimes turned dark when Jane Austen's sporadic mentions of well-earning colonels in 'the Indias' became hard to ignore, or the Sherlock Holmes I so admired casually spat out something racist or sexist. Often both, in tandem. Of course, I remember many such bitter passages, but I shall have to refuse to give you examples. It isn't the examples that count; it is the feeling.

When you grow up in a country that used to be a colony, even the air you breathe is postcolonial. The stories we are told as children, the contents of our history books, the multitude of languages between which we continually switch, the silently internalised consciousness of a colonial hierarchy of the world, and the undercurrent of shame at typically 'native' behaviours. Funnily enough, where I grew up, in my mother-tongue, the English word 'colony' is used to describe the residential block where one lives, while the concept of colonialism itself has an array of other translations and connotations. I have also heard 'colony' to mean a Dalit ghetto in rural parts.

Most people around me grew up multilingual. And while this is, in retrospect, a valuable trait, that multilingualism often carried within itself a hierarchy of languages, a bitter awareness that code-switching was a hal- lowed skill and "good English" a sign of culture and education. The past half-century has seen many theoretical texts about that keenly postcolonial sense of language confusion and not-belonging. But reading and writing about third spaces and double and triple binds doesn't quite take away the sharp bite of the realisation that I am significantly less eloquent in what I call my mother-tongue than I am in English.

*All round me are words, and words and words,
They grow on me like leaves, they never
Seem to stop their slow growing
From within...[...]*

And still, I don't know what so many things are called in any other language I speak: the names of so many birds or trees or foods. Because I only ever learnt them from my mother.

*[...] Words are a nuisance, but.
They grow on me like leaves on a tree,
They never seem to stop their coming,
From a silence, somewhere deep within ...
Kamala Das, "Words"*
<figure><img src="image_57.png" /></figure>

I don't remember exactly when I started reading feminist theory for the first time. I suppose there never really is a single beginning to anything meaningful; several small beginnings merge into each other and make one forget that there ever was a before. But I remember feeling the way I used to feel while reading all those books as a child. Less alone. Like finding friends I never knew I already had. It made me feel like a part of something greater, something worth fighting for. And against. Feminist theory dared me to move from not-woman to woman, it opened up mental spaces in which it was possible and necessary for someone who didn't fit the long list of conventions of femininity to exist as equally woman. White feminist writers became my mentors and heroes – if they were women hacking away at the binds of the patriarchy, I wanted to follow in their footsteps and hack along. They weren't foreign white women to me, they were feminists.

And then I found Audre Lorde. And Teresa de Lauretis and Chandra Mohanty and so many others. I found new heroes. And my feminism began to grow. It became more coloured, more queer, more different. It became more. The boxes grew and I grew up. Newer threads began to weave themselves into the picture and I needled them in as I found them. For the teenager in me looking for explanations, feminist theory with all its complexities and debates and shortcomings became a playing field of learning and understanding the world. The more I read, the more multidimensional it all became. I had grown up romanticizing the ideals of freedom and emancipation, and feminist theory gave them new pastures to unfold and multiply. And the more I read, the more it all seemed to fit together into a tapestry of domination and struggle, power and injustice stretching across time and space.

We've got it now, haven't we? *We've found our ideology*. The invisibility of acts of violence is an act of violence itself. Invisibility is injustice. The struggle for visibility is freedom.

But there must be more. *There has to be.*

There aren't those many things which move me quite the way theory does. Theory is in the body, they say. If I try to shut my mind off for a minute and just take in what my body feels, I realise that it doesn't work that way. I can't separate them. I sit in a library and read an essay by Audre Lorde, and it *does something to me*. I can feel it in the pit of my stomach, the tingling which gets stronger and spreads through my body. I choke up and shiver for the sheer sense of... *emancipation?*. From what, though? Is it emancipation I am feeling or something else? It is that sense of being less alone, of finding a part of myself in someone else's words, and fitting into the tapestry of the world. It is emotional. And very much physical. Why should I try to write theory when reading theory can be so life-changing?

Why should I even attempt to 'do theory' when in such moments, theory in fact seems to start doing me?

It is the same with poetry. Every now and then, I'll find a poem that I feel in my body and it refuses to let go.

Between the narratives emerging out of marginalised corners of human existence and the structures which have caused them to shift into those corners and out of them, there is that fleck of no-man's land which I like to call emancipatory theory. Between those continents of objective explanation and subjective truth, a possibility emerges to walk the borderlands of thinking and feeling, of someone else and one's own self, and let the personal and political dissolve into one and many at once. I am sure I am exaggerating.

I have often blurred the lines between the personal and the political, as so many of us do every now and then. They intermingle and break apart like tides on a shore. But it becomes dangerous when you can't separate them at all as they coagulate aggressively into the same entity – I can't help thinking that I have made the political into my 'the personal' and lost sight of myself.

When I read queer theory or postcolonial or decolonial theory or feminist theory, who is the subject of that reading? Does the reading self ebb and flow amidst an ocean of other readers and feelers and force a sense of
<figure><img src="image_58.png" /></figure>

solidarity with strangers? Is that sense of being a part of a discourse, feeling almost ethereally connected with the writing author-subject and those who came before and will come after, a false sense of assumed solidarity? Can one follow in the footsteps of an emancipatory legacy by reading and feeling vicariously while sitting at a table and forgetting about one's own life?

This escapist flight of fancy into theory makes me feel like a fraud sometimes. Fighting the big fight from the comfort of my writing table. With a nice cup of hot tea. The ultimate 'Schreibtischretter'. Schreibtischretterin.

I'm lying. Usually it's a cup of coffee.

*Poetry is not a luxury.*

*Your Silence will not protect you.*

These aren't my words. They are Audre's.

Sitting in my childhood room trying to blend out all the noise as I try to write, I realise that I have been playing at this game of visibility and invisibility ever since I was a child. And while the past decade of growing up seems to have made it easier to play, I must admit that I'm still not entirely sure I've quite understood the rules. Born into this world with a deep, primal need not to be seen, somewhere along the way, I also developed that precarious need not to hide. I desire the comforts of invisibility, of silence, of solitude, of intervals of nothingness and nobodiness; and I also desire basking in the warmth of speaking and being seen. Desire is funny that way, ask anyone.

*Answer.*

*That you are here—that life exists and identity,*

*That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.*

Walt Whitman

*Or not.*

Lauren Fournier, loosely defines autotheory as “contemporary works of literature, art, and art-writing that integrate autobiography and other explicitly subjective and embodied modes with discourses of philosophy and theory in ways that transgress genre conventions and disciplinary boundaries”. Which could mean anything – which is exactly what I love about loose definitions. They are the most fun for walking on a tightrope.

But it doesn't matter – this is not that text, remember?

It must have been around the age of seventeen that I suddenly realised that most of the books I had read, and most of the ideas I had consumed, were the brainchildren [– I had not expected this to be the actual plural of ‘brainchild’, damn it –] of white cis-men. After that, I started making it a point to read more books by women, by authors from countries as diverse as possible, by queer writers, differently abled writers, and writers of colour. Like Penelope, weaving by day and unravelling by night. Waiting. The scales still haven't quite balanced yet, but it's a process and not a single event, is it now? Rome wasn't burned down in a day, after all.

For now, I still enjoy reading Sherlock Holmes. Because now I can shake off the racist and sexist parts as the author's shortcomings without letting them get under my skin as literary truths of a misshapen world. Because nobody can take away my ability to enjoy the stories just because I don't happen to be a middle-aged white man in London.
<figure><img src="image_59.png" /></figure>

Because we don't belong to our identities and our identities don't belong to us. Because the truths under my skin can only ever be my own.

I'll just have to find them.
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# Sixth Chapter: Much too Much—A Dialogue on Watching *Lost Highway*

Paul Kaletsch & Saskia Schomber

Spoiler and Content Warning: This contribution contains spoilers of David Lynch's *Lost Highway*. The movie deals explicitly with pornography, violence, and sexual violence.

## Introduction

### Lost Highway

Although throughout his career David Lynch's critical and commercial appreciation was very up and down, today he belongs to what most would consider 'the US-American canon'<fnref n="1" />. Among Tarantino, Cronenberg, or the Coen-Brothers, he served as one of the figureheads of a creative director-driven cinema.<fnref n="2" /> *Lost Highway*, a 1997 movie, forms one of the centerpieces of his œuvre. Together with *Mulholland Drive* (2001) and *Inland Empire* (2006), his last movie to this day, it composes the so-called L.A. trilogy. Like most of Lynch's movies, it combines uncannily familiar pictures of a white US-American (sub)uria with experimental and surrealist elements.

As David Foster Wallace reports, Lynch's own blurb of the movie captures its elusiveness:

* A 21st Century Noir Horror Film

* A graphic investigation into parallel identity crisis

* A world where time is dangerously out of control

* A terrifying ride down the lost highway<fnref n="3" />

And indeed, if any genre applies, describing *Lost Highway* as an experimental mystery noir horror might work.

For those who are still wondering what the movie is about, a plot summary proves to be a difficult task. It could read as follows: In the first half of David Lynch's 1997 *Lost Highway*, when Fred Madison, a Jazz musician, and his wife Renee receive ominous video tapes of their L.A. mansion, their lifeless and sexually frustrated marriage disintegrates, ending in the brutal murder of Renee. In the second half of the picture, Pete, a young mechanic, begins a dangerous affair with the mysterious Alice, the lover of his customer, mobster-boss Mr. Eddy. The inevitable conflict of both men leads to the killing of Mr. Eddy.

Yet that only condenses what supposedly happens in the movie into an easily readable summary. First of all, it does not take into account the movie's aesthetics and the way they complicate our understanding of its plot. And what is more, it also implies that the movie tells us two apparently separate stories. As such, this summary already interprets and disambiguates one of the central enigmas of the film.

### Transformation Scene

In fact, a central and ambiguous 'transformation scene' (47:39–53:16) links both halves of the movie and the protagonists to each other. This scene and precisely its ambiguity and our reception of it provoked us to write this piece. Recently convicted for the murder of his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette), Fred (Bill Pullman) sits in a death row cell. He is suffering from severe headaches. However, the guards deny him help. Then, serene music sets in. Next, the music stops, and we see a cabin in the desert burn down in reverse time. Afterwards, time flows lineary again in forward direction and an enigmatic figure steps out of the cabin, seemingly staring at Fred. This 'Mystery Man' (Robert Blake) already appeared twice in the movie, lastly Fred met him at a party.

<footnote n="1">1 Even in 2022, two of Lynch's movies (*Blue Velvet* and *Mulholland Drive*) continue to remain on the famous "The Greatest Films of All Times" list, put together by *Sight and Sound* on the basis of their ciricic's poll every ten years (https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/greatest-films-all-time).</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 Wallace 2013, 163. Interestingly, and not all that surprising, no women featured in this new canon of US-American *auteur*-cinema at that time.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3 Wallace 2013, 150.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_61.png" /></figure>

Back in the cell, the ceiling light crackles intensely. The movie cuts to a shot of a median strip of a highway, seen from a moving car.<fnref n="4" /> Then, Pete (Balthazar Getty) stands on the side strip of that road. In a crossfade, his family and girlfriend call Pete's name and run towards him during some kind of thunderstorm. In the following cut to the cell's firing ceiling light, smoke swirls through the cell. Fred rolls on the gory floor, screaming and covered in blood, while electricity is humming. A shot of a surface moves through smoke and flickering electric light to a gory humanoid orifice. In serenity, a blurred humanoid figure hovers in ethereal light. Fade-out to a black screen. When a prison guard checks Fred's cell, he reacts shocked. Later, his superior states that the inmate of the cell is not Fred. Instead, Pete sits in the cell, and looks at the door with a bloody face.

Fred and Pete are played by two different actors. The middle-aged Bill Pullman's “natty”<fnref n="5" /> appearance as Fred oscillates between high-strung tension and overworked exhaustion. Balthazar Getty, in contrast, in his early twenties at the time of the movie's release, is a vital adolescent with a sometimes slightly dopey expression who plays tough.

With their generic North American heterosexual looks and demeanor, similar hair colors and not too different body figures, one might, seen from behind, mistake the actors for each other. Under close scrutiny, however, they don't look very much alike.

In general, the movie's first part with Fred as the protagonist, before the transformation scene, strongly differs from its second part, after the transformation scene, now with Pete center stage. For example, the first part operates with a rather closed spatiality, not limited to the house of Fred and Rene but focusing on it. Be it their house, the feverish jazz club, the crowded villa during the party scene, or the cell, all of those places confine Fred. Contrariwise, the second part emphasizes Pete's mobility, fitting his job as a (car) mechanic. It underlines Pete's movement through a variety of often open spaces, not ignoring but also not centering on, for instance, the closure of his parents' house.

On the other hand, particularly towards the end of Pete's plot, the colors, music, and atmosphere pick up on motifs of the first part. The similarities converge in a third, brief, and last part of the movie. Following a sex scene between Pete and Alice in the desert (01:57:14), in a second 'transformation', the nude Pete disappears and a similarly undressed Fred replaces him as the protagonist. But even before, reappearing characters, actresses, plot elements, and locations cross over between the two plots of Fred and Pete. Most stunningly, the actress Patricia Arquette who plays Fred's red-haired wife Renee then returns as the blonde Alice. Later, after Fred's reintroduction, Renee stars again in the third part of the movie.

What disturbs our reading of this development as an apparent 'transformation' and 'retransformation', however, is a scene that occurred a few minutes earlier, when Pete saw a framed photograph featuring both Renee and Alice. This photograph, to complicate matters further, is found in the villa of Andy, for whom both Renee and Alice worked; he is also the host of the party Renee and Fred attended earlier, and is ultimately accidentally killed by Pete.

Given these few examples, the idea of a 'transformation' taking place in the movie becomes questionable; one cannot help but ponder, however, how the different parts of the movie relate to each other. This question sparked off a dialogue which blossomed into this collaborative work. After Saskia watched the movie recently for the first time, we realized that we had diverging takes on the first transformation scene. From Saskia's vantage then, Fred did not corporeally transform in the scene, but the audience witnessed Fred's reimagination of his self as Pete. She translated the puzzling narration of *Lost Highway* into one story, i.e., Fred's story, and interpreted Pete as Fred's imagination: Hence, the narration of the second-half of the movie stretches an actually very short moment of the plot extensively, that is, Fred's waiting for his execution. When we discussed this, Saskia directly corroborated this with observations from the movie.

Paul, instead, did not search for logical links. Rather, the connection of the different parts or stories of the movie did not really matter to him. Accordingly, the transformation scene did not strike him as special nor problematic, and he didn't attempt to solve it. When Paul talked to Saskia about that scene, however, he instinctively resisted a resolution of the movie's ambiguity. At the same time, he made irrational claims about a real transformation from Fred into Pete, which would have disambiguated the movie, too. Summarizing one could

<footnote n="4">4 Attentive viewers remember that the movie also opened with an image of a similar (perhaps the same?) highway.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5 Wallace 2013, 155.</footnote>
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say the scene did not make sense to Paul, but its equivocal mystery, like many others of the movie, engaged
him aesthetically.

A Dialogue

We were hooked on the differences in our viewing experience and wanted to explore them further. So, we decided to keep up our dialogue to try to find out what caused our diverging experiences. Having never worked with movies before, we both turned to the theoretical frameworks we usually work with in academic contexts to do so.

Saskia, who took the movie to narrate Fred's story, presumed that there had to be a plot in which this story was formed and told.<fnref n="6" /> For someone working with narrative theory, this plot can be analyzed and its structure understood by means of, e.g., narratology. When employing this kind of analysis, however, Saskia realized soon that the narration of the movie did not yield to her former understanding as smoothly as expected. Starting with Fred in his cell as a key scene for the relation of the two protagonists to each other, she encounters *Lost Highway* as a striking example of narrative ambiguity, i.e., a narration that offers contradicting hermeneutic clues that cannot be resolved into one single version of a plot. Thus, while being able to capture the workings of the narrative, the analysis itself failed to corroborate a satisfying and unequivocal interpretation of the movie.

Narrative ambiguity, as Saskia's part will explore, is not synonymous to a postmodern postulate of an openness of meaning and arbitrariness of interpretation. Rather, it is a very specific way of narrating that incites and relies on the recipient's (repeated) attempts to make sense of the plot; it foregrounds the simultaneity of different plots and leads to an unsolvable cognitive predicament. Pleasure stems from this failing but unceasing attempt of hermeneutic disambiguation.

Even though Paul did not experience the movie like Saskia did, its nebulosity did *do* something to him. Naturally, he was curious to explore what precisely the movie did to him, how it did that, and how it differed from something interpretable. Since Paul was reading the becoming-animal plateau of Deleuze and Guattari's (DG) *A Thousand Plateaus* at that time, he wanted to observe with their theoretical repertoire how the movie's ambiguity (in the common-sensical use of the word) produces an affect with/on him. DG's non-representational strand of poststructuralism fittingly resists both the determination of meaning and the stale postmodern playing with meaning(s) or insisting on their 'gliding'.

The movie affected Paul when he rewatched it after Saskia did. This affect was self-sufficient, but, unfortunately, did not survive Paul's repeated viewings of *Lost Highway*. The more often he rewatched the movie and thought about it to write this piece, the less the movie managed to affect him. Instead, *Lost Highway's* formal mimesis of a conventional movie and simulation of a comprehensible plot increasingly unleashed a detective within Paul who could not stop to attempt figuring out the meaning of the movie once and for all. This triangle of form, plot, and his inner detective quickly absorbed the unique connection between the movie, Paul, Paul's environment, and the context of the viewing, and turned its formerly produced affect into interpretations. Despite the organizational success of these interpretations, they could not satisfy Paul—similar to Saskia's encounter with a cognitive conundrum that no single interpretation can ever solve.

We conclude with a summary of our different analyses of *Lost Highway's* functioning, and the question if the movie, from that vantage, 'succeeded' or 'failed'. We consciously will not attempt to really integrate our arguments into each other, but try to discern how they relate. While we both discuss how the movie feels overwhelming to us, it turns out that we are not talking about the same phenomenon. Instead, we differentiate how *Lost Highway* overwhelms us into the cognitive overload of simultaneous narratives (Saskia) and an experience of affective excess (Paul).

Interestingly, Saskia ends up close to where Paul started, namely, from his resistance towards any resolution of the movie's ambiguity. However, Saskia's embrace of an irreducible (specifically narrative) ambiguity is based on a narratological argument—not an emotional attachment. Curiously, since Paul closes with the diagnosis that the movie can't sustain its production of affects but confronts him with successive and different

<footnote n="6">6 Story here means the chronologically ordered, reconstructed version of events, whereas the plot is the way those events are told in narrative with all their omissions, shifted orders, repetitions, etc.</footnote>
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interpretations that can't provide closure, this brings him to Saskia's starting point of the lack of a reading that sutures the movie together. Therefore, we will explore if Saskia's analysis can offer something to the remaining debris of Paul's approach. Lastly, we discuss how the act of interpreting the movie and the resulting interpretations cause effects for and on both of us. However, our framings of what constitutes a good/bad, a joyful/sad a/effect differ.

## *A Narratological Exploration (Saskia Schomber)*

### In Search of a Plot

Critics don't tire of telling us that it is no use trying to understand, interpret or explain David Lynch's movies and that they should rather be experienced, felt, that you should just let yourself be overwhelmed by them.<fnref n="7" /> While I intuitively see the point of this encouragement, in my experience, at least, it ultimately does not work out when we take *Lost Highway* as an example.

For one thing, there still is much in the movie—and also in the way Lynch talks about it—that makes you look for explanations. Symbols and formal sign posts abound; what are we supposed to make of them, if, due to their frequency and connection to enigmatic plot dynamics, we cannot accept them as mere coincidence? Are they just creating a *sur-plus*-effect, or do they function as an infinite string of hermeneutic snares<fnref n="8" /> or as mere atmospheric devices? They might well be. The purely 'aesthetic' approach, however, as Paul has pointed out, runs the risk of becoming stale after its first experience. Is *Lost Highway*, then, a movie one can only watch successfully once and by willfully ignoring its details?

For another, most of us would agree that in spite of all mystery there is some kind of plot or even plots in the movie, it is not just bits and pieces of sensual impressions; rather, *Lost Highway*, despite all its craziness, evidently makes use of conventional techniques of cinematic narration.<fnref n="9" /> There is a story told, thus an analysis of its narrative form must be possible. Is there something to be gained by an analysis like that of an apparently unintelligible movie, which people tell you to 'just' experience aesthetically, that is: sensuously?

I would like to propose that it is, in fact, the movie's narrative form and, even if this impulse might be grounded in my *déformation professionnelle* as a literary scholar, thinking about it in terms of narrative theory that helps us understand precisely how (or why) *Lost Highway* affects us in the direct, sensuous, irritating way it does. While we may not be able to 'explain the movie', we can investigate the workings of its narrative mechanisms. Its effects, I think, rest upon the way the story is narrated: It is due to the film's narrative ambiguity that we want to explain it, fail to authoritatively explain it, and learn to revel in the pleasure of the excessive cognitive demands that come with this process.

### Time and Space

Now, for full disclosure, I have to mention that, before I saw *Lost Highway* for the first time, I had already browsed through Slavoj Žižek's long-winded thoughts about it in his 2000 essay *The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch's Lost Highway*. So, my fixation on *Lost Highway* as a narrative might partly be mediated by psychoanalytic readings of it. Typically, such an approach to narrative highlights the symbolism of its motives and dichotomies. A central argument of Žižek's essay, however, is a structural observation about Lynch's movie: "The temporal loop that structures *Lost Highway* is thus the very loop of the psychoanalytic treatment in which, after a long detour, we return to our starting point from another perspective."<fnref n="10" /> By equating the narrative structure of the movie with the psychoanalytical process, Žižek highlights the temporalities of the film

<footnote n="7">7 Famously, Paul Taylor stated in his review of Lynch's *Eraserhead* (1977) that it is "a movie rather to be experienced than explained" (Taylor 1979, 44). The director himself—not to say that he has any more authority over his movies than his viewers—describes his work as intuitive, not intellectual; commenting on the last movie of his L.A.-trilogy, *Inland Empire* (2006), Lynch encouraged viewers to use their intuition, while stating "It's [the movie] supposed to make perfect sense." (cf. Colette-White 2007).</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8 I.e., a mere obstacle on a hermeneutic forward trajectory, cf. Barthes 1974, 38; 41–43 and 209–210.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9 The critical reception often discusses Lynch's movies as navigating the faultline between experimental and mainstream cinema, see fn. 23 on this.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10 Žižek 2000, 18.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_64.png" /></figure>

that are equally interesting from a narratological perspective. The way in which the movie, at its end, seems to pick up its own beginning, poses a major challenge in analyzing its temporal structure.

On first glance, we seem to have two rather linear and chronologically unfolding narrations, even if their connection is unclear. The movie narrates scenes of a marital life, how the couple receives the video tapes leading up to the murder of Renee, and Fred's conviction. Then it narrates Pete's return to his home and job, and his starting affair with Alice. Finally, Pete turns back into Fred (or is replaced by Fred, if you wish). Fred, who is actually supposed to be in a death row cell, then kills Mr. Eddy, the man that has been established as Pete's erotic rival for the past 60 minutes or so, but has now become the lover of Fred's wife Renee—the same wife that, *pace* the first narrative, is actually already dead.

I think it is safe to say that at this point we cannot ignore any longer that something is seriously off with the linearity of not only the narration, but also the story underneath it. The point is driven home when in the final minutes of the movie we see Fred ringing the doorbell of his own house twice, saying “Dick Laurent is dead,” then being chased by the police; and twice the doorbell rings in the opening scene of the movie, where Fred hears someone say “Dick Laurent is dead” through the speaker, but cannot see anyone on the street. There is only the faint sound of a siren in the distance.

It is at this final point of the movie that viewers cannot help but doubt the linearity of time. However, there have been earlier instances where time felt out of joint and the narration seemed to actually bend and merge vectors of time instead of projecting them forwards. An uncanny example of that is the telephone scene at the party, in which the Mystery Man is on the landline of Fred's home talking to him while standing in front of him. Space and time, as it shows, are equally unhinged in the ontology of the movie's world. Since Paul will give this scene further attention,<fnref n="11" /> let me turn now to the so-called ‘transformation scene’, that has Fred sitting in a tightly locked death-row cell. Here, too, something disturbing is happening on a narrative level. While the temporalities of the events seem to pose no immediate problem, their spatiality does: A protagonist vanishes and another one appears in his place while everything else in the setting as well as the other characters remain the same. This logical break, occurring roughly halfway through the movie, as well as the apparent time loop we become aware of at its end, cause what I call narrative ambiguity.

## Narrative Ambiguity: Three Questions and Three Dynamics

Taking its cue from this high-level observation on the movie's spatio-temporal structure, my investigation into this phenomenon and its effects is based on three questions: What do I mean by narrative ambiguity? What alternative plots result from it? And what exactly are narrative strategies that produce this ambiguity?

What do I mean by narrative ambiguity? Narratives can be ambiguous. Not in the postmodern sense in which all art is essentially ambiguous, i.e., open to multiple, subjective interpretations. Narrative ambiguity denotes a specific, concentrated kind of ambiguity that becomes tangible for the audience by means of narrative devices. It emerges from specific narrative dynamics that produce contradicting hermeneutic clues.<fnref n="12" /> These lead to distinct, conflicting but hermeneutically equivalent interpretations of the text or smaller textual units and create an unresolved 'cognitive stalemate'<fnref n="13" /> in which all versions seem equally plausible. It often destabilizes the temporalities and ontologies presented in a narrative. And lastly, the key point of narrative ambiguity is that it ultimately cannot be resolved—and does not have to be resolved since it proves to be aesthetically productive, as I will later elaborate. In this regard, it differs from, e.g., traditional rhetoric, in which ambiguity is a stylistic deficiency, or daily communication where disambiguation is usually essential.<fnref n="14" />

What are the different plots? There are ramifications but let us focus on the main dichotomy already discussed: Either Fred is Pete / Pete is Fred or Fred is not Pete / Pete is not Fred. So, either the transformation scene really is a transformation, i.e., Fred is turned into Pete and back into Fred—and who is to say that a movie could not present us with a fantastic plot like this? This is, after all, the liberty of fiction. Or it is not a transformation and then we see the dream or some other psychogenic state of Fred (or the visual manifestation

<footnote n="11">11 Cf. Paul's section 'My Story With *Lost Highway*: From Horror To Excess'.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">12 Cf. Rimmon 1977.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">13 Potysch 2018, 194.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">14 Bauer et al. 2010, 8–9.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_65.png" /></figure>

of his psyche that is not consciously accessible for him, being only visible for the audience<fnref n="15" />).

How exactly is this narrative ambiguity produced? I will concentrate on three narrative dynamics of the movie that produce ambiguity, going from a macro to a micro level of narration.

### 1) Collapse of narrative levels:

As viewers, one way to judge if Pete is a hallucination or dream of Fred is to discern if the Pete-events form a metadiegetic narration, i.e., are not on the same narrative level as the rest of the narra-tion. In the transformation scene itself, Fred's excruciating headache and the strange, elusive images of lights, as well as the short shot of Pete on the side of the highway before we see Fred rolling on the floor could be interpreted in accordance with filmic conventions as a clue that everything that happens afterwards is only in Fred's head. This interpretation starts to falter, however, when we notice that nar-rative levels are not neatly separated in the movie, especially in its second part.

There are some clearly metadiegetic elements which can be understood as embedded narratives.<fnref n="16" /> We are shown, for example, the visualization of Alice's memories of her first meeting with Mr. Eddy, two porn videos featuring Alice and/or Renee, and, of course, the tapes that Fred and Renee receive. Those, however, at the same time turn out to be metaleptic devices, i.e., they are used to cut across narrative levels so that elements from one narrative level contaminate the other:<fnref n="17" /> Remembering the narrative's temporal loop, we have to ask ourselves, if it is Fred who is ringing his own door, then maybe it is him filming and sending the tapes, too? But how can the character that is actually filmed in some of these tapes be the one producing them?

Narrative levels obviously start to collapse here and elude our ability to describe them logical-ly. Another example of this occurs at the end of the movie, in the desert. The Mystery Man has just given a video player to Mr. Eddy which shows himself, Andy, Renee, and others watching yet another screen where a gory porn video featuring Renee is shown. But as if this layering of nar-ratives isn't complex enough, when our perspective returns to the scene in the desert, the vid eo player (which is, mind you, not a camera) suddenly shows what is happening right this min-ute in front of Mr. Eddy, namely, it shows Fred and the Mystery Man standing in front of the car. Thus, the movie's repeated, confusing metaleptic dynamics ultimately make the narrative levels fold into themselves, making it impossible to distinguish them with certainty.

### 2) Competing focalizations:

A big part of the movie's narrative seems to be internally focalized, i.e., we have an outside view of the character, but our perception is tied to the perspective of Fred and Pete: We see only what they see, the interpretation of what is happening is tinged by their emotions, assumptions, and concerns.<fnref n="18" /> We, as the audience, engage with both of these characters, the internal focalization triggers us to experience both of them as fleshed out, embodied figures. Thus, the movie clearly has two male protagonists: Fred and Pete are, despite their points of convergence, two people with two different lives.<fnref n="19" /> By having Fred reappear in—literally—Pete's place towards the end of the movie, however, the narrative establishes a frame, which might suggest some sort of narrative primacy of Fred's voice over Pete's. Again, we come up lost, conflicted about two equally strong narrative signals.

<footnote n="15">15 Pete, in the words of Foster Wallace 2013, 160 “as some Kafkaesque metaphor for guilt and denial and psychic evasion.”</footnote>

<footnote n="16">16 See Kuhn 2009 (figure 1).</footnote>

<footnote n="17">17 Cf. Pier 2009, 190: “In its narratological sense, metalepsis, first identified by Genette, is a paradoxical contamination between the world of the telling and the world of the told: “any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe (or by diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe, etc.), or the inverse [...]” ([1972] 1980: 234–35).” See Genette 1980, 234–237.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">18 Again, take, as an example, the scene of the party at Andy’s house, discussed by Paul in section ‘My Story With *Lost Highway*: From Horror To Excess’.</footnote>

<footnote n="19">19 Cf. Wallace 2013, 157: “Then there’s this scene where Bill Pullman’s head turns into Balthazar Getty’s head. As in, the Bill Pullman character in *Lost Highway* turns into somebody completely else, somebody played by *Lord of the Flies* Balthazar Getty, who’s barely out of puberty and looks nothing like Bill Pullman. The scene is indescribable, and I won’t even try to describe it except to say that it’s as ghastly and riveting and totally indescribable as anything I’ve seen in a U.S. movie.” My point here is, again, very similar to Paul’s experience of the potential identity of Fred/Mystery Man, see pp. 12–14 and 17–18.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_66.png" /></figure>

3) Individual scenes:

As a last point let us take a closer look at the transformation scene in the middle of the movie. The scene clearly functions as a tilt: Up to this moment the narrative has been giving us one plot—a plot whose way of being told has been puzzling at times, admittedly, mysterious in its representation of some events and patchy in others. But when Fred is turned into or replaced by Pete, we suddenly lose our grip on what we thought to be the structure of this plot.

Narrative ambiguity is produced by effects of tilting that are triggered in recipients at moments when previously accepted systems or patterns of organization are destabilized, thus having us check for new ways of meaning-making, generating multiple conflicting plots.20 It is important, however, that a tilt-effect in this sense is producing a balance perpetually in jeopardy, it is not causing the narrative to actually tilt over in one or the other direction. Ambiguity's allure is to always hang in the balance, not to fall. The transformation scene is the first moment of the movie whose violation of our logical and hermeneutic mechanisms of watching is so brutal that we can no longer ignore it. But the knack of this tilt-movement is that it not only makes us aware of the ambiguity of what follows; instead, in opening up multiple conflicting plots, it also projects this dynamic back, making us realize that ambiguity has been starting to creep in long ago and is seeping through the whole narrative. If we now remember Fred's conversation and simultaneous phone call with the Mystery Man at the party, we see that the spatio-temporal stability of the movie's world has been questionable ever since.

What is more: In this scene, too, we have interfering elements like the shot of the burning cabin in time-reverse. They hardly qualify as metadiegetic elements, since they seem to be totally disconnect-ed from the other diegetic levels. There is also no indication to their status as anachronies; the cabin, which does feature as a site later on, will not burn down, so the above-mentioned shots cannot be explained as prolepses, i.e., narrating a plot event before it chronologically happens. Precisely because of their total disconnect, however, they could be understood as metanarrative pointers to certain nar-rative strategies or a shift in the narrative stance, pointing us to the fact that we are about to witness something (not for the first time maybe) that defies the way we perceive the physical, spatio-temporal laws of the world in our daily reality.

These are only a few of the mechanisms causing us to be left with the alternative plots outlined above. They are equally possible and the narrative makes it impossible to judge which one is the actual plot. Of course, we can pin the narrative down to one or the other plot version or transcend this question in favor of a psycho-analytical interpretation, as Žižek does, where we have two plots connected by means of analogy or symbolism. We can also just watch the movie, cherish the pictures, get caught up in the music and ignore all signs and clues and violently shut down our minds whenever they start wheeling.

However, we can also choose to accept the challenge: If we acknowledge the movie's narrative ambiguity, it is not an either/or of interpretation. If we cannot decide on one authoritative viewing, we have to bear the indecisiveness. Instead, as soon as we are done with watching it, we have to start over, watch it again because we realize that tying *Lost Highway* down to one way of interpreting it, means cutting down the others. This causes a feeling of deficiency, of lack, even of want. Therefore, what makes *Lost Highway* special is not that all of us can construct our personal reading of the movie, even if Lynch says we are supposed to do that. I don't think this is what is important here or that this is what is triggering us so heavily. Rather, a viewer's actual aesthetic appreciation of *Lost Highway* emerges from its specific narration that challenges us to endure the indecisiveness of the clues and the simultaneity of the plots: Reproducible pleasure stems from our necessary attempts, but ultimate failures to stick with one authoritative viewing of the movie.

## The Pleasure of an Endless Ribbon

What does that mean for our practical experience of sitting down and watching the movie? Bernd Her-zogenrath compares the movie to a Möbius strip which on a very basic level, and leaving all psychoanalysis
<figure><img src="image_67.png" /></figure>

aside<fnref n="21" />, describes very well our narrative experience of ambiguity. A Möbius strip is a surface with only one side, there is no inside or outside, it is an endless ribbon.

It is not by chance that the movie ultimately ends in movement, i.e., with Fred driving down the highway and starting to scream, obviously having another painful headache or some sort of seizure, followed by a shot of the median strip seen from a moving car by night—a shot we already saw at the beginning of the movie and during the first transformation scene. The median strip of the highway at the same time suggests a linear, ongoing movement and, being an echo of the scenes we have seen before, a loop back to the beginning of the movie.

We are used to watching movies in whose stories time is moving linearly forward (even if the narration might not) and we feel uneasy when the spatio-temporal or ontological stability of a narrative seems to be in jeopardy; we cannot actually flesh out all the readings of a narratively ambiguous movie in our first reading, we need to start over, something that *Lost Highway* obviously urges us to do. But we cannot, at the same time, ever fully re-write or erase our other, equally plausible constructions. The movie challenges us to endure the cognitive overload it produces (while, of course, still reserving for us the alternative to re-focus on its aesthetics, if we cannot cope with the simultaneity of its possible plots). That is the nature of narrative ambiguity: When we move with the narrative of a Möbius strip, then, while we move forward, we also retrace our steps. We are always on a terrifying ride down the lost highway.

## Watching Lost Highway With Deleuze (Paul Kaletsch)

### My Story With Lost Highway: From Horror to Excess

Like Lynch's *Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway* disturbed me when I watched it for the first time as a teenager. Robert Blake's black-clad Mystery Man haunted me afterwards, especially the face of this hybrid of a person and an evil spirit: a face covered with white makeup, lips and eyes painted black, and the black hair shaved, a thin line parting it in the middle (Biodrowski, 1997). The Mystery Man's blazing dark eyes continuously pierce their target and don't blink. They twinkle with mischief, while the mouth contorts into a constant thin-lipped and derisive smile. I can only describe the timelessness of the Mystery Man as some kind of geriatric infant. A scene as an example helps to illustrate the kind of mysterious horror this character evokes.

Renee and Fred attend a party at Andy's villa, a friend of Renee's (27:50 in the movie). While Renee flirts with Andy, a stranger, the Mystery Man, approaches Fred, and the loungy beats fade into silence: "We've met before haven't we?" Even though party attendees enjoy themselves right next to the two interlocutors, the Mystery Man somehow isolated Fred. They are now alone together in the midst of the crowd. Fred looks amused but irritated, grabs his drink, and answers, "I don't think so. Where was it that you think we met?" The Mystery Man retorts, "At your house, don't you remember?" Fred's smile slowly disappears, "No, no, I don't. Are you sure?" The Mystery Man doubles down, "Of course, as a matter of fact, I'm there right now." Fred's mimic tenses up and he double checks, "What do you mean: You're where right now?" The Mystery Man replies dead-pan, "At your house." The Mystery Man hands Fred his phone and dares him to call the landline of his own house. And indeed, the Mystery Man picks up after two rings. Now, Fred talks to the Mystery Man on the phone, whilst the other Mystery Man grins at him: "How did you do that?" Through the phone Fred receives this explanation, "You invited me. It is not my custom to go where I'm not wanted." Fred inquires, "Who are you?" Both Mystery Men laugh simultaneously in response and their cackle amplifies into a booming reverb. After taking the phone from Fred, the Mystery Man leaves the party and the music reappears immediately, as if it had never stopped playing in the first place (32:08, the scene ends at 33:37).

<footnote n="21">21 Herzogenrath himself stresses this comparison in the light of his psychoanalytical interpretation of the movie (Herzogenrath 1999, section *Digression 2*): "On the one hand, Lacan employs the Moebius Strip as a model to conceptualize the 'return of the repressed,' an issue important in *Lost Highway* as well. On the other hand, it can illustrate the way psychoanalysis conceptualizes certain binary oppositions, such as inside/outside, before/after, signifier/signified etc. - and can, with respect to *Lost Highway*, characterize Fred/Pete. These oppositions are normally seen as completely distinct; the Moebius Strip, however, enables us to see them as continuous with each other: the one, as it is, is the 'truth' of the other, and vice versa."</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_68.png" /></figure>

Clearly, the Mystery Man isn't good news in the movie. Not his actions make him so creepy—he hardly engages in any except dialogue—but he is just creepy as such and inexplicably so. So, it's no surprise that he scared young Paul and stuck with him. Based on the few scenes in which the Mystery Man briefly appears, I experienced *Lost Highway* as a horror movie. Apparently, that exceeded my teenage sensitivity, but already then, I didn't mainly 'enjoy' the movie's horror, that's not why it stuck with me, and why I talked Saskia into watching it. In my first viewing, the movie simply was too much. In my subsequent four viewings across the span of roughly fifteen years, it became very obvious that Fred and the Mystery Man at least have a very intimate connection, if Fred is not the Mystery Man and vice versa: Before the party, Fred briefly (mis-)recognized another face in Renee's, that of the Mystery Man, and she frightened him; the Mystery Man is in Fred's *house* in the party scene; later Fred and the Mystery Man kill Mr. Eddy/Dick Laurent together. However, my increasing awareness of such solidifying clues—as long as I didn't watch the movie too often in too short of a time span—never turned into anything but hints implying possible interpretations. Although these explanations theoretically added up, the movie presented me with different characters, i.e., Fred is Fred (Bill Pullman) and the Mystery Man the Mystery Man (Robert Blake). In my viewing experience, both figures always operated autonomously, so I could naively experience them as the movie presented them to me. Despite my simultaneous intellectual readings of Fred and the Mystery Man as possibly one and the same, surprisingly, I didn't suffer from any cognitive dissonance.

While *Lost Highway* entertained me, that is, it still worked as a movie, it navigated the edges of my comfort zone. I didn't feel the need to care that I could neither follow the plot nor make any sense of it. The movie clearly made me feel something but absolved me of the imperative to give meaning to that feeling or decipher its cause. This conjunction of confusion, uneasiness, and the release from the demand to grasp the story line and conclusively interpret it composed the beauty of the motion picture for me. Still, after my conversation with Saskia about the transformation scene, and our puzzlingly different takes, and the decision to write something together about *Lost Highway*, I had to do more than just say that it 'tickles' me nicely. I had to say what 'tickles' me, how the movie's 'tickling' works, and what of me is 'tickled' and responds 'ticklishly' (Deleuze, 1995, pp. 8–9).

## Breakdown

*Lost Highway* didn't give off that dry and boring high-brow vibe because it came in the familiar disguise of a neo-noir flick set in the United States of America of my imagination. So, I didn't need to force myself like with genuinely artsy stuff. I was thinking that I probably signed up for a bunch of beautiful people looking cool whilst shooting and/or screwing each other in an L.A. of permanent night, rain, and neon-lights, and I was so OK with that. So much for my aesthetic expectations and *Lost Highway* satisfied them at the beginning.

The movie starts with someone invisible buzzing the doorbell of Renee and Fred's house twice. Fred pushes the listen button and hears a strange voice saying, 'Dick Laurent is dead.' Peeking through the windows, he can't see anyone, though, only hearing police sirens. You don't see the death of Dick Laurent; you just hear of it. And at that point, due to a lack of context, you can't interpret it. At the end of the movie, though, a shot shows Mr. Eddy/Dick Laurent dead in the desert after Fred and the Mystery Man murdered him. What Saskia has described as a temporal loop, namely Fred pulling up in his own driveway, ringing the bell, and declaring 'Dick Laurent is dead', can also reveal the situation of the mysterious beginning: Fred, with the help of the Mystery Man, has killed Dick Laurent.

In the large form of the action-image, a character replies to a situation with an action on the basis of her perception of the situation in order to modify the situation and/or to introduce a new one (Deleuze, 1986a, pp. 155–156; 1995, p. 51). I couldn't recognize that in *Lost Highway*. Film noir, however, belongs to the small form of the action-image (Deleuze, 1986a, pp. 160–169). Here, sequences of action-situation-action construct the motion picture's plot: "The action advances blindly and the situation is disclosed in darkness, or in ambiguity. From action to action, the situation gradually emerges, varies, and finally either becomes clear or retains its mystery" (Deleuze, 1986a, p. 160). Although the 'first' action does not produce the situation but reveals some
<figure><img src="image_69.png" /></figure>

of it, it is the fragment of the situation and its perception, again, that generates the successive action (ASA'). *Lost Highway* precisely begins with such an action partially uncovering a mysterious situation, with successive actions revealing more and more of the initial situation.

At 35:20, something disturbs the camera movements and the (time) cuts' smooth and imperceptible rendering of action-situation-action sequences (Deleuze, 1995, p. 59). At 33:38, Fred and Renee drive back to their house from a party in Andy's villa, where Fred had the previously described bizarre encounter with the Mystery Man. Driving home Renee tells a jealous Fred where she met the host, Andy, became friends with him, and that he had a job for her. Strangely, she seemingly can't recall the type of job when Fred asks about it. When they enter their street, inside the house an intense light appears briefly. It's unclear whether the couple notices this or not. Hence, Fred's prior uncanny meeting with the Mystery Man and his suspicion of a liaison between Andy and Renee might agitate Fred as well at that time. When Fred exits the house later after searching it, at 36:00, he chides Renee for leaving the car because he thought someone was inside the house. So, apparently, that distressed him.

Back to 34:34, though: Fred turns off the alarm system of their home and searches the place, accompanied by ominous ambient music. On his way through the house, he eyes the phone. Suddenly, at 35:20, the phone inside rings twice. Note that the phone also rang twice when he called his own landline in the scene with the Mystery Man before. After the second ring, the camera travels from the phone, across their bedroom and a red curtain until Fred appears in profile in the hallway at 35:32. He makes a 45 degree turn towards the camera, but then just stands there seemingly paralyzed. The camera zooms in on him and accelerates, while the ambient background track grows into a screeching sound—if you listen closely, you can hear a pitched down voice murmuring 'your house'. When the camera locks Fred into a headshot, the music fades back to an intense swooshing. The camera remains closely on Fred's face and upper body. Whilst thoroughly tranced, he seems to be staring at or recognizing something in the direction of the camera, and then, slowly, at 35:54 gets back to his senses and moves outside to Renee.

Clearly, Fred can't act or react between 35:32 and 35:54, and something does this to him and/or within him. Now, this doesn't necessarily have to relate to the situation which the search disclosed—the house and the two phone rings—however, the movie seems to suggest that something inside the house yet outside the frame, whatever Fred is looking at (the camera), relates to it. Of course, the scene with the Mystery Man comes to mind as a related exterior (in relation to this shot) and predecessor to this scene: Did the scene with the Mystery Man really happen before; does it happen at the same time when Fred searches his house; is Fred in his house all the time and has never been to the party; will he go to the party later; or is it just an uncanny coincidence that the phone rings twice in both scenes? Fred doesn't seem to know and neither does the audience. Consequently, such reasoning doesn't lead to anything but futile speculation, so I will move from the cause of Fred's paralysis to his inaction which the movie presents rather clearly. First, the situation fails to disclose itself to Fred; second, he can't form a clear perception of the situation that causes him to act, but the situation's excess of perception overwhelms him; third, Fred fails to act in response to this mental overload, instead it causes him to freeze: Perception turns into affect and through affect the situation acts on Fred.

Since the situation doesn't disclose itself to Fred nor to the audience and both form unclear perceptions of it, between 35:32 and 35:54, the "sensory-motor link" (Deleuze, 1995, p. 51)—the causal relation between situations, their perception, and actions and the characters and movie's seamless movement through (sequences of) them—breaks down. Accordingly, the image's camera movements and time cuts don't serve the "sensory-motor scheme" (Deleuze, 1995, p. 59) anymore—Fred cannot react—but deliver a narrative either too simple or too obscure: Fred is paralyzed for a bit, but you don't know why; or Fred is paralyzed due to reasons which you can only obtain from interpretations of unclear clues in the movie until 35:54. Therefore, due to the resistance of the intersection of the cuts and the camera movement against the sensory-motor scheme, I couldn't perceive the cliché immanent to the scene that would have realized the clear causality and movement I wanted to see (Deleuze, 1986b, p. 20). For instance, I could have read the cliché like this: Fred suspects someone in the house; accordingly, he searches it; there's no one inside, but the phone rings twice; hence, he brings Renee back inside.
<figure><img src="image_70.png" /></figure>

The camera moves the viewer through the house, in which Fred only features as a character populating the spaces of the house that the cuts allocate to him. From Fred in the hallway (probably leading to the bedroom) at the first ring the scene cuts to the phone in the bedroom, and the red curtain. From there the camera travels the hallway until it meets Fred whose face, although he stares intensely into the camera, remains vacant throughout the shot. When the phone rang first, I couldn't know where Fred is—at the second ring, he's in the hallway of the bedroom—because the camera doesn't trace Fred's movements and the detaching cuts between Fred, the room and its objects further disoriented me. Interestingly, though, even after closely watching the scene repeatedly, I perceived Fred as experiencing something uncomfortable in the time between the second phone ring and his exit from the house. As if something hit him, when the camera zooms in on his face and the crescendo of noise peaks, but he doesn't know what, and he can't react to that unrecognizable something. The movie, however, doesn't support my reading. I can't know if something 'hits' him. Even though Fred gazes in a direction, there might as well be nothing. I interpreted the camera's acceleration onto Fred's face and the uncomfortable ambient sound as something that Fred experiences, although only I did. The interplay of the deep saturated black and red colors, the presence of darkness and shadows, and the grating sound give an intense impression of the couple's house. Together with the image's sound and movement intersection, this staging of the house clearly oppressed me, and I projected my discomfort onto Fred. And, indeed, before the first ring of the phone, Fred seems tense, but then his face goes blank until he leaves the house again.

Even now if I rewatch the scene, I feel uncomfortable. Neither an action happens, nor a situation takes place that makes me uneasy. I can't pinpoint what causes my unease. As discussed above, I'm not only confronted with the couple's house and its atmosphere as such, and the lack of a creepy action and/or situation, but also the image's time cuts and camera movements. Interestingly, the latter partly show Fred as he navigates the house and follow his point of view but mix it with point of view shots whose viewing subject, however, remains unclear. On the one hand, the house uncannily becomes an observing, moving, and living something. On the other hand, it feels as if a third party (not the viewer or the camera) is watching Fred in the house. Of course, this suits a movie that opens with a scene of a couple receiving videotapes recording their house's facade and later its inside. Lastly, although the sensory-motor link doesn't subordinate the camera movements and the cuts anymore, their rhythmic conjunction generates a quick succession of an enigmatic situation, the situation's excess of Fred's perception, and his inaction (Deleuze, 1986b, p. 20). The scene's story either describes a husband searching his house, and, hence, lacks a meaning, that is, an interpretation of this clear activity (why does he do that?); or its meaning, in unfathomable ways, exceeds that which the movie displays.

## Lost Highway and I Build Something

When Fred goes into temporary paralysis after the phone rings twice, my inner detective kicks into overdrive. Where have I seen a phone ringing in the movie before? In the party scene, Fred called the couple's landline and the Mystery Man picked up after two rings. The Mystery Man spoke to Fred at the party and from his own landline at the same time. When is before and when is later? Where is Fred during the party and where is the Mystery Man? After the party, who is in the house when the phone rings other than Fred? Is Fred the Mystery Man or vice versa? Yet one only saw Fred, who was searching his house after the party and was temporarily paralyzed after the phone rang twice. At this time in the movie, one can't establish a clear link between the Mystery Man and Fred. The movie suggests something—the phone rang twice in both scenes; the Mystery Man spoke to Fred from Fred's landline—but that's it. The scene affected me; it confronted me with a choice. I could either follow hints in the scenes beforehand and my interpretations of them—are Fred and the Mystery Man the same person—or just take in the movie's plot as a narrative, that is, a contingent effect of camera and editing that doesn't offer closure and doesn't need to form a coherent whole together with my perception and interpretation.<fnref n="22" />

<footnote n="22">22 Deleuze understands cinematic narrative as a secondary by-product of primary camera movements and cuts: "Narrative in cinema is like the imaginary: it's a very indirect product of motion and time, rather than the other way around. Cinema always narrates what the image's movements and times make it narrate. If the motion's governed by a sensory-motor scheme, if it shows a character reacting to a situation, then you get a story." (Deleuze, 1995, p.59)</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_71.png" /></figure>

The first time I watched the movie, scenes like these especially struck me because I didn't have to make sense of them but experienced them aesthetically—meaning a prioritizing of the conjunction of camera movements, cuts, sound, colors, and lighting and a relativization of plot as an effect—letting them affect and resonate with me. The unique interplay of my subjectivity, environment, the movie, and the context of the movie's viewing produced the specific function of aesthetic viewing and affective processing (what resonates with me) (Deleuze, 1995, pp. 8–9). Such a singular function differs from the (pre-)designed purpose of a movie—to be bought, rented, viewed, and discussed—because the function becomes in the spontaneous relating of the movie to unforeseen exterior components—a piece of music sampling a ripped film copy (Smith, 2018, p.99–100).<fnref n="23" /> How *Lost Highway* functioned with me absolved me of the need to organize the movie's plot, its suggestions, and my interpretations into a coherent whole. Instead, the movie operated on me. Likewise, the movie didn't need to produce a plot from sequences of actions, situations, the character's perception of the situations, and the character's reaction to that perception; on the contrary, it could reveal how its contingent narrative depends on the intersection of camera movements and cuts. Rather than providing a legible plot according to the audience's clichés, the motion picture could affect me.

## How Lost Highway and I Fail

On the one hand, *Lost Highway's* aesthetic mimesis of a film noir triggers my inner detective. In this apparent formal 'imitation' I'd include the movie's suspenseful atmosphere, the characters of the femme fatale, the gangster, and the mysterious stranger, the contrast between the shadows and stark lighting, the color palate's emphasis on black, yellow, and red, the thrilling but smooth jazzy film score by Angelo Badalamenti, but also the tracing of actions gradually disclosing Fred's double murder of his wife Alice/Renee, Mr. Eddy/Dick Laurent, and Pete's killing of Andy. On top of that, *Lost Highway*, despite its unconventionality, never suggests a complete departure from the medium of a feature film to an art flick. And thus, the movie's narration's constant simulation of an intelligible plot provides my inner detective with clues. On the other hand, the sheer excess of the movie operates directly on me. *Lost Highway's* weird and unexpected but somehow working combination of a soundtrack ranging from haunting ambient, pulsating and feverish free jazz to harsh rock and industrial, fear, over-saturated colors, eccentric characters, goofball humor, and shocking (sexual) violence just runs me right over. The movie's addition of the occasional breakdown and frequent stuttering of the action-situation-new/modified action sequence overwhelms me even more. Since I, the setting of the screening, and *Lost Highway* changed with each viewing (given that contemporary debates reevaluated the movie, didn't talk about it, or somehow related to it or the issues it deals with; other cultural products explicitly or implicitly cited it, etc.), the movie affected me differently and, likewise, created different arrangements between its environment and mine, resulting in different techniques of viewing the movie. As long as I didn't write about *Lost Highway*, I only watched it when I didn't recall it anymore in detail, so once every couple of years. Each time the movie completely overwhelmed me, and, thus, I never lost myself in ruminations about the plot nor pedantically focused just on the cuts between scenes, for instance. The movie carried me away and I rode with it. Despite my discomfort, that was the beauty of my experience. Unsurprisingly, viewing the movie for the purpose of writing this contribution took that away.

My intention to experience the movie aesthetically yet again and process it into resonances in order to write this paper re-ordered the relation between *Lost Highway*, my environment, and the context of the movie's screening into a rigid arrangement. I intentionally decided how to watch the movie and analyzed it accordingly. Hence, my writing process reduced the viewing of the movie to a one-way transfer of its content to me for the purpose of a vaguely Deleuzian analysis. I wanted *Lost Highway* to repeat my viewing experiences exactly to date. I ‘produced’ the movie “with a certain purpose in mind” (Smith, 2018, p. 99). I desired it to “carry out that purpose in a predictable manner” (ibid.). I didn’t want *Lost Highway* and me to create anything new, anything

<footnote n="23">23 Smith draws on DG's discussion of a knife-rest in *Anti-Oedipus* for the purpose of his elaboration of DG's concept of machines and their functions—and how DG's machines and their function differ from common sense machines: “Given a certain effect, what machine is capable of producing it? And given a certain machine, what can it be used for? Can we possibly guess, for instance, what a knife rest is used for if all we are given is a geometrical description of it?” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p.3)</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_72.png" /></figure>

else anymore (Deleuze, 2006, pp. 218, 220), but to give me that “dead repetition of the same” (Smith, 2018, p. 99) of a commonsense machine.

In the scene of the couple in the house, Fred re-perceives the situation between 35:51 and 35:54, after he comes to his senses again. He reevaluates the situation: Before, he was worried. Fred searched the house. No one was in it except him. Hence, Fred can return to his wife and does so in order to re-enter the house with her. This sequence re-establishes the action-situation-modified action sensory-motor scheme. Even though Fred does that, something seems off with him. Throughout the scene, Fred moves very slowly, aimlessly, and seems absent-minded. Renee also can't read her husband well. After entering the house together, Fred stands in the bedroom. He steps into the doorway of the bathroom, where he looks at Renee removing her makeup. When Renee notices Fred's glance, she pauses and regards Fred somewhat anxiously through the mirror. Fred returns to the bedroom, takes off his jacket and puts it in the wardrobe. Then, he disappears into the darkness of the hallway connecting the bedroom to the house. Still in the bathroom, Renee, hunched over the sink, washes her face. Suddenly, she seems to notice something off and has a disturbed look on her face. Meanwhile, in the darkness, Fred stares at himself in a mirror. When Renee returns to the bedroom, she frightenedly notices that Fred isn't there. Afterwards, she peeks into the darkness of the hallway, yells Fred's name, and later, 'Fred? Fred, where are you?' Renee moves back to the bedroom. Two humanoid shadows traverse the living room. Later, Fred walks through the dark hallway, probably in the direction of the bedroom. With a dark screen, the scene ends at 40:16.

As this summary proves, after the breakdown of the sensory-motor link, the previously smooth succession of actions-fragment of the original situation-new action sequences and the movement of the characters through these sequences still stutters. As for the stutter of the A-S-A', i.e., the sequence of Fred looking at Renee, Renee returning a disturbed glance in the mirror, Fred taking off his jacket and disappearing develops jerkily—despite the long, steady shots with few cuts that mainly switch from Fred to Renee or vice versa—and the actions don't causally build on each other. Concerning the characters' movement, at 37:26, Fred slowly recognizes something outside the frame and then, walks into that direction in a daze. And the narration, likewise, stammers incoherently. I can describe what happens after they enter the house intelligibly but can't explain the point of the scene: It figures as something overly symbolic—the transformation of the husband into a killer—and/or very mundane: A couple that doesn't communicate well, returns after a party, and goes to bed. One can speculate in many directions, but that's all.

From the perspective of a formal analysis, the scene rather generically deploys elements of the psycho-analytic representation of dreams, such as its excessive use of darkness, red, symbolic objects, and ambient drone. However, the scene's stilted and naive delivery doesn't reflect this obvious reference at all. Despite this formal unoriginality, the camera and editing work achieves something in this scene. After the couple enters the house, the camera hardly moves, in contrast to its actant-like devouring and pacing movement that the cuts only support when Fred searches the house. Only once in a while it slowly picks up movement, when it starts following a character as they almost exit the frame—when Fred walks from the bedroom into the adjoining hallway—or slightly traces the movement of a character—Renee washing her face, turning into the direction of the camera, seeming alarmed. Mainly, the characters move through static and long wide-angle shots. The cuts do the real work here: They cut from Renee's to Fred's face, from one room to another, from a headshot of Fred to a wide-angle shot of him in the bedroom. They separate the characters temporally (after each other) and spatially (in different rooms). Thus, in the scene's first part of Fred's searching the residence, the camera moves as a third uncanny force in the house. The camera's motion, again, speaks to the beginning of the movie, when the couple, first, at 10:15 to 12:59, receive a video tape with a shot of their house's facade; later, from 19:18 until 22:28, just before the party scene at Andy's, they get a tape of the inside of their house and, more eerily even, of them asleep in their bedroom, as if the camcorder recorded them from the ceiling. In contrast, in the scene's second part of the couple in the house, the cuts create an uncomfortable length in the absence of camera movement, a drawn-out time, and division between the characters. Even though in both parts a clear situation, fathomable actions, and especially a causal link between them are lacking, the movement's force in
<figure><img src="image_73.png" /></figure>

the first part and the heavy duration of the second one affected me differently: My affect changed from terror to anticipating uneasiness. Accordingly, the scene's camera and editing work can operate directly on me, with their by-product of narrative only interfering afterwards.

From another perspective, however, the successive actions—Fred's search of the house, the couple's entering of the house, Renee's getting ready for bed, Fred's disappearance, Renee's call for Fred, and the shadows' crossing of the living room—simply operate elliptical. While they all veil the situation, they, likewise, function as indexes of the original situation with each action disclosing more, something different from the initial situation of Dick Laurent's death (Deleuze, 1982). After Fred disappears into the darkness at the end of the couple in the house scene, in the successive scene, Fred receives another videotape in the morning and watches it alone. At 42:03, he sees himself screaming, covered in blood, and kneeling beside Renee's dead and mutilated body. Even though the shot neither shows the act of murder nor Fred with a weapon, the tape fills the gap between last night and the morning with Fred's killing of Renee. The narration quickly assimilates the temporary breakdown of the sensory-motor schema—Fred's paralysis—and its stuttering—the rendering of the couple in the house—into the larger, overarching plot as a narrative fragment that makes sense later.

When I viewed the movie repeatedly to write this chapter, I already had Fred's murder of Renee/Alice and the Mystery Man and Fred's killing of Mr. Eddy/Dick Laurent in mind. I frantically tried to connect the scene of Fred searching the house and the couple in the house to that. My reconstruction of the events went something like this: Before, Fred was worried. He searched the house. Fine, he then acted a little funny, but eventually returned to Renee and entered the house with her. Again, he acts weird. Renee feels uneasy with him watching her. He disappears. Renee worries. Fred kills her. He understands that he murdered Renee. Much later you understand that Fred killed Mr. Eddy/Dick Laurent beforehand because he hired Alice/Renee for his production of pornographic movies and was her lover. In these viewings of *Lost Highway*, the camera and editing work couldn't affect me anymore, even though this initiated the whole creative process of my first viewing. The scene's (couple in the house) contrived style and excessively symbolic images, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, its incoherent narration of a very simple, (sadly) omnipresent, and well-known story—a domestic femicide committed by a possessive husband—increasingly frustrated me. Especially because I wanted to be affected by *Lost Highway*, and not crack the case of what *really* happens. While my detective enjoyed the pleasure of cracking the case, the simplicity of the revealed content disappointed me: Particularly, viewing the movie like this, *Lost Highway* locks me into Fred's/Pete's mind and I need to follow his/their actions, to understand—from Pete's perspective—why he kills his erotic rival Andy and why Fred murders Dick Laurent, and how each character—Fred/Pete, Renee/Alice, Andy, Mr. Eddy/Dick Laurent—meets their final and inevitable destination of death.

## Conclusion

Certainly, *Lost Highway* feeds into our preconceived notions of intellectually challenging movies. Its length, confusing temporality, the double roles of some actors, the recurrence of some figures in Fred's and Pete's life alike, for instance, would not work in a typical Adam Sandler comedy (no judgment intended). However, we framed the movie's overwhelmingness, ambiguous narration, and 'lack' of a central point message as achievements. But doesn't that simply cherish a postmodern aesthetics now of stale taste? The point of our endeavor was precisely not to celebrate the debatable 'postmodernism' of *Lost Highway* but the effects of this movie on us as viewers:<fnref n="24" /> We investigated the way the movie affected us and/or simultaneously generated different plots. On the remaining pages, we redirect the question of the movie's 'success' or 'failure' to these effects. Given the premises we outlined above: Does the movie work and where does it fail? And, building on our different approaches to this question, how do our perceptions of *Lost Highway's* success or failure relate to each other?

<footnote n="24">24 See Wallace (2013, p. 168–170, 185–186, 200–201) on this in his essay on the making of *Lost Highway*: David Lynch's movies are postmodern, but don't belong to the full-on dry high-brow postmodernism, and, while they use filmic conventions, they are neither family friendly Hollywood movies.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_74.png" /></figure>

Coming from narrative theory, there's an opportunity for pleasurably watching the movie, but it does not suffice to fall back on its 'aesthetics' in the common sense of the word, i.e., focusing only on its music, colors and atmosphere without trying to make sense of it. Rather, *Lost Highway's* narrative ambiguity still works on us and enables repeated viewings of the movie despite the obsolescence of the excitement of postmodernism.

One way to enjoy the movie is to work through the different ways of reading its plot knowing that none of them is all-encompassing or dominant. You embrace the reading that readily approaches you in one viewing. However, you accept its functionality not as an all-encompassing one. Thus, you try to acknowledge the simultaneous co-existence of other equivalent plots without overwriting the ones already written into your mind. We can thrive in the exhaustion caused by this cognitive challenge, although—or likely because—we have been taught that, if we are indeed searching for a plot, we can expect to be able to put events together into *one* plot; this plot should be ultimately backed up by a story that agrees with the rules of temporal linearity. Instead of feeding into these expectations, *Lost Highway* presents us with its Möbius strip of plots that defies those rules and, ultimately, with its simultaneous plots bring us to our limits of performing the very act of imagining the linear version of events, its story. This is, of course, a facultative approach to watching a movie like *Lost Highway* and tracing its workings and effects; it is not an answer to how Lynch's movies work in general, even though they may often have similar effects.

From a Deleuzian point of view, a movie should affect the viewer, it should build a singular connection between the viewer, the movie, and the viewer's environment that breaks the arrangement between the movie and the viewer who consumes the cultural commodity for the sole purpose of entertainment. If one watches *Lost Highway* seldomly, it operates as a powerful tool in the service of a rearrangement and/or building, precisely because its mimesis of a film noir and its simulation of an intelligible plot lure the viewer in and then, sucker-punch her with an overwhelming ride that increasingly disposes of these crutches of Hollywood conventionality. However, when I watched the movie repeatedly for this contribution, exactly the mimetic form and the plot of *Lost Highway* conjured an annoying inner detective within me who set out to finally crack the case with the *one* all-encompassing, exhaustive interpretation. This triangle of sadness successfully turned the movie into a failure: The affect was transformed into interchangeable interpretations, which managed to reorder *Lost Highway* and my ecology into one of object, world, and interpreting consciousness. Therefore, I could no longer be content with taking in the Mystery Man and Fred as two different characters. The consideration that these two different characters might be one and the same person caused an unpleasant cognitive dissonance. Thus, the movie failed me as a viewer who was looking for an affective viewing. Once the interpretations started, they offered neither closure nor pleasure but only successfully repressed the potential of *Lost Highway* to work as filmic material that needn't be interpreted, that can affect.

Interestingly, Paul ended up in the spot where Saskia started her analysis, that is, no single interpretation could provide closure or satisfaction for his awakened hermeneutic desire. If one remains stuck in an analysis of the movie's affects and production of something 'new', then, *Lost Highway* can only fail. Can Saskia's attempt to accept and embrace the simultaneity of plots provide an exit to this blockage encountered by Paul? Clearly, a focus on interpretations can never satisfy a non-representational inquiry because such an inquiry rejects meaning as a relevant epistemic category. However, interpretations do not only produce meaning but also other a/effects, especially, their simultaneity—as Saskia pointed out. Interestingly, both parts of this contribution addressed the affect of a ‘too much’, but they framed it differently. The lazy viewer of Paul experienced cognitive dissonance as something unpleasant—that Fred and the Mystery Man might be two different characters and the same person at the same time—whereas Saskia would frame the challenge of this, and the effect of its strain, as engaging (and thus an aesthetic pleasure).

At the same time, the challenge of narrative ambiguity still resides within the realms of interpretational dynamics. One can still interpret, but has to change the practice of interpretation, i.e., absolving the interpreter from the postulate of unequivocality.

There is also a different kind of overload, an excess, that can only be encountered, when one either sees the movie for the first time or one's memories of *Lost Highway* start to blur. Now, the combination of the movie's length, its confusing mix of actors and characters, and its out-of-joint temporality feels excessive, the movie is too much. This excess differs from the unsortable neatness of a cognitive overload. Instead of an emotion that can be traced back to a cause, this excess is an unrecognizable affect: You don't know what the point was, but somehow *Lost Highway* hit you.
<figure><img src="image_75.png" /></figure>

Maybe David Foster Wallace was right all along (at least, in this regard):

This may in fact be Lynch's true and only agenda—just to get inside your head. He seems to care more about penetrating your head than about what he does once he's in there. Is this good art? It's hard to say. It seems—once again—either ingenuous or psychopathic. It sure is different, anyway.²⁵

Let us finish by saying: He got in ours, that's for sure.
<figure><img src="image_76.png" /></figure>

Bibliography

Barthes, R. (1998). *S/Z* (R. Howard, Trans.; Repr). Blackwell.

Bauer, M. et al. (2010). Dimensionen der Ambiguität. In W. Klein and S. Winkler (Ed.), *Ambiguität* (pp. 7–75). Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft 158; Metzler.

Biodrowski, S. (1997, April). *Cinefantastique Robert Blake Interview*. Lynchnet.
http://www.lynchnet.com/lh/cinerb.html

Colette-White, M. (2006, September 6). *Lynch Presents Impenetrable Empire To Venice Film Fest*. Chron.
https://www.chron.com/entertainment/movies_tv/article/Lynch-presents-impenetrable-Empire-to-Venice-film-1503966.php

Deleuze, G. (1982, April 20). *Cinema: The Movement-Image, Lecture 15, 20 April 1982* |
*The Deleuze Seminars* [Lecture].

Cinema: The Movement-Image 15, University of Paris 8 at Vincennes/St. Denis.
https://deleuze.cla.purdue.edu/seminars/cinema-movement-image/lecture-15

Deleuze, G. (1986a). *Cinema 1. The Movement-Image*. University of Minnesota.

Deleuze, G. (1986b). *Cinema 2: The Time-Image*. University of Minnesota.

Deleuze, G. (1995). *Negotiations, 1972–1990*. Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, G. (2006). Portrait of the Philosopher as a Moviegoer. In D. Lapoujade (Ed.),
&A. Hodges & M. Taormina (Trans.), *Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995* (pp. 213–221).
Semiotext(e) ; Distributed by MIT Press.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). *Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism And Schizophrenia*. University of Minnesota Press.

Genette, G. (1980). *Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method*. Cornell University Press.

Herzogenrath, B. (1999). On the Lost Highway: Lynch and Lacan, Cinema and Cultural Pathology.
*Other Voices*, 1(3).
http://www.othervoices.org/1.3/bh/highway.html

Kuhn, M. (2009). Film Narratology: Who Tells? Who Shows? Who Focalizes? Narrative Mediation in Self-Reflexive Fiction Films. In P. Hühn et al. (Ed.), *Point of View, Perspective, and Focalization: Modeling Mediation in Narrative* (pp. 259–278). De Gruyter.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110218916.3.259

Pier, J. (2009). Metalepsis. In P. Hühn et al. (Ed.), *Handbook of Narratology* (pp. 190–203). De Gruyter.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110316469.326

Potysch, N. (2018). *Wiederholt doppeldeutig in Bild und Schrift. Ambiguität im durchbilderten Roman.*
Wehrhahn Verlag.

Rimmon, S. (1977). *The Concept of Ambiguity. The Example of James*. University of Chicago Press.
<figure><img src="image_77.png" /></figure>

Smith, D. W. (2018). What Is The Body Without Organs? Machine and Organism in Deleuze and Guattari. *Continental Philosophy Review*, 51(1), 95–110. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-016-9406-0w

Taylor, P. (1979, January 1). Eraserhead (review). *Monthly Film Bulletin*, 46(540), 44.

Wallace, D. F. (2013). *A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays And Arguments*. Abacus.

Žižek, S. (2000). *The Art Of The Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch's Lost Highway*. Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities/University of Washington.
<figure><img src="image_78.png" /></figure>

# Seventh Chapter: Short Essay About Birthdays

Felix Berenskötter

Do birthdays matter? The intuitive answer is yes, they do. A birthday reminds us of the inaugural moment of entering the world and of growing up/older. It is an occasion to mark this process by adding another year and, occasionally, pass certain (shared) milestones in our life journey. As such, birthdays are moments of recognition of the Self as a temporal being and seem important events in our calendar year, worthy of celebration. They have an existential dimension. Given that, we might try to glean an answer from one of the key thinkers of existentialist phenomenology, Martin Heidegger. That is not straightforward because, as far as I am aware, Heidegger never explicitly discussed whether and how to value the day of our birth. However, he offers a philosophical terrain within and against which this question can be explored.

In his influential treatise *Being and Time*, Heidegger grapples with the meaning of being by focusing on the temporality of life and the fact that the existence of every human unfolds from birth to death (Heidegger 1953). For Heidegger, our unfolding is not meaningfully measured by counting how many years we spent on this planet. Like Henri Bergson before him (Massey 2014), he rejects the notion of scientific time, a representation of the flow of time as a neat succession of quantitatively measurable units that can be objectively grasped by instruments such as the clock or the calendar. From his existentialist perspective, a date on the calendar that is presented as the same day and month, year on year, has no meaningful relevance for our being in time. A meaningful understanding is generated, rather, through experiences, which are gradually built up as we discover and disclose the world and ourselves within it. In Heidegger's logic, an experience that enables us to grasp our temporality in full and provides a sense of 'authentic' being must bring us to face to face with the possibility of our own death.

The event [*Ereignis*] plays an important role in this regard. From a Heideggerian perspective, the event is a profound intellectual and practical experience that pulls *Dasein* out of the comfort of the everyday and provides a primordial moment clarity of being in time (Heidegger 2013). Crudely put, I see two readings of how an event enables this: One version that leans towards essentialism and tends to be associated with Heidegger sees the event as a grounding experience, both emotionally and the cognitively, that enables Being to 'find itself'. Another version, closer to a Bergsonian reading of how we process experiences, considers the event as a moment of radical openness that allows for transformation and new possibilities of being. While there is a tension between these two accounts, including over whether the event is a moment of discovery and certainty, or an open source of creativity, in both accounts the event gives Being something like an emancipatory moment of enlightenment. Moreover, and importantly, for Heidegger an event that brings us to face the possibility of our own death is a singularising experience that cannot be shared with others.

It is hard to see the birthday – both the actual day of birth and subsequent days marking the occasion – constituting such an event. Of course, the moment of birth is the original primal event that brings us into the world and constitutes *Dasein*, to use Heidegger's terminology. As such, it is profound. Yet, the moment of birth is not an experience we grasp consciously or have a memory of. A newly born has very little capacity to reflect about its being in the world, let alone understand that it now is unfolding towards death. Heidegger describes birth as being 'thrown into the world', an event that happens to us, which we did not ask for or have any control over. It happens *ungefragt*. However, the moment of 'delivery' usually *is* intimately experienced by the mother and, more indirectly, by those who witness and are closely emotionally connected to the born child, such the mother's partner.<fnref n="1" /> For them, birth has the status of a significant event that becomes lodged in their memory, and, in that sense, it has an important social dimension from the start.

Heidegger's account of Being's subsequent unfolding – or, we might say, growing up – also cautions against reading annual celebrations of this day as events containing extraordinary experiences. Contrary to Hannah Arendt's reading of natality as a new beginning and of creative possibilities (Arendt 1998), Heidegger sees Be-

<footnote n="1">¹ Of course, there is a big difference between the mother's experience of giving birth, often under significant pain, and the partner who witnesses it as a bystander. Thus, we might argue that their respective experiences constitute different events, or different facets of one event, the arrival of their child in the world.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_79.png" /></figure>

ing captured in a world dominated by everyday routines and superficial forms of public communication that put being in a mode of “groundless floatation” (Heidegger, 1953: §37, 177). Heidegger speaks of Being “swirled into the un-authenticity [*Uneigentlichkeit*] of the *Man*,<fnref n="2" /> moving us away from grasping our very own being in time (Ibid., 179). In this vein, birthday celebrations and associated practices – purchasing presents, messages on social media, spending money on a party – are not events but rituals that satisfy societal and often commercialised expectations. The key issue with such birthday rituals, from a Heideggerian perspective, is also that they are momentarily acts in the present that do not require Being to reflect on its temporality and therefore do not provide a source for meaningful temporal orientation (Heidegger, 1953: 346). Even when celebratory routines are logically linked to an event in the past (birth) and a tradition of marking its occasion, they provide little incentive for engaging historical Being and reflecting on where we come from. Similarly, even as they indicate a step into the future by virtue of ‘getting older’, birthday celebrations tend not to involve a substantive engagement with the possibility of death. If anything, as routine practices embedded in the *Man*, they are part of a structure designed to avoid deeper reflection about Being’s finitude and distract from the anxiety this may cause.

But let us not get caught up in Heideggerian reasoning. Even if birthday celebrations have elements of an annual ritual, I would argue that they are not, at least not necessarily, embedded in the *Man*. Rather, they give us a reason to temporarily suspend the pressures of the everyday. Birthdays matter because they *are* an opportunity to pull back from the everyday and spend the day differently. Granted, not every birthday matters in the same way, and we cannot plan their eventfulness in an existential sense. But they *are* an opportunity to meaningfully engage with our being in time: A birthday invites us to look back at our younger selves and consider how far we travelled, to see the new number representing our age as representing a new stage in our life, or as an indicator of being a step closer to old age, which we may (or may not) associate with fragility and death. In any case, just as our biographies are not formed in isolation, birthdays rarely if ever are singularising events. Instead of expecting birthdays to provide an authentic experience in the Heideggerian sense, we turn them into an intimate space for friends and family, an event that allows us to spend ‘quality time’ with others we care about and who care about our being in the world. In this reading, birthdays mark Being as a social creature that shares its lifeworld with others – parents who have a memory of our birth as a significant event, friends who entered our lives at different points and experienced important moments with us, partners who make plans with us for the future. And they don’t need a formal invitation. Just as birth is a shared event, birthdays are not moments we own in isolation; they are moments when family and friends join us to celebrate being in time together. As such, they are special.

<footnote n="2">² Heidegger discusses the *Man*, which can be translated as ‘one’ or ‘they’, as the dominant structure of being in the world. Formed through loose communication and everyday routines, it enables us to seemingly obtain knowledge of ‘everything’ and embedding ourselves in a world where everything appears to be ‘in order’ (Heidegger 1953: 167–177). The temporal experience of being in the *Man* is the presence, characterised by forgetfulness of what was and a lack of genuine engagement with what could be. As such, Heidegger agues, being in the *Man* is inauthentic.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_80.png" /></figure>

Bibliography

Hannah Arendt (1998 [1958]) *The Human Condition*, second edition, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Martin Heidegger (1953 [1927]) *Sein und Zeit*, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag

Martin Heidegger (2013) *The Event*, translated by Richard Rojcewicz, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Heath Massey (2014) *The Origin of Time: Heidegger and Bergson*, Albany: SUNY Press.
<figure><img src="image_81.png" /></figure>

# Ways of Concluding: Solitary Engagements and Living-Together

Quintus Immisch

## 1) Social structure

To begin with Proust, the only thing more difficult than adhering to a regime is not to impose it on others: "il y a une chose plus difficile encore que de s'astreindre à un régime, c'est de ne pas l'imposer aux autres."<fnref n="1" /> *Ré-gime* here can mean many things, from a medical indication to a diet to a general lifestyle. Proust's aphorism contains a skepticism about being with others. Apparently, the normative coercion of such a régime becomes easier when we can direct it at others. At the very least, Proust makes us think about our desire to impose rules on others. Rules may not be a bad thing at first: We need rules to cross the street safely, not just once, but every day, as often as we want. Rules make life a bit more expectable, they introduce repetition and repeatability, seriality. They are a way for us to structure time, to shape it through specific, perceptible events. A clear disad-vantage of rules, on the other hand, can be that they are exhausting or boring to follow; sometimes they seem pointless, meant for other people and situations. Maybe this or that is just not *your* event. This is certainly also the subtext in Proust's skepticism: the *ré-gime* imposed here is above all a temporal one, referring to the novel's central topic: time. The *Lost Time* of the novel's title is, after all, that time which is no longer available because we are too much influenced by modern life and its regulations, its temporalities, its structuring events. One can certainly think about this in a 7-volume work of fiction, which, by the way, is often boring and makes us *lose time*. Since we had less time available, we took other paths. We wanted to explore the concept of the event while considering how the academic norms of thinking and writing, the academic *ré-gime*, could potentially be set aside: We wanted to deal with the event, but without prescribing a way or manner or *ré-gime* (Paul calls this 'undisciplined').

Now, if our premise to this edited volume was to prescribe neither a concept nor a definition of the event from which to explore a thematic field, epistemic constellations, experiences, and practices, then, this antholo-gy could have been, in a sense, a solitary affair. After all, we haven't even determined a 'method' or right way to proceed, and, instead, have embraced the uncertain. A theoretical exploration, an affective protocol, a narrative, something figurative: everyone could do what they wanted, "stumbling among snatches, between the bounds of different fields of knowledge, flavors".<fnref n="2" /> Within or between these fields, we would have all gone in different directions, seen different things along the way, we would all have had something different, a different story to tell: as many kinds of events as people. Indeed, if having a method means "to fetishize the goal as a privileged place, to the detriment of other possible places", in our solitary explorations, we all preferred the unmethodical and "eccentric path of possibilities, stumbling among blocks of knowledge."<fnref n="3" />

However, our project turned out a less lonely affair because, as a matter of fact, we did feel something like an epistemic proximity. In fact, during our explorations we all went to similar places, got into areas and fields of 'knowledge' where perhaps one of us had already been or was yet to go. While we might have been in the same places, topoi, fields of knowledge, in some kind of shared space, we certainly visited at different times. That being said, did this topical proximity ultimately lead us all to do the same thing, somehow? Certainly, in our contemporary moment of the post- after postmodernism and poststructuralism (amongst others), we struggled to imagine that we could discover anything 'new' whilst walking on such familiar paths.

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by”?<fnref n="4" />

Alas, today, I must burden Robert Frost's spatial imaginary with the fact that probably both of these roads are suffering from epistemic overtourism: All paths have already been trodden extensively. That one can neither be original in 2023 anymore nor innovative is a given. And so the stories of our 'roads taken' will resemble each

<footnote n="1">1 Marcel Proust, *À la recherche du temps perdu*, vol. V, *Sodome et Gomorrhe II*, Paris: Gallimard 1924, p. 190–191.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 Roland Barthes, *How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces*, edited by Claude Coste, translated by Kate Briggs, New York: Columbia University Press 2013, p. 4.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3 Barthes, *How to Live Together*, p. 133.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4 Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken", *The Atlantic Monthly* 116/2 (August 1915), p. 223.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_82.png" /></figure>

other, the narratives of the paths we have traveled may be similar to each other, just as “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another”.<fnref n="5" /> Exploring the same ‘fields of knowledge’, we will somehow quote each other and everything that has already been written about it, with our contributions establishing a corpus full of similarities.

Similar, yes, but not identical either, that is why, when looking at our panorama of paths taken, we can see some overlaps, while other features may not be shared by all the contributors. It is precisely these ‘family resemblances’ that I will now focus on. Several of the contributions in this volume have in common that they interrogate the event–albeit on very different levels–from similar directions: In similar ways, these texts only construct the event as an effect of their mode of questioning, uncertainty, and not knowing. This is not simply the modern pose of denial, but these constitute productive approaches to the event as something that may not even exist. While this vagueness might steer us in various directions, we’ve still forged an important similarity: the social dimension of the event in the epistemic community of this edited volume. I aim to illustrate these twin aspects—the concept’s vagueness and its social implications—using the Saskia and Paul’s contribution on *Lost Highway*, Mrunmayee’s “Penelope Unravelling,” and my essay on Proust.

Paul and Saskia provoke a whole set of questions right away in their exploration of *Lost Highway*. They show how unclear an event, that is, in this case the event of a movie and its events of life and murder in a marriage, can be concerning the involved parties: Who is this event for? From whose point of view? What are its consequences, and for whom? And even more generally, who exists at all: Who is there? As if this uncertainty of people involved wasn’t enough, they reflect these questions on the level of their writing, offering us two readings of a film whose appeal is to momentarily create an eventful constellation of, indeed, Saskia and Paul: for once, they allow two perhaps disconnected thoughts to make sense to us and become a crystallization of pleasure. And these two are so sneaky in letting us have fun, yet they annoy us with their questions, questions, questions. The ambiguous arrangement of characters in this interpretation of *Lost Highway* confounds our scientific protocols, which typically involve a researching subject studying an object. However, amid the myriad transformations within the film and Saskia and Paul’s creative exploration, it becomes challenging to ascertain if we can even continue discussing ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ in this context. Despite all this ambiguity, one thing remains certain: the event brings people together—not just Saskia and Paul but also within the film itself. Let’s not forget that in *Lost Highway*, on one hand, the event occurs in the midst of a married life, a paradigmatic form of institutionalized living together. On the other hand, it is linked to an idea of murder, that is, to the elemental ‘betrayal’ of human community.

In her marvelously open piece, Mrunmayee explores the possibility of events in postcolonial constellations. Following the mythological figure of Penelope, who unravels at night the threads of the fabric she wove during the day, Mrunmayee asks about iterative overwritings of colonialism in a world, in which “even the air you breathe is postcolonial”. But just as a cloud of breath quickly evaporates, in this harrowing contribution we need the patience of looking quite slowly in order to be able to accept that just an event, that one event, that *the* event here is apparently not enough. Events would have to happen all the time, with every breath. But if an event is obviously insufficient, can it still be an event? Or is it simply merciless time passing, second by second, breath by breath, a time imposed on us, by subjects, discourses, by society? This ambiguity arises from the fact that the event in “Penelope Unravelling” is completely dissolved by its strongly iterative nature: the frequency blurs it, and along with it, it blurs time. To cope with the postcolonial world, we tend to need permanently events: multiple events in one’s biography, but also multiple on a global macroscale. Indeed, we can see here, that emancipation or liberation from coloniality cannot be a single event, but must happen constantly, just as Penelope is unravelling not just one time but every night. This contribution obviously sees the event as a social instance. Penelope (protagonist, by the way, in a myth about ‘fidelity’ and marriage) asks quite explicitly about identities (and their boxes) and invokes the backdrop of global colonialism as a form of non-coexistence or forbidden coexistence, not without grasping its implications for the precarious present.

In my contribution on Proust’s *In Search of Lost Time*, a queer event emerges from the perspective of a minoritarian (i.e., marginalized but holding the potential for emancipation) epistemology and subjectivity,

<footnote n="5">5 Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel”, in: *The Julia Kristeva Reader*, edited by Toril Moi, New York: Columbia University Press 1986, pp. 34–61, p. 37.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_83.png" /></figure>

evoking the question of how precarious subjects are endowed with a queer temporality and how they can re-
spond in and to a community that rejects them. However, the queer event is almost invisible, and can be easily
overlooked, which makes its relevance questionable. What is such an event supposed to accomplish if it doesn't
impose itself? If we must learn how to perceive it? One kind of dissolution here takes place in space: The event
is very literally pulled from its spatial margins and extended into its surrounding contexts and infrastructural
settings. In fact, this is a question of the agency of 'things', of the material object, that may seem familiar from
art theory: Is something 'art', because a special information is 'stored' in this thing, or does it become so only
by the context (e.g., us, who consider it as art)? Similarly, things in *In Search of Lost Time* first do nothing, and
the event can only unfold in the context of a setting. Besides questioning the event's epistemology, this contri-
bution also explores its social aspect: The contrast between chrononormativity and queer temporality focuses
on the question of life in community and its limits. Conflicts are, after all, always forms of contact, and difficult
coexistence, in which perhaps only one of the two antagonists 'lives', but both are involved.

These three contributions demonstrate an intriguing interplay, combining a radical questioning of a ‘the-
ory’ of the event with a firm emphasis on its social aspect: Their different ways of looking at the event are
enigmatic, questioning, and they only allow us to approach the event without knowing or knowledge. Rather,
the contributions question what we call knowing. Clear contours of events disappear here, overlap in part, but
also leave large voids. Are all our contributions enigmatic then? Is there even a reason to publish them side by
side or to read them together?

No tree sees the next one,
Every one is alone?<fnref n="6" />

Not quite. However solitary the explorations of these events may be: their events are not. In our solitary, rule-
free explorations, we have apparently failed to do precisely one thing: to think our epistemic solitude. Instead,
the events we engage with take place in joyful togetherness. Our events never happen to one person alone, in
an unobserved moment, at an unusual time. Instead, we seem to be dealing here with events that, whether
peaceful or conflictual, connect people with one another or, in any case, presuppose or thematize connections
between individuals and collectives. In fact, I think that all three contributions postulate a social structure of
the event. We do not have the event on one side and the subject on the other; instead, a multiplication of the
subject often constitutes the event.

## 2) Living Together

By understanding the event as decentered and placing it in the context of the question of living together,
these three contributions are not without predecessors or conceptual history. In his first lecture at the Collège
de France in Paris, literary theorist and semiologist Roland Barthes follows a personal 'phantasm', namely, the
idea of an *idiorrhythmic* life in a community, which would offer enough space for individual life rhythms but
would still create something like social cohesion. Barthes borrows the concept of *idiorrhythmry* from monastic
communities on Mount Athos in Greece, where the monks come together only for prayer and are free to or-
ganize their lives independently the rest of the time. The lecture circles the concept in various topics, figures
of thought and scenes, one of which is also 'the event'.<fnref n="7" /> Barthes observes that groups often are formed when
people wait together for an event. Waiting together endows the group with a *telos*; no idiosyncratic togetherness,
everything has its purpose.<fnref n="8" /> Certainly, for Barthes, these telos-driven groups lack appeal as he favors intrinsic
motivation as the basis for being together. Discouraged by such teleological examples of living together, he
turns to solitude: "Because Living-Together, especially idiorrhythmic Living-Together, must incorporate the

<footnote n="6">6 Hermann Hesse, "Im Nebel", quoted from Gunnar Decker, *The Wanderer and his Shadow*, translated by Peter Lewis, Cambridge, Mass/London, England: Harvard University Press 2018, p. 720.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7 Roland Barthes, *How to Live Together. Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces*, edited by Claude Coste, translated by Kate Briggs, New York: Columbia University Press 2013, pp. 84–86.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8 Barthes, *How to Live Together*, pp. 46–47.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_84.png" /></figure>

values of Living-Alone as its paradigmatic opposite.”<fnref n="9" /> In this exploration of the solitary life, Barthes engages with Daniel Defoe’s *Robinson Crusoe*. This novel tells of Crusoe’s shipwreck, and then of his life on an island, where he first lives solitarily and eventually comes into Friday’s company. Living alone on an island, Barthes analyzes, means above all uneventfulness. Here, Barthes dismisses a classic, intuitive attribution when he links uneventfulness with pleasure, but event with pure boredom. In fact, the modern novel—let us think of Proust—namely, suggests quite the opposite: the uneventful boredom of the novel contrasts with the exciting and eventful modern world where everything is getting faster. Completely different is Barthes, who discovers pleasure precisely in the absence of events: “Its charm is precisely that of a day-to-day existence with no events.”<fnref n="10" /> And as soon as the events on the island set in, something is lost for Barthes. “I find I’m no longer able to fantasize about the way Robinson Crusoe organizes his life, his domestic set-up, the hut, the vines, the bucolic.”<fnref n="11" /> The events distract from the cozy imagination; indeed, for Barthes the events fill up, and quite spatially obstruct the imaginary space that had been opened by the eventlessness. The active subject of a reading *écriture* (that is, a reading that actually ‘writes’ the text, ‘produces’ it) becomes a rather passive hermeneutic subject that does not imagine, but only awaits the chronology of events.

The event turns me into a different kind of subject. I become a subject of suspense, of the murder of the Father-I’m no longer a subject of the nest, of the Mother: the event as Father (Oedipus and the protocol of the event; all events are Oedipal). The charm of Robinson Crusoe = the non-event.<fnref n="12" />

The event mirrors the question of living together on a narrative level. Barthes recurs here to his own theory, set forth in *Le plaisir du texte*, that there are two different kinds of reading, to which also correspond two different kinds of texts. One kind is the text of *plaisir*, which is ultimately boring. It aims only at its end, lives entirely from the plot. Barthes classifies it as Oedipal, just as in the myth of Oedipus, the final revelation shows that Oedipus killed his own father, symbolizing the release of narrative tension. To read such a text would be “an Oedipal pleasure (to denude, to know, to learn the origin and the end)”, and “every narrative (every unveiling of the truth) is a staging of the (absent, hidden, or hypostatized) father”.<fnref n="13" /> Such a reading runs towards the naked truth, and consequently represents a guided, ultimately second-rate pleasure. In contrast, Barthes positions the *jouissance* found in modernity, which focuses not on ultimate, progressive revelation, but momentary flashes; this would be the ‘true’, genuine desire. Let’s go back to Crusoe: While reading Defoe’s novel when events are still absent in the plot, there is a whole world to imagine. However, the introduction of the event piques the reader’s curiosity, channeling it towards the end of the novel (‘what happens next?’). In so doing, the event-plot precludes momentary pleasure and points to a later pleasure to be found at the end of the narrative; the event is thus paradoxically never related to the moment, always to the future. Barthes, on the contrary, desires momentary, present pleasure, which is then to be found in the uneventfulness and the imagination fueled by it.

That being said, Barthes concern in novels we may not know or even want to read, isn’t just a literary game. Instead, a social phenomenon is evident here. Barthes prefers uneventfulness not just as a sort of literary taste, but also in society, as his critical analysis reveals: “[O]ur entire civilization is in the Will-to-Act”.<fnref n="14" /> Against this hostile society, populated by events and fathers to be killed, Barthes thus seeks the uneventful community: “To fantasize Living-Together as an everyday reality: to refuse, repel, violently reject the event. The event is the enemy of Living Together”.<fnref n="15" />

And that’s why he so fastidiously avoids the event throughout his lectures. He provides no definitions, no spectacular finds. Nothing much happens (we might think of a queer temporality of these lectures). Instead, he declares the lecture a failure and postpones its completion into the future: the event that is to come. This proleptic character of the lectures<fnref n="16" /> is connected to the suspension of the event that makes the lecture a space

<footnote n="9">9 Barthes, *How to Live Together*, p. 84.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10 Barthes, *How to Live Together*, p. 84.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11 Barthes, *How to Live Together*, p. 84.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">12 Barthes, *How to Live Together*, p. 84.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">13 Roland Barthes, *The Pleasure of the Text*, edited by Richard Howard, translated by Richard Miller, New York: Hill and Wang 1998²³, p. 10.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">14 Barthes, *How to Live Together*, p. 85.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">15 Barthes, *How to Live Together*, p. 84.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">16 Cfr. Patrick ffrench, “How to Live with Roland Barthes”, *SubStance* 38/3 (2009), pp. 113–124.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_85.png" /></figure>

for pleasurable imagining.

Barthes, whose skeptical attitude is certainly also fed by *the* event par excellence, May 1968,<fnref n="17" /> thus decen-
ters the event by removing it from our attention and banishing it from utopias; and, at the same time, he ties
it to living together. Apparently, as we are Editing, Writing, and Encountering the Event, Barthes is our specter,
or perhaps we, too, are Barthes’ specters. Stuttering around, do we follow his way, or does he follow ours?

There's something different about Barthes' events, though. By being so afraid of the event, he endows it with a mythology. The event is concrete, it has a face, it is something that can (and must) be feared. The whole discourse on the event, this lecture, is it not ultimately a struggle against the 'absolutism of reality'?<fnref n="18" />

We, in turn, are not that interested in the concept of the event. We break it down into a multiplicity and stretch it into spaces. Our event is not the Other, it loses its contours, its difference. It does not even have to be kept at a distance, but now allows for similarities and proximities. It's not a radical rupture or an *epoche*: Instead, it can be smooth and transient. Now this, now that may be an event; in conjunction with other qualities, with contexts, we may notice an event here and there. Just as in the concept of family resemblance, soon one characteristic joins with others to form a community, then dissolves again, leaving room for new connections: a short handshake, actually like Paul and Saskia meeting briefly in their interpretations of *Lost Highway*; or in "Penelope," where new events are constantly unfolding in the postcolonial contemporary. Everyday life, where nothing special happens, and the event are no longer opposites at all but can temporarily coincide. And perhaps this is precisely what leads nowhere: Just as this conclusion leads nowhere, dissolves. Just as our original travels and our epistemic proximities lead nowhere. And just as our concept of the event leads nowhere. But at least we're not imposing a *régime*, be it dietary or epistemic. Instead, these texts raise questions about how we want to approach 'subjects' of study in the future: with critical distance, devoid of emotion, following a systematic methodology as Felski suggests of Critical Theory, or exploratively, perhaps in an openly subjective way with attachment.<fnref n="19" /> Let's see.

<footnote n="17">17 Roland Barthes, "L'écriture de l'événement", *Communications* 12 (1968), pp. 108-112.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">18 Hans Blumenberg, *Work on Myth*, translated by Robert M. Wallace, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press 1985.</footnote>

<footnote n="19">19 Cfr. Rita Felski, *The Limits of Critique*, Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press 2015; Elizabeth S. Anker/Rita Felski (ed.), *Critique and Postcritique*, Durham: Duke University Press 2017; Rita Felski, *Hooked. Art and Attachment*, Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press 2020.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_86.png" /></figure>

Bibliography

Anker, Elizabeth S./Rita Felski (ed.), *Critique and Postcritique*, Durham: Duke University Press 2017.

Barthes, Roland, “L’écriture de l’événement”, *Communications* 12 (1968), pp. 108–112.

Barthes, Roland, *The Pleasure of the Text*, edited by Richard Howard, translated by Richard Miller, New York: Hill and Wang 199823.

Barthes, Roland, *How to Live Together. Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces*, edited by Claude Coste, translated by Kate Briggs, New York: Columbia University Press 2013.

Blumenberg, Hans, *Work on Myth*, translated by Robert M. Wallace, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press 1985.

Felski, Rita, *The Limits of Critique*, Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press 2015.

Felski, Rita, *Hooked. Art and Attachment*, Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press 2020.

ffrench, Patrick, “How to Live with Roland Barthes”, *SubStance* 38/3 (2009), pp. 113–124.

Frost, Robert, “The Road Not Taken”, *The Atlantic Monthly* 116/2 (August 1915), p. 223.

Hesse, Hermann, “Im Nebel”, quoted from Gunnar Decker, *The Wanderer and his Shadow*, translated by Peter Lewis, Cambridge, Mass/London, England: Harvard University Press 2018, p. 720.

Kristeva, Julia, “Word, Dialogue and Novel”, in: *The Julia Kristeva Reader*, edited by Toril Moi, New York: Columbia University Press 1986, pp. 34–61.

Proust, Marcel, *À la recherche du temps perdu*, vol. V, Sodome et Gomorrhe II, Paris: Gallimard 1924.
## Afterword

Levi McLaughlin

This exciting birthday volume exemplifies the potential for mutually supportive collaboration to transcend the loneliness of existential terror. It is a multivarious resummoning of ideas and voices that tend to be silenced in formal discourses. It is freeing.

Through their contributions, the participants in this collection urge us to overcome the intimidating task of articulating a coherent thought. Writing, or even speaking, can trigger moments, or weeks or years, of anxiety-driven freezing. An incipient freeze precedes each enunciation. The arresting tyranny of the blank screen is ever-present. The urgency to create intellectual product smacks into the resistance of self-doubt. This resistance is cousin to other existential paralyses: confrontation with the laughably fleeting nature of our time on the planet. Our ludicrous individual irrelevance in the face of the cosmos.

Birthdays can be bleak this way. They reliably occasion outcry at the existential. I am no doubt guilty of this myself, but aging mostly means whining about inevitable metabolic realities that comprise existence for all organisms. Greeting a birthday with dread turns into cliché. But there is maybe an honesty to this process that's worth acknowledging. To feel one's time passing, and to mark it annually, invites a genuinely relatable paralysis. Oh shit. Time is short. Is this it? Will I be remembered? Do I matter to others? This is tough to overcome. Birthdays perennially pull this kind of existential dread to the surface.

To respond to Felix's observation in this collection, really to build on it, I suggest that birthdays indeed occasion a confrontation with being-in-the-world. Take even the most depressingly routinized ritual marker one can imagine, like an office party attended in a desultory fashion by uninterested coworkers who hum through "Happy Birthday" and watch impassively as you blow out a candle on a store-bought muffin. This awful gathering could trigger a dive into a yawning abyss, into an arresting apprehension of Dasein, "there-being," worthy of Heideggerian analysis. Under flickering fluorescent lights lodged in a drop ceiling, one could confront the raw reality that yeah, we're gonna die, and does it matter? Each passing year invites one to tick off passing anniversaries. Every year ratchets up the terror, hardens the freeze.

But buried in the mundanity of ritualized social obligations is immanent relational being, of maybe actually caring about one's relevance to others. Of pushing past self-involved moaning to prioritize the relevance of others. Of understanding oneself as a self necessarily in temporally contingent relationality to others. To affirm that relationality is constituted by exciting frictions that deserve much more passionate engagement than we tend to allow.

I'm not really interested in descrying whether the birthday counts as a Heideggerian event qua Heidegger. Nor am I qualified to do so. I'd rather focus on the inspiring camaraderie of the collective that saw this remarkable book come together and what it promises for the reader. I think back on the intensity of the Zoom meeting Paul organized in the morbid depths of the pandemic. In the worst doldrums of the Covid-19 era, when footholds on time slipped, when misreadings of social cues seemed to outnumber instances of mutual recognition, participants in this volume dedicated hours across multiple time zones to just riff. Riffing in the most heartwarming, honestly supportive ways.

The freedom to riff on ideas, to build without constantly tallying how a presentation or essay will "count" toward quantified imperatives: there is a spirit to this engagement that tends to slip into the spectral. Seeking to articulate voices that are conventionally marginalized, to let incomplete ideas play out, on their own terms, or remain frustratingly elusive, is the kind of intellectual work that gets sucked to the bottom of institutionally mandated norms. The birthday Zoom was itself spectral, proceeding over Zoom boxes. We all led spectral lives during lockdown, fractured through screens. It's a time I recall now mostly as jetlag without travel, jangled nerves.

The birthday Zoom combatted this norm. It was a fleeting link across multiple countries and living circumstances in the weirdest of times to collaborate on ideas and share sensations that so often go unvoiced. It was a temporary suspension of normative pressures that cultivate instinctual aversion to all but the most non-threatening, peer-reviewable product. It was a chance to exist outside a routinized timescale. To try shit
out without concern about measuring its success against a relentless institutional imperative. To let the spectral remain spectral.

I see specters interpenetrate between the collected pieces. Taylor's riff on Derrida's hauntology, on what she calls the “conjuring of co-conspirators,” sang out in our mediated interactions. Taylor starts us off by inviting us to think about the exciting potential to recall subjectivities and perceive them on their own wavelengths, subjectivities that are conventionally reduced to tropes, or simply erased. She does this even as evidence for her object of inquiry, the Haitian Revolution, remains elusive, decays with the passage of time and erasure through imperialist pressures. She lets the people who powered the Haitian revolution and the details of its fifteen years of local and global intricacies demand to be understood via their own legibility, not through summary but as “inexhaustible threads.”

Hauntings prevail in the other pieces, refusing to let the reader rest easy. Ideas float up, expressing a yearning that is always-already within each fumbled attempt to connect. Misconnections, or maybe non-connections, underlie agonized interactions in DM Braid's short fiction excerpt. Or maybe they underlie a failure to honestly interact. There is a spectral elusiveness to the quest for social certainties that drives the protagonist. This elusiveness informs the first-person view of most, arguably all, of the writers here. Arnaud's innovative, and jarring, cross-reading of Spengler and Deleuze/Guattari is an imaginative elixir that lets fantasies of civilizations grow and die, even as it invokes inquiry that fundamentally undermines fantastical thinking that propels nationalism. Empirical research is the enemy of nationalist fantasy, and yet these civilizational fantasies haunt us, refusing to die, persisting the face of evidence. Quintus guides us through a queering of temporalities in Proust, refusing to reduce temporal intricacies, and, instead, to let non-hegemonic perceptions of time proceed on their own pace. The queering of time in Quintus's chapter recalls for me the elusive temporality of what I instinctually characterize as the worst of the pandemic, revealing that this arduous period was in fact good in some ways—for those who could afford social distancing, that is. We were allowed to suspend all kinds of everyday routines to question our taken-for-granted measurements. It was a time out of time that permitted the failure, maybe only temporarily, of heteronormative measures of life stages and “responsible” schedules. Where were we supposed to be in our lives? What the fuck was a day, even? The fuck is it now?

Pursuit of unraveling is most fun in Mrunmayee's "Penelope Unraveling." She writes provocatively of loneliness, of rebellion. It's an autotheoretical reflection that is deeply relational, and relatable. Relationality is at its most explicit in Paul and Saskia's deep readings of Lynch's Lost Highway. More than querying narratology, representation, temporalities, and other tactics to deal with cognitive overload, I derived pleasure from their caring interaction.

Theirs is the collaborative spirit of this book's encounter. Encounters require such care, such willingness to give in, to let the elusive remain an unresolved cluster that speaks in its own languages to you. This project lets each participant demand patience from the reader, and from one another. Each piece requires a quick shifting of gears to calibrate engagement following the rhythms of each contributor, and the rhythms of their materials. Constant recalibration is freeing. The willingness to recalibrate, to push beyond existential self-doubt to really try out honest exchange, facilitates connections between the chapters and recalls that wonderful day in the midst of the pandemic.

This volume is a wonderful tribute to a landmark celebration that was an inspired, and inspiring, rejection of dread.

## Biography

Levi McLaughlin is Professor at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, North Carolina State University. He is co-author of *Kōmeitō: Politics and Religion in Japan* (IEAS Berkeley, 2014) and author of *Soka Gakkai's Human Revolution: The Rise of a Mimetic Nation in Modern Japan* (University of Hawai'i Press, 2019; in Japanese from Kodansha, 2024), as well as numerous book chapters and articles on religion and politics in Japan.