# Beyond the Madeleine: Experience, Temporality, and the Queer Event in Proust

Arnaud Miranda, Felix Berenskötter, Paul Kaletsch, Saskia Schomber

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## To cite this version:

Arnaud Miranda, Felix Berenskötter, Paul Kaletsch, Saskia Schomber. Beyond the Madeleine: Experience, Temporality, and the Queer Event in Proust. The (Un-)eventfull. A Transdisciplinary Journey, Windpark Books, pp.47-59, 2024, 10.22029/jlupub-18638. hal-04880085

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Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
# The (Un-)eventful:
a Transdisciplinary Journey

edited by Paul Kaletsch and Quintus Immisch

## Contributors:

- Taylor Borowetz

- D. M. Braid

- Arnaud Miranda

- Quintus Immisch

- Mrunmayee Sathye

- Paul Kaletsch

- Saskia Schomber

- Felix Berenskötter
## Imprint

Publisher
windpark books
kontakt@windparkbooks.de
Leonhard Fuchs, Felix Hofmann-Wissner, Jana Marei Matejka, and Paul Jürgens

Edited by Paul Kaletsch and Quintus Immisch
Designed by Daniela Sonnabend (info@doppelaugen.de)
Typeset: Adelphe by Eugénie Bidault (https://typothequeunjuge.com/genderfluid.space/)

https://doi.org/10.22029/jlupub-18638

https://windparkbooks.de/produkt/the-un-eventful-a-transdisciplinary-journey-ebook/ISBN 978-3-949363-35-1

## License

This book is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

You are free to:
Share—copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
Adapt—remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.

Under the following terms:

Attribution
You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

The text in this book is authored by various contributors. Each author's contribution is indicated where applicable.

Disclaimer:
The views and opinions expressed in this book are those of the respective authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of windpark books or its editors.

This book is a digital version of a title that is also available in a print-only edition. Please note that the content, layout, and formatting may differ between the digital and print versions. The print edition may contain additional design elements and layout specifics that are not present in this digital format.

Order the print edition and find more releases at:
https://windparkbooks.de/produkt/the-un-eventful-a-transdisciplinary-journey/ (ISBN 978-3-949363-36-8) or say hello by email kontakt@windparkbooks.de
Table of contents

Biographies & Abstracts 3

Preface: Teardrops and Treetops 9
Daniela Sonnabend & windpark books

Welcome: An Introduction-Machine 10
Paul Kaletsch

First Chapter:
Specters of the Haitian Revolution 23
Taylor Borowetz

Second Chapter:
A Character Study 30
D. M. Braid

Third Chapter:
A Metaphysics of the Stump: Spengler's Thousand Plateaus 39
Arnaud Miranda

Fourth Chapter:
Beyond the Madeleine: Experience, Temporality, and the Queer Event in Proust 47
Quintus Immisch

Fifth Chapter:
Penelope Unravelling 60
Mrunmayee Sathye

Sixth Chapter:
Much too Much—A Dialogue on Watching *Lost Highway* 66
Paul Kaletsch & Saskia Schomber

Seventh Chapter: Short Essay About Birthdays 84
Felix Berenskötter

Ways of Concluding: Solitary Engagements and Living-Together 87
Quintus Immisch

Afterword 93
Levi McLaughlin
# Biographies & Abstracts

## windpark books (publisher)

windpark books, an independent publishing group for contemporary art, was founded in Darmstadt, Germany, in 2017 by Leonhard Fuchs, Felix Hofmann-Wissner, and Jana Matejka, later joined by Paul Jürgens in 2023. Born from a quest for intellectual exchange, the project evolved into an “open park” for collaborative development and publication of genre-fluid and independent printed matter in close collaboration with artists, writers, and scientists. Publications are understood as holistic artistic creations, with realization, production, and edition essentially based on individual concepts and therefore not necessarily pursuing economic added value. As publishers, curators, and editors, they foster collaborative creativity, mutual knowledge exchange, and insight into diverse realms of work, life, and interests, adhering to an ideology of the printed publication as a higher medium.

windpark books' catalog includes over 50 publications, with editions ranging from 50 to 250 copies. From participating in small zine fairs in Frankfurt to hosting their own events for each release, windpark books is dedicated to cultivating a vibrant cultural exchange. Their books can be found at Buchhandlung Walther König (Berlin & Frankfurt am Main), Salt and Pepper (Tokyo), CORNER BOOKS (Setagaya), and Printed Matter (New York). For more information, visit www.windparkbooks.de.

## Daniela Sonnabend (contributing artist)

Daniela Sonnabend is an artist with a background in graphic design. She is currently doing her Master's in Art at Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon, where she is working with (auto)fictional narratives, anecdotes and observations in language and spatialisation.

## Welcome: An Introduction-Machine

Paul Kaletsch

Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, this decidedly normative epistemic intervention proposes an eventful practice of writing introductions that does not reduce an introduction's function to what it *should do* but explores what else it *can do*. Similarly, the process of making this book allowed contributors to do what they wanted to do and how they wanted to do it. That being said, these contributions indulge neither in art for the sake of art nor transgressiveness. Academic standards define that an introduction of an edited volume originating from a conference *should* narrate the emergence of such a volume, introduce the contributions, and develop their shared common ground in terms of method, topics, and research questions and arguments. Early career researchers internalize such notions of what constitutes genuine academic knowledge and how one can correctly produce such science in institutionalized higher education. This internalization accomplishes the self-disciplining of young scholars, while the strong causality between publishability and citability, on the one hand, and job security and career opportunities, on the other hand, externally disciplines the writing of early career scholars into compliance with such epistemic norms. In contrast to that, the transdisciplinary and collaborative process of making this book served undisciplining as finding a different way of making a book, a shield against internalized self-disciplining and disciplinary imperatives, and (at least temporarily) unlearning disciplinary norms. While during the book-making the contributors practiced their craft in order to undiscipline themselves from disciplinary imperatives, the book shall afford you, dear reader, the luxury to treat yourself to the event of reading as a process of exploring your untapped potential to read differently or to do something altogether differently with the book and your world out there.

Keywords: Eventful Epistemic Practices, Disciplining, Undisciplining, Deleuze and Guattari
Paul Kaletsch (he/him) is a Politics PhD student at SOAS University of London. Currently, he is working on the post-viva corrections of his thesis. In his thesis, Paul reconceptualizes ‘failed and ended’ political resistance, specifically the 2014 protests in Hong Kong, as a Deleuzian event. He is also a guest researcher with the Graduate Center for the Study of Culture (GCSC) of the University of Giessen (JLU), where he serves as the speaker of the Research Area 3: Performativity. At JLU’s Faculty of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies, Paul teaches a class on theories of resistance. Recently, he published a review on the concept of negativity and negative critiques of joy and submitted a forthcoming essay on the productivity of students’ unsuccessful engagements with difficult theory. With regards to a postdoc project, Paul is interested in conversations about the epistemic (in)-commensurability of political, psychoanalytical, literary, and physical conceptualizations of resistance. Similarly, he welcomes exchanges about the role of desire in the rise of the German right and how a political response to this threat can combine micro- and macro-political labor.

## First Chapter:

### Specters of the Haitian Revolution

Taylor Borowetz

What does it mean to be responsible to spirits? This chapter is not an exercise to exorcise, but a conjuration of co-conspirators; the dead are not simply at rest but can enact a new world through us. Visible in debates on the politics of memory and the archive, the question of how we convene with ghosts is implicit in our construction of a ‘past’ and its necessity to the present. Writing historically conjures the limits of communication, language, and knowing; our desire to represent the fullness of being is mediated by our ability to access mere archival traces. Choosing to paper over these cracks necessarily sacrifices complexity. Instead of unfounded narrative coherence, this chapter aims to sit with contradictions and fragments at the core of historical inquiry. Inspired by Derrida’s insistence on the proliferation of specters, it proposes an epistemological posture that posits the decomposition of its object of analysis into apparitions, partial echoes, and uncanny reflections. It reads this method of spectralization through the Haitian Revolution in four ways. First, it decomposes larger historical events and processes into complex, partial, and inexhaustible threads. Second, it fractures ethical systems into contradictory and contingent evaluations rather than assuming a coherent whole. Third, it allows the researcher to reach toward individuals excluded from traditional archives and historical legibility. Fourth, specters gaze at us from beyond the limits of our epistemic practices, a reminder that we can know and live otherwise. When we convene with the specters of the Haitian Revolution, their struggle continues to affect us: haunting precludes an ‘end’.

Keywords: Specters, Haitian Revolution, Vodou

Taylor Borowetz (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Politics and International Studies at SOAS, University of London. She is a theorist, writing recursive analyses of the concept of liberation through the Haitian Revolution and contemporary abolitionist thought. Her scholarship aims to witness liberatory praxis and its crystallization in history. Taylor has published in *The International Journal of Human Rights, Political Studies Review*, and *E-International Relations*. She hopes to do politically meaningful work in different forms and forums as an opportunity to build coalitions with other scholar-activists. Part-time, Taylor teaches chess in prison.
Second Chapter:
A Character Study
D. M. Braid

Other people's lives are their own, most of them stay hidden from those who remain relative strangers (and conversely), some things – doubts and dreams – even from those closest to them; and even where and when, in a moment of carelessness – a scrap of a conversation between friends overheard by chance –, flashes of an other life shine through – by way of an unexpected habit or an unseasonal haircut –, they offer little more than an occasion to fabricate, to put together all sorts of observations and memories into something somebody could actually live, and to reflect on one's own life thus cast in relief, on one's preoccupations and oneself; on the irremediability of the past and getting older and further from an ideal state of youth where everything still seemed possible. Yet no one can live that ever alluring other life. But, maybe, no one can do any more, even about their own life, than to imagine and continuously re-imagine it, without getting any closer to what it may be or should be.

Keywords: selective perception, objectification, (re-)constructing an Other, memory, youth, aging

"D.M. Braid" is a nom de plume. The author holds a Ph.D. in philosophy and writes, apart from literary prose of different length, also academic texts mainly on the history of philosophy and the exact sciences in the 19th and early 20th century.

Third Chapter:
A Metaphysics of the Stump Spengler's Thousand Plateaus
Arnaud Miranda

Spengler's *Decline of the West* and Deleuze and Guattari's *A Thousand Plateaus* have apparently nothing in common. This contribution aims to explore what happens if one tries to intertwine them together. This unexpected encounter may shed light on each of the two works, but also create a whole new philosophical object. My hypothesis is that, besides the apparent distance between their thoughts, these thinkers share common reflections on the notions of rooting and territorialization. Spengler's conception of cultural rooting helps us to understand the meaning of the concept of deterritorialization in *A Thousand Plateaus*. Conversely, Deleuze and Guattari's views on territoriality set a new tone for Spengler's description of civilizational uprooting. The contribution will first focus on the reasonable connections one can establish between Spengler and Deleuze and Guattari. I will demonstrate that, despite their undeniable ideological distance, there are several reasons to connect them together (I). After these necessary preliminaries, I will describe Spengler's conception of territoriality in the *Decline of the West*, and what can be considered as its theoretical limits (II). As a response, we will see that Deleuze and Guattari's conception of deterritorialization can shed new light on these limits (III). Finally, because *A Thousand Plateaus* cannot be considered a mere response to the *Decline of the West*, I will rather defend the idea that reading them together opens the way for conceptual invention. The metaphysics of the stump, a philosophical story that can be told about civilizational decay, is what I will propose to draw from such a hybrid reading of Spengler and Deleuze and Guattari (IV).

Keywords: deterritorialization; rooting; stump (metaphysics of); territory; tree (metaphysics of); uprooting

Arnaud Miranda is a PhD candidate in Political Theory at Sciences Po (CEVIPOF, Law School). He is currently working on his dissertation under the supervision of Pr. Julie Saada (Sciences Po) and Pr. Jean-Yves Pranchère (ULB). His dissertation studies the metaphors of decadence in contemporary political thought and shows how this imaginary exceeds the boundaries of the reactionary tradition.
Fourth Chapter:

Beyond the Madeleine: Experience, Temporality, and the Queer Event in Proust

Quintus Immisch

This paper explores the concept of queer events by looking at Proust's novel *In Search of Lost Time* (in particular vol. 1, *Swann's World*). The first section situates the novel in the context of modernity and the discourse of acceleration, drawing on the concepts of *chrononormativity*, which imposes time orders on subjects, and *queer temporality*, that eludes normative time. The contribution then explores this opposition of hegemonic and individual time in Proust's *Recherche*, focusing on the narrator's seclusion and loneliness, as well as his untimely sexuality marked by oedipality. A rereading of the famous madeleine episode then reveals its sexual symbolism and raises the question of whether queer events are possible in this novel or not. The final section discusses if the queer temporality of the novel follows hegemonic discourse or allows for a 'time of its own' and generalizes these considerations in the idea that the event can be seen as a usable infrastructure. From this perspective, the rereading of Proust's *Recherche* can direct the discussion of queerness from debatable 'identities' to ephemeral contexts and settings.

Keywords: allochronism, body, chrononormativity, consciousness, desire, decentered event, fin de siècle, fluidity, gay, heteronormativity, homosexuality, infrastructure, literature, memory, modernism, modernity, mother, narration, novel, oedipal, othering, peripheral, productivity, queer, queer studies, queer temporality, queer theory, subjectivity, synchronization, temporality, time, sex, sexuality

Quintus Immisch is a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at the Universities of Tübingen and Aix-Marseille (cotutelle) and is currently finishing his dissertation on nakedness/nudity in modern literature and culture. He studied in Tübingen, Rome and Paris, was a research assistant in Tübingen (2020-24) and is currently a visiting scholar at the Université libre de Bruxelles. Trained in and working across German, Romance and Ancient Literature as well as Literary and Cultural Theory, his research interests include the (naked) body, questions of living-together, the concept of similarity, as well as queer and decolonial theory.

Fifth Chapter:

Penelope Unravelling

Mrunmayee Sathye

Shifting between a diary entry, literary non-fiction, and academic prose, “Penelope Unravelling” is an “auto-theoretical reflection on autotheory”, written by someone who would very much prefer to read other people’s lives rather than write one honest sentence about her own. In an attempt to dive into the memories of a child and bring them to a grown-up’s page, the text struggles to confine a self to the page which is quite determined not to find out who it is.

Navigating very personal experiences with notions of identity, embodiment, gender, emancipation, and (post) coloniality on the one hand, but also critical interludes on canons of literature, and patriarchal and (post)colonial constellations on the other hand, the text interlaces the personal with the political and the political with the poetical, rather loosely weaving a narrative out of unconnected musings only to unravel it the moment it starts to seem coherent. The author/narrator frolics from one thought to the next, jumping from deliberations on academia to experiences of art, from a struggle for identity to a desire for invisibility, trying to locate the beginnings of the author’s tedious relationship with emancipatory theory. Eventful, to say the least.

“Penelope Unravelling” is in some ways the exasperated rant of a restless self, entangled with episodes of dis- tant nostalgia coming to life; moments of undiluted affect intermingling with moments of abstraction and dif- fused with miscellaneous witticisms. This a love letter to reading, and a declaration of loneliness, deliberately lost among the words with which it was written.

Keywords: academia, autotheory, body, canon, canon critique, colonialism, emancipatory theory, identity, post-colonialism, reading, theory
Mrunmayee Sathye is a PhD candidate at the University of Tübingen in the field of Literary and Cultural Theory and a scholar of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. In her dissertation, she is engaging with contemporary autobiographical narrative techniques and attempting to trace the ways in which the subject of the narrative, the autobiographical I constructed in literary texts, navigates and negotiates between multiple dynamic and intersecting identities.

## Sixth Chapter:
### Much too Much—A Dialogue on Watching *Lost Highway*

Paul Kaletsch & Saskia Schomber

This contribution is a dialogue on our viewing experience of David Lynch's *Lost Highway* (1997) and the effects and affects of the movie's 'too much'. We start from our different perceptions of a central scene of the movie in which one protagonist is apparently transformed into another. After the introduction, Saskia proposes a narratological reading of *Lost Highway*, before Paul turns to non-representational theory. Specifically, from a narratological point of view, it emerges that the movie's narrative ambiguity—i.e., its narrative structure that generates simultaneous, equally plausible plots—produces its engaging and straining effects. In contrast, the non-representational analysis, relying on Deleuze's engagement with cinema, studies how the interplay of camera movements and film cuts in a specific scene causes the breakdown of narrative and affects the viewer. The conclusion differentiates our experiences that *Lost Highway* is 'just too much' into the idea of a cognitive overload due to narrative ambiguity, on the one hand, and the affective excess of its puzzling and repulsive combination of unexpected but somehow working filmic elements, on the other. While the cognitive overload is a phenomenon that challenges, but also pleasures us while re-watching the movie, the affective excess can only be encountered when one either sees the movie for the first time or one's memories of *Lost Highway* start to blur. We end by exploring how our findings relate to each other.

**Keywords:** action-situation-action (A-S-A'), affect, ambiguity, breakdown/stutter, cognitive overload, cognitive conundrum, dialogue, effect, excess, failure, film, focalization, horror, inner detective, interpretation, machine, metadiegesis, möbius strip, mystery, narrative, narrative ambiguity, narrative levels, narratology, neo-noir, noir, non-representational theory, perception, pleasure, plot, postmodernism, sensory-motor link scheme, situation, simultaneity, story, success, temporality, temporal loops, transformation

Saskia Schomber studied Classics in Giessen and Tübingen. She is a teaching and research assistant at the Classics department of the University of Giessen, currently finishing her PhD thesis on the poetics and narrative aesthetics of late Greek epic poetry. Other research interests include performance studies in Greek tragedy, literary theory, esp. postclassical narratology, and critical approaches in Classics. At the moment, she is co-editing a translation of Dionysius of Halicarnassus' treatise *De compositione verborum* and preparing to co-edit a collected volume on Queer Temporalities in Classical Reception.

## Seventh Chapter:
### Short Essay About Birthdays

Felix Berenskötter

This contribution offers some reflections on why birthdays (might) matter. It explores this question in the philosophical terrain of existentialist phenomenology, specifically the thought of Martin Heidegger, who grappled with the meaning of being by focusing on the temporality of life. Using as a reference Heidegger's reading of the event as a profound and singularising experience in which humans face the possibility of their own death, I suggest that neither the moment of birth nor the subsequent celebration of birthdays fall into this category. Instead, I maintain that birthdays are intrinsically social occasions that allow us to spend 'quality time' with
<figure><img src="image_3.png" /></figure>

others we care about and who care about our being in the world. As such, birthdays are not moments we own
in isolation; they are moments when family and friends join us to celebrate being in time together.

Keywords: Birthday, Event, Temporality, Existentialism, Individualism, Friendship, Heidegger, Bergson, Arendt

Felix Berenskötter is a Reader (Associate Professor) in International Relations in the Department of War Studies, King's College London. From 2009 to 2024 he was based at SOAS, University of London, where he also headed the Department of Politics and International Studies. Felix' research deals with theorising world politics as a creative and political endeavour, with a particular focus on the concepts power, identity, anxiety, security, peace, and friendship. His work has been published in a variety of outlets. He is currently completing a textbook on the power of concepts and is writing a monograph on international friendship and estrangement.

## Ways of Concluding: Solitary Engagements and Living-Together

Quintus Immisch

This essayistic conclusion reflects on the work on our edited volume and links the question of the event with Roland Barthes' concept of idiorrhythmy, aiming to locate the space for creativity that this edited volume wanted to offer within the dynamic interplay between constraint and originality. A first section takes a closer look at three contributions to the volume, arguing that the event is understood as a social structure that allows for individual practices and seems to dissolve social cohesion, but nevertheless generates epistemic proximities, as these contributions share several ways of conceiving their writing. A second section contextualizes these considerations with Roland Barthes' lectures on *How to Live Together*, which model a minimal regulation of social cohesion in the concept of idiorrhythmy, suggesting a concept that holds potential for 'undiciplined' ways of writing.

Keywords: Living-together, similarity, social structure, epistemology
<figure><img src="image_4.png" /></figure>

## Preface:

## Teardrops and Treetops

Daniela Sonnabend & windpark books

When I was little, probably about five years old, we lived right beside a field. Once you went down the hill there was a small stream with a puny peninsula hidden behind bushes. This islet was our own magical place. Here we collected tadpoles, organised mud fights and brewed magic potions. Sometimes, I threw my sister into the stream, so that she wouldn't always cling to me. But my favourite thing was watching the shrimps, fish and other tiny creatures in the world of the stream.

One of those days, when I was crouching down observing a small crayfish, it happened. Suddenly and unexpectedly, I felt a stinging pain in my eye. I reflexively squeezed it shut, my balance faded and I toppled backwards onto the soft earth. With all my strength, I struggled to keep the other eye open, so that I could dimly recognise the trees around me. I could feel the foreign body moving in my eye, floating from top to bottom between my eyelid and cornea, the small black lump pushing itself under my lower eyelid. Finally, I gave in and also closed the other eye. All I could see now was a reddish haze that shimmered between dark- and orange-red.

After a few seconds, the small black shadow, whose shape I couldn't identify, became visible. It was difficult to concentrate on trying to recognise its shape because whenever I tried to follow it with my gaze, it moved out of my focus at the same speed. So I tried to stare straight ahead under my closed eyelids to recognise the object that was now on the right side of my outer field of vision. With my eyes squeezed tightly shut and focussed, the small dot began to develop contours. A drop-shaped base with two wider drops on either side of it, like a spade. I felt the resistance between my eye and eyelid suddenly reduce and at the same time the shape I had just found expanded slightly and melted into a shapeless lump. The itching could no longer be suppressed and I rubbed the tears out of my eye.

When I opened them, I saw the little fly buzzing away from my face. After two disorientated loops, it seemed to have regained its balance and disappeared behind the treetops.
<figure><img src="image_5.png" /></figure>

# Welcome: An Introduction-Machine

Paul Kaletsch

## I) Undisciplining the Discipline

Once upon a time a designer sat down. They constructed an object to solve a problem. Often during dinner, the designer's guests picked up their napkins to clean themselves. Whilst doing so, they put their used cutlery on the tablecloth and soiled it. You can hardly imagine what a terrible mess that caused. Each time the designer yet again had to clean, starch, and iron the linen. Now, once and for all, they had had enough of this drudgery and their careless and messy guests. And so, the designer shaped the object's form in such a way that their guests could rest their cutlery on the object without ruining the tablecloth. Problem solved. My extremely detailed and historically accurate account of the invention of the knife rest depicts how the knife rest received its form in order to serve a function that the object's designer had in mind prior to their invention of the knife rest (Smith, 2018, pp. 99–100).<fnref n="1" /> The thinking that implicitly operates in my account assumes a natural correspondence between the form of the knife rest and the purpose that it *should* accomplish. In other words, due to the physical form of the knife rest, one only uses the knife rest correctly if one places used cutlery on it. Such thinking limits the knife rest to this one function as a solution to one specific empirical problem in a particular context.

In *Anti-Oedipus*, Deleuze, a poststructuralist philosopher, and Guattari, a political activist and institutional psychotherapist, sought to provide a political alternative for the post-68 French left to dogmatic Marxism or psychoanalytic thought or the various attempts to fuse them. For this purpose, they tackled, amongst other things, the relevance of the Oedipus complex, as the title of their book indicates. In very vulgar terms, this psychoanalytic complex refers, for instance, to the “Oedipal triangle” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 3) between parents and son. Apparently, since the son naturally desires his mother sexually, he must want to murder his father in order to have her all to himself. Yet Deleuze and Guattari refused to take the naturalization of this triangular constellation as “something perfectly obvious, a ‘given’ that is there from the very beginning.” (ibid.) Instead of accepting the seemingly obvious relevance of Oedipus, they proposed another question: Namely, “Given a certain effect, what machine is capable of producing it? And given a certain machine, what can it be used for?” (ibid.) The thinking implicit in these two questions does not start from the premise of Oedipus but examines the Oedipus complex as an effect produced by a machine. And even though the word ‘machine’ immediately triggers the image of a machine in a factory constantly churning out physical products that correspond to a certain model, put that on hold for now. Simply because one can neither compare the reification of Oedipus as an apparently objective fact that structures social relations and society to an industrial product nor the social machine producing Oedipus to a machine manufacturing physical objects in a factory. Similarly, returning to the knife rest, don’t confuse the function—the knife rest’s purpose of holding used cutlery during meals—for which the designer invented the knife rest in the first place, and shaped its form to best perform that service, with the certain effect that the question of Deleuze and Guattari pertains to. However, the function of the knife rest plays a role in the effect in question, that is, the seemingly natural and unquestionable correspondence between the knife rest’s shape and its function. In other words, the knife rest’s function just follows the form of the knife rest—the shape predetermines this usage. Regardless of the purpose that the knife rest was designed for and its fixed form, a knife rest can do so much more. Precisely, at this point, the machine comes into play. Again, though, be warned, don’t mistake the machine for the knife rest making machine in the knife rest factory—which in this example, as opposed to the Oedipus one, indeed exists—with the social machine in question. The social machine—the complex set of relations between an order of knowledge, norms, and everyday social practices—reduces not just the knife rest but really any kind of tool to just one natural function: the one that corresponds to the purpose that its designer shaped the tool for. Therefore, Deleuze and Guattari’s first machinic question examines the social arrangement that reduces the knife rest to *what it should do*.

<footnote n="1">¹ I picked up the example of the knife rest from Smith's (2018, p. 99) reference to the introduction of Deleuze and Guattari's (1983, p. 4) *Anti-Oedipus*.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_6.png" /></figure>

Paraphrasing Deleuze and Guattari very crudely, they propose a puzzling second question when they ask what the knife rest can be used for. Obviously, a knife rest should be used as a knife rest, so why do they even ask such a stupid and invalid question? Smith's (2018) discussion of Deleuze and Guattari's conceptualization of the machine, provides this answer: "One could perfectly understand what the knife-rest is in terms of its actual properties, but this does not at all exhaust what it can *do* [emphasis in original]" (p. 100). Smith here reiterates the knife rest as a body from the vantage of Deleuze and Guattari's Spinozist understanding of bodies. Such bodies are not defined by what they actually *are* but by their capacities and inabilities, that is, what they virtually *can, and cannot do* as determined by the different relations that they enter into in varying contexts (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013, pp. 299–304). From this perspective, a knife rest only receives the function to hold used cutlery as a result of its external relations to a consumer of food, cutlery, and the context of a formal meal.

Introductions of edited volumes usually clarify the topic of the book and the shared methodological approaches, summarize the different contributions, locate a red thread, and situate the edited volume in the extant literature on the subject. Often introductions take a short and structured form in order to serve these purposes because such adherence to academic standards ensures publishability and citability. Accordingly, introductions only introduce like this because academia disciplines them into this correspondence between form and function. I will start from another point.

I know the effect that I want the introduction to accomplish, so I will build an introduction that can produce that: Namely, I want to have fun while writing this introduction, and I would like you to have fun reading it. If you don't, just put it aside. With fun I actually mean joy and with joy I mean that I am writing not for the sake of writing, or to inform you, but so that "my force of existing or my power of acting is increased or improved" (Deleuze, 1978, COURS VINCENNES - 24/01/1978, para. 13). If the affect or "affectus" (ibid., para. 28) of joy corresponds to an increase in my power of acting—or my bodily capacity—then I'm not here to feel good or, in other words, emotionally happy (Massumi, 1995, p. 88). Rather, I want to write in a way that makes the capacity of my body and of the body of the reader rise, no matter if that causes sad or happy emotions.

In the preface of Deleuze and Guattari's *A Thousand Plateaus*, the book's translator, Massumi (2013), does not ask readers of the book if they like *A Thousand Plateaus* or if the book holds any truth in relation to the world but three very different questions: "What new thoughts does it make it possible to think? What new emotions does it make it possible to feel? What new sensations and perceptions does it open in the body?" (p. xiv) An increase in a body's power of acting—or potential—hence, raises the body's capacity to think 'new' thoughts, take 'new' actions, utter 'new' statements, and relate to different discourses and matter.<fnref n="2" />

The ‘new’ sounds a little mystical, so let me try to reframe this. In order to do so, let me return to the setting of a formal dinner. The meal behavior of the adults on the table is limited to the reproduction of the knife rest’s supposedly natural function. That is, they only use the knife rest during a formal dinner to place their dirty cutlery on it. Due to the fixation of the knife rest’s spatiotemporal setting to formal dinners and the restriction of its external relations to diners and their used cutlery, the knife rest can only provide us with the “dead repetition of the same” (Smith, 2018, p. 99): A knife rest is a temporary location for cutlery during formal occasions.

*A child enters the formal dining room.* This is not just a kid of one of the guests. No, I'd like to think of this child as a persona in the fashion of Deleuze and Guattari's reconstruction of Little Hans. In a case study, the psychoanalyst Freud named a boy with a phobic response to horses Little Hans. Concerning the previously raised question about the 'new', Deleuze and Guattari provide one interesting answer in their reading of Little

<footnote n="2">² Even though it might sound strange that a body articulates new statements, I stick with the term body because, although, in his lecture on Spinoza, Deleuze occasionally adds the soul or mind to the body, he clearly emphasizes the latter: "we don't even know [savons] what a body is capable of, we prattle on about the soul and the mind and we don't know what a body can do. But a body must be defined by the ensemble of relations which compose it, or, what amounts to exactly the same thing, by its power of being affected. As long as you don't know what power a body has to be affected, as long as you learn like that, in chance encounters, you will not have the wise life, you will not have wisdom." (Deleuze, 1978, COURS VINCENNES - 24/01/1978, para. 29)</footnote>
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Hans' inquiries into who and what possesses “a peepee-maker” (ibid., p. 298). According to Little Hans, a girl must have a peepee-maker not because she owns a certain organ but simply because she urinates. This conceptualization of the peepee-maker accordingly does not reduce the peepee-maker to an organ. Rather, Deleuze and Guattari's reading conceptualizes peeing as “a machinic functioning” (ibid.) that different arrangements of non-organic and organic components can accomplish: “Does a locomotive have a peepee-maker? Yes, in yet another machinic assemblage.” (ibid.) A locomotive's running engine releases both steam and condensation water during its operation. Little Hans' own physical composition urinates with an organ. In this context, the 'new', then, designates the ontological difference between such an organic arrangement and constellations that facilitate peeing but do not operate organically.

Deleuze and Guattari, in their discussion of their observations and analysis of how children engage with animals, offer another conceptualization of the 'new' in their exploration of Little Hans' horse:

> They [children] make a list of [animals'] affects. Little Hans's horse is not representative but affective. It is not a member of a species but an element or individual in a machinic assemblage: draft horse-omni-bus-street. It is defined by a list of active and passive affects in the context of the individuated assemblage it is part of: having eyes blocked by blinders, having a bit and a bridle, being proud, having a big peepee-maker, pulling heavy loads, being whipped, falling, making a din with its legs, biting, etc. These affects circulate and are transformed within the assemblage: what a horse 'can do.' (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013, p. 300)

An assemblage here conceptually refers to the context of the horse's current relations, for example, its place (street), and the road users it interacts with (the bus). In this context, certain actions of the horse can disturb the assemblage and transform it (biting, falling, or going into a different direction). Other elements reduce the horse's capacity to change the assemblage, the driver's tools to control the horse, for instance. Little Hans catalogues how the variation of contexts produces new functions of what a horse can and cannot do. To an engineer like Little Hans, the 'new' either refers to the ontological difference in terms of components and relations between assemblages that produce similar functions or to the difference between the functions that a body can engage in its current assemblage and the functions that the body can accomplish in other assemblages.<fnref n="3" />

During formal dinners the adults always maintain the knife rests' assemblage and, thereby, reproduce what the knife rest can do (function as a rest for cutlery). The enforcement of etiquette at such a dinner, on the other hand, constrains the knife rest's potential for other functions: 'Carl, you put the knife rest on the wrong side.' 'Just put your used cutlery here, Yvonne.' 'Suzan, you're fidgeting with the knife rest, again. I told you that makes me nervous.' However, for little children the regime of etiquette does not apply yet. Depending on the crowd, on most formal occasions, children can still do what they want as long as they do not endanger themselves or others, and do not cause noise that significantly interferes with conversation. And so, the kid who just entered the stage can move around freely and play. As discussed previously, this child's playing works like this: The kid abducts objects from their established context and relates them to other objects and moves them to different places. In doing so the child engineers new functions for these objects. In contrast to the adults, the child holds a higher power of acting because it understands that the design of the knife rest does not dictate its function but its external relations, its context, or, in other words, its assemblage, do. And so, the kid, in experimentally relating the knife rest to different objects, explores what the knife rest can do. Therefore, such a kid might as well relate the knife rest to the table and produce new functions: a tool to form the table's shape and a drumstick to make percussive sounds.

The child functions as the player who dissolves existing contexts of objects and creates new assemblages with them that the kid can maintain or yet again transform into another arrangement. Constraining environ-

<footnote n="3">³ I use the word similarity here to address both the proximity of different operations of urination—they all accomplish peeing in some way—and the idiosyncrasy of such functions of urinating—the release of urine differs as much from the release of steam or condensation water as an organic function of peeing differs from a machinic functioning not confined to an organ.</footnote>
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ments, such as the family or the school, shackle the world with an epistemology of truth: Objects and bodies hold supposedly 'natural' functions corresponding to their form. Accordingly, objects and bodies *should* repeatedly perform this 'natural' function in the same and reliable manner. In contrast to you and me, this strange way of seeing the world is still unfamiliar to the child. It must actively learn such disciplining knowledge on the cumbersome path of institutionalized education. Playing allows the child to move from the world of the *should* to a world that does not present itself as an ontological constant but is constantly *becoming* in the process of playing. Namely, in this practice of playing the kid does not just insert its body into a given world but, in doing so, engages in worlding, a practice of ontological production *with* the world. The player changes the world as much as the world absorbs the kid and dissolves its body into a new assemblage: again and again. The child's play already reveals that it *knows* how to engage in undisciplined epistemic production; the kid doesn't require undisciplining but maybe it can teach us.

What I think an introduction *should do* in an edited volume compels me to write in a way that ensures that the introduction does what it *should* do. This, of course, does not just happen in the somehow hermetically sealed space of my subjectivity but takes places in a sense of obligation toward the publisher (I need to deliver something decent), a responsibility towards the contributors (an introduction should mention them or relate to their chapters), and existing standards of writing in the academic discipline of politics. You and I both have internalized such norms, forcing us to engage in self-disciplining. We are not kids anymore. And this prevents us from just starting to engage in undisciplined epistemic practices. I want to build an introduction-machine that moves us (that's you, the reader, and me) from the world of the *should* to the world of *becoming*. Moreover, earlier I stated that I want to write this introduction in a way that increases my capacity and that of the reader to produce the 'new'. Therefore, like disciplined writing dedicated to academic standards of rigor, originality, and clarity, I normatively commit my writing of this introduction to a mission of playfulness, productivity, and the 'new.' Since my self-disciplining, unfortunately, will simply ignore these empty and abstract norms, I attempt to emulate these concrete practices of writing undisciplined/eventfully/playfully. Writing eventfully plays around both with the components of this edited volume and the literary form of introductions in general. In doing so, this playful writing explores what I and the reader *can and cannot do* in different author-reader-introduction assemblages. Such experimentation with the components of this introduction, the edited volume, and *the introduction as such* unlocks the door to another world of a fluid lab that neither affords itself nor its 'observer' stability but invites the latter to games that constantly change the 'observer' and the 'world.' Hopefully, such an approach of attempting undisciplined writing accomplishes my undisciplining as a process of gradually undoing internalized norms of what constitutes genuine knowledge and what kind of epistemic practices can produce such knowledge. Moreover, ideally, in this becoming-child (or Little Hans) I will re-learn undisciplined epistemic practices.

My elaboration on the purpose of this introduction already segues into the question of what I want this volume to do. I have been talking about how I want to write in a way that, in a sense, undisciplines my writing. However, this is not just about my 'spiritual journey' in writing this introduction, it's as much about Quintus (the co-editor), you (the reader), the other authors, the publisher (*windpark books*), and Daniela Sonnabend (the contributing visual artist). This reminds me of the emergence of this book: our work process but also the book's origin. The whole thing evolved from a symposium that I organized for my 30th birthday. For this occasion, I wanted friends to present something that they were knowledgeable about, but that their professional context denie them to talk about extensively in the work environment. I brought friends together from different backgrounds who otherwise wouldn't have talked to each other. There was music, literature, design, and academic presentations. Towards the end of the symposium, we just hung out, but there was the constant feeling that we could cook up something together, that we were in fact doing that at that very moment. Like the symposium, the book should work as an island where the contributors can do what they want to do and not what they think they *should* do. Before the book, though, the island didn't constitute a real place yet. Instead, the island merely existed in the form of the hope that knowledge and knowledge production could be different. However, this wish did not even articulate another epistemology but presented a completely unimagined and, therefore, unknowable epistemic alterity. Those who want to travel to the island, thus, require the aid of the
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conceptual persona of the kid because its playing illustrates one mode of undisciplined knowledge production. Only in becoming-kids, that is, in the process of unlearning discipline by attempting to write like the child plays, the travelers can reach the island. The intersection of the passenger's collaborative attempts of undisciplining makes the island a real space that invites undisciplined modes of epistemic productivity, affords, and protects them.

And then, there's you, the reader. Since I won't summarize the contributions in the introduction, you have two choices. You can either look at the list of abstracts and, based on them, decide what you want to read and what you don't want to. Or, rather than just extracting information from the book or deriving pleasure from the included art, for a publication on the event it might be more interesting for you to open yourself to the book in order to develop a singular technique of reading *with* the text: You can cite this tome, criticize it, throw or give it away, reinterpret it, rework the book into another object, and so forth. If you have a hard copy in front of you, you could, for instance, follow Daniela Sonnabend's art and read the disconnected bits and pieces you encounter on that journey. Whereas you'll find artistic interventions by Daniela and creative design by *windpark books* in the hard copy, the electronic publication won't feature these but offer a very plain black and white reading experience, almost lacking design, focusing on the text. How you're reading the digital document—whether on a smartphone, an electronic reader, a tablet, a laptop, or a stationary monitor—either increases or reduces your mobility, and, thus, shrinks or enlarges the environment that interacts with you during your consumption of this product. If you're on your phone, perhaps take a good look at what you see off-screen during your commute. Once something strikes your interest, search for that (in form of a keyword), something related, or a triggered association in the file. In my case, I think of the stationary screen in my room as something asep tic, almost immaterial, that just displays the text as such. However, if I'm eyeing it closely, I can detect a tiny black stain covering parts of this document. Moreover, the haptic feel of the display, its colors, and its frame, likewise, interfere materially with the electronic publication. So, I might as well follow how the materiality of my stationary technological setup uniquely renders the digital volume. The previously mentioned stain on my monitor, for example, can inspire me to read a contribution that somehow addresses disturbance, materiality, or texture, and so forth. Whether you're reading an electronic or physical copy, and where and when you're reading the book, all these can serve as tools to undiscipline your reading of this edited volume from your original reason and purpose of coming here, facilitate your construction of different goals or none at all, and foster you to read or use the book differently than you intended initially.

Lastly, there's the collaborative process of *making* the book between the contributors, the editors, the pub- lisher, and the contributing artist. After the symposium, a friend who attended asked me—or I asked him, I can't recall—if we shouldn't turn the symposium into a book. Yes, I wanted to do that, but I didn't simply want to translate the oral presentations into writing. On the one hand, I didn't think that the presentation's appeal would survive in text. Although they were good presentations, they wouldn't function as well as chapters in an edited volume. On the other hand, I was interested in the making of this book as a process that doesn't attempt to identically mimic something spoken in text: I wanted our *making* of this book to resist the process of how we think we're supposed to create an edited volume based on a workshop, conference, panel, or symposium. I wanted to produce a book that relates to my symposium but resists the organization of its writing into the sole service of another 'higher' purpose, such as the mimetic representation of speech or the communication of content. Similarly, *windpark books*, Daniela, and I were not comfortable with a one-to-one translation of the print into a digital copy. Instead, I fancied a process of making this book in which writing, designing, and editing predominantly resist against the imperative of turning the book into a conference publication and the established way in which one produces such publications. I was hoping that our process of making the book would, as a side-effect, immanently construct its own method of making an edited volume and a purpose for the publication not solely reducible to the resistance against academic imperatives.

And I think mainly we did that in bringing people together. That, of course, is a corny cliché. Churches, the Rotary Club, the Young Republicans all do that, likewise, and probably more successfully than we're doing it here. Still, I think we did that a little differently. Even though academic texts and authors working in academia
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dominate the volume, we don't only feature contributions to different academic fields. Amongst other entries, you can find biographic reflections, a short story, and the academic contemplation of a movie from two authors unfamiliar with film studies in this volume. Our process of making the book succeeded, if perhaps some of the academic contributors got to know an artist and creative approaches, and theory contaminated *windpark books* and Daniela a little bit.

However, I don't think we'll be the first nor the last ones to bring creative and academic approaches together in one book. I think what's special about what we're doing is that it started with a digital symposium where people actually presented, discussed, and hung out together. Furthermore, I hosted a writing retreat in my parent's house, where two of the contributions were written and I edited them on the spot. During that weekend, other contributors to the volume joined, and an acquainted philosophy PhD student popped by for dinner one night. Similarly, I didn't know *windpark books*. I knew Felix Hofmann-Wissner beforehand, but I got to know Jana and Leo, and later Daniela Sonnabend during online meetings. In the meetings with *windpark books* and those with Daniela Sonnabend I realized how much the university and theory shape my thinking and language, and how difficult it was for me to relay my ideas clearly to people who're creatively producing things and articulate as well as approach releasing a book very differently than I do.

I just name-dropped the event in the paragraph on reading, saying that this is an edited volume on the event. And then it's in the title of the book, too. So, what about the event? I'd say you're in the wrong place if you're looking for reconceptualizations of the event, critiques of existing concepts of the event, or contributions that address the event as a topic of interest. Instead, Quintus calls these practices of reading, writing, and publishing that I discussed previously eventful practices. I concur that these practices of writing, reading, and publishing operate eventfully in the sense that this undisciplining of the edited volume unleashes an unpredictable process: In advance, we cannot and “We do not know what the book might possibly become or what relations it may enter into” (Nail, 2017, p. 24). So, there you have it: the ominous red thread. Not what the different contributors write about ties the volume together but that the authors write about what they want and that they don't comply in their writing to how they think they *should* write but that they allow themselves to find another way of writing in the process of writing their pieces. The electronic and printed form of this publication, the publisher of the hard copy, *windpark books*, the artist collaborating in the design of the printed volume, Daniela Sonnabend, they all serve the ‘undisciplining’ of our *making* of this book—how to write an introduction, what tone is appropriate for a chapter, who can contribute and on what—and the undisciplining of your reading of the finished product.

Before I go more into the topic of undisciplining, I will venture on a brief detour on disciplined writing. I for one admire disciplined work and disciplined working a lot, perhaps also because I struggle with it. For instance, I love economic writing reduced to the bare minimum, for example, the prose of parts of the modern and contemporary Anglo-American literary canon. Undisciplined work and undisciplined work processes are not per se better in terms of quality than disciplined writing. *Anti-Oedipus* and *A Thousand Plateaus*, two collaborative works of Deleuze and Guattari, function as undisciplined writing because they operate as literature, political manifesto, and theory at the same time. The authors allowed their collaboration to unfold into a singular style. While this, depending on your opinion, might work well in the two books, the reception of *Anti-Oedipus* and *A Thousand Plateaus* always risks to either reduce the undisciplining to their concepts (content) or their mode of writing (expression). Don't get me wrong, this piece doesn't present my improved model of Deleuze and Guattari reception. I'm just trying to walk that line keeping these pitfalls in mind.

Deleuze's own philosophical writing challenged philosophy in the conceptually rigorous language of philosophy, for example, with his concept of the image of thought in *Difference and Repetition*. However, Deleuze and Guattari's concepts don't work that way. In 'Rhizome', the introductory chapter of *A Thousand Plateaus*, Deleuze and Guattari just assault the reader with an infinite stream of neologisms: "In a book, as in all things, there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification" (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013, p. 4). This is the second page of 'Rhizome'
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and of *A Thousand Plateaus*, so, prior to this sentence, they could not introduce any of these concepts—segmentarity, stratification, territoriality, and (de/re-) territorialization—yet. Admittedly, they never really define them in a stable and easily comprehensible way throughout the book. An analysis that only tries to understand the meaning of such a concept, compile a stable definition from all the different uses in the books, or situate the concept in the intertext of references that Deleuze and Guattari drew on and the historical context they wrote in, on the one hand, will lead to frustrating results because the concepts do not hold a convincing stable meaning or definition. On the other hand, such a way of engaging with the concepts completely fails to address their aesthetic and affective dimension. For instance, as Deleuze pointed out, the body without organs is as much a concept as a practice of living: “I know people who’ve read nothing who immediately saw what bodies without organs were, given their own ‘habits,’ their own way of being one.” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 8) While you cannot feel Kant’s concepts, Deleuze and Guattari’s mode of literary conceptualization facilitates a resonance that functions affectively and, hence, oftentimes fails on the plane of pure reason.<fnref n="4" />

Similarly, one can reduce the concepts of Deleuze and Guattari to narratives and metaphors or imitate their way of writing. As for the former, any of the plateaus read as a story just offer an annoying piece of literature because, even though Deleuze and Guattari were very fond of literature, they clearly could not write prose. They occasionally succeed in writing catchy political polemics (the intro of *Anti-Oedipus* comes to mind). At most times, however, they read like a desperate imitation of Burroughs, a beat poet famous for his literary experiments (whom Deleuze often cites). So, just read Burroughs if you want that. More problematically, though, reading Deleuze and Guattari as stories supposed to operate on the somehow magically detached and autonomous plane of creativity reduces their writing to art for art's sake. However, they always wrote to intervene politically by means of concept creation. Literariness, hence, serves concept creation for Deleuze and Guattari. Such concepts should facilitate a critical analysis of capitalism in the present and, based on that, a rethinking of what left politics can do in this context. Concepts, thus, serve politics in the collaborative writing of Deleuze and Guattari. As soon as the rhizome turns into a metaphor that only operates on an aesthetic level and the body without organs into a weird little short story, both plateaus lose their conceptual heft.

Concerning their mode of writing, Deleuze and Guattari often used short bits of literature for conceptual purposes. For instance, in 'Postulates on Language' in *A Thousand Plateaus*, they reconstruct Kafka as an ontological engineer of assemblages. Moreover, their writing submits scientific concepts from geology, biology, and mathematics to their politico-philosophical purposes. On its own, this bricolage of science, philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis, and politics does not do any of its constituent parts justice. It's not science but pseudo-science at best. Mostly, the writing suffers from unnecessary fuzziness and bad pacing—they draw out the easy parts, but they write faster the more difficult the content becomes. Writing like Deleuze and Guattari is not undisciplined. It's just bad (and pretentious).

So, I want the writing, the editing, and the design of the volume not only to engage in undisciplinary processes of producing but to deliver undisciplined products that are well written, intelligible, fun, and interesting. Pieces that don't namedrop for the sake of namedropping, don't introduce concepts without defining them, or lack an argument or structure. Ergo, pieces should engage in undisciplining but don't unnecessarily sacrifice disciplined writing just because they think that undisciplining *should* not look disciplined. If undisciplinary epistemic trajectories require a certain amount of disciplining in terms of clarity and structure because it renders their writing accessible, then, that's fine. Undisciplined writing doesn't need to be incomprehensible, unorganized, sloppy, and fast. Again, mind you, dear reader, that while undisciplining can be fun, in the sense of entertaining, that is, it doesn't have to be.

Primarily, I wanted short pieces that inspire. So, the contributions are not fully fledged, and I encouraged the authors to deliver them that way. Ideally, after you have finished a piece which you enjoyed, you will think that the author should expand on this elsewhere. A contribution works if the author's writing affected her

<footnote n="4">4 At least that's what I—without ever really having engaged with any concepts of Kant—claim in this crude example to make a point.</footnote>
joyfully and if you received joy reading it. Or, in other works, the writing worked if the author's capacity and inspiration to write differently increased and if your capacity to read differently rose. A piece that looks undisciplined but doesn't undiscipline you, however, doesn't work—so, drop it! Your time is precious and not every bit here works for you or has been written for your constitution.

## II) An Island

Why does it matter anyway—undisciplining? The more time I spend in academia—and maybe that applies to other professional environments as well—the more I become aware of its disciplinary processes and the voluntary and involuntary self-disciplining of early career scholars, even theoretically leaning or creatively working ones. Indeed, one can't talk about disciplining in academia without addressing privilege and positionality. I, for example, can write however I want. If my dissertation won't cut it, I'll be sad. Although I don't have enough money to just relax for the rest of my life, at least I have enough financial resources and cultural and social capital—not to mention my heteronormative masculinity and whiteness—to probably make it elsewhere without too many difficulties. Hence, technically, I can resist academia's discipline and don't need to self-discipline my writing, my research, and my teaching. If you're in a more marginalized positionality, though, you can't afford that, or, at least, it costs a lot more.<fnref n="5" />

Yet, interestingly in my social circle the prospect of precarity and academic failure disciplines both friends from privileged and unprivileged backgrounds into researching less what they want, refraining from using theory not established in their subjects, and abstaining from writing in a manner that their field of study might not tolerate. Obviously, if society doesn't grant you a second chance, you must do what's necessary to get a job. That's a problem that undoubtedly necessitates structural changes in academia. However, surprisingly, even those who could dare something due to their safety net, don't resist academia's disciplining. Instead, even privileged early career scholars or established researchers engage in the reproduction of academia's disciplinary mechanism, fearing to disappoint themselves and their social environment if they—for once—don't make it.

I have previously addressed how the book, ideally, should serve as an island where those involved in the *making* of the edited volume find shelter from disciplinary imperatives and a space in which they can explore their own trajectories of undisciplining. I don't think that a shared topic—let's be honest, the event isn't one—a method, or even an interest keeps us together. Indeed, some of us were loosely acquainted, some already friends, and others were strangers before this project kicked off. However, everybody joined because they wanted to write differently—not in the way they learned and *ought to*—about something they usually couldn't write about—what's relevant to them and not to their professional environment—and were excited by the idea of doing so: They did it for the kicks and not for the finished product and possible professional rewards associated with such a publication. The desire to produce undisciplined, for the thrill of it, and to do so together instead of in the usual professional isolation, to find togetherness, and a new way of being together connects these people, this book, its contributions, the artist, and the publisher.

And still, if the book constitutes the island as a place enabling undisciplining, then, the publication will exile us once again to the mainland, that is, in our disciplined professional environments of the *should*. Collaborating in the *making* of the book allowed the different contributors to travel to this island and to temporarily inhabit this space together facilitating undisciplining. And yet as soon as *windpark books* releases the publication, the book as a stable product renders the open process of undisciplined book *making* redundant. Apparently, the book did not sustain the island, but its *making* did: temporarily collaborating productively in an undisciplined fashion. Certainly, collaborating in this way might have temporarily raised the contributors' capacity

<footnote n="5">5 Nobody put this more succinctly than Darius, a character from *Atlanta*, a television series by Donald Glover, in a conversation with Earn, the show's protagonist, in the second season's 11th episode, *Crabs in a Barrel*, starting at 19:36: “Earn: ‘I’m getting better at this. You know that.’ . . . Darius: ‘I see you, man, I see you learning. But learning requires failure. Al just trying to make sure you ain’t failing in his life. You know, like, y’all both Black, so I mean y’all both can’t afford to fail.’” (Murai, 2018)</footnote>
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for undisciplining even in their regular professional context. Yet discipline does not fancy such undirected and unpredictable forces of productivity, and so—in the case of academia—it quickly excises this productive desire from our bodies with long hours of unpaid and tedious work of, for instance, grading, timetabling, and administration, precarious prospects of monetary gains and job stability (the construction of interests underpinning ‘rational behavior’), and standards (artificial intelligence is a relevant subject; no one talks about psychoanalysis anymore; you shouldn’t write blogposts.) Even worse, discipline can seduce us into thinking that we’re engaging in undisciplining but actually doing its labor. Think of the joyful spirit of experimentation, the facilitation of rhizomatic organizations, and the dismissal of normativity all present par excellence in contemporary Silicon Valley capitalism. Only a continuation of undisciplined collaborative work or at least of a space that enables such trajectories to unfold, can maintain the island.

Framing the *making* of the book as the construction of an island poses another question. How can one leave the island? Or rather, how can the island not only serve as a refuge of amusement whose trajectories of undisciplining only function in a spatiality of isolation, remoteness, and periphery? How can the island connect its undisciplinarity to the disciplined mainland—the reality of the professional environments of the contributors—and perform political labor of resistance where it actually matters? Deleuze and Guattari provided an interesting answer to this in their conceptual distinction of pleasure from desire. They conceptualize desire as “a process of production without reference to any exterior agency, whether it be a lack that hollows it out or a pleasure that fills it” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2005, p. 154). Instead of a Lacanian lack that generates productive desire or a pleasure that desire must inevitably seek, this concept of desire operates as a self-arranging, autopoietic, undirected, and unpredictable process of production: an ontological force of productivity. To this Deleuze and Guattari contrast pleasure: “Desire will be assuaged by pleasure; and not only will the pleasure obtained silence desire for a moment but the process of obtaining it is already a way of interrupting it, of instantly discharging it and unburdening oneself of it.” (ibid.) According to Deleuze and Guattari’s idiosyncratic reading of the pleasure principle, subjects experience desire as a constantly unnerving demand on them, a demand, however, that does not offer any other clues than its insistence on the subject. To obtain peace from this cryptic force running through them and their environment, subjects translate their desire into their social environment’s language of interests: interests in security, financial gain, power, sex, and so forth. None of these are reprehensible, but, in this immanent ontology, they don’t precede desire as natural interests but succeed it: They result from certain social arrangements of desire.

Anyway, earlier I committed my writing of this introduction to an increase of what you and I can do (joy) as opposed to happiness (pleasure). The island fails if it enables contributors to pursue their little hobbies—their irrelevant art for art’s sake—to catch their breath only to function a little longer in the intolerable reality of the mainland, in other words, if contributors only do what the logic of the mainland dictates people *should* do with their free time to receive pleasure (rest, consume, reproduce, or gain some kind of resources: education, money, social capital, etc.).

Previously, I mentioned togetherness. The mainland only allows working together if its synergies maximize profit in comparison to non-collaborative performances of the same project. These incidental collaborations only sustain the overall logic of alienation effectuated by contemporary capitalism. On the mainland, solitary undisciplined epistemic or creative production, on the other hand, competes against each other for rewards in the form of job stability and financial security. The art market, for instance, translates the undisciplinarity of certain art into financial value and, thus, paralyzes such creative products by means of commodification. The contributors of this volume, instead, didn’t get together for the sake of living together, like organizations dedicated to living (together), such as a family or a flat share. Togetherness in our case didn’t mean that each contributor must collaborate with another contributor in their work. Even if contributors didn’t work together in such an obvious manner, they were doing their own stuff—what they want to do but what the mainland prohibits them to do—but they were not alone in doing so. Instead, contributors were part of a community of contributors working on completely different things but in a similarly undisciplined ‘method’ of working. At least during the *making* of this book, the contributors inhabited the same place, the project of *making* this
<figure><img src="image_13.png" /></figure>

book, at the same time (the publication timeline). The contributors temporarily shared the space of this project, so that they could unfold their own trajectories of undisciplining. The different contributions could resonate with each other in the common spatiotemporality. However, a focus on these ‘intertextual’ resonances ignores the collectivity’s resonance, that is, the book *making’s* spatiotemporality that facilitated undisciplining. In other words, only the collective organization of a time and space can enable undisciplining that the mainland doesn’t immediately reintegrate or destroy. The island succeeds only if it perpetrates a logic of undisciplined producing co-constituted by collective transdisciplinary organizing.

### III) Perspectives

Earlier I gravely stated that the island's life rests on sustained undisciplined producing and a communal space that can host such processes. Put in a less serious tone, I don't see editing this volume as a one-off thing. Or, at least, I hope it won't be. So, I'm thinking about how we can maintain the connection between those who attended the symposium and remained in conversation but didn't contribute to this volume and those who worked together on the book, and what we could do with the network composed by these relations. Even though the whole writing retreat that I mentioned previously was a disaster—since we had zero downtime, I was sick throughout the whole thing, and one of the contributors was close to a breakdown at one point—I think the format as such—perhaps not in my parent's home, not with such time pressure, and with me understanding what I can and can't do, what I should and shouldn't do as an editor—has a lot of potential. *Windpark books* will probably organize some kind of launching event for the publication. Such 'eventfulness' could offer a promising path to maintain connections. To rent a house together in the countryside and get together with people from different academic fields, activists, and artists to produce something but without a clear product in mind, I think, could work out brilliantly over the span of one or two weeks.

For this publication the predefined outcome of an edited volume, somehow based on or related to my birthday symposium, from the get-go overcoded the open process of getting together temporarily for the purpose of doing something collaboratively. Removing this clear goal cuts out the teleological direction from doing something together and reintroduces openness, so that the objective can transform into a process that constructs or finds its own "end, the goal, the object (the idea) that fascinates, attracts, directs, and activates a tropism, the Cause (with a capital 'C'), in three words: the for-what-purpose, the *Telos* [emphasis in original]." (Barthes, 2013, p. 43) Don't get me wrong, I don't want to exalt undifferentiated openness in itself. Rather, there is not only the purpose of doing something together but also a clear "motive, the determination (objective), causality, cause (with a small 'c'), in a word: the why" (ibid.). Namely, people get together because they want to temporarily live together with precisely *these* people and for the purpose of collaborative production.<fnref n="6" /> And such a situation would pose the problem—nothing problematic but rather a productive problem inhering in the situation and insisting on different solutions—of how to live together (temporarily) in order to create in a collaborative and open process.

I neither fancy the exclusiveness of a club nor the institutionalization of a public and professional network. The former brings the downsides of elitism and exclusion, whereas the latter removes the ethics of becoming-friends—not in the sense of everyday friendship but the communitarian forms and practices that shared epistemic and artistic production create—and replaces fun with obligations and earnestness. To a certain extent, this network must remain exclusive, if it doesn't want to institutionalize and risk anonymity and professionalism between members. Yet, I'm thinking more of the exclusivity of outsiders, a clique of nerds in high school, who can kind of 'sense' who might want to join their network. Let me pull an example from the first episode of the fourth season of the Duffer brother's Netflix-show, *Stranger Things*, to illustrate how this differs from the exclusion on grounds of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and so forth found in institutions, such as British 'Gentlemen's clubs' or North American and German 'party' or political fraternities.

<footnote n="6">6 Since people don't get together to have a good time but to *work* in an undisciplined fashion, and only share a space temporarily, I don't worry too much about contributors not getting along.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_14.png" /></figure>

In Hawkins, Indiana, the local *Dungeons and Dragons* (a fantasy tabletop role-playing game) club, named *Hellfire*, is in a pinch because Lucas, one of its members, can't join the campaign's finale because he's got a basketball game. The club and Eddie, its leader, don't sanction postponement since Eddie and other members might graduate soon. So, Dustin and Mike need to find a substitute (a sub) for Lucas. At 57:03, we see Dustin and Mike struggling because all the potential substitutes declined their offer. As a last resort, they recruit Erica, a Black middle-school nerd, who has already featured in *Stranger Things* previously as Lucas' sister. Eddie reacts as to be expected—interestingly not on grounds of race (there are other Black members in *Hellfire*) or gender but because of her age:

Eddie: 'Absolutely not.'

Dustin: 'You asked for a sub. We delivered.'

Eddie: This is Hellfire Club. Not Babysitting Club.

Erica: 'I'm 11, you long-haired freak.'

Eddie: 'My, my, the child speaks.'

[Others chuckle]

'So, what's your name, child?'

Erica: 'Erica Sinclair.'

Eddie: [chuckles] 'So this is Sinclair's infamous sister.'<fnref n="7" />

Erica [turns around to Mike and Dustin]: 'He's sharp.'
[all laughing]

[Eddie glances menacing at his crew in the back. They stop laughing.]

Eddie: 'What's your class and level? Level one dwarf?'

[Others laugh]

Erica: 'My name is Lady Applejack. And I'm a chaotic good half-elf rogue, level 14. And I will sneak behind any monster you throw my way and stab them in the back with my poison-soaked kukri. And I'll smile as I watch them die a slow, agonizing death. So, we gonna do this, or we gonna keep chitchatting like this is your mommy's book club?'

Eddie: 'Welcome to Hellfire.'

[They shake hands.] (The Duffer Brothers, 2022)

The scene ends at 58:26. For Hellfire Club in the end neither Erica's age, gender, nor race matter. Her passion for and knowledge of *Dungeons and Dragons* serve as her entry card to the finale of the campaign. Hellfire Club, on the one hand, operates as a closed society because its members usually are so committed that they don't need to recruit strangers to keep the game running. However, if need be and the person's right, Hellfire

<footnote n="7">7 Sinclair is Lucas' and Erica's surname.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_15.png" /></figure>

will open its doors to someone external, if the other members can vouch for the recruit and the recruit for herself.

I don't think I fancy the idea of permanent closure and only temporary openness all that much. Why shouldn't people approach us, even though we might be currently not looking for new authors, editors, designers, artists, and so forth? Then again, for this edited volume, at one point, the recruitment of participants had indeed ceased because Quintus and I knew how many contributions we wanted, the authors had confirmed them, and *windpark books* and I had decided on an artist for collaboration in the design of the book. So, I think that pretty much sums up a possible M.O. for this network: no advertisement and institutionalization, no permanent closure, and recruitment based on an 'applicant's' desire to say something interesting in a compelling but undisciplined fashion and to collaborate with others for that purpose.

Earlier I claimed that the island depends on ongoing undisciplined processes of productivity or at least a place where these can happen at any time. During my birthday symposium and the *making* of this book a network of people formed. The preceding paragraphs offered a perspective for a post-book future of this network. The survival of the network depends on three things: undisciplined creative and epistemic production, connecting people within the network and linking people inside the network to persons outside the network, and organizing events that can lead to undisciplined production.

Of course, most likely, we'll just publish the book and that's it. But you, dear reader, may now suddenly feel an inclination towards undisciplined production and/or organizing collectives dedicated to such transdisciplinary work. In that case, see you on this or another island. Or, you're not feeling particularly joyful after reading this introduction, and who could blame you for that? If you feel like it, try another chapter or drop the book. No worries and good riddance.
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Bibliography

Barthes, R. (2013). *How to live together: Novelistic simulations of some everyday spaces*. Columbia University Press.

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

Deleuze, G. (1978, January 24). *GILLES DELEUZE, LECTURE TRANSCRIPTS ON SPINOZA'S CONCEPT OF AFFECT: COURS VINCENNES - 24/01/1978* [Lecture]. https://www.gold.ac.uk/media/images-by-section/departments/research-centres-and-units/research-centres/centre-for-invention-and-social-process/deleuze_spinoza_affect.pdf

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

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2005). *A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia* (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2013). *A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia* (1. paperback ed). Bloomsbury.

Massumi, B. (1995). The Autonomy of Affect. *Cultural Critique*, 31, 83–109. https://doi.org/10.2307/1354446

Massumi, B. (2013). *Translator’s Foreword: The Pleasures of Philosophy. In Deleuze and Guattari’s *A Thousand Plateaus* (1st ed., pp. ix–xvi). Continuum.*

Murai, H. (Director). (2018, May 10). *Crabs in a Barrel* (Vol. 2). RBA,343 Incorporated, MGMT. Entertainment, FXP.

Nail, T. (2017). What is an Assemblage? *SubStance*, 46(1), 21–37.

Smith, D. (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/s11007-016-9406-0

The Duffer Brothers (Director). (2022, May 27). *Season 4—Chapter 1* (Vol. 4) [Netflix]. Netflix.
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# First Chapter:
Specters of the Haitian Revolution

Taylor Borowetz

Toussaint Louverture and Cécile Fatiman are dead. Toussaint Louverture was a revolutionary leader and governor general, and Cécile Fatiman was a Vodou priestess who sparked massive uprisings. We cannot ask either of them about their experiences. We are prevented from doing so by an intractable barrier: the space between life and death. We are sealed in our world, and they are sealed in theirs. This confines us to the traces that they, and all others who rose up in the Haitian Revolution, left behind. Stories, letters, scraps of paper: we attempt to piece them together, trying to conjure a ghost.

This contribution proposes a plane on which to convene with specters, presented as a methodology that can inform historical research and theory-building. Working with Derrida's framework of spectrality, it briefly outlines four main offerings. First, it contends that spectralization can be applied to historical events and processes to decompose them into partial, inexhaustible threads, increasing narrative complexity. Second, it argues that an analogous process of decomposition can provide an alternative to conglomerating incoherent ethical systems. Third, spectralizing allows the researcher to reach toward individuals rendered inaccessible, excluded from traditional archives and historical legibility. Finally, specters gaze at us from beyond the limits of our epistemic practices, a haunting reminder that we can know and live otherwise. To Derrida, being responsible to spirits is the ultimate ethical imperative.

## On the spectralization of historical narrative

Between 1791 and 1804, enslaved people on the French colony of Saint-Domingue orchestrated a revolution. They rebelled against the plantation owners and slave drivers, their colonial “masters”, and the overarching edifice of racial slavery as a whole. Culminating in the first ever post-colonial, post-slaveholding free Black republic, we now refer to this period of uprisings as the Haitian Revolution. This description functions as a useful heuristic, folding together a wide range of motivations, individuals, ways of knowing, and ways of being. Enslaved people and their comrades embodied metaphysical systems within and beyond a wide range of African, Indigenous, Vodou, and Christian cosmologies. Their actions were salient in a multiplicity of worlds.

Flattening this ethical, epistemological, and ontological richness by describing it as motivated entirely by escaping slavery does a historiographical injustice. The events comprising the Haitian Revolution signified much more than just a revolt against French authority and the plantation system: Robbie Shilliam writes that our simplifications represent “a fundamental failure of our politics and imagination. In doing so we are silencing the response” (2017 p. 23). The revolutionary response was wider and deeper than categories of race or exploitation can capture (Shilliam 2017).

Homogenising these events under the umbrella of a single term has clear political salience: the “Age of Revolutions” was, historiographically speaking, Western and European. Intellectual histories of liberty, democracy, and individual rights present the French and American revolutions as events of universal significance. For the most part, the Enlightenment and its corollary philosophical canon could be situated geographically, and allegedly provided all one needed to know about human nature and the corresponding possibilities for social organization.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, a Haitian anthropologist, sparked a wave of change. In *Silencing the Past*, he outlines the necessity for alternative histories to rectify a tradition of Eurocentric omissions. Trouillot’s historiographical project was animated by a much larger conviction: that the Haitian Revolution has the potential to reverberate throughout global political thought. Denying its centrality therein couldn’t be attributed to the paucity of archival sources from the Haitian Revolution, but rather a concerted effort to restrict the constitution of our historical narratives to certain European voices and subject positions.

Referring to the events between 1791 and 1804 as the Haitian Revolution allows us to participate in Trouillot’s historical-political project by proposing a node, akin to the French and American revolutions, that our
<figure><img src="image_18.png" /></figure>

analyses can coalesce around. Singularizing the Haitian Revolution makes it possible to draw inspiration for the possibility of political action in the present. It proves to us that incredible, expansive, and world-historical changes are possible, and that those suffering the horrific excesses of imperialist violence can be the architects of such a foundational shift.

All strategies of historical narration require simplifications of one type or another. All allow different theo-
retical frameworks and concepts to proliferate. All lead us to emphasise one set of cases or actions over another.
Omissions are necessary in order to render a narration coherent. We must, however, remain explicit about the
limitations of each strategy: the events we designate “irrelevant” and the stories we allow to fade into ghosts.
International hostility fueling the stigmatization of Vodou, for example, caused depictions of the Revolution
and its causality that were inextricably intertwined with the religion and its rituals to be subsumed beneath
more hegemonically palatable stories.

Spectralization provides a framework to approach narrations of the Haitian Revolution as a whole. Grand narratives can cement a teleology that is difficult to shake, and these representations can flatten important details for the sake of a larger coherence. The Haitian Revolution cannot be captured in a single narrative arc. Recognizing the political importance of telling the story of the Revolution in a way that makes it legible from the outside, this contribution proposes a different approach: leaning into the discomfort of fragmentation and contradiction rather than a coherent totality. The goal of such a historiographical approach is the decomposition of events that have been “fixed” in their significance, thereby holding them open for continuous and generative reinterpretation. Derrida suggests one such method: convening with ghosts.

On the decomposition of ethical systems

Having dealt with the epistemological costs of fixing a teleological legibility inherent in retelling the Hai-
tian Revolution as one coherent event from which we can gather a central political lesson or a single ethical
imperative, narrating individual stories and biographies can constitute a move toward complexity. Treating a
single person as representative of a whole, however, is distinct from reflexively focusing on one part as a frag-
ment among others and fails to offer many epistemological improvements due to the persistence of an implicit
retroactive simplification. Focusing on one narrative that would necessarily exclude others often takes the form
of intensifying the logic of representation and retelling events in the most “complete” way possible to anchor
a claim to scientific legitimacy, or by claiming that one causal political logic predominates, un-alienating the
behaviour of people in the past on the basis of class or racial distinctions, for example. This section engages
with the spectralization of an individual as an alternative to singularizing a system of ethics and treating the
individual in question as an embodiment of it.

Despite the fact that Toussaint Louverture is relatively accessible to us, any coherent narration is neces-
sarily incomplete. An academic might attempt to give an overview of his contributions to French or Enlight-
enment thought, but this would struggle to capture a conceptualization of freedom that may have been gained
from Vodou practice, or contributions to medical knowledge from an upbringing in African Allada culture. The
perspective from which one engages in scholarship necessitates certain simplifications, and thus certain omis-
sions, in order to produce a coherent narrative. As scholars, we are necessarily limited by our own perspectives.
In addition to the frameworks to which we attach and order new information, we bring methodologies of
viewing and approaching reality. Though we can read the traces Louverture left behind, our attachment, being
in our own worlds, necessarily prevents us from fully accessing his. Unknowability beckons to us from beyond
the limits of our epistemic practices, the intersection of our methods and positionality. The void of death and
the absences in the archive we cannot fill proliferate a host of spectral presences.

Toussaint Louverture was an architect of the Haitian Revolution, of sovereignty, and of independence.
Per Hazareesingh's 2020 biography *Black Spartacus*: Toussaint chose the surname "Louverture" in August of
1793, countering governor Léger-Félicité Sonthonax's declaration of emancipation by identifying himself as
"the opening". Prior, he carried the name "Bréda" from the slaveowners of the plantation he was born on.
Life expectancy on the Bréda estate was 37 years, with one of the highest mortality rates of Afro-Caribbean
plantation workers in the region. However, Louverture's father's reputation may have conferred the necessary
<figure><img src="image_19.png" /></figure>

social standing to allow him to marry a higher status free woman and may have given him supervisory power over the Bréda estate as Bayon de Libertat's coachman. In a 1797 letter to the Directory, Louverture wrote that he had been emancipated 20 years earlier (whether this was formal/legal emancipation or de facto liberté de savanne was unspecified). After he was freed, before the outset of the revolution, Louverture owned at least one slave and rented a coffee plantation that was cultivated by 13 enslaved people. Hazareesingh's biographical details regarding Louverture's early life emphasize the ways his education and upbringing may have shaped his political and ideological commitments (2020). Louverture was brilliant, consistently followed by glowing appraisals as a healer, strategist, manager, Christian, and republican. He was raised in Allada culture, and studied Machiavelli, Montesquieu, and Raynal.

After climbing through military ranks and gaining recognition, Louverture was appointed Governor-General of Saint Domingue by the French. He held this position between 1797 and 1801, when, without French approval, he moved to draft a new constitution without approval from France (Popkin 2011). The Constitution of 1801 outlawed slavery on the island forever. It didn't necessarily break Saint-Domingue from French control, but this move, as well as naming Louverture Governor and Chief General for life, was a stark claim for an unprecedented degree of political autonomy.

We can come to know Louverture through our scholarship. Hazareesingh engages archival material with meticulous rigour and depth, but even one who isn't a trained historian can now access a range of artefacts: Louverture often dictated letters and proclamations, written documents that were commonly circulated in French. But we can do more than just read the Constitution of 1801, for example, we can understand it. Foun-dationally, Louverture is legible to us because we can attach his actions to our own schemas to give them meaning. Outlawing slavery in a constitution is, historically speaking, a very specific articulation of liberation, salient only within certain contexts. In a contemporary world where politics plays out on the lines of states, laws, and proscriptions governing the behaviour of individuals, we understand the stakes of legal-juridical rights as codified in a constitution. Louverture's actions suddenly take place on surprisingly familiar territory.

However, Louverture's voices aren't always harmonious: owning at least one slave while sacrificing his life to end the institution, allying with the planter class, and at times even executing revolutionary leaders who were committed to the causes of the Black formerly enslaved population. He was a human being, not the embodiment of an ethical system that we project backwards. Avoiding "contradictory" behaviours implies that recognizing his incredible successes and sacrifices requires complete adherence to an external standard of behaviour, deviation from which would otherwise refute the overarching ethical and political representation inscribed retroactively. However, we cannot reconstruct the ethical systems within which he made his choices or recreate the stakes that he took into account. The only thing we can be certain of is that these ethical systems are multiple and fragmented. We have letters, speeches, legal documents, and biographies, but never enough to render Louverture truly knowable to us, to put ourselves in his world. We don't understand how his actions, like owning slaves or quashing rebellions, made sense to him. Despite the grandest stack of archival papers or the most beautiful oral histories we cannot be with him, exhaust him, or do him justice. He is present but simultaneously unknowable, partial, and fragmented, sealed in this liminal state by death.

Between life and death, we re-enter the realm of the specter. The discord between Louverture's multiplic-tous voices prevent us from getting to him, from getting to know him. A specter, to Derrida, is a fragmentation of being. Not a whole individual—we may imagine a spirit—a specter is a partial, particular reflection, and there is never just one. We create and multiply specters when we engage with them, just as our image of Tous-saint Louverture begins to proliferate into a multiplicity of voices, narrations, and experiences when we listen closely. Similarly to the proliferation of events following a spectral fragmentation of the Haitian Revolution, an individual's decomposition into specters pulls at the seams of our desire to order the world into coherent, systematic wholes. The discord between these specters prevents us from subsuming them into a single ethical framework.

## On illegibility and archival exclusion

Cécile Fatiman shaped the trajectory of the events we designate as the Haitian Revolution. An enslaved woman in Saint-Domingue, Fatiman was a high priestess of Vodou. Her presence, however, is always already
<figure><img src="image_20.png" /></figure>

spectral. Fatiman is virtually absent from historical accounts of the Haitian Revolution, appearing in archi-
val material for one night: August 21st, 1791. We meet her in Bwa Kayiman, woods surrounding an alligator
swamp (Shilliam 2017).

Robbie Shilliam synthesises an account of the events that took place between Sunday August 14th, 1791, and the following Sunday, August 21st<fnref n="1" />. Enslaved workers had started to meet regularly to plan the insurrection, originally setting the date for the 24th of August. However, after fires are set to two plantations just days later, the revolutionaries are caught and interrogated. Dutty Boukman, a *houngan* or high priest of Vodou, realizing time was of the essence, convened a meeting on the 21st. He begins the meeting with a prayer.

Fatiman then joins us through Shilliam's text, an account he had to piece together from five different pub-
lications in order for us to come to know her. Following Boukman's prayer,

Cécile Fatiman, a *mambo* (female priestess), is ridden by the *lwa* Ezili Kawuolo who presides over a blood oath binding all present to liberty or death. In the following week fifteen thousand enslaved peoples join the insurrection and destroy one hundred and eighty-four sugar plantations on the northern plains. It starts from here, in earnest, what comes to be known as the Haitian Revolution.

*Lwa* are spiritual agents in Haitian Vodou, one of whom possesses Fatiman during the ceremony. Shilliam argues it is completely irrelevant whether one ascribes a certain ontological status to the specter- either way, the causal relationship is clear: "If the *lwa* were not gathered at Bwa Kayiman with the chiefs, then there would have been no revolution. I am making an eminently pragmatic point" (2017 p. 23).

One way of coming to know a spirit is to be possessed by it. Derrida's spectral framework describes an analytic of possession as a liminal state. He blurs the distinction between being possessed by something and being possessed of it, both ownership and captivation. He conceptualizes the specter using a Western metaphor of the ghost and the corresponding metaphysical assumptions. In Derrida's discussion possession is largely metaphorical, difficult to grasp and impossible to quantify. But on August 21st, 1791, Cécile Fatiman's possession was real. It constituted the collectivity that gathered in Bwa Kayiman that night. It was central to maintaining relationships with the spiritual agents and practices of Vodou more generally. It had consequences for the entire trajectory of the Haitian Revolution.

Fatiman and Kawuolo's presence in the history of the Haitian Revolution challenges the scholar through their relative absences in the archive, pushing the Derridean analytical framework to its limits and haunting us from the edges of our ways of knowing. In addition to the reality and causal effects of Ezili Kawuolo's presence, the metaphorical quality of possession as a metaphor fails to engage with the actual world. Per Shilliam's account: in Vodou cosmology, there is no super-natural category. The world of humans is the world of the *lwa*, and they join us at a crossroads between dimensions. This is one of the central premises of Vodou, that these respective domains, and those within them, can interact. The ceremony that Fatiman undertook allowed her to make way for such an interaction, to allow Ezili Kawuolo to un-seat and temporarily replace her own consciousness, taking a corporeal existence. Thus, the *lwa* can intervene materially in human affairs. During the ritual of possession the *lwa* offer a specific type of knowledge and oversight [konesans] to witnesses who can then cultivate it and be moved to action. *Lwa* are organized along universal categories of human experience and can channel the forces they represent. Ezili Kawuolo is known to be a "fierce protector of her people, and righteous avenger of those who refuse her people their humanity" (Shilliam 2017 p. 19).

We cannot, however, move closer to her through the same archival methods with which we approach Louverture. One possible reason for Fatiman's absent presence could be the logic of the archive of the Haitian Revolution with regard to Vodou. From 1835 to 1987, successive Haitian governments banned many widely accepted religious customs by legislating against "spells" or "superstitious practices" (Ramsay 2014). In addition to the general ostracization of Haiti by the west following the Revolution, Vodou was specifically targeted by the Catholic Church and occupying US forces (Ibid.). The long durée of Vodou's stigmatization that Ramsay

<footnote n="1">1 In a footnote, Shilliam writes that his account is synthesised from the work of Bob Corbett, Daniel Simidor, and Rachel Beauvoir-Dominique, "The Bois Caiman Ceremony: Fact or Myth," 2002, http://faculty.webster.edu/corbetre/haiti/history/revolution/caiman.htm; Rachel Beauvoir-Dominique and Eddy Lùbin, "Investigations Autour Du Site Historique Du Bois Caiman: Rapport" (Cap-Haitien: ISPAN, 2000); Kate Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti (London: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 43–45; David Patrick Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 8192; and Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution From Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), 91–92.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_21.png" /></figure>

chronicles may have led to Fatiman's initial displacement from the revolutionary archive in periods of intensifying religious marginalization. Her systematic exclusion and the paucity of documentation, in addition to her fundamental role, puts Fatiman in a liminal position.

Unlike Louverture, we cannot access her thought in more detail through speeches or letters; we cannot come to know her through a biography. Her absence is even more glaring given her presence: in addition to her role sparking the Revolution she was married to Louis Michel Pierrot, a general in the Haitian revolutionary army who later became the president, and she reportedly lived to be 112 (Dayan 1998). Despite her centrality Fatiman is rendered spectral, partial, and fragmented: haunting our histories of the Haitian Revolution, conjured for a single night. She exists at the limit of our knowledge about the Haitian Revolution and ways of knowing it, pulling us toward the fragmentation and incompleteness of an overarching story. We can start to perceive her absences. Spectrality allows the scholar to feel what we can never know, at least to sense that something inexhaustible about her remains beyond our grasp:

> It [the specter] is something that one does not know, and one does not know if precisely it is, if it exists, if it responds to a name and corresponds to an essence. One does not know: not out of ignorance, but because this non-object, this non-present present, this being-there of an absent or departed one no longer belongs to knowledge. At least no longer to that which one thinks one knows by the name of knowledge. (Derrida 2011 p. 5).

We want to know her to be responsible to her, but our desire is also generated by its impossibility. We desire to possess; we desire to possess what we cannot possess. We desire to be possessed; we desire to be possessed because we cannot be possessed (Derrida 2011). We desire to know the unknowable. Fatiman, herself, is not unknowable, but having lost her to death we can only engage her through fragmented specters. Fatiman's specters present a fundamental illegibility that will remain regardless, but they generate the desire to know differently, to know more, to undertake attempt after attempt. We are called to sense them, to feel, and to be moved.

## On responsibility to specters

If we still want to know differently, to learn to live differently, how do we proceed? Engaging with the specter shows us the limits of our epistemic systems. We are forced to accept increasing fragmentation, to decompose with them. Even more uncomfortable than the multiplicity of specters is their heterogeneity (Derrida 2011). Specters of the Haitian Revolution proliferate out of every story, dissonant calls fly out of every document. The political goals and ethical inheritances of these specters are not uniform, and at times, directly contradictory. Louverture's alliances with the white plantation owners may have been motivated by a strategic realpolitik to retain both revolutionary goals and overall palatability (Girard 2012), but this position was likely morally repulsive to the formerly enslaved who were largely of African origin or descent, constantly victimized by racial terror.

In this particular case, engaging with the specters of the Haitian Revolution forges a position for situated, ethical, and necessarily fallible research: "[...] a context, always, remains open" (Derrida 2011 p. xvi). As the specters proliferate, so do the ways we can learn to live. We attempt to know otherwise, again and again. Specters pull at the seams of overarching ethical and epistemological systems, amplifying dissonance until the entire structure becomes untenable. The non-contemporaneity of our responsibility to those who are not with us unhinges the living present (Derrida 2011 p. xviii). Specters, and their proliferation, are generative of problems but not necessarily solutions. The nature of decomposition is messy. Ways of learning, knowing, and living, are multiplicitous and contradictory. The openness and complexity of inheritance, however, does not mean our choices are infinite (Derrida 2011). Spectrality is not an endless dissipation. The Haitian Revolution is both inexhaustible and constituted by real people and real events, marked by the material stakes of political struggle.

But these people, and these events, are unknowable to us. Even if I had succeeded to recount Cécile Fatiman's story, it would have been doing her an injustice. We don't share a foundational cosmology or metaphysics, and I cannot guess to what extent categories of gender and racial violence were salient. Attempting to write about her does injustice to her actions, inasmuch as I fail to place them in any kind of milieu where her
<figure><img src="image_22.png" /></figure>

decisions and motivations resonate. I retroactively simplify them, creating a caricature along lines that make sense only to me. Even if I did have more information about Fatiman, I attach it to a schema that necessarily diverges from hers in fundamental ways. I cannot even know whether the categorical subject position I apply to her, the label of a Vodou priestess, would be meaningful at all, or at least in any of the same ways.

Acknowledging the agency of the *lwa* doesn't grasp the richness of these events: the meaning and significance of the night Fatiman was possessed. The conceptual sensibility of the specter gives us a way to open a dialogue with her when other strategies are doomed to fail. This presents a practice of learning from ghosts, one that might offer a mode of engaging with historical events, spirits, and ethics by fragmenting them into generative and incomplete threads. Individual spirits decompose into specters, relentlessly confronting our desire to render them legible. We approach Toussaint Louverture but he is inexhaustible. We begin to tell his story; it disintegrates into fragments in our hands. We get closer to the specters only to become aware of what we cannot know. Frustration is implicated but this exact failure moves us; showing us what we cannot know makes us aware of our epistemic limits. We continue because we can feel that the specter is watching us, we are haunted. This becomes the ethical imperative:

> No justice [...] seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some *responsibility*, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of exterminations, victims of the oppressions of capitalist imperialism or any of the forms of totalitarianism (Derrida 2011 p. xviii).

To live with specters is to begin the work of mourning (Derrida 2011). We visit the graveyard to convene with the dead: not to dig up their bones but to honour their legacy, lest we forget them. Still, we trespass on sacred grounds, aware that our best efforts to know Fatiman will not suffice. She shows us that our epistemic practices are violent, even beyond the injustice of Eurocentric simplification. The language of our incantations is itself inadequate: speaking in historically specific Western customs and metaphors surrounding death minimizes the connections between the different planes of a Vodou cosmology (Shilliam 2017). My externality to these metaphysical systems leaves me with crude tools, but we can still use them to push our ways of knowing to their limits. To mourn is to grapple with our relationship to the dead.

If we want to learn to live our lives differently, Derrida writes, we can only learn from specters. We can ignore them and continue on well-worn paths, saving ourselves the effort of critical interrogation and the discomfort of change. If we want something else, however, we need to locate knowledge outside our own set of experiences. To truly live otherwise, we can only learn from the unique liminality, the “heterodidactics between life and death” (2011 p. xvii). This provocation, “to learn to live”, summons ethics as a category, as well as epistemology. Learning to live from beyond our current spatial and temporal situation echoes Trouillot’s historiographical project, and the insistence in the capacity of history to co-create theory and political discourse. The proliferation of specters of the Haitian Revolution offers a mode of existentialist pedagogy, partners in dialogue from who we might learn to live.

If we choose to ignore the specters of the victims of systematic oppression, and especially of the Haitian revolutionaries, their gravestones might fade but their spirits will not disappear. Beyond sensing their gaze and feeling discomfort we can allow their desires to possess our bodies: offering them vessels to affect material change. This is more than a gift of agency-as-libation. Revolution is an attempt to enact political futures, and the project of the Haitian Revolution remained open to those who undertook it. If we fix our narrative and close it off, defining its stakes on the basis of our own categories, we limit its possible futures. A single narrative has a single trajectory, but revolution is dedicated to the unknowable potential of collective action. Being responsible to specters is generative of ethical political life. Bridging the otherwise intractable gap between life and death we can witness them, welcome them home, and invite them to the table where we imagine and enact our futures.
<figure><img src="image_23.png" /></figure>

Bibliography

Dayan, J. (1998). *Haiti, History, and the Gods*. University of California Press.

Derrida, J. (2011). *Specters of Marx*

Girard, P. R. (2012). *Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the Atlantic System: A Reappraisal. The William and Mary Quarterly* 69(3): 549.

Hazareesingh, S. (2020). *Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture*. London: Allen Lane.

Ramsay, K. (2014). *The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti*. The University of Chicago Press.

Shilliam, R. (2017). Race and Revolution at Bwa Kayiman. *Millennium*, 45(3), 269–292.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829817693692

Trouillot, M. R. (1995). *Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History*.
5th pr. Boston, Mass: Beacon Press.
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Second Chapter:
A Character Study

D. M. Braid

"tell me how the sun sets for you"
— Sorry: Tell Me (2022)

He sits with his friend. Everybody is talking. I sit in front, apart, facing them, preoccupied. I hear all the con-
versations going on but I am not really listening to any one. Still, I hear it clearly when he turns to his friend and

he says: “[...] So I’ve decided I won’t take any drugs this week.”

I look up from the text I've been skimming.

I say: "Did you just say you weren't going to do drugs this week?!"

He blushes. He says: "Did you just hear that..."

I say: "So that is actually what you said." His friend smiles.

He has missed his chance to deny it.

Perhaps he has no instinct for dishonesty.

He stutters a transparent lie to save face: "Not... that I take drugs, normally. 'cause that would be... bad.",
he says (though what he means is that it would be bad if I knew that about him, so he is giving me a
chance to disbelieve it).

His face has become quite red – because he is pale, he blushes easily and visibly – but he still smiles (an embarrassed smile). I smile as well, genuinely amused. Then he starts laughing, tentatively – to pass what he said off as a joke? –, and I join in. So does his friend, and maybe a few others who overheard the exchange.

In retrospect, I don't know what we were trying to make believe by laughing about it, or what we were
laughing about. I think about that a lot over the days that follow, and I think about him, and I think about what
his life must be like in order to require a decision not to take drugs for a week.

What kind of drugs does he normally take?

How frequently, how much, and what for?

Just recreation? (Weed? Or 'shrooms?)

Or party-drugs? (Speed? Coke?)

A kind of rebellion? (Acid?)

Addiction? (Heroin?)

Who is he?

Questions.

They all show only how little I know him (and the world he inhabits).

Why did it surprise me to discover that he took drugs?

I don't know him well enough to even guess answers. And why should I?

He is one among many in this room, but it is he who stands out to me. Why?

When I walked along the hallway that Monday I almost walked past him and his friend. When I last saw
them he wore his hair about ear-length, and had dyed it a bright, garish blond. That served as a hallmark by
which I spotted them. It was hard to miss. Now it is cropped close, its natural colour. He must have had it cut
over the weekend.

I turn around, having almost walked past them, and gesture at where his
hair used to be longer. I say: "No more?!"

He says: "I got bored with it. So I cut it. It was time for a change."

I say: "Change is good, sometimes, I suppose. But this is maybe the wrong season to cut your hair as short as you did."

(It is early October, already colder.)
<figure><img src="image_25.png" /></figure>

Him: "That's what they said at the hairdresser. I'll just wear a hat."

Me: "If you can pull that off."

On second thought, I'm confident he can pull off almost anything simply on account of how he carries himself: with such self-assurance, like a prince.

Somebody else tells me, a few days later – the Thursday of the same week – that he studies biology. We come to talk about him because I tell the story of me overhearing him tell his friend about pausing his drug habit, without naming names or describing anything more than his former hair style and self-assurance, but that's all it takes for Somebody Else to say: "Oh, I know him.".

He stands out not just to me.

"He probably wants to be a doctor", Somebody Else tells me.

(But who is he really, apart from the image we have formed of him?)

I wonder why he might want that.

I guess he hasn't thought about it. It would surprise me if he had. Why?

All my guesses all have no basis. All I can really do is make up stories.

The images flare up on their own now like dust in the saturated sun falling through walls of windows at a family estate: a family of physicians, or university graduates for whom being a doctor is one of a handful of proper career choices, or of aspirants to such a life who see medicine as an inroad to the world they hope to inhabit. Possibilities. An accident, a book, a memory of kindness, an image that came to him at the right time. How could I know? Who did I think he was?

In spite of everything I can only guess, I say (with a determination that surprises me): "That makes sense. He seems the type. Ambitious, privileged."

There I have a word that captures him: "privileged". Privileged to a point where he can afford to take for granted that "obviously a straight white male cannot claim to speak for everyone" – a phrase he will use once in conversation, one which is not about him, exactly, as this phrase is not really about him even when he says it, but just a thing one says to have more people say it, to make it true – as a truth beyond doubt, reflection or practice, and go about his life unburdened. He speaks, regardless.

Or so it seems to me. He is that privileged. All blond and light.

I wonder if his ambition will change, or if he will be one of those people who seamlessly grow into an early plan for their life, one which they had growing up – or others had for them, knowingly or not –, rather than one they formed only after making the first few choices, mistakes of their own, some of them to happiness, some to the opposite of happiness. (I am one of those people, just growing into something, and I don't know in which direction I shall fall.)

[Who is anybody apart from the images others have of them?]

One time, later, he signs off an e-mail submitting a small piece of work with the words: "If this will not do, I shall write another.", and there is the other word that will come, in my mind, to define him: "shall". As I read that sentence, I was suddenly sharply aware of how little used that verb is in spoken American English. How distinguished it sounds, even in writing, how distinctive; how fitting it was for him, in particular, to use it. It is his word. It spans his life, or seems to. He lives in the "shall": the things he shall do, the goals he shall accomplish, the dreams that shall fulfill themselves, the future shall be his.

It surprises me how harshly I judge him now, in writing.

I am reminded of a line that struck me in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, where Joan Didion notes that "writers are always selling somebody out". Yes. But I am also exposing myself to make a point here. I am not sure what it is, what I am articulating, or trying to, but I know that this text betrays more about me than I want to reveal, about what catches my attention, what interests me, what preoccupies me when I am left alone with myself: hopes, fears, fascinations, assumptions; all of that is personal, yet here it is plain to see between the lines. In thinking about him, I am mainly studying myself.

The questions of his life are mine: hobbies, pass-times, tastes, preferences. (Besides the drugs.) Relationships? Friends? Lovers? Maybe even partners of a longer term than lovers are, girlfriends? (Boyfriends?) Plenty of images of him drinking with friends, laughing together in a cone of light or leaning against the wall half in the dark on a bad night, defeated by love (unrequited?), by the aftermath of desire fulfilled or by all these images of what else, always still more than he could ever become, he should – on whose authority? – be already.
<figure><img src="image_26.png" /></figure>

What are the designs for his life unspooling in his mind?

What does he want? What does he remember?

What does he choose to forget?

Now I should ask myself, why these are the questions I ask.

Why do I idolise his confidence, his beauty and – being older by a span that will in a few years become irrelevant – his youth as I do?

But I don't want to ask myself any of this.

All he is are things I do not have, some I never had like he has them!

Is that it? That he is beautiful. (Does he know it, and, if so, does that knowledge make him self-conscious, uneasy, or proud, or is it to him just a fact, perhaps only vaguely apprehended, if at all, like the fact that he gravitates towards the clothes he chooses to wear and the people who stand out to him in a crowded room?) That is not it, I decide. This is not infatuation.

I am interested in who he is, what he stands for in my mind, not in being with him.

Another time: we leave somewhere almost together by accident, me a few steps ahead of them. His friend mumbles something inarticulate, a quirky habit of his (I'll eventually come to understand), to which I turn around with a puzzled look, asking without asking to explain, just to speak with them a little more:

He (shrugs his shoulders,) says: "No words..."

Me: "I'll have a lot of anecdotes to tell by the end of this, I'm sure."

Him: "What do you mean?"

Me: "You're like a well of stories, the pair of you."

Him: "What stories?"

Me: "Like the drug-story."

I hadn't used that label in front of them before, but he knows immediately what I am talking about. His friend knows, too, and says: "Yeah, I have told that story to so many people since then."

Me: "So have I. Without naming names, obviously."

A month or so later, I will refer to him as "drug-boy" when speaking to others, because at that point I have told the story to everyone.

Him: "I'd like to have that stricken from the record."

Me: "What?"

Him (after a pause, perhaps intentionally dramatising, though it doesn't feel like it in the moment):

"Everything I ever said..."

And just like that my image of him shifts again.

There is doubt.

A surprise to me, another one.

His friend tells me, later, in his absence, that he is a "big smoker". Again, I am surprised, though I should have learned my lesson by now.

I had taken him to be certain of whatever he did. Why did I think that?

That was what first struck me about him, a year or so before the drug-story, when he came up to me for the first (and only) time to ask something. I don't remember what the question was, something well-prepared, formulated with excessive precision, too clearly targeted at a minute point, a technicality; I recognised it as a strategic question, targeting a gray-zone in the pertinent statutes. I told him the answer, which – as tends to be the case with clear questions – was clear and brief, he nodded and left.

As I think about it now, and about him then, it strikes me that as I see him in that first memory, he appears more commanding than he does now: Sturdier, taller (I think I may remember him taller than me, but I see now that he is not, or not by very much — we are almost the same hight; though he certainly seems taller from the distance because he is leaner than I am; he is, in fact, strikingly thin. (The association is unavoidable: drugs?)). Older(-looking)?

<footnote n="1">1 Isn't it a great unhappiness to idolise things that eluded me always. Not to not ever have had them, but to have wanted them all the while.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_27.png" /></figure>

We never, to my memory, spoke one on one after that, not until long after I overheard him telling his friend about his decision to not take drugs for a week.

What does it say about me that I remembered that scrap of a conversation in the first place, and that I dwell on it, think about him, at this length.

He reminds me later, we did speak again once more in between these moments: A brief conversation I forgot about. What does it say about me that I did not remember our second conversation? What else might I have forgotten?

He bites his nails. I notice that only after I speak to him one on one again, sitting down for a while, a year after we first spoke, a little over two months since I overheard him tell his friend he wouldn't take drugs for a week. (For all I know he has forgotten that day.) I notice how his nails look cut very short. (They are also covered with brown spots, which, to me, look like the remains of handling dough for baking, or clay for sculpting, or sand to fill up pots halfway before setting down a little plant and fixing it in place carefully with more soil, some water, putting the pot down on a saucer, the saucer on his windowsill or a shelf full of little flowers – Think of that! –, yet, as I see him, I would be surprised if they are that; what they really are, I cannot guess – Drugs? – because I do not really see him. That is what I should have learned, but cannot seem to accept.) Then, the next day, I look at him from the distance across a room and see him biting his nails. I must have seen him bite his nails before, but I never noticed. Attention is odd that way, I guess.

Have I forgotten something that would make me see him entirely differently?

Think about: him alone because of how easy it is to think about him in the company of others, the centre of a group or a party; think about: him feeling shy because of how easily he seems (to me) to engage with others, with such assurance; think about: him thinking how he shall scrape by on as little as possible because I cannot beat back the impression of wealth, of privilege!

Now I remember another moment I forgot. The first of those meetings with me in front and them there in front of me, he and his friend talking, just two in a group of others. These meetings take place weekly in a building I have never been to, in a room I didn't bother to check out before that first day. I spot him ahead of me, walking more slowly than I am – he has no need to hurry: he shall be on time –, so I naturally catch up. “You don't, by any chance, know where exactly the room is?”, I ask him without introduction or preambles; much is left unsaid: that I remember him (from almost a year earlier), i.e. that I still know who he is, and do so well enough to recognise him in the crowd on the sidewalk, that I know we are heading to the same place (or should be, if both of us do what we are signed up for). I wonder if he thought about any of the implicit certainities – then or later – I skipped over to get directly to my question, to which he responded, then, directly: “I was hoping to follow you.”, he says (though he could, of course, not have known we would run into each other like this, by chance, out on the street), leaving all the same things left unsaid.

I wonder.

I wonder, too, if he feels like he has something to prove.

I have often wondered if I inspire that in certain people, specifically in those who have a high opinion of themselves. To even wonder about that probably exposes a rather pure form of arrogance in me, my own self-assurance. Still, the fact is that I have often felt when reflecting on my relationships with other people, especially those who stand closer to the periphery of my life, exactly those who don't know me too well, that I make some people feel they need to prove to me specifically how they are clever, sophisticated people. (As if to them I stood for something!) I wonder if he feels that way, but I can never ask – because that would brand me with all that arrogance –, and so I can never know.

For reasons of their own both he and his friend address me by my last name only, no first name, no “Mister”, not even “Hello”, just a comma after.

I don't know what to make of that.

I just wonder.

Where does he come from that morning, walking slowly from where he lives – “home”? – or elsewhere? How does he live, surrounded by what (and whom)?

Things: Carpets, notes, bedding with patterns on it or pictures, plants by the windows (open or closed at night), curtains or blinds, books (how many and which?), stuffed animals, warmth or cold in the winter, clothes in piles on the floor (like mine are) or neatly folded and stacked, love or loneliness? Drugs.
<figure><img src="image_28.png" /></figure>

For a while I pass by a lamppost on my daily commute to the centre of the city – I usually take a different route back –, where somebody has affixed a poster that reads “ADDICTED? We can help!” with some faded pictures meant to project a wholesome atmosphere, a phone-number and an address to some kind of religious establishment. Every day when I stop there at that light which stays red for a long time and lean on that lamp-post it reminds me of that conversation; it keeps me thinking of him and his drug-habit, magnifies it in my mind more and more disproportionately as time flies.

I idolise his drug-habit as something else I never had, even when I was that age.

To him it probably has no such monolithic status. He can take drugs or not, week by week, a habit only intermittently, like cold-brew coffee or exotic food.

I don't know what he eats. I offered him, among others, donuts once or twice on days when I bought a whole box from some charity bake-sale and he always declined them, seemingly conscious of, as people vaguely put it, “what he puts in his body”, almost neurotically so, since he is young and he can certainly stomach a donut (and the drugs, whichever kind now, apparently present no such problem). But he is not in the habit, and that is probably for the best.

It keeps me wondering.

I try to decide if he looks younger or older with his hair cut.

Older: because that colour was so clearly to my mind one only a teenager could choose<fnref n="2" />. Now he no longer wears his youth for all to see. Age is hard to estimate precisely without clear indicators. So for all anybody could tell from seeing him now, he could be in his 20s. I doubt anybody would guess him older.

Younger: because attention is now focused on his face, and he has a young face, because he is young (and his life has been easy, I imagine again: soft light falling through high windows, large rooms, open spaces outside, leisure, choices, beauty—by many measures a happy life, but bathed, as it appears to me, in an unreality that exposes his life to my pages like to photo-paper which, once developed, depicts only a made-up world); by the looks of his face, he could be any age between 15 and 25, give or take a year. I don't know how old he in fact is. I'm guessing he was 19 when we first met; high with self-assurance.

And yet: doubt, maybe some lightless days now and then, more or less long and dark, or spaces overstuffed with expectations, images like old dust making the air too dense to breathe in an attic storing generations of things no one shall ever use again, too many habits to shake: all he shall be.

I am reminded of an evening lecture I attended long ago on the topic “Why Grow Up?”. One of the answers it supplied was that maturity brings certainty: As you grow older, you know – more and more – who you are. In the discussion following the lecture, the moderator said: “It has been my experience that as I have grown older, I found myself questioning more and more of what I previously took for granted, and so I find fewer and fewer certainties in my life now.”

That has been my experience as well, overall.

But I have also experienced the opposite.

My life has taken on a more definite shape in time. That has not come from the discovery of absolute certainties. It is the result of deciding to take for granted, “only for the time being” (I tell myself), this or that, knowing it full well to be contestable at best, and swearing to myself to review it before it inadvertently becomes a principle but knowing also, deeper down, that I will never again find that time to reflect on it—time getting away from you, that is what ageing means<fnref n="3" />. Certainty is an embarrassment.

He does not yet know too well who he is.

I imagine him lying in bed in the evening: on his back or his side, anxious or calm, reaching up by force of habit to brush strands of hair out of his eyes only to find it cropped short, suddenly feel the beat of his heart and wonder whether this haircut was a mistake (so late in the year), only to call himself by his own name, because nobody else is there in the dark with him, and say: “No. It’s alright. Hair grows back. You look fine. You’re okay. And the people around you won’t look at you different. They are your friends. You’re not alone.”

<footnote n="2">2 But ours is a time trying to shape a world where nothing is refused (so nothing is true, either), everything is admitted, and nobody is ever hurt, a world – but what makes a world real if not that it is the source of random, irremediable hurt…? – of universal, perennial adolescence.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3 The lesson to draw: to be careful with the choices you make because even most of those that seem like you can revise them at any point, you will never return to. They become fixtures, facts. The great difficulty, and always the same difficulty, lies in grasping the choices I make as I am making them; and, to make them (on the basis of such an awareness, or without it, as the lucky manage to do) in such a way that won't make me regret them later, looking back over what came of them. That is the definition of a happy life. Few are lucky enough, often enough.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_29.png" /></figure>

I am.

That moment on the sidewalk seems so long ago. Not because it was that long ago, but because so much has changed. He cut his hair, decided not to take drugs for a week. But what has changed most is how I see him now. All the complication, if that's what it is, or just the difference between what I imagined and what he turns out to be. It may as well be the sediment of years.

Years of him changing before my eyes, while I get no closer to who he is.

Such is the spectacle of others.

When we first met he wore his hair the same length it was before he cut it after he dyed it. His hair is naturally blond, not that artificial blond he later chose, but a solid shade—befitting the solid young man I took him to be; not one which – like the colour of my hair these days – shades off into brown or grey as the seasons and my stress-levels change. (Though after he had it cut, it did look brown more than blond.) Perhaps that was part of it. With his hair dyed, especially with that colour he chose, he looked younger; not because it changed his appearance drastically – he was, as I said, blond already – but because it changed the kind of personality his appearance suggested: no longer the tall, elegant, ambitious and diligent prince, but rather, now with that screaming bright hair, the rebel, awash – that seems to me an inevitable association with garish hair-colours – in a certain kind of electronic music, who goes out to clubs (of course, again, I think: to take drugs), to dance, to drink, to meet new people, for the possibility of sex.

"Isn't that why anyone does anything?", his friend says to me years later.

He was once asked to define himself in three words – so he tells me somewhere in between all those moments I find more memorable – and when I ask him, he tells me that his three words were (in this order): "sardonic", "chatty", "British". When I say nothing in response, he says: "Are you surprised?", I don't know if I am. His face takes on a broad, mischievous grin, perhaps a challenge for me to tell him that he is really somebody else and the expression that comes to my mind when I speak of his "self-assurance", and a smile that says "sardonic" above all; so I say: "With that smile, I believe it."

I don't know why I aspire to speak in these defeating witticism which seem meant almost to preclude a response. Killing conversation at will like that is a skill I cultivate. (How can I, recognising that trait of my character, still wonder why at the end of the days and years that pass I remain alone? As if it wasn't obvious.) That I succeed shows, upon reflection, also what confidence I can project. The silences I can produce are a sign of respect I can command.

I have often wondered if I inspire that in certain people. In him, too.

I ask myself whether he is like me. I do not know. I cannot guess.

I cannot possibly let him know how much I have been thinking about him (and why, WHY, WHY ever have I been thinking about him so much).

All the explanations that come to mind are too simple. It isn't that he reminds me of myself; nor is this some delusional infatuation, although I cannot deny altogether that some desire runs through it all somewhere, somehow. I just don't know for what. Knowing that would be key. But I neither want to live my life with him, nor to live his life in his place. Maybe I want to live my life while – impossibly – being how I see him—but that, now, is neither here, nor there, neither him, nor me, not his life, nor mine, nor anything<fnref n="4" />.

At the basis of all this thinking about him is a constellation of disparate circumstances – a conversation, a hair-cut, a lamppost; two different but commensurate youths lived through by different people in different places, who happen to meet really only relatively briefly along the long ways through their lives –, each one so remote from the others that to relate them all their circumstances to one reason or even only a cohesive array of coordinate causes would yield a story so complicated it would strike nobody as worth telling. It promises no insight. It cannot be done.

I can't get to him from across this distance between us.

And still. Still I try to see him in these images. Really, I paste them over the face and the posture of guilty pride I remember, to make my impressions up into something more than just that, something resembling a person to tell me I know him well. Why?

That smile, he smiles often enough with only half his mouth and a vague trace of derision as a counterbal-

<footnote n="4">4 Why is it still so hard – only for me? – to separate envy and desire?</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_30.png" /></figure>

ance, and the easy confidence I take it to stand for. It fits him so well, based, as it is, in wealth, privilege and a princely beauty draped over his boyish frame. I wonder if I am capable of anything like that.

Could I, or could I have at some point, if things had been different, things entirely out of my control, in a different world, could I have had such confidence?

I wonder if he, in turn, wishes he were older.

I did when I was that age. (Not knowing, then, what that meant, and how I would then, that is: now sometimes wish, to the contrary, to be younger again.)

I expect he doesn't think about any of that.

A colleague tells me that she finds anonymity liberating when dealing with other people's work: "If I know whose work I am looking at, I just have expectations and I think that's unfair to them. If I am too invested in some people, it's for all the wrong reasons."

That little remark stays with me after we say goodbye at the end of another evening of food and not knowing whether we could be closer to one another than we are.

There is no doubt I am invested in him for all the wrong reasons.

What endears me about other people generally and about him in particular (generally speaking) is just that they are closer to living some alternative life like I like to sketch out for myself when I feel ill at ease in my own; and younger people closer still to living a life other than their own. Everything still seems possible: boundlessness, excess, a passion that can throw him around the room, smash him into furniture, pin him down or blow him away. And then to recover unscarred. Love as I imagine "it should be", as I've never felt.

He is still young. He is not who he was, with his hair cut short.

He does the things he does not because that is who he is but just because the opportunity presents itself. His friend later describes to me a party they went to by saying: "Drugs were ingested." and I say: "Like that, in the passive voice?". They do not yet know that to be someone in particular consists in knowing when to say "No.", which opportunities to ignore, and which invitations to refuse.

Some people never do, only after a certain age, that ignorance is ignoble.

I think only now do I really appreciate just how young he was when I first met him, and still is. He was probably born in the 2000s. His features, his frame, his body all testify to his youth. I did not appreciate that until I was older, say 25, how bodies change – subtly but definitively – in one's early to mid-20s. They inevitably develop a certain sturdiness, clunkiness. That thinness which marks the bodies of children, teenagers and even many people, students especially (that is to say, people whose lives do not involve significant physical strain on a regular basis), at age 20 or so, grows out of itself; people grow up, at least physically. With his hair cut, the schoolboy almost re-emerges.

I am no longer that age.

That is what I notice as I think about him. Maybe, just maybe, just that.

I notice how my mind is settling – only in some places, of course, this observation is deceptive –, I notice myself no longer remembering if I in fact said what I am saying to the very same person before; I find the moments that constitute my days begin to smear, and blend, and vanish without leaving so much as a trace in memory.

I no longer experience events as singular.

I have begun to notice in myself a stagnancy: I notice myself repeating formulations I have used before; there are things about which I no longer change my mind, or think about at all any more. I have had almost every conversation I have too many times already. Exceptions are rare; still, when they come and I know it in the moment, they are wonderful. Maybe it was always like this, the exceptions always exceptions.

He never is who I take him to be.

I envy him that his life is not in this stagnant phase yet; that is his youth.

I wonder whether he envies me, in any way at all, even a little; if this life of mine has something to envy for the likes of him, for somebody living a life so unlike what my life ever was and, if I am being honest, could possibly have been. That is the test to determine if my life is not, after all, alright as it is. Because confirmation from people whose lives are like mine is easy and worthless, nothing but externalised self-affirmation. It is affirmation, envy, desire, admiration coming from those unlike myself that counts; and to find in others, in turn, something I am not yet but can find it in myself to want to be.
<figure><img src="image_31.png" /></figure>

It always comes back to my inability to separate envy and desire: obsessive imagining all the least
little details of his life for myself as if I was there<fnref n="5" />.

And so I wonder also, I have to admit that, too, finally, if he likes me.

I wonder if we could be friends, maybe in a few years time; in another life.

I wonder if he thinks about me sometimes and thinks “I should tell him about this!”. To experience this or
that as something to tell somebody in particular is the basis of friendship and is, what friendship is.

The summer after the drug-story, when I have no expectation of ever seeing him again – our paths diverged again –, I send him a brief message, like a postcard. It says “Be well.” and how I envy the self-assurance I take to define him.

I don't expect to hear back. But again he surprises me. He responds.

Then more than two years later, a sudden insight flashes across an evening. I don't know how long he had
not been on my mind at that point but suddenly there it is: I can imagine him voting Tory. I see it before me, I
know what his reasons will be: that, though he does not support everything they stand for, their policies make
things easier for him, because he is privileged, and, beyond principled commitments to equality &c., he does
not have it in him to take too much out of his own life to give to others. I do not envy that.

(But perhaps I have no need for envy because I am no different.)

Then everything turns out differently, and once again we are all in the same place: him, his friend and I.
More than two years have passed since I overheard him talking about not taking drugs. I have moved and, no
longer passing by that lamppost and with the fullness of time expended and expanding in between, I have not
thought of him often or much at all. His friend informs me that he has “discovered cooking”.

There is that sudden rush of discovery again, like air into a vacuum, my thoughts are drawn by some
latent power to fill that other life.

I know I should resist this. I should not just make him up for myself, only to find that he is not who I
imagine. To take seriously another person – not just hear their words and watch their actions, and say “I get
it.”, “I understand.”, but grasp the fabric interlacing them – is to hold oneself back.

His friend reminds me that, after the meeting at the start of which I overheard their conversation, they
lingered while everybody else left and I packed up my things and, as I turned to leave he was about to approach
me, not knowing what he would say but wanting to say something to reassure himself, presumably, that I did
not think badly of him; he still remembers, as his friend now tells me, that I said only: “As long as you’re having
fun.” — “That is his favourite part of the story.”, his friend says: “That you didn’t care.”

Why not? (How have I forgotten that part of the story entirely? (I remember it now.)

I cannot claim to know what it would be wrong for him to do.

And even if: it is not my place to tell him how to live.

But in another way I cared a great deal: I have thought about it to no end.

And about him. To no end. We are still relative strangers; though we could be friends, perhaps, we remain
what we have been: semi-distant acquaintances.

In conversation with his friend I refer to him vaguely as “your buddy”. His friend corrects me: “No”, he
says, “He is my good friend.”

As these years come to their conclusion, I meet him for coffee. He has grown older, learned to say no to
drugs, among other things, and learned how difficult it is to say yes to anything knowing that doing so means
saying no to more than we like of the possibilities open to us, standing where we do, living in this time replete
with chances. The world grows ever surer, narrower, in time.

This permanence of life lived comes as the great surprise of growing older: how the minor circumstances
or their traces, the stages that seemed only temporary reshape one's perspective on the future and one's ability
to act in every new present moment, realign hopes and wishes and stay, fixtures now.

Everything always happens for the first time, but also always only once.

So I feel as if I'm limping, always half a step behind my own life.

I can never be prepared for what I then have to live with.

When I first met him, he was 18 or so and I was 25.

<footnote n="5">5 That is what desire is, to aspire to miss out on nothing about somebody else to be in a position to touch every part of their body and soul.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_32.png" /></figure>

Now I am 29 and he must be 22. We are four years older, four years later, no longer as young as we were,
but still young, both of us.

What now?

He hasn't changed much, I find: his hair still blond, its natural shade again, the same length as before,
parted in the middle. He looks as good as ever.

Smiles.

Was he this upstanding, if vaguely uncertain still largely confident character all along, not the stoner, raver,
rebel or addict he sought at times to appear to be (or that is how it came to seem to me, in any case).

He has learned that it is not enough to be good, even excellent, at something, even many things; or to be vile.
It is not enough to choose a life wholesale, like hair-dye to apply to oneself late at night alone in the bathroom.
One must have something to hold onto, at least that, if nothing else, something one can find it in oneself to
want always and above all else to be. We have both been discovering this fact for ourselves, by different routes
over these four years.

My education, which seems only preparation for another life to come, did prepare me, but for a life I, when
it comes to that, now, no longer want to live.

His friend tells me that he is indecisive and unsure what to do with himself. "I am trying to persuade him to become a cook, but I think he would have to...", he trails off, "... get over some ideas..." — "... of what he thinks is beneath him?"

I try to talk them into having me over for dinner, because I have, one might call it: a naturalist's, an anthropologist's, a writer's interest in watching them interact, listening to them talk to one another, seeing him cook—but that never happens.

He has "discovered' cooking" not because "one does" (at a certain age—many do, others don't), or because
he needed to—he found it in himself to want to begin doing that now.
Can't he hold on to this habit and be content?

I wonder if his friend is any more reliable as a witness to his inner life, whether how his friend sees him
—or, for that matter, how he sees himself, if he thinks about that much at all — is any more accurate than my
image of him.

Who is he, really?

I have gotten no closer. But the one final question all this failing raises above all the others now is: closer
to what? And it reveals its own answer.

If people are nothing but the images they can make stick in the eyes of others, there is no fact of the matter.
We are all making him up. He is, too.

What of it, all this?

When I arrive, mostly on time, he has already sat there a while, waiting, with a cup of coffee. We talk for
two hours, from 4pm into the early evening of a spring day about this and that, changes and plans, his and
mine. It is perfectly pleasant, perfectly ordinary, even cordial; for all anybody could tell, we are just two friends
catching up over coffee. Maybe, just maybe, we are just that. (Or we could be, now, or in a few years' time.)
At the end we shake hands.

(He remains in the end, who he was: upstanding, ambitious, privileged.)

When we talk about his friend and about writing, he says: "I tried writing once, but I am really more of a
reader. But I envy him that he has this passion to commit himself to." To envy other lives and to desire to have
them as one's own is how life moves, always towards something other than I am now.

Who is he now? He doesn't seem to know for certain himself. Does anyone?

I tell him about this, as I call it, “prose piece”.

I say: "In the end it's not really about you, I mostly wound up writing about myself getting older."
And he says: "Doesn't everyone?"

Bibliography

Joan Didion: We tell ourselves stories in order to live. Collected nonfiction. Everyman's Library 2006.
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# Third Chapter:
## A Metaphysics of the Stump: Spengler's Thousand Plateaus

Arnaud Miranda

I believe the experience of reading philosophy is not unrelated to alchemy. It is not accidental if these two disciplines were historically close and mysteriously joined. Reading philosophy has to do with a hermetic tradition to decipher, which you can only do through an experimental—somehow artisanal—process. A philosophical text may remain obscure or ambiguous on its own and become clear and meaningful when resonating with other texts. The old alchemist says: when you see something for too long, you can't see it anymore; you need to look away to grasp its very essence. Philosophical understanding comes with an alchemical revelation: the truth of a text sometimes hides in another, stranger book.

That is precisely what I intend to show in this contribution on Deleuze and Guattari's *A Thousand Plateaus and Spengler's Decline of the West*. On paper, these two books have nothing in common. Spengler is a reactionary thinker, the father of the German Conservative Revolution, and his book seems to nostalgically depict the end of our civilisation. Deleuze and Guattari, on their part, wrote a post-May 68 revolutionary book and called for the liberation of desires. However, we will see that these two books share a lot in common. More precisely, each one helps to make sense of the other through the notion of territoriality. *A Thousand Plateaus* brings interesting perspectives on Spengler's description of the end of civilisation as an uprooting. Conversely, the *Decline of West* emphasizes the ambiguity of Deleuze and Guattari's revolutionary concepts of deterritorialization and rhizome. Each work will act as an alchemical revelation for the other: we will see that there is already some Deleuze and Guattari in Spengler, and that we can find traces of the *Decline of West* in *A Thousand Plateaus*. Therefore, a question arises: what does happen once we uncover this unexpected relation? Will the alchemical solution remain heterogeneous, or can we merge them into a new philosophical object? What can the common reading of Spengler and Deleuze and Guattari help us to understand?

To answer these questions, I will divide my contribution in four parts. I will first try to justify the connection between the two texts with historical and formal reasons (I). Then, I will expose Spengler's conception of territoriality in the *Decline of the West* and its theoretical limits (II). We will see that Deleuze and Guattari's own vision of territoriality can shed new light on the limits of Spengler's thought (III). Nonetheless, *A Thousand Plateaus* cannot be read as a mere response to the *Decline of the West*. One should rather read these two conceptions of territoriality as closely intertwined: they allow us to develop a philosophical conception of civilisational decay that I call a *metaphysics of the stump* (IV).

### *Some reasonable justifications*

On the face of it, one might think that a cross-reading between Spengler and Deleuze-Guattari is an absurdity. Of course, it has already been shown that postmodernity has inherited a lot from the reactionary tradition (Wolin, 2004). Derrida, among many others, was a Heideggerian and Foucault was a careful reader of Schmitt. But one could rightfully say that Spengler doesn't have the aura of the two and is not known to be a primary source for Deleuze and Guattari's work. Nonetheless, I will defend that some reasons exist to twine their thoughts together. Besides historical and conceptual reasons, we will see that the very structure of the *Decline of the West* and *A Thousand Plateaus* opens the possibility of a seducing combination.

There are several intertextual trails that indicate the presence of Spengler in Deleuze and Guattari's writings. First, Spengler is explicitly named on a few occasions. In *A Thousand Plateaus*, Spengler's *Man and Technics* is cited for his reflections on the performativity of language (Deleuze, 1987, 76). This way of using Spengler can come as a surprise. It is twice a surprise. First surprise: what is the need for Deleuze and Guattari to specifically quote Spengler about the performativity of language? It doesn't seem to be a very Spenglerian idea, or a fully original quote. Second surprise: within the Spenglerian corpus, the idea they quote is relatively marginal. It is not general knowledge about Spengler that Deleuze and Guattari could have extracted from a rapid and oriented reading. By the way, the quote appears to be very different from an earlier mention of the German
<figure><img src="image_34.png" /></figure>

author by Deleuze alone. In a seminar in 1955, Deleuze mentions Spengler's *Decline of the West* (mistakenly titled as *'Destin de l'Occident'*') as an example of how philosophy can be intricated with totalitarian regime (Deleuze, 1955). If Deleuze undoubtedly hasn't read Spengler in 1955, *A Thousand Plateaus* (1980) may suggest the contrary. This late reading of Spengler takes place in a constellation of references to reactionary thinkers, especially close to what we consider as the spirit of the Conservative Revolution. For example, Ernst Jünger is mentioned three times in *A Thousand Plateaus* (Deleuze, 1987, 403, 518, 564) and the ambiguous figure of Dumézil serves twice as a basis for a plateau (Deleuze, 1987, 434, 528). Moreover, one might see the shadow of Schmitt in several passages describing the sea as 'a smooth space par excellence, and yet was the first to encounter the demands of increasingly strict striation' (Deleuze, 1987, 479). Hence, Deleuze and Guattari have reactionary references, and Spengler is a (minor) one of them. There is a second intertextual trail for Spengler's influence—although indirect—in *A Thousand Plateaus*. Deleuze and Guattari admittedly built their reflections on nomadism and *milieux* by reading Toynbee. One might see Toynbee as a mere proxy of the Spenglerian revolution. By his own admission, Toynbee's philosophy of history directly emerged from his reading of Spengler (Joll, 1987). Hence, even if Deleuze and Guattari hadn't directly read the *Decline of the West*, some Spenglerian ideas could have passed through their reading of *A Study of History*.

Besides the references to reactionary philosophy in *A Thousand Plateaus*, I must also insist on Spengler's compatibility with postmodern interpretations. Spengler is not a traditional counter-revolutionary thinker like De Maistre or Maurras. His 'relativist philosophy of history' (Merlio, 2019) anticipates leftist cultural critique (*Kulturkritik*) and deconstruction of history as a totality. In a beautiful article entitled 'Spengler's vengeance', Bouveresse showed how Spengler's philosophy thrived with French Theory even if his works were completely forgotten. To him, it is 'by pure ignorance' if postmodern thinkers such as Foucault, Veyne, Deleuze and Derida 'generally forget to mention an author of which they can be considered, in many respects, the objective successors' (Bouveresse, 2001, 88). It is not the case of every leftist cultural critic. Adorno admitted his debt, considering that 'Spengler hardly found an adversary who was his equal, and forgetting him has worked as an evasion' (Adorno, 1941, 306). With Jünger and others, 'Spengler stands, [...] among those theoreticians of extreme reaction whose criticism of liberalism proved superior in many respects to that which came from the left wing' (Adorno, 318). In other words, there may be conceptual reasons why Deleuze and Guattari refers to Spengler even if he is reactionary: his cultural critique prefigures the deconstructive project of postmodernity.

Besides these external justifications for a common reading, there also exist philosophical proximities. Deleuze and Spengler are both undeniably Nietzscheans. Nietzsche is not only a recurrent reference, but a true key to understand their philosophies. Of course, their interpretations differ: Spengler may well be read as the archetype of right-wing Nietzscheanism while Deleuze embodies what could be called left-wing Nietzscheanism. Nonetheless, this common inspiration explains conceptual proximities: their similar reluctance towards rationality and history as a linear process. Consequently, both Spengler and Deleuze develop a vitalist philosophy of becoming.

The last element I would like to emphasize is the unexpected proximity between the *Decline of the West* and *A Thousand Plateaus* as theoretical works. They share a certain way of writing: a kind of antistructure. First, they are both massive works that have the peculiarity to do philosophy by drawing on a set of heterogeneous disciplines. They philosophize *through* musicology, architecture, biology and not about these objects. As Deleuze confesses in his *Abécédaire*, his work with Guattari had something of Bouvard and Pécuchet's "encyclopedic attempt" (Deleuze, 1996a). In that sense, Deleuze and Guattari's apparent theoretical modesty joins Spengler's collector mania. Second, and this is the most important element, Spengler's book doesn't have the systematic structure that he claims his new philosophy has. Chapters interact rather than progressively and logically following each other. The *Decline of the West* has *ni queue ni tête*, it is chaotic and needs to be deciphered.

*Spengler's territoriality: rooting and uprooting*

One way to decipher Spengler's *Decline of the West* is to emphasize the notion of territoriality. His peculiar account of birth and decay of cultures relies on the idea that they are plant-like beings. Cultures root in a motherland, on which their survival depends: once they have sucked out all the nutriments of the soil, they crystal-
<figure><img src="image_35.png" /></figure>

lize and finally die of uprooting. Now that we know the general idea, let's try to understand more precisely how it is articulated in the *Decline of the West*.

According to Spengler, humans are not intrinsically historical. Their fundamental condition is a chaos of becomings. The original human life is ahistorical magma, with no orientation in space and time, no destiny. Spengler describes it as follows:

> A boundless mass of human beings, flowing in a stream without banks; upstream, a dark past wherein our time sense loses all powers of definition and restless or uneasy fancy conjures up geological periods to hide away an eternally unsolvable riddle; downstream, a future even so dark and timeless [...].
> 
> (Spengler, 2021, 128)

I want to insist on the way Spengler describes the ahistorical condition of humanity. It is not only ‘timeless’ and a world where ‘our time sense’ has no ‘powers of definition’, humans are swallowed by the geological force of the earth. It is not only that they have no temporal orientation, but they also have no territory to settle. Or when they do, it is nothing more than a flash in the dark:

> Over the expanse of the water passes the endless uniform wave train of the generations. Here and there bright shafts of light broaden out, everywhere dancing flashes confuse and disturb the clear mirror, changing, sparkling, vanishing. These are what we call the clans, tribes, peoples, races which unify a series of generations within this or that limited area of the surface. (Spengler, 2021, 129)

Hence, the condition of the ahistorical man is to fight for survival, living in nomadic herds, sometimes settling somewhere as an ephemerous clan. But above all, the ahistorical man lives in chaos. His existence is nonsensical: he has no territory, no identity, no destiny.

However, out of this chaotic life cultures emerge. Continuing his metaphor of the chaos of humanity as an ocean of darkness, Spengler says:

> But over this surface, too, the great Cultures accomplish their majestic wave cycles. They appear suddenly, swell in splendid lines, flatten again and vanish, and the face of the waters is once more a sleeping waste. (Spengler, 2021, 129)

Even if they finally return to ‘sleeping waste’, cultures bring something different. Cultures are proper historical beings: they are the ‘prime phenomenon’ of history (Spengler, 2021, 128). The life of cultural men transubstantiate: from being pointless and chaotic human life is now oriented towards a destiny. Where does that essential transformation come from? What does a culture have, that ahistorical life doesn’t have? Territoriality. From the ahistorical and chaotic life, Spengler says, cultures ‘are separated by a deep soilboundness’ (Spengler, 2021, 814). What makes a culture historical is the phenomenon of rooting: men settle in a specific place that becomes their cardinal point and their origin. This process of rooting is a way to locate in space and time, to determine the culture’s identity and destiny. That is the reason why Spengler compares cultures to plants: cultures are ‘essentially related to the plants, in that they are bound for the whole duration of their life to the soil from which they sprang’ (Spengler, 2021, 168). When he says the words ‘bound to’, one must take this seriously. When a culture roots in a soil, the counterpart is that it defines its own limits. The development of a culture will be forever limited to the land it grew upon. Hence, ‘there is a mother landscape behind all expression forms’ of cultures, which ‘must fulfill their [cultures] history there where their idea originated’: ‘their [cultures] inner evolution stays spellbound in the place of their birth’ (Spengler, 2021, 814). Every expression of a culture is hence an exploration of its own identity, a realization of its limited destiny. One must see a culture as a tree. There is no tree without a seed rooting in a specific place (otherwise, seeds are blown in the wind). However, the counterparts of the rooting are that the tree cannot spread indefinitely, and that its inherent possibilities of development are bound to the ecosystem it grows in.

One may now wonder what happens to the tree once it is fully grown. What does happen to a culture that has realized all its inherent possibilities? Spengler makes it pretty clear in the following passage:
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Every Culture stands in a deeply symbolical, almost in a mystical, relation to the Extended, the space,
in which and through which it strives to actualize itself. The aim once attained—the idea, the entire
content of inner possibilities, fulfilled and made externally actual—the Culture suddenly hardens, it
mortifies, its blood congeals, its force breaks down, and it becomes Civilisation. (Spengler, 2021, 129).

Once it has explored every possibility of its rooted identity, a culture begins to crystallise into an inanimate
being: civilisation. Civilisation is paradoxically the full actualisation of a culture's potential and the symptom of
its decadence. As such, civilisation is also a process of uprooting. Civilised men progressively lose their organic
bond to the soil. For Spengler, the modern city is paradigmatic: 'the Cosmopolis itself, the supreme Inorgan-
ic, is there, settled in the midst of the Culture landscape, whose men it is uprooting, drawing into itself and
using up' (Spengler, 2021, 379). Hence, civilisation consists in the inorganic decay of a culture. Once a culture
explored its inherent possibilities, it loses its vitality and becomes a mechanic and phantomatic being. Speng-
ler continues to use the metaphor of the tree to describe this process. What happens to the full-grown tree? It
slowly dies at the peak of its height. Civilisations are 'like a worn out giant of the primeval forest', they 'thrust
their decaying branches towards the sky for hundreds or thousands of year' (Spengler, 2021, 129). Ultimately,
their 'immemorially old roots' are 'dried up in the stone masses of its cities' (Spengler, 2021, 626).

Through the process of rooting, cultures open a breach in the ahistorical chaos. They give their peo-
ple a spatiotemporal orientation, a destiny, a history. One may wonder what happens after a culture's blood
congealed into a civilisation. Spengler has an intriguing idea. Once a culture has completely dried up into
an inanimate body, it allows new forms of ahistorical lives to thrive: 'in the midst of the land lie the old-
world cities, empty receptacles of an extinguished soul, in which a historyless mankind slowly nests itself'
(Spengler, 2021, 975). In other words, ahistorical life blossoms up from the ruins of the civilisation. The
uprooting process of civilisation hence leads to the emergence of new forms of ahistorical life. But is this
'historyless mankind slowly nest[ing] itself'? Spengler does not elaborate much on it but draws the en-
igmatic figure of the *fellah*<fnref n="1" />. 'We find everywhere in these Civilizations [...] and the giant cities in turn at
the end of the evolution [...] a small population of fellaheen who shelter in them as the men of the Stone
Age sheltered in caves and pile dwellings' (Spengler, 2021, 641). As the chaotic ahistorical human life, fel-
laheen life 'is just the zoological up and down, a planless happening without goal or cadenced march in
time, wherein occurrences are many, but, in the last analysis, devoid of significance' (Spengler, 2021, 707).
Spengler does not expand on this idea. He simply concludes on the fact that we are to be witnesses of the end
of 'the historically dying West' and of 'the fellah world waking up' (Spengler, 2021, 728).

*Deleuze and Guattari's territoriality: ritournelle and deterritorialization*

I believe *A Thousand Plateaus* can shed light on this enigmatic posthistorical life. To understand why, we must first consider Deleuze and Guattari's own account of territoriality. This notion is closely related to the crucial concepts of territorialization and deterritorialization, which are disseminated through the book. I consider the chapter 'Of the Refrain' ('De la Ritournelle') to be the best passage to understand what is at stake in these ideas (Deleuze, 1987, 310–350). Deterritorialization can be a frighteningly abstract concept, and this chapter makes it concrete and simple. This will hence be our anchor point.

First, I must define some terms precisely. A *ritournelle* is not simply a 'refrain' as the English translation suggests. The English 'refrain' has its equivalent in French with the word *refrain*, which corresponds to a repetitive part of a song. However, a *ritournelle* is not a simple refrain. It has the repetitive aspect of the refrain but has nothing to do with a chorus (which is elaborated, structured, connected to the verses). It is rather a childish mantra, repeated over and over for itself. Now, we can start reading what Deleuze and Guattari say about the *ritournelle*, and how it is linked to the processes of territorialization and deterritorialization. According to them, territorialization and deterritorialization can be understood through three moments that are not 'successive'

<footnote n="1">1 *Fellah* (pl. *Fellaheen*) is originally a historical term to describe a traditional Egyptian farmer. Spengler gives a completely different meaning to the word: a *fellah* is for him the typical ahistorical residue that survives a dying civilisation.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_37.png" /></figure>

but ‘three aspects of the same thing, the *ritournelle*’ (Deleuze, 1987, 312). Deleuze and Guattari decompose these three moments as a story.

The first moment describes the origin of the process of territorialization. It is illustrated with the following passage, that describes the exorcising aspect of a childish *ritournelle*:

I. A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients himself with his little song as best he can. The song is like a rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos. Perhaps the child skips as he sings, hastens or slows his pace. But the song itself is already a skip: it jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos and is in danger of breaking apart at any moment. (Deleuze, 1987, 311)

The fear of chaos is warded off by the reassuring repetition of the same musical mantra. Lost in the dark, the child ‘orients himself’ by considering the song as a ‘calm and stable center in the heart of chaos’<fnref n="2" />. One can understand here the very origin of territorialization from Deleuze and Guattari: it is a way to ward off the disorder of chaos, to give oneself an orientation through the repetition of the same. Identity and sameness as the condition for orientation in the darkness of chaos. I hardly need to mention that this sounds very Spenglerian.

The second moment of the story describes the process of territorialization itself. Once the *ritournelle* oriented oneself in the dark, one must organize space and time in order to preserve this fragile order. Let us read how Deleuze and Guattari describe it:

II. Now we are at home. But home does not preexist: it was necessary to draw a circle around that uncertain and fragile center, to organize a limited space. Many, very diverse, components have a part in this, landmarks and marks of all kinds. [...] The forces of chaos are kept outside as much as possible, and the interior space protects the germinal forces of a task to fulfill or a deed to do. This involves an activity of selection, elimination and extraction, in order to prevent the interior forces of the earth from being submerged, to enable them to resist, or even to take something from chaos across the filter or sieve of the space that has been drawn. (Deleuze, 1987, 311)

Now that one has a cardinal point, he must organise space and take the most of it. To keep ‘the forces of chaos’ outside, the ‘germinal forces’ must be directed towards ‘a task to fulfil or a deed to do’. In another’s words, once it has been rooted, the seed must germinate and grow. It must exploit the hardly conquered soil. The *ritournelle* is now not only a childish mantra to ward off the forces of chaos, it has now become a rallying song to repel them. By this very process, territorialization produces the territory itself. It creates a land with frontiers, and an identity through its psalmodic repetition of the same song. To territorialize is then not only ‘a question of keeping at a distance the forces of chaos knocking at the door’, but also inseparable from the production of an *ethos*, which means ‘abode and manner, homeland and style’ (Deleuze, 1987, 320). Territorialization is thus a matter of ordering chaos through the production of identity and territory.

This is where the last moment of the story comes into play. Deleuze and Guattari precise that ‘the territory is constantly traversed by movements of deterritorialization’, ‘always *en route* to an at least potential deterritorialization’ (Deleuze, 1987, 326). Hence, the very product of territorialization would be somehow deterritorialized. To understand what this means, let us read the last part of the text:

III. Finally, one opens the circle a crack, opens it all the way, lets someone in, calls someone, or else goes out oneself, launches forth. One opens the circle not on the side where the old forces of chaos press against it but in another region, one created by the circle itself. As though the circle tended on its own

<footnote n="2">2 It should be noted that Spengler also describes the origin of cultural rooting through the metaphors of child fear and musicality. It is 'from this primitive fear' that 'springs historical sensitiveness in all its modes' and that 'every new Culture is awakened in and with a new view of the world' (Spengler, 2021, 190). And this 'new view of the world' of a culture, its style, is depicted as a *Takt*, a specific rhythm. 'Style', he says, 'in the Cultures, has been the *Takt* of the process of self-implementing' (Spengler, 2021, 643–644) In that sense, every culture has its own musicality: 'the *Takt* of Classical existence was different from that of Egyptian or Arabian; and we can fairly speak of the *andante* of Greece and Rome and the *allegro con brio* of the Faustian spirit' (Spengler, 2021, 132).</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_38.png" /></figure>

to open onto a future, as a function of the working forces it shelters. This time, it is in order to join with the forces of the future, cosmic forces. One launches forth, hazards an improvisation. But to improvise is to join with the World, or meld with it. One ventures from home on the thread of a tune. Along sonorous, gestural, motor lines that mark the customary path of a child and graft themselves onto or begin to bud "lines of drift" with different loops, knots, speeds, movements, gestures, and sonorities. (Deleuze, 1987, 311–312)

This passage describes the heart of the process of deterritorialization. The 'circle', which is the territory created by the *ritournelle* process of territorialization, must open. The key is that the circle doesn't collapse into the original chaos. It doesn't fall facing the forces of chaos. It creates the conditions of its own dissolution: the circle does not open 'on the side where the old forces of chaos press against it but in another region, one created by the circle itself'. Let me say it differently. The *ritournelle* was originally a repetitive song to ward chaos off. It was the very process of territorialization as the production of sameness, identity. Now, Deleuze and Guattari say that the *ritournelle* will ultimately open itself to variations. This is a very concrete idea. Imagine a refrain you mechanically repeat for hours. You will ultimately vary from the original, say a word for another, change the order of the phrases, incorporate lyrics from a different song, etc. This is the very process of deterritorialization: the auto-dissolution of sameness and identity. This also concerns the territory itself. A territory always bears the conditions of its own dissolution: it tends 'on its own to open onto a future, as a function of the working forces it shelters'. By setting arbitrary lines to exist as a land, the territory creates the possibility of their demolition. Deleuze and Guattari nicely called this 'ambiguity between the territory and deterritorialization': 'the ambiguity of the Natal' (Deleuze, 1987, 326). As a conclusion, we can now appreciate the very meaning of this banal and concrete sentence previously mentioned: 'one ventures from home on the thread of a tune' (Deleuze, 1987, 312).

## *A Metaphysics of the Stump*

The attentive reader undoubtedly noticed the resonances between these two conceptions of territoriality. Nonetheless, it is time for me to explicitly connect the dots. I will now try to show how *A Thousand Plateaus* and the *Decline of the West* do not only converge but eventually merge. This will lead us to the untold story these two books secretly narrate: the metaphysics of the stump.

First, I would like to explicitly state the resonances we have heard between Spengler's and Deleuze-Guattari's conceptions of territoriality. Their two stories first converge in the way they describe territorialization. The process of rooting consists in the exorcisation of primitive chaos. Rooting on a soil implies orientation and order. The origin is the cardinal point. That is not all. To territorialize also determines one's identity and territory as a totality bounded around sameness and repetition. More surprisingly, Deleuze and Guattari's idea of deterritorialization finds echoes in Spengler's description of a civilizational uprooting. In both, the actualization of identity coincides with its auto-dissolution. Spengler's cosmopolis is at the same time a pure product of a rooted culture and a force that will eventually lead to its uprooting. Equally, Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of territorialization and deterritorialization are inseparable; they are ontologically conjoint.

Another element the *Decline of the West* shares with *A Thousand Plateaus* is the importance of vegetal metaphors. The idea of rooting and territorialization is inseparable from the figure of the tree. Spengler's culture 'blooms on the soil of an exactly definable landscape, to which plant-wise it remains bound' (Spengler, 2021, 129). Deleuze and Guattari, for their part, suggest that 'the tree has dominated Western reality and all of Western thought' with the imagery of 'the root-foundation, *Grund, racine, fondement*' (Deleuze, 1987, 18). However, if Spengler ends its vegetal metaphorical story with the slow death of the old-tree, Deleuze and Guattari introduce another figure: the rhizome. The rhizome incarnates the idea of deterritorialization. While the tree is grounded and territorialized in one originary location, the rhizome is constantly deterritorializing. It is multiple, heterogeneous, disruptive, unpredictable. It is chaotic and defined by its bare becoming. However, one must not take the rhizome as the conceptual opposite of the tree. The relation between territorialization and deterritorialization applies to the tree and the rhizome. Their realities are intertwined: 'trees may correspond
<figure><img src="image_39.png" /></figure>

to the rhizome, or they may burgeon into a rhizome' (Deleuze, 1987, 17). In other words, the tree may be necessary for the rhizome to thrive and conversely: 'A new rhizome may form in the heart of a tree, the hollow of a root, the crook of a branch. Or else it is a microscopic element of the root-tree, a radicle, that gets rhizome production going' (Deleuze, 1987, 15). To be precise, rhizomatic life seems to consist in being *in-between* trunks and branches:

> The stems of the rhizome are always taking leave of the trees, the masses and flows are constantly escaping, inventing connections that jump from tree to tree and uproot them [...] Even, and especially, territories are perturbed by these deep movements. (Deleuze, 1987, 506)

In this last passage, one can hear the deterritorializing power of the rhizome. The rhizome does not only thrive in the cracks of the roots, the branches and the trunk, its undermining force threatens to uproot the tree.

Now we can see how the *Decline of the West* and *A Thousand Plateaus* intertwine to tell a common story. Spengler makes us understand the relation between territoriality and the historical development of culture. Deleuze and Guattari, in their part, give us a deep insight on the uprooting and death of the Spenglerian old tree. This leads to what we can call a metaphysics of the stump. The primary condition of humanity is chaotic, nomadic, pure becoming. It is a wasteland, hosting a nonsensical and disorganized profusion of wild grass, ferns, and many unidentifiable primitive plants. The soil is covered by what seems to be an ocean of unleashed vegetal becomings. Suddenly, deeply burying its roots in the soil, one plant grows vertically. A culture territorializes. The growing tree now overlooks the chaotic rug and deploys its wide branches overhead. In the shadow of leaves, a circle of clear ground surrounds the trunk of the majestic tree. The tree now has come to maturity—the culture becomes a civilisation. On the giant's body, the first signs of fatigue appear: some moss thrives on the roots, fragments of lichen cover a few branches, a woodpecker has nested in the trunk. Finally, the dying old tree dries up, crashes onto the floor, ultimately a bare stump. In and on the dead body of the giant, thousands of species now proliferate: mammals, insects, fungi, worms, etc. A multiplicity of beings survives and develops only because of the presence of the tree stump. Their survival depends on the presence and the destruction of the tree. In other words, it is only in the ruins of the decadent civilisation that new forms of chaotic life will thrive.

What can we learn from this image of the stump? First, one can understand how fertile Spengler's description of civilizational decay can be, when read in the light of Deleuze and Guattari's *Thousand Plateaus*. One can see that uprooting has to do with the liberation of multiple chaotic becomings. The end of history is not the apocalypse, it is simply the resurgence of chaos in the ruins of civilisational order. Second, when reading Spengler, one can have a new and original insight on *A Thousand Plateaus*. Deterritorialization takes an interesting meaning when related to the idea of decadence. A rooted historical identity is not simply the enemy of becoming and multiplicity; it is their very condition of existence. The rhizomes thrive on the tree trunk. Hence, deterritorialization is not primitive chaos, it is the necessary irruption of disorder inside order; it is the inevitable explosion of difference into the land of identity and sameness. Spengler helps us to understand that the Western civilisation is a dying tree. This could lead to pure fatalism and nostalgia. However, Deleuze and Guattari give us an incredible guide to understand the new forms of life that emerge from the uprooting of Western identity and culture. The end of history is not the end of the world, but the liberation of becomings in the ruins of our dying civilization. We can survive as rhizomatic scavengers. We are meant to become woodworms. Our new forms of life will consist in decomposing what was previously our own cultural identity. Deconstruction is not a revolutionary process: from the moment the seed germinated, it has always been the inescapable horizon of the Western tree.
<figure><img src="image_40.png" /></figure>

Bibliography

Adorno, Theodor W., "Spengler today", *Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung*, Volume 9, Issue 2,
(Leipzig: C. L. Hirschfeld, 1941), pp. 305–325

Bouveresse, Jacques, "La vengeance de Spengler", in *Essais II. L'époque, la mode, la morale, la satire*,
(Marseille : Agone, 2001), pp. 83–114.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, *A Thousand Plateaus*, trans. Brian Massumi,
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, *What is Philosophy?*, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burshell
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

Deleuze, Gilles, "Qu'est-ce que fonder ?" *Cours hypokhâgne*, Lycée Louis le Grand,
30th of November, 1955, (https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/218).

Deleuze, Gilles, *Negotiations*, 1972–1990, trans. M. Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).

Joll, James, "Two Prophets of the Twentieth Century: Spengler and Toynbee.", *Review of International Studies*, Volume 11, Issue 2, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 91–104.

Merlio, Gilbert, *Le début de la fin?*, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2019).

Spengler, Oswald, *The Decline of the West*, vol. I and II (1918, 1922), trans. Charles Atkinson
(Budapest, Arktos Media, 2021).

Wolin, Richard, *The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism* (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

Video

Deleuze, Gilles, "F comme Fidélité", in *L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze* (Dialogue avec Claire Parnet), Pierre-André Boutang, 1996.
<figure><img src="image_41.png" /></figure>

# Fourth Chapter:
## Beyond the Madeleine: Experience, Temporality, and the Queer Event in Proust

Quintus Immisch

### I. Modern Times, Queer Temporality, and the Event

Modernity has always been a matter of synchronization and time management. Fascinated by what has ‘just happened’, ‘modern’ times are characterized by acceleration and the fact that humans are subject to a rapid and pulsed rhythm of time. While people, goods, and news circulate faster and faster in modern life, humans progressively find themselves in a new time regime, which is supposed to guide them to increase their productivity, be it at work or in their allegedly private pleasures. We know how the story goes: it’s the story of trains and buses, of telegrams, photographs and movies, of machines and assembly lines. They condition, illustrate, produce and comment on the fast and homogenized life, especially in the emerging big cities. And not only that: How much the accelerated feeling of life affects also the imaginary, for example, is shown by the modern novel’s need for events: its protagonists long for something to happen. This discourse of acceleration pulses life, and we can call it *chrononormativity*[^1] a hegemonic time regime that hardly allows for alternatives and imposes a rhythm on thoughts, bodies, machines. At the same time, the modern temporal order has constructed its ‘other’ by conceiving figurations of what resists this chrononormativity. These exteriorities of time have been filled with concrete marginal figures: As modernity continually races into the future, it invents the ‘savages’ and ‘primitives’ in order to locate them in a long-gone prehistory (Johannes Fabian calls this *allochronism*).[^2] According to this narrative, far away in time and space, the ‘savages’ represent an earlier evolutionary stage, which is ‘not yet’ as developed as (such a colonial) modernity. Other resistant figures, sick of the modern time regime and not being part of it, are pathologized as *hysterics* and *neurasthenics*: They are modern, but cannot keep up, they stumble, caught in their nervous conditions. In Freud, for example, we can see that all these figures are conceived analogously, and even explicitly connected, when he publishes *Totem and Taboo* and still announces, in the subhead, some *Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics*.[^3]

But there is another figuration of modernity that resists the established time order: the queer figures who move beyond the hectic centers of acceleration, populating the modern time horizon with their ‘peripheral desires’.[^4] Modern sexuality is structured by several events that are supposed to guarantee its smooth functioning and its proper development towards heterosexuality: We can think, for example, of Freud’s anal and oral phases, of the Oedipal triangulation, of the ‘first time’. All these events organize biographies and conduct people into heterosexual couples, sealing those ultimately in marriage. Thus, these events structure the hetero-modern arrow of time and, biopolitically, induce humans to biological reproduce. We can see how this dynamic translates into concrete biographies, for example, in the genre of the *Bildungsroman*, which sends central (bourgeois male white heterosexual) subjects into the world, ‘initiates’ them, and lets them return home as young fathers. *Be fruitful and multiply*.

The story goes quite differently for the ‘peripheral’ queer: Moving beyond the channeled sexuality and “operating [...] off the designated biopolitical schedule of heterosexuality”[^5], they live a life under the sign of what is called queer temporality.[^6] For Jack Halberstam, for example, queer temporality is “the dark nightclub, the perverse turn away from the narrative coherence of adolescence – early adulthood – marriage – reproduction – child rearing – retirement – death, the embrace of late childhood in place of early adulthood or immaturity

<footnote>[^1]: Elizabeth Freeman, *Time Binds. Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories*, Durham: Duke University Press 2010, p. 3.</footnote>

<footnote>[^2]: Johannes Fabian, *Time and the Other. How Anthropology Makes its Object*, New York: Columbia University Press 1983.</footnote>

<footnote>[^3]: Sigmund Freud, *Totem and Taboo. Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics*, in: *The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud*, vol. XIII, edited by James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis 1955.</footnote>

<footnote>[^4]: Michel Foucault coined the term “peripheral sexualities” to describe what is marked as perverse in the 19th century (e.g., masturbation, queer sex), cfr. *The History of Sexuality*, vol. 1, translated by Robert Hurley, New York: Pantheon Books 1978, p. 39. Cfr. Robert Deam Tobin, *Peripheral Desires. The German Discovery of Sex*, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2015.</footnote>

<footnote>[^5]: E. L. McCallum/Mikko Tuhkanen, “Introduction. Becoming Unbecoming. Untimely Mediations”, in: *Queer Times, Queer Becomings*, edited by E. L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen, Albany: State University of New York Press 2011, pp. 1–21, p. 5.</footnote>

<footnote>[^6]: *Queer Temporalities*, special issue GLQ: *A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies* 13, 2–3, 2007, edited by Elizabeth Freeman.</footnote>