Sixth Day: The Worst-Case Scenario Lullaby (Bonaparte)

December 8, 2020

Everything I have recounted thus far is only a theoretical description of the real effects made possible by the schizoid and depressive poles, which can only be further exacerbated by the real situation of solitude caused by living on a desert island, as in the case of the purely fictional portrait of Robinson Crusoe. Therefore, at this point I will now depart from the theoretical “instrument of research” deployed by Deleuze’s commentary and instead make a few observations from my own phenomenological investigation of living on a desert island these past six months. As I already reported to the reader: I am alone, having neither a Friday, a Tuesday, nor even a companion animal. And yet I am not complaining, since I have also discovered many advantages in my solitude, even convincing myself to welcome my “bachelor” state as a necessary part of my existential research for these reflections, especially when I came to understand that I was never more alone than when I was with others.

However, I must also confess to my reader that I have been haunted by the image of Robinson’s decomposing face during the long nights of insomnia, accompanying by the fading vision of the others like lamps in windows on far-distant islands that are being turned off, one by one. On some nights while I lay there gazing at the ceiling above my bed and thought I could see the shadow of Friday circling above me like a shark. At these moments I began to wonder if I was already dead, or worse, that given the current situation of the lockdown, I became persecuted by the idea that, if I died tonight, the police wouldn’t discover my bloated corpse for weeks. The image of my rotting body became an “idee fixé” of sorts, which kept me awake and vigilant for many nights, when I would stare at the dark ceiling for hours hearing in my head the final refrain from the “Melody X” by the artist Bonaparte: “Something’s gotta change . . . Hold on to something good.”

In the last reflections, I briefly touched on the effects of depression and secondary narcissism caused by solitude, so today I wish to cover the effects of memory and dreams. As Deleuze says in the eighteenth series of Logique du sens (“On Sexuality”), “We are schizophrenic while sleeping, but manic-depressive when nearing the point of awakening.” Perhaps the depressive position can be best represented, however, as the point of awakening in which the subject never completely awakens; thereby introducing a duration that can last for days, weeks, months, or even years. In this regard, it can be compared to the night of pure insomnia. During my own nightly bouts of insomnia, for example, I began to notice a pattern in that most memories were negative. The faces of lost or missing relationships, broken engagements, ex-wives and lovers, betrayed friendships, and alienated family members and children crowded my consciousness in the night until I succumbed to exhaustion and fell unconscious. I was disturbed by this at first, and the residues of negative memories would linger throughout the days, provoking long periods of depression and what Robinson referred to as “wallowing in the mire.”

Eventually, however, I began to understand the positive role of memory, including traumatic or negative memories, which can be explained in reference to the earlier meditations on Heidegger. First of all, the role of memory can be explained by the withdrawal of the “Other-Structure” as I described in last week’s meditation, which can also be described in Heidegger’s terms as the “world structure” composed of signs and references to others who are ready-to-hand. As the “whole structure in all of its constituent” parts gradually withdrew into the past and is no longer actual, the role of memory rises to the surface and becomes more visible and “present-to-hand.” This became especially visible during the nights of insomnia, as I have already recounted. The part played by negative and traumatic memories (including memories of physical shocks, accidents, violent incidents, social embarrassment, shameful experiences, moments of personal insult, etc.) can be easily seen as the manifestation of past events when the “referrals” and “references” to people and things in the world were disrupted or broken, and the relations that these references once designated have now been “lit up” by the memory-work. In other words, along with the darkening or withdrawal of the actual world, memory fills in to reconstruct the “whole structure in each of its constituent parts” and thus often chooses negative and traumatic memories to convert them into new “signs” (Zeichen) that point to the missing references, as if in an attempt to reconnect them to the “whole structure” of referrals that can relocate Dasein in relation to the world. In some respects, this only serves to further confirm Heidegger’s claim that Dasein cannot not “return to the world wherein it was”—however, with the caveat that this world may no longer be present. Consequently, the role of negative memory can now be understood as “reparative,” in some respects also related to the discussion of the reparative role of the depressive position in reconstructing the surface of the lost or missing object (the Ego). In this case, during the night of insomnia when consciousness feels itself slipping into nothingness and in the grips of an eternal present and no future except for unconscious sleep, bad or negative memories function exactly like “navigational beacons” (recalling the line I quoted earlier from the poem by Celan) that appear to “light up” the portions of the world that have been covered by darkness. Thus the role of negative memory in particular appears like the night-light in Bonaparte’s melody.

But we must ask why negative or traumatic memories are selected, rather than happier or more pleasant memories of Dasein’s past. Immediately, however, we would need to ask a following question: “Selected or chosen by whom?” It is certainly not the subject of Dasein itself that chooses which memories appear to surface in the face of insomnia, since negative memory happens in consciousness like an obsession in which the subject cannot choose, or does not choose, to participate. On one level, it has to do with the intensity of the disruption that first attached itself to the broken or missing reference, which first caused the being or object to be converted and become “present-to-hand” as a “sign” (Zeichen). Thus the work of memory can now repurpose the inventory of signs first created by negative or traumatic events to provide them with new meaning, in the sense of orienting Dasein toward the world to which they belonged, but now with the intensity of obsession and compulsive thinking that often characterizes the manner in which negative memories appear in consciousness in insomnia. On another level, the importance of negative memory returns to Heidegger’s axiomatic definition of Dasein as an entity that is in each case “mine” (je meines), and we can see that the character of “mineness” (Jemeinigkeit) is what determines Dasein’s relation to negative memory in a manner that is different from happier memories I may have shared with others. For example, the death of a family member, the broken engagement, or the traumatic experience touch Dasein’s own being at its core in a manner such that Dasein appears before these experiences and feels in these experiences something that remains unsharable and inexpressible to others. Thus Dasein finds itself “alone” with or alongside its own existence, an experience of ecstasy (ékstasis). At the same time, as I have already argued, this experience of aloneness is somewhat contradictory and even impossible, since Dasein can never be absolutely alone unless there is also the possibility of the others, which is to say, there is no place in the world that Dasein can go to be alone without bringing along all the others, including on a desert island. In other words, desert islands and castaways can only exist in a world with others, even if these others happen to be absent or missing in the place wherein Dasein finds itself. In this case, Dasein must carry along its own others—if only to be able to exist all by itself!—and this will account for the role of negative memory in those situations, like the night of pure insomnia, where Dasein feels that is most alone. At that moment, all the others return, including those beings Dasein either thought it had lost forever or had thought it had sent away and condemned in eternal hatred to exist in pure impersonal Being. Of course, like in Virgil, the damned are often the first ones to return, and they often wear the faces long-lost friends, missing lovers, and also the most hated enemies.

I have also discovered that dreams, particularly what the medical sciences today refer to as “vivid dreams,” have a similar “reparative” role. If Freud first described defined the dream-work as a combination of the residues from the previous day’s experiences, mixed with repressed and unconsciousness memory, in the situation of extreme solitude, vivid dreams can be understood as the residues that belonged to the previous world that are combined with an intensity that might resemble the hallucinatory visions of schizophrenic delirium, following Deleuze’s comparison. In this regard, dreaming actually might be understood as a resistance to the depressive position that primarily determines the Ego’s conscious thought during the day, since the primary role of dreams is to construct surfaces and territories on the body without organs. For example, after many nights I began to notice vague patterns in the dream-work that exactly resembled the many-colored fields under the wing of an airplane flying at thirty thousand feet, and these patterns seemed to connect to other fields and territories that disappeared on the horizon, as if the dream-work was reconstructing the entire surface of the world from one zone to the next, field by field, territory by territory (even though “reconstructing” would not be the right word here, since the entire surface of the world does not preexist the production of the partial territories or fields). Upon waking, moreover, I realized that I was always dreaming from a position of great “height,” as if the dream-work was fabricating a perfectly smooth surface by flattening out the depths of the body that threatened to engulf my consciousness during the periods of insomnia. It was with this realization that I recalled again the picture of Celan’s later poems, which I had earlier described as constellations of stars on a black and moonless sky, but which might also be described as patches of territories constructed on a surface that is shaped like an orb, or rather, as a conglomeration of images that look like fields on a series of partial surfaces. St. John of the Cross described them as “crystal morsels” of dark contemplation that God sends to some individuals, especially to those like me “who are not destined to so lofty a degree of love as others.” If Deleuze compared dreams to the schizoid process of investing libidinal energy in the production of surfaces from the erogenous zones and connecting these zones to the body without organs, we might also understand the function of dreams as the dynamic formation of a surface space around a singular zone of the body (the eye, the ear, the mouth, the lips, the vagina, the anus, etc.) in order to reinvest the drives in new surfaces produced by the dream images. In fact, I find an exact correspondence with Celan’s habit of constituting clusters of word images around particular orifices that serve as “singular points” of the erogenous zones on the body—but once again, usually from a perspective or point of view of a great height that separates the surfaces from the fathomless depths of the body.

Finally, the third class of images I have already addressed in the previous meditation around the status of the lost or missing object—that is, the representatives of “the good object” that still exists somewhere in the world, having already escaped the island precisely by having been lost already. Phenomenologically speaking, the exact manner of their apparition in the night of insomnia is akin to hallucination, since the representatives of the lost or missing object exists in the duration of an eternal present that is constructed as a “zone” on the body without organs, and which is usually operated by the Other-Structure through the establishment of genital sexuality. Here I recall from memory Lacan’s little fable of the lamella from Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, the “good object” represents nothing less than the indestructible, immortal life of the libido! In other words, it embodies that part of the Ego’s own primary narcissism that the sexed being necessarily loses in passing through sexual division (Lacan even compares the unsexed body without organs to an amoeba because it is extra flat and moves around like an amoeba.) If we excuse the humor in Lacan’s little fable, it can be seen as the best explanation of how the body without organs survives any division installed by the sexual organization and, moreover, bears no relation to the death or mortality of the sexed living being. It is for this reason, as Lacan says, it can fly off and run around; it can lose to a “good object” only to discover it again elsewhere; moreover, for the purposes of our investigation, because it represents the libido’s pure indestructible instinct for life, it can exist in the world even when “the world is gone.” In other words, because it is indestructible, it still exists somewhere in the world, whether it lands on the face of a lost lover who is either dead or still living on a desert island somewhere, the face of someone I have never met, or who has just passed me in the next car; perhaps, the iridescent eye of the Moon, the luminous and acephalic body of a distant planet like Saturn, Venus, or Uranus; and, finally, under certain special conditions, the face of God. In fact, the only way you know that it is missing again is when the object that provided it with a temporary surface or facade no longer stares back at you; although, it also has the strange habit of suddenly disappearing one day only to return and land back on the same object the next. This is why I have also insisted on the status of the image of the “good object” as a hallucination, rather than as a memory image, or even a dream image, because the image of the good object is what still relates the Ego to its own indestructible life (i.e., primary narcissism) reflected on a surface that shines brightly with the beauty of metal or glass, the image of a gaze that is possessed by the Ego as the missing piece of its own pure and indestructible desire. Nevertheless, in this image there is still present a fundamental dehiscence between the anonymous and essentially impersonal nature of desire and the living being who constitutes its most outward and superficial apparition, since it was only by chance to begin with that the Ego happened to suddenly rediscover its own image in another person who appears on the body without organs like Venus rising from the waves. Finally, it is interesting that Lacan also concludes his little fable with a warning that the missing lamella could also return some night and envelope your face while you are sleeping and suffocate you, since a body without organs, according to Antonin Artaud’s original formula, has “no mouth, no teeth, no larynx.” This basically reasserts the same caution I expressed toward the body without organs that can be produced by the return of primary narcissism, and why earlier I chose to interpret the final metamorphosis in Tournier’s version of Robinson’s “solar sexuality” as either a pure schizoid phantasy or the hallucinatory deliria of real schizophrenia or real psychosis. Therefore, in conclusion, to add a note of caution to my fellow castaways, I will recall again the lyric of Bonaparte’s dark melody that has become my own personal talisman to stand guard against the possibility of the lamella’s return while I am sleeping: “Hold on to something good”; at the same time: keep it at a safe distance! But, above all: “keep the night-light on!”