Preface: To My Fellow Castaways

IN THE EARLY SUMMER OF 2020, I decided to return to Heidegger’s concept of “Being in the World” (In-der-Welt-sein), believing it now needed to be fundamentally revised in (the) light of the pandemic. At this point, it was apparent to everybody that “the world was gone,” and I heard this statement from many others over the previous two months, beginning in early spring. Of course, there was also an equal number of deniers in those early days as well, until gradually the reality of the worsening situation was undeniable for most, even though this stubborn realization was still couched in rationalization and qualifications concerning the novelty of the virus, as if what we were experiencing was just a more severe strain of the common flu and nothing that would warrant the appellations of “pandemic” or “plague.”

Regardless of this debate over the proper nomenclature, as of this date in late June, well over 200,000 Americans have died from the Covid virus, and more than 1.2 million globally. Certainly, for the sake of the dead and departed ones, and for the members of their families and the communities to which they belonged, I think we should sympathize with the sentiment that “the world is gone,” even though no one outside this closed circle of mourning would be capable of understanding the existential meaning of this particular statement that can belong only to the community of the dead. By paraphrasing these statements with the simple phrase “the world is gone,” therefore, I am speaking for “everybody” (or as the French have the habit of saying, “tout le monde”); although, I realize that I am not speaking for “everyone.” Regardless, whomever I am speaking for or to, myself included, it seems we must come to terms with the following facts: The first fact is that the world is now gone, referring to the world that existed before the pandemic, at least from the point of view of the present. The second fact we must contend with is that the world to come is largely unknown, and that it is possible that the previous world will not return, referring to the world as it was before, what is now referred to as “the past world,” “the world prior to the pandemic . . . ,” and by some as “the lost world.”

“The world is gone” is originally from the poetic statement that appears in the final line of a poem written by the Jewish poet Paul Celan that reads: “The world is gone. I must carry you” (Die Welt ist fort. Ich muß dich tragen). The meaning of this phrase has remained somewhat of a mystery, despite the history of voluminous criticism, especially given that many of Celan’s readers—even the most astute—have already assumed they know specifically to whom (dich) this statement is addressed. It is often cited alone, outside the context of the poem itself, the specific biography of the poet, or the body of Celan’s work during the period it was written. Instead, it has become a topic in a rhetorical sense, and thus has assumed a shallow and false profundity in many of the critical and philosophical discourses that have employed it exclusively to talk about the poetry of the Holocaust. As a result, the poetic statement itself has fallen to the level of a platitude. As one consequence, it follows that the statement might not be relevant to our discussion of the nothingness of this world, or to address the most contemporaneous community of the dead. Therefore, if it is to become the object of the following meditations, in (the) light of the current pandemic, all its earlier meanings must first be subtracted or at least bracketed according to the phenomenological method, perhaps even crossing out or crossing through (durchkreuzen), in the manner of the later Heidegger, which I will also employ here to make this illegibility more visible to the reader: Die Welt ist fort.

As to the second phrase of the poetic statement, one can only add to the endless speculation on the identity of you (dich). The first possibility is that the you represents Celan’s mother, who appears in many of the earliest poems from Mohn und Gedächtnis (1952) as the “one whose hair the sky wore that day,” in the figure of “your ashen hair Shulamite.” Another possible interpretation is that the addressee here is Heidegger and is intended as a refutation of the phrase “the world worlds” (die Weltwelten). This statement becomes the explicit object of Heidegger’s later claims concerning the “saving power” of poetry in the writings of the postwar period such as “The Question concerning Technology,” where the figure of Hölderlin is invoked, as if in a seance, in the famous line from the Patmos: “But where danger is, grows / The saving power also.” Of course, some would find this second interpretation grotesque when measured against the tragedy of the first. However, in a poem that is collected in Lichtzwang (Lightforce), published three years after Atemwende (Breathturn), where we find the first statement, the philosopher is directly addressed as “you, with yourself” (du / mit der dich) and described as an “island-channel . . . fogged in by hope” (Inselflur du . . . übernebelnden Hoffnung).

In the second seminar of The Beast and the Sovereign, delivered in the prepandemic era, Derrida also conjoins Celan and Heidegger in a mirror-game between the fort of the poetic statement Die Welt ist fort and the Da of Dasein, the entity that is always found In-der-Welt-sein. Derrida gives this poetic statement its most direct interpretation (in the exergue saying “there is no world, there are only islands”). Nevertheless, I will continue to make the argument that I have already introduced, that this statement does not bear the same existential meaning that it might have today, even though it expresses the same sense. This is not to say that Derrida was merely speaking metaphorically (which of course he could almost never be accused of doing), but only that it would be impossible for him to imagine in 2002 that the statement would actually become true less than twenty years later, and in ways that he could never imagine—that is, that “there is no world,” that in place of the former world there is an archipelago composed of 7.8 billion tiny islands.

According to the strictest understanding of the logic of world that is developed earlier in Sein und Zeit, if we could imagine a situation in which the world was absolutely fort, then by definition there would be no entity that could in any way be called “Dasein”—if only because there is no there (da) there, just as there could neither be “I” nor “you,” that is to say, no possibility of language. This raises the question of whether and in what way the I and you in the poem can even exist, if only because the minute that there is language there must also be the possibility of the I, and the second there is an I there must also be the possibility of a you (even if the being that is designated by the you is absent, lost, far away, or dead). In the case of Celan’s later poems, we must now acknowledge the impossibility of a world that is peopled by the German language, which has been completely silenced by the poet; thus, the entities who are encountered in the poems as I and you can exist only in the language of the poem. In fact, I would even argue that the translation of Celan’s later poetry into another language is impossible in principle, despite the mere linguistic possibility, which is why I will not refer to any English versions of the poems, which in my view are only various misreadings all based on the mistaken assumption that they are translated from the German language. It is this new situation of “worldlessness” of the language of Celan’s poetry that we might now understand the first phrase of the poetic statement, and especially in the case of the late poems, beginning with “Atemwende” (1967), which start to resemble an archipelago of tiny islands, or a constellation of stars on an infinite ocean of space (in some ways recalling Pascal’s infinite void).

Nevertheless, I will argue that the being who speaks from this new situation of “worldlessness” cannot be likened to a purely worldless (weltlos) being like the stone in Heidegger’s 1929 lecture, which appears next to the animal as “poor in world” (weltarm), and the human being as “world-forming” (weltbilden). In order to grasp the situation I am describing, therefore, one would need push it to its most extreme limit and imagine that the you being addressed names an entity that in no manner can be encountered In-der-Welt-sein, but rather as an entity that can only be encountered in the poem standing opposite to the I. Of course, the situation I am describing does not belong to ordinary language, which must always presuppose a world peopled with others who could at any moment become you, but rather only in the language of the poem, which Celan describes in “The Meridian” as a “language actualized, set free under the sign of radical individuation which, however, remains just as aware of the limits drawn by language as of the possibilities it opens.” It is perhaps in this sense, according to a state of worldlessness that Celan’s late poems evoke, that we might understand the second phrase, Ich muß dich tragen, meaning that either the being or entity that is addressed as you (dich) is literally carried (tragen) into existence, or whose very existence is preserved, by the I (Ich) of the poem. According to Celan’s extreme formulation of language in the poem, therefore, the poem holds its own ground, its own time determined as a present that is not in the world but is “already-no-more” (Schon-nicht-mehr); however, in holding its own ground, the poem nevertheless “pulls itself back from an ‘already-no-more’ into a ‘still-here’ [Immer-noch].” In other words, the Da, that is, the ground of the poem is the “still here” and, for Celan, “the ‘still here’ can only mean speaking.” As Celan concludes his formulation of the still-here-still-speaking place and time of the poem, this is why “I must carry you” (ich muß dich tragen), if only because the poem is “still here” and “still speaking” that the I needs a you in order to speak, to continue speaking, and this you can even be an “altogether other” (ganz Anderen), since “for the poem, everything and everybody is a figure of this other toward which it is heading.” Therefore, the conversation between an I (Ich) and a you (dich) that is actualized by the poem, a conversation that can only take place in the language of the poem, everyone and everything can become you, including those beings that Heidegger already defined as being without world (weltlos).

In the speech given on the occasion of receiving the Bremen prize in 1958, Celan defines the poem essentially as “a letter in a bottle thrown out to sea with—surely not strong—hope that it may somehow wash up somewhere, perhaps on the shoreline of the heart.” When I reread this line recently, in (the) light of the pandemic, I suddenly realized that “the world is gone” can really only be heard as a phrase that can only be spoken by someone who has become shipwrecked and who lives alone on a desert island—as a complaint, a sudden realization, a condemnation of his bad luck or fate, in a moment of weeping and inconsolable rage, perhaps quiet resignation, or finally, as a statement of fact. Therefore, even if the prepandemic Derrida critiques the genre of the “Robinsonade” in philosophy—as fabula, a fable or fiction, even as mythos—we must now come to realize that the very sense of the myth has changed completely: it can no longer be judged as a fiction or false representation of the real, but rather as the most literal approximation of real existence. This is because it can be taken as a fact and no longer a merely a fiction, or a fable, that today, at least to some degree, everybody (tout le monde) lives on a desert island.

To address this situation, which might today be likened to our “new existential Commons,” so to speak, I decided to construct my own desert island philosophy in a series of reflections on the following questions: First, given the fact that the world is gone, what was the world? (No longer the ontological question “what is world?”) Second, what is “existence without world”? (No longer defined as an ecstatic or abnormal experience, but instead arises from the daily and habitual experiences of boredom and depression, and also from the nightly occurrences of insomnia and feelings of worldlessness.) Third, finally, where are “the others”? (Especially since I no longer belong to a world peopled with others, who now appear as nothing but the brightly colored lights that compose the background of consciousness and memory, but exist in some way to be defined in “a world without others.”)

In meditating on these three questions from the locus of my own desert island, I managed to salvage from the wreckage of previous worlds only a small pile of waterlogged books that I am now completely dependent on for my memory in the following investigation of these three guiding questions. However, it is important to point out that, unlike previous desert island reading lists, these texts were not carefully preselected in preparation to become a castaway, and my syllabus is arranged by serendipity and consists only of the few texts that I happened to bring with me on the boat before it was shipwrecked off the coast of Fayetteville, New York. Of course, it not merely by chance that all the books I had packed before the catastrophe in some way related to my new situation, since it just so happened that I had already been thinking about solitude, and specifically about issues surrounding a lack of personal memory of others from my own past, which had become more severe even before the lockdown began. Although, unlike the original Crusoe, I never thought to pack a copy of the Bible, and not being raised in a particularly religious family, I never set the scriptures to heart and cannot recite anything from memory. This lack of religious education will no doubt be fateful for the role that God will play in my own desert island philosophy—which is to say, almost none.

Before beginning my desert island reflections, however, first allow me to simply describe the pile of books I have in front me, which I will list in no particular order.

• A sun-bleached and well-worn copy of the German edition of Sein und Zeit with pages missing or destroyed by the tide.
• A xeroxed copy of “The Question concerning Technology” that I had folded and stuck into my copy of Sein und Zeit at some point, which I found in the crevice a tree.
• The Klosterman paperback of Heidegger’s 1929 seminar Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik still wrapped in plastic (the least-damaged book in my collection, as if it bears no trace of the catastrophe).
• A hardback copy of Derrida’s 2002 seminar on The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 2.
• The three small blue cloth volumes of Suhrkamp’s Paul Celan: Gesammelte Werke (probably the most prized possession in my entire library).
• A small pocket-book edition of Emmanuel Levinas’s De l’Existence à existents.
• The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross.
• Deleuze’s Logique du sens, which I found days later floating on the other side of the island, which now looks more like a conch or sea anemone.
• Michel Tournier’s novel Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique.
• J. M. Coetzee’s Foe.
• Albert Camus’s La Peste, on the cover is a picture of a feral black cat on the streets of Oran, Algeria.
• John Berryman’s book of poetry, The Dream Songs.
• Finally, a shrink-wrapped copy of Roland Végsó’s Worldlessness after Heidegger: Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction (Edinburgh, 2020), which is the only “secondary source” I had thought to bring along, since Végsó’s analysis of the theme “worldlessness” in Heidegger was an inspiration, even before the island became real and no longer merely theoretical.

I will provide a more complete list at the end, including the translated English versions of the above titles that I brought for reference, but these thirteen books make up my entire “Desert Island Library” and will have to suffice in place of a formal bibliography or footnotes in the following reflections. My plan is to meditate on a particular book each day (though the difference between day and night will become a constant theme of my reflections, since I have already lost all track of time): however, this should be sufficient citation for the reader to follow my tracks around the island. As far as any scant references to other texts, they are purely from my own bad or weak memory, so I hope that the reader will excuse any gross inaccuracies and that the editor will not ask me to provide proper citations (which I will refuse owing to the same issue of weak memory). In any case, I would argue, one cannot be shipwrecked and bring along the entire library! That would be a pure fiction! Moreover, in adhering strictly to the rustic limitations of my chosen genre, there was no internet on my island. In other words, when living on a desert island—that is, if one wants to call this “living”—one is forced to make do with what one already has to hand, that is, to exist “with no provisions but an open face” (Led Zeppelin, “Kashmir”).

Fayetteville, New York, June 29, 2020