Chthonic Restitutions: Madness and Oblivion

Javier Berzal de Dios

Abstract This essay theorizes madness as a chthonic emplacement to dishevel existentially insufcient and detached interpretations of disorder. Refecting on Nietzsche’s emphasis on poetry over systematic thought, I take up Lorca and Baudelaire’s visceral language on death and the earthly to revisit chthonic myths as expressing an underworld uncontrollable sphere beyond systematicity. Written from the phenomenologically precarious position of my own mental illness, this essay develops a sincere rhetoric to approach the chthonic from within rather than at sterilized distance. This positioning retains the indexicality of the intense and disorganized as a critical facet, in turn exploring the nuances of the experience without discursive reductions or romantic musings, from the ground down.

Cassandra: ototototoi popoi da. – Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1072

Following the social turn of the 1960s, administrators and teachers of academic discourse began to replace “reason” and “rationality” with “critically,” or “critical thinking,” as their highest aim; however, the presumption of a rational subject remained stable. – Margaret Price, Mad at School 39

Am I mad now? In truth, the question of madness calls forth to a future memory: will I have been mad? Or really: how mad will I think I had been? Lucidity is anachronistic, an ex post facto verdict, casting out to madness what thought itself on mark… Madness itself voices the language of truth—this madness of mine—an eternally rational utterance, charts and graphs at hand. I picture philosophers terribly sane, so much they take for granted, so restrained and hygienic their connections… so reliable a language. Jacques Derrida thinks Michel Foucault imprecise, and argues that René Descartes actually gives weight to the possibility of madness when wondering if he may be possessed (Writing 56). And maybe Derrida is right, and Descartes asks in good faith. But does he understand what he is asking?

Nosotros ignoramos que el pensamiento tiene arrabales donde el flósofo es devorado por los chinos y las orugas [We ignore that thought has outskirt neighborhoods where the philosopher is devoured by Chinese men and caterpillars] (Lorca, “Panorama ciego de Nueva York,” Poet 66) 1 Am I mad now? The question of madness is ubiquitous, manda- tory—especially in writing, where one cannot even read the room. In face of the actual implications of the prospect, to cogitate oneself mad unearths a ravenous, autophagic rationality. How I wish to write about madness as judiciously as Descartes and Foucault and Derrida: the dis- playing of madness in an epistemic orrery—the becoming-concept of madness, whatever boundaries it may have, that can be charted or even rejected. “It is not a theme, a subject matter, but a word,” Shoshana Fel- man discloses, “I told myself that I had no idea, a priori, what ‘madness’ may be” (264). From this madness of mine (a priori flter of experience) to “madness,” the word: quotation marks’ shadow is almost cruciform, an expiatory denouement. How I wish to theorize madness and evalu- ate—that is value out (ex-, from/to the outside)—the likes of Foucault’s “mental illness and madness, merged with and mistaken for each other from the seventeenth century on, are now becoming separated under our very eyes or, rather, in our language” (“Madness” 293). A “madness” bereft of incessant ligatures—philosophers never get disoriented in the cave’s entrails, reminiscing about the days of sheltered shadow puppetry and secure shackling. No nos salvan las solitarias en los vidrios, ni los herbolarios donde el metafísico encuentra las otras vertientes del cielo. Son mentiras las formas. Sólo existe el círculo de bocas del oxigeno. Y la luna… [The tapeworms in the glass do not save us, nor the herbal shop where the metaphysician fnds the other sky slopes. The forms are lies. All that exists is the circle of mouths of the oxygen. And the moon…] (Lorca, “Luna y panorama de insectos,” Poet 116) But it is hospitium that is needed: xenia, not salvation. Hospitium, a tesserae that establishes a pact—concessit ut eodem iure… to speak, in madness, even… Cassandra’s “ototototoi,” the truest words I know. How raw madness is, how sincere and ante-sophisticated: afective, social, intersubjective… sincerity is “the intensities that circulate among subjects” (Alphen and Bal 5)… if allowed to, one may add—the mimesis of “composed” so exhausting.

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So maybe Descartes is frank in pondering whether an evil genius or demon (genium malignum) has possessed his mind. Still, consider his reaction: he optimistically thinks he can do much to guard against the spirit, who “will be unable to impose on me in the slightest degree… But this is an arduous undertaking, and a kind of laziness brings me back to normal life” (19). Descartes envisions his demon a nuisance that goes away when you ignore it. A pet demon. Derrida imagines madness a silence approachable from fction alone, “the silence of madness is not said, cannot be said in the logos of this book, but is indirectly made present… in the pathos” (Writing 37). This is Descartes, too: only in fction a demon ceases to be mercurial; only in fction laziness generates its banishment. Do you know doubt, René? Could it be that your genius malignus was a protective genius loci? The author of Luke: the Devil takes Jesus to the pinnacle of the temple and says, “throw yourself from here.” Now, that sounds more like a demon to me. Am I mad now? Doubt implies distance from chthonic points of no return, those most stable deterritorializations of a black hole. We must ingrain doubt (ingrain, from en graine, a red dye made with crushed insects, a most chthonic material) while having some type of faith in the self—that is, faith that there is a self around the ofal sinkhole. From here, peak moments of rationality are most suspect: a fatal spiraling rationality armed with nothing but logic and irrefutable evidence, that’s the danger. We must doubt, always. But doubt is a double-edged, self-opening spatiality where chthonic emplacements also materialize—or better, dematerialize—the further you run from them... Los insectos, los muertos diminutos por las riberas. Dolor en longitud… [The insects, The tiny dead by the shores. Pain in longitude…] (Lorca, “Luna y panorama de insectos,” Poet 116) Amidst recrudescing chthonic sieges, how sweet the prospect of a Cartesian “I” seems, how desirable. It may be easier to follow Blaise Pas- cal and doubt everything to the point of unburdening: “I do not know… what the world is, nor what I myself am. I am in terrible ignorance of everything. I do not know what my body is, nor my senses, nor my soul” (218). It is from Pascal that we get to Louis Aragon’s “I no longer wish to refrain from the errors of my fngers, the errors of my eyes,” errors that lead to “admirable gardens of absurd beliefs, forebodings, obses- sions and frenzies” (10). And yet, we cannot imagine Persephone happy amidst volcanic intimacies, to borrow Lorca’s words. Even in the middle

SubStance #153, Vol. 49, no. 3, 2020 SubStance #153, Vol. 49, no. 3, 2020 6 Javier Berzal de Dios of summer: twilight breeze lacerations, fallen buttons invoking ennosigaios (earth-shaker) Poseidon… Madness—this madness of mine—an excess of language, an excess of rationality. Where can I fnd, enjoy really, this “fundamental absence of language,” Foucault writes about? (Madness 286). Claudia Crawford rightly responds: “Madness rages around us and in us day and night. We hear it in the hushed growth of a blade of grass… Madness is not silent… I think, rather, that our philosophers lack ears” (19). This restless flter-projector of meaning, a relentless montage ap- paratus, conceptual heir to Sergei Eisenstein imposing a reiterative past. “Never believe that a smooth space will sufce to save us” (Deleuze and Guattari 500); indeed, smooth spaces generate the most intense striations. The interviewer asks, “How do you see the threat of madness that has afected you?” Hélène Cixous’s answer invokes the chthonic depths: I hurry and fee when I see it again: there’s nothing more terrifying. Madness and terror are the same thing. It’s as if I lost sight of the reason for living. Why live? Life then appears to be on the threshold of death. It’s a temptation that happens when death, in its endless fght with the angel, gets the better of life. Then one drops the key to life. It is a fall, terrifying. It is a hole dug into the self, but which is, in general, caused by an accident. I am not speaking of the madness that condemns one to the asylum… I am speaking here of what touch us [frôler] and resolve itself in attenuated forms… But when it comes down upon you, you lose control.” (29) A chthonic, intimate frôlement—the madness that brushes against you, that touches you with familiarity in the most unexpected moments. Chthonic glimpses on a sunny spring day—I know I should be happy, I know—a thought crossing Persephone’s mind that cannot be shaken. Not a brush- ing aside that puts you on the verge, but a touch made possible because the volcanic edge is at arm’s distance. Grounding, a sinkhole in waiting. In the chthonic depths, nothing is made of stars, just volcanic shadows. Coagulated. Encrusted. Oh, Persephone: it all began a glimmering day when you were picking fowers; and now, do you hate them or love them even more? Madness: scenographic changes, the in situ elsewhere. I search for Persephone to commiserate. Oh, Persephone, how hard it is to describe the most sour sweetness of chthonic pomegranates… “sweet as honey, against my will and by force he made me taste it” (Athanassakis, Homeric Hymns 12). La granada es la prehistoria de la sangre que llevamos, la idea de sangre, encerrada en glóbulo duro y agrio, que tiene una vaga forma de corazón y de cráneo.

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[The pomegranate is the prehistory of the blood that we carry the idea of blood, imprisoned in the hard and sour globule that has a vague form of heart and skull.] (Lorca, “Canción oriental,” Book 102) Mise en garde— prêts? If ideas endeavor fying, the tilting of words… José Ortega y Gasset, addressing the question of the theatre (in a posthumous work), noted all things need to be understood in light of their most perfect states—at their healthiest and most functional, we could say, rather than in decadence (“Idea del teatro” 828-9). It is the same when it comes to human beings, he argues. If you were to encounter a man at a time when he “sufered from a stomach cramp or going through a nervous breakdown or with a fever of a hundred and four,” we would not be in a position to defne his qualities or capacities. “You would’ve known him when that man was not properly a man, but a ruin of that man.” But is it not in the precariousness of madness that intimacy dwells? To know someone is to know them without the veneer of self-control, at their nethermost. A lucid chthonic happiness emerges at the dusk of doubt: to write a goodbye note, to calmly give away belongings. Georges Bataille: “I throw myself amongst the dead/dressed in white sunlight” (Impossible 147). After her “ototototoi,” and “io, so hard,” and “e, e, such pain,” Cassandra gazes back from the threshold of Hades: “Enough of life. Strangers, I ask you this: bear witness after I am dead that I was right” (1313-15). There is purity too, the simplicity of Persephone’s single concern, striving for a return. The celebrants know; Persephone knows: return is never guaranteed. Reading David Hume in Hades, one realizes each spring a conquest. So, focus… focus… There are too chthonic pilgrimages—the tightrope distance from horizontality to verticality. This is madness: not to wonder “why is this my life?” but “why is this I in my life?” The chthonic aspect of the “I” that rambles, even on life’s spring. Do you blame yourself Persephone, do you think it your fault? Madness—this madness of mine—like an amphisbaena, the venomous bicephalous creature, depicted in the Aberdeen Bestiary biting its own neck and locked in an existential duel (Fig. 1). Those who are prey to conficting emotions do not know what they want, says Baruch Spinoza, for whom the madman (delirans), the gossip- ing woman (garrula), and the child (puer) belong together because they are “unable to restrain their torrent of words” (106). The origin of the amphisbaena: after Perseus severed the head of the chthonic Medusa, blood dripped out of the Gorgon’s disassociated head while he was fying over the desert. From the blood swallowed by the earth, the amphisbaena spawned—an orphaned birth. Eventually, the

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Figure 1. Amphisbaena from the Aberdeen Bestiary, 12th century, Aberdeen University Library, England. Univ. Lib. MS 24 depiction of the animal received wings and legs, but originally it was a double-headed serpent with a second one on the tail, “as though one mouth were too little for the discharge of all its venom,” adds Pliny (8:35). Cassandra criticizes Clytemnestra in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon: “So daring is the female killer of the male. What could I call this loathsome creature? An amphisbaena?” (1230). Cassandra—unkempt hair and bitten lips—may I call you Cassie? “Ototototoi,” “ai ai me.” I understand. You know best what it means to know and not be believed. They thought you mad, and their disbelief was a chthonic re-emplacement: “Apollo, Apollo! You destroyed me. Now for a second time” (1080-2). He cursed you, Cassie, for withdrawing your consent—you had a right, Cassie, I hope you know, now that you walk in the Elysian plains, where Hesiod says one lives untouched by sorrow. Do they believe you in the Elysian Fields, Cassie? Do they think you sane? Are the mad sane in heaven? Or just mad but at peace? To think myself in heaven means to imagine madness assert, et in caelis ego. Cassandra, you

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knew this, too—those words of yours in the threshold of Hades, a most tragic fnal prophecy: “Now I shall go inside and sing laments” (1313). Do others in the Elysian plains come to listen to your laments… even if they don’t understand? Nietzsche: “posthumous people (me, for instance) are understood worse than contemporary ones but heard better. More precisely: no one ever understands us—and that’s what gives us our authority” (Twilight 171). The authorship of a page written by someone envisioning themselves already dead—one is reminded of Lorca’s self-prophecy: Cuando se hundieron las formas puras bajo el cri cri de las margaritas comprendí que me habían asesinado. [When the pure forms sank under the cri cri of the daisies I understood that they had murdered me.] (“Fábula y rueda de los tres amigos,” Poet 12) The chthonic thought of Lorca, who not long before those words had fashioned himself Persephone to Dalí’s Demeter,2 continues: Recorrieron los cafés y los cementerios y las iglesias Abrieron los toneles y los armarios Destrozaron tres esqueletos para arrancar sus dientes de oro, Ya no me encontraron ¿No me encontraron? No. No me encontraron. Pero se supo que la sexta luna huyó corriente arriba, y que el mar recordó ¡De Pronto! los nombres de todos los ahogados. [They reconnoitered the cafes and the cemeteries and the churches They opened the casks and the wardrobes They shattered three skeletons to pull their gold teeth, Still they did not fnd me Did they not fnd me? No. They did not fnd me. But it was known that the sixth moon escaped upstream and that the sea remembered, suddenly! the names of all the drowned.] (“Fábula y rueda de los tres amigos,” Poet 12) Forgetting is Lethe, the chthonic river of lost memories. Heidegger con- cludes: Lethe, “oblivion, is a concealment that withdraws what is essential and alienates man from himself, i.e., from the possibility of dwelling within his own essence” (Parmenides 72). Dante disagrees, describing Lethe as a cleansing that discharges guilt, which conceals a truer and purer essence. Lethe is painful, Heidegger maintains, “of course forgetting is painful” (72). Ironically, Heidegger’s impetus belongs to modernity—that restless

SubStance #153, Vol. 49, no. 3, 2020 SubStance #153, Vol. 49, no. 3, 2020 10 Javier Berzal de Dios resurrection of the past that turns all that is “buried and living” to something “visible and dead,” as Jean Baudrillard puts it (72-73). All visible, a logos speaking with a “mad unison of light” that identifes all—Eugen Fink’s Helios as a “world-clock” that “illuminates the entirety of all things” (Heidegger, Heraclitus 35, 39). No, no son los pájaros …………………………………… ni el metálico rumor de suicidio que nos anima cada madrugada, es la capsula de aire donde nos duele todo el mundo es un pequeño espacio vivo al loco unisón de la luz. [No, it is not the birds …………………………………… or the metallic rumor of suicide that rouses us every dawn, it’s the capsule of air where the whole world hurts us it’s the small, lived space to the mad unison of light.] (Lorca, “Panorama ciego de Nueva York,” Poet 66 ) “The penitentiary immortality, the carceral immortality of an unrelenting memory,” Baudrillard expounds, “the Unconscious is already something of this type” (72-73). It is in sleep that one steps outside the “common universe” and into a “private” one, as Heraclitus says (55)—a rest from the unconscious, even, if dreams stay at bay. The Orphic hymn to Sleep (instructions: “incense with opium poppy”): you grant holy solace to our every sorrow you save souls by easing them into the thought of death (Athanassakis, Orphic 65) And that is why Charles Baudelaire fnds the intimacy of a lover’s touch in forgetting—a poetic visionary that conjures Nyx (Night), who dwells in the chthonic Tartarus with her children, Thanatos (Death) and Hypnos (Sleep): Je veux dormir! dormir plutôt que vivre! Dans un sommeil aussi doux que la mort, J’étalerai mes baisers sans remords Sur ton beau corps poli comme le cuivre. Pour engloutir mes sanglots apaisés Rien ne me vaut l’abîme de ta couche; L’oubli puissant habite sur ta bouche, Et le Léthé coule dans tes baisers. I want to sleep! sleep rather than live! In a slumber as sweet as death, I’ll spread my kisses without remorse On your beautiful body, polished like copper. To devour my appeased sobs Nothing equals the abyss of your bed,

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Powerful oblivion inhabits your mouth And Lethe fows in your kisses. (73-74) Lethargy as ritual, Lethe-ergos: a procession to an oblivion-cleansing; the ceremonial committal of a head (“ma tête endolorie”) in a chthonic bothros (“dans tes jupons remplis de ton parfum”). Heidegger argues that forgetting is not experienced by the Greeks as a subjective state: “forgetting is no-longer-being-there-with-it,” he says, Lethe “is the concealment that lets the past, the present, and the future fall into the path of a self-absenting absence” (Parmenides 82-83). Baudelaire agrees with Heidegger in ascribing Lethe a relationship to action and strife—the strife that life is, in the case of the French poet. But the banal skulks in Heidegger’s nightmares: “We are tempted to say that the Greeks conceived forgetting not only in relationship to cognitive comportment but also with regard to the ‘practical’” (Parmenides 83). Derrida pushes this: “would the forgetting of a being (an umbrella, for example) be in- commensurable with the forgetting of Being? For which it would all the more be a bad image” (Spurs 141). Baudelaire’s Lethe is the respite from that sufocating “mad unison of light.” But to think of insides and outside is to think of cave-sun dialectics… to have the sun as witness… Helios, informing Demeter about seeing the rape of Persephone. Ask Persephone how far the unconcealing logos of the sun would get you. Persephone forgets—seeks to forget—during the months on the surface, no doubt. “Forgetting easily assumes the appearance of a simple lacuna, a lack, uncertainty,” writes Derrida, searching for the essence of forgetting (141). In Baudelaire, forgetting is therapeutic—a sound argument, in psychologi- cal terms: the opposite of forgetting is a memory that remains eternally present, i.e., alethia as trauma. Truth is then letheia, too, the forgetting that allows one to see things anew, for what they are—not framed by the past… to be able to step into a river anew. Disclosure is a light, a “mad unison of light,” shining on the exposed everything, but this gets you nowhere, does nothing—the complexity required for a system of thought to be in unison fattens the simple shining fugue that life is. Life, of course, is a philosophical problem—a nuisance, like Descartes’s demon—which is Nietzsche’s point. Or François Laruelle’s “the unrefective is the essence of the real” (164). Perhaps the problem is not that we have forgotten what being was for the Greeks, but rather that we remember too much to understand it. Forgetting is essential to being, not a detriment or a lack, but what makes it possible—because, Nietzsche asserts, being is action. The stylistic “voluptuousness” of Heidegger, as Ortega y Gasset well describes it, is symptomatic to his project (“En torno” 804). Heidegger approaches an inquiry with the economic assumption that words’ truth-yield neces- sarily remains positive—Danube bonds that foat upstream.

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Heidegger: “There is an old Chinese proverb that runs, ‘Once pointed out is better than a hundred times said.’ To the contrary, philosophy is obligated to point out precisely through saying” (Heraclitus 17). Lorca: “Where the philosopher is devoured by Chinese men and caterpillars” (“Panorama,” Poet 66). Truth, at its most undeniable, exists in what does not have to be said, in the before-justifcation. Truths expressed with a gaze, with a touch; in bout and song (joust-jouissance). Truths that are celebrated; truths that, gallingly it seems, require no footnotes. Nietzsche’s core insight is that an understanding of being begins by reveling, not exegesis or taxonomy (no nos salvan—Lorca’s point as well). Nietzsche’s turn to myth and poetry is a celebration of truth as forgetting. It is because truth is forgotten that it can be continuously re-envisioned. Only by forgetting truth can one exist in the now of life. Without Lethe, no Homer. Cassandra cannot forget the future: “ototototoi popi da. Apollo, Apollo!” “ai ai me!” It is not “speaking in tongues.” Cassandra’s nonce- words are grounded in the intellectual physicality of grief—in discursive intentionality and meaning: “e, e, such pain, such pain” (1014). Ototoi is an ante-logon, the being in speech from which language emerged, at the frontier. Cassandra witnesses her own death, and brings with her a chthonic expressive lament. But it is not proper, responds the Chorus Leader, because Apollo “is not the god for someone who laments… There she goes again, profanely calling on the god who’s not appropriate for joining cries of grief” (1078). Cassandra ototois Apollo with chthonic grief—forms be damned! And the audience, are they appalled by the profanation?3 The ototoi is the madness that exists outside of discourse, not because it is meaningless, but because discourse dimmed it improper (not-adapted, unft). In other words: the in-proper (the chthonic ante-proper that erupts into-proper) is recast as im-proper. The fertile capabilities of the chthonic, germ of language and thought. Ototototoi is a riposte, not out of language and thought, but into its most profound depths—it is more grounded, not less. It is “anterior,” in Laruelle’s sense of existing before (not beyond) the authoritative; and therefore, anterior to “other” or “unconscious,” since those are notions only extraneously graspable from the authoritative position (32-3, 40-1). The chthonic threshold—ototoi visions, the “prehistoric” pomegranate—precedes the type of evaluation regime (again, ex-valuation), that requires “precomprehension of historicity, i.e., of the invariants of history that language, tradition, and community, and so forth are” (Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s 110). The raw and the emotive have in truth been quieted and expelled from philosophical discourse since the Phaedo. Authoritative thought hears in rawness unsophisticated

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infections—the madman, the gossipy woman, and the child’s. Later, the Enlightenment would take this very position, visualized in Jacques-Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii (1786) and The Death of Socrates (1787). Chthonic anticipations: on the one hand, Cassandra’s ototois; on the other, Socrates authoritatively commanding his followers to stop behaving like women and control themselves. In Nietzsche, the place usurped by the cold-hearted philosopher is revendicated by the poet, who knows things “to the very bottom,” that is, chthonically (Human 258, 222).4 Poets, aware of their power, “set out to discredit that which is usually called reality and transform it into the uncertain, apparent, spurious, sinful, sufering, deceptive; they employ all the doubts that exist as to the limitations of knowledge… to spread a wrinkled veil of uncertainty over things” (222). The irony is that Ni- etzsche’s Dionysian body was not fercely dismembered by maenads in ecstatic frenzy, but clinically dissected to transplant selected organs into healthy bodies. This grafting of conceptual tissue, or allograft (allo-, other; -graft, to insert a shoot), brings us back to Lorca: No nos salvan las solitarias en los vidrios, ni los herbolarios donde el metafísico encuentra las otras vertientes del cielo. [The tapeworms in the glass do not save us, nor the herbal shop where the metaphysician fnds the other sky slopes.] (“Luna y panorama de insectos,” Poet 116 ) Exhausted indeed, Baudelaire dreams himself posthumously, chthonically: a lethal kiss for a forever slumber. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe writes that Heidegger’s solution to the German problem of national identifcation is, much like Nietzsche’s, of a “paradoxically Winckelmannian type: ‘we must imitate the Ancients… [to be understood: better than the others have] in order to make our- selves inimitable’” (299). But what is writing if not subjective acts of self-refection? We must read Heidegger subjectively, technologically, and biologically—that is, the way he refuses to think about the Greeks, and therefore the locus of his philosophical fears. From Lacoue-Labarthe we then extrapolate the notion of national identity to that of the personal in two thinkers who fervently desire to be remembered—that is, whose fght is against being forgotten. Because indeed identifcation problems are problems of imitation, the Heideggerian self-staging, which is also Nietzsche’s, is the identifcation with “a past that is not past but still to come… a beginning so great that it dominates every future” (299). Heidegger’s Lethe is a river from which you want to take a tiny sip just

SubStance #153, Vol. 49, no. 3, 2020 SubStance #153, Vol. 49, no. 3, 2020 14 Javier Berzal de Dios before being reincarnated (forget as little as possible when you come to Lethe, that’s also Plato’s recommendation in the concluding lines of the Republic). This is Heidegger and Nietzsche’s mythopoetic aspirational, a messianic remembering in orphic raiment. Nietzsche, in any case, revels in the fcticity of the framework: Ecce Homo doubles down on the fctive— Castiglione is a fundamental pillar of his thought (an alliance recognized and absorbed by W. B. Yeats). There are the refective questions of a writer that, as Maurice Blan- chot puts it, “watches his pen form the letters” (Work 330). But there are also living posthumous thoughts: chthonic words scribbled in feral longhand, discovered later as if written by someone else. (Were they not?) Not merely forgotten or unconscious in the sense of being able to say, I believe the “authenticity of the facts which otherwise I have no reason to doubt. Nevertheless, I have no recollection” (Derrida, Spurs 141); but spectral apparitions of uncertain authenticity. The logic of madness will make you understand why the ancients upheld the Muses. (Or, perhaps more hospitably: “agency is a matter of intra-acting; it is an enactment… Agency is about changing possibilities of change entailed in reconfguring material-discursive apparatuses of bodily production” [Barad 178]). Yet another death of the author: the author swallowed by volcanic depths— visited by the chthonic nymph Melinoe, who drives one mad with protean visions and dreamscapes. Melinoe, Persephone’s ofspring—the night- visitor, the bringer of amorphous sights celebrated in the Orphic Hymns:

In the guise of Plouton Zeus tricked Persephone and through wily plots bedded her; a two-bodied specter sprang forth from Persephone’s fury. This specter drives mortals to madness with her airy apparitions as she appears in weird shapes and strange forms, now plain to the eye, now shadowy, now shining in the darkness— all this in unnerving attacks in the gloom of night. (Athanassakis 57)

“I call upon Melinoe, safron-cloaked nymph of the earth.” Mecha- nisms of confagration where pure forms sink: blazes from earth and from earth, chthonic crumblings. Inter-acts / in terra acts / interred acts. As Charles Bambach notes, Reich academics like Heidegger and Alfred Baeumler fancied the chthonic manageable, a proto-soil-and-blood nomos of the Volk (296 and passim); but, Bataille insist, the chthonic volcanic

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Earth, in its “incandescent reality,” surfaces a destructive force of “hard- ness and depressing rage,” with no fealty to human territories (Visions 200-201). The chthonic here is not an excess as transgression that belies the absolute excess of law itself, as Slavoj Žižek puts it in his analysis of Bataille—otherwise noting the latter’s necessity for law in order to enjoy his transgressions (95)—but a turbulent yet potentially fertile ante- emplacement (Melinoe’s “weird shapes and strange forms”) that posterior systematic order (always a “sieve-order” as Michel de Certeau notes [107]) cannot capture: “excess” is what escapes, in general, but “madness” is what is foretold to leave—in “madness” the sieve-ness of order is made operational, which indeed allows the renegade Bataille to enjoy an escape act (much like Nietzsche’s enjoys the “fugitivus errans” mask). But in madness, not in “madness,” pure forms sink: the collapse of the system as the earth unfastens a sinkhole—the sieve-ness swallowed up, eaten by alluvial caterpillars. Nietzsche has some things to say about madness, that is, “the outbreak of arbitrariness in feeling, seeing, and hearing; the enjoyment in the lack of discipline of the head, the joy in human unreason […] the opposite of the world of the madman is not truth and certainty but… the non-arbitrary in judgement… a law of agreement” (Gay 77). In his Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze avoids this madness like the plague. His enculage of Nietzsche indeed produces a monstrosity: an Apollonian Dionysius, a satyr-gentleman rationally debating Kant. But Nietzsche expels the lov- ers of wisdom until they understand the capricious tactical encounter that love is. And so, Claudia Crawford asks about Derrida and Foucault: “Why, ultimately, is madness condemned to silence according to these thinkers? Because once again, it is maintained that the position from the madman speaks is one place, and the discourse in which he attempts to communicate that position irrevocably another position” (19). “I distrust all systematizers and avoid them” (Nietzsche, Twilight 159). What’s a philosopher to do with such analytic ruin? The creation of concepts, however turbulent, is the creation of stable systematic relationships. (Even if concepts are themselves the product of metaphor, as Sarah Kofman aptly notes [35], they are nonetheless philosophically sys- tematized, that is, emplaced outside of myth’s freeplay relations through the regulatory economies that uphold an academic endeavor critical of unique codes ([119]). To face Nietzsche’s unsystematicity, a rhizome will not sufce, much less cosmic relationships with their theological tinge— John Keats’s negative capability may be closer, alas so subjective. This is the tragic demand of madness: not to think of concepts but to poetically sabotage their structural consistency.

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Yo muchas veces me he perdido para buscar la quemadura que mantiene despiertas las cosas

[Many times I have lost myself to search for the burn that keeps things awake.] (Lorca, “Panorama,” Poet 68)

Authoritative thought needs regulations and, as Bataille puts it, “true poetry is outside laws” (Impossible 158). “Outside” here does not mean a dialectical opposition. On the one hand—and returning Žižek’s point— one can sense the mischievous sense of enjoyment in transgressing (or non-observing) the rule; but on the other hand, Bataille exhumes the chthonic caves below the law—a visceral opening that is prior to the rule and threatens with collapsing it. Hesiod writes in the Theogony: in truth, the frst to come was Chaos (Chasm, Abyss), followed by the Earth and the underworld Tartarus. A downward pilgrimage. Emmanuel Levinas’s interpretation of Jean Wahl’s “transdescendence” comes to mind: the moving towards a deeper below, a lower understanding of life (Levinas 137). Blanchot, in consonance: “Between thinking and dying there is a sort of downwards ascendance… the more we rise, step by step, towards the precipice, the sheer fall, headlong” (Writing 39-40). But the chthonic jour- ney of transdescendence, from the ground down, retains a potential aspect, however perilous, and its primordial fertility… This is death (Thanatos) in the sense of a disruption of unity, yet it is not the outside, the absence, but the appearance of primeval absence amidst layers—Blanchot’s “neither other nor the same” (39). The earthquakes of madness breach thresholds to Hades where solid structures once amass… sieging inside out; and so, systematicity remains unable to delineate the chthonic sinkholes and landslides “where the pure forms sank,” and it can only re-envision them in dialectic discourse (in- proper recast as im-proper). Hecuba asks Cassandra—and here Cicero quotes a now lost (i.e., forgotten, chthonic) text—“why those faming eyes, that sudden rage?” (297). Continental philosophy, in signifcant ways, shares Ludwig Wittgenstein’s therapeutic goals—lessons were learned: sous les pavés, la doline chthonien. This is why excess is enjoyable in relationship to order. It is not merely in dialectical structural terms, but also because order ofers an existential safety net above the precipice that allows for an enjoyment of a sublimated excess. Or, perhaps, reason’s self-enjoyment requires an inversion of the chthonic danger of madness which, sterilized as “madness,” is transformed into wisdom’s silenced aegis in order to shelter discourse from a moonless-night realization of an endless cosmic cave, calcite crystals shining on its vault… but now I am dragging Peter Sloterdijk into Žižek… and I forgot to eat today, again—

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maybe I need to set an alarm, aohj, so defeating. Before incarnation, souls drink from Lethe; perhaps some of us drink so much, we forget how to live. Stop typing. Eat. Western Washington University Notes 1. Translations of Lorca and Baudelaire are mine. For convenience, the bibliographic references direct the reader to bilingual Spanish-English editions of the poems. While I consulted and relied on those, in general I approached the translation from a more literal position in order to focus on word choices. 2. Lorca wrote in one of the manuscripts of El paseo de Buster Keaton a dedication to the artist, who used to call the poet “hijito” (little son): “Adiós Dalilaitita / Dalimita / Dalipiruta / Dametira / Demeter / Dalí” (Peral Vega 82-83). 3. The play of words “Apollo-appalled” is cleverly introduced by Oliver Taplin’s translation to capture Aeschylus’s own play of words, “Apollo-apollon,” “destroyer” (Aeschylus 35 n.6). 4. As Leo Strauss summarizes, from the poet’s point of view, philosophy is “unerotic and a-music, unpoetic… blind to the human things as experienced in life, in acts of living” (6). The poets from chthonian depths send Nietzsche as retribution (Nemesis) against Plato’s Symposium.

Works Cited Aragon, Louis. Paris Peasant. Translated by Simon Watson Taylor, Exact Change, 1994. Athanassaki, Apostolos. The Homeric Hymns. The John Hopkins University Press, 2004. Athanassaki, Apostolos, and Benjamin Wolkow. The Orphic Hymns. The John Hopkins University Press, 2013. Aeschylus. The Oresteia. Translated by Oliver Taplin, Norton, 2018. Alphen, Earnst van, and Mieke Bal. “Introduction.” The Rhetoric of Sincerity, Stanford Uni- versity Press, 2009, pp. 1-16. Bambach, Charles. Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks. Cornell University Press, 2003. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press, 2007. Bataille, Georges. The Impossible. Translated by Robert Hurley, City Light Books, 1991. ---. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Translated by Allan Stoekl, University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Baudelaire, Charles. Les Fleurs du mal. Poulet-Malassis et de Broise, 1857. Baudrillard, Jean. The Illusion of the End. Translated by Chris Turner, Stanford University Press, 1994. Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster. Translated by Ann Smock, University of Nebraska Press, 1995. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall, University of California Press, 1984. Cicero. De Senectute. De Amicitia. De Divinatione. Translated by W.A. Falconer, Harvard University Press, [1923] 2001. Cixous, Hélène. White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text, and Politics. Edited by Susan Sellers, Columbia, 2008. Crawford, Claudia. To Nietzsche: Dionysus, I Love you! Ariadne. State University of New York Press, 1995. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

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Derrida, Jacques. Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction. University of Ne- braska Press, 1989. ---. Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles. Translated by Barbara Harlow, University of Chicago Press, 1979. ---. Writing and Diference. Translated by Alan Bass, University of Chicago Press, 1978. Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy (Second Edition). Translated by John Cot- tingham, Cambridge University Press, 2017. Felman, Shoshana. Writing and Madness: Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis. Stanford Uni- versity Press, 2003. Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Translated by Richard Howard, Vintage, 1988. ---. “Madness, the Absence of Work.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 21, no. 2, 1995, pp. 290-298. Heidegger, Martin. Parmenides. Translated by André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz, Indiana University Press, 1998. Heidegger, Martin, and Eugen Fink. Heraclitus Seminar. Translated by Charles H. Seibert, Northwestern University Press, 1993. Heraclitus. Fragments. Translated by T.M. Robinson, University of Toronto Press, 1991. Kofman, Sarah. Nietzsche and Metaphor. Translated by Duncan Large, Stanford University Press, 1993. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics. Stanford University Press, 1998. Laruelle, François. A Biography of Ordinary Man: On Authorities and Minorities. Translated by Jessie Hock and Alex Dubilet, Polity, 2018. Levinas, Emmanuel. “Reality and Its Shadow.” The Levinas Reader, edited by Seán Hand, Basil Blackwell, 1989, pp. 129-143. Lorca, Federico García. Book of Poems (Selection) / Libro de poemas (selección). Translated by Stanley Appelbaum, Dover, 2004. ---. Poet in New York. Translated by Pablo Medina and Mark Statmen, Grove Press, 2008. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols. Translated by Judith Norman, Cambridge University Press, 2005. ---. The Gay Science. Translated by Josephine Nauckhof, Cambridge University Press, 2001. ---. Human, All Too Human. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale, Cambridge University Press, 1996. Ortega y Gasset, José. “En torno al ‘Coloquio de Darmstadt, 1951.’” Obras Completas VI, Taurus, 2006, pp. 797-810. ---. “Idea del teatro.” Obras Completas IX, Taurus, 2009, pp. 827-882. Pascal, Blaise. Pensées. Translated by Rogier Ariew, Hackett, 2005. Peral Vega, Emilio. Pierrot/Lorca: White Carnival of Black Desire. Tamesis 2013. Pliny the Elder. Natural History. Translated by John Bostock, Henry Bohn, 1855. Price, Margaret. Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life. The University of Michigan Press, 2011. Spinoza, Baruch. Ethics. Translated by Seymour Feldman, Hackett, 1992. Strauss, Leo. On Plato’s Symposium. University of Chicago Press, 2001. Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. The MIT Press, 2009.

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