Memory Theatre

Simon Critchley, Liam Gillick

• Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780992974718
• eBook ISBN: 9780992974732
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

A French philosopher dies during a savage summer heat wave. Boxes carrying his unpublished miscellany mysteriously appear in Simon Critchley's office. Rooting through piles of papers, Critchley discovers a brilliant text on the ancient art of memory and a cache of astrological charts predicting the deaths of various philosophers. Among them is a chart for Critchley himself, laying out in great detail the course of his life and eventual demise. Becoming obsessed with the details of his fate, Critchley receives the missing, final box, which contains a maquette of Giulio Camillo's sixteenth-century Venetian memory theatre, a space supposed to contain the sum of all knowledge. That's when the hallucinations begin...

Memory Theatre

I was dying. That much was certain. The rest is fiction.

The fear of death slept for most of the day and then crept up late at night and grabbed me by the throat, making sleep impossible no matter how much alcohol I had drunk that evening. Insomnia had been my clandestine companion for much of my adult life, at least after the accident. But since the discovery of the boxes and the building of the memory theatre, it had intensified with the force of an implacable logic: If I was going to die anyway, then why sleep?

Then the bladder game would begin. Teeth brushed and flossed, a confident final piss in the toilet, a few pages of Ulysses perused in the exquisite 1960 cloth-bound Bodley Head edition, sleep would softly descend… only to be interrupted by that vague alien-like pressure in the lower abdomen. Do I need to piss or don’t I? Up and down, to and fro, throughout the night until the terrors of darkness disappeared with dawn. Suicidal and sometimes homicidal thoughts would slowly subside. Sleep would come, but too late.

The next day I would walk around with a thousand invisible tiny lacerations around the eyes and a painfully acute sensitivity to noise that would make the most humdrum tasks hugely cumbersome. This had gone on for three years, my fear growing stronger ever since the realization. I was exhausted with exhaustion.

¶ I had moved from England to New York in January 2004 to see if my necronautical activities met with a kinder reception in the New World than the indifference I had experienced in the old one. On return to the University of Essex that June, in an effort to clear up and leave my old office, sort through my papers and finally move my books, a peculiar thing happened.

Semi-hidden in my office, I came across an unfamiliar series of boxes, five of them in a stack, sort of mid-sized, brown cardboard boxes. After speaking to Barbara, the administrator in the philosophy department, it became clear that they were the unpublished papers, notes and remains of a close friend and former philosophy teacher of mine in France, Michel Haar. They had been sent unannounced by his brother from the sanatorium in which Michel died from a heart attack in the dreadful summer heatwave that swept France in 2003. His death had followed a long bout of neurological, psychological and hypochondriacal illnesses that had besieged him since taking early retirement from his chair in the philosophy department at the Sorbonne and which, indeed, were the cause of his early retirement. Truth to tell, there was always a slightly maniacal death wish in Michel. When he finally received his chair in Paris, the dream of every self-respecting French academic, he incorrectly told everyone he was replacing Sarah Kofman, the great Nietzsche scholar, who had committed suicide on the 150th anniversary of Nietzsche’s birth. Michel seemed determined to repeat the fate of his supposed predecessor.

I subsequently tried to contact Michel’s brother Roger, whom I’d met once for dinner in a terrible chain restaurant in Paris (‘Hippopotamus’ or something like that; Michel was a cheapskate and didn’t care about food). I had his phone number in Strasbourg, but it no longer worked. I sent a letter that was later returned unopened, ‘retour à l’envoyeur’ stamped across it. Michel was divorced and estranged from his wife, Anne, after refusing to have children. Narcissistic to the end. I knew of no other immediate family members. I was left with the perplexity of not knowing why these boxes had been sent to me. Michel had a few devoted students who knew him much better than I did. He didn’t really have what you would call friends.

I immediately began to go through the boxes, finding everything within them in apparent disorder, although each box was marked with a sign of the zodiac, from Capricorn to Gemini. The Taurus box was missing. Had it been lost in transit or was there some design at work? The zodiacal signs didn’t surprise me as Michel was possibly the first philosopher since Pico della Mirandola in the late fifteenth century to have a deep commitment to astrology. Like Pico, Michel was a genethlialogist, a maker of horoscopes.

In the box marked Capricorn, I found some absolute gems, such as notes from a lecture on ethics and Marxism by Jean-Paul Sartre at the École normale supérieure in 1959, when Michel was a student. There was also the transcription of a debate between Sartre and several normaliens, including two of my former teachers, Clément Rosset and Dominique Janicaud, and a young, vital and very Sartrean Alain Badiou. I found ‘Notes de cours’ from Louis Althusser’s class on materialism in ancient philosophy, with long discussions of Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius.

To my complete astonishment, I found the original copies of a triangular correspondence between Jean Beaufret, Jacques Lacan and Martin Heidegger, which concerned the latter’s visit to Cerisy-la-Salle near Saint-Lô in Normandy in 1955 to deliver the lecture, ‘Was ist das – die Philosophie?’, the title of which had always made me laugh. Don’t know why. Most amusingly, some of the correspondence between Lacan and Beaufret deals with the topic of what Herr und Frau Heidegger might choose to eat for breakfast chez Lacan during their passage through Paris. Lacan had made complex plans to obtain specially imported Schwarzbrot from Alsace, together with hard cheeses and ham. Beaufret spends some paragraphs reassuring Lacan that the Heideggers looked forward to nothing better than some croissants, a café crème and perhaps a little tartine. Beaufret, a tortured, closeted homosexual who spent most of his days in his pyjamas, was in analysis with Lacan for five years and this was the only time that the great psychoanalyst ever appeared to take any interest in him.

I found a large number of more conventional academic manuscripts in the first box, which kept circling back to the problem of nihilism and to Michel’s lifelong fascination with Heidegger’s mighty two-volume Nietzsche, based on lectures from the late 1930s, but which had appeared in German in 1961 when Michel was in his early twenties. Heidegger himself and many of his apologists saw these lectures as the place where a critique of National Socialist ideology was being articulated after his fateful and hateful tenure as Rector of Freiburg University for about a year from the time the Nazis came to power in 1933. I thought that such apologetics were bullshit. For Michel, much more interestingly, what was at stake was the question of the relation between philosophy and poetry, in particular the disclosive possibilities of non-propositional forms of language such as verbalized nouns and tautologies. To what extent was Nietzsche’s wildly inventive, poetic and polemical thinking contained by Heidegger’s increasingly strident philosophical critique, which interpreted Nietzsche as the mere inversion of Plato and, ultimately, as a figure for our entrapment in metaphysical modes of thinking, rather than a release from them? On this reading, Nietzsche was not the exit from nihilism, but its highest expression, its fulfilment. (There was a German word for this – there always is – but I’ve forgotten it.)

Michel kept coming back, in text after text, to the poetic dimension of Nietzsche’s language and style as that which might escape philosophy. This line of argument was continued in a series of extraordinary short handwritten papers I found on various poets: Saint-John Perse (Michel had introduced me to his long poem, Anabase, when I first met him – I still read it in T. S. Eliot’s translation), Francis Ponge (an essay on the descriptive prose poems in Le parti pris des choses), Wallace Stevens (on his late poems from ‘The Rock’ – he had discovered Stevens through Anne) and Rilke’s ‘Ninth Duino Elegy’ (a commentary on the words, ‘Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable’). On each occasion, he showed, with exquisite delicacy, the fragile force of poetic language as that which pushes back against hard reality and pulls free of flat-footed philosophy.

Poetry lets us see things as they are. It lets us see particulars being various. But – Michel insisted – poetry lets us see things as they are anew. Under a new aspect. Transfigured. Subject to a felt variation. The poet sings a song that is beyond us and yet it is ourselves that it sings. Things change when the poet sings them, but they are still our things: recognizable, common, near, low. We hear the poet sing and press back against the pressure of reality. I instantly thought that many of these texts could have been published, if I could interest the increasingly flagging and beleaguered French and Anglophone academic presses. But such plans soon seemed irrelevant.

Michel had a small cult following in France and the United States, but lacked the capacity for endless and shameless self-promotion that most often defines philosophical fame. He slipped into his pyjamas around 10.30 p.m. and slept like the dead thanks to the chemical kindness of his liberal doctor. While sometimes spotted with moments of brilliance, Michel’s talks in English were usually long, rambling and incoherent. He also often seemed to lose interest in what he was saying.

In the Aquarius box, I found many strange maps. Michel had somehow obtained an annotated cloth print of the Mappa Mundi from Hereford Cathedral. This extraordinary object from around 1300 presents the world divided into three continents (Europe, Asia, Africa), with its centre in Jerusalem, which was shaped like a little keyhole. I came across a series of almost fantastical antique maps of Australia or more precisely New Holland, seemingly drawn by French explorers from the early to mid-1700s. There were hand-drawn maps of the estuarial systems of Virginia and North Carolina, combined with exhaustive descriptions of flora and fauna. Most...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Contents
• Memory Theatre
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Copyright