What is a Metaphysical Experience?

Commitment and Contemporaneity in Cultural Analysis

Mario Veen

Originally written in 2005 as a Master's thesis. Lightly edited to correct typographical errors and garbled characters; otherwise unrevised.

It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, - is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, Letter 8

Wohin springt der Absprung, wenn er vom Grund abspringt? Springt er in einen Abgrund? Ja, solange wir den Sprung nur vorstellen und zwar im Gesichtskeis des metaphysischen Denkes. Nein, insofern wir springen und uns loslassen. Wohin? Dahin, wohin wir schon eingelassen sind: in das Gehören zum Sein. Das Sein selbst aber gehört zu uns; denn nur bei uns kann es als Sein wesen, d.h. an-wesen.

Whereto does the leap leap, when it leaves the ground? Does it plunge into an abyss? It does, as long as we merely imagine the leap within the scope of metaphysical thinking. It does not, insofar as we leap and let ourselves go/let go of ourselves. Whereto? There, where we are already admitted: in our belonging to being. Yet being itself belongs to us; since only with us can it present itself as being, that is, be present. [1]

— Martin Heidegger, “The Principle of Identity”, p.25

0. Introduction

Cultural analysis is a practice that studies cultural objects with an awareness that this study itself is as cultural as the objects it commits itself to. As such, this practice analyzes its objects from a basic experience of culture, as well as in terms of this experience.

This project is an investigation into contemporaneity and commitment. Contemporaneity is the object of cultural analysis, and commitment is what makes any analysis possible. When thematized as a concept, the word contemporaneity designates the situation of belonging to, or happening during the same period of time. As such, it is not restricted to what we call “the present,” but rather theorizes our presence to the temporal structure of present, past, and future. Contemporaneity is that in which our own presence endures, and calls for an analysis that is guided by what is missing in its concepts.

What follows is an investigation into the transductive relationship between the cultural analyst and the object of analysis within the framework of contemporaneity. To characterize this relationship as transductive means that the subject and object of perception emerge in a primordial interfaciality, outside of which neither is thinkable. For the duration of the performance of the analysis, the analyst is committed to the object of analysis. It is this commitment that sets the stage for analysis, and makes it first of all possible for anything to be present or absent on it. Commitment is a performative act that creates the possibility of being present to an object by delineating and clarifying in advance the kind of objects that can enter the analysis, as well as the way in which these objects show up.

The word commitment (com-mittere, to send with) holds within it at least five ways in which the analyst can work with the object of analysis. It can mean doing, performing, or perpetrating, as in “committing a murder”, suggesting that there is a certain violence or secrecy involved when the object is being committed. Secondly, when we commit ourselves to the care of a doctor, it means to entrust or put in charge. In this sense, we delegate authority to that which we are committed to. Thirdly, the word can also designate a legitimate confinement, as when we commit someone to a hospital or prison cell. This suggests that both the analyst and the object of analysis are confined to the analytic space. As long as commitment prevails, it is not possible for either to escape the analysis. This meaning could also be seen as a stronger version of the second one, since that to which authority is delegated designates a certain space that we have not decided on ourselves. While the act of being committed is legitimate, it may not always be voluntary – at least not for the patient. The fourth sense in which commitment is used shifts attention from confinement to the end to which this confinement is a means. To commit something to memory, for example, means to store it, in order to safeguard it for the future. Finally, commitment can also mean that one is bound or obligated to something as by pledge, as one can be committed to orders. Being committed to something in this way usually means that we have to act in a certain way on account of a higher authority.

These five senses in which commitment is used are quite close to each other, and seem to depend primarily on the object of commitment. Whether it is a crime, someone who takes care of us, a hospital or prison, memory or a safe, or an order or a promise, determines whether the object of commitment is perpetrated, taken care of, locked up, stored, or instructed. In committing ourselves to analysis, we project our limited experience on the world in general. This is why analysis needs objects that will always exceed it, and never allow it to come to rest. That analysis does nonetheless come to rest, if only temporarily, for example by being written down as a text, means that while the object exceeds that which can be analyzed, our commitment exceeds the object. This object, which is part of culture as a whole in ways that we will never be able to grasp as a whole, is claimed as being contemporary with our existence, and presented as if it experiences the moods and movements that we go through while we analyze it. This is why analysis should proceed by making committed claims about the object. These claims do not have an objective – or subjective – truth value, but they express that which we experience when we find ourselves face to face with the object.

A committed claim is a performative utterance that confers a certain delineated authority on a certain object in a way that confines this object within certain limits, in order to transmit it as a temporally structured claim that expresses a certain view of the world in a way that is focalized for others that are present within the space in which this commitment takes place. During the analysis, the kind of claims as well as that which they are committed to can change, and in fact should change for the analysis to become fruitful, if only because in each of these movements it becomes clear what the analysis was committed to before it let go of its commitment. Both Heidegger and Adorno theorize this moment as a radical experience in which the object of commitment shows itself in its withdrawal, while nothing in fact changes. What takes place, instead, is an emotional and existential experience of the totality within which our analysis is performed. Attunement, for Heidegger, is the ability “to be touched by something.” (138) He gives the example of a public speaker, who speaks from and to his attunement to the public. The realization that possibilities for action that we can see are determined by something like a mood, humor, boredom, etcetera, leads him to look for a fundamental experience of the world in which our being in it can be experienced as a whole. In boredom, for example, everything that shows up is already boring from the start. In fear, whatever we may become present to is already disclosed as a harmful object that we cannot control, and that approaches us from a suspicious area. The object is close, and comes closer, but is never close enough for us to reach it. That fear does not depend on the object of fear becomes clear from the fact that when fails to show up and harm us, the fear only grows stronger. (Par. 30)

Any analysis is therefore restricted in advance by the frame of mind in which it is performed, and this basic experience determines what shows up, how it shows up, and who it shows up for. In Being and Time, as well as in “What is Metaphysics?” Heidegger looks for a fundamental mood in which we are forced to face this frame of mind itself. When this happens, the world recedes as a totality, and we feel anxious, but not for one particular object. When the anxiety passes, we are forced to conclude that the object of our fear was properly nothing. An essential development has taken place, and yet nothing in fact changes.

What does this mean, that nothing in fact changes? According to Heidegger, “the world is already presupposed” (366) if it is possible for us to encounter entities within it. We have no control over the fact that they are discovered alongside our own existence. Our freedom, which is delineated by the fact that we have not brought ourselves into being, and have been born into a world that we have not made ourselves, is limited to “what one discovers and discloses each time, in which direction, how, and how far.” (366) When we think back of an event in our childhood, for example, we might be able to discover exactly what happened, how important it was to us, how it shaped our life, and how we interpreted it. The necessary condition for these relations to the experience – that it happened – this is something we will never reach through representation. (135).

In his Camera Lucida (1980), Roland Barthes writes about a photograph of his mother without showing the photograph itself. Since he is not sure about the existence of something like the that of “Photography”, he started his inquiry “with no more than a few photographs, the ones I was sure existed for me.” (8) This should be the first methodological step toward cultural analysis, and it is also how Heidegger starts the second division of Being and Time – “from and in a basic experience of the ‘object’ to be disclosed.” (232) Object, in Heideggerian phrasing, here literally means something that is thrown ahead of us, so that we actually have it before us. Representation, in the sense of merely imagining, is too weak a term to designate this kind of object. The object really has to be there when we are analyzing it, like the photograph of Barthes’ mother, which was probably lying on his desk when he was writing about it. We can use the term representation only if it is taken at face value, as re-presenting. Then the phrase “the analyst represents the object of analysis” comes to mean that, while analyzing, the analyst becomes present over and over again to the object. The “re-” is to signify that when the analysis leads astray – “gets distracted” – from the object, the analyst has to become present to the object again. Naturally, the experience of it will not be the same anymore – something has changed.

Our objects of analysis do not need to be there spatially while we analyze them, like Barthes photograph. What is necessary, however, is that they are experienced as being contemporary, so that what happens to the object is integrally linked with what happens to the analysis – and therefore the analyst. The first part of this essay will be devoted to an analysis of two situations that determine the way in which we view the world to such a degree that they are at the heart of any analysis. Trauma, the inability to abandon objects to time, represents the flipside of commitment. When we become present to our everyday life as a traumatic situation, this means that we find ourselves in a world in which change is impossible, since we hold on to one particular object that sets the terms and conditions for the way anything can be experienced. Miracles, on the other hand, represent the possibility of letting go of that which we are committed to, no matter how impossible this may seem. For example, the fact that we are bound to the laws of physics, and that we do not know how these laws come into being, may turn out to be a traumatic situation. The concept of trauma, in this analysis, is used as a conceptual tool to designate these kinds of situations, and not as a psychological phenomenon – although this may be part of it. The concept of the miracle, likewise, is not taken in the religious sense, but rather as the possibility of seemingly impossible situations to occur. The main purpose of both of these concepts it to make us present to a totality in which we find ourselves always in one way or another.

When a concept designates a totality, it makes assertions about all possible objects that can appear within it. We can say, for example, that all possible objects can be seen as image, as text, as medium, etcetera. Yet any one concept fails to unlock for us the object as we experience it. Adorno writes in a discussion of the relation between concept and object that “by gathering around the object of cognition, the concepts potentially determine the object’s interior.” (162) He uses the metaphor of a well-guarded safe-deposit box to illustrate his idea of constellation, in which one circles around what is to be unsealed, “in response, not to a single key or a single number, but to a combination of numbers.” (163)

Trauma and miracle represent two ways in which an experience of culture can be metaphysical. Before the actual analysis of a particular cultural object starts, we should be present to those objects that we cannot abandon at any point during the analysis. The kind of laboratory we do our research in, to use a metaphor, determines what will be regarded as a research object, an instrument, or the border between the controlled research area and everyday life. If cultural analysis, which is a particular experience of everyday life, has a metaphysical dimension, then we should ask what metaphysics is. The second part is devoted to the implications of Adorno’s and Heidegger’s view of metaphysics, and the implications this has for cultural analysis. Both thinkers have articulated the idea that metaphysics is something to be experienced, rather than merely an object of contemplation. The former’s “Meditations on Metaphysics” is inspired by hope and despair, and the wish to express a fundamental unfulfillment with culture as a whole. For Adorno, metaphysics is possible only as a legible constellation of things in being. From those it would get the material without which it would not be; it would not transfigure the existence of its elements, however, but would bring them into a configuration in which the elements unite to form a script. (407) For Heidegger, metaphysics expresses itself in a fundamental ontology in which an understanding of what it is to be in the world is developed and appropriated. (196) In “What is Metaphysics?” he articulates the view that this is only possible when we establish ourselves as questioners by posing a question that encompasses the whole of metaphysical problems, and that calls our existence as questioners into question. In the following analysis of trauma and miracle as cultural phenomena, we will inquire into the ways in which they can be made legible as a constellation of objects and concepts, as well as how they put the subject of the experience into question.

The experience of these situations makes us present to a metaphysical question that concerns cultural analysis: what are we committed to? In terms of subjectivity, this means to ask what frames the subject. From the outset there are three possibilities. First, it could be the world in which the subject exists, and that contains its whole life from birth to death. Second, it could be the things (objects, events, actions, experiences, etcetera) one deals with, and in the context of which one is restricted to the present situation. Third, it could be “something else” that is not (entirely) determined by, and cannot be totally explained in terms of the two previous possibilities. Concepts such as the soul, agency, will, the body, and subjectivity itself can be seen as ways of making sense of this latter possibility.

1. When Experience Fails

Kirilow: Man is unhappy because he does not know that he is happy; only for this reason. This is all, the whole thing! Who realizes this will become happy instantly, in the same moment.
Stawrogin: When did you realize, then, that you are so happy?
Kirilow: Last Tuesday, no, Wednesday – it was already Wednesday, because past midnight.
Stawrogin: What was the occasion?
Kirilow: I do not remember, there was no occasion; I was walking around my room… it does not matter. I stopped my clock, it was 3.37.
—Dostojevski, The Demons

My life has been filled with terrible misfortune; most of which never happened.
—Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, Essays

I've thought of committing suicide, but I've got so many problems, that wouldn't solve them all.
—Woody Allen, Anything Else

Today, too, I had an experience that I hope I shall understand in a few days time.
—Jørgen Leth, The Perfect Human

A. Trauma

Some events resist integration in the existing state of affairs, and end in trauma. Ernst van Alphen calls trauma “failed experience.” (1997: 206) He points out that its failure to be integrated in the current situation makes it impossible to voluntarily remember these events. When they come back to us, they present themselves without our control, and without any distance to us.

“A traumatic memory, or better, re-enactment, does not know [a temporal] distance towards the event. The person who experiences a traumatic re-enactment is still inside the event, present at it. (…) The traumatic event that happened in the past does not belong to a distanced past: it is still present in the present.” (207, his emphasis) In a traumatic experience something ‘comes up’ within the world that fails to ‘go down’ in it. Something happens that fundamentally changes the way in which we interpret our world, and ourselves. It becomes the defining moment of our lives, and we find ourselves in a double bind: we are unable to make sense of the experience, but only through that experience is it possible to understand ourselves. As a result of this double bind the experience is constantly relived. We make sense of the world in the light of it, so that it constitutes the context of our lives. No matter how much time passes, all performed actions are a reiteration of the reaction to the way in which the traumatic event occurred – and continues to occur everyday in the present.

David Cronenberg’s film Crash (1996) visualizes how the re-enactment of trauma can shape one’s entire life. James Ballard, the protagonist, survives a near-fatal car accident. The event continues to haunt him, and he is fascinated by it at the same time. Crash portrays the way in which Ballard and other characters construct their world around car accidents. They track down car wrecks and their victims right after the accident, admiring the scene of the accident, they re-enact famous historical crashes, and drive around town as dangerously as possible. Their fear linked with the accident is transformed into an erotic desire for it. Instead of reliving the event every night in his nightmares, Ballard creates a world in which driving safely is a sin, and where arriving at the destination without a scratch is the accident. This world is perverted in the true sense. Instead of coming to terms with the status quo again after his accident, the world has to come to terms with his experience so that there will no longer be anything accidental about it.

A traumatic experience consists of a discovery of who we are, but this is rejected as something that we should not be. In this rejection, we also reject ourselves. Van Alphen notes the impossibility of narrators of traumatic experiences to look at themselves while they remember the event. Accounts of trauma often come across as distant and cold, devoid of any emotion. “The narrator is not able to pay attention to what happened to himself in the camp, but not to his life in the present, after the Holocaust, either.” (2002: 205) Adorno asks himself “whether after Auschwitz you can go on living – especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by all rights should have been killed, may go on living.” (1973: 363) The obvious question is why Adorno did not regard his escape from a horrible death as a miracle, destiny, or, at the least, as a fortunate accident. I could very well imagine that escaping from such a terrible situation makes one aware what it is we want in life, as we so often hear about people who had a near-death experience. Why, in other words, is trauma incapable of inducing change? Adorno’s answer is that the kind of subjectivity needed to escape a camp is the same kind of subjectivity that made the camps possible in the first place, and therefore cannot be embraced as something positive. The narrator is still inside the event, as a cold spectator. It changed things for him forever, but he for whom things change is also lost.

There are three elements in the original event, that together make up this context. First, there is that which happened. Let us take a relatively innocent example: a high school student answers a teacher’s question, and all the other students start laughing. Secondly, there is the interpretation of what happened: the student concludes that all the other students start laughing because of his answer. They might have been laughing about something else that had nothing to do with our poor student, but this is what he concludes. Third, what happened is very important to him – so important that his interpretation of the event is relevant to how he views himself. We could imagine that if this is the first time that this timid student ventures a response to a teacher’s question, and if he is completely certain that his answer is right, it comes as a big shock to him that the response is laughter. In the case of trauma the event is so relevant, that it means something in the realm of who we are. Our student, even if he thinks that the others are laughing at him, could dismiss it as something insignificant. However, a lot is at stake for him, and he concludes that he gave the incorrect answer when he was so confident about being right, and that if this is the case, he must be very stupid. The reason that his answer is wrong, he concludes, is that there is something wrong with him.

In trauma something happens that resists integration in the status quo to such an extent that it calls for a revision of who we are. The conflation of what happens with our interpretation of ourselves is so powerful that we have to come up with a whole new interpretation of ourselves. Our high school student encounters laughter at a moment where he puts his intelligence at stake. He concludes that, since the others are laughing, it means that he is stupid. This is what is wrong with me, he thinks, and instantly comes up with a way to compensate for it. As if from a distance, he sees himself making a joke. The others, including the teacher, laugh even harder, but now they are laughing with him instead of at him.

If we, who have probably never suffered from trauma in the narrow medical sense of the word, want to reach an understanding of the concept of trauma from within a specific basic experience, it is probably through these kinds of everyday situations that everyone experiences at one point in their life, and that signal crucial stages in our development. I mentioned in my introduction that I want to write about everyday life, but it is unclear what exactly ‘everyday life’ is, and what it means to write about it. On the one hand, the word ‘everyday’ has connotations such as common, ordinary, average, and mundane. On the other hand, it has an air of collectivity: ‘in everyday life, people behave such and such’. I use everydayness in an ironic way, since the topics under discussion are far from ordinary, nor do I want to take a sociologist’s perspective on how people in general behave. Instead, when I speak of everyday life, I mean to talk about our life – that is, your life and my life. Whether I am the text, or, as I experience it, the writer of the text – and whether this makes any difference – is besides the point. The important thing is that you are the reader, and I am speaking to you. To suppose that we share anything at all is presumptuous in any case, but since you are reading this essay that I wrote, I daresay that we do share something. What is more, our lives are far from ordinary. As the American poet E.E. Cummings put it: The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople – it's no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike. Mostpeople have less in common with ourselves than the squarerootofminusone. You and I are human beings;mostpeople are snobs. Take the matter of being born. What does being born mean to mostpeople? Catastrophe unmitigated. Socialrevolution. The cultured aristocrat yanked out of his hyperexclusively ultravoluptuous superpalazzo,and dumped into an incredibly vulgar detentioncamp swarming with every conceivable species of undesirable organism. Mostpeople fancy a guaranteed birthproof safetysuit of nondestructible selflessness. If mostpeople were to be born twice they'd improbably call it dying-- you and I are not snobs. We can never be born enough. We are human beings;for whom birth is a supremely welcome mystery,the mystery of growing:which happens only and whenever we are faithful to ourselves. You and I wear the dangerous looseness of doom and find it becoming. Life,for eternal us,is now'and now is much to busy being a little more than everything to seem anything,catastrophic included.

For these reasons – that our live is both private and unusual as opposed to public and ordinary – to write about everyday life means to write about it paradoxically.

Since I am writing about our life, I would like to invite you to ‘listen’ to the examples I give in this essay – as well as to the objects that I quote – with your own life in mind. I try to use examples that are flexible, without having to take recourse to generalizations. The examples should be so specific that they become universal, so that the reader can make them specific to his or her own life again. So instead of visualizing a white middle class male, you could try to remember a situation in which you put yourself on the spot, in which the way you act is very important to your self-image, and in which this effort fails. Perhaps it takes place in a classroom, perhaps on the playground or at the office. Perhaps you are being laughed at, perhaps ridiculed or even bluntly ignored. Perhaps you decide that you are stupid, perhaps that you are different, ugly, in the wrong place at the wrong time, misunderstood. The point about the high school student in relation to trauma is the universality of that experience within his life. In other words, every time he finds himself in a situation where his intelligence is at stake, he reacts by being funny – thus reiterating his reaction to the original traumatic event.

While we are at it, there is something else to say about the methodology of this essay. Writing about anything, at least writing about it here, means to bring to bear concepts on objects. Concepts are not just words, even if they are words. Mieke Bal makes a point about this in her book Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: I say ‘word’ here instead of concept because, in these cases, the dilution deprives the concept of its conceptualizing force: of its capacity to distinguish and thereby to make understandable its specificity; hence, to ‘theorize’ the object, which would thus further knowledge, insight, and understanding. ‘Trauma,’ for example, is used casually to refer to all sad experiences, whereas the concept in fact theorizes a distinctive psychic effect caused by happenings so life-shattering that the subject assaulted by them is, precisely, unable to process them qua experience. ‘Trauma’ as concept, therefore, offers a theory that the casual use of the word obliterates. (2002: 33)

Characterizing trauma as only having psychic effects for an individual subject is of course a debatable claim, and one that maintains a strict division between mind and world. There is also a distinctive corporeal effect to trauma, arguably only corporeal – bypassing psychology as a whole, as I will point out near the end of this chapter. Moreover, collective experiences could end up in collective trauma. Trauma is the concept under scrutiny, and its object is everydayness – not the word in its every day use, nor do I simply want to make the claim that everybody suffers from some kind of trauma, or that a traumatic experience is a metaphysical experience. Rather, if we analyze metaphysical experience as trauma, this might enlighten us.

Although metaphysical experience is not trauma, it is possible to conceive of the former in terms of the latter. A metaphysical experience, too, is so life-shattering that everything which happens afterwards will take place in the context of that event, which, in its failure to become something remembered, can only be relived. For its failure to be absorbed by the status quo the singular, the accident, the nonidentical, becomes the universal: the rule, the identical. The fundamental difference is that in the case of trauma we long to escape from the event, while metaphysical experiences are the very thing we long for – and we escape from this longing instead. Metaphysical experience fails precisely when it does not fail to be experienced within the status quo. It has the heart of trauma, but we should not be left traumatized. Nor should the experience be degraded to one that can be made sense of in the way we are used to making sense of experiences. At the intersection of trauma and metaphysical experience, psychologists pass us in the opposite direction. While they try to bring it back to the status of an experience that can be made sense of as an accident – which means, an event that was not caused by the subject of experience, and for which he or she is not to blame – we want to follow it through as an experience that provides a link between the eternal and the mundane.

To come to terms with the kind of subjectivity needed to survive the trauma one needs to be in a world that makes possible that trauma over and over again. This is the guilt that Adorno writes about. (1973: 363) How is it possible to live in such a world? A traumatic experience reveals that the whole world is like the object of the experience, and at the same time this world is rejected as something that should not be. With the world, we also reject ourselves as being in a world where everything that is, is like that. As we said before, trauma changes things forever, but he for whom things change is also lost. Perhaps this revealing power is the truth of trauma: it shows that the singular is the true universal. Traditionally, experience is that by which people come to terms with the world. To say that someone is experienced means that the subject of experience is – to use a musical metaphor – in tune with the world. Inexperienced are those who may have big ideas, but not the slightest clue about how to imply those ideas at a practical level. Bluntly put, their mind is not adapted to the world. Being experienced here means being knowledgeable about the world, and skilled to perform actions in it. An experience, as a singular event, serves to add a piece of knowledge about the world that helps us to act in it more efficiently. On the other hand, it can also raise or lower our expectation about what can possibly happen. Again, the experienced are better capable of both identifying what is relevant and making sense of it in a way that turns it into operative knowledge – which would lead one to assume that somehow their mind is more developed, or more flexible, or better in tune with the actual state of affairs. In this way, the experienced person is capable of giving the object of experience a place within the world as he knows it. Of course, even the most experienced person projects something limited upon the world as a whole. If, however, something happens to an “experienced” person that is so devastating that it can neither be done away with as something irrelevant, nor be made sense of within the status quo, it is this “being experienced” itself that becomes the object of experience. The process in which the subject gains experience about the object of experience – in its interpretation of what happens – whereby the object transforms the subject, so that the subject can in turn transform the experienceable world again – so that our interpretation becomes what happens – this process is suspended as a whole. It is no longer the subject who has to adapt itself to the world, but the world as a whole that has to come to terms with the object of experience.

That a singular object conceals that the whole world is like it is an idea that Baudrillard finds in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Foucault claims that prisons exist in order to conceal the carceral nature of society. (Foucault, 1977) Baudrillard, in turn, argues that Disneyland is “there to conceal the fact that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America, which is Disneyland.” (Baudrillard, 1988) It creates the illusion that, once we leave Disneyland, we enter the adult world again. When experience fails to be processed qua experience, we fail to see it as a singular event that comes up, affects us, and is terminated as an event. Just as Holocaust survivors continue to live in a concentration camp long after the end of WWII, our high school student grows up in a world where it is decided that he is stupid. Is it justified to make such a comparison? This is what we shall find out later. For now, it is already possible to draw a parallel between Baudrillard’s description of the raison d’être of Disneyland, and the concentration camps, in order to transform the concept of trauma into something we can work with. Jacques Lusseyran, a French Holocaust survivor, can help us on our way. In Buchenwald the blind Lusseyran met Jeremy. In his autobiography he describes his inability to understand why Jeremy did not close his eyes for the sufferings in the camp, and did not dream of better places. Jeremy explains: "For one who knows how to see, things are just as they always are." he said. At first I did not understand. I even felt something quite close to indignation. What? Buchenwald like ordinary life – impossible! . . . I remember that I could not accept this. It had to be worse – or if not – then more beautiful. Until finally Jeremy enabled me to see. [my emphasis] Adorno, referring to Proust’s description of childish experiences, points out that to a child “it is self-evident that what delights him in his favorite village is found only there, there alone and nowhere else.” His mistake creates “the model of experience, of a concept that will end up as the concept of the thing itself, not as a poor projection of things.” (Adorno, 1973: 372) Lusseyran and the others make this same mistake, and Jeremy corrects it. While all the others saw Buchenwald as an exception, an accident, a terrible break of ordinary life, Jeremy showed that Buchenwald was not unique, not even privileged to be one of the places of greatest human suffering. . . .Jeremy taught me, with his eyes, that Buchenwald was in each one of us, baked and rebaked, tended incessantly. nurtured in a horrible way. And that consequently we could vanquish it, if we desired to with enough force. For Jeremy, the incarceration in the camp was not a life-shattering experience. He said that in ordinary life, with good eyes, we would have seen the same horrors. We had managed to be happy before. Well! The Nazis had given us a terrible microscope: the camp. This was not a reason to stop living. Jeremy was an example: he found joy in the midst of Block 57. He found it during moments of the day where we found only fear. And he found it in such great abundance that when he was present we felt it rise in us. Inexplicable sensation, incredible even, there where we were: joy was going to fill us. (Lusseyran, 1987. my emphasis)

Just as the prison and other institutions served as a microscope for Foucault, and Disneyland and Watergate for Baudrillard, Lusseyran saw through the eyes of Jeremy that Buchenwald concealed the sufferings of the whole society, and that, since it was possible to live before Auschwitz, it is also possible to go on living after it. Not only that – we managed to be happy before, so we can be it again.

The very problem of trauma, however, is that it does not allow for anything new to happen. Baudrillard identifies places such as Disneyland as revealing that the whole society is like that, and that therefore there is no escape from it. For Foucault, the carceral society shows that there is no escape from the panopticon. Both these authors – Baudrillard perhaps more that Foucault – are quite negative about the kind of subjects these societies create. Again, the world is rejected as something that should not be, but, since this is the only world we can live in, it also contains all the possible methods of understanding ourselves.

Nothing new can happen if we only anticipate within the trauma. Our hopes, so to speak, are trimmed down to what is thought possible, so that we will never again experience the same pain we experienced in the trauma. Fleas in a flea circus are trained in a similar way. They are locked up in jars of different heights. Attempting to escape their prison, they first jump against the lid of the jar a couple of times. After a while, however, they learn that if they jump just below the lid, they will not hurt themselves. Oddly, even when the lid is removed they will stick to that height, and this makes them particularly suitable to be ‘trained’. For us it seems nonsensical that they do not notice that they can jump as high as they want to, but this is only because we can assume a ‘god’s eye perspective’. That for the fleas the limits are very real means that they cannot transcend them. Hence, the restriction that matters is not the ‘objective’ one that was there at some moment in the past and has now vanished, but the restriction to the possibilities for action that they can anticipate. If a fly is put in the same situation, it will keep on flying into the walls of the container until either the lid is eventually removed, or until it runs out of oxygen. Which option is better? Again we can turn to Adorno.

Spellbound, the living have a choice between involuntary ataraxy – an esthetic life due to weakness – and the bestiality of the involved. Both are wrong ways of living. But some of both would be required for the right désinvolture and sympathy. (Adorno: 1973, 364)

We are not insects, of course, but we do impose restrictions on our anticipation of what is possible. Trauma constitutes the limit. Before that, everything is possible – beyond it, impossible. When we try to connect nine dots arranged in this order with four straight lines, without lifting pen from paper, this seems impossible: In order to make it possible, we have to break through one of those restrictions we have imposed on ourselves. For example, most people who are confronted with this problem will assume that it is only allowed to draw the lines within the box. When this assumption is let go of, the impossible suddenly becomes possible. In this way, we can also make it possible to connect the dots – again with straight lines and without lifting pen from paper – with three lines, or two, or even with one. Moreover, if you have actually solved the puzzle in this case, this could mean that you had to let go of assumptions such as that one cannot draw on someone else’s work, or that it is forbidden to draw on text.

This is of course only a silly intellectual exercise, but it shows how sometimes our world has to come to terms with the object of experience – the object of experience being that breakthrough in which it becomes possible to connect the lines. The best know breakthrough took place in Archimedes’ bathtub (after which he allegedly called out ‘Eureka!’), and the most influential ones are probably those of Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud. The consecutive assumptions that were let go of by them – that we are the center of the universe, that we are the origin of the species, and that we are masters of ourselves – transformed our world into one where we occupy no privileged place, and where we have no control.

Before we take a closer look at this letting go of assumptions, let us review what has been discussed so far. I started out by saying that trauma is failed experience. It places us in a double bind in which the traumatic experience is constantly relived. Our interpretation of what happened in the traumatic experience becomes the context in which we understand ourselves, and whatever happens after the trauma will be interpreted in this context. Since we attribute the failure of experience to ourselves, and since this failure is irrevocable, to live after the trauma means to compensate for the way we failed in it, i.e., for what is wrong with us. This is by no means an ‘objective’ failure, or one that anyone could blame us for, but the experience of not finding a place, not belonging, or acting incorrectly is interpreted as a fault in who we are. The truth of trauma is that it reveals that the whole world is like the object of experience, and that, since we have managed to be happy before the traumatic experience, we can be happy again. The problem, however, is that as long as our interpretation of what happens after the trauma does not go beyond the context of the traumatic experience, it is impossible to experience anything truly different.

The experience of a trauma is a metaphysical experience insofar as it is an experience of wholeness and eternity that the conventional concept obliterates. Even though this wholeness can so far only be interpreted in negative terms as a totalitarian experience outside of which nothing exists, the whole can be seen in withdrawal, and experienced in a double fault where trauma, the failure of experience, fails, as we have already seen in the description of Jeremy. Trauma is an example of how an experience can be something metaphysical. We made the passage from experience to that which lies beyond experience, but in such a way that experience loses its grip. The experience has been metaphysical, but in such a way that we are now trapped in a world where it is impossible to experience anything beyond it.

It is precisely this impossibility that shows us how to proceed: In a closed system of immanence, any difference will be a miracle.

B. Miracle

We cannot help but give the cold serenity experienced in trauma a more holy, mystical sense. For us outsiders, who cannot imagine what it must be like to be in a camp or a car crash, perhaps the category of miracles can serve as a concept to visualize what a metaphysical experience would look like. For this, let us turn to Quentin Tarantino’s film Pulp Fiction (1994), in which three surreal stories are intertwined. One story deals with the gangsters Jules and Vincent. In the first scene these two sitting down to eat a meal in a restaurant where a robbery is taking place. The movie then skips to a scene of the two paid killers going to make a house call, trying to scare someone into paying his debts. Suddenly a man bursts out of the closet, emptying his gun at the two gangsters, who miraculously survive and kill their attacker. Then Vincent accidentally shoots someone in the head and a ‘fixer’ is called in to clean up the mess. Later he meets a girl who is related to his boss. She nearly dies of a drug overdose until a needle of medicine is trusted into her heart to revive her. In the epilogue of this movie, the gangsters Jules and Vincent go to a coffee shop. There we see that Vincent has learned nothing from the ordeals he has been through, but Jules reveals that he has made an important decision.

Jules has experienced their survival as a miracle. By all means their attacker in the apartment should have killed them, but they remain unscratched. As they sit down for a cup of coffee in the restaurant, the following conversation follows. By then, it is already clear that Jules has decided to leave the violent gangster life, in order to ‘walk the earth’, until God will put him where he belongs. Jules: I just been sittin’ here thinkin’.

Vincent (mouthful of food): About what?

Jules: The miracle we witnessed.

Vincent: The miracle you witnessed. I witnessed a freak occurrence. Jules: Do you know what a miracle is?

Vincent: An act of God.

Jules: What’s an act of God? Vincent: I guess it’s when God makes the impossible possible. And I’m sorry Jules, but I don’t think what happened this morning qualifies.

Jules: Don't you see, Vince, that shit don't matter. You're judging this thing the wrong way. It's not about what. It could be God stopped the bullets, he changed Coke into Pepsi, he found my fuckin' car keys. You don't judge shit like this based on merit. Whether or not what we experienced was an according-to-Hoyle miracle is insignificant. What is significant is I felt God's touch, God got involved.

Vincent: But why?

Jules: That's what's fuckin' wit' me! I don't know why. But I can't go back to sleep. Vincent: When did you make this decision – while you were sitting there eatin' your muffin?

Jules: Yeah. I was just sitting here drinking my coffee, eating my muffin, playin' the incident in my head, when I had what alcoholics refer to as a "moment of clarity." Vincent is very clear that what happened can be interpreted in different ways, and that frankly Jules’ obsession with the incident annoys him. The event may have been highly unusual and irregular, but definitely not impossible. Right after the incident, he tries to convince Jules that these things, although they are irregular, do happen sometimes: Vincent: ...ever seen that show "COPS?" I was watchin' it once and this cop was on it who was talkin' about this time he got into this gun fight with a guy in a hallway. He unloads on this guy and he doesn't hit anything. And these guys were in a hallway. It's a freak, but it happens.

Vincent refers to a previous experience to incorporate what happened into the status quo, as a fortunate accident. He has learnt the hard reality of the gangster life, and something like this cannot upset him.

Jules, on the other hand, takes a different perspective. What matters is not what happened, nor whether it should be interpreted as an accident or a miracle. What is significant is not the debated miracle which precipitated his change but rather that the change has occurred and that Jules felt the touch of God. What he felt, in effect, is that the impossible has been made possible for him. The object of experience cannot be experienced, and yet he experienced it. Whereas Vincent tells him that there is no explanation for something like this, and does not need one, Jules also cannot explain it, but has to make sense of it. He “can’t go back to sleep,” as he puts it, and the world will never be the same again. His characterization of the miracle is puzzling. He experiences it, but the characteristics that we usually attribute to experience – the actual event and our interpretation of it – are deemed irrelevant. Hume’s definition of a miracle as “a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent” seems to apply here. (Hume, 123n) Hume’s argument against the existence of miracles, modeled after an argument made against the doctrine of transubstantiation by John Tillotson, Archbishop of Canterbury2 , is that the belief in miracles contradicts with common sense. A belief in miracles contradicts the doctrine that like events under like circumstances produce like results. To give up that doctrine amounts to giving up sense experience as the only basis for real knowledge, so that “no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish.” (123) This, Hume would agree with Vincent, is not the case. Yet giving up common sense is precisely what Jules does, and he seems to be quite sure about it: “from here on in, you can consider my ass retired.”

Yet nothing objective changes. Throughout the movie Jules is portrayed as a ruthless gangster, and this continues after his “moment of clarity”. The test follows promptly. A renegade couple interrupts their conversation as they decide to rob the restaurant. When the man points his gun at Jules, he stays dead calm, and starts talking to the man as if they are having a normal conversation. He quotes (his version of) a passage from the bible, which he had previously only uttered in rage, before killing his victims.

Jules: There's a passage I got memorized. Ezekiel 25:17. "The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness. For he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you." I been sayin' that shit for years. And if you ever heard it, it meant your ass. I never really questioned what it meant. I thought it was just a cold-blooded thing to say to a motherfucker 'fore you popped a cap in his ass. But I saw some shit this mornin' made me think twice. Now I'm thinkin', it could mean you're the evil man. And I'm the righteous man. And Mr. .45 here, he's the shepherd protecting my righteous ass in the valley of darkness. Or it could be you're the righteous man and I'm the shepherd and it's the world that's evil and selfish. I'd like that. But that shit ain't the truth. The truth is you're the weak. And I'm the tyranny of evil men. But I'm tryin'. I'm tryin' real hard to be a shepherd.

Jules lowers his gun, lying it on the table, after which the two robbers run out the door. When, in the final scene of the movie, Vincent and Jules calmly leave the restaurant, Jules still looks like a gangster, acts like a gangster, but is no longer a gangster. There are no objective changes visible, except that we know that Jules has made a resolute decision to leave the gangster life, and that the anticipation of being a shepherd has made him a new man – his first act being not to kill the robber he addresses with this little speech. In his own words, the “miracle” made him “think twice” about this bible passage. Which is only natural, since he experienced an event that by all means should have killed him. It feels to him as if something extraordinary happened that should be taken seriously, and cannot be dismissed as an accident. He feels that it is so relevant to his life, that he has to make sense of it. He ponders the whole of its life – and the kind of world he lives in, in the light of this experience. Precisely because nothing has changed after the miracle – as Vincent shows – and because at the same time Jules is incapable of doing away with the whole incident without making sense of it, something has to be changed. Again, the miracle itself changed nothing, but it revealed to Jules how to change himself.

In a “moment of clarity” that occurs during the consumption of a cup of coffee and a muffin, he realizes that God got involved in saving him from the bullets. This suddenly made the bible passage, that he had only been using to sound cool, very relevant, and he starts to ponder what it could mean to his life. He explains to the robber that he has considered two possibilities: either I am right and you are wrong, and I am performing the Lord’s work with my gun – or, we are both essentially good, and I am not responsible for this situation since it is the world that makes us bad. Though this option is tempting, Jules resists delegating his responsibility for who he is: the tyranny of evil men. It might be interesting to speculate on the function of God in these three options, as the totalities they represent. In the first, the society, people are right or wrong in relation to each other. God is on the side of those who are right, and helps them fight evil men. The second totality is the world in which people live as social beings, but is more than the social world. In this world, everybody is equally doomed, and people have to join together in order to survive in a hellish place with the help of God. In the third totality, it does not matter whether or not people are right or wrong. There are only the weak and the strong, and the weak tyrannize the strong. Whether or not God actually came down from heaven to save Jules does not matter in this world. It is more a matter of understanding the situation, in order to decide how one is in it. The bible passage in itself is entirely meaningless in the way that Jules uses it before his executions, and only provides him with a language to make sense of the situation. First, he is just a ‘bad motherfucker’ (as it says on his wallet) who uses semi-biblical language to sound cool. Then, after he realizes that this passage is about himself, he is the right man on the right track, or, if he is wrong, he is a victim of the situation. Finally, he realizes that he is a strong man that can take his faith in his own hands. Jules, to use the metaphor of the flea circus, failed to feel the pain of the lid of the jar that he had anticipated, and realized that it was gone. What he felt – the ‘touch of God’ – was a breaking through an invisible limit.

Let us run another parallel: the allegory of the dot. The situation is that there are nine dots, arranged in the form of a square, in a world where one had to move from dot to dot. It is impossible to transcend the two-dimensionality of this world, and movement is only possible in a straight line. Through experience we have learned that we need at least four lines to connect all the dots. If someone were to tell us that it is possible to use only three lines, we would probably call him a liar or a fool, for thinking that he can alter the laws of physics. When, however, the statement comes from a source that we trust, we start to expect that the same is possible for us. A certain stubbornness is needed to solve mind-benders. In the end, giving up the assumption that one can only draw within the box is all that it takes. By giving up another assumption, we only need two lines – and with yet another invisible border gone, only one line. Perhaps all that it takes for the impossible to become possible is the realization that the impossible is in fact possible. Perhaps this is all it takes to have a metaphysical experience. Does it work like this in our own lives? Let us return to Jules, to find out how we can link miracles to trauma and metaphysical experience. We can distinguish three dimensions of a miraculous experience in Jules. First, something happens that is not supposed to happen – or, as in this case, something does not happen that is supposed to happen. Experience fails, but in a different way than it does in trauma. In trauma the unforeseen takes place, while in a miraculous experience the anticipated does not take place. In trauma the object of experience becomes so powerfully present, that its singular and accidental nature is transformed into the whole, the universal. What becomes present in the moment that a miracle is experienced, is the absence of the anticipated event. This absence throws us back upon our anticipation, and refers us back to our present life as the context in which we anticipate these kinds of events.

The second dimension of a miraculous experience is that our life and the world we live in becomes present as a whole. Contrary to traumatic experience, it does not become present as an overpowering whole that takes over our entire life, but rather as a receding whole. What happens and our interpretation do not matter because they take place within that whole. This leaves us with nothing to guide us. The third and final dimension is that a miraculous experience throws us back upon ourselves, upon what we believe is possible or impossible. As the world that used to make sense of ourselves vanishes, the reasons and circumstances that we used to justify our actions disappear with it. Jules gives up the justifications of being right or not responsible, and thereby gives up being a gangster. Traditionally miracles are a positive experience, in which people find a guideline and something that they can be certain of – a religious truth, for example. According to the above, this traditional characterization comes closer to that of the trauma. What actually happens in a miraculous experience, is that we let go of the need for any guideline or security.

When God makes the impossible possible, He does this without any objective changes. Rather, when the impossible happens, what is experienced is an understanding of the whole that is also capable of reconfiguring specific relations of meaning. If a hail of bullets is fired at me, and none of these bullets hit me, what actually hits me is that I was supposed to be dead. If I am still alive, that means that someone bent the laws of physics for my sake. In the case of miracles this grasp of the whole and the ability to reconfigure it are reified catachreses. The only thing that is certain about the occurrence of a miracle is its authority, “God’s touch.” It is a sign to help us realize something that we had not realized before, and that we better realize soon. Precisely the lack of a naturalized referent is its motor for change, and in the clearing of this lack a referent is created. Being shot at was nothing new for Jules. Bullets that hit him when they were supposed to hit him, and missed him when they were supposed to miss him had never made him think about his life style. They were always signs that had naturalized referents, such as his quick reflexes or the gunman’s aiming capabilities. The framing of these events make them into everyday experiences, since he is a gangster, and gangsters shoot and get shot at. Miracles are an escape from a closed system of immanence, and the more our ability to make sense of everything increases, the less likely they are to occur. If their taking place depends on us at all, being open to their occurrence and a willingness to interpret them as something out of this world – in other words, a certain naivety – is the most we can prepare ourselves. We no longer prey for them or even acknowledge their existence, but at the same time it would be a miracle if our deepest wishes could be fulfilled. Though they are very close to our world, they are only close enough to realize their impossibility in a world that has no outside. Even priests warn us that we should not wait for divine intervention, and encourage us to get excited about the mundane miracle of birth in roughly the same way biologists do.

At the same time, however, it seems that this is useless knowledge, since we have no control over whether or not a miracle will take place. They occur at 3.37, or while we are drinking our coffee.

2. When Metaphysics Falls

Metaphysical experience “was never located so far beyond the temporal as the academic use of the word metaphysics suggests.” (Adorno, 1973: 372) Metaphysical experiences are moments in which eternity is found in everyday situations. They provide a passage from the material to the eternal. The eternal, in turn, fails to maintain itself as a higher principle, and leads back to its opposite, the material. “Thinking people search for truth in matter because they are aware that there is nowhere else for them to search,” (Ali, 2003: 99) says hardcore materialist Tariq Ali. There is, indeed, nowhere else to search than in that which matters to us. What we can understand is limited to what we encounter within our world. Without the objects from which, and in the midst of which, it makes sense to do anything, we would be able to speak nor be silent. Adorno commits metaphysics to what can be articulated. If text is to serve as a cover concept of metaphysics, it commits it to what it can make articulable. This proceeds from a metaphysical experience of what cannot be articulated, but has to be articulated nonetheless.

Adorno looks for such experiences in Proust’s descriptions of the happiness contained in certain village names. What is opened up in these village names, is their possibility. They are proper names, so they must belong to something they are proper to. This aedequatio rei is their truth. The secret of proper names is that they refer to something that does not exist but can exist, and this is their passage from the material to the eternal. The places they refer to can be found on a map, which opens up the possibility of actually being there. Yet only as long as we have not been there do utopias remain utopian.

Fulfillment and craving go together. When we manage to break through the cycle of appropriation and fulfillment, the objects open up, and reveal their inside as removed from them – as their context. In this sense it can be a metaphysical experience to discover that the longing for a cigarette is an impotent longing for something bigger, something more potent. As Oscar Wilde said, “there is nothing left for me now but the divine μονόχρονος ἡδονή [undivided pleasure] of another cigarette. Cigarettes have at least the charm of leaving one unsatisfied.” (Wilde, 1890) Their promise of happiness is what should be kept alive. Of course this is not enough, and precisely because this is not enough is there the possibility of change.

When an awareness of the closed system is actively contradicted to an awareness of what we want, it becomes clear that we long for more than we have been socially conditioned to. This wish for a different society is the motor of change – an emotional and existential metaphysical experience. I use the term ‘society’ here for the totality in which we live, and in which eventually all problems have to be resolved. Even if we are annoyed with the laws of physics, this is, in the first place, probably a pretense for a wish for a different society, and secondly, invention and innovation are both essentially social phenomena. The task of metaphysics is to fight against the despair that comes with running up against the walls of the world we have been born into – a world that did not prevent the holocaust – and ask where we can still find utopias.

Metaphysical experiences have an emotional dimension in that they make us aware of the closed system we live in. The past is irrevocable, and what happened cannot be fixed. This is a source of anger, a craving for a better society that will never be fulfilled. “And yet it is tempting to look for sense, not in life at large, but in the fulfilled moments – in the moments of present existence that make up for its refusal to tolerate anything outside of it.” (Adorno, 1973: 378) These moments, such as expressed in Proust’s village names, make us aware of what we want. Let us turn to another proper name – probably the most famous one in film history.

“I don't think any word can explain a man's life,” says one of the searchers through the warehouse of treasures left behind by media mogul Charles Foster Kane. Orson Welles’ debut film Citizen Kane (1941) shows how a newsreel reporter fails to find out the meaning of Kane’s dying word “Rosebud.” The movie ends with a series of shots leading to the close-up of the word “Rosebud” on a sled that has been tossed into a furnace, its paint curling in the flames. We remember that this was Kane's childhood sled, taken from him as he was torn from his family and sent to a boarding school. The reporter tries to make sense of Kane’s life by interviewing the people that knew him well. Yet each person provides a different perspective, a contrasting image of the same man. This is illustrated by the scene where Kane walks down an echoing corridor lined with mirrors, showing us an infinite amount of Kanes. In the end, we are left in the dark – even with the symbolic meaning for the riddle of Rosebud. “Mr. Kane was a man who got everything he wanted and then lost it. Perhaps Rosebud was something he couldn't get or something he lost. Anyway, it wouldn't have explained anything.”

“Rosebud” is an illustration of an experience that fails to go down in our memories as just another experience, and that we nonetheless cannot make sense of, since “any sense that is made is already fictitious.” (Adorno, 1973: 376) As Mr. Bernstein puts it in the movie, "a fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn't think he'd remember. You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn't see me at all, but I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since, that I haven't thought of that girl.”

The Dutch poet Piet Paaltjens, after having had a similar experience, did what poets do, and wrote a poem about it. The poem tells of a poet that has been writing romantic poetry for a woman that he dreamed up. She does not exist and he knows it, but this does not matter for her to be the object of his desire. Again, we can see how craving and fulfillment go together. One day, as he is writing about the love of his life once again, he looks through the window and sees her sitting in a passing carrousel. To find out that the object of his desire actually exists comes as a great shock to him, of course. Instead of running out right away to meet her, he first contemplates the possibility of pursuing his materialized vision of happiness, and finally decides to remain where he is in order to keep writing about her.

What will he do? Go to Woerden?

Even further if he must, Until his eye meets hers again His heart her pounding heart He hesitates – no he hesitates not, – At least not for very long “To hunt the lost is not a job For children of the song!

But mourning what is lost With soft cries of the heart With white tears dropping down his cheeks That is the singer’s part3 To choose poetic misery over the possibility of finding true happiness may seem strange to us, but this is in fact what we do all the time. Happiness, according to Adorno, “gives us the inside of objects as something removed from the objects.” (374) This becomes apparent when we manage to lay our hands on that which is supposed to give us fulfillment, and our presence to the possibility of being fulfilled makes us aware that the object of anticipation can only make us happy when it remains precisely that. “And yet one is not disappointed; the feeling now is one of being too close, rather, and not seeing it for that reason.” (373) As in Paaltjen’s poem, “idle waiting does not guarantee what we expect; it reflects the condition measured by its denial.” (375) Fantasies, wishes, and utopias are constructed in such a way that our waiting in vain is protected from the disaster of having to regard them as something that can actually be achieved. What they protect is the way in which we wait for it – in the case of Paaltjens, as a mourning poet. To hunt for the lost, as Citizen Kane does, would prevent him from dwelling in this basic experience of the irrevocability of the past, expressed as the longing for an ideal image that has been arduously constructed as the origin and the end of his poetry. This image reaches a climax in the poem “Train Wreck.” When two fast trains pass each other in opposite direction the poet, who is sitting in the first train, manages to catch a quick glimpse of the eyes of a woman sitting in the second. This split second, however, is enough for him to identify them as the eyes of the happiness he has been waiting for his entire life, and he has time enough to describe them in detail. His despair over the fact that within a few seconds they will be miles apart expresses itself in a wish that the two lovers might be joined for eternity, and melt together in a marvelous and terrible train wreck.

In Cronenberg’s Crash, similarly, a husband and wife who have been married for years try to provoke an “accident” in which they will be able to experience a moment of happiness that they have been unable to experience through years of stable marriage. Their craving for a moment in which fulfillment goes together with their own negation expresses what Adorno calls the “self-absolutizing particular,” (406) which is the object of critique of dialectics. Dialectics “destroys the claim of identity by testing and honoring it; therefore, it can reach no farther than that claim.” (406) Both Heidegger’s and Adorno’s thinking affirm that metaphysics proceeds from a basic experience of our everyday life that says no more than that it is. Even to ask for the meaning of life already exceeds this task, since it already presupposes that there is a meaning to it, and “to go after the whole, to calculate the net profit of life – this is death.” (377) For Heidegger, likewise, there is always something missing as long as we exist. When this is no longer the case, we will no longer be there. Reality – which is complete – is that about which we can now say that then, when we will no longer be there, there will still be other things. (213) Philosophical problems pertaining to the nature of reality, therefore, presuppose an isolated subject that, if it is not worldless, at least needs a conformation of the existence of a world through some kind of God’s eye perspective. This confirmation of the facticity of existence, however, cannot be found by merely staring at the world. If there is to be a metaphysics, it proceeds from a fundamental experience of facticity. In this experience all sense is lost, so that we become present to it as that within which our understanding manifests itself. (152) In the moment when the world of relations in and between objects recedes as a totality, not only does it fail to make sense for us – it also fails to not make sense.

Heidegger explores this moment in his essay What is Metaphysics?

(1967) All that we are present to in a metaphysical experience is “that there are beings – and not nothing.” (103) In this experience, even “we ourselves – we humans who are in being – in the midst of beings slip away from ourselves.” (101) This is how Heidegger can come to a definition of metaphysics as the “inquiry beyond and over beings, which aims to recover them as such and as a whole for our grasp.” (106) In this sense there is a solidarity between Heidegger and Adorno, despite the acidic antipathy the latter had for the former. In What is Metaphysics?, as well as in Adorno’s “Meditations on Metaphysics,” the one who questions is itself put in question to such a degree that Heidegger can ask why there are beings, and not rather nothing (110), and Adorno – “whether after Auschwitz you can go on living.” (363) When Auschwitz is experienced as metonymy for the whole of culture, as Buchenwald was for Jeremy, Disneyland for Baudrillard, the carceral system for Foucault, modern technology for Heidegger, and the anthropological machine for Agambem, we might ask whether it is possible for us to experience the object of cultural analysis in its recession by putting forward object that cannot be made sense of, and of which we nonetheless have to make sense.

We are, in a word, committed to the object of analysis in the five senses which I outlined in the introduction. Analysis is, first of all, one of the ways in which the object can be performed, that is, one of the ways in which we can deal with that which we encounter within our environment. The choice to analyze the object instead of, for example, using it, staring at it, destroying it, ignoring it, means that we commit ourselves to that which a specific cultural object has to say about culture as a whole. This does not mean that we “let the object speak,” as if we would be able to endow it with a voice. It merely means that we start listening to it as that without which we ourselves would not be able to speak nor be silent. We are, thirdly, confined to the moment of analysis together with our object, and try to capture this experience. We might suspend ourselves in an eager anticipation that mourns the loss of the object instead of running after it, or, as it sits in a fast train that passes ours in the opposite direction, we might express our desire that when the analysis ends, we as well as the object will be suspended in eternity. It is to this hope or despair that the object is committed, and thereby safeguarded and stored for the future, for example, when made legible as a text. Through the object it is this despair or hope that is felt by the reader. This is where Adorno succeeds, and Heidegger fails. “The dialectics of Being and entity – that no Being can be conceived without an entity, and no entity without transmission – is suppressed by Heidegger.” (115) Heidegger suppresses this transmission in his constant emphasis on the formality of the existential analysis, which refrains from making any judgments about the concrete ontical possibilities it might open up for us. His insistence on the total absence of any concrete objects in the analysis as a necessary condition for metaphysical experiences to take place may seem to make it impossible to extract methodological comments about cultural analysis – which always needs an object – from the existential analysis. However – and this is a capital point to emphasize for anyone who is interested in a reading of Being and Time that is committed to the concept of authenticity as it is outlined within this work – it is precisely Heidegger’s refusal to let anything like a “positive content” slip into his analysis that makes us present to our own despair and the desire to have this handed over to us, and remains true to the possibility of provoking – that is, calling forward – the reader to come into action, simply because reading is not enough. This is why, in current debates about Heidegger’s work, the attention should be shifted from what we can do with it – e.g., applying its concepts to media studies, or using it as a philosophical framework that can be applied to our own life – to what it can do with us. Adorno, who writes from and in terms of his experience of contemporaneity “after Auschwitz”, is equally inaccessible for those of us who did not experience the Holocaust. Both thinkers thematize the possibility of being unfulfilled, and refuse to let their analyses come to rest in either a Kantian resolution of antinomies, or a Hegelian Absolute. While the following thought can also be found throughout Heidegger’s work, Adorno’s style manages to make the object of metaphysics felt: Represented in the inmost cell of thought is that which is unlike thought. The smallest intramundane traits would be of relevance to the absolute, for the micrological view cracks the shell of what, measured by the subsuming cover concept, is helplessly isolated and explodes its identity, the delusion that it is but a specimen. There is solidarity between such thinking and metaphysics at the time of its fall. (408)

Let us review the analysis performed in the first part with the object of metaphysics in mind. As the analysis of traumatic and miraculous experience progressed, concepts were introduced along the way. The purpose of their introduction was not so much to “explain” the phenomena in question, but rather to increase their legibility. These concepts do not offer any answers to the questions raised by the analysis. In fact, they only seem to raise more questions. At this point, the analysis finds itself in a seemingly impossible position. To start with, it thematized a situation that cannot be made sense of and has to be made sense of. Allusions to the Holocaust and other terrible tragedies, however, prevent us from disposing of this analytic position as being doomed from the start. I argued that in a traumatic situation the whole world is like the object of experience. Precisely because the experience defines our attitude toward the world as a whole, it cannot have a place within this world, as just one of the possible ways of experiencing it. For the experience to become something to be remembered, there would need to be a situation that contextualizes the traumatic experience as something that suddenly becomes relevant. Yet since relevance is, as we have argued, one of the aspects that makes up this experience from the start, alongside the event itself and our interpretation of it – so that we cannot really speak anymore of “the event itself” – the traumatic experience cannot become relevant. To rephrase this thought, the moment that a traumatic experience is not relevant, is the moment that the experience ceases to be traumatic. In this moment, to which I lent the name “miracle”, the object of experience falls away as a totality. What becomes relevant instead, is this moment of release.

Let us visualize the following situations. Kirilow, walking around in his room around half past three in the morning, thinking “man is unhappy – because he does not know that he is happy.” Michel de Montaigne, sitting at his desk, writing “my life has been filled with terrible misfortune – most of which never happened.” Woody Allen, “I thought of committing suicide – but I’ve got so many problems, that wouldn’t solve them all.” Jules, “I’m the tyranny of evil men – but I’m trying real hard to be a shepherd.” Finally, the poet Piet Paaltjens, writing “he hesitates – no he hesitates not – at least not for very long.”

In each case something happens at the dash that turns the last part of the thought into the antinomy of the first. Something gets lost when we reformulate these sentences in a way that seems to preserve their “phrastic content,” as Richard Hare would call it: “Man is happy, and he does not know it.” “Most of the bad things that I remember have not actually taken place.” “Suicide would not solve all my problems, so I will not do it.” “I’m trying not to be a bad man anymore.” And, finally, “he hesitates.”

The latter sentences make sense. The former do not. Yet they raise some interesting questions about being and knowledge (Kirilow), interpretation and “actual” events (Montaigne), ends and solutions (Allen), being and becoming (Jules), and poetry and action (Paaltjens). The transformed set of sentences, however, are statements about happiness, about memory, a decision, the formulation of a good intention, and a description of an (in)action. What gets lost, is the fact that in each of these cases the one who utters them calls himself in question. What is more, they provoke us to visualize possible situations in which these sentences can be uttered. There is, in each case, something impossible in them.

Yet the worst thing that critique can do is to say that something should not be. If it does this, it will remain captured by that which it seeks to get rid of. Instead, it should simply let it go. It is possible to experience the impossible because we can anticipate it. Determinate negation is the giving up of assumptions of impossibility: a letting go of the status quo in order to get something better. What would determinate negation look like for us? Concretely, it means to let go of whatever it is we hold on to, without knowing where we will end up. Kirilow lets go of the idea that he is unhappy, thus he becomes happy. We need not have faith in anything in order to let go of something, nor is there anything we should know in advance. All that is needed in order to let go of something, is something to let go of. The bigger that of which we let go, the bigger the breakthrough experience. The “no man’s land between the border posts of being and nothingness” (Adorno, 1973: 381) is in that moment of release – full release and thus a full experience.

For Heidegger the realization that human beings will eventually come to an end, expressed in the possibility of being towards death, is the master opportunity for a metaphysical experience. In Being and Time he writes that “death is, as the end of Dasein, in the being of this being in relation to its end.” (328) Adorno criticizes this seemingly universal category as affected by history. “Metaphysical reflections that seek to get rid of their cultural, indirect elements deny the relation of their allegedly pure categories to their social substance.” (368) If change is to be the object of metaphysics, he warns, it follows that a disregard of temporal cultural circumstances will result in a sterile doctrine that, if not ultimately appropriated by culture to justify the status quo, will at least be unable to change that which it does not take into account. In the context of Adorno’s project, where change is the object, this critique is fully grounded. The metaphysical category of death is incapable of inducing anything nonidentical within our world since it refuses to be maintained in our lives as the realization that it will once be as if we have never lived at all. That we will never be able to accomplish enough in our lives to prevent our accomplishments from melting away into nothingness can only result in an impotent longing to live forever – in the hope “that death does not constitute the entirety of existence.” (369) We may, however, allow Heidegger’s vision of death to slip into Adorno’s moment in which change can happen. In this way the miracle aspect of metaphysical experience, which is less present in Adorno’s work than Heidegger’s, can be enriched by Adorno’s critique on Heidegger, who perhaps took the traumatic aspect of metaphysical experience too lightly, and merely suggests that after such an experience, we have to find our way again. (142)

In the case of trauma, the inability to abandon objects to time, the emphasis lies on our attachment to cultural objects as that without which we would not be able to speak nor be silent. Culture as a whole can be experienced as being traumatic in running up against the walls of the limited realm of possibilities it offers. When this running itself becomes the object of experience, the effect may be called miraculous when we are able to let go of whatever limitations hold us back from giving ourselves fully to this limited realm of possibilities. This is an intramundane transcendence in which we experience our experience – which is therefore something beyond experience. The object of experience is then not what we observe, but our observations, but the possibility of observation itself as a constellation of things in being: the object of analysis, the analyst, the space in which the analysis takes place. The object of analysis is trapped in its inability to make itself legible. The analyst cannot escape her point of view, without which she would disappear – and therefore has the choice between either proving this point of view, or proving that it is not her point of view. The space in which the analysis takes place, finally, is itself contained and limited by the object of analysis – that exceeds all possibilities of being analyzed – and the commitment of the analyst – who exceeds both the object of analysis and the analytic space that is contained by it. In her unfulfillment, she may decide to leave the analytic space to go to the pub around the corner for a beer, or remain committed to the object of analysis and regard this unfulfillment – which could be frustration with the analysis, boredom, or inspiration, or any other mood that leads us to decide to end the analysis – as that which contains all: the object of analysis, the analytic space, and the analyst herself. She may then come to regard this unfulfillment as being the primary object of analysis. This “object”, in the Heideggerian sense of that which is thrown ahead of us, so that we actually have it before us, is that from which and in terms of which the analysis can proceed. Commitment is the necessary condition for such an analysis to take place, since it is all that we can hold on to in order to remain faithful to the analysis at the moments when we most want to give it up. It is in those moments, which can unfurl into an existential and emotional metaphysical experience, that we can come to put ourselves in the question, and experience the object of analysis as a totality which we can be, be in, or be surrounded by. When we let go of that which makes us want to leave the analytic space, or that which prevents us from entering it – or even that which prevents us from leaving it – this could be the start of an analysis without any pretenses, only guided by a commitment to make sense of that which cannot be made sense of.

In the practice of cultural analysis, the concepts of trauma and miracle can be useful tools to unlock the object of analysis through a metaphysical experience. These experiences cannot themselves become objects, however, since one cannot talk about another’s trauma or miracle without relating it to one’s own. They are also tools to provoke a movement of attachment and letting go that breaks through the cycle of appropriation and fulfillment. This latter cycle is currently expressed in current debates about the choice between “objectivity” or “subjectivity”. In an “objective” analysis one proves that what is expressed – made legible in a text – is not one’s point of view, while a “subjective” analysis aims to prove that this point of view, as a point of view, is valid and relevant. Beyond these binary oppositions remains the possibility of performing an analysis in which the object of experience is the point from which we view the world – in one word, culture. Cultural analysis then becomes an analysis of culture that is cultural, nothing more and nothing less.

3. Conclusion

In Being and Time, Heidegger’s groundbreaking move is to start with simply being there, instead of with a predetermined collection of concepts such as reality, or knowledge, from which the analysis would not be able to escape. He breaks down the whole of being in the world into three equiprimordial totalities: the world, being in it, and the being that is in the world. Whenever we are there, we exist as being ahead of ourselves, while already being in a world, as being with that which is encountered within this world. (193) On the basis of the foregoing analysis of trauma, miracle, and metaphysical experience, which theorizes experience as always having a metaphysical dimension, and metaphysics as something to be experienced, an analysis of these three equiprimordial totalities could serve as a way to delineate the object of cultural analysis.

Idealism is only possible when one is already in a world, and only as this or that presence to what is encountered within it.The term idealism designates a state of affairs that can be described as if through a God’s eye perspective. To posit an ideal as an eternal value, in the way that Plato did, means that we are already ahead of this mundane situation. That which one is ahead of (being-in as being-with) determines who one is – not because there is a collection of objects at the center of which a subject stands that subjects these things to a mind, and is subjected to them as a body, but rather it is the way in which one is ahead of that which one is, while being in a world within which one is with that which is within that world, that determines if and how these things enter a constellation of objects, and – to take it one step further – that they enter it as objects in the first place. In getting ahead of oneself, this whole constellation is geared toward what it is not yet. And, since it is geared toward its not-yet as a whole, the constellation does not consist of something like a blueprint and building blocks that together bring the not-yet into being. In being ahead of itself, it is already a whole, and only as the object it anticipates. In idealism, it is anticipation that makes the end possible, and not, as the concept of idealism suggests, the end that makes it possible for us to anticipate it. Utopias, wishes, and fantasies make us present to possibilities of being fulfilled, but usually without even considering the possibility of fulfilling these possibilities within this presence. If this would be the case, then unfulfillment as such brings about its particular fulfillment, which is expressed in a kind of thinking that thinks from a need. “The need is what we think from, even where we disdain wishful thinking.” (Adorno, 408) It is this need that determines what makes sense to do, and, in the same stroke, enables us to do it. There is, by definition, never a moment in which we cannot do what we need to do. Rather, what we need to do is in this case anticipated as an impossibility within the situation in which we find ourselves, anticipated by a being in that situation, and expresses that in order to do what we need to do, things need to be otherwise.

Utopias, wishes, and fantasies make us present to a closed system of immanence in which nothing new can happen. This is what Heidegger calls facticity: our “shared faith with the beings that are encountered within our world.” (55). This facticity can never be encountered by staring at that which is in this world with us. (135) It will always present us with the same realm of possibilities as long as it remains what it is, (179) so that as long as our interpretation of ourselves remains restricted to this realm, it remains captured by what is “familiar, attainable, bearable, fitting, and proper.” (193)

This situation could be interpreted as a gap between mind and world, in which the world in which we find ourselves determines that which can exist in it in such a way that there is no longer a possibility of getting ahead of oneself. Even the smallest seed of the most innocent dream would lead to instant annihilation. This would be a world in which the destruction of nonidentity is systematized, and the death of exception mechanized. What this world is not yet, is exactly what it has always been, so that the not-yet is literally already there, and anticipation is executed in calculation, certainty, and predictability. No matter how bad things are in this world, a change of mind would lead to something even worse.

The question is whether the impossible is nonetheless anticipated in this totalitarian situation. If so, it is anticipated as a possibility. Materialism, the third possibility, emphasizes the dialectic between those objects we concern ourselves with, and that to which our concern is directed. When we are committed to a particular object, we always anticipate it in this or that way. In this way, the object can be transformed. When our commitment changes, however, it is not merely the object, but our anticipation of it that is transformed.

On the basis of these three totalities, which are always present together in one way or another, we can give a formal account of metaphysical experience by distinguishing three dimensions. In a metaphysical experience, first of all, the not-yet is experienced as being already there. In this way, a possibility can become an opening for action. Secondly, it is an experience of that which is impossible as long as the status quo maintains itself. In our wishes, dreams, and fantasies we become present to that which we are committed to. This could be characterized as an intramundane transcendence – a presence to the totality in which we find ourselves with an awareness that this leaves us unfulfilled. Finally, a metaphysical experience is an experience of the world as a totality, and what it is like to be in it. This can manifest itself as anxiety, as it does in Heidegger, but also as humor. This third dimension is perhaps the most important, since it makes us experience the situation we are in as something in which we cannot remain standing, but which we nonetheless have to escape. This makes us present to ourselves as the one who anticipates the impossible as if it were already there.

A metaphysical experience brings about the understanding that we can only be fulfilled by anticipating our own end. Through this anticipation we become present to what is still missing for us to become what we can be. When this not-yet is anticipated as if it were already there, the need to fulfill the impossibility becomes a possibility for action, within which we will be forever unfulfilled. Nothing factical changes, but we become resolute. This “anticipatory resoluteness,” as Heidegger calls it, is the transductive relationship between the need and thinking. (Adorno, 408) While we may still be doing what we were always doing, and no change is visible, the fact that in the moment of anticipation of our own end everything that we thought we could be certain about is temporarily taken away from us, “we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing.” (Rilke) A Heideggerian possibility is not an escape from time, but actually creates us as temporal beings. Within this possibility it is impossible to waste time, since, when I am my possibility, everything that I do and everything that happens occurs within the clearing for that which is my possibility. This is why Heidegger can claim that the self is ontologically separated by an abyss from a subject “that maintains itself within the multiplicity of its experiences.” (130) Understanding is not something that is contained within subjectivity, but is precisely the understanding that the subject is not its self. To understand always means to understand to be this or that being which one is not yet, and is anticipated as if one were it already. As such, it is an understanding of its self as a totality, constructed from within the contingent circumstances in which the subject finds itself.

The Adornian subject finds itself in a traumatic situation that does not make sense, and from which sense nonetheless has to be made. As long as they remain captured by this situation, “the living have a choice between involuntary ataraxy – an esthetic life due to weakness – and the bestiality of the involved. Both are wrong ways of living.” (364) This is why thinking must think against itself, and transcend the space that it reserves for itself toward that which is unlike thought. Cultural analysis should not be boxed in by a concept, let alone by the concept of concept. Rather, it should let itself be framed by objects that elude any conceptual framework, and that never let our thinking about them come to a rest.

Adorno recognizes this when in the final phase of his “Meditations on Metaphysics”, negative dialectics has to turn against itself because it is “at once the impression and the critique of the universal delusive context.” (406) Analysis as critique should not come to an end within its own frame when it becomes “a critique of the fact that critique itself, contrary to its own tendency, must remain within the medium of the concept.” (406) Analysis should reserve a frame for itself, and delineate and clarify its object in advance before starting the “actual” analysis in which we “let the object speak,” so that it creates a situation that will leave it forever unfulfilled. Before it is committed to any particular object, cultural analysis is therefore committed to a frame. When this frame itself becomes object, we can become present to contemporaneity as a whole. The cultural analyst, therefore, always has the choice between being a thing in the analytic space, or being the analytic space itself. Neither choice is invalid, but each has its own consequences. The former is characterized by attachment, the latter by letting go. When a cultural analyst finds himself or herself present in a room together with the object of analysis, it could be a valuable exercise to practise this distinction: being the room or being a thing in it.

4. Bibliography

Note: The citations taken from Heidegger’s Being and Time are my own translations of Wildschut’s Dutch translation of the original German version. Most of these translations are inspired by, and sometimes identical to, the English translation of Macquarrie and Robinson. To avoid confusion, the page numbers refer to the original German version, as is common practice. In citing Adorno and Heidegger, I have merely indicated the page number, since it is clear from the text from which work the citation is taken.

• Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics, New York: Seabury Press, 1973.
• Ali, Tariq. The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity, London: Verso, 2003.
• Van Alphen, Ernst. Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.
• Van Alphen, Ernst. “Caught by images,” in Journal of Visual Culture, Vol 1 (2): 2002.
• Bal, Mieke. Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: a rough guide, Toronto: University of Toronto Press Incorporated, 2002.
• Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulations, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988.
• Cronenberg, David. Crash (1996).
• Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth Of The Prison, London: Penguin Books, 1977.
• Heidegger, Martin. Zijn en Tijd, Nijmegen: Uitgeverij SUN, 1998.
• Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time, Oxford: Blackwell, 1980.
• Heidegger, Martin. “What is metaphysics?” in Basic Writings, London: Routledge, 1993.
• Hume, David. “Section X: Of Miracles” in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding in Classics of Western Philosophy, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1999.
• Lusseyran, Jacques. And There Was Light, Independent Pub Group, 1987
• Paaltjens, Piet. Snikken en Grimlachjes, 1987 in VCL Dolfijnreeks, Vol 9, Den Haag: VCL, 1998.
• Welles, Orson. Citizen Kane (1941).
• Tarantino, Quentin. Pulp Fiction (1994). Quotes from the original screenplay, to be found at http://www.albany.edu/scj/jcjpc/vol4is1/chavez.html.
• Wilde, Oscar. “The True Function and Value of Criticism,” in The Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review. Edited by James Knowles. Vol XXVIII. July-December, 1890. Pp. 123-47. London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co.

Notes

1. My translation
2. In Rule of Faith, 1676 and A Doctrine Against Transubstantiation, 1684
3. Translated from Dutch by the author