The Ghost in Me: Towards a Phenomenology of the Doppelgänger more

The Ghost in Me: Towards a Phenomenology of the Doppelgänger (Presented 04/06/10 at “Traces: Thinking Through Remains,” UCL, Department of Anthropology. Please do not cite without permission) Introduction Why do the dead return? When asking this question, we tend to turn toward the world. Doing so, we reach out to the dark recesses hidden behind walls and enclosed beneath floorboards. There, we have some hope of catching sight of spectres, phantoms, and other apparitions defying both the living and the dead. Over dust covered crates and abandoned houses, the night of shadows carries us into the heart of the undead. Yet what if this night and this abandoned house were not situated in some remote dwelling far from the city, but in fact was already within us – was already with us – indeed, already us? What if, the traces of dead were no less dead than the flesh and blood of our still beating hearts? What, finally, if the return of the dead was in fact the return of our own bodies coming back to haunt us? Such are the questions I wish to pose in this paper. And I pose this idea of the undead as not a ghoul that exists “out there,” but as already with us through our bodies via the figure of the doppelganger. Here, too, my concern is not with meeting one’s own double “out there” in the world of things and people, but of experiencing one’s own body as being doubled—a point I shall expand upon with recourse to Merleau-Ponty. In the first place, however, why the doppelgänger? What is the relation between the undead and the double? My hypothesis for this paper is that doppelgänger acts as a conduit to the undead, affording us a lived experience of how materiality and immateriality can unite in the same body. In turn, this will lead me to characterise the body as being haunted by the trace of its own ghosts. Memory and Imagination Before I unpack this rather dense claim, let me return to my opening question: why do the dead return? For the most part, the response to this question has been to assign our experience of ghostly phenomenon to either memory or imagination. And here a risk forms. Take memory in the first case. Conferring a causal relationship between memory and sightings of ghosts suggests a sediment of unfinished personal history discolouring our experience of the world, such that once that history was subtracted, then vision would be restored. To “see” would mean to unconsciously remember that which is dead but has yet to move on. Especially pressing in this reading would be particular kinds of losses, not least those which occur suddenly and remain affixed to a heightened state of pathos. There, the presence of those who passed from life would be felt at a more acute level, the voices of a ghostly presence more audible, sitting aside those who speak in the living. Yet 1 the dialogue would invariably prove to be a solitary act, a summoning of one’s own failure to transform the losses of the past into the gains of the present. In this way, the ghost would essentially reinforce what Merleau-Ponty calls the “fundamental narcissism of all vision,” with the experience of being haunted traceable to a debt the dead still owe to the living (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 139). If this interpretation of ghosts presses too hard on memory as the production of a series of accidents in perception, then leaning toward imagination is equally as problematic. Here, the positivist assumption would be that the visitation of a ghost would be nothing more than a speculative apparition spontaneously created from nothing. The seeing of the ghost would thus be parallel to a mis-seeing of things in the word, no different from one of the senses being cloaked in a veil. Does “my mind play tricks on me,” as the language would have it, when I see a ghost? To Haunt How to counter this impulse to psychologise the ghost? How, in other words, to give a voice to that which is inherently voiceless? One way to approach this is via the tension in the word “haunt.” For what we can note in this word “haunt” is a telling ambiguity. On the one hand, we speak of locales that are frequently visited as places “to haunt.” Of those places, familiarity and a sense of ownership are chief characteristics. I haunt the place that I am attached to, allow myself to become attached to it, as it becomes attached to me. And here, a turning occurs. The place I haunt also becomes haunted, and in turn mirrors my gaze. Now, it is no longer “I” who possess this place, but this place that possesses me. Once my home and my haunt, now the same place has becomes unhomely and haunted. The implication of the ambiguity within “haunt” is that it points to a double intentionality, a doubling of experience, conflating the homely and the unhomely, the familiar and the unfamiliar. The haunting folds back upon itself, invoking both sameness and otherness simultaneously. The object of hauntings is not menacing in its lurking anonymity, but disturbing in its familiarity, albeit in an augmented form. When we are shocked by things in the night, then it is only because we already have a relationship not only with the night, but also with the things that seek to commune with us from the beyond. Contrary to folklore, things that come from nowhere (and nowhen) only appear as such on first sight—or rather, first touch. Rather, the sentience in inanimate matter has an orientation that is guided by the embodied worlds that cross through that environment’s horizon. In a word, we are already in the midst of what haunt us long before that affect vibrates through us. The deliberation inherent in this movement points to a magnetism at the heart of all hauntings, a magnetism that stems from the heart of human life. Ghosts from the “other world” find us. Able to navigate their way to surface of the world, their appearance is never coincidental but forever timed with our human coming and goings. How is this coincidence of materiality and immateriality, the living and the dead, possible? To answer this question, we must 2 turn inward, attending to the role our bodies play in structuring the relationship between temporality and hauntings. The Prepersonal Body It is at this juncture that I wish to bring in an idea from Merleau-Ponty in order to give flesh to my claim that the experience of the undead is really the experience of one’s own body. Indeed, this term “one’s own body” is a deliberate allusion to Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of embodiment, which places emphasis on the unity, centrality, and intelligibility of the human body. For him—as perhaps some of you know—the body is not simply an inert mass of flesh, nor is it a container to transport us from one zone to another. Rather, the body is the centre of experience, the very condition of experience, the zero-point of all orientation, and at all times expressing a way of being-in-the-world that is singular to it. At the same time, there is another side this experience of one’s own body as the centre of being, which Merleau-Ponty calls the “prepersonal body.” Here, I want to quite a lengthy passage, which is as rich as it is important: There appears round our personal existence a margin of almost impersonal existence which can be practically taken for granted, and which I rely on to keep me alive….it can be said that my organism, as a prepersonal cleaving to the general form of the world, as an anonymous and general existence, plays, beneath my personal life, the part of an inborn complex. It is not some kind of inert thing; it too has something of the momentum of existence. It may even happen when I am in danger that my human situation abolishes my biological one, that my body lends itself without reserve to action. But these moments can be no more than moments, and for most of the time personal existence represses the organism without being able to either go beyond it or to renounce itself; without, in order words, being able to reduce the organism to its existential self, or its self to the organism (Ibid., pp. 96–97). This passage is as striking as it is important. Merleau-Ponty is effectively claiming that the unity of embodiment is made possible thanks to an anonymous subject existing “beneath” my personal existence, such that I am kept “alive” by this absent presence. How am I kept alive? In certain cases, my body will “lends itself without reserve to action,” establishing a continuity that would otherwise be dispersed were I simply a cognitive agent. At such a point, the bodily perception of things is accented, as an unconscious body is summoned to action. Not only this, but for the most part, impersonal existence is “repressed” by personal existence, as though avoiding the status of being an organism, and that alone. At no time is the “anonymous and general existence” of which I am constituted freely available to my personal being. Only in certain “moments” is the anonymous architecture of being visible. And the reason is clear: experiencing the prepersonal, anonymous body carries with it an enigmatic quality, into which reason and cognition fail to apprehend. Yet such 3 moments are reported to exist, whereupon my personal body comes into contact with this anonymous field of force “beneath” but also within me. So: how does Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the prepersonal, anonymous body relate to the theme of traces, ghosts and hauntings? Placed alongside our everyday experience of our bodies as being the centre of experience, the (sub)/emergence of the prepersonal body returns us to the ambiguity at the heart of what it is “to haunt.” In both cases, we are faced with a doubling of experience, with the familiarity of the individual lived body forever shadowed by the anonymity of the prepersonal body, which is both invisible, universal, and at odds with our experience of the world as “homely.” Structurally speaking, the immanence of the prepersonal body means that my own body is at the same time other, forever positioned in relation to, in the words of Merleau-Ponty, a “world more ancient than thought” (Ibid., p. 296). More ancient than thought, I experience the very transcendental structure of what it is to have a body—not my body, but the “inhuman” body, yet to figure itself as belonging to the world of particular things. Touching this dark side of being, the result is a primal experience of uncanniness. At times, “my life slips away from me on all sides and is circumscribed by impersonal zones” (Ibid., p. 386). No wonder, therefore, that Merleau-Ponty speaks of “repression” as a chief factor in our relationship to the prepersonal body. The knowledge that within me dwells another self, ambiguous and ancient, of which I am only partially conscious, is a thought more attuned to the sense of being possessed by another body rather than possessing our own body. It is this sense of two distinct experiences dwelling in the same body that leads us to the human body becoming its own doppelgänger—a claim I shall now explore. My Doppelgänger So far, I have suggested that Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the prepersonal body presents us with an exemplary case of the ambiguity of being haunted. Precisely through evading our grasp while simultaneously being constitutive of what it is for the body to grasp in the first place—precisely through this, the prepersonal body exists as a trace within the structure of one’s own flesh. What, then, of the experiential aspect of the doppelgänger? How is it that I come to experience myself as other; that is, as both my habitual self but simultaneously a modified and in some sense anonymous self? In the reminder of this paper, I want to explore this question. Here, we can remind ourselves of Merleau-Ponty’s claim that the prepersonal body appears when I am in danger—in such a moment, the ancient body is summoned to action, thus momentarily revealing the infrastructure upon which my unity and orientation depends. With danger, comes disclosure. My body is at an edge, its contours revealed. But alongside danger, uncanniness and estrangement assume an equal importance, given that awareness of the body as being doubled is not without an affective dimension to it. 4 After all, the figure of the doppelgänger is not harmonious in its structure but, according to Freud, “has become an object of terror, just as the gods become demons after the collapse of their cult” (Freud, 2003, p. 143). Thus, my concept of “I” is met not simply with another “I,” but instead with a “non-I.” The self who purports to visit my body when my world is stretched to a liminal sphere, is not felt as “an insurance against the extinction of the self,” to quote Freud, even though Merleau-Ponty will have us think of the prepersonal body as lending “itself without reserve to action” (Freud, 2003, p. 142; Merleau-Ponty, 2006, pp. 96–97). The other subjectivity does not come to fortify my being, but to displace and estrange it. This displacement is inevitable, given that the reality of the “I” is put into question once another being assumes residence within my body. Thus, the experience of the double casts a shadow over the materiality of the world, its presence dispatched upon the self with no prior warning. Time and place are dethroned in this arrival, the fabric of the world shown to be prey to an abiding sense of otherness. In that fragmentation, the self-presentation of the “I” as occupying a particular place is overturned by the gaze of another “I.” Toward the end of his career, Merleau-Ponty would write: “I feel myself looked at by things” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 183, my emphasis). Merleau-Ponty’s claim has a profundity that extends to the flesh of the world before returning the corporeality of the lived body. Not only do I feel things look at me, but I also feel myself looked at by my own self. Only, this self who is looking at me is not my “alter ego,” nor is it a mechanism of my psychodynamic activity. Rather, the other who looks at me, who dwells within me, is prior to the psychodynamics of the self, to some extent already dead while also evading time all together. Indeed, the felt experience of this anonymous presence only comes alive through a gesture of metamorphosis; that is, when the teleology of the prepersonal body strives toward an end that “I” the personal self remain hitherto unaware of. Through this, disquiet ensues, and beyond the frontier of my immediate existence, a host subject can be felt moving from within. In this respect, the reality of the doppelgänger points toward an archetypically uncanny aesthetic. Through its emergence, the other self that arrives is horrific, not because it is an abject mutation of personal ego, but because it lacks all intimacy with my own being. “It may be said,” as Merleau-Ponty does, citing Binswanger “that the body is ‘the hidden form of being ourself’” (Merleau-Ponty, 2006, p. 192). Hidden from sight, the body constitutes a foundation that is absent to appearances yet visible to the subterranean world, whose entrance is barred by desire. Immeasurable in its history and secret in its presence, the very condition of being embodied establishes an intensity of uncanniness, which, as Freud writes, “can surely derive only from the fact that the double is a creation that belongs to a primitive phase in our mental development” (Freud, 2003, p. 143). At the heart of the horror of the doppelgänger is the discolouration of the self as a coherent and unified thing, transparent to its own nature and indivisible in its structure. 5 Indeed, even within the very fabric of my physiological being, unity is outflanked by the trace of an alien presence haunting my being, as Erwin Strauss puts it: “My hands are parts of my body. Yet other parts—the heart, the adrenal glands, the reticular activating system—are not mine in the same sense, for two reasons: (1) Not immediately acquainted with them I only know them through anatomical studies and instruction; (2) I do not master them; as a creature, they possess me” (Strauss, 1967, p. 107, my emphasis). They possess me. With this, Strauss invites us to consider how this benign possession extends not only to the organs of which I am composed, but to their very prepersonal being. The Body Out of Time Doubling, otherness, embodiment, and anonymity: with these concepts, I have attempted to give a reading of the human body that does justice to the peculiarity of encountering one’s double as a residual trace already within oneself. And yet, if I have for the most part considered the prepersonal body as the trace interwoven in the human body, then the reverse is also true. Given that the prepersonal body is, in Merleau-Ponty’s words, “another subject beneath me, for whom a world exists before I am here, and who marks out my place in it”—given this, it surely makes more sense to speak of our own selves, here and now in the flesh, as a trace of the impersonal existence that will outlast our own bodily expiration. In this way, the question of why the dead return points to the body as existing out of time, to paraphrase Lovecraft. As a double, the body is the clearest conflation of the materiality of flesh and the immateriality of spirit—and in a literal sense, an organ of the waking dead. Contact Dr. Dylan Trigg Philosophy Department University of Sussex Brighton d.j.trigg@sussex.ac.uk 6