The Enclosed Sun

"Death and the Labyrinth", London: Continuum: 165, 166

By  Michel Foucault

In Roussel’s early works language manifested itself as a sun. It placed things in sight and within reach, but is such a dazzling visibility that it obscured what it had to show, separated appearance and reality, the face and the mask with a thin silver of light.

Language, like the sun, is this brilliance which cuts, removes the cardboard surface, and proclaims what it says: it is this double, this pure and simple duplicate. The cruelty of this solar language is that instead of being the perfect sphere of an illuminated world, it divides things to introduce darkness into them. During this period the pathological feeling is that of an internal globe, marvellously luminous, which seeks to shed its light on the world; it must be safeguarded in its original space out of fear lest its rays lose themselves even to the depth of reaching China: Roussel shut himself up in a room with curtains carefully drawn. The language traces what is shared by these opposing images. The sun is enclosed, running the danger of being lost in the external night, and there the sun set free creates beneath each surface a little lake of night, shifting and disturbing. These two profiles facing each other create out of the same need the following figure: that of an enclosed sun. It is closed in so as not to dissipate itself, so that it will, no longer divide things in two,  but present them against the background of its own luminosity. It’s the solar language held prisoner by the lens of La Vue, enveloping men, words, things, faces, dialogues, thoughts, gestures, all displayed without any reticence or secret within the circular glass lens. It is also the opening found within a unique and duplicated sentence, the calm microcosm of the circular stories. But this period of the domesticated sun, “placed in a box” that is opened at will and visible to the core by a piercing, sovereign glance, was for his illness the period of melancholy, of the lost sun and of persecution. With Impressions d’ Afrique, the sun of language is hidden within the secret; but at the heart of this night where it is maintained, it becomes marveslously fecund, causing machines and automaton corpses, incredible invetions and careful imitations to be born above itself in the light of garden parties. During this time, life holds a promise like an imminent afterlife. Thus the work and the illness circle around their incompatibility, which binds them.

It only remains to see in this exclusion a compensatory mechanism (the work bars the burden of resolving in the imaginary the problems posed by illness).

Unless it is perceived as an essential incompatibility, nothing can ever fill the hollow core. It Is also toward this void that Artaud wanted to move in his work, but from which he always found himself separated: he separated it from his work and also from himself by the work; he never stopped casting his language toward this medullary ruin, hollowing out a work which is the absence of a body work.

 Paradoxically for Roussel this hollowness is the sun, a sun which is there but which remains unattainable. It shines, but its rays remain contained within its sphere; it dazzles, but it cannot be seen through; for the core of this sun would rise, but the words cover it up and hide it; it is unique and yet it is double, and twice duplicated since it is its own mirror and nocturnal opposite.

But what is this solar emptiness if not the negation of this madness through his work, and of the work by his madness? Their mutual exclusion is along more radical lines than can be recognized within the interpretation of a unique subjective experience.

This solar void is neither the psychological background of the work a meaningless idea nor a theme that coincides with illness. It is Roussel’s linguistic space, the void from which he speaks, the absence which binds and mutually excludes his work and his madness . This void is not to be understood as a metaphor. It is the insolvency of words which are fewer in number than the things they designate, and due to its principle of economy must take on meaning. If language were as rich as existence, it would be the useless and mute duplicate of things; it would not exist. Yet without names to identify them, things would remain in darkness. This illuminating flaw of language  was experienced by Roussel as an anguish, as an obsession, if you will. In any case, quite unique forms of experience (quite “deviant,” which is to say quite disorientating) were required to expose this bare linguistic fact: that language speaks only from something essential that is lacking. From this lack is experienced the “play” – in both senses of the word (the limit and the principle simultaneously) – in the fact that the same sentence repeated can have another meaning. From this follows the proliferating emptiness of language, its capacity to say thing, all things, to lead them to their luminous being, to place in the sun their “mute”  truth to “unmask” them. From that also follows its power to create by simple repetition things never said, nor heard, nor seen. There is the misery and celebration of the signifier, and the anguish before too many and too few signs, Roussel’s sun, which is always there and always “lacking,”  which runs the risk of dissipating itself outside, but which also shines on the horizon- that is the constitutional flaw of language, its poverty, the irreducible distance from which the light shines indefinitely. By this essential distance where language is called upon to fatally repeat itself, and things to be absurdly confused, death makes audibly clear the strange promise that language will no longer repeat itself, but will be able to repeat infinitely that which is no more.