#dylan trigg

The window of your home affords you a glimpse of an alien world. For you, the frame to the outside world serves less to connect you with that world and more to fortify your distance from it. In and through the window you observe another world taking place. If there is a rapport between you and this world, then it is only a visual one, vulnerable at all times to alienation and anxiety. You know your place in the cosmos. It centres at all times on the intersection between your home and the existence that takes place outside of that space. Dare you move beyond the home to find yourself in the world of contingency and chance, then almost immediately you are overwhelmed with regret. For you know that unlike the outside, your home maintains your presence in the world, securing you within a boundary line, which you have no reason to transgress.

“I am not in space and time, nor do I conceive space and time; I belong to them, my body combines with them and includes them.”

The persistence of the I is thus not simply an aggregation of personal memories, values and commitments. It is instead the work of an anonymous body, to which the personal I has an ambiguous relation. (...) As well as the perception of our immediate world, the body is occupied in the retention of a body belonging to a prehistorical realm. This prehistory of the human body establishes a paradoxical structure central to subjective experience. On the one hand, the human experience of being a bodily subject is characterised by the body anchoring and orienting our phenomenal experience. Thanks to the body, we are able to find our way in the world, indeed to have a world. To this end, the body is irreducibly mine. At the same time, “my” own body is doubled by an anonymous body, which in some sense is not mine owing to its prehistoric anonymity. While it is true that the prepersonal body is constitutive of the personal self, it is at the same time inaccessible, alien, and invisible to the personal self, and thus, critically, marks an incipient threat to selfhood. After all, if the prepersonal body remains alien to personal existence, can we be sure that its buried teleology coincides with our own cognitive intentionality?

In an important passage, [Levinas] writes: ‘Existence is not synonymous with the relationship with a world; it is antecedent to the world. In the situation of an end of the world the primary relationship which binds us to Being becomes palpable’. In this passage, Levinas is assigning a reality to existence that is not dependent on there being a world in the first place. Rather, existence precedes the birth of the world, marking a constant presence that is at once immersed in the world of things but at the same time resistant to being identified with those things. For this reason, ‘Being is essentially alien and strikes against us. We undergo its suffocating embrace like the night, but it does not respond to us’. At the same time, this pre-human existence also emerges in ‘the twilight of the world’ whereupon the appearance of the subject folds back upon its disappearance.

In the nooks and alcoves that have been reconstituted and altered, my involvement with the [places of the past] has ended. Reduced to the outsider of my own memory, the assurance that coincides with self-presence is undermined. After all, where am “I” in this return? The answer is clear: partly dispersed in time, and yet partly absorbed in place, but never actually “here.” Place and time: two pillars of identity, now bathed in a strange, even uncanny, light.