In occult literature, I read the simulacrum refers to a small image of a whole: a particular person can be represented by some of his hair, or a fingernail, which can then find place in a ritual. Didn’t Parmenides press the young Socrates as to whether there were Ideas of these offgrowths of the body? And wouldn’t Bataille have included them in the (non)category of the formless?
Either way, it is as though we could be known, each of us, by way of what is sloughed from us; the path to the essential is to be gained via the inessential. But magic always placed faith in secret correspondences, in the connection of symbols and the order of things. The simulacrum would be just another symbol; the image grants the chance of the manipulation of the whole. This is what the child believes in writing the name of his infatuee on his exercise book. If I have her name, then I have something of her. How many times do I need to write it for the love-spell to be cast?
The poppet, I read, is a doll that is meant to be substitutive of a person to cast spells of healing, fertility or binding. A physical trace of its object is unnecessary; the poppet can be made from wax, clay or branches, or any number of substances. But the effigy so produced stands in for the person it is meant to represent; to act upon the poppet is to act on the person. This practice, which is called ‘image magic’, is to be distinguished from those famous practices from New Orleans Voodoo that centre on ‘voodoo dolls’, which are, I read, ‘power objects’ rather than proxies.
Image magic: isn’t this what I work when I speak about you, rather than to you? As adolescents, I remember learning the power of speaking about others. Immense power: alliances were formed and dissolved, secrets kept and broken. X. spoke about Y. to Z., and then Z. spoke to Y. about X.: our relation to each other acquired a new kind of depth. Where was the immediacy of our childhood friendships?
Add to this the drama of the diary, of written confessions; every relationship was doubled. Strange discovery that to write was to begin to reconstitute the world, to discover patterns and correspondences. To keep a diary was a magical operation; if it allowed the development of interiority this was only insofar as it made an image of the world, and even an image of oneself. Who were you, the writer? And what was the world you were writing about?
Could I say I began to relate to myself as to an effigy? That something of my substance was captured in the ink covered pages of my five year diary? Now I was like the fairy-tale ogre whose heart was buried outside of him. Then writing was something like the hair or fingernails that were the basis of the simulacrum. I had doubled myself using my own substance.
But wasn’t there another, more difficult lesson? To double myself was only to separate out that doubling that belongs, also to the original. To speak, to write, was to redouble a doubling that had already set itself back into the conditions of my life. For isn’t language already the outside inside? Isn’t it already what has turned me from myself?
It is Plato, not Aristotle, who understands the threat of writing. He banishes the poets from the polis because he fears the power of a language that no longer refers, that doubles itself, that belongs to the alogon rather than the logos (Schmidt). Aristotle accommodates the tragedian; but Plato knows the tragedy embodies something more frightening: a struggle at the limits of the polis, a struggle against the Ideas and for the proliferation of the magic of the image.
Alogon: the double of language. Or, language become simulacral, material, all hair and fingernails. Language that lets itself be carried in the direction of the formless (Bataille). But what if there are no Ideas, and the sky is empty? Then language was always made of hair and nails, and the logos is always doubled. And I, too, the speaker, the writer, have a kind of double, a companion, like a vestigal twin, who speaks with me and writes with me.
He is writing now, his ghostly hand within mine. And when he speaks, I hear his murmuring in my voice. Sometimes I want to confront him, and ask him who he is. But from what angle can I see him, he who is also me? How can I turn so as to meet what gives me the power to turn? In the end, I have to look for him in my own face.
But what mirror will show him? I wonder whether writing is the mirror in which he seeks to find me, and that somewhere he is as though reaching out his hand to press against mine. But his hand is already mine; his reaching is my reaching; we are joined, but we do not occupy the same time. I imagine he lags behind me, that he draws me back into the past, but also that the future is only his return, the return of the past. I don’t know which one of us is writing this.
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