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What is a Metaphysical
Experience?
Commitment and Contemporaneity in Cultural Analysis
Mario Veen
MA Thesis Cultural Analysis
1 July 2005
Supervisors: Ruth Sonderegger & Sudeep Dasgupta
Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis

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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
1
My translation

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Table of Contents
0. Introduction 4
1. When Experience Fails 11
a. Trauma 11
b. Miracle 23
2. When Metaphysics Falls 31
3. Conclusion 42
4. Bibliography 48

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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

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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

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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

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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

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“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 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

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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

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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.

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2. 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

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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

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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

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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 experience 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.

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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:

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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. (1946: 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

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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.

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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

19. 19
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

20. 20
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:

21. 21
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

22. 22
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.

23. 23
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?

24. 24
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

25. 25
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.
2
In Rule of Faith, 1676 and A Doctrine Against Transubstantiation, 1684

26. 26
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.

27. 27
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

28. 28
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

29. 29
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

30. 30
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.

31. 31
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

32. 32
impotent longing for something bigger, something more potent. As Oscar Wilde
said, “there is nothing left for me now but the divine ο όχ ο ο ήδο ή
[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, an 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 moment, 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

33. 33
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

34. 34
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 part
3
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
3
Translated from Dutch by the author

35. 35
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

36. 36
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

37. 37
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

38. 38
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

39. 39
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.

40. 40
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

41. 41
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

42. 42
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.

43. 43
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.

44. 44
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.

45. 45
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

46. 46
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

47. 47
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.

48. 48
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 images,” in Journal of Visual
Culture, Vol 1 (2): 2002.
 Bal, Mieke. Travelling Concepts of 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: Hacket Publishing Company, Inc., 1999.

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 Lusseyran, Jacques. And There Was Light, Independent Pub
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