Summary
The following discusses various perspectives that may or may not exist in the therapeutic-theatrical interaction between osteopaths and patients (all sorts of whimsical thoughts about the possibility of contacts being different). The osteopath, perhaps a sentient being, perhaps endowed with perspectives like a beautiful machine, integrates with patient X and their aspects Y. Transcosmic and phenoallergic perspectives equally influence this encounter. We note that we still do not know what a “to integrate with” might mean. (We attest to the possible magical impossibility of meaning for any integration in the interactive calculus of contact-making.)
a) The Double Dual Role; or More?
The two actors always stand in at least two, sometimes up to infinitely many roles in relation to each other: The viewing windows then always imagine something like a dual role, which assigns the expertise of suffering to the patiently waiting and the expertise of the activist to the activist. Both, however, as the dual role speaks, leaning shyly over the windowsill, are something like a togetherness. In the understanding of such an orchestration of mirror fields and apostasies preparing itself within man, the subject with its compartments for the activist, suffering with its sufferers for the patient, and above all, the With an original attitude of care, of which man is often told, it would have it – it would constitute his One and Ethos. Anyway. Then there is the economy of pure giving to consider and the state before any contractual security. If we follow Derrida and Hobbes, which is not always the easiest to think simultaneously, the former is not easily obtained, being held in the veil of an impossible possibility, and the latter is extremely desirable, as otherwise the right of Cain, preceding the right of Abel, would prevail. Together, the patient and the activist strive to attend to healing and wholeness in the creative process. For unsurpassed is he who does good, and unsurpassed is the experience of that upon which good is wrought. In between, perceptions and sensations sparkle around. In their sparkle, a great shame is discernible before the monstrous Bataillean intimacy that embraces both, as soon as the Feuerbachian limes between man and animal begins to dissipate. If this occurs, then an economy of absolute, incomparable expenditure is to be advocated.
b) Alphanumeric Dimensions, exemplified by contacts a, b, c, etc., and the softness of the flesh 1, 2, 3, etc.
First question: is there even such a thing as a subjective dimension? Where would the subject be, i.e., the underlying principle of such a measure? Does it hide in its perceptive inherences, does it simply think to itself, or does the eternal swamp of emotional monstrosities spread, which even Plato’s charioteer could not drain? Axiom one: there would be a subject. Corollary: the subject is completely and utterly devoted to the flesh; it is over-identified with the flesh. Axiom two: the subject would be admired by the world. Corollary: the discourse of the subject presupposes a world opposed to the subject. Second question: what does the world marvel at? Solution: (a) the world marvels at the flesh (b) the world marvels at the consistency of the flesh (c) the world marvels at the lust of the flesh (d) the world marvels at the endless fear of the flesh (what does the flesh fear? Its dismemberment and its non-being) (1) in doing so, the world loses itself in the flesh; the flesh tastes good to it (2) in doing so, the world chokes on the flesh; it is disgusted by this flesh, this mass devoid of geometry (3) in doing so, the world penetrates the flesh (the flesh is then contaminated and can be destroyed by the world) (4) in doing so, the world cries out with lust for existence (5) in doing so, the world soils itself with the fear of the flesh (6) in doing so, the world thinks only one thing: where should the knife be applied to the sacrificial animal? (7) in doing so, the world loses itself completely in the thoughts of sacrifice (8) in doing so, the world experiences itself as an object for the first time (9) in doing so, it dawns on the world for the first time that only it can be considered as the object of sacrifice, and it divests itself of its objective substantiality and flees into the pre-interpretive space of Bataillean intimacy. In doing so, it reveals its meaning to the artists of Lascaux and has flesh painted on the cave walls. Note: in one of the innermost chambers of the Lascaux cave system, there is a reclining man with an erect penis next to a dying animal. When viewing the image, one can hear the steaming of the flesh. This sole depiction of a human shatters all interpretative maneuvers. We know the intimacy of the people of Lascaux, and at the same time, it is the ultimate foreignness to us. It has now become a large part of the fear of the flesh, a single great trauma in the heart of what is called history and civilization. We refuse to discredit such a depiction as postmodern absolutism. Let the discreditors prove to us that they are still capable of becoming like the people of Lascaux, and we already know that they will fail miserably. Their facts evaporate on the cave walls, and the door is now wide open to interpretative arbitrariness. Only the corpses of inauthentic facts are swept through the sluices of interpretive currents. They can be counted and then form lists of flesh-facts that only the finger of God can manage. Are there still feelings in these contacts? What the lock keepers experience is merely a showing. Or, to put it differently: what the lock keepers experience is finally pure appearance. The mere or pure appearance is the phenomenon par excellence. It refuses the garrulousness of the Logos; it does not yet fuel a narrative. It is one thing above all: not a subject/object. But it is, and this is utterly annoying, the staging of that deceptive god who first sets this wretched S/O dilemma in motion. Thus begins this accursed history of an S/O relationship, ranging from the two-headed Parmenides to the quantum universe of postmodern physics, and used with such enthusiasm by free-riders of all possible stripes that it makes one shudder. Dear God, put an end to this evil game and destroy the phenomenon, eradicate every faint possibility of a showing, leave us, the patient and the activist, in the silence of nothingness, and thereby allow flesh and world to heal.
c) “We” – the erectable limb of the man of Lascaux.
In the intercosmic dimension, viewpoints emerge in the isolated activist as part of a ritual collective. The viewpoints target the activist and condemn him to be a passionist. The activist experiences himself as a product of the viewpoints that gaze upon him. He is and acts only as one gazed upon by the viewpoints. He is thus a prisoner of the pathos that accrues to him from the gazes of the viewpoints. He cannot resist it. The more he thinks of resistance, the more all resistance within him dwindles. He becomes prey to the “seeing points,” as Henriette Beese calls them in her translation of Deleuze’s Proust and Signs. He becomes the product of a grandiose deterritorialization, as Deleuze, together with Guattari, but elsewhere, also writes. His privacy is always already public space, is exposure. Only one strategy remains for him: surrender. Thereupon, he falls into a hermeneutic coma. The patients stand around his couch and assess his condition. They touch his flesh. They check the scales of softness from one to a hundred. The activist’s flesh has grown dull; it responds only wearily. It is comatose flesh. It is excellent flesh. It could withstand the seal of quality. It would certainly be edible. Thus, the patients dream to themselves the dream of incorporation. But in this dream, all flesh becomes a sign. The semiotization of the flesh. Against the changing backdrops of dream landscapes, the signs always combine into nine patterns. They signify multiples and something different each time. The signs desperately call for their lord and master. A certain John Searle answers, and John Searle, in turn, calls to the signs to finally calm down. It is all quite simple, he just has to complete the devilish reiteration of Derrida’s iteration of meaning, in order to then, as a crowning conclusion, so to speak, be able to affix his signature. And John Searle continues to speak and complains – to whom, it is unclear – that Derrida has twisted his name into S.A.R.L, when he only wanted to save one last possibility of hermeneutic arrival: the original meaning. Everything revolves around this, the first or last meaning. God’s list of names for objects, the appeal to the great baptismal act by analytical philosophy. Only in this logistic liturgy can, similar to a belief in transubstantiation, the incredible abyss between sense and meaning, which Mr. Frege’s brain had torn open between the morning star and the evening star, be bridged. Alone, what all fellow combatants lack is the mediating element: the Holy Spirit, trembling between the Son of Man and God the Father. At this point, the activist’s hermeneutic coma ends, and one hears him sigh: so much effort and still no glimmer of structure. How can we proceed with so much ambiguity? He sees the patients sleeping beside his bed. A true Gethsemane scene. In the Gethsemane scene, the image of ‘we’ implodes into the cold solitude of the individual. The human individual finds himself in the frosty blue of a moonlit night and feels only one thing: the absence of the Other. He conjures the Other, but the Other does not respond. In this conjuring, it is said, the isolated human must shed blood through the pores of his sweat glands. Whether this is physiologically possible at all, we will not discuss. It is also completely irrelevant for this scene, as physiology represents the sister of physics and, as such, is subject to the deceptive dictate of the object and its scalability. What interests us much more here is the world that has lost its ‘we’. No pack, no collective, no people, no followers, not even an opposite to look angrily into the eyes. So the activist rises from his bed, leaves the sleeping patients behind, walks towards the world, and fantasizes in overwhelming images about the word “relationship.” This fantasy is now his subject-fleshly bait. It allows him to continue living in a net of signs beyond any structure. What remains for him now is only pre-worldly turmoil, initial babbling, as in the Tower of Babel, sensations, atmosphere, the memory of the man lying next to the dying animal with an erect penis, only dimly discernible after he, equipped with a firebrand, had overcome the incomprehensible darkness of the cave. Thanks to this reminiscence of a truly superhuman act, it becomes clearer to him that he will return only as one purified. And during recurring touches on never-mappable body regions, during intense atmospheric journeys, during atmospheric hovering experiences in the trans-emotional elaborate, the certainty increasingly presses upon him that his distance from the absent Other has transformed into such an urgent proximity that he could only return as God.
d) The Reach of Objective Mutilation.
The patients have woken up in the meantime. They are very agitated because the activist’s camp is empty. They look for the gardener they could ask where the activist has been moved. There is no gardener. The absence of the object, which left its traces as imprints in the camp, clarifies things for them: objective mutilation has begun. Objective mutilation can go so far that the flesh will only be regarded as an interchangeable mass within an unmanageable collective of interchangeable masses. Every fiber will have been mapped, baptized, labeled, and thus made manageable. There will be certainty and no more intimacy. This is the sacrifice: the sacrifice of a logically trained mind, a mind that will call itself “scientific” and will thus fall prey to the stigma of a simultaneous success story and a total error regarding being itself. Within this total error, the inside-outside game will be played. It will be played fiercely, and the little word “exact” will rise over the nocturnal water and float in the sparse moonlight (much sparser than in the Gethsemane scene); an annoying and intrusive spirit whose eyes scan the ten thousand table rows up and down so as not to miss a single thing that might still be hiding in the great epiphany of all things. This spirit does not seek the reason for the tears that the patients are now shedding, left alone in a thoroughly calculated universe. They touch the thousand things, embrace them, try to give meaning—even if only a hermeneutic byproduct—to this touch, this embrace, this feeling. But there is nothing left but data: Given: length, width, height, production date, expiration date, and entry into the desert of unusable objects. So the patients cry out for flesh, they cry out for the softness of the flesh, for its warmth, for the steam in the huts when the entrails of the slaughtered animal are hung up. Screaming, they now drag at things, beat them, again and again, following an infernal rhythm. But things do not turn back into flesh. Only one thing remains: an immense measurability that has settled over everything like a sacred spell. The “atmospheric” quality of the “space between” the patients themselves and “their” objects has given way to a coordinate system. In this coordinate system, the patients pray and await the arrival of the activist, for only then may salvation be granted to them in a possible therapeutic relationship.
e) Curse: The Interobjective Conversation.
When objects begin to speak, the world has reached its extreme. Then the world’s astonishment ceases. It is then merely present and talks at the subjects. The subjects, however, whether they belong to the activists or the patients, cannot hear the narrative flow of the objects, and if they could hear it, they would not understand it, and if they did understand it, they would lose their senses. This is the curse that objects impose on subjects. Thus, subjects are exposed to all possible intrigues. They are presented with a will that is merely the product of interobjective conversation. Yet, the objects realize none of this. They are, after all, only objects, and they speak only with each other and rarely with subjects. It is more often the subjects who speak to the objects, and if someone claims that objects speak to him, he is readily taken into custody. The S/O structure of an S speaking to an O—according to the custody expertise—has evidently suffered a dent. So who influences whom here? This is difficult because only subjects believe they possess something like a will, and objects, without perceiving it themselves, undermine the sovereignty of this will. The will of subjects is consequently a hyper-elastic quantity. It is also inhomogeneous and, in reality, unpredictable, although subjects attribute such a property to it. This constitutes their most fundamental deception. Against the backdrop of such deception, patients now encounter activists. What happens then? Typologies run rampant, fantasies blossom, flesh-interactions steam away, there are stalemates and dynamics, there are symptoms and deceptive maneuvers, there are syndromes and mislabeling, there are inclusions and exclusions, and above all, there are authorities and subserviences. In the mire of all these moments, the will ferments, emits gases, and is difficult to tame. Thus, some supposedly want to heal, and others supposedly want to be healed. The activists are the healers, and the patients are the targets of possible healings. If the endeavor succeeds, both are in a state of euphoric fellow-humanity. Can this fellow-humanity still be compared to a possible fellow-humanity among the people of Lascaux? This question must remain unanswered. There is no way to even approximately answer such a question. This question projects itself into a methodical nirvana. In a word: the question of Bataillean intimacy in the relationship between activists and patients is an unanswerable question.
CONCLUSION:
We have made many considerations and arrived nowhere. However, this finding is entirely appropriate to the matter we have addressed. If we were to utter a word of definitive statement about it, that would already be a contemptible error. For such a statement would treat the encounter in question in the style of impulse laws that describe the behavior of two colliding spherical bodies. And to the experts we call out: Wake up! Anatomy has played its part; it is pure cartography of a single deception! Physiology is pure madness; it is the history of a megalomaniacal usurpation of the living! Everything else, up to Sheldrake’s dream of morphic fields, is something like deception within deception, a second-degree deception: the Russian doll of a confusion of reality. So let us think back and forward at the same time to the flesh and to the moment before appearance itself will have appeared. Let us think about it, let us go within ourselves, let us breathe deeply, let us fuel our spirit and speak aloud: Long live the non-birth of the phenomenon! Literature Bataille G. 1986. Lascaux: Prehistoric Painting or the Birth of Art. Klett-Kotta. Stuttgart. Bataille G. 1997. Theory of Religion. Trans.: A Knop. Matthes & Seitz. Munich. Bataille G. 2001. The Abolition of Economy. Trans.: H Abosch, G Bergfleth. Matthes & Seitz. Berlin. Cage J. 1987. Silence. Trans.: E Jandl. Suhrkamp. Frankfurt a.M. Char R. 1999. Birdman Dead and Bison Dying. In: ibid. Lascaux. Trans.: E Frey, H-J Frey, FP Ingold. Kleinheinrich. Münster. S 13. Deleuze G. 1993. Proust and Signs. Trans.: H Beese. Merve. Berlin. Deleuze G, Guattari F. 2000. What is Philosophy? Trans.: B Schwibs, J Vogl. Suhrkamp. Frankfurt a.M. Derrida J. 2001. Limited Inc. Trans.: W Rappl, D Travner. Passagen. Vienna. Derrida J. 2003. A Certain Impossible Possibility of Speaking of the Event. Trans.: S Lüdemann. Merve. Berlin. Frege G. 2002. Function – Concept – Meaning. Vandenhoek & Ruprecht. Göttingen. Feuerbach L. 1969. The Essence of Christianity. Reclam. Stuttgart. Hobbes T. 2005. Leviathan. Trans.: J Schlösser. Meiner. Hamburg. Jüngel E. 2001. 7th ed. God as the Mystery of the World: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified in the Dispute Between Theism and Atheism. Mohr Siebeck. Tübingen. Mersch D. What Shows Itself: Materiality, Presence, Event. Fink. Munich. Nancy J-L. 2003. 2nd ed. Corpus. Trans.: N Hodyas, T Obergöker. diaphanes. Zurich. Nancy J-L. 2008. Noli me tangere. Trans.: Ch Dittrich. diaphanes. Zurich. Parmenides. 1996. Didactic Poem. In: H Diels and W Kranz (Eds.). The Fragments of the Presocratics. Weidmann. Zurich. S 228–241. Plato. 2005. Phaedrus. In: G Eigler (Ed.). Plato. Works in Eight Volumes. Greek and German. Trans: F Schleiermacher. 4th unchanged ed. Wissenschaftliche Buchgemeinschaft. Darmstadt. Vol 5 of 8. Roth P. 2002. In the Valley of Shadows: Frankfurt Poetics Lectures. Suhkamp. Frankfurt a.M.
