The Hermaphrodite, by Michel Serres

A translation of Michel Serres' L'Hermaphrodite (Paris: Flammarion, 1989), by Randolph Burks.

The Hermaphrodite

By Michel Serres

From the back cover: Sarrasine and Zambinella On the night of a party in the heart of winter, in Paris, Balzac intersects the story of a sculptor and a singer. A narrative full of mystery – it will be lifted at the end – full of profuse riches, of sensuality, unheard of, untouched. Music and sculpture exchange their power, mortally attracting one another. The sculptor will fall, a victim of three stilettos. The love story, like every enigma, plunges toward the tomb, toward the corpse – from which statues are born. Following Balzac, Michel Serres sheds light on the entire complexity of such a strange short story – so as to go progressively, by loops and knots, chisels and volutes, to the heart of the mystery. “Sarrasine” or the superabundant androgyne.1

1 The following is a commentary on Honore de Balzac’s short story “Sarrasine.” I highly recommend reading this story before continuing, otherwise much of what follows will make little sense. Unless otherwise indicated, all footnotes are the translator’s. Also, it’s not clear whether the bibliography is Serres' or not, but I included it anyway.

Table of Contents

The Salon where the Curious Chat Midnight, Middle The Fullness of Meaning Sculpture and Music The Fetish Space and Time Causes and Things Bibliography

1 3 8 15 24 29 37 49

Serres/The Hermaphrodite

Judging, deciding, this is the primary sense of the act of criticism. 2 The exercise of exegesis of holy books formerly led to discerning between heretical readings and the orthodox one. Critique would no longer leave the tribunals, whether religious or civil, those of Reason or Taste, the media and the University readily changing into courts where things and cases are debated – final judgment, final judicial authority.

The critic, priest or philosopher, judges in any case, knows the codes, the theory and method, applies them and decides following law.3 But why do our languages say law? Written codes permit decision, whereas their name has already turned to one side of space, bodies and time: the balance symbolizing or representing justice tips. Might law conceal beneath this word an entire anthropological and mysterious past which for obscure reasons prefers the right hand to the left one?

How can we orient ourselves in space and thought? But this verb, unjust, also turns to the orient. Our bodies, symmetrical, tremble, distraught. Precisely at the incipit of “Sarrasine” hesitates a disquieted body, dancing, immobile, from one foot to the other, right, left, half entering the ball, half leaving the narrative, an entrance guard preposed in pre-written regions. * The Salon where the Curious Chat A parasitical crowd flits about at the ball at the Lanty mansion while posing the true questions: Why? How? Where did he come from? Who are they? What's the matter with him? What has she done? Balzac sets forth the canonical program of what will be called the social sciences and, laughing, chastises the manners of the curious people who chat about them. While placing their empty glasses on a console, these philosophers wonder whether those who are feeding them don’t look like assassins. The parasites become detectives so as to put their hosts to death. Honore de Balzac foresees the manners of the critics who live from works.

2 Criticism=critique, which can also mean “critique” in Kant's sense. I will translate the term in both ways, depending on the context. Obviously, sometimes both are meant.

3 Law=un droit, which can mean “law” in general or “right” in the sense of human rights. Droit is also the adjective for “right,” as in right hand.

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Serres/The Hermaphrodite The genius of the French language arranged things so that the adjective “curious” derives from “cure,” particularly medical cures, from its attentive care and concern, but that it quickly passes, to the ears of the people who know they are denounced or surveilled, from concern to suspicion or from interest to avid indiscretion. The curious seeker or researcher, a snooper, annoying, ill-mannered, lacks a good deal of reserve and restraint; he's a discourteous, crude person. This boor reads letters, sounds and rummages through private lives, scrutinizes the secrets of childhood and the bed, ceaselessly hitting below the belt and in the bank account. Happy if he discovers a skeleton in the family closet. A detective, customs officer, voyeur, he definitely has to have the right to ask questions.

Don’t answer. Be wary of the curious. Have you ever read your life displayed in the papers or reviews, most often falsely? Your manner of speaking, your income and amorous ways? With what right have they torn you limb from limb? For science and the truth, for the good of mankind, for the cure. In fact, for the salary and the scientific glory. Have you ever noticed that curiosity is continually practiced on the dead and the weak and defenseless, and never regarding the powerful? The subjects of the social sciences differ from their objects; these aren't the same men. Have you ever met a group of peasants on the Paris road climbing to the capitol in order to clarify the customs of their administrators? Or on the flights to the United States a Zulu or Guarani school going to hold a seminar on some notable American scholars?

Formerly the dominant colonized the dominated. Now they observe them.

I would like to see constitutions inscribed with the right of men and peoples to refuse to be studied.

The same genius of the same language calls the fashionable gossip – whether society, scientific or social gossip – where precisely causes are sought “chatting” [causerie]. The curious chatters [causeurs] of the ball, sitting on the divan of malicious gossip, are in fact preparing a judicial trial. Chatting [causer], accusing: same word, same action; no excuse, same word: this is not chance; each detail, above all minor ones, contributes to the case [cause]. The knowers of hearts and minds, experts in medicine, history and sociology are leading a police investigation by following good critical methods. “Sarrasine” begins and ends as a critical analysis on the subject of aesthetics and works of art and so correctly goes back to the causes, like a detective novel. The word, again, predicts it: criticism seeks and finds a crime.

The chatters' curious questions formulate anew, by reforging them from the point of view of the social sciences, the questions stated by Immanuel Kant a few years before when philosophy entered its critical phase, that is to say, the tribunal. We are just leaving a dark period when everything was decided before a previously chosen final authority after a curious inquest into causes. The social sciences and the philosophies or theories founded on them are only acquainted with detective methods. That’s the second danger, a real one: those who practice them risk behaving as the method or theory dictates.

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Serres/The Hermaphrodite Yet in the critical, criminal or judicial inquest, the narrator of “Sarrasine” ends up at the right cause, which none of the curious got to. Elected therefore the best inspector or detective, he relates his denouncement next to Rochefide, who he says knows how to punish, designating her by this description as a tribunal, and as a judge by her name: rock of the sworn faith [rocher de la foi jurée]. * Midnight, Middle When you announce your arrival by train or the midnight plane, don’t neglect to specify the date and some further piece of information, for two figures coexist in this ambiguous point, the end of the legal day and the beginning of the following one; two numbers, zero and twenty-four, occupy the same place. Should your correspondents have poorly understood the telegram, you'll find yourself alone in deserted straits, disoriented. Exactly midnight, doubtful midnight. The old saying: “Midnight is the time for crime” opens a subtle alibi since the word “crime” expresses what can be judged or decided, just like the term “criticism,” whereas this time alone escapes decision. The twelve strokes ring, yesterday swings into today – does midnight belong to the one or the other? The narrator, who is musing and is soon going to write or speak, who is observing, seated inside and outside of a window, the garden and the ball, is standing on a spatial and temporal threshold, between two dances, two dates and two worlds, between depth and frivolity; lastly he feels the division of his body between the left and the right; yes, the narrator is seeking to orient himself. * Orpheus, returning from the underworld, turns around too soon and only sees Eurydice's vanishing phantom behind him: just like his lover, music flees from him.

Lot’s wife, fleeing the rain of stones and fire inundating and laying waste to Sodom, turns around too soon and changes into a pillar of salt; statuary reaches her. Neither of the two is awaiting the threshold of deliverance, the exit door toward the daylight, after which sculpture would vanish or music would come about.

And if someone, a man like Orpheus, a woman like Lot’s wife, Greek or Jewish, was standing exactly on this border, balancing right between the Underworld and the world beneath the sun, death and life, the lamentable horror of destruction and rebirth, what would they see, what would they do, what would they be? In love with Eurydice, Orpheus became a pederast, it is said; outside the Sodomite city, Lot

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Serres/The Hermaphrodite passed into incest with his daughters: where can we define a border once again for sex?

Balzac describes it first: to the right, death and cold, trees imperfectly covered with snow in a garden, a danse macabre for specters or shrouds in the shadows under the moon, nature in mourning; to the left, the ball of the living, pretty women half covered in flowers, shouts, murmurs mixed with music, lively eyes, voluptuous steps. To the right, immobile forms, frozen, to the left, bacchanalia. Someone is standing on the sought-for threshold, one leg in a coffin, a pillar of salt, one leg warm, keeping time to the music, one statue leg, one music leg. Who is it? The mixed body. What does he see? The border of two disparate tableaux, the one pleasant, the other funereal, dead and alive. What role does he play? A moral macedoine. Suffice it to say that he comprehends, located in the middle between two worlds and two arts.

Posed there, he has no need for any strong prompting to turn to this or that side commonly inhabited by one or the other, for he becomes, at leisure, the one he sees or wants. The intelligent and comprehensive observer, balanced, vibrating, disquieted, lies at the intersection of the borders and mixes the extremes in his body.

The imbecile thinks he is at the center, the sympathetic one seeks the verges’ vanishing point. He is, when he wants, he or she that he describes. Even opposites.

He's a thinker and novelist here.

Where can we find the point that's common to the sculptor and the female musician? And when can we find it? At midnight? * Nothing is as stable as a statue, nothing more unstable than music. It passes and flows with time or, rather, makes time perceptible. With repetition it differs, according to the interpreter and the moments, whereas the Sphinx, stubborn, has been contemplating for forty centuries. So bodies in movement will be sculpted, ritornelli will be composed. In order to observe the immobile idol and the gauze dress-clad dancer together, a site or point of view that's stable and unstable at the same time is discovered: why not claim it's metastable?

Logical discourse unites opposites: life and death, man and woman, yes and no; but beyond or on the nether side of speech and words, it's better to live the union in one’s own body. It's in this way that the narrator, or Balzac himself – what does it matter? – orients himself: left and right, feet or legs. Lot’s wife and Orpheus turn around. In which direction?

Nothing is as important as orientation, which always decides before thought: as proof, the word, which turns us toward the east while making us believe in a free choice. We orient ourselves by the north; why don’t we occident ourselves thanks to the south? As though space detested the southwest. Likewise the body leans to the right in all known cultures: we write the law [le droit] and the just according to this 4

Serres/The Hermaphrodite penchant, and we have the audacity to say, when we aren't changing direction, that we're going straight [allons droit]. Balzac or the narrator boldly chose the minority side: to the right, death, to the left, life; mourning or joy. This is the decision of a lefthander.

The left-hander lives in a physically and socially dextrogyrous world, that is to say, turning to the right, like a maladroit paralytic who at every moment has to accept the choice that's converse to his own. Most often, he even writes with his bad hand.

Hence a body that’s strangely unstable, but stable nonetheless, in that freedom.

Always thwarted, or more or less, if he takes the right he makes a good choice, but if he decides on the left he also makes a good choice. Ever since his birth, by his posture and gestures, he has introduced tolerance: he comprehends everything and cannot reject anything. You will never make a thwarted left-hander a fanatic, a militant, a dogmatic or a philosopher of antithesis. * Everything, in the world, is oriented in one direction: atoms, molecules or crystals turn, as well as winding shells or the branches of trees at the irruptions of their trunks, as well as our bodies, which are symmetrical but drawing entirely to one side, lastly the planets, stars and galaxies. I dream that the word “universal” might signify less general or global than screwed or turned in a direction: the universe would be understood as the sum of torsions, inversions or conversions, a sum invariant across these locally perceptible changes. And time, history, our ideas and opinions, law, morality and politics also incline in the same way. Thus orientation, being universal, concerns the exact sciences as much as the social sciences without it being able to be decided whether that obliquity, crucial, comes to us from the world, which assigns us into its inert or living lines of force, or from the collective cultures, which aren't outweighed by our knowledge.

Doubtlessly left-handed, the narrator is plunged, body and soul, into the oriented world, human and cosmic, a warm and brilliant ball facing the icy garden, a landscape and flesh whose double parts seem at first sight to be contradictory, but which attention shows to be symmetrical: the dance of the dead reflects as in a mirror the image of the dance of the living, crystals of snow facing the fire of diamonds. But this symmetry requires additional observation: the space, light or warmth, the figures and symbols are divided around the threshold of the Lanty's mansion in the same way as the seated subject's body, whose left hand is opposed to the right one without being able to be superposed; this event of non-symmetrical symmetry, in which identity is mixed with a singular paradox and which reveals the most refined alterity, has received the name enantiomorphy.

“Sarrasine,” luxuriously, begins with the incarnation of that societal and world enantiomorphy, by making every axis of symmetry coincide: doubtful midnight, the 5

Serres/The Hermaphrodite spatial threshold of a window recess, the middle plane of one's own body, the point where the temperatures become reversed, the glimmering lights, the noises and pleasures, the passage from the inside to the outside or from the collective to the natural, the door of death. Everything is pre-oriented and is going to be distributed at a stroke starting from the place from which a left and a right spread out in every imaginable field without any field taking precedence over any of the others. And since one leg is freezing and the other is keeping time to the music, it happens that in this place, at this instant and in these circumstances, via this body, sculpture encounters music and separates itself from it, as though enantiomorphic to each other: the story of Sarrasine and Zambinella is already here.

The world and the bodies saturated with mirrors multiply and divide themselves; thus the universe bears its own image. Why do we always forget that our bodies reflect themselves, one half in the other half, that our left hand reflects our right hand, just like the breast, the foot or the kidney, and that therefore an invisible mirror accompanies us, passing through the middle of us, through the navel, the cowlick and the perineum? If we remembered this mirror that never leaves us it would serve for understanding knowledge and alterity.

The sex, most often, is located in the center or along the axis, as though orientation enveloped it in the left and the right. The mirror passes through there.

Direction, universal, includes or implicates the sex, rarer.

Who am I on this axis or on the surface of the reflecting mirror at the center of my body? Who am I in the organs without image, model, double or equal? Where can the other and the same be found in the twin parts that are reflected, enantiomorphic, in this mirror? * There are many capital letters that are simply symmetrical, the A around its vertical axis, B, C, D, E around their horizontal axes, but very few asymmetrical ones such as F, G, J, L, N, etc. Among these latter, S and Z hold a singular place for possessing in themselves an organization that’s a little more complex: a rotation around their centers makes their two halves coincide in such a way that they can strictly be seen as symmetrical and asymmetrical at the same time. In addition, they're opposed to each other as though in a mirror. Symmetrical capitals remain unchanged by this reflection, whereas the asymmetrical ones, Alice would say, take the other path to Wonderland. In Lewis Carroll’s sense, S draws the other path of Z, or S and Z together make each other, like dance partners, the figure eight, or as the Greeks wrote, the chi of chimera. Left-handed S reflects right-handed Z. The same mirror slips between the left and right hands, or between the two eye movements when they read texts written from left to right or conversely.

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Serres/The Hermaphrodite This enantiomorphic event, which in the eighteen century was called the paradox of symmetrical and non-congruent objects, gave Kant reason to meditate, between 1770 and 1786, on a space that would be irreducible to the operations of logic since such obstructions are met with there. But to his eyes the symmetry plane or the surface of the reflecting mirror only separated exemplary hands and led him, via mathematics, to pure knowledge. A half century later, Balzac, also launched on the critical path with regard to the fine arts, rediscovered the question of orientation, added to it and extended it to the field of what would be called the social sciences, social observation, the thickness of emotion, the proliferation of symbols and the role of language: the narrator contemplates, muses, remains in organic intimacy but goes as far as the generality of orientation, the most concretely that it is possible, before producing his narrative.4 In any case, Balzac and Kant together teach that there is no knowledge for the latter nor production for the former that doesn’t start with the entire body, having its bearings in the world, as though there were direction before language.5 It is from this corporeal site where every organ takes a place that the text surges, which is written from left to right while randomly mixing symmetrical, enantiomorphic and asymmetrical letters. * Kant called on geometry for help with the faltering logic because a supplementary theory was needed for the events of symmetry around the mirror: later an aesthetic would be needed before the analytic. Plunged with his body and hands in this space, Balzac doesn’t have recourse to this rigorous formalism. He carefully describes the same division of symmetrical but opposed – hot and cold, mourning and joy, danse and dance, movement and rigid fixity – which neither the tropes and figures of rhetoric nor antithesis are sufficient to describe. Antithesis comes from a logic that’s too poor to express the facts of orientation. Hence the slightly blind appeal to a suitable algorithm: not in the meaning [sens], active or passive, signifying or signified, but in the spatial direction [sens] of the letters and proper names.

Left-handed S is therefore opposed while reflecting it to right-handed Z. I believe Balzac to be left-handed, who speaks here of Balsamo, substituting the S for the Z as in Sarrasine, something Roland Barthes saw well.6 The left-hander is opposed to the right-hander while remaining identical, enantiomorphic. Sarrasine is opposed to Zambinella as S is to Z, certainly. But the 4 Muses=rêve, which evokes the reverie the narrator is in at the beginning of the story. I will also translate this as “dream.”

5 Direction=sens, which can also mean “meaning.”

6 Serres' footnote: Roland Barthes. S/Z, Éditions du Seuil, 1970.

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Serres/The Hermaphrodite name of the woman or the man or the castrato signifies, the Z removed, in Italian, “both in her”: man and non-man since castrated, non-woman then but also woman in appearance. She embodies not lack but fullness. She embodies fullness plus lack.

No antithesis says this union, ambidextrous, but it is marked by the proper name.

For the same reason, I believe that Sarrasine is written with an S because the same meaning “two in him or her” is exactly described by an amphidromic proper name: SARRAS. SERRESINE might express the same palindrome for another thwarted lefthander. In the final analysis, I’d wager a thousand to one that the born lefty Balzac, therefore belonging to the sinister minority, nonetheless wrote with his right hand, something that the tranquil in its rights majority reputes to be a thwarting [contraréité]. This majority believes that contradiction suffices to express these crossings where identity gets along well with opposition and fullness with lack and the body with its cut, crossed, literally chimerical brain. * Balzac meditates on the fine arts while constructing them. He doesn’t seek the criteria of judgment, for he doesn’t care about aesthetics, but rather the conditions of production because he wonders about the artist’s active practice. Before critique, which is easy, labors the work-producing man, with difficultly. Before the metalanguage of judgment, a thing has to be constructed. Hence the primary reference to the body, to its mute position in the world, hence its precritical dive into a multiply-oriented space, tracing direction [sens] before language, where the frost of death and the cadence of rhythm face each other, what's going to become sculpture and music, Sarrasine and Zambinella. These bodies and these names rise from these shadows, and the entire short story from these relations. * The Fullness of Meaning I’ve always received a secret and complete satisfaction of the heart, senses and soul from “Sarrasine,” particularly its first part: can castration and its ravages fill in this way? Richness comes in profusion, and we only understand a lack. Does our head think our total joys poorly? A mystery. The final unveiling of the absent sex still leaves a black abyss, in which we delight.

We are filled first with the mixture accomplished by the body of the observer who names it macedoine. His left hand, at ease in the ball’s warmth, reflects, in the window’s recess, the right hand frozen stiff by the snow, in the garden of the 8

Serres/The Hermaphrodite mansion. One foot that knows how to dance is keeping time to some minuet while the other leg is hardening from cold in a coffin, the place of a danse macabre. No antithesis here that would tear us to pieces, but rather our everyday enantiomorphy: the window and its mirror never leave the axis of our bodies. Finally a complete author! Finally our real black and white world, life and death, hot and cold, transiting via the real body around its reflecting and luminous plane.

Orpheus turns around – to the left or toward the right? –, the Eurydices pass, shining, shuddering, eclipsed, as though heedless, and vanish in the musical commotion of the party. Lot’s wife turns around – to the right or toward the left? – and becomes a pillar of salt. Music and sculpture mix in the same body; one foot dances, the other freezes, according to the direction of the orientation; two arts encounter each other, two languages, two myths, two sexes soon. We are filled therefore by this concrete body that comprehends everything carnally.

We are filled by the immense fortune of the hosts, estimated to be in the millions, apparent at first and translated into brilliant salons, paintings by the masters, rare gems, an unabashed luxury, but a fortune above all satisfying by the abstract figure that includes more and makes everything possible, as general equivalent. Adding numbers meets with no contradiction, whereas the collection and consumption of qualities can find major ones: you can't enjoy without end. Thus greed can pass for being infinite, but not lust or gluttony. Money, compatible with money, is accumulated. Why? Because it has no qualities. It does not stink, as has been said since Vespasian.7 In the kingdom of the sense of smell, the latter cannot smell the former. Money effaces every mark, every obstacle that could cause contradiction, or dilutes the sweat of the poor or the blood of the despoiled on it, every pollution, coming from labor or not: this filthy sign, left by them on value, would announce from afar that said value still belongs to them. Colorless, odorless and flavorless, the general equivalent can now circulate without antecedent; no quality hampers it, but above all it becomes addable, indefinitely and without contradiction, like the number series: pure quantity. Without any obstacle in itself to growth, it removes them everywhere else.

Look at the obstacle of languages, an opposition encountered starting at the border. However intelligent or creatively a thought springs up, if it isn’t expressed in the good language it’s a dead letter for everyone. Balzac’s short story eliminates contradiction. The two hands aren’t opposed but are rather reflected in a mirror; twenty sous make a franc, and the family named Lanty speaks five languages.

Borders divide space through exclusion: inside, an element possesses a property, outside it possesses its negation. Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here or no one ignorant of French, Italian, Spanish, English or German. Yet the Lantys speak 7 In French, the quote translates literally as: it has no smell.

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Serres/The Hermaphrodite them to perfection: they lift the barrier of languages, therefore the borders of space, therefore negation, therefore contradiction. Discourse fills and doesn’t divide, more Pentecost than Babel. If you add this competence up in you, the way a bank account swells, the map flattens, the mountains leveled, the valleys full, no more foreignness.

Balzac’s short story explores alterity: how do we go from left to right, from the other side of the mirror, of meaning [sens], of value, of the world map or one’s own language?8 The story fills because it removes every barrier standing in the way of crossing. A short story without disquieting foreignness.

Thus the daughter Marianina is filled with lots of talent and beauty. We must again add up, combine or sum up elements that are sometimes incompatible. Under what condition does that become possible? By a radical treatment of dominance.

Balzac’s short story planes down such dominance so as to obtain universal compatibility. An immense discovery of logic, morality and philosophy.

An example: the good, the just and true lie to the right, the most generally, in habits or cultures. The author’s body, from the start, causes life to pivot, warmth to the left. The right can no longer exclude the left. For dominance creates incompatibility and so impels to exclusion. Can it be said that every exclusion has dominance as its reason and motor? Aggressive and strong in its right, wielded with intention, the right puts the left in hell, without seeing its own image in the mirror.

Thus that prima donna – Malibran, Sontag, Fodor or others – lacks accuracy or sensibility for example? Listen to the tone, a master quality that will not tolerate the concomitant blossoming of the others. Any given talent devours everything, sculpts partial bodies or produces lop-sided works. He who sums up the virtues must have erased the dominance of each one of them in himself to make them compatible or nonexclusive; retain the quality but level down the arrogance, excess or aggression.

Why would creativity become crushing? Gentle intelligence, blandishments of the soul, modesty of science, the transparency of a white language that mixes the colors of the spectrum and makes knowledge and emotion be forgotten, yes, great art unites to the same degree competence and the heart, the beautiful and the true, which is what Balzac does, who is defined there, the way every author is defined in a type, here Marianina of body and song, a beauty who should remain veiled, singing completeness.

When you encounter exclusion, seek dominance; when you find an obstacle, contradiction, incompatibility, observe the dominator: he who imposes his language on the world, who makes his theory compulsory, covers his property with the sweat of the poor and the blood of the despoiled, who gives forced currency to his talent.

Nothing new from now on under the Sun. When it appears, nothing remains visible; 8 The word Serres uses refers to an old-style world map divided into two hemispheres.

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Serres/The Hermaphrodite when it gleams, nothing shines in its universal halo. Only the Lord illuminates. At the dawn, the stars disappear. Monism kills pluralism, whereas the Sun is humbly part of billions of stars. Only the darkness welcomes all of them; the light excludes them at the same time as the gentle shadow, the condition of their compatibility. When light comes into darkness, the darkness receives it, necessarily; how could it act any differently? But no one, ever, has seen the brightness receive the black. Light erases darkness while accusing the darkness of never receiving it. The night doesn’t expel the day, which withdraws of itself, but the latter effaces the night. Excluded, the obscure, blindly. Anything can happen in the nocturnal sowing where the stars shooting among the chaos precede short stories; nothing new under the Sun. 9 Absolutely dominant. Absolutely exclusive. Without Other. One Law. One Subject.

One Being. Being. Vitrifying all of history, every book, name and language, space and time, all possible alterity, the only things that remain are It and its declinations, tropes or rays, forms and orb, its seasons. The implacable, inescapable violence of monomaniacs, the limit economy that obtains the most possible results by means of the minimal effort, the total and hard theory exempt from the work of the sciences and language, of the heart and beauty. May I name this universal incompatibility yet again? This Me-alone, this Being-there, this Law could be called the phallus. But this does not signify sex, tenderness, love or relation, but only excess, arrogance, obstacle and aggression, the phallic law infinitely laying claim to the exclusivity of itself: dominance or condition for incompatibility. Its law gives the other to the flamethrower. Yet Balzac’s short story patiently constructs the conditions for alterity, its coming, its advent, its welcome. How do we pacify the libido of destruction?

Balzac’s short story, begun by a body gesture or position, constructed by this double body, a body finally complete, sketches a difficult, rare, logical operation at the same time as a humanitarian, irenic, delectable act, and a sublime aesthetic: “Sarrasine” excludes exclusion. What do we do to add up, sum up, work in the positive, to be opposed without negation to negation? How do we go about saying yes? Answer: attentively read the name Filippo, his sister's twin in beauty or completeness. He is precisely called Lanty Antinous, the exclusion of exclusion on the program. One more time, the proper name plays the role of an algorithm for meaning [sens]. And Hadrian's favorite was thought a little to participate in the two sexes.

Excluding exclusion or eradicating the dominant phallic law, that’s the deepest sense of castration.

In healthy theology, God puts together all the perfections and qualities, alone rendering them compatible. *

9 Short stories=nouvelles, which can also mean the news.

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Serres/The Hermaphrodite To the discovery now of the “link common to every art and which always flees those who seek it.” A new addition, again a fusion; how to welcome music and sculpture at the same time or, better still, how will sculpture accept music so as to unite with it? By a “secret poetry,” the hidden name of this common link, incarnated in the young Marianina? Yes, poetry as the fabrication, the production, the entire construction of this work, of this highly improbable unknown masterwork that planes down differences and unites painting, Joseph-Marie Vien and Girodet, with sculpture, Bouchardon and Sarrazin, these former arts anew to music, Jommelli or Rossini, to dance, to song, to opera, in the architecture of Rome, set up with scenery, these former arts again to the technology of the artificial, to Philip James de Lautherbourg, inventor of the Eidophusikon, a mobile panorama with changing lights and sound, to alchemy, to literature, bad or good, Ann Radcliffe or Lord Byron, to the construction of a short story in which the statue serves as a type for a painting and this latter for a narrative in which the model performs [se produit] at the theater and sings, loved by the sculptor who takes it as a model and reproduced [reproduit], in the narrator’s reverie, as an idol linked to dance: here is the hide the slipper game in which the quasi-object runs from hand to hand, always fleeing those who seek it but following a common link. Beauty: construct it in this way.

Don’t define it. Critique only makes use of negative operators. Creators combine, add, sum up, link, unite; critics define, divide, cut, slice the text, delink, analyze, destroy. What treatise on aesthetics doesn’t begin by dividing the arts, doesn’t make them succeed one another as though a common beauty was unknown to them? Can beauty be divided? Critique it, destroy it, you've lost it. Critical philosophy rules in the empire of the negative; the fruitfulness of the work is born in the positive, without empire or rule, without dominant or contradiction. Go, go, run, adopt the gesture, continue, and faith will come to you. How to go about it? No one knows the secret of this poetry, of the fabrication that isn't taught. Teaching is only done by defining, destroying and analyzing. Do you want to write? Give up critique. Abandon theory, method, every intellectual, emotional famine, and the demands of beauty will be fulfilled.

The Countess of Lanty welcomes the age that’s come and becomes miraculous with beauty because of it, for accepting it causes age to no longer contradict charm but, once again, to add to it, like knowledge to innocence. The common link includes qualities and the arts in such a way that negation vanishes and destruction is pacified. Peace engenders beauty. The short story seeks beauty, therefore the strength of production or engendering, therefore peace, therefore inclusion. It first lists several examples or types of inclusion: the complete body that I called enantiomorphic, the fortune in sum, the mouths that speak five languages, the cosmopolitan family, the talent in full bloom, the fruitful federation of the arts, before attaining the canonical type, the true secret of the text that remains secret 12

Serres/The Hermaphrodite even after the unveiling of the castrato. How to name, to designate, to describe this champion of inclusion? * Why did God create the world, whereas he could have been satisfied with his infinite goodness? The answer fills: no one creates by default but rather does so by excess. The creator is superabundant. Thus the Lanty family enumerates several types of superabundance: the fullness of talent, riches, languages and charm.

Deprived of exclusion, the short story seeks agglutinating mixture so as to end up at saturation, at supersaturation, that condition for productivity. I don't know what misunderstanding of work makes people today believe that invention requires lack, flaws or insanity, instead it demands fullness, excess or surplus. God creates the world through superabundance, and Balzac does his books through superpower; fertility comes with happiness. The short story seeks the positive, the plus sign.

And finds, at a given moment, the moral macedoine. To my knowledge, moralists, repelled by the disparate, must detest macedoine; to my knowledge, critics don't much like mixture, repelled by what isn’t distinguished or makes no distinction. Yet the recipe, precisely, excludes exclusion: add, at leisure, radishes to carrots, all are welcome, as well as artichoke hearts, if you wish – there’s no limit to the superabundance. Turnips don’t exclude cabbage. Being from the kitchen, watch the judge’s grimace and his nausea. That however is supersaturation, devoid of central law. No sauce binds it, no principle will coagulate it. But nothing will make it turn, veer or go toward either. Macedoine gives a typical example of universal addition, of inclusion without dominance.

This mixture conditions a profound, algorithmic thought of the universal. Since the Greeks, we have thought within a framework formed by abstract and theoretical mathematics, deduced from principles and sculpted as an axiomatic pyramid by non-contradiction. The first rigorous meaning of logos. Since the writer prophets of Israel, we have thought within a framework formed by the principle of Solomon, seen again at the beginning of the Gospel according to Saint John: nothing new under the sun; in the beginning, the Light of the Word. The second sparkling meaning of logos, sculpted, too, by exclusion. A mathematics or a logos that is more flexible, more agglutinating and positive, utilitarian as well or close to experience, had been driven away by the Greek miracle or the light of the only Sun, and kept at a distance for three millennia, only coming back to life on rare occasions, with the Arabs, the Renaissance, in Leibniz and during the 19 th century in certain works in tentative forms. This repressed formalism, of an algorithmic nature, returns and triumphs with the computer age, occupying the place of and even menacing the abstract mathematics stemming from the Greeks. Of light, it prefers the speed 13

Serres/The Hermaphrodite whereas Greek mathematics made us prefer the brightness. It corresponds to the philosophy of mixed bodies. The end of the Greek era and the beginning of a new world. I'll return shortly to these forms of thought.

The algorithm corresponds to the recipes for macedoine. “Sarrasine” seeks a superabundance for the creation that the dominant thought cannot give. As usual in such cases, it blindly seeks this common link that flees it only under our light, exclusive of every other solution. Start from antithesis, and you will end up at castration. Start from the left-right enantiomorphy or from the superposition of images, start from symmetry, and you will create the hermaphrodite, the epitome of inclusion. How long did Hermes seek Aphrodite? Filled from having found her.

For this joy in superabundance, the superpowerful and creative excess, with an eye to this inclusion, we must first exclude exclusion or temper the phallic law, level the mountains and gently fill in the valleys separating the qualities, thin down the vain and useless column at the crossroads. We must imagine Hermes as being gentle.10 Welcoming and appeased.

So the paternal image darkens a bit: ugly, small, pocked-marked, “boring as a banker,” the count only seemed deep because of his quotations; if you spoke to him about animals he would answer with proper names and phrases learned in books; if you were worried about some solution he would redouble the questions while amassing notes at the bottom of the page, reciting Wellington or Metternich, generals and strategists of real or theoretical armies. You have recognized the critic and his phallic knowledge, terrifying, that high society that’s ugly, small, pockmarked and translates in its own way the creations of the poets, Lord Byron or any other superabundant producer, dividing them, cutting them – only the phallic law castrates –, destroying them. Don’t cite, don’t judge, give up critique, fabricate. To do this, plunge into Aphrodite, lifted one day from the noisy sea, or from the contradictionless mixture of qualities.

“The Unknown Masterpiece” causes Aphrodite to come to life [suscite] as the precondition of the work, born from the palette, issuing from the nautical noise; “Sarrasine” causes Hermaphroditus to come back to life [ressucite] as the champion of inclusion and the condition of the work, born from the additional plenitude of meaning. “Sarrasine” or the superabundant androgyne: Hermes must be thought of as filled.

But not satisfied by the subtle tearing to shreds that carves a text into lines, words or letters and that brings it back to the coded sequence that the old padlocks would give us to read or would hide, padlocks whose wheels, turning independently of one 10 With the “column at the crossroads,” Serres is referring to the herma. In French, the god and the boundary stone have the same spelling. He will allude to this several times in this work.

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Serres/The Hermaphrodite another, each carried figures. The number of sequences that can be strung together in this way, gigantic, tends to infinity. Likewise, the text would show itself or conceal itself in this multiplicity like a pin in a needle stack: each word of the text figures in the dictionary like a number on its wheel. This leads to the idea of a plurality of meanings that made the generation that preceded us dizzy, no doubt through ignorance of logic and combinatorial algebra, the fundamental science of coding. The horn of abundance that supplies an infinity of meaning comes from this grave misunderstanding which could amusingly be called the sophism of the padlock. The distance between being-able-to-say and saying separates an immense number from a very small one. The wheels don't remain free to turn as the text advances: its meaning tends to unity.

I’m not taking the fullness of meaning in the sense of this false calculation. * Sculpture and Music The androgyne? Here it is.

“I was plunged in a reverie… in an imaginary arabesque,” and now I produced a chimera: a beast whose two parts are crossed as a chi, a Greek letter in which an S and a Z are crossed. Cut in two by the mirror or the window but reunited by the enantiomorphy of his body and the world, meditating on the human coin, symmetrical and asymmetrical at the same time by its heads and tails sides, a coin and chimera himself, the observer or narrator, the subject of the story and object as well, produces a composite body that’s mixed like his own, just as Jupiter gave birth to Minerva.

Can the androgyne be better expressed than by the king of the gods, himself a supermale, in the labor of women and mothers? Even further, if the goddess Athena or Minerva sprang out of Zeus’s head as a fully armed and formed adult, wellarticulated, she had to have lived in him, included in the male and better than enclosed in his belly, spread in his head, thigh and legs. Did crases of Athena-Zeus, Junerva or Mipiter exist primordially before Hermaphroditus appeared?

The lateral chimera, left-right, engenders a complete chimera on the model of a divine chimera. The engendered androgyne, half hideous, “divinely female from the waist up,” double-sexed, sums up, in addition, the ages, one hundred years old and twenty-two, warmth and cold, thinness and full shapeliness, ruins and verdure, ugliness and beauty, life, death, dancing movement and sculptural paralysis. The hermaphrodite of direction and orientation, the most general, produces an additional hermaphrodite on the archetype of a celestial hermaphrodite. Three completenesses, three sums of qualities suddenly made compatible: yet if we are 15

Serres/The Hermaphrodite ignorant of everything about Zeus’s sex and that of the observer’s, we know exactly that the phallus is absent in and for the association of the old man and the marquise.

Historians will call Balzac ambisexual. But let’s consider the scene.

What did Hermaphroditus see when it was reflected, like Narcissus, in the smooth surface of a fountain or a mirror? Where in the image were the angle of the elbow, the capillary superabundance and the large symmetries or the little sexual asymmetries placed? The old question of the double is luxuriously redoubled here.

What do sublime lovers or creators see in windows? The image of abundance, superabundant.

“They were there, before me, both together, united and so close…” Close. * Sarrasine’s beautiful love won. Did not lose but triumphed. The positive wins out over the negative and love over death; for sculpture, mad about music, succeeds in modeling a statue in the singer. Even before the story introduces the sculptor, his work, living and half-dead, precedes him. And the conditions of the work have even preceded the masterwork in this unknown old man.

“Japanese idol, silent and motionless as a statue,” that’s Zambinella, years after the insane passion, whose body drifts toward the solid: cold, heavy, stupidly indecisive like a paralytic, he scarcely turns two blue-green eyes comparable to tarnished mother-of-pearl; the throat that made Europe come running rings like a rock bouncing off other rocks along its own echoes before plunging into the water; his cracked voice resembles “the noise made by a stone falling in a well.” Even the musical wave becomes petrified. His flesh disappears between the skin and the bones; his thinness causes the skeleton to stand out or form hollows; his shapes become vitrified, invaded with stones and jewels, metals and precious stones. Dead?

Not yet. Immortal, some say, like a mummified idol. Living or dead, we don’t know. A sculpted statue in any case.

“Add to these details all the marvels of the Venuses rendered by the chisel of the Greeks”: this is the Zambinella of the previous years, before the thunderbolt-love conceived by Sarrasine that night, this is the classic statue. More than a women: a masterwork. And a masterwork always for the same and additional reason: entirely Venus all across this summed-up body. Everywhere else, here and there, only partial qualities are seen, breasts, neck, knee, shoulder, waist, for an ignominious remainder. Here finally is the union, the totality of marvels, here is the superabundance endowed in its center with the absence of the phallus. Pygmalion’s statue comes down from its pedestal, total. And, in fact, please take into account: the creature can be called woman – she has the best appearances of that – and nonwoman in reality, as well as man, evidently, and non-man in truth. It's enough for the 16

Serres/The Hermaphrodite phallic law to be absent for that addition or sum or union of non-compatible attributes to become miraculously possible. The remainder concerns beauty or literature. So here is the androgyne or the hermaphrodite again.

The literary narrative, enantiomorphic like its author, is doubled in the mirror and now in time: one side toward Elysium, in the Lanty's mansion, the other following the fury of Sarrasine, from Saint-Die to Paris and Rome, the symmetry or enantiomorphy plane going, upright, through Madame the marquise de Rochefide's chamber, an axis or equilibrium of justice. Two masses of equivalent narrative – this rarity has been remarked. The identities or paradoxes concerning the image and the model in the mirror plunge into time just as much as into space, following the sequences of the short story and their rhythm. In passing, does the arrow that characterizes time differ as much as it is said from spatial orientation? In brief, music and its methods, fugue or counterpoint, order such properly enantiomorphic reversals in time the way sculpture displays them in volume. Literature adds them and makes them both be seen or read by following the link that’s common to these two arts.

The short story begins when midnight strikes, the end or beginning of one day or another, and its second part is recounted after or happens before the first part. The image and model in the recess of the window are also recognized in time, where midnight marks a floating axis. So here are two statues that correspond to each other, one alive, joyous, green and beautiful, young, complete, totally finished in its perfections, on the side of the dance of the living where the most beautiful women of Rome swarm, bustle and flit about, in a word musical; the other almost dead, hideous and old, cold, skin and bones, whose voice is reduced to the broken sound of stones in a well, with eyes of mother-of-pearl and sunken projections, a specter wrapped in a shroud on the side of the danse macabre whitened by snow and the moon, in a word sculptural. Yes, Sarrasine’s beautiful love succeeded, and statues proliferate as though he had never stopped sculpting the body of his beloved in time: the mirror puts a Western goddess face to face with a Japanese idol, Far Eastern.

Hermes, motionless like a milestone on the spatio-temporal axis of symmetry, in the space of the window recess and at the hour of midnight, sees the double reflection of Aphrodite that stands on the one side above the ocean of cheers and chaotic applause and that, resurrected, rises on the other from among the dead.

Hermes, stone, milestone, cairn at the crossroads, a rustic or abstract statue, psychopomp, accompanies the shades of the dead and plays the cithara so the living can dance. Aphrodite, perfect statue, plus Hermes, brute reference stone, plus Aphrodite, music standing above the chaotic noise and born from it, plus Hermes, inventor of musical notation, motionless and doubly-oriented Hermaphroditus Balzac, describer of forms and composer, produces this literature which philosophically sums the arts and sciences and without incompatibility.

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Serres/The Hermaphrodite

The condition of this compact sum rises above the tabernacle, on Good Friday: let the phallic law be immolated. Hermes’s arrogant part dies there and that day. Might the death of God have this meaning? The moment when young Sarrasine sculpts a log and perches it above the altar, in a mad gesture of castration and offering, constitutes the center of the narrative, the keystone of its construction, its secret. * A system, usually, presupposes the exclusion of this non-exclusion that mixture presupposes. It's unaware of the art of inclusion and wants every truth to require distinction or contradiction. Dialectic puts the latter into play, and analytic seeks out debate. Analytic and dialectic, the same combat, both armed to engage in it. Here is the hard core, lethal or thanatocratic, the steel armor rather, bristling on the outside around a weak flesh. Battle, debate, conflict all rage, desired as methods in the two cases or fields, because, in both of them, cutting up and distinction, separation or, to sum it up in a word, sect, section and sex dominate together. Sex designates the same gesture as distinction, that is, separation and cutting up. The phallic law governs there. And if castrating the sex was equivalent to cutting the cutting up?

The masterwork, unknown for the aforementioned reasons, proliferates in the time or space excluded by these systems: one might say that a certain form of art or fabrication can’t survive except outside these judging and severing philosophies. So to sex, taken in this cutting sense, the masterwork, an addition or sum of capacities, prefers the androgyne and to distinction prefers mixed bodies. Hence the dazzling staging of “Sarrasine,” a multiple complex of associated meetings, parallel like reflections or crossed like chimeras. If you make the effort of sculpture converge on systems that are asymmetrical in form or posture, divergence and stability, immobility in motion, and the incandescence of frozen marble or the life of funerary bronze converge with the effort of music so as to saturate the irreversible flow of time with rhythmic tempos, recurrences, refrains and ritornelli, mirror or crab canon counterpoints, you have some chance of finding “Sarrasine” as the sum or common link and unknown masterpiece and, more profoundly, as the condition for access to the masterpiece or its production, just exactly as you run the thrilling chance of constructing a new philosophy, unknown still to this day, more algorithm than system, if you weave or knot the multiple confluence of the sciences, patiently followed one by one, of the religions, respectfully considered, of the arts, practiced with fervor, and of the literatures themselves, already unknown confluences. If you don’t exclude anything and place a mirror in the antithetical site of contradiction or debate, philosophy, unknown to this day, will resemble less a field of carnage than a peace treaty. Boundary stone Hermes, stone and cithara, united to the Greek and

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Serres/The Hermaphrodite Oriental Aphrodites, announces the fecundity of peace. Love and the positive produce the unknown masterpiece. How? Add zero to a number, and it becomes the same number: same thing, if you multiply it by one. These quasi null terms, which nonetheless make the good functioning of these operations possible, are called neutral elements. 11 Castration in “Sarrasine” invents and introduces this neutral element into human affairs and the social sciences, this element that I just called the erasure of a dominating law. Neuter expresses the inclusion of an excluded-third well enough: neither one nor the other or both one and the other. Castration plays the role of a neutral element here, putting alterity into play for the entire operation.

Example: it’s not enough to announce that money does not stink. It must be observed that a stink would make it unusable or obstruct its circulation. Yet stink founds property: every animal soils its niche. To invent money, we must therefore go as far as erasing the very foundation of appropriation, the biological law of local dominance. Neuter, currency. So it circulates and accumulates without contradiction, that which was to be proved. As though it was necessary to castrate one’s property for a clean [propre] that can pass through everyone’s dirty hands to appear. Clean? If we wash something it soon becomes neuter once more in a new respect.

It indeed seems that Lydia invented money, on the shores of the Pactolus. Gyges, the shepherd, founder of the Lydian dynasty, discovered a naked corpse wearing a ring on its hand at the bottom of a cavern. The stolen ring suddenly made him quite invisible. Thanks to this he killed the king, seduced the queen, and became rich and powerful. Come out of the ground, he invents power and value, the invisible hand that founds them. He erases or effaces the body that is one's own with an eye to the new invention: the neuter, King Gyges.

Let the white, the neuter, the polyvalent domino, the transparent, the abstract be sought. Algebra could only be born toward the XVth century after the Italian invention of cossic notations, thus named by the cosa, the thing [chose], that x that's worth everything and anything, without any value of its own and with any value, that thing that’s not in itself, entirely for others.

One must lose or erase one’s soul in order to save it. We must leave a thousand of our own pretensions to better live in society. The monadology as a set and system only exists if the monads don’t have doors or windows. We must dress, veil ourselves, hide our sex to be able to live in common. Castration abounds, if we open our eyes. Every law, even of profit, presupposes, implies a loss someplace.

11 Neutral=neutres, which is also translated as “neuter” in this section.

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Serres/The Hermaphrodite “Not everyone understands this language but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who are born that way from their mother’s womb, there are eunuchs who became that way by human action and there are eunuchs who made themselves that way because of the Kingdom of God. Who can understand, let him understand.” (Matthew 19: 11-13) I seemed to understand that the giver of meaning is opposed to the fullness of meaning because he seems to give while keeping everything, in reality like an exclusive guard of the source of meaning, and because in any case he expels every other meaning. Yet a community of such exclusives must be thought and sometimes organized. We must not exclude that unique giver under penalty of resembling him, therefore of repetitively continuing this dismal history.

Let’s go back into ourselves and stop our complaining. Let’s lose at our own game so that the chance may grow that a complete game may come for the greatest number.

Let’s lose property so money can circulate. Let’s abandon our visibility. Let’s abandon sex for music, the first image here. Let’s lose life for the masterwork, just like Sarrasine, the image of the image. All of them profiles of the Kingdom of God. Let’s lose at the game of the received violent slap.

Castration reflects and reinvents, on the side human affairs and the social sciences, the symbol = x of algebra or the neutral elements of operations. Castration here makes that fertile bushing out of beauty possible. Balzac’s short story multiply unfurls around the operation of symmetry and enantiomorphy. The glass of a window or a mirror divides our bodies into two same and different zones, enantiomorphic: our identity is mixed with our own alterity as indistinctly as Hermes and Aphrodite in the androgyne. “Sarrasine” extends the problem of regions of space to human things and therefore meditates on alterity. What am I, me other?

In this operation of symmetry and asymmetry, of indistinct mixture, without exclusion, of same and other, the trace of the axis or plane around which the same and other turn passes exactly through our unparalleled organs. Again, the neutral element of said operation resides in this axis or plane. Therefore the text must of itself neutralize the sex. The law of production presupposes that it is a neutral element.

That which was to be proved. * Love, not the phallus, the positive, thanks to the neuter, produce the masterwork.

How? How to sculpt a statue? How to become a sculptor? What is in the latter, in the former? Better still: how did statuary come to cultures? “Sarrasine” relates the work and life of an individual artist, unknown, but by exploring its poetry or secret fabrication, the link common to all the arts, which always flees those who seek it, we 20

Serres/The Hermaphrodite discover a general anthropology of sculpture in general, the way formerly “The Unknown Masterpiece” opened, under this posted unknown, an ontology of power and capacity for us. Poussin’s or Sarrasine’s monographs modestly conceal, like the trees, the forest of answers to the questions – how? what's the matter with him? 12 where does he come from? – posed by the philosophers, whom Balzac scoffs at because they go, without risking their work or their skin, into the salons. But where do statues come from?

From death. From the tomb. From funeral rites. From the corpse. From the hard skeleton and the softer flesh. From the carcass. From putrefaction. From what has no name in any language. From that hole, from that lack, from that absence of language, from that castration from which the object in general = x comes. “From that creature without name in human language, form without substance, a being without life or life without action.” Neuter, white, abstract. If the seed does not die…13 Where do statues come to us from? They come back. Gods, heroes or men, great or false, resurrect as ghosts.14 Phantoms that rise from second funerals, at the end of all rotting. Pure remains of their liquefied flesh. Statues come to us from that first gruesome technique, exercised on that first object, a universal practice, characteristic of every culture, from which the origin of every technology emerges in the human race.15 They come from mummies. From the separation, by the paraschist, of the Canopic vases containing the soft from the dry bones and tanned skin, in Egypt, for example.

The first statue: the mummified corpse, come back, having left its box. The first statue: this box itself. What is in a black box, the pyramid or the tomb? What is in the Lanty's mansion?

But where do statues come from? From death and after it; from the tomb and what is hidden there. From immobility, there. From being-there. From the “here lies.”

“Here lies” covers what has no name in any language. Here or there. So what then is there [qu'y a-t-il donc là]? Being-there, marked by the raised stone, menhir, betyl, rock over a tomb, meteor. * So how did statuary come?

The mystery of “Sarrasine” clears up as one reads in the direction of the short story: a riddle is posed, a solution follows it. Time goes from left to right, as along an 12 What's the matter with him=qu'y a-t-il. This phrase is echoed above in the question “what is in the latter” [qu'y a-t-il en celui-ci], a phrase which recurs throughout the rest of the section, whenever you see the question “what is in...?”

13 John 12:24.

14 Ghosts=revenants, which literally means “those who come back.”

15 Technology=technique, which could also be translated as “technique,” as in the first part of this sentence. The same is true on pp. 29 of this work.

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Serres/The Hermaphrodite axis or on the page, along the successive lines or according to the sheets of the book, but it runs from right to left, since the second part goes back, like memory or pretrial investigations, to Saint Die, Paris or Rome toward the musical youth of the old man become statue. The common reading easily adapts to this everyday crossing of discourses exposing the cause after the effect, whereas the latter follows the former: this is called chatting, among the curious, as we have seen. 16 This temporal chimera in the narrative offers no more obstacle than the crossing of the eyes or the hands, during the morning toilette, facing the mirror. Yet if a slight effort restores the paradox of the sides of the body by suspending this natural ease, a conversion or a traverse of this type likewise leads us to read the short story in the very ordinary direction of the written lines, by suspending the reflux of direction. A cause waits to the right, of course, and if another were hiding to the left?

At the end of the short story, along the straight line of time, stands the statue that the painter will copy and that its author, at the moment of dying, wanted to destroy but failed. A little before, its living model appeared, woman, non-woman and more than woman: masterwork. Let’s go back from Rome to Paris, let’s begin with the beginning.

In the beginning, to the left of the lines, the Lanty's mansion opens for a brilliant ball: midnight, paradoxical, strikes; a window slides where the guide stands. We enter into the box; what's in this box? A long series of rooms lit with a thousand lights, jewels, chandeliers and glances leads to the further end of the reception rooms, from one boudoir to another, from one box to the next, in the direction of inclusion or implication, of secrecy, of shadow. In the last cabinet, semi-circular, the light, discrete, coming from a soft lamp in an alabaster vase illuminates blue satin hangings. White light, cold color, deserted room. This vestibule separates the light from the shadow, the public from the private, noise and silence. Adonis-Endymion reposes in this sanctuary, man and woman, on a lion skin, unveiled by a little Eros.

Image of the image in the box of the box. In the little room a door opens as well, hidden behind the hangings, from which “a tall, thin man, a sort of familiar spirit, a mysterious guardian, appeared as if by magic.” Shadowy mouth.

Hermes, sitting, external, internal, in the window recess, leads us, psychopomp, along boxes noisy with language, white, clear and peopled, to the threshold of the black box where Hermes, again, watches over the veil whose dark folds hide the door whose leaf closes the shadowy mouth without speech. The cause lies under inclusions.

So how did the stone block come?

“The first time this strange personage showed himself was at a concert, when he seemed to have been drawn to the salon by Marianina’s enchanting voice.” Music resurrects the dead, evokes phantoms. Where did this strange personage come from? From the shadowy mouth, from the second profound window. Who? That 16 Chatting=causant, which literally reads as “causing.”

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Serres/The Hermaphrodite strange being that has no name in any language. Remember the choir of old Persian men whose song lamented, evoked, cried and spoke before Darius’s tomb. At a certain moment, the scoliaste says, the text is lacking, effaced, destroyed, he believes; no, language gets lost there. No word in any language says that. And at this moment, by this aperture or this speechless mouth, the shade of the King, dead and living, rises from the dead. Speech withdraws before music, the universal language, which alone can say the work of mourning. Marianina, incantatory, an Orpheus with inverted sex, abandons the singular direction of language for music, once again universal, and suddenly, a Eurydice with inverted sex, “this familiar spirit concealed for months at a time in the depths of an unknown sanctuary” appears. 17 You might think you were reading The Ancient City: the house Lanty, family and fortune, was supported and founded on the tomb of the ancestor, there. And the enchanting incantation brings him back. And the cavatina of Tancrède brings him back again.

And a roulade sends him away.

The statue doesn’t come, but comes back from among the dead.

So we know the secret from the start; we have even always known it. The disquieting strangeness, the alterity that we carry in our bodies, mixed with our life, like Aphrodite with Hermes or the right with the left or silent music with talkative language or the obscurity in the flickering light of the moiré of an undulating and folded curtain, is evoked in the musical and dancing lament of death. Might death be this link that’s common to all the arts, arts that always flee those who seek this link?

Must we approach death, or must it approach us if we want to give birth to beauty?

Neuter death, supreme castration.

A dead man. The death’s head and two crossed bones on a tomb. A specter. A black face with yellowish orbits and maxillary bones made to protrude by its indescribable gauntness. Yellow and thin skin glued on to the bone and run through with starred wrinkles like a crack in a windowpane. A vitrified mummy. A cadaverous skull hidden beneath a wig, a skeleton dressed in lace acting as a rag.

Who then comes back? A dead man, a specter, a mummy, an idol, lastly a statue.

From the depths of time or history, from the depths of the house or the black box, the genealogy of statues unfurls since the origin.

The short story, read in one direction, discovers the cause for a plausible autobiography or a detective novel or a trivial suspense whose interest is sustained by means of sex, as in the posters whose eroticism allows products to sell well. Read in the other direction or in the ordinary direction of time, the short story discovers the cause for anthropology, aesthetics and ontology. The masterwork comes from death. The statue rises above the mummy, come out of the tomb.

“His almost somnambulistic preoccupation was so concentrated on things that he found himself in the midst of people without seeing the people.” The old man, cause twice over – cause of a crime downstream and cause of the statuary masterwork 17 Direction=sens, which could also easily mean “meaning” here.

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Serres/The Hermaphrodite upstream – coming from death and going toward death, becoming himself thing, hard, cold, stony, no longer saw anything but things while no longer hearing people chat [causer] or seek causes. What is a statue? A cause become thing and the cause of things. An obscure sentence that still needs to be elucidated. * The Fetish The society philosophers gloss fantastically about this half-statufied mummy under the names of ghoul, vampire or artificial man.

A dead person who comes out of the night of their tomb to suck the blood of the living is called a vampire, and a ghoul [goule] if they gluttonously [goulûment] devour dead bodies. It's advisable to be wary of the fantastic in general and of this one, macabre, because it represses, so as to make them be forgotten, quite familiar and daily habits in the mountains beyond the Carpathians or in South India toward Mysore. I believe parasitism to be universal; it is easily shown that it forms the primary and simple element of human and social relations: these carrion-eating practices only let one variety be seen. Life insurance allows the beneficiary to eat and drink straight from the dead person, and a life annuity transforms a kind of bet on the date of death into gold – “would you have the kindness, monsieur, to tell me what you mean by a Genoese head,” a quality you give to this old man? Enormous capital depends upon his life. Everyone around him, beautiful bodies and fresh faces with ruby lips, eats and drinks upon the hour of his death; ten ghouls revolve around this gold-producing skeleton. May I say: vampirism? Or: the very profession of historian for he who wants to gain the marquise’s favors by unearthing Sarrasine’s secrets or for he who earns his salary and a few university degrees by exhuming Balzac’s? Repeat what you mean, monsieur, by Genoese head. Does the life of the head or of that body produce gold? For its grandchildren? Yes, of course. May I say: alchemy? Nothing fantastic there, but simple banking formulas, old as the exchange bank, so old that formerly the mummy of some ancestor could be given as security for a loan, so ancient that the first king of Lydia, where money and its uses are said to have been born, drew his original fortune from a corpse stretched out in a statue or a bronze tomb. What is in the statue or in the tomb? The remains of a man. What is in or on the corpse? A gold ring endowed with a collet into which a gemstone is fitted, the beginning of a treasure. No atrocity, no silliness, nothing of the fantastic there, rather that anthropological evidence that value comes from death, that life also comes from it, life which feeds on that value, and that from that Japanese idol, the mansion’s strange god or familiar spirit, a statue, emanates a fortune made by this idol or produced by it, made by the fetish. Just as it was crossing the threshold of 24

Serres/The Hermaphrodite the shadowy mouth, accompanied, pushed, forced by a psychopomp Hermes, the skeleton removed an expensive ring from one of its fingers and tossed it into Marianina’s bosom. When you say that money does not stink, do you presuppose that it's rid of the insupportable stench of carcasses? Don't vampires and ghouls have noses? That’s why, instead, corpses are embalmed.

Neither the Comte de Saint-Germain, that adventurer who made himself out to be immortal and drew money and fame from his deferred death, nor Cagliostro, a hypnotist, alchemist, could have done better than this fetish, during the same age that the President de Brosses, in Dijon, was inventing the thing and its feminine name, before Auguste Comte made it masculine and put it at humanity’s origin. 18 Everything happens as though the castrato or Zambinella, whose name says both in her, lived and died at the precise moment when this object or concept began, in the neuter hesitation of its gender. At the beginning of that century both un and une fétiche were said at the same time.

Fabricating le or la fétiche, Balzac, well before the invention of these theories, came across sexual fetishism, according to Freud, formed on the mother’s absent penis, and commodity or value fetishism, according to Marx, as the foundation of exchange. The old man plays both roles, exactly, for the family and the surrounding people. Explaining “Sarrasine” by means of these two bible fragments would appall me, so much does the cognitive power of the narrative understand the functioning of the fetish before the theories explain it. These latter are born blind to what precedes them and, full of resentment, take vengeance by destroying the works that had a presentiment of them.

But “Sarrasine” surpasses at a single stroke these four systems – the two before it and the two after it – by making the aging and neuter many times over castrato a Genoese head, slowly dying at the center of those who have every interest in devouring him, who therefore kill but preserve him, a victim in royalty. The entire family lays in wait for him, hides him, shows him despotism and affection, shameless respect. When the mother or brother or daughter take him back to the hole, are they re-interring him, or are they coddling him? Both, definitely. Under the neuter and the double sex and the double gender and the double direction, the double logic of the deified whipping boy's head appears. The fetish one has made or fashioned, in its turn, makes everything, like a fairy. The double root of the word reappears.

The statue marks the site where several paths toward the origins meet, paths that have been marked out for two hundred years. * Cagliostro, it is said, made gold under the name of Balsamo, in other words: balm.

Did he want to indicate by this word his state as an embalmed corpse or the 18 For de Brosses, “fétiche” is a feminine noun, une fétiche, while for Comte it's masculine, un fétiche.

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Serres/The Hermaphrodite alchemist secret of his work, value coming from the body, once again? Balsamo bears the letter S in the place where Balzac is written with a Z: his father was named Balssa. The author rewrote his true name by the inverse substitution of that letter by which his father left the name. The enantiomorphy of the two letters, which brings together and separates the chaste sculptor from his impossible musical lover or which assembles them and crosses them in a chimera, crosses, separates and brings together even more the name of the author and the pseudonym – identical except for these two letters or this reflection – of the allegedly immortal alchemist who has reappeared as a ghost in the form of the quasi centenary Zambinella, the fetish old man, an idol producing gold and jewels and resembling the old Balssa.

Through this play of letters in a mirror or alchemy of the word, through the injection of his body over the threshold of the mansion or along the axis of the mirror, at the beginning of his short story, Balzac throws himself headlong, in veiled terms, with ambiguous sex into his written work, just as Balthazar Claes gets lost, till death do him part, in his Quest, but there, in addition, the author is divided between the mad and suicidal lover and the beloved he cannot hope for, between the son and the father, the man and the wife, death and immortality, ruin and fortune, the maker and the charlatan; he occupies every place; lastly he is between sculpture and music, the art that produces the object on the nether side of language and meaning and the one that fashions the subject before all meaning and every language, he who loves and describes the things as such as well as raw men. He penetrates bodies and letters in his text before this latter recounts or signifies, before it even exists.

So facing Balzac, in the left part of the narrative, appears – an idol or fetish, a mummy – the dead father or the alchemist Balsamo, an embalmed corpse, a ghost from the shadowy mouth that was called back by the evocative music, a quasi dead or immortal statue.

On the other side, to the right, facing the young Sarrasine, above the tabernacle, stands the other proto-statue, an obscene log, whose sex is immolated or sacrificed by this scene or gesture, the figure of Christ, on Good Friday, the day of his death.

The model of lack is erected above the black box, offered.

Balsamo, the image of Balzac, of course. But Balsamo: “balm” in Italian or Sicilian, Cagliostro’s languages, would also translate “mummy” in the ancient Semitic languages, that syrupy balm, that fragrant herb, sticky, viscous, a kind of myrrh polish which was used to coat or stuff the corpses to assure them of some immortality. In the Greek language, it is said as: Christ. The anointed one, not embalmed, victor over death, after Good Friday, bears this name, which begins with a chi.

All the images take on coherence on luminous networks of asymmetry: facing the balsamic idol, an emaciated mummy pompously dressed and overloaded with jewelry, appears the archaic figure of the Good News, where the full is erected as the reflection of lack and lack as the reflection of the full. The unpublished and new law 26

Serres/The Hermaphrodite completes the former phallic and violent law, and transports poverty into another world, not wealth or power; love, not dominance. The Christian proto-statue follows and goes beyond the final pagan mummy.

Those who have the final word designate this other world: the murdered Sarrasine’s last sentence, lashing the dominating and bloody cardinal with irony, calls him Christian, a word that falls from his mouth with his life. A final word corresponding to the proto-statue, in two days of agony, the death of God and of the artist. And the last words of Madame de Rochefide, standing to complete an inaccessible rock, the rock of faith according to the Scriptures, the first stone of sculpture and foundation, say the future of this same Christian after death; purity, virtue without altar, an unknown country.

Our earthly art ends there – and is going to get lost in the heavens, Poussin and Porbus of “The Unknown Masterpiece” will say less than a year later, while the angelic, incorporeal girls of Michelangelo, Bellini and a hundred Gothic cathedrals rush to flock around the bed of “Massimilla Doni” to bemoan the forgetting of that country: the genius of Christianity. * I believe in the Resurrection; better, I see, I know, I experience death as a beginning and not an end. Far from destroying us, it produces us; behind us, in us, it impels us to culture, words, thoughts, hominity, humanity, behind me, in me, it impels to a work, at every hour of the day and night; for two thousand years it has no longer lain in front of us; don’t embalm corpses any more. Everything comes from it while we seem to go to it; history has changed orientation, and time has changed its direction of flow; it no longer runs toward death but ensues from it; let the dead bury the dead. I now await the equivalent of the Resurrection for the new collective death that appeared hardly a half century ago and which, behind us, in us, disquiets current life and history.

In the beginning, death. In the beginning stands the fetish; Auguste Comte was right. The skeletal old man leaves the black box, a mummy, already a statue, but behind him, in the tomb, sleeps the sculptor who made it. Sarrasine dies and his work superabounds; he or she that he loved lives on, sculpted. The mummy old man is dying, and his family, perfection of life and beauty, is giving grandiose parties. For a long while Balzac’s corpse hasn't been preserved from dissolution by the balm, and his masterpieces, like fetishes, open to give us gold.

Statuary comes from death and value comes from it too, and our entire work will ensue from it. As though the body transformed into stone or gold, or into that worked object which flows from it this morning and participates in it. Full, dense, chryselephantine for example, the statue is worth a treasure; hollow, it implicates it, 27

Serres/The Hermaphrodite hides it, encloses it, includes it. It conceals, veils or buries the corpse, that is to say, value. * Everything begins with the fable of the pious peasant whose wooden idol didn’t give anything back in thanks for the sacrifices or offerings he was making to it, but who, instead, received thunderstorms, scourges, a thousand catastrophes in return.

The idol gave him fortune and power the wrathful day that he broke it: a treasure was lying inside.

From the fable we pass on to the moral, by breaking the first one perhaps.

Socrates, the son of a midwife and a sculptor, therefore a statue issued from a body or a treasure come out of a statue, wished to resemble the ugly Sileni, hollow as cabinets and who when opened would deliver up the quintessence of the concept.

Philosophy, pure, lies in religions. Ideas come to us from idols.

Don’t run to abstraction, quickly said, like a precocious shoot. Begin with knowledge, then with the fabulous, myth and the fantastic, the long road of every science, on the one side, or of stories and narratives, on the other: the so precious formal comes from these ores. It lies within. Otherwise said, philosophy – pure and abstract theory – can today no longer do without the encyclopedia or anthropology, or first following their paths and methods – or therefore listening to a thousand narratives.

Only philosophy knows how to demonstrate that literature is more profound than it and precedes it. It lies within. * So go, like Gyges, searching underground for a tomb; discover the hollow statue in the cenotaph; see the corpse in the statue; and find the value on the dead man in conclusion. That's the secret of the Lantys’ fortune. In the shadowy mouth, there's an idol and beneath the fetish a cadaverous old man: on his finger is the ring.

Not everyone has the luck that the earth quakes and opens of itself in front of them. Lacking an earthquake, you have to get up early in the morning to open it. To dig, pierce, bore, work, open the soil, the tomb, the trunk, the piece of black wood.

Breaking the fetish, opening, working the corpse. History or anthropology is the first to discover these at first vulturish and funerary practices transformed into flights of vampires by the fantastic. In the beginning, embalming, mummification. Balzac doesn’t care about Balsamo, but he embalms and mummifies the beloved body, first.

This first statuary, this originary technique invents the object. The first object as such is the dead flesh, inert matter in the strict sense: the fundamental, conditional, 28

Serres/The Hermaphrodite transcendental object that has no name in any language and that, for this very reason, appears as the first object as such, first thing, in itself, never again for others or for itself, thing and cause at the same time. This statuary therefore invents matter, as well as form, as well as the way to go from one to the other. It seeks to preserve the human form, which is in its turn fundamental, conditional, transcendental, at the moment when it's disappearing without return, when matter, inert flesh, the object as such are being annihilated. The human form appearing at the beginning of major works, holding with its right hand and its left foot, as right here, the door leaves of the shadowy mouth. What's after this form, under it, in it?

Making a hole, boring, piercing with a chisel, opening the passage with a hammer.

The word “experience” means precisely: opening an exit, the light of a mouth or door. The sculptor after the paraschist invents matter, therefore form, but above all experience, the experimental labor that, from matter, knows how to work form. The work.

Hence the artificial man, the first work. Automaton, robot, mobile bronze girls who served Hephaestus their producer at table, golem. At the same time, on the dead body, the double statuary begins, mother on the left of technology and on the right of the fine arts. * Space and Time The left part of “Sarrasine” closes and opens in the form of multiple niches where the fetish goes, sits enthroned and hides: a shining and white box, then gray and soft in the middle, a black box under a blue hanging. The statue of the Genoese head stabilizes unstable death in the spatial wing of the short story; the right wing, temporal, runs and flees, panting, from Franche-Comté to Paris and Rome; the sculptor moves there, furious with naïve genius, just as a bull charges, muffle low and long breath, at the lures or masks, right at each of them and zigzagging from one to the other, staggering until being put to death. On the left, the here, on the right, time. The party takes place in the three classical unities, action, space and brief time, giving a funereal drama in which an apparition, idol or specter, fetish, ghost, statuary, rises at the foundation of the unities; on the other side, a life wanders – changes place, becomes mistaken in its target. Nothing could be more profound than this wandering when one wants to describe duration. Being-there, on one side, time or wandering, on the other.

Most living bodies feel and let be seen an immobile and cold half, their own statue, facing another one, flying, dancing, warm, active, supple, fast, their own wandering; decided left- or right-handers, we are all hemiplegics, half sculpture, half 29

Serres/The Hermaphrodite music, living there for ourselves and being mirrored in the object side, black, mortuary and frozen. The living I drags its stiff image about in its closest proximity.

Who will tell which one encloses the secret of the other since the one contains the nothingness of death and the other carries the wandering, empty and subjective absence that says or cries “I”? The narrative of “Sarrasine” unfolds the body that opens it.

But the idol appears in a musical site in the middle of the mansion where people are singing and dancing, and the sculptor’s wandering plunges him into music: the two parts, enantiomorphic, make one of the two arts appear, dually, on the background of the other. “Sarrasine,” chimera, crosses the link that’s common to the arts just as our common bodies, chimerical, cross the links that unify them. The statue, stable, wanders the mansion, escaping its guardians, and appears among cavatinas and contra-dances; the sculptor runs after the charms or artifices of music. * Where can Houdon’s Diana or Rude’s the Marseillaise be found? In the center of the Place de l'Étoile, on the right pillar of the Arc de Triomphe when it's seen along the axis running from the Louvre in the direction the Seine flows or in the middle of a semi-circular hall where the half-light makes its whiteness burst forth, in the Frick Collection, in New York, facing Central Park. Poorly posed questions, floating answers. The sphinxes of Karnak cadence the avenue that leads to the place announced by the obelisks and held by the colossal statue of the god. No, statuary doesn’t transport itself over a point that’s already defined and chosen; on the contrary, it defines this point. As though the god had chosen it. Or as though the men from Marseille, come from afar, had newly founded Paris, there. The statue, static, is identical to being-there; it is the place, the site or that without which we would never ask the question: where? The statue is the being of the there. People say that you can go around the statue at leisure. Certainly. You can also go around any place.

In other words, a place is defined in this way, as a condition for the infinite or closed circle of points of view on it. In its turn and more fundamentally, the statue defines this place. There is no site without a stone that's been raised or put up, without a rock to trust in for reference.

Where can that motion of Couperin the Great or Fauré’s Requiem be found?

Neither in the manuscript nor in the scores scattered across the surface of the Earth, nor at the level of the strings on the harpsichord playing it, nor below the baton of the conductor, nor in any given hall at any given date, nowhere or everywhere: music wanders. Homeless and placeless.

A given statue, a given reference, singularity of a site. Music, the universal language of wandering. These two arts, dual, face each other, enantiomorphic.

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Serres/The Hermaphrodite The Marseillaise by chance sings, as though the statuary group were seeking, through the music, to occupy or found every site between Paris and Marseille. * I have already recounted the fight to the death of Hermes and the peacock. Argus, his skin strewn with eyes, a clear omnidirectional ball, sees all around from his panoptic site. You can go around him; everything is always already foreseen; you will see, of course, but will be seen, by the uncircumventable theory. Space becomes the empire of being-there, which watches, surveils, even at night or when sleep only blinds half its eyelids, an expanse completely covered by its ultra-lucidity. No one nears being-there without passing through its flame-thrower. So Hermes invented the lyre.

And music bathes the spatial singularity, the divine, royal, central reference that possesses all of space starting from its star – nothing new under this Sun; it immerses it in invisible waters, occupying the volume without holding any point, universal, running the flow of time, exactly wandering. Argus no longer knows where to turn his gazes.

Music draws tears from us that veil our view of space.

Argus can be imagined frantic. Distraught. He desperately opens every pore of his skin in order to see or experience the invisible flow that penetrates them. Thus the sculptor at the Opera. He discovers an experience without gaze, he who doesn’t know how to know without seeing. He runs after wandering, he who only knows places. He goes from places to interferences, he who only trusts in reference.

The panoptic statue, disoriented, dies from the cithara invented by wandering. * Sarrasine can be said to be passionate, drunk with desire, furiously running after sex. The mystics, from anguish to ecstasy, can be read as a variety of the mentally ill.

But the insane don’t write like St. John of the Cross. Men love women but don’t all sculpt to the equal of Michelangelo. Sarrasine can be imagined as a bull charging Zambinella’s red skirt and only finding wind at each horn blow, but getting skewered of himself on the cardinal’s daggers as on a muleta. Can be: that means possible, permitted, desirable, pleasant as much as you please. The text even brings us there.

Sex attracts, its absence disappoints: and if the error over sex created deceptions and lures as well?

The hero of a novel falls in love with a false girl whose friends organize a subtle but tame game, a dinner christened an orgy, to make fun of him and his failure when he learns that the false girl is concealing a castrato. A threepenny novel, literally

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Serres/The Hermaphrodite doubtful, where the male thespians play female roles. Do you truly die from what can be found in Casanova?

Naïve, Sarrasine falls for every trap just as the bull charges at the red lure behind which there is, in fact, only the sword for the latter or the dagger for the former when a certain phallic law comes back. But the beast with the low forehead itself quickly learns to charge next to the veil floating in front of the emptiness, and a frightful slaughter would begin if they didn’t shorten the bullfight, whose length exactly equals the time of learning. The short story must quickly be stopped and Sarrasine killed.

Naïve, the reader generously falls for the same traps just as the sculptor charges at the lace and flounces behind which what he hopes to be there isn’t there. The author hardly gives him the time to learn and quickly closes the narrative which, too long, would no longer deceive anyone, even naïve.

Naïve, the critic falling for the differed sex, then for the absent sex or the error over sex. But he learns, as well, because he disposes of a longer time than the narrative of a short life or the evening of a conversation in the boudoir of a pensive marquise or the time of ordinary and suspenseful reading. Too naïve therefore if he went no further than the disappointed pursuit of sex. The short story combines death with its lure the way the bull’s run adds being put to death to the charges at the cape, and no one would say, without serious misunderstanding of what is being played in the arena, that the bullfight merely consists in the removal of the target.

That absence conceals a more fundamental absence. * A given poster at the crossroads fascinates insofar as it shows and conceals sex, a poster that's attracting and disappointing, burning or castrated. While we are running to this paper, monetary stakes are being decided behind our backs; the merchants sell their products. The same thing with criticism: explication via sex impassions, but the clarity that it brings grows in inverse proportion to the interest that it produces. While attention is fixed there, you can do or say anything, protected by the heat and brightness of this fire. In this way, you can approach and touch large elk in rut, ordinarily too dangerous and inaccessible. * In other words. A sculptor falls in love with a female singer in a theater in Rome.

He loves like everyone what everyone in the world loves at the same time and in the same place. A love story ensues, failed like many others and almost all since almost all were founded on the same mimetism. He makes her into a statue; she turns him

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Serres/The Hermaphrodite to derision and precipitates his death: he’ll fall, victim of three stilettos. That’s the tissue of every tragedy.

Yet a parallel story precedes that one; no doubt born under similar conditions at the Paris Opera, it had for a while brought together Sarrasine and Clotilde, the renowned nymph who was just as celebrated as the Roman castrato and who, just as fickle, had, it seems, already deceived him. Return to your statues; I hardly triumph over them, she is made to say when she sent her lover back to the love of the arts.

Sarrasine chases after works, not women, and women chase after being chased after, her and not a statue, her, living and sexed, not the dead and sexless statue that her treacherous friend, Sophie Arnould, well sees, as Sarrasine does, resides and sleeps in her. The artist already loves a castrato: he falls in love at first sight in Rome, between two fat abbots who took the vow of chastity. Sarrasine fails with Clotilde because he desires that piece of stone in her or, even better, the fetish enclosed in her, the Japanese idol, mummy, skeleton, death doll that each one of us conceals, you as well as me, or Clotilde and Zambinella, and which will end up appearing. No, no, that's not me, the female singer says, but rather a body covered with stone, precious stones, those jewels worn by a King’s daughter who is saluted when she passes. No, that's not me but rather the statue made by someone else. Sarrasine and Clotilde’s failed love contains the secret of the second failure, as well as the division of the living body and the cold and dead statue, a division that opens the work and sculpts it, composes it and unfurls it; their failed love contains, in addition, the secret of the work as well as the division of the living body and the short story.

These two parallel and identical stories receive an intersected light from the other parallel but again enantiomorphic story which brings together the narrator and the marquise de Rochefide: an inaccessible rock, she says of herself, I present myself as a statue. Rochefide, a standing statue, a fixed and reliable reference, faithful. The narrator wants to make her a soul that’s emotional, exalted, burning and delicate, passionate… “A strange kind of tyranny,” she replies. “You want me not to be me.” No, that’s not me [moi], says the statue, but rather some line or thread to which the slightest breath of air gives a form that it rolls and unrolls, develops and disperses…

That, truly, is the self [le moi]. * No, no, that’s not me, says the female singer, but rather a statue; no, that’s not me, says the statue, but rather a kind of music…

Music wanders, sculpture marks being-there; the latter will never catch the former; Sarrasine will have neither Clotilde nor Zambinella; the way a man can, of course, fail with a woman, the way a mimetic hero, of course, steps into the tragic victim’s place; the way a sculptor or an alchemist scientist can run vainly after a young female singer as though after childhood or immortality; but, profoundly and 33

Serres/The Hermaphrodite by prosopopoeia, the way the immobile, objective and frozen, funerary, spatial singularity of sculpture dually denies the flowing, ubiquitous and invisible universality of music. How could form as such encounter what deforms with the slightest breath of air? Orpheus turns around and transforms into a pillar of salt, a feminine and Sodomite statue. How could he ever catch up with Eurydice, who vanishes?

Music, the lure of place, develops and disperses in space and dissolves in silence.

Sculpture is hard, heavy and faithful like rock and matter, hard and straightforward like an object, hard in the sense of the high forces necessary to bore, polish, to work or move it; music is soft, in the sense of the low energies of the sign, light, not even deceitful since softer than language, still weighty with meaning, a language sometimes attached to reference: meaning in language, affirming or denying, can lie and mask, seduce or trick, just as much as it wants; music, outside meaning, before or beyond it, moves before deception or beyond it. Often language retains a trace of sex by genders, masculine or feminine, articles, nouns, female or male pronouns; music, free of gender because free of language, can be said to be androgynous and hermaphroditic, neuter and complete, a eunuch by the hand of men and by nature and for the Kingdom of God. Here is castrated music and the castrated singer, here is the link of the prosopopoeia to the literary character and the driving force of the demonstration. The narrative deceives and deceives us through language; music makes Sarrasine frantic and kills him, right below the lure and in its condition.

How do we now bring the hard and the soft together? Through the literary narrative, the third man of the two arts. * A statue, here I am castrated. To death. There we are castrated by music and its complete loss of meaning. Castration, universal, passes through objective hardness and through the softness before signs. Suffice it to say that all mind as well as all flesh undergoes and accepts it. The chaste sculptor Sarrasine hopelessly loves the statufied Clotilde or the musico-castrato; Balzac will not have the inaccessible rock.

In the beginning, the body doesn’t know any edges, whether internal, to cadence it with parts, functions, members or appendages, or external, to separate it from a world: it isn’t individuated and can't be defined. Its nebulousness in the beginning is mixed with an indefinite, vague and universal mixture. A chaos of colors and tones, the noisy beauty dissolves in seawater like a drop of wine in the Mediterranean, neighboring Cyprus and Malaga at the same time despite its smallness. If I cut off my leg and throw it in the ocean, the French and English fleets will be sailing around in my liquefied limb the next day. A frozen leg resembles the trees in the garden, already covered with snow; the left side, shoulder and foot, luminous and white, dances like and with the shining women, a chandelier burning in the warm salons.

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Serres/The Hermaphrodite The body, without name, edge or definition, pours out or, better, expands into space without limit and time without orientation, with its own consistency of flabby and half-fluid flesh, half-hard half-soft, a viscous flow with medium solidity, mixture.

Experience recognizes some alterity or other. It demands, requires, insists for this a limit, an edge, a catastrophe. This first catastrophe or cutting into the indefinite, forming a first border, must be called castration. The immense pseudopod that goes from Cyprus to Malaga breaks up; a living foot, delicious, of a sovereign beauty, is suddenly defined on the chaotic and mixed background, the way Aphrodite was born from the noisy sea. Swollen foot, cut off foot. Without this castration, there wouldn’t be any body or world, the two remaining mixed, with vague edges. It’s a question of the first experience, in the radical sense of opening the first pore. The body, now, encounters, at this defined edge, things quite different from it. A stone, an object, an inaccessible rock. From then on, it recognizes, at this catastrophe, the other absolutely speaking.

Woman or man – what does it matter! – indistinctly undergo from the world these natural mutilations that make them more and more living bodies and more or less individuated, being able to suddenly feel, receive and then know the world. The richness of perceptions and clear thoughts grow in proportion to the number and the precision of these catastrophes.

Castration precedes sex. Cutting itself defines sex and gives it its name: sect, section, intersection. Through this catastrophe or primitive limit that makes us – hermaphrodites at the origin, that is to say, mixed bodies – Theodore and Dorothy, women or males, we can feel and then know others. The opening to others grows in proportion to the vivacity of this second cutting.

The originary state, fundamental and conditional, transcendental, remains the mixture, some trace of which we still preserve. The voluntary return to these conditions and the courageous readoption of the first castrations or catastrophes characterize the adventure of the producer, of the inventor or artist, sculptors or musicians, men of letters. There is no work without this third ordeal in which the arts and sciences are defined.

The catastrophe that opens to the world happens to all of us starting from our mother’s womb; the second one, which gives us access to others, makes us eunuchs through the actions of men; and the third, which transforms us into work-producing men, we carry out on ourselves of ourselves, when we seek the Kingdom of God. * Music returns us to that primal soup that the Ionian physicists formerly called the indefinite without limit when they observed or thought its cosmic, mixed shape, which Balzac lets be heard and fluctuate beneath the foot of the Noisy Beauty, the bedrock or condition that Rodin, admirably understanding he who he was modeling, 35

Serres/The Hermaphrodite left formless above the pedestal, the prime matter from which the statufied Balzac rises. Every work that’s beginning or every beginning calls for music, whose outpouring frees from every limit, whose expansion erases edges and catastrophes, whose plenitude absolves every castration. The body inundates the plain anew with its archaic indefinite and plunges into transcendental joy, the condition in the subject for all happiness. The borders of the individual are dissolved as in absolution or the absolute of orgasm or of ecstasy. Music drives us out of our pores through which the world enters so as to mix with us who mix with it; 19 we return to conditions anterior to experience, when the distinction of the exterior and the internal had not yet castrated us, in such a way that the soul, the wind of the soul, as formerly, animates space and the stars and these latter become weighed down with our bodies. Argus’s panoptic ball, ultra-defined, festooned with catastrophes, a monadic sphere meticulously castrated, blows up – the statue plunged in musical universality explodes. That's the true story of the sculptor who loved the fake female singer. * But, by the way, who wields the chisel, the instrument of castration? Who breaks, cuts, carves, polishes? Who defines the limits, edges or borders? The sculptor. What is a statue? A closed set of catastrophes, which prevent outpouring or compress expansion. The chisel, precise, cuts into the mixed.

Who castrates? Bouchardon. Who castrates? Sarrasine.

Sarrasine reduces Clotilde to a statue and clips Zambinella.

And places the obscene log forever and ever above the tabernacle, one Good Friday. Castration, death, Kingdom of God. That Christ statue, manifestly, dominates the short story. One understands that the young Jesuits or critics hadn’t understood a thing. But the old men were smiling. They were remembering Matthew: he who can understand, let him understand! The castrator put the phallus in a safe place: so obviously exposed, no one sees it, everyone adores it.

Behind Sarrasine’s chisel is hidden, just as precise, Balzac’s stylus. Did you see, at the entry to the ball, his dance partner? An elegant and young dancer, with delicate forms and a fresh face, white and pink, like a child's; transparent as pure glass, she floats across her gauze dress, mixes with the old man, who as a result finds his music again, runs, crosses the salons, and throws herself on a divan, forgets everything in the fascination that Vien’s Adonis gives her, to the point where she doesn’t notice that someone takes her hand, waltzes, audacious, with a young aide-de-camp beneath the angry, sullen, envious gaze of her jealous man: a nameless silhouette, vague, admirable with musical liquidity. What will she become the next day?

Unrecognizable. And the narrator, here, plunges into the same ecstasy as Sarrasine 19 Enters=rentre, which can mean both “enter” and “re-enter.” Difficult to say which Serres intends.

36

Serres/The Hermaphrodite when he sees Zambinella for the first time: in both cases, we see the first and delicious promptings of love. What a love that resembles hate to this degree!

Unrecognizable, I was saying: Madame the Marquise de Rochefide, stiff, will speak of altars and virtue, will judge, punish, a counsel rock, an inaccessible rock, a statue.

Who is wielding the stylus here, who was holding the chisel just now, if not the man to whom she reproaches: you want me not to be me? Who carves and cuts into the self [moi], who defines the indefinite?

In a detective short story, the curious chatters don’t always agree on the name of the murderer. * Music itself sculpts the mixed state of a thousand and one limitations and catastrophes since it sometimes makes the outpouring come back over itself, returning its flow, through tempos, counterpoints, fugues, ritornelli, all of them techniques of symmetry that locally prevent the indefinite from confusedly invading place. Hence the cutting, the castration, holds back the noise and the sea. The Ancient Greeks’ arithmetic limited the unlimited, like music, and produced this latter.

At first sight, sculpture, wholly defined, saturated with castrations, is objectivized, a form on the nether side of language and meaning, facing music, a temporal subject before all meaning and all language, formless, indefinite. Not so fast. Enantiomorphy returns. Sculpture’s matter gives the indefinite to the chisel, and the algorithms of music impose the ends and fixity of the defined on the invading flux.

The castrato, on a whim, stops singing, refuses, draws back, ceases the aria; become old and skeletal, he stood still, statufied.

Zambinella, music, became statufied during his old age, in Paris, just as Sarrasine, sculpture, became music, in Rome, in his youth, at the Argentina theater. Like our bodies, the short story is cut into two parts, the one soft-hard, the other hard-soft. * Causes and Things Become thinner, already stiff, a skeleton, a corpse, the mysterious old man appears in the midst of the party like the statue of the Commander. The first part of the narrative or its left side, according to the direction of reading, ends with the putting into, the putting back into the black box of the castrated singer turned into an idol or fetish and ghost: the skeleton returns to the closet, the statue in the tomb.

The music identified with sculpture enters into a secrecy such that the common link to the arts always flees those who seek it.

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Serres/The Hermaphrodite The second part, to the right, is going to unveil the truth. What truth? Which black box to open? Why? How? The curious chat and ask questions: what’s the matter with him? Where does he come from? Must we seek the identity of a person and ask the question: who? Or the sex of that same person, he or she or mutilated sheep? Where are we to head? How should we orient ourselves? The black boxes are going to open one after the other progressively, the Jesuit school, the holy tabernacle one Good Friday, Bouchardon’s studio… and suddenly the theater entirely illuminated with chandeliers and glory, showing a quite visible and recognized prima donna on the stage to the cheering of the crowd; after dark staircases and corridors as complicated as labyrinths, a mysterious apartment that is “as brilliantly lit as it is magnificently furnished” into which Sarrasine penetrates, dazzled, as though the feast were being held on the very stage of the theater, a white box of the white box in which the facets of the bottles are sparkling over the course of a banquet where the statue, by going back up time, again becomes a tangible and desired body; we are resolving the question “who?”, no doubt; once again, at the ambassador’s, in Rome, for a party symmetrical to the reception at the Lanty's mansion, the black-white box in which the question of sex and its lack is resolved opens. The sequence of bright boxes, open, where someone or something is exhibited in full light, corresponds to the enchained series of dark tombs, closed, enveloped, inverting them. The two sides of the short story reflect each other; one thinks one sees that the right says the truth of the left, whereas it represents it. As much as the thresholds of the first boxes, moiré curtain, door, wicket, blue hangings, are veiled, the second ones open widely on to space, a palace courtyard, a place where the crowd is in a crush, a park for walking. The old duenna reflects, as a woman guide, the mysterious guardian, the spirit who shuts the private apartment. So the veils are easily lifted one after the other but by making the problems vary, problems whose multiplicity calls for a set of answers. The philosophers who were invited for drinks had, from the first lines, posed only one question.

Where does he come from? Italy. Who are they? Zambinella’s lateral descendants.

What did she do? She deceived a man in love regarding her person and her sex.

Why? For fun and entertainment. Why bring only one answer to the battery of “what’s-wrong-with-him’s” and “how’s”? Where did the Lanty’s fortune come from?

From art. But from what else? From a protector cardinal. Really? From crime as well.

But who killed? The question “who?” abounds. The old man, the Genoese head, is indeed called Zambinella, but what else? A famous singer. Then castrato. Lastly, responsible for a murder. But who else, since the requirement superabounds? The narrator himself: Balzac and the observing body at the beginning and Sarrasine loving and dead are one.20 The interrogation doesn’t stop once the unconscious black box is filled with language. Who else, or what?

20 Serres' footnote: Pierre Citron, “Interpretation de Sarrasine,” L’Année balzacienne, 1972, pp. 8197 and “Dans Balzac”, ibid., 1986, pp. 85-101 and passim.

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Serres/The Hermaphrodite

* One must have worked for a long time in the countryside to know the practices of castration, a very ordinary operation on plants and animals in these places. The doctors or charlatans of past centuries operated on young human males in secret, against the express will and decrees of the Catholic Church, even though this latter readily welcomed into its choirs those who, among them, the deed done, manifested talent. Possible accidents were put forward… So history has only retained rare accounts of a forbidden art that was supposed to imitate the art of the veterinarians or empirics of the rural world. The techniques vary according to the people and the place. Whether ligature of the scrotum was used, the pressure of casseaux or ablation – more heroic – of the glands, every amputation leaves the penis intact. 21 So there isn't merely a lack under Zambinella’s feminine veils, who doesn’t defend himself for nothing from the sculptor’s liberties. Thus the Japanese idol, with the female dancer, doesn’t form a Hermaphrodite simply by metaphor. To my knowledge, the ancient Hermae exhibited a raised member but not gonads. Sexual not genital, already.

Certain castrated men endured the life of an ox or the fate of a victim. Others had hit the jackpot. Women and, inevitably, among them, the richest or most titled fought passionately over the most gifted in another respect than that of having a rare voice.

With such lovers they ran no risk of progeny: the pill alone has replaced them. The pituitary gland supplements the lacking hormones in abundance; who hasn’t seen neutered cats or dogs engage in a thousand cavortings? Profiting from their double rarity, from the fierce competition which the theaters and royal courts engaged in for them, the women and males dreaming of the mother’s absent penis, these demi-gods of a vanished society could amass a grandiose fortune and fame. We've lost all memory of such a fuss as well as any ear for such a music. All of Europe lay at the feet of these unheard of and unusual stars.

Do you think Madame de Rochefide would have cried scandal so virtuously, her being so well-informed about Paris, if the castrato Zambinella’s vocal talent plus a few common bank revenues had alone explained the pomp of the Lanty family? No; here is the skeleton in the closet: the idol, statue or fetish, comes out of a shameful, intersexual and international princely whore’s past. The common link veiled by the illusions of the counter tenor. * If it were just a question of name, person and sex, the last black box in which the final secret lies wouldn’t open. Sarrasine has just laid his hands on the singer finally 21 Casseaux are wooden devices used to castrate animals.

39

Serres/The Hermaphrodite dressed as a man and who winds up, half dead from fear, in the “dark and bare studio,” facing his own statue. Vien and Lautherbourg, among others, came to the assistance of the sculptor in this abduction. Who are these men, and where do they come from, why, how? Vien later, as we have already learned, will copy the marble statue executed under the orders of the cardinal, and Girodet will use that copy as a model for the Endymion in the Louvre and in the pretty boudoir hung with blue satin. This link no longer flees those who seek it: a thread that runs from work to work, from the sculpture to the painting, and link that attaches the first to the second part of the narrative or its left side to its right side – the first thread, no doubt the only one. The sole access road to the truths of this story goes through a painting and its model, through a statue and its type, through the link that’s common to two narratives and two arts. Through things, not men.

As for Philippe-Jacques de Lautherbourg, born in 1740 and dead in 1812, he invented a big machine that he called Eidophusikon, a kind of mobile panorama, painting, theater, architecture and already cinema, equipped with music and changing lights, a bit more than opera. We remember “Gambara,” in which the composer and instrument maker of this name fell into the darkest poverty with his wife without having been able to make his “Panharmonicon” known, a new instrument about which we only know its name, which also indicates an attempt to capture total musicality. Vien grips the link that holds the narrative and resolves its problem while Lautherbourg constructs the ichnography, the geometral where all the arts are projected. We are approaching the solution.

Now here, in one of the final struggles of “Sarrasine,” between the courtyard of the palace, under the dark night, and the somber studio, I think I see that precisely every art is joining together to grab music. Every muse is working together around that which has fled them, from dark box to bright chamber, since the Paris Opera where Clotilde the dancer left Sarrasine to his rocks, which fled them again in Rome, from the theater to the feast and from the park to the embassy, which will flee them in the proximity of death… just as Eurydice vanishes when her composer turns around… it escapes like Proteus, ungraspable with every grip… we must finally abduct it, stop it, tie it up to truly learn what it is, what to name that which has no name except the community of muses or the link common to all the arts, which gender and which sex it belongs to, why it makes people crazy and how it heals, where it comes from, what it's the cause of… but Sarrasine is going to die from having wanted to unveil it, before having been able to do so, without undressing it or deciding… why?... because music conditions all the arts and remains behind them the way Eurydice walks far behind Orpheus’s back or Lot’s family behind the woman changed into a statue or the way the Underworld and Sodom on fire explode behind the turned around Orpheus or pillar of salt, music behind everyone and unknown by everyone although it's present in everyone, giving them movement and life, spirit and fire, music that's inaccessible because deprived of meaning, whereas meaning freezes, defines and 40

Serres/The Hermaphrodite imprisons the other arts, music without definition, indefinite, infinite in comparison to each of them strictly defined in its stone, by its language, by its form and in its tones, music without gender or sex, of every gender and sex, taking on every meaning and every clothing, the omnitude of appearances… it flees those who seek it and those who abduct it too… lastly it's the link that’s common to all the arts, that Zambinella who always flees those who seek him or her, Gambara and Vien and Lautherbourg and Sarrasine… appears here, in the stage lights, a singer with a body built with perfect parts, female, Eurydice, male, homosexual, with or without sex, androgynous, panharmonic… reappears as a female dancer… as a clay, stone or marble statue, Lot’s wife frozen in her salt… reappears as Vien’s or Girodet’s painting… as the beloved body of the divine night… as a fetish or Japanese idol… a mummy covered with finely-worked jewelry… reappears as a story told to seduce a marquise… as a short story from The Human Comedy… may I provoke its appearance, me who evokes it on this page which doesn’t define it but which pulls it behind it like a comet’s tail, a page whose beauty will only happen through its reserved coming.

The artist seeks out music, loves it, abducts it, almost grabs hold of it and doesn’t name it. He would kill it if he held it, if he turned around toward it and would no longer invent. He hopes that it follows him, behind, and that it appears in his wake, wherever he goes, and lets himself, in the end, be put to death by it. * Socrates obliges us to search for meaning, analytically, in language, hates grand rhapsodies, stops them and tears them limb from limb. Ravaged by the taste for death, this son of a sculptor lies down while debating with his disciples after having accepted the laws and the sentence that condemn him, after having drunk the hemlock whose cold stiffens him, invading him little by little starting with his feet: he has become a statue, his father’s work. Yet, in prison, at the point of death, he remembers to learn music and his benumbed fingers wander over the vibrating strings, trying while dying to find the rhapsodies that his life had continually assassinated. * Dying finally is the question. In the dark and bare studio, noise rumbles, seeking someone to devour. No one knows who or what the prowling agony is going to finish off: the word “death” spreads, numerous and mobile on the page, fluctuating and poorly fixed, terrible.

Sarrasine is facing Zambinella who doesn’t dare look at the statue made by the one and representing the other, materializing their relationship, all three playing a final unwitnessed scene where hate suddenly seems to substitute for the 41

Serres/The Hermaphrodite pathological illusion which is continually given the names of “love” or “desire” and which does nothing but liquidate old hatreds, so that noise has never ceded its place and has castrated everything and everyone long since, since the castrated singer’s childhood, or the sculptor’s adolescence in the Basoche and at school among a dense battalion of fathers and teachers. It wants a victim, at random, now.

The cardinal’s sicarians, who followed the abduction from afar, kept watch at the door. The sculptor, threatened in this way, threatens the musico with his sword, a present from Bouchardon – will I be pardoned for stopping at this fatal moment to read, regarding castration, in Sarrasine’s name the portcullis spiked [la herse hérisée] with enormous iron pikes that during the Middle Ages was lowered between the drawbridge and the entrance of a strong castle, and in the name of his master, the bush hammer [marteau à bourcharder], that roller armed with big points that carve into the protruding parts of poorly rough-hewn stones? Judge the terror that this cutting edge inspires for a second time in the singer, and Sarrasine shouts in a literally extravagant way: Die! You will live! I'm dead! 22 He doesn't know who or what his saber is going to fall on since he also seizes a hammer and throws it at the statue with a force that's again so extravagant that he misses it. The destruction of the work, of the creator or of the interpreter hesitates and trembles between the three.

Music, once more, will escape from it; the statue remains standing, a spatial replica, therefore false, of the temporal musical score; and the sculptor dies. But the stone is no better than dead flesh or illusory femininity, and the singer, soon, will leave his tomb shaped like a corpse or mummy. Death wins the entire game.

The condition that's common to the arts and the link that gathers them together, music follows them like a comet's tail, but behind it again prowls the shadow of death. Behind Orpheus, Eurydice; but behind this latter's back lies limbo and cemeteries. Behind the back of Lot's wife, a statue, her husband runs with their daughters; behind their back the city collapses under the stones and fire. Common to all the muses, music accompanies them, invisible and present in every work like its guardian angel. But noise, war mother of all things, bears in itself generative death. If you don't die, if you don't descend to the Underworld, you will never create.

Sarrasine dies, like Frenhofer, and Gambara is no better. Pierre Grassou is in good health. Death engenders the arts.

The two fundamental arts, music for time and sculpture for space, being-there or here-lies, face each other facing the statue, their relation or link, both pairs blind to the death that dominates and produces them. Here-lies the sculpture and music flees. Because they are engendered by death, we don't see or know what engenders the arts, dazzled when we turn around toward the final condition of creation, toward its origin which vanishes like Eurydice to Orpheus's gaze, blinded by the black light of hell, behind her. The female musician, here, becomes a statue in addition, like 22 Extravagant normally means something like “crazy.”

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Serres/The Hermaphrodite Lot's wife, stiffened by the horrors that happened to Sodom. Blinded or stiffened, we believe the arts to be unengendered. * When the old painter Frenhofer's studio finally opens in front of Poussin and the others, “The Unknown Masterpiece” leads them to lift the green serge veil that's in front of a chaotic and noisy ensemble, a foggy blur of colors, forms and tones with indistinct shades, a confusion that serves as the background to a perfect form, a foot or torso of Venus, emerging from the nautical noise. Poussin discovers the well of the multiple, condition of the art work. That semi crazy noise, we hear it when Gambara interprets his opera Mahomet: formless creation, deafening cacophony, a collection of discordant sounds tossed about at random, a hubbub of notes. Accompanied by the delirious painter and the delirious musician, Balzac, one would say, foresaw the paintings or compositions that no one understands at the time I'm writing and which will seek the promise of improbable births in the original background noise.

The narratives that philosophize about the arts in The Human Comedy attain those virtual totalities, that sort of indefinite that the first physics, along the shores of the Ionian Sea, thought in the past: the noisy beauty hides and conditions beauty by the background and original hubbub, buries beauty beneath the noise of battle. Even “Pierre Grassou,” which takes the problem of creation from the other direction since it defines impotence by lack and no longer by excess like the first two, even “Pierre Grassou” attains and describes such multiplicities: the narrative begins with the unfurling exposition in which nothing can be recognized and which has replaced the former selective salon, and ends with the superb gallery of forgeries in Ville-d'Avray where the forging painter of real success replaces the fakes with the real according to chance. The authentic inventors' palate vibrates with noise and disorder and exposes them to every risk, from which they draw beauty, whereas the copiers' palate assembles the demands of the judgment of taste, which always and rightly wants to substitute the real for the fake [faux] yet only being able to produce forgeries [faux] itself. Here is the maxim of critique, the media and the University, all tribunals mixed together: “inventing in all things is wanting to die by inches; copying is living.” The mediocre eats well at the institutions' table and his references resemble a thesis, museum or bank account where the real never deceives, whereas the creator, excessive or deficient, turns to the dangerous sea noise before the birth of Aphrodite or Hermaphroditus, and even, beneath the noise, hubbub or battle, to the tumult of hell: to the originary chaos of death. *

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Serres/The Hermaphrodite The genius of the languages scattered across Northern and Southern Europe, Latin or Germanic, arranged things so that the word chose [thing] has the word “cause� as its root. Everything happens in our languages as though the real were born in the assemblies that debate and judge. Can critique say in a more lightningfast short-circuit the passage from the tribunal of Reason to designation or to the loss of the thing in itself? The language in common use for thousands of years before the courts and dicasteries in these regions had predicted this result. Can one say or think more profoundly than the partial covering over of causes and things [choses]?

The shining curious people who were chatting about everything just now at the Lanty's ball, the philosophers who teach that people are rogues, were beginning to conduct an investigation for a trial. If you don't know how or can't invent, a judge, you'll be thought of in addition as exacting and rigorous. They were seeking the cause or causes. Where does he come from? From all of Europe, from the South and the North. Who are they? Agnates or cognates of Zambinella.23 What did she do? She misled a sculptor about her sex in such a way that he died from love. How? By murder. Why? Because the cardinal Cicognara took revenge on him for abducting his protege. Were the police satisfied? But, by the way, how did they learn all this? How did they lay their hands on the criminal origin of a fortune, in short on the causes?

Quite simply through a chain of things: a painting refers to a statue which refers to its model and its maker. The things go back to their cause, as with the words. Things accuse us. Here is the age of suspicion, of critique, here is the reign of the police under which we have lived. * The police go back to the causes or critique to the conditions. The latter are divided into necessary and sufficient conditions. When the methodical movement goes from the conditioned to the condition, it discovers above all necessary conditions, which make us laugh with their dullness. Balzac owed his existence to a father and a mother, who he loved or hated, like everyone, and was plunged into a historical, social and political environment that was vibrant with conflicts and in which language and money circulated with merchandise; he lived rich or starving.

No one boasts of escaping these constraints, which hold or affect everyone, with or without a work, producers of works of stupidity or genius. I have never read a critique that goes beyond the zone of necessary conditions, always of an overwhelming patency, conditions that are universal of course like genealogy or history, sex or economy, language, but useless once you seek to return from the condition to the conditioned. How do you produce some given work starting from some given historical, sexual or linguistic determination? Sufficient conditions 23 Cognates=cognats, which does not have the linguistic sense that the English does.

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Serres/The Hermaphrodite would be required, conditions that alone permit the actual genesis of the specific thing.

Necessary conditions are found at the market or even in streams; nothing could be more common or better distributed by the large ideological organizations.

Conversely nothing could be so rare as the smallest sufficient condition. I don't myself know how to isolate one or make it be seen, but I do know how to recognize, without possible mistake, he who has found one or even the mute thing that envelops it by the obvious sign of beauty. This latter flees before the hate that impels to seek causes, but returns and descends, sometimes, on to innocent and brought to peace things. How can we give any credibility to a page that pretends to show the conditions of a work of art in a language that's awkward and ugly, decomposing a text that's stiff, repetitive and inelegant? Who wouldn't laugh at such a contradiction? How can we explain beauty by ugliness and the inventive by a redundant method or theory? But he who, meditating on the sufficient condition, suddenly creates beauty has laid his hand on the sufficient condition; he has adopted the gesture and can continue.

I believe what Balzac wrote about music and sculpture, or about their canonical relations – impossible loves and lethal proximity – because his entire body orienting itself in the problem produces, with an excess of life and omnitude, the work “Sarrasine” which, in its turn, makes my understanding and my body, in elation, fruitful. But don't believe a single word I write, if in your turn you've never experienced this fullness of meaning that leads you to pursue and perfect. Failing to transmit this burgeoning joy, I understood nothing and lose my existence. If yes, reader, get to the labor of giving birth; if yes, get to the work! * Information theory defines the former as proportional to rarity. Necessary conditions, because common and universal, don't bring any information: nothing's poorer and more banal than a cause or the search for causes, and the French language denounces their dullness with the mischievous verb causer [to chat]; nothing's more repetitive than a method that ceaselessly brings the same result and excuses the teacher from the overwhelming and happy obligation of inventing by brushing aside the students with alert intelligences. Sufficient conditions, extremely rare, productive, saturated with information, change, glide, run, always flee those who seek them. Nothing's more ordinary than a cause, nothing's rarer than a thing.

The critic or detective seated on the mansion's and short story's threshold, one hand in the warm, one foot frozen in the tomb, keeping time on the left, sculpted by ice on the right, goes back to the cause or to the tribunal decision and finds them.

What of it? He has just discovered a foul crime. We are well ahead here. How many haven't brought in any fortune?

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Serres/The Hermaphrodite Now beside the causes, deceptive castrato and sicarians who murdered the sculptor, stands the thing: the statue of the latter, a producer, and of the former, a copy of a model. The relation of Sarrasine to Zambinella passes through the cause or the thing.

Observe it, in your life and labors: try to talk to someone about a thing, and he will almost always answer you with proper names, references or citations; he's interested in relations and causes, almost never in the object. Here is rarity.

Everyone wallows in the stakes, fetishes and merchandise, all of them things assigned or brought back to causes, and remains blind to the object as such.

Luminously, “Sarrasine” indicates the first path, and Balzac writes a critique of judgment there, body and work of art merged, but in the final black box lies the thing that the crime prevents from seeing. One more effort, let's turn around, let's leave the corpse and the cause, let's consider the thing: a silent pre-critique in which the entire body constitutes the mute object that well returns the favor, producing it, leaving it after its death to testify to beauty, culture, in sufficiency.

The statue engenders the painting which engenders the narrative which engenders other texts: a strange and rare horn of plenty in which the body, complete, oriented or sexed, produces the chain that produces it. Whatever verdict some tribunal may make on people or actions, this objective and silent series, constitutive, remains, whose genesis one doesn't know, because this same “one” is constituted by falling, a greedy collective, upon causes. Causes descend from things, sometimes.

What is sculpture? A rare question in books. A fundamental art, originary, primitive. Why? Because, from it, things are born. In it, by it, the body constitutes the object which constitutes the body in return through the intermediary of death.

Because, from it, we can sketch a genealogy of the object as such, alone and mute.

Because, from a cause, from a crime, from death, a corpse comes, that of Sarrasine, a mummy, that of Zambinella coming out of the tomb, a statue that misleads about its origin and its model, male, female, and that is no longer understood, yes, a thing lastly, productive of things, of money, jewels, of works without ancestry. This anthropologically first art opens a history that we've lost or that we've never written, us, inundated with objects or with languages and only knowing how to manipulate the former by naming them by means of the latter stakes, fetishes and merchandise. In sculpture, silently and for the first time, the transcendental and extremely rare adequation of causes and things, of the objective work and death, mother of cultures, is formed.

At the upstream limit of this black history, in the dark light of dawn, stands the thing-cause in itself, formless rock, raised stone. The sculptor seeks to lay his hand on that first object: never did philosophy know how to accompany him in this enterprise, too removed from tribunals, causes and languages. The English language 46

Serres/The Hermaphrodite calls the most ancient standing menhirs, of a very hard material, the most originary mass statues of my cultural zone, those of Stonehenge for example, Sarsen Stones, “Pierres Sarrasines,” named “Sarrasines” to definitively refer them to a savage foreignness. Ghostly rocks of my ancestors forgotten beneath vertiginous layers of languages, yet fixed and faithful up to this day, silent, incomprehensible, weighty [pesants], as though hung [pendus] between earth and heaven, I was going to write: pensive [pensifs]. * And the marquise remained pensive.

Pensive, Balzac wrote, which makes us read and believe that the marquise thinks [pense]. And certainly she appears to think. But the language goes farther than its appearance: the marquise pèse [weighs] and pend [hangs]; these two verbs saying the origin or root of the verb penser [to think]. The body here stops as though stunned. In addition, whoever thinks something that he ends up saying, but she who remains pensive hesitates, doubts and doesn't think anything. Nothing follows from this pensiveness; the short story comes to an end. The marquise in equilibrium on a balance remains distraught, suspended. The text maintains its suspense.

The language, in secret, behind itself, says more and better than it seems to say.

The marquise doesn't know what to think about all that nor about herself – her virtue, like that of pure souls, has its country in heaven. And she remains suspended between heaven and earth, holiness in the Kingdom of God and the infamies that the Paris she lives in and loves wallows in: she divides herself between two places. Does she know herself? No one will have known me, she says. “A singular tyranny,” she protested against the narrator, “you want me [je] to not be me [moi].” Pensive, suspended between I and me [je et moi]. You are, the narrator answers in petto, more capricious, more whimsical or fantastical, a thousand times, than my imagination; yet this latter was dividing him, like a chimera, between life and death or warm and cold when he was plunged in reverie at the beginning of the short story. “Sarrasine” takes place in the middle of a musing writer and a pensive marquise.

The text develops between two doubts or balances, suspense in equilibrium and itself double as well, or stands like a book in the middle of bookends, two divided bodies, the first split between life and death, warmth, light and snow, the latter among heaven and earth, each doubting itself, as though torn: suspense written between a man's body and a woman's body – one dreamy, one pensive – cut but joined, glued, melted, mixed, assembled by the very text of “Sarrasine,” which acts as their symmetry plane or enantiomorphy plane passing through the sex. Yes, their joining is complete, realized, perfect as though they had made something infinitely 47

Serres/The Hermaphrodite better than love: having through the short story itself finally become Hermaphroditus.

Motionless statues, seated, dreamy, pensive, melted together by the sculptor Sarrasine, who is dead and has vanished in the middle, into a single absolute masterpiece.

Dream and think, of life and of death, write facing heaven, and you will become androgynous, hermaphroditic Adam, the first statue.24 Stanford, October-November, 1986

24 Of life and of death=à la vie à la mort, which means “always” and is sometimes translated as “till death do us part.”

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Serres/The Hermaphrodite

Bibliography

1923. F. Haböck, Die Gesangskunst der Kastraten, Vienna, Universal-Edition, 2 volumes.

1933. H. David, « Balzac italianisant : autour de Sarrasine », Revue de littérature comparée, pp. 457-464.

1960. A. Heriot, The Castrati in Opera, London, Calderbooks.

1963. Jean Seznec, « Diderot et Sarrasine », Diderot Studies, IV, pp. 237-245.

1966. Pierre Citron, « Note sur Sarrasine », L'Année balzacienne.

1967. J. Reboul, « Sarrasine ou la castration personifée », Cahiers pour l'analyse, VII. 1970. Roland Barthes, S/Z, Éditions du Seuil.

1971. P. Barbéris, « A propos du S/Z de Roland Barthes », L'Année balzacienne.

1972. Pierre Citron, « Interprétation de Sarrasine », L'Année balzacienne, pp. 8197.

1973. L. Frappier-Mazur, « Balzac et l'androgyne », L'Année balzacienne, pp. 253277.

1977. Pierre Citron, Introduction, notes et variantes pour Sarrasine, in Balzac, La Comédie humaine, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, tome VI, pp. 1036-1041 and 1543-1554.

1986. Pierre Citron, Dans Balzac, Éditions du Seuil : sur Sarrasine : pp. 24-25, 85101, 110-111 and passim.

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