S h o r t Es s ay

Individuation: This stupidity

Nicola Masciandaro
Department of English, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, New York.

Abstract The problem of individuation exposes the insuperable stupidity of

human being and guarantees the groundlessness and illegitimacy of any systematic
understanding of it.

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2010) 1, 124–131.

doi:10.1057/pmed.2010.11

I will diminish and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

Yes, that was the name. I was Gandalf.

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

Proem & Gloss

Event of oneself, ongoing primordial,
Without way or opening, a very hard fall.

‘Kaspar Hauser: Well, it seems to me y that my coming into this world y was
a terribly hard fall! Professor Daumer: But Kaspar! That y No, that’s
not y How should I explain it to you?’ (Herzog, 1974). ‘Who am I? How did
I get into the world? Why was I not asked about it, why was I not informed of
the rules and the regulations but just thrust into the ranks? y And if I am
compelled to be involved, where is the manager – I have something to say about

r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 124–131
www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/
 Individuation: This stupidity

this. Is there no manager? To whom shall I make my complaint?’ (Kierkegaard,

1983, 200).

In the beginning, beginning’s very middle,

See my blinding opening, your pure white hole.

‘[S]ometimes I wake up with a feeling of childish amazement – why am

I myself? What astonishes me y is the fact of finding myself here, and at this
moment, deep in this life and not in any other. What stroke of chance has
brought this about?’ (De Beauvoir, 1974, 1). ‘We now know the location of
this narrow passage through which thought is able to exit from itself – it is
through facticity, and through facticity alone, that we are able to make our way
towards the absolute’ (Meillassoux, 2008, 63). ‘Individuation as such, as it
operates beneath all forms, in inseparable from a pure ground that it brings to
the surface and trails with it. It is difficult to describe this ground, or the terror
and attraction it excites’ (Deleuze, 1994, 152).

Summoned by something making answering its call,

Walking an opening where stepping is trail.

‘This characteristic of Dasein’s Being – this ‘‘that it is’’ – is veiled in its

‘‘whence’’ and ‘‘whither’’, yet disclosed in itself all the more unveiledly; we call it
the ‘‘thrownness’’ of this entity into its ‘‘there’’; indeed, it is thrown in such a
way that, as Being-in-the-world, it is its ‘‘there’’’ (Heidegger, 1962, 174). ‘When
I consider the brief span of my life absorbed into the eternity which comes
before and after y the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the
infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing
of me, I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is
no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put
me here?’ (Pascal, 1966, no. 68).

Stumbling perfectly, on stumbling, the way a ball,

Deep surface, no opening, feels, cannot, its roll.

‘Just as stone is first presented to the intellect as something in its own right
and not as universal or singular, neither is stone first grasped through a second
intention, nor is universality a part of the meaning of the concept, but the mind
understands the nature of stone for what it is in itself and not as universal or as
particular or singular – so in its extramental existence stone is primarily neither
one nor many numerically, yet it has its own proper unity which is less than the
unity pertaining to a singular’ (Scotus, 2005, sect. 32). ‘In the abandon in
which I am lost, the empirical knowledge of my similarity with others is
irrelevant, for the essence of my self arises from this – that nothing will be able

r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 124–131 125
 Masciandaro

to replace it: the feeling of my fundamental improbability situates me in

the world where I remain as though foreign to it, absolutely foreign’ (Bataille,
1988, 69).

Will these clauses, unconcluding, speak being’s wheel,

Our anarchic opening, foundation beyond frail?

‘As for the soul being ‘‘mixed up’’ I dare say we’ve the whole divina
commedia going on inside us y’ The real mediation is, however, the meditation
on one’s identity. Ah, voilà une chose!! You try it. You try finding out why
you’re you & not somebody else. And who in the blazes are you anyhow?
A voilà une chose!’ (Pound and Shakespear, 1984, 206). ‘[I]nterpreting is itself
a possible and distinctive how of the character of being of facticity. Interpreting
is a being which belongs to the being of factical life itself. If one were to describe
facticity – improperly – as the ‘‘object’’ of hermeneutics (as plants are described
as the objects of botany), then one would find this (hermeneutics) in its own
object itself (as if analogously plants, what and how they are, came along with
botany and from it)’ (Heidegger, 2008, 12).

Or are they, caught underneath, wax to empty seal,

Signs only of opening, of depths unreal?

‘Even more than the style, the very rhythm of our life is based on the good
standing of rebellion. Loath to admit a universal identity, we posit individua-
tion, heterogeneity as a primordial phenomenon y to revolt is to postulate this
heterogeneity, to conceive it as somehow anterior to the advent of beings and
objects’ (Cioran, 1998, 42). ‘Don Quixote, steeled by his intrepid heart, leapt
upon Rocinante, grasped his little round shield, clasped his pike and said:
‘‘Friend Sancho, I would have you know that I was born, by the will of heaven,
in this iron age of ours, to revive in it the age of gold, or golden age, as it is often
called. I am the man, I repeat, for whom dangers, great exploits, valiant deeds
are reserved’’’ (De Cervantes Saavedra, 2001, 154).

Event of oneself, so perversely actual,

Queerest opening, a sparrow through the hall.

‘Another of the king’s [Edwin’s] chief men signified his agreement with this
prudent argument [in favor of accepting Christianity], and went on to say:
‘‘Your Majesty, when we compare the present life of man on earth with that
time of which we have no knowledge, it seems to me like swift flight of a single
sparrow through the banqueting-hall where you are sitting on a winter’s day
with your thegns and counselors y Even so, man appears on earth for a little
while; but of what went before this life or of what follows, we know nothing.

126 r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 124–131
 Individuation: This stupidity

Therefore, if this new teaching has brought any more certain knowledge, it
seems only right that we should follow it’’’ (Bede, 1990, 129). ‘God or the good
or the place does not take place, but is the taking-place of the entities, their
innermost exteriority. The being-worm of the worm, the being-stone of the
stone, is divine y Evil, on the other hand, is the reduction of the taking-place of
things to a fact like others, the forgetting of the transcendence inherent in the
very taking-place of things’ (Agamben, 1993, 14).

Essay

Why am I me? A stupid question. Stupid. Not that one is in error to ask it –
though one is certainly wandering. Not because it might be unanswerable, or
lead into a bottomless, abyssic tautology. The question is stupid because it
brings me face to face with an essential stupidity, with my stupidness, with
stupid human being. This stupidity is not simple, not a matter of straightfor-
ward inability or blindness. It is complex, intractable, so enrooted as to be
almost unintelligible – a kind of radical neural network that flashes within
intelligence, stupefying it towards itself: a vision that is blind, a blindness within
vision, an ability that is unable, an inability within ability. Accordingly, I know
the question, but do not really ask it. Or I sincerely pose the question, and
proceed no further. Or I indulge the question endlessly, in all permutations of
emphasis. Or I suddenly discover an answer and it does not matter. Or I fail to
think the question and wonder why. Or I sleep, or wake, merely staring at its
feeling. And so on. I am too stupid to answer this question. And to ask it, just
stupid enough.
What is the mechanism of such stupid questioning? I imagine a small organ,
neither inside nor outside myself, like a polymelic phantom limb, a subtle
psychic appendage implanted at birth behind my crown, during the moment of
my coming to be, whenever that was. This organ (or appendix, or tumor),
whose painful inflammation is despair – ‘despair is the paroxysm of
individuation’ (Cioran, 1996, 59) – is like a strange supplementary bodily
member, intimate and inessential, which I can feel yet not move, barely move yet
without feeling. Stupid organ, organ of stupidity. It moves, is moved, like an
inalienable shackle, only to reinforce its immobility. Am I to sever this organ,
hemorrhage of haecceity, escape it? ‘[E]scape is the need to get out of oneself,
that is, to break that most radical and unalterably binding of chains, the fact
that the I [moi] is oneself [soi-même]’ (Levinas, 2003, 55). Just who, then,
would escape? See Peter Sellers, tugging at a fake beard that will not come off.1 1 In the final scene of
When you finally free and find yourself, you do not even have the last laugh! Or After the Fox
(1966), starring
do I strengthen this organ, exercise it until it evolves and flowers, on the day
Peter Sellers,
that today becomes paradise, into a halo? A very special monstrous growth criminal
then,2 a means of the apotheosis of monstrosity, something whose troublesome

r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 124–131 127
 Masciandaro

mastermind Aldo spasm is really the vibrational awakening of a primordially inherited

Vanucci, a.k.a. The perfection.3 This stupidity: penumbra of whatever being, like the distorted
Fox, escapes prison
self-shadow that a lamp casts by its own light.
disguised as a
doctor, also played This stupidity, an omnipresent blankness faced in the mirror of Why am I
by Peter Sellers, me?, is a glitch in the system, a malady whose unaccountable advent calls the
whom he leaves integrity of everything wholly into question. A bug, something at once alien and
tied up in his cell.
endemic to system as such. An infinitely intrinsic whim or non-interpretable
A crucial element
of Vanucci’s decision suspending each entity in its ownmost location, giving its event the
disguise is a fake inalienable status of an empyrean conspiracy. Whence Scotus’s doctrine of
beard. After haecceity as the ontic summit of a creature: ‘in those beings which are the
clearing the prison highest and most important, it is the individual that is primarily intended
gates, he tries to
remove it, but it
by God’ (Scotus, 2005, xxi). This stupidity is a human stupidity, afflicting in
will not come off. one stroke my species-being (why am I not a cat?), the arbitrariness of my
He, whoever he identity (why am I not you?), and my being as such (why am I happening at
now is, exclaims, all?). But this stupidity belongs equally to every entity, and also to non-entities,
‘My God, the
wrong man has
who with respect to individuation are totally people too. Whence I envision
escaped!’ Nothing to be the supreme commentator on Heidegger’s interpretation of Why
2 ‘A being – a face, a are there beings at all, instead of nothing? as ‘first in rank for us as the broadest,
gesture, an event – as the deepest, and finally as the most originary question’ (Heidegger, 2000, 2).
is special when, Nothing notes in the margin, ‘That is a nice question for you, but why am I
without resembling
any other, it
nothing rather than something?’ Why am I me? arrives as a question at once
resembles all the more originary, more immediate and more telic. Long ‘after’ and long ‘before’
others’ (Agamben, the existence of anything and everything is accounted for, the one-sided
2007, 59). asymmetry that individuation articulates remains, this stupidity whereby
3 ‘It does not take whatever is is inexplicably caught being itself. For although Why am I me?
place in things, but
meaningfully intersects with Why anything? as its individualization, it is
at their periphery,
in the space of ease superiorly profound by virtue of being more purely factical. Individuation
between every indicates the incommensurable actuality according to which whatever is is in
thing and itself y fact such as it is. Individuation captures the concrete, specific actuality of
This imperceptible
facticity.4 It names the invisible and horribly palpable loop whereby everything,
trembling of the
finite that makes its even nothing, is anarchically something. Heidegger would trace individuation to
limits indeterminate time (1995, 80–82). Yet time itself is fatally afflicted or wholly perforated by it,
and allows it to produced as a perfect plenitude of individuation’s hole. Why is it now
blend, to make (whenever) now? Why are we postmedieval?
itself whatever,
is the tiny We who? We is a person immunizing themselves against this stupidity,
displacement that someone hiding the senselessness of we inside its own repetition.5 Usually the
every thing must human we (human as we), or some subset collectivizing itself as universal.
accomplish in the Whence the inevitable appearance of the animal as mirror wherein to see this
messianic world’
(Agamben, 1993,
stupidity, ‘sheep [who] do not stand alone or suffer individuation’ (Ronell,
53–55). 2002, 54), ‘animals [who] are in a sense forewarned against this ground,
4 In scholastic protected by their explicit forms’ (Deleuze, 1994, 152), a cat who observes that
philosophy, the ‘One comes through life and to life, without ever knowing how. At least that is
specificity of how it was with me’ (Heller-Roazen, 2007, 15),6 another whom Derrida

128 r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 124–131
 Individuation: This stupidity

therefore is (following) (Derrida, 2008, 56). With them, I seriously enjoy actuality is worked
understanding this stupidity, staring at it intelligently: ‘Stupidity is neither the out via the concept
of concreation:
ground nor the individual, but rather this relation in which individuation brings
‘The actualness of
the ground to the surface without being able to give it form’ (Deleuze, 1994, the created is not
152). But that is not enough. It will not do. I will not submit myself. Not to itself actual; it is
the cowardice of definition.7 Not to any community of the question, even/ not itself in need of
a coming-to-be or a
especially one that takes the cosmic egg as its wall. I must do something truly
being-created.
stupid. I will love.8 Therefore, it may
not be said that
actuality is
Epilogue something created.
It is rather quid
concreatum,
concreated with
Love blazes beyond the horizon of our dreams, the creation of a
A silence lighting the world and burning what seems. created thing’
(Heidegger, 1988,
The taken-for-granted gravity of being, love 104).
Joins impossibly, within, below, and above. 5 ‘Thus one can find
a senior scientist
and professor of
Are they in love or is love in them? No one knows genetics y
Why, how, where, when this fact, force, feeling, or form grows. claiming that by
knowing our
genomes, ‘‘we will
Discourse dies in the real presence of lovers’ eyes,
begin to know
A breathless Icarus falling through flaming skies. ourselves for the
first time.’’ Such a
Hold firm to love, the only firmness, the real real, naturalistic
perspective of the
A constant heart-command holding the self’s own seal.
human sciences
typically makes
Listen close to love, the secret whispering sign, impossible the
A word-sword quietly killing I, me, and mine. distinction between
the person’s
individuation
Love tells Nicola this, a bright, dark speaking sun. essentially through
Love remembers us, truly friend, not we but one. herself, per se, and
through other
extrinsic
contingent factors,
About t he Auth o r per accidens’
(Hart, 2009, 368).

Nicola Masciandaro is Associate Professor of English at Brooklyn College and 6 Citing Hoffmann
(1976, 16).
the author of The Voice of the Hammer: The Meaning of Work in Middle
7 ‘We define only out
English Literature (Notre Dame, 2007) and emerging essays on various subjects of despair. We must
(sorrow, commentary, the hand, metal, anagogy, beheading, Aesop, dislocation, have a formula, we
Dante and the dissolution of the cosmos). Other current projects include: must even have
the open-access journal Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary, many, if only to

r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 124–131 129
 Masciandaro

give justification to a book on mystical mourning entitled The Sorrow of Being, co-edited
the mind and a volumes (on commentary and speculative medievalism), a ritual from an alien
fac¸ade to the void’
ontology (The Mourn), and periodic black metal theory symposia (E-mail:
(Cioran, 1975, 48).
nicolamasciandaro@gmail.com).
8 ‘Seeing something
simply in its being-
thus – irreparable,
but not for that Refer e n c e s
reason necessary;
thus, but not for
Agamben, G. 1993. The Coming Community, trans. M. Hardt. Minneapolis, MN:
that reason
University of Minnesota Press.
contingent – is
love’ (Agamben, Agamben, G. 2007. Profanations, trans. J. Fort. New York: Zone.
1993, 105). Bataille, G. 1988. Inner Experience, trans. L.A. Boldt. Albany, NY: State University of
New York Press.
De Beauvoir, S. 1974. All Said and Done, trans. P. O’Brien. New York: Putnam.
Bede. 1990. Ecclesiastical History of the English People, trans. D.H. Farmer. New York:
Penguin.
De Cervantes Saavedra, M. 2001. Don Quixote, trans. J. Rutherford. New York: Penguin.
Cioran, E.M. 1975. A Short History of Decay, trans. R. Howard. New York: Arcade.
Cioran, E.M. 1996. On the Heights of Despair, trans. I. Zarifopol-Johnston. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.
Cioran, E.M. 1998. The Temptation to Exist, trans. R. Howard. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press.
Deleuze, G. 1994. Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton. New York: Columbia.
Derrida, J. 2008. The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. M.-L. Mallet and trans. D. Willis.
New York: Fordham.
Hart, J.G. 2009. Who One Is, Book One: Meontology of the ‘I’: A Transcendental
Phenomenology. London: Springer.
Heidegger, M. 1962. Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. San Francisco,
CA: Harper Collins.
Heidegger, M. 1988. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. A. Hofstadter.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Heidegger, M. 1995. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude,
Solitude, trans. W. McNeill and N. Walker. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Heidegger, M. 2000. The Fundamental Question of Metaphysics. In Introduction to
Metaphysics, trans. G. Fried and R. Polt, 1–54. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Heidegger, M. 2008. Ontology – The Hermeneutics of Facticity, trans. J. van Buren.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Heller-Roazen, D. 2007. The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation. New York: Zone.
Herzog, W., dir. 1974. The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. New Yorker Films.
Hoffmann, E.T.A. 1976. Lebensansichten des Katers Murr. Frankfurt, Germany: Insel.
Kierkegaard, S. 1983. Fear and Trembling; Repetition, trans. H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Levinas, E. 2003. On Escape, trans. B. Bergo. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Meillassoux, Q. 2008. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans.
R. Brassier. London: Continuum.

130 r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 124–131
 Individuation: This stupidity

Pascal, B. 1966. Pensées, trans. A.J. Krailsheimer. New York: Penguin.

Pound, E. and Shakespear, D. 1984. Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear, Their Letters,
1909–1914, eds. O. Pound and A.W. Litz. New York: New Directions.
Ronell, A. 2002. Stupidity. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Scotus, J.D. 2005. Early Oxford Lecture on Individuation, trans. A.B. Wolter.
St Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute.

r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 124–131 131