C7. Traumata Triumphant

Bones are not concepts. But they are constraints—enabling ones at that. This is precisely what makes them legible as precursors of conceptual finitude. A casement of linguistic rules is only the most epithelial, epigene, or proximal layer of collapse into one’s own chronotopic systematicity.1 Moreover, just as hormetic perturbation triggers these various infoldings of biogenesis, so too does the Kantian exploration into orientational rationality find its beginnings in traumatic tremors.

Biographically speaking, Kant’s philosophical career was in no small part triggered by the 1755 earthquake that decimated the bustling city of Lisbon. This fatal calamity troubled a 31-year-old Kant so much that it provoked three essays from him—in swift succession—on the topic of seismology, which are amongst his earliest published writings.2 Here, in 1756 (fifteen years prior to the musings in his first Critique), Kant was already remarking—with clear trepidation—that we ‘know the surface of the Earth fairly completely’, but that ‘we have another world beneath our feet with which we are at present but little acquainted’. And, after indicating the inwardly-riven ‘fissures’, innermost fundaments, and ‘unfathomable depths’ that variegate this ‘internal structure’, Kant adds that thus far we have only penetrated it to a depth of around ‘500 fathoms’ (which is ‘not even one six thousandth part of the distance to the centre of the Earth’). He then dwells upon the feeling of ultimate consternation people feel when they realise that the seismic Earth ‘moves under their feet’—that they have never stood upon firm ground. Far from being merely an easily-forgotten reverie of his dogmatic slumbers, the aftershocks of this feeling of quaking consternation are carried through into the very conclusion of the critical project. In the ‘Analytic of the Sublime’, Kant refers to sublimity as a feeling of ‘Erschütterung’, which can be translated as ‘tremoring’ or ‘quaking’.3 On both a biographical and philosophical level, the Kantian subject doubts itself—reaching for the supernal or supererogatory—only in response to external stressors shuddering upwards from our unquiet planet.4

Time has its own developmental history (its own Bildung), namely evolution’s unfolding procession of chronotopic intrications, which themselves are serially deposited in response to the grand tremors and quaking perturbations of the body of the earth. Let us, then, embark upon a geotraumatic vivisection of our grounds of orientation: peeling back transcendental overlay down to osseous underlay; quarrying the prehistory of our inferential exoskeleton through our physical endoskeleton; shaving away conceptual, linguistic, and synaptic laminae; spelunking the larynx, opening onto grand coelems—dropping down the spinal echelons—in a phyletic katabasis through our architectures of chronotopic encasement.5 Descending down the vertebral metameres, one realises that these nested world-infoldings chart the gargantuan paroxysms that roll through time aeonic. For the spine is the marker of chronogenic whiplash; nervous intrication generates a sense of speeding time; inertial drag is a known side effect. There is no sense of time’s movement without a concomitant desire to speed it up: to be aware of time moving is to anticipate the oncoming future, which invariably causes it to arrive earlier and earlier. A sense of the new, by changing present behaviour, causes the new. Thus the very experience, or consciousness, of temporal movement provides the conditions for history’s acceleration.6 Sensitivity to time is nothing other than further sensitization to time; or, once entangled, one only can become more entangled. Historically speaking, self-consciousness of historicism provided the very material conditions under which history became revolution upon speeding revolution.7 To sense time moving is already to cause it to move faster.8 This is the very heart of the synonymy of ‘the modern’ and ‘the catastrophic’ which Reinhart Koselleck traces to the past few centuries of political upheavals, but this dynamism began—albeit glacially at first—many aeons ago when temporality infiltrated the first sparking neuron.9 Indeed, in tracing the long-durational gestation of such chronoceptivity back to neural inner collapse, we note how appropriate it is that René Thom theorized the topological shape of catastrophe to be that of the invaginated fold.10

Nonetheless, in this phylogenesis of time, a sense of the future arriving earlier is indistinct from the past’s drag upon the present. Only relative to such a drag could any precocity be defined. But when one’s past is a story of quakes and perturbations, the internality implied by ‘one’s own history’ begins to unravel. Ultimately, discovering finitude entailed discovering that thought is functionally internal to itself, but self-containment becomes problematic when modulated through the dimension of Grand History. Here, ‘internality’ and ‘inclusion’ are reconstituted as a medium of ancestral self-abruption rather than telescoping self-similarity and ownership. What is at stake, then, is the realisation that the historical vanishing point of self-containment just is self-exclusion: in other words, depth. Historically speaking, I contain my outside. This is what time does to a body, as we shall see in tracing out this Secret History. The lesson is clear: psychosomatic containment of oneself, when percolated through Grandest History, equals hypogene alienation—the alienation of a body riddled with time. It is this realisation that is inaugural of the phylogenetic phantasy that is Spinal Catastrophism.

Hegel was perhaps wrong, after all, to dispute the fact that ‘Spirit is a bone’.11

We now turn to the diverse forms taken by this hypergenealogical reverie—first of all to the most recent exponent and inventor of the term itself, before tracing its multiple sources back through the various forgotten avenues of modern thought.