Dylan Trigg - The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny

The Memory of Place

SERIES IN CONTINENTAL THOUGHT

Editorial Board

Ted Toadvine, Chairman, University of Oregon

Elizabeth A. Behnke, Study Project in Phenomenology of the Body

David Carr, Emory University

James Dodd, New School University

Lester Embree, Florida Atlantic University

Jos Huertas-Jourda, Wilfrid Laurier University

Joseph J. Kockelmans, Pennsylvania State University

William R. McKenna, Miami University

Algis Mickunas, Ohio University

J. N. Mohanty, Temple University

Dermot Moran, University College Dublin

Thomas Nenon, University of Memphis

Rosemary Rizo-Patron de Lerner, Pontificia Universidad Catlica del Per, Lima

Thomas M. Seebohm, Johannes Gutenberg Universitt, Mainz

Gail Soffer, Rome, Italy

Elizabeth Strker, Universitt Kln

Nicolas de Warren, Wellesley College

Richard M. Zaner, Vanderbilt University

International Advisory Board

Suzanne Bachelard, Universit de Paris

Rudolf Boehm, Rijksuniversiteit Gent

Albert Borgmann, University of Montana

Amedeo Giorgi, Saybrook Institute

Richard Grathoff, Universitt Bielefeld

Samuel Ijsseling, Husserl-Archief te Leuven

Alphonso Lingis, Pennsylvania State University

Werner Marx, Albert-Ludwigs Universitt, Freiburg

David Rasmussen, Boston College

John Sallis, Boston College

John Scanlon, Duquesne University

Hugh J. Silverman, State University of New York, Stony Brook

Carlo Sini, Universit di Milano

Jacques Taminiaux, Louvain-la-Neuve

D. Lawrence Wieder

Dallas Willard, University of Southern California

A Phenomenology of the Uncanny

DYLAN TRIGG

OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS / ATHENS

Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701
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2012 by Ohio University Press
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First paperback printing in 2013
ISBN 978-0-8214-2039-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Trigg, Dylan.

The memory of place : a phenomenology of the uncanny / Dylan Trigg.

p. cm.(Series in Continental thought)

Includes bibliographical references (p. 337) and index.

ISBN 978-0-8214-1975-5 (hc : alk. paper)ISBN 978-0-8214-4404-7 (electronic) 1. Place (Philosophy) 2. Memory. I. Title.

B105.P53T75 2011

114dc23

2011036028

For my Parents and Brother
With Love

You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming.

Rainer Maria Rilke, For the Sake of a Single Poem

TOUCHING THE PAST

We still believe that there is a truth about the past; we base our memory on the worlds vast Memory, in which the house has its place as it really was on that day, and which guarantees its being at this moment.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

I have seen this place before. It is three oclock on a Thursday afternoon, and I am standing outside my childhood home. On the upper right, through the tree, is the room I slept in. From within that room, I would be able to hear a train in the distance. Through an adjoining alleyway on the left of the house is the place where some children once set fire to some disused tires, causing thick clouds of smoke to disturb the bees in the garden. If I get close enough, perhaps near enough to touch the door, I would be able to see the kitchen where I once burned myself. Dare I trespass beyond this door? In doing so, more than a spatial border would be transgressed. Crossing that borderline, I would risk conflating the traces of familiarity with the presence of unfamiliarity, entering into the scene of a different timescale, and so producing a place divested of its intimacy with my memory but now accommodating of other peoples lives. So I maintain a distance, allowing my imagination to repair the wounds of time. In the nooks and alcoves that have been reconstituted and altered, my involvement with the place has ended. Reduced to the outsider of my own memory, the assurance that coincides with self-presence is undermined. After all, where am I in this return? The answer is clear: partly dispersed in time, and yet partly absorbed in place, but never actually here. Place and time: two pillars of identity, now bathed in a strange, even uncanny, light.

Another memory has surfaced. This time the distance is nearer and I am placed inside a house that I recently vacated and only now has been leased to another tenant. But an anomaly occurs. The new guest has yet to move his furniture and belongings in, and I encounter the place in a transitional state: deprived of my own items, yet lacking the presence of another human, and thus exposed to the strange anonymity in between.

Here, the memory of the place has yet to recede into a mythical past, has yet to be divested of its relation with calendar time. Instead, walking through the environment, feeling the light strike me in a singular way, and becoming aware of the damp air, the effect of which is a condition of the basement level, I am immediately returned not only to a specific time but also to a particular mode of embodiment. As I sit on a wooden box in the bedroom, my head must tilt at an uncomfortable angle in order to view the window above. Once more, I encounter the window primarily through its small and damaged air vent, which rotates with a gentle creaking noise. Below street level, the focus of this room is oriented toward the nameless human beings who walk above. Only their feet can be seen. Sometimes, however, a voice comes into the room before receding into silence. I confess: I had forgotten about the low-level melancholy this room invokes; forgotten, too, about the insomnia that became constitutive of my experience of failing to sleep here.

I leave, and am now in the lounge. All that remains of my former presence is the mannequin of a woman in the patio area. Too cumbersome to move, it has remained stationary, entering into a decaying existence, apathetic to its new owner. Despite this fragment of the old life, I am still able to sense my own presence in the room. When I move nearer to the French doors, the combination of feeling the draft and smelling the rotting wood returns me to a piece of writing I was finishing on aesthetic experience three years ago. As though the two events have formed one image, it is impossible for me to isolate the act of writing from the draft and rot.