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Popular Culture Review
a form of narcissism that will inevitably lead to psychological imbalance. The
only healthy thing to do once someone dies is to stop loving her.
The problem is that the dead are always still present—and thus
seemingly ready to accept our love. Phenomenologically, we experience people
long after they are dead. It is something Freud never addressed, but when we
actually look at our experience, the dead are always present: they are presenced,
precisely, as absent. In this way, it still seems possible to love them.
What is at work here is what Edmund Husserl called “the play of
presence of absence.” When we investigate the underlying structures of
consciousness we discover that mind is always dire cted at something, and that
something is always a whole. This is an important point that most American and
British epistemologists are still not keen on accepting. For them, it seems as if
only one side of an object is visible at any given time and thus the true object of
consciousness is thus at best merely a surface of an object from a single vantage
point. As you look before you as you read this essay, you see the page as it sits
in the bound journal. It seems you can only see the journal from one angle right
now, and thus the object of your consciousness must be the-ffont-of-thisparticular-page-in-the-joumal. However, phenomenology calls on us actually to
look at our experience rather than reason abstractly about it. And when you look
at our experience of the journal, you will find that you are experiencing—you
are conscious of— a whole object and not some fa$ade, some two-dimensional
surface. In fact, if you truly thought that you were seeing just the front of things
all around you now, if you thought that you were living in some sort of
elaborately constructed movie-set, there would be good reason to worry about
you and your brain.
Instead, it is the case that we actually do experience whole things
around us; but how does this happen if all we ever physically see with our eyes
are profiles and surfaces? The answer is to be had in understanding the way in
which consciousness itself is structured. We are capable of experiencing
something that is, in some sense, absent. And this experience is not a lack, a
non-experience, or a negation. Instead, it is an actual, full experience: a presence
of that which is absent. You are thus experiencing the journal as a whole object
right now. You can see the current page as present, but you are simultaneously
experiencing all of the rest of the journal as presently-absent, as there-too, as
apperceived rather than directly perceived. The back cover is being experienced
right now—it is immediately taken as that which could be fully present if you
just turned the journal over and took a look. And it is thus that presence and
absence are always at work in consciousness.
It is a small step to say that the dead are thus still present for us. This is
meant to be taken in a literal way, though not in the sense that there are literal
ghosts. It is true that Derrida’s notion of “the spectre” and “the trace” are
coming out of this phenomenological tradition. The claim that there is no such
thing as a complete erasure, that there are always traces in a text both of what
has been negated and what is necessarily working to undermine the text as it