(14) The abracadabrant story of the Moon Child

 

 

 

“To say that this archipelago is a pre-world is to say that it does not belong to the stabilized order of things, but to that moment when the world is not yet separated from what, strictly speaking, overflows it.”

— Where does this gibberish come from… well… this sort of philosophy…
— These are our master’s words…
— I did not express myself well… I wanted to know what his model was… from whom he derived his arguments… the wording of my question is clumsy and somewhat dismissive, but that is not my intention…
— You mean… which philosopher would be closest to this notion?
— Exactly…
— When I asked him that question myself, he answered that the question was anything but clumsy… or dismissive… “it touches the point where a thought ceases to be merely ‘one’s own’ and enters a broader constellation. And what you formulate here does not belong to a single philosopher: it is a line of thought, a kind of subterranean vein running through several works.” That is what he told me.
— And which would be the closest?
— The closest, in an almost direct sense, would be Henri Maldiney. In his work, one finds precisely this idea that the real never reduces itself to what is already formed, already constituted.
— If I remember correctly, he speaks of the event as something that “arrives” without being contained within the prior structures of experience.
— That is it… what you call “what overflows” corresponds very closely to what he sometimes calls the “opening of the real,” or again the impossibility for the world to be closed. For him, the world is not a stable frame, but something that reconfigures itself from what passes through it and unsettles it.

— From another angle… very close as well, but with a different tone, Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In his later texts, especially around the notion of the “flesh of the world,” he shows that the world is not a set of clearly delimited objects, but a depth-texture, a kind of fabric in which every perception leaves a remainder, a thickness that cannot be exhausted. This “remainder” is a form of overflow: that which, in the visible, exceeds any complete grasp.

One can also strongly hear Martin Heidegger behind this idea. When he thinks being as what withdraws even as it gives itself, he describes something very close: what appears never exhausts what is. There is always a withdrawal, a reserve. This withdrawal is not a lack, but the very condition of appearance. What you call “overflow” could here be described as this active withdrawal, this non-coincidence of the world with itself.
With Emmanuel Levinas, the question takes an ethical turn. What overflows the world is the Other, not as a merely external person, but as that which exceeds any representation we can have of it. The Other can never be contained within my world. It overflows it, opens it, calls it into question.
One might also mention Georges Didi-Huberman, whom you already invoked. When he speaks of the image as event, he insists that the image never reduces itself to what it shows. It opens and overflows the visible. It introduces into the gaze something that was not anticipated by it.
And, in a more literary yet equally rigorous vein, Maurice Blanchot. In his work, the world is constantly exposed to what he calls the “outside,” not a locatable elsewhere, but a dimension where reference points dissolve, where language itself is drawn toward what exceeds it.

If one were to risk a synthetic formulation, our master told me, without enclosing these thinkers within a single doctrine, one could say that what they describe belongs to a thought of the world as open, incapable of closing upon itself, always exposed to what exceeds it without being foreign to it.

And perhaps what is most accurate, in the end, is not to seek “the” philosopher, but to see that he is… like us… and like the Moon Child… already at the point of crossing between several, where their thoughts, without merging, begin to resonate together.