(31) The abracadabrant story of the Moon Child

“Language is the house of Being. In its shelter dwells man. Thinkers and poets are the guardians of this dwelling. Their guardianship consists in bringing about the manifestation of Being, insofar as, through their saying, they bring this manifestation into language and preserve it within language.”

Martin Heidegger, Letter on Humanism

Lucian’s Notebook

We speak from within a dependence older than ourselves. There is therefore in our lives a kind of original debt. Not a fault, but an anteriority impossible to erase.
When Pascal Quignard says that language is “neither divine nor human,” he means that it exceeds this opposition. It is not simply fabricated like a tool. Nor has it fallen from the sky like a sacred law. It precedes us, it circulates, it is transmitted, it transforms, but no one can truly say: “here is the one who founded it.” It is there before us, and we receive it.
That is why he corrects in advance the dream of total freedom. He says, in substance: one can free oneself as much as possible, but one cannot be absolutely free. This sentence may seem pessimistic. In reality, it is above all lucid. It reminds us that we are not, whoever we may be, pure beginnings. We are always already caught in attachments.
But the text… every text… does not stop at this dependence. It seeks an opening. This opening is the possibility of thinking our dependence. We cannot entirely step outside language, nor the group, nor origin. Yet we can approach what precedes us. We can try to feel what, within us, comes from before us.
This is where the idea of “pre-language” and “post-language” appears. Pre-language is what exists before words: primary sensations, raw emotions, bodily rhythms, archaic fears, the bond with the mother, the cry, the night, dread, hunger, presence, absence. All of this exists before discourse. I do not know whether the Moon Child knows this…
Post-language is not simply what comes after speaking well. It is rather a state in which thought tries to go beyond ordinary language without abolishing it. As if, through words, one were trying to reach something that words do not entirely contain. Literature, in Quignard, often moves in this direction: it uses language to touch what precedes language.
In this sense, truly thinking does not consist merely in organizing ideas. Truly thinking would be to approach this very ancient zone within us, this primordial obscurity, this birth that is never entirely finished.
This is why he writes: “one must contemplate the void upstream of all things.” The “void” here is not simply nothingness. It is the before. It is what was there before sharply defined forms, before names, before explanations. To contemplate this void is to accept looking at what, within us, is not yet well ordered. It is risky, because one loses one’s bearings there.
Hence these powerful phrases: “one can die for thinking.” They must not be understood only in a physical sense. Quignard means that thinking to the end can overturn existence. Truly thinking can undo ordinary securities. It can unseat us, bring down certainties, make the identity we believed immutable waver. Thinking is not always comfortable. It touches on birth, loss, death.
And yet, there is in this text a promise. He also says: “one can be reborn. One can begin one’s life again.” This means that this descent toward the origin is not only destructive. It can also open a new beginning. By passing through something very ancient, very obscure, one can recover a more vivid form of life, less imprisoned in the automatisms of the group.
When he writes: “the first world may advance its snout into the second world,” the image is almost animal. The first world is the archaic, primitive world, prior to words, prior to social rules. The second world is the organized, civilized, spoken, regulated world. The first has not disappeared. It still advances its head into the second. It continues to traverse it. The most ancient past is not dead. It rises again.
This is what he says even more simply: “the once-before still arises.” The once-before is the very ancient. But here, as for the Moon Child, it is not a past locked behind us. It is a past that insists, that returns, that surfaces in the present. What is most ancient within us is often also what arises most spontaneously: a sudden fear, a desire, an image, an unexplained emotion, an attraction to the night, to the forest, to the sea, to a face, to a piece of music. The most ancient is not abolished. It still works within us.
This is where the final sentence about nature appears.
“Nature is the best of visibles.”
This means: among all that we see, nature is perhaps what still best allows this more ancient origin to appear. Why? Because it is not entirely made by human hands. It emerges. It grows. It bursts forth. It overflows. It comes from a ground older than our constructions.
When he adds that its “upsurge still springs from behind first visibility,” he means that, in nature, something of the origin is still visible. Not completely, not clearly, but perceptibly. A light on the sea, a branch in the wind, an animal that appears, the brilliance of the sun—all this can give us the impression of seeing something that comes from much farther than what we can name.
The final expression, “a strange backward glance,” is magnificent. It means that to see nature is not only to look ahead. It is as if one were looking backward, toward a past without precise memory, toward a depth prior to our conscious life. Nature makes us feel something archaic. It reminds us of a first world that we have never truly known as subjects, yet from which we come.
To simplify greatly, one could say that this text tells us this: the human being often believes he thinks alone, but he never thinks alone. He thinks within a language he has received, within narratives he has not chosen, within a dependence older than himself. Yet he can try to move back toward this obscure origin. It unsettles him, it puts him at risk, but it can also allow him to be reborn. And nature is, for him, one of the rare places where this origin can still be glimpsed.
There are therefore, in this passage, three very simple ideas, even if they are expressed in a difficult way. First, we do not begin from ourselves. Then, truly thinking consists in approaching what precedes our words. Finally, this effort does not bring total freedom, but a deeper lucidity, sometimes painful, sometimes renewing.