TechnoLogics: Ghosts, the Incalculable, and the Suspension of Animation

4. The Elixir of Life

4 The Elixir of Life The hoarder behaves then like an alchemist, speculating on ghosts, the “elixir of life,” the “philosopher’s stone.” Speculation is always fascinated, bewitched by the specter. —Derrida M any specters haunt the nineteenth century. One of them is called communism, but there is an uncanny phantasmagoria of other names produced by the encounter between the ghosts of the past and the ghosts of the future in a present that is haunted by both. As capital, linked with the sciences, begins to gain the power to realize ancient dreams of immortality, Nathaniel Hawthorne constructs “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” (1837), Mary Shelley writes not only Frankenstein (1818/31) but also the “The Mortal Immortal” (1833), and, most systematically, Karl Marx, also employing the language of alchemy, labors to exorcise the ontological reason of Hegel’s Absolute Spirit as he elaborates, prophetically, on the linkage between human and machine beings. In Hawthorne’s story, the old Dr. Heidegger, a “very singular man,” performed a “little experiment” long before the investigations of Being, Time, and the Gestell of modern technology. “If all the stories were true” (1959, 113), the narrator muses, then the old doctor’s study must have been an odd place indeed. “Around the walls stood several oaken bookcases, the lower shelves of which were filled with rows of gigantic folios and black-letter quartos.” A skeleton was stored in a closet; a looking glass hung between the bookcases, 69 where it was “fabled that the spirits of all the doctor’s deceased patients dwelt within its verge, and would stare him in the face whenever he looked thitherward” (114). A portrait of his dead fianc ée, who had taken one of her lover’s prescriptions and died on the night before the wedding, graced the opposite wall. The study is a place of technics, learning, guilt, desire, and death. In fact, the spirits of the dead appear as mirror images to the gaze of the doctor, staring back at him when he peers into the mirror. His projective reflection calls back the dead from the silvery surface of the mirror of memory that serves as a threshold between the living and the nonliving, who are, nonetheless, able to be summoned and represented . Such crossings between putatively distinct regions of being, now being translated from the speculative—whether of a mythic or philosophical type—to the empiricism of the pragmatic, mark the “period” of the transepochal, which, although it is now accelerating, has been in preparation for millennia. Dr. Heidegger’s chambered text is also a strange studio of words, a place of magic and revivification where the “greatest curiosity” (114) is a book of magic. The narrator, who is never identified, continues to set the scene for “our tale” by describing the doctor himself: Now Dr. Heidegger was a very strange old gentleman, whose eccentricity had become the nucleus for a thousand fantastic stories. Some of these fables, to my shame be it spoken, might possibly be traced back to my own veracious self; and if any passages of the present tale should startle the reader’s faith, I must be content to bear the stigma of a fiction monger. (114) Ec-centricity (or perhaps what Derrida calls the “ex-orbitant,” a spinning out of orbit that has everything to do with the earth spinning off its tracks) serves to generate fantastic texts, thousands of them, and the narrator is implicated in “shame,” describing himself—or herself— as both “veracious” and as a “fiction monger.” That which narrates always narrates itself as well as its object. And a certain voraciousness is also close at hand. The narrator is, apparently, as exorbitantly eccentric as the strange Dr. Heidegger, and both are the sources of an endless fascination that takes the form of narratives to be told and retold, however unbelievable. Both, it seems, are dealers, merchants even, in fiction. In primitive dreams of the philosopher’s stone. The initial gambit in this story, at first thought to be a “conjuror’s trick” (and there is plenty of magic in all of these texts), is to revive a rose that was given to the old Dr. Heidegger by Sylvia Ward, his long 70 TechnoLogics dead fiancée. It is cast into a vase brimming with the elixir of life sent by a friend from the magic kingdom itself, Florida. (The story was first published under the...