Francisc Ormeny
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
ormenyfrancisc@yahoo.com

 

 

Digging out the Heideggerian Linguistic Utopia from Bryan Fuller’s and Mads Mikkelsen’s Hannibal (Seasons 1 & 2)

(The Insinuation of the Vortex in the Human Act of Blinking)

 

 

 

Abstract: In this study we analyze the vortical insinuation and inscription of the transcendental fierceness (its rapacious avidity for a reincarnation-through-fiber-corruption in the flooded human “cloud”) in the human experience, through the supra-linguistic gesture of blinking. We apply Heidegger’s anti-humanist utopian vision on the primacy of language over the human subject (ego) to Bryan Fuller’s and Mads Mikkelsen’s Hannibal series (Season 1 & 2 only). According to Heidegger and to his recent exegetes, modern man’s model of perfectibility should take into account a divorce from the vulgar individualistic concerns and replace them with a greater attentiveness to Being, through a language that can disclose the Being and further brings it into the open. This displacement is enacted by making use and abuse of the most emotionally intense (verbal and non-verbal) meta-erotic expressions. We analyze how Mads Mikkelsen (Hannibal) uses the act of blinking (always coupled with a large spectrum of facial tensions and chiasms), – one by means of which intersubjectivity is at once disbanded and affirmed, and one which allows man to use the energy of the nonpresence and nonevidence while retreating into his coziest and most demonically-fertile inner abysses and secretly recharging himself therein – to control his subjects, to destroy their Eros and to make them brutishly and desperately cling to reason.

Keywords: Linguistic Utopia; Linguistic Anti-humanism; Saying (Sage); Blinking; Fierce Transcendental Insinuation; Savagely-Poetic Expressions of Being.

 

Although the show seems to be a stand-alone (intransigently independent) reflexive line about the body and its culinary pollinations and polymorphizations, Hannibal, as far as the essence of the theological, epistemological and axiological privileges[1] from behind which it was conceived (and according to which it was assumed by its captious audience) goes, is a savage meditation about the preeminence of linguistic acts over any other type of human acts … genetic or generic.

This work of cinematic Schellingian shadowy theology[2] is constructed around the premise that neither divine imagination nor human phantasy can exist, as long as they are not translated into language and thus turned into an incarnated echo – i.e. into a life-tree that imitates the structure of a derivation tree (used by linguists working in generative grammar and considered by them a primary object of human study) bent over the grave of the former Cartesian human ego (fiendishly deepening his roots in the sustaining and bulging darkness of the human body and using its branches in order to bring upon ourselves storms that normally should not belong to us). It is here that Bryan Fuller’s utopian linguistic vision (“What do you see, doctor? Sum up the Ripper in so many words? Choose them wisely. / Oh, I always do. Words are living things. They have personality, point of view, agenda. They’re pack hunters”[3]) meets what was generally condemned as late Heidegger’s anti-humanism:

 

The Cartesian ego or consciousness is no longer conceived as the privileged subject of knowledge. (…) A more radical decentering of the subject occurs with Heidegger’s famous “turn” or “Kehre” and the associated attack on Sartre’s humanism. In Heidegger’s later writings his earlier, apparently existentialist account of individual existence – as “anxious” or “caring”, “authentic” or “fallen” – gives way to a more impersonal preoccupation with Being. Heidegger wishes to divert our ‘thinking’ from its individualistic concerns towards a greater “attentiveness to Being”. Only by transcending the limited perspective of the Cartesian subject, “who may deign to release the beingness of beings into an all too loudly bruited ‘objectivity’”, can “thinking” “realize the proper dignity of man” as “the shepherd of Being”. Accompanying this change of emphasis, there is in Heidegger’s later writings an overriding concern with language as “the House of Being” (…) Language discloses Being or “brings it into the open”: “language alone brings beings into the open for the first time. Where there is not language, as in the Being of stone, plant, and animal, there is also no openness of beings, and consequently no openness either of nonbeing and of the empty.”[4] (…) Heidegger is particularly hostile to Sartre’s Cartesian claim that “one must take the subjectivity as his point of departure”[5]. Heidegger’s anti-humanism leads instead to “thinking” as the “letting-be” of transcendent Being [author’s note: through language].[6]

           

In more direct words, when the characters from the series begin referring to their lives and to their deaths in terms of punctuation marks, as Jack Crawford’s dying wife Bella does when Hannibal tricks her and maliciously refuses to euthanize her (“Hannibal: The punctuation at the end of a sentence gives meaning to every word, every space that proceeded it. Bella: They moved my punctuation mark, Dr. Lecter. You moved my meaning. I’m not here because I want to be here. You saw to that.”[7] ), what they do is resurrect in the most eloquent manner the cleanest possible abruptness of the colors of the deific frenzied feeding, and provide a model for the reincorporation of the “God” into the human “cloud”[8] (host), via language – i.e. monstrously attribute a human system to the (infernal) divine self-understanding, in the exact manner in which John Fowles’s character Clegg from The Collector does to his rare and dangerous butterflies, using only the most ontologically “developed” (up to the limit of lunacy) words: “Seeing her always made me feel like I was catching a rarity, heart-in-mouth, as they say. A Pale Clouded Yellow, for instance. I always thought of her like that, I mean words like elusive and sporadic, and very refined – not like the other ones, even the pretty ones. More for the real connoisseur.”[9]

Clegg’s description of Miranda in terms of insects by means of the most exquisite possible choice of words, Heidegger’s stress on language to the detriment of the human subject, and Bryan Fuller’s decomposition and punctuation of the human matter in terms of derivation trees represent an anti-humanist utopia but not necessarily a dystopia – because the real aim behind all these three examples is not at all a deculturation or a critique of any kind of the human subject; on the contrary, all of them are attempts at making use through abuse of the phenomenal empty (available, unoccupied) spaces (Wolfgang Iser’s vision of some areas of human thinking and of human intuiting for which there are no specific or code-governed signifieds, so that the signifier can point to an empty position, and can also allow for a nonbeing to be posited as a signified), in order to project (and inject) in there a demented fleshy consistency for the otherwise unrealistic human speculations, longings, infinite wishes and cravings – all disconnected from ideologies and skillfully connected to the passionately-obsessive idea of evolution (change) into better / superior grasping forces:

 

The derivation of “utopia” is Greek words meaning “not-place”, and utopianism is generally identified with unrealistic speculation, providing the adjective “utopian” with its everyday pejorative meaning. (…) Utopian though is seen as springing from the unconscious, whose imaginative capacity confronts, challenges, surpasses, and overrides conscious reality by means of projected counter-pictures containing hopes, desires, and wishful thinking. This utopian faculty, however, is only critical if disconnected from existing ideologies, and based on an understanding of social totality and the means of realizing better conditions of existence. (…) utopianism is limited neither to a literary genre nor to specific conceptions of the good life. It rather plays a genuine role in relation to possible or intended change in existing social conditions.[10]

 

*

 

            Yet, talking about linguistically-secured derivation trees and Heidegger’s linguistic anti-humanism in the same logic, and applying these conjoined thought-tapestries to the Hannibal series is an extremely dicey claim, and this happens precisely because Heidegger was against all sequences of “orthodox” grammar and phonetics, and equally obsessed with letting the in-between-the-lines speak for itself, through our (in) voices. Heidegger abjured all “affability and condescension”[11] in his relation with the category that we like to call today “Grammar Nazis” and, in his bond with the Being through language, adopted the position that, once again, we like to identify today as that of an emotionally-engaged “situated observer” or “positioned subject”[12] (always with an implied critique of the so-called “detached” phenomenological and linguistic observer, a raw scientist relying solely on his disengaged reason and impersonal observation): 

 

More vigorously than ever, the later Heidegger fights against the entire phonocentric and logical-grammatical representation of language that has dominated from antiquity up until Husserl in order to summon us to the place where language itself speaks and where humans learn with humility that they are not the masters of language, but that it is rather they who are under the command of language (…) we learn that speaking is not just using words in a banal fashion to name things and beings; naming cannot be reduced to providing an already known object with a name, to affecting things with a label that fits them  like a glove (…) Naming is not the arbitrary act of denomination that some believe it to be. Contrary to a tenacious image inherited from metaphysics, words are not barrels and buckets from which we draw the content of a pregiven meaning. To speak is to receive into oneself the saying [author’s note: our italics] of the words of our language. To name is “to call the thing to the world”, to summon it in its very absence into our presence, to invite it to do something in a world of things.[13]

           

In the Hannibal series, this artifice within the linguistic utopia promoted by Bryan Fuller (and having its roots, consciously or not, deeply implanted in a Heideggerian soil) appears when the discourse on language passes from the radically-visceral psychiatrist Hannibal to his milder and softer colleague – Doctor Alana Bloom:

 

Alana Bloom: Sharing will help normalize.

Abigail Hobbs:  I’m not normal… not anymore.

Alana Bloom: What happened to you was a… Some of these women aren’t even sharing. They speak in “little girl voices”, telling everyone what was done to them without saying a word about it. Certain traumas can arrest vocal development. And victims can sometimes broadcast victimhood involuntarily.[14]

 

            In the lines above we have an example of what Michel Foucault called the “strong power,” which is the power to attract (and to seduce), and which stands opposed to Hannibal’s “weak power” (at least at this level of expression), a power irremediably bound to all the types of coercive influences and supremacies, a power which governs our lives in the shape of a scale, starting from the most elusive informative methods and ending up in full-fledged actual physical force.

What Dr. Bloom implies by “speaking about something ‘in little girl voices’ and without actually saying a word about that something” resembles Heidegger’s vision of man being “trapped” in the inseparable and indissoluble interminglings and interlinkings of language by the grace of the fabulous magnetism of the language’s saying (Sage) – an almost transcendental manifestation of the springs of creation as they enter, each time as if (als ob) for the very first time, into the complexly-enfleshed human poetry, made of intuition, gestures, unique facial expressions and depths of eye-effulgences and splendors:  

 

Words are like gestures that engender a world by making things come to the world and the world come to things. This is the “poietic” power of speaking attested to by the poet, who, better than anyone, knows that we do not cease to speak after our language, which always walks in front of us in each of our steps. Language is like the “house of being” that humankind inhabits, the unique dimension in which we can establish residence, and where the paths of thinking always already pre-traced in our bosom are discovered, Provided we listen to our language, we become aware that we are always already caught up in its saying (Sage), in the inextricable interweavings of the relations that it spins and to which we belong due to our own speaking. With the omnipresence and omnipotence of language that is expressed in the unusual tautological formula “Die Sprache spricht” (language speaks), humans do not speak except by providing a reply to it and by entering into correspondence with its saying [author’s note: our italics]. If speech relieves humans of all initiative, what they say, each of their words, is carried by the speaking of their language. Language is like the “Geläut der Stille” (the sounding of stillness) that nevertheless does require the speaking of mortals in order to be understood, provided that they are disposed to the quiet hearing of this eloquent silence.[15]

 

*

I

n trying to treat Abigail Hobbs’s posttraumatic stress disorder, Doctor Alana Bloom perfectly intuits Heidegger’s thesis on die Sage, but she fails to implement it. On the other hand, if Hannibal misses his therapy at the level of the discourse per se (where he behaves like an orthodox priest of doom or like an inquisitor the boiling “high definition” plasma), he perfectly applies it at the level of gestures, of a supreme use of silence, and of the act of blinking – displays which Heidegger interprets as being of paramount importance in the “capturing” of the Being inside a human vocalized value; as being capable of inducing a decisive positioning of the subject in his relationship with a Beyond, actively involved and trans-organically immersed in His human design:

 

(…) the wink, ostensibly a bonding gesture, also manifests a moment of dysfunction: I wink at the other in my very incapacity to reach that other in a more articulate way. As in the case of the blink, intersubjectivity is at once disbanded and affirmed: for in winking at or to another I also collaborate with that other in some significant way. I assert the link that my lack of express verbal representations has otherwise placed in question.[16][17]

 

To speak in real terms, what Caroline Dhavernas (Alana) beautifully formulates but fails to bring into the act, Mads Mikkelsen (Hannibal) elevates to the highest possible allure and appeal – the virtuoso of the Danish actor transforming the very mystery of language into a an all-pervading differential and into the ultimate trigger for the aborted consciousness. This is also where he shifts his discursive weak power into a strongly-seductive (as if shifting into the highest possible gear) gestural influence and art of rooting a person to the ground (as it combines in a fatal / deadly way the power of the most intense non-spoken with the avidity of a Being that greedily awaits its incarnation into the human host), a power capable to arrest the human subject in an truly anti-humanistic manner, while taking away all his speaking vigor. (This is also how Hannibal manages to para- and supra-linguistically get into the mind of Will Graham and seize both his will and his power of self-understanding and of crime-reconstruction[18] [his clarity], creating an inescapable blind-spot on the mind of his patient: “Dr. Lecter: Lost in thought? Will: Not lost. Not anymore. I used to hear my thoughts inside my skull with the same, (…) tone, timbre, accent, as if the words were coming out of my mouth. Dr. Lecter: And now? Will: Now my inner voice sounds like you. I can’t get you out of my head.”[19])

 

In his will to penetrate the mystery of language, Heidegger discovers another name that is more appropriate because it gathers together in a single word logos and Being, the Saying and the Said, and that which induces us to speak. He calls it “die Sage” (Saying), from an ancient word that has the same origin as deixis, the source of signs that are not made from the gestures of humans, but rather from the “gesture of word”. This is a remarkable hypostasis of language that seems to take away every power of the speaking subject in order to give this power to the Saying and the Said of language. For the thinker, all original language is “the coming of Being into the Said” that it assumes as its destiny, and it is foundational for the history of the community of humans. At this point we are (…) carried away into the mysterious land in which lies the being of language as Sage (legend) and out of which all that “there is” in world originates.[20]

 

And Bryan Fuller knows how to make the best of Mads Mikkelsen’s capacity to embody and synthesize in real time and in real facial laws the clash of phenomenal powers as well as the serene acceptance of the developing disaster, by using feverish and intimately-porous close-up shots combined with long takes and long shots, where “long takes give the impression of real time; long shots allow us to see complete figures in the context of their milieu; the moving-camera knits time and space together in a contiguous whole so that events can appear to be actual.”[21]

                Every time Mads Mikkelsen blinks, he uses this clever ruse in order to retreat into the most sacred depths of his inner voids (or, as he says, of his “vast mental palace”), and to recharge himself with the gestating powers of the vortexes that await ravenously and devastatingly therein, puddling threateningly at the edge of his being, in the reverberatory furnace of pre-language. That is why Mason Verger (portrayed by Michael Carmen Pitt) ends up being disfigured and dementedly dehumanized by Hannibal – as he cannot understand the supra-linguistic and utterly-disarming use of the power of the non-presence, in the act of blinking (“Don’t get me wrong. I play chicken with Margot all the time. I just don’t tell her I’m playing. I’m good at chicken, Dr. Lecter. I never blink.”[22]):

 

“Nonpresence and nonevidence are admitted into the blink of the instant. There is a duration to the blink, and it closes the eye. This alterity is in fact the condition for presence, presentation, and thus for Vorstellung in general.”[23] The blink of the eye, the obverse of the glance, undermines the open-eyed attestation of the kind of sheer presence that is available in essential insight, whether this is said to occur in Platonic or Aristotelian noesis, Cartesian intellectual intuition, or Husserlian Wesensanchauung. But something not taken into account by Derrida is that if the same blink detonates the now as point in time (i.e., as “source-point” in Husserl’s term), by the same token it affirms the subjectivity of the subject: an abyssal subjectivity but a subjectivity nonetheless. For when I blink, for a fleeing instant I retreat into a bottomless refuge that lies, somewhere and somehow, within myself.[24]

           

All the murders and all the horrors can be erased by the blink of the eye, because when one blinks he re-opens his accusing wounds and his sloppy cuts, and the horrors and the maggots of denunciation disappear back into those wounds. For this reason the blinking signals exactly what Edmond Jabès called the “wounded words.” Through blinking credibility and naturalness is restored (“You get all starey and non-blinky like that, it’ll undermine you and me, but mainly him. (…) You are smitten with the accused, Miss Bloom. And it is adorable, but not our brand of defense.”[25]). In the blink of the clever eye, the identification between the indexical and the projective is greater than anywhere else – the two melt into each-other and fuse with one-another, turning into an undetectable superior predator (haunting its prey neither inside, nor outside the human spectrum) – namely, into a predator capable of escaping representation (the ultimate human system of detection) and of resting on a new (unknown and unapproachable) ontological foundation, a “groundwork” reaching not the linguistic constructs but the very springs and reservoirs of the need-for-language. Here is where the anti-humanist utopia begins (in the not-yet translated vortex which imperatively demands its first translation, in the noxious ravenous nothingness of the middle position [no-longer uncreated, but not-yet creation[26]]):

 

“I return with the unsayable. The unsayable can be given to me only through the failure of my language. Only when the construct falters do I reach what I cannot accomplish.”[27] Faltering constructions – linguistic and otherwise – expose the fault of foundations and the error of every foundationalism. This crack, this fault, lies “beyond” the end of theology. (…) The wound of words is a tear that cannot be mended – a tear that can never be wiped away. This tear or tear, which interrupts the system of exchange, is neither exactly inside nor outside the text. As such, it eludes the economy of representation. That which is neither outside nor inside cannot be represented either referentially or self-reflexively.[28]

 

Will Graham, a man trapped in Hannibal blink – in this supra-linguistic anti-humanist “teleportation-contraption,” loses control over both time and space (Hannibal being able to literally maneuver him like he would a hologram – “Well, I was on a beach in Grafton, West Virginia. I blinked, and then I was waking up in your waiting room, except I wasn’t asleep! Grafton, West Virginia, is three-and-a-half hours from here”[29]). He loses his dreams and his sleeping hours (as a consequence of having had his blink stolen by Hannibal and replaced with his psychiatrist’s “clandestine” blink – unlike Hannibal who sleeps and dreams perfectly: “Hannibal: What is there to think about? You listen to your breathing in the dark and the tiny clicks of your blinking eyes. I dream more now than I used to”[30]). Moreover, while immersed in the compact plasma of the pre-linguistic streams of Being and surrounded by the walls of Hannibal’s linguistic utopia, he also has his meta-erotic creative knowledge worryingly suspended.

He now strives desperately to cling to his fading reason in order to remain, at least a common man, at least a primal organically oriented Hominidae in front of the colossal vortical assault of the Being through the linguistic living marks of direct passage of the transcendental fury into the human experience – such as the blinking. In the doing of it he goes against his nature, his design – because he is not and he has never been a “normal man.” And this is how Hannibal uses the linguistic utopia to break him own – by forcing him to urgently forget about his meta-erotic creativity and to desperately seek a degraded refuge in reason:

 

(…) meta-erotica. It must be said that this mystical or creative knowledge is not what it is known as rational knowledge. And then, only the Devil will always know what the rationalists name reason! Rattio is a thing, and Vernuft is another. I am reading, for example, from a rationalist (Lev Sestov), the following lines about Pascal: “The fundamental condition of the possibility of human knowledge consists, I repeat, in that that the truth can be noticed by any normal man.” What is a normal man? Maybe it is the same thing as the “middle man” (the average man, Durch-schnittsmensch). Meaning a fantastic entity: Phantasia non homo, as Petronius used to say (Satirycon, XXXVIII, 16). And exactly about these poor normal men, who notice the rational truth and nothing more, the count Joseph de Maistre, another agonic, wrote, not without arrogance: “They are only right!: (“Ils n’ont que raison!”). The poor human reason and not the divine, creative truth.[31]

 

 

This work was possible due to the financial support of the Sectorial Operational Program for Human Resources Development 2007-2013, co-financed by the European Social Fund, under the project number POSDRU/159/1.5/S/140863 with the title “Competitive European researchers in the fields of socio-economics and humanities. Multiregional research net (CCPE).”

 

 

 

Bibliography

Arion L. Kelkel, “Language after Husserl,” in Lester Embree, Elisabeth A. Behnke, David Carr, J. Claude Evans, José Huertas-Jourda, Joseph J. Kockelmans, William R. Mckenna, Algis Mickunas, Jitendra Nath Mohanty, Thomas M. Seebohm, Richard M. Zaner (eds.), Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997, pp. 394-401.

Bernard, Freydberg,Schelling’s Dialogical Freedom Essay (Provocative Philosophy Then and Now), New York: State University of New York Press, 2008.

David West, “The Contribution of Continental Philosophy,” in Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit (eds.), in A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, Oxford and Cambridge (Massachusetts): Blackwell Publishers, 1995, p. 39-71.

Edward S. Casey, “The Time of the Glance: Toward Becoming Otherwise,” in Elizabeth Grosz (ed.), Becomings. Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures, Ithaca (New York) and London: Cornell University Press, 1999, pp. 79-97.

Hans-Herbert Kögler, “Utopianism,” in Ted Honderich (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 892-893.

Henry Heath Bawden, The principles of pragmatism: a philosophical interpretation of experience, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, The Riverside Press Cambridge, 1910.

John Fowles, The Collector, London: Vintage, 1998.

Mădălina Diaconu, Pe Marginea Abisului, Søren Kierkegaard şi nihilismul secolului al XIX (On the Edge of the Precipice, Søren Kierkegaard and the Nihilism of the 19^th Century), Bucureşti: Editura Ştiinţifică, 1996.

Mark C. Taylor, “The End(s) of Theology,” in Sheila Greeve Davaney (ed.), Theology at the End of Modernity (Essays in Honor of Gordon D. Kaufman), Philadelphia (PA): Trinity Press International, 1991, p. 233-248.

Miguel de Unamuno, Agonia Creştinismului (The Agony of Christianity), translated from Spanish by Radu I. Petrescu, Iaşi: The European Institute Publishing House, 1993.

Tim Bywater, Thomas Sobchack, Introduction to Film Criticism, New York: Longman, 1989.

 

Internet Sources

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hannibal_%28TV_series%29

http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/

 

 

Notes

Francisc Ormeny
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
ormenyfrancisc@yahoo.com

 

 

Digging out the Heideggerian Linguistic Utopia from Bryan Fuller’s and Mads Mikkelsen’s Hannibal (Seasons 1 & 2)

(The Insinuation of the Vortex in the Human Act of Blinking)

 

 

 

Abstract: In this study we analyze the vortical insinuation and inscription of the transcendental fierceness (its rapacious avidity for a reincarnation-through-fiber-corruption in the flooded human “cloud”) in the human experience, through the supra-linguistic gesture of blinking. We apply Heidegger’s anti-humanist utopian vision on the primacy of language over the human subject (ego) to Bryan Fuller’s and Mads Mikkelsen’s Hannibal series (Season 1 & 2 only). According to Heidegger and to his recent exegetes, modern man’s model of perfectibility should take into account a divorce from the vulgar individualistic concerns and replace them with a greater attentiveness to Being, through a language that can disclose the Being and further brings it into the open. This displacement is enacted by making use and abuse of the most emotionally intense (verbal and non-verbal) meta-erotic expressions. We analyze how Mads Mikkelsen (Hannibal) uses the act of blinking (always coupled with a large spectrum of facial tensions and chiasms), – one by means of which intersubjectivity is at once disbanded and affirmed, and one which allows man to use the energy of the nonpresence and nonevidence while retreating into his coziest and most demonically-fertile inner abysses and secretly recharging himself therein – to control his subjects, to destroy their Eros and to make them brutishly and desperately cling to reason.

Keywords: Linguistic Utopia; Linguistic Anti-humanism; Saying (Sage); Blinking; Fierce Transcendental Insinuation; Savagely-Poetic Expressions of Being.

 

Although the show seems to be a stand-alone (intransigently independent) reflexive line about the body and its culinary pollinations and polymorphizations, Hannibal, as far as the essence of the theological, epistemological and axiological privileges[1] from behind which it was conceived (and according to which it was assumed by its captious audience) goes, is a savage meditation about the preeminence of linguistic acts over any other type of human acts … genetic or generic.

This work of cinematic Schellingian shadowy theology[2] is constructed around the premise that neither divine imagination nor human phantasy can exist, as long as they are not translated into language and thus turned into an incarnated echo – i.e. into a life-tree that imitates the structure of a derivation tree (used by linguists working in generative grammar and considered by them a primary object of human study) bent over the grave of the former Cartesian human ego (fiendishly deepening his roots in the sustaining and bulging darkness of the human body and using its branches in order to bring upon ourselves storms that normally should not belong to us). It is here that Bryan Fuller’s utopian linguistic vision (“What do you see, doctor? Sum up the Ripper in so many words? Choose them wisely. / Oh, I always do. Words are living things. They have personality, point of view, agenda. They’re pack hunters”[3]) meets what was generally condemned as late Heidegger’s anti-humanism:

 

The Cartesian ego or consciousness is no longer conceived as the privileged subject of knowledge. (…) A more radical decentering of the subject occurs with Heidegger’s famous “turn” or “Kehre” and the associated attack on Sartre’s humanism. In Heidegger’s later writings his earlier, apparently existentialist account of individual existence – as “anxious” or “caring”, “authentic” or “fallen” – gives way to a more impersonal preoccupation with Being. Heidegger wishes to divert our ‘thinking’ from its individualistic concerns towards a greater “attentiveness to Being”. Only by transcending the limited perspective of the Cartesian subject, “who may deign to release the beingness of beings into an all too loudly bruited ‘objectivity’”, can “thinking” “realize the proper dignity of man” as “the shepherd of Being”. Accompanying this change of emphasis, there is in Heidegger’s later writings an overriding concern with language as “the House of Being” (…) Language discloses Being or “brings it into the open”: “language alone brings beings into the open for the first time. Where there is not language, as in the Being of stone, plant, and animal, there is also no openness of beings, and consequently no openness either of nonbeing and of the empty.”[4] (…) Heidegger is particularly hostile to Sartre’s Cartesian claim that “one must take the subjectivity as his point of departure”[5]. Heidegger’s anti-humanism leads instead to “thinking” as the “letting-be” of transcendent Being [author’s note: through language].[6]

           

In more direct words, when the characters from the series begin referring to their lives and to their deaths in terms of punctuation marks, as Jack Crawford’s dying wife Bella does when Hannibal tricks her and maliciously refuses to euthanize her (“Hannibal: The punctuation at the end of a sentence gives meaning to every word, every space that proceeded it. Bella: They moved my punctuation mark, Dr. Lecter. You moved my meaning. I’m not here because I want to be here. You saw to that.”[7] ), what they do is resurrect in the most eloquent manner the cleanest possible abruptness of the colors of the deific frenzied feeding, and provide a model for the reincorporation of the “God” into the human “cloud”[8] (host), via language – i.e. monstrously attribute a human system to the (infernal) divine self-understanding, in the exact manner in which John Fowles’s character Clegg from The Collector does to his rare and dangerous butterflies, using only the most ontologically “developed” (up to the limit of lunacy) words: “Seeing her always made me feel like I was catching a rarity, heart-in-mouth, as they say. A Pale Clouded Yellow, for instance. I always thought of her like that, I mean words like elusive and sporadic, and very refined – not like the other ones, even the pretty ones. More for the real connoisseur.”[9]

Clegg’s description of Miranda in terms of insects by means of the most exquisite possible choice of words, Heidegger’s stress on language to the detriment of the human subject, and Bryan Fuller’s decomposition and punctuation of the human matter in terms of derivation trees represent an anti-humanist utopia but not necessarily a dystopia – because the real aim behind all these three examples is not at all a deculturation or a critique of any kind of the human subject; on the contrary, all of them are attempts at making use through abuse of the phenomenal empty (available, unoccupied) spaces (Wolfgang Iser’s vision of some areas of human thinking and of human intuiting for which there are no specific or code-governed signifieds, so that the signifier can point to an empty position, and can also allow for a nonbeing to be posited as a signified), in order to project (and inject) in there a demented fleshy consistency for the otherwise unrealistic human speculations, longings, infinite wishes and cravings – all disconnected from ideologies and skillfully connected to the passionately-obsessive idea of evolution (change) into better / superior grasping forces:

 

The derivation of “utopia” is Greek words meaning “not-place”, and utopianism is generally identified with unrealistic speculation, providing the adjective “utopian” with its everyday pejorative meaning. (…) Utopian though is seen as springing from the unconscious, whose imaginative capacity confronts, challenges, surpasses, and overrides conscious reality by means of projected counter-pictures containing hopes, desires, and wishful thinking. This utopian faculty, however, is only critical if disconnected from existing ideologies, and based on an understanding of social totality and the means of realizing better conditions of existence. (…) utopianism is limited neither to a literary genre nor to specific conceptions of the good life. It rather plays a genuine role in relation to possible or intended change in existing social conditions.[10]

 

*

 

            Yet, talking about linguistically-secured derivation trees and Heidegger’s linguistic anti-humanism in the same logic, and applying these conjoined thought-tapestries to the Hannibal series is an extremely dicey claim, and this happens precisely because Heidegger was against all sequences of “orthodox” grammar and phonetics, and equally obsessed with letting the in-between-the-lines speak for itself, through our (in) voices. Heidegger abjured all “affability and condescension”[11] in his relation with the category that we like to call today “Grammar Nazis” and, in his bond with the Being through language, adopted the position that, once again, we like to identify today as that of an emotionally-engaged “situated observer” or “positioned subject”[12] (always with an implied critique of the so-called “detached” phenomenological and linguistic observer, a raw scientist relying solely on his disengaged reason and impersonal observation): 

 

More vigorously than ever, the later Heidegger fights against the entire phonocentric and logical-grammatical representation of language that has dominated from antiquity up until Husserl in order to summon us to the place where language itself speaks and where humans learn with humility that they are not the masters of language, but that it is rather they who are under the command of language (…) we learn that speaking is not just using words in a banal fashion to name things and beings; naming cannot be reduced to providing an already known object with a name, to affecting things with a label that fits them  like a glove (…) Naming is not the arbitrary act of denomination that some believe it to be. Contrary to a tenacious image inherited from metaphysics, words are not barrels and buckets from which we draw the content of a pregiven meaning. To speak is to receive into oneself the saying [author’s note: our italics] of the words of our language. To name is “to call the thing to the world”, to summon it in its very absence into our presence, to invite it to do something in a world of things.[13]

           

In the Hannibal series, this artifice within the linguistic utopia promoted by Bryan Fuller (and having its roots, consciously or not, deeply implanted in a Heideggerian soil) appears when the discourse on language passes from the radically-visceral psychiatrist Hannibal to his milder and softer colleague – Doctor Alana Bloom:

 

Alana Bloom: Sharing will help normalize.

Abigail Hobbs:  I’m not normal… not anymore.

Alana Bloom: What happened to you was a… Some of these women aren’t even sharing. They speak in “little girl voices”, telling everyone what was done to them without saying a word about it. Certain traumas can arrest vocal development. And victims can sometimes broadcast victimhood involuntarily.[14]

 

            In the lines above we have an example of what Michel Foucault called the “strong power,” which is the power to attract (and to seduce), and which stands opposed to Hannibal’s “weak power” (at least at this level of expression), a power irremediably bound to all the types of coercive influences and supremacies, a power which governs our lives in the shape of a scale, starting from the most elusive informative methods and ending up in full-fledged actual physical force.

What Dr. Bloom implies by “speaking about something ‘in little girl voices’ and without actually saying a word about that something” resembles Heidegger’s vision of man being “trapped” in the inseparable and indissoluble interminglings and interlinkings of language by the grace of the fabulous magnetism of the language’s saying (Sage) – an almost transcendental manifestation of the springs of creation as they enter, each time as if (als ob) for the very first time, into the complexly-enfleshed human poetry, made of intuition, gestures, unique facial expressions and depths of eye-effulgences and splendors:  

 

Words are like gestures that engender a world by making things come to the world and the world come to things. This is the “poietic” power of speaking attested to by the poet, who, better than anyone, knows that we do not cease to speak after our language, which always walks in front of us in each of our steps. Language is like the “house of being” that humankind inhabits, the unique dimension in which we can establish residence, and where the paths of thinking always already pre-traced in our bosom are discovered, Provided we listen to our language, we become aware that we are always already caught up in its saying (Sage), in the inextricable interweavings of the relations that it spins and to which we belong due to our own speaking. With the omnipresence and omnipotence of language that is expressed in the unusual tautological formula “Die Sprache spricht” (language speaks), humans do not speak except by providing a reply to it and by entering into correspondence with its saying [author’s note: our italics]. If speech relieves humans of all initiative, what they say, each of their words, is carried by the speaking of their language. Language is like the “Geläut der Stille” (the sounding of stillness) that nevertheless does require the speaking of mortals in order to be understood, provided that they are disposed to the quiet hearing of this eloquent silence.[15]

 

*

I

n trying to treat Abigail Hobbs’s posttraumatic stress disorder, Doctor Alana Bloom perfectly intuits Heidegger’s thesis on die Sage, but she fails to implement it. On the other hand, if Hannibal misses his therapy at the level of the discourse per se (where he behaves like an orthodox priest of doom or like an inquisitor the boiling “high definition” plasma), he perfectly applies it at the level of gestures, of a supreme use of silence, and of the act of blinking – displays which Heidegger interprets as being of paramount importance in the “capturing” of the Being inside a human vocalized value; as being capable of inducing a decisive positioning of the subject in his relationship with a Beyond, actively involved and trans-organically immersed in His human design:

 

(…) the wink, ostensibly a bonding gesture, also manifests a moment of dysfunction: I wink at the other in my very incapacity to reach that other in a more articulate way. As in the case of the blink, intersubjectivity is at once disbanded and affirmed: for in winking at or to another I also collaborate with that other in some significant way. I assert the link that my lack of express verbal representations has otherwise placed in question.[16][17]

 

To speak in real terms, what Caroline Dhavernas (Alana) beautifully formulates but fails to bring into the act, Mads Mikkelsen (Hannibal) elevates to the highest possible allure and appeal – the virtuoso of the Danish actor transforming the very mystery of language into a an all-pervading differential and into the ultimate trigger for the aborted consciousness. This is also where he shifts his discursive weak power into a strongly-seductive (as if shifting into the highest possible gear) gestural influence and art of rooting a person to the ground (as it combines in a fatal / deadly way the power of the most intense non-spoken with the avidity of a Being that greedily awaits its incarnation into the human host), a power capable to arrest the human subject in an truly anti-humanistic manner, while taking away all his speaking vigor. (This is also how Hannibal manages to para- and supra-linguistically get into the mind of Will Graham and seize both his will and his power of self-understanding and of crime-reconstruction[18] [his clarity], creating an inescapable blind-spot on the mind of his patient: “Dr. Lecter: Lost in thought? Will: Not lost. Not anymore. I used to hear my thoughts inside my skull with the same, (…) tone, timbre, accent, as if the words were coming out of my mouth. Dr. Lecter: And now? Will: Now my inner voice sounds like you. I can’t get you out of my head.”[19])

 

In his will to penetrate the mystery of language, Heidegger discovers another name that is more appropriate because it gathers together in a single word logos and Being, the Saying and the Said, and that which induces us to speak. He calls it “die Sage” (Saying), from an ancient word that has the same origin as deixis, the source of signs that are not made from the gestures of humans, but rather from the “gesture of word”. This is a remarkable hypostasis of language that seems to take away every power of the speaking subject in order to give this power to the Saying and the Said of language. For the thinker, all original language is “the coming of Being into the Said” that it assumes as its destiny, and it is foundational for the history of the community of humans. At this point we are (…) carried away into the mysterious land in which lies the being of language as Sage (legend) and out of which all that “there is” in world originates.[20]

 

And Bryan Fuller knows how to make the best of Mads Mikkelsen’s capacity to embody and synthesize in real time and in real facial laws the clash of phenomenal powers as well as the serene acceptance of the developing disaster, by using feverish and intimately-porous close-up shots combined with long takes and long shots, where “long takes give the impression of real time; long shots allow us to see complete figures in the context of their milieu; the moving-camera knits time and space together in a contiguous whole so that events can appear to be actual.”[21]

                Every time Mads Mikkelsen blinks, he uses this clever ruse in order to retreat into the most sacred depths of his inner voids (or, as he says, of his “vast mental palace”), and to recharge himself with the gestating powers of the vortexes that await ravenously and devastatingly therein, puddling threateningly at the edge of his being, in the reverberatory furnace of pre-language. That is why Mason Verger (portrayed by Michael Carmen Pitt) ends up being disfigured and dementedly dehumanized by Hannibal – as he cannot understand the supra-linguistic and utterly-disarming use of the power of the non-presence, in the act of blinking (“Don’t get me wrong. I play chicken with Margot all the time. I just don’t tell her I’m playing. I’m good at chicken, Dr. Lecter. I never blink.”[22]):

 

“Nonpresence and nonevidence are admitted into the blink of the instant. There is a duration to the blink, and it closes the eye. This alterity is in fact the condition for presence, presentation, and thus for Vorstellung in general.”[23] The blink of the eye, the obverse of the glance, undermines the open-eyed attestation of the kind of sheer presence that is available in essential insight, whether this is said to occur in Platonic or Aristotelian noesis, Cartesian intellectual intuition, or Husserlian Wesensanchauung. But something not taken into account by Derrida is that if the same blink detonates the now as point in time (i.e., as “source-point” in Husserl’s term), by the same token it affirms the subjectivity of the subject: an abyssal subjectivity but a subjectivity nonetheless. For when I blink, for a fleeing instant I retreat into a bottomless refuge that lies, somewhere and somehow, within myself.[24]

           

All the murders and all the horrors can be erased by the blink of the eye, because when one blinks he re-opens his accusing wounds and his sloppy cuts, and the horrors and the maggots of denunciation disappear back into those wounds. For this reason the blinking signals exactly what Edmond Jabès called the “wounded words.” Through blinking credibility and naturalness is restored (“You get all starey and non-blinky like that, it’ll undermine you and me, but mainly him. (…) You are smitten with the accused, Miss Bloom. And it is adorable, but not our brand of defense.”[25]). In the blink of the clever eye, the identification between the indexical and the projective is greater than anywhere else – the two melt into each-other and fuse with one-another, turning into an undetectable superior predator (haunting its prey neither inside, nor outside the human spectrum) – namely, into a predator capable of escaping representation (the ultimate human system of detection) and of resting on a new (unknown and unapproachable) ontological foundation, a “groundwork” reaching not the linguistic constructs but the very springs and reservoirs of the need-for-language. Here is where the anti-humanist utopia begins (in the not-yet translated vortex which imperatively demands its first translation, in the noxious ravenous nothingness of the middle position [no-longer uncreated, but not-yet creation[26]]):

 

“I return with the unsayable. The unsayable can be given to me only through the failure of my language. Only when the construct falters do I reach what I cannot accomplish.”[27] Faltering constructions – linguistic and otherwise – expose the fault of foundations and the error of every foundationalism. This crack, this fault, lies “beyond” the end of theology. (…) The wound of words is a tear that cannot be mended – a tear that can never be wiped away. This tear or tear, which interrupts the system of exchange, is neither exactly inside nor outside the text. As such, it eludes the economy of representation. That which is neither outside nor inside cannot be represented either referentially or self-reflexively.[28]

 

Will Graham, a man trapped in Hannibal blink – in this supra-linguistic anti-humanist “teleportation-contraption,” loses control over both time and space (Hannibal being able to literally maneuver him like he would a hologram – “Well, I was on a beach in Grafton, West Virginia. I blinked, and then I was waking up in your waiting room, except I wasn’t asleep! Grafton, West Virginia, is three-and-a-half hours from here”[29]). He loses his dreams and his sleeping hours (as a consequence of having had his blink stolen by Hannibal and replaced with his psychiatrist’s “clandestine” blink – unlike Hannibal who sleeps and dreams perfectly: “Hannibal: What is there to think about? You listen to your breathing in the dark and the tiny clicks of your blinking eyes. I dream more now than I used to”[30]). Moreover, while immersed in the compact plasma of the pre-linguistic streams of Being and surrounded by the walls of Hannibal’s linguistic utopia, he also has his meta-erotic creative knowledge worryingly suspended.

He now strives desperately to cling to his fading reason in order to remain, at least a common man, at least a primal organically oriented Hominidae in front of the colossal vortical assault of the Being through the linguistic living marks of direct passage of the transcendental fury into the human experience – such as the blinking. In the doing of it he goes against his nature, his design – because he is not and he has never been a “normal man.” And this is how Hannibal uses the linguistic utopia to break him own – by forcing him to urgently forget about his meta-erotic creativity and to desperately seek a degraded refuge in reason:

 

(…) meta-erotica. It must be said that this mystical or creative knowledge is not what it is known as rational knowledge. And then, only the Devil will always know what the rationalists name reason! Rattio is a thing, and Vernuft is another. I am reading, for example, from a rationalist (Lev Sestov), the following lines about Pascal: “The fundamental condition of the possibility of human knowledge consists, I repeat, in that that the truth can be noticed by any normal man.” What is a normal man? Maybe it is the same thing as the “middle man” (the average man, Durch-schnittsmensch). Meaning a fantastic entity: Phantasia non homo, as Petronius used to say (Satirycon, XXXVIII, 16). And exactly about these poor normal men, who notice the rational truth and nothing more, the count Joseph de Maistre, another agonic, wrote, not without arrogance: “They are only right!: (“Ils n’ont que raison!”). The poor human reason and not the divine, creative truth.[31]

 

 

This work was possible due to the financial support of the Sectorial Operational Program for Human Resources Development 2007-2013, co-financed by the European Social Fund, under the project number POSDRU/159/1.5/S/140863 with the title “Competitive European researchers in the fields of socio-economics and humanities. Multiregional research net (CCPE).”

 

 

 

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Mădălina Diaconu, Pe Marginea Abisului, Søren Kierkegaard şi nihilismul secolului al XIX (On the Edge of the Precipice, Søren Kierkegaard and the Nihilism of the 19^th Century), Bucureşti: Editura Ştiinţifică, 1996.

Mark C. Taylor, “The End(s) of Theology,” in Sheila Greeve Davaney (ed.), Theology at the End of Modernity (Essays in Honor of Gordon D. Kaufman), Philadelphia (PA): Trinity Press International, 1991, p. 233-248.

Miguel de Unamuno, Agonia Creştinismului (The Agony of Christianity), translated from Spanish by Radu I. Petrescu, Iaşi: The European Institute Publishing House, 1993.

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Internet Sources

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hannibal_%28TV_series%29

http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/

 

 

Notes