The corpus of effects (and affects) around
the word `illustrate' is very revealing (and somewhat confusing as we shall
see). If one looks in a dictionary for words in the environs of `illustrate',
there is invariably an impression of dislocation. The definiton of `illustrate'
itself we might take to be positive: to explain, make clear by examples,
to luminate, or shed light on a subject by drawings, diagrams, pictures.
Yet...what about the `il-'? All the rest of the words with that prefix seem
to portray an idea of falseness, even those words which would seem closest,
e.g., il-locutionary, il-lusion, il-lusory (from the latin ilusor
meaning to mock or illude--already peculiar concatenations and divergences
are forming. The relationship of `appearance' to `false' appearance, appearance
over and against reality, only hints at shadings which threaten to turn
into Heideggerean meditations of massive ontological proportions). `Illuminate'
as a noun is even somewhat revealing: one who pretends to know, or
shed light on by having extraordinary knowledge or skill, as in a member
of the illuminati . (More precisely, according to Webster's: "(1)
In church history, persons who had received baptism; in the ceremony they
were given a lighted taper as a symbol of their spiritual enlightment; (2)
members of a 16th-century Spanish sect who believed that, by mental prayer,
they had attained to so perfect a state as to have no need of ordinances,
sacraments, and good works; (3) the members of an anticlerical, deistic,
republican society founded in 1776 by Adam Weishaupt, professor of law at
Ingolstadt in Bavaria. It was suppressed by the Bavarian government in 1783:
called also the order of the illuminati; (4) persons who profess to have
extraordinary knowledge or enlightment: chiefly a satirical use."
We have not really moved very far from the doublings which the golem represents
(illustrates?) with all the tortured chiasmatic returns which it presents,
religiosocial, epistemological, ontological. The phrase `virtual reality'
itself is contaminated by that very Aleph Beth which the golem entrails/entails.
Always a contaminated doubling, adrift, yet another form of pharmikon. Is
this creation we have made a real thing? What is the status of its
realness? Is it real such as what a woman can make from her womb? Is this
il-lumination of life in fact a mockery of life, an illusion of life? What
is the relationship of that which we have created to illustrate and that
which it claims to illustrate? This is the very region of the uncanny and
the fear it generates: the illinition ("thin crust of some extraneous
material smeared on...") , the `bad lining' (quite different from the
`sub-lining' of the sublime) of either the ecstatic, virtual body or the
actual body of the Golem (manifested by language) seems to want to slough
off the content/container from which it arose (or at least the fear of that
which it lines "Language speaks..." M. Heidegger, Golemizer.).
(Here, one could make a variety of, purely speculative of course, moves
which would link the 28 day lunar cycle of cellular sloughing of menstruation
to a whole cultural `fear' of `bad linings', il-luminations, the un-canny
[thy name is woman, according to Freud, a Golemizer if ever there was one],
indirect [illusory?] lighting in all sorts of metaphorical circumstances
from gender relations, to ontology, to epistemology. These `bad linings'
are the very fertile ground which de-construction tills/tilts. And also
the very liminal range that techné in general, and the the prosthesis
in particular occupies.)