The subject looks back.

In a decidedly non-Heideggerian act of projection (1962: 426), it throws itself into its past so as to return to – excavate, observe, visit, haunt – a prior location, a neatly separated site that is neither fully temporal nor spatial, qualitative or quantitative. Upon successfully retrieving that which appeared to have been lost but is nevertheless found again, that which teleologically justifies the journeying, the subject is mechanically pulled back into the now, where it can freely instrumentalize it to whatever end it sees fit.

That such a rationalization is as common as it is criticized doesn’t, however, spare one of the tasks of justifying why that is. Straw man concerns notwithstanding, the backward gaze is never the mere archaeological and disinterested unearthing and inspecting of what was. To this end, it could be worth asking how might, for instance, the subject be said to be able to look back at all, when, strictly speaking, there is no subject to speak of that precedes the look, but only its mere phantasmic double – the selfsame phenomenon split into and confused for cause and effect – as in the case of Butler’s (1999:33) constitution of the subject? And, speaking of which, what precisely is the nature of the look, when the psychoanalytical gaze – as that which escapes the look, that which is irreducible to the mere ‘physical’ act of looking, of turning one’s head so as to visually grasp that which was both imperceptible and prior to the act – always betrays one’s irreconcilable involvement in the object of the gaze as such, so that what this phenomenal query returns is always, to some degree, what was libidinally sought to begin with (Žižek 2006: 17)? And how would one go about isolating, as in a laboratory, that which was, i.e. bracket off that which is deemed irrelevant, when – to Nietzsche (2001: 36) – the spontaneous eruption of that which is imperceptibly acquired in time retroactively shows what appeared at first to only have been to still, in fact, be – or when, to Bergson (1946: 116) – the possible, as the image of the real that is retroactively projected into the past, always requires and is thus more, not less than the real? And, lastly, how can we come to terms with looking back and finding, as Latour (1991: 47) does, that the past as we knew it never has been, that it indeed never began?

Yet, to posit the looking back of such a split, incoherent and irreconcilable subject is equally untenable. It, of course, cannot look back, for there is no it that precedes or transcends the look – it is constituted in the look itself. Nevertheless, that is of little consequence, for, it, as the look, can only gaze at that which it cannot yet comprehend – that which has not yet ceased to still be. And even if we were to abstract away one’s drive as a structural precondition of apprehending anything at all, it is still entirely plausible that what it does end up looking at turns out to never have been, to begin with.

Kantor’s Wielopole Wielopole may be of particular interest to our dilemma. One may be compelled to read Kantor’s apparent efforts to look back so as to recreate his own past—to reenact a memory which does not belong to him – precisely not as such, but rather as a means of investigating where one is, as a grounded, embodied entity, one whose past can never be crudely bracketed out, but rather conditions its very being. That is, not an effort to reclaim or revisit the past – how could he, it is a past that he never had the chance to experience – but rather the staging of the very impossibility of such an undertaking, the ceaseless interrogation and consequent destruction of that which can neither speak nor hold the answers he’s looking for. And even if that wasn’t the case, how could he ever extract life out of the non-living? And who could populate his space if not – on the one hand – the corpses of those that are irrevocably barred from life, who return, linger, haunt – properly spectral apparitions – bodies who function as ontological barriers to the things-in-themselves, reminders of that which is forever inaccessible, and – on the other – Kantor’s own doubles? i.e., his uncles as the vital embodiment of his memory – split, unstable, contradictory – and finally Kantor himself, whose physical presence is that which ensures the positing of the backward gaze as a structurally split inward look.

That is all to say, to look back is an act of doubling. It is to split oneself, to ‘go back’ into oneself, so as to arrive at oneself – that is, neither, strictly speaking, to arrive into a space proper – finite, localizable – nor is it a different space at all, for it was always already there, nor, lastly, is it a space that can be occupied. It is, in fact, this empty space, this responsively expandable material nothing that nevertheless fills it up and renders it inaccessible, which functions as the double of the splitting, i.e., the precondition of this internal spectral return. 

To look back is therefore never to come across what was, but rather to disintegrate what is in order to discover oneself anew – to throw oneself into oneself so as to come across an unfinished and unfinishable, deformed, colourless, motionless husk – to awaken post-moulting as the skin that was shed.

As it annihilates the subject, the gaze lingers on.