I had moved from England to New York in January 2004 to see if my necronautical activities met with a kinder reception in the New World than the indifference I had experienced in the Old. On return to the University of Essex in June of that year, in an effort to clear up and leave my old office, sort through my papers, and finally move my books, a peculiar thing happened.
Semi-hidden in my office, I came across an unfamiliar series of boxes, five of them in a stack, sort of midsized brown book boxes. After I spoke to Barbara, the administrator in the Philosophy Department, it became clear that they were the unpublished papers, notes, and remains of a close friend and former philosophy teacher of mine in France, Michel Haar. They had been sent unannounced by his brother from the sanatorium in which Michel died from a heart attackin the dreadful summer heat wave that swept France in 2003. His death had followed a long bout of neurological, psychological, and indeed hypochondriacal illnesses that had besieged him since taking early retirement from his chair in the Philosophy Department at the Sorbonne and which, indeed, were the cause of his early retirement. Truth to tell, there was always a slightly maniacal death wish in Michel. When he finally received his chair in Paris, the dream of every self-respecting French academic, he incorrectly told everyone he was replacing Sarah Kofman, the great Nietzsche scholar, who had committed suicide on the 150th anniversary of Nietzsche’s birth. Michel seemed determined to repeat the fate of his supposed predecessor.
I subsequently tried to contact Michel’s brother Roger, whom I’d met once at a dinner in a terrible chain restaurant in Paris (Michel was a cheapskate and didn’t care about food). I had his phone number in Strasbourg, but it no longer worked. I sent a letter that was later returned unopened,
retour à l’envoyeur
stamped across it. Michel was divorced and estranged from his wife, Elizabeth, after refusing to have children. Narcissistic to the end. I knew of no other immediate family members. I was left with the perplexity ofnot knowing why these boxes had been sent to me. Michel had a few devoted students who knew him much better than I did. He didn’t really have what you would call friends.
I immediately began to go through the boxes, finding everything within them in apparent disorder, although each box was marked with a sign of the zodiac, from Capricorn to Gemini. The Taurus box was missing. Had it been lost in transit or was there some design at work? The zodiacal signs didn’t surprise me, as Michel was possibly the first philosopher since Pico della Mirandola in the late fifteenth century to have a deep commitment to astrology. Like Pico, Michel was a genethlialogist, a maker of horoscopes.
In the box marked
Capricorn
, I found some absolute gems, such as notes from a lecture on ethics and Marxism by Jean-Paul Sartre at the École Normale Supérieure in 1959, when Michel was a student. There was also the transcription of a debate between Sartre and several
normaliens
, including two of my former teachers, Clément Rosset and Dominique Janicaud, and a young, vital, and very Sartrean Alain Badiou. I found
Notes de Cours
from Louis Althusser’s class on Montesquieu and Rousseau and the draft of a long dissertation by Michel on ancient materialism, withdetailed discussions of Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius.
To my complete astonishment, I found the original copies of a triangular correspondence between Jean Beaufret, Jacques Lacan, and Martin Heidegger, which concerned the latter’s visit to Cerisy-la-Salle on the Normandy coast in 1955 to deliver the lecture
“Was ist das—die Philosophie?”
the title of which had always made me laugh. Don’t know why. Most amusingly, some of the correspondence between Lacan and Beaufret dealt with the topic of what Herr und Frau Heidegger might choose to eat for breakfast
chez
Lacan during their
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