and incoherent. He also often seemed to lose interest in what he was saying.
In the
Aquarius
box, I found many strange maps. Michel had somehow obtained an annotated cloth print of the
Mappa Mundi
from Hereford Cathedral. This extraordinary object from around 1300 presents the world divided into three continents (Europe, Asia, Africa) with its center in Jerusalem, which looked like a keyhole. I came across a series of almost fantastical antique maps of Australia, or more preciselyNew Holland, seemingly drawn by French explorers from the early to mid-1700s. There were hand-drawn maps of the estuarial systems of Virginia and North Carolina, combined with exhaustive descriptions of flora and fauna. Most impressive of all was Michel’s own six feet by four map of natural catastrophe, with extensive detail on the paths of hurricanes in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, the tornadoes of the American Midwest, maps of volcanic explosions from Vesuvius to Krakatoa and beyond. There was also a detailed prose description of the meteorite the size of Manhattan that allegedly fell on the Yucatán Peninsula fifteen million years ago, wiping out most forms of life on earth, including all dinosaur species.
In the
Gemini
box, I discovered heavily annotated copies of the 900 Theses or Conclusions of Pico, and drafts of commentaries on Marsilio Ficino’s translations of Plato, especially
Symposium
, and Tommaso Campanella’s
City of the Sun
(Michel was obsessed with the description of the ideal city with its religion based on a solar cult. Oddly, when we were together in Italy in those summers, he always avoided the sun). I also found a series of fragmentary but fascinating drafts for a study of the technological metaphors in Heidegger’s
Sein und Zeit
, with deeply originalinsights on Heidegger’s obvious references to hands, hammers, nails, and the workshop world of fundamental ontology, but less obvious references to car indicators, washing machines, typewriters, radio signals, and even primitive computer systems: “For there too the gods are present,” Heidegger would seem to be suggesting. I came across transcribed notes from a number of sessions of a Heidegger reading group that took place informally at the ENS in the early 1960s and which included Michel, his great friend Dominique, and a young Jacques Derrida, as well as a number of visiting Americans. I remember Michel telling me about this group, which was apparently almost covert during the overwhelming hegemony in Paris in those years of what was called “
le Freudo-Marxisme
,” the intoxicating Gallic cocktail of Leninism and libidinism that was particularly popular at the time.
In
Gemini
, I also found a short, odd text—written in English—called “The One True Philosophy of Clothes.” It was anonymous, but my guess is that it was written by Michel’s American wife, Elizabeth, who worked for many years in the Paris fashion industry, a job that she had great difficulty combining with her immense passion for Ibsen, Racine, and Attic tragedy, especially Euripides. The consequenceof this collision was satire and the model was Thomas Carlyle’s
Sartor Resartus
, “The Tailor Re-tailored.” She begins by writing,
What is the human being but a garment and what is the world but the living garment of God? If language is the expressive garment of thought, then clothes are the expressive garment of the body. Nature and life itself are but one garment woven and ever-weaving from the loom of time. As Carlyle writes, “The whole external universe and what holds it together is but clothing and the essence of all science lies in the PHILOSOPHY OF CLOTHES.”
The philosophy of clothes is not some specialized sub-discipline taught in fashion schools. It is the key to understanding everything. It is the germ and gem of all science. The human being is the fashioned animal and fashion is the key to understanding the human being. Let me put this in a simple linguistic
In the
Aquarius
box, I found many strange maps. Michel had somehow obtained an annotated cloth print of the
Mappa Mundi
from Hereford Cathedral. This extraordinary object from around 1300 presents the world divided into three continents (Europe, Asia, Africa) with its center in Jerusalem, which looked like a keyhole. I came across a series of almost fantastical antique maps of Australia, or more preciselyNew Holland, seemingly drawn by French explorers from the early to mid-1700s. There were hand-drawn maps of the estuarial systems of Virginia and North Carolina, combined with exhaustive descriptions of flora and fauna. Most impressive of all was Michel’s own six feet by four map of natural catastrophe, with extensive detail on the paths of hurricanes in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, the tornadoes of the American Midwest, maps of volcanic explosions from Vesuvius to Krakatoa and beyond. There was also a detailed prose description of the meteorite the size of Manhattan that allegedly fell on the Yucatán Peninsula fifteen million years ago, wiping out most forms of life on earth, including all dinosaur species.
In the
Gemini
box, I discovered heavily annotated copies of the 900 Theses or Conclusions of Pico, and drafts of commentaries on Marsilio Ficino’s translations of Plato, especially
Symposium
, and Tommaso Campanella’s
City of the Sun
(Michel was obsessed with the description of the ideal city with its religion based on a solar cult. Oddly, when we were together in Italy in those summers, he always avoided the sun). I also found a series of fragmentary but fascinating drafts for a study of the technological metaphors in Heidegger’s
Sein und Zeit
, with deeply originalinsights on Heidegger’s obvious references to hands, hammers, nails, and the workshop world of fundamental ontology, but less obvious references to car indicators, washing machines, typewriters, radio signals, and even primitive computer systems: “For there too the gods are present,” Heidegger would seem to be suggesting. I came across transcribed notes from a number of sessions of a Heidegger reading group that took place informally at the ENS in the early 1960s and which included Michel, his great friend Dominique, and a young Jacques Derrida, as well as a number of visiting Americans. I remember Michel telling me about this group, which was apparently almost covert during the overwhelming hegemony in Paris in those years of what was called “
le Freudo-Marxisme
,” the intoxicating Gallic cocktail of Leninism and libidinism that was particularly popular at the time.
In
Gemini
, I also found a short, odd text—written in English—called “The One True Philosophy of Clothes.” It was anonymous, but my guess is that it was written by Michel’s American wife, Elizabeth, who worked for many years in the Paris fashion industry, a job that she had great difficulty combining with her immense passion for Ibsen, Racine, and Attic tragedy, especially Euripides. The consequenceof this collision was satire and the model was Thomas Carlyle’s
Sartor Resartus
, “The Tailor Re-tailored.” She begins by writing,
What is the human being but a garment and what is the world but the living garment of God? If language is the expressive garment of thought, then clothes are the expressive garment of the body. Nature and life itself are but one garment woven and ever-weaving from the loom of time. As Carlyle writes, “The whole external universe and what holds it together is but clothing and the essence of all science lies in the PHILOSOPHY OF CLOTHES.”
The philosophy of clothes is not some specialized sub-discipline taught in fashion schools. It is the key to understanding everything. It is the germ and gem of all science. The human being is the fashioned animal and fashion is the key to understanding the human being. Let me put this in a simple linguistic
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