Marcellvs L.’s work moves on the line separating presence from absence, the consistency of reality from its inconsistency. It indicates the space of undecidability between 0 and 1 or, to put it in philosophical terms, between nothingness and reality. Infinitesimal calculus studies the infinitely small (infinitesimal) intervals in the various fields of mathematics. I think that Marcellvs’s work does the same; but with the means of art. We can distinguish between two registers, the register of finitude (which is constituted reality, the world of real numbers) and the register of infinitude (which describes the unreality of zero or of nothingness). Translated into Lacanian categories, this would be the difference of reality from the real. Everything is decided by the differentiation between these two orders, of which the first marks consistency, the second, inconsistency.

I believe that Marcellvs ultimately insists on the undecidability of the register of consistency from that of inconsistency. Time and again, his films point toward the spectral dividing line that ties these registers together as much as it separates them from each other. Hence the ghostly streak of his work. The ground and the groundlessness of the abyss coincide. Reality and unreality are crossed, and as they cross, they engender a phantomlike interstitial zone that lets our certainties falter. I would accordingly speak of the implicit ontology in Marcellvs’s work. Ontology occupies itself with being and with presence. It does so—already in Parmenides, for example—by distinguishing the sphere of being from the sphere of nothingness. Being and nothingness, presence and absence are fundamental categories of ontology. Now, twentieth-century philosophy, taking its cue from Nietzsche, articulated itself as a philosophical critique of metaphysics by calling ontology in question. Derrida’s deconstruction of logocentric metaphysics is a deconstruction of the ontology of substance and subject correlative to it. It proceeds by interlocking the category of presence with that of absence. Presence is always also absence. There is presence only as absentic presence. The category of disappearance becomes central. Deleuze, for his part, speaks of becoming. Both Derrida and Deleuze invoke Maurice Blanchot, whose literature (like several important texts and films by Marguerite Duras) opens up a spectral space that is the space of undecidability between being and nothingness. It is the phantomlike zone of a general ontological instability.

Reality proves to be a promise of consistency that is broken. Reality is a fiction, a narrative. It is a sort of fabric full of wholes, continually translucent to its own impermanence. Deleuze called this fabric an immanence level; in Wittgenstein, it is called form of life or language-game. Lacan speaks of the symbolic order. All are floating architectures strung like fragile nets over the abyss of inconsistency, which Deleuze, with Nietzsche, calls the chaos. Marcellvs’s works point into that chaos. They do so with great precision.

Marcus Steinweg