On the edge of non-existence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledgeit, annihilates me.

Essentially different from "uncanniness," more violent, too,abjection is elaborated through a failure to recognize its kin;nothing is familiar, not even the shadow of a memory

The lashes/cilia framing the head are directed outward, as if to suggest abeing that is about to corne apart, this fate perhaps intimatedby the formless matter making up the périphéries of the image

For Redon, however, atavistic proportions were not enoughto articulate the status of the body in a Darwinian universe.Redon’s evolutionary body reaches its most devastating expression in Tes Origines, where we find not so much Cormon-esquerenderings of distorted human anatomy, but rather an obsessionwith anatomy’s absence. In Les Origines, Redon pulls the bodyback into the primeval slime, taking it apart before our eyes. Hisinterest, in other words, is not so much evolutionary form, butrather evolutionary formlessness

What is left out of these discussions, however, is the question of the human body. Redon’s evolutionism, I will argue, isessentially about the body—about the implications of Darwin-ian thought for the possibility, or impossibility, of stable human form. We should also consider these questions: What did“origins” mean to viewers during Redon’s time? What kinds offantasies and anxieties were bound up in the question of originsin 1883? Redon’s album is not just a whimsical diagram of theorigins of the universe; rather, it is a devastating essay on the human body, its abject beginnings, and its demoted status underevolutionary law.

Because the story il tells is also confusing—this is,after ail, science through the eyes of a Symbolist—much of thescholarship on the album has focused on making sense of theplates. Sven Sandstrôm was the first to organize Redon’s imag-ery, perhaps against its will, into a cohérent evolutionary story

search for the unknown

Thus a sheet of white paperhorrifies me. It impresses me disagreeably to the pointof making me sterile, of depriving me of the taste forwork (except, of course, when I propose to represent areal object, for example a study or a portrait). A sheetof paper is so shocking to me that I am forced, as soonas it is on the easel, to scrawl on it with charcoal, witha crayon or any other material, and this operationbrings it to life.

Plis visions exist by themselves,in an independent sphere over which they reign absolutely.

Redon always insisted that his imagination had itsroots in the observation of nature. To him even themost fantastic drawings were "true" because the visionshe translated into the velvet-like texture of charcoaldrawings were never absolutely detached from reality;they were part of his own world, of his peculiar atavism.As he has said: "My originality consists in bringing tolife, in a human way, improbable beings and makingthem live according to the laws of probability, by putting —as far as possible —the logic of the visible at theservice of the invisible."

(which he considered sterile unless it concerned itself with tendencies and ideas)

Pleading for the legitimacy of pictorial invention, he called it "a rightthat has been lost and which we must reconquer: theright to fantasy, to the free interpretation of history.The example of the great artists of the past justifiesthis claim. If, in order to convince the most rebelliousones, it does not suffice to state that this truth imposesitself today [with the work of Fromentin] ... if the entire collection of the Louvre with its masterpieces, andthe clarity of their language, is not a protest strong andsolemn enough, then we shall have to wait patientlyuntil the light dawns. We shall have to tell those whoare the most misled to bide their time a little longer, tolisten sincerely and with more veneration to the noblelanguage of beauty. The moment will come withoutdoubt. Maybe it will be given to those who are still inthe somber anteroom to lift a corner of the veil, to seeat last, beyond the penumbra, in the splendor of a luminous clearing, this beautiful garden of poetry, filledwith great murmuring and delights. It is a homelandmade for all. How many pure joys they abjure who obstinately limit art!"

. Redon's own often curious cap-tions were meant to be read sequen-tially like a sort of poem, contributingto the mysterious effect of the who

macabre fan-tas

s.

Redonunderstood Symbolist aesthetics as a technologyof the psyche, an exercise in mediating the ma-terial and the spiritual.

Fearful symbols ofevolutionary memory often coincided withhaunting images of secular history.

Or-igins (1883)

While advances in astronomy are undoubtedly behindrevived interest in ancient cosmological symbols, recentcoveries also contributed to a renewal of the extraterrestriallife debate, a discourse that may well have influenced Redocosmological imag

sted in solar myths. Amongother images he used that of the setting sun to suggest thePrussian advance

. Redon's"Sad Ascent", another lithograph from In the Dream, with itsblack celestial body hovering ominously over the rooftops ofParis and melancholy balloonhead conflation, may be a com-bined reference to political disaster and Janssen's mission

ral but even more specifically to one eclipse inparticular: that of December 22,1870, which took place duringthe last desolate days of the war, two days after the defeat ofRedon's own battalion of the Secon

Iconographically, the solar eclipse is an ageold portent ofimpending doom and was revived as such in the work ofRedon and others immediately following the loss o

. From this information, data abouttemperature and age could be deduced, revolutionizing thestudy and understanding of the solar syste

“Microbomania” and “syphilophobia,” both public aspects of the Pasteurianrevolution, provided Redon with suggestive subject matter for his biologically orientednoirs, which effectively embody contemporary Decadent and even occult themes aswell.

The volvox had attracted a great dealof attention because certain zoologists had attempted to attribute a mouth, organs, andeven an eye to it.

According to Auguste Barbey,“In the obscure depths of marshes, illuminated suddenly by a phosphorescent glow,vibrios and germs, bacilli and infusoria big with human faces, sad or inexpressive,produce a dreadful effect” (Barbey 1894). “Vibrio,” is a pathogenic microorganism.Gerard Beauregard would call the oeuvre in general “germs” and would remark, “Itis all right to exhibit again the fantastic and terrible, but why these microbes . . . these‘vibrios’?” (Beauregard 1894)

The fantastic aspectof microbes even became a part of public entertainment. In 1883 the show “LesInvisibles” at the Th ́eˆatre des menus-plaisirs in Paris showed microorganisms to a largeaudience through a solar microscope.

Redon’s images of microorganismsare in keeping with scare tactics of Pasteurian hygienists who preached prevention byrevealing the hidden enemy to the public as something more powerful and destructiveto humans than any conceivable visible danger

“Life takes part in the work of death in all its phases”

The combination of life-death forces took on new meaning with the adventof Pasteur’s work

Degeneration theory, circulating in the last three decades of thecentury, included ideas that the nation had slipped from power because of generalphysical conditions such as the lack of corporeal strength, shorter stature than inpast generations, and the fear that the French race was aging and thus in decline.

espite the official celebration of scientific progressin the postwar period, Redon dwelled on man’s vulnerabilities in light of scientificdevelopments. In so doing, he responded to an anxious postwar generation susceptibleto scientific discourses that emphasized man’s fragility in light of new developments inscience.

i am not a Darwinist, because I do not do sc

ne. Byexchanging the classical ideals of academic tradition for the scienceof psychophysiology, Redon created in the figure of the Devil anew, we might say boldly updated, icon of melancholy, a potentsymbol of the modern human condition, in which - as is sopoignantly dramatised in text and image by The Temptation of StAnthony - a brave new, science-oriented world struggles with theloss of (Christian) existential certa

he Symbolist avant-garde, with whom Redon by then had close t

True justice is paying only once for each mistake.True injustice is paying more than once for each mistake

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