The bowels of the cryptomat1

A psychographical descent

'The clearest feeling was still one of absence'.2

(a)topos
We will first have to establish the place occupied by the text within this publication. Is the text a mere
addition or does it - violently, to a certain degree - demand a place of its own? Is it innocuous or does
it colonise the subject? Is the text a supplement or an integral part of a particular topic? If we realise
that the text is a system of traces interweaving (texere = weave) everything, it can hardly be called an
addition. Indeed, it destabilises such concepts as identity and origin and, hence, also opposing structures containing a strict hierarchy (hiers: holy + arkh: leadership). And is not so that, because it destabilises what is holy to many, it is considered perilous? As if it were trespassing? As if it were something that should be approached with great circumspection? A common response may be to restrict
its space and obsessively cling to the idea of the text as a mere supplement. In that case, the text will
be regarded as ancillary or little more than a preface, a praefatio, or an introduction. Or worse: a eulogy. Is not the text invariably regarded as a praefor a 'saying in advance', a summary, a unifying part,
a description announcing that which is to come, namely the essence, which is anyway presumed complete, clear and finalised? This would mean that the text frames everything in a structure in an attempt
to achieve maximum efficiency implying that, by doing this, we are in fact burying (praefodio) something in an anonymous grave. The text would thus always be placing something in a crypt, hiding something, interring something, making it indecipherable. Understood in this way, the text would appear
always to be intending to take the place of the other or at least to stifle the other, framing it like an
ergon. But seeking out the (non-)place of this text, we will find it to be a crypt itself (which raises the
question of what a crypt is).
The text often appears to be regarded as something whose only purpose is to fill a void or lack.
Is there a lack that is to be filled and that, hence, will be denied? Is there not always a lack, forever
elusive? The text as a mere tool: the very presumption is equal to an attempt at its debasement. It is
the hierarchy and authority in a book that will be destabilised by the text. Rather than serving as simple
adornment, the text forms and deforms that in which it is contained. It is not merely added to something else, to something essential that is to be accompanied and clarified by the text. On the other
hand, this does not mean that, in destabilising the idea of an authority, the text simply claims such
authority for itself so as to rule over subjects of its own from an authoritarian position. After all, everything is on loan, always. Everything is bricolage Any authority, any unity and any identity will therefore be only artificial. When we read, write and create, we do so from within a tradition of texts, codes
and images. So it is important to realise that 'though you live in it the resources are still borrowed, so
you are living without authorisation, which implies a certain degree of separation'. 3 There is no language that precedes language and that could serve to understand language; there is no meta-language
to be found outside language that would allow us to examine it in a pure and homogeneous fashion.
There is no meta-text, no possibility to bring about a panoptic discourse that fully withdraws from the
work and that withdraws the work itself from its background. The text uses texts and always already
finds itself in their midst. This complicates the idea of a hierarchical structure and creates an -.

Neography of my own: crypto + mat ( + ): driven (matos) by the cryptic.

Paul Virilio, Bunker Archeology, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 4th edition, 2012, p. 9
3
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Preface to Reading Derridas Grammatology, Gaston and Maclachlan (ed.), Continuum, p. xxxii
2

'Like any trace, the book is []

a living-dead machine [].'4

The text cannot be understood as an external, descriptive means that is added to the work merely to
clarify it and to be forced into a structure (and stricture). The text is not a thing that wants to push the
work into the discourse on art to achieve a pure unity. On the contrary, the text will make both itself
and the work move, shift and disseminate, opposing the violence of any system aiming to establish a
particular identity. In other words, rather than merely describing works, this text goes along with them
and gets into the psyche of the cryptographic room. (Like deconstruction, text is always already at work
within the work.) The text will therefore parasitise the works, probably do them injustice, annoy and
injure them; just as it will get into other texts to abuse and colonise them, carve out useful elements
and force them into a completely different context. And since the works will remain largely unknowable, enigmatic and cryptic and I am calling the text equally cryptic and disseminating, this text will have
to be as non-descriptive as possible and even partly unreadable. (The impossibility the necessary
impossibility should be respected rather than denied.) The text as a cryptogram. In its cryptic capacity, the text leads us (astray). The text is an (a)topographical (de)structure whose elements remain
indecipherable. This means the unknowable and the hidden take centre stage.
Crypto-porus
It is impossible to say we can work our way towards the crypt since this would imply conceiving it as
an entirely autonomous, external and knowable 'thing' and approaching it according to a theory that
is entirely alien to it. We will have to start from the cryptic room of the written word and the works
(additionally taking on the burden of having to follow a cryptic approach). We are already encrypted.
Everything starts from the crypt so that we could assume everything to be a crypt effect.5 If this
text is a crypt, however, its presentation is delayed. A crypt does not present (itself). A crypt is cryptic,
i.e. coded. Its place or placing is equal to disguising and concealing. But this does not involve complete
secrecy or suffocation: the concealing is at the same time a revealing. Occupying the room is as much
making it what it is: a room. It is this Heidegerian battle between the earth (die Bergende) and the
world (die Offenheit), more in particular the movement of the , which is important. 6 It is a
battle that will never be over. Inherently defying completion, the dis-covering is bound to end with a
certain failure. The work has been placed inside the cryptomat. It takes up a place but seems not to be
taking place in literal terms. After all, knowledge will never be complete. In other words, we will always
know only by approximation, only control in part. 7 The work and the text will always remain partly undiscovered
This text as a visual work sets up a world of its own. Its cryptography suggests the presence
of the corpses and spirits of previous authors: the text too is subject to hauntography 8. The text is
haunted (hant) by earlier texts. It is obsessed (hant) by traces of somebody unknown who, despite
his absence, is able to catch us unawares. Somebody unknown who can - or who, through his sheer
potentiality, does - create (t)error.
The cryptographic text, which can never be fully decoded and at the same time will never be
able to decode itself either, finds an ally in the artificial buildings that open up underground and unworldly worlds: monuments that seem to have been erected for nobody; museums showing no works;
gateways giving access to nowhere; stands holding no spectators; a hippodrome displaying no spectacle; bunkers employed in no war; flights of steps up or down leading nowhere rather seeming to
4

Jacques Derrida, Sminaire La Bte et le Souverain, vol. II (2002-2003), ditions Galile, p. 194
Jacques Derrida, Fors, p. xvii The Anglisch Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, for The Wolf Mans
Magic Word. A Cryptonomy, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, University of Minnesota Press, 1986, p. xiii
6
Cf. Martin Heidegger, Das Werk und die Wahrheit, in Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, Holzwege, pp. 25-44
7
Martin Heidegger, Holzwege, p. 39
8
This is my own variation on Derridas hauntologie. Cf. Spectre de Marx.
5

make their way to aporias or abyssal depths. The mise en scne as a mise en abme And we must
certainly not economise on the abyss9. We should keep repeating this abyssal quality to confirm it
with maximum vigour. The text and the buildings place themselves en abme(r). The building is the
destroying and the confirming of traditions, of stories, of stories about stories. We keep creating (wayward) traces ourselves, self-referential markings that will never stop shifting and disseminating. We
walk along Holzwegen, trying to find our way through the dark and oppressive angiporta which not
infrequently prove to be dead ends a-poros
Je suis voudrait dire je suis hant10

Ghosts, corpses and carcasses are enclosed within the cryptographic temples, stands, stairwells and
gateways that overcome their temporary nature by eventually being granted a place in an archive. Not
only do they hide ghosts, they haunt themselves. Their death highlights my own mortality: remember
that you are mortal Memento Mori. Dead or alive, living dead, essential or redundant in any case,
the cryptographic buildings will cause a crack in the familiar room. They are isolated, inside outside the
room, impenetrable. They seem to be hiding something. Protecting it. The room has been torn open
and the wounds will never be fully healed. The violence used in constructing the crypt (the building,
but equally this text) leaves traces. And what is important here is the trauma (as compulsive re-enactment): eventually, the building will be destroyed (its non-temporariness is temporary) and will have to
be rebuilt, remembered; the stories will have to be re-enacted. And in between assembly and disassembly (and subsequent assemblies and disassemblies, ) it is at rest in a world it has created (and
opened), bringing spirits, corpses and carcasses back to life. It is feared as much as it is loved, like the
simultaneously attracting and repelling forces of the abyss. The sublime of the building arouses fearful
pleasure and pleasurable fear. The cryptographic building is like the very fear described by Kierkegaard
as a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathic sympathy11. The cryptographic building and the cryptographic text are each an attractive horror (and each creates a horrendous attraction). They are like the
abyss and the labyrinth: inviting but, on closer inspection (something that is being counteracted all
along), a road leading to an a-poros. The crypt is like cursed Medusa's gaze, turning into stone whoever
looks her in the eyes. In other words, you may take a fleeting glance, lightly touch upon it, but you
cannot enter into it any further, not penetrate it, you will never be able to grasp it.... and, least of all,
survive it.
The building and the text penetrate and parasitise the room, cut it through with surgical precision kher (hand) + rgon (work). Their handwork affects the idea of a pre-given reality and destabilises it from within. The building and the text are not simply added, on the contrary: they will destabilise the idea of a Reality by establishing and opening a world themselves through their incision.
Heidegger, referring to a painting by Van Gogh, said that: Das Bild stellt eigentlich nichts dar12. That
is, it re-presents nothing existing outside the painting, prior to the painting, independently of the painting. Heidegger expresses a similar idea when referring to the temple: Ein Bauwerk, [] bildet nichts
ab13. The same holds for drama: the tragic events are not about battle but write the battle. The tragedy
does not tell [] about the battle, but each and every essential word [is involved in] that battle []14.
So the work sets up (and opens) a world. But of course it is extremely important not to think of the
world as an object. After all, the Dasein is subordinate (unterstehen) to the world. And this world will
never be fully penetrable and transparent, it will always remain partly enigmatic and knowledge will
always be limited. The alien element will always be preserved. This should not be taken as something

Jacques Derrida, La Vrit en Peinture, p. 44

Jacques Derrida, Spectre de Marx, ditions Galile, 1993, p. 212
11
Vigilius Haufniensis (Sren Kierkegaard), Het Begrip Angst, Erven J. Bijleveld, Utrecht, 1958, p. 49
12
Martin Heidegger, Holzwege, p. 38
13
Ibid., p. 27
14
Ibid., p. 29
10

negative but rather as something that calls for an endurance non passive, a non-passive endurance.15
The enduring of radical uncertainty.
At the same time, this ushers in the (living) dead; the corpses and carcasses of lost civilisations
and parasitised writers. The crypt is a parasitic (en)closure, heterogeneous to the I, the Self, the
Unique. It defies translation, being cryptic, silent but nonetheless endowed with thousands of languages. The corpses come with mourning but this will never fully externalise (for the dead are brought
back to life, finding themselves between life and death, being both dead and alive). Any translation
will always be a transformation, retaining the alien and the cryptic. Mourning is appropriate and impossible at once. Loss is strongly sustained, deep inside, in the dungeons, vaults, crypts, the flooded
tunnels of a lost civilisation. This cryptography is home to a ghost, a phantom je suis hant: haunted
and obsessed. The obsession too leads to the impossibility of mourning, because of the constant reenactment: trauma.
Testis mentior
(Silent) witness. The testament can emerge only from the crypt so that it will remain unknown forever.
The testament seems untranslatable We remain confined within the feeling of desire aroused by an
empty theatre, a bodiless grave, the cenotaph for an absent (possibly always yet to come) hero, the
non-place of the crypt a hidden place, a disguise concealing the traces of the act of disguising, a
place of silence.16 The crypt evokes a strong desire, a desire that borders on obsession: the desire to
cut out something, to purloin it from its habitat so as to be able to cherish it fully, confirming it through
perpetual repetition. Fetishism. The traces of buildings are interrupted when one of them is cut out
and placed within a completely different (and alien) story a story within a story; mise en abme(r). It
becomes an illustration for a family story of your own that is placed in the silent room and can be
approached only from the outside the contents remaining hidden. Cryptophylia.
Footsteps can be heard only round the walls of the cryptographic buildings, which themselves
refer to the traces of footsteps and the remaining impressions of a lost presence. An empty and silent
deambulatory represents the imagination of walking: we wander and stray; lose our way; walk according as our imagination unfolds, without any specific purpose or destination (dambuler). The deambulatory remains empty; we move round it in circles, outside the circle, seemingly never getting inside or
being able to penetrate it. Our moving is always ex-orbit-ant. Our imagination takes us along the foot
traces of long-lost memories of long-lost civilisations. Never away never here. Protective and violent,
the cryptographic is strangely dualistic. While we appear never to lose hope that the traces will refer
to like-minded people, they may equally well lead us to horror, like the footprint found by Robinson
Crusoe: an unidentifiable trace, a stranger's mark, a cryptographic presence of a potential foe. Derrida
says about this: The footprint [la trace dun pas] in the sand on the shore [] not only transforms into
the appearance of a ghost, a phantom [], but a paralysing hallucination, [] a sign that is as threatening as promising, uncanny, as diabolic as divine: the other man. What frightens Robinson is that the
trace may refer to the ghostly presence of another man [].17
This fear also leads to an obsession. More in particular, where he appears in meditation, in terror on
this naked footprint [] 18. He feels persecuted, chased and tracked down by the trace, at the same
time cherishing an almost fetishist desire for it.
The cryptographic text and buildings have been erected for nobody. Decoding remains impossible; translation remains a transformation. The incised idiom of the parasitising buildings and the text,
their mutual alliance (an association that is also a dissociation whose fault line takes the proper shape
15

Jacques Derrida, Lautre Cap, ditions the Minuit, Paris, 1991, p. 37

Jacques Derrida, Fors, p. xvii
17
La Bte et le Souverain, p. 81
18
Ibid., p. 84
16

of a cryptic room 19), has an idiocratic effect. Idiocracy: the power of the familiar (and the odd). It has
the effect of alienation from that which is outside the circle; an alienation from what is outside the
circle becoming unheimlich. Shut out of a home. The a-topos of the emigrant.
And yet, through the power of our fantasy or imagination, we can circumvent this a-topos and, on the
contrary, find a strong idea of the topos: a place of our own, a sense of preservation and of narcissism:
the fantasy stays safely in touch with itself, in the dark room of its own secret, wallowing in its own
image. Even so, (historical) tradition remains invaluable to the fantasy of the cryptographic buildings
and the text, since both allow it to haunt the impenetrable crypts and bring its corpses and carcasses
back to life. The crypt is equally a burial tomb. The cryptographic buildings (and the text) keep its carcasses intact protect them from death and from life. They accommodate and protect living dead that
counteract mourning
The cryptographic building is erected from the runa the downfall. The ruins haunted by the
spirits and ghosts. Hant: haunted and obsessed. The text adopts this obsession - because it is obsessed
by texts, writers, corpses and carcasses of previous generations that knew their own ghosts. It will
never be able to cope without the alien or other: the text is always already contaminated, that is,
preoccupied, inhabited [habit], haunted [hant] by its other [] 20. And any attempt to displace it will
only have the effect of confirming it: something will be formed inside the fear [hantise] of that which
it aims to shut out, fight or suppress21. The obsession with the cryptographic room holding its stories
en abme, its stories abm, its secrets sealed forever is an obsession that owes its continued existence wholly to its impenetrability. This obsession is confirmed over and over again, never yielding satisfaction. The cryptographic building erects a second crypt round itself enabling it to hide its spirits and
carcasses, its living dead and anonymous witnesses. Its hospitality is the final refuge for silent witnesses
of an unknown unknowable civilisation. At the same time, it does not allow them to get away
Are not the cryptographic buildings themselves the living dead and spirits that conjure up illusion and obsession? Threat and promise? A threatening promise? A dramatic desire a desire for
drama? The threat of and the desire for the living dead? [Crusoe] is afraid to die alive by being swallowed or devoured []. This is the grand delusion here []: [] he thinks of it as a threat, but with such
compulsion as makes one wonder whether he may not be cherishing the threat as a promise, that is,
as a desire.22 The cryptographic works never constitute an unambiguous story but always a drama that
is to be deciphered (being indecipherable), a story about a story (about a story, ad infinitum). My
desire and obsession are contained in the (historical) story of genocide and migration, I am a part of
the cryptographic and cryptomatic building I belong to the cryptomat. Just like everything seems to
belong to a phantasmagoria
Unheimlich!
Put aside, cut out; scalpelled from an alienating world to migrate to another, not less alienating world
where the idiom of the cryptomat sets the rules. What remains are traces and marks of a quest. Marks
that can never be concealed but are silhouetted against the room that they both inscribe and encrypt.
The Unheimliche breaks through time and again unpredictable alienation.
What is important in this exodus, but also in the cryptomatic buildings and the text, are the
idiom and the idiomatic the idio-matos: the urge of one's own; the idio-mnos: the urge to move
independently (invariably ending up in the crypto-mat: driven by the cryptic). The silent witnesses, the
corpses and spirits, the stories in stories and lost monuments are kept alive by the idiomat and as a
result, their individuality, which can never be traced back, is killed. The cryptographic and cryptomatic
building continues to be haunted itself; it invents its own language but in parallel it equally joins in with
the corpses and carcasses, constructions and texts, stories and images that keep producing an (original) lack that can never be filled entirely. There remains a lack a lack that is necessary. After all, the
19

Jacques Derrida, Fors, p. xviii

Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx, p. 255
21
Ibid., p. 77
22
La Bte et le Souverain, pp. 122, 123
20

story always calls for an 'and this' or 'and that', an 'etcetera...'. For it may never end (being continuously
supplemented by one's own stories, drama and images). It brings the ghosts back to life in a different
story, a story in a crypt; the silent witness, in the dark and enclosed openness of its galleries, stairs,
colonnades, impenetrable walls, its incision in the room, its colonialism. The buildings and this text are
ob-scure but not the desire to explore the story in depth, dig it over, to search the bowels of the
corpses and carcasses for the meaning of the crossing, the journey and migration, and to save the
stories from oblivion, keep them away from the dusty archives. To save them from functionalism. And
yet stifle them within a framework, marked by desire, ghosts and obsession
endless dramatisation of ghosts.23

The crypt refers to nothing. It seems to be closed to everybody, finding its existence within this
apparent enclosure, much like a secret owes its existence to its slight revelation. Krupt krupts
kruptein: conceal, cover, hide, bury. The cryptographic buildings are unknowable (as this text should
be virtually unreadable). For the text gets into these cryptographic and cryptomatic buildings and, by
parasitising, destabilises the confidence in the possibility of making distinctions between standard
and non-standard, serious and non-serious, normal and abnormal, [] literal and figurative
[].24 And it thus blurs the distinction between parasitic and non-parasitic. Any text is a para-citing
and a para-siting; the same holds for the cryptographic building It feeds on the spirits (which keep
haunting and obsessing the building) of dramas handed down through time, like the text feeds on the
cryptographic buildings. Death may take us to the same place omnes eodem cogimur Or rather: to
a non-place.
And this non-place (the a-topos) is very important. The cryptographic buildings seem not to
relate to the traditions but rather to isolate themselves from historical events through the cryptofetishism and the narcissism of their fantasy and the cryptographic character that itself is impenetrable. Cryptophylia is nourished over and over again. The urge to decipher is strong but it is important to
realise that the deciphering can never be completed. The deciphering must not be completed. The
cryptographic must be preserved to allow the searching to go on forever The ghosts and zombies25
must be able to continue to wander.
Erratio
Within the (a)historic room, absence is emphasised by a single figure, a lost silhouette. It opens the
happening as an abyssal depth abme(r). The happening is a 'to happen', a 'to come', an -venir a
happening that is (continually) to come. It is always unexpected. The future can only manifest itself as
an absolute danger. It can only announce, present itself in the shape of a monstrosity.26 The cryptographic buildings are in the silence of a raid to come, within the monster of the past as well as within
the monster of the future. [Th]e future is necessarily monstrous: [...] if it was not monstrous, it would
not be a future, it would already be a foreseeable, predictable and programmable tomorrow. 27
Cryptography is frightening and tempting. I cannot get away from it abyss and aporia. Traces
of an absence: a chance encounter is always to happen

Ben Overlaet

23

Spectres de Marx, p. 75
Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc, ditions Galile, Paris, 1990, p. 73
25
Zombie: zumbi = fetish
26
Jacques Derrida, De la Grammatologie, Les ditions Minuit, Paris, 1967, p. 14
27
Jacques Derrida, Points the suspension, ditions Galile, Paris, 1992, p. 400
24