01

Let me start by thanking Watanabe-san for the invitation—and Uno Kuniichi for the introduction: to Shy, to Watanabe-san (or Kimiko), to Ko Murobushi—and, actually, also to Butoh. But that’s a longer story.

It was a joy to receive Kimiko’s invitation to join you all in this symposium—originally planned as an in-person event (and even without masks!) as we used to do things in the old days. (Now, under the current circumstances, I am not even sure if join is really the right word.) When Kimiko contacted me I had just moved back to Tokyo and it sounded like a lovely opportunity to engage in this kind of intellectual conversation outside the space of the university—but incidentally also very close to it, as I happen to pass by Shy many times a week on the way to Waseda. But it was also not without some hesitation that I accepted to join this group of specialists and old friends of Ko. To my concern about not being able to contribute much to a conversation on Ko’s legacy, Watanabe-san responded that the point was not so much to speak about Ko, but from Ko—possibly an even more daunting task.

Whatever the preposition, I join you all here virtually as a newcomer, an outsider. An outsider to Ko’s work, to Butoh and to dance scholarship—although not entirely to dance itself, which has occupied a significant place in my life over the past twenty years (minus the last one and a half), but thus far always apart from or outside of any intellectual pursuits. And here we are already slowly approaching the question, since this relationship between dancing and thinking seems to occupy a central place in Ko’s reflection. But we will get there soon.

Nijinsky at Midnight. My initial response to this title was to bring the conversation closer to my own field, or at least to the context of my ongoing work on the intersections of aesthetics and economic theory. Hence the title I proposed for this presentation, “The economy at midnight.” Yet, somewhere along the way, I got derailed, seduced, bewitched perhaps, by this idea of midnight. Therefore, more than the economy at midnight, what I have to say here regards perhaps a certain economy of midnight, or a midnight economy, which informs—or haunts—cultural imagination across geographic and linguistic borders.

Starting from—or with—Ko, we are handed down, gifted a sequence of notes and diary entries, sparsely connected references to midnight in diverse guises and appearances. The notes have the tone of an expression of interest, of curiosity about, and as Ko puts it, of attachment to the idea of minuit, as it figures in the writings of Mallarmé, Nietzsche, and Artaud, among others: “Et puis, je suis attaché au Minuit de Mallarmé… Un attachement qui s’étend au Minuit de Nietzsche aussi.”[*1]

All this, continues Ko [I quote and translate]: “I do not think. Of my own will, I twist this thought (or twist thinking itself) and project myself in its outside.”[*2]

And the act of projecting oneself outside, which means also outside of the realm of thinking, emerges as a key aspect of the experience of midnight as described in these notes. “Entrer en contact nûment, c’est tout le problème du Minuit.”[*3] Midnight as a time of immediacy, a time of attraction, transgression, of “nude contact,” and, as such, a time of dance.

02

Mallarmé’s poetry occupies a pivotal position, at the core of this speculation around midnight. Not only for Ko, but also for Nijinsky himself, whose 1912 choreography Après-midi d’un Faune borrows its title from Mallarmé’s poem. And what do we learn from the poet about midnight? How does midnight figure, what kind of role is attributed to it in the economy of Mallarmé’s poetics?

In an early version of Mallarmé’s “Igitur or Elbehnon’s Folly” written around 1865, “midnight” makes a first appearance as a time of decision: not arbitrary, subjective decision, but of a decision by chance, by the throw of the dice: “the midnight when the dice must be thrown.”[*4] Indeed, this notion of chance and its ambiguous relation with prediction and fate informs and structures the story. That this idea of the throw of dice appears here, more than twenty years before the publication of the first version of Un Coup de Dés, that it figures here precisely in relation to midnight is not without significance to the context of Mallarmé’s work, and hints at the centrality of this idea of midnight in his poetry.

A few lines further, midnight appears again as the time in which Igitur “descends the stairs of the human spirit.” He “goes to the bottom of things.” And what he finds there? No sentiment or feeling, writes Mallármé, no spirit even, but solely “ashes, neutrality.”[*5] This movement towards the bottom of things seems indeed to structure and drive the whole story—towards the end, the tomb where Igitur goes to play against his mother’s will, amid the ashes, the ashes of the stars and those of his ancestors.

The ashes of midnight reappear in the “Sonnet en yx,” one of Mallarmé’s most debated poems. Between the phoenix and the cinerary amphora, midnight here is once again associated with uncertainty, anguish, but also with discovery, unveiling; more precisely, it is anguish itself that is described as a midnight—and simultaneously as a lamp bearer: “L’angoisse, ce minuit, lampadophore.”[*6]

Before Mallarmé, this illuminating, “lamp-bearing” aspect of midnight is to be found in Theophile Gauthier’s “Pensée de Minuit,” which depicts the retrospective gaze that illuminates the past, like a voyager who, upon reaching the top of a hill, throws a last glimpse upon the blue fields he left behind. And it resurfaces, in reverse, in Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil, in a poem entitled “L ‘Examen de Minuit,” which ends with a call to “turn off the lamp of consciousness.”[*7]

03

This liminal quality, of being a watershed moment between past and future, light and darkness, between consciousness and the lack thereof, is a crucial aspect of midnight. Midnight is the limit itself made time, where the end meets a new beginning and the familiar gives way to the unknown, unpredictable, and uncontrollable: the “throw of dice.” I suspect this is not unrelated to what Ko describes as midnight’s “unveiled potentiality.”

As such, midnight is also the time of mysterious appearances and apparitions. In this sense, midnight, 真夜中 is closely associated with the idea of the witching hours, the time of the night when supernatural events are most likely to happen, when ghosts, demons, and witches are most likely to appear.

In terms of its precise time frame, the witching hours do not necessarily coincide with 12 AM or the zero hour. Christians in the European Middle Ages tended to identify the witching hours with the period between 3:00 and 4:00 in the morning. The concern with so-called witchcraft was such that in the sixteenth century the Church went as far as to prohibit any sort of activities during that time of the night.

In the Japanese (and Chinese) tradition, 丑三つ時, the third hour of the ox, corresponding to the period between 2:00 and 2:30 AM, held a similar meaning in terms of its relationship with supernatural phenomena. So much that if you type 丑三つ時on a machine translator, it will often render it into English as “witching hour.”

Modern medicine explains the origins of these transcultural beliefs on the basis of the human body’s circadian rhythm. 3 AM corresponds to the time of our deepest sleep, with a peak of melatonin in the body. According to physiology, this is the point in which humans are most likely to experiences nightmares and other frightful experiences and sleep-related disturbances.

To quote my three-year old son, who likes to say it with a mixture of awe, excitement, and curiosity, midnight is “obake no jikan!!!”

Meanwhile, for most modern grownups, the witching hours have lost their supernatural aura. Yet, the term still survives in popular culture, often with the meaning of a time of bad luck or in reference to the hours of the night when babies cry with no apparent reason (although from experience that can be really any time…). In the world of financial economics, where superstitions and throws of dice are never too far, the “witching hours” denote a specific time of the day in which stocks undergo increased volatility.

But speaking of children’s stories and fairy tales, how can we talk about midnight without mentioning Cinderella? Cendrillon in the “canonic” version by Charles Perrault, Aschenputtel in the Brothers Grimm version: once again the ashes! Perhaps more than any other literary piece, the tale of Cinderella expresses the character of midnight as limit, a limit between magic, the supernatural world, and the natural, ordinary world, between a beautiful fantasy and the ugly, dirty reality, the limit between sparks and ashes. “How many instants can we discover,” asks Ko, “which emit sparks?” This, too, is “the problem of midnight.”

What is at stake in this limit, which cannot, should not be crossed, this forbidden frontier? What is the point of this prohibition and taboo, which, at the same time, must absolutely be broken so that the story can unfold? Cinderella must disobey the fairy’s advice and overstay at the ball, so she can leave behind her shoe, like Igitur playing around the tombstones against his mother’s will so that he can get “to the bottom of things,” the ultimate ground.

Indeed, this crossing the limit and breaking the rules is itself a constitutive element of play, its inherently transgressive aspect. Even if one of the basic characteristics of play, according to Johan Huizinga, consists in its bounded, delimited nature, the possibility of crossing the border can never be too far of the act of playing. Any play, in its most radical sense, is fundamentally a play with or about the limit, a playful overcoming of the border; to play is always, as the saying goes, to “play with fire.”

Some associate the meaning of midnight in Cinderella’s story with a certain medieval tradition of masked balls, which mandated that, after dancing and enjoying themselves in the company of mysterious partners, at midnight everyone would remove their masks and reveal their true identities. One might wonder whether this moment of unmasking and revelation, this crossing over the limit between fantasy and reality would be the high point of the party, the climax of the dance, or rather as its closure.

Soren Kierkegaard, for whom the latter was definitely the case, dedicated a few lines of his first book, Either/Or, to this figure of midnight [I quote]: “Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when everyone has to throw off their masks? Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this? Or are you not terrified by it?”[*8] Here again, midnight appears as the limit: a limit between the aesthetic and ethical spheres of life, which Kierkegaard attempted to neatly distinguish from each other. Midnight, in this case, as the moment of throwing off the masks, represents the end of the party, of the time of sheer enjoyment, and the beginning of ethical life: to put it in Bataille’s terms, the return to the “restricted economy”[*9] of everyday life. Perhaps Cinderella, too, would have wished she could slip away before midnight. Or not.

After all, is this alternative between slipping away or returning to the enclosed realm of everyday life, between escapism and the categorical imperative, even necessary? Returning to Ko, rather than slipping away, what would it really mean to project myself in the outside?

Perhaps, Ko’s attempt to think midnight, or as he puts it, to “twist the thought” around midnight, to think at the limits of thought and dance at the limits of dance, is precisely a way to reframe this alternative, to rethink the outside in terms of what he calls the “zero hour of the body, the midnight body, and the zero hour of thought.”[*10] Possibly the same impetus animates Bataille’s speculations on the “accursed share” of economic transactions, beyond the restricted paradigm of scarcity and productive consumption, an economy founded on unproductive expenditure, luxury, transgression.

Not by chance, when attempting to explain what he means by the “outside,” underscored in the original text, Ko directs us to a quote by Michel Foucault, from “La pensée du dehors”: [Foucault writes] “Attraction is no doubt for Blanchot what desire is for Sade, force is for Nietzsche, the materiality of thought for Antonin Artaud, and transgression for Georges Bataille: the pure, most naked, experience of the outside.”[*11]

Much could be said about this chain of correspondences which express Foucault’s attempt to translate and find general equivalences between different systems of thought around what emerges as a universal experience of the outside. For now, following Foucault’s lead, I will just like to close with the hypothesis that a similar experience of the outside is among other things, what constitutes the experience of dance.