Coleridge wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner following the advice of Thomas Burnet that is quoted at the beginning of the poem: “… ne mens assuefacta hodiernae vitae se contrahat nimis, et tota subsidat in pusillas cogitationes” “… so that the mind, preoccupied with everyday matters, does not shrink excessively and subside entirely into petty thoughts.” Civilization had already culminated in that most fluid and narrow-minded century in which Coleridge had been born, and it was now beginning to feel the weight of its own clutter, of the mental dross forever babbling around it, whereas the Whole had been banished for its lack of taste and restraint. Like the Vedic gods in the beginning, Transcendental Subjects felt oppressed by the lack of space. Coleridge’s albatross persuaded them that, wherever the Whole became visible again, a rash impulse was driving them to kill it. But the albatross was still too much like a symbol on paper. It merely foretold the reemergence of the Whole. The Whole: the Whale! Then the white wings stretched out over the immense wrinkled brow of Moby Dick.

Once past the equator of history, what used to be silence needs to be said with violence, in every detail: indeed, this alone is to be said. Now it seems radiant and isolated. Just as Sade’s loquacious protocol takes the place of the hierogamic cloud, so the slaughter of the whale replaces the brahmin’s silence in front of the suffocated victim. Pornography has more to do with a theological task than with Eros: all that is hidden must be revealed, secret languages must once again be illegible—no longer because they are secret but because they are offered to the eyes of everyone, and are now almost a part of the landscape. The 120 Days of Sodom establishes a serial order, which is the closest approximation, in the combinatory sky of the concept, to the periodicity of the Zodiac. And the search for Moby Dick follows the cycle of the constellations until Ahab readies himself for the final act of his hunt, trampling angrily on the quadrant, the residual sign of dependence upon the sky. At the center of these two ungodly circles is the epiphany of killing. In Sade, the young girls tormented by licentious excesses are thrown by Minski, the Muscovite ogre, into a courtyard of wild animals, “where they are devoured in less than three minutes.”⁴¹⁹ And Juliette, who watches, assures us: “Je n’ai de ma vie perdu de foutre plus lubriquement”—“Never in my life have I had such a lubricious orgasm.”⁴²⁰ Melville goes further. While Sade makes only a brief mention of wounded flesh, before returning straightaway to the atrocious, long-winded conversation, further échauffée by the entertainment, Melville raises literature to the level of the slaughterhouse, taking it over a threshold never before crossed, writing down on the page what we always knew was going on, but off-stage and never put into words. “The ivory Pequod was turned into what seemed a shamble; every sailor a butcher.”⁴²¹ Literature had flourished out of sacrifice, but it had never described the act of butchery, always preferring to draw a labyrinthine garland around that void. With Melville, butchery indeed becomes the center of the book. The Taylorist factory, which Sade had earlier evoked in the ferocious pace of The 120 Days of Sodom, now reappears in the task of slaughtering the whale, described with eager attention like that of Marcel at the Guermantes ball, but here carried out in the austral light, amid the stench and filth of the enormous carcass. Now, between the indifferent sea and sky, in the interminable vastness of the spaces, butchery, which in the city is hidden behind concrete walls, once again becomes a delicate severing of the cosmic elements: even the Arché becomes palpable, when the wild Indian Tashtego risks dying “smothered in the very whitest and daintiest of fragrant spermaceti; coffined, hearsed, and tombed in the secret inner chamber and sanctum santorum of the whale.” An image of the sweetest death, the fall “into Plato’s honey head.”⁴²² And so, at the end of the dissection, when the usable material has been extracted from the slain animal and its beheaded body is returned to the waters, what we finally see is something inexhaustible, indelible, a “white phantom” that no human blade could diminish, nor even the beaks of birds and the teeth of sharks that rival man in the “horrible vulturism of earth.”⁴²³ The headless white carcass floats away. Soon we will meet it again under the name Moby Dick: “The vast tackles have now done their duty.⁴²⁴ The peeled white body of the beheaded whale flashes like a marble sepulcher; though changed in hue, it has not perceptibly lost anything in bulk. It is still colossal. Slowly it floats more and more away, the water around it torn and splashed by the insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with rapacious flights of screaming fowls, whose beaks are like so many insulting poniards in the whale. The vast white headless phantom floats further and further from the ship, and every rod that it so floats, what seem square roods of sharks and cubic roods of fowls augment the murderous din. Beneath the unclouded and mild azure sky, upon the fair face of the pleasant sea, wafted by the joyous breezes, that great mass of death floats on and on, till lost in infinite perspectives.”