BORN AGAIN

Black marks cast onto a white surface, the former better known as the letters of the
alphabet, the latter as the pages of a book. Everything piled into two stacks of paper, one
to the left the other to the right, the margin between the pages waiting for Christian
Abrahamsson’s notes about what it means to be human. In addition, each sheet has a
recto and a verso, two mirrors with drastically different tains, the verso capturing the
meaning of moving pictures, the recto formalizing Euclid’s geometry and Aristotle’s laws
of thought.
All told a spatial exercise in the epistemology of the extreme, typography
itself a manner of showing the way, like other maps indicative and imperative in the
same breath, the location of the hidden treasure indicated by the / in the book’s title –
Topoi/graphein. In essence a merger of the cartographer’s map and compass, the
elaborate typography a snapshot view of transition.
Ideally the facing pages should be read in one glance, admittedly easier said
than done. At any rate the topoi on the left are extracted from the three movies of Code
Inconnu, Lord of the Flies and Apocalypse Now, excellent harbingers of what is at stake:
the first a collage of fragmentary points, every door securely locked; the second a
condensed story of social organization, classical power struggles represented by a
kaleidoscope of criss-crossing lines; the third a set of disintegrating projection planes,
everything solid melting into air, everything holy profaned. On the opposite pages is the
graphein, the author’s interpretation of the three movies, a creative play between the
major modes of human communication, the pictures of show and tell to the left, the
stories of analysis and understanding to the right.
Nothing new under the Greek sun, tragedy remaining the most insightful
conception of thought-in-action and action-in-thought. The original setting is crucial, for
Socrates — a Janus-like figure who with one eye was scanning the old, with another
imagining the future — lived his long life in the abyss between Homer’s mythos and
Plato’s logos. What the dramatist then discovered was that the crucial tension of his time
lay in the attitudes to predicament, the archaic poets taking a person’s social standing to
reflect his or her ability to handle contradiction, the new philosophers defining paradox
as the greatest threat to human reason, an enemy to be fought by all means. As
Wittgenstein later put it, “without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and
indistinct: its task to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries” (Tractatus
Logico-Philosophcus, 4.112).
Well decreed albeit to the price of short-circuiting important aspects of
what it is to be human. For even though the achievements of formal logic cannot be
denied— no DNA, no spaceship, no computer, no bomb, without it — every
mathematician knows that struggling with paradoxes is the only way to learn. In
addition, the political convulsions of the last century are deeply rooted in predicament,
retired decision makers frequently confessing that whatever they did they did
something wrong. An orgy in promises that could not be kept and therefore should
never have been given, the election results bought with junk bonds issued in the voters’
own name. The nature of social democracy in a nutshell, the malfunctioning of the
Swedish model the author’s taboo-laden subtext.
To be more precise: whereas the problem for the tragedians was the
drawing of the boundary between the humans and the gods, the problem for the post-
democrats is that even though all animals are equal, some pigs are more equal than the
others, a degenerating situation that the Founding Fathers did their utmost to avoid.
Hence the Declaration of Independence with its triangulation of checks and balances, a
genial document sometimes misused, sometimes ignored. Had the boys been equally
smart, Simon might have survived the ordeals of being sacrificed. Instead was the
collective verdict: “You’re not wanted. Understand? — Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill
the blood!”
In my reading it is this tension between the human contradictions of
predicament and paradox, on the one hand, and the clarity of logic and geometry, on the
other, that lies at the heart of Christian’s study. Nowhere is this more evident than in the
twisted universe of Apocalypse Now, the once brilliant colonel declared insane because
he can no longer be fitted into the internet of conventional categories, his behavior
beyond any conceivable rules of ethics, the taken-for-granted collapsing in on itself. By
every definition a creature of the in-between, like the tautological God equal only to
himself, by definition true but not informative. Pure difference, no identity, no excluded
middle either. As in the Realm of Psychosis, the ability to make distinctions all but
erased.
 The onslaught of madness thus diagnosed, the treatment offers itself: a dose
of deified reification, in the present book exemplified by the little Arab spitting Anne in
the face, by the imagined Beast on the deserted island, by the real Monster in the tiger
cage. In each and every case an embodiment of the evasive in-between, yet another
instance of human action understood as a game of ontological transformations. Once
that trick has been successfully performed, the chosen scapegoat is ready to be
sacrificed, the sense of social cohesion automatically reestablished; rites of purification
when they work, the horror vacui of Kierkegaard’s Abgrund successfully colonized. No
wonder therefore that Percival Wennys Madison sought in his head for an incantation
that had faded away: “I am, I am —.” No wonder either that “The horror …. the horror,”
were Kurtz’s last words.
Mission completed, the mappa mundi of points, lines and planes recreated.
Sigmund Freud looking into himself, Captain Willard a serious case of Post Traumatic
Stress Disorder. Will he ever deliver the letter the colonel wrote to his son?

*
A Reader’s Guide to a rich and demanding book. But why should those particular
mappings be trusted? Not so clear, for whereas Christian was searching for words rich
enough to capture his abstract ideas, I have taken the black marks literally, held them in
my hands, caressed them, squeezed them and waited for them to come. In both cases
revelations that none of us knew were there, his approach more akin to Saussure’s
semiotics, mine to Lacan’s psychoanalysis.
A futile exercise, of course, for it is built into the sign itself that no
translation can ever be perfect. The classic definition nevertheless holds: to state a
scientific truth (by extension to publish an academic thesis) is to claim that something is
something else and be believed when you do so, the mixed-up pronouns often more
confusing than revealing. Who is he, the original writer? Who am I, the interpreter? Who
are you, the imagined audience?
But none of this explains why I so happily accepted the invitation to
participate. The impetus came instead from my mother, a midwife who for her entire
career was stationed in a remote area of rural Sweden, an ideal position for witnessing
how generations come and go. Every home had she visited, every cottage and every
mansion, rich and poor, sick and healthy, wise and stupid. Everyone she knew, just as
everyone knew her, for how could anyone forget the pains and pleasures of giving birth.
And that is why I am so intrigued by the affinities between my mother’s calling and my
own, nothing like the euphoria of holding the new-born in your hands; for her the
softness of a baby’s skin, for me the smell of a freshly bound thesis. Tears in our eyes.
With Christian the excitement came in the spring of 2008, more exactly on
the Friday of May 16, the day when he successfully defended his doctoral dissertation,
the topic too demanding to be mastered in a foreign tongue. But such is life that practice
leads to insight, this English reformulation of the Swedish original an excellent example.
For him an offspring born again, for me the life-threatening redantio placentae finally
expulsed. Quite a feat — and quite a revenge —most dissertations obsolete before they
are submitted.
Miraculous event this festive book release, the text more urgent today than
a decade ago. Not, however, because the analytic framework (the graphein) has been
rewritten, but because the world itself (the topoi) has changed, the empirical data finally
catching up with the theoretical interpretations. Five examples from the renovated
animal farm: a/ the terrorist horrors (including the populist reactions) unthinkable
without the in-between, the suicide bomber its objective correlative, the invisibility of
the / forged into a throat-slashing knife; b/ elected representatives (including
Presidents Putin, Zuma, Duterte and Trump) predictably unpredictable, each and every
almighty rehearsing the script that “I myself will make all my goodness pass before you,
and will proclaim the name of the LORD before you; and I will be gracious to whom I will
be gracious, and I will show compassion to whom I will show compassion. But you
cannot see my face, for no man can see me and live” (Exodus 33:19-20); c/ the atrocities
of Rwanda, Srebrenica and Aleppo inseparably tied to the socially taken-for-granted,
individual acts collectively blessed by the ruling ruler and the policing police; d/ the
uncertainties of the precariat, a political bomb potentially more explosive than the
alienations of Marx’s working class, the terms “truth” and “trust” etymologically closely
related, Janus the ultimate guarantor; e/ the twittering media, in the same utterance the
message and the messenger, fix-points, lines and projection screens thoroughly
intertwined. Google Galore, a Hackers’ Paradise, chaos a mouse-click away; f/ the
dialectics of certainty and ambiguity out of bounds, the excluded middle the power
holder’s fix-point par excellence.
 *
Therefore, take your time and trust my judgment. For even though every author is
unique, some authors are more unique than the others. And for that reason there is
much to ponder and much to learn, not least about Christian’s subsequent excursions
into the spatial roots of Nazi policies1 and the topology of cartographic reason, 2 the
intricate relations between distance and human interaction well captured by the holes
of Henry Moore’s sculptures.
Gunnar Olsson

1”On the Genealogy of Lebensraum,” Geographica Helvetica, Vol. 1, 2013, pp. 1-8.
2“Guest Editorial: Special issue on Mathematics and Space,” Environment and Planning
D: Society and Space, Vol. 30, 2012, pp. 315-381.