THE FOUR LUXEMBOURGS
                        CIVITAS PEREGRINA
 
                  From the diary of a traveler
                    Pseudo-Vladislav Todorov
 
 
                        VLADISLAV TODOROV
                 Department of Slavic Languages
                   University of Pennsylvania
                     vtodorov@sas.upenn.edu
 
             _Postmodern Culture_ v.3 n.2 (January, 1993)
 
        Copyright (c) 1993 by Vladislav Todorov, all rights
        reserved.  This text may be freely shared among
        individuals, but it may not be republished in any
        medium without express written consent from the author
        and advance notification of the editors.
 
 
 
The explorers of Luxembourg usually designate its four stages
according to the four possible etymologies of its name.  The
first three: the Luminous one, the Dissipated one, and the
Twisted one stem from the Latin: Lux, Luxuriosus, Luxus.  The
fourth is usually derived from the name of the legendary
revolutionary Rosa Luxembourg.  The present exploration shall
adhere to these interpretations of the name thus established
through tradition.
 
I.  The Luminous City of Luxembourg
 
Some travelers also refer to it as the City of the Sun.  This
city encloses an enormous hill.  Seen from afar its architecture
resembles a gigantic mesh that has caught and subdued the
upheaval of the mighty masses of earth which had inflated with
gas and lava the earth's crust and left behind the mountains as
monuments of their provocative erections towards the sun.  The
city is segmented into seven circles or rings that grip the hill
in concentric circles towards the top.  It resembles a formidable
crinoline that repulses any rascal who might crawl up the hill.
A grandiose temple is erected at that very top.  To be precise
the temple itself is the top.  It springs up into an
extraordinarily large dome on the top of which rises another
smaller dome in whose center gapes an orifice that looks straight
on the middle of the temple where the altar is placed.  The dome
is painted inside with the map of the celestial constellations,
as if the sky repeats itself only lower down and smaller than
itself.  It has stooped down to the temple like a mystical
constellation, a cipher that locks the meaning of the earthly
events.  The orifice is the threshold at which the maximal cosmic
space is turned over into the minimal symbolic space of the
temple.  It is precisely through this orifice that the cosmos
discharges its own superfluity for it to descend as the sacred
order of the temple.  Thus, the temple resembles a Cyclops's
skull turned towards the sun which has scorched his eye in order
to illumine him from inside.  In this sense the illuminated-the
internally luminous city is blind.  Thus built the temple
manifests through its figure the original sin of man towards the
sun.  Because before he stood on two legs, before his forehead
bulged out like a church dome, before his eyes turned radiant,
before he became sunlike man was turning up towards the sky and
its luminaries, his scarlet and cracked like an enormous sore
ape's ass.  It is precisely this original anal openness of man
towards the sun that some travelers saw manifested in the
architecture of the shrines.  The radiant--the seeing eye, the
organ of light that bathes in rays will always drag after itself
like a tin can the embarrassment of being once an anus.  Thus the
central aperture of the temple, respectively the city expresses
the ambivalent openness of the citizens towards their ruler--the
Sun.  Anyone entering the temple seems to cave in an ass through
whose anus the Sun down-casts its stern and all-pervasive gaze.
It is the source of the total illumination of the city.  In
general, the whole city is arranged in such a way that it
culminates spatially in the aperture.  Thus the whole city bathes
its guilt in light.  That is an all-encompassing luminescence in
which you cannot help but wallow.  This is the city of the total
vertical transparency emanated by its center (the aperture).  An
all-pervasive solar gaze descends downwards as a guillotine.  Man
who stares against this gaze glows completely illumined from
inside.  Man stops casting a shadow.  The city corpus is in fact
the terrestrial figure of this super-terrestrial gaze.  The very
body and structure of the city are the terrestrial incorporation
of the downward gaze of a super-power.  The city itself
represents the total exteriorization and exhibition of life
before this gaze.  The descending transparency of the world
manifests the epiphany of the Eye of the supreme supervisor--the
Sun.  Any kind of opaque negativity is usurped by the center.  It
is located there beyond and above the aperture of the city.
Inside and below the aperture all is positive-transparent.  The
people are neighbors for they are totally illumined and
all-pervaded by the self-same luminous substance.  They bathe in
this totality and thus they prosper.  Completely transparent and
weightless they seem to lack bodies with tunnels flatulent with
heavy slops.  This is the city of the completely erect and
utterly projected outwards and upwards man who baths in the
descending divine gaze.  The emblem of the city is the Obelisk.
Its erecting corpus is the spiritual gaze enacted in the matter
of the world.  The Eye-Sun as phallus.
 
II.  The Dissipated City of Luxembourg
 
This city rises not completely built and not completely
demolished.  A grand bust happened and the crowd bustles around
the city somewhat rowdy, somewhat corrupted, somewhat raped,
somewhat exhausted, promiscuously fornicating, having once
transformed plummets into maces.  The demolished city gapes like
a cold volcano resounding from time to time with damnation.  Once
the people had grown defiant and started erecting a Tower City in
order to reach God.  They tried to look upwards and see God.
They wanted to erect the vertical (upwards) transparency of the
world.  It was an attempt to establish surveillance over God.  To
catch God on the spot.  So God got furious and segmented, that
is, demolished their language.  He dismantled it into a multitude
of mutually impenetrable languages.  A total incongruity set in
that demolished the corpus of the city.  The demolished Tower
City stands for the demolished human look advancing upwards to
make transparent the world space.  The fragmentation of language
manifested an opaqueness that descended from above.  This figured
the absence of God, i.e.  the absence of a center in the space of
the City that could fully absorb all negativity in itself and
thus make the people neighbors.  God abandoned the Babel.  The
God-forsaken city developed an exclusively horizontal vision and
strategy.  The neighbor turned stranger.  The space between
people hollowed out.  When God desolated the city He, so to speak
distributed the negativity among the citizens.  He turned
everyone into something partial, strange, alien, something
"other" than everyone else, into a capsulated particularity.  The
only possible interest became the horizontal interest between
the incompatible particularities.  Everyone lusted after power,
strove to achieve self-made and self-fashioned Deiformity.  The
space of the city became a space of internecine strife.  Thus the
negativity discarded by God burst forth and desolation occurred.
 
Each desired the other in order to possess and abuse him, to
subdue and mastered him.  The space between thee and me was
reduced.  The city life demonstrates the desolation as a common
condition.  The corpus of the city that had started threatening
erection towards God was castrated and went limp as a gut--the
cesspit.  God forced man to bend over.  He twisted his bold gaze
downwards.  Thus God reinstated man's guilty position.  Bent over
in guilt man met the eyes of his fellowman and desired him.  He
desired his neighbor.  The Cross became the emblem of the
castrated city corpus.  The broken up obelisk.
 
III.  The Twisted City of Luxembourg
 
Before they lived in their city, the people were engulfed in the
intestines of a Bull.  The Bull was God.  And then one day the
Hero appeared and led them out by killing the Bull-God.  Before
this happened, the world was split in two chambers, into
physical and allegorical space.  The allegorical space was the
Labyrinth, whose tunnels always led towards the mouth of the
Bull.  The physical space was the Bull himself.  The Labyrinth
allegorically represented and exhibited the Bull's intestines.
The mouth of the Bull was the aperture which connected the two
spaces.  Exactly there "the one" began and ended in "the other".
 
The mouth was the threshold.  The world was set up as a
two-chambered device engulfing the people from one space into the
other.  The allegorical space (the Labyrinth) continually
collapsed into the physical one (the Bull's mouth).  This way the
procession of Death was performed.  The physical space was God
himself.  The allegorical one--His phony presence outside His own
natura.  In order to succeed the Hero had to walk back this same
lethal path, to do an act opposite to the engulfing.  It was
precisely for this reason that the Hero did not appear among the
living ones in the allegorical space in front of the mouth of
the Bull-God.  He appeared in the rear of the physical space or
at the aperture opposite to the mouth--the anus of the Bull-God.
 
From there he entered the physique of the intestines and led out
the people engulfed there back to the mouth.  He led them out.
Thus the Hero liquidated the Bull-God.  He abolished the physique
of the God and as a consequence of this he found himself together
with his people in the allegorical space of the Labyrinth which
survived as the One space.  This turned out to be the virtual
City of their liberation.  The liquidation of God reduced the
world to the omnipresence of the allegorical space.  Nothing
could exist beyond it.  The tunnels of the figurative reality did
not lead to any apertures.  They were blind.  The liquidation of
God came as a radical denaturalization of existence.  The
Labyrinth is by itself a twisted construction.  The corpus of the
Labyrinth City does not resemble any bold exalted erection.  It
can never be straight, nor can it be broken.  Its natural joints
are twisted so that it cannot stand up.  It drags its spreading
horizontality.  The transparency is reduced to the direct
visibility in the convolutions of the tunnel.  The global
allegorical space could be recognized in the fact that the
Labyrinth is exactly the same in all its cells and can be
surveyed without moving about.  It is a self-duplicating
sameness.  The citizens live in one and the same allegory without
being able to see each other because of the vertebral-like
structure of the Labyrinth.  The physical space was absolutely
shredded up and so busted.  The allegorical one opened unlimited
and thus became omnipresent.  There was no power able to justify
this endless allegorical order.  The Labyrinth has no center.
Every place in it is absolutely identical to every other place.
In each cell of it emerge exactly the same things as in every
other one.  There are no heroically privileged places.  When the
Hero led his people into the Labyrinth he himself disappeared.
He took a place in it and became like everyone else.  He acquired
the anonymous existence of everyone else.  The Labyrinth as an
emblem signifies nothing but the torso of the world after God was
wrested off it.  Nothing is present to testify to the sense of
life, nothing exists to justify the order of the world but it is
total.  The Absurd.  It is conspicuous the final de-gradation of
the phallus into a colon.  The erection is supplanted by
constipation.
 
IV.  Luxembourg--the Phantom City
 
Comrade Luxembourg--this is a woman
 
                            --Platonov
 
Most travelers describe it like this: a gigantic corpus, slowly
augmenting, because it inflates and at the same time blackens.
Having reached the point of bursting, exactly when its crust is
ripping frightfully, threatening to let out slops and gases, the
corpus starts slowly to soften and lighten up until it turns into
a pulp.  It is a necrotized womb stuffed up by dead substances.
A womb turning into a vampire.  This is the city of the most
incredible metamorphose, mutation and vicissitude.
 
This city is organized according to the grammar of an instructive
language.  In contrast to the Tower City, here the language has
not been demolished, but nevertheless, no tower has been built,
no "Common Home".  This language propagates and agitates people
to perform the sublime act--to claw the earth in exaltation.  It
was necessary to dig harder and more cunningly in order to
transform the earth interior into a "Common Home".  The main
effort of the subjects was to dig out a colossal pit, a gigantic
aperture--sanctuary, an organized subterranean eternal sun-trap.
 
The total language projected reality of the Phantom City.  In the
space of the City reverberated thunder like proclamations.  The
people became heralds of stunning proclamations, of verbal
maltreatment because the proclaimed reality was a bruised piece.
 
Reality dispersed in panic chased away by its own proclamations.
 
Language was the virtual reality and all things real peek out of
it as phantoms.  The Last Judgment was proclaimed real in order
for a phantom to be punished--the bourgeoisie.  Communism was
proclaimed real in order for the other phantom to be immortalized
--the proletariat.  It was realized by being proclaimed.  Do you
recollect the story of the madman, who believed he was a hen, so
They fed him with raw corn.  He did not stop being insane but he
stopped pretending to be a hen, so that he wouldn't have to gnash
his teeth on the raw corncobs.  Someone proclaimed himself God
and proceeded to feed on soil.  The sun was proclaimed to be the
Universal proletarian.  Language.  In the language there was no
center nor horizontal or vertical coordination.  It performed
twisted parables according to the rules of its grammar.  Language
was a radioactive instrument that caused monstrous mutations in
the city.  Uncanny, melancholic longing engulfs the souls of the
citizens.  A longing for reality.  And only through longing could
reality open itself in the minds.  Through this longing did the
unnamed reality rush into the phantom figure of the city.  The
longing became the aperture through which reality made known its
own presence.  One thing sustained the population and the
militants of the City--the fact, that there had to be a super
point of view, one might say a central herald of the
proclamations, for whom, everything that happened was observable,
manageable, and goal-oriented.  There existed the certainty that
the life of the City is performed before the gaze of one
centralized Eye-Mind.  A certainty, that one surveyor observes
and supervises the correct going on of the grandiose ceremony
called Proletarian Revolution.  Otherwise to every glance from
inside life passed as an arbitrary dispersal or merging of
phantoms and names.  The despair came with the suspicion that
this super Eye-Mind is also a phantom.  A high density phantom
arbitrary authorized with a centralized ontological presence.
The certainty that the transparency of the City descended from
above was a sham.  This "see-through-all" Eye was also
proclaimed.  Through renaming its realities the Phantom City
assembled and disassembled itself like an animated toy puzzle
before the amazed eyes of the greatest Dadaist of the world
(proclaimed to be such in Zurich).  Like a real hero this Dadaist
succeeded in getting to the bottle and letting loose the genie of
the most imbecile Hocus-pocus.  And with an exalted babble it
penetrated the City and proclaimed it.  Another Dadaist of the
same rank constructed a machine for executions with quite
artistic and precise functions.  Then he himself jumped into it
and thus became the requisite matter for its function in order to
demonstrate its exquisite perfection.  At night, tired by the
excessive work of the Hocus-pocuses, the citizens of the Phantom
City sulked and listened to the lamp fuse sucking in the
kerosene.  And in order to stifle the rumbling of their empty
stomachs, they nibbled the wall plaster.  This city had no
special emblem.  It was emblem itself.  For there existed no sign
 
that could stand for it.  Everything got proclaimed--interned
into the Cit.
 
                      *         *        *
 
All travelers observe a strict tendency towards de-naturalization
of Luxembourg during its four stages:--passing from a vertical
into a horizontal symbolism and its vanishing into crooked
parabolas;--an ever more irreversible dislocation of the natural
joints and apertures of the city corpus;--presence, then absence,
then abolishing and at the end turning into a vampire of the city
center;--from emblem representing the essence of the city--to a
city emblem of itself.
 
Usually the travelers evade the teleological interpretations,
because they lead life unto a certain destination and in this
sense to certain utopia or anti-utopia.  Others speak of the
cyclic recurrence of the herein described stages.  Still others
to whom we pertain are convinced of the principle of the back and
forth momentum.  According to this principle the City of the Sun
and the Phantom City are respectively the upper and lower
dead-point between which historically acts the piston of
Luxembourg.
 
IMPLETA CERNE!  IMPLENDA COLLIGE!