The Thing Beneath the Name

The same wine is not drunk in the same way whether it is announced or poured in silence. The name that precedes it—a grand cru, a vintage—casts a kind of halo over the glass, and it is this halo we taste first, before the wine itself. Between the thing and what is said of it lies an entire interval where esteem takes root. An ancient mind made it a discipline to traverse this space in reverse, to descend from the name back to the thing.

Marcus Aurelius, in his notebooks, trains himself to name things by their matter alone. “Falernian is grape juice; this purple robe is the wool of a sheep, dyed with the blood-red hue of a shellfish.” The most celebrated of wines, the fabric of rank: he reduces them to what they are made of, and the prestige vanishes. Not out of contempt for things—but to see them without the veil language stretches before them.

For all things that seem worthy of our attention and trust, we must strip them bare and consider them in their simplicity and weakness, removing the vain prestige with which speech surrounds them. This proud display is a dangerous impostor; and the trap is all the more treacherous as the objects appear more deserving of our pursuit.

The operation is precise. The name does not lie outright: it adds. To the wool and the dye, it adds rank; to the fermented juice, reputation. This surplus is nowhere in the thing—nature knows neither grand cru nor imperial purple, only grapes and a shellfish; it comes from without, from “all that is said of it.” Thus prestige is, in the strictest sense, an impostor: it passes itself off as a quality of the object when it is but a deposit of words. The gaze that undoes it is the office of the ruling principle, the hēgemonikon, whose task is to judge representations rather than submit to them. To return the thing to its simplicity is not to debase it: it is to cease being deceived.

What does it mean to see the thing as it is?

For Marcus Aurelius, it means describing it by its matter alone, without the prestige added by what is said of it: the grand cru reverts to grape juice, the purple to dyed wool. The name gilds the object; the naked description restores it to its simplicity—and the gaze ceases to be dazzled by a brilliance that was never in the thing.

Prestige also settles upon persons, where it is no longer called splendor but reputation. Another gaze, born in a very different world, has been trained against this deposit. In the deserts of Egypt, a young monk comes to ask an elder how to live in solitude. The answer unfolds as a performance: “Go to a tomb and hurl many insults at the dead you find there”; then, the next day, “offer them blessings and praises.” The dead, of course, do not respond—neither to abuse nor to flattery. “Take their example,” the elder says:

consider that they were untouched by your insults or your praises, and strive to die as they have, so that no matter how ill you are treated, you may never grow angry, and no matter how much esteem or praise you receive, you may never swell with vanity; this is how you will sanctify yourself.

The monk does not seek to win esteem or flee insult: he practices becoming, before the one as before the other, as unmoved as the dead. For praise and insult say nothing of what he is; they say only what is said of him. Vainglory—the Greek tradition calls it kenodoxia, “empty glory”—is precisely the hunger for this deposit of words upon oneself: feeding on the gaze of others as if the name it bestows were the reality it covers.

Yet the two gazes do not make the same gesture. Marcus Aurelius strips the coveted object: he returns the wine, the purple, to their matter, and it is the thing, named truly, that loses its deceptive luster. The desert strips the praised subject: it makes the man deaf to what is said of him, and it is the self that ceases to swell with a name. One undoes the prestige of things to no longer desire them falsely; the other undoes the prestige of the self to no longer gaze into it. And the ground differs beneath them: for the Roman, it is nature, which knows no ranks and recognizes only grapes and wool; for the monk, it is another gaze, that of God, before whom the voice of men weighs nothing. To reduce to matter is not to surrender to God: they are not two names for the same asceticism.

And yet, beneath the divided gesture, the same intuition holds. On both sides, what is said of a thing is not the thing; the name is a surplus from without—a prestige the wine does not bear, a glory the dead do not feel. To dwell in this surplus is to covet a brilliance that is nowhere, or to swell with a word the first silence belies. To free oneself from it is, in both cases, to return to what is when what is said of it has been removed: the grape beneath the grand cru, the man beneath his reputation. Two hands lifting the same gilding—one from the things we pursue, the other from the face we show.

There remains, before what attracts or wounds us, a simple test: remove the name, and see what still stands. What vanishes with the word was only the word; what remains, when it has fallen silent, was the thing.

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