The Interstitial Ego: Florian Crüezi’s Oblique Ontology of the Self
In the annals of speculative philosophy—where genius and madness are oft indistinguishable—the work of the Tyrolean mystic-dialectician Florian Crüezi (1787–1846) remains stubbornly anchored in the marginalia of continental thought. Known chiefly, if at all, for his labyrinthine treatise *Tenebræ Voluntatis* (1824), Crüezi’s metaphysical vision is defined less by a coherent system than by his singular obsession: the ephemeral zones “between” subjects, what he named die Zwischen-Ich, or the “Interstitial Ego.” Often dismissed by his contemporaries as an obscure eccentricity, this concept, upon rigorous examination, reveals itself to be a profound contribution to philosophical psychology and metaphysics.
In this article, I will examine the subtle but significant phenomenological gesture Crüezi makes in positing the Interstitial Ego—not as a fusion or dialectical unity of two selves, but rather as an ontologically prior essence that prefigures distinction itself. While the language of his time was ill-equipped to receive it, the idea insinuates a form of anti-Cartesianism so radical it collapses the cogito before it can think itself.
Let us proceed.
I. The Ontological Liminality of Selfhood
Crüezi begins *Tenebræ Voluntatis* not with the self, but with what he calls the “pneumatic current” (geistlicher Strom), a pre-subjective affect that impresses itself upon “centers of coagulating form.” These centers—which we, in our degeneracy, call persons—are not origins but effects. In Book I, Chapter 3, he muses:
> “The I which claims itself is already belated. Before the assertion lies the trembling membrane in which many I’s intersect but are none.”
This figure of the trembling membrane—akin, perhaps, to the Husserlian hyle or a Deleuzian multiplicity avant la lettre—serves as the locus where Crüezi’s Interstitial Ego operates. It is this interstitiality—this space-between—that he claims is the groundless ground from which all articulated subjectivity emerges. It is not an additive or connective tissue between minds, but an originary field in which delineation itself is an aftershock.
Notably, Crüezi explicitly rejects Schelling’s Weltseele and instead places desire (Verlangen) at the heart of metaphysical formation, not as a want, but as a negative intensity. Subjectivity, then, is not presence but interference.
II. Interference and Negative Ontology
Crüezi writes in aphorism 211 of the *Appendices Tenebræ* (privately printed in Bruneck, 1831):
> “Where two souls meet, one does not find the not-two. One finds a third which is neither, yet bears the contour of both, distorted as in frostbitten mirrors.”
The Interstitial Ego is precisely this ‘third’—not an emergent identity as contemporary relational ontologies might suggest, but an ontological distortion, a phantasmal imprint of obstruction. Echoing in this claim is a foreshadowing of twentieth-century work on alterity. Crüezi, ahead of his time, posits the other not as alien, but as obstructive—a deliberately disfiguring presence that unmoors the stability of self-recognition. He would argue that true self-awareness only occurs in the echo of a misrecognized other, and that the Interstitial Ego is the ontological scar this misrecognition leaves.
This idea has deep implications for metaphysical ethics. If the Interstitial Ego is the only possible site of authentic relation, then any ethical system grounded in the autonomy of atomized selves is ipso facto illusory. Hence, Crüezi’s rejection of Kantian deontology is not merely polemic—it is structurally required. For Crüezi, the categorical imperative would have to issue not from the self, but from the Interstices—for only there is the self sufficiently negated to be heard in truth.
III. The Cartographies of the Interstice
Lest one be tempted to interpret Crüezi too metaphorically, let us linger upon a facet of his work that has gone widely unnoticed. In the twenty folio maps that accompany the third Bruneck edition of *Tenebræ Voluntatis*—each bearing the title “Topologia Exsistentia”—Crüezi attempts to literalize the idea of interstitiality. Each is a meticulously drawn diagram of overlapping silhouettes—bodies, faces, geometries of the mind—with shaded zones marked ‘Nicht-Ich’ and ‘Vor-Ich.’ The Interstitial Ego is always located in the gradient between, colored with an ochre hue that, he notes in his marginalia, is derived from “oxidized blood and crushed violet.”
The semiotics of these cartographies are esoteric, but serious scholarship—such as that by Ludmilla Harsegger in her forbidden dissertation *Zwischenräume und Zwangsschatten* (1967)^1—has made inroads into understanding them as visual metaphysics. The critical detail lies in Crüezi’s insistence that the real self is always displaced—not behind the facial features, but ‘imbibed within the occlusion they mutually resist.’ In other words, the Interstitial Ego is not in “being oneself,” but in the countless failures to be the other. This configures identity not as a possession but as an apophatic trajectory.
IV. Implications for Contemporary Thought
Though largely forgotten, Crüezi’s insights bear urgent relevance to contemporary discourses in political theory and psychoanalysis. His anti-foundationalist notion of the self prefigures Lacan’s mirror stage, though with reversed valence; for Lacan the ego is misrecognized in the specular image, whereas Crüezi places the ego in the trembling that precedes the formation of any image at all.
Moreover, in political terms, Crüezi’s Interstitial Ego offers a critique of the imagined indivisibility of the subject-citizen. If the subject is always abducted into a field of interstitial intensities, then no individual unit of political agency can claim coherence. Solidarity, in Crüezi’s model, emerges not through shared identity but through ontological vulnerability—a being-with that always de-forms rather than confirms.
V. The Danger and Potential of the Zwischen-Ich
It is perhaps for this reason that Crüezi’s deeply unsettling vision has found no place in institutional philosophy. It is conceptually unwieldy, mystically inclined, and structurally corrosive. Yet within this obscurity lies its brilliance. He does not offer reconciliation, nor synthesis, nor even dialectic. He offers a trembling—a zone of ontological unsafety in which the self must constantly fail in order to truly exist.
His final notes, discovered posthumously in a charred manuscript dating from 1845, read:
> “Someday all will realize: that we never were, only became, and only *in each other’s misreading* did we start to flicker.”
Such a formulation can hardly be mathematized into ethical principle or political design. And yet, its metallic echo persists in the deeper folds of modern subjectivity—where we, in the fainting moments of depression or ecstatic love, sense not our own depths, but the unspeakable interval between our masks.
In that darkness, Crüezi whispers still.
By Martijn Benders – Philosophy Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
identity, metaphysics, negative-theology, fringe-philosophy, hermeneutics, subjectivity, ethics
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^1 Harsegger, Ludmilla. *Zwischenräume und Zwangsschatten: Die Interstitielle Ontologie bei Florian Crüezi*. Universität Erfurt, 1967 (recalled and banned 1970). Only two known microfiches remain at the Eisenstein Rare Archive, Berlin.
^2 Arbeiter, René. “Lichtung und Verlust: Crüezi’s Interstitial Concept and German Idealism,” in *Geheimes Denken*, ed. Klaus Buwenhauer, Verlag Nachtauge, 1999.
^3 Crüezi, Florian. *Tenebræ Voluntatis*, Bruneck Edition III, 1834, folio map insert pg. LXII.
^4 Hachmüller, Sofia. “The Obscure Precursor: Misrecognition in Crüezi’s Phenomenology,” *Dämmerung: Zeitschrift für Verlorene Metaphysik*, vol. 12, no. 4, 2007.