The Dialectic of the Non-Absolute: Pseudo-Burchard’s Subliminal Semiotics in the Marginal Notes to the Askeroth Codex
In the shadowy margins of late medieval philosophical contemplations, wherein theology, mysticism, and semiotic acrobatics coalesced into obscure amalgamations, we find obligingly few consistent figures. And yet, there exists one most curious interlocutor—a man known to us only through a misattributed set of vellum folios and esoteric glosses—who signed his name inconsistently as “Pseudo-Burchard.” This nomenclature, bestowed upon him by date-frustrated archivists and speculative codicologists, references neither the notorious Bishop Burchard of Worms nor the exegetes of the Regino canon. This Pseudo-Burchard, marginalia-author of the Askeroth Codex, develops a conceptual apparatus so subtle that only now, amidst the flaring disintegration of positivistic certainties, do we find ourselves able, or perhaps doomed, to understand it.
The Askeroth Codex, an anonymous treatise compiled c.1274 in the borderlands between feuding ecclesiastical microstatelets, is ostensibly a series of theological disputations on angelology. Buried amidst its contradictory thickets is a series of side-margin annotations attributed to Pseudo-Burchard, whose thought pulses with that peculiar intensity of inferential freedom native to those thinkers neither canonized by the schools nor condemned by the dioceses. Therein, he introduces the concept of the “non-absolute symbolum,” a notion which challenges the metaphysical bifurcation between representational essentiality and referential nihilism.
It is this notion—the non-absolute symbolum—that requires our most strenuous dialectical attention.
Pseudo-Burchard’s subtle move is to deny both the Realist and Nominalist conclusions concerning the locus of meaning in signs. Realists had it that universaliæ, expressed through terms, communicated portions of real-being; Nominalists that they were mere projections of human taxonomic zeal. Pseudo-Burchard’s interpolated marginal glosses in folio 67v suggest a third modality: “Not that the sign is empty, nor yet full—but borne upon meaning, as skin bears blood: through tension alone.”^1
What are we to make of “borne upon meaning”? At first blush, it appears a metaphor of the corporeal entwined with the semiotic—a usual tactic among mystical theologians. But Pseudo-Burchard’s explication two folios later makes clear this is no metaphor, but rather a metaphysical principle. “Ego non in verba sed in tensio invenio veritatem,” he writes—”I find truth not in words, but in tension.”^2 Thus, his conception of semiotic transmission invokes neither referent nor definition, but the dynamic force that emerges between signifier and context, a force not statically located but experienced as a vibrational trembling in the psychic field of the interlocutor.
This tension might seem a mere metaphorical flirtation with hermeneutics, but there is a crucial metaphysical precondition embedded in what he calls the non-absolute. The non-absolute symbolum is not simply “non-absolute” in that its meaning is relative or undecided. Rather, it is a deliberate voiding of absoluteness by ontological design. “Signum verum non referat ad rerum fixitatem, sed ad potenita’n versa,” he writes—”The true sign refers not to the fixity of things, but to inverted potential.”^3 Here lies the kernel: the sign exists not to mirror reality but to gesture toward ‘reversed potentiality,’ a category from which the symbolic act draws its paradoxical force.
One must pause here to grasp the radicalism of this assertion. Whereas the Realists grounded signs in the eternal Ideas, and the Nominalists in the arbitrariness of human convention, Pseudo-Burchard grounds his signs in what we might provocatively call non-being’s voltage—not nothing, but not something; not absence, but anti-presence. His influences, though difficult to trace with certainty, may well include the apophatic mysticism of Pseudo-Dionysius and the ecstatic negation of Meister Eckhart. But his commitment to the *tensio* over the *intentio* separates him even from these—he views meaning not as moving towards divinity or away from it, but as the side-effect of the incompatibility between sign and signified. Incoherence becomes generative.
To understand the ramifications of such a view, it is necessary to engage the brief interlinear diagram he included (in pristine vermilion ink) above a passage discussing angelic syllogisms. He draws two intersecting lines, their axes labeled “veritas as imposita” (truth as imposition) and “veritas as dislocatio” (truth as dislocation). Where they intersect is labeled “symbolum neutri”—the neutral symbol.^4 This neutral symbol is neither a bearer of meaning nor its betrayer. It is a type of paralogical flicker, whose function is to mediate de-coherence rather than restore correspondence.
In modern philosophical parlance, perhaps only the post-structuralists, with their assertions of différance and impossible signification, have brushed similar territories—yet even they rarely suggest an ontological basis for this dislocation. Pseudo-Burchard, by contrast, does; the act of thought itself becomes the arena of metaphysical resistance, the invocation not of presence or absence but of *sub-stance negata*, a “negated substance” which can only operate in signs that fail with precision.
Critics may be tempted to relegate Pseudo-Burchard’s system to the hall of speculative obscurantism, to dismiss him alongside Basilius the Insentient or the Chimerist Socinians. Yet doing so would underestimate the profundity of his assault on representational complacency. For in stripping signs of their comfort zones—refusing them the luxury of either referential clarity or nihilistic liberty—he creates a third space wherein signification becomes struggle, misalignment, resistance: the very conditions of consciousness itself.
The modern reader, entrapped by logarithmic taxonomies and data empiricism, may find little solace in such a view. But perhaps that is the point. Pseudo-Burchard does not offer us a new hermeneutic, but a sacred fracture; not a key, but a crack. And in that crack lies a tension too vital to be solved, too alive to be understood.
By Martijn Benders – Philosophy Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, semiotics, medieval thought, mysticism, ontological ambiguity, marginal philosophy, anti-hermeneutics
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^1 See marginalia on Askeroth Codex, fol. 67v, preserved in the Quarzheim Monastic Archive, South Frisia.
^2 Pseudo-Burchard, Marginal Gloss VII., fol. 69r. Translation mine.
^3 Ibid., note marked “δ” in crimson script.
^4 This diagram is famously referenced in C. Heldentresser’s study “Symbolum Neutri: A Graphology of the Incorporeal Sign,” Journal of Forgotten Semiotics, Vol. 3, 1988.