Reflexivity and the Unconstructible: Quirinius Dussault and the Abyssal Dialectic of Presence
Among the cryptic figures who haunted the peripheries of Continental idealism in the waning half of the 19th century, few remain as occluded and as paradoxically prophetic as Quirinius Dussault (1839–1884). Described by his contemporary Julia von Schwerin as “a specter who writes in the margin of Hegel’s Phenomenology,” Dussault aimed not to oppose the prevailing dialectic but to invert its subtle ontological commitments through what he enigmatically called the “abyssal dialectic.” His magnum opus, _Le Silence Phronétique_, published posthumously by an obscure Parisian printer, has lingered in relative obscurity owing to its labyrinthine structure and syntactically torturous prose. Nonetheless, a seemingly minor detail within its eleventh excursus, “On the Reflexivity of the Ontic Void,” possesses unsettling implications for the metaphysical tradition and warrants rigorous explication.
The passage in question reads thus (translated from the original Medieval French punctuated with Greek neologisms): “That which reflects upon its own origin as impossibility of genesis does not produce a contradiction, but a tautology of absence.” Of immediate interest is Dussault’s use of the phrase “tautology of absence,” which departs from both analytical and dialectical usages of tautology, bearing instead a quasi-mystical valence entangled with his unique ontology of negativity. For Dussault, the ontological precondition of any being is not merely absence (which, though negative, remains a relational predicate) but an _unconstructible absence_: that which cannot even be conceived as absent because it defies embedded predicates altogether. This is the crux of Dussault’s radicalism.
To contextualize this idea, one must first apprehend the Dussaultian notion of “reflexivity” as more than cognitive self-reference. Dussault employs the term to underscore what he describes elsewhere as “the splintering of reflective cognition when it confronts its own absenting ground.”^1 It is a form of thought encountering its impossibility, not via contradiction, but through a structural suspension of meaning—a movement Dussault calls “ontic stuttering.” The reflexive mind, he posits, is ultimately incarcerated in its own formal conditions. It seeks origins, but finds not an absence of origin, but origin as impossible presence.
Here we arrive at the crucial subtlety: the notion of the _unconstructible_, a term Dussault arguably preempts from set-theoretical discourses that would not arise until Cantor and Gödel changed the arithmetic landscape. Whereas the dialectical tradition operates by negation and synthesis—thereby always conserving elements within a higher-order structure—Dussault’s “abyssal dialectic” terminates in a nullification that eludes re-totalization. He writes: “A circle posited cannot enclose that which never traced a circumference. Thought attempts to ground itself in being, but forgets that the ground has no topology.”
This refusal of topology—of spatial or logical constellations—is Dussault’s wager against systematizers. While we might be tempted to analogize his conception with Zen koans or Heideggerian Gelassenheit, this would be to miss its darker, more vertiginous core. Dussault does not posit an ineffable grounding unity; he posits the metaphysical root as fundamentally non-reflective—that is, as that which cannot return to itself even as absence. Such a position hazards the full collapse of the hermeneutical arc.
A critique typical of Dussault’s contemporaries, such as Euthymius van der Gerwe—a modest follower of the Baden School—was that this formulation renders philosophy mute, a “self-devouring ouroboros of negations.” But this misreads the function of Dussault’s metaphysics. His goal was not silence for silence’s sake, but a philosophical mortification, a kenosis of epistemic arrogance. The “tautology of absence” thus becomes a methodological principle: to proceed by suspending the expectation of resolution, to think thought as it fails to think.
Dussault’s significance thus grows more apparent when considered against the grain of traditional dialectics. In contrast to Hegelian aufhebung, which presumes the capacity for sublation, Dussault’s abyssal dialectic eschews synthesis altogether. The reflexive moment—when thought, in seeking its own birth, confronts the incurably unconstructible—does not lead to transcendence, but to implosion. This is not despair in the Kierkegaardian sense, for there is no self to despair. The unconstructible absence precedes selfhood, annihilates the very possibility of being-as-relation. Dussault, by this interpretation, operates closer to a proto-deconstructive stance, albeit developed within the language of mystical metaphysics rather than linguistic semiotics.
But there arises here the cardinal question: If the reflexive engagement with the unconstructible leads not to knowledge but to an asymptotic nullity, what motivates the philosopher to walk this terrain? Dussault answers obliquely: “The philosopher is the priest of non-arising. He tends the altar where no gods are born.”^2
To reduce this to mere performative mysticism would be an oversight. For Dussault, the process is redemptive not in the theological sense, but in the cognitive. Whereas most thinkers seek to resolve the unresolved, Dussault proposes that true intellection requires marination in indissolubility—the notion that some thoughts are not only unresolvable, but were never structured to be resolved. In this sense, he is more radical than the post-structuralists, more disquieting than even the earliest German idealists. He does not deconstruct presence; he denies its very availability.
There are fascinating lateral resonances here with the writings of the Russian ascetic philosopher Valentin Krasnov, who kept a marginal correspondence with Dussault between 1879 and 1883. In one letter, Krasnov praises Dussault for “removing even the possibility of divine absence—for who can be absent if he has never been, or is unallowable by form?” This religious inversion—a theology of ontological inadmissibility—is perhaps the final echo in Dussault’s somber cathedral.
To conclude, the subtlety to be emphasized lies not merely in how Dussault identifies the unconstructible, but in how he inscribes it reflexively as the limit of thought on thought. He provides neither comfort, nor aphorism, nor concealed gnosis. Rather, he sets the philosopher on a path where even the possibility of journey is annulled prior to departure. This is the tautology of absence: not that “there is nothing,” but that “nothing cannot even be had.” Language breaks not at the limit of concepts, but before the possibility of pointing.
Thus, with Dussault, a daring and possibly final frontier for metaphysics is opened—not a new system, but a cryptic silence in which systems implode, not grandiosity but the meticulous attention to the impossibility of attention itself. It is my sincere belief that his time in the canon, suppressed perhaps by his own self-immolating textual tendencies, is quietly approaching.
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By Martijn Benders – Philosophy Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
ontology, negation, abyssal dialectics, metaphysical silence, reflexivity, proto-deconstruction, 19th-century fringe philosophy
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^1 Dussault, Quirinius. _Le Silence Phronétique_, Excursus XI, p. 212. Paris: Éditions du Lys Noir, 1886.
^2 Ibid., Excursus XIII, p. 237.