“The Unassimilable Remnant”: What is at Stake?

Abstract

In the “Alchemy” issue of Spring Journal Stanton Marlan published his remarkable essay, “From the Black Sun to the Philosopher’s Stone.” The blackness of sol niger brought with it for Marlan “the mortificatio of brokenness, incision, and wound, castration, cut, negation, with an ultimate ‘No’ to the ego, with what felt unassimilable.” Time and again Marlan insists on there being something unassimilable. The blackness of sol niger is his proof and paradigm. He says he encountered a darkness that refuses conscious assimilation. But is this really true? No doubt, this blackness was initially “felt unassimilable”. But the fact that the psychic images have their own internal solidity, integrity, and intactness and don’t go away even when assimilated in no way means that there is an “unassimilable remainder” in the emphatic sense. The blackness of the black sun is by no means unassimilable, although of course not in the sense of assimilation as being incorporated by an ego stance.