Saint Joseph of Copertino, artist unknown. Yves Klein, The Leap into the Void, 1960.

The cosmonaut of the erotic future who on December 13, 1868 (one of the most auspicious
Aaron Schuster days in the history of levitation) floated out of a third-
story window and returned through the window of an
What happens to levitation, one of the great imaginative adjoining room; or the ascension of Christ, archetype
figures of art and literature, in the transition from a reli- of all saintly air travel; or the magnetic levitation train
gious culture to the disenchanted universe of modern zipping commuters between Shanghai and the Pudong
science? What becomes of ecstasy, rapture, ascension, International Airport at a maximum speed of 431 km/h.
transcendence, grace when these give way to “space Levitation derives from the Latin levitas, meaning
oddity”: man enclosed in a tin can floating far above lightness. The term would appear to have been coined
the world? Is the cosmonaut a prophet of the erotic as the opposite of gravitation, sometime in the early
future, avatar of man’s stellar renaissance, as Stanley seventeenth century when humanity’s conception of
Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke once imagined? Or is he like the cosmos was being revolutionized by Brahe, Coperni-
Nietzsche’s madman, proclaiming as Gagarin himself cus, and Kepler. Rather than being based on qualitative
was rumored to have said: “I don’t see any God up here”? “elective affinities,” the attraction of bodies became a
matter of purely quantitative relations expressed by
Levitation: what is it? algebraic symbols. Though the ancient cosmology was
The word levitation has several senses and connota- effectively vanquished by the new clockwork universe,
tions: miraculous, magical, oneiric, but also scientific this was hardly a simple or straightforward affair. Even
and technological. Levitation is equally an affair of mys- Sir Isaac Newton hedged his bets. While developing his
tics and engineers, charlatans and poets. One thinks of theory of gravitation, Newton was also privately elaborat-
the feats of the Scottish medium Daniel Dunglas Home, ing a highly idiosyncratic theology. According to certain

23
 Sassetta (Stefano di Giovanni), The Blessed Ranieri Rasini Freeing Poor
People from Prison in Florence, 1437–1444.

obscure and, until recently, largely neglected writings, II and published in 1949, Cendrars’s book presents a
after the Apocalypse “children of the resurrection” (nota- kind of literary collage. Prose poetry, exotic travelogues,
bly Newton himself) would be able to levitate at will, personal memoirs, and found texts, including scholarly
soaring “to the furthermost extremities of the universe.”1 documents, are all pasted together in a complex con-
Levitation is also related to levity, to the light- struction. Cendrars is renowned as an adventurer, and
hearted, the frivolous, and the fun. The link between the stories he recounts here do not disappoint: there
levitation, levity, and laughter was made explicit in the is his trip across Siberia with a jewelry merchant, his
1964 Walt Disney classic Mary Poppins (as we’ll see, the pilgrimage to a strange Brazilian doctor obsessed with
the 1960s was an absolutely crucial decade for levita- Sarah Bernhardt, his voyage from Rio to Cherbourg with
tion). Near the end of the film, the curmudgeonly bank 250 tropical birds (none survive the boat ride), his work
director miraculously ascends as he goes into hysterics as a war correspondent for British headquarters in Paris.
at an employee’s little joke. I won’t tell you the joke—it’s But it is the death of his son Rémy, a pilot who perished
not very good. Later we learn that the old man died. But in the early months of the war, that provides the novel’s
he died happy from levitating laughter. “center of gravity.” Often Cendrars’s “parceling of the
sky” is interpreted as an act of mourning. He had spoken
Parceling the sky with his son about the idea of proposing St. Joseph of
One of the great literary works of the past century deal- Copertino, famed levitator, as the patron saint of French
ing with levitation, combining the technology of aviation aviators. Though Cendrars’s plan was foiled by the
with Christian mysticism, is Blaise Cendrars’s Le lotisse- American air force, which adopted St. Joseph as their
ment du ciel (literally “The Parceling of the Sky” but own guardian angel in 1943, his fascination for the flying
translated as Sky Memoirs). Begun during World War priest was unabated. While hiding from the Gestapo in

24
Aix-en-Provence, he spent his time in the library immers-
ing himself in the study of levitation, and in particular the
life of St. Joseph.
Cendrars ends the first part of the book with a pas-
sionate proposal to make a film about the levitating
saint: “If a producer ever feels like making this prodi-
gious film, I—I, who have sworn never again to waste
my time making films—will drop everything, give up my
solitude, my tranquility, and my writing, to make this
film about St. Joseph of Copertino, in memory of my
son, Rémy, the pilot, and as a souvenir for his sometime
girlfriend, the out-of-work baker’s girl, with whom I lost
touch in wartime Paris.”2

St. Joseph: The Movie

What might this cinema of levitation have looked
like? And what genre would it be? Perhaps an action
film? That would certainly fit the temperament of
Cendrars, but, frankly, there is not much in the life of the Anonymous, The Ascension of Christ, from the series Travels and
Wanderings Through the Holy Land, ca. 1481.
seventeenth-century Italian priest to recommend such
an approach. It is true that Joseph’s miraculous flights
did provoke suspicion, and that he was investigated
by the Inquisition at Naples for several weeks. But in The show centered on the adventures of a group of
the end, Joseph was released after the judges found nuns in the Convent San Tanco in Puerto Rico. Sister
no demonic wrongdoing. A historical drama, then? Bertrille could be counted on to get the nuns out of any
Large portions of Cendrars’s book are simply transcrip- jam by virtue of her unexplained ability to fly (perhaps it
tions of the classic 1928 study by Olivier Leroy titled La had to do with the aerodynamics of her oversized hat).
Lévitation: Contribution historique et critique à l’ étude Of course the storylines were limited—there are only so
du merveilleux. One could imagine a Duras-style film many situations one can devise that require the heroine
essay with long shots of airplanes taking off and landing, to levitate—and so the show was cancelled after three
perhaps an image of a tropical sun floating languidly seasons.
in the sky, while the voice-over endlessly recites pas- As it happens, a film was made about the life of St.
sages from Leroy. Personally, I like to think that it would Joseph. It is titled The Reluctant Saint and was released
have been a slapstick-style comedy with lots of physical in 1962. The movie was directed by Edward Dmytryk,
gags—the unfortunate priest always being lifted off at who is best known for The Caine Mutiny and for being
just the wrong moment, flying away while sitting on one of the “Hollywood Ten.” It is very difficult to get
the toilet, and so on. There are two details that speak in hold of a copy of this film. I have seen it and can report
favor of this conception. First, Joseph was the only saint that it is rather conventional and dull. Yet with Ricardo
ever to have succeeded in flying backwards: retrorsum Montalban playing the suspicious Father Raspi, and the
volantem. Cendrars was especially delighted by this fact. great Maximilian Schell in the role of St. Joseph, it is still
Second, Joseph was a total imbecile who (ironically) definitely worth a view.
became the patron saint for candidates for the priest-
hood and people taking university degrees. So, what we The artist levitator
have in effect is a dim-witted backwards-flying priest, a I think it would not be terribly controversial to call Yves
role that would have been perfect for Jerry Lewis in his Klein the artist-levitator of the twentieth century. Indeed,
prime. with Klein, levitation becomes a veritable revolution-
In order to envision the appropriate kitsch aesthet- ary program. In his 1959 manifesto Overcoming the
ics for our hypothetical comedy, we need look no further Problematics of Art, the artist proclaims: “We shall
than The Flying Nun, a highly eccentric television series thus become aerial men. We shall know the forces that
that ran from 1967 to 1970. No history of levitation pull us upwards to the heavens, to space, to what is
would be complete without mentioning this program. both nowhere and everywhere. The terrestrial force of

25
 Gianni Motti, Levitation, 1995 (in collaboration with illusionist Mister RG).

James Bond levitates in orbit with Holly Goodhead in Lewis

Gilbert’s Moonraker, 1979.

Bruce Nauman, Failing to Levitate in the Studio, 1966.

The miracle of love as levitation in Andrei Tarkovsky,

The Mirror, 1975.

26
attraction thus mastered, we shall literally levitate into a his balcony—and broke a leg. There should be a name
complete physical and spiritual freedom!”3 for this kind of vertiginous mimetic behavior. Perhaps
This ideal, which is simultaneously that of the artist, after the Stendhal syndrome, we could call it the Klein
the artwork, and life itself, is embodied in Klein’s iconic syndrome.
photograph The Leap Into the Void ; its other, lesser
known title is Obsession of Levitation. The artist’s auda- Psychoanalyzing the cosmonaut
cious plunge is that of a saint announcing the dawn of “The cosmonaut of the erotic future” is a phrase that
a new era,4 an epoch of immateriality where buildings occurs once, in passing, in the 14 March 1962 session
will be fashioned from air currents, color dissolved into of Lacan’s seminar Identification—the same year as the
the void, and life and art merged in blissful union. In the release of the film The Reluctant Saint, almost one year
caption beneath the photograph, it is written: “Today the after Yuri Gagarin’s space flight aboard Vostok-1 on 12
painter of space must, in fact, go into space to paint, but April 1961, and approximately sixteen months after the
he must go there without trickery or deception, and not appearance of The Leap Into The Void. In other words, a
in an airplane, nor by parachute, nor in a rocket: he must particularly propitious moment in the history of levitation.
go there on his own strength, using an autonomous, indi- How does the analyst interpret Gagarin’s voyage?
vidual force; in short, he must be capable of levitation.”5 Lacan paints a vivid portrait of the cosmonaut as living
With his leap, Klein both anticipates the space flight of pulp implanted in a tin can, quivering flesh plugged into
Yuri Gagarin and outdoes him. The artist is superior to a complex technological apparatus. If for Freud man had
the cosmonaut in that his journey into space is made already become a “prosthetic God,”7 in the era of the
without the aid of technological gadgetry. Of course, it is cosmonaut he would seem to be relegated to a button
ironic that The Leap Into the Void is precisely a doctored pusher, utterly dependent on the machine that supports
photograph, an early and masterful example of image his life functions and extends his limited sensorium.
manipulation before the days of Photoshop. As much as Gagarin himself, together with Soviet psychologist Vlad-
it may aspire to “True Life,” art, after all, remains a matter imir Lebedev, stated plainly: “The main function of the
of illusion. The photograph was staged on October 19, operator in the ‘man-machine’ system, provided it func-
1960, with Klein’s judo pals holding a blue sheet to catch tions normally, is to take the reading of instruments.”8
the levitating artist. It appeared soon after in the publica- For Lacan, the precarious situation of the cos-
tion Dimanche 27 novembre. Le Journal d’un seul jour monaut hooked into an impenetrable mechanism
(Sunday November 27th: Newspaper of a Single Day). is not an isolated or extreme case, but reveals the
universal condition of the human subject. We are all
Failing to levitate, or the art of the fall erotic cosmonauts, split between our everyday, phe-
Bruce Nauman’s photograph Failing to Levitate in the nomenological life experience and the computing
Studio appears six years later as a kind of counter- apparatus—what Lacan calls the “symbolic order”—that
weight to Klein’s ascensional sublimation (sublimation parasites our body and secretly controls our thoughts
being one of Klein’s favorite words). From the trium- and desires. The lot of the modern subject, adrift in a
phant leap of the artist-levitator, always suspected of universe of significations without substantial support or
charlatanry and cheap showmanship, we are presented foundation, is perfectly encapsulated by the “the experi-
with the fall of the clown. (Nauman once famously trans- ence of the cosmonaut: a body that can open and close
formed himself into a spitting fountain.) Later, Nauman itself weighing nothing and bearing on nothing.”9
staged a performance in which two actors were instruct-
ed to sink into the floor or, more mysteriously, let the Space sex
floor rise above them. At one point during his speculations on the cosmonaut,
If the classical ideal of art is a kind of elevation, Lacan raises the delicate matter of the effects of anti-
lifting up or spiritualization, one way of characterizing gravitation on sexual desire: “What happens in the state
contemporary art is as an “art of the fall.”6 Rather than of weightlessness to the sexual drive, which usually
the miraculous flight of the saint, its iconic figure is the manifests itself as going against gravity?”10 In other
well-timed tumble of the slapstick artist. In short: Buster words, what happens to male erection in outer space?
Keaton in place of St. Joseph. I am thinking especially of How can the phallus properly “levitate” in a gravity-
Bas Jan Ader’s Fall films, but there are many failed levita- free environment?11 There have been internet rumors
tions in recent art history. After hearing about The Leap circulating for some time about sexual experiments con-
Into the Void, Paul McCarthy reportedly jumped from ducted by NASA and the Russians, but it was popular

27
French science writer Pierre Kohler who first discussed impresses the crowds; it is not the sporting achieve-
them in print in La Dernière mission: Mir l’aventure ment of having gone further than the others and
humaine (The Last Mission: Mir, The Human Adventure), broken the world records for height and speed. What
published in 2000. The chapter titled “Cosmic Love” (in counts more is the probable opening up of new forms
English) begins with a precise scientific question: “Have of knowledge and new technological possibilities,
the astronauts—or the cosmonauts—already made love Gagarin’s personal courage and virtues, the science
in outer space? If so, how many of them … and who?” that made the feat possible, and everything which that
Considering the secrecy of government organizations, in turn assumes in the way of abnegation and sacrifice.
we may never know the answer. For the conspiracy- But what perhaps counts most of all is that he left the
minded, Kohler reports that information regarding Place. For one hour, man existed beyond any hori-
the best positions for sexual intercourse in a state of zon—everything around him was sky or, more exactly,
weightlessness is to be found in the NASA dossier STS - everything was geometrical space. A man existed in
75-Experiment no. 8. At the end of the film Moonraker, the absolute of homogeneous space.14
James Bond floats in amorous embrace with Dr. Holly
Goodhead, but this is a highly idealized picture. As In brief, Gagarin is the ultimate figure of exile: a man
Kohler informs us, zero-gravity sex is no easy proposi- without roots in a cosmic desert without horizon or end.
tion: best first to strap yourself to your partner.12 Mel Brooks once made a comedy sketch called “Jews
in Space,” but Levinas goes even further: in the vast
Jews in space expanses of space, we are all wandering Jews.
Compared to the Christians, levitation is not really a
Jewish strong point. One can, of course, find some scat- Remembering how to fly
tered episodes of miraculous flight in the Old Testament, In the February 2008 issue of the Journal of Hand
but the phenomenon of levitation, especially as ecstatic Surgery, there appeared an article by Dr. Samuel O.
experience, is largely absent from the Jewish tradition.13 Poore examining the question of whether, through
There is an important exception to this general neglect: reconstructive surgery, the human arm may be trans-
Emmanuel Levinas’s reflections on Yuri Gagarin, contained formed into a functional wing. Can man’s ancient dream
in his short 1961 essay “Heidegger, Gagarin and Us.” of unassisted flight finally be realized through cutting-
What does space flight signify for the Jewish phi- edge surgical techniques? After thoroughly detailing the
losopher? The first thing that strikes the eye is the way medical possibilities and problems, the answer finally is
that Levinas puts Gagarin and Heidegger back to back. no.15 Yet as a certain literature would have it, the power
Strange comparison: what do the Russian cosmonaut to fly, far from being a vain aspiration, is a most ordinary
and the rustic thinker of Todtnauberg have to do with and general human capacity. Everyone can fly. Only, we
one another? In fact, they represent absolute antipodes: have forgotten how to do so.
Soviet Communism and German Fascism, technologi- The historian of levitation cannot fail to be
cal wizardry and technophobic anti-modernism, vita impressed by the different ways in which levitation is
activa and vita contemplativa. Most importantly, for posited as universal destiny. Who is the cosmonaut
Levinas this impossible couple stands for the choice of the erotic future? Is he the soaring angel of ecstasy
between “enlightened uprootedness” (enracinement that augurs the coming of paradise on earth? Is he the
éclairé) and “earthly attachment” (attachement ter- machinic apparatus that parasitizes our body and con-
restre). By voyaging into space, man leaves behind his trols our deepest desires? Or is he the geometric prophet
mythic homeland: even further, he discovers that this of a new interstellar Diaspora? One of Eugene Ionesco’s
hallowed place was never anything but superstition lesser-known plays, A Stroll in the Air, first performed on
and idolatry. Levitation makes of the human being a December 15, 1962 (a little more than one month after
creature of the universe. Against the philosopher of the the release of Dmytryk’s film on St. Joseph), suggests
forest clearing, Levinas defends the astral desires of that salvation lies in reclaiming our innate levitative
technological man. powers. When Monsieur Bérenger rises into the sky one
To quote Levinas’s remarkable elegy to Gagarin Sunday afternoon, he explains his behavior to dubious
in full: onlookers thus: “Man has a crying need to fly.... It’s as
necessary and natural as breathing .... Everyone knows
What is admirable about Gagarin’s feat is certainly how to fly. It’s an innate gift but everyone forgets.”16 The
not his magnificent Luna Park performance which same sentiment was later echoed in Paul Auster’s Mr.

28
 From “Jews in Space,” a segment in Mel Brooks’s History of the
World, Part I, 1981.

Alexei Leonov, Over the Planet, 2003. Painting of the first

spacewalk by the cosmonaut who accomplished it. Courtesy
Alex Panchenko.

Marc Chagall, Over Vitebsk, 1915–1920.

29
Cover for edition of two plays by Eugene Ionesco. Poster for Steven Spielberg’s E.T., 1982.

30
Vertigo. At the novel’s end, the narrator, once a vaude- involving as it does an apparent suspension of the laws of gravity.” The Inter-
pretation of Dreams, in Standard Edition, vol. 5, p. 394. Freud’s colleague Victor
villian “Wonder Boy” renowned for his gravity-defying
Tausk adds that erection is first experienced as “an exceptional and mysterious
stunts, offers the following simple instructions for feat,” something “independent of the ego, a part of the outer world not com-
levitation: pletely mastered,” and even a kind of “machine subordinated to a foreign will.”
See “On the Origin of the ‘Influencing Machine’ in Schizophrenia” [1919], Sexu-
ality, War, and Schizophrenia: Collected Psychoanalytic Papers, ed. Paul Roazen
Deep down, I don’t believe it takes any special talent (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1991), pp. 213–214.
for a person to lift himself off the ground and hover in 12 In contrast, in the cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky, levitation always occurs in
place of the sexual act. By virtue of its unreal, miraculous character, levitation is
the air. We all have it in us—every man, woman, and
apt to convey the miracle of love, which, according to Tarkovsky, is completely
child—and with enough hard work and concentration, obscured by images of copulating bodies. Incidentally, it was another Soviet
every human being is capable of duplicating the feats I filmmaker, Pavel Klushantsev, who first filmed zero-gravity space scenes.
13 One should not forget, however, the mystical tradition of Judaism, which
accomplished as Walt the Wonder Boy. You must learn
includes flying rabbis; see, for example, the floating Jews in Cynthia Ozick’s
to stop yourself. That’s where it begins, and everything short story “Levitation,” or scenes of flight in the paintings of Marc Chagall. Like
else follows from that. You must let yourself evapo- Judaism, official Islam also de-emphasizes levitation. One of the most interest-
ing treatments of levitation in the Islamic tradition is found in the work of Avi-
rate. Let your muscles go limp, breathe until you feel
cenna, who, some six centuries prior to Descartes, proposed a radical thought
your soul pouring out of you, and then shut your eyes. experiment to demonstrate the nature of self-consciousness. This experiment,
That’s how it’s done. The emptiness inside your body in which a man is imagined deprived of sense data, floating in a void, was later
dubbed the “Flying Man.”
grows lighter than the air around you. Little by little,
14 Emmanuel Levinas, “Heidegger, Gagarin and Us” [1961] in Difficult Freedom:
you begin to weigh less than nothing. You shut your Essays on Judaism, transl. Seán Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1997), p. 233.
eyes; you spread your arms; you let yourself evaporate. 15 Samuel O. Poore, “The Morphological Basis of the Arm-to-Wing Transition,”
Journal of Hand Surgery, vol. 33 (February 2008). I thank Darius Miksys for this
And then, little by little, you lift yourself off the ground.
reference.
Like so.17 16 Eugene Ionesco, “A Stroll in the Air,” in Plays, vol. 6, transl. Donald Watson
(London: John Calder, 1965), pp. 46–47.
17 Paul Auster, Mr. Vertigo (New York: Penguin, 1994), p. 293.
This essay is adapted from a talk given as part of the night program of the
Berlin Biennial (“Mes nuits sont plus belles que vos jours”) in the Zeiss
Planetarium, Berlin, on 4 May 2008.

1 Frank Manuel, The Religion of Isaac Newton (London: Oxford, 1974), p. 102. I
also draw here on Joel D. Black, “Levana: Levitation in Jean Paul and Thomas de
Quincey,” Comparative Literature, vol. 32, no. 1 (Winter 1980), pp. 44–45.
2 Blaise Cendrars, Sky Memoirs, transl. Nina Rootes (New York: Paragon House,
1992), p. 148. The other great writer of the twentieth century fascinated with
St. Joseph was Italian playwright and actor Carmelo Bene, who wrote a whole
play about the flying priest. For Bene, the most interesting characteristic of St.
Joseph was his imbecility—he quips that Joseph was so stupid he didn’t even
know the law of gravity.
3 Yves Klein, “Overcoming the Problematics of Art,” in Overcoming the Prob-
lematics of Art, transl. Klaus Ottmann (Putnam, CT: Spring Publications, 2007),
p. 64; translation modified.
4 The suspended pose of the self-defenestrating artist might best be described
with the paradoxical expression of an “upwards fall.” As Cendrars writes: “The
saint who falls into ecstasy falls into the abyss, floats On High, levitates, gyrates
in a transport, breaks out, and is no longer in possession of himself. At the most,
he lets out a cry or a last sigh. Then he lets himself go and plummets into the
very depths of the Word of God. He soars…” op. cit., p. 135.
5 Klein, “Selections from ‘Dimanche,’” in Overcoming the Problematics of Art,
op. cit., p. 106.
6 See Gérard Wajcman, “Desublimation: An Art of What Falls,” Lacanian Ink, no.
29 (Spring 2007).
7 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, transl. James Strachey (Lon-
don: Hogarth, 1955) vol. 21, pp. 91–92.
8 Yuri Gagarin and Vladimir Lebedev, Psychology and Space [1968], transl.
Boris Belitsky (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2003), p. 259.
9 Jacques Lacan, “Merleau-Ponty: In Memoriam,” Merleau-Ponty and Psychol-
ogy, ed. Keith Hoeller, transl. Wilfried Ver Eecke and Dirk de Schutter (New Jer-
sey: Humanities Press, 1993), p. 74; translation modified.
10 Lacan, Seminar IX, L’Identification, session of 28 February 1962 (unpublished).
11 For the father of psychoanalysis, the paradigmatic levitating object is the
phallus. “The remarkable phenomenon of erection,” Freud writes, “around
which the human imagination has constantly played, cannot fail to be impressive,

31