«THE POOL OF TEARS»: THE METAPHYSICS OF DISSOLUTION
Abstract
The article is devoted to a philosophical interpretation of the second chapter of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll as a model of permeable subjectivity in which the boundary between the internal and the external appears ontologically unstable. The study examines a form of subjectivity that loses not identity as such, but rather the very capacity to maintain a stable boundary between itself and its own states. Particular attention is paid to four dimensions of this process: the transformation of affect from a psychic state into an environment of existence, the crisis of bodily commensurability with the world, the destabilization of linguistic self-identity, and the emergence of a fluid community after the dissolution of the hermetic subject.
The theoretical and methodological framework of the study draws upon affect theory (S. Ahmed, B. Massumi), phenomenology of the body (M. Merleau-Ponty), philosophy of sense (G. Deleuze), hermeneutics of the subject (P. Ricoeur), and the theory of abjection (J. Kristeva). It is argued that none of these traditions fully articulates the moment of radical permeability – a situation in which the subject discovers not its own destruction, but the primordial instability of its boundaries. This very moment – philosophically underexamined within both classical and post-structuralist traditions – constitutes the central focus of the article.
The study demonstrates that Wonderland functions not as a space of the destruction of an already constituted identity, but as an environment that reveals its original non-hermetic nature. The pool of tears is interpreted not as a metaphor of emotional excess, but as a specific form of a fluid world in which affect ceases to be an internal state and acquires spatial and ontological dimensions. Carroll’s text is thus considered a philosophically relevant model of subjectivity that presupposes permeability as an original ontological condition rather than as a consequence of crisis.
The article concludes by emphasizing the relevance of this model for understanding the contemporary subject, which exists within conditions of continuous affective circulation, fluid linguistic environments, and the erosion of boundaries between the internal and the external.
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References
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