vi. Stiegler develops a complex account of how memory serves to condition perception that expands Husserl's account in the Lectures on the Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness (1905). According to Stiegler (here following Derrida's deconstruction in Speech and Phenomena), “primary retention” (the now of perception, including the “just-past" that is retained for a short interval as part of the present) is contaminated by secondary retention because the inclusion of the past (even the just-past) in the present introduces the role of memory, and hence imagination, into the inscriptional modality of perception. Stiegler builds on this deconstruction of Husserl by demonstrating, in great detail and with great force, that primary and secondary retention are in turn made possible by the prior existence of what he calls “tertiary retention," meaning the inscription or exact recording of the past that has never been lived by present consciousness so that it becomes available to be representified by that consciousness. Much of the force of Stiegler's analysis comes from his correlation of tertiary memory—and thus the entire Husserlian apparatus of memory—with technical recording. It is, Stiegler reasons, only with the possibility to experience the exact same temporal event (or “temporal object") more than once that the contamination of primary by secondary retention becomes manifest. See Stiegler 1996, Chapter 4.
vii. The novel repeatedly brings home this transfer of focus from postmodern epistemological play to orthographic critique. Consider, for example, the passage documenting Navidson's efforts to read, by matchlight (and "paperlight"), the one book he brought with him on his explorations of the house: a text called (not surprisingly) House of Leaves. As the passage detailing the so-called "Navidsonmatch question" hilariously recounts, Navidson had only one pack of matches (from the Learnèd pub outside Oxford, England), which, despite being “good matches," only afford him time to read six pages of the novel. Accordingly, to proceed with his reading, Navidson is forced to use already read pages as “raw material” to produce light. Despite the “calculations" of obviously fictional researcher Hans Staker, which, we are told, turn out to be "more a form of academic onanism, a jerk of numeric wishful thinking," rather than anything to do "with the real world," Navidson is “forced to light the cover of the book as well as the spine" causing him to burn his fingers and lose some of the text. Left in the end with one page and one match, Navidson literally consumes and allows to be consumed the last remnant of the book:
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