Elis

Elis is the pale, ethereal boy in Heidegger’s reading of Georg Trakl, and the book treats him as more than an emblem of innocence. He represents a gentle relation between the sexes, set against a discord that fragments human kinship; yet his presexual appearance also makes him an uncanny figure, unsettling the very distinction he seems to reconcile.

Identity and Meaning

In Heidegger’s interpretation, Elis stands for gentle Sex: not sexual discord, but a harmonious duality. The discussion connects this image to the myth in Plato’s Symposium and reads it as Heidegger’s version of the proposition that there is no sexual relationship. Elis thus figures a hoped-for relation in which duality does not become antagonism.

The argument gives this figure a particular importance within Heidegger’s account of a displaced or decomposing human kind. Discord between the sexes is presented not as one division among many, but as a generative fracture: other forms of human discord are understood as infected by it. Elis’s gentleness offers a counter-image to that fragmentation, though it does not remove the conflict that defines the surrounding account.

The Gendered Opposition

The book challenges the apparent neutrality of Elis’s presexual figure. Although Heidegger describes the boy’s childhood as sheltering a gentle twofoldness that includes both youth and the maiden, the analysis argues that Elis’s gender neutrality itself marks him as a boy. The opposing, discordant figure is not neutral either: it is coded as feminine.

On this reading, sexual difference does not simply name the two sexes within a single human species. It also names an opposition between the asexual and the sexual, which is then mapped onto the distinction between boy and woman. Using Ernesto Laclau’s logic of hegemony, the book describes sexual difference as the Real of an antagonism: an external division that is represented through an internal division between the sexes. Elis’s apparent innocence therefore belongs to a structured contrast, rather than to a position outside gender.

Innocence and Uncanniness

The book also reverses the consoling meaning of Elis’s gentleness. As a presexual child confronted with an overripe feminine figure, he can appear not merely innocent but monstrous. Heidegger’s account, as discussed here, allows ghostly spirit to hold gentleness and destructiveness together: gentleness gathers intensity into friendship, while unrestrained license consumes itself in revolt and becomes active evil. Elis consequently stands near the point where innocence becomes difficult to separate from the possibility of harm.

The discussion calls this figure an instance of the creature described by Eric Santner and places him among pale, ethereal children in horror fiction who return to haunt adults. It also proposes Tom Ripley, Patricia Highsmith’s character, as a related figure: angelic innocence joined to ruthless destructiveness, with a subject position not yet marked by sexual difference. These are comparisons, not episodes in Elis’s own story; their purpose is to show how widely the unsettling conjunction associated with him can recur.

Literary Echoes and Reach

The same figure is traced through other works. In The Decalogue, a mysterious, Christ-like homeless young man appears to the protagonist at decisive moments, extending the image of an asexual, ghostlike presence. In Michel Houellebecq’s Les particules élémentaires, the book finds a further, ironic culmination: humanity collectively chooses genetically modified asexual humanoids as a way of escaping the deadlock of sexuality.

These echoes enlarge Elis’s significance without turning him into a conventional character with a developed plot. He functions as a recurring figure through which the book tests the promise of harmony against the danger of exclusion: the child seems to stand beyond sexual conflict, yet that apparent transcendence is itself shaped by a gendered opposition and shadowed by the possibility of evil.