Logic, Glyphs, and the Fiction of the Impossible
Spyridon St. Kogkas
In the locked room of metaphysical fiction, the weapon is logic, the motive is paradox, and the corpse is rationality itself. This essay undertakes not a linear argument but a diagrammatic traversal across domains, logic, fiction, cryptography, and philosophy, to interrogate how formal structures do not reveal truth but instead conspire to encrypt it. The presumption that logic is rational is here discarded in favor of a more urgent claim: logic is insurgent, glyphic, and dramatized through impossibility. In a world of sealed systems, the breach, the impossible event, becomes not the failure of logic, but its most potent gesture.
In defense of Logic against Reason, we need thinking from the side of Locked Room Mysteries, where Fiction is just the disguise of impossible in the crime series of a phenomenal rationalism..so the Structures are not rational, are Glyphs, Locked rooms, and who knows maybe all the ongoing situation of the historical time is just the set of so many sets of this kind of Structures where Reason desires to kill them in the name of it’s Natural supremacy of biomaterial laws of existence. But the Logic of the Structures is coming from non material grounds. Why Abyss should be necessarily a space under the earth or over the Skies? Logic is what still accepts Abyss Ungrund without any geological or astronomical determination.
I. Logic as Locked-Room Fiction
Let us begin, not with a philosopher, but with the detective. The locked-room mystery, a genre obsessed with hermetic enclosures violated by inexplicable crime, becomes our epistemological model. Not merely entertainment, these texts enact structural metaphysics. In John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man (1935), often ranked as the quintessential locked-room novel, the conundrum unfolds: a man is murdered in a room sealed from within, with freshly fallen snow outside and no footprints visible. The crime scene becomes a metaphysical challenge to deductive reason. The very spatial parameters of the room are calibrated to preclude entry. The logic of the crime obeys no apparent rationale, and yet the solution, often absurdly baroque, retroactively rationalizes the impossible.
This motif evolves in Paul Halter’s Le Diable de Dartmoor (1993), a murderer vanishes mid-act in front of witnesses, while snow again eliminates the possibility of retreat. These narratives restage Gödel’s incompleteness theorems as narrative form: closed systems capable of expressing truths (in this case, crime scenes that follow natural law) must, inevitably, contain truths (crimes) that cannot be resolved within them. The locked-room is not merely an artifice; it is an ontological condition.Japanese fiction radicalizes this model. In Soji Shimada’s The Tokyo Zodiac Murders (1981), the plot is an algorithmic abomination: an astrologer is murdered and his stepdaughters are dismembered and rearranged into a womanly golem. The mystery is not merely logical, it is computational. Yukito Ayatsuji’s The Decagon House Murders (1987) uses architectural structure (a ten-sided house) to construct a logic labyrinth, a recursive commentary on the detective form itself.
These texts offer not a plot but an operating system: their enclosures simulate deductive closure but ultimately defer the rational resolution.Such fiction is not escapism but cryptographic allegory. Like Gödel numbering or Turing machines, they encode limits within procedures. Their power lies not in the satisfaction of solution, but in staging the performative violence of logic as system.
II. Logic Is Fiction
We arrive at Leibniz. The baroque logician, obsessed with order, creates a vision of monads: infinite, windowless units, each containing a complete reflection of the universe. Each monad operates autonomously, unable to communicate, and yet synchronized by a divine pre-established harmony. This is not physics but metaphysical cryptography. In each monad, as in each locked room, the whole is encoded, but the encoding is encrypted.Leibniz’s combinatorial dream captured in the Dissertatio de Arte Combinatoria, imagines a universal symbolic language in which all concepts could be broken into primitive elements and recombined into a calculus. This is the logic of fiction itself: characters and situations as elements, recombinable into infinite narratives. Yet even Leibniz sensed the paradox, his notion of incompossibility posits that not all possible worlds can co-exist. This is the foundation of structural impossibility: an assertion that logic can name what cannot logically occur.
Enter Gödel, the logician whose theorems unhinge the very framework that Leibniz dreamt of completing. Gödel’s incompleteness results demonstrate that every formal system capable of expressing basic arithmetic will contain propositions that are true but unprovable within the system. This is more than mathematics: it is fictionality. The unprovable proposition is the locked room’s corpse, the event that must have occurred, but whose mechanism cannot be deduced from the known rules.In this sense, Gödel does not refute logic; he fictionalizes it. He turns proof into plot. His theorems enact narrative uncertainty within formal language. Logic becomes gothic.
III. Serres and the Noetic Parasite
Michel Serres, heir to both Leibniz and Gödel, displaces the primacy of message in favor of noise. His Hermès series proposes that true communication lies not in clarity but in contamination. The figure of the parasite, who eats off another, who distorts and interrupts, becomes central. In The Parasite, Serres notes: “The parasite invents a new system, a system of noise.” Logic, in Serres’ view, is not the unfolding of transparency but the management of interference.This echoes in Hermès V: Le Passage du Nord-Ouest, where Serres reads Leibniz as an arch-smuggler of knowledge across disciplines. The transmission of information is never linear; it is always transductive. Rationalism is only a surface operation. Beneath it lies Hermetic passage, discontinuous traversal. Communication is always encrypted.Serres brings us closer to fiction. He names noise as both disruption and creation: every system is haunted by the illegitimate, the anomalous. Logic’s most generative moments occur when it ceases to operate cleanly. This is the glyphic moment.
IV. Cryptogony & Anaphilosophy
The glyph is neither word nor image, neither message nor code. It is a residue. Glyphopoiesis, the act of producing signs that resist legibility, is not irrational but supra-rational. In Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés, the page is constellation, not line. Here, form itself is encrypted.To write glyphically is to commit to a logic of concealment. A logic that does not explain but implicates. This is not Derridean différance, but a more ancient, cryptogonic gesture: writing that generates worlds precisely by not revealing them.In locked-room fiction, the glyph is the room itself, or the trace that undoes the solution. It is the impossibility that remains after all explanations are exhausted. It is the ghost in the floorplan.
We now turn fully to anaphilosophy, not the refutation of philosophy, but its oblique inversion. The logic that structures these impossibilities is not anti-rational, but post-rational. It is speculative, theatrical, glyphic. It uses logic not as foundation but as mise-en-scène.In this light, structures aren’t rational. They are hermetic. They permit traversal only through performative disjunctions, encrypted movements, aesthetic coups. The structure is the locked room. Thought is the impossible murder within.If Leibniz foreshadowed Borges, Serres operationalized him as a theory machine. Borges’ Death and the Compass is perhaps the ultimate synthesis: a detective story that collapses under its own recursive logic. The detective invents the crime, becomes its victim. This is the diagram of thought misfiring into truth.
The metaphysical split between materialism and idealism is itself a decoy structure. In historical metaphysics, Idealism is often invoked as the spiritual specter to be exorcised by a triumphant materialism, which claims empirical robustness, clarity, and worldly immanence. But what if Idealism is not an enemy but a constructed Other, a fictive antagonist designed to secure the epistemic supremacy of matter and it’s Ratio against Logic? Structures and Ideas are not the platonic shadows of a decaying tradition, but glyphic machines that do not obey either pole. They are trans-categorical processes. Their function is not to represent but to encrypt, distort, replicate, transduce. They are anti-phenomenal, not immaterial. They form not through transcendence but through the convulsive, invisible pressure of events. They are closer to viral code than Platonic Form.
True logical fiction, as in the locked-room genre or the combinatorial world of Leibniz, reveals that thought need not pass through matter to manifest. It may instead erupt from an internal consistency that eludes all sensory verification, an imaginary schema capable of generating consequences without any grounding referent. Structures, then, do not belong to Idealism. They are autogenetic. They are parasites of the real, not projections.
The Event, in this frame, is not Kantian (synthesized by the subject), nor Hegelian (dialectically subsumed), nor materialist (emergent from matter’s accidents). It is Leibnizian-Borgesian: an impossible configuration that suddenly recomposes all preconditions. An intrusion of the glyph into the grid.The rational-materialist model of logic, derived from operationalist technics and computational metaphors, must be abandoned. It remains deeply servile to visibility, predictability, progress idolatry and correspondence. But logic in its fiction-mode resists all this. It is closer to a “murder” in a sealed room with no weapon, no entry point, no motive, yet no doubt about the “corpse”.
To think structures is not to engage in idealism. It is to suspend the real, without denying it. To write glyphs that produce truth without representation. Logic does not emerge from the brain, from code, or from matter. It emerges from interference. From impossibility. From fiction.Structures aren’t rational. They’re insurgent. They’re encrypted. And they are still, in spite of philosophy, happening.
Extended Bibliography
Carr, John Dickson. The Hollow Man. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1935.
Halter, Paul. Le Diable de Dartmoor. Paris: Le Masque, 1993.
Shimada, Soji. The Tokyo Zodiac Murders. Tokyo: Kodansha, 1981.
Ayatsuji, Yukito. The Decagon House Murders. Tokyo: Kodansha, 1987.
Takagi, Akimitsu. The Tattoo Murder Case. Tokyo: Kodansha, 1948.
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Dissertatio de Arte Combinatoria. Leipzig: 1666.
Leibniz. Monadology, 1714.
Gödel, Kurt. Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze, 1931.
Serres, Michel. Hermès V: Le Passage du Nord-Ouest. Paris: Minuit, 1980.
Serres. The Parasite. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.
Mallarmé, Stéphane. Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard. Paris: Cosmopolis, 1897.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Death and the Compass, in Ficciones. Buenos Aires: Sur, 1944.
