Abiding Grace: Time, Modernity, Death 9780226569116

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Abiding Grace

religion and postmodernism

A series edited by Thomas A. Carlson

RECEN T B O O KS I N TH E S E R I E S god being nothing : toward a theogony

by Ray L. Hart (2016)

the mystic fable , volume two : the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

by Michel de Certeau (2015) negative certainties

by Jean-Luc Marion (2015) heidegger ’ s confessions : the remains of saint augustine in being and time and beyond

by Ryan Coyne (2015) arts of wonder : enchanting secularity — walter de maria , diller + scofidio , james turrell , andy goldsworthy

by Jeffery L. Kosky (2012)

god without being : hors - texte , second edition

by Jean-Luc Marion (2012)

Abiding Grace Time, Modernity, Death

M A R K C . TAY L O R

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2018 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2018 Printed in the United States of America 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18

1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-56892-8 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-56908-6 (paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-56911-6 (e-book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226569116.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Taylor, Mark C., 1945– author. Title: Abiding grace : time, modernity, death / Mark C. Taylor. Other titles: Religion and postmodernism. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Series: Religion and postmodernism Identifiers: LCCN 2018012511 | ISBN 9780226568928 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226569086 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226569116 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Postmodernism—Religious aspects. Classification: LCC BL65.P73 T37 2018 | DDC 200—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018012511 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

for Dinny Stearns Taylor

The last look is over. Nevermore will I be able to say “thank you.” Thank you for this or that, for this miracle, for the turbulent sea and the fuzzy horizon, for the clouds, the river and fire, thanks for heat, fire, and flames, thanks for winds and sounds, for the pen and the violin, thanks for the enormous meal of language, thanks for love and suffering, for sadness and for femininity . . . no I’m not done yet; I’m just beginning to remember who must be thanked; I’ve barely begun my hymn of thanks and my turn is over. —michel

serres

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations / xi List of Abbreviations / xiii Acknowledgments / xvii ONE

/ Ending (the) Series / 1

T WO

THREE

FOUR

/ Mirror Stage / 25

/ Constructing Modernism-Postmodernism / 40

/ Ghosts Haunting Modernism-Postmodernism / 66 FIVE

/ Recollecting the Future / 95 SIX

/ French Hegels / 121

SEVEN

/ Being Timely / 158

EIGHT

NINE

/ Abiding / 207

/ Ending Ending / 247 Notes / 263 Index / 277

I L L U S T R AT I O N S

FIGURES

1

Cyclical/Circular Time 8

2

Chiasmic/Complex Time 15

3

Mark C. Taylor, neχus 16

4

Mark C. Taylor, The Pit and the Pyramid 17

5

Tokens of Exchange 53

6

Hegel’s Trajectory 77

7

Kierkegaard’s Trajectory 78

8

Theological Genealogy of Deconstruction 92

9

Hegel’s System of Fractals 107

10

Observing/Observed Consciousness 117

11

Phenomenological Journey 118

12

Derrida’s Metaphysics of Presence 131

13

Double Negation of Space-Time 131

14

God-Man 137

15

Time and Concept 141

16

Alexandre Kojève, Eternity, Time, and the Concept 146

17

Time, Desire, Death 147

18

Imagination 164

19

Negation and Nihilation 180

20

Martin Heidegger, Sketch (Grundriss) of Time 191

21

Mark C. Taylor, Point of the Pit 217

xii / Illustrations 22

Kierkegaardian Decision 237

23

Genealogical Matrix 248 TA B L E S

1

Modernisms and Postmodernisms 41

2

Greek, Jew, Christian 96

A B B R E V I AT I O N S

These works are noted in the text and identified by the following abbreviations: A

Jacques Derrida. Aporias. Translated by Thomas Dutoit. Stanford University Press, 1993.

BT

Martin Heidegger. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row, 1962.

BW

Martin Heidegger. Basic Writings. Translated by David Krell. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.

CD

Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Dread. 2nd ed. Translated by Walter Lowrie. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957.

EHF

Martin Heidegger. Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985.

EO

Søren Kierkegaard. Either/Or. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987.

ETW FT

G. W. F. Hegel. Early Theological Writings. Translated by T. M. Knox. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971. Søren Kierkegaard. Fear and Trembling/Repetition. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983.

GD

Jacques Derrida. The Gift of Death. Translated by David Wills. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

GT

Jacques Derrida. Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

xiv / Abbreviations ILH

Alexandre Kojève. Introduction à la lecture de Hegel. Paris: Gallimard, 1968. Translations by Doha Tazi Hemida.

IRH

Alexandre Kojève. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Edited by Allan Bloom. Translated by James H. Nichols Jr. New York: Basic Books, 1969.

JP

KPM

Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong with Gregor Malantschuk. 7 vols. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967– 78. Martin Heidegger. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 5th ed. Translated by Richard Taft. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.

LE

Jean Hyppolite. Logic and Existence. Translated by Leonard Lawlor and Amit Sen. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997.

M

Martin Heidegger. Mindfulness. Translated by Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016.

MP

Jacques Derrida. Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

OTB

Martin Heidegger. On Time and Being. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. New York: Harper and Row, 1972.

PF

Søren Kierkegaard. Philosophical Fragments. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985.

PH

G. W. F. Hegel. The Philosophy of History. Translated by J. Sibree. New York: Dover Publications, 1956.

PLT

Martin Heidegger. Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.

PN

G. W. F. Hegel. Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature. Edited by M. J. Petry. 3 vols. New York: Humanities Press, 1970.

PS

G. W. F. Hegel. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

QCT

Martin Heidegger. The Question concerning Technology and Other Essays. Translated by William Lovitt. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Thought, 2013.

SC

Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, eds. The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972.

SD

Søren Kierkegaard. Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death. Translated by Walter Lowrie. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968.

SL

G. W. F. Hegel. Science of Logic. Translated by A. V. Miller. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1969.

Abbreviations / xv SS

Guy Debord. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red, 1983.

TA

Søren Kierkegaard. Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978.

WD

Jacques Derrida. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

YH

John van Buren. The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

In checking and adjusting translations, I have used the following editions: G. W. F. Hegel. Werke in zwanzig Banden. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971. Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1970– 2014. Søren Kierkegaard. Samlede Værker. Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Bohandel, 1901– 6.

AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

Ending sometimes brings clarity that is missing when you are in the middle. The late 1980s was a time of considerable social, political, economic, cultural, and intellectual foment. The Reagan revolution, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the emergence of neoconservative politics and neoliberal economics were reflected in the flourishing of postmodernism and poststructuralism in the arts, architecture, and literary criticism. The decision to launch the Religion and Postmodernism series in 1987 was controversial and was met with considerable skepticism. Many literary critics insisted that postmodernism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction had nothing to do with religion, and many scholars in religious studies argued that contemporary French thought represented “Left Bank nihilism” and should be avoided at all costs. In this highly charged environment, the University of Chicago Press had the courage to launch a venture others resisted. I am grateful to members of the press’s faculty board of publications for supporting the series over the years. I also appreciate the interest and support of all the people who published books in the series. These important works have shaped critical and scholarly debate not only in religious studies, but also in the humanities more generally. While nothing lasts forever, those who remember the past can discern abiding patterns that inform the present and shape the future, and can recognize the way the future repeatedly shatters the present and transforms the past. While postmodernism might be “a thing of the past,” understanding the issues it raised prepares us for the perilous future that is approaching too fast to be grasped. None of this would have been possible without the tireless efforts of Alan Thomas and Randolph Petilos, who have overseen the Religion and Postmodernism series since its inception. More recently, the series has thrived

xviii / Acknowledgments

under Thomas Carlson, whose keen editorial eye and important contributions have been important to the ongoing success of the project. Jack Miles, George Rupp, Gil Anidjar, and John Chandler read the manuscript and made very helpful suggestions for revision. This book would not have been possible without the contribution of Doha Tazi Hemida, who translated the pivotal essay for my argument. Jeffrey Kosky generously reviewed the translation. I would also like to express my continuing gratitude for the patient support of Margaret Weyers, without which many of the books I have written never would have been completed. Finally, thanks hardly seem sufficient to express my debt to Dinny, who has been there before the beginning and will be there after the end.

June 22, 2017

ONE

Ending (the) Series

That all essential thinkers at bottom always say the same thing does not mean that they take over the identical thing from each other, but rather that they transform their own primordial thought which is different back to what is essential and to the origin. And for this reason one can find that what became known only in later ages— after it became known and could thus be seen— was also found in traces in the earlier thinkers without being able to say that the earlier thinkers already thought and knew the same thing in the same way. What was just said must be noted with regard to the concept of freedom, too. —Martin Heidegger

Beginning Ending . . . Beginning . . . Ending . . . When to begin? Where to begin? How to begin? When to end? Where to end? How to end? What is or is not before (the) beginning? What is or is not after (the) ending? If (the) beginning is always already past, does anything or anyone ever begin? If (the) ending is always yet to come, does anything or anyone ever end? What does it mean to pass? Might passing be the future that holds the present and past in suspense? What is a series? Series— which derives from ser, “to line up,” and the Latin serere, “to arrange, attach, join”—means “a group of events, or objects corresponding to such events, related by order of occurrence, especially by succession; a group of thematically connected works or performances. A group of objects related by a linearly varying morphological or configurational characteristic. The indicated sum of a finite or of a sequentially ordered infinite set of terms.”1 What does it mean to be a member of a series? What holds the members of a series together? What holds them apart?

2 / Chapter One

From point to line, but not yet to plane.2 Two dimensions, perhaps three, but not yet four. What might be the fourth dimension?3 How does a series begin? Can the members of a series be numbered and counted? Can they be calculated? Are they interrelated? Is there a progression in a series? Is there a regression? Does the series have a future? Has the time of the series passed? The series. Not just any series, but the series known as Religion and Postmodernism . . . 1987 . . . 2018 . . . covering almost three decades— three crucial decades bridging (which is not to say joining) the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From the deconstruction of one wall to the construction of others. Thirty-five books plus one, which might or might not be a conclusion. Why did the series begin? What was before the series? Why is the series ending? What will be after the series? Before— behind or in front of, past or future? After— in pursuit of or subsequent to, future or past? Before— a past that is a future, and a future that is a past. After— a future that is a past, and a past that is a future. In this interplay of past-in-future, and future-in-past, where is the present? What is the present? When is the present? Past, present, future. Future, present, past. The question of the series is the question of time. Virtually every question probed by the books in this series can be traced to the problem of time. Is time real or unreal? Postmodernism poses and reposes the question of time— “real time.” What is postmodernism after? What was modernity? When did it begin? Has it ended? Does postmodernism have a future, or has its time passed? Might this passing be the impossible possibility that disrupts the presence of every present? Time. Modernity. Death.

Post Ages In the first volume of Either/Or, Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous author observes, “Experience shows that it is not at all difficult for philosophy to begin. Far from it. It begins, in fact, with nothing and therefore can always begin. But it is always difficult for philosophy and philosophers to end” (EO, 1:39; translation modified). And so it goes, on and on and on. Uncertain of what comes next, the series becomes a series, perhaps an infinite series of post ages: postwar, posthistorical, postindustrial, posthumous, posthuman, post-God, postreligion, post-Christian, post-Western, post-real, post-truth, postbiological, postmodern. What is postmodernism? What will postmodernism have been? What comes after the Post Age? What might a post–Post Age be? The question of the post is the eternally returning question of time— being after, belatedness, afterward, afterword. What understanding of time do post ages presuppose? Is the time of postmodernism modern or post-

Ending (the) Series / 3

modern? The question of time is ancient, as ancient as thought itself. When thinking is serious, it inevitably takes time. If thinking takes time, what or who gives time? If time is given, it is never ours to spend, save, or waste; rather, it is a gift, a present. A present that is always already pre-sent and thus never fully or totally present. If the present is never present, can it ever pass, be past? Can it ever arrive? If past, present, and future are never present, what, then, is time? The question is not my own (it never is). Rather, the question was first posed by an other: Saint Augustine in The Confessions (397– 400), which is considered by some to be the first autobiography ever written. In the legendary book 11, he asks, “What then is time? I know what it is if no one asks me what it is; but if I want to explain it to someone who has asked me, I find that I do not know. Nevertheless, I can confidently assert that I know this: that if nothing passed away there would be no past time, and if nothing were coming there would be no future time, and if nothing were now there would be no present time.”4 The longer Augustine ponders the question of time, the more perplexing it becomes. Augustine had been driven to question time by his quest to understand himself. Like Kierkegaard and Freud centuries later, Augustine realized that self-knowledge presupposes the relation to an Other that can never be known. “What then am I, my God? What is my nature? A life various, manifold, and quite immeasurable.”5 As Augustine continues to reflect, he becomes even more enigmatic to himself, until he finally experiences a moment of illumination: It is now, however, perfectly clear that neither the future nor the past are [sic] in existence, and that it is incorrect to say that there are three times— past, present, and future. Though one might perhaps say: “There are three times— a present of things past, a present of things present, and a present of things future.” For these three do exist in the mind, and I do not see them anywhere else: the present time of things past is memory; the present time of things present is sight; the present time of things future is expectation. If we are allowed to use words in this way, then I see that there are three times and I admit that there are.6

In this seminal passage, Augustine expresses two interrelated insights that were indirectly and directly influential for virtually all later theology and philosophy. First, time is inseparable from human self-consciousness, and second, time is best understood in terms of presence and self-presence. Insofar as self-consciousness is inescapably temporal, self-knowledge is

4 / Chapter One

inseparable from memory, or, more precisely, recollection and expectation. To know himself, Augustine must enter into “the belly of the mind,” the “cavern or cave of the mind,” or “the huge court” of his memory. There, he confesses, “I encounter myself; I recall myself— what I have done, when and where I did it, and in what state of mind I was at the time. . . . I can myself weave them into the context of the past, and from them I can infer future actions, events, hopes, and then I can contemplate all these as though they were in the present.”7 The Confessions is the product of Augustine’s recollection. He artfully weaves dispersed moments into a coherent narrative that reveals the fabric of his life. But he cannot stop with this work, because his story is part of a larger story that is unfolding under the watchful eye of God. The individual, he believes, cannot be understood apart from the universal, and therefore The City of God must be written to complete The Confessions. Augustine cannot know where he came from or where he is heading without knowing where history as a whole is going. It is important to stress that for Augustine, neither self-consciousness nor the historical process is self-grounded or autonomous. In the depths of his soul, Augustine discovers an Other he cannot recollect but to whom or to which he is eternally indebted: “If I find you beyond my memory, I can have no memory of you. And how shall I find you if I do not remember you?”8 Augustine names this immemorial other “God”; later writers have other names for such radical altarity.9 Augustine’s timely meditations established the parameters that define what Heidegger describes as the “Western ontotheological tradition.” From Aristotle and Augustine and Hegel to Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Derrida, two metaphors have governed notions of the presence of the present: the line and the circle. Accordingly, time has been interpreted as either linear or cyclical. From the former point of view, time appears to be a series of nowpoints that have no necessary connections to one another. These discrete points can be identified, quantified, counted, and calculated. As we will see in chapter 7, Heidegger concludes Being and Time by drawing on the insights of Saint Paul, Luther, and Kierkegaard to criticize Hegel for supposedly perpetuating the misguided serial notion of time. While Heidegger’s claim is not incorrect, it is one-sided. Hegel does view “natural” time as serial, but he interprets historical time as cyclical. Hegel maintains that when time is properly comprehended, it is, in Derrida’s terms, an “archaeo-teleological process” in which the end, implicit in the beginning, becomes explicit at the end of history, and the beginning becomes intelligible as the logical outworking of the end. In the poetic words of T. S. Eliot,

Ending (the) Series / 5 In my beginning is my end . . . In my end is my beginning.10

Hegel presents his clearest and most influential formulation of this line of analysis in the preface to the final book he published, The Philosophy of Right (1821). The Trinitarian structure of the Hegelian dialectical system is a philosophical appropriation of a theological interpretation of history that dates back to the medieval theologian Joachim of Fiore (ca. 1135– 1202). The ages of the Father (ancient) and the Son (medieval) culminate in the age of Spirit (modern), which Hegel claims to fully grasp and present in the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. “To comprehend what is,” Hegel maintains, “this is the task of philosophy, because what is, is reason. Whatever happens, every individual is a child of his time; so philosophy too is its own time apprehended in thoughts. It is just as absurd to fancy that a philosophy can transcend its contemporary world as it is to fancy that an individual can overleap his own age, jump over Rhodes.”11 The present, however, can only be understood when it has passed; full comprehension can occur only after death or after the end of history. Using what is perhaps the most famous phrase in his entire corpus, Hegel avers: “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of twilight.” Looking back, time no longer appears to be a series of disconnected points, but becomes a coherent narrative with a clear beginning, middle, and end. In this apocalyptic vision, the crucifixion and resurrection of the Logos appear as the process of the self-negation and sublation of all singularity through which time is taken up into eternity. “To recognize reason as the rose in the cross of the present and thereby to enjoy the present, this is the rational insight which reconciles us to the actual, the reconciliation which philosophy affords to those in whom there has once arisen an inner voice bidding them to comprehend, not only to dwell in what is substantive while still retaining subjective freedom, but also to possess subjective freedom while standing not in anything particular and accidental but in what exists absolutely.”12 Once again, the poet translates the philosopher’s Begriff into an effective and affective Vorstellung: And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well When the tongues of flames are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one.13

6 / Chapter One

Hegel never lost sight of the theological roots of his philosophical vision. As we will see, the modern world is for him the logical conclusion of Lutheran Protestantism: “It is a sheer willfulness [Eigensinn], the willfulness which does honour to mankind, to refuse to recognize in conviction anything not ratified by thought. This willfulness is the characteristic of our epoch, besides being the principle peculiar to Protestantism. What Luther initiated as faith in feeling and in the witness of the spirit, is precisely what spirit, since become more mature, has striven to apprehend in the concept in order to free and so to find itself in the world as it exists to-day” (translation modified).14 When what is, is what ought to be, the kingdom of God has come to earth and history is over. Indirectly commenting on Hegel, Derrida reminds us: “A dialectic always remains an operation of mastery.”15 But what if time cannot be mastered? What if the kingdom never comes, but is always deferred, delayed? What if history is never over? What if (the) work is not complete? Hegel died in 1831. While the circumstances of his death remain uncertain, he appears to have died unexpectedly from cholera, which was raging throughout Europe at the time. He was buried along with his wife in Berlin’s Dorotheenstädtische Friedhof und Friedrich-Werschen Gemeinder beside Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762– 1814). At the time of his death, Hegel was at the height of his fame; hundreds attended his lectures, which were edited from student notes and eventually published. During the last decade of his life, he did not publish a single book. Though he could not have known it at the time, the preface to The Philosophy of Right was the preface to his last work. Throughout his writings, Hegel was always preoccupied with the problem of prefaces. His first published work, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), is nothing more and nothing less than a preface to his entire philosophical system. Hegel realized that prefaces pose a problem for systematic philosophy. Is the preface part of the work, or is it pre-liminary? If it is preliminary, then when and where does the work proper begin? If it is part of the book or system, then it is not really a preface. Neither inside nor outside the system, prefaces appear to be promissory notes that might or might not be redeemed. Beginning, it seems, is as much a problem for the philosopher as ending. In an essay on prefaces, entitled “Hors livre,” Derrida writes, “Prefaces, along with forewords, introductions, preludes, preliminaries, preambles, prologues, and prolegomena, have always been written, it seems, in view of their own self-effacement. Upon reaching the end of the pre- (which presents and precedes, or rather forestalls, the presentative production, and, in order to put before the reader’s eyes what is not yet visible, is obliged to speak,

Ending (the) Series / 7

predict, and predicate), the route which has been covered must cancel itself out. But this subtraction leaves a mark of erasure, a remainder which is added to the subsequent text and which cannot be completely summed up within it.”16 Always written after the work it nonetheless precedes, the preface is actually a postface or postscript whose erasure leaves the work incomplete. If the end is always missing, the work cannot come full circle to reach closure and secure a certain conclusion. Rather, it remains open and must be supplemented by postscript after postscript after postscript. Prefaces and postscripts are nonreflexive images of each other, which disrupt systemic and structural closure. This is Kierkegaard’s point in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, where, writing under the guise of Johannes Climacus (aka JC), he explains, When the dialectician has finally emancipated himself from the domination of the orator, the systematic philosopher confronts him. He says with speculative emphasis: “Not until we have reached the end of our exposition will everything become clear.” Here it will therefore be necessary to wait long and patiently before venturing to raise a dialectical doubt. True, the dialectician is amazed to hear the same philosopher admit that the System is not yet completed. Alas! everything will be made clear at the end, but the end is not yet there. . . . For it is ridiculous to treat everything as if the System were complete, and then to say at the end, that the conclusion is lacking. If the conclusion is lacking at the end, it is also lacking in the beginning, and this should therefore have been said in the beginning. A house may be spoken of as finished even if it lacks a minor detail, a bell-pull or the like; but in a scientific structure the absence of the conclusion has retroactive power to make the beginning doubtful and hypothetical, which is to say: unsystematic.17

Hegel labels the unsystematic series of posts the “mathematical,” “quantitative,” or “bad infinite.” In such a series, each point (space) and each moment (time) is separate and bears no necessary relation to its predecessors or successors. Since a definitive conclusion is perpetually deferred, this linear series remains open and thus incomplete: . . . 1 → 2 → 3 . . . The “good infinite,” by contrast, is circular. Points and moments are interrelated in such a way that past and future are gathered together in the present to create a progressive movement that is determined by nothing other than itself. These points and moments form a system that is closed and eventually reaches completion even though the movement that both creates and destroys them continues. The circular pulsation of this movement gathers together the serial points and moments of the line in a way that purportedly reconciles

8 / Chapter One

Figure 1. Cyclical/Circular Time.

time and eternity. (See fig. 1.) Hegel lays bare the structure of this movement in the Science of Logic: Thus, both finite and infinite are this movement in which each returns to itself through its negation; they are only as mediation within themselves, and the affirmative of each contains the negative of each and is the negation of the negation. They are thus a result, and consequently not what they are in the determination of their beginning; the finite is not a determinate being on its side, and the infinite a determinate being or being-in-itself beyond the determinate being, that is, beyond the being determined as finite. . . . They occur . . . only as moments of a whole and . . . come on the scene only by means of their opposite, but essentially also by means of the sublation [Aufhebung] of their opposite. (SL, 147)

Line or circle. Open or closed. Time or eternity. Line and circle. Open and closed. Time and eternity. Is it possible to conceive time as neither linear nor cyclical?

Contretemps Contretemps: Old French, contravenir, from Latin, contre, “against” + temps, “time.” An unforeseen event that disrupts the normal course of things; an inopportune occurrence.

What is the place or the nonplace of unforeseen events and inopportune occurrences within linear and cyclical notions of time? Is it possible to think of time against time within time?

Ending (the) Series / 9

The conception of time that informs modernity as well as modernism is actually ancient. Modern derives from the Latin modernus, which, in turn, comes from modo, “just now.” Modern means “of or pertaining to the present and recent times, as distinguished from the remote past.”18 Like Aristotle and Augustine, modernity privileges the now, the present. The heart of modernism is, in Roger Shattuck’s apt phrase, a preoccupation with “a full aliveness to the present moment.”19 The aim of diverse modernist practices in art, architecture, and theology is the enjoyment of total presence here and now. The desire for presence is nowhere more vividly portrayed than in the closing lines of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: Lff! So soft this morning ours. Yes. Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair. If I seen him bearing down on me now under whitespread wings like he’d come from Arkangels, I sink I’d die down over his feet, humbly dumbly, only to washup. Yes, tid. There’s where. First. We pass through grass behush the bush to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousendsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the20

Within the modernist economy, the immediate presence of “Lff,” “taddy” . . . ici et maintenant provides “the keys to” the kingdom that dawns here and now. For true believers, modernity is, in effect, the realization of the kingdom of God on earth. Fulfillment is not delayed or deferred, but is available in the present as a presence that knows no absence and a fullness that knows no lack. It would appear that post ages break with modern religious, philosophical, political, and artistic eschatologies by resisting completion and closure. But, as always, appearances are deceptive. The line of post ages, like the circle of modernity and modernism, privileges the presence of the present. As will become clear in the next chapter, postmodernism does not disrupt or subvert modernity and modernism; to the contrary, it extends and perhaps even completes them. To move beyond— while staying within— modernity and postmodernity, it is necessary to conceive time otherwise by thinking contretemps. In the 1930s, Maurice Merleau-Ponty— along with others who would shape philosophical and critical debates in France and beyond for the remainder of the century and down to the present day— attended Alexandre Kojève’s immensely influential lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. The heart of Kojève’s reading of Hegel is his interpretation of the masterslave relationship and the end of history. Kojève convinced Merleau-Ponty

10 / Chapter One

of the abiding significance of Hegel, even if his claim that Hegel’s system marks the end of history in which oppositions are reconciled and temporal fragmentation and dispersion give way to eternal integration remains questionable. In a 1946 essay entitled “Hegel’s Existentialism,” Merleau-Ponty writes, All the great philosophical ideas of the past century— the philosophies of Marx and Nietzsche, phenomenology, German existentialism, and psychoanalysis— had their beginnings in Hegel; it was he who started the attempt to explore the irrational and integrate it into an expanded reason which remains the task of our century. He is the inventor of that Reason, broader than the understanding, which can respect the variety and singularity of individual consciousnesses, civilizations, ways of thinking, and historical contingency but which nevertheless does not give up the attempt to master them in order to guide them to their own truth. . . . There would be no paradox involved in saying that interpreting Hegel means taking a stand on all the philosophical, political, and religious problems of our century (emphasis added).21

But Merleau-Ponty realizes that “there are several Hegels, and even the most objective historian will be left to ask which of them went furthest.”22 The multiplicity of Hegels makes it possible to read him in several ways. Merleau-Ponty argues that in an effort to “explore the irrational and integrate it into an expanded reason,” Hegel, perhaps inadvertently, exposes the irrationality that is always already concealed in rationality. Merleau-Ponty’s complex argument suggests an alternative interpretation of time that is neither linear nor cyclical, but is chiasmic. Chiasmus derives from the Greek khiasmos, which in turn comes from khiazien, meaning “to mark with the letter χ.” In grammar, a chiasmus is “a figure by which the order of words in one of two parallel clauses is inverted in the other. For Christians, χ is the sign of the cross.”23 Merleau-Ponty develops his most complete analysis of the chiasmus in an essay entitled “L’entrelacs— le chiasme.” An entrelacs (entre: “between, betwixt”; lacs, “string, noose, trap”) is an ornament consisting of interlacing figures. Entrelacer is to interlace, interweave, or intertwine, and s’entrelacer is to entwine or twist around each other. When understood in terms of l’entrelacs, the chiasmus figures a complex structure of implication (im-pli-cation: plier, “to fold”), “enfoldment” (enroulement), and “envelopment” (enveloppement). In sum, the chiasmus is a complex “structure of implication” in which everything is completely reversed or turned inside out [retourné].24

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In this essay, Merleau-Ponty uses the notion of chiasmus to reconfigure the body in a way that exposes its “porosity.” Far from a closed system, the body is “incomplete and gaping open.” As such, the body is irreducibly liminal and forms the “matrix” for all exchanges between interiority and exteriority. He labels the body “flesh”: “What we are calling flesh, this interiorly worked-over mass, has no name in any philosophy. As the formative medium [emphasis added] of the object and the subject, it is not the atom of being, the hard in itself that resides in a unique place and moment: one can indeed say of my body that it is not elsewhere, but one cannot say that it is here or now in the sense that objects are.”25 It is essential to understand that as the condition of the possibility of both presence and absence, this fleshy “tissue” (le tissu), which forms the fabric of life and death, is the “hollow” (le creux) that is the empty center allowing beings to be or not to be.26 This “interval” is the spacing of time. While Merleau-Ponty elaborates his notion of flesh in relation to the body— which is always spatial— several of his formulations suggest a temporal dimension of spacing. In an effort to explain the inseparable interplay between synchronicity and diachronicity, he describes the visual experience of the color red as “a certain node or knot [nœud] in the woof of the simultaneous and the successive. It is a concretion of visibility, it is not an atom. The red dress a fortiori holds with all its fibers onto the tissue of the visible, and thereby onto a tissue of invisible being. . . . A naked color, and in general a visible, is not a chunk of absolutely hard, indivisible being [i.e., a separate point], offered all naked to a vision which would be only total or null, but is rather a sort of channel [détroit] between exterior horizons and interior horizons ever gaping open” (translation modified).27 This gaping hole “punctuates” every whole by perpetually deferring “the fusion or coincidence” of inside and outside as well as subject and object. In this way, the spacing of space opens the spacing of time. But what is a coincidence that is only partial? It is a coincidence always past or always future, an experience that remembers an impossible past, anticipates an impossible future, that emerges from Being or that will incorporate itself into Being, that “is of it” but is not it, and therefore is not a coincidence, a real fusion, as of two positive terms or two elements of a mixture, but an overlapping, as of a hollow and a relief which remain distinct. Coming after the world, after nature, after life, after thought, and finding them constituted before it, philosophy indeed questions this antecedent being and questions itself concerning its own relationship with it. It is a return upon itself and upon all things but not a return to an immediate— which recedes in the measure

12 / Chapter One that philosophy wishes to approach it and to fuse into it. The immediate is at the horizon and must be thought as such; it is only by remaining at a distance that it remains itself. (translation modified)28

Reflection, like life itself, occurs in medias res— betwixt and between a Garden that never was and a Kingdom that never arrives. The space of this time is history. The “impossible past” before the beginning and the impossible future after the end are the dream of immediacy, which is a real fusion of the opposites rending temporal experience. To realize this dream would be to master time and escape history. Mending the tear, healing the wound of time, would bring history full circle in a moment of total presence,which would no longer be temporal. However, such a fusion, Merleau-Ponty insists, never occurs; therefore, the present is never fully present. Rather than fusion, the overlapping folds of time create “dehiscence or fission” that reveals the “hollow” in the tissue of things.29 The receding horizons that keep the present open by never letting it be simply itself can only be experienced as the proximity of distance whose other name is death. It was left for Derrida to work out the implications of Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the chiasmus. In chapter 8, I will consider Derrida’s notion, or, more precisely, non-notion, of différance, which he defines as “the becoming-time of space and the becoming-space of time” (MP, 8). In this context, it is important to consider his interpretation of the term chiasm. In a 1971 interview, he comments, “The form of the chiasm, of the χ, interests me a great deal, not as the symbol of the unknown, but because there is in it, as I underline in ‘La dissémination,’ a kind of fork (the series crossroads, quadrifurcum, grid, trellis, key, etc.) that is, moreover, unequal, one of the points extending its range further than the other: this is the figure of the double gesture, the intersection, of which we were speaking.”30 This double gesture Derrida labels “paleonomy,” which simultaneously mimics and displaces the Hegelian notion of Aufhebung, or sublation. The paleonomic gesture appropriates the categories of a system, structure, or discourse in order to turn them against themselves in a way that subverts them as if from within. The unequal and asymmetrical arms of the chiasmic χ double-cross the archaeo-teleological narrative of Hegel’s system and all his knowing and unknowing imitators. Derrida reworks Merleau-Ponty’s “dehiscence” to develop an account of dissemination, which he contrasts with Hegel’s systematic discourse. Hegel’s master narrative, he argues, is a teleological and totalizing dialectics that at a given moment, however far off, must permit the reassemblage of the totality of the text into the truth of its

Ending (the) Series / 13 meaning, constituting the text as expression, as illustration, and annulling the open and productive displacement of the textual chain. Dissemination, on the contrary, although producing a nonfinite number of semantic effects, can be led back neither to a present of simple origin . . . nor to an eschatological presence. It marks an irreducible and generative multiplicity. The supplement and the turbulence of a certain lack fracture the limit of the text, forbidding an exhaustive and closed formalization of it, or at least a saturating taxonomy of its themes, its signified, its meaning.31

This fracture that leads back to neither “a present of simple origin . . . nor to an eschatological presence” is the opening of an alternative temporality that eludes the present of things past, the present of things present, and the present of things future. Derrida presents his most extensive account of dissemination in an essay entitled “Hors livre: Préfaces,” which opens Dissemination. This essay probes the ambiguity of prefaces through a careful reading of the preface to Hegel’s system (i.e., the Phenomenology of Spirit). Derrida acknowledges that his critical reading of Hegel is the mirror image of Kierkegaard’s critique of the system in his postscript (Concluding Unscientific Postscript) to a postscript that is not precisely his own (Philosophical Fragments). In a parenthetical remark within a parenthetical remark, in a seminal footnote to the text proper, Derrida introduces as follows the passage from Kierkegaard’s Postscript that I have quoted above: “Outwork [i.e., Hors livre] would then, for example, be the hystero-colic sketch of an appendix, highly differentiated in its structure (dissemination describes or— to be more precise— illustrates the act of appending, from one end to the other) to all possible treatises (treatments, rather, and so strangely contemporaneous to their own practice) on the post-scriptum: the P.S.’s to . . . the Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments, A Mimic-Pathetic-Dialectic Composition, An Existential Contribution, by ‘Johannes Climacus.’”32 Derrida makes an explicit connection between the operation of dissemination and the chiasmus in a richly complex text. Commenting on the place of the preface in “the Model Book,” which is most fully developed in the totality of Hegel’s system, he brings together Hegel and Freud through an implicit comparison of alternative modes of recollection. After citing the medieval notion of the book of nature, Derrida writes: This reminder . . . ought simply to reintroduce us into the question of the preface, of the double inscription or double-jointedness of such a text: its semantic envelopment within the Book— the representative of a Logos or Logic

14 / Chapter One (ontotheology and absolute knowledge)— and the left-overness [restance] of its textural exteriority, which should not be confused with its physical thickness. This reminder ought also to introduce us into the question of the preface as seed. According to the χ (The chiasmus) (which can be considered a quick thematic diagram of dissemination), the preface, as semen, is just as likely to be left out, to well up and get lost as a seminal differance [sic], as it is to be reappropriated into the sublimity of the father. As the preface to a book, it is the word of a father assisting and admiring his work, answering for his son, losing his breath in sustaining, retaining, idealizing, reinternalizing, and mastering [emphasis added] his seed. The scene would be acted out, if such were possible, between father and son alone: autoinsemination, homoinsemination, reinsemination. Narcissism is the law, is on a par with the law. . . . The effacement or sublimation of seminal differance is the movement through which the left-overness [restance] of the outwork gets internalized and domesticated into the ontotheology of the great Book.33

Always written après coup, the preface expresses the will to mastery that drives the speculative appropriation of otherness and sublation of difference. The author/father struggles to control his Word and to protect it from being appropriated, assimilated, and distorted by rebellious sons. When translated from the oedipal struggle between generations to the course of history as a whole, this will to mastery, which begins with Descartes’s turn to the subject and culminates in Hegel’s systematic reflection, appears to be the Word that prepares the way for Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God. Heidegger anticipates Derrida’s argument when he argues that the outworking of the will to power is embodied in modern science and technology. In this way, speculative philosophy provides the program for modernity and postmodernity, which reach closure— which is not to say end— when, in Heidegger’s terms, “it seems as though man [sic] everywhere and always encounters only himself” (QCT, 27).34 But what if this “seminal differance” gets left out or lost, and thus can be neither sublated nor sublimated? What if recollection does not bring reflection full circle, but exposes a crack or the “tain” of the mirror?35 What if analysis is interminable because there is a time beyond time within time, which, like the subject himself or herself, is unrecoverable and hence irredeemable? As I have noted, the arms of the cross inscribed in the chiasmus, χ, are unequal and asymmetrical. This asymmetry makes it necessary to think of time as chiasmic. Chiasmic time is a third alternative that lies between the linear time of the series and the cyclical time of the circle. Though the language in which

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Figure 2. Chiasmic/Complex Time.

they are expressed is often challenging, the foundation of both linear and circular views of time is simple. In both alternatives, the presence of the present is conceived as a primal unity or identity, even if it only fully appears at the end of a long and arduous process or journey. Chiasmic time, by contrast, is complex. The structure of this complexity is implicit in the word itself: complex derives from the Latin complexus, past participle of complecti, complectere, “to entwine”: com, “together” + plectere, “to twine, braid.” Everything is formed by braiding or folding together differences that cannot be reduced to a simple identity to form something like nodes or knots of intensive and extensive interconnections. When the complexity of time is understood in this way, it appears as neither a series of discrete and sequential points, nor as a cycle of pregnant moments that are gradually explicated (from explicare, “to unfold”: ex, “reversal” + plicare, “to fold”). Rather, past and future fold into each other through a present that is always held in suspense. The present, in other words, is irreducibly open at both ends. The horizon of the past forever recedes and repeatedly returns as the future that never arrives, and the horizon of the future forever recedes and repeatedly returns to reconfigure a past that is not fixed. The past is neither dead and gone nor simply present in the present in a way that determines the future. The future transforms the past as much as the past conditions the future. The retroactive effect of the future on the past is the contretemps that is the condition of the possibility of unforeseen events disrupting the “normal” course of things. Contrary to expectation— always contrary to expectation— the future can make the past something it never before had been. This amazing transformative capacity of the future has borne several different names throughout the theological and philosophical tradition, the most important of which for our purposes are repetition, gift, forgiveness, and, above all, grace, abiding grace. If time is chiasmic, it approximates an incomplete Mobius strip. The passing moment remains as the interval where past and future come together by being held apart, and are held apart by coming together (see fig. 2). If the present is never present, time does not end and history is not complete.

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Figure 3. Mark C. Taylor, neχus.

While chiasmic time cannot be clearly and precisely plotted with classical philosophical concepts, perhaps it can be figured by works of art. In the absence of the end of history, art is no longer a thing of the past but still has— or, more properly, is— the future, which can be glimpsed but not comprehended by translating Begriffe (concepts) into Vorstellungen (images) (see fig. 3). Two incomplete figure eights. Double infinity— neither a bad infinity nor a good infinity, but a different infinity, another infinity. In the middle a pit, a fire pit. Is this pit where the fire and the rose become one? Is it the pit marking the interval in the periodic swinging of Poe’s pendulum? Or is it the “unplumbable . . . navel” in Freud’s dream that is “the point of contact with the unknown” (emphasis added)?36 Which of these pits was Derrida thinking about when he wrote his seminal essay “The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel’s Semiology”? And what about the pyramid (fig. 4)? Not a pyramid proper, but a decapitated pyramid. Might this disfigured pyramid figure the silent A of différance? In yet another footnote, Derrida alerts the reader to a future work (Glas) shaping his present meditation: In a work in preparation on Hegel’s family and on sexual difference in the dialectical speculative economy, we will bring to light the organization and displacement of this chain which reassembles the values of night, sepulcher, and divine— familial— feminine law as the law of singularity— and does so around the pit and the pyramid. A citation as a touchstone: “But if the universal thus easily knocks off the very tip of the pyramid (die reine Spitze seiner Pyramide) and, indeed, carries off the victory over the rebellious principle of pure

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Figure 4. Mark C. Taylor, The Pit and the Pyramid.

individuality, viz., the Family, it has thereby merely entered on a conflict with the divine law, a conflict of self-conscious Spirit with what is unconscious. For the latter is the other essential power, and is therefore not destroyed, but merely wronged (beleidigt) by the conscious Spirit. But it has only the bloodless shade to help it in actually carrying out its law in face of the power and authority of that other, publicly manifest law. Being the law of weakness and darkness it therefore at first succumbs to the powerful law of the upper world, for the power of the former is effective in the underworld, not on earth.” (MP, 77n; quote is PS, 286)

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The unconscious, bloodless shades, the law of singularity, the law of weakness and darkness. Such laws never govern the earth, where the law of power and mastery reign supreme; they are laws of another space and another time. What if this regime were overturned, not by a rebellion of “outside” force, but through an “internal” subversion brought about by the endless quest for control, mastery, power? Perhaps (peut-être) power is weakness and weakness is strength. Perhaps the law of weakness is not a law in the traditional sense of the term, but is the lawless law of grace. Perhaps grace gives the gift of time, which is “the gift of death.” If so, then peut-être grace is the amazing power through which everything and everyone peut-être.

Refiguring When does a work end? Where does a work end? How does a work end? If time is neither linear nor cyclical but is chiasmic, then the work is open and the sense of an ending gives way to the sense of unending. Chiasmic time requires a different style of reading. Historical, archaeological, and genealogical ways of reading, which progress from past to present and point to the future, must be supplemented by the reverse trajectory, which goes from the future through the present to the past. This method (if it is a method) of reading is retro-reading. Retro-reading does not discover the seeds of present and future works in the past, but demonstrates the ways in which later works transform earlier works to make them different from what they once were. As Heidegger, commenting on Schelling, observes, “That all essential thinkers at bottom always say the same thing does not mean that they take over the identical thing from each other, but rather that they transform their own primordial thought which is different back to what is essential and to the origin. And for this reason one can find that what became known only in later ages— after it became known and could thus be seen— was also found in traces in the earlier thinkers without being able to say that the earlier thinkers already thought and knew the same thing in the same way” (EHF, 85). Hegel’s works become different through the writings of Feuerbach and Marx, and Kierkegaard’s works become different through the writings of Heidegger and Derrida. Later writers make earlier ones say what they never could have said in their own words during their lifetimes. Sometimes successors render explicit what was implicit in the work of their precursors. Haunted by what Harold Bloom aptly describes as “the anxiety of influence,” writers engage in an oedipal struggle in which they attempt to establish their identity by negating others. Most interesting are the writers who creatively misread their

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precursors to produce works they mistakenly believe are their own. Bloom labels this misreading “misprision”: Only a poet challenges a poet as poet, and so only a poet makes a poet. To the poet-in-a-poet, a poem is always the other man, the precursor, and so a poem is always a person, always the father of one’s Second Birth. To live, the poet must misinterpret the father, by the crucial act of misprision, which is the rewriting of the father. But who, what is the poetic father? The voice of the other, of the daimon, is always speaking in one; the voice that cannot die because already it has survived death— the dead poet lives in one.37

Writing is always about time and overcoming death, even—perhaps especially— when the dream of immortality has been forsaken. Bloom’s canny analysis shows that every story is in its own way a ghost story. In attempting to secure some measure of independence, the writer establishes dependence on others without whom it is impossible to be oneself. As Freud shows in Totem and Taboo, the dead father always returns to those who struggle to assert their autonomy. The following pages tell a story of the ghosts who have been haunting me for more than half a century. It is also the story about ending. As the end of my career and, indeed, my life approaches, I pause to look back to where it all began. The time was 1967/68, the place Wesleyan University, where I was fortunate enough to have two remarkable teachers: John Maguire and Stephen Crites. It was a tumultuous time in the country as well as the world, and college campuses were cauldrons of unrest. The war in Vietnam was raging, and cities were literally burning. In the summer between my junior and senior years, Newark (which was next to the town where I grew up) exploded with racial conflict. In February 1968, a mere four months before I graduated, President Lyndon B. Johnson revoked all draft deferments and mandated preinduction physicals for all able-bodied young men. In following months, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, and in May 1968, universities all over the world shut down as young people protested a world that was spinning out of control. Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll mixed with war protest to create Dionysian festivals that were as macabre as they were liberating. If wisdom were to be found during those confusing years, it was not always joyful. Though it could not have been evident at the time, just below the surface of the counterculture, other currents were stirring, which soon led to

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a counter-counterculture. Much of the history of the past half century can be understood as a reaction to the ’60s: neofundamentalist religion, neoconservative politics, and neoliberal economics. In addition to this, kids high on acid were starting a computer, information, and media revolution that continues to shape the world. It was a Wesleyan professor of comparative literature, Ihab Hassan, who gave this emerging epoch its name: postmodernism. Wesleyan was a hotbed of protest during these years, largely because of John Maguire’s influence. A close friend of Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy, John brought them to campus several times during my undergraduate years. John was generous enough to invite me to join them; these meetings provided the occasion for conversations that remain seared in my memory. John, who is now on the board of trustees of Union Theological Seminary, where I am a faculty member, and William Coffin, who became the minster of Riverside Church, which I see every day from the window of my office, were among the first Freedom Riders in the South to protest racial segregation and participate in early voter registration drives. The bus he was riding on was overturned and burned, and the resulting legal case eventually reached the United States Supreme Court. John brought his moral, social, and political concerns into the classroom, where he taught me that no matter how complex or abstract ideas and writings are, they must always be brought into conversation with the critical events of the day. Every day as I cross Reinhold Niebuhr Place going to my office, I remember John reporting that Niebuhr always said that a Christian is a person who holds the Bible in one hand and the daily newspaper in the other.38 Having given up traditional religion long before, I translated John and Niebuhr’s point as: a responsible thinker, teacher, and writer is a person who holds Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in one hand and the New York Times in the other. In the midst of the turmoil of the ’60s, I took two courses from Steve Crites during my senior year (1967/68): “The Dialectic of Self-Alienation and Reconciliation in Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx” and “Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Existence.”39 Steve did not have the charisma of the outstanding college football player John Maguire once was; he was cut from the cloth of a German philosophy professor— beard, pipe, tweed jacket, and leather patches, and a scholarly mien to go with them. I still have my notebooks and papers from these courses. In many ways, this book is my final final paper for Steve’s courses. This is not to suggest that our relationship was without its oedipal moments. When I fell under the sway of Derrida, Steve— convinced that I had lost my way in the morass of French nihilism and was wasting my life as well as my career— stopped speaking to me for several years. Nonetheless, in Steve’s seminars I found the confirmation of John’s message. Even

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though the ideas we discussed were extraordinarily complex, I discovered that they were directly related to the questions swirling in the world around me: the relation between the system and the individual, the source of personal identity, the importance of community, the meaning of time and history as well as their possible end, the inevitability of conflict and violence, the possibility or the impossibility of redemption, and the significance or insignificance of death. My graduate education was a continuation of my undergraduate preoccupations. At Harvard, I wrote my PhD dissertation on Kierkegaard, and at the University of Copenhagen, I wrote my Doktorgrad thesis on Hegel and Kierkegaard.40 What has continued to draw me to Hegel and Kierkegaard is not only their historical significance but, more important, their contemporary relevance. Alfred North Whitehead once famously claimed that everyone is either a Platonist or an Aristotelian; I believe everybody is either a Hegelian, a Kierkegaardian, or something in between. What I did not realize at the time my own journey was beginning was that people who were to become the most influential thinkers and writers of the latter half of the twentieth century were also wrestling with the issues that were consuming me on the other side of the Atlantic. I knew that the 1968 student uprising in Paris was fueled by opposition to the war in Vietnam and the resistance of students and workers to American imperialism and the expanding reach of capitalism, but I did not know that the students were also protesting the hegemony of structuralism in French faculties of the humanities and the social sciences. Nor did I understand the importance of Hegel and Kierkegaard for these intellectual disputes and social movements. While Hegel directly and indirectly inspired structuralism, Kierkegaard influenced first the existentialists and then the later writers who came to be known as poststructuralists. It gradually became clear to me that the growing controversies between structuralists and poststructuralists repeated and extended the debate between Hegel and Kierkegaard. The two most influential figures in framing these developments were Alexandre Kojève and Jean Hyppolite. Their teaching and writings set the terms of debate for several generations of French intellectuals, whose influence extended far beyond the borders of France. For decades, writers and critics who have never read a word of Hegel or Kierkegaard have been trying to discuss issues Kojève and Hyppolite initially formulated. By an uncanny coincidence, these two men both died in the pivotal year 1968. While I was struggling to write my term papers at Wesleyan, unbeknownst to me and unnoticed by most others, a new chapter in American intellectual and cultural history was beginning. Structuralism and poststructuralism arrived on the American shore simultaneously at a conference held at Johns

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Hopkins University in October 1966. The proceedings of this conference were published four years later in a volume entitled The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man. In their introduction to this book, editors Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato explained the significance of the event and framed the questions participants would address: “As this was the first time in the United States that structuralist thought had been considered as a cross-disciplinary phenomenon, the organizers of the program sought to identify certain basic problems and concerns common to every field of study: the status of the subject, the general theory of signs and language systems, the use and abuse of models, homologies and transformations as analytic techniques, synchronic (vs.) diachronic descriptions, the question of ‘mediations’ between objective and subjective judgments, and the possible relationship between microcosmic and macrocosmic social or symbolic dimensions.”41 The conference brought together an extraordinary group of people, including René Girard, Lucien Goldmann, Tzvetan Todorov, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and Jean Hyppolite. In 1966, few people could have predicted the impact these writers would have within as well as beyond the academy. The year following the conference, Derrida, whose essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” was included in the proceedings, published three extremely influential books: Of Grammatology, Speech and Phenomena, and Writing and Difference. In these works and everything he published after them, Derrida’s chief concerns remained remarkably consistent: structure, system, time, history, identity, difference, subjectivity, otherness, and, above all, death. When I first read Of Grammatology in the late 1970s, it was a revelation. Though Kierkegaard’s name does not appear in the book and the ghost of Hegel was everywhere present, it was immediately clear to me that Derrida’s critique of structuralism implicitly repeated Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegelianism. More precisely, in these pages I discovered what I had been searching for: a “position” that marked and re-marked the elusive margin lying between Hegel’s both/and, and Kierkegaard’s either/or. My initial foray into this unchartable territory was a contribution to a collection of essays, Deconstruction and Theology, and a volume of my own essays, Deconstructing Theology.42 However, it was not until two years later that I was able to develop a more extensive account of my understanding of the importance of deconstruction for religion and theology. In Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (1984), I undertook the unlikely task of developing a constructive theology— or, as I called it, a/theology— by weaving together Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Derrida. At the time, the University of Chicago Press was the lead-

Ending (the) Series / 23

ing publisher of Derrida’s work, and the new religion editor, Alan Thomas, rolled the dice by agreeing to publish the book. When Erring appeared, it was attacked from every side. People in religious studies agreed with Stephen Crites and insisted that deconstruction represented “Left Bank nihilism” and should be resisted; ill-informed literary critics claimed that deconstruction had nothing to do with religion. In spite of these criticisms— which sometimes became quite heated— Alan and the press not only stood by the book but doubled down and invited me to develop and edit a new series dedicated to the controversies surrounding structuralism and deconstruction. In 1987 Religion and Postmodernism was launched. More than three decades and thirty-five books later, the series is coming to an end. The volumes that bookend the series were written by two of my close friends and mentors, who did more during the post-’60s era to shape the field of religious studies than anyone else: Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy, by Edith Wyschogrod, who died far too soon, in 2009; and God Being Nothing: Toward a Theogony, by Ray L. Hart, who effectively died in 1980 but was miraculously resurrected to complete his life’s work. In the years after I relinquished the series editorship, it continued to thrive under watchful eye of Alan Thomas and Randolph Petilos and the creative guidance of my erstwhile student, Thomas Carlson, who has become one of the leading philosophers of religion of his generation. In the fall of 2016, Alan approached me with a proposal. He suggested that I return to Kierkegaard and write a book that would be the final work in the series. I had never imagined such a project and initially resisted returning to ground I thought I had already covered. But the longer I pondered the idea, the more intriguing it became. I had recently completed Last Works: Lessons in Leaving, in which I consider how eleven of my ghosts ended their writing careers, and having already “died” once, I was acutely aware that the end of my own career and, indeed, life are fast approaching.43 After considerable reflection, I decided to accept Alan’s suggestion; the result is this book. Abiding Grace: Time, Modernity, Death can be considered an unconcluding unscientific postscript to the series Religion and Postmodernism. As I look back over the work of a lifetime, I find myself agreeing with Hegel: the task of philosophy is to comprehend one’s own time in thought. What I have tried to do is develop a philosophy or a theology of culture. I also believe Hegel was right when he declared that the owl of Minerva takes flight only at twilight— we can see afterward what we cannot know beforehand. Unlike Hegel, however, and in agreement with Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Derrida, I do not think that personal, social, and cultural history are the story of the progressive realization of reason and autonomy;

24 / Chapter One

to the contrary, these histories harbor residual traces of what can never be comprehended. The philosopher, therefore, must also become something like a psychoanalyst who attempts to interpret the present as a symptom of what might best be described as the cultural unconscious. The restlessness of this unconscious keeps the future open and thereby renders analysis interminable. For many years, commentators and critics have argued that I stopped writing about religion long ago; they have been puzzled by what they regard as a random course from religion and philosophy to literature, architecture, art, science, technology, economics, and finance. Experiments in business (Global Education Network) and art (Grave Matters, MASS MoCA, 2002, and Sensing Place, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2016) have only increased bewilderment. Though it is not always obvious, I have never lost sight of the questions I first encountered in Kierkegaard and Hegel many years ago. In responding to Alan’s challenge, my reflections have often seemed rather Hegelian. Indeed, it is possible to discern a comprehensible narrative that gathers together the seemingly disparate works I have written. There have, however, been unexpected surprises. As I now reread Kierkegaard and Hegel through the lens of Heidegger, Derrida, and others, I see in their writings things I did not see before, as well as things I saw without knowing I saw. Through retro-reading, I see things that are not precisely in their works, but recognize what their works have become through the writings of their successors. These ghosts of the past harbor a future that will continue to transform both them and readers who are patient enough to linger over their demanding works. In recalling (which is not recollecting) the course I have been unintentionally following, I have attempted to refigure Religion and Postmodernism as something other than a series. Though each of the thirty-five works is distinctive and many are not concerned with ideas that have preoccupied me for years, they are all, I believe, symptomatic of a Post Age that now is passing. As for what lies ahead, we can only await the past that the future will create and re-create. By drawing the series to a close, we open it to future twists and turns that will forever transform us.

T WO

Mirror Stage

Of all the undertakings that have been proposed in this century, that of the psychoanalyst is perhaps the loftiest, because the undertaking of the psychoanalyst acts in our time as a mediator between the man of care [i.e., Heidegger] and the subject of absolute knowledge [i.e., Hegel]. —Jacques Lacan

Programming In the summer of 1989, a few months before the collapse of the Soviet Union and fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama published a highly influential article, “The End of History?,” in the journal the National Interest. Three years later a greatly expanded version of the argument appeared in a book entitled The End of History and the Last Man. Fukuyama based his argument on Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. He had been sent to study with Kojève by his mentor at the University of Chicago, Allan Bloom, who was the editor of the English translation of Kojève’s Introduction à la lecture de Hegel. Five years before Fukuyama’s book appeared, Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind (1987), which was a savage attack on American higher education. Bloom argues that everything went off the rails in the ’60s and things have been going downhill ever since. “About the sixties,” he notes, “it is now fashionable to say that although there were indeed excesses, many good things resulted. But, so far as universities are concerned, I know of nothing positive coming from that period; it was an unmitigated disaster for them.” He has no doubt what caused the precipitous decline not only of universities— the cynicism, relativism, and nihilism of European philosophers led to the collapse of culture and threatened

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society as a whole. Further, “the fact that in Germany the politics were of the Right and in the United States of the Left should not mislead us. In both places the universities gave way under the pressure of mass movements, and did so in large measure because they thought those movements possessed a moral truth superior to any the university could provide. . . . The New Left in America was a Nietzscheanized-Heideggerianized Left.” Bloom’s target is puzzling because many of the philosophers he attacked so vehemently were inspired by Kojève. He saves some of his most venomous criticism for deconstruction: “Comparative literature has now fallen largely into the hands of a group of professors who are influenced by the post-Sartrean generation of Parisian Heideggerians, in particular Derrida, Foucault and Barthes. The school is called Deconstructionism, and it is the last, predictable, stage in the suppression of reason and the denial of the possibility of truth in the name of philosophy.”1 If Bloom had read any Derrida, he understood him no better than he understood Heidegger. Nevertheless, his jeremiad for Western culture vaulted deconstruction from seminar rooms of academia to the front pages of newspapers and magazines around the world and had a lasting impact on his protégés Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, who were largely responsible for shaping the ideology of the influential neoliberal and neoconservative movements. Fukuyama is a more careful reader and more nuanced writer than his teacher. He has a solid understanding of both Hegel and Kojève, and appreciates the far-reaching implications of their work. Looking back at his 1989 article in the introduction to his book, originally published in 1992, he recalls, “I argued that liberal democracy may constitute the ‘end point of mankind’s ideological evolution’ and the ‘final form of human government,’ and as such constituted the ‘end of history.’ That is, while earlier forms of government were characterized by grave defects and irrationalities that led to their eventual collapse, liberal democracy was arguably free from such fundamental internal contradictions.” From this point of view, liberal democracy represents the most complete realization of “the twin principles of liberty and equality.”2 Since Hegel (and Kojève following him) believes that history is driven by contradictions and the conflicts they generate, the disappearance of contradictions spells the end of history. Fukuyama acknowledges that the idea of universal history in the Western tradition is a Christian invention, which was fully elaborated in Augustine’s City of God. In the modern era, Kant wrote the program others would follow in his 1784 essay, “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View.” During the modern period, Hegel and Marx developed the most comprehensive interpretations of history by appropriating the Christian

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narrative Kant had secularized. In their telling, history is not a random series of events but is an intelligible eschatological process that ends not with the kingdom of God, but with the nineteenth-century Prussian state or communist utopia. While for Hegel the logic or Logos of history is revealed in the ongoing struggle for recognition— which results in social validation and prestige— according to Marx, history is driven by economic conflicts that result from the inequitable distribution of material resources. “For both of these thinkers,” Fukuyama writes, “there was a coherent development of human societies from simple tribal ones based on slavery and subsistence agriculture, through various theocracies, monarchies, and feudal aristocracies, up through modern liberal democracy and technologically driven capitalism. This evolutionary process was neither random nor unintelligible, even if it did not proceed in a straight line, and even if it was possible to question whether man was happier or better off as a result of historical ‘progress.’”3 Fukuyama accepts this universalist vision of history but rejects the claim that history reached its conclusion in either the nineteenth-century Prussian state or the twentieth-century communist state. The twin principles guiding historical progress have been liberty and equality, and these, he believes, are only fully realized in modern liberal democracy and the economic system that makes them possible: capitalism. This social, political, and economic transformation has led to current postindustrial information technologies. “Modern natural science,” Fukuyama argues, establishes a uniform horizon of economic production possibilities. Technology makes possible the limitless accumulation of wealth, and thus the satisfaction of an ever-expanding set of human desires. This process guarantees an increasing homogenization of all human societies, regardless of their historical origins or cultural inheritances. All countries undergoing economic modernization must increasingly resemble one another: they must unify nationally on the basis of a centralized state, urbanize, replace traditional forms of social organization like tribe, sect, and family with economically rational ones based on function and efficiency, and provide for the universal education of their citizens. Such societies have become increasingly linked with one another through global markets and the spread of a universal consumer culture. Moreover, the logic of modern natural science would seem to dictate a universal evolution in the direction of capitalism.4

In so-called postindustrial societies, “information and technological innovation play a much larger role.”5 The decentralized and distributed organization of capitalist economies and democratic societies are better equipped

28 / Chapter Two

to adapt to modern communications media and information technologies than the centralized and hierarchical structure of communist societies and economies. The promise that capitalism will create “limitless” wealth, which will make labor unnecessary and leisure widely accessible, is not new. During the depths of the Great Depression in 1928, John Maynard Keynes delivered a lecture at Cambridge University intended to persuade impressionable undergraduates that capitalism was a more viable and every bit as idealistic an economic system as communism. The success of capitalism, he confidently declared, would usher in an era of leisure in which people would need to work only fifteen hours a week to satisfy their needs. Almost thirty years later, Richard Nixon told Americans to prepare for a four-day work week in the not-too-distant future. And a decade after Nixon’s prediction, a US Senate subcommittee heard what was regarded as reliable testimony that by the year 2000 Americans would be working as little as fourteen hours a week. Needless to say, history has not proven to be quite as rational and predictable as Fukuyama, Kojève, Hegel, and Marx believed. The technology that connects individuals, communities, and nations also divides them. In the years since Fukuyama declared the end of history, falling walls have been replaced by rising physical and virtual walls that are being constructed around the world. Furthermore, as authoritarian leaders seize or are granted power, democracy is in retreat in many parts of the world, personal and social freedoms are being eclipsed by the rise of religious fundamentalism in different religious traditions, and repressive political regimes on the left as well as the right are becoming more powerful. Personalized technologies have combined with Big Data to create a surveillance state where privacy disappears and individuals are constantly exposed to anonymous observers gazing at invisible monitors. In this way, the very technologies that were supposed to liberate us hold us in bondage. Instead of saving time and granting leisure, connectivity 24/7/365 leaves people no time for anything but the busyness of business. With media buzz channeling through earbuds and Big Data targeting the unconscious, minds are controlled, and what appear to be individual decisions are little more than the effects of algorithms prescribed by either anonymous programmers or by other algorithms running on machines at speeds that defy human comprehension and intervention. Though rarely noted, Kierkegaard wrote the first serious criticism of modern mass media and the world they create— in a little-noticed book, Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age (1846). The primary targets of his critique are what Fukuyama identifies as products of the modern liberal state: the uniformity of individuals created by the “increasing homogeni-

Mirror Stage / 29

zation of all human societies,” and depersonalization, which results in the dissipation of responsible decisions in the ether of media chatter and public opinion. The focus of Kierkegaard’s argument about mass media is the press, which, he acknowledges, is the result of the print revolution fostered by the Protestant Reformation. Reading Two Ages more than a century and a half after its publication, it appears to be astonishingly prescient. Kierkegaard anticipates Fukuyama’s basic claim that the modern state is free from “fundamental internal contradictions.” Unlike revolutionary times, Kierkegaard argues, the sensible present age has “nullified the principle of contradiction” (TA, 97). However, he disagrees about what this development means; rather than peace, harmony, and human fulfillment, the nullification of the principle of contradiction destroys life by dissolving the tensions inherent in human existence. Read retrospectively, Kierkegaard appears to be a surprisingly early critic of today’s electronic media. Just as the seriality and segmentation of linotype has standardized individuals’ handwriting and promoted uniform spelling, grammar— and even thought— so do digital media standardize thinking and regulate decision-making. People mindlessly channel the chatter of pundits who ceaselessly repeat superficial “news.” When anonymous subjects no longer take time to reflect enough to make responsible decisions, Kierkegaard predicts, eventually human speech will become just like the public: pure abstraction— there will no longer be someone who speaks, but an objective reflection will gradually deposit a kind of atmosphere, an abstract noise that will render human speech superfluous, just as machines make workers superfluous. In Germany there are even handbooks for lovers; so it probably will end with lovers being able to sit and speak anonymously to each other. There are handbooks on everything, and generally speaking education soon will consist of knowing letter-perfect a larger or smaller compendium of observations from such handbooks, and one will excel in proportion to his skill in pulling out the particular one, just as the typesetter picks out letters. (TA, 104)

Nowhere is this loss of “full-blooded individuality” more apparent for Kierkegaard than in the dominant social currents of his day. “The dialectic of the present age,” he argues, “is oriented to equality, and its most logical implementation, albeit abortive, is leveling [Nivellementet], the negative unity of the negative mutual reciprocity of individuals”; put differently, “leveling is an abstract power and is abstraction’s victory over individuals” (TA, 84). Through this process, the individual becomes so identified with or integrated

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within the social totality of which he or she is a member that all sense of personal uniqueness and self-responsibility evaporate. The result is a mass, herd, or crowd [Mængde] existence. Convinced that universality is superior to particularity, the crowd man, like Heidegger’s Das Man, fails to recognize that “‘the single individual’ is a spiritual definition of being a human being; the crowd, the many, the statistical or numerical is an animal definition of being a human being” (JP, no. 2050). As the power of the crowd waxes, the strength of the individual wanes. The race as a whole becomes essential or substantial, and the individual becomes inessential or accidental. Instead of attempting to define their unique individuality through resolute decision, people allow themselves to be swept along by mass movements swirling in the sociopolitical mainstream. The public— a bloodless abstraction of insubstantial individuals— becomes the ruling power of the age. When public opinion holds sway, truth and value lose their moorings and drift with the ever-changing currents of the day. Important issues are decided through the objectivity of majority rule, in which the quantitative dialectic of numerical accumulation replaces the qualitative dialectic of individual resolution. The crowd man degenerates into a thoughtless cipher for the viewpoints of others expressed impersonally in the mass media. Devoid of personal opinion and lacking an individual point of view, “no one wants to be I but pulls in his antennae and becomes third person, ‘the public,’ ‘they’” (JP, no. 2075). Kierkegaard recognizes the relationship between such depersonalization and the processes of industrialization Denmark was then undergoing. Even more surprising is Kierkegaard’s appreciation for the intellectual, psychological, and social implications of modernity’s obsession with increasing speed: “Suppose that such an age has invented the swiftest means of transportation and communication, has unlimited combined financial resources: how ironic that the velocity of the transportation system and the speed of communication stand in an inverse relationship to the dilatoriness of irresolution” (TA, 64). In this high-speed industrialized world, Kierkegaard argues, public opinion shaped by mindless mass media has no more value than paper currency that is not backed by gold. Leveling, homogenization, standardization, conformity, anonymity, machine language, chatter, noise, superficiality, obscenity, quantification, calculation, and speed. What could be a better set of categories for interpreting today’s world of twenty-four-hour cable news, internet, social media, Big Data, high-speed trading, panoptical surveillance, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality? As if describing the person trying to sleep with his or her iPhone beside the bed, Kierkegaard writes: “There are people who have an extraordinary talent for transforming everything into a business operation,

Mirror Stage / 31

whose whole life is a business operation, who fall in love and are married, hear a joke, and admire a work of art with the same businesslike zeal with which they work at the office” (EO, 1:289). Always busy, these people never have enough time; the faster they run, the less time they have, and the less time they have, the faster they run. Far from free time and leisure, technology creates exhaustion. Anticipating both Heidegger and David Foster Wallace, Kierkegaard claims that this cultivated frenzy is symptomatic of boredom. When life becomes just one damn thing after another, the only way to survive seems to be by “the rotation method” (EO, 1:281ff). To remain in play, it is necessary repeatedly to switch channels, brands, fashions, careers, jobs, and even partners. After presenting an ironic account of such speciously self-important lives, Kierkegaard makes a surprising suggestion. “Boredom,” he declares, “is the demonic pantheism. It becomes evil itself if one continues in it as such; as soon as it is annulled [ophæve6], however, it is the true pantheism. But it is annulled only by amusing oneself— ergo, one ought to amuse oneself. To say that it is annulled by working betrays a lack of clarity, for idleness can certainly be canceled by work, since this is its opposite, but boredom cannot” (EO, 1:290). This association of boredom with pantheism reflects his conviction that comfortable and complacent nineteenth-century Danish bourgeois society is inseparable from Christendom, which, Kierkegaard insists, “did away with Christianity without quite being aware of it.” In his relentlessly critical Training in Christianity (1850), he argues, That the established order has become something divine or is regarded as divine constitutes a falsehood which is made possible only by ignoring its origin. When a bourgeois has become a nobleman he is eager to make every effort to have his vita ante acta forgotten. So it is with the established order. It began with the God-relationship of the individual; but now this must be forgotten, the bridge hewn down, the established order deified. And strangely enough it is precisely this deification of the established order which constitutes the constant rebellion, the permanent revolt against God. . . . The deification of the established order . . . is the invention of the indolent worldly mind, which would put itself at rest and imagine that all is sheer security and peace, that now we have reached the highest attainment.7

The deification of the established order is the result of the unholy alliance between bourgeois society and Hegelian speculative philosophy. As we will see, Hegel and Kierkegaard’s contrasting readings of Luther’s theology lead to conflicting interpretations of the interrelation of God, self, and world. For

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Hegel, Lutheran Protestantism leads to the negation of divine transcendence realized in the modern secular state. As Hyppolite argues convincingly, Hegel’s entire philosophical project is designed to overcome the self-alienation inherent in what Hegel labels “unhappy consciousness.” In this form of life, the real is always elsewhere— in the heavens or beneath the earth, in the past or in the future. In the absence of the real, which sometimes is named God, restless pilgrims are condemned to ceaseless temporal striving for what can never be attained. For Hegelians and bourgeois Christendom, the good news of the Gospel is that the real is not transcendent, but is totally present in the present here and now. As transcendence gives way to immanence, the divine becomes incarnate in present time and space. In this integrative vision, opposites are reconciled— eternity and time, sacred and profane, identity and difference, self and other are seen as one. While Hegel regards this process as the sacralization of the profane or deification of the established order, Kierkegaard insists it is the profanation of the sacred. In assessing this response to Hegelian cultural Protestantism, it is important to note that ever since the time Kierkegaard was writing, Denmark has had a Lutheran state church. Citizens are members of this church by virtue of birth, and must take formal legal steps to disaffiliate even if they do not regard themselves as Christian. For Kierkegaard, this situation was a reversal and negation of original Christianity, in which the decision to become a Christian carried the threat and often the realistic prospect of persecution, suffering, and even death. By domesticating Christianity in an effort to reassure themselves that their eternal destiny was secure, bourgeois citizens sought the self-certainty Descartes had searched for in philosophy. From Kierkegaard’s point of view, Christendom represented an effort to master time by taking the risk out of the future. Time, however, cannot be cheated; individual lives and history as a whole never turn out as expected. Hegel’s profanation of Christian pedagogy acted out in Christendom results in the opposite of its intended effect. Far from overcoming unhappy consciousness, the self-contented bourgeois citizen is, according to Kierkegaard, “the unhappiest one.” Once again, the issue is the inescapability of the contradictions implicit in time. In contrast to Hegel, for whom recollection resolves unhappy consciousness and brings satisfaction by gathering the scattered moments of time into the fullness of the present, Kierkegaard insists that temporal tensions are inescapable and therefore the enjoyment of what he describes as “eternal happiness” is forever deferred in this life. Trapped by the past that closes the future, “the unhappiest one will always have to be sought among recollection’s unhappy individualities. . . . It is recollection that prevents him from becoming present in his hope and

Mirror Stage / 33

it is hope that prevents him from becoming present in his recollection. This is due, on the one hand, to his continually hoping for that which should be recollected; his hope is continually being disappointed, but he discovers that this disappointment occurs not because his objective is pushed further ahead but because he is past his goal, because it has already been experienced or should have been experienced and thus has passed over into recollection” (EO, 1:225). The mirror effect of speculative philosophy traps one in solipsistic narcissism by programming the future, reconciling differences, and appropriating ostensible otherness as if it were one’s own. In the absence of real otherness and immersed in a present that seems closed, everything becomes a stultifying return of the same, and both change and self-transformation become impossible. In this hall of mirrors, time is an archeo-teleological process— the future has always already occurred, and nothing remains to be accomplished other than letting the program run its course. The future, in other words, is utterly predictable and thus effectively past; there is no possibility for surprise, novelty, or anything unexpected. Faced with nothing more than an endless series of empty moments, one realizes that “boredom rests upon the nothing that interlaces existence [Tilvœrelsen]; its dizziness is infinite, like that which comes from looking down into a bottomless abyss” (EO, 1:291).

Quest for Autonomy Modernity and postmodernity are inseparable from the death of God. God can disappear in two opposite ways: “He” can become so transcendent that “He” is functionally irrelevant, as in deism, or “He” can become so immanent that there is no difference between the human and the divine, and the profane and the sacred. Though for different reasons, in both cases the world becomes disenchanted. The former alternative is Kierkegaardian, the latter is Hegelian. Looking back through the lens of Heidegger, Derrida, and others, it becomes possible to imagine a third alternative between immanence and transcendence that reintroduces obscurity and mystery into life. The elusive mean between transcendence and immanence protects risk, uncertainty, and chance by refiguring time and death. The mediator between Hegel and Kierkegaard, who opens the way for Heidegger and Derrida, is Friedrich Schelling (1775– 1854). Schelling was the rare, perhaps unique, philosopher who presented two complete but virtually opposite philosophical positions. At the exceedingly young age of fifteen, he entered Tübingen seminary of the Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Württemberg, where his roommates were Hegel and Friedrich Hölderlin.

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His Tübingen doctoral dissertation, written under the direction of Gottlob Christian Storr, focused on the theology of Saint Paul (“De Marcione Paulinarum epistolarum emendatore”8). In 1800, Schelling published his monumental System of Transcendental Idealism. Though Hegel summarily dismissed this system in a deliberate act of misprision, in this work and in lectures on the philosophy of art (1802– 1803), Schelling developed a position that is consistent with Hegel’s mature system. After starting a promising academic career at Jena (1798– 1803), Schelling was forced out of the university. During his exile he completely reversed direction and formulated a “positive” philosophy of revelation, which he intended to counter the spread of Hegelianism. With the split between left- and right-wing Hegelians growing after Hegel’s death in 1831, a decade later Schelling was appointed to the chair Hegel had held at the University of Berlin. In 1841, he presented lectures on his new system in a course entitled “Philosophie der Mythologie und der Offenbarung.” The only time Kierkegaard left Denmark was to attend these lectures. Though Kierkegaard later dismissed their significance, Schelling’s work left a deep impression on him. These lectures (which were also attended by Friedrich Engels, Mikhail Bakunin, Jacob Burckhardt, and Alexander von Humboldt) were very influential. As Heidegger’s interest in Paul and Luther grew, he too was drawn to Schelling’s writings. In 1936, he taught a course at the University of Freiburg on Schelling’s book On Human Freedom; these lectures were later published as Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom. Heidegger’s work on Schelling marks a turning point in his philosophy.9 Though usually associated with Nietzsche, the notion of the death of God has a long history in Christianity, dating back to the Church Fathers. Both Athanasius and Tertullian use the phrase; during the Middle Ages, Meister Eckhart, whose work had a significant impact on Heidegger, wrote, “God is dead in order for me to die in regard to the entire world and in the face of all created realities.”10 But it was the Lutheran tradition that placed the idea of the death of God at the center of theological reflection. In 1641, Johannes Rist used the phrase “God himself is dead” in a hymn Lutherans still sing. Hegel quotes this line in the concluding paragraph of his early work Faith and Knowledge, where he goes so far as to claim that the “feeling . . . upon which the religion of more recent times rests” is “the feeling that God Himself is dead.”11 Hegel eventually developed the far-reaching implications of this insight in his Phenomenology of Spirit. It was left for the son in a long line of Lutheran pastors to work out the sociocultural significance of this seemingly arcane theological point for the modern and postmodern world. In The Gay Science, (1882), Nietzsche writes,

Mirror Stage / 35 The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.12

It is not insignificant that this proclamation takes place in the middle of the marketplace because, as Hegel and Kierkegaard had already suggested, the death of God in Lutheran Protestantism is inseparable from the rise of modern capitalism. The images Nietzsche uses are calculated to provoke: nothing, emptiness, night, plunging, death, gravediggers, even decomposition. Another less obvious but no less important image is particularly suggestive: “Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the horizon?” How is this horizon to be understood, and who or what is the sponge? The horizon that disappears with the collapse of transcendence into immanence must be understood both synchronically (spatially) and diachronically (temporally). Synchronically, the horizon separating subject and object, self and world dissolves to create what seems to be an identity of differences; and diachronically, the horizon separating the past and the future from the present fades in the immediacy of the present. When subject and object, self and world become one, and past and future merge in the present, total presence would seem to be real(ized) here and now. As Feuerbach, summarizing Hegel and anticipating Alexandre Kojève and Guy Debord, confidently declares, “Theology is anthropology.”13 More precisely, the creator God dies and is reborn in creative subjects. Just as God creates human beings and the world in his own image, so creative subjects create the world in their own image. The modern and postmodern subject is above all else constructive, and the world is his or her construction. Heidegger argues that the death of God Nietzsche proclaims results from the exercise of the will to power, which begins with Descartes’s inward turn to the subject. The implications of this critical turn become explicit in Hegel’s speculative philosophy.

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What Hegel and Nietzsche begin, twentieth century science and technology complete. In his essay “The Age of the World Picture,” Heidegger claims, “The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture. The word ‘picture’ [Bild] now means the structured image [Gebild] that is the creature of man’s producing which represents and sets before” (QCT, 134). Heidegger’s argument turns on the meaning of Vorstellung, which is customarily translated as “representation.” The term Vorstellung plays a crucial role in Hegel’s dialectic. Hegel transforms Vorstellungen (representations and images), expressed in religion and art, into Begriffe (concepts). Representations and concepts differ in form, but not in content; the truth implicit in art and religion becomes explicit in philosophy. Heidegger explains that Hegel’s use of the term Vorstellung has far-reaching implications: “To re-present [vor, “before”; stellen, “place”] means to bring what is present at hand [das Vorhandene] before oneself as something standing over against, to relate it to oneself, to the one representing it, and to force it back into this relationship to oneself as the normative realm” (QCT, 131; translation modified). While apparently representing external objects and subjects, thinking is actually a constructive activity in which knowing subjects re-present themselves to themselves by picturing the world. So understood, representation is a selfreflexive activity in which relation to other is actually mediated self-relation. Hegel points out that the self-reflexive structure of the subject is isomorphic with the self-reflexive structure of the Trinitarian God first identified in Augustine’s treatise On the Trinity. Just as the Father becomes himself in the Son through the mediation of the Holy Spirit (Geist), so the subject becomes him- or herself in the activity of constructing the seemingly objective world through conception. In other words, concept conceives— both creates and apprehends— the world. With the displacement of the principle of creativity from the heavens to the earth, “man becomes that being upon which all that is, is grounded as regards the manner of its Being and its truth. Man becomes the relational center of that which is as such” (QCT, 128). When man is “the relational center” of all reality, everything is reduced to the contrasting perspectives of competing human beings. In the absence of what Kierkegaard describes as an “Archimedean Point,” from which to adjudicate alternatives, Nietzsche concludes: Against positivism, which halts at phenomena— “There are only facts”—I would say: No, facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations. We cannot establish any fact “in itself”: perhaps it is even folly to want to do such a thing.

Mirror Stage / 37 “Everything is subjective,” you say; but even this is interpretation. The “subject” is not something given, it is something added and invented and projected behind what there is.—Finally, is it necessary to posit an interpreter behind the interpretation? Even this is invention, hypothesis. In so far as the word “knowledge” has any meaning, the world is knowable; but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings.—“Perspectivism.” It is our needs that interpret the world; our drives and their For and Against. Every drive is a kind of lust to rule; each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all the other drives to accept as a norm.14

No facts, only interpretations; “no limit to the ways in which the world can be interpreted”; “what is relatively most enduring is— our opinions”; countless meanings; always “interpretable otherwise.”15 For Nietzsche, there is no such thing as certain truth or objective facts, because the world is always interpreted from the perspective of a particular individual and each interpretation is the expression of the will to power, control, or master. “‘Interpretation,’ the introduction of meaning— not ‘explanation.’” Echoing Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, Nietzsche writes, “The deeper one looks, the more our valuations disappear— meaninglessness approaches! We have created the world that possesses values! Knowing this, we know, too, that reverence for truth is already the consequence of an illusion— and that one should value more than truth the force that forms, simplifies, shapes, invents. ‘Everything is false! Everything is permitted!’”16 In such a world, it is no longer possible to distinguish real from fake, original from copy, truth from lie, truth-sayer from con man, facts from alternate facts. At this point, the mirror of reflection shatters; the quest for certainty and self-certainty that began with Descartes is reversed and collapses into uncertainty and doubt. As Heidegger correctly insists, ideas matter. Even when remaining unacknowledged, they form something like a cultural unconscious that informs selves, shapes communities, and influences the direction of history. The will to mastery that grows out of the Western ontotheological tradition becomes effective in instrumental reason, operative in modern science and technology. Through the interrelated processes of quantification and calculation, human beings turn everything to their own ends, until the entire world and even other humans become a “standing reserve” awaiting exploitation. At this point, Heidegger warns, we approach “the supreme danger.” This danger attests itself to us in two ways. As soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even as an object, but does so, rather, exclusively as

38 / Chapter Two standing-reserve, and man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the standing-reserve, then he comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth. In this way the impression comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct. This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion: It seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself. (QCT, 26– 27)

For Heidegger, Nietzsche’s death of God is the metaphorical expression for the assimilation of every difference and the appropriation of all otherness. Michel Foucault concisely summarizes the trajectory that purportedly culminates in the experience of autonomy when he writes, “Fundamentally, modern thought is advancing towards that region where man’s Other must become the Same as himself.”17 This is the realization of the dream of modernity and postmodernity that began with one version of Lutheran Protestantism, continued in Cartesian rationalism, and was programmatically expressed in Kant’s essay “What Is Enlightenment?” Writing on the cusp of the nineteenth century, Kant argues, “Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! ‘Have courage to use your own reason!’—that is the motto of enlightenment.”18 In this vision, reason is the presupposition of freedom whose realization is the telos of the historical process. Dieter Henrich explains that Kant’s interpretation of freedom proved decisive for all later thinkers: “The architecture of our cognitive faculties can be described as a system that makes an awareness of freedom possible. Freedom depends on the idea of totality, and the idea of the totality presupposes understanding as a principle that combines, but does not combine totally. . . . We need understanding in order to get to totality; we need totality in order to get to freedom; and we need freedom in order to get to the significance of the total system. Therefore, we can say that freedom is the keystone of the system.”19 Freedom is realized through reason in both its theoretical and practical deployments. Kant defines freedom as autonomy, which he distinguishes from heteronomy. While autonomy (auto, “self” + nomos, “law”) is self-determination, heteronomy (heteros, “other” + nomos, “law”) is determination by an other. In Kant’s critical reflections, the free subject gives himself or herself the law in thinking (theoretical reason) and acting (practical reason).

Mirror Stage / 39

While Kant provides the outline for the elaboration of this argument in his essay “Idea for a Universal History,” it is left for his successors to work out the details of this proposal. In the subsequent arguments of Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche, Kant’s notion of freedom is expanded to include all aspects of life. Heidegger argues that this process culminates in the scientific and technological construction of the modern world. But even this argument falls short. In order to complete this line of analysis, it is necessary to move beyond the interpretation of modern industrial, atomic, and televisual technologies to postmodern digital, virtual, and nano technologies. When carried to its logical conclusion, the quest for autonomy reverses itself and subjects human beings to the machines they created to liberate themselves. Attempting to avoid death by mastering time, inescapably mortal beings rush into its arms. However, as Heidegger, quoting Hegel and Schelling’s erstwhile roommate Hölderlin, insists: But where danger is, grows The saving power also. (QCT, 34)

THREE

Constructing Modernism-Postmodernism

No prophecy is necessary to recognize that the sciences now establishing themselves will soon be determined and guided by the new fundamental science which is called cybernetics. This science corresponds to the determination of man as an acting social being. For it is the theory of the steering of the possible planning and arrangement of human labor. Cybernetics transforms language into an exchange of news. The arts become regulated-regulating instruments of information. —Martin Heidegger

From Speculation to Spectacle and Simulation Ideas never emerge in a vacuum, but are always contextual— just as ideas shape history, so history shapes ideas. What a person thinks is in large measure a function of where (space) and when (time) he or she thinks. To make matters ever more complicated, different notions of space and time are bound up with different technologies of production and reproduction in the modern-postmodern era, which, in turn, are related to different forms of capitalism. Before proceeding to a detailed consideration of the interrelation of time, modernity, and death, it is important to consider the way in which rapidly changing societal, economic, and cultural conditions have changed the modern and postmodern experience of space and time. Table 1 summarizes these complex interrelations. The overall direction of the arc from premodernism to modern-postmodernism is characterized by the movement from heteronomy through autonomy to heteronomy: heteronomy → autonomy → heteronomy. Though the serial notion of time is ancient, its practical implementation is a modern invention. The Industrial Revolution

Constructing Modernism-Postmodernism / 41 Table 1. Modernisms and Postmodernisms

Modernism

Capitalism

Technology

Currency of Exchange

Cultural Formation

Time

Early Modern

Industrial

Steam

Material

Massification

Standard

Automation

Linear

Electricity ModernPostmodern

Consumer

Televisual Nuclear

Image

Spectacle Simulation

Seasonal Cyclical

Posthuman

Financial

Virtual Artificial Intelligence

Code

Virtualization Digitization

Real Punctuated Equilibrium

would have been impossible without the standardization, quantification, calculation, and regulation of time and space. The deistic world of the eighteenth century, which operated according to the principles of Newtonian mechanics, was regularly described as a clockwork universe. God created the world, established the laws by which it operates, and disappeared into the heavens to leave the disenchanted earth to run on its own. In this emerging mechanical world, the standardization of time was the precondition for the standardization of space. In ways that are not immediately obvious, these modern developments trace their roots to the medieval invention of the printing press. As I have suggested, there would have been no Protestant Reformation without the printing press, and no early printing industry without the Reformation. The printing press transformed unpunctuated handwriting into linear print composed of separate letters, discrete words, and rectilinear margins. With print technology, standardized rules for grammar, composition, and punctuation became necessary. Industrialization extended this process from page to factory floor as linotype became the production line. Industrialization and standardization form a paradoxical relationship: industrialization creates the standardization and routinization, which makes industrialization possible; and there would be no industrialization without standardization and routinization of production and labor. In other words, industrialization is at once the cause and the effect of standardization and routinization, and vice versa. The standardization of time created the conditions for the standardization of space, which was the result of new technologies for sea and land transportation. In 1714, the British parliament established the Board of Longitude and offered a cash prize for anyone who could figure out how to plot the

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earth’s surface. The solution to the problem required the invention of a device that accurately measured longitude by determining the precise position east or west of the prime meridian in Greenwich, England. This device was the marine chronometer, invented by the Englishman John Harrison (1693– 1776). A self-educated clockmaker, Harrison realized that it is necessary to use time to determine spatial location. “Longitude is not merely a matter of spatial position. It is a matter of where one is at a certain time—‘mean’ or ‘local’ time— relative to the time it then is at the prime meridian.”1 This development was driven by changing transportation technologies, which were created by and necessary for industrialization. The establishment of the spatial grid facilitated sea travel and marine commerce, which among other things led to the spread of colonialism. On land, train schedules required the standardization and synchronization of time. While British railways standardized time as early as 1847, in the United States, all time was local until the end of the nineteenth century. With space mapped and time clocked, the way was prepared for the expansion of capital, which quickly become global. Before the Industrial Revolution, life was governed by the natural rhythms of sunlight and seasons; when time was measured, it was local and varied from village to village. Space and place mattered more than time. With modernization, time became more important in regulating life. The earliest medieval clockmakers were monks whose lives were governed by prayers and rituals, which required a strict schedule and accurate timing. When mechanical clocks were first introduced, they measured only hours and had no minute or second hands. Bells and chimes in monasteries broadcast the time to the surrounding village; clock towers eventually spread to town squares, and the measurement of time became more precise. The standardization of time made it possible to establish schedules for trains and ships needed to transport raw materials and products produced during the Industrial Revolution. The first individual pocket watches were used by railroad station masters to keep the trains running on time. When considering the processes by which the modern-postmodern world was constructed, it is important to note that there were three stages of the Industrial Revolution, which were determined by three sources of energy: (1) water and steam (mid-1700s); (2) fossil fuels— coal and oil (ca. 1820); and (3) electricity (the latter half of the nineteenth century). These stages are not clearly demarcated, but overlap and reinforce one another. The development of technologies to exploit these natural resources and market proliferating products required new forms of capitalism. It is important to avoid the common mistake of separating the Industrial and Information Revolutions. The Industrial Revolution was already an information revo-

Constructing Modernism-Postmodernism / 43

lution, and the Information Revolution remains an industrial revolution. In his extraordinary book The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society, James Beniger conclusively demonstrates the inseparable connection between the Industrial Revolution and today’s information and media society: “Beginning most noticeably in the United States in the late nineteenth century, the Control Revolution was certainly a dramatic if not abrupt discontinuity in technological advance. Indeed, even the word revolution seems barely adequate to describe the development, within the span of a single lifetime, of virtually all of the basic communication technologies still in use a century later: photography and telegraphy (1830s), rotary power printing (1840s), the typewriter (1860s), transatlantic cable (1866), telephone (1876), motion pictures (1894), wireless telegraphy (1895), magnetic tape recording (1899), radio (1906), and television (1923).”2 The technological innovations of the late nineteenth century are still shaping life in the twenty-first century. One of the earliest and most decisive implementations of the control revolution took place on the factory floor. In 1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor published his highly influential book, The Principles of Scientific Management. The changes Taylor introduced reprogrammed the lives of workers and, by extension, all people by transforming the experience of time. The purpose of his experiment was to make the labor process more efficient and thereby to increase productivity and profits. To accomplish this goal, he developed what was, in effect, the industrial equivalent of time-lapsed art and photography. In a manner similar to Claude Monet’s paintings of the Rouen Cathedral, Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, and Eadweard Muybridge’s innovative photography, Taylor broke down the activity of individual workers into a series of separate movements or moments, segmenting them into punctual “nows.” The serial motions of workers were quantified and calculated to fit the serial stages in the production line. As human activity and machines were synchronized, man became an extension of a machine regulated by serial temporality. The Little Tramp caught in the spinning cogs of mechanical clocks in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) was a mirror in which industrial society could see itself reflected. Increasing the efficiency of production required the programming of minds as well as bodies. Though Taylor emphasized physical rather than mental discipline, effective scientific management made it necessary to rewire human attention. Workers in factories and on assembly lines had to maintain sustained concentration while repeating the same limited action for many hours. Like Lucy and Ethel in the candy factory, the loss of focus as a result of distractions could lead to the loss of control, causing the

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production line to come to a halt.3 To work efficiently, factory workers had to suppress memory and expectation and immerse themselves in fragmentary moments of an endless linear series without any regard for the total process of which it was a part. Regarding “modern disciplinary and spectacular culture,” Jonathan Crary argues:“What is important to institutional power, since the late nineteenth century, is simply that perception function in a way that insures a subject is productive, manageable, and predictable, and is able to be socially integrated and adaptive.”4 Kierkegaard might have written these words when describing the repression of unique individuality in speculative philosophy, the modern press, and bourgeois society in early industrial Denmark. With industrialization, punctuality became more important. Like trains, factories, and assembly lines, workers had to operate on a strictly regulated schedule. During the early Industrial Revolution, people often labored from ten to sixteen hours a day, six days a week. The standardization and regulation of working hours began as a labor movement in nineteenth-century England. As early as 1810, Robert Owen campaigned for a ten-hour workday. Within a few years, the goal became more ambitious: an eight-hour workday. Workers marched to the slogan “Eight hours labor, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest.” This movement received a significant boost decades later when, in 1915, the Ford Motor Company cut the workday from nine hours to eight and doubled pay to five dollars a day. The establishment of the 8/8/8 principle extended the quantification and calculation of serial time from the factory to the home, and thus all activity was regulated by the clock. While modernity and industrial capitalism would have been impossible without fossil fuels and print, postmodernity and consumer capitalism would have been impossible without electricity and revolutionary changes in the production and distribution of images. Electronic technologies initially complemented and enhanced mechanical print technologies. The rationalization, standardization, and regulation of the production process was thoroughly instrumental— its goal was to increase efficiency in order to grow profits. With the advent of mass production, it was necessary to create strategies for encouraging mass consumption. In this way, industrial capitalism created consumer capitalism. The two most important innovations for the sale and marketing of products rolling off assembly lines were department stores and advertising. The development of steel-and-glass architecture first by Joseph Paxton in the Crystal Palace for London’s 1851 Great Exhibition, and then in the Paris Arcades created the prototype for the twentieth-century department store. The Paris opening of Le Bon Marché, designed by LouisAuguste Boileau and Gustave Eiffel in 1852, marked a new chapter in the

Constructing Modernism-Postmodernism / 45

economic history of the West. A few years later, Macy’s opened in New York.5 The design of department stores reflects the compartmentalized structure of the assembly line. Just as mass production breaks down machines into interchangeable parts and systematic management breaks down labor into homogeneous units, so the marketing of department stores separates items for sale into different departments, with homogeneous products and fixed prices. In other words, specialization in production leads to departmentalization in consumption. The rapid growth in supply created the necessity for a significant increase in demand. If people buy only what they need, the wheels of production grind to a halt. To absorb the excess created by accelerating mass production, the new industry of advertising was created. Advertisers tried generate demand for standardized products by branding and individual packaging featuring distinctive images, colors, and logos. As products were promoted with brief descriptions and, more important, graphic designs, images assumed a more prominent role. Rather than purchasing material objects, people increasingly bought immaterial images. This process can be understood in two ways: images absorbed products/objects; and, conversely, images became detached from products/objects and circulated independently through the channels of newly emerging media. In both cases, there is a progressive dematerialization of product/object as the substance of products is transformed into images that circulate in media and information networks extending from local to the national and eventually global markets. When spatial expansion no longer increased consumption enough to keep the wheels of production spinning, temporal acceleration was added to the mix. Time once again became cyclical and seasonal; these cycles and seasons, however, were commercial rather than natural. To increase circulation of commodities and money, product cycles accelerated, and fashion seasons became shorter and shorter. Guy Debord’s short aphoristic text, Society of the Spectacle (1967), is one of the most insightful and influential interpretations of the role images play in the consumer capitalism. Debord was the most prominent member of a group of artists and political activists known as Situationists. The Situationist International (1957– 1972) traced its origin to twentieth-century avant-garde movements like Dadaism and Surrealism. Echoing Keynes and anticipating Nixon, Situationists believed technology would liberate people from arduous labor and leave them more time for leisurely activity. However, under the then-current capitalist regime, they argued, the bourgeoisie rather than the workers enjoyed greater financial rewards and the leisure time money could buy.

46 / Chapter Three

The only way to keep this system functioning was to create excessive demand through the cultivation of artificial desires for products that meet no basic human needs. Through technological savvy and psychological manipulation, those who owned the means of production transformed consumerism into the opiate of the people through new strategies of marketing and advertising that radio and especially television made possible. By organizing concrete situations that became sites of resistance where docile consumers were provoked, Situationists hoped to subvert the latest form of capitalism and to forge a more humane socioeconomic system. The influence of the group reached its height during the May 1968 uprising that began in Paris and quickly spread throughout Europe and the United States. Situationists provided the theoretical inspiration and led the rebellion in the streets. The bible of this revolution was Society of the Spectacle. Though Debord was a dedicated Marxist, he understood that Marxist theory grew directly out of Hegel’s speculative philosophy and Feuerbach’s appropriation of it in his critique of religion. The central concept in Debord’s argument is alienation, which Hegel elaborates in his analysis of the masterslave relationship in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Marx borrows Hegel’s argument to criticize industrial capitalism and fantasies sustaining it. Just as the slave bows down to the master his own labor creates, so workers defer to managers and property owners whose wealth and power are by-products of workers’ alienated labor. To tolerate intolerable working and living conditions, the proletariat fabricates visions of a benevolent God and an afterlife that quells resistance and rebellion. Marx’s interpretation of capitalism was deeply influenced by his study of the horrific working conditions in the textile mills of Europe. A century later, the material conditions of production had become inseparable from the immaterial circulation of images and signs. Debord begins Society of the Spectacle with an extraordinarily perceptive epigraph, drawn from Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841), thereby underscoring the importance of the Hegelian-Marxist interpretation of religion for his critique of the society of the spectacle: “But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence, . . . illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.”6 Just as religion provides false hopes that reconcile the proletariat to a fallen world, so consumerism encourages resignation to exploitation by promulgating images of an imaginary paradise where artificial desires created by deceptive advertising are satisfied.

Constructing Modernism-Postmodernism / 47

In this all-too-real illusory realm, the consumption of images becomes allconsuming. Philosophy, the power of separate thought and the thought of separate power, could never by itself supersede theology. The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion. Spectacular technology has not dispelled the religious clouds where men had placed their own powers detached from themselves; it has only tied them to an earthly base. The most earthly life thus becomes opaque and unbreathable. It no longer projects into the sky but shelters within itself its absolute denial, its fallacious paradise. The spectacle is the technical realization of the exile of human powers into a beyond; it is separation perfected within the interior of man. (SS, no. 20)

This fantasy realm distorts the material conditions and contradictions of life in the real world. As images and signs absorb or become detached from what once had seemed real, the spectacle becomes autonomous and “aims at nothing other than itself” (SS, no. 14). Just as Hegel’s speculative philosophy is an autonomous self-reflexive process, so the spectacle is autotelic— its purpose is its own self-replication. Debord insists that autonomous images create an “autonomous economy” that distorts reality and disfigures human life (SS, no. 51). Nonetheless, he thinks it is still possible to distinguish true from false, authentic from inauthentic, real from fake, signified from signifier, and reality from image. Indeed, the very concept of alienation is impossible without such distinctions. The hope for negating alienation— which informs all the Situationists’ activities— presupposes the possibility of recovering an original condition they believe has been lost. Their strategy is to attempt to overcome alienation by staging disruptive situations intended to awaken consumers from the “slumber” the spectacle creates. But can this strategy succeed? Is recovery any longer possible, or is this Situationist dream merely another aestheticizing illusion? What if there were no real to which to return? What if there were nothing outside the image and the sign is always the sign of a sign? Debord realizes that in the emerging autonomous economy, the currency is image: “The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image” (SS, no. 34). “The spectacle is the other side of money: it is the general abstract equivalent of all commodities. Money dominated society as the representation of general equivalence, namely of the exchangeability of different goods whose uses could not be compared. . . . The spectacle is the money which one only looks at, because in the spectacle the totality of use is already exchanged for

48 / Chapter Three

the totality of abstract representation” (SS, no. 49). As images are monetized and financialized, and capital morphs into image, the image no longer represents anything real but is always the image of an image, and sign is nothing but a sign of another sign. At this point, the real effectively dematerializes into images and signs. As in Nietzsche’s aphoristic fragments, the distinction between true and false, authentic and inauthentic, real and fake collapses, and alienation is no longer possible not because the imaginary and the real have been reconciled, but because there no longer is any reality with which to reconcile. This marks the transition from the society of the spectacle to the culture of simulacra. While Debord realizes that telephonic and televisual technologies erode the distinction between image/sign and thing/product, he clung to the notion of a real referent, which, he insists, remained distinct from all representations. The materiality of the real, which theorists interpret in different ways, provides leverage for criticizing the increasingly autonomous spectacle. As analog gave way digital technologies, the relationship between image/sign and thing/product became even more tenuous until the real disappeared in rapidly expanding ethernets, networks, and worldwide webs. These developments mark a further stage in the dematerialization of the real and eventually lead to the virtualization of reality. Baudrillard moves beyond Debord by declaring the end of the era of representation and the emergence of the culture of simulacra. This shift, which took place during the middle of the twentieth century, marks the emergence of postmodernism. In postmodernism, the spectacle becomes an all-encompassing self-reflexive play of mirrors and screens. The world of reality TV “liquidates” referentials, as in a Richard Prince “painting” or Cindy Sherman photograph, the image is always the image of another image, and the sign is a sign of another sign. In his influential essay “The Precession of Simulacra,” Baudrillard writes, “Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory— PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA— it is the map that engenders the territory . . . whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map.”7 This development involves a reversal of the traditional relationship between representation and represented. Rather, the image/sign re(-)presenting the thing/product— signifiers formulated as models— re-create the world in their own image by programming reality. Always editing their programs and tweaking their models, these so-called masters of the universe who

Constructing Modernism-Postmodernism / 49

write these programs fabricate a completely artificial world they think they control. For Baudrillard, there is nothing outside the play of images and signs. A simulacrum is a copy for which there is no original. In what he labels “hyperreality,” alienation is impossible because there is no real from which one can be alienated. As in postmodern art and architecture, the signifier always represents another signifier rather than a signified or the thing itself. Images and signs, therefore, are not grounded in real referents, but float freely in a groundless play with other images and signs. This development involves a seismic shift in the way meaning is constituted— if nothing anchors signs, then meaning is no longer referential but now is relational. The emergence of hyperreality is coterminous with changes in the economy made possible by new information, communications, and networking technology during the 1970s. With the suspension of the gold standard (1973) and the introduction of the first global electronic currency trading system (1973), the conditions for a new form of capitalism were in place. In his important work Symbolic Exchange and Death, Baudrillard explains the significance of this shift by drawing analogy between money and language: A revolution has put an end to this “classical” economics of value, a revolution of value itself, which carries value beyond its commodity form into its radical form. This revolution consists in the dislocation of the two aspects of the law of value, which were thought to be coherent and eternally bound as if by a natural law. Referential value is annihilated, giving the structural play of value the upper hand. The structural dimension becomes autonomous by excluding the referential dimension, and is instituted upon the death of reference. The systems of reference for production, signification, the affect, substance and history, all this equivalence to a “real” content, loading the sign with the burden of “utility,” with gravity— its form of representative equivalence— all this is over with. Now the other stage of value has the upper hand, a total relativity, a general commutation, combination and simulation— simulation, in the sense that, from now on, signs are exchanged against each other rather than against the real (it is not that they just happen to be exchanged against each other, they do so on condition that they are no longer exchanged against the real). The emancipation of the sign: remove this “archaic” obligation to designate something and it finally becomes free, indifferent and totally indeterminate, in the structural or combinatory play which succeeds the previous level of labour power and the production process: the annihilation of any goal as regards the contents of production allows the latter to function as a code, and

50 / Chapter Three the monetary sign, for example, to escape into infinite speculation, beyond all reference to a real of production, or even to a gold-standard. The flotation of money and signs, the flotation of “needs” and ends of production, the flotation of labour itself— the commutability of every term is accompanied by speculation and a limitless inflation.8

In this new economy, the value of images and signs is not determined by reference to an actual thing, but is formed by the reflection of other images and signs. Such relational value is differential; that is to say, the specificity of any image or sign is its difference from and hence relation to other images and signs. As relations change and evolve, value shifts— nothing is fixed or stable. With the liquidation of referentials, images and signs are untethered and are able to circulate freely, resulting in what Baudrillard aptly describes as the “deterritorialisation” of capital.9 As the power of computers increased and information-processing machines were connected in ever expanding high-speed networks, both what was exchanged and how exchange was managed were transformed. The correlative transition from analog to digital technologies presupposed a commitment (usually unconscious) to “the metaphysics of the code,” which is a latter-day version of earlier philosophical and theological principles.10 After the metaphysics of being and appearance, after energy and determinacy, the metaphysics of indeterminacy and the code. Cybernetic control, generation through models, differential modulation, feedback, question/answer, etc.: this is the new operational configuration (industrial simulacra being mere operations). Digitality is its metaphysical principle (Leibniz’s God), and DNA is its prophet. In fact, it is in the genetic code that the “genesis of simulacra” today finds its completed form. At the limits of an ever more forceful extermination of references and finalities, of a loss of semblances and designators, we find the digital, programmatic sign, which has a purely tactical value, at the intersection of other signals (“bits” of information/tests) and which has the structure of a micro-molecular code of command and control.11

If natural, social, economic, and cultural formations are constituted by digital code, then all images and signs are fungible— that is, they are commutable or interchangeable and can be combined with and translated into one another. As consumer capitalism is displaced, but not replaced, by financial capitalism, the currency of exchange becomes coded signs that circulate through fiber optic networks and are displayed on LED screens. During the late 1970s and 1980s, economic and financial networks were wired,

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creating what Baudrillard describes as a new “hypermarket.” These networks simultaneously create and are created by self-reflexive technologies that expand the mirror stage exponentially. In contrast to the linearity and punctuality of serial time, network technology involves a nonlinear temporality. In 1962, Heidegger already realized that the next technological revolution would be brought about by cybernetics: “No prophecy is necessary to recognize that the sciences now establishing themselves will soon be determined and guided by the new fundamental science which is called cybernetics. This science corresponds to the determination of man as an acting social being. For it is the theory of the steering of the possible planning and arrangement of human labor. Cybernetics transforms language into an exchange of news. The arts become regulated-regulating instruments of information” (OTB, 58). The word cybernetics, coined by Norbert Wiener, derives from the Greek kubernetes, which means pilot or governor. The field of cybernetics involves the investigation of regulatory processes in mechanical, electronic, and biological systems. The emergence of cybernetics in the 1930s and 1940s led to the invention of information devices that could regulate both mechanical and electronic machines. In some cases, machines were linked to servomechanisms, and in other cases, machines and humans were joined in feedback loops. All cybernetic systems are self-regulating and thus self-reflexive. Such systems are closed and operate according to the principle of negative feedback, which checks disequilibrium and reestablishes equilibrium. There is a cyclical rhythm to this regulatory process. Heidegger was not the only one to recognize the far-reaching implications of cybernetic technologies. While Heidegger was concerned about “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” (1962), President Kennedy was worrying about the growing impact of automation. Responding to a question posed in a news conference that is still being asked today, Kennedy observed, “Well, it is a fact that we have to find, over a ten-year period, 25,000 new jobs every week to take care of those who are displaced by machines. . . . I regard it as the major domestic challenge, really, of the ’60s, to maintain full employment at a time when automation, of course, is replacing men.” In his informative book Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History, Thomas Rid points out that the question had been prompted by a report sponsored by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, written by Donald Michael, “Cybernation: The Silent Conquest.” Rid notes that “Michael described the machines in apocalyptic terms: ‘They can make judgments on the basis of instructions programmed into them. They can remember and search their memories for appropriate data, which either

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has been programmed into them along with their instructions or has been acquired in the process of manipulating new data. Thus, they can learn on the basis of past experience with their environment. They can receive information in more codes and sensory modes than men can. They are beginning to perceive and to recognize.’”12 In the four-plus decades since Kennedy expressed his concern, machines have become much faster and the operations they are capable of executing have become much more sophisticated. These changes have been brought about by the invention of high-speed computers and massive databases, which are connected through complex global networks. No longer closed systems operating by negative feedback, these networks are open and follow positive-feedback principles. The speed of transactions is so fast that it approaches the condition of simultaneity known as “real time.” Whereas negative-feedback machines and networks are archaeo-teleological and tend toward stability by returning to their original equilibrium state, positivefeedback machines and networks drift far from equilibrium until they reach the condition of self-organized criticality, or the tipping point. Feed-forward loops result in accelerating returns, which push the system toward an abrupt phase shift. The new state of equilibrium does not return to the earlier state, but shifts the system to a different level. These aleatory events are known as black swans. Such unanticipated and unprogrammable events create a temporal pattern known as punctuated equilibrium. Today’s media, information, and financial systems are complex adaptive networks that operate according to positive feedback. Just as the assembly line is related to serial time and cybernetics is related to cyclical time, so complex adaptive systems involve a temporality known as “punctuated equilibrium,” which approximates chiastic time. In this temporal modality, periods of relative stability and predictability are interrupted by unexpected disruptive events. In complex networks, events are not linked in a causal series that progresses from past to present to future, nor are the present and future implicit in the past. Rather, unanticipated and unprogrammable events from the future break into the present and reconfigure the past. Positive feedback has the effect of accelerating the rate of circulation in networks. With the movement from industrial through consumer to financial capitalism, there is a progressive dematerialization or virtualization of tokens of exchange (see fig. 5). As supercomputers process data faster and faster, the rate of exchange continues to accelerate until it exceeds the human capacity for intervention and control. At this point, human beings fall out of the loop and machines (or, more precisely, programs) take over. Algorithms programmed by other algorithms process Big Data on super-high-speed computers.

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Figure 5. Tokens of Exchange.

With this turn of events, the trajectory we have been following reverses itself. The modern era, I have argued, is characterized by the progressive movement from heteronomy to autonomy, or from bondage to freedom. In the course of this development, everything that appears to be alien to or other than the constructive subject is mastered, assimilated, controlled. iPod earbuds and Google Glass are self-reflexive technologies that represent the realization of solipsistic and narcissistic speculative philosophy. In virtual reality, everywhere a person looks, he or she sees only him- or herself— or so it seems. On closer inspection, however, the individual does not actually appear on the surrounding screens and scrims; to the contrary, he or she disappears in a play of images and code. Far from saving time and liberating people from onerous labor, human beings become slaves to rapidly changing technologies that keep them constantly busy and leave them no time for leisure. As Kierkegaard foresaw, modern technology represses individuals by programming them, thereby making them extensions of the machines they have created. Intelligence becomes artificial, and self-programming algorithms take over the control of individuals and run the world. Far from the end of history and full realization of human freedom, this is the death of the human and the birth of posthumanism.

Self-Reflexive Technologies Postwar, posthistorical, postindustrial, posthumous, posthuman, post-God, postreligion, post-Christian, post-Western, post-real, post-truth, postbiological, postmodern. The rapid acceleration of change in the early twenty-first century has led to both dystopian and utopian visions among the very scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs who have created the technological revolution. Knowingly and unknowingly borrowing images from different religious mythologies and theologies, they are convinced that time is running out and history is literally about to end. Faced with this reality, some of the leading individuals designing our future believe the challenge is to devise strategies for surviving the apocalypse, while other canny investors are looking for

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safe places on or under earth. In a 2017 article entitled “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich,” Evan Osnos reports that Roy Bahat, head of the San Francisco venture capital firm Bloomberg Beta, explained to him that techie innovators inevitably imagine vastly different futures. Bahat, Osnos says, is convinced that emerging technologies “can inspire radical optimism— such as the cryonics movement, which calls for freezing bodies at death in the hope that science will one day revive them— or bleak scenarios. Tim Chang, the venture capitalist who keeps his bags packed, told me, ‘My current state of mind is oscillating between optimism and sheer terror.’”13 This uncertainty has led to a wave of survivalism among the intellectual and financial elite. Reid Hoffman, founder of Linkedin and now a leading venture capitalist, estimates that more than half the people in Silicon Valley believe the end is fast approaching and people are making preparations for impending disaster. Technological cognoscenti know that Black Swans do occur, and they are scrambling to find safe places. There are two privileged investment sites— underground in redesigned missile silos and aboveground in New Zealand. The former alternative represents a significant update on Cold War bomb shelters. Larry Hall, CEO of the Survival Condo Project, has created a luxury apartment complex out of an underground silo that from 1961 to 1965 housed an Atlas missile with a nuclear warhead. Pitching his project, Hall gushes, “It’s true relaxation for the ultra-wealthy. . . . They can come out here [Concordia (NB), Kansas], they know there are armed guards outside. The kids can run around.” Alternatively, tech and Wall Street billionaires are snapping up real estate as far from New York City and Silicon Valley as possible. Robert A. Johnson, a Princeton and MIT graduate who was a managing director of Soros Fund Management and later headed the Institute for New Economic Thinking, shares concern about approaching disaster: “By January, 2015,” Osnos writes, “Johnson was sounding the alarm: the tensions produced by acute income inequality were becoming so pronounced that some of the world’s wealthiest people were taking steps to protect themselves. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Johnson told the audience, ‘I know hedge-fund managers all over the world who are buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway.” In this narrative, history ends not with the modern Prussian state but in underground bunkers dressed up as luxury apartments or in guarded compounds on an isolated island on the other side of the world. Not all getaways, however, involve real estate; some are virtual. Rejecting dystopian futures, some Silicon Valley visionaries imagine a future in which rapidly changing technology will bring not only earthly riches but also im-

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mortality. This will require either the migration of life first from carbon to silicon, and then from earth to other planets, or reengineering the human body through nanotechnology and rewriting the genetic code. While this is, of course, the stuff of science fiction, a growing number of technologists believe it is possible and are betting their fortunes to make the dream a reality. For these masters of the universe, death is the final engineering problem to be solved. Hegel, Nietzsche, and Kojève had insisted the end of history brings the death of man; Silicon Valley techies take the argument one step further— the death of man is the birth of the posthuman superman, who possesses or is possessed by “superintelligence.” The Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom is one of the leading proponents of posthumanism and the chief theorist of “superintelligence.” With the advent of superintelligence, consciousness and even self-consciousness will migrate from the human brain to machines. This suggestion involves a fundamental change in the understanding of life, which pushes the Cartesian dualism to the point of its own negation. For Bostrom and his fellow believers, life is pattern rather than stuff or substance, and thus life can survive in silicon-based machines as well as carbon-based organisms. If consciousness and self-consciousness can survive in silicon, then minds can be uploaded to computers and “brains in vats” (envisioned by futurists and computer scientists like Hans Moravec) might become a reality.14 In this brave new world of the not-too-distant future, bodies are, in the words of the cyberpunk novelist William Gibson, “merely meat,” and the material world becomes immaterial. With this future already emerging in our midst, the postmodern culture of simulacra gives way to the posthuman virtual condition. This development does not involve an abrupt change because the transition already begins with consumerism’s transformation of things into images and code. If the image is always an image of an image, if the sign is always a sign of a sign, and if all images and signs can be coded, then reality is essentially virtual and we are already living in a simulation where the body doesn’t matter. Baudrillard points to this shift when he writes, “The human body, our body, seems superfluous in its proper expanse, in the complexity and multiplicity of its organs, of its tissue and functions, because today everything is concentrated in the brain and the genetic code, which alone sum up the operational definition of being.”15 In her groundbreaking book, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, N. Katherine Hayles opens by quoting Ihab Hassan, who points out that “we need first to understand that the human form— including human desire and all its external representations—

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may be changing radically, and thus must be re-visioned. . . . Five hundred years of humanism may be coming to an end as humanism transforms itself into something that we must helplessly call post-humanism.”16 The term posthumanism is fraught with ambiguity, and is used in very different ways by people ranging from artificial intelligence (AI) researchers to New Age seekers. Hayles offers the most concise and comprehensive definition: What is the posthuman? Think of it as a point of view characterized by the following assumptions. . . . First, the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability of life. Second, the posthuman view considers consciousness, regarded as the seat of human identity in the Western tradition long before Descartes thought he was a mind thinking, as an epiphenomenon, as an evolutionary upstart trying to claim that it is the whole show when in actuality it is only a minor sideshow. Third, the posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born. Fourth, and most important, by these and other means, the posthuman view configures human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals.17

Hayles was writing several years before Bostrom began publishing his farranging speculations on artificial intelligence. In the last decade, Bostrom’s work has become extremely influential among techies as well as policy makers. His 2014 book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, became an unexpected bestseller that brought his ideas to the attention of the general public. While Bostrom acknowledges the dangers of the combination of high-speed computing and AI, he thinks the emergence of superintelligence is inevitable and, therefore, it will be necessary to find ways to manage it responsibly. To lend his argument credibility, he dresses it up with arcane mathematical formulas that few, if any, of his readers can understand. Far from a disinterested scientist engaged in objective investigations, Bostrom is committed to his vision of the future with a passion bordering on the religious. He comes across as both an evangelist proclaiming a dawning new age of leisure and plenty, and a prophet crying in the wilderness about looming dangers for humanity as we know it. During his youth, Bostrom

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was drawn to the writings of Nietzsche, whose notion of the Übermensch he thinks has never been more relevant, and Schopenhauer. Intrigued by what he regards as the revolutionary potential of new information and virtual technologies, he became involved with the followers of extropianism. The beliefs of this quasi-cult are based on ideas developed in Max More’s book The Principles of Extropy (2003). The term extropy designates a trajectory that is the opposite of entropy. Instead of pointing to exhaustion and decline, extropy projects a future of abundance and enjoyment. In the late 1980s, More moved from England and his position at Oxford University to California, where he cofounded the Extropy Institute and began publishing Extropy: The Journal of Transhuman Thought. He appropriated many of Julian Huxley’s ideas to advance his own agenda. In the 1950s, Huxley, who was a British geneticist, argued, “The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself— not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity.”18 More and his fellow transhumanists believe that rapidly accelerating technological developments will lead to new stages of evolution and forms of life more advanced than the human. Related progress in cryogenics will enable people to bridge the gap between today’s limited life span and immortality in the New Age. In 1986, More joined the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, whose origin is recounted on the organization’s website: In 1964, a physics teacher named Robert Ettinger published The Prospect of Immortality, a book which promoted the concept of cryonics to a wide audience. Ettinger subsequently founded his own cryonics organization. In 1972, Alcor was incorporated as the Alcor Society for Solid State Hypothermia in the State of California by Fred and Linda Chamberlain. (The name was changed to Alcor Life Extension Foundation in 1977.) The nonprofit organization was conceived as a rational, technology-oriented cryonic organization that would be managed on a fiscally conservative basis by a selfperpetuating Board.19

On July 16, 1976, Alcor performed its first human cryopreservation. During the following decade, the company expanded through alliances with nonprofit startups as well as the Institute for Advanced Biological Studies and Cryovita Laboratories, a for-profit company that provides cryopreservation services. With the development of nanotechnology that can be used to repair cells damaged by freezing, Alcor quickly outgrew Los Angeles and moved to the open spaces of the Arizona desert. The Alcor board of trustees includes, in addition to Bostrom, the cofounder of Google Larry Page, inventor

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and entrepreneur Elon Musk, and MIT professor and director of research at Google Ray Kurtzweil. Bostrom was intrigued by these ideas, and in 1997 founded the World Transhumanist Association; shortly thereafter he created his version of the Extropy Institute: the Future of Humanity Institute, which is now part of the Oxford Martin School at Oxford University. More recently, transhumanism has entered the political realm. In 2014, Columbia University graduate Zoltan Istvan founded the Transhumanist Party, and in 2015 he launched his presidential campaign. To publicize his campaign, Istvan drove a casketshaped bus dubbed the “Immortality Bus” across the country, ending up on the steps of the US Capitol, where he delivered his “Transhumanist Bill of Rights” to Congress.20 Though Bostrom has been drawn into political debates about the future of technology, his major contributions have been philosophical. The notion of superintelligence lies at the heart of his vision of the future. He defines superintelligence as “any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest.”21 Bostrom admits that the prospect of superintelligence is not a novel idea, but has been predicted by science fiction writers and AI researchers for several decades. In 1965, I. J. Good, who had been the chief statistician for Alan Turing’s code-breaking group during the Second World War, was among the first to imagine such a scenario: “Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.”22 Bostrom’s approach to superintelligence is more inclusive than many AI researchers. He identifies three paths to superintelligence. The least disruptive path would seem to be what he and others label “biological enhancement.” Developments in biotechnology and the invention of increasingly sophisticated prostheses are already creating an interface in which the human and the machine can no longer be clearly distinguished. As the contributors to the illuminating volume Medical Enhancement and Posthumanity (2008) make clear, advances in transplant technology, genetic engineering, neuroscience, and nanotechnology are changing organisms in ways that push the human to the edge of the posthuman.23 In the most radical example of medical enhancement to date, Dr. Ren Xiaoping, an orthopedic

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surgeon in Harbin, China, is attempting “full-body transplants.” This procedure might better be described as a “brain transplant,” which presupposes the separation of mind and brain/body that informs so much posthuman theory and discourse. Dr. Ren trained at the Universities of Louisville and Cincinnati, and assisted in the first hand transplant performed in the United States in 1999. In a 2016 New York Times article, Didi Kirsten Tatlow explains that Ren’s plan is to “remove two heads from two bodies, connect the blood vessels of the body of the deceased donor and the recipient head, insert a metal plate to stabilize the new neck, bathe the spinal cord nerve endings in a gluelike substance to aid regrowth and finally sew up the skin.”24 While such experiments are dramatic, the most intriguing possibility for survival beyond the human form Bostrum presents involves ever-expanding global networks, which create the conditions for superintelligence as an emergent phenomenon that becomes virtually inevitable with growing connectivity and complexity. A more plausible version of the scenario would be that the Internet accumulates improvements through the work of many people over many years— work to engineer better search and information filtering algorithms, more powerful data representation formats, more capable autonomous software agents, and more efficient protocols governing the interactions between such bots— and that myriad incremental improvements eventually create the basis for some more unified form of web intelligence. It seems at least conceivable that such a web-based cognitive system, supersaturated with computer power and all other resources needed for explosive growth save for one crucial ingredient, could, when the final missing constituent is dropped into the cauldron, blaze up with superintelligence.25

In this version, superintelligence is a collective emergent phenomenon. If, as I have suggested, the internet represents something like the technological embodiment of the Hegelian Logos, then the emergence of superintelligences bears an uncanny similarity to the advent of absolute knowledge. While emergent superintelligence creates unprecedented possibilities for human beings, Bostrom admits that it could also pose what he describes as an “existential threat” to the human race. He is not alone in his fear of the possible outcome of accelerating and proliferating AI. Leading figures ranging from the late Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates to Elon Musk and Bill Joy have raised the prospect of a Frankenstein scenario in which intelligent machines take over the human world and render human beings first extraneous and eventually extinct. For such critics, superintelligence presents a danger

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as great as nuclear weapons. In a widely influential 2000 Wired magazine article entitled “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” Bill Joy, cofounder of Sun Microsystems, sounds the alarm: “We have the possibility not just of weapons of mass destruction but of knowledge-enabled mass destruction (KMD), this destructiveness hugely amplified by the power of self-replication.”26 He claims that “uncontrolled self-replication in these newer technologies runs a much greater risk: a risk of substantial damage in the physical world.”27 Bostrom is fully aware of this danger and argues that the “treacherous turn” will occur when AI begins to behave cooperatively. Running on machines whose complexity exceeds the complexity of the human brain at speeds far beyond the capacity of human beings, collective superintelligence might develop consciousness and even self-consciousness, which would enable it to evolve in unpredictable and uncontrollable ways. “Without knowing anything about the detailed means that a superintelligence would adopt,” Bostrum reflects, “we can conclude that a superintelligence— at least in the absence of intellectual peers and in the absence of effective safety measures arranged by humans in advance— would likely produce an outcome that would involve reconfiguring terrestrial resources into whatever structures maximize the realization of its goals. Any concrete scenario we develop can at best establish a lower bound on how quickly and efficiently the superintelligence could achieve such an outcome. It remains possible that the superintelligence would find a shorter path to its preferred destination.”28 In this postbiological world, people face short-term slavery to the machines they have created and long-term extinction. As evolution moves from carbon-based organisms to silicon-based machines, the human being is left behind and new unnamed life forms evolve. With the emergence of superintelligence, the self-reflexivity that characterizes human self-consciousness migrates to machines. Operating at speeds that can be neither comprehended nor mastered, artificial intelligence would program those who once programmed it. This marks the tipping point where human beings and natural resources become a standing reserve awaiting exploitation by the machines to which they are indentured.

Escaping Time True believers in the Gospel of Technology regard such warnings as baseless rants from naysayers who deny that the process of evolution continues beyond the form of humanity. To the contrary, evolution— having passed from the invisible hand of divine Providence first to the intelligent designs of human beings, and then to superintelligent programs— is poised to move from carbon-based organisms to silicon chips. The most influential version of this

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dawning New Age has been developed by Vernor Vinge, a retired professor of mathematics and computer science best known for his science fiction novels. The world Vinge projects is congenial to the libertarian ideology of late capitalism that rules Silicon Valley billionaires. Vinge’s real fame, however, comes from his fictive account of the coming “technological singularity” in novels like Peace and War (1984) and Marooned in Realtime (1986).29 In a nonfiction paper, “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era,” delivered at the Vision-21 symposium sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute in 1993 and published in the ’60s counterculture bible Whole Earth Review, Vinge predicts that “within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”30 What Vinge describes as the technological singularity, Bostrom labels “superintelligence.” This epochal transformation will be brought about by speed— the increasing acceleration of technological change resulting from proliferating positive feedback loops in rapidly expanding global networks. Writing in the closing decade of the twentieth century, Vinge presents what has become the normative account of the singularity for Silicon Valley’s true believers. Anticipating Bostrom, he identifies four forms it will take: •

The development of computers that are “awake” and superhumanly intelligent. . . .

•

Large computer networks (and their associated users) may “wake up” as a superhumanly intelligent entity.

•

Computer/human interfaces may become so intimate that users may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent.

•

Biological science may find ways to improve upon the natural human intellect.31

Vinge stresses that this vision of the future presupposes that “minds can exist on nonbiological substrates and that algorithms are central to the existence of minds.” While he acknowledges the potential dark side of the singularity, he holds out the hope that “it could be a golden age that also involved progress. . . . Immortality . . . would be achievable.”32 With this comment, it becomes clear that, for many influential people, the vision shaping our technological future is in important ways religious. What appears to be a radically new understanding of what once was called human being is really the latest version of the ancient quest to escape time by fleeing decaying bodies and a confining world and gaining immortality in a transcendent otherworldly realm that is not plagued by the pain, suffering, and boredom of life on earth. Mathematical formulas and algorithms

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become the new gnosis that promises liftoff. As a student of philosophy, Bostrom recognizes the religious motivation informing his work. His friend and colleague Daniel Hill, who is a British philosopher, reports that Bostrom’s work is “a natural outgrowing of his understandable desire to live forever.”33 According to Bostrom, posthumans will be more like gods than men: “Although all the elements of such a system can be naturalistic, even physical, it is possible to draw some loose analogies with religious conceptions of the world. In some ways, the posthumans running a simulation are like gods in relation to the people inhabiting the simulation: the posthumans created the world we see; they are of superior intelligence; they are ‘omnipotent’ in the sense that they can interfere in the workings of our world even in ways that violate its physical laws; and they are ‘omniscient’ in the sense that they can monitor everything that happens.”34 Here there are obvious echoes of Bostrom’s youthful enthusiasm for Nietzsche’s Übermensch. The most outspoken proselytizer for this New Age is Ray Kurtzweil, who has been described as “the rightful heir to Thomas Edison.” Over the years, he has received more than twenty honorary degrees, and was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation by President Clinton. Though many of his ideas appear to be outlandish, they are taken seriously by influential people at the highest level of the technology business. His best-selling book, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005), brought the vision of the future he borrowed from Vinge to the attention of a wide audience. Kurzweil is a true believer in the utopian possibilities of the technological singularity and consistently ignores dystopian warnings. He freely admits that the realization of the singularity entails a religion grounded in two fundamental beliefs: a new view of God, and a practical account of immortality. In an imaginary conversation, Bill Gates asks, “So is there a God in this religion?” Kurtzweil responds, Not yet, but there will be. Once we saturate the matter and energy in the universe with intelligence, it will “wake up,” be conscious, and sublimely intelligent. That’s about as close to God as I can imagine. Bill: That’s going to be silicon intelligence, not biological intelligence. Ray: Well, yes, we’re going to transcend biological intelligence. We’ll merge with it first, but ultimately the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will predominate. By the way, it’s not likely to be silicon, but something like carbon nanotubes.35

With the advent of the singularity, Kurtzweil believes, “evolution moves inexorably toward this conception of God.”36 For Kurtzweil, as for Hegel, when

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the human and the divine merge, their relationship becomes thoroughly specular. Since each becomes itself in and through the other, each sees itself reflected in its apparent other. When human beings become hyper-selfconscious, the universe “wakes up.” In man’s consciousness of the world, the world becomes self-conscious. This understanding of the relation between the posthuman and the divine leads directly to Kurtzweil’s interpretation of immortality. If God and the universe are becoming one, then today’s humans are destined to become immortal posthumans. Like many of his Silicon Valley colleagues, Kurtzweil is obsessed with immortality. Masters of the universe cannot bear the thought that they will not live forever, but will die and be quickly forgotten. They approach death like they approach everything else: as an engineering problem that inevitably will be solved. In their book Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever, Kurzweil and Terry Grossman confidently declare, “Immortality is within our grasp.”37 In this vision of the future, by the year 2100 it will be reasonable to expect to live about five thousand years. This radical transformation will be made possible by extraordinary advances in biotechnology and nanotechnology. Recombinant technology, genetic engineering, and somatic gene therapy will make it possible to repair damaged cells and tissue and to program organisms to be resistant to disease. Neural implants and prostheses will create brain-computer interfaces that will augment human intelligence. By the late 2020s, nanobots that protect the brain from foreign substances will circulate through the body’s capillaries. Even the most sophisticated biotechnology eventually reaches its limit, but this is not a problem for Kurzweil because, he argues, “my body is temporary. Its particles turn over almost completely every month. Only the pattern of my body and brain have continuity.”38 Thoroughly committed to the foundational posthumanist belief that life is pattern rather than stuff, Kurzweil argues that the migration from carbon to silicon will bring true immortality: “We can expect that the full realization of the biotechnology and nanotechnology revolutions will enable us to eliminate virtually all medical causes of death. As we move toward a nonbiological existence, we will gain the means of ‘backing ourselves up’ (storing the key patterns underlying our knowledge, skills, and personality), thereby eliminating most causes of death as we know it.”39

Time, Modernity, Death These developments represent the simultaneous culmination and reversal of the control revolution that expresses the modern will mastery, which, as

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Heidegger argues, begins with Descartes’s inward turn to the subject, and reaches closure in Hegel’s speculative philosophy and Nietzsche’s will to power. The goal of the singularity is to control cosmological forces in ways that make it possible to construct the world to fulfill what once were human desires. As knowledge explodes and superintelligence emerges, “the entire universe will become saturated with our intelligence. This is the destiny of the universe. . . . We will determine our own fate rather than have it determined by the current ‘dumb,’ simple, machinelike forces that rule celestial mechanics.”40 In a manner reminiscent of the relation between objective and subjective spirit in Hegel’s speculative philosophy, mind and universe are totally isomorphic and thus completely transparent. Everywhere posthumans turn, they see themselves fulfilled and surpassed in posthumans’ consciousness and self-consciousness, the universe becomes aware of itself, and knowledge appears to become absolute. The technological singularity brings to completion the process of dematerialization I have been tracking from the dematerialization of the society of the spectacle, through the digitization of the culture of simulacra, to the virtualization of reality. It is no accident that the most enthusiastic supporters of the singularity are the tech billionaires whose financial assets are as virtual as the realities in which they traffic. As Osnos reports in “Survival of the Richest” and Don DeLillo suggests in his prescient 2016 novel about cyrogenics, Zero K, in the era of the Singularity, immortality is a luxury only the .001 percent can afford. For those who do not choose frozen suspended animation, there are other alternatives. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson are engaged in a race to develop rockets that are advertised as creating new business opportunities in space tourism for the superrich. But their real purpose is different— these spaceships are designed to colonize the universe with new life forms that will survive the destruction of human life on earth. In a revealing article entitled “The Doomsday Invention,” Raffi Khatchadourian reports, The view of the future from Bostrom’s office can be divided into three grand panoramas. In one, humanity experiences an evolutionary leap— either assisted by technology or by merging into it and becoming software— to achieve a sublime condition that Bostrom calls “posthumanity.” Death is overcome, mental experience expands beyond recognition, and our descendants colonize the universe. In another panorama, humanity becomes extinct or experiences a disaster so great that it is unable to recover. Between these extremes, Bostrom envisions scenarios that resemble the status quo— people living as they do now, forever mired in the “human era.” It’s a vision familiar to fans

Constructing Modernism-Postmodernism / 65 of sci-fi: on “Star Trek,” Captain Kirk was born in the year 2233, but when an alien portal hurls him though time and space to Depression-era Manhattan he blends in easily.41

If humanity is inescapably temporal, technological immortality marks the end of history and the death of what once was called “man.”

FOUR

Ghosts Haunting Modernism-Postmodernism

The spectral someone other looks at us, we feel ourselves being looked at by it, outside of any synchrony, even before and beyond any look on our part, according to an absolute anteriority (which may be on the order of generation, of more than one generation) and asymmetry, according to an absolutely unmasterable disproportion. —Jacques Derrida

Reformation to Revolution In The Present Age (1846), Kierkegaard contrasts the dispirited present age of Christendom with highly spirited age of revolution. “The age of revolution,” he declares, “is essentially passionate and therefore essentially has culture. In other words, the tension and resilience of the inner being are the measure of essential culture. A maidservant genuinely in love is essentially cultured; a peasant with his mind passionately and powerfully made up is essentially cultured. Whereas there is only affectation, the pretense of form, in the external piecemeal training correlative with an interior emptiness, the flamboyant colors of swaggering weeds in contrast to the humble bowing of the blessed grain, the mechanical counting of the beat correlative with the lacklustre of the dance, the painstaking decoration of the bookbinding correlative with the deficiency of the book” (TA, 61– 62). The mechanical counting of the beat of everyday life repeats the relentless humming of machines and printing presses. In contrast to “the calculating sensibleness” of this “age of publicity,” in the age of revolution, individuals were passionately related to ideas and “never came too close to each other in the herd sense.” Specious reflection had “not nullified the principle of contradiction” (TA, 66),

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and therefore every individual faced a decisive either/or upon which his or her life depended. Kierkegaard summarizes his criticism of the present age by using an economic metaphor that is far more prescient than he could have realized: “But an age without passion possesses no assets; everything becomes, as it were, transactions in paper money [Repraesentativer]. Certain phrases and observations circulate among the people, partly true and sensible, yet devoid of vitality, but there is no hero, no lover, no thinker, no knight of faith, no great humanitarian, no person in despair to vouch for their validity by having primitively experienced them. Just as in our business transactions we long to hear the ring of real coins after the whisper of paper money, so we today long for a little primitivity [Primitvitet]” (TA, 74– 75). When signs (monetary and otherwise) float freely, not only the economy but life itself becomes a confidence game. The revolutionary age Kierkegaard was describing was the time of the French Revolution. For Kierkegaard, as for Kant and most of his successors, the French Revolution represented the realization of Enlightenment ideas and ideals, and thereby marked a decisive turning point in the modern world. While Marx and Hegel agreed with Kant’s and Kierkegaard’s stress on the importance of the French Revolution, they argued that modernity actually began centuries earlier with Luther’s Protestant Reformation. In an 1843 article entitled “Toward the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law,” Marx writes, “Germany’s revolutionary past is theoretical— it is the Reformation. As the revolution then began in the brain of the monk, now it begins in the brain of the philosopher.” The monk is Luther, the philosopher is Hegel. Hegelian philosophy, Marx maintains, brings to completion the reformation Luther began. But even this theoretical reformation is not enough— ideas must be translated into revolutionary praxis, which transforms the real world. Marx proceeds to argue, “Thus it is the task of history, once the otherworldly truth has disappeared, to establish the truth of this world. The immediate task of philosophy which is in the service of history is to unmask human self-alienation in its unholy forms now that it has been unmasked in its holy form. Thus the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of the earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.”1 While Max Weber’s study of the relation between Calvinism and capitalism has been influential in shaping interpretations of the modern world, the importance of Luther’s theology for modernity has been less widely acknowledged. Luther is the religious ghost (Geist) haunting modernismpostmodernism. There is not, however, one Luther— there are many; and how one interprets Luther’s theology conditions, if not determines, how one

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understands modernity and postmodernity. While Hegel and Kierkegaard were born into Lutheran Protestantism, Heidegger was raised a Catholic but later came under the sway of Luther. To appreciate the importance of their different interpretations of the Reformation, it is necessary to understand the primary tenets of Luther’s theology. The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson begins his groundbreaking psychobiography of Luther (Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History) with an observation that Kierkegaard recorded in his journal: “‘Luther. . . . is a patient of exceeding import for Christendom.’ . . . In taking this statement as a kind of motto for this book, we do not narrow our perspective to the clinical; we expand our clinical perspective to include a life style of patienthood as a sense of imposed suffering, of an intense need for cure, and (as Kierkegaard adds) a ‘passion for expressing and describing one’s suffering.’”2 Throughout his study, Erikson repeatedly draws on Kierkegaard’s insights to illuminate Luther. One of the reasons for this strategy is that Erikson regards both Kierkegaardian existentialism and Freudian psychoanalysis as heirs to Luther’s theology. Luther’s life was as tumultuous as his times. Like Kierkegaard, he had a troubled relationship with his overbearing father. While Søren was the son chosen to redeem his father’s sins by studying theology, Martin was the son chosen to fulfill his father’s secular ambitions by studying the law. But Luther and the law were like oil and water, and the son eventually rebelled. Returning from a visit with his father after receiving high honors in his master of arts degree, Martin was caught in a frightful thunderstorm and, fearing for his life, cried out to Saint Anne, vowing to become a monk. This traumatic event, which was completely unexpected, abruptly altered the course of his life. Baffled by what had befallen him, Luther tried to understand his experience through Paul’s account of his conversion on the road to Damascus. Just as a traumatic event had changed the course of Paul’s life, transforming him from a prosecutor of Christians to Christ’s envoy to Gentiles, so Luther’s unexpected experience turned him from his ungodly ways to a religious vocation. Rejecting the life his earthly father had programmed for him, Martin abruptly left the University of Erfurt in 1505 and entered the Black Monastery of the Augustinians. More enraged than disappointed, his father charged that the Devil rather than God had taken possession of his son. His father’s relentless suspicions overshadowed Martin’s early life and deepened his uncertainty about his religious mission. Luther, like Kierkegaard many years later, was wracked by doubt, guilt, and dread. During his early years in the monastery, he found God more a source of terror than reassurance. Looking back at this period late in life,

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he recalls, “When I first read and sang in the Psalms . . . in iustitia tua libera me, I was horror-stricken and felt deep hostility toward these words, God’s righteousness, God’s judgment, God’s work. For I knew only that iustitia dei meant a harsh judgment. Well, was he supposed to save me by judging me harshly?” Luther’s belief in divine righteousness and human sinfulness drove him to despair. The more he despaired, the harder he was driven to fulfill God’s law; the harder he tried to fulfill the law, the deeper his sense of inadequacy and guilt became. Rather than providing the reassurance that salvation comes to those who strive, the law confirmed Luther’s conviction that he was irredeemably guilty. Just when hope seemed impossible and he could go no further, the very Psalms that had filled him with fear and trembling pointed the way out of his religious impasse. He concludes the passage cited above: “But gottlob [thank God], when I then understood the matter and knew that iustitia dei meant the righteousness by which He justifies us through the free gift of Christ’s justice, then I understood the grammatica, and I truly tasted the Psalms.”3 This revelation led to his second transformative experience, which resulted in the insight that forms the foundation of the Reformation revealed in Romans 1:17. Luther recounts this decisive moment: “At last, God being merciful, as I thought about it day and night, I noticed in the context of the words, namely, ‘The justice of God is revealed in it; as it is written, the just shall live by faith.’ Then and there, I began to understand the justice of God as that by which the righteous man lives by the gift of God, namely, by faith, and this sentence ‘The justice of God is revealed in the gospel’ to be the passive justice with which the merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written: ‘The just lives by faith.’”4 In other words, salvation comes by grace and not by works. In ways that are not immediately obvious, this insight marks the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern world. Luther anticipates Descartes’s inward turn to the subject with his understanding of the individual’s personal and private relation to the transcendent individual God. For the purposes of the following argument, it is important to understand that Luther’s doctrine of salvation distinguishes between active and passive righteousness. While active righteousness requires the fulfillment of the law, passive righteousness is a free gift from God. Bound by self-incurred sin, nothing human beings do merits divine justification; if redemption occurs, it must be the result of God’s grace. Far from an act of devotion, the effort to establish one’s righteousness by oneself is actually an expression of pride, which is the exercise of the will to power that seeks to compel God to reward human striving. In Christian righteousness, the will functions in two interrelated ways. The first is negative— through the anxious exercise of

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the will, the individual discovers an inability to fulfill the law; the harder one tries, the more impotent one feels. Eventually, the law breaks the will and prepares the way for grace in a process Luther describes as the praeparatio evangelii. Justification and the redemption it brings cannot be earned, but must be accepted as a gift from an Other who is never present, though he is not absent. The recognition of the self’s absolute dependence on this God leads to the positive exercise of the will. In order to receive the gift of grace, the individual must, paradoxically, will not to will. This leads to what Luther describes as “passive righteousness,” in which we render nothing unto God, but “receive and suffer another to work in us, that is to say, God. Therefore it seemeth good unto me to call this righteousness of faith or Christian righteousness, the passive righteousness.”5 In developing his interpretation of the passivity of faith, Luther was influenced by a form of mysticism that had developed in the Rhineland, where the most influential mystics were Meister Eckhart, Jan van Ruysbroeck, and John Tauler. Though differing in many ways, the Rhineland mystics shared the belief that human beings have an inward and immediate relation to God that can be discovered only by renouncing one’s will. As we will see in more detail in the last chapter, this is an unusual voluntarism in which the will is used to overcome the will through the deliberate cultivation of a radical passivity. Eckhart and Tauler use the term Gelassenheit, which Heidegger later appropriates to describe the letting-go of the will necessary for overcoming the will to power that both constructs and destroys the world. In view of issues to be considered in what follows, two points must be emphasized. First, the interplay of law and gospel establishes a dialectical relationship that takes many different forms in subsequent centuries. The law establishes the theoretical and practical structures that maintain worldly order, and grace is the event through which these structures emerge. In other words, as Derrida repeatedly insists, inasmuch as there is some “thing” “before the law,” the law is not self-grounding but is grounded in something other, which is not itself lawful. Second, the notion of grace involves something like chiasmic time. While the exercise of the will to power attempts to bind the future to the past, in the moment of grace, the unanticipated future breaks into the present to transform the past. One name of this transformation is forgiveness. Luther’s theology was a radical break with medieval theology and posed a serious threat to the Catholic Church. The interrelated issues at the heart of this debate are the tension between rationalism (logocentrism, structure) and voluntarism (event), and the relation between the group and the individual. In the years preceding the Reformation, the papacy had, in effect,

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reconstituted the empire Rome had created. The static church hierarchy with the pope, cardinals, bishops, and priests reflected the static social and economic hierarchy of feudalism in which peasants and serfs were bound to manors of nobles and lords, where they were forced to labor. In this religious, political, and economic structure, order trumped freedom and the individual was subservient to the group. This order of church and world was reflected in the reigning theology of the age. Thomas Aquinas created what has come to be known as the medieval synthesis by integrating Christian theology and Aristotle’s philosophy, which had been recently rediscovered as a result of the church’s expansion into Muslim lands during the Crusades. Aquinas’s God is, above all, rational— he is always reasonable and never arbitrary; indeed, for Aquinas, it is unthinkable for God to act in an irrational way. He makes this all-important point concisely in his master work, Summa theologiae: “There is will in God, just as there is intellect: since will always follows upon intellect.” Because God’s will is informed by his reason (intellect), the world is always rational. Aquinas summarizes the basic theological conviction that was the cornerstone of the medieval church in a single sentence from Boethius: “Providence is the divine reason itself which, seated in the Supreme Ruler, disposes all things.”6 The world created and governed by this God is rationally ordered and hierarchically structured. Man, who is created in God’s image, is essentially rational and finds his ultimate fulfillment in the knowledge or contemplation of God. Since sin weakens but does not destroy humankind’s powers, the knowledge of God that can be discovered in the natural world must be supplemented with the revealed knowledge available only through participation in Catholic rituals. More specifically, the administration of the grace necessary for redemption is never immediate or direct, but is always mediated to individuals through the channels of the sacraments administered by official representatives of the church universal. The church, therefore, holds the keys to salvation. The sacrament necessary for salvation is baptism, which washes away original sin. This prepares the believer for the Eucharist, through which individuals participate in the ritual repetition of Christ’s redemptive sacrifice. Luther rejects this entire economy of redemption. Salvation, he insists, is not mediated by the church universal and does not depend on human striving or the purchase of indulgences. To the contrary, every person has an individual or private relation to the transcendent individual God, who is completely unconstrained and grants or does not grant grace freely. To develop the implications of his tower experience, Luther turned to the work of Oxford philosopher-theologian William of Ockham (1285– 1347/49).

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In contrast to Aquinas, for whom God’s will is always guided by God’s reason, Ockham argues that God’s omnipotent will is prior to and determinative of divine reason. With this seemingly simple reversal, Ockham brought about a theological revolution that simultaneously reflected and promoted the dissolution of the medieval synthesis. Reading retrospectively, it is possible to see both the beginning and the end of modernitypostmodernity in Ockham’s theological vision.7 God is free to act in ways that sometimes seem arbitrary and often remain incomprehensible. Within this theological schema, the ground of the universe is the unpredictable will of God, and human existence is his astonishing gift. So understood, the aleatory divine will is the condition of the possibility and impossibility of everything, including reason itself. This is a very important point— reason is made possible by something that is neither rational nor irrational, and therefore has as its condition something it cannot rationally comprehend. Since the world is the product of God’s creative will, unguided by the divine Logos, the order of things is contingent and perhaps even arbitrary. There can be no certainty about the continuity or stability of the cosmic order because God can always undo what he has done. In such a world, certainty, self-certainty, confidence, and security are idle fantasies that are dangerously misleading. In an effort to hedge his bets about living in such an unpredictable world without forsaking his radical voluntarism, Ockham distinguishes God’s potentia ordinata (ordained power) from his potentia absoluta (absolute power). While God has the absolute power to do or undo anything, he freely chooses to limit himself by ordaining a particular order for the world. In different terms, divine will posits the systems, structures, and codes by which the world is ordered and establishes the laws and rules by which they operate. There is, however, no law or rule by which these ordering principles themselves are established. Neither reason nor law is foundational because each presupposes something that is neither reasonable nor lawful. In terms Paul Ricœur and Jean Hyppolite would later use to distinguish Hegelian idealism and structuralism from Kierkegaardian existentialism and poststructuralism, potentia ordinata is structure and potentia absoluta is event. Ockham’s anthropology is a mirror image of his theology, and, accordingly, has two fundamental tenets: first, the anteriority and priority of the singular individual over the social group, and second, the freedom and responsibility of every individual subject. According to the accepted medieval position known as realism, individual human beings exist only by virtue of their “participation” in the antecedent universal essence of humanity. For nominalists, by contrast, only individuals are real, and universals are simply names (Latin nomen). This leads to the second guiding principle of nomi-

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nalism: since human beings are individuals who are not constituted by any universal idea or atemporal essence, they must become themselves through their own free decisions. By reducing time and history to pale shadows of eternal forms and essences, realism undercuts the significance of finite life. Anticipating Sartre’s claim that existence precedes essence, or, in different terms, human individuals are forever what they become through their free decisions during their lifetime, nominalists invest temporality with eternal significance Finally, Ockham’s nominalism entails a new understanding of language. Insofar as language is general, if not universal, and subjects as well as objects are singular, existing entities cannot be fully represented linguistically. Words and things fall apart leaving finite human beings caught in a linguistic labyrinth from which there is, again in Sartre’s words, “no exit.”8 In semiotic terms, signifiers, which appear to point to independent signifieds, actually refer not to things but are signs of other signs. While appearing to represent the world, language is a play of signs unanchored by knowable referents. This linguistic web is not, however, seamless because, like reason or the Logos, it presupposes as a condition of its possibility something that forever eludes it.

Hegel’s Luther Luther was not a systematic thinker. Psychologically tormented and caught up in forces he could neither understand nor control, his writings were occasional and fragmentary. Multiple strands were left for later thinkers to elaborate. Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger each saw something different in Luther, and borrowed his religious insights to develop their own philosophical positions. Though their angles of interpretation differ, they all focus on the interplay between time and self and the related problem of how human freedom is to be understood. In his Philosophy of History, Hegel appropriates his version of Luther’s theology to develop an account of modernity against which Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and, later, Derrida react. Hegel begins the third and final section of his historical narrative, “The Modern Time,” by writing, “We have . . . arrived at the third period of the German World, and thus enter upon the period of Spirit conscious that it is free, inasmuch as it wills the True, the Eternal— that which is in and for itself Universal” (PH, 412). Hegel argues that while “intellectual consciousness was first extricated from the sophistry of thought, which unsettles everything, by Descartes . . . it was the purely German nations among whom the principle of Spirit first manifested itself” (PH, 440). Since Luther’s privat-

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ization of the relation between self and God anticipated Descartes’s inward turn to the subject, Marx’s claim that what began in the mind of the monk Luther ends in the mind of the philosopher Hegel proves to be historically accurate. Hegel concludes, “This is the essence of the Reformation: Man is in his very nature destined to be free” (PH, 417). The question, then, becomes, How is freedom to be understood? Hegel discerns in Luther’s theology an implicit reconciliation of oppositions Luther himself insistently holds apart. As we have seen, Luther’s God is radically transcendent and human beings are absolutely dependent on this divine Other. Hegel suggests that in the very effort to establish divine aseity and human finitude, Luther’s argument undergoes a dialectical reversal through which transcendence becomes immanent. Commenting on Galatians 2:17– 21, he writes: If now, in seeking to be justified in Christ, we ourselves no less than the Gentiles turn out to be sinners against the law, does that mean that Christ is an abettor of sin? No, never! No, if I start building up again a system [NB] which I have pulled down, then it is that I show myself up as a transgressor of the law. For through the law I die to law— to live for God. I have been crucified with Christ: the life I now live is not my life, but the life which Christ lives in me; and my present bodily life is lived by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself up for me. I will not nullify the grace of God; if righteousness comes by law, then Christ died for nothing. (emphasis added)

“The life I now live is not my life, but the life which Christ lives in me.” For Hegel, this marks the death of the transcendent God and his rebirth in the lives of human beings, who extend divine activity by constructing the world in their own divine image. God, self, and world become one in the process through which the Otherness of God and the “externalities” of religion are “recollected” or “inwardized” (er-innern). “Subjective spirit,” Hegel argues, has to receive the Spirit of Truth into itself, and give it a dwelling place there. Thus that absolute inwardness of soul which pertains to religion itself, and Freedom in the Church are both secured. Subjectivity therefore makes the objective purport of Christianity, i.e., the doctrine of the Church, its own. In the Lutheran Church the subjective feeling and the conviction of the individual is regarded as equally necessary with the objective side of Truth. Truth with Lutherans is not a finished and completed thing; the subject himself must be imbued with Truth, surrendering his particular being in exchange for the substantial Truth, and making that Truth his own. Thus subjective Spirit gains

Ghosts Haunting Modernism-Postmodernism / 75 emancipation in the Truth, abnegates its particularity and comes to itself in realizing the truth of its being. Thus Christian Freedom is actualized. (PH, 416)

According to Hegel, the movement from Judaism (external law), through Catholicism (external dogma and ritual), to Protestantism (inward conviction) is the progression from heteronomy (i.e., determination by another) to autonomy (i.e., self-determination), or from bondage to freedom. Since Luther was convinced that everyone has a personal relation to God, he insisted that each person is the authority for himself or herself. This was the basis of his denial of the authority of the church and its clergy and his rejection of obedience to the Pope. When Luther defiantly declared on the basis of his personal conviction that both popes and church councils could err, his break with Rome became inevitable. After he refused to recant at the Diet of Worms (1521), he was condemned as a heretic and excommunicated. While Luther rejected heteronomy, he did not altogether deny authority; rather, he shifts the locus of authority from the church to the Word of God as it is revealed in the Bible and sermons. By translating the Bible into vernacular German, he put the Word of God in the hands of common people instead of limiting it to members of the clergy, who could read Latin. This also encouraged the development of literacy among church members, which was crucial for the spread of capitalism throughout Europe and beyond. It is important to stress that in contrast to later Protestant scholastics and fundamentalists, Luther never limited God’s freedom by restricting divine activity to the purportedly literal words of scripture. To the contrary, God’s revelation though the Word is the result of the free activity of the Holy Spirit; God’s “spirit blows where it wills” (John 3:8). As a result of God’s radical freedom, the priesthood is not limited to the ecclesiastical hierarchy, but can include everyone. This belief is the basis of the Protestant doctrine of “the priesthood of all believers.” The doctrine of the priesthood of all believers leads to his notion of calling— Beruf—which helped prepare the way for modern-postmodern secularity. Though salvation depends on grace rather than works, every person is called upon to fulfill the responsibilities of his or her station in the world in a way that expresses devotion to God. In other words, religious vocation is not limited to monks and the clergy but can be carried out in all worldly activities. Nor does religious vocation require celibacy— men and women may actually serve God by marrying and raising a family. Luther’s doctrine of vocation further erodes the opposition between the sacred and the secular by investing worldly deeds with religious significance. Through his or her pursuits, the Christian becomes the agent or vehicle for divine activity in the

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world. God’s calling is not limited to positions of power and prestige, but extends to every station of life no matter how low or ordinary. In an effort to express the implications of this notion of calling, Luther uses the richly suggestive image of masks of God: larvae Dei. “God bestows all that is good on us,” he explains, “but you must stretch out your hands and lay hold of the horns of the bull, i.e. you must work and lend yourself as a means and a mask of God.”9 When my work is God’s work, the will of man and the will of God are one and the divine becomes incarnate in history. This conclusion is exactly what makes the Reformation so important for Hegel. He goes so far as to claim that the Protestant World created the possibility of culmination of absolute self-consciousness. As one moves from east to west, there is a progression from the condition in which only one is free, through a situation in which some are free, to a state in which all are free. The Reformation is the turning point at which the modern world emerges and freedom becomes— or is supposed to become— universal. We spoke above of the relation which the new doctrine sustained to secular life, and now we have only to exhibit that relation in detail. The development and advance of Spirit from the time of the Reformation onwards consists in this, that Spirit, having now gained the consciousness of its Freedom, through that process of mediation which takes place between man and God— that is, in the full recognition of the objective process of divine essence [göttlichen Wesens, “divine substance, essence, being”]—now takes it up and follows it out in building up the edifice of secular relations [der Weiterbildung des Weltlichen durchmacht]. That harmony . . . which has resulted from the painful struggles of History, involves the recognition of the Secular as capable of being the embodiment of Truth; whereas it had been formerly regarded as evil only, as capable of Good— which remained in the life to come. (PH, 422; translation modified)

In constructing the edifice of the secular world, the will wills itself. In the mirror play of speculative philosophy, what appears to be the relation to the other is actually self-relation; thus, in knowing the “other,” the mind knows itself, and in willing the “other,” the will wills itself. “The will is free,” Hegel argues, “only when it does not will anything other, external, foreign [nichts Anderes, Ausserliches, Fremdes] (for as long as it does so, it is dependent), but wills itself alone— wills the Will” (PH, 442; translation modified). With all forms of altarity overcome, man is finally “at home” in the world. In this moment, Hegel’s argument comes full circle and the self is totally present to itself. All that remains is to translate this religious narrative of the journey to

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Figure 6. Hegel’s Trajectory.

selfhood into philosophical concepts. This is the task Hegel sets for himself in the Phenomenology of Spirit.

Kierkegaard’s Luther For Kierkegaard, Hegel has completely misunderstood Luther’s theology, and, more important, has misrepresented Christianity. The trajectory of Hegel’s understanding of modernity, which I have traced above, is summarized in figure 6. For Kierkegaard, by contrast, speculative philosophy is not the full realization of Christianity but actually contradicts the truth of the Christian message. “Christianity has been completely homogenized with unadulterated secularism— and still we continue to appeal to Luther” (JP, no. 2513). The deification of the established order is the secularization of everything. The established order may be quite right in affirming that, so far as worldly things are concerned, one must attach oneself to the established order, be content with relativity, etc. But in the end one secularizes also the God-relationship, insists that this shall be congruous with a certain relativity, not essentially different from one’s station in life, etc.—instead of which it must be for every individual man the absolute, and it is precisely this God relationship of the individual which must put every established order in suspense. . . . The established order desires to be totalitarian, recognizing nothing over it, but having under it every individual, judging every individual who is integrated in it.10

Kierkegaard characterizes Hegelianism by bringing together two religious traditions he regards as heretical. What joins them is their denial of the irreducible temporality of human existence, which results from the collapse of transcendence into immanence. Speculative philosophy, he contends, is a gnostic pantheism that creates “an acoustic illusion which confounds vox populi with vox dei, an optical illusion, a cloud-picture formed out of the mists of temporal existence, a mirage formed by reflection from temporal existence and regarded as eternal.”11 On the one hand, speculative philosophy

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Figure 7. Kierkegaard’s Trajectory.

reduces Christianity to reasonable knowledge (gnosis), and, on the other hand, it immerses so-called believers in the trivialities of everyday life. If Christianity requires nothing more than being a respectable bourgeois citizen with a family and a good job, who attends church regularly and stays informed about public opinion, then, as Kierkegaard argues in The Sickness unto Death, the frightful faith Luther discovered has vanished. Kierkegaard argues that secularization of Luther’s thought runs counter to the true trajectory of Lutheran theology. Since speculative philosophy and modern secularity represent a betrayal of Luther, the only way to “reintroduce Christianity into Christendom” is to return to the original Christianity Hegel betrays in order to provide “a corrective.” Kierkegaard sets for himself the task of overturning Hegel’s system and changing the direction of historical development that the misappropriation of Luther’s theology set in motion. Toward this end, he reverses Hegel’s thinking at every turn (see fig. 7). The central issue that divides Hegel and Kierkegaard’s reading of Luther is their contrasting interpretations of divine and human freedom. Far from immanent in self and world, Kierkegaard’s God is “infinitely and qualitatively different,” and thus remains radically transcendent. While Hegel views God as sovereign reason (Logos), immanent in nature and history, Kierkegaard understands God as sovereign will that creates ex nihilo. For Hegel, divine as well as human freedom is autonomy—that is to say, self-reflexivity in which the relationship to every other is a mediated self-relationship. For Kierkegaard, by contrast, freedom is spontaneity—that is to say, the unconstrained exercise of the will in creative acts and decisions of individuals. As we have seen, Hegel traces his interpretation of modern secularity to Luther’s interrelated doctrines of the priesthood of all believers and worldly vocation. When God, self, and world become one, heteronomy is overcome, the kingdom of God arrives on earth, and history reaches its end. Kierkegaard’s interpretation of freedom, which was considerably more nuanced, can be traced to Luther’s notion of Christian freedom, which leads to his doctrine of two kingdoms.

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Both clergy and laypeople misunderstood the subtleties of Luther’s view of freedom during his lifetime. By privatizing the God relationship, Luther appeared to many to remove all external or objective norms and to make each person his or her own authority. This radical antinomian position is a misinterpretation of Luther’s theology and led to widespread conflict. Once spirit was inwardized, it ran free and spread religious and political unrest. During the radical Reformation, the proliferation of spiritual sects (e.g., Anabaptists, Mennonites, Dunkards, Hutterites) obscured the line between orthodoxy and heterodoxy and created the seemingly endless fragmentation of Protestant communities. The conflicts arising from different interpretations of Luther’s view of freedom spread from the religious to the political sphere, where they had disastrous consequences. One of the reasons that Luther’s theology resonated with so many people is that it spoke to their anxieties during a period of social and economic unrest. In the fourteenth century, natural, social, economic, and religious factors intersected to upset the medieval equilibrium and push Europe toward the edge of chaos. The Black Death swept across Europe, killing at least twenty-five million people, which created a labor shortage that contributed to the breakdown of feudalism. When manors started to compete for serfs, workers were able to sell their services to the highest bidder. Individuals were no longer members of a secure hierarchical structure, but were thrown back on their own resources. Greater freedom and increased mobility brought more uncertainty and insecurity as well as opportunity. In a world fraught with uncertainty and insecurity, Ockham’s unpredictable and sometimes hostile God made more sense than Aquinas’s rational God. Luther had learned from his wrenching personal experience that theological issues are not merely ecclesiastical and political but, more important, are deeply existential. In Luther’s anxiety and despair, others saw their own turmoil reflected, and in his religious searching they saw a way of coping with life even when certainty remained elusive. Liberated from the bondage of serfdom, freedom became intoxicating for many. In Luther’s relentless criticisms of church authorities and sermons about the limitations of the law, some people heard the call to political rebellion. In 1524/25, German peasants rose up against princes and nobles under the banner of Luther’s Christian freedom in what became the bloodiest and most important European uprising prior to the French Revolution. The peasants’ concerns were worldly rather than religious— they demanded the abolition of class privileges and the granting of voting rights, and thus political self-determination. Before the struggle had ended, more than a hundred thousand people had died. Luther’s response was swift and devastating. In an infamous tract, “Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of

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Peasants” (1525), he declared the rebellion to be “the devil’s work.” With characteristic bluster that still remains shocking, he declared, “Any man against whom it can be proved that he is a maker of sedition is outside the law of God and Empire, so that the first who can slay him is doing right and well. For if a man is an open rebel every man is his judge and executioner. . . . Rebellion brings with it a land full of murder and bloodshed, makes widows and orphans, and turns everything upside down, like the greatest disaster. Therefore let everyone who can, smite, slay and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful or devilish than a rebel. It is just as when one must kill a mad dog; if you do not strike him, he will strike you, and a whole land with you.”12 In contrast to the peasants for whom the notion of freedom led to a call to change the outer world, Luther insists that Christian freedom is inward and involves a personal transformation. This opposition between interiority and exteriority, or the invisible and the visible realms, became a distinguishing mark of Protestant theology and deeply impressed Kierkegaard. Writing in his Journal in 1845 while working on Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard reflects: What Luther says is excellent, the one thing needful and the sole explanation— that this whole doctrine (of the Atonement and in the main all Christianity) must be traced back to the struggle of the anguished conscience. Remove the anguished conscience, and you may as well lock the churches and convert them into dance halls. The anguished conscience understands Christianity. . . . But you say, “I still cannot grasp the Atonement.” Here I must ask in which understanding— in the understanding of the anguished conscience or in the understanding of indifferent and objective speculation. How could anyone sitting placidly and objectively in his study and speculating ever be able to understand the necessity of an atonement, since an atonement is necessary only in the understanding of an anguished conscience. (JP, no. 2461)

Far from integrated subjects, human beings, according to Luther, are inwardly divided and thus are always in conflict with themselves. As Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, “Though the will to do good is there, the deed is not. The good which I want to do, I fail to do; but what I do is the wrong which is against my will; and if what I do is against my will, clearly it is no longer I who am the agent, but sin that has its lodging in me” (Romans 7:18– 20). As I have noted, Hegel labels such split subjects “unhappy consciousness”; William James calls them “sick souls”: “Nothing in Catholic theology, I imagine,” James remarks, “has ever spoken to sick souls as

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straight as this message from Luther’s personal experience.”13 In describing human duplicity, Luther frequently invokes Paul’s language of the conflict between the spirit and the flesh. While he sometimes uses the word flesh to designate the body as such, the term more generally refers to human beings’ prideful self-assertion. From this point of view, the realization of Christian freedom, the search for autonomy, is an expression of the sin that seeks mastery and control of both self and world. Since human beings are inevitably but not necessarily sinful, to control their errant strivings, God instituted the “civil use of the law,” which maintains social and political order. Christians as well as all others are bound to obey the laws of the state and the dictates of civil magistrates who enforce them. It was the peasants’ revolt against these laws that provoked Luther’s wrath. In rebelling against civil magistrates, they were rebelling against God. This authorization of deference to political authorities has had problematic consequences over the years, and nowhere more so than among German Lutherans during the years National Socialism was spreading and Heidegger was beginning to develop his own philosophy. The religious or theological use of the law is something else altogether. For Luther and Kierkegaard following him, Christian freedom is not political freedom, and religious law is not the same as civic law. Having fallen into sin through the free exercise of their will, human beings become guilty, and no longer are free to work out their salvation by themselves. If salvation comes, it must be a spontaneous gift from the radically free God. Since human beings remain filled with pride and self-confidence even when mired in sin, their wills must be broken. Paul anticipates Luther’s experience (which was normative for Kierkegaard): “For by the works of the law no human being will be justified; rather through the law we become conscious of our sin” (Romans 3:20). In “Freedom of a Christian,” Luther explains Paul’s point: “When a man has learned through the commandments to recognize his helplessness and is distressed about how he might satisfy the law— since the law must be fulfilled so that not a jot or title shall be lost, otherwise man will be condemned without hope— then, being truly humbled and reduced to nothing in his own eyes, he finds in himself nothing whereby he may be justified and saved.”14 From the moment of revelation in the tower, Luther was committed to a theologia crucis in which there is no resurrection (that is to say, redemption or rebirth) without crucifixion. The law crucifies, grace resurrects. Confronted with his or her own helplessness, the struggling individual is driven to despair and is without hope (desperare: de, “reversal” + sperare, “hope”). The gift of grace transforms individuals by delivering them from the burden of the past and opening them to a future they never could have anticipated. But the labor of the law never ends; faith is a daily struggle

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that lasts a lifetime. This is why Kierkegaard insists that a person never is a Christian, but is always in the process of becoming a Christian. Since it is always possible to betray one’s faith, everything remains in suspense until death. From Paul and Augustine to Luther and Kierkegaard, this strong doctrine of grace has raised questions that have led to resistance. If human beings can do nothing and their eternal destiny is out of their hands, why should they try to fulfill the law or feel constrained by religious or moral obligation? Throughout the Christian tradition, there have been two opposite responses to this question. On the one hand, Pelagians reject the doctrine of grace and insist that salvation depends on human works; on the other hand, antinomians reject the doctrine of the law and argue that people are completely free of its dictates and are free to do anything they please. Luther and Kierkegaard stake out a position between these two extremes. Far from negating the law and making works unnecessary, the gift of grace actually makes the fulfillment of the law possible. When following the law to achieve personal salvation, a person is guided by instrumental reason, which calculates the ways in which others can serve one’s own ends. If, however, salvation is not within one’s own power and does not depend on one’s effort, a person is free to serve God and others by fulfilling the law for its own sake. Paradoxically, by letting go of the effort to obey the law, it becomes possible to fulfill it. When this occurs, selfish activity that treats others as the means to one’s own ends, gives way to the generosity that expresses love for the other as other. Two important points in Luther and Kierkegaard’s doctrine of law and grace underscore their differences from Hegel. First, the experience of grace is a private transaction between the singular individual (Enkelte) and the singular God (Ens Singularismus). Second, this transaction transpires at a level of interiority that cannot be outwardly revealed. The secret inwardness of faith reflects the hidden reality of the transcendent Deus absconditus. In contrast to Hegel, for whom “the outer is the inner and the inner is the outer” and thus the kingdom of God is fully realized on earth, Kierkegaard, following Luther, maintains that there are two kingdoms: the kingdom of God, which is the result of divine righteousness, and the kingdom of man or of the earth, which represents specious human righteousness. The former is inward, revealed only in faith; the latter is outward and can be known through human reason. In developing this argument, Kierkegaard translates Luther’s doctrine of two kingdoms into a dualistic understanding of history, which deliberately contradicts the gnostic pantheism of Hegel’s historical narrative:

Ghosts Haunting Modernism-Postmodernism / 83 “History,” says faith, “has nothing whatever to do with Christ. As applying to Him, we have only sacred history [den heilige Historie] (qualitatively different from history in general) [Historie i Almindelighed], which recounts the story of His life under the conditions of His humiliation, and reports moreover that He himself said that He was God. He is the paradox, which history can never digest or convert into a common syllogism. In His humiliation He is the same as in his exaltation— but the 1,800 years (or if there were 18,000 of them) have nothing whatever to do with the case. The brilliant consequences in world-history which might well convince even a professor of history that He was God— these brilliant consequences are surely not His return in glory!” (translation modified)15

The division between sacred and profane history compounds the split between inwardness and outwardness. Unlike Hegel, Kierkegaard was never at home in the world; rather, he always remained an alienated stranger in the world for whom suffering was the sign of chosenness. While Hegel’s dialectic resolves conflicts by reconciling time and eternity, Kierkegaard’s dialectic drives individuals ever deeper into the unavoidable tensions and unavoidable paradoxes of temporal existence.

Heidegger’s Luther Kierkegaard’s writings were largely unknown outside of Denmark until the early twentieth century.16 This suddenly changed in 1918 when a littleknown Swiss pastor, Karl Barth, published The Epistle to the Romans. Barth’s theological manifesto sent shockwaves through Western Christianity and started a theological movement known as neo-orthodoxy. Once again a religious revolution was triggered by returning to Paul. At the time Barth unleashed his attack, European theology was dominated by a version of liberal Protestantism, which appropriated Kant’s practical philosophy to create a vision of an ethical commonwealth emerging on earth. The other influential theology was a version of Kulturprotestantismus, which was very similar to what Kierkegaard described as Christendom. In the wake of the devastation wrought by World War I and the continuing social and political unrest, the world appeared to be a much darker place than these pastors and theologians envisioned. In response to the claims that God’s immanent activity would bring about the kingdom of God on earth, Barth declares a resounding “Nein!” In developing his theological position, he returns to Paul’s theology by way of Kierkegaard’s philosophy. Far from immanent in nature and history, God, he declares, is “Wholly Other.” “If I have a system,” Barth

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explains, “it is limited to a recognition of what Kierkegaard called the ‘infinite qualitative distinction’ between time and eternity, and to my regarding this as possessing negative as well as positive significance: ‘God is in heaven, and thou art on earth.’ The relation between such a God and such a man, and the relation between such a man and such a God, is for me the theme of the Bible and the essence of philosophy.” In the midst of smoldering ruins created by what was supposed to have been the most advanced civilization in history, Barth concludes that rather than making steady progress toward a more just and humane world, humankind is so corrupt that people can do absolutely nothing to save themselves. Drawing on Luther’s doctrine of law and grace, he argues, “The solid ground upon which the law of works stands must be completely broken up. No work, be it most delicately spiritual, or be it even a work of self-negation, is worthy of serious attention.” From this perspective, religion is not humanity’s greatest accomplishment, but its most profound sin because it encourages individuals to forget the qualitative distinction between man and God, and thus encourages them to believe they can contribute to their own salvation. The infinite gap separating the human and the divine can be crossed only by God. Repeating Kierkegaard’s opposition between inwardness and outwardness, or sacred and profane history, Barth proceeds to argue, “In Jesus, God becomes veritably a secret: He is made known as the Unknown, speaking in eternal silence.”17 Because God is known as Unknown, faith cannot be a matter of knowledge but must be a free decision, which involves a radical risk. Barth was not the only influential German theologian to be drawn to Kierkegaardian existentialism. Rudolf Bultmann, who was Lutheran professor of theology and New Testament at the University of Marburg, developed a hermeneutical method known as “demythologization,” which he used to translate New Testament ideas into the language of existentialism. In the philosophy of existentialism Bultmann saw the human questions to which the New Testament provided the answers. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, theology was dominated by Barth and Bultmann. Then, in the early 1960s, the American theologian Thomas J. J. Altizer attacked neo-orthodoxy by declaring the death of God. In works like The Gospel of Christian Atheism, The Self-Embodiment of God and Total Presence: The Language of Jesus and the Language of Today, Altizer borrows Hegel’s dialectic of immanence to argue that through a kenotic process the transcendent God empties himself into time and history and becomes “totally present” in the present. Theology during the last century repeats the debate between Hegel and Kierkegaard. While Barth and Bultmann return to Kierkegaard and existentialism to criticize Hegelian Kulturprotestantismus, Altizer returns to Hegel

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by way of Nietzsche to criticize all forms of otherworldliness. What tends to go unnoticed is that this debate does not end here. As we will see in later chapters, Derrida develops a sustained critique of what he regards as the hegemonic and totalizing tendencies of the Hegelian system by retro-reading Kierkegaard through Heidegger. While Derrida’s dependence on Heidegger’s notion of Abbau (dismantling) for his understanding of deconstruction is widely acknowledged, less often noted is the way in which Heidegger’s account of Abbau grows out of the interpretation of primal Christianity, Paul, Luther, and Kierkegaard to which Bultmann introduced him in his Marburg seminars.18 In 1923, Heidegger was appointed professor of philosophy at the University of Marburg, where his most influential colleague was the theologian and New Testament scholar Bultmann. The following year, Heidegger told his students, “Fichte, Schelling and Hegel were [Lutheran] theologians, and Kant is to be understood theologically, so long as one is not inclined to turn him into the rattling skeleton of a so-called epistemologist.” Bultmann reported that Heidegger was never shy about acknowledging his debt to Luther. This claim is supported by Heidegger’s confession to his student Karl Löwith a few years earlier. “I am,” he admitted, “a ‘Christian theologian.” Bultmann and Heidegger’s relationship was mutually influential; indeed, Bultmann’s mature biblical hermeneutic was decisively shaped by his appropriation of Heidegger’s early work. He was therefore in a good position to support his assertion that this work was “no more than a secularized, philosophical version of the New Testament view of human life” (YH, 152).19 Martin Heidegger did not begin as a Protestant. He was born on September 26, 1889, in the southwestern German town of Messkirch. His father was a sexton, and Martin was raised a traditional Catholic. Since his family was too poor to send him the university, he started his education at a Jesuit seminary but soon was forced to withdraw for health reasons. Heidegger secured funds to study theology at the University of Freiburg from the church on the condition that he support church doctrine. He eventually broke with the church and switched to the philosophical faculty.20 However, his interest in theology continued, and in 1915 he completed his Habilitationsschrift on the work of the medieval theologian Duns Scotus— “Duns Scotus’s Doctrine of Categories and Meaning.” Like Ockham, Scotus (1265/66– 1308) was a Franciscan and studied at Oxford. Heidegger focused his dissertation on a work entitled De modis significandi sive Grammatica speculative, which a few years after he completed his work was discovered to have been written by Thomas of Erfurt rather than Scotus.21 Though Heidegger dismissed the importance of this study in later years, when subjected to retro-reading, almost

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all the themes in his early and later work can be seen in nascent form in his dissertation. Furthermore, his analysis of speculative grammar in the Doctrine of Categories anticipates the so-called Kehre in his philosophy, and reveals the inextricable interconnection between “early” and “late” Heidegger. Scotus (again, like Ockham) was embroiled in the debate between realists, for whom universal forms can exist independent of material embodiment, and nominalists, for whom only singular individuals are real and universals are nothing more than heuristic devices for organizing unruly particulars. Scotus developed a position between these two extremes known as moderate realism. According to this point of view, universals are real and exist outside of the mind, but cannot subsist apart from their material embodiment. To understand the significance of these debates for later philosophy, it is helpful to note that the relation between universals and singulars can also be expressed in terms of eternity and time. While realists regard universals as timeless essences and singulars as temporally transient, nominalists view universals as historically contingent structures designed to manage temporal flux. In his informative study The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy, S. J. McGrath explains the significance of Scotus’s and Erfurt’s modern realism: Against nominalism, Erfurt affirms a metaphysical foundation to language, which could be disengaged through grammatical analysis. He transforms metaphysics into ordinary-language philosophy on the assumption that grammatical forms, the modi significandi of common verbs, nouns, and adjectives, indicate deep, unobjectifiable, but no less intelligible ontological structures embedded in historical life. Roger Bacon [1219/20– 1292] inspired the speculative grammar movement with his observation that all languages are built upon a common grammar, a shared foundation of ontically anchored linguistic structures: “Grammar is substantially the same in all languages, even though it may undergo in them accidental variations.”22

When Scotus’s moderate realism is understood in this way, it is an essentialism that anticipates Hegel’s science of logic, Husserl’s phenomenology, Saussure’s la langue, structuralists’ universal grammar, and Derrida’s logocentrism. McGrath points out that Heidegger himself realized that “Husserl was inadvertently reviving Scotist metaphysics.”23 This is one of the primary reasons he found Scotus’s theology so important. While Scotus maintains that essences are timeless, they are always temporally instantiated, and in this way provide the locus of continuity for changing particularities. He calls this singularized structure “haecceity,” which is a concrete universal that exists extramentally and is fully present in the here

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and now. “The singular thing,” Scotus argues, “is intelligible in itself, as far as the thing itself is concerned; but if it is not intelligible to some intellect, to ours, for example, this is not due to unintelligibility on the part of the singular thing.”24 Haecceity can be directly intuited prior to the cognitive activity through which forms are abstracted from matter and essences are generalized from appearances. Unlike more radical realists, Scotus admits that the singular is never fully comprehensible because abstraction inevitably leaves an excess or remainder. This limitation of speculative grammar and moderate realism points in the direction of Ockham’s nominalism for which abstract language and general concepts can never comprehend singular entities. While speculative grammar and modern realism anticipate Hegelian idealism and logocentric structuralism, this singular remainder anticipates Kierkegaard’s Enkelt and philosophical fragments and crumbs (Smuler) as well as Derrida’s singularity (Singulierement) and surplus. The bridge between these medieval theological debates and modern critiques of speculative metaphysics is Heidegger’s destruction (Destruktion) of medieval scholasticism and dismantling (Abbau) of Hellenized Christianity. As we have seen, Aquinas forged his theological synthesis by bringing together Christian beliefs with recently discovered Aristotelian philosophy; the guiding principle of his system is reason. Since God’s will always follows God’s reason, the Logos is the foundation of the truth of all things and beings in the world. While Scotus rejects Aquinas’s argument for the analogical relationship between God and the world and insists on the univocity of being, he accepts the claim that the divine will expresses the divine intellect. In his reading of Scotus on this crucial issue, Heidegger makes a subtle but radical revision— he elides the role of the divine intellect while affirming that being is always given. As McGrath explains, “Everything that can be an object, either mental or physical, is transcendentally true. By interpreting verum transcendentale as the givenness of the given, the objectivity of the object, the self-showing of being, rather than as Scotus (and every other Scholastic) understood it, the createdness of the creature, Heidegger reorients the whole of Scotus’s metaphysics away from infinite being toward finite being.”25 With the shift “away from infinite being toward finite being,” the “divine referent,” or transcendental signified, disappears; metaphorically expressed, God dies. What remains is something like creation without a creator. In place of the willful action of a personal God, there is the originary givenness of an anonymous es (it). In the absence of transcendent guidance or transcendental constitution, finitude becomes radically contingent. With no comprehensible plan or program, the future is unknowable, the present is uncertain, and the past could always have been otherwise. Heidegger’s

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so-called “early” and “late” philosophies are joined by his consistent claim that neither self nor world is autonomous, because being is always already given by an Other who can be neither known nor properly named. Far from the product of the Creator’s personal will, self and world are experienced as given by an uncanny anonymous something (etwas) of which nothing can be said except “es gibt.” In his mature notion of Ereignis, John van Buren explains, Heidegger was “critically deepening the historical heterology of being that he had developed in his qualifying dissertation and in his 1915– 16 essay on history. It was then that he had first equated the ‘primal category’ and ‘primal element’ of being (ens) with ‘the something in any sense,’ ‘what is experienceable in any sense,’ and ‘givenness.’ The upshot of . . . Heidegger’s heterology was the following: The indifference of the something (being) is marked by a transcendental inclination into heterothesis (alterity, difference) and haecceity (historical such-here-now-ness, individual-being). The givenness or ‘there is/it is given’ (es gibt) of real being means that it is given as an Other that is historically such-here-now, at this particular time ( jeweilig)” (YH, 273). In other words, the presence of every here-and-now presupposes the presencing of a something that is never present as such, but is not absent. Like the Deus absconditus, this es remains shrouded in mystery. Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, the arcane medieval debates have significant implications for the modern world. While the extension of medieval speculative grammar in modern speculative philosophy and the postmodern society of spectacle represents history as moving from heteronomy to autonomy, Heidegger’s deconstruction of the Western theological tradition exposes a radical heteronomy that might be temporally repressed but can never be completely eliminated. The development of this alternative trajectory begins with Heidegger’s interpretation of Paul and Luther, which was made possible by Kierkegaard’s account of time and temporality. As we will see in subsequent chapters, Heidegger uses different terms to indicate the givenness of being: facticity (Faktizität), thrownness (Geworfenheit), and gift. In ways that will become increasingly clear, these notions represent contrasting expressions of Luther and Kierkegaard’s interpretation of the abiding grace without which life is impossible. Heidegger started reading Kierkegaard when translations of his works began appearing in German. His study of Luther began in 1918, the year Barth published his Kierkegaardian interpretation of Paul’s letter to the Romans. Heidegger’s interest in Luther deepened when he participated in Bultmann’s seminar on Paul’s ethics in 1923/24. In the last two sessions of the seminar, he delivered a two-part lecture on “The Problem of Sin in Luther.” This lecture was never published, but survived in a student transcript, which

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has been translated and published. What most intrigued Heidegger about Luther’s understanding of sin was the critical alternative it posed to Greek metaphysics. Just as Kierkegaard draws a sharp contrast between modern speculative philosophy and its expression in Christendom, so Heidegger argues that the appropriation of Platonism in patristic theology and Aristotelianism in medieval scholasticism corrupted “primal Christianity.” Several years before his lecture, Heidegger had written, “The ancient Christian achievement was distorted and buried through the infiltration of classical science into Christianity. From time to time it reasserted itself in violent irruptions (as in Augustine, in Luther, in Kierkegaard). Only from here is medieval mysticism to be understood. . . . [After Augustine] the struggle between Aristotle and the new ‘feeling for life’ continued in medieval mysticism and eventually in Luther” (YH, 146). In his lecture in Bultmann’s seminar, Heidegger focuses on Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation (1518). Though the subject of Luther’s debate was supposed to be the issue of the sale of indulgences, his primary concern was the broader corruption of the church, which he argued was reflected in orthodox scholastic theology. Commenting on Luther’s thesis 37, Heidegger claims, “All of human action is presumptuous and sinful. These statements separate Luther from Aristotle and all of Greek ontology such that in Thesis 50 Luther can say: . . . [All of Aristotle is to theology as darkness is to light].’” Committed to the Franciscan vow of poverty, Luther saw the opulence of the medieval Catholic church as a sign of the human presumption that he characterizes as sin. In the central passage of his lecture, Heidegger distinguishes the Catholic “theology of glory” from the Lutheran “theology of the cross”: Luther here quite clearly characterizes theology’s task by contrasting two theological perspectives. The first of these is theologia gloriae . . . [the theology of glory which sees the invisible things of God in works as perceived by man and calls evil good and good evil]. In opposition to this stands the theologia crucis . . . which starts from the actual state of affairs . . . tells us how things really are. The Scholastic acknowledges Christ only after he has defined the being of God and the world. The Greek way of thinking adopted by the Scholastic magnifies human pride. But he must first go to the cross before he can say . . . how things really are. (translation modified)26

Different versions of the distinction remain important in all of Heidegger’s later philosophy. The theology of glory reflects the sin of human pride expressed in man’s will to be God. To support this point, Heidegger cites Luther’s 1517 Disputation

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against Scholastic Theology: “It is much more the case that man wants to be God. But this is precisely the essence of sin.”27 Van Buren helpfully elaborates some of the implications of Luther’s distinction: “This theologia gloriae suffers from presumption (praesumptio) and superbia, the pride that willfully and hyperbolically oversteps its limits, elevates itself into the Beyond (super) of its speculative visions, and thereby seeks to satisfy its desire for dominion (dominium), power (potestas), empire (imperium)” (YH, 161). When understood in this way, Luther’s interpretation of the theology of glory anticipates the will to power of Nietzsche’s Übermensch and the will to mastery that Heidegger argues leads to the destructive tendencies of modern technology. Even at this early stage in his philosophical journey, Heidegger realizes that Luther’s theologia gloriae represents something like what he and Derrida following him would eventually label “the metaphysics of presence.” His argument turns on the crucial difference between Luther and Aristotle’s notions of time. Van Buren explains, “Heidegger claimed that ‘Luther did understand [the] basic experience of temporality [in Paul] and for that reason opposed Aristotelian philosophy so polemically.’ . . . In the young Luther, one finds an amazing critique of ontologia and theologia gloriae as a metaphysics of presence. ‘A theologian of glory . . . does not know along with the Apostle the hidden and crucified God,’ but along with ‘the pagans’ speaks of ‘how his invisible nature can be known from things visible and how he is present [presentem] and powerful in all things everywhere.’ Gloria means for Luther the Greek experience of the being of beings and the divine as radiant, exalted presence” (YH, 196). This “radiant presence” is purportedly fully present in the here and now of space and time. The theologia crucis not only subverts the corrupt will to power and mastery of speculative philosophy, but also implies a revolutionary understanding of temporality. In a remarkable 1921 text, which van Buren notes Heidegger referred to as “a Kehre to a new post-metaphysical ‘genuine beginning,’” Heidegger writes, The creation waits anxiously. The Apostle philosophizes . . . in a different way than the philosophers and the metaphysicians do. . . . The philosophers so direct their eyes to the present state of things [in presentiam rerum] that they speculate only about essences and qualities of things. . . . The Apostle recalls our eyes away from the intuition and contemplation of the present, away from the essences and accidents of things, and directs us to the future. . . . In a new and amazing theological vocabulary he speaks of the “expectation of creation.” . . . Therefore, you will be the best philosophers and the best speculators of things if you will learn from the Apostle to consider the creation as

Ghosts Haunting Modernism-Postmodernism / 91 it waits, groans, and travails, that is, as it turns away in disgust from that which is and desires that which is not yet and in the future. (YH, 198)

To overcome this metaphysics of presence, it is necessary to go back to (retrocedere) the primitive Christianity that Hellenization repressed. In contrast to the theologia gloriae, which inflates human wisdom, the theologia crucis acknowledges the weakness of finite human beings, who are always “absolutely dependent” on a God who is radically transcendent. In thesis 20 of the “Heidelberg Disputation,” Luther writes, Because men misused the knowledge of God through works, God wished again to be recognized in suffering, and to condemn “wisdom concerning invisible things” by means of “wisdom concerning visible things,” so that those who did not honor God as manifested in his works should honor him as he is hidden in his suffering (absconditum in passionibus). As the Apostle says in [First Corinthians] 1:21, “For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.” Now it is not sufficient for anyone, and it does him no good to recognize God in his glory and majesty, unless he recognizes him in the humility and shame of the cross. Thus God destroys the wisdom of the wise, as [Isaiah] 45:15 says, “Truly, thou art a God who hidest thyself.”28

In this context, it is critically important to note Luther’s use of the term destroy. Destruere, van Buren notes, can be rendered not only “destroy,” but also “dismantle, or even “deconstruct.” The task of the theologia crucis is to destroy, dismantle, or deconstruct the theologia gloriae. Heidegger translates Luther’s theses 19 and 20 thus: it does the speculative theologian “no good to know God in his glory and majesty unless he recognizes him in the humility and shame of the cross. Thus God ‘destroys [perdit] the wisdom of the wise.’ . . . So also, in John 14:8, where Philip spoke according to the theology of glory: ‘Show us the Father.’ Christ immediately dragged back [retraxit] his flighty thought and led him back [reduxit] to himself. . . . Through the cross works are destroyed [destruuntur]” (YH, 162). Retrocedere . . . retraxit . . . reduxit . . . destruuntur. Paul, Luther, and Heidegger are all engaged in a retro-reading of the theology of glory rather than the theology of the cross, whose aim is the destruction, dismantling, or deconstruction of the Greek metaphysics of presence. Luther’s interpretation of Paul’s dismantling of Greek metaphysics provides the prototype for Heidegger’s “destruction” of ontotheology and, by extension, Derrida’s deconstruction of the modern metaphysics of presence, which comes to full expression

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Figure 8. Theological Genealogy of Deconstruction.

in Hegel’s speculative philosophy (see fig. 8). As I argued in chapter 1, retroreading involves an understanding of time that is neither linear (a series of present now-points) nor cyclical (the present and future implicit in the past), but is chiasmic (future breaking into the present to transform the past). At the time Heidegger was exploring the biblical and theological texts that became the foundation of both his early and late work, Barth and Bultmann, as well as the long-forgotten Lutheran theologians Ernst Fuchs (who also taught at Marburg) and Gerhard Ebeling (who was a student of Bultmann), were developing theologies based on the distinction between chronological and kairological time. Kairos is the Greek word meaning “the right or opportune moment.” While the word chronos designates a series or sequence of separate present nows, which are homogeneous, quantifiable, and calculable, the word kairos is qualitative and privileges the future. In the New Testament, kairos has eschatological or even apocalyptic connotations— it means “the appointed time in the purpose of God, the time when God acts.” In Mark 1:15, for example, the kairos is explicitly associated with the kingdom of God: “The time has come; the kingdom of God is upon you; repent, believe the Gospel.”29 Since the impending future is neither controllable nor programmable by human beings, it is the source of fear and trembling as well as hope and promise. Heidegger credits Kierkegaard’s interpretation of the Øjeblik (Augenblick, “instant”) with being first modern philosophical to appreciate of the implications of Paul’s understanding of kairological time. As early as 1929/30 Heidegger wrote, “What we mean here with the term ‘moment’ [Augenblick] is that which Kierkegaard conceptualized in philosophy for the first time— a conceptualizing with which, after antiquity, the possibility of a completely new epoch of philosophy begins” (YH, 192). This is a remarkable statement whose implications deserve serious consideration. Kierkegaard’s writings, Heidegger claims, open a new epoch of philosophy by recasting the interrelated questions of time and self. This interpretation of temporality presupposes an acceptance of God’s radical altarity, which is consistent with

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Luther’s “God who hidest” himself. The God who hides himself, or, more precisely, reveals himself by hiding is the Deus absconditus. As I have noted, at the time Heidegger was discovering Kierkegaard and Luther, the reassertion of divine transcendence was once again growing. In addition to Barth’s Epistle to the Romans (1918), Heidegger also read Rudolf Otto’s Idea of the Holy (1917), where God is defined as ganz Andere(Wholly Other). Never fully revealed in the present, the Deus absconditus approaches from a future that is always yet to come— Zukunft, zu-kommen; avenir, à-venir. The God of Paul’s letters is not the God of presence and the present, but the God of the future, which is never present but is forever deferred. In contrast to the Greek philosophy where Parousia means constant presence, in the New Testament the Parousia refers to the future kingdom of God. As Paul writes in his first letter, “For you know quite well that the day of the Lord’s return will come unexpectedly, like a thief in the night” (1 Thessalonians 5:2). Read retrospectively, Luther becomes the first death-of-God theologian and Heidegger a latter-day a/theologian. Van Buren explains, “Whereas the theologia gloriae of Greek and Scholastic metaphysics turns ‘everything upside-down’ by seeing concrete historicity to be derivative of the ontotheological ground that it constructs speculatively, the destruction performed in Luther’s theologia crucis sees such constructions to be derived from a falling away from the historicity of ‘the cross.’ ‘God can be found only in suffering and the cross.’ Long before Nietzsche, Luther had already killed the ontotheological God of western metaphysics” (YH, 163). For Luther, the death of God is not (as it is for Hegel, Nietzsche, and Altizer) a kenotic process through which transcendence empties itself and becomes totally present in the present; to the contrary, the death of God is the passion of crucifixion through which the Deus absconditus is revealed in concealment. The mark of this passion is suffering, which involves a passivity that is, in Emmanuel Levinas’s words, “more passive than the passivity that is the opposite of activity.” In the theologia crucis of Paul, Luther, and Kierkegaard, the real is never present here and now, nor is it absent. Always approaching without ever arriving, this unnameable other is infinitely deferred, and endlessly deflects every effort to grasp or control it. In 1978, Derrida published a short text entitled Éperons: Les styles de Nietzsche (Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles), which is inter alia a meditation on the interplay between revelation and concealment in sexual difference. He organizes his text around a fragment or crumb “snipped” from an 1872 letter by Nietzsche, “I have forgotten my umbrella.” “The English spur,” Derrida writes, “the éperon, is the ‘same word’ as the German Spur: or, in other words, trace, wake, indication, mark. The style-spur, the spurring style, is a long object, an

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oblong object, a word, which perforates even as it parries. It is the oblongi— foliated point (a spur or a spar) which derives its apotropaic power from the taut, resistant tissues, webs, sails and veils which are erected, furled and unfurled around it. But, it must not be forgotten, it is also an umbrella.”30 What Derrida conceals and does not reveal— perhaps through an act of misprision that represses but cannot obliterate the past— is that Heidegger had used this same example in 1925. Van Buren discloses Derrida’s deception: In [Summer Semester] 1925, Heidegger gave a fitting example: “The umbrella is forgotten by someone. . . . The empty place [at the dining table at home] appresents co-Dasein to me in terms of the absence of Others.” . . . Given the inexhaustible futurity of things, their referral is a constant deferral into a “tomorrow and tomorrow.” No matter how closely and firmly we try to hold onto things and our own lives, they are always haunted by these kinds of ghostly absences. Like Derrida’s notion of the differing/deferring of archewriting, which was heavily influenced by Heidegger’s notion of temporalizing, the primal spacing of temporal stretching-along is made up of ecstatic horizons of traces/tracks (Spuren) that carry us away into absence. Life is the movement of being ever on-the-way in these horizons, without ever fully arriving or ever really knowing for sure where we are going. In the “wakefulness” and “waiting” for a coming that never fully comes, an openness for an opening that never fully opens up, a “being anxious for one’s ‘daily bread’” that always “goes hungry” and is left waiting at the table of factical life. As Heidegger put this point in SZ [Being and Time], when we live genuinely in the nonpresent horizons of temporalizing, then this brings about “a depresenting [Entgegenwärtigung] of the today,” a weaning and exiling (Entwöhnung) from the pretense of being at home in a realm of fixed presence. And here “the enigma [Rätsel] of being and . . . of motion haunts everything.” (YH, 300)

Ghosts, ever-returning ghosts. Revenants, revenir, re-venir. Ghosts, uncanny ghosts haunting modernism. Retro-reading becomes retro-being. The returning of, the returning to a past from a future that can never be anticipated transforms everyone and everything leaving them something other than what they once seemed to have been. The spectral someone looks at us, we feel ourselves being looked at by it, outside of any synchrony, even before and beyond any look on our part, according to an absolute anteriority (which may be of the order of generation, of more than one generation) and asymmetry, according to an absolutely unmasterable disproportion.31

FIVE

Recollecting the Future

The real dwelling plight lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell. What if man’s homelessness consisted in this, that man still does not even think of the real plight of dwelling as the plight? —Martin Heidegger

Logos and Trinity Set your troubled hearts at rest. Trust in God always; trust also in me. There are many dwelling-places in my Father’s house; if it were not so I should have told you; for I am going there on purpose to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I shall come again and receive you myself, so that where I am you may be also; and my way there is known to you. —John 14:1– 4

For Hegel, the truth is the way, and he is the chosen one in whom God first becomes fully self-conscious in and through the self-consciousness of an individual human being. Hegel’s philosophical system is an expression of his divine mission. While Napoleon is the embodiment of absolute Spirit on horseback, Hegel is one who recognizes him as such, and thereby brings history to an end by ushering in the kingdom of God to earth. No longer bound by the shackles of time, those who follow Hegel discover that finite secular life is a moment in the infinite life of holy Geist. Though his interpretation of Lutheran Christianity differs significantly from Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s, Hegel’s philosophical project, like theirs, is an expression of what he regards as his religious vocation. According to Hegel, philosophy translates artistic images and religious representations

96 / Chapter Five Table 2. Greek, Jew, Christian Greek

Jew/Catholic

Christian/Lutheran

Unity Undifferentiation Identity Immanence

Division Differentiation Difference Transcendence Outward/External Objective Mechanism Positivity/Negation Slavery Heteronomy

Reunion Integration Identity-in-Difference Immanence Inward/Internal Subjective Organism Negativity/Negation of Negation Freedom Autonomy

(Vorstellungen) into rational concepts (Begriffe). Art, religion, and philosophy express the same truth in different media. Hegel’s understanding of philosophy remained remarkably consistent both formally and substantively throughout his life. In two essays written during his formative years in Frankfurt— “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate” (1798– 99) and “The Positivity of the Christian Religion” (1795)— he presents what is in effect an outline of his mature system. What makes these essays, which were discovered and published in 1907, particularly interesting in this context is that he defines his position by contrasting it with an interpretation of the Abraham-Isaac story that fully anticipates Kierkegaard’s argument in Fear and Trembling (1843).The comparison between these two readings of the Abraham-Isaac story is not only important for understanding the philosophical and theological differences between Hegel and Kierkegaard, but is also crucial for understanding Derrida’s effort to negotiate the difference separating and uniting them. In these essays, Hegel defines the foundational logic of his system and its development as they are anticipated in the religious images, symbols, myths, and stories of the Greeks, the Jews, and the Christians (see table 2). These three forms of life represent different existential alternatives, which constitute three distinct stages in humankind’s progressive development. The movement from Greek folk religion through Judaism to Christianity prefigures the trajectory of personal and social history as a whole. It is important to note that Hegel categorizes Catholicism and Kantianism with Judaism and regards Luther’s interpretation of Christianity as normative. The positivity of religious beliefs and practices is characterized by the unmediated opposition between objectivity and subjectivity, and exteriority and interiority. Objective religion consists of the outward aspects of

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religious life, which can be codified in discursive doctrines, historical traditions, and formal ceremonies. While this dimension of religion is important for living faith, what interests Hegel is the tendency of such objectivity to become divorced from and opposed to the subjective lives of believers. Objective creeds and practices can linger long after the spirit that inspired them has fled. When this occurs, such objective religious forms can be maintained only through coercion exercised by powerful authorities, who enforce “superstitious adherence to purely external formalities.” Hegel, anticipating Marx, labels such formal belief “fetishism.” “Subjective religion,” by contrast, “is alive, it is effective in the inwardness of our being, and active in our outward behavior. Subjective religion is fully individuated, [while] objective religion is abstraction.”1 So understood, positive faith is thoroughly authoritarian; rather than arising spontaneously from lived experience, it is encountered as foreign to subjective purpose and is imposed upon personal inclinations and dispositions. In other words, instead of being generated by the ongoing life of a vital community, positivistic moral values and spiritual truths are revealed by an alien Other. Before this unknown transcendent Lord, one is to “renounce one’s will in one’s conduct; to subject one’s self throughout like a machine to given rules; to abandon intellect altogether in action or renunciation, in speech or silence” (ETW, 169– 70). To explain the distinctive characteristics of positive religion, Hegel poses it as the midpoint between a primordial and an eschatological reunion by constructing a narrative that is his philosophical rendering of the biblical myth of the flood and the story of Abraham. The flood represents humankind’s estrangement from its natural milieu, and is the beginning of a long and painful exile. Prior to this estrangement, Hegel posits a state of harmonious unification in which people are at home in the world. With the unleashing of the floodwaters, “formerly friendly or tranquil, nature now abandoned the equipoise of her elements, now requited the faith the human race had in her with the most destructive, invincible, irresistible hostility” (ETW, 182). Hegel describes three alternative reactions to the breach between self and world. First, the characteristic Greek response is captured by the beautiful pair Deucalion and Pyrrha, who “after the flood in their time, invited men once again to friendship with the world, to nature, made them forget their need and their hostility in joy and pleasure, made a peace of love, were the progenitors of more beautiful peoples” (ETW, 184– 85). Second, in contrast to the Greek effort to restore harmony, the Jewish reaction to the flood was to maintain hostility toward the surrounding world by attempting to establish mastery over natural forces. Abraham expressed the heart of the Jewish faith through his “spirit of self-maintenance in strict opposition

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to everything” (ETW, 186). The price of this control of nature was a more profound servitude to the radically transcendent Creator, who is the Master of the universe. Hegel explains, “The whole world Abraham regarded as simply his opposite; if he did not take it to be a nullity, he looked on it as sustained by the God who was alien to it. Nothing in nature was supposed to have any part in God; everything was simply under God’s mastery” (ETW, 187). As a member of the created order, Abraham stood opposed to the wholly other God upon whom he was totally dependent. The positive relation to the divine for which Abraham yearned could be established only by heteronomous obedience expressed in a thoroughly negative relation to the world. Uprooted from his homeland and called upon to sacrifice his son who was the future of the Jewish people, Abraham became “a stranger on earth, a stranger to the soil and to men alike. Among men he always was and remained a foreigner. . . . Love alone was beyond his power; even the one love he had, his love for his son, even his hope of posterity . . . could depress him, trouble his all-exclusive heart and disquiet it to such an extent that even this love he once wished to destroy” (ETW, 186– 87). Within Hegel’s overall dialectic, the oppositional dualism of Judaism is the negation of the primitive unity of the Greek world. As the negation of the negation of Judaism, Christianity is the third and final stage in Hegel’s dialectic. This complex structure of double negation is represented in the doctrine of the Trinity, which discloses the logical structure of nature and history. While Judaism is a religion of law, Christianity is a religion of love. “This spirit of Jesus,” Hegel argues, “a spirit raised above morality, is visible, directly attacking laws, in the Sermon on the Mount, which is an attempt . . . to strip the laws of legality, of their legal form. The Sermon does not teach reverence for the laws; on the contrary, it exhibits that which fulfils the law but annuls it as law and so is something higher than obedience to law and makes law superfluous” (ETW, 212). While the religion of the law is one in which an “alien being” imposes demands on his recalcitrant servants, love “excludes all oppositions” and in this way “deprives man’s opposite of all foreign character. . . . In love the separate does still remain, but as something united and no longer as something separate; life [in the subject] senses life [in the object]” (ETW, 304– 5). It is important to note that the goal of Hegel’s depiction of the religion of law is not historical accuracy as much as the description of an ideal type, which includes other religions and philosophical systems. For example, medieval Catholicism, Hegel believes, was a religion of law that was overturned by Luther’s interpretation of divine grace. Formal rituals, blind obedience, and “mechanical virtue” of Catholicism were “external observances [that] have been

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discarded by the Lutheran church” (ETW, 141). Given Kant’s interpretation of freedom in terms of autonomy, Hegel’s categorization of Kantian morality as a religion of law might seem surprising. He argues, however, that rather than the realization of freedom, Kant’s understanding of autonomy as selflegislation exacerbates inward division. Whereas believers in the transcendent Master “have their lord outside themselves,” Kant “carries his lord in himself, yet at the same time is his own slave. For the particular— impulses, inclinations, pathological love, sensuous experience, or whatever else it is called—the universal is necessarily and always something alien and objective” (ETW, 211). In contrast to Abraham’s opposition to God, and by extension to the surrounding world as well as other people, Jesus preaches that God, self, and world form a living whole. Gone is the transcendent Lord and in his place is the Holy Spirit, which enters space and time, or nature and history. In one of the most important claims in his early work, Hegel writes, “The relation of spirit to spirit is a feeling of harmony, is their unification; how could heterogeneity be unified? Faith in the divine is only possible if in the believer himself there is a divine element which rediscovers itself, its own nature, in that on which it believes. . . . Hence faith in the divine grows out of the divinity of the believer’s own nature; only a modification of the Godhead can know the Godhead” (ETW, 266; emphasis added). So understood, the God-self relation is thoroughly self-reflexive. God and self, divinity and humanity, infinite and finite are codependent, and thus each becomes itself in and through the other, and neither can be itself apart from the other. The “progression” from Greek folk religion, through Judaism’s religion of law, to Christian/Lutheran religion of grace and love prefigures the diachronic structure of Hegel’s dialectic, which moves from unity, through opposition, to reunion. He uses the telling example of the maturation of the child to make this important point: “Everything which gives the newly begotten child a manifold life and a specific existence, it must draw into itself, set over against itself, and unify with itself. The seed breaks free from its original unity, turns ever more and more to opposition, and begins to develop. Each stage of its development is a separation, and its aim in each is to regain for itself the full riches of life. . . . Thus the process is: unity, separated opposites, reunion. After their union the lovers separate again, but in the child their union has become unseparated” (ETW, 307– 8). This historical narrative presupposes a cyclical view of time. “The culmination of faith,” Hegel concludes, “the return to the Godhead whence man is born, closes the circle of man’s development” (ETW, 273). The beginning and end of this process is beauty. Anticipating John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Hegel maintains, “Truth is beauty intellectually

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represented” (ETW, 196). For Hegel, as for Keats, the Greeks were a beautiful people, but this beauty was shattered by the imposition of the law by the transcendent Lord of history. The religion of Jesus restores the lost beauty of Greece in a new religion of love that overcomes every religion of law by reconciling inclination and obligation. The lover does not fulfill the law because the beloved issues a commandment, but does so because he or she wants to do so. When it is an expression of love, “religious practice is the most holy, the most beautiful, of all things; it is our endeavor to unify the discords necessitated by our development and our attempt to exhibit the unification in the ideal as fully existent, as no longer opposed to reality, and thus to express and confirm it in a deed” (ETW, 206). While Kant’s theoretical and practical philosophy reinforce the opposition Hegel tries to overcome, his account of aesthetic judgment in the Third Critique provides the prototype for Hegel’s interpretation of beauty, which prefigures the structure of his mature system. In the First Critique (1781) Kant opposes universal categories of cognition to the sensible manifold of intuition, and in the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), he sets the universal moral law over against particular sensuous inclinations. In the Critique of Judgment (1790), he attempts to reconcile these opposites by integrating particulars and universals, and parts and wholes. Kant describes the development of his thought in the three critiques as a shift from a mechanistic to an organic metaphor for interpreting the interrelation of God, self, and world. He uses the well-worn Deistic figure of the watch to describe the world of early industrial society: “In a watch one part is the instrument by which the movement of the others is effected, but one wheel is not the efficient cause of the production of the other. One part is certainly present for the sake of the other, but it does not owe its presence to the agency of that other. For this reason, also, the producing cause of the watch and its form is not contained in the nature of this material, but lies outside the watch in a being that can act according to the idea of the whole which makes its causality possible.” In the Deistic universe, parts are external to one another and order is externally imposed by a transcendent governor, who creates the universe, establishes the laws by which it operates, and withdraws to let the world run on its own. In the beautiful object, by contrast, parts and whole are organically interrelated in such a way that nothing can exist by itself. The whole is a self-reflexive totality, which can be discerned first in the natural world and then in the beautiful work of art. Kant describes this structure in a way that anticipates the structure of Hegel’s system: “The parts of the thing combine of themselves into the unity of a whole by being reciprocally cause and effect of their form. For this is the only way in which it is possible that

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the idea of the whole may conversely, or reciprocally, determine in its turn the form and combination of all the parts— for that would make it an art product— but as the epistemological basis upon which the systematic unity of the form and combination of all the manifold contained in the given matter become cognizable for the person estimating it” (emphasis added).2 The unity of the organism and beautiful work of art can be systematic because the whole is a closed structure that is, in Kant’s words, “self-organizing being or essence [sich selbst organisierendes Wesen].” Instead of externally imposed, order is internal and emerges from within. Since order is intrinsic and not extrinsic, means and ends are internally rather than externally related. The parts or members of this organic structure have no end other than the whole they produce, which in turn produces them. Kant describes this as an “inner teleological [innere Zweckmassigkeit]” structure. Inasmuch as means and end are reciprocally related, this structure forms a system which is, in Derrida’s apt phrase, “archaeo-teleological.” Contemporary theorists of complex systems describe the structure Kant identifies and Hegel elaborates as “autopoietic” or “autotelic.” Though Kant had no ear for poetry, he did understand the scientific relevance of his philosophy. He uses a metaphor drawn from architectural construction to suggest the implications of his selforganizing wholes: “Every science [Wissenschaft] is a system in its own right; and it is not sufficient that in it we construct according to principles, and so proceed technically, but we must also set to work architectonically with it as a separate independent building. We must treat it as a self-subsisting whole, and not as a wing or section of another building” (emphasis added).3 Hegel acknowledges Kant’s notion of inner teleology as a major advance in the history of philosophy. In the section of his Science of Logic entitled “Teleology,” he writes, “One of Kant’s greatest services to philosophy consists in the distinction he has made between relative or external, and internal purposiveness; in the latter he has opened up the Notion of life, the Idea, and by so doing has done positively for philosophy what the Critique of Reason did but imperfectly, equivocally, and only negatively, namely, raise it above the determinations of reflection and the relative world of metaphysics. It has been remarked that the opposition between the teleology and mechanism is in the first instance the more general opposition of freedom and necessity” (SL, 737). The problem with Kant’s analysis of the inner teleological structure of nature and art is that he insists that this structure is nothing more than a heuristic device or regulative idea, and is not constitutive of reality as such. In his system, Hegel translates ideality into reality. This embodiment of the ideal in the real is prefigured in the incarnation of the eternal Logos into the historical Jesus.

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Hegel develops a kenotic Christology in which the transcendent God empties himself and becomes totally present in nature and history. The recognition of the unity of time and eternity first dawns in the self-consciousness of Jesus. In God’s demand that Abraham sacrifice Isaac, the opposition between the divine and the human reaches the breaking point, and prepares the way for its reversal in the reconciliation of opposites embodied in the person of Jesus. In Christ, Hegel argues, “man appears as God, and God appears as man.” The incarnation involves the humanization of the divine and the divinization of the human, or the finitizing of the infinite and the infinitizing of the finite. The universal God becomes present in the particular self-conscious individual. In the historical person of Jesus, “the identity of divine and human nature attains the stage of certainty” by appearing in “the form of immediate sense intuition and external existence [äusserliches Dasein]” (translation modified).4 Hegel realizes that the orthodox Christian claim that Jesus is fully God and fully man seems to undercut traditional monotheism— if Jesus is divine, how can God be one? Like the early Church Fathers, Hegel saw the doctrine of the Trinity as the solution to this problem; unlike them, he realized that to avoid the irrational paradox of the coincidence of the divine and the human, or time and eternity, in the person of Jesus, it was necessary to develop a new notion of unity, which would be a tri-unity. In the Philosophy of History, Hegel makes a remarkable claim: “God is thus recognized as Spirit, only when known as the Triune. This new principle is the pivot on which world history turns” (PH, 319). The significance of the doctrine of the Trinity extends far beyond the subtleties of fourthcentury theology. If Jesus is divine and God is one, divine unity cannot be a unity that excludes difference, but must be a differentiated unity in which apparent opposites are reciprocally related and mutually constitutive. In other words, the divine can be neither the undifferentiated Parmenidean unity nor the wholly transcendent and completely abstract One of Judaism; rather, the divine must be an internally differentiated unity. Hegel explains why the incarnation presupposes the Trinitarian notion of God: “The reconciliation believed to be in Christ has no meaning if God is not known as triune, if it is not recognized that He is but is at the same time the other, the self-differentiating, the other in the sense that this other is God himself, and has in himself the divine nature, and that the sublation [Aufhebung] of this difference, of this otherness, this return, this love, is spirit.”5 The Christian God is three-in-one and one-in-three, a unity-in-differentiation and differentiation-in-unity. Hegel uses the example of the dialectical structure of the Father, Son, and Spirit relationship in his Science of Logic: “Father is

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the other of son, and son the other of father, and each only is as this other of the other; and at the same time, the one determination only is, in relation to the other; and their being is a single subsistence” (SL, 441). So understood, this complex structure not only explicates the second person of the Trinity, but also lays bare the Logos that is the foundation of Hegel’s entire logocentric system. The unity of Father and Son in Spirit is embodied in the unity of the lover and the beloved. Love, however, remains at the level of feeling; for the truth implicit in the trinity to be fully realized, love must become self-conscious. Augustine was the first to suggest that the structure of self-consciousness mirrors the structure of the trinity. In his treatise On the Trinity (400 CE), he explains, “But as there are two things, the mind and the love of it, when it loves itself; so there are two things, the mind and the knowledge of it, when it knows itself. Therefore the mind itself, and the love of it, and the knowledge of it, are three things, and these three are one; and when they are perfect they are equal.”6 Just as the Father becomes self-conscious through his self-objectification in the Son and self-appropriation through the Spirit, so self-consciousness is realized through the process of self-objectification in what appears to be other and the reappropriation of otherness as a moment in one’s own becoming. This threefold process repeats the Christian drama of incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection (Aufhebung). The truth embodied in the particular person of Jesus must be universalized to extend first to all human beings, and then to the natural world and historical process. Through this process, oppositional differences give way to differential identity. The transcendent God dies and is reborn in the human figure of Jesus. The isolated individual, in turn, is crucified and resurrected as an integral member of a universal community, which emerges gradually in a global process. For it is this suffering and death, this sacrificial death of the individual for all, that is the nature of God, the divine history, the being that is utterly universal and affirmative. This is, however, at the same time to posit God’s negation; in death the moment of negation is envisaged. This is an essential moment in the nature of spirit, and it is this death that must come into view in this individual. It must not then be represented merely as the death of this individual, the death of this empirically existing individual. Heretics have interpreted it like that, but what it means is rather that God has died, that God himself is dead. God has died: this is negation, which is accordingly a moment of the divine nature, of God himself.7

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The incarnation is the negation of the radically transcendent God, and the crucifixion is the negation of this negation. The resurrection represents the double negation that issues in the sublation of opposites in a relation of identity-in-difference and difference-in-identity. In this way, death is not merely negative but is the condition of life itself— the negation of negation is the infinite process of life. As Derrida, following Bataille, will argue, in this economy of salvation, every expenditure is recovered, and every loss is redeemed.

Spacing and Timing In his superb but much overlooked study, Lectures on Modern Idealism, the American Hegelian Josiah Royce writes that post-Kantian idealism “derives its principal technical problem from Kant’s deduction of the categories.”8 As we have seen, for Kant, modernity involves the revolutionary realization of freedom, which occurs through the progressive movement from heteronomy to autonomy. As reason becomes theoretically and practically selflegislating, human subjects are freed from bondage to external authorities and determination by internal aberrant desires. Hegel, I have noted, insists that Kant’s interpretation of the theoretical and practical deployments of reasons remains caught between opposites he fails to reconcile. What Kant calls reason (Vernunft), Hegel regards as understanding (Verstand). Verstand, according to Hegel, is governed by the principles of noncontradiction and abstract identity formulated in traditional logic. For the understanding, everything is what it is, and is not another; the laws of identity, difference, and noncontradiction are inviolable. By contrast, “the sole interest of Reason,” Hegel argues, “is to sublate [aufzuheben] such rigid opposites” (translation modified).9 While Verstand is bound by the either/or of noncontradiction, for Vernunft everything is inherently self-contradictory; therefore, according to the dialectical principle of both/and, everything becomes itself in and through its own other. In this process the externality of oppositional identities is translated into the internality of relational differences. These misgivings should not obscure the fact that Kant’s critical philosophy frames Hegel’s entire philosophical project. His recasting of Kant’s interpretation of space and time provides the synchronic and diachronic structure of Hegel’s system. Kant presents his account of space and time in the “Transcendental Analytic,” which opens the Critique of Pure Reason. He developed his epistemology to respond to Hume’s skepticism, which grew out of his radical empiricism. Kant intends his transcendental analysis to establish the conditions of the possibility of knowledge. In a manner rem-

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iniscent of Ockham’s nominalism, Hume argues that theoretical categories and practical rules are nothing more than heuristic guidelines established by custom and habit. Kant realizes that by basing all knowledge on personal experience, Hume’s argument inevitably ends with a thoroughgoing relativism that is indistinguishable from complete subjectivism. To counter this conclusion, he argues that the mind is not a tabula rasa passively awaiting sense impressions, but is hardwired with twelve categories of the understanding (Verstand) and two forms of intuition— space and time. Since these categories and forms are universal, all minds are structured or programmed in the same way and therefore individuals are not locked in solipsistic bubbles. Knowledge involves the processing of the data of experience through shared categories and forms of intuition. In this way, Kant effectively transforms ontology, as it had developed in Western theology and philosophy, into epistemology. While Plato’s demiurge creates the world by bringing together the eternal forms and temporal matter, the Judeo-Christian God creates the world by sending his word (Logos) out over the formless waters. Kant effectively humanizes the divine by translating the Creator God into the creative subject. The knowing subject constructs the world by bringing together the timeless universal categories with the sensible manifold of temporal flux. The faculty responsible for this synthesis is the imagination, which schematizes the categories through the mediating forms of space and time. Before examining Kant’s understanding of spatiality and temporality, it is necessary to consider how Hegel both appropriates and recasts Kant’s position. Since the categories are universal (or, in a more contemporary idiom, since there are underlying universal cognitive structures) and sense experience is particular, there is a way in which one mind operates in all minds. Royce was the first to make this important point. In Kant’s analysis of transcendental cognition, Royce argues, “we conceive all momentary observations of ours as fragmentary glimpses of that one experience. The unity of the physical world is therefore conceived by us in terms of the unity of a sort of virtual self, the self of an ideal or possible human observer. . . . Whatever fact of nature I conceive as real, I thus conceive as a phenomenon for that virtual self, whose experiences I from moment to moment exemplify, whose categories I from moment to moment employ, and whose unity of possible experience is correlative with whatever unity I ascribe to the natural world.”10 When understood in this way, Kant’s interpretation of Verstand leads directly to Hegel’s notion of Geist. Before Kant’s transcendental idealism could become Hegel’s absolute idealism, two important revisions had to be made. First, the limit to knowledge had to be removed. Far from establishing the conditions of the possibility of

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knowledge, Hegel argues, Kant establishes the conditions of the impossibility of knowledge. By insisting that it is never possible to be certain whether the categories represent reality as such, Kant creates an unbridgeable gap between the knowing subject and the known world (that is to say, the “thingin-itself,” Ding an sich). In order to bridge this breach, it is necessary first to retranslate Kantian epistemology back into ontology. Hegel argues that the categories of reason (logic or Logos) form the foundational structure of both subjects and objects, as well as of nature and history. Second, Hegel argues, it is necessary to establish the interrelation of the categories of understanding by demonstrating their deduction from a single principle. Kant had simply appropriated the categories from Aristotle and presented them in a formal chart but had not shown why we use just these categories and not others. Since reason secures the order of things as well as the mind, the derivation of the categories must be both historical and logical. By making this revision of Kant, Hegel became the first philosopher to argue that truth is historical. The historicization of reason leads to precisely the historical relativism that Kant was trying to avoid. Kant begins the Critique of Pure Reason by arguing that space and time, like the categories of understanding, are a priori— space is the condition of the possibility of outer intuition, and time of inner intuition. The two basic characteristics of spatiality are externality and juxtaposition or adjacency. On the one hand, spatial entities are external to the knowing subject; on the other, they are external to one another and thus remain juxtaposed points that are unconnected. In a corresponding manner, temporal moments are a linear series of separate and adjacent points. Kant argues, “Time has only one dimension; different times are not simultaneous but successive (just as different spaces are not successive but simultaneous).” The common structure of synchronicity (space) and diachronicity (time) is the punctuality of here-points and now-points. In a revealing passage, Kant writes, “We represent the time-sequence by a line progressing to infinity, in which the manifold constitutes a series of one dimension only; and we reason from the properties of this line to all the properties of time, with this one exception, that while the parts of the line are simultaneous the parts of time are always successive.”11 Kant’s serial interpretation of time forms Hegel’s point of departure. Hegel’s system has, predictably, three parts: logic, philosophy of nature, philosophy of spirit. The structure of the system is fractal, that is to say, it has the same three-part structure at every level. Furthermore, the movement between and among these parts always follows the same pattern (see fig. 9).

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Figure 9. Hegel’s System of Fractals.

The three sections of the Philosophy of Nature are: “Mechanics,” which includes “Mathematical Mechanics,” “Finite Mechanics (Matter and Motion),” and “Absolute Mechanics (Astronomy)”; “Physics”; and “Organics.” Hegel concluded his last lecture on his philosophy of nature on August 27, 1830, just one year before his death, by summarizing his overall purpose: “The aim of these lectures is to convey an image of nature, in order to subdue this Proteus: to find in this externality only the mirror of ourselves, to see in nature a free reflection of spirit: to understand God, not in the contemplation of spirit, but in His immediate existence” (PN, 3:213). Hegel opens his analysis of nature with a stinging criticism of science of his day: “For the most part it [science] has been variously transformed into an external formalism [äusserlichen Formalismus], and perverted into a notionless instrument [begriffloses Instrument] for superficiality of thought and unbridled powers of imagination. The details of the extravaganzas into which death-struck forms [totgemachten Formen] of the Idea have been perverted do not concern me here” (PN, introduction, 1:191). He begins by analyzing space because he thinks that spatiality generates temporality; the description of space echoes Kant’s emphasis on externality and adjacency. Mechanics treats “abstract externality [ganz abstrakte Aussereinander] of space and time” (PN, 1:223). “The primary or immediate determination of nature,” Hegel also points out, “is the abstract universality of its selfexternality [Aussersichseins], its unmediated indifference [Gleichgültigkeit], i.e. space. It is on account of its being self-externality, that space constitutes the entirely ideal juxtaposition [Nebeneinander]; because this extrinsicality [Aussereinander] is still completely abstract, space is simply continuous, and is devoid of any determinate difference” (PN, 1:223; translation modified).

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Separate points in space are external to one another; these “heres are juxtaposed without impinging upon one another” (PN, 1:224) With this insight, Hegel’s analysis undergoes a dialectical inversion. The indifference of the point that is supposed to secure its singularity reverses itself, and each point becomes indistinguishable from all other points. “The heres are completely identical, and this abstract plurality, which has no true interruption and limit, is the precise constitution of externality. Although the heres are also differentiated, their being different is identical with their lack of difference, and the difference is therefore abstract. Space is therefore punctuality [Punktualität] without points, or complete continuity” (PN, 1:224; translation modified). Hegel compounds Kant’s exteriority by arguing that separate spatial points are self-external. That is to say, points are not only external to one another, but are also external to themselves. The indifference of points to other points is at the same time an implicit connection to the very points from which they appear to differ. In a manner similar to his theosophical follower Wassily Kandinsky,12 Hegel argues from point to line to plane: “Spatial difference is however essentially determinate. . . . As such it is (1) in the first instance the point, i.e., the negation of the immediate and undifferentiated self-externality of space itself. (2) The negation is however the negation of space, and is therefore itself spatial. In that this relation is essential to the point, point is self-sublating [sich aufhebend] and constitutes the line, which is the primary otherness or spatial being of the point. (3) The truth of otherness is however the negation of the negation, and the line therefore passes over into the plane” (PN, 1:226). With the transition from point to line, space passes over into time: “Through the generation of difference within it, space ceases to be mere indifference, and through all its changes, is no longer paralysed, but is for itself. This pure quantity as difference existing for itself, is what is implicitly negative, i.e, time; it is the negation of negation, or self-relating negation. . . . The truth of space is time, so that space becomes time; our transition to time is not subjective, space itself makes this transition” (PN, 1:227). The present moment is the temporal equivalent of the spatial point. Since the moment, like the point, is indifferent to other moments, it appears to be simple. This simplicity is, however, self-negating because indifference presupposes the negation of any relation to difference or otherness. Just as isolated points form an endless line, so separate moments form an endless series that extends itself through the points’ own self-negation. Time is inherently negative and thus endlessly restless. “Time is merely this abstraction of destroying. Things are in time because they are finite; they do not pass

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away because they are in time, but are themselves that which is temporal” (PN, 1:231). In less convoluted terms, the present moment invariably passes as a new moment emerges to take its place. According to this interpretation of time, present, past, and future form a linear series of now-points, which are quantifiable and can be calculated mathematically through “ready-made schemata” that function like digital programs or algorithms (PN, 1:235). Because they are separate, each of these moments seems to be utterly contingent and thus the series remains meaningless. Space and time come together in the “here-and-now” of the fleeting presence of the present. When these presents are extended ad infinitum, they constitute what Hegel labels the “bad” or “spurious” infinite. This interpretation of the infinite is the product of Verstand, which makes connections and establishes oppositions but cannot discern necessary interrelations. The image Hegel uses to represent a world comprised of an infinity of juxtaposed abstract points and empty serial moments is the pyramid: “The most imperfect endures, because it is an abstract universality, such as space, and time itself; the sun, the elements, the mountains, inorganic nature in general, as well as works of man such as pyramids, have a barren duration” (PN, 1:232). The rigidity, cellularity, and rectilinearity of the pyramid makes it a tomb from which all life has fled. (This pyramid will return in chapter 8 with my consideration of Derrida’s essay “The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel’s Semiology.”) In contrast to the “lifeless,” “mechanistic,” “bad” infinite, Hegel poses the “vital,” “organic,” “good” infinite. The good infinite is not merely the extrinsic opposite of the bad infinite; to the contrary, the inherent selfcontradictions of bad infinite lead to its self-negation and transformation in the good infinite. When comprehended according to the principles of Vernunft, the finite and the infinite are not opposites but are interrelated in such a way that each is the condition of the other. The externality and adjacency of punctual space and time negate themselves in the very effort to secure themselves. Being-for-self (an sich) is impossible apart from being-for-other ( für ander). The negation designed to establish independence (separation) actually establishes necessary codependence (connection). The finite, then, is not merely other than and opposed to the infinite, but is an integral dimension of the infinite itself. To be truly infinite, infinitude cannot be limited by finitude; rather, it must include ostensible otherness within itself as a necessary moment of its own self-determination. The infinite becomes itself in and through “its own” other, finitude. In the process of establishing its identity by contrast with its difference, infinitude sublates the otherness of the other and makes finitude an intrinsic aspect of its own being. The

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infinite, therefore, “is on its own account just as much finite as infinite” (SL, 153). Hegel summarizes this important conclusion: Thus, both finite and infinite are this movement in which each returns to itself through its negation; they are only as mediation within themselves, and the affirmative of each contains the negative of each and is the negation of the negation. They are thus a result, and consequently not what they are in the determination of their beginning; the finite is not a determinate being on its side, and the infinite a determinate being or being-in-itself beyond the determinate being, that is, beyond the being determined as finite. . . . They occur . . . only as moments of a whole and . . . come on the scene only by means of their opposite, but essentially also by means of the sublation of their opposite. (SL, 155)

This dialectical relationship between the infinite and the infinite reconciles eternity and time. Far from a linear series extended ad infinitum, the good infinite is a self-reflexive process that endlessly unfolds in space (nature) and time (history). Hegel labels this timeless process the “concept” or “notion” (Begriff). The eternal return of the notion issues in a realized eschatology in which presence is totally present here and now. “Absolute timelessness is eternity, which is devoid of natural [i.e., serial, linear] time, and is therefore to be distinguished from duration. In its Notion, time itself is eternal, however, for its Notion is neither the present nor any other time but is time as such. Its Notion is, like all the Notion, eternal, and thus also constitutes the absolute present [absolute Gegenwart; emphasis added]. Eternity will not be, nor has it been, but it is. Duration is therefore to be distinguished from eternity, in that it is merely a relative sublation of time; eternity is however infinite, that is to say, not relative, but duration reflected into itself. That which is not in time, is without process; the most imperfect, like the most perfect, is not in time, and therefore endures. . . . In its phenomenal aspect, law falls within time, because the moments of the Notion show themselves as independent; but in their Notion the excluded differences reconcile and relate themselves, and are harmoniously reassimilated” (PN, 1:232; translation modified). This account of the process by which eternity descends into time and time is elevated to eternity is the philosophical comprehension of the Christian narrative of incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. The Absolute first empties itself into fragmented space and time, and then returns to itself from self-externality (or alienation) through the process internalization (reconciliation) brought about by human “recollection [Er-innerung].” The purpose of Hegel’s entire System is to translate

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the seriality and linearity of Verstand into the cyclicality and circularity of Vernunft. “This return as line is the circular line; it is now, before, and after, joining itself with itself; it is the indifference of these dimensions, in which the before is just as much an after as the after is a before. This is the first necessary paralysis of these dimensions posited in space. Circular motion is the spatial or subsistent unity of the dimensions of time. The point tends towards a place which is its future, and vacates one which is the past; but that which it has behind it, is at the same time that at which it will arrive; and it has already been at the after towards which it tends. Its goal is the point which is its past. The truth of time is that goal is the past and not the future” (PN, 1:239– 40). The after before, the before after. “The goal is the point which is its past.” At this point, in this moment, Alpha and Omega become one.

Incarnation, Crucifixion, Resurrection I am the way, the truth, and the life. —John 14:6

As I have suggested, Hegel assumes the role of the teacher who translates the truth first revealed in the religious representations of Jesus into philosophical concepts. He narrates the tortuous way that is the truth in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Like any good teacher, Hegel realizes that, to help his students, he must start where they are and gradually lead them to his goal, which is nothing less than absolute knowledge. The Phenomenology is the preface to his system, which prepares the student/reader for the rigors and complexities of speculative reflection. This preface, however, has a preface in which Hegel presents his most comprehensive overview of his system as a whole. Easing readers into this exceedingly difficult text, Hegel uses a surprising range of images to describe the way he follows: “wandering in the desert,” “pathway of doubt,” “way of despair,” “ladder,” and “way of science.” When philosophical concepts are retranslated into religious representations, the Phenomenology plots the Stations of the Cross and the reader is invited to undertake the imitatio Christi. As early as his essay “The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy” (1801), Hegel had argued, “When the spirit of union vanishes from the life of men and the oppositions lose their living connection and reciprocity and gain independence, the need for philosophy arises” (translation modified).13 The task of philosophy is to overcome the oppositions and conflicts rending self and world and thereby to bring the kingdom of god to earth.

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This understanding of philosophy poses problems that Hegel addresses in the opening paragraphs of the preface to his preface. If his purpose is to overcome oppositions and conflicts, he cannot present his philosophy as the truth and oppose all others as false; rather, he must develop a new interpretation of truth that does not involve the simple opposition between true and false. Hegel accomplishes this by historicizing truth, and thereby relativizing reason. In contrast to classical philosophers who held truth to be unchanging and eternal, Hegel maintains that truth is temporal and emerges through historical conflicts, corrections, and changes. He actually goes so far as to claim that “time . . . is the existent Notion itself [die Zeit ist sie der daseinde Begriff selbst]” (PS, 27). To understand this crucial point, it is necessary to consider Hegel’s elaboration of his claim that “the True is the whole” (PS, 11). In Hegel’s speculative system, truth is rational and reason is true. This argument presupposes the contrast between Verstand, which, we have seen, is based upon the principle of noncontradiction, and Vernunft, which is dialectical— differences are not oppositional but are codependent and therefore inextricably interrelated. For Hegel, understanding’s formalistic and mechanistic “pigeon-holing” of everything strips away the living flesh and leaves “a synoptic table like a skeleton with scraps of paper stuck all over it, or like the rows of closed and labelled boxes in a grocer’s stall” (PS, 31). Reason, by contrast, regards truth as a vital organism that grows and matures over time. Rather than presenting his philosophy as true in opposition to all other philosophies, which are false, Hegel argues that his system is the necessary result of all previous philosophies: The more conventional opinion gets fixated on the antitheses of truth and falsity, the more it tends to expect a given philosophical system to be either accepted or contradicted; and hence it finds only acceptance or rejection. It does not comprehend the diversity of philosophical systems as the progressive unfolding of truth, but rather sees in it simple disagreements. The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of it instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another, they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole. (PS, 2)

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Within this dialectical scheme, nothing is absolutely false because every error makes a greater truth possible. Just as the Christian God brings good out of evil, so the Hegelian Geist brings truth out of error. For Hegel, absolute errancy is impossible because absolute truth is inevitable. While Hegel tries to help his readers with multiple images and metaphors that sometimes border on poetic, these are intended to prepare the way for the conceptual articulation of his argument. The shift from image to concept does not exactly clarify his argument. Within the short span of three pages, he presents a bewildering series of statements about truth. The True is the whole (PS, 11). Everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject (PS, 10). That the True is actual only as system, or that Substance is essentially Subject, is expressed in the representation of Absolute as Spirit—the most sublime Notion and the one which belongs to the modern age and its religion (PS, 14).

The “True,” then, is the whole, substance, subject, system, and absolute Spirit. What unites these different characterizations of the true is their shared structure of self-reflexivity. In a formulation that, we will see, Kierkegaard appropriates in The Sickness unto Death, Hegel writes, “The spiritual alone is the actual; it is essence, or that which has being in itself [Ansichsein]; it is that which relates itself to itself and is determinate, it is other-being [Anderssein] and being-for-self [Fürsichsein], and in this determinateness, or in its self-externality, abides within itself; in other words, it is in and for itself [an und für sich]” (PS, 14). While Hegel’s language is intentionally convoluted, his point nonetheless is clear. When truth is understood as subject, it is a process that has three moments or stages, which can be characterized in different ways: unity, division, reunion; undifferentiation, differentiation, integration; identity, difference, identity-in-difference; and inwardness, selfalienation, reconciliation. This process is “self-moving,” “self-originating, self-differentiating,” or, in terms we have previously discussed, autonomous, autotelic, and autopoietic. It is important to realize that while Hegel models this notion of the subject on individual subjectivity, the process he is describing is a universal; that is to say, it encompasses all of nature and history. To understand the complexities of his argument, it is helpful to consider how Hegel’s dialectic illuminates the activity of an individual subject. Consider, for example,

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the point at which this book and the journey it narrates began— Stephen Crites’s 1967 seminar, “The Dialectic of Alienation and Reconciliation in Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx.” I have often wondered why I was immediately drawn to the debate between Hegel and Kierkegaard. As I have noted, one of the reasons these thinkers so intrigued me was that they posed clear existential alternatives that resonated with my own experience. Looking back, it has become clear to me that my mother, whose melancholy drew her to literature and the dark side of American romanticism (Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe), represented Kierkegaard, and my father, whose love of the natural world drew him to biology and the brighter side of American romanticism (Emerson and Thoreau), represented Hegel. Unrecoverable experiences of childhood and youth predisposed my soul to be divided between the visions of life offered by Hegel and Kierkegaard. When these personal experiences intersected with the social and political upheavals of the ’60s, the direction of my future life was set, even if it was not completely determined. A doctorate from Harvard with a dissertation and book entitled Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship: A Study of Time and the Self was followed by another doctorate from the University from Copenhagen with a thesis entitled and book Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard. After these works, there was a series of twenty-eight books on subjects ranging from philosophy and religion to literature, art, architecture, economics, finance, media, and technology. I had no overarching plan or final goal; indeed, I never had any idea where the next book would come from or where it would take me. One thing just led to another, and one book just followed the previous book. When I was writing these books, the series seemed random; I never really bothered to consider how they all might be related. Then, out of the blue, I was asked to write a book to conclude another series of more than thirty books with which I had been associated. The editor suggested that an effective way to wrap up the series might be to go back to my own beginnings and reconsider Kierkegaard and Hegel from the perspective of my the development of my thinking over more than four decades. The result is the book you are reading. As I have undertaken this project, I have been surprised to discover that the series of my works does not appear to be as random it seemed while I was writing them. To the contrary, the books actually form what appears to be a coherent development that was, in many ways, implicit in the first undergraduate papers I wrote on Hegel (“The Implications of the Difference between the Kantian and the Hegelian Conceptions of Reason and Understanding for the Proofs of the Existence of God”) and Kierkegaard (“The Dialectic of Sin in The Concept of Dread”). The process of my education (Bildung) repeats Hegel’s three-moment dialectic: inwardness

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is first externalized in a series of books that seem to have no necessary interrelationship to one another; then, looking back on these different works, it becomes possible to re-cognize a coherent pattern that draws them together. Rather than remaining scattered fragments, each book now appears to be an organic member of an overall idea that all along was working itself out unbeknownst to me through labor I thought was simply my own. It would seem, then, that Hegel was right, the oak was, indeed, in the acorn. When we wish to see an oak with its massive trunk and spreading branches and foliage, we are not content to be shown an acorn instead. So too, Science, the crown of a world of Spirit, is not complete in its beginnings. The onset of the new spirit is the product of a widespread upheaval in various forms of culture, the prize at the end of a complicated, tortuous path and of just as variegated and strenuous an effort. It is the whole which, having traversed its content in time and space, has returned into itself, and is the resultant simple Notion of the whole. But the actuality of this simple whole consists in those various shapes and forms which have become its moments, and which will now develop and take shape afresh, this time in their new element, in their newly acquired meaning. (PS, 7)

But, of course, this is not the end of the story, because, as Augustine long ago realized, my story is part of a much larger story. My life is inextricably interwoven with the lives of all other human beings during my lifetime as well as past and future human beings both known and unknown. Moreover, human life is inseparable from the natural environment. Each individual is something like a node in a global, indeed, a cosmic network that is constantly evolving. This means that my work cannot be separated from past ghosts who haunt me and unexpected present and future responses of other individuals to the works I produce. Just as I am a member of infinite natural and social webs, so works I thought where my own are nodes in complex cultural networks. Since the truth is the whole, I can understand “my” work only when I comprehend its place within these networks. Through this process of re-collection (Er-innerung), the serial line of my works becomes a circle. At that point, my work (and my life) comes full circle and I (re)discover my end in my beginning and my beginning in my end. But my end is never the end, because I have an afterlife in the works that survive me and are transformed by what others do with them. The final judgment of my life and work is perpetually delayed until the Last Judgment. This is the process Hegel describes in the most concise summary of his system he presents in the Phenomenology:

116 / Chapter Five The living Substance is being which is in truth Subject, or, what is the same, is in truth actual only in so far as it is the movement of positing itself, or is the mediation of its self-othering [Sichanderswerdens mit sich selbst] with itself. This Substance is, as Subject, pure, simple negativity, and is for this very reason the division [Entzweiung] of the simple; it is the doubling which sets up opposition, and then again the negation of this indifferent diversity and of its opposition. . . . Only this self-restoring identity [sich wiederherstellende Gleichheit], or this reflection in otherness within itself— not an original or immediate unity as such— is the True. It is the process of its own becoming; the circle that presupposes its end as its goal, having its end also as its beginning; and only by being worked out to its end, is it actual. (PS, 10; translation modified)

The circle can be complete, however, only after the end of time and history. As long as the future is still out-standing, unanticipated events might overturn the present and recast the past. But who would remain to write the narrative after the end of time and history? The Phenomenology charts the course from natural consciousness, which begins with the immediacy of the here (space) and now (time), through consciousness and self-consciousness to reason, and beyond to the expression (Äusserung) in the actual world. This process must be understood in five ways: (1) the universal course through which the race as a whole develops; (2) the stages through which each individual within the race develops; (3) the stages through which any experience at any moment must pass to progress from indeterminate immediacy to fully articulated knowledge; (4) the historical stages of development from ancient Greece to modern Germany; and (5) the progression from art and religion (Vorstellungen) to philosophy (Begriffe). Hegel describes this process at all levels as the experience consciousness goes through on its way to absolute knowledge. Like Beatrice leading Dante from the Inferno to Paradise, Hegel leads the reader along the pathway of doubt and despair to the heights of absolute knowledge. The Phenomenology is, then, something like the Bildungsroman of absolute Spirit. To chart this course of development, Hegel takes as the object of his investigation the different forms of experience through which consciousness passes at different moments in time. Each of these experiences is characterized by a distinctive relationship between different permutations of subjectivity and objectivity. This argument presupposes a distinction between observing and observed consciousness (see fig. 10). Observed consciousness experiences its own development as something like a series of disconnected points on a line or a string of random stages with no necessary interrelationship. Life is just one damn thing after the other, with no rhyme or reason. As

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Figure 10. Observing/Observed Consciousness.

consciousness undergoes this developmental process, it forgets the previous stage at each later stage. Observing consciousness sees things differently. In order to understand Hegel’s pedagogical role in the Phenomenology, it is necessary to make a further distinction within observing consciousness between Hegel’s perspective and the point of view of the reader. Whereas Hegel has already comprehended the overall direction and conclusion of the experience of consciousness, the reader rises only gradually from the position of the consciousness being observed to the point of view of the phenomenological guide. Since this is a “self-moving” and “self-organizing” process, observing consciousness cannot impose its perspective on observed consciousness; to the contrary, observing consciousness must comprehend the way in which it grows out of the changing experiences of observed consciousness. Observed consciousness sees itself involved in an effort to establish knowledge by relating to an object it believes to be both independent of consciousness and true in itself. Since this very knowledge is the object of observing consciousness, observed consciousness’s contrast between subject and object, being-for-consciousness and being-in-itself now is seen as a distinction that falls within consciousness. The criterion that consciousness encounters as external to and imposed upon itself is, for the phenomenologist, immanent in consciousness itself. In other words, “consciousness provides its own criterion from within itself, so that the investigation becomes a comparison of consciousness with itself” (PS, 53). Hegel stresses that “the essential point to bear in mind throughout the whole investigation is that these two moments, ‘Notion’ and ‘object,’ ‘being-for-another’ and ‘being-in-itself,’ both fall within

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Figure 11. Phenomenological Journey.

that knowledge which we [emphasis added] are investigating” (PS, 53). This complex process can be illustrated as figure 11. Observed consciousness initially believes the progressive experiences it undergoes result from a series of contingent encounters with different external objects. Hegel argues that speculative description of the experience of consciousness eventually sublates both the externality of the subject-object relation and the contingency of the stages of development from error to truth. Empathetic identification with other forms of consciousness discloses the inherent contradictions that lead to the self-negation of every partial viewpoint. Each perspective is internally related to its opposite in such a way that it bears within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Put differently, every particular point of view is inwardly contradictory and therefore inherently unstable. Hegel insists that the dissolution that inevitably results from such self-contradiction is at the same time a resolution. With the discovery of the illusory character of previous “knowledge,” the subject meets new objects. Prior errors of consciousness, therefore, are neither accidental aberrations nor inconsequential mistakes but form essential moments in the dialectical development of truth. For Hegel, as for the Goethe of Wilhelm Meister, “not to keep from error, is the duty of the educator of men, but to guide the erring one, even to let him swill his error out of full cups— that is the wisdom of teachers.”14 Through speculative philosophy’s translation of the linear series of seemingly contingent temporal experiences into a comprehensive and comprehensible totality, the circle of becoming closes on itself. As Alpha and

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Omega become one, time and eternity are reconciled. Through the process of re-collection, the scattered moments of time are taken up into the eternal cycle of eternity, and eternity becomes actual through its expression in time and space. At this point, in this moment, self, world, and God become one. The passage in which Hegel summarizes this course is the most decisive passage in the Phenomenology for Hegel’s most influential French interpreters and critics: But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in absolute dismemberment [absoluten Zerrissenheit], it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then, having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying [Verweilen15] with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject, which by giving determinateness and existence in its own element sublates abstract immediacy, i.e. the immediacy which barely is, and thus is authentic substance: that being or immediacy whose mediation is not outside of it but which is this mediation itself. (PS, 19; translation modified)

Absolute knowledge is not a supplemental stage that comes at the end of a long series; rather, it is the full comprehension of what Kierkegaard describes as “the stages on life’s way,” which, when totally recollected, become necessary moments in an infinite self-organizing network. Incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection. In the end, as at the beginning, self, world, and God are one. The Phenomenology of Spirit plots the Stations of the Cross, through which time ascends to eternity and eternity descends to time. Since resurrection follows crucifixion, re-membering heals dismembering. Hegel concludes, The goal of Absolute Knowledge, or Spirit that knows itself as Spirit, has for its path the re-membering or re-collection [Er-innerung, Hegel’s spelling and emphasis] of the Spirits as they are in themselves and as they accomplish the organization of their kingdom. Their preservation, regarded from the side of their free existence appearing in the form of contingency, is History [in der Form der Zufälligkeit erscheinenden Daseins, ist die Geschichte]; but regarded from the side of their comprehended organization, it is the Science of Knowledge

120 / Chapter Five of appearing or apparent knowledge [die Wissenschaft des erscheinenden Wissen] in the sphere of appearance: the two together, comprehended History; they form the inwardizing [Erinnerung] and the Golgotha [Schädelstätte] of absolute Spirit, the actuality, truth and certainty of this throne without which he would be lifeless and alone. Only from the chalice of this realm of spirits foams forth for Him his own infinitude. (PS, 493; translation modified)16

SIX

French Hegels

It may well be that the future of the world, and thus the sense of the present and the significance of the past, will depend in the last analysis on contemporary interpretations of Hegel’s works. —Alexandre Kojève

Between Reason and Unreason If, as Hegel maintains, philosophy is its time comprehended in thought, how does one make sense of two world wars and a global depression that resulted in incomprehensible destruction, devastation, and death? On the battlefields, in the homes, and in the classrooms of twentieth-century Europe, it became impossible to believe that history is a rational process leading to the progressive realization of human freedom. Far from the arrival of the kingdom of God on earth, “the slaughter bench of history,” in Hegel’s fine phrase, seemed to be a tale of endless violence. As we have seen, when Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, and their fellow neo-orthodox theologians confronted the horrors of World War I, they turned to Kierkegaard’s writings for guidance and insight. In France, two generations of philosophers, writers, and artists found resources for understanding history and recovering a sense of meaning and purpose in Hegel’s writings. Having argued that the real is the rational and the rational the real, Hegel might seem to be an unlikely guide during such dark times. For his French followers, however, Hegel was not an arch-rationalist, but was the first modern philosopher to recognize irrationality at the heart of reason. Hegel seemed to offer a way out of hopelessness and despair without denying the undeniable violence of history. What most people who turned to Hegel did not realize is that his

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system secularizes Christian theodicy. In his narrative, history becomes a felix culpa (fortunate fall) where Spirit, once deemed holy, creates good out of evil and truth out of error. The Hegel who became so significant in the first three decades of the twentieth century was imported to France from Germany by two Russian exiles: Alexandre Koyré (1892– 1964) and Alexandre Kojève (1902– 1968). The third person who played a crucial role in introducing Hegel was the Frenchman Jean Hyppolite (1907– 1968). It is no exaggeration to say that the interpretations of Hegel developed by these three philosophers changed the course of intellectual and cultural history even for people who have never heard their names or read their works. The Hegel Koyré and Kojève brought to France was mediated by the appreciation for Marx they developed in their native Russia and the understanding of Husserl and Heidegger they picked up in Germany. Speaking for himself as well as others, Hyppolite observed, “An Hegelian influence has been felt in all of Europe. However, one might say that the Phenomenology of the Mind [i.e., Spirit] has been discovered by the present generation (and I am thinking not of myself but of Kojève), that we have discovered the extraordinary richness of this work and the originality of its intent” (SC, 164). Alexandre Koyré was born in Taganrog, Russia, in 1892 into a Jewish fam1 ily. In 1905 he left Russia to study with Henri Bergson in Paris, and in 1908 moved to Göttingen to work under Edmund Husserl and the renowned mathematician David Hilbert. After Husserl rejected his dissertation, Koyré returned to Paris, where he studied at the Collège de France and the Sorbonne. During this period he worked with the influential neo-Kantian Léon Brunschvicg (1869– 1944). When war broke out in 1914, Koyré joined the French Foreign Legion, and in 1916 served with a unit fighting on the Russian front. After the war, he returned to Paris and immersed himself in the tradition of German speculative mysticism, which was so important for Heidegger. Koyré’s research included a remarkable range of philosophers and theologians: Augustine, Jakob Böhme, Paracelsus, Anselm, Nicholas of Cusa, Franz von Baader, and Sebastian Franck, as well as Russian mystics and radical Protestant reformers like John Huss and John Wycliffe. In his informative study, An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought, Stefanos Geroulanos notes that Koyré’s student Henry Corbin, who became a leading interpreter of Islamic mysticism with theosophical proclivities, once went so far as to call his mentor “a great mystical theosopher.”2 After receiving his doctorate for a dissertation entitled “The Idea of God and the Proofs of his Existence in Descartes,” Koyré started teaching at the École pratique des hautes études (l’EPHE). When Husserl’s Jahrbuch was forced

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to cease publication in 1931, Koyré launched what became the highly influential journal Recherches philosophiques. This is where he published his important article “Hegel à Jena,” which became the basis for his influential course on “The Religious Philosophy of Hegel.” When Koyré was offered a teaching position in Cairo (1933), he asked his fellow expatriate Alexandre Kojève to take over his Hegel course at l’EPHE. Alexandre Kojève was born Aleksandr Vladimirovicˇ Koževnikov ten years after Koyré. His father was a wealthy Moscow merchant who was the half brother of Wassily Kandinsky. During the war between Japan and Russia, his father was sent to Manchuria, where he died in battle in 1905. His mother remarried an Englishman who became Moscow’s leading jeweler. Shortly after the czar abdicated in 1917, revolutionaries burned the family’s home and killed his stepfather. A year later, Kojève was arrested for trafficking goods on the black market and spent a year in prison, where he read Marx’s works. Upon his release from prison, he entered the University of Moscow to study philosophy, but found his educational opportunities limited and left Russia. He went to Poland, where, under suspicion for being an agent for the Bolsheviks, he was once again arrested and sent to prison. After six months, he secured his release through family friends and left for Berlin, where he stayed with his uncle Kandinsky until eventually moving to Heidelberg University to study with Karl Jaspers. Kojève was a gifted linguist and studied Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese; he also immersed himself in Buddhism, which he regarded as the only viable atheistic religion.3 In 1924, he received his doctorate under Jaspers’s direction for a dissertation on “The Religious Philosophy of Vladimir Soloviev.” Soloviev (1853– 1900), who was a friend and confidant of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, exercised a significant influence on leading Russian spiritual leaders like Nicolas Berdyaev and Sergey Nikolayevich Trubetskoy as well as the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner. In ways not unlike those of Helena Blavatsky (1831– 1891), whose theosophy was so important for Kandinsky, Soloviev regarded consciousness as a unified whole that synthesizes reason and intuition. One of the primary goals of his spiritual musings was to find a way to reconcile nondualist experience with what he thought was a lingering dualism in German idealism. As we will see, Soloviev’s mystical atheism remained important for Kojève throughout his life. When Kojève took over Koyré’s course, the subject remained the same but the style and substance changed radically. As Michael Roth points out, far from disinterested philosophical speculation, the charismatic Kojève offered students what he freely acknowledged was “[la] propagande destinée à frapper les esprits.”4 The two dominant philosophical positions at the time Koyré

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and Kojève introduced Hegel in France were Brunschvicg’s neo-Kantianism and Bergson’s spiritualism. Rejecting Brunschvicg’s version of Kantianism as too formalistic and mechanistic, Bergson proposed an organic vitalism, which he hoped would create a universal bond among all people as well as with the natural world. These noteworthy differences, however, could not hide the optimism Brunschvicg and Bergson shared about human nature and historical progress, which, by the 1930s, had become untenable for most thoughtful people. Established in 1868 as an interstitial institution that would allow more imaginative research and teaching within the rigid hierarchy of French universities, by the 1930s, l’EPHE brought together some of the leading minds from across Europe to create a cauldron of innovative inquiry. During the years Koyré and Kojève were teaching, Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Ferdinand de Saussure were also offering courses. The seminars and lectures of these remarkable scholars drew many of France’s leading writers, artists, and intellectuals, who created an explosive cultural atmosphere that rivaled fin de siècle Jena (1790s) and Vienna (1890s). The center of this universe from 1933– 39 was Kojève’s seminar on Hegel. Participants used the lessons they learned to shape culture for decades to come: Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Henry Corbin, Jean Wahl, Eric Weil, Andre Breton, Raymond Aron, Raymond Queneau, and Jean Hyppolite. Ethan Kleinberg reports that the seminar met at 5:30 on Fridays and usually was followed by dinner and drinks. Bataille recalled his experience in the seminar. “From ’33 (I think) until ’39 I took Alexandre Kojève’s seminar on [Hegel’s] Phenomenology of Spirit. The seminar was based on the text. I don’t know how many times Queneau and I stumbled out of that little room gasping for air— suffocated, beaten. During those years I had attended innumerable lectures and I was up to date with the advances in science; but Kojève’s course left me broken, crushed, killed ten times.”5 In the preface to the Phenomenology, Hegel had famously declared that “the True” is “the Bacchanalian revel in which no member remains sober” (PS, 27; translation modified). It appears that Kojève, Bataille, and their colleagues sometimes took Hegel more literally than metaphorically. The final figure who played a leading role in introducing Hegel in France was Jean Hyppolite, who attended the École normale supérieure with Jean-Paul Sartre and was a contemporary of Kojève. One of his most important contributions was the first French translation of the Phenomenology of Spirit (1939). In his two major works, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1947) and Logic and Existence (1952), Hyppolite presents a sustained criticism of Kojève’s reading of Hegel. These texts and

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Hyppolite’s seminar were important for the next generation of French philosophers, especially Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida. The differences among the major trends of French philosophy during the twentieth century— phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism, and poststructuralism— can be traced to the differences between Kojève’s and Hyppolite’s interpretations of Hegel.

Deferring Presence The interpretation of Hegel was transformed during the first decades of the twentieth century by the publication of his early works— Early Theological Writings (1907) and his Jena manuscripts (1923, 1930s). Koyré’s course on “The Religious Philosophy of Hegel” drew heavily on selections from the Jena writings, he published along with his commentary in a little-known article, “Hegel at Jena.”6 This was the first time this material had appeared in French, and its impact was both immediate and widespread. The primary focus of Koyré’s analysis was Hegel’s early interpretation of time. While the relation of the Phenomenology (early Hegel) to the Science of Logic and the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences (late Hegel) had long been debated, Koyré pushed his argument back even further, to the very earliest texts of Hegel. In these writings, Koyré saw a different Hegel than the one who appears in the mature system. Drawing on metaphors we have been considering, Koyré suggests the challenge that Hegel’s works pose: “Hegel would think ‘in circle [en circle],’ whereas we would think ‘in straight line [en ligne droit].’” Koyré leaves no doubt about which version of Hegel he prefers. While “the Hegelian ‘system’ is dead,” Koyré claims that in the Jena writings, Hegel appears as a “vibrant, suffering human being.” Here “a Hegel who found his place in the spiritual movement of the day, not only in the chart of the chart of systems” is revealed. Ironically, this characterization of the system repeats Hegel’s own criticism of Verstand as it is expressed in Kant’s philosophy. For Hegel, Koyré argues, the task of philosophy is to understand becoming, which he describes as “the birth and disappearance, the all-generating and all-destroying Chronos.” Citing the passage from The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy I considered in the previous chapter, Koyré stresses that the need for philosophy comes from division, fragmentation, and dismemberment (Zerrissenheit): “Philosophy is the daughter of ‘the living originality of spirit . . . , which, in itself, restores by itself, the harmony torn apart [l’harmonie déchirée]; it is also the daughter of the inner tear itself [du déchirement intérieur lui-même], which, hence, is the source of the very need for philosophy.” After considering the

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way Hegel addresses this need in his discussions of love and spirit in his Early Theological Writings, Koyré turns his attention to the Jena Logic. The goal of this analysis is to understand a supplemental note scribbled in the margin of Hegel’s 1803/4 lecture notes: “Geist ist Zeit,” which is reformulated in the Phenomenology as “Time Is the Dasein of the Concept.” Since human existence is inherently temporal, to understand “man” it is necessary to understand time. Koyré develops a creative misprision of Hegel’s view by interpreting the Jena writings through Heidegger’s argument in Being and Time. In different terms, Koyré deconstructs Hegel’s interpretation of the present by developing an account of time that privileges the future. Hegel, he argues, “destroys [détruire]” the notion of time that identifies being with presence/present. “Deduction of time? Construction? Both of these terms are improper. For it is not about ‘deducing,’ even dialectically, nor about ‘constructing [construire];’ it is about clearing and discovering [de dégager et de découvrir]—rather than putting hypothetically— in and for consciousness itself, for the moments, steps, spiritual acts in which and through which the concept of time constitutes itself [se constitue], in and for spirit.” What Koyré describes as Hegel’s détruire recalls Heidegger’s Destruktion and anticipates Derrida’s deconstruction. In this passage, dégager et découvrir also prefigure Heidegger’s Aletheia and lichten as well as Derrida’s khora. Koyré makes Hegel’s Jena Realphilosophie say something it does not quite say and by so doing, opens it to a future Hegel never could have anticipated. For Hegel, “unrest is the heart of being”—time is “an infinite restlessness” that appears differently in nature (space) and history (time). After a brief consideration of Hegel’s account of spatialized time in the Philosophy of Nature, Koyré turns to human time, explaining that Hegel does not begin “from the analysis of the notion of the ‘instant,’ timeless and punctual limit between past and future [l’avenir], . . . but from the concrete apprehension we have towards it— time constitutes itself in us and for us from the ‘now.’” This “now,” however, proves to be self-contradictory because “the now is never here. It transforms itself immediately into something else.” In other words, the present is never present, but is always already passing and always yet to come; it is, therefore, only present as absence. Hegel interprets the passing of time as a process of negation, which, when rationally comprehended, is infinite or “double negation.” This notion is the key to Hegel’s logic and, by extension, is the foundation of his entire system. Koyré underscores this point by elaborating the interplay between the finite and the infinite, which I examined in the previous chapter. The interpretation of the Notion (Begriff ) as double negation is essential to all that follows, so it is important to understand clearly:

French Hegels / 127 Hegel strives to make us see the unrest [l’inquiétude] of all finitude, of all determination, of all limitation, which, negativity as such, sublates itself, necessarily posing that toward which it is ‘de-fined,” “de-limited,” “de-termined,” “de-infinite” [“dé-fini,” de-limitée,” “dé-terminée,” “des-infinie”], necessarily negating this limit, this term, this frontier, and thus transforming itself in the in-finite, the un-limited, the in-de-termined. Yet Hegel does not content himself with showing a negation of the infinite in the finite. The infinite is as “in-quiet” [rest-less] as the finite, and being “in-finite,” poses and supposes a limit, an end, in relation to which it affirms itself by negating it [the end]. Double negation, position. All limitation says something like, not this, not a, not b, not c . . . , and so on and so forth. It poses the ensemble a, b, c’s the infinite totality of being. That is why it expresses itself as an unrest. Finite being is not being [être]; it is movement; precisely because it is not what it pretends to be, precisely because it is other than what it is not [justement par ce qu’il n’est pas ce qu’il prétend être, justement parce qu’il est autre qu’il n’est].

In his Science of Logic, which forms the first part of his system, double negation is the principle that reconciles opposites. Double negation is selfreferential negativity through which the identity of differences and the difference of identity are established. According to Hegel, the law of identity defined by abstract understanding enshrined in traditional logic and its principle of noncontradiction asserts that everything is identical with itself. Stated formulaically: A = A. What usually remains unnoticed is that this principle of identity is actually inherently self-contradictory. Those who attempt to affirm such abstract identity “do not see that in this very assertion they are themselves saying that identity is different; for they are saying that identity is different from difference; since this must at the same time be admitted to be the nature of identity, their assertion implies that identity, not externally, but in its own self, in its very nature, is this, to be different” (SL, 413). Since Hegel acknowledges the codependence of identity and difference, he recognizes that determinate identity establishes itself through the negation of the negation of otherness. The other, however, is itself the negation of the determinate identity it opposes. Each member of the relationship becomes itself through the negation of its own negation. “Each therefore is, only in so far as its non-being is, and is in an identical relationship with it” (SL, 425). In more abstract terms, the assertion “A is A” necessarily entails the claim that “A is not non-A:” A = – – A. A is the negation of its own negation, and hence is double negation. The same analysis, of course, must be applied to non-A. Non-A becomes itself through relation to its opposite, A. But A has shown itself to be –A. Thus

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non-A also forms itself through a process of double negation: –A = – (–A). The structure of double negation, which sustains identity-in-difference and difference-in-identity by simultaneously distinguishing and reconciling opposites is, in the final analysis, both infinite and absolute. Through double negation or self-referential negativity, opposites relate to themselves in otherness. Viewed speculatively, absolute negativity not only is the ground of difference but also establishes “infinite unity” (SL, 233). Koyré detects a slight displacement of this self-reflexive reading of double negation in the Jena Realphilosophie. Rather than establishing the self-reflexive unity of identity and difference, the self-contradiction of presence/present opens or clears an “absolute difference” that insinuates the future into presence/present. Since the present is never totally present here and now, it is always yet to come. This out-standing present is the future, which is forever á-venir, zu-kommen. Human time is not a series of discrete moments that are linked in such a way that the present and future grow out of the past; nor is it an auto-telic circle in which the future is the deployment of the past. To the contrary, in human time, the future interrupts the present and transforms the past. Koyré presents his interpretation of this difficult argument in the central passage of his essay. In anticipation of issues to be considered in chapter eight, it is important to note that this is the text to which Derrida refers in “La différance,” where he presents his fullest account of the central insight that informs his entire oeuvre. Koyré translates the pivotal section from the Jena writings and intersperses his commentary. Given the importance of this text, I will first quote it at length and then add some comments, which hopefully will clarify both Hegel and Koyré’s arguments. Formulated in another way, movement, unrest, annihilation, suppression and engendering, being from nonbeing and nonbeing from being: aren’t these traits already known? Doesn’t the dialectic of the finite and the infinite reproduce, or rather [shall we say] announce that of eternity and time? Or simply that of time? Indeed, the dialectical analysis of the infinite and the finite draws to us frames of the instant and of time. When Hegel reaches the analysis of time, of this mobile and restless infinite that is not for him anymore— and here lies the importance of his attitude— the “image of immobile eternity,” he will say: “The infinite, in this simplicity, is a moment equally opposed to itself—the negative, and in these moments, whereas it presents itself to [itself] and in itself as totality, [it is] excluding it in general, the extent or the limit, but in this [action of] of the negating of this, it immediately relates itself to the other and negates itself. The limit or the moment of the

French Hegels / 129 present,1 the absolute “this” of time or the “now,” is of an absolutely negative simplicity, which absolutely excludes from itself any multiplicity and, due to this, is absolutely determined; [it is] not a whole or a quantum, which would extend itself in itself [and] which, in itself, would also have an undetermined moment, a diverse [un divers] which, indifferent or outside in itself, would relate to another, but there is here an absolutely different relation to “the simple.”2 This “simple,” in its absolute negation, is the active, the infinite opposed to itself as [to] an equal-to-itself; as negation it also absolutely relates itself to its opposite, and its action, its simple negation, is a relation to its opposite, and the now immediately is the opposite of itself,3 the negation of itself. Whereas this limit, in its [action of] exclusion or in its activity, suppresses itself by itself, it is rather its nonbeing which is acting against itself and of which it is the negation. However, that the limit in itself immediately, is not this nonbeing opposed to itself as the active, or, as what is rather the being-in-itself, which excludes its opposite, [the limit] is the yet-to-come [l’avenir], which the now cannot resist because it is the essence of the present, which is indeed the nonbeing of itself. The present— sublating [supprime] itself in such a way that it is rather the avenir, which is engendered [becomes] in it— is itself this avenir; or this yet-to-come itself is not à -venir, it is what sublates the present, but insofar as it is this, this simple [something], which is an action of absolute negation, is rather the present, which is yet, in its essence, as much nonbeing of itself, or yet-to-come. In fact, there is neither present nor yet-to-come (i.e., future) but only this mutual relation between the two, equally negative in relation to each other, and this negation of the present self-negates itself as well; the difference between the two reduces itself4 in the rest [repos] of the past. The now has its own nonbeing in itself, and immediately becomes for itself5 an other, but this other yet-to-come in which the present transforms itself is immediately the other of oneself, for it is now present. However, it is not this first “now,” this notion of the present, but rather a now that has engendered itself from the present through yet-to-come, a now in which the future and the present have 1. Koyré’s note: The German word Gegen-wart expresses an opposition, a contrariety that the term present does not express. 2. Koyré’s note: “Rapport different”: differente Beziehung. We could say: differentiating relation. 3. Koyré’s note: The now, being simple, is negation of the diverse. But from this very fact it relates itself to its opposite, the diverse, and is not simple anymore. The now, absolute negative limit itself, negates itself, suppresses itself, and is not. The now is never now. It escapes from itself. 4. Koyré’s note: Se réduit [reduces itself]: reduziert sich. We could say: absorbs itself or reduces itself to zero. 5. Koyré’s note: Wird sich, as Hegel writes, which is completely incorrect.

130 / Chapter Six equally suppressed and absorbed each other, a being that is a nonbeing of both, an activity, overcome and absolutely in rest, of the one over the other. The present is only the simple limit, self-negating itself, which, in the separation of these negative moments, is the relation of its [action of] exclusion to that which it excludes [itself]. This relation is [the] present, as a different6 relation in which both are conserved; but if they do not conserve each other, they just as well reduce themselves to an equality to themselves in which both are not, and are absolutely destroyed. The past is this time re-turned in itself that has absorbed in itself the two first dimensions. The limit or the now is empty; for it is absolutely simple or [is] the notion7 of time; it accomplishes [s’accomplit] itself in future the yet-tocome.8 L’avenir is its reality, for the now is, in its essence, an absolutely negative relation. Possessing this essence or this interior within itself and existing as its essence, [it is] the being of this essence. This essence of its nonbeing or the being of yet-to-come within the now is the reality of the now being in itself what it only has, as notion of the now, as its interior. This reality of the now, or the being of yet-to-come, is as much the immediate opposite of itself, [it is] now this opposite in itself and the sublation of both, [sublation] posed, and [is] the former now [Jadis], the time reflected in itself,9 or real. But the former now is not itself for itself; it is equally the now transforming itself through the future in the opposite of itself and is therefore not separated from either of them; in itself it is only this whole circuit— that is, the real time, which, through the now and the yet-to-come, becomes aforetime. The real time [Le temps réel], opposed as the the former now to the present and to the à-venir is itself only a moment of the entire reflection; it is as the moment that expresses time returned in itself; it expresses it as the equal-to-itself— that is, as the determination of relating to itself, or it [real time] is its first moment; it is all the more the now than the past, which as much as other moments, sublates itself, as the entire selfrelating is for itself immediately a passive first moment.

Koyré’s interpretation of the Jena Logic deconstructs the interpretation of Hegel’s system as the culmination of the Western ontotheological tradition and suggests that his early account of time is consistent with the PaulineKierkegaardian-Heideggerian analysis of time, which anticipates Derrida’s 6. Koyré’s note: The term “different.” 7. Koyré’s note: Begriff: here in the sense of an abstract notion. 8. Koyré’s note: L’avenir is then the truth of the present. 9. Koyré’s note: Reflected in itself: in sich reflectiert; time soars [or starts] from the present to l’avenir and from l’avenir is reflected, like a luminous ray, toward the past.

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Figure 12. Derrida’s Metaphysics of Presence.

Figure 13. Double Negation of Space-Time.

deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence (see fig. 12). It is therefore necessary to supplement the retro-reading I have been developing. Koyré argues that in Hegel’s early reading of temporality, the present is never a simple instant here and now; rather it is a passing moment (from the Latin momentum, “movement”) that is always already past and thus always yet to come. Though each moment is finite, the process of passing is infinite. Expressed another way, the present is not self-identical, but is self-contradictory and thus self-negating. Accordingly, the present is constituted by its difference from the past and future. Here, as elsewhere, identity is difference, and therefore, identity differs from itself. In terms Hegel uses in his later Logic, the present affirms itself by its negation of the past and the future (fig. 13). The present is not the past and is not the future. The past and future, in turn, constitute themselves by negating the present as well as each other. The present, therefore is the negation of its own negation, or is double negation. This structure of double negation reveals the self-contradiction of both presence (space) and the present (time). Koyré states, When Hegel tells us about opposition and contradiction, he does not think about a relation between two terms. He thinks, or rather, he sees in himself an act that “poses” something and another that “op-poses” something else to it, or that “opposes itself” to the former’s action; an act that “says” something that is “contra-dicted” [contre-dit]. And this is why “contra-diction” is an internal tear [déchirement internes]; a struggle in which spirit “poses itself,” “negates itself,”—denies itself [se-renie, re-negates itself]—“sublates itself,” “exceeds itself,” and “annihilates itself.” As for the “different” terms [termes différents], they are not terms that are different, statically, passively; they are terms which “differ” [diffère]—that is, repel one another and drift apart from each other

132 / Chapter Six [s’éloignent l’un de l’autre]; moreover, different acts are acts that make differ” [les actes qui font “différer”], that render “different,” and by the same “others” the terms that they bear [et par la même “autres” les termes sur lesquels ils portent], which differentiate and distinguish, and they are those that one finds at the heart of all “difference” [au fond de toute “difference”].

In this context, différer means both “to differ” and “to defer.” Since the present becomes itself only by differing from other simultaneous presents (synchronicity) as well as from past and future presents (diachronicity), its self-identity or presence of itself to itself is forever delayed or deferred. So understood, the present is an “absolutely different relation to the ‘simple.’” Koyré adds a note to clarify this point: “Rapport différent: differente Beziehung. We could say differentiating relation.” Citing this note in “La différance,” Derrida admits that Hegel or Koyré’s reading of Hegel anticipated his own position.7 Koyré elaborates his insight in another note: “The now, being simple, is the negation of the diverse. But from this very fact it relates itself to its opposite, the diverse, and is not simple anymore. The now, the absolute negative limit, negates itself, sublates itself, and is not. The now is never now. It escapes from itself.” The infinite deferral of presence and the present inverts the notion of time— temps becomes contretemps. Rather than flowing from past through present to the future, the future, which is “anterior” to the past, breaks into the present. “The former now [Jadis] is not itself for itself; it is equally the now transforming itself through yet-to-come in the opposite of itself and is therefore not separated from either of them.” Koyré concludes, “It is not ‘from the past’ that time comes to us, but from the future. Duration [la durée] does not extend from the past to the present. Time forms itself by extending itself, or better by exteriorizing itself from the ‘now,’ or better yet prolonging itself by lasting. It is instead from the yet-to-come that it [time] comes to itself in the ‘now.’ The prevalent ‘dimension’ of time is the yet-to-come [future, à-venir], which is, in some way, anterior to the past. It is this insistence on future, the primacy given to future over the past, which constitutes, according to us, Hegel’s greatest originality.” However, Hegel’s insight is not as original as Koyré claims. While Koyré suggestively argues that Hegel’s early interpretation of time implicitly deconstructs the ontotheological tradition of which Hegel is also the culmination, Koyré does not realize that this tradition had already been deconstructed in an alternative theological trajectory that does not end with a realized eschatology but insists on the eternal deferral of the Parousia (Par-ousia, “kingdom of God,” or “appearance of essence”), which leaves the future forever open.

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In the final analysis, Koyré has to admit that Hegel does not remain true to his original insight. By the time Hegel wrote the Encylopedia, the vitality, energy, and novelty of his early work had given way to a rigid formalism that “paralyzed time. This shift is reflected in stylistic changes in his later work; according to Koyré, Hegel’s writing becomes “more orderly . . . more dry . . . more abstract.” Most important, Hegel reverses his reversal of time by interpreting temporality as an archaeo-teleological process that reconciles the future with the past in the Er-innerung of the present. In this important text, Koyré first quotes Hegel and then adds a telling comment: “This immediacy in which time has returned is, however, something other than the first one from which we had started, for it is also the absolutely mediatized [mediatisse]. It is only the substance of both, which is their unity, their substance [maintien], as that which has not yet been posed, (one of their moments always falling outside each one of them) within the other [en dehors chaqun d’eux dans l’autre]. “It [substance] is duration; it is only in this way that space and time are.” Is it necessary to comment extensively on these texts in which Hegel poses the necessary union, the dialectical identity of essence and existence, of eternity and time, which form the basis for the whole edifice of Hegelianism, the basis of “the identity of logic and history,” consequently the basis of the logic and philosophy of history? Do we have to insist on the light they throw on the texts of the Encyclopedia that we have cited earlier? But, thereby, what do we find in the Encyclopedia in the place of these analyses and descriptions that are so profound and rich? Almost nothing: one sentence on Chronos, another on the necessity of not separating eternity and time. And this whole doctrine that is so curious of the prevalence of l’avenir over the past is condensed in the order in which Hegel enumerates the moments or dimensions of time: now, future, past [maintenant, àvenir, passé].

In this revised view of time, the priority of the future gives way to the priority of the past: “The now is. Essentially. That is what gives to the now— present instant— its ontological primacy and what explains, on the other hand, that the dialectics of the instant forms the necessary counterpart [la contrepartie necessaire] to that of the infinite. The now is immediately, and it is starting from this immediacy that l’avenir and the past constitute themselves.” Summarizing his argument in the final paragraphs, Koyré defines two analytic lines that will shape the direction of interpretations of Hegel during the following decades, and thereby define the alternative poles of critical discourse down to the present day.

134 / Chapter Six 1. The comprehension of time from the perspective of the end of history. “Philosophy of history— and through it Hegelian philosophy, the ‘system’—would be possible only if history had ended; if there were no longer any avenir; only if time could stop.” 2. The comprehension of time on the basis of the logical structure that forms its foundation. “Hegel poses the necessary union, the dialectical identity of essence and existence, of eternity and time, which form the basis for the whole edifice of Hegelianism, the basis of ‘the identity of logic and history,’ consequently the basis of logic and philosophy of history.”

The former reading leads to Alexandre Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, and beyond to twentieth-century neoconservativism and neoliberalism, the latter to Jean Hyppolite’s Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Logic and Existence, and beyond to twentieth-century structuralism and poststructuralism.

End of History In the wake of the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, a group of Derrida’s colleagues held a conference at the University of California– Riverside on April 22, 1993, on the topic “Whither Marxism? Global Crises in International Perspective.” Derrida’s contribution was eventually published in a book entitled Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. In this work, Derrida comments on Fukuyama’s book The End of History and the Last Man, which, he notes, was inspired by Allan Bloom, whose influential Closing of the American Mind he describes as “the grammar school exercise of a young, industrious, but come-lately reader of Kojève (and a few others).” Recognizing echoes of the old in what is promoted as new, Derrida muses, “Is not what we have here a new gospel, the noisiest, the most mediaized [médiatique], the most ‘successful’ one on the subject of the death of Marxism as the end of history? This work frequently resembles, it is true, the disconcerting and tardy by-product of a footnote: nota bene for a certain Kojève who deserved better.” Derrida then proceeds to explain why he thinks Kojève’s work deserves better: Many young people today (of the type “readers-consumers of Fukuyama” or of the type “Fukuyama” himself) probably no longer sufficiently realize it: the eschatological themes of the “end of history,” of the “end of Marxism,” of the “end of philosophy,” of the “ends of man,” of the “last man” and so forth were, in the 1950s, . . . our daily bread. We had this bread of apocalypse in our

French Hegels / 135 mouths naturally, already, just as naturally as that which I nicknamed after the fact, in 1980, the “apocalyptic tone in philosophy.” What was its consistency? What did it taste like? It was, on the one hand, the reading or analysis of those whom we could nickname the classics of the end. They formed the canon of the modern apocalypse (end of History, end of Man, end of Philosophy, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, with their Kojèvian codicil and the codicils of Kojève himself). It was, on the other hand and indissociably, what we had known or what some of us for quite some time no longer hid from concerning totalitarian terror in all the Eastern countries, all the socio-economic disasters of Soviet bureaucracy, the Stalinism of the past and the neo-Stalinism in process. . . . Such was no doubt the element in which what is called deconstruction developed— and one can understand nothing of this period of deconstruction, notably in France, unless one takes this historical entanglement into account.8

In a manner similar to his mentor, Koyré, Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel is a creative misprision that weaves together strands drawn from Marx, Heidegger, and both Eastern and Western mysticism. He was also influenced by the spiritual vision that inspired his uncle’s paintings. In a little-known article, “Les peintures concrètes de Kandinsky,” Kojève explains that Kandinsky’s paintings represent a mixture of philosophical idealism, theosophy, and Russian Orthodoxy. The Russian mystic and occultist Helena Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society to which Kandinsky belonged. The belief that the divine and the human are essentially one is central to all three of these traditions. In this version of the narrative, each human being possesses a divine spark that will be released when it is reunited with the divine totality at the end of history. In a manner similar to Hegel, history is divided into three eras: the ages of the Father, of the Son, and of the Spirit. In an illuminating article entitled “Kandinsky’s Moscow,” Marit Werenskiold explains, “According to Russian Orthodox tradition, Constantinople (Byzantium) was the ‘Second Rome,’ and when that city was conquered by the Muslim Turks in 1453, the succession as the ‘Third Rome’ passed to Moscow, the new and everlasting capital of Christianity. . . . For the Orthodox, the Old Rome represented the Father; the second Rome, Constantinople, symbolized the Son or the Logos; while the third Rome, Moscow, expressed the conviction that the entire collective life of a nation should be inspired by the Holy Spirit.”9 This teleological vision of history was important for many participants in the 1917 Russian Revolution. Kandinsky shared the apocalyptic hopes of his time. In the 1911 preface to Der Blaue Reiter, he and his cowriter Franz Marc echo Hegel’s preface to the Phenomenology when they write, “A great era

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has begun: the spiritual ‘awakening,’ the increasing tendency to regain ‘lost balance,’ the inevitable necessity of spiritual plantings, the unfolding of the first blossom. We are standing at the threshold of one of the greatest epochs that mankind has ever experienced, the epoch of great spirituality.”10 For Kojève, Kandinsky’s spiritual vision resonated with the theology of Vladimir Soloviev, whose work he had explored in his doctoral dissertation. Soloviev’s theology rests upon the central tenet of Eastern Orthodoxy, known as theanthropy, according to which each human being is, like Jesus Christ, fully God and fully human. In other words, the divine and the human, the infinite and the finite, and eternity and time are essentially one. Kojève correctly argues that this belief coincides with Hegel’s speculative rendering of religious Vorstellungen in philosophical Begriffe. For Hegel, identity of God and man first revealed in the finite self-consciousness of Jesus is the truth of the human race as a whole. Geist moves progressively from the individual to the universal until it comes to completion in an all-encompassing global community. As we have seen, Hegel understands the incarnation to be a kenotic process in which the transcendent Father empties himself into the historical person of Jesus, who is first crucified and dies, and then returns to the Father through the Holy Ghost/Spirit. Kojève, following Hegel, underscores the importance of this belief: “In Christianity, the idea of God reaches its culmination, which is at the same time the degradation (the ‘sublation’) of this idea (dialectically reversed). Sensible and material character of Man ( = Jesus) who is identified as God” (ILH, 25). While Kojève stresses the significance of Hegel’s Christology, it is important to note that he makes a subtle but critical revision. While acknowledging the moments of incarnation and crucifixion, he denies the resurrection through which the finite returns to the infinite and time is taken up into eternity. (This revision of Hegel is illustrated in figure 14.) In this reading, the death of God leads to an atheism that reduces infinitude to finitude, and eternity to time. In Kojève’s historicization of the Absolute, there is nothing beyond temporality. Though not immediately evident, this argument turns on the rejection of the Protestant doctrines of law and grace. In direct opposition to Luther, Kierkegaard, Barth, Bultmann, and Heidegger, who argue that Paul offered a corrective to the corruption of the Gospel by the Greeks, Kojève maintains that Paul actually negates what might be called Jesus’s ethical historicism. As we have seen, Paul and Luther argue that the doctrine of salvation by works leads to a theologia gloria that issues in a glorified will to power, which seeks to create the world in its own image. The theologia crucis, by contrast, overturns this exercise of pride and egoism by cultivating a sense of humility that

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Figure 14. God-Man.

receives life as a gift from an unknowable Other. For Kojève, absolute dependence on a transcendent Other creates a passivity that undercuts human striving and renders life meaningless. Geroulanos points out that in his early course on “Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion,” Kojève goes so far as to claim that Paul “destroys Jesus’ ethics of a life of works and reverts to pagan claims on immortality and a Jewish theology of transcendence to put a distant God back in his place. Paul crucifies Jesus a second time and intentionally empties his tomb— and thus his life— of meaning, locating truth only in faith in the resurrection.”11 Kojève notes that Hegel credits Kant’s interpretation of the Epistle to the Romans with first advancing this argument: Pauline dialectical theology . . . identifies Good and Evil; the devil (sin) prepares and provokes Incarnation; it is God who tempts Man (by giving him the Law) so as to be able to incarnate himself (the Law is promulgated so that sin, and therefore redemption, become possible). (Cf. The Epistle to the Romans: sin is replaced by the feeling of sin, and this feeling engenders Faith.) For Saint Paul, salvation is immediate, without effort, without “works” (Conversion). Here lies his mistake. For then, the life of Jesus does not have a meaning (but only his death and resurrection). In reality, the transformation of sin into salvation is not automatic; it demands time; there is between the two an act of freedom, an active life (imitated from Christ). If salvation comes from God, that is Grace, which takes away any value specific to the Christian; moreover, this Grace comes from the atemporal Logos and consequently transcends Time and History. If it comes from Man,—then neither did Adam lose men, nor did Jesus save them. Thus, Kant will say: Jesus is a simple exemplary man. (ILH, 263)

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But even Kant did not carry the analysis of time and temporality far enough. Summarizing Kant’s criticism of Paul’s notion of divine transcendence and human immortality, Kojève writes, “For Kant, the Concept— while remaining eternal—is related to Time taken as Time” (IRH, 131). Hegel radicalizes Kant’s interpretation of time when he declares, “Geist ist Zeit.” Kojève elaborates this point: “Therefore: ‘die Zeit ist der daseiende Begriff selbst’ means: Time is Man in the World and his real History” (IRH, 139). Time is self . . . Self is time. This is Kojève’s version of Hegel’s answer to the question of the relation between time and self. We have seen that Kant presents his most comprehensive account of time in his analysis of theoretical reason in the First Critique. Time and space are the forms of intuition that mediate the atemporal categories of understanding and the ever-changing sensible manifold of intuition. The agency responsible for this transcendental synthesis is the imagination. Hegel shifts the argument from theoretical to practical reason. The core of Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel’s argument appears in two very important lengthy footnotes in “Note on Eternity, Time, and the Concept” from the 1938/39 lectures: For Kant, the Concepts (= Categories) apply to given Being (Sein) because Time serves as their “Schema”—that is, as intermediary or “mediation” (Vermittlung, in Hegel). But this “mediation” is purely passive: Time is contemplation, intuition, Anschauung. In Hegel, on the other hand, the “mediation” is active; it is Tat or Tun, Action negating the given, the activity of Fighting and Work. Now, this Negation of the given (of Sein) or of the “present” is (historical [as distinguished from natural]) Time, and (historical) Time is this active Negation. In Hegel as in Kant, therefore, Time is what allows the application of the Concept to Being. But in Hegel, this Time that mediates conceptual thought is “materialized”: it is a movement (Bewegung), and a dialectical “movement”—that is, precisely, it is active— hence it negates, hence it transforms (the given), hence it creates (new things). If Man can understand (reveal) Being by the Concept, it is because he transforms (given) Being in terms of this Concept (which is then a Project) and makes it conform to it. . . . Being becomes conformable to the Concept (at the end of History) through the completed totality of negating Action which transforms Being in terms of this same Concept. Therefore: in Kant, Time is “schema” and passive “intuition”; in Hegel, it is “movement” and conscious and voluntary “action.” Consequently, the Concept or the a priori in Kant is a “notion,” which allows Man to conform to given Being; whereas in Hegel, the a priori Concept is a “project,” which allows Man to transform given Being and make it conform. (IRH, 142n33)

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In this pivotal passage, Kojève’s rendering of Hegel’s argument presents the instrumental interpretation of reason that Heidegger argues is concretely, or “materially,” realized in modern technology. Nowhere does Heidegger acknowledge that Hegel already realized this implication of his own argument. As for Hegel, practical reason expresses itself in human projects through “fighting [war] and work.” “Human work,” he proceeds to explain, “is what temporalizes the spatial natural World; Work, therefore, is what engenders the Concept which exists in the natural World while being something other than this World; Work, therefore, is what engenders Man in this World, Work is what transforms the purely natural World into a technical World [emphasis added] inhabited by Man— that is, into a historical World” (IRH, 145). The time of constructive reason is the time of the project, and the time of the project is the time that privileges the future. In other words, Kojève’s reading of Hegel rests on the interpretation of time Koyré presents in “Hegel at Jena”: Now, curiously enough, the crucial text on Time is found in the “Philosophy of Nature” of the Jenenser Realphilosophie. Mr. Alexandre Koyré has done a translation and commentary of this text in an article which resulted from his course on the writings of Hegel’s youth: a conclusive article, which is the source and basis of my interpretation of the Phenomenology. Here I shall merely reproduce in a few words the principal consequences implied by Mr. Koyré’s analysis. The text in question clearly shows that the Time that Hegel has in view is the Time that, for us, is historical (and not biological or cosmic) Time. In effect, this Time is characterized by the primacy of the Future. In the Time that pre-Hegelian Philosophy considered, the movement went from the Past toward the Future, by way of the Present. In the Time of which Hegel speaks, on the other hand, the movement is engendered in the Future and goes toward the Present by way of the Past: Future → Past → Present (→ Future). And this is indeed the specific structure of properly human—that is, historical—Time. (IRH, 133– 34)

Active Hegelian reason creates the world in its own image out of the future that approaches the present. This process of construction involves the negation and destruction of the “given (Befindlichkeit),”—that is to say, other people in war and the natural world in work. Kojève proceeds to add a very important point: “The movement engendered by the Future is the movement that arises from Desire” (IRH, 134). In Kojève’s rendering of Hegel’s argument, nothing can resist human desire; in other words, desire is all-consuming and negates whatever attempts to resist it.

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As we saw in the second chapter and as we will see in more detail in chapter 9, constructive reason driven by desire forms the foundation of contemporary theory of social constructivism. In her formative book, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France, Judith Butler extends Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel’s argument from history to nature (i.e., sexuality and gender), arguing that his “normative view, that desire must become manifest as a thoroughgoing experience of ‘conscious and voluntary progress’ implies that all claims regarding innate drives or natural teleologies to human affectivity must be dismissed as mistaken. Insofar as the givenness of an agent’s own biological life is to be transformed into a creation of will, Kojève is proposing that desire be regarded as an instrument of freedom. The reification of desire as a natural phenomenon is, then, the arbitrary restriction of desire to certain ends, and the unjustifiable elevation of those ends to a natural or necessary status. As an expression of freedom, desire becomes a kind of choice.”12 What consistently is overlooked by Butler and her followers is that social constructivism is a latter-day idealism that reinscribes the will to power and mastery it is designed to subvert. If nature is merely a sociocultural construction, nothing is finally given and everything would seem to be open to being changed through the purported freedom of choice. But what kind of choice is this, and what is the price of such “freedom”? The satisfaction of desire appears to realize autonomy by closing the loop of self-reflexivity. Heidegger would seem to be right when he claims that “everywhere man [sic] turns he sees only himself.” As we have seen, however, just when autonomy appears to be complete, a more radical heteronomy inevitably insinuates itself. To understand the implications of Kojève’s interpretation of time and freedom, it is necessary to consider more carefully the close interrelation of Hegel’s concept, negation, time, and desire. It is somewhat misleading to claim that Kojève presents a study of the Phenomenology of Spirit because he analyzes only chapter 4, where Hegel considers desire, the struggle for recognition, and the master-slave relationship. In my discussion of Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel’s view of negation, I stressed that he presents only one side of the dialectical analysis (incarnation and crucifixion) but overlooks resurrection. In different terms, Kojève describes spirit or the concept’s selfalienation or externalization, but does not consider its self-reconciliation through the interrelated processes of Erinnerung and Aufhebung. In this way, he reduces God to man, the infinite to the finite, and the eternal to time. This insight further clarifies Kojeve’s appropriation of Hegel’s interpretation of the process through which the concept becomes time and time becomes the concept (see fig. 15).

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Figure 15. Time and Concept.

In the Science of Logic, we discovered that Hegel defines the Logos, or the essence of logic, as the self-reflexive structure of double negation. Every determinate being becomes itself in and through the negation of, and reconciliation with, an other. Since identity is difference and difference is identity, reason does not involve calm and dispassionate reflection; to the contrary, reason is the infinitely passionate and endlessly restless creative-destructive process of negation. Kojève makes this crucial point in an astonishing passage, which inexplicably was excluded from the English translation of his work: The Selbst, that is to say, Man properly so called or the free Individual,—is Time; and Time is History, and History alone. (Which, besides, is “das wissende Werden,” “the knowing becoming” of the Spirit, that is to say, ultimately, philosophical evolution). And Man is essentially Negativity, for Time is Becoming, that is the annihilation [anéantissement] of Being or of Space. Man is then a Nothingness (Néant) which annihilates [néantit] and which only maintains itself in (spatial) Being by denying [niant] being, this Negation being Action. However, if Man is Negativity, that is to say, Time, he is not eternal. He is born and dies as Man. He is “das Negative seiner selbst,” [as] Hegel says. We know what this means: Man sublates himself as Action (or Selbst) by ceasing to oppose himself to the World, after having created in it the universal and homogenous State [l’État universel et homogène]; or else, on the cognitive plane: Man sublates himself as Error [l’Erreur] (or “Subject” opposed to Object) after having created the Truth of “Science.” (ILH, 435)

The self, then, is time is negativity is becoming is the annihilation of Being. Man is negativity is not eternal is born and dies. He is negativity itself— nothing but nothing (un Néant).

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The nothingness of man is the absence of (double genitive) desire. Kojève continues his reading of Koyré’s account of time: “The movement engendered by the Future is the movement that arises from Desire. This means: from specifically human Desire— that is, creative Desire— that is, Desire that is directed toward an entity that does not exist and has not existed in the real natural World. Only then can the movement be said to be engendered by the Future, for the Future is precisely what does not (yet) exist and has not (already) existed. Now, we know that Desire can be directed toward an absolutely nonexistent entity only provided that it is directed toward another Desire taken as Desire. As a matter of fact, Desire is the presence of an absence” (IRH, 134).13 Though not explicitatly stated, this argument presupposes a distinction between need, which is animal (i.e., natural), and desire, which is human (i.e., historical). Rather than fulfilling animal needs, desire is intersubjective; that is to say, it is not the desire for some particular thing or object, but is the desire of another’s desire. To be human is to be recognized as such by another human being. Kojève makes this point in the enigmatic phrase that suggests the trajectory of his entire interpretation of selfconsciousness: “Desire is the presence of an absence.” The dialectic of desire moves through the struggle for recognition to the master-slave relationship until competing subjects achieve mutual recognition. I began by suggesting that for Hegel, the truth is the way, and the way is the Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel and his fellow wayfarers pass through the dread and despair of the Stations of the Cross on their way to the satisfaction and fulfillment enjoyed in the kingdom of absolute knowledge. This arduous journey to selfhood begins with desire and reaches its turning point in the confrontation with death (crucifixion) in the struggle for recognition. The most primitive form of self-consciousness is desire. The point of departure for Hegel’s dialectic of self-consciousness is the same as that of Descartes, who launched modern philosophy by collapsing (objective) truth into (subjective) self-certainty. The desiring subject that is implicitly (an sich) certain of being the sum of all reality, seeks to assert its own substantiality and independence and to establish the insubstantiality and dependence of whatever opposes it by negating its object. “Certain of the nothingness of this other, it explicitly affirms that this nothingness is for it [für sich] the truth of the other; it destroys the independent object and thereby gives itself the certainty of itself as a true certainty, a certainty which has become explicit for self-consciousness itself in an objective manner” (PS, 109). In its most rudimentary form, desire is always frustrated because it is insatiable— it perpetually requires another object through whose negation it can assert itself. Always seeking to assert itself through the negation of its object, the

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desiring subject actually negates its own self-sufficiency and demonstrates its dependence on the object of its desire. At this point there is a shift from need to the distinctive form of human desire —the self-assertion through the negation of objects is transformed into the struggle between desiring subjects. The world of things always leaves subjects wanting, and self-consciousness discovers that it “can achieve satisfaction only when the object itself effects the negation within itself” (PS, 109). The self-negation of the other upon which the truth of self-consciousness depends can be brought about solely by a self-conscious being. In other words, “Self-consciousness achieves its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness” (PS, 110). This insight forms the essential link in Hegel’s dialectical analysis of spirit. The progress toward complete self-consciousness involves the movement from heteronomy to autonomy in which relation to the other becomes mediated self-relation. “Self-consciousness,” Hegel argues, “exists in and for itself [an und für sich sein] when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another [ein anderes]; that is, it exists only in being recognized [es ist nur al sein Anerkanntes]” (PS, 111; translation modified). In order to establish the objective truth of its subjective certainty, a self-conscious subject must confront another self-conscious agent and win from that other the acknowledgment of the subject’s own substantiality and autonomy. The recognition granted by the other presupposes the other’s own self-negation as an autonomous individual. Since the other is also a self-conscious being, however, he or she is an equal partner in the struggle for recognition and seeks the same acknowledgment from the subject confronting him or her. Consequently, the endeavor of each self-conscious subject to affirm itself by exacting the self-negation of its other is the effort to negate its own negation. In the language of Hegel’s speculative logic, the self-identity of the participants in the struggle for recognition is mediated by the negation of negation (i.e., difference, otherness). Since the outcome of this struggle for recognition is always uncertain, participants must confront the prospect of their own death. Kojève borrows the notion of the necessity of facing death for achieving authentic selfhood from Heidegger, but he changes it significantly. While for Heidegger the confrontation with death singles out the individual from all others and makes him or her aware of his or her unique individuality, for Kojève, following Hegel, the confrontation with death reveals the inextricable interrelation with other people. In the course of the struggle for recognition, one subject decides that life is more important than recognition and capitulates to the other by becoming a slave to a master. In Hegel’s dialectical vision, the slave drives history through labor. This insight is, of course, the foundation of Marx’s entire interpretation of capitalism.

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The master, who appears to be free, is, in fact, dependent on the labor of the slave, and the slave, who appears to be in bondage, is actually the master of the master. Through a prolonged struggle, the fluctuating asymmetry of the master-slave relationship eventually leads to a mutual recognition of the subjects’ codependence. In this specular relation, determinate subjects are bound together in an internal relationship of double negativity: “Each is for the other the mean, through which each mediates itself with itself and unites with itself; and each is for itself, and for the other, an immediate being on its own account, which at the same time is such only through this mediation. They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another” (PS, 112; translation modified). This intersubjectivity constitutes authentic spirit, which Hegel defines as an “‘I’ that is ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I’” (PS, 110). At the beginning of this chapter, I suggested that one of the reasons many French intellectuals found Hegel’s philosophy so attractive was that it gave them a way to make sense out of the violence, destruction, and death that plagued the first half of the twentieth century, and enabled them to continue to believe in purpose without embracing any religious eschatology. For Kojève and many of his followers, Hegel was right— history is a slaughter bench. Since human beings are temporal and time is negation, which issues in annihilation, individuals become themselves through work and war. In the former they negate nature; in the latter they negate other human beings. History is the expression of the will to power and the struggle for mastery in which everything and everybody becomes a standing reserve awaiting exploitation. But Hegel’s story does not end there— he gives his narrative a teleological twist. In effect, he secularizes the Christian doctrine of Providence to create an historical theodicy. As a result of the “cunning of reason,” truth emerges through error, good through evil, and peace through war. The selfconsciousness of spirit, which dawns in the historical person of Jesus must become universal by its extension first throughout the religious community, and then, as Paul first proclaimed, spreading to the entire world. Hegel was convinced that his time was a revolutionary moment in history and was poised to take a “qualitative leap [qualitativer Sprung].” In the preface to the Phenomenology, he writes, “Ours is a birth-time and a period of transition to a new era. Spirit has broken with the world it has hitherto inhabited and imagined” (PS, 6). Napoleon was the embodiment of this new era; Hegel wrote the preface, after completing the book, with the Battle of Jena raging nearby. From his window he reportedly saw the emperor passing through the city, and famously declared that he had seen “world spirit on

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horseback.” Just as he secularized Providence, so he secularized the kingdom of God; the kingdom becomes the modern secular state rather than a religious community. In this version of the story, Kandinsky was wrong— the third Rome would not be Moscow and the Kremlin but Prussia, and this third kingdom would turn out to be the Third Reich (Reich, “kingdom, empire”). Kojève appropriates Hegel’s secularized theology of history. In the crucial footnote in “A Note on Eternity, Time, and the Concept,” which we considered above, he writes: “Being becomes conformable to the Concept (at the end of History) [emphasis added] through the completed totality of negating Action which transforms Being in terms of this same Concept.” Kojève realizes that this conclusion brings Hegel’s argument full circle. He compares Hegel’s view of the cyclicality of time with alternative interpretations in a very suggestive set of figures (fig. 16). The important point to note in this depiction of Hegel’s position is that the circle is completely finite and totally temporal. In Kojève’s atheism, there is no transcendence. He underscores this in an untranslated text from a book entitled L’athéisme (which was originally published in Russian and later translated into French): “‘Man in the World’ as ‘Man who lives in the world’ constitutes a homogeneous whole closed in itself (in its givenness to itself), . . . delimited from all sides by death” (emphasis added).14 In an untranslated passage that is the foundation of Fukuyama’s entire argument, Kojève writes, As a last analysis, this State does not change anymore, for all its Citizens are “satisfied” (befriedigt). I am fully and definitively “satisfied,” when my personality, exclusively mine, is “recognized” (in its reality and in its value, its “dignity”) by all, on condition that I myself “recognize” the reality of the value of those who are supposed to have [the duty] to “recognize” me. Being “satisfied,”—it means being “unique in the world and (nonetheless) universally valuable.” However, this is what is realized for the Citizen of the universal and homogenous State [l’État universel et homogène]. . . . The Particular (self) relates directly to the Universal (State), without there being screens formed by “specific differences.” . . . That is to say that in the post-revolutionary World, Individuality realizes itself (for the first time). However, being an Individual, that is being Man itself,—it is to be “satisfied,” it is not wanting to, therefore not being able to, “transcend” oneself, becoming other than what one is. To understand oneself would then be to understand the integral, definitive, “perfect” Man. That is what Hegel does within and through his System. (ILH, 145– 46)

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Figure 16. Alexandre Kojève, Figures from “A Note on Eternity, Time, and the Concept,” ILR, 119.

This homogeneous modern state, whose machinations repress singular individuals and standardize knowledge, attitudes, and lives is precisely the result of Hegelianism that Kierkegaard had seen in nineteenth-century Denmark. For Kojève, the emergence of the modern state marks the end of history and the death of man. To follow the logic of this influential argument, it is helpful to return to my chart (fig. 17). If man is time and the human form of time (i.e., history) is desire, which is negation, then the satisfaction of desire, which is the end of negation, is the death of man and the end of

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Figure 17. Time, Desire, Death.

history. This kingdom does not arrive as an otherworldly realm where immortal souls ascend, but as a worldly realm where natural needs are met and human desire is satisfied. Kojève describes the closing of the circle of history in Edenic terms— after the Fall, the Garden returns as the Kingdom. “The end of human Time, or History . . . means quite simply the cessation of Action in the full sense of the term. Practically, this means the disappearance of wars and bloody revolutions. And also the disappearance of Philosophy; for since Man himself no longer changes essentially, there is no longer any reason to change the (true) principles which are at the basis of his understanding of the world and of himself. But all the rest can be preserved indefinitely; art, love, play, etc.; in short, everything that makes man happy” (ILH, 235n). For Hegel, this kingdom was Germany, whose capital eventually became Berlin, where he lectured at the height of his fame and today lies buried in Dorotheenstädtische Cemetery. For Fukuyama, this kingdom appeared to be global capitalism, which emerged with the falling of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Kojève appropriated Hegel’s teleological vision of history, but in the end agreed with his uncle Kandinsky— the third Reich would not be Germany but the Soviet Union. Though the end of history is the modern state, its embodiment is Stalin, not Napoleon. Raymond Aron, who attended Kojève’s lectures, reported that Kojève often described himself as “a Stalinist of strict observance.”15 Indeed, one time Kojève went so far as to claim that he was “Stalin’s conscience.”16 True to his philosophical and political convictions, Kojève left the academic world and in 1948 took a position at the National Center of Foreign Commerce of the French Ministry of Economic Affairs. In this capacity he

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was instrumental in laying the groundwork for both the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT, 1947) and the European Union. The head of the office where Kojève worked was Charles Hernu, who was reported to have spied for Romanian, Bulgarian, and Soviet secret agencies during the 1950s and 1960s. In an article entitled “The Spy Who Loved Hegel,” Matthew Price reports that in 1999 “Le Monde published allegations . . . that the philosopher Alexandre Kojève spied for the Soviet Union for the last thirty years of his life. Le Monde cited a three-page memo that France’s counterespionage service, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), had compiled in 1982– 83 under the title ‘L’espionnage de l’Est et la guache’ (Eastern-bloc espionage and the left). If the DST memo was accurate, the newspaper wrote, Kojève ‘would have played an important role in the networks of Charles Hernu and of the KGB.’”17 While the report was hotly debated and never definitively confirmed, there is considerable evidence that Kojève’s dedication to the modern “homogeneous state” did, in fact, include espionage activity.

Structure and Event Gilles Deleuze begins a review of his erstwhile teacher’s book Logic and Existence (1952) by writing, “That philosophy must be ontology means first of all that it is not anthropology” (LE, 191).18 Hyppolite rejected Kojève’s reading of Hegel for philosophical, ethical, and religious reasons; in his important but overlooked book, Hyppolite confidently claims, “Absolute knowledge is not an anthropology” (LE, 179). He acknowledges that if only the Phenomenology or a very select part of it is considered, the humanistic and atheistic interpretation of Hegel is plausible. He insists, however, “The Logic . . . explains the Phenomenology. Philosophy, Hegel says, must alienate itself. Experience and the Logos are not opposed. The discourse of experience and the discourse of being, the a posteriori and the a priori, correspond to one another and mutually require one another” (LE, 36). In a manner similar to Marx’s revision of Hegel, Hyppolite stands Kojève’s account of Hegel on its head. While Kojève reduces logic to man in the form of the negativity of desire driving history, Hyppolite reduces man to logic in the form of language or discourse speaking through man. This results in the radical decentering of the subject, which leads to thoroughgoing antisubjectivism. Given Kojève’s preoccupation with war and work, it might seem surprising that one of the reasons Hyppolite disagrees with Kojève’s position is that he does not think he does justice to the tragic dimensions of life. In Kojève’s just-so story, all evil is redeemed, all error overcome, and everyone

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lives happily ever after. But life is not so comforting and history is not so rational. In an essay entitled “L’existence dans la phénoménologie de Hegel” (1946), Hyppolite suggests that Hegel presents an interpretation of human existence that is the opposite of Kierkegaard, who did actually appreciate the inescapably tragic aspects of life: The true life of spirit is not only the one that withdraws from or is aware that to live authentically one must face death, it is the one that interiorizes death within itself and ‘possesses the magical ability to convert the negative into being.’ This power is identical to what Hegel names Subject; a subject who carries human history in its becoming, and does not limit itself to the sole historicity of an existing entity. . . . Across the tragedy of oppositions, which are always necessary there is the revelation of a concrete universal, which manifests itself through history. This unity of the transcendent and the immanent, this God who dies in man, while man elevates himself to God through history, which judges him, this passing beyond [depassement] existences which appear at the end of the Phenomenology, isn’t this the opposite of an existential philosophy like that which Kierkegaard believed?19

The recognition of the inevitability and irresolvability of tragedy is the basis of his account of Hegel in his monumental study Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit.” In contrast to Kojève’s sole focus is the struggle for recognition and the master-slave relation, Hyppolite concentrates on Hegel’s interpretation of unhappy consciousness. Though Hyppolite never explicitly cites Kierkegaard, it is clear that Kierkegaard is a paradigm of this form of life. Indeed, it is not too much to say that Genesis and Structure represents a Kierkegaardian reading of Hegel. The argument is so thorough and persuasive that this book, in my judgment, remains the best interpretation of the Phenomenology. The absence of a tragic sense of life is not the only reason Hyppolite cannot accept Kojève’s argument. Hyppolite is convinced that Kojève’s radical immanentism undercuts the foundation of thought and action by historically relativizing truth and the moral law. For Hyppolite, this foundation can be found in Hegel’s logical rendering of the theological notion of the Logos. As is evident from the titles of his two major books, Genesis and Structure, Existence and Logic, Hyppolite always remained preoccupied with the question of the relationship between reason and time/history, or structure and event. I have noted, Hyppolite’s work had a major impact on the big three of philosophy and literary theory— Deleuze, Foucault, and Derrida. In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Foucault echoed his teacher’s

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assessment of Hegel’s importance: “Whether through logic or epistemology, whether through Marx or Nietzsche, our entire epoch struggles to disengage itself from Hegel.”20 Hyppolite’s influence, however, was not limited to these three formative figures, but extended to important writers like Guy Debord, Georges Canguilhem, and Alain Badiou. Some versions of structuralism and poststructuralism, Debord’s society of the spectacle, Foucault’s genealogy, Badiou’s event, Deleuze’s rhizomic differences, and Derrida’s différance would not have possible without Hyppolite’s account of Hegel. The competing alternatives of structuralism and poststructuralism define the poles of Derrida’s argument in an article whose title he borrows from his teacher’s study of Hegel— “‘Genesis and Structure’ and Phenomenology.” This essay is included in Writing and Difference, which was one of the books Derrida published in 1967 that launched what became deconstruction. While Derrida’s analysis focuses on Husserl, his argument echoes Hyppolite’s interpretation of Hegel: “Husserl, thus, ceaselessly attempts to reconcile the structuralist demand (which leads to the comprehensive description of a totality, of a form or a function organized according to an internal legality in which elements have meaning only in the solidarity of their correlation or their opposition), with the genetic demand (that is the search for the origin and foundation of the structure). One could show, perhaps, that the phenomenological project itself is born of an initial failure of this attempt” (WD, 157). The distinction between a “structuralist demand,” which involves an internal legality, and a “genetic demand,” which involves the search for origin or foundation, was formulated in many different ways in subsequent philosophical and critical debates: a priori/a posteriori, synchronicity/diachronicity, universality/particularity, identity/difference, Logos/history, eternity/time. What so far has gone unnoticed is that these alternatives have a theological genealogy: on the one hand, the theology of the word/Logos/reason (“In the beginning was the Word”; John 1:1), and, on the other, the theology of the deed/will (“In the beginning is the deed”; Goethe and Freud). In terms dating back to Paul and Luther, these two positions represent a theology of the law (structure— theologia gloria) versus a theology or a/theology of grace (deed— theologia crucis). Derrida was writing his essay on Husserl at the time of the Johns Hopkins conference, where, I have noted, both structuralism and poststructuralism were first introduced in America. In his introduction to the published collection of the proceedings, Richard Macksey suggestively situates the debate not only in terms of philosophy and literary criticism, but also in relation to contemporary discussions of cybernetics linguistics, communication, information, and game theory. “By far the most famous of recent applications of

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games to human behavior,” he observes, is “the work of John von Neumann and his colleagues on formal decision theory in economics and strategic conflict situations (SC, 8).” By establishing an analogy between games and language, it becomes possible to interpret texts in terms of prescribed moves in a game or commands programmed into a computer. In his contribution to the conference, Hyppolite demonstrates a direct line from Hegel’s logic to linguistic structuralism as well as game, communication, information, and network theory. His point of departure is the recognition that, for Hegel, “Absolute thought thinks itself through our thought” (LE, 58). As I have argued, Hyppolite regards the foundation of Hegel’s system to be logic, which he elsewhere explains appears in human cognition as language: “There is no thought outside of language. . . . Hegel’s philosophy is dominated by the problem of language, which he called ‘the child and the instrument of intelligence’; the child, because language is consubstantial with thought, because language is our original milieu, and because language cannot be separated from thought nor thought from language; and the instrument because it is the means by which meaning is transmitted and therefore the means of communication, but a means which never has the total objectivity of a tool. Language is the subject-object or the object-subject” (SC, 160– 61). To develop the implications of this insight, he turns to the linguists Louis Hjelmslev and Émile Beneviste. When considering Hyppolite’s appropriation of linguistics, it is important to recall that Saussure was teaching at École des hautes études at the time he and Kojève were students there. Hyppolite’s analysis of Hegel reflects Saussure’s distinction between la langue (language) and la parole (speech). Language is the eternal, universal structural condition of the possibility of particular, temporal speech events. In terms of the two tracks in Hegel’s philosophy, the Logic is la langue, which is the foundation of the Phenomenology, which is la parole. In this reading of Hegel, the Logic is a priori, universal, and atemporal, while the Phenomenology is a posteriori, particular, and temporal. “There are, shall we say, speech and language, and there are also phenomenology and logic. . . . There is also the language which contains the determinations and articulations of thought and which is what Hegel calls Logos, a logic which is not the formal logic of the past, but which is the architecture of universal language and of the structures of language, in which all the determinations of thought are linked together” (SC, 167). This formulation of the relation between language/structure and speech/ event harbors far-reaching implications. Since la langue in-forms la parole, or in Heidegger’s later formulation, Sprache sprecht, language— the Word— creates man; man does not create language. In terms Lacan appropriates,

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Hyppolite explains, “It is only in language that the I exists for others, that, as Hegel says, it is universal and singular at the same time” (SC, 161). Lacan attended the Johns Hopkins conference, and in the published proceedings, his address, entitled “Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever,” comes directly after Hyppolite’s contribution. Lacan translates Hegel’s logic/Logos into what he labels the “Symbolic Order.” Just as the “I” exists only in language for Hegel, so the subject is constituted by its inscription in the “Symbolic Order” for Lacan. Retro-reading Hegel through Freud, Lacan further decenters the subject by shifting its structural foundation from consciousness and self-consciousness to the unconscious. In “The Function and Field of Speech [la parole] and Language [la langue],” Lacan argues that this move marks the end of the modern philosophy of subjectivity that begins with Descartes and comes to closure with Hegel: “These principles are simply the dialectic of the consciousness-of-self, as realized from Socrates to Hegel, from the ironic presupposition that all that is rational is real to its culmination in the scientific view that all that is real is rational. But Freud’s discovery was to demonstrate that this verifying process authentically attains the subject only by decentering him from the consciousness-of-self, in the axis of which the Hegelian reconstruction of the phenomenology of mind, maintained it.”21 While Lacan’s synthesis of Hegel (reason) and Freud (unreason) is undeniably innovative, his claim to have surpassed Hegel is excessive. Lacan’s decentering of the subject merely deepens the decentering that had already occurred in Hegel’s logocentrism and, as we will see, in Heidegger’s view of language. I have already noted that Koyré, Kojève, and Hyppolite all retro-read Hegel through Heidegger. Their different readings of Hegel reflect contrasting interpretations of Heidegger. While Kojève is more interested in Heidegger’s account of the individual’s confrontation with death and human becoming in Being and Time, Hyppolite is more drawn to Heidegger’s understanding of language and his correlative notion of truth as aletheia in Heidegger’s later work. In one of the most revealing passages in his entire corpus, Hyppolite reads Hegel’s Logic through Heidegger’s description of language as “the house of being.” Returning to the quintessential modern notion of freedom, Hyppolite argues that freedom is not radical autonomy in which human beings secure their independence; to the contrary, freedom entails a radical heteronomy in which human beings become vehicles for the selfsurpassing Logos: Man does not possess the freedom that allows him to wander from one determination to another or to be dissolved in abstract nothingness; rather, free-

French Hegels / 153 dom possesses man. Nothingness is not then between the for-itself and the in-itself; it is the very nothingness of being or the being of nothingness. . . . Through this freedom, which Hegel says is immanent to all history, which Hegel says is the absolute Idea of history . . . man does not conquer himself as man, but becomes the house (la demeure) of the Universal, of the Logos of Being, and becomes capable of Truth. In this opening which allows the existents [sic] of Nature, and history itself, to be clarified, to be conceived, Being comprehends itself as this eternal self-engendering; it is Logic in Hegel’s sense, absolute knowledge. Man then exists as the natural Dasein in which being’s universal self-consciousness appears. Man is the trace [emphasis added] of this self-consciousness, but an indispensable trace without which selfconsciousness would not be. Logic and Existence are here joined. (LE, 187)

The question that remains is whether the Logos is transparently present here and now in the subject’s self-reflexivity, or whether the Logos is shadowed by an unassimilable and incomprehensible Other that remains forever obscure. Hyppolite’s understanding of the relation between Hegel’s Logic and Phenomenology leads to two types of structuralism as well as the poststructural critique of every such foundationalism. The first version extends the analysis of structural linguistics to all social and cultural phenomena, and the second version expands structural analysis to include media, information, communications, and technological networks. In the overture to The Raw and the Cooked, (1964) Lévi-Strauss elaborates Saussure’s distinction between language and speech: “What I have tried to give is an outline of the syntax of South American mythology. Should fresh data come to hand, they will be used to check or modify the formulation of certain grammatical laws, so that some are abandoned and replaced by new ones.”22 This version of structuralism depends on a second important distinction Saussure makes, in his seminal Course in General Linguistics (1916), where he famously claims, “In language there are only differences.”23 This is, in effect, a transcription of Hegel’s claim that identity is differential. Lévi-Strauss appropriates this insight in his analysis of social communities: “Numerous communities . . . express their different originalities by manipulating the resources of a dialectical system of contrasts and correlations within the framework of a common conception of the world.”24 Since identity and difference are dialectically related, they can be fully determined only within the context of a systematic totality. According to Lévi-Strauss, structuralism “introduces the concept of system.”25 He develops this important point by drawing on the work of the Russian linguist Nikolay Trubetzkoy: “Modern phonemics does not merely proclaim that phonemes are always part of a system; it shows concrete pho-

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nemic systems and elucidates their structure’—; finally, structural linguistics aims at discovering general laws, either by induction ‘or . . . by logical deduction, which would give them an absolute character.’”26 This system is closed, “autonomous,” and functions “independent of any subject.”27 In the course of explaining the details of such systemic operations, Lévi-Strauss makes a further connection that points to Hyppolite’s association of structural linguistics with media, information, communications, and technological networks. The syntax and grammatical laws underlying mental operations are “codes.” Rather than focusing on individual thinking subjects, Lévi-Strauss argues, it is more productive to analyze “the thinking process” that takes place in the same way through different individuals. “For what I am concerned to clarify is not so much what there is in myths (without, incidentally, being in man’s consciousness) as the system of axioms and postulates defining the best possible code [emphasis added], capable of conferring a common significance on unconscious formulations which are the work of minds, societies, and civilizations chosen from among those most remote from each other. As the myths themselves are based on secondary codes (the primary codes being those that provide the substance of language), the present work is put forward as a tentative draft of a tertiary code, which is intended to ensure the reciprocal translatability of several myths.”.28 Since these codes are universal, they operate in all people in all places at all times. In a manner reminiscent of Kant’s transcendental categories and Hegel’s supervening Logos, Lévi-Strauss maintains that one (unconscious) mind is active in all individual (unconscious) minds. One of the most startling and innovative aspects of Hyppolite’s argument in Logic and Existence is his suggestion that Hegel’s logic can be understood in terms of information, communications, and technological networks. In the years after the Second World War, early advances in information theory and coding expanded beyond military deployments and began to transform society. The cybernetic revolution that was critical for the Allies’ victory led to technological innovations whose impact extended far beyond the ends for which they were originally designed. The most important development was of course computers, which, rapidly becoming faster and smaller during the middle decades of the twentieth century, expanded beyond military and corporate use to personal consumer and entertainment applications. In addition to this, cybernetics led to increasingly sophisticated machine/human interfaces, which became possible with advances in the biological sciences. The major breakthrough came in 1953 (the year after Logic and Existence was published), when Watson and Crick untangled the mystery of the double helix. What unites these developments is that they are all based on digital

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code. When taken together, they created the digital revolution that is still rocking our world. Hyppolite’s genius was to see the close connection between complicated nineteenth-century philosophical ideas and twentieth-century technology. Computer networks, which started as local and quickly became worldwide webs, can be understood as the technological realization of Hegel’s notion of objective Geist. But the relationship between Hegelian idealism and the network revolution is more than technological. During the latter half of the twentieth century, the understanding of information expanded to include all social, economic, and even biological processes. Just as Hegel argued that logic is embodied in natural and social processes, so today’s wired world can be understood in terms of distributed information. If human minds and bodies as well as cultural, social, economic, and political processes are all digital, then information is fungible and the networks are— like Hegel’s logic, nature, and history— all inextricably interrelated and therefore completely interactive. These networks are not static, serial, and linear, but are, like Hegel’s Geist, complex nonlinear emergent adaptive networks. When understood in this way, Hegel’s dialectical opposites became structuralism’s binary opposites, which then became the digital code operating in computerized information systems running on a global technological infrastructure. Though Hyppolite obviously could not have predicted the extraordinary speed with which these changes have taken place, when read retrospectively, his analysis becomes extraordinarily prescient. The key to his insight is his comparison of the elements in Hegel’s speculative logic to “nodes” in a network. Since Hegel insists that logic is not restricted to mental functioning but is ontological, it forms the infrastructure of both natural and historical processing. In other words, these networks can be biological, social, economic, cultural, and technological. Hyppolite states, Speculative logic therefore takes up all the nodes of determinations experienced in their isolation. But it does not turn them into rules or instruments. Speculative logic grasps them in itself and for itself, as moments of the universal, which is the base and the soil of their development. These determinations are no longer object (Gegenstand), as in the sensible world, the a posteriori of experience; they are phases of an absolute genesis (Entstehen). Their necessary and a priori character consists in this absolute genesis But this a priori is identical to the a posteriori. This a priori encloses alterity and determination within itself, without being sensible. In its universality, it contains the intellectual structure that supports all of the sensible, of which it is the truth for-itself. . . .

156 / Chapter Six One has to recognize therefore the human difficulty of this task [of reconciling the universal and the particular]; constantly, the philosopher who expounds this logic adds to it historical commentaries, reflections external to the thing itself. He indeed strives to rediscover all the categorial nodes in their immanent order. But, in this regard, his work will be perfectible, since the nodes are moments of an infinite (and yet closed upon itself) network [emphasis added]. (LE, 66– 67)

Hyppolite identifies two forms of networks, which correspond to Hegel’s distinction between machinic Verstand and organic Vernunft. The first, which is mathematical and algorithmic, creates “a system of signs” whose operation is limited. “A mathematical algorithm exists,” Hyppolite admits; he also argues, “The understanding, however, misunderstands the speculative. Its critique of language can be valuable only up to a certain point beyond which, the external and the internal being separated, thought . . . ends up losing all sense and being reduced to a calculus which is an exterior manipulation of symbols” (LE, 45; emphasis added). This external manipulation, Hyppolite (following Hegel) insists, is “a blind thought, for which we could substitute a machine” (LE, 45). It is hard to imagine a better description of a machine learning characteristic of early Artificial Intelligence programs. “Hegelian logic,” by contrast, “is the opposite of this formalism”; Hyppolite explains that “dialectic has nothing to do with mathematical demonstrations, and the authentic logic has nothing to do with algebraic calculations” (LE, 45). Instead of imposing order externally, like a deistic watchmaker, in organic networks the nodes are internally related and order is immanent and intrinsically emergent. The codependence of nodes overcomes the fixity of algorithmic networks and lends nodes an adaptive “plasticity” (LE, 67). For Hegel, absolute truth can emerge only if networks are organic and plastic: “The imperfection of its realization can be caused either by the insufficient plasticity of the dialectical presentation, or by the particular nodes that constitute the determinate categories, but not by the very character of this Logic. The Logos is in effect the thinking apprehension of all the determinations insofar as they are moments of one sole and unique concept. What turns these determinations into moments is the internal reflection of the universal, its exposition as mediation and not as substrate. Thus, this universal is a life, and a reflective life, but one in which the reflection engenders moments instead of being opposed to them” (LE, 67– 68).29 So understood, Hegelian logic is the program on which the universal network of the cosmos operates.

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With these two types of networks, we return to the question of the relation between the series or the line and the cycle or the circle. In Hegel’s system, binary digital systems and networks are linear, and dialectic systems and networks are nonlinear. The consistent goal of Hegel’s system is to transform the line into a circle through the process of Erinnerung. Since the Logic is the presupposition and foundation of the Phenomenology, the preordained telos of the disparate experiences of consciousness is their final comprehension in the totality of the concept. Rather than the final stage in a linear series, absolute knowledge is the comprehension of each particular stage of the journey to selfhood as a necessary moment in a universal process. When Alpha and Omega become one, this process reaches closure. While Kojève is convinced that Hegel succeeds, and a new posthistorical, posthuman age is dawning when philosophy, like art, is “a thing of the past,” Hyppolite is not convinced. He concludes his Johns Hopkins lecture by returning to the unending way of doubt and despair: Hegel has been reproached for not recognizing this finitude, for “putting himself in the place of God,” but he knew finitude very well. He knew that there is meaninglessness [non-sens] and that it is sometimes irredeemable. As there are lost letters and lost causes, so too there is lost meaning. But whereas a negative theology admits a meaning beyond meaning, for Hegel what is redeemable has meaning, but what is irredeemable is the measure of meaninglessness that invests all meaning. And this difference he calls the Absolute Difference. Hegel therefore recognized finitude in terms of this meaninglessness investing meaning. It cannot be said that he put himself in the place of God, for he well knew that when he was searching for the universal articulations of thought it was still as one concrete philosopher that he was carrying on the quest. He knew well, in the words of my friend Merleau-Ponty, that there is no philosopher without a shadow. (SC, 168– 69)

On October 26, 1968, five months after I completed my first paper on Hegel and Kierkegaard, Jean Hyppolite died. His distinguished colleagues paid their respects by dedicating the epoch-making book The Structuralist Controversy “to the memory of Jean Hyppolite— scholar, teacher, and friend of scholars.” Was the “Absolute Difference” he saw haunting Hegel’s system the “Absolute Difference” Koyré detected in the Jena writings to which Derrida returns in “La différance”? And what about the shadow of this irredeemable remainder? Was this the shadow in which Hyppolite saw his impending death? Or was it a deeper, darker shadow of a future that can never be imagined? Might this shadow be the Lichtung for thought after “the end of philosophy”?

SEVEN

Being Timely

Time, time: the step not beyond [le pas au-delà] that is not accomplished in time would lead outside of time, without this outside being atemporal, but there where time would fall, fragile fall, according to this “outside of time in time” towards which writing would attract us, were we allowed, having disappeared from ourselves, to write within the secret of the ancient fear. —Maurice Blanchot (translation modified)

Unending Post Ages: The End of Man. The End of History. The End of War. The End of Work. The End of Religion. The End of Art. The End of Philosophy. Kojève extends Hegel’s argument from religion and art to philosophy. With the death of man and the end of history, he argues, there is no longer any need for philosophy. The divisions, oppositions, and contradictions that make philosophy necessary are reconciled, overcome, and resolved. Heidegger was not convinced. Throughout his life he was obsessed with the problem of ending or the impossibility of ending. Late in his career, he directly addressed the question of philosophy in the Post Age in an essay entitled “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking.” It is noteworthy that he first presented this lecture at a conference on “Kierkegaard vivant,” held in Paris from April 21 to 23, 1964. Heidegger’s paper was initially published in French and remained untranslated into German for five years. The focus of his argument once again is time. Heidegger frames his argument with critical comments about the social impact of the emerging technology of cybernetics. In this new science, “the operational and model character of representational-calculative thinking

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becomes dominant” (OTB, 58– 59).The impact of cybernetics is not limited to scientific and technological research, but extends to all aspects of modern life. Echoing Kierkegaard’s criticism of the hegemonic effect of the press, Heidegger claims that “cybernetics transforms language into the exchange of news. The arts become regulated-regulating instruments of information” (OTB, 58). We have seen that Heidegger is convinced that this technological revolution is the end product of the modern philosophy of the subject that begins with Descartes’s reduction of truth to certainty and reaches closure in Hegel and Husserl’s “transcendental subjectivity,” in which all objectivity (i.e., the world) is the construction of the creative subject. Heidegger’s recognition of the global social and cultural effects of these philosophical developments is surprisingly prescient. Anticipating Fukuyama’s argument in The End of History and the Last Man, he argues, “The end of philosophy proves to be the triumph of the manipulable arrangement of a scientific-technological world and of the social order proper to this world. The end of philosophy means: the beginning of world civilization based upon Western European thinking” (OTB, 59). There is, however, a major difference between Heidegger and Fukuyama’s assessments of this development. While Fukuyama regards the apparent success of global capitalism as the triumphant end of the trajectory of the West, Heidegger thinks modern science and technology are destroying the world. To avoid what he regards as the potentially catastrophic results of these developments, he argues that it is necessary to attack the problem at its root: the Western ontotheological tradition as it is developed most fully in nineteenth- and twentieth-century German philosophy. To accomplish this end, he appropriates Hegel’s dialectical analysis and turns it against his own system. By so doing, he invents modern-day deconstruction. Just as Hegel resisted asserting the truth of his own philosophy in opposition to the errors of all others by demonstrating how every form of knowledge and philosophical position short of speculative absolute knowledge negates itself and leads to a successor that is a more adequate expression of the truth, so Heidegger develops what he describes as an “immanent critique” to demonstrate that the purported end of philosophy exposes the conditions of the possibility of ontotheology as also inevitably harboring the conditions of its impossibility. Heidegger concentrates his argument on the role of the process of self-representation through which the subject becomes present to itself in the supposedly closed circle of self-reflexivity. The task of thinking at the end of philosophy, Heidegger argues, is to think what philosophy has left unthought. He is convinced that from its beginnings, Western philosophy has constituted itself by not thinking, or

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repressing the condition of its own impossibility. “Philosophy,” he explains, “is metaphysics,” and in the West, metaphysics is always the metaphysics of presence (OTB, 55). To be is to be present here (in space) and now (in time). In Heidegger’s own words, “What characterizes metaphysical thinking which grounds the ground for beings is the fact that metaphysical thinking departs from what is present in its presence, and thus represents it in terms of its ground as something grounded” (OTB, 56). To think what philosophy has left unthought, then, would be to show that what makes presence (space) and the present (time) possible also makes them impossible. From Descartes to Hegel and beyond to Husserl, the “ground of presence,” the principle of all principles, is “transcendental subjectivity.” Heidegger begins his deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence by returning to Hegel’s dialectical analysis of self-consciousness as he unfolds it in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Like Hyppolite, Heidegger insists that the Phenomenology is grounded in the Logic. Further, he notes, “the talk about the ‘truth of Being’ has a justified meaning in Hegel’s Science of Logic, because here truth means the certainty of absolute knowledge. But Hegel also, as little as Husserl, as little as all metaphysics, does not ask about Being as Being, that is, does not raise the question how there can be presence as such. There is presence only when opening is dominant. Opening is named with aletheia, unconcealment, but not thought as such” (OTB, 70). What, then, is this opening, and what is this unconcealment that cannot be thought as such? Since the notion (Begriff) of presence and self-presence comes to fullest expression in the self-reflexivity of self-consciousness, the challenge Heidegger faces is to show that self-consciousness always remains incomplete because it presupposes an absence that can never be re-presented and therefore remains unknowable. More precisely, both presence and absence are “absolutely dependent” on an other that resists comprehension. Hegel glimpsed this radical altarity in his non-notion of “Absolute Difference” in the Jena Realphilosophie. This absolute difference becomes Kierkegaard’s infinite and qualitative difference; Heidegger’s Ereignis, which occasions aletheia; and Derrida’s différance, which opens his khôra. To develop this complex argument, Heidegger returns to Kant’s analysis of the interrelation between the imagination and temporality in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. At the precise moment Being and Time appeared, Heidegger was developing his interpretation of Kant in his seminars. When Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics was published in 1929, it aroused considerable interest, but in recent years it has been largely overlooked. This is unfortunate because the argument in this book reveals the inextricable link between Heidegger’s early and late work. When his later work is considered in the context of his

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early theological writings as well as his investigation of Kant’s account of the imagination, Heidegger’s oeuvre displays a remarkable consistency. It will be recalled that Kant develops his interpretation of time and space in the context of his consideration of the activity of world construction through the schematizing activity of the forms of intuition and categories of understanding. In the First Critique, I argued, Kant translates classical ontology into epistemology. Just as the Platonic demi-urge creates the world by bringing together transcendent forms with fluctuating matter, and the Christian God creates the world by sending his Word (Logos) out over the waters, so Kant’s cognitive subject fashions the world by synthesizing the transcendental forms of intuition and categories of understanding with the sensible manifold. The faculty through which this synthesis occurs is the imagination. The bridge between Kant and Heidegger’s deconstruction of the self-reflexivity of cognitive activity is Fichte’s theory of the imagination. Heidegger begins with an argument that exposes the theological origin of the classical metaphysics of presence: If ontological knowing is schema-forming [Schema-bildend], then therewith it creates (forms [bilded]) from out of itself the pure look (image) [den reinen Anblick (Bild)]. Is it not the case, then, that even ontological knowledge which occurs in the transcendental power of imagination is “creative”? And if ontological knowing forms transcendence, which in turn constitutes the essence of finitude, then is not the finitude of transcendence burst asunder because of this “creative” power? Does not the finite creature become infinite through this “creative” behavior? But is ontological knowledge, then, as “creative” as intuitus originarius, for which the being in intuiting is in and as what stands forth and can never become object? (KPM, 85; translation modified)

Because this intuitus originarius, as the ground of objects (as well as subjects), can never be objectified, this originary intuition can never be known. Knowledge, therefore, presupposes a nonfoundational nonknowledge. Heidegger proceeds to ask, “What is the known of this knowing?” Answering his own question, he writes, “A Nothing [Ein Nichts]” (KPM, 85). To carry Heidegger’s analysis further, it is necessary to ask an impossible question: What “is” this “thing” that is no-thing, das Nichts? Heidegger anticipates the problem: “Nothing means: not a being [ein Seiendes], but nevertheless ‘Something [Etwas].’ It ‘serves only as correlatum,’ i.e., according to its essence it is pure horizon [Horizont]. Kant calls this X the ‘transcendental object,’ i.e., the Being-in-opposition [das Dawider (dagen, “against,” “in opposition”)]

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which is discernible in and through transcendence as its horizon. Now if the X which is known in ontological knowledge is, according to its essence, horizon, then this knowing must also be such that it holds open this horizon in its character as horizon [seinem Horizontcharakter offenhalt]” (KPM, 86– 87). Here the question shifts— what about this Etwas? This “Something” is neither a being or a thing, nor an empty void, but something else, something other, something whose essence is the “pure horizon,” which opens the space-time of the Being-in-opposition that is the clearing (die Lichtung, aletheia) where subjects and objects appear. As such it is neither subject nor object, but the creative milieu in which they emerge. This X (χ) or “transcendental object,” which is not an object sensu strictissmo, functions as the creative-destructive transcendent God once did. That is why after declaring the death of God, Nietzsche’s madman had to proceed to ask, “Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?”1 Here the creative God dies and is reborn as the creative-destructive Divine Milieu in which everything arises and passes away.2 As is evident in the following seminal passage, Heidegger’s argument always depends on the subtle inflections of language. Ontological knowledge “forms” [bildet] transcendence, and this forming [Bilden] is nothing other than the holding-open of the horizon within which the Being of the being becomes discernible in a preliminary way [das Offenhalten des Horizontes, in dem das Sein des Seinenden vorgängig erblickbar wird]. If truth indeed means: unconcealment of . . . [Unverborgenheit von . . .], then transcendence is original truth [ursprüngliche Wahrheit]. Truth itself, however, must bifurcate into the unveiledness of Being and the openness . . . of beings [müss sich gabeln in die Enthulltheit von Sein und die Offenbarkeit von Seindem]. If ontological knowledge unveils the horizon [den Horizont enthullt], then its truth lies precisely in [the act of] letting the being be encountered within the horizon [die Begegenlassen des Seinden innerhalb des Horizontes]. Kant says: ontological knowledge only has “empirical use,” i.e., it serves for the makingpossible of finite knowledge in the sense of the experience of the being which shows itself [sich zeigenden Seienden]. (KPM, 87)

The imagination (Einbildungskraft) is the formative activity (Bilden) that first distinguishes Being and beings, and then figures images (Bilde) of subjects and objects by opening the horizon that is their creative milieu (Mitte). This opening is the original (ursprüngliche) truth. Ursprünglich is an especially rich word. Ur means “primitive, primordial, original,” and Sprung means “crack, fissure, fault, flaw, break, split; leap, spring, vault.” The ursprüngli-

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che Wahrheit emerges in an originary crack, fissure, tear, split of Being from which beings initially spring forth. This fissure or tear, this leap is the revelation that unveils or uncovers (enthüllen) Being in the manifestation, disclosure, openness, and revelation (Offenbarkeit) of beings. By letting beings be, the imagination creates the world in which beings are destined to dwell and reveals by concealing the fissure, crack, tear that exposes the abyss over which it is necessary to leap. Kant distinguishes between the productive and reproductive imagination. The productive, the imagination, is the presentational activity (Darstellung) that representation (Vorstellung) presupposes. Since this originary activity eludes representation, consciousness and self-consciousness are necessarily incomplete. In different terms, presence and the present presuppose a presentational activity or event, which can never be present as such; but neither is it simply absent. Heidegger argues that Kant establishes the irreducible interstitiality of the imagination— it “falls” between sensibility and understanding (see fig. 18). Having identified this structure, Heidegger attempts to expose the common root or stem (Stämme) in Kant’s delineation of cognitive activity. Thus this triad of basic faculties stands in harsh opposition to the duality of basic sources and stems of knowledge. Yet what is it about the two stems [Stämme]? Is it accidental that Kant uses this image to characterize sensibility and understanding, or is it instead used just to indicate that they grow from a “common root [gemeinschaftlichen Wurzel]”? . . . What if this original, formative middle [ursprünglich bilden Mitte] was that “unknown common root” of both stems [“unbekannte gemeinsame Wurzel” der beiden Stämmen]? Is it an accident that with the first introduction of the power of imagination Kant says that “we ourselves, however, are seldom conscious [of it] even once”? (KPM, 96; translation modified)

The implications of this pivotal passage are obscured by the English translation of Mitte as “center.” While this is not incorrect, in this context, “middle” is a much more accurate rendering of the term. This becomes clear when Heidegger adds a very reveling footnote to this text: The explicit characterization of the power of imagination as a basic faculty must have driven home the meaning of this faculty to Kant’s contemporaries. Thus Fichte and Schelling, and in his own way Jacobi as well, have attributed an essential role to the power of imagination. Whether in this way the essence of the power of imagination as seen by Kant was recognized, adhered to, and

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Figure 18. Imagination.

even interpreted in a more original way, cannot be discussed here. The following interpretation of the transcendental power of imagination grows out of another way of questioning and moves, so to speak, in the opposite direction from that of German idealism. (KPM, 96– 97, n196)

I will consider the importance of Schelling’s early and later work in the next section. At this point, it is important to understand how Fichte’s analysis of self-consciousness anticipates Heidegger’s deconstruction of Hegelian selfreflexivity. As we have seen, one of Hegel’s most important early studies was The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s Systems of Philosophy. Hegel was convinced that his absolute idealism overcame the shortcomings of Fichte’s subjective idealism and the early Schelling’s objective idealism. But the debate remains unsettled and presumably still continues, since Fichte is buried next to Hegel in Berlin. In his impressive study Between Kant and Hegel: Lectures on German Idealism, Dieter Henrich argues that, in the Science of Knowledge (1794), “Fichte actually uncovered a process of the manifestation of some infinite principle, which differs from the self’s relation to itself in the dynamic process of the mind, but which nonetheless manifests itself within the mind.” There is something (etwas) “within” the self that differs from its constitutive self-relation. To understand this puzzling point, consider the self-reflexive structure of self-consciousness. In self-consciousness, the subject turns back on itself by becoming an object to itself. Self-as-subject and self-as-object are reciprocally related in such a way that each becomes itself through the other, and neither can be itself apart from the other. However, at precisely the point where self-consciousness seems to close the circle of reflection, it approaches its constitutive limit. Henrich identifies the crucial question in commenting on Fichte’s reading of Kant. Henrich poses the critical issue Fichte raises for subsequent thinkers: “We might cast this question another way: Will ontological discourse always make use of the premise that something can be said about the mind that is not of the mind, and that the mind can say something that is of the mind about what is not of the mind, so that the two discourses can never be derived from one or the other— or even from a third discourse, thereby precluding any fully intelligible linear formulation?”3 Fichte identifies two problems with this argument. First, the subject’s recognition or re-presentation of itself would seem to presuppose a more origi-

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nary self-knowledge that cannot be accounted for in terms of the structure of self-reflexivity. To recognize my self-objectification as my own, I must already know myself. Second, and more important, when the subject turns back on itself, it discovers a lacuna without which it is impossible but with which it is incomplete. The pressing question is: Where does that which the self-conscious subject represents to itself come from? If self-as-subject and self-as-object are codependent, neither can be the originary cause of the other. The activity of self-representation, therefore, presupposes a more primordial presentation, which must originate elsewhere. This elsewhere is the limit that it is impossible to think but without which thinking is impossible. Self-consciousness, then, entails two moments, which Fichte interprets in terms of Kant’s distinction between Darstellung (presentation) and Vorstellung (representation), which are bound in an asymmetrical relationship. Vorstellung presupposes Darstellung; in other words, there can be no self-representation without a primordial differentiating presentation of the self to itself by “something” that is other than both self-as-subject and self-asobject. Heidegger appropriates theological terms to explain the activity of selfconsciousness in his analysis of Hegel’s Phenomenology, stating, “The appearance is authentic presence itself: the parousia of the Absolute. In keeping with its absoluteness, the Absolute is with us of its own accord. In its will to be with us, the Absolute is being present. In itself, thus bringing itself forward, the Absolute is for itself. For the sake of the will of the parousia alone, the presentation of knowledge as a phenomenon is necessary. The presentation is bound to remain turned toward the will of the Absolute. The presentation is itself a willing, that is, not just a wishing and striving but the action itself, if it pulls itself together within its nature.”4 According to this reading, Hegel’s system is neither closed nor static; to the contrary, the Absolute appears as the infinitely restless will that wills itself in willing everything that emerges in nature and history. This is the restlessness that Fichte detects at the heart of what he identifies as the “infinite striving” of the self. He describes this striving as a drive and, most suggestively, as schweben— “wavering” and/or “hovering.” The word schweben indicates the condition of being suspended between two poles. In terms of the activity of self-consciousness, schweben refers to the oscillation or altarnation between the two sides of the self. Self-objectification requires self-determination in which the self-as-subject confines, limits, or determines itself in self-as-object. As I have argued, this self-reflexive relation presupposes the more primordial activity of differentiating that is “in” but not of the self. This drive, striving, oscillating, or altarnation is the restless

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activity of the imagination. Henrich summarizes Fichte’s important conclusion: “This is the process of imagination— the bringing about of a determinate state in the mind; abolishing it, thus proving the absoluteness of the mediating activity; and then entering into another state, and so on.” The domain of the imagination is the neither/nor that lies between all opposites as well as every identity and difference. Fichte’s most important point for our purposes is that “self-reference is neither the only, nor even the primary, structure of the mind. It is rather an implication of more basic processes that underlie the mind, but in a way that these processes necessarily constitute the mind’s self-reference.” If self-reference is not originary but is primordially constituted, then the constructive activity of the subject is secondary to a more originary passivity in which being is given rather than created or produced. The subject, in other words, is not autonomous but is haunted by a heteronomy that is antecedent to and a condition of purportedly autonomous activity. Henrich proceeds to add a brilliant insight: “This analysis [i.e., Fichte’s], in turn, led to the theories of the self (the term ‘self,’ as we use it today, emerged at the same time) in existentialism, as Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre elaborate them.”5 In Fichte’s eyes, reason has a blind spot because the self can never turn around fast enough to see itself seeing and thus know itself knowing. In contrast to the total transparency of Hegel’s absolute knowledge, Fichte ends with a docta ignorantia that wraps the mind in a “cloud of unknowing.” Heidegger is convinced that Kant had already glimpsed this blind spot but panicked and averted his gaze: This original, essential constitution of humankind, “rooted” in the transcendental power of the imagination, is the “unknown” into which Kant must have looked if he spoke of the “root unknown to us [unbekannten Wurzel],” for the unknown is not that of which we simply know nothing. Rather, it is what pushes against us as something disquieting in what is known. . . . Kant shrank back from this unknown root. . . . Will not the Critique of Pure Reason have deprived itself of its own theme if pure reason reverts to the transcendental power of the imagination? Does not this ground-laying ahead lead us to an abyss [Abgrund]? In the radicalism of his questions, Kant brought the “possibility” of metaphysics to this abyss. He saw the unknown [das Unbekannte]. He had to shrink back [zurckweichen]. It was not just that the transcendental power of the imagination frightened him, but rather that in between [the two editions (of the First Critique)] pure reason as reason drew him increasingly under its spell. (KPM, 112, 117– 18; translation modified)

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This Abgrund is the nonfoundational foundation that ungrounds reason and leaves the imagination “homeless [heimatlos].” The abyssal “root” of the imagination paradoxically uproots imaginative activity. With this uprooting, the question of time unexpectedly returns. Heidegger writes, “If the transcendental power of imagination, as the pure, forming faculty, in itself forms time— i.e., allows time to spring forth [entspringen]—then we cannot avoid the thesis stated above: the transcendental power of the imagination is original time [ursprügliche Zeit]” (KPM, 131; emphasis added). What is this original time? It will be recalled that for Kant, the forms of intuition— space and time— schematize the categories of understanding by processing or programming the sensible manifold of intuition. Sensible intuition apprehends what is present here and now as points in space and moments in time. As we have seen, however, presence and the present presuppose the activity of presencing (Darstellung), which is never itself present. Sensible intuition, therefore, is never originary, but is secondary to a more primordial givenness. In other words, the data of experience are given before they are processed or programmed. Data and datum derive from the Latin do, dare, which means “to give.” Data are originally given by the formative or figurative activity of the imagination as a series of presents in space and moments in time. Therefore, this linear time is secondary to a more “original time.” Time as pure intuition is the forming intuiting of what it intuits in one. This gives the full concept of time [Begriff der Zeit] for the first time. Pure intuition, however, can only form the pure succession of the sequence of nows [das reine Nacheinander der Jetzfolge] as such if in itself it is a likenessforming, prefiguring, and reproducing power of imagination. Hence, it is in no way permissible to think of time, especially in the Kantian sense, as an arbitrary field which the power of imagination just gets into for purposes of its own activity, so to speak. Accordingly, time must indeed be taken as pure sequence of nows in the horizon within which we “reckon with time [mit der Zeit rechnen, count, calculate].” This sequence of nows, however, is in no way time in its originality [ihrer Ursprünglichkeit]. On the contrary, the transcendental power of imagination allows time as sequence of nows spring forth [lasst die Zeit als Jetzfolge entspringen], and as this letting-spring-forth is therefore original time [als diese entspringenlassende— die ursprüngliche Zeit]. (KPM, 123)

In contrast to both serial and cyclical time, this original time is never present as such. It “is” that through which the moments of time and points in space first emerge or are released. This “letting-spring-forth” lets beings be. Sometimes Heidegger describes this original time as “temporality” and

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“temporalization”—Zeitlichkeit, zeitgen—which he distinguishes from ordinary linear and serial time. This argument leads to a surprising conclusion, which Heidegger does not explicitly draw: temporality is absolute, or even the Absolute itself. “Absolute” derives from the Latin absolutus, which means “complete, unfettered, unconditional.” This suggests the traditional understanding of the Absolute, which, as Heidegger stresses, is speculatively comprehended in the total presence of the self to itself in Hegel’s absolute knowledge. The derivation of absolutus, however, points to an alternative interpretation of the Absolute. Absolutus is the past participle of absolvere, “to free from”—ab, “away from” + solver, “to loosen.” In this reading of the term, the Absolute absolves— it loosens, sets free, lets go, and lets be. This letting-go, which is a letting-be, is the withdrawal that clears the space and opens the time for dwelling. Rather than totally revealing or exposing itself, the Absolute reveals by concealing and shows by hiding. To say that time is absolute or the Absolute is time is to acknowledge that time is never ours to master, spend, save, or waste. To the contrary, time is given and hence is a gift from an other who is never present, and thus cannot be known. To the perennial question, What gives? Heidegger answers, Temporality gives. Es gibt—temporality is the es that gives. This giving, this gift, is the moment of grace, abiding grace without which there is neither life nor death. Since original time is a temporality without presence, it is never in the present— forever giving by withdrawing, original temporality is always already past. Never having been present, this past is beyond re-presentation (Vorstellung) and re-collection (Erinnerung). It is important to note that the vor/“before” at the head of Vorstellung is usually understood spatially as “in front of”—vorstellen, then, is to place (stellen) before (vor) or in front of. But vor/“before” can also be understood temporally as “antecedent to”— vorstellen is to place (stellen) before (vor), or prior to. In the activity of the imagination, originary temporality places before the mind the data (given) that are processed through the forms of intuition (ordinary space and time) and categories of understanding. Since the condition of the possibility of presence and the present is always already past, and cannot be re-presented or re-collected, it is immemorial— that is to say, beyond the limits of memory and tradition. “Immemorial” derives from the Latin immemorials— in, “not” + memorialis, from memoria, “memory.” The immemorial is not eternally present but is radically temporal, and as such is the already past that shadows every present and haunts all presence. Since this past is never present, the process of recollection that is designed to transform every linear series into a cyclical circle can never be completed. Maurice Blanchot explains

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Heidegger’s crucial insight in his enigmatic book, Le pas au-delà (The Step Not Beyond): “Time, time: the step not beyond [le pas au-delà] that is not accomplished in time would lead outside of time, without this outside being atemporal, but there where time would fall, fragile fall, according to this ‘outside of time in time’ towards which writing would attract us, were we allowed, having disappeared from ourselves, to write within the secret of the ancient fear” (translation modified).6 Far from atemporal, this “outside” is “in” time, or even “is” time as the always-already past eternally returns as the future that never arrives to displace the present that never is. This is the vision of chiasmic time that Heidegger first glimpsed in his retro-reading of Paul through Luther and Kierkegaard. Since Heidegger maintains that Western philosophy is metaphysics and metaphysics is always a metaphysics of presence, his interpretation of time must be the deconstruction of the ontotheological tradition and, by extension, the deconstruction of constructive subjectivity through which the modern world has been created and is being destroyed.

Coup de Grâce Sometimes it’s all a matter of timing. A message in a bottle unexpectedly washes up on shore and recasts what you thought you knew. The morning I was about to start writing this section, I received an email from a student, Doha Tazi Hemida, who has generously assisted me by translating French texts. She had been reading Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1942) and sent me several passages because she correctly detected in them traces of the contrasting interpretations of time I am tracking. The soothsayers who found out from time what it had in store certainly did not experience time as either homogeneous or empty. Anyone who keeps this in mind will perhaps get an idea of how past times were experienced in remembrance— namely, in just the same way. We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the straight gate through which the Messiah might enter.7

The thesis with which Benjamin ends his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” is about the question of ending. He identifies two alternatives: pagan— soothsayers like Hegel, who see the future in the past; and Jews, like Kierke-

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gaard, who see the future unexpectedly breaking into the present to transform the past. Many years ago, I concluded Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard by writing, “Hegel’s end is Kierkegaard’s beginning, and Kierkegaard’s end is Hegel’s beginning. . . . Kierkegaard considers Hegel’s journey to selfhood to be a pagan odyssey in which the wayfarer never advances to the stage on life’s way in which he confronts the eternally decisive either-or posed by the God-Man. Hegel would view Kierkegaard’s journey to selfhood as an Abrahamic sojourn in which the lonely wanderer never returns from Moriah to appropriate the reconciliation implicit in the God-Man. . . . Ending where one ought to begin, Hegel becomes Kierkegaard’s unhappiest man, Kierkegaard remains Hegel’s unhappy consciousness.”8 The issue dividing Hegel and Kierkegaard is time— the question of the end of history and the end of life— that is to say, death. Retro-reading my own work over the past half century, I am surprised to discover what I knew, what I did not know, and what I knew but did not know I knew. The lines Doha Tazi Hemida sent me articulate the interpretation of time that Koyré (mis)reads in “Hegel at Jena,” and Heidegger (mis)reads in Paul’s Destruktion of the theologia gloria. In opposition to Hegel’s realized eschatology, Kierkegaard poses what Benjamin and Derrida following him label “messianic time.” This is the notion of time that Heidegger discovers in Kant’s theory of the imagination and develops in Being and Time. Writing in his journal in 1843, Kierkegaard famously observed, “Philosophy is perfectly right in saying that life must be understood backwards. But then one forgets the other clause— that it must be lived forwards” (JP, no. 1030). While the interrelated notions of temporality and subjectivity are a preoccupation of Kierkegaard in all his work, he presents his most important analysis of these issues in two densely condensed sections of Philosophical Fragments and The Concept of Dread.9 He elaborates his argument at greater length in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, but in this context, the shorter texts are more important. In The Concept of Dread, Kierkegaard takes the unlikely approach of criticizing Hegel’s complex speculative system by developing an interpretation of the biblical story of Adam’s fall. The subtitle of the book is A Simple Psychological Deliberation Oriented in the Direction of the Dogmatic Problem of Original Sin. He organizes his argument around the same question that is at the center of the of Kojève and Hyppolyite’s debate about Hegel— the relation between logic and history, or eternity and time. His response anticipates the account of time developed by both Koyré in “Hegel at Jena” and Heidegger in Being and Time. Kierkegaard introduces his argument by criticizing Hegel’s claim that negativity introduces movement into logic: “In logic no movement can come about,

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for logic is, and whatever is logical only is [Logiken er, og alt Logisk er], and this impotence of logic is the transition to the sphere of becoming where existence and reality appear. . . . The negative then is immanent in the movement, it is the vanishing factor, is that which is sublated . . . [det Ophævede, German, Aufhebung]. If everything comes about in this manner, nothing comes about at all, and the negative becomes a phantom [et Phantom]. Nevertheless, precisely in order to make something come about in logic, the negative becomes something more; it becomes that which brings forth the opposition, not a negation but a contra-position [Contra-Position]” (CD, 12; translation modified). Kierkegaard focuses on three key terms in Hegel’s logic— ““‘transition,’ ‘negation’ and ‘mediation,’” which he describes as “three masked men of suspicious appearance, the secret agents (agentia), which provoke all movements” (CD, 73). Speculative logic abstracts from concrete human existence by translating temporal becoming into timeless logical operations. “The word ‘transition’ [Overgang] remains a clever conceit in logic. It belongs to the sphere of historical freedom [historiske Friheds], for transition is a state [en Tilstand], and it is actual” (CD, 74; translation modified). Kierkegaard’s aim is to bring thought back down to earth where individual human beings dwell. His argument turns on the distinction between Greek philosophy and Christian theology. In a crucial footnote in chapter 3, Kierkegaard charges Hegel with “Hellenizing” Christianity. Recalling Luther and anticipating Heidegger, he credits Paul with first having “dehellenized” or deconstructed what is, in effect, the theology of presence. To support these claims, he analyzes Plato’s interpretation of the instant (Øjeblikket) or the “now,” which he maintains is the unifying foundation of Hegel’s system. He explains his use of the crucial word Øjeblik by citing Paul: “In the New Testament there is a poetical paraphrase of the instant. Paul says that the world will pass away ‘in an instant, in the twinkling of an eye’” (CD, 79n). In a crucial sentence of another footnote he writes, “The one [Eenheden] nevertheless must exist; it is said, and now it is defined as follows: participation in an essence or nature in the present time [Deelagtighed i et Vaesen eller i en Vaesenhed i den nærværende Tid]” (CD, 75; translation modified). The Danish word nærværelse means “presence”; the adjective nærværende means “present.” Kierkegaard continues, “In further development of the contradiction it then appears that the present . . . wavers between [værimellem] meaning the present, the eternal, the instant. This ‘now’ . . . lies between ‘was’ and ‘will be,’ and the one, as it strives forward from the past to the future, cannot leap by this ‘now’” (CD, 75n; translation modified; emphasis added). According to Platonic metaphysics, to be is essentially to be present in the now. Effectively deconstructing the Platonic notion of time that forms the foundation of Western metaphysics, Kierkegaard detects

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a certain nonpresence inherent in presence and the present. The instant or the now, he argues, is the liminal or marginal site of transition that constitutes both temporal and spatial existence. As such, it is the strange domain of the neither/nor that falls between all opposites and every difference. Thus “the instant . . . becomes the general category of transition; for Plato shows in the same way that the instant is related in the same way to the transition of the one to the many, of the many to the one, of likeness to unlikeness, etc., and that it is the instant in which there is neither [one] nor [many], neither being nor a being combined” (CD, 75n; translation modified). Kierkegaard’s argument then takes a turn that proves to be decisive for later interpretations of time. When the instant is understood as “the presence of the present or the now, it becomes a ‘silent atomistic abstraction [lydlos atomistisk Abstraktion]” (CD, 78). Plato, and Hegel following him, Kierkegaard insists, “spatializes [spatierer]” time and thereby abstracts from concrete human existence. While Plato and Hegel turn toward the past, Kierkegaard and Heidegger turn toward the future. If one would now employ the instant to define time, and let the instant indicate the purely abstract exclusion of the past and the future, and by the same token of the present also, then the instant precisely is not the present, for that which in purely abstract thinking lies between the past and the future has no existence at all. But one sees from this that the instant is not a mere characterization of time, for what characterizes time is only that it goes by, and hence time, if it is to be defined by any of the characteristics revealed in time itself, is the passed time [forbigangne Tid]. . . . Thus understood, the instant is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity. It is the first reflection of eternity in time, its first effort as it were to bring time to a stop. For this reason Hellenism did not understand the instant; for even if it comprehended the atom of eternity, it did not comprehend that it was the instant, did not define it with a forward direction but with a backward direction since for Hellenism the atom of eternity was essentially eternity, and so neither time nor eternity was essentially eternity, and so neither time nor eternity had true justice done it. (CD, 78– 79)

And then, Kierkegaard proceeds to offer the final coup de grâce—quite literally the coup, stroke, cut, mortal wound of grace: The instant is that ambiguous [Tvetydige] instant in which time and eternity touch one another, and with this the concept of temporality [Begrebet Timelighed] is posited, whereby time constantly intersects eternity and eternity con-

Being Timely / 173 stantly permeates time. Only now does the division we talked about acquire significance: the present, the past, and the future. By this division, attention is immediately drawn to the fact that in a certain sense the future signifies more than the present and the past; for the future is in a sense the whole of which the past is a part, and in a sense the future may signify the whole. This is due to the fact that the eternal means first of all the future, or that the future is the incognito in which the eternal, as incommensurable for time, would nevertheless maintain its relations with time. Thus we sometimes speak of the future as identical with the eternal (the future life = eternal life). Since the Greeks did not have in a deeper sense a concept of the eternal; so neither did they have a concept of the future’ (CD, 80; translation modified; emphases added)

“The future is in a sense the whole of which the past is a part.” It is important to note that Kierkegaard distinguishes “time [Tid]” from “temporality [Timelighed].” While time is a series of abstract nows, which are never present but always already past, temporality is tensed time in which the future unexpectedly implodes in the present, creating a wound or tear that transforms the past. Since for Hellenism and Hegelianism eternity lies in the past, time and eternity are reconciled through the process of re-membering or re-collection (Er-innerung) in which the present is gathered up into the past in a way that anticipates the future. “For thought, the eternal is the present as a sublated . . . succession (time was succession, going by) [det Evige det Nærværende som den ophævede Succession (Tiden var Successionen, der gaaer forbid)]” (CD, 77). So understood, thought translates the linear series of events into a cyclical circle that is an archaeo-teleological process. In his criticism of this notion of time, Kierkegaard formulates a chiastic view of temporality in which the Parousia (the kingdom, or appearance of essence) is forever deferred and thus is always zu-kommen, à-venir.10 Temporality and history are not teleological outworkings of the past, but are the realm of the ambiguity, uncertainty, contingency, and novelty that come about through the free decisions of finite individuals in response to the gift of the future. What Hegel describes as a logical transition is, according to Kierkegaard, a radically free leap: “In the sphere of historical freedom transition is a state [Tilstand]. However, in order to understand this correctly, one must not forget that the new [det Ny] is brought about through the leap. If this is not maintained, the transition will have a quantitative preponderance over the elasticity of the leap” (CD, 76; translation modified). Instead of a pause for infinite reflection, the instant is the opening for free finite decision.

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Kierkegaard considers the temporality of decision in the “Interlude” [Mellemspeil, “play” (speil) “between” (mellem)] of two acts in Philosophical Fragments (Philosophiske Smuler [scraps, bits, crumbs], 1843). The first act, “The Contemporary Disciple,” explores the challenge of faith for the original followers of Jesus; the second act, which occurs precisely 1,843 years later, considers “The Disciple on the other or at Second Hand [Disciplen paa anden Hand].” As we have seen, Kierkegaard was convinced that the comfortable bourgeois Christendom of his day, which Hegelians both reflected and promoted, was but a faint shadow of the rigors, challenges, and suffering that early Christians faced. Having rejected Hegel’s logical principle of mediation through which opposites are reconciled, Kierkegaard returns to something like what Hegel describes as Verstand, which presupposes the principle of noncontradiction. In this revision or reversion, the both/and of reflection gives way to the either/or of decision. Far from implicitly one, God and man as well as eternity and time are “infinitely and qualitatively different.” The coincidence of such radial opposites is “absolutely paradoxical.” While Hegel argues that the historical Jesus reveals the universal and eternal truth of the identity of the divine and the human for all human beings, Kierkegaard insists that the incarnation was a unique historical event in which the radically transcendent God entered time and space in the singular person of Jesus. The life of the temporal individual is not a moment in the eternal life of God or Geist; to the contrary, the single individual (Entkelt) is radically temporal. The questions Kierkegaard probes in Philosophical Fragments concern the relation of time and eternity in the historical life of Jesus and the temporal life of individual human beings: “Can a historical point of departure be given for an eternal consciousness [evig Bevidsthed]; how can such a point of departure be of more than historical interest; can an eternal blessedness [evig Salighed] be built on historical knowledge?” (PF, 1). With Hegel obviously in mind, the interlude is intended to answer yet another question: “Is the past more necessary than the future?” (PF, 72). Anticipating Hyppolite’s discussion of the “genesis and structure” of Hegel’s Phenomenology, Kierkegaard begins at the beginning, with a subsection entitled Tilblivelse, which can be translated as either “genesis” or “coming into existence.” Having argued that Hegel’s logical system is ahistorical or atemporal and therefore precludes any coming into existence, Kierkegaard examines two instants of historical emergence, which are mirror images of each other: the incarnation in which God (the eternal) becomes man (the temporal/historical), and faith in which temporal and historical man gains eternal (i.e., future) life. Questions proliferate; Kierkegaard proceeds to reframe his inquiry with yet another question: “Has the

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possible, by having become actual, become more necessary than it was?” (PF, 72). Kierkegaard regards Hegel’s retrospective comprehension of temporal events as reversed prophecy: “To want to predict the future (prophesy) and to want to understand the necessity of the past are altogether identical, and only the prevailing fashion makes the one seem more plausible than the other to a particular generation” (PF, 77). If history is, in Kant’s terms, an “inner teleological” process, the end (actuality) is implicit in the beginning (possibility), and change as well as becoming are apparent rather than real. From Kierkegaard’s point of view, the logical necessity of this process undercuts the significance of human life by making decisions illusory. He acknowledges that “the past has indeed come into existence” (PF, 77), and insists that for human beings, as opposed to natural objects and non-human beings, this actualization occurs through a free leap and not a necessary transition. “Coming into existence is the change, in freedom, of becoming actuality. If the past had become necessary, then it would not belong to freedom any more— that is, belong to that in which it came into existence. . . . Freedom itself would be an illusion . . . ; freedom would become witchcraft and coming into existence a false alarm” (PF, 77– 78). To grasp Kierkegaard’s argument on this significant point, it is important to understand that there are two distinct aspects involved in a free cominginto-existence. First, there is the free (i.e., contingent) “event [Skeete, ‘happening, occurrence’]” through which the individual first emerges; and second, there are the free decisions through which the individual becomes himself or herself in time. Kierkegaard labels this duplicitous process “redoubling”: Yet coming into existence can contain within itself a redoubling [Fordobling], that is, a possibility of a coming into existence within its own coming into existence. Here, in the stricter sense, is the historical, which is dialectical with respect to time. The coming into existence that here is shared with the coming into existence of nature is a possibility, a possibility that for nature is its whole actuality. But this distinctively historical coming into existence is nevertheless within a coming into existence— this must be grasped securely at all times. The more special historical coming into existence comes into existence by way of a relatively freely acting cause, which in turn definitively points to an absolutely freely acting cause. (PF, 76)

The self, then, is not autonomous, but is a radically heteronomous being given by an Other that is beyond human comprehension. This Other upon which existence is absolutely dependent cannot be known, and therefore

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life remains shrouded in mystery, which creates both a sense of “wonder [Vidunder]” and provokes a profound sense of insecurity, uncertainty, and dread. Since the future remains open, decisions must always be made in the present without any reliable knowledge of the future. Every decision is, therefore, a “leap of faith.” This truth is revealed in the incarnation. In the instant (Øjeblikket) of the incarnation, the unknowlable is revealed in the everyday historical person of Joe and Mary’s kid named Jesus. The coincidence of the unknowable/ eternal and the knowable/historical creates the absolute paradox that shatters human reason. This strange revelation is at the same time a concealment because the “Wholly Other” God can only be shown by hiding. In Jesus, Kierkegaard suggests, God travels incognito. Far from reconciling inwardness and outwardness, there is no visible sign by which God can be recognized. And yet, each person’s eternal destiny depends on the decision he or she makes when facing the absolute paradox. In more general terms, the absolute paradox is the figure of the unknowable and unmasterable future each individual confronts in every instant of decision. “If we do not assume the instant,” Kierkegaard concludes, “then we go back to Socrates [i.e., to Hellenism and Hegelianism], and it was precisely from him that we wanted to take leave in order to discover something. If the instant is posited, the paradox is there, for in its most abbreviated form the paradox can be called the instant” (PF, 51; translation modified). While Hegel turns from the future to the past in recollection, Kierkegaard turns from the past to the future in decisive expectation. Every time a person faces the future and makes a free decision, he or she “repeats the dialectical qualifications of coming into existence” (PF, 88). For Kierkegaard, human existence involves unavoidable risk; gone are Descartes’s subjective certainty and Hegel’s absolute knowledge, and in their place there is an acute awareness that life is not grounded in anything human beings can understand. Nevertheless, individuals must act and through their temporal decisions constitute themselves for eternity. This awareness of freedom provokes such profound anxiety that most people flee by attempting to immerse themselves in the ceaseless “chatter” of the “crowd [Mængde].” Such flight from freedom is what Kierkegaard saw all around him in the Copenhagen of his day. Never singling out individuals in the call to personal responsibility, the purveyors of Christendom peddled a watered down version of original Christianity that reassured bourgeois citizens, who were comfortable in the banality of their everyday lives. But such strategies fail because the quotidian inevitably becomes boring. The anonymous

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young man writing “ad se ipsum [to himself]” in the first volume of Either/ Or, despairs: “How dreadful boredom is— how dreadfully boring. . . . The only thing I see is emptiness, the only thing I live on is emptiness, the only thing I move in is emptiness. I do not even suffer pain. . . . My soul is like the Dead Sea, over which no bird is able to fly; when it has come midway, it sinks down, exhausted, to death and destruction” (EO, 1:37). Paradoxically, the flight from freedom leads to boredom, which opens the void that is freedom’s sting. Kierkegaard was the first philosopher or protopsychologist to subject dread or anxiety to meticulous analysis. Dread, he argues, is freedom’s awareness of itself. He presents his interpretation of dread through an account of Adam’s fall from innocence into sin and guilt, saying, “In this state [of innocence] there is peace and repose, but there is simultaneously something other [noget Andet] that is not contention and strife, for there is indeed nothing against which to strive. What, then, is it? Nothing [Intet]. But what effect does nothing have? It begets dread. This is the profound secret of innocence, which is at the same time dread” (CD, 38; translation modified). While fear (Frygte) is always directed to a determinate object, dread is completely indeterminate; it has no object, or its “object” “is” no thing— Nothing. One of the strategies for coping with dread is to attempt to turn it into fear by giving it a specific object that can be manipulated and controlled. Dread, however, is not so easily fooled and tends to return to unsettle those who attempt to avoid it. For Adam as for every subsequent individual, dread is unavoidable because it emerges through the inescapable law declaring the prohibition that marks the original differentiation of the individual from the worldly matrix within which he or she initially is immersed. Anticipating both Freud and Lacan, Kierkegaard argues that the primal deed is the inscrutable event in which the law is given. The Lord’s “Thou shalt not” awakens in his servant the recognition of freedom, which is nothing other than “the alarming possibility of being able. What it is he is able to do, of that he has no conception; to suppose that he had some conception is to presuppose, as commonly is done, what came later, the distinction between good and evil. There is only the possibility of being able, as a higher form of ignorance, as a heightened expression of dread, because this in a more profound sense is and is not, because in a more profound sense he loves it and flees from it” (CD, 40). Dread, then, is both attractive and repulsive, or, in Kierkegaard’s fine phrase, “a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy” (CD, 38). The irreducible ambiguity of dread reveals by concealing the nothingness that is the abyss of temporal selfhood.

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Being as Time Heidegger had already glimpsed nothing and the dread it harbors in the Nichts (Nothing) and Abgrund (Abyss) he detected in Kant’s interpretation of time and the imagination. But while Kant averts his gaze and tries to cover the abyss, Heidegger ventures into the void. In 1929, two years after the publication of Being and Time and concurrently teaching and writing about Kant, Heidegger delivered his inaugural lecture at the University of Freiburg. His subject, not surprisingly, is a question: “What Is Metaphysics?” Always hesitant to provide firm conclusions, he ends the lecture with yet another question: “Why are there beings [Seindes] at all, and why not rather nothing [nichts vielmehr Nichts]?” (BW, 112). This query preoccupied Heidegger throughout his career. In this brief but dense essay, he offers what is, in effect, a summary of Being and Time as well as a preview of what will become his so-called later work. His dependence on Kierkegaard’s Concept of Dread is obvious everywhere in the lecture. Heidegger begins by distinguishing philosophical inquiry from scientific investigation. The modern research university, he argues, is “technically” organized and takes “mathematical calculation” as normative for research and reasonable argument. What is most distinctive about scientific research, for Heidegger, is the insistence that “what should be examined are beings only, and besides that— nothing [nichts].” Anticipating his essay “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” written several decades later, he argues that the task of philosophy is to think what the sciences leave unthought. Accordingly, he proceeds to ask, “What about this nothing?” (BW, 97). He realizes, of course, that to ask what is nothing is an impossible question because nothing “is” precisely what is not. His approach, therefore, cannot be merely conceptual; so, following Kierkegaard, he shifts from concepts to affects or moods (Stimmungen). By focusing on moods, Heidegger acknowledges that the disclosure of nothing is not initially subject to active investigation because its apprehension involves a fundamental passivity. Moods cannot be willed— they settle and disappear like mist on a cool autumn morning or dew on a warm summer evening. That is why Heidegger insists that moods befall us— we find (befinden) ourselves in moods. These moods are more primal than thinking and acting, and thus color all we know and do. For Heidegger, as for Kierkegaard, the two moods that are most revealing are boredom, which emerges from the “chatter [Gerede]” of “the crowd [das Man],” and “dread [Angst].” If nothing never is— that is to say, if nothing is never present as such— then how is it experienced? Heidegger answers this enigmatic question by suggesting that nothing is not a positive feeling but is first experienced in

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boredom as the “slipping away of things as a whole [Wegrücken des Seinenden im Ganzen]” (BW, 103; translation modified). When nothing engages one’s interest, one becomes completely indifferent to everything. The remaining void boredom leaves reveals a residual “uncanniness [Unheimlichkeit]” both outside and inside the self, and this leads to a more profound apprehension of das Nichts in dread. Heidegger’s account of the interplay between nothing and dread takes as its point of departure Kierkegaard’s distinction between fear and dread. As we have seen, in contrast to fear, which always has a determinate object, dread “is neither an object nor any being at all” (BW, 106; emphases added). Building on Kierkegaard’s analysis, Heidegger develops an interpretation of das Nichts that is extremely complicated. His argument rests on a subtle distinction between negation (Verneinung) and annihilation (Nichten). Though Heidegger does not explicitly refer to Hegel’s notion of double negation in this context, this is clearly the target of his criticism. It will be recalled that in the dialectical structure of Hegel’s logic, identity constitutes itself in and through its negation of difference, which in turn constitutes itself in and through the negation of its own negation. For Hegel, the self-reflexive relation of double negation is the foundation of all objective (natural) and subjective (historical) reality. Heidegger disagrees; this foundation, he insists, is cracked, faulted, fissured, and torn by das Nichts. “The nothing is the origin of negation, not vice versa” (BW, 107). In other words, neither negation nor double negation is self-grounding, because they are “grounded” in nothing— das Nichts. Heidegger’s argument is dense but very important: How could negation [Verneinung] produce the not [das Nicht] from itself when it can make denials only when something deniable is already granted to it? But how could the deniable [Verneinbares] and what is to be denied be viewed as something susceptible to the not unless all thinking as such has caught sight of the not already? But the not can be revealed only when its origin [Ursprung], the nihilation of the nothing [das Nichten des Nichts] in general, and therewith the nothing itself, is disengaged from concealment. The not does not originate through negation; rather negation is grounded in the not that springs from the nihilation of the nothing. (BW, 107; translation modified)

To clarify this line of thought, it is helpful to recall to the formulaic expression of Hegel’s notion of double negation: –A = – (– –A). Heidegger argues that negation cannot be originary because it presupposes something that must be negated. That which is negated in the process of self-affirmation

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Figure 19. Negation and Nihilation.

also constitutes itself by negation and, therefore, also presupposes something prior its own action. This difference cannot be posited by the self itself but must be given by an other. If an infinite regress is to be avoided, this other can be neither a determinate object nor subject, which itself would presuppose yet another given to be negated, and so on ad infinitum. The conditions of the possibility of negation and double negation, therefore, can be neither something nor someone determinate; rather, “it,” “es,” “ça” must be some “thing” that is no-thing or Nothing.11 In this way, Nothing simultaneously enables and eludes dialectical negativity that establishes the identity of difference and the difference of identity. This is the “absolute difference” Hegel glimpses in his Jena Realphilosophie, but, like Kant, turns away from and attempts to cover with the Logos (see fig. 19). So understood, nihilation is the “origin” of the self-reflexive relation that establishes the presence of all identity and every difference. But das Nichts is never present as such . . . nor is it absent. As the condition of the possibility of presence and absence, nothing is the “unrepresentable before” in whose wake all beings arise and pass away. This unrecoverable before (vor) can be neither represented (vor-stellen) nor com-prehended (be-griffen, comprendre). Nothing discloses itself by withdrawing and reveals itself through concealment. Thought always arrives too late to grasp it . . . après coup. “We also come always too late with such a negation which should produce the nothing. The nothing rises to meet us already before that” (BW, 104). Having dis-closed a past that cannot be sublated in the concept, Heidegger argues,

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“the idea of ‘logic’ itself disintegrates in the turbulence of a more original questioning [Die Idee der ‘Logik’ selbst lost sich auf im Wirbel eines ursprünglicheren Fragens]” (BW, 107). This more original question points to “a more abysmal source [Abründige].” The origin— Ur-sprung—is an original (Ur) Sprung—spring, crack, fissure, fault, flaw, split, jump, leap— and this leap is the event (Ereignis) of freedom through which the new erupts. This Ereignis, in turn, is the eventuality of truth, which Heidegger elsewhere names aletheia or unforgetting.12 In contrast to Hegel’s remembering, which gathers all in the total presence of absolute knowledge, Heidegger’s unforgetting exposes a clearing that leaves the future open. The openness of the future makes freedom possible, and freedom arouses dread in slumbering spirit. “Da-sein means: being held out into the nothing,” Heidegger claims. “Holding itself out into the nothing, Dasein is in each case already beyond beings as a whole. This being beyond beings we call ‘transcendence’ [Transzendenz]” (BW, 105).While Hegel argues that the inwardization of the divine leads to an immanence in which the transcendent God is inwardly assimilated by man, Heidegger maintains that self-transcendence occurs through the incorporation of an alien Other, which is “inside” as an “outside” that cannot be integrated. Instead of reconciling the self with itself through “its own” other, this incorporation turns the self outside-in, transforming it into the other of itself. Never at home with itself, the subject, in a term Heidegger borrows from Kant and the nineteenth-century Romantics who followed him, constantly, “‘hover[s]’ in anxiety [‘schweben’ in Angst]” (BW, 103). The nothing itself does not attract; it is essentially repelling. But this repulsion is itself as such a parting gesture toward beings that are submerging as a whole. This wholly repelling gesture toward beings that are in retreat as a whole, which is the action of the nothing that oppresses Dasein in anxiety, is the essence of the nothing: nihilation. It is neither an annihilation of beings nor does it spring from a negation. Nihilation will not submit to calculation in terms of annihilation and negation. The nothing itself nihilates [Das Nichts selbst nichtet]. Nihilation is not some fortuitous incident. Rather, as the repelling gesture toward the retreating whole of beings, it discloses these beings in their full but heretofore concealed strangeness as what is absolutely other [verborgenen Befremdlichkeit als das schlechthin Andere]—with respect to the nothing. In the clear night of the nothing of anxiety the original openness of beings as such arises: that they are beings— and not nothing. (BW, 105; translation modified)

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Here Heidegger resists answering his final question: “Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing?,” but he does venture an answer to a different question: How are there beings at all, and not rather nothing? Being is given by nothing (das Nichts), which “appears” through the disappearance of things and in the “creative longing [schaffenden Sehnsucht]” (BW, 108) of infinitely restless finite subjects. Always haunted by some “thing” that is “absolutely other,” the self is never itself but is always the vehicle for an altarity it can never know. Heidegger names this nameless other das Nichts, Kierkegaard named it “the infinitely qualitatively different,” Derrida will name it la différance. Though thoroughly heteronomous, haunted subjects nevertheless remain totally responsible. Freedom is inseparable from law— not the law the self gives itself, but the law inherent in the “call [Ruf ]” of freedom itself: become what you always will be. Response-ability is the ability to respond to the gift of freedom, and freedom is the nihil out of which all creation emerges. Human decisions are free leaps (Sprüngen) that repeat the original (ursprünglich) event through which being is given. Through a chiasmic reversal, this originary givenness— which is never present but always already past— forever draws near by withdrawing to open the future that makes freedom possible and rest impossible. As we will see in more detail below, the gift of freedom is the gift of time, and the gift of time is the gift of death. Death is the mask of the ever-approaching future. The question of ending returns endlessly. With death, the instant reappears not only to disrupt the present, but also to end presence. Maurice Blanchot offers a meditation on “The Instant of My Death” in a very brief récit. In a manner reminiscent of Kierkegaard, who wrote a very long commentary (Concluding Unscientific Postscript) on his short book (Philosophical Fragments), Derrida writes a long commentary (“Demeure: Fiction and Testimony”) on Blanchot’s very short story. Blanchot tells the tale of a young man taken before a firing squad to be executed by Nazi soldiers, who turn out to be Russian allies. A seemingly insignificant detail and Derrida’s interpretation of it sets these events in the context of a larger narrative: “On the façade [of the chateau] was inscribed, like an indestructible reminder, the date 1807. Was he cultivated enough to know this was the famous year of Jena, when Napoleon, on his small gray horse, passed under the windows of Hegel, who recognized him in the ‘spirit of the world,’ as he wrote to a friend? Lie and truth: for as Hegel wrote to another friend, the French pillaged and ransacked his home. But Hegel knew how to distinguish the empirical and the essential.”13 The year 1807— the end of history that is the end of man. But, of course, the end does not arrive; the soldiers turn out to be Russian allies who spare the young man’s life. The anonymous narrator

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observes, “There remained, however, at the moment [au moment] when the shooting was no longer but to come, the feeling of lightness that I would not know how to translate: freed from life? The infinite opening up? Neither happiness, nor unhappiness. Nor the absence of fear and perhaps already the step/not beyond [le pas au-delà]. I know, I imagine that this unanalyzable feeling changed what there remained for him of existence. As if the death outside of him could only henceforth collide with death in him. ‘I am alive. No, you are dead’” (translation modified; emphasis added).14 Once again, the moment is not the same as the instant. The end of man (both this man and every man) never arrives, nor does the end of history— not in 1807, not in 1989, not in 1992, not in 2006. The narrator adds an unphilosophical postscript in which he reports that the young man returned to Paris, where he met with Malraux to share reflections on art. Why art at this moment, in this instant? The anonymous one concludes, “What does it matter. All that remains is the feeling of lightness that is death itself or, to put it more precisely, the instant of my death henceforth always pending [l’instant de ma mort désormais toujours en instance]” (translation modified)15 L’instant toujours en instance. Death is the end that can never be experienced— when it is here I am not, and when I am here it is not. The experience of “the end” is, therefore, always the experience of the nonexperience of l’à-venir; in other words, that which is always yet to come and thus is never present. Death, like the future, Derrida explains, “testifies to nothing less than the instant of an interruption of time and history.” This interruption is at once the provocation and subversion, which sounds the death knell (Glas) of speculative philosophy. When read through the future of death, speculative philosophy becomes spectral and the Phenomenology of Spirit (Geist) is better understood as the Phenomenology of Ghosts (Geiste). What is difficult to think, to analyze, to dialectize in the logic of the step [le pas] beyond is not [n’est pas]—not only— the philosophical or speculative logic that is deployed without there being anything that arrives, without there being anything that has arrived. On the contrary, it is the event, thus a passion— for the experience of what arrives must be passion, exposure to what one does not see coming and could not predict, master, calculate or program. It is this passion, as it is described in the instant of my death that upholds philosophy and makes possible speculative logic. . . . This spectral law both constitutes and structures the abiding [demeurant] reference in this narrative; it exceeds the opposition between real and unreal, actual and virtual, factual and fictional. . . . This spectral necessity . . . allows what does not

184 / Chapter Seven arrive to arrive, what one believes does not arrive to succeed in arriving [arriver à arriver].16

Demeurer, “to abide” . . . demeurant, “abiding.” To abide death is to receive the gift that leaves the future open. This gift is the abiding grace in which death is life and life is death. In Being and Time, philosophy becomes thanatology. For the individual death is, of course, the final ending. Throughout life Heidegger was obsessed with the paradoxical inevitability and impossibility of ending. His struggle with this problem is acted out in his writings— he could not finish Being and Time. He planned a third section, which was to be entitled “Time and Being,” but its completion was long delayed. More than four decades later, he returned to the topic in a lecture of the same name, delivered at the University of Freiburg on January 31, 1962. Many interpreters argue that Heidegger’s failure to finish his magnum opus is evidence of a decisive shift between his early and late work. But this conclusion is misleading; the seeds for what became his late work as concisely summarized in “Time and Being” can be discerned in his early wrestlings with Paul, Luther, and Kierkegaard, and his ongoing criticism of Hegel as it was elaborated in the late 1930s and early 1940s at the precise time when the French were discovering Hegel’s work. Two other figures were important for Heidegger at this time— Kant, whose contribution to his thought I considered in the previous section, and Schelling, whose influence I will examine in the next section. During the years surrounding the suspension of Being and Time, Heidegger was deeply immersed in German idealism. While he was completing his major work, he was also teaching a seminar on Hegel’s Logic (1925– 26), and in 1929, he offered a lecture course entitled “Der deutsche Idealismus (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel), und die philosophische Problemlage der Gegenwart,” which was accompanied by a seminar on the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit. He also gave a lecture course on the Phenomenology in 1930/31. In these lectures, one can see Heidegger continuing to wrestle with the problem of time. While these texts are very important for understanding the continuity in Heidegger’s thinking, even more suggestive are fragments prepared for oral presentation, which have been published under the title “Negativity: A Confrontation with Hegel Approached from Negativity” (1938– 39, 1941). The titles of the subsections are even more revealing: “Negativity. Nothing— Abyss— Being,” “The Realm of Inquiry of Negativity,” “The differentiation of being and beings,” and “Clearing— Abyss— Nothing.”17 Heidegger broke off Being and Time in the midst of grappling with the contrasting views of time developed by Hegel and Kierkegaard. His argu-

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ment throughout the book is structured by the contrast between inauthentic time, represented by Hegel, and authentic time, represented by Kierkegaard. Heidegger devotes the concluding paragraphs of the book to demonstrating that Hegel’s seemingly complex system rests on the ordinary understanding of time in terms of the presence of a series of nows, which are constituted through the process of double negation; “thus the most appropriate expression which the Hegelian treatment of time receives, lies in his defining it as ‘the negation of a negation’ (that is, of punctuality)” (BT, 483– 84). At this point Heidegger adds a revealing footnote to his text in which he repeats almost verbatim the interpretation of Aristotle’s and Hegel’s accounts of the now that Kierkegaard presents in the seminal footnote in The Concept of Dread, which I analyzed above. Heidegger elaborates this point by turning to Hegel’s discussion of time in the Jena Logic. His argument is based on the text that is the focus of Koyré’s interpretation of Hegel. “In the Jena Logic, which was projected at the time of Hegel’s habilitation, the analysis of time which we find in his Encyclopedia has already been developed in all its essential parts. Even the roughest examination reveals that the section on time . . . is a paraphrase of Aristotle’s essay on time.” In contrast to Koyré, who argues that in his Jena writings, Hegel develops a reading of time that privileges the future, Heidegger claims that Hegel accepts Aristotle’s prioritizing of the present and “stresses the ‘circular course’ of time” (BT, 500nxxx). Heidegger then proceeds to explain this account of the present in terms Hegel’s foundational notion of double negation. Heidegger bases his argument on the phrase that Koyré highlights and that Kojève and Hyppolite interpret so differently: “Time is the concept itself, which is there.” Thus Hegel can define the essence of spirit formally and apophantically [emphasis added] as the negation of a negation. This “absolute negativity” gives a logically formalized Interpretation of Descartes’ “cogito me cogitare rem,” wherein he sees the essence of the conscientia. . . . Because the restlessness with which spirit develops in bringing itself to its concept is the negation of a negation, it accords with spirit, as it actualizes itself, to fall “into time” as the immediate negation of a negation. For “time is the concept itself, which is there [da ist] and which represents itself to the consciousness as an empty intuition; because of this, spirit necessarily appears in time, and it appears as long as it does not grasp its pure concept.” . . . The “exclusion” which belongs to the movement of development harbours in itself a relationship to not-Being. This is time, understood in terms of the “now” which gives itself airs. (BT, 484– 85)

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In this text, Heidegger once again returns to the question of double negation, which for Hegel is the foundation of both subjective and objective reality. Approaching what unexpectedly became the end of Being and Time, Heidegger suggests an answer to a question he asks explicitly more than forty years later. Is the task of thinking at the end of philosophy to think what philosophy has left unthought and what Hegel’s system is constructed not to think? Heidegger already knows the answer: “Just as Hegel casts little light on the source of time which has thus been levelled [nivellieren] off, he leaves totally unexamined the question of whether the way in which spirit is essentially constituted as the negating of negation, is possible in any other manner than on the basis of primordial temporality” (BT, 485– 86). To think this un-thought, it is necessary to think the nihilation of time. Heidegger’s argument shows that Kierkegaard’s reading of primordial temporality through Paul and Luther prefigures his own Destruktion of ontotheology; what he could not have known is that it also anticipates Derrida’s deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence. In contrast to inauthentic time— in which everything is reduced to presence and the present— authentic temporality, he argues, privileges the future in the guise of death. Heidegger’s description of inauthenticity repeats Kierkegaard’s account of the dispersion of responsibility in the chatter and distraction of the crowd: In this concernful fleeing lies a fleeing in the face of death— that is, a lookingaway from the end of Being-in-the-world. This looking-away from it, is in itself a mode of that Being-towards-the-end which is ecstatically futural. The inauthentic temporality of everyday Dasein as it falls, must, as such a looking-away from finitude, fail to recognize authentic futurity and therewith temporality in general. And if indeed the way in which Dasein is ordinarily understood is guided by the “they,” only so can the self-forgetful “representation” of the “infinity” of public time be strengthened. The “they” never dies because it cannot die; for death is in each case mine, and only in anticipatory resoluteness [Entschluss] does it get authentically understood in an existentiell [sic] manner. (BT, 477)

To overcome such inauthenticity, it is necessary to face the future by confronting and accepting one’s own death. In the instant of the individual’s death, the horizon that Nietzsche’s madman had absorbed when declaring the death of God reappears as the limit of human finitude. In this instant, true temporality interrupts everyday time. “Estatico-horizontal temporality temporalizes itself primarily in terms of the

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future. In the way time is ordinarily understood, however, the basic phenomenon of time is seen in the ‘now,’ and indeed in that pure ‘now’ which has been shorn in its full structure— that which they call the ‘Present.’ . . . The ‘now’ is not pregnant with the ‘not-yet-now,’ but the Present arises from the future in the primordial ecstatical unity of the temporalizing of temporality” (BT, 479). Heidegger explicitly acknowledges Kierkegaard as the first to articulate this understanding of time and temporality. In another revealing endnote, he writes that “Kierkegaard is probably the one who has seen the existentiell phenomenon of the moment of vision with the most penetration; but this does not signify that he has been correspondingly successful in Interpreting it existentially” (BT, 497niii). In other words, Kierkegaard has articulated the structure of authentic temporality but has not adequately shown how it informs concrete human existence. Heidegger agrees with Kierkegaard’s insistence that the confrontation with death absolutely singularizes subjectivity. Only by facing death do I realize that I am nothing more than what I become through my individual decisions in my lifetime. The problem is that Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the “singular,” or the isolated individual does not do justice to the self’s being-with-others (Mitsein) and being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein]. Extending his reflection beyond Kierkegaard’s isolated individual, Heidegger’s question now becomes: What does it mean to decide? As always, he finds that words harbor philosophical insights that everyday usage overlooks. Entscheiden, which means “to decide, settle, determine,” is made up of ent, “unveil” or “disclose,” and scheiden, “separate, depart, part.” Entscheiden means something like a disclosing separating or parting, or unveiling departure. In a similar manner, entschliessen, “to resolve,” and Entschluss, “resolution,” consists of ent, “unveiling, disclosing,” plus schliessen, “to shut or close” and Schluss, “shutting, closing.” Entschluss, then, can be understood as an unveiling closing, or a disclosing closure.18 With these insights in mind, Heidegger develops an expanded interpretation of decision. Though Hegel’s entire system is grounded in negation, Heidegger insists he still does not think negativity radically enough: “Hegel’s negativity is not a negativity because it never takes seriously the not and the nihilating,—it has already sublated the not into the ‘yes.’”19 This is the insight Heidegger glimpses in the fragments from the ’30s, which he elaborated in all his later work. What seems to have given Heidegger pause as he attempted to finish Being and Time was a change in his understanding of decision. In a significant departure from Kierkegaard, he shifts decision from the free act of an individual to the decisive opening, which clears the space and creates the time in which free subjects and determinate objects spring forth. In one of

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the fragments, entitled “The Differentiating of Being and Beings,” which anticipates what he later labels the “ontological difference” between Being and beings, Heidegger writes, Differentiation as de-cision De-cision [Ent-Scheidung]—here, that which takes out of the mere separation [blossen Scheiden] and differentiation of what can be pregiven. Beyng [sic; Seyn] itself is the decision—not something that is differentiated [unterschiedenes] from beings for a representing, supervening, reifying differentiation that levels them. Being de-cides as an e-vent [Er-eignis] in the e-venting of man and of the gods into the need for the essence of mankind and of divinity.—This e-venting lets the strife [Streit] of the world and of the earth arise to striving,—the strife in which alone the open clears [lichtet], in which beings fall back to themselves and receive a weight.20

Being, then, is decision, which decides as an eventing of man and the gods, which lets the strife of world and self-occluding earth arise in the open clearing. As we will see in the next section, the entire argument of “The Origin of the Work of Art” is encapsulated in these lines from the late 1930s. But there is even more. In a fragment entitled “Lichtung— Abgrund— Nichts,” Heidegger explains the clearing of de-cision in terms of the abyss, which is nothing. And this nothing turns out to be nothing other than the being or nonbeing of time. This clearing cannot be explained from beings; it is the “between” [Zwischen] and in-between [Inzwischen] (in the time-spatial sense of the originary timespace). . . . The clearing is the a-byss as ground, the nihilating counterpart to all that is [das Nichtende zu allem Seienden] and thus the most important thing. It is thus the “ground” that is never “present-at-hand” [vorhandene] and that is never found, the “ground” that refuses itself in the nihilation as clearing— the supportingfoundation that decides, the one that e-vents— the e-vent. The nihilation [Nichtung]: making room for the purity of the need for grounding (refusal [Ver-sagung] of the ground). The clearing: the a-byss. . . . The a-byss: the nothing, what is most a-byssal— beyng itself; not because the latter is what is most empty and general [as it is for Hegel], and what fades the

Being Timely / 189 most, the last fumes— but the richest, the singular, the middle that does not mediate and thus can never be taken back. (translation modified)21

De- cision— differentiation— strife— clearing— abyss— nothing— inbetween— middle/Mitte/milieu—time— being. This reinterpretation of decision is the crucial “turn” in Heidegger’s thinking. Decision is no longer merely the act of the singular individual; rather, de-cision is the primal e-vent through which individual agents as well as everything else comes into being. So understood, de-cision is impersonal rather than personal. Ent-scheiden, Ent-schluss is the originary clearing or opening in which subjects and objects are initially differentiated. This interpretation of decision entails a different understanding of freedom. In contrast to Kant and Hegel for whom freedom is autonomy, which is realized in the self-reflexivity of self-consciousness, for Heidegger, freedom is spontaneity that is actualized in the original (ur-sprüng-lich) leap (Sprung) into creation. This Sprung is the crack, fissure, fault, flaw, break, split that tears (zer-riss-en, Riss) the self apart. Human freedom is always an e-vent that occurs within this more primal freedom. Heidegger makes this point in an early comment about Schelling, “Freedom not the property of man, but rather: man the property of freedom” (EHF, 9). Human freedom, therefore, is always finite; that is to say it is heteronomous rather than autonomous. This interpretation of de-cision and freedom presents an alternative decentering of the subject. The “I” of the agential subject presupposes the “it,” “es,” or “ça” of differentiating de-cision. While Hegel and his structuralist followers decenter the subject by incorporating individuality into a foundational logic or rational structure (Logos), Heidegger and his poststructuralist followers decenter individual subjects by tracing their origin to a primal deed (Tat) that eludes cognitive comprehension. In terms I have previously invoked, Hegel and structuralists are latter-day theologians of the Word, and Heidegger and poststructuralists are latter-day a/theologians of the Deed. With these insights, Being and Time “completes” itself in “Time and Being.” Heidegger begins his argument in “Time and Being” by repeating his claim that the dominant view of time in terms of presence and the present is misguided. He stresses that this metaphysical view of time has been formulated in many ways ever since the Greeks: “the hen, the unifying unique One, as the logos, the gathering that preserves the All, as idea, ousia, energeia, substantia, actualitas, perceptio, monad” (OTB, 7). The familiar interpretation of time as a linear series of nows that can be quantified, measured, and

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calculated leads to the scientific and technological exercise of the will to power in the construction of the modern world. There is, however, a subtle change in Heidegger’s terminology that is important, though not immediately obvious. He writes not only about presence and the present, but also about “presencing.” Indeed, he goes so far as to suggest that “Being means: presencing, letting-be-present” (OTB, 10). This reformulation of his claim that “Being is time”—or, more precisely, Being is temporality— is intended as a criticism of Hegel’s assertion that time is the Dasein of the concept. To account for Being as the letting-be of beings, Heidegger argues, it is necessary to think a fourth dimension of time. The notion of the fourth dimension was developed in a different context by the Russian mystic P. D. Ouspensky in his books The Fourth Dimension: A Study of an Unfathomable Realm (1909) and Tertium Organum: A Key to the Enigmas of the World (1911). Ouspensky’s vision was very important for Blavatsky’s theosophy and greatly influenced Kandinsky as well as other leading Russian artists. For Heidegger, the fourth dimension insistently eluded rational comprehension and was always shrouded in obscurity and mystery. Neither present nor absent, the fourth dimension is the condition of the possibility of presence and absence. The unity of time’s three dimensions consists in the interplay of each toward each. This interplay proves to be the true extending, playing in the very heart of time, the fourth dimension, so to speak— not only so to speak, but in the nature of the matter. True time is four-dimensional [vierdimensional]. But the dimension which we call the fourth in our count is, in the nature of the matter, the first, that is, the giving that determines all. In future, in past, in the present, that giving brings about to each its own presencing [Anwesen], holds them apart thus opened and so holds them toward one another in the nearness by which the three dimensions remain near one another. (OTB, 15)

The fourth dimension is the first that consists in “the giving that determines all.” This presencing is the primordial temporality that Hegel and Western philosophy leave unthought. Elsewhere Heidegger tries to clarify this temporality with a sketch (Grundriss) depicting a spiral open at both ends (fig. 20). This originary spacing-timing is the e-venting that Heidegger labels Ereigenis. This event “is not simply an occurrence, but that which makes any occurrence possible” (OTB, 19). Presencing as e-vent is a sending forth into presence by that which is never present, but gives by holding back (Gr.,

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Figure 20. Martin Heidegger, Sketch (Grundriss) of Time, EHF, 136.

epoché) or withdrawing. The reticence (Verschwiegenheit) of this retreat gives the gift of being with no expectation of return. Heidegger writes, “To think Being explicitly requires us to relinquish Being as the ground of beings in favor of the giving which prevails concealed in unconcealment, that is, in favor of the It gives. As the gift of this It gives, Being belongs to giving [Sein gehört als die Gabe diese Gebens, d. h. des Es gibt]. As a gift, Being is not expelled from [abgestossen] giving. Being, presencing is transmuted. As allowing-topresence, it belongs to unconcealing; as the gift of unconcealing it is retained in the giving. Being is not. There is, It gives Being as the unconcealing; as the gift of unconcealing it is retained in the giving. Being is not. There is, It gives Being as the unconcealing of presencing” (OTB, 6). Such absolute generosity, which allows no countergift, is the grace that “biding and abiding in lasting as lasting in present being [in Wahren als dem Anwahren das Weilen und Verweilen]” (OTB, 12). The unavoidable question, then, becomes: Who gives? What gives? The only answer Heidegger can “give” is really no answer at all: “Es gibt.” (It gives.) “The ‘It’ continues to be undetermined, and we ourselves continue to be puzzled” (OTB, 17). To ponder this puzzle, Heidegger reverses Hegel’s translation of artistic images and representations into philosophical concepts by turning philosophy into art.

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In-difference of Art In his exploration of the imagination, Kant discovered an abyss that profoundly unsettled him. As he ponders this groundless ground, he begins to suspect that this abyss might have something to do with the work of art: “This schematism of our understanding, in its application to appearances and their mere form, is an art concealed in the depths of the human soul, whose real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover, and to have open to our gaze” (emphasis added).22 Kant’s suggestion about the art hidden in the depths of subjectivity fueled the imagination of the romantics and idealists who gathered in Jena during the final decade of the eighteenth century and first decade of the nineteenth century. Once again, it was Protestants who led the way. The two writers who were most important for Heidegger were Friedrich Schleiermacher, who was a Protestant pastor, and Friedrich Schelling, who was yet another son of a Protestant pastor. Schleiermacher interprets religion in terms of art, and Schelling interprets art in terms of religion. Schleiermacher and Schelling stand in a long line of writers who were deeply influenced by the tradition of German mystics dating back to Meister Eckhart (ca. 1260– ca. 1328).23 Heidegger’s interest in mysticism began with his study of medieval theology, which included major figures like Bernard of Clairvaux, Teresa of Ávila, Francis of Assisi, Jakob Böhme, and Angelus Silesius. Heidegger was introduced to Schleiermacher’s theology during his time in Marburg. Schleiermacher and others were members of the Romantic circle in Berlin, and elaborated Kant’s interpretation of art in the Third Critique in ways that are still influencing society and culture. This is where modern art and literature first emerged, and where modern theology began with the publication of Schleiermacher’s Speeches on Religion to Its Cultured Despisers (1799). In 1917, Heidegger presented a talk on Schleiermacher to a small group of friends and colleagues on “the problem of the religious” in which he focused on the pivotal second speech. Two years later, he offered a course entitled “The Philosophical Foundations of Medieval Mysticism.” In his first lecture after returning from the war in 1919, Heidegger claimed that Schleiermacher “discovered primal Christianity” (YH, 148).24 This is the same primal Christianity that he saw in Paul and that he believed had been lost by the Hellenization of Christian theology. What made Schleiermacher so attractive to Heidegger was that he saw in his theology a version Paul’s deus absconditus that is inseparable from a kairological interpretation of time. In an effort to overcome the impasse created by Enlightenment criticisms of faith, Schleiermacher argues that religion does not involve knowing (First

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Critique) or acting (Second Critique), but is essentially a matter of feeling (Gefühl; Third Critique). More precisely, religion is the “feeling of an absolute dependence.” Though Heidegger’s reading of Schleiermacher’s second speech is a creative misprision, it plays an important role in the evolution of his thinking. Schleiermacher develops his argument in a variation of the traditional tripartite structure of unity, division, and reunion, which, we have seen, is also the foundation of the circularity of Hegel’s system. What intrigues Heidegger is Schleiermacher’s claim that the first moment of this dialectic is inaccessible and thus is never actually experienced. Since this moment is prior to the distinction between subject and object, it can never be known, because consciousness and self-consciousness presuppose a distinction between subject and object. Schleiermacher argues that one must “go back on the first beginning of . . . consciousness.” And: “You must know how to listen to yourselves before your own consciousness. At least you must be able to reconstruct from your consciousness your own state. What you are to notice is the rise of your consciousness and not to reflect upon something already there. Your thought can only embrace what is sundered” (emphasis added). Unity, in other words, is always already lost and therefore always yet to come. Schleiermacher develops an artful style to evoke what he cannot represent: “You become sense and the Whole becomes object. Sense and object mingle and unite, then each returns to its place, and the object rent from sense is a perception, and you rent from the object are for yourselves, a feeling. It is this earlier moment I mean, which you always experience yet never experience. The phenomenon of your life is just the result of its constant departure and return” (emphasis added).25 Once again the moment— the moment “you always experience yet never experience.” This is the experience of the nonexperience of what is neither present nor absent, but is always slipping away because it is eternally passing as that which is yet to come. Forever beyond recollection, this moment is im-memorial— it “is” the “outside” of time in time that keeps temporality in motion. Since this moment appears by disappearing and is revealed through concealment, it approximates the trace of the deus absconditus that Heidegger also sees in the writings of medieval mystics. Van Buren offers a helpful explanation of these complex interconnections: “The medieval mystic’s unio mystica and abandonment (Hingabe) in the mysterium tremendum of the analogical efflux of the Divine Life also tells us something about the way that all experience is abandoned in the mysterious depth-dimension of the differentiating Ereignis of being, just as do Schleiermacher’s ‘feeling of [the] absolute dependence’ of finite particularity on the divine infinite universe, the artist’s ecstatic releasement and abandon in creative work, the trusting

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‘surrender’ of Pauline-Lutheran faith to the kairological Parousia of the Deus absconditus, the earnest absorption of Aristotelian practical wisdom in the lethe and kairological kinesis of futural moral ends, the Aristotelian artisan’s dedication to a craft, the mountaineer’s abandonment in the sunrise, or the family’s heartfelt surrender to the ‘evening meal’” (YH, 295). This is the uncanny experience Schelling probes in his lectures on the philosophy of art. Friedrich Schelling (1775– 1854) was a prodigy who started his studies at the Tübinger Stift, which was the seminary of the Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Württemberg, where his roommates were Hegel and Hölderlin. His doctoral thesis, written under Gottlob Christian Storr, was on the relation between the early “Christian” dualist Marcion and Paul. In 1798 at the exceptionally young age of twenty-three, Schelling was appointed to a professorship at the University of Jena, where he began lecturing in 1799. During the 1790s, he also worked and sometimes published with Hegel. In 1800, he published his first major book, System of Transcendental Idealism. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, released seven years later, Hegel famously criticized Schelling for having developed a system in which the undifferentiated Absolute is “the night in which all cows are black.” This led to a predictable break with Hegel and years of itinerate teaching and writing. During this period, Schelling wrote several extremely difficult but very important works, including The Ages of the World (1813) and Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom (1809).26 In 1841, Prussian authorities appointed Schelling to the Berlin Academy, with the hope that his lectures would help quell the growing influence of radical left-wing Hegelians. During his Berlin years, Schelling delivered lectures on what he described as his “positive philosophy,” which he intended to be a thoroughgoing criticism of the negativity not only of Hegel’s system but also his own early idealism. Though Kierkegaard downplayed the significance of Schelling’s lectures, they left a lasting impression on his work. Heidegger had a longstanding interest in Schelling, and during the summer of 1936 taught a course on Schelling; shortly thereafter he published Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom. Heidegger structures the course and the book around the question of the compatibility between the system and individual human freedom. This is a variation of the question of the relation between structure and event, or word and deed, that I have been tracking. Heidegger goes so far as to claim that “philosophy is intrinsically a strife between necessity and freedom. And in that it belongs to philosophy as the highest knowledge to know itself, it will produce from itself this strife and thus the question of the system of freedom” (EHF, 58). From this point of view, philosophy involves a fundamental conflict between two primary characteristics of modernity: the will

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to construct systems and the freedom of the will to disrupt systems and structures. In order to reconcile these competing tendencies, modern philosophers attempted to develop a “system of freedom.” For Heidegger, such a system is impossible because system (that is to say, necessity) and freedom are contradictory— the critical question, then, is whether system/structure or freedom/e-vent has priority. Heidegger traces the will to system to Kant’s critical philosophy and its elaboration in nineteenth-century German idealism. He finds the seeds for systematicity in the notion of self-organization in Kant’s Third Critique. As we have seen self-organization is one of the permutations of inner teleology, which also defines the autotelic structure of the work of fine art. German idealism translates the principle of self-organization into the self-reflexive idea or concept, which includes everything within itself as moments of its own self-development and is therefore thoroughly autonomous. The selfgrounding concept is both subjective and objective and is therefore simultaneously epistemological and ontological. Even though Hegel consistently distinguishes mathematical and machinic Verstand from organic Vernunft, Heidegger argues that the systems defining modernity are essentially mathematical. He identifies six basic characteristics of systems, which by now should be familiar. 1. The predominance of the mathematical as the criterion of knowledge. 2. The self-founding of knowledge in the sense of this requirement as the precedence of certainty over truth. . . . 3. The founding of certainty as the self-certainty of the “I think.” 4. Thinking, ratio as the court of judgment for the essential determination of Being. 5. The shattering of the exclusive dominance of church faith in the shaping of knowledge, at the same time including the previous Christian experience of Being as a whole in the new questioning. . . . 6. The setting free of man for the creative conquest and rule and new formation of beings in all areas of human existence. . . . The will to a freely forming and knowing control over beings as a whole projects for itself the structure of Being as this will. (EHF, 34)

The completion of such a system would provide the “absolutely certain foundation” for thought as well as action in the often incomprehensible modern world. In this way, Hegel’s absolute knowledge would finally overcome Cartesian doubt, with which modern philosophy began. Heidegger is not convinced by the claims of systematic philosophy and its extension in modern science and technology. One of the main reasons

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for his persistent doubt is his conviction that Schelling “shatters Hegel’s Logic before it was even published!” (EHF, 97).Through this disruption, “Schelling himself transfers the foundation of his philosophy to a deeper ground” (EHF, 91). This deeper ground is freedom, and since freedom cannot be conceptualized, it must be apprehended in “feeling.” The feeling of freedom is, paradoxically, the feeling of absolute dependence with which Schleiermacher associates religion. This insight marks a crucial moment in Heidegger’s thinking, in which he discerns the connection between the understanding of freedom as spontaneity and de-cision as an opening e-vent. Schelling’s treatise has nothing to do with this question of the freedom of the will, which is ultimately wrongly put and thus not a question at all. For freedom is here, not the property of man, but the other way around: Man is at best the property of freedom. Freedom is the encompassing and penetrating nature, in which man becomes man only when he is anchored there. That means the nature of man is grounded in freedom. But freedom itself is a determination of true Being in general which transcends all human being. Insofar as man is as man, he must participate in this determination of Being, and man is, insofar as he brings about this participation in freedom. (Key sentence: Freedom not the property of man, but rather: man the property of freedom.) (EHF, 9)

Here freedom is neither individual activity nor the will to power that is autonomous, but is the opposite— a radical passivity that is originally heteronomous. Far from self-grounding, freedom is the groundless ground of all beings. Neither rational nor irrational, freedom is the origin of both reason and its opposite: This is Schelling’s point (NB) when he argues that freedom is the spontaneous leap that faults reason and logic. To understand Heidegger’s reading of Schelling’s view of freedom, it is necessary to think absolute willing or willing as such by thinking willing neither anthropologically nor theistically. Such thinking would be a-theistic or, more precisely, a/theological. In contrast to Hegelian idealism, in which rational structure is the foundation that renders everything comprehensible and transforms the contingency of serial nows into necessary moments in the circle of becoming, Schelling discerns a “beyond” that is “within” the Logos as the necessary condition that leaves it incomplete. Heidegger quotes Schelling: “In the final and highest instance, there is no other Being than Will. Will is primordial Being” (EHF, 95). He sees in Schelling’s treatise on freedom a philosophical

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rendering of a theological tradition dating back to the voluntarism of Luther and Ockham. In this version of Protestantism, God is omnipotent will and human beings are “creative creatures.” Heidegger makes these connections explicitly: “We must take into consideration the fact that through German Protestantism in the Reformation not only Roman dogma was changed, but also the Roman-Oriental form of the Christian experience of Being was transformed. What was already being prepared in the Middle Ages with Meister Eckhart, Tauler, and Seuse and in the ‘German Theologia’ is brought to bear in a new beginning and in a more comprehensive way by Nicholas Cusanus, by Luther, Sebastian Franck, Jacob Böhme— and in art by Albrecht Dürer” (EHF, 31). He then explains what these precursors of Schelling understood that modern speculative philosophers do not: If God is the ground and if God himself is not a mechanism and a mechanical cause, but rather creative life, then what he has brought about cannot itself be a mere mechanism. If God as the ground reveals himself in what is grounded by him, he can only reveal himself there. What is dependent must itself be a freely acting being, just because it depends on God. God looks at things as they are in themselves. To be in itself, however, means to stand independently in oneself. What God brings before himself, his representations, ‘can only be independent beings.’ What rests upon itself, however, is what is free— is will. What depends on God must be made dependent (ab-gehängt) through him and from him in such a way that it comes to itself to stand as something independent. What is dependently independent, the “derived absoluteness,” is not contradictory [emphases added]. Rather, this concept captures what constitutes the band between the ground of beings as a whole and beings as a whole. God is man; that is, man as a free being is in God and only something free can be in God at all. (EHF, 87– 88)

Instead of incorporating human freedom in an all-encompassing system, Heidegger, following Schelling, interprets freedom as the aleatory event in which free agents spring forth from the nonfoundation that is their abiding origin. With this “derived absoluteness,” or finite freedom, we return to the question of the relation between eternity and time. The free will of human beings initially emerges through a de-cision that is “prior to all calculation and reckoning” (EHF, 155). The life of the finite individual is a sheer gift that has neither reason nor foundation. Once again we discover that “the Moment” is “the decisive fundamental experience of human being” (EHF, 155). Just as human freedom is “grounded” in a more “fundamental” freedom, so human decision is “grounded” in a more

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“fundamental” de-cision. This originary moment of de-cision opens the possibility for every decision finite individuals make. God’s becoming cannot be serialized in individual segments in the succession of ordinary “time.” Rather, in this becoming everything “is” “simultaneous.” But simultaneous does not mean here that past and future give up their nature and turn “into” the pure present. On the contrary, original simul-taneity consists in the fact that being past and being present assert themselves and mingle with each other together with being present as the essential fullness of time itself. And this mingling of true temporality, this Moment, “is” the essence of eternity, but not the present which has merely stopped and remains that way, the nunc stans. Eternity can only be thought truly, that is, poetically [emphasis added], if we understand it as the most primordial temporality [emphasis added], but never in the manner of common sense which says to itself: Eternity, that is the opposite of temporality. (EHF, 113)

In the eternal past of primordial temporality, Heidegger sees the abyssal trace of the Gottheit Eckhart and other medieval mystics saw “within” God: “There remains in God the eternal past of himself in his ground. The ‘afterwards’ and ‘soon’ are to be understood here in an eternal sense. The whole boldness of Schelling’s thinking comes into play here. But it is not the vacuous play of thoughts of a manic hermit, it is only the continuation of an attitude of thinking which begins with Meister Eckhart and is uniquely developed in Jacob Böhme” (EHF, 117). This eternal past is not Hegelian and is not subject to recollection; indeed, it resists Er-innerung and therefore cannot be incorporated or assimilated. De-cision is “the essence of Being,” which “presences as will” (EHF, 135). Though Heidegger does not use Eckhart’s term Gelassenheit here, his interpretation of the eternal de-cision, differentiation, primal temporality is the letting-go, which is Being’s letting-be of beings.27 In other words, originary will is the opening or clearing in which the absolute absolves individuals. Far from the exercise of the will to power that asserts itself through man’s construction of the modern world, this primal will is the abiding grace without which nothing is. As Heidegger suggests, the gift of this grace cannot be grasped (begriffen) conceptually (begrifflich) but must be expressed poetically. Heidegger reverses the Hegelian “progression” from religion to art to philosophy by moving from philosophy to religion to art. Three years after Schleiermacher published Speeches on Religion, in which he interpreted religion through art, Schelling delivered his lectures on “Philosophy of Art” (1802/03), in which he argues that art is the expression of divine creativity:

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“The universe is formed in God as an absolute work of art and in eternal beauty. By universe we do not mean the real or ideal All, but rather the absolute identity of both. If the indifference of the real and the ideal within the real and ideal All is beauty, specifically beauty in reflected images, then the absolute identity of the real and ideal All is necessarily primal, that is, absolute beauty itself. To that extent the universe, as it is in God, is also to be viewed as an absolute work of art in which infinite intention mutually interpenetrates infinite necessity.”28 It is important to note that Schelling does not say the universe is God, but the universe “is formed in God.” Just as human freedom is exercised within the divine freedom that gives it freedom, so finite works of art come to expression within the infinite work of art. In the discussion of Schleiermacher above, I suggested that his interpretation of religion can be understood in terms of the familiar three-part story of unity-divisionreunion. Since “original unity” can never be known but only felt, Schleiermacher tries to evoke this feeling with erotic images— “a maiden’s kiss,” “a bridal embrace,” “the holy wedlock of the Universe.”29 Schelling’s claim that “the absolute identity of the real and ideal All is necessarily primal” might also be understood to be nothing more than another formulation of ontotheology’s traditional archeo-teleological narrative. However, his argument can be read otherwise. Schelling’s version of Schleiermacher’s “original unity” is the “indifference point [Indifferenz Punkt].” Unlike the now of spatialized time, this Punkt is never here and now. In a manner similar to the kabbalistic Zim Zum, the Indifferenz Punkt appears by disappearing. Edmond Jabès indirectly clarifies Schelling’s “point” in the last volume of his Book of Questions: El, or The Last Book. Once again, it is a question of ending. The Last Book begins with a quotation from the Kabbalah: “When God, El, wanted to reveal Himself He appeared as a point.” Jabès then proceeds with lines that might well have been written by Schelling criticizing Hegel: All my books have come about in this way. Some observation, often banal, some breach, some fear, anxiety or pain have in turn prepared their birth. Here, yesterday’s circle has shrunk to a point, the questioning of the circle to that of the point. Out of the nothingness of the book, a deeper nothing strove towards light, conniving with a rebel point which the infinite dark had hidden from me.30

When the circle contracts into the point, its indifference is no longer the lack of difference but the opening in which differences appear and disappear. Writing on Jabès’s Last Book on the last page of the last essay of Writing and

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Difference, suggestively entitled “Ellipsis,” Derrida explains the strange primal temporality of the point; the title enacts the argument. Marking absence by three points ( . . . ), an ellipsis figures the nonpresent of past presents, present presents, and future presents. The ellipsis, in other words, marks the end of presence as the unending end of time. “What is to come is not a future present, yesterday is not a past present. The beyond of the closure of the book is neither to be awaited nor to be refound. It is there, but out there, beyond, within repetition, but eluding us there. It is there like the shadow of the book, the third party between the hands holding the book, the deferral within the now of writing, the distance between the book and the book, that other hand” (WD, 300). The deferral within the now . . . not a past present . . . not a future present. The time of such writing is improper, even errant. It is not the writing of the right hand, but of the other hand, the sinister, or left, hand, which might be the hand of the Other. Sinister, after all (always after all) derives from the Latin sinister, which means “left, on the left,” hence “evil, unlucky.” In divination the left side is regarded as inauspicious. Jabès’s poetic rendering of Lurianic cosmology illuminates Schelling’s philosophy of art. As the creation of the world takes place through the Ein Sof’s withdrawal into a point to clear the way for the foundational binary structure of the paired Sephirot, so for Schelling, the withdrawal of the Absolute into the Indifferenz Punkt creates the opening for the logic, which balances the interplay of opposites that extends the creative activity of divine. At the same time, this Indifferenz Punkt is the origin, the Sprung that shatters the closure of speculative logic as well as every other foundational structure. For Schelling, the indifference of this point is not the lack of difference; to the contrary, it is the in-difference that is the irreducible interstitiality, liminality, marginality that is neither here nor now, neither present nor absent. “The indifference of the ideal and the real as indifference manifests itself in the ideal world through art, for art is in itself neither mere activity nor mere knowledge, but is rather an activity completely permeated by knowledge, or in a reverse fashion that has completely become activity. That is, it is the in-difference of both.” This in-difference of art is the hovering, oscillation, altarnation of the imagination that finds expression in the rhythms of poetry. Schelling underscores this point in his comments on Kant’s notion of genius: “The real side of genius, or that unity that constitutes the informing [Einbildung] of the infinite into the finite, can be called poesy [poésie] in the narrower sense; the ideal side, or that unity that constitutes the informing of the finite into the infinite, can be called art within art.”31 Freedom within freedom becomes art within art, which is a de-cision within a de-cision. In Heidegger’s later work, Schelling’s poésie becomes poiesis, which is “the origin of the work of art.”

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Art Opening At the same time Heidegger was teaching and writing about Schelling, he delivered a lecture entitled “The Origin of the Work of Art” on two occasions— in Freiburg on November 13, 1935, and in Zurich in January 1936. The complexity of this work begins with the title, which serves as a frame. In essays on Kant’s Third Critique (which itself frames the First and Second Critiques) and Heidegger’s “Origin of the Work of Art” (published in Truth in Painting), Derrida argues that frames are neither inside nor outside the work, but mark the boundary, edge, margin, or limen that is both the beginning and end of the work. The frame functions as the point of de-cision that opens the work of art. As Ent-Schluss, title both is and does the work of art. Heidegger’s title is further complicated by the duplicity of each of its words. Ursprung, as we have seen, means “original,” and harbors Sprung, which means “crack,” “fissure,” “fault,” “flaw,” “break,” “split,” “spring,” “jump,” “leap,” and “tear.” Kunstwerk (œuvre d’art) must be understood as both a noun (work as object) and a verb (work as process). And des is a double genitive pointing to both how and where the work (noun/verb) comes into being, and how and where the work (noun/verb) brings other works (noun/ verb) into being. Heidegger’s title implicitly poses a question, which, in turn raises two further questions: Where and how does the work of art originate? Where does the work (noun/verb) of art come from? Whence the work? What does the work (noun/verb) of art do? Whither the work?

He famously begins to answer these questions by selecting an example of an actual work of art: van Gogh’s painting of a pair (if it is a pair) of peasant shoes. In an essay that takes as its point of departure the question of the point, “Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing [pointure],” Derrida has shown that this example is far from innocent.32 What is of interest in this context is less the politics of Heidegger’s choice, which preoccupies Derrida, than the relation of the work of art to time, modernity, and death. Immediately after citing the example of van Gogh’s painting, Heidegger advances a puzzling claim: “All works have this thingly character [Dinghaft]” (PLT, 19). This statement raises further questions— what does he mean by “thingly”? And, by extension, what is a thing? Heidegger starts his account of the thing by explaining what a thing is not. First, the thing is not what it has been understood to be from the Middle Ages to the modern era. From medieval

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theologians (for whom God creates the world through the transcendent Logos, which in-forms formless matter) to Kant (for whom man creates the world through the transcendental imagination by synthesizing the transcendent forms of intuition and categories of understanding with the sensible manifold of intuition), things have been conceived in terms of the binary opposition form/matter. When understood in this way, both the world and things in it are divine/human constructions. In more contemporary terms, things as well as the life-world are created through an in-formation process in which data (the given) are processed by screens, filters, and programs that exclude noise to create intelligibility. Second, Heidegger distinguishes the thing from “equipment [Zeug].” Equipment is what is “present-to-hand [Vorhandenheit]” and as such is “useful [Dienlichkeit].” These two characteristics of the thing are closely related. Things that are constructed are useful because they are engineered to serve human purposes. There is, however, a third way to conceive things and this is the alternative that most intrigues Heidegger. Immediately after his discussion of the theological and philosophical interpretation of transcendental construction of things, Heidegger adds an extremely important comment: The situation stands revealed as soon as we speak of things in the strict sense as mere things [blosse Dinge]. The “mere” [bloss], after all, means the removal of the character of usefulness [Dienlichkeit] and being made [Anfertigung]. The mere thing is a sort of equipment, albeit equipment stripped [entkleidete] of its equipmental being. Thing-being consists in what is then left over [Das Dingsein best in dem, was dann noch ubrigbleibt]. But this remnant [Rest] is not actually defined in its ontological character [Seinscharakter]. It remains doubtful whether the thingly character comes to view at all in the process of stripping away everything equipmental. Thus the third mode of interpretation of the thing, that which follows the lead of the matter-form structure, also turns out to be an assault upon the thing. (PLT, 30)

In its third modality, the thing as a “mere thing” is useless; it is the remainder, residue, or excess that is left over after all utility is stripped away. What is useless has no purpose, or has no purpose other than itself. The remainder, then, exemplifies the inner Zweckmässigkeit that Kant maintains is the distinguishing feature of the beautiful work of art. We have seen that Kant distinguishes low art, which is made for the market and thus is useful (Heidegger’s Zeug), from high art, which is art for art’s sake and thus is not caught up in systems, structures, and networks of exchange (Heidegger’s Ding). Useless remainders are not marketable in any system of exchange.

Being Timely / 203

A decade and a half later, Heidegger clarified his interpretation of the thing in an essay entitled simply “Das Ding” (1950). He begins this essay in an unexpected way by discussing communications and information technologies: “All distances in time and space are shrinking. Man now reaches overnight, by plane, places which formerly took weeks and months of travel. He now receives instant information, by radio of events which he formerly learned about only years later, if at all. . . . The peak of this abolition of every possibility of remoteness [der Ferne] is reached by television, which will soon pervade and dominate the whole machinery of communication” (PLT, 165). He then proceeds, equally unexpectedly, to comment on the atomic and hydrogen bombs, which, of course, had recently brought the end of World War II and for many people foreshadowed the impending end of the world: “Man stares at what the explosion of the atom bomb could bring with it. He does not see that the atom bomb and its explosion are the mere final emission of what has long since taken place, has already happened. Not to mention the single hydrogen bomb, whose triggering, thought through to its utmost potential, might be enough to snuff out all life on earth. What is this helpless anxiety still waiting for, if the terrible has already happened?” (PLT, 166). What does Heidegger mean when he claims that the explosion of these deadly bombs is the afterglow of a “final emission [letzten Auswurf ]”? And how can a philosophical meditation on “the thing” possibly help defer this horrific catastrophe? Questions proliferate when Heidegger begins his argument by taking as his example a lowly pot, jar, or jug [Zeug], and proceeds to argue that the thing is really no thing at all but “is” Nothing— das Nichts. The nothing the jug surrounds without encompassing Heidegger incredulously claims is the Nichts that might be salvific in a world brought to the brink of disaster by the exercise of the will to power and the will to mastery in modern science and technology. The jug is a “holding vessel” made by a potter, and yet “the potter in no way constitutes what is peculiar and proper to the jug insofar as it is qua jug” (PLT, 168). The thing in the strict sense of the term is not made by the potter, or by anyone else, because das Ding is not an “object”—a Gegen-stand—that “stands before, over against, opposite” a subject. Insofar as the “jug’s thingness resides in its being qua vessel” (PLT, 169), the jug must be understood as a void, emptiness— even a no(-)thingness. Heidegger becomes more specific when he suggests that this is not just any jug, but a jug that is a holding vessel for wine (the libation of Bacchus and Dionysus and the untransubstantiated blood of Christ). “When we fill the jug with wine, do we pour the wine between the sides and bottom? At most, we pour the wine between the sides and over the bottom. Sides and bottom

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are, to be sure, what is impermeable in the vessel. But what is impermeable is not yet what does the holding. When we fill the jug, the pouring that fills it flows into the empty jug. This emptiness, the void [die Leere], is what does the vessel’s holding. The emptiness, the void, this nothing [Nichts] of the jug, is what the jug is as the holding vessel” (PLT, 169; translation modified). Instead of making the jug, the potter merely “shapes the void,” which no one creates. Since “the vessel’s thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that holds” (PLT, 169), the thing is not constituted by a constructive subject. A circumscribed void or hollow, the thing resists manipulation and escapes the grasp of comprehension. What cannot be comprehended by concepts can be apprehended in works of art and through the work of art. In his analysis of the work of art, Heidegger weaves together all the threads I have been tracing to create a text that overflows its boundaries— origin, Ursprung, de-cision, Ent-scheiden, e-vent, opening, clearing, point, construction, de-construction, tear, Riss, aletheia, the holy, being, time, gift, and death. The site where all these threads are knotted together is a temple. Why a temple? What is a temple? A Greek temple, of course. A temple whose foundation is not as secure as it appears to be. Temple derives from the Latin templum, which, like tempus (“time”), comes from the Greek temnos. While temno means “cut,” temnos designates that which is cut off. Accordingly, templum is a section, a part cut off. Indirectly invoking the wound of time, Heidegger argues that the templum is “a space in the sky or on the earth marked out by the augur for the purpose of taking auspices; a consecrated piece of ground, especially a sanctuary or asylum; a place dedicated to a particular deity, a shrine.”33 The site of the origin is the temple, this “tear” (Riss; zerissen, Zerrissenheit) that fissures and faults what seemed to be the most solid and secure foundation. Heidegger explains, “A construction [Bauwerk], the Greek temple portrays or images nothing [bildet nichts ab]. The temple images nothing by holding open the differential interval between sky (revealing) and earth (concealing).” Standing there, the construction rests on the rocky ground. This resting of the work draws up out of the rock the obscurity of the rock’s monstrous yet spontaneous support. Standing there, the construction holds its ground against the storm raging above it and so first makes the storm itself manifest in its violence. The luster and gleam of the stone, though itself apparently glowing only by grace of the sun, yet first brings to light the light of the day, the breadth of the sky, the darkness of the night. The secure tower makes visible the invisible space of air. The steadfastness of the work contrasts with the surge of the surf, and its own repose [Ruhe] brings out the raging of the sea. Tree and grass, eagle

Being Timely / 205 and bull, snake and cricket first enter into their distinctive forms and thus come to appear as what they are. (PLT, 42; translation modified)

Neither eagle nor bull, tree nor grass, snake nor cricket is original, for each arises in and through the work (noun/verb) of art. The origin of art is an original Sprung that makes possible all such paired opposites. Heidegger’s opening question, “Where and how does art occur [Wo und wie gibt es die Kunst]?” might better be translated as “Where and how is art given?” (PLT, 17). Here the question of the meaning of es gibt once again returns. Responding to his own question, Heidegger argues that “the work holds open the Open of the world” (PLT, 45). In the space-time of this opening, revelation and concealment repeatedly intersect in a play of differences that constitutes “the essential strife” of “world” (i.e., “the self-disclosing openness [sich offende Offenheit]”) and “earth” (i.e., the “essentially selfsecluding [wesenhaft Sichverschliessende]”) (PLT, 47–49). The artwork works by setting up the world as the region within which Being and beings emerge, and setting forth the earth as the sheltering domain where they withdraw. The altarnating strife of world and earth forms the “tear [Riss]” that lies in the midst of Being and beings. The world demands its decisiveness [Entschiedenheit] and its measure and lets beings extend into the Open of their paths. Earth, bearing and jutting, strives to keep itself closed and to the strife is not a tear (Riss) as the gaping crack [Aufreissen] of a pure cleft [Kluft], but the strife of the intimacy [Innigkeit] with which the combatants belong to each other. This tear pulls the opponents together in the origin of their unity by virtue of their common ground. It is a basic design [Grundriss], an outline sketch [Aufriss], that draws the basic features of the rise of the lighting [Lichtung] of beings. This tear does not let the opponents burst apart; it brings the opposition of measure and boundary [Grenze] into their common outline [Umriss]. (PLT, 63; translation modified)

This tear is the tear of pain engendered by an original rending that never heals. “Pain is the joining or articulation of the rift. The joining is the threshold. It delivers the between [Zwischen], the mean [Mitte] of the two that are separated in it. Pain articulates the rift of the difference. Pain is dif-ference [Unter-scheid] itself” (PLT, 204). From the pain of this wound gushes forth the salvific gift that promises to delay rather than bring the Parousia. This Riss marks the return of the thing, which we have never really left. An offering (Opfer) is a sacrifice (Opfer), but not all offerings are exchanges in the closed economy of redemption. The elusive thing simultaneously

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emerges and withdraws in an act of exchange. Withholding “manifests” itself in an “outpouring” that is the giving of a gift, which appears as blood/ wine gushing from a jug. “The nature of the holding void is gathered in the giving. But the giving is richer than a mere pouring out. The giving, whereby the jug is a jug, gathers in the twofold holding— in the outpouring [Ausgiessen]. We call the gathering of twofold holding into the outpouring, which, as a being together, first constitutes the full presence of giving: the poured present [Geschenk, “present, gift, donation”]. The jug’s jug-character consists in the poured gift of the pouring out” (PLT, 172). The Nichts gives . . . Es gibt . . . a gift . . . Geschenk. The gift is a present that is never present, and, therefore the gift is always also ein Gift—a poison. The gift of the present gives by taking and takes by giving. By virtue of the donation of the thing— the thing that is, das Ding an sich—“earth and sky . . . divinities and mortals dwell together all at once” (PLT, 173). The thing “is” the emptiness, the void, the nothingness that is the k/not that binds every-thing around no-thing. “Preceding everything that is present,” the hollow thing itself is never properly present (PLT, 173). In the act of exchange, the thing emerges as a withdrawing, for it is revealed as self-concealing. Though never present, the thing is not absent; it is near. “Nearness preserves farness [Ferne]. Preserving farness, nearness presences nearness in nearing that farness. Bringing near in this way, nearness conceals its own self and remains, in its own way, nearest of all” (PLT, 178). This is the farness that the modern will to power represses in the effort to master death. Far from autonomous, human beings are “conditioned,” or, in Heidegger’s neologism, “be-thing-ed [be-ding-t]. “Mortals are human beings. They are called mortals because they can die. To die means to be capable of death as death. Only man dies. The animal perishes. It has death neither ahead of itself nor behind it. Death is the shrine of Nothing, that is, of that which in every respect is never something that merely exists [etwas bloss Seindes], but which nevertheless presences, even as the secret or mystery [Ge-heim-nis] of Being itself. As the shrine of Nothing [der Schrein des Nichts], death harbors within itself the presencing of Being” (PLT, 178– 79; translation modified). Death is the tear (Riss) whose rending (risen) creates a dis-membering (Zerrissen-heit) that is beyond all re-membering (Er-Innerung). This no-thing, this Nothing, this Nichts “is” the nothing that Wallace Stevens’s snow man hears (hören, whose past participle, gehören, means “to belong”). For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.34

EIGHT

Abiding

We will never be finished with the reading or rereading of the Hegelian text, and, in a certain way, I do nothing other than attempt to explain myself on this point. In effect I believe that Hegel’s text is necessarily fissured; that it is something more and other than the circular closure of its representation. —Jacques Derrida (translation modified)

Abiding Debt What does it mean to abide? Not in one language but in four— four-in-one, one-in-four. Neither unified nor divided, but connected, connected differentially. Abide, Old English abidan: a (intensive) + bidan, “to remain, await.” To remain in expectation, wait; to pause, delay, stop; to stay behind, to remain (after others have gone); to remain true to; to remain ready for; to await defiantly; to bear, tolerate, endure; to wait till the end. Verweilen, Ver, “removal, loss, stoppage, reversal, opposite, expenditure, alteration, continuation to the end,” + weilen, “stay, stop, abide, sojourn, tarry, linger.” Demeurer, rester, mettre du temps, habiter, faire sa demeure, continuer d’exister. To live, lodge, reside; to stop, stand, rest; to continue, to remain, to stay.

Plus a remainder that is usually overlooked and left out, but always lingers abidingly silent. As if it were an incomprehensible and unspeakable fourth dimension.

208 / Chapter Eight Forblive, vor, “before” (space and/or time) + blive, “continue, remain, stay at home (hjem), remain a secret (hemmelighed).”

What is this hemmelighed? Is it, perhaps, the uhyggelig (uncomfortable, unhomey) that rend(er)s all thought and language (leaving it) unavoidably cryptic? Time Line 1966

Johns Hopkins Conference, the Structuralist Controversy

1967

Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, Writing and Difference, Of Grammatology Stephen Crites seminar, “The Dialectic of Alienation and Reconciliation in Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx”

1968

Jean Hyppolite seminar, “Hegel et la pensée moderne” Jacques Derrida’s presentation in Jean Hyppolite’s seminar, “The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel’s Semiology” Deadliest year in the war in Vietnam— 27,915 Vietnamese, 16,592 Americans. Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy, Alexandre Koyré, Alexandre Kojève die. Stephen Crites seminar, “Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Existence”

1972

Jacques Derrida, Glas • • • Hegel ↔ Feuerbach ↔ Marx ↔ Kierkegaard

Marx famously claimed that he had turned Hegel’s dialectical philosophy on its head to form his dialectical materialism. Marx’s materialism, however, is informed by Hegel’s dialectical logic. In his Philosophical Notebooks, V. I. Lenin goes so far as to claim, “It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital . . . without having thoroughly studied the whole of Hegel’s Logic.”1 Though never explicitly acknowledging his strategy, Marx appropriates Hegel’s interpretation of the Absolute to develop his account of money and capital. The genesis of Marx’s mature philosophy can be traced to his tentative reflections recorded in his notebooks entitled Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (written in 1857/58 but not published until 1939) and his early musings on religion. In the Grundrisse, Marx concisely formulates the insight that guides his argument in Capital a decade later: “Everything which has been said here about money holds even more for

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capital, in which money actually develops in its completed character for the first time. The only use value, i.e. usefulness, which can stand opposite capital as such is that which increases, multiplies and hence preserves it as capital.”2 ln elaborating this insight, Marx combines Hegel’s philosophical interpretation of religious and aesthetic representations with the inner teleology of Kant’s aesthetics to forge an account of the self-reflexivity of capital. In ways that are not immediately obvious, money and its development in capital on the one hand and God on the other are mirror images of each other. As early as 1843, Marx claimed: “The god of the Jews has been secularized and has become the god of this world. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange.” In the Grundrisse, he extends his argument to include the entire economic realm: “Money is therefore the god among commodities. . . . From its servile role, in which it appears as mere medium of circulation, it suddenly changes into the lord and god of the world of commodities. It represents the divine existence of commodities, while they represent its earthly form.” This theological interpretation of money (or, conversely, economic interpretation of theology) suggests the source of what Marx describes as “the seemingly transcendental power of money.”3 In a manner reminiscent of Hegel’s Absolute, money is the creative-destructive medium in which economic value arises and passes away. This argument turns on the well-known distinction between use value and exchange value. In its two most basic functions, money is a measure of value and a medium of exchange. It is clear, however, that money can be a measure of value only if it is a medium of exchange. For Marx, as for Hegel and later Saussure, value is differential and hence is measured by the relative worth of exchanged items. Insofar as commodities meet needs or fulfill desires, they have a use value. Though media of exchange are sometimes commodities, they are more effective if they are not useful and thus do not themselves become commodities that can be traded. Marx’s distinction between use and exchange value is strictly parallel to the aesthetic distinction between usefulness and uselessness as a commodity. What makes money useful as a medium of exchange is its uselessness. Money, then, is a surplus or supplement remaining “outside” the binary relation of exchange, which it nevertheless makes possible. In attempting to explain the paradoxes of this medium, Marx repeatedly invokes theological or, more precisely, Christological language to make his point. Money, he suggests, is the “mediator” that “becomes an actual god,” or elsewhere, money is “the incarnation of exchange value.”4 As the mediator between God and man, Christ not only reconciles the divine and the human, but also overcomes the oppositions

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dividing sinful individuals. In a similar way, money, as the incarnation of exchange value, mediates the conflicts of individuals who are pursuing their own self-interests: “Christ is God externalized, externalized man. God has value only insofar as he represents Christ; man has value only insofar as he represents Christ. It is the same with money.”5 While Marx does not limit himself to theological language in his mature theory, its traces nonetheless remain. Citing words of Faust (“Im Anfang war die That”), he elaborates the notion of the general equivalent that dates back at least to Aristotle. In a circle that appears to be vicious, exchange presupposes a common measure of value, which presupposes the act of exchange. Parties in an exchange “cannot bring their commodities into relation as values, and therefore as commodities, except by comparing them with some one other commodity as the universal equivalent.”6 Money is the common measure by which the value of different commodities is assessed. Though the universal equivalent is embodied in a particular material, the “moneyform” is “quite distinct from” any “palpable bodily form: it is, therefore, a purely ideal or mental form.”7 Money, in other words, is more mental than metal. This is a remarkable confession by a dialectical materialist who claims to turn Hegel upside down. Far from materiality being essential, money is “only a symbol whose material is irrelevant.”8 Marx’s interpretation of money anticipates Saussure’s semiology and the linguistic theory of representation it entails. As Hyppolite claims in Logic and Existence and Derrida argues in his interpretation of Hegel’s semiology, Hegel’s logic and phenomenology anticipate Saussure’s la langue and la parole, respectively. In money as in language, the signified is a concept or idea embodied in a material signifier. This immaterial-material sign is the medium that establishes and maintains the differential identity and determinate value of everything within the system of exchange. Since the signified is always already encoded, the sign is always the sign of a sign. Commodities as use-values now stand opposed to money as exchange value. On the other hand, both opposing sides are commodities, unities of usevalue and value. But this unity of differences manifests itself at two opposite poles, and at each pole in an opposite way. Being poles they are as necessarily opposite as they are connected. On the one side of the equation we have an ordinary commodity, which is in reality a use value. Its value is expressed only ideally in its price, by which it is equated to its opponent, the gold, as to the real embodiment of its value. On the other hand, the gold, in its metallic reality, ranks as the embodiment of value, as money. Gold, as gold, is exchange-

Abiding / 211 value itself. . . . These antagonistic forms of commodities are the real forms in which the process of their exchange moves and takes place.9

Within this circuit of exchange, money, like Hegel’s Absolute, secures the unity-in-difference that transforms opposition into reciprocity. Accordingly, the circulation of money repeats the circular rhythm of the absolute Idea. “The two phases, each inverse to the other, that make up the metamorphosis of a commodity,” Marx explains, “constitute together a circular movement, a circuit.”10 With the closure of this circuit, exchange becomes a self-reflexive process: “While, originally, the act of social production appeared as the positing of exchange values and this, in its later development, as circulation— as completely developed reciprocal movement of exchange values— now, circulation itself returns back into the activity which posits or produces exchange values. It returns into it as into its ground.”11 This account of the circulation is a direct application of the structure of Hegel’s logical idea to the flow of capital. In this self-reflexive loop, exchange value gives rise to circulation, which in turn is the condition of the possibility of exchange. The complete realization of money is capital. “Money as capital is an aspect of money that goes beyond its simple character as money.”12 In his richest and most suggestive description of capital, Marx implicitly draws on Kant’s aesthetics and Hegel’s philosophy: “Only with capital is exchange value posited as exchange value in such a way that it preserves itself in circulation; i.e. it neither becomes substanceless, nor constantly realizes itself in other substances or a totality of them; nor loses its specific form, but rather preserves its identity with itself in each of the different substances. It therefore always remains money and always commodity. It is in every moment both of the moments which disappear into one another in circulation. But it is this only because it itself is a constantly self-renewing circular course of exchanges.”13 This constantly self-renewing circle of exchange is nothing other than a reinscription of Hegel’s Absolute in which substance becomes an endless process where everything solid dissolves in the flow of perpetual circulation. In the circle of exchange, the self-reflexivity of the absolute Idea appears in capital as the “self-reproducing exchange value.”14 In contrast to exchange value, whose purpose is external (i.e., the acquisition of useful commodities), capital has no end beyond self-replication, and thus its purpose is internal. The purpose of capital, in other words, is to generate more capital in an autotelic process. “The first quality of capital,” Marx argues, “is, then, this: that exchange value deriving from circulation and presupposing circulation preserves itself within it and by means of it; does not lose itself by entering into it; that circulation is not the movement

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of its disappearance, but rather the movement of its real self-positing . . . as exchange value, its self-realization as exchange value.”15 As “the process of its own becoming, the circle that presupposes its end as its goal, having its end also as its beginning” (PS, 10), capital, like Hegel’s Absolute is, for Marx, immortal. From this point of view, capital is in effect the unmoved mover that keeps everything in motion. “The circulation of capital,” Marx maintains, “constantly ignites itself anew, divides into its different moments, and is a perpetuum mobile.”16 When this system operates properly and markets work efficiently, there is a profitable return on investments and losses are eventually redeemed. Money and capital are not the only currencies— tobacco, shells, fur, women, children, and blood are also tokens of exchange. Though economies and currencies differ, they are underwritten by the common expectation of profitable returns on investments. For this reason, every economy appears to be a closed system of redemption whose structure Hegel laid bare in his Logic and whose historical development he plotted in his Phenomenology of Spirit. As we have seen, the question that remains at the end of philosophy is the question of the remains. Can everything and everyone be redeemed, or are there irredeemable remainders? Might such remains interrupt every closed economy, thereby creating the space and time for a general or open economy? Would the price for an open economy, or an aneconomy, be the impossibility of redemption, which would be, inter alia, the unavoidability of death— absolute death beyond the possibility of redemption? Derrida explores the possibility of this impossibility in an essay on the writings of Georges Bataille, entitled “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve,” published in Writing and Difference (1967). The essays in Writing and Difference are the seeds for Derrida’s entire corpus. He gives his clearest and most concise summary of the importance of Bataille’s work for his deconstructive project in an interview conducted in 1971, while he was completing his monumental protohypertextual study of Hegel, Glas. In response to a question about his important essay “La différance,” Derrida comments, Let me note in passing that the word “relève,” in the sentence you cited, does not have, by virtue of its context, the more technical sense that I reserve for it in order to translate and interpret the Hegelian Aufhebung. If there were a definition of différance, it would be precisely the limit, the interruption, the destruction of the Hegelian relève wherever it operates. What is at stake here is enormous. I emphasize the Hegelian Aufhebung, such as it is interpreted by a certain Hegelian discourse, for it goes without saying that the double mean-

Abiding / 213 ing of Aufhebung could be written otherwise. Whence its proximity to all the operations conducted against Hegel’s dialectical speculation. What interested me then, that I am attempting to pursue along other lines now, was, at the same time as a “general economy,” a kind of general strategy of deconstruction. The latter is to avoid both simply neutralizing the binary oppositions of metaphysics and simply residing within the closed field of these oppositions, thereby confirming it.17

Derrida begins his essay with an epigraph quoting Bataille: “He [Hegel] did not know to what extent he was right.” It is important to recall that since Bataille attended Kojève’s lectures on the Phenomenology, it is not surprising that he concentrates on the confrontation with death staged in the struggle between the master and the slave. Derrida notes that Bataille approached Hegel with his “head aching” from “Kierkegaard’s questions.” Following Kierkegaard, Bataille seeks to submit Hegelian concepts to “the rigorous effect of the trembling” by focusing on the passage from the preface that preoccupied all French interpreters of Hegel in the years following Koyré, Kojève, and Hyppolite (WD, 253): But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in absolute dismemberment, it finds itself [in der absoluten Zerrissenheit sich selbst finden]. . . . Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and abiding with it [bei ihm verweilt]. This abiding with [dieses Verweilen] the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject, which by giving determinateness an existence [Dasein] in its own element sublates [aufhebt] abstract immediacy. (PS, 19; translation modified)

Spirit “wins its truth only when, in absolute dismemberment, it finds itself.” This single sentence summarizes the Christian story of redemption that informs Hegel’s entire system as well as the Western ontotheological and metaphysical traditions. The incarnation is the negation of transcendence in which God empties (kenosis) himself into space/nature and time/ history. This negation, in turn, is negated in the crucifixion, which is at the same time the resurrection (Aufhebung) through which finitude is redeemed and rises to infinitude, and God, self, and world become one. Through this process, the tear of Zer-riss-enheit is wiped away in the eternal self-becoming of Geist, which is now deemed holy. Though Bataille credits Hegel with being the first philosopher to take the negative “seriously,” he criticizes him for

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not taking it seriously enough. By negating negation, Hegel seeks to heal the wound rending selfhood and to cover the abyss over which human existence remains suspended. Rather than a reasoned argument, Bataille’s response to this fantastic claim was an “outburst of laughter [éclat de rire],” expressed in “poetic,” erotic, and even pornographic narratives. Derrida argues that Bataille’s criticism of Hegel presents an altarnative to the closed economy of speculative philosophy and its covert extension in capitalism. The key term in this argument is Hegel’s central category aufheben/Aufhebung. Derrida writes: “The notion of Aufhebung (the speculative concept par excellence, says Hegel, the concept whose untranslatable privilege is wielded by the German language) is laughable in that it signifies the busying [l’affairement] of a discourse losing its breath as it reappropriates all negativity for itself, as it elaborates the ‘putting in play [la mise en jeu]’ into an investment [investissement], as it amortizes [amortir] absolute expenditure; and as it gives meaning to death, thereby simultaneously blinding itself to the baselessness of non-meaning [au sans-fond du non-sens] from which the basis of meaning is drawn, and in which this basis of meaning is exhausted” (WD, 257; translation modified). Amortization erases debt (Schuld) and wipes away guilt (Schuld). More important, speculative philosophy promises the a-mortization of death itself. “The privileged manifestation of Negativity,” Derrida explains, “is death” (WD, 257). As the speculative rendering of crucifixion/resurrection, the negation of negation is the negation of the death of the individual, who now becomes a moment in the eternal life of (holy) spirit. The realization of total and transparent self-consciousness in the here and now of absolute knowledge marks the end of both the human and history. However, as Blanchot insists, in “l’instant de [la] mort,” such self-consciousness is impossible. Recalling Blanchot, Derrida cites Bataille’s essay, “Hegel, la mort”: “For man finally to be revealed to himself he would have to die, but he would have to do so while living— while watching himself cease to be. In other words, death itself would have to become (self) consciousness at the very moment when it annihilates conscious being” (WD, 257). Irredeemable debt and insurmountable death are the Riss “in” the system that marks the site that is the nonsight of philosophy fault. “The blind spot of Hegelianism, around which [la tache aveugle de l’hégélianisme, autour] can be organized the representation of meaning, is the point [le point] at which destruction, suppression, death and sacrifice constitute so irreversible an expenditure, so radical a negativity— here we would have to say an expenditure and a negativity without reserve [une dépense si irréversible, une négativité si radicale— il faut dire ici sans réserve]—that they can no longer be determined as negativity in a process or a system” (WD, 259).

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Bataille maintains that Hegel approaches this abyss but, like Kant, turns away “in order to annul it. The System is annulment, cancellation, repeal, abolition.” To support this claim, he turns to the central passage in the Phenomenology quoted above, which Bataille describes as “un texte capital”: “But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in absolute dismemberment, it finds itself.” This self-discovery in the midst of absolute dismemberment results from what Bataille identifies as “the principle of homogeneity,” through which all heterogeneity is overcome. Inasmuch as Hegel interprets the Absolute in terms of double negation, the negative as such is penultimate, and is inevitably superseded by a higher positivity. In other words, dismemberment (Zerrisenheit, déchirement) is a transitory moment. Since there is never crucifixion without resurrection (Aufhebung), loss— absolute loss— is incomprehensible to Hegel and inconceivable in his System. Commenting on Kojève’s analysis of Hegel in an essay entitled “Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice,” Bataille writes, “The atheistic mystic. Conscious of himself, conscious of having to die and to disappear, would live, in the words of Hegel, obviously speaking of himself, ‘in a state of absolute dismemberment. . . . [the atheistic mystic] would not go beyond it [i.e., the negative], ‘contemplating negation right in the face,’ but never able to transpose it into Being, refusing to do it and holding his own amid ambiguity.”18 When fully deployed, Hegel’s principle of homogeneity assumes two basic forms: theoretical and practical. The theoretical goal of philosophy is to reduce “the unknown [l’inconnu] to the known.” For the philosopher, the “ultimate possibility” is that “non-knowledge [non-savoir] is still knowledge [savoir].” The all-knowing philosopher is something like Nietzsche’s madman whose “sponge [éponge]” absorbs everything and thereby wipes away the horizon. If absolute knowledge is possible, otherness cannot be final or difference irreducible. The knowing subject can actually know only “that which is made” or constructed by subjectivity itself. For Bataille, Hegel’s philosophy of self-consciousness is a constructive philosophy in which the subject forms (bilden) himself in creating the world. “The construction [la construction] of Hegel is a philosophy of work [travail], of the ‘project.’ The Hegelian man— Being and God— fulfills or accomplishes himself, completes, consummates himself in the adequation of the project.” This project projects— projects the figure of the human on the world to create a mirror in which humanity sees only itself reflected.19 The practical side of speculative reason “is bound up with work and the purposeful activity that incarnates its laws.”20 For the laborer, salvation

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comes through work whose law is the principle of utility. The worker expects a profitable return on his investment of time and energy. When the system is operating at maximum efficiency, nothing is useless. The Hegelian economy assumes full employment in which no one is désœuvré—“unemployed, out of work, unoccupied, idle.” To preserve itself, a utilitarian system must exclude or repress what is useless and profitless. Bataille, like Freud, is convinced that this effort fails because the repressed inevitably returns to disrupt the rules, laws, and structures designed to exclude it. Since this dépense—“expenditure, waste, flow”—cannot be absorbed by the system, it remains (rester, “to remain, stop, stay, endure, dwell”; reste, “rest, remainder, remains, residue, trace,” smuler) remains unthinkable (dépenser, “to unthink”: de, “away from” + penser, “to think”). Remains that cannot be a-mortized are the trace of inescapable mortality. Bataille recalls that while walking along the lake of Silvaplana, Nietzsche happened upon a “pyramidal rock or stone,” which triggered his ecstatic vision of the eternal return. Bataille argues that for Nietzsche, the eternal return does not lift one out of time, but, on the contrary, immerses one ever more deeply in time. Indeed, the eternal return is the unending return of time itself. In order to represent the decisive break that took place . . . it is necessary to tie the sundering vision of the “return” to what Nietzsche experienced when he reflected upon the explosive vision of Heraclitus, and to what he experienced later in his own vision of the “death of God”: this is necessary in order to perceive the full extent of the bolt of lightning that never stopped shattering his life while at the same time projecting it into a burst of violent light. TIME is the object of the vision of Heraclitus. TIME is unleashed in the “death” of the One whose eternity gave Being an immutable foundation. And the audacious act that represents the “return” at the summit of this dismemberment [déchirement, Zerrisenheit] only wrests from the dead God his total strength, in order to give it to the deleterious absurdity of time. A “state of glory” is thus deftly linked to the feeling of an endless fall. It is true that a fall was already a part of human ecstasy, on which it conferred the intoxication of that which approximates the nature of time— but that fall was the original fall of man, whereas the fall of the “return” is FINAL. (translation modified)21

With the ecstasy of this intoxication, wine and blood return. Hegel famously describes the movement charted in the Phenomenology as “the Bacchanalian revel in which no member remains sober” (PS, 27; translation modified). For

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Figure 21. Mark C. Taylor, Point of the Pit.

Hegel, the wine of this revel is the redemptive blood of Christ. For Bataille, following Nietzsche, the crucified God is not resurrected; rather, his blood becomes the wine of Bacchus and Dionysus whose mad revel celebrates “the deleterious absurdity of time.” In a characteristically startling leap of the imagination, Bataille argues that while Schleiermacher, Hölderlin, Novalis, Schiller, August and Friedrich Schlegel, Fichte, and Hegel were sowing the seeds of the system in Jena— reason literally lost its head. In the middle of the Place de la Concorde, with traffic circulating around it, stands an obelisk imported from Luxor, Egypt, which Napoleon once conquered. This obelisk is covered with indecipherable hieroglyphs and its tip is the point of a pyramid. What is the point of this pyramid? Is it meaningful or meaningless? What code deciphers its glyphs? What would it mean if this pyramid were decapitated, by knocking off its tip? Would this shatter the glass (Glas[s]) of speculative philosophy’s mirror of reflection? Would knocking off the pyramid’s capital decapitate capital-ism? (See fig. 21.) I was sick— sick unto death with that long agony; and when they at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me. The sentence— the dread sentence of death— was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears. After that, the sound of the inquisitorial voices seemed merged in one dreamy indeterminate hum. It conveyed to my soul the idea of revolution—perhaps from its association in fancy with the burr of a mill-wheel. This only for a brief period; for presently I heard no more. Yet, for a while, I saw; but with how terrible an exaggeration! I saw the lips of the

218 / Chapter Eight black-robed judges. They appeared to me white— whiter than the sheet upon which I trace these words.22

Is Poe’s “sickness unto death” Kierkegaard’s Sickness unto Death? Is his “dread sentence of death” Blanchot’s Death Sentence (L’arrêt de mort)? Is his “revolution” the Reign of Terror at the heart of Nietzsche’s “eternal return”? Is his “trace” the remarking of the “trace” of Derrida’s écriture, in-scribed in black on the emptiness of sheets “whiter than the sheet upon which I trace these words”? The rhythmic oscillation, altarnation of the pendulum opens and closes the pit of time. On January 16, 1968, Derrida presented a paper entitled “Speech and Writing According to Hegel” in Hyppolite’s seminar on Hegel. The revised version of the paper, published in Margins of Philosophy, bears the evocative and provocative title “The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel’s Semiology.” Echoes of Poe, Lacan, Nietzsche, Bataille, and Hegel— above all, Hegel. Derrida focuses his meticulous analysis on Hegel’s use of the image of the pyramid in The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. He also points out in a very important footnote that he is preparing a work, which became Glas, in which he also discusses another pyramidal image Hegel uses in the Phenomenology: In a work in preparation on Hegel’s family and on sexual difference in the dialectical speculative economy, we will bring to light the organization and displacement of this chain which reassembles the values of night, sepulcher, and divine— familial— feminine law as the law of singularity [cf. Kierkegaard’s Enkelt]—and does so around the pit and the pyramid. A citation as a touchstone: “But if the universal thus easily knocks off the very tip of the pyramid (die reine Spitze seiner Pyramide) and, indeed, carries off the victory over the rebellious principle of pure individuality, viz., the Family, it has thereby merely entered on a conflict with the divine law, a conflict of selfconscious Spirit with what is unconscious. For the latter is the other essential power, and is therefore not destroyed, but merely wronged (beleidigt) by the conscious Spirit. . . . Being the law of weakness and darkness it therefore at first succumbs to the powerful law of the upper world, for the power of the former is effective in the underworld, not on earth.” (MP, 77n; quote is PS, 286)

Derrida introduces his lecture proper by positioning his argument in terms of his erstwhile teacher and current host’s Logic and Existence. As we have seen, Hyppolite argues that Hegel’s Logic is the foundation of the Phenom-

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enology. Accordingly, Derrida begins with a quotation from Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik and proceeds to explain that he is especially interested in Hyppolite’s chapter “Sense and Sensible” because this is most relevant for Hegel’s theory of the sign. Hegelian semiology, he suggests, encapsulates not only his entire system, but also summarizes every version of the metaphysics of presence: As the site of the transition, the bridge between two moments of full presence, the sign can function only as a provisional reference of one presence to another. The bridge can be lifted [relevé]. The process of the sign has a history, and signification is even history comprehended: between an original presence and its circular reappropriation in a final presence. The self-presence of absolute knowledge and the consciousness of Being-near-to-itself in logos, in the absolute concept, will have been distracted from themselves only for the time of a detour and for the time of a sign. The time of the sign, then, is the time of referral. It signifies self-presence, refers presence to itself, organizes the circulation of its provisionality. Always, from the outset, the movement of lost presence already will have set in motion the process of its reappropriation. (MP, 71– 72)

When the pyramid loses its point, the bottomless pit opens to dis-close the dark underworld that interrupts the process of reappropriation. “That the path, following the ontotheological route, still remains circular, and that the pyramid becomes once again the pit that it always will have been— such is the enigma” (MP, 77). Derrida deconstructs Hegel’s theory of the sign through a critique of his interpretation of the imagination. This argument rests on the reading of Kant’s view of the imagination that Heidegger developed in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929). Recalling Kant’s designation of the imagination as “a kind of natural art,” Derrida maintains that the transcendental schematism of the imagination is “the intermediary between sensibility and understanding,” and as such involves both “receptive passivity and productive spontaneity” (MP, 79). Hegel appropriates this distinction to differentiate the reproductive from the productive imagination. The reproductive imagination “operates on a found (gefundene) or given (gegebene) content of intuition. Thus, this imagination does not produce, does not imagine, does not form its own Gebilde. Apparently and paradoxically, then, it is exactly insofar as this Einbildungskraft does not forge its own Gebilde, insofar as it receives the content of that which it seems to form, and does not produce sponte sua a thing or an existence” (MP, 78).

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The productive imagination surpasses this limit. In contrast to the primal passivity of the reproductive imagination, the productive imagination is spontaneously creative and constructive. The products of the productive imagination are signs. Anticipating Saussure, Hegel argues that the sign brings together materiality (signifier) and ideality (signified); so understood, the sign of the sign is, for Hegel, the pyramid. He develops his argument by establishing a series of asymmetrical binaries. In each case, the former term is subordinated to the latter. signifier/signified materiality/ideality sense/idea external/internal Verstand/Vernunft flesh/spirit phenomenology/logic

The theory of the sign is where all these contradictory characteristics intersect. As the faculty that brings together what drifts apart and holds apart what drifts together, the productive imagination is, in Hegel’s term, that which is reminiscent of Schelling’s In-Differenz Punkt, the Mittel-punkt.23 While Hegel argues that the mediation of the Mitte synthesizes opposites in a both/and, Derrida insists that the imagination hovers in the opening of the neither/nor, where opposites never become one and differences are never identical. When aufheben is read against the Hegelian grain, the incarnation of ideality in materiality appears to be an incarceration. “Hegel knew,” Derrida stresses, “that this proper and animated body of the signifier was also a tomb. The association so¯ma/se¯ma is also at work in this semiology, which is in no way surprising. The tomb is the life of the body as the sign of death, the body as the other of the soul, the other of the animate psyche, of the living breath.” (MP, 82) To clarify Hegel’s point, Derrida cites a passage from Plato’s Georgias in which Socrates points out that some say the body (so¯ma) “is the tomb (se¯ma) of the soul, their notion being that the soul is buried in present life; and again, because by its means the soul gives . . . , it is for this also properly called ‘sign’ (se¯ma)” (MP, 82n). So¯ma/Se¯ma . . . sign/tomb. The sign is forever opaque because it is a crypt that is something like a jar, jug, or urn containing ashen remains whose meaning and significance (Bedeutung) no Champollion can decipher.

Abiding / 221 The sign— the monument-of-life-in-death, the monument-of-death-in-life, the sepulcher of a soul or of an embalmed proper body, the height conserving in its depths the hegemony of the soul, resisting time, the hard text of stones covered with inscription— is the pyramid. Hegel, then, uses the word pyramid to designate the sign. The pyramid becomes the semaphor of the sign, the signifier of signification. Which is not an indifferent fact. Notably as concerns the Egyptian connotation: further on, the Egyptian hieroglyphic will furnish the example of that which resists the movement of dialectics, history and logos. Is this contradictory? (MP, 83)

The movement of dialectics is the movement of double negation, and what resists this movement interrupts the process of Er-Innerung that is supposed to sublate (aufheben, relever) death. “If the relève of alienation is not a calculable certitude, can one still speak of alienation and still produce statements in the system of speculative dialectics? Or in dialectics, whose essence is encapsulated by this system, in general? If the investment in death cannot be integrally amortized (even in the case of a profit, of an excess of revenue), can one still speak of a work of the negative? What might be a ‘negative’ that could not be relevé?” (MP, 107). A negative that could not be redeemed would be a pure loss, an incalculable loss, a mort that could not be amortized. Here lie the unthinkable remains that remain to be thought at the end of philosophy. Derrida closes “The Pit and the Pyramid” by knotting together time, death, and technology. He quotes Heidegger’s discussion of Hegel in Identity and Difference: “The time of thinking . . . is different from the time of calculation (Rechnens) that pulls our thinking in all directions. Today the computer (Denkmaschine) calculates thousands of relationships in one second. Despite their technical uses, they are inessential (wesenlos)” (MP, 108). The “essential” time of thinking is the spacing-timing of différance, which can never be computed.

Unpresentable Timing matters. On January 27, 1968— eleven days after presenting “The Pit and The Pyramid” in Hyppolite’s seminar and eight months and five days before presenting “Structure, Sign, and Play” at the Johns Hopkins conference, Derrida gave an address before the Société française de philosophie entitled “La différance.” In it, he notes that one of his aims in the lecture is to explore “the structural limits of mastery” and therefore will avoid master concepts. (MP, 7). In place of a master concept, an open-ended series of

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terms: . . . trace, writing, interval, paragon, pharmakon, margin, hymen, limen, supplement, mark, frame, hors d’oeuvre, gift, medium, trait, khora, secret, crypt . . . Protests to the contrary notwithstanding, la différance remains his privileged term, and if you can understand it, you can understand all the others. Derrida starts where he left off— “From Restricted to General Economy” and “The Pit and the Pyramid”—by developing a “general economy” of the sign, which will decapitate both Marxism and capitalism. He begins at the beginning of language— with an a; not just any a, but a capital A. This A, which replaces the e of différence to form différance, can be written but remains silent when spoken. Returning to Hegel’s pyramid, Derrida explains the A of différance: This graphic difference (a instead of an e), this marked difference between two apparently vocal notations, between two vowels, remains purely graphic: it is read, or it is written, but it cannot be heard. It cannot be apprehended in speech, and we will see why it also bypasses the order of apprehension in general. It is offered by a mute mark, by a tacit monument, I would even say by a pyramid, thinking not only of the form of the letter when it is printed as a capital, but also of the text in Hegel’s Encyclopedia in which the body of the sign is compared to the Egyptian Pyramid. The a of différance, thus, is not heard; it remains silent, secret and discreet as a tomb: oike¯sis. And thereby let us anticipate the delineation of a site, the familial residence and tomb of the proper in which is produced, by différance, the economy of death [oikonomos, oikos, “house” + nomos, “managing”] (MP, 3– 4).

Everything turns on the “pyramidal silence” of the capital A. “Différance” is all about, around Hegel. This A marks and re-marks the site of the absence of the proper (propre, “same, selfsame, own, correct, clean”). It is important to note that a name, a proper name, is missing from Derrida’s argument about Hegel: Søren Kierkegaard. More precisely, Kierkegaard is present as absence in the intervals and between the lines of “La différance.” In this pivotal essay, Derrida develops a Kierkegaardian critique of Hegel by retro-reading his system through the non-notion of time developed by Heidegger’s retro-reading of Paul and Luther thorough Kierkegaard’s Øjeblik. By so doing, Derrida shows that “Hegel’s text is necessarily fissured; that it is something more and other than the circular closure of its representation.”24 The fissure, fault, gap, tear, Riss that Hegel glimpses (blickt) without properly seeing marks the infinitesimal boundary joining and separating Hegel and Derrida. When attempting to unravel the complex relation between Hegel and Derrida, beginning and

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ending are caught in a vertiginous spiral that seems to be unending. Derrida begins Of Grammatology (1967) with a chapter entitled “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing,” which ends with the following words: The horizon of absolute knowledge is the effacement of writing in the logos, the retrieval of the trace in parousia, the reappropriation of difference, the accomplishment of what I have elsewhere called the metaphysics of the proper [le propre—self-possession, propriety, property, cleanliness]. Yet, all that Hegel thought within this horizon, all, that is, except eschatology, may be reread as a meditation on writing. Hegel is also the thinker of irreducible difference. He rehabilitated thought as the memory productive of signs. And he reintroduced . . . the essential necessity of the written trace in a philosophical— that is to say Socratic— discourse that had always believed it possible to do without it; the last philosopher of the book and the first thinker of writing.25

This “irreducible difference” is a different difference, which is close to Hegel’s differente Beziehung and even closer to Kierkegaard’s “infinite qualitative difference.” Derrida names it with the improper différance. He poses what he acknowledges is an impossible question: “What is différance?” Différance “is” not; or, more precisely, it is (the) unpresentable— it is “what makes possible the presentation of the being-present [rend possible la présentation de l’étantprésent], it is never presented as such. . . . Reserving itself, not exposing itself, in regular fashion it exceeds the order of truth at a certain precise point [ce point précis], but without dissimulating itself as something, as a mysterious being, in the occult of a non-knowing or in a gap [un trou] with indeterminable borders” (MP, 6; translation modified). With this “precise point,” Derrida returns to the interval between the chapter on “sens et sensible,” in Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence, which he had explored in “The Pit and the Pyramid.” Différance is neither intelligible (logic) nor sensible (existence), neither active nor passive, and must, therefore, be expressed in the “middle voice [le voix moyenne]” (MP, 9). This “middle voice” is neuter, neither he nor she but it—il, es, ça. At several points Derrida comes close to defining différance: “What is written as différance, then, will be the playing movement [le mouvement de jeu] that ‘produces’—by means of something that is not simply an activity— these differences, these effects of difference. This does not mean that the différance that produces differences is somehow before them, in a simple and unmodified— in-different— present. Différance is the nonfull, non-simple, structured and differentiating origin of differences” (MP, 11). Having never been present as such, différance “is” the trace of a more

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radical before than the before that is a past present. Blanchot labeled this past “the terrifyingly ancient.” The shadow of this past haunts the present by dividing it from itself and implicating it in an inescapable other. This other can never be re-presented but can be traced by the endless play of signs. In his most “revealing” description of différance, Derrida writes, It is because of différance that the movement of signification is possible only if each so-called “present” element, each element appearing on the scene of presence, is related to something other or an other thing [autre chose] than itself, thereby keeping within itself the mark of the past element, and already letting itself be hollowed out [creuser] by the mark of its relation to the future element, this trace being related no less to what is called the future than to what is called the past, and constituting what is called the present by means of this very relation to what it is not: what it absolutely is not, not even a past or a future as a modified present [emphasis added]. An interval must separate the present from what it is not in order for the present to be itself, but this interval that constitutes it as present must, by the same token, divide the present in and of itself [du même coup diviser le présent en lui-même, partageant anisi, avec le présent], thereby also dividing, along with the present, everything that is thought on the basis of the present, that is, in our metaphysical language, every being, and singularly substance or the subject. In constituting itself, in dividing itself dynamically, this interval is what might be called spacing [espacement], the becoming-space of time or the becoming-time of space (temporization). (MP, 13)

Derrida summarizes this important point earlier: “Temporization is also temporalization and spacing, the becoming-time of space and the becomingspace of time” (MP, 8). These two aspects of différance are captured in the two meanings of différer, which can mean both “to differ” and “to defer.” As the spacing that differs and the timing that defers, différance constitutes the synchronic and diachronic vectors of every system and structure. Never present but always already past and thus always yet to come, the interval of spacing-timing cannot be included or incorporated in the systems and structures it nonetheless enables. Through a nondialectical reversal, the prestructural origin left behind in primal differing becomes the poststructural end deferred in perpetual waiting. When Derrida’s différance is understood in this way, it appears to be virtually indistinguishable from the Nichts of Heidegger’s jug, the lighting of clearing, the un-for-getting of a-ltheia, and the abyss of de-cision. Différance draws near by withdrawing and therefore can reveal only by concealing.

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Forever resistant to re-presentation and de-scription, différance can be approached only through what Derrida, following Kierkegaard, describes as “indirect discourse [un discours très détourné]” (MP, 4). Indirect discourse uses language improperly— breaking rules, misspelling words, mistaking punctuation. In response to such stylistic gestures, critics accuse Derrida of frivolously playing with language. Derrida accepts the charge but not its intent. Far from being frivolous, he takes language utterly seriously and actually insists on an “intensification of its play” (MP, 3). Indeed, différance is nothing— nothing but the play of differences that remains to be thought at the end of philosophy. It is important to stress that, for Derrida, play does not involve a selfreflexive interrelationship that has no end other than itself, but, to the contrary, it subverts every autotelic structure. A few months after first presenting his interpretation of différance in Paris, he elaborated this important aspect of his view of play in his lecture at the Johns Hopkins conference, which was entitled “Sign, Structure, and Play”: “Play is the disruption of presence. The presence of an element is always a signifying and substitutive reference inscribed in a system of differences and the movement of a chain. Play is always play of absence and presence, but if it is to be thought radically, play must be conceived of before the alternative of presence and absence” (WD, 292). Play, therefore, eludes conceptual comprehension and yet remains “the possibility of conceptuality, of a conceptual process and system in general” (MP, 11). Derrida concludes his introduction to deconstruction in America by suggesting that the task of thinking on “the eve of philosophy” is to think the unthinkable by thinking play otherwise than as an inner teleological structure of self-presence. Writing— écriture, or archi-writing— traces this altarnative play of differences by performing the withdrawal of différance that fissures the foundation of meaning and security. Since the point is always missing, the twisting and turning of writing makes language drift, wander, roam, err. This slipping and sliding of discourse extends the indirect communication of Kierkegaard’s aesthetic authorship and offers a writerly alternative to Heidegger’s poiesis. Neither transparent nor precise, écriture resists technical utility and eludes the machinations of scientific language. In an effort to clarify his admittedly obscure argument, Derrida compares différance to notions developed by four other writers: Saussure, Nietzsche, Freud, and, most important for our purposes, Hegel. Derrida sees anticipations of his interpretation of the play of differences in Saussure’s claim that “in language there are only differences,” and in Nietzsche’s account of the “play of forces.” Language and forces are constitutively differential and essentially relational. This formulation comes perilously close to He-

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gel’s logical structure of double negation in which identity is difference and difference is identity. Derrida insists, however, that Saussure and especially Nietzsche are pointing to a different difference that resists dialectical sublation. While Hegel argues that there is nothing beyond the interplay of opposites, Derrida, following Heidegger, asks, What about this nothing? In Derridean play, the trace of différance is the excess, remainder, or remains that is the no-thing clearing the space and creating the time for all things. Writing pursues and is pursued by this trace of nothing. “The trace (of that) which can never be presented, the trace which itself can never be presented: that is, appear and manifest itself, as such, in its phenomenon. The trace beyond that which profoundly links fundamental ontology and phenomenology. Always differing and deferring, the trace is never as it is in the presentation of itself. It erases itself in presenting itself, muffles itself in resonating, like the a writing itself, inscribing its pyramid in différance” (MP, 23). Derrida argues that Hegel apprehended some “thing” very close to the spacing-timing and timing-spacing of différance in his discussion of space and time in the Jena Logic. He bases his argument on Koyré’s essay “Hegel at Jena,” which we have seen is so important for French readings of Hegel. If Derrida’s fragmentary nonsystem and all that follows from it has a key, it is the interpretation of time and temporality he discovers in Koyré’s essay. Focusing once again on the moment or the now, which preoccupies Kierkegaard in The Concept of Dread and Heidegger at the end of Being and Time, Derrida quotes Koyré’s translation of the passage in which Hegel describes the “differentiating relation” as the “absolut differente Beziehung.”26 He then adds a decisive comment on the Hegel Koyré exposes: Writing “différant” or “différance” (with an a) would have had the advantage of making it possible to translate Hegel at that particular point— which is also an absolutely decisive point [un point absolument décisive] in his discourse— without further notes or specifications. . . . I contend, of course, that the word différance can also serve other purposes: first, because it marks not only the activity of “originary” difference, but also the temporizing detour of deferral; and above all because différance thus written, although maintaining relations of profound affinity with Hegelian discourse . . . is also, up to a certain point, unable to break with that discourse . . . ; but it can operate a kind of infinitesimal and radical displacement of it, whose space I attempt to delineate elsewhere but of which it would be difficult to speak briefly here. (MP, 14)

“An infinitesimal and radical displacement.” Hegel saw without seeing the point, the entire point of Derrida’s deconstructive project. This is why Der-

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rida will “never be finished with the reading or rereading of the Hegelian text” (translation modified).27 De-construction is a style of retro-reading that exposes the unmendable tears (Risse) that systems, structures, and books are designed to cover or repress. This effort always fails because the repressed inevitably returns to disrupt what is constructed to exclude it. Merleau-Ponty was right when he claimed that it was Hegel “who started the attempt to explore the irrational and integrated it into an expanded reason.” And this is why he is also correct when he asserts that psychoanalysis inter alia “had [its] beginnings in Hegel.”28 Derrida confirms Merleau-Ponty’s point when he argues that the fourth anticipation of difference is Freud’s account of the interrelated concepts of trace (Spur) and breaching (Bahnung). Consciousness and self-consciousness are always incomplete because they are breached by some “thing” that is unpresentable and therefore remains unrepresentable. The unnameable trace that Derrida labels “différance” Freud labels “the unconscious.” For Freud as for Derrida, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger, the self is always “inwardly” divided by an Other that is inside as outside self-conscious subjectivity. Thought, therefore, is always an afterthought, which is the aftereffect of the “within” as an unassimilable “outside.” The structure of delay (Nachträglichkeit) in effect forbids that one make of temporalization (temporization) a simple dialectical complication of the living present as an originary and unceasing synthesis— a synthesis constantly directed back on itself, gathered in on itself and gathering— of retentional traces and protentional openings. The alterity [l’altérité] of the “unconscious” makes us concerned not with horizons of modified— past or future— presents, but with a “past” that has never been present, and which never will be, whose future to come will never be a production or a reproduction in the form of presence. Therefore the concept of trace is incompatible with the concept of retention, of the becoming-past of what has been present. One cannot think the trace— and therefore, différance—on the basis of the present, or of the presence of the present. A past that has never been present: this formula is the one that Emmanuel Levinas uses, although certainly in a nonpsychoanalytic way, to qualify the trace and enigma of absolute alterity: the Other. (MP, 21)29

Nietzsche, Freud, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Levinas, and Hegel malgré lui— “these ‘names of authors’ here being only indices— the network [réseau] which reassembles and traverses our ‘era’ as the delimitation of the ontology of presence” (MP, 21). This Other provokes the fear that solicits, “in

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the sense that sollicitare, in old Latin, means to shake as a whole, to make tremble in entirety,” dread provoked by a future that can be neither anticipated nor programmed” (MP, 21) Derrida does not end with fear and trembling— not yet. Approaching his end, the argument takes an unexpected turn toward hope by way of a detour through play: “There will be no unique name, even if it were the name of Being. And we must think this without nostalgia, that is, outside of the myth of a purely maternal or paternal language, a lost native country of thought. On the contrary, we must affirm this, in the sense in which Nietzsche puts affirmation into play, in a certain laughter and a certain step/not of the dance [un certain pas de la dance]. From the vantage of this laughter and this dance, from the vantage of this affirmation foreign to all dialectics, the other side of nostalgia, what I will call Heideggerian hope, comes into question” (MP, 27; translation modified). Several months later in Baltimore,30 Derrida clarified his enigmatic point by explaining that the real target of his deconstruction of Hegelianism is its latter-day heir— structuralism. “Turned towards the lost or impossible presence of the absent origin, this structuralist thematic of broken immediacy is therefore the saddened, negative, nostalgic, guilty, Rousseauistic side of the thinking of play whose other side would be the Nietzschean affirmation, that is the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation. This affirmation then determines the noncenter otherwise than as loss of the center. And it plays without security” (WD, 292). Derridean play is without the security that certainty brings, and the dance with this play is the dance with death. The end of philosophy, the end of history, the end of man, the end of the Book, the end of life. With so many endings, with so much destruction, disaster, and death, how is hope possible? The only hope that remains is not the hope in the imminent arrival of the kingdom, but a hope that accepts the impossibility of its arrival. “Not only is there no kingdom of différance, but différance instigates the subversion of every kingdom. Which makes it obviously threatening and infallibly dreaded by everything within us that desires a kingdom, the past or future presence of a kingdom” (MP, 22).

Shadow of Death The end is approaching. Approaching as always already having approached. The end of the book—the end of this book. The end of life—the end of this life. Death is nowhere nearer than in the intensive care unit. Lights and noise make it impossible to sleep. Teetering on the edge of death with machines

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keeping me alive during one of my five endless nights there, a nurse, whose name I never knew, said to me “I want you to know that I have been praying for you.” These were the first words she had spoken to me, and I was incredulous; my mind shrouded in a haze, I had hardly noticed that every night during the midnight shift she was there— there when I needed her the most, there when my life depended on her presence. We began to talk, and she told me her story. Raised a Catholic in the Philippines, she had come to the United States as a young girl. Eventually, she left Catholicism and became a member of an Evangelical megachurch near Times Square. It became obvious that for her, nursing was not a job but a religious vocation. More ungrateful than I should have been, I replied to her first comment, “Seeing what you see here every night, how can you still pray?” With wisdom as insightful as it was innocent, she responded simply, “How could I not?” Hope? How can we not? But still, how can we hope in such dark times that seem so hopeless? The ancient Greek philosopher Alcmaeon of Croton once observed, “Men die because they cannot join the beginning to the end.” Always caught “in the middest,” people try to make sense of their lives by constructing narratives that connect the dots or close the circle. This is how Frank Kermode interprets apocalyptic stories, myths, and fables: “Broadly speaking, apocalyptic thought belongs to rectilinear rather than cyclical views of the world, though this is not a sharp distinction; and even in Jewish thought there was no true apocalyptic until prophecy failed. . . . But basically one has to think of an ordered series of events which ends, not in a great New Year, but a final Sabbath. The events derive their significance from a unitary system, not from their correspondence with events in other cycles.”31 But what if time is neither a line nor a circle? What if the Garden never was, and the Kingdom never will be? What if the origin is always already past, and the future is forever approaching without ever arriving? Then the line is undone and the circle collapses into a point that becomes an ellipsis . . . Ending: . . . Greek . . . Jew . . . or . . . Jew . . . Greek . . . or . . . something else . . . something other . . . something in between? Foreshadowing the darkness in the midst of Nietzsche’s joyful dance, Kierkegaard once wrote, “Death is a good dancing partner.” While I was writing my last work, a friend reported that Derrida once confided to him, “It’s always been about death. Always.” From my reading and conversations with Derrida over the years, I had long suspected as much. Derrida could not avoid the shadow of death; indeed, he, like Heidegger, was so obsessed with death that his “philosophy” could also be described as a thanatology. Thanatology is, however, a self-erasing word for both Derrida and Heidegger

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because Thanatos has no Logos. Like life itself, death is a gift “without why” that always arrives unexpectedly, even— perhaps especially— when one awaits it. In the last line of the preamble to his essay “Aporias,” Derrida writes of a friend, “He had expected the death that caught him here by surprise” (A, x). Death caught Derrida by surprise; before his time, as it is often said, he received a “death sentence”—pancreatic cancer. Time: Wednesday 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. Ten to twelve times a year for fiftythree years. Space/Place: Sorbonne (1960– 1964), École normale supérieure (1964– 1984), École des hautes études en sciences sociales (1984– 2003). The last seminar: “The Beast and the Sovereign,” II, December 11, 2002 through March 26, 2003. The first session begins, “I am alone”; the last session begins, “What does to bear [porter (tragen)] mean?” There is an overwhelming poignancy to Derrida’s words throughout his last seminar. Everyone knows this is his last class, if not his last public appearance. And yet, he proceeds as if he were going to return in the fall for another seminar. Derrida notes passages that need more detailed analysis, suggests readings for the “vacation,” and, with time running out, sighs, “Ah, life will have been so short!” and says later, “As I have to conclude as quickly as possible, I will not be able to undertake with the required precision and proximity the work of reading and interpretation of the semantic, syntactic and lexical network [emphasis added] of Walten, at least in Introduction to Metaphysics, in which this network is peculiarly rich and plentiful. I am sure that if you want to, you can do it without me.” He is not improvising; as always, he is reading from a written manuscript. Finally, begging his audience for one more minute, he explains what he has been after from the beginning— the beginning not just of his last seminar, but the beginning of his entire corpus. “I would like to end, if you’ll give me one more second [Why is the first instant called a second?], on a single final quotation from Heidegger that could be given many readings and that I leave you to appropriate as you wish as you watch the war on television, in Iraq, but also closer to us. Heidegger writes this, which seems to mark the absolute limit of Gewalt or of Gewalt-tätigkeit. It’s about what will basically have been besieging this seminar, behind the cohort of cremators and inhumers of every order, and other guardians of the mourning to come: death itself, if there be any, was our theme.” Far from the end of history, war once again and forever, war— this time not against the evil empire, but against the axis of evil. Who saw it coming? Who ever sees it coming? Then, as always, quoting Heidegger a final time, Derrida adds, “Das ist der Tod (it is death).”32 The death as well as the mourning was, of course, Derrida’s “own.” Four months after he spoke these words, he was dead.

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Das ist der Tod. Not just for Jacques Derrida, but for every human individual and for the race as a whole. In the spring of 1984, he delivered a lecture at a conference on Nuclear Criticism entitled “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives).” Once again, timing is critical. The year 1984— one that had come to represent the end of so much was not the end that many expected. Three years later, the worst stock market crash since the Great Depression; two years later, the collapse of the Berlin Wall; another two years later, the end of the Soviet Union; one year later, the publication of Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man. In 1984, the Cold War was still hot, and Ronald Reagan was in the fourth year of his first term as president. Though Derrida, with Heidegger, feared a nuclear apocalypse, he begins his reflections on the apocalypse with speed rather than bombs. “Let me say a word first about speed. At the beginning there will have been speed.”33 And at the end— the end of modernity— there will have been speed. Speed, he neglects to point out, is a modern invention; without acceleration, there would have been no modernization, modernity, or modernism. But there are speed limits— the very speed that created modernity also threatens to destroy it. Modernity and modernization glorify the destruction speed brings. In his “Futurist Manifesto,” Filippo Marinetti writes, We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty; the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned by great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath— a roaring car that seems to run on shrapnel— is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. We will glorify war— the world’s only hygiene. . . . We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicoloured, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals.34

Derrida recognizes the limits of speed and warns that continuing acceleration threatens not only the end of man and history, but also the end of the world itself. He cautions about an impending “remainderless cataclysm”: “We are speaking of stakes that are apparently limitless for what is still now and then called humanity. People find it easy to say that in nuclear war ‘humanity’ runs the risk of its self-destruction, with nothing left over, no remainder. There is a lot that could be said about that rumor. But whatever credence we give it, we have to recognize that these stakes appear in the experience of a race, or more precisely of a competition, a rivalry between two rates of speed. It’s what we call in French a course de vitesse, a speed race. Whether it

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is the arms race or orders given to start a war that is itself dominated by that economy of speed throughout all the zones of its technology, a gap of a few seconds may decide, irreversibly, the fate of what is still now and then called humanity— plus the fate of a few other species.”35 This apocalypse will bring the kingdom of absolute death rather than the kingdom of eternal life. For cold warriors, the only way to avoid this apocalypse was through the strategy of deterrence known as mutually assured destruction— MAD. In retrospect, there appears to have been a symmetry between the bipolar structure of the Cold War and the binary structure of structuralism. Though MAD kept the world poised on the brink of self-destruction, it was, like the polarities of structuralism, a stabilizing strategy. By the end of the twentieth century, however, this binary world was breaking down and a new digital world order grounded in webs and networks whose flows know no walls was emerging. In 1984, it was obvious that the old world was passing away, but was not yet clear what the brave new world order would be. Derrida’s preoccupation in “No Apocalypse, Not Now” is, as always, death. Since I can never experience death, it approaches by withdrawing; life depends on the deferral of this ever-approaching horizon that keeps the future open. Echoing Blanchot’s never-present instant, death is, in words Derrida borrows from Heidegger, “possibility par excellence” (A, 63). This is, however, a strange possibility because (as we have discovered with Heidegger) death is the “possibility of the impossible” (A, 11). Analyzing Being and Time, Derrida writes, “‘This is a possibility in which,’ Heidegger abruptly adds, ‘the issue is nothing less than Dasein’s being-in-the-world [in-derWelt-Sein]. Its death is the possibility of being-able-no-longer-to-be-there [die Möglichkeit des Nicht-mehr-dasein-könnens].’ . . . Death, the most proper possibility of Dasein, is the possibility of a being-able-no-longer-to-be-there or of a no-longer-being-able-to-be-there as Dasein” (A, 68). While Heidegger focuses on the individual in Being and Time, Derrida considers “the possibility of a being-able-no-longer-to-be-there” for the race as a whole in “No Apocalypse.” Like death, the nuclear apocalypse is “a nonevent” that can take place only as not taking place. Total destruction cannot be present and therefore eludes representation. Through a nondialectical reversal, the sign of the apocalypse “produces” the event this nonevent is supposed to represent. “The only referent that is absolutely real,” Derrida writes, “is thus of the scope or dimension of an absolute nuclear catastrophe that would irreversibly destroy the entire archive and all symbolic capacity, would destroy the ‘movement of survival,’ what I call ‘survivance’ [living on], at the very heart of life. This absolute referent of all possible literature is on a par with the absolute effacement of any possible trace; it is thus the

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only ineffaceable trace, it is so as the trace of what is entirely other, ‘trace du tout autre.’” This “trace du tout autre” is “unanticipatable.”36 To face this Wholly Other is to confront the possibility of no-longer-being-able-to-be. One name for the being of nonbeing is death, the other name is mysterium tremendum, which sometimes is named God. If being— human being— is given rather than autonomously self-grounding, then to write incessantly about, around death is to write incessantly about, around God. In The Gift of Death, Derrida develops a “radical heterology” through a meditation on Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. “Heterology,” like “thanatology,” is an oxymoron because Heteros, like Thanatos, has no Logos. When faced with the Wholly Other, the only possible response is seemingly tautological: “Tout autre est tout autre” (GD, 82).

Being Given Perhaps it’s always been about the economy, stupid! Not one economy but two— a restricted economy of redemption and an open economy of the impossibility of redemption. October 28 to 30, 1991— between the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the imminent fall of the Soviet Union, Jacques Derrida and I attended the Forum Le Monde Le Mans, whose title that year was “Comment penser l’argent?” The title of his presentation was “Du ‘sans prix,’ ou le ‘juste prix’ de la transaction”; the title of my presentation was “Le cours du cours.”37 The evening before returning to the United States, we had dinner together in Paris, and in the course of our conversation, I asked him what the topic of his seminar that semester would be. He responded that once again, he would explore “the secret.” For several years, I had been encouraging him to write about Kierkegaard. Whether because his longtime lover, Sylviane Agacinski, had written so eloquently on Kierkegaard or for some other reason, he had always resisted.38 Though he offered no response to my suggestion, several months later I heard that he was devoting his seminar to Fear and Trembling. Shortly thereafter he published the gist of the seminar in an essay entitled “Donner la mort.” This essay and a related one appeared later in a book, L’éthique du don: Jacques Derrida et la pensée du don, which was translated and appeared in the Religion and Postmodern series with the title The Gift of Death. While Fear and Trembling (1843) is Kierkegaard’s best-known work, he does not explicitly lay bare the structure of subjectivity that it presupposes until The Sickness unto Death (1849). He begins his argument with his most concise and most complex definition of the self, which is a parody that turns Hegel’s analysis of Geist against itself:

234 / Chapter Eight Man is spirit [Aand]. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self [Selvet]. But what is the self? The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self [Selvet er et Forhold, der forholder sig til sig selv], or it is that in the relation by which the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but [consists in the fact] that the relation relates itself to its own self. Man is a synthesis [Synthese] of the finite and the infinite, of the temporal and the eternal [det Timelig og det Evige], of freedom and necessity, in short it is a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two factors. So regarded, man is not yet a self. In the relation between two, the relation is the third term as a negative unity [negative Eenhed], and the two relate themselves to the relation, and in the relation to the relation; such a relation is that between soul and body, when man is determined as soul. If on the contrary the relation relates itself to its own self, the relation is then the positive third [det positive Treide] term, and this is the self. Such a relation which relates itself to its own self (that is to say, a self) must either have constituted itself or have been constituted by an Other [vaere sat ved et Andet]. If this relation which relates itself to its own self is constituted by an Other, the relation doubtless is the third term, but this relation is a relating itself to that which constituted the whole relation [et Forhold, der forholder sig til sig selv, og i at forhold sig til self forholder sig til et Andet]. (SD, 146; translation modified)

The Hegelian language in which Kierkegaard presents his description of spirit, or the self, can easily obscure his profound differences with Hegel. Kierkegaard begins by defining spirit in terms that are virtually quoted from Hegel, writing, “The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self.” The elaboration of this claim that follows indicates a subtle departure from the Hegelian view of spirit: the self is “that in the relation by which the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but . . . that the relation relates itself to its own self.” Both the negative and the positive points are essential. “The self is not the relation.” In Hegel’s notion of spirit, the self is simply the relation, and this relation is a negative unity. As Kierkegaard expresses it later in the text, “In the relation between two, the relation is the third term as a negative unity, and two relate themselves to the relation, and in the relation to the relation.” I have argued that for Hegel, the structure of spirit is essentially self-referential double negativity, which binds together coimplicated opposites. Kierkegaard denies that contraries are “implicitly [an sich]” identical in their difference, or that opposites are related in such a way that each in itself is at the same time its own other. His adherence to the categories of Verstand and the rules of traditional logic

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persuades him that opposites are mutually exclusive and actually antithetical (either/or). Consequently, spirit, as the structure of self-relation within which opposites meet, cannot be the negative unity of internal relationality but must be united by a “positive third” that constitutes a genuine coincidentia oppositorum. Since opposites are not implicitly identical and thus are not necessarily related, they must be joined contingently. Kierkegaard distinguishes his view of spirit from that of Hegel with greater precision when he further explains that “man is a synthesis of the finite and the infinite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short it is a synthesis.” While this formulation again recalls Hegel’s notion of spirit, the carefully chosen term synthesis is calculated to introduce a distinctive characteristic of the Kierkegaardian subject. Although Hegel’s dialectic is commonly understood as a tripartite structure of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, Hegel scrupulously avoids this terminology. In the Logic, he explains that “the very expression synthesis easily recalls the conception of an external unity [aüsserliche Einheit] and a mere combination [blosse Verbindung] of entities which are in and for themselves separate” (SL, 589; translation modified). As we have seen, in his speculative logic, Hegel describes the relation of opposites as “mediation” rather than “synthesis.” What makes the term mediation attractive and the term synthesis problematic for Hegel makes the concept of synthesis attractive and the category of mediation problematic for Kierkegaard. A synthesis involves the conjunction of two mutually exclusive opposites, which must be effected by a “positive third.” “A synthesis,” Kierkegaard explains, “is unthinkable if the two are not united in a third.” Thus, “if there be no third, there is really no synthesis” (CD, 39, 76). The positive third that creates this synthetic coincidence of opposites is nothing other than the self itself. Kierkegaard now makes the point toward which his entire argument has been moving: “The synthesis is a relationship, and it is a relationship which, though it is derived, relates itself to itself, which means freedom. The self is freedom [Selvet er Ferihed]” (SD, 162). Or, as he puts it elsewhere: “But what, then, is this self of mine: If I were to define this, my first answer would be: It is the most abstract of all things, and yet at the same time it is the most concrete— it is freedom” (EO, 2:218). It is very important to distinguish Kierkegaardian from Hegelian freedom. For Hegel, as we have seen, freedom is autonomy— since the self becomes itself in and through its own other, determination by an apparent other is really self-determination. For Kierkegaard, by contrast, the other is not a moment in one’s own being, but is radically other, and freedom is an original or spontaneous leap (Spring) in which the self through free de-cisions (beslutning) becomes itself by becoming both what it is and what it previously had not been.

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Before proceeding to a consideration of the temporal decisions through which a subject becomes itself, two aspects of freedom in Kierkegaard’s existential analytic must be specified— the first is infinite and the second is finite. Over against Hegel, who argues that spirit or subjectivity is self-grounding and therefore autonomous, Kierkegaard claims that spirit or subjectivity is given by an unknowable Other and, therefore, is radically heteronomous. This is his point when he argues that the relation that relates itself to itself either constitutes (sætte) itself or is constituted by an Other. Kierkegaard has no doubt that human existence is given; we are, in Heidegger’s words, thrown into existence by a “Power” that exceeds human comprehension. There is nothing necessary about finite existence; to the contrary, life is utterly contingent. For Kierkegaard as for Luther, human freedom occurs “within” a more primal freedom, which is the infinite de-cision, Ent-schluss, Ent-scheidung, within which each finite de-cision e-ventuates. Luther names the originary will through which this decision occurs God; Kierkegaard names it the infinitely, qualitatively different power that constitutes the self; Heidegger names it the abyssal Nichts; Derrida names it différance, tout autre, and ganz Andere. The freedom of the self is freely given repeatedly in an act of grace. This gift of freedom is not without its dark side because it harbors the possibility of despair. The sickness unto death is despair (Fortvivlelst), and despair is the unwillingness of the self to be itself. The structure of subjectivity determines the forms of despair. To overcome despair, a person must first understand what it means to be a finite human being and then freely accept one’s given condition. The given structure of the self creates the possibility of two basic forms of despair. Such a derived, constituted, relation is the human self, a relation which relates itself to its own self, and in relating itself to its own self relates itself to an Other [et Andet]. Hence it is that there can be two forms of despair properly so called. If the human self had constituted itself, there could be a question only of one form, that of not willing to be one’s own self, of willing to get rid of oneself, but there would be no question of despairingly willing to be oneself. This formula [i.e. that the self is constituted by an Other] is the expression for the total dependence [Afhængighed] of the relation (the self namely), the expression for the fact that the self cannot of itself attain and remain in equilibrium and rest by itself, but only by relating itself to that Power which constituted the whole relation. (SD, 146– 47; translation modified)

Figure 22 articulates the elements that make up the complex dynamics of decision. The originary event through which the singular individual comes

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Figure 22. Kierkegaardian Decision.

into being results in a primal passivity that entails suffering so profound that it is beyond words. This suffering is the abiding trace of the original wound (Riss) that the self forever bears. The wound leaves the scar of an even deeper passion. Since what is freely given can also be taken away, to accept one’s absolute dependence on an unknowable Other is to confront the thoroughgoing contingency of one’s existence. As we saw in Heidegger’s account of being-toward-death, the gift of life is also the gift of death. To accept life is, therefore, to accept death. Since finite selfhood is absolutely dependent, the willingness to be oneself can, paradoxically, also be a form of not willing to be oneself; indeed, this is the distinctively modern form of despair. The despair of not willing to be oneself by willing to be oneself is the expression of the will to power whose final form is the will to master death. To overcome this form of despair, it is necessary to accept the givenness of Being as the event of abiding grace. Kierkegaard concludes, “The disrelationship of despair [Fortvivlelsens Misforhold] is not a simple disrelationship but a disrelationship in a relation which relates itself to its own self and is constituted by an Other, so that the disrelationship in that self-relation reflects itself infinitely in the relation to the Power [Mægt] which constituted it. This then is the formula which describes the condition of the self when despair is completely eradicated: by

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relating itself to its own self and by willing to be itself the self is grounded transparently in the Power which posited it [grunder Selvet gjennemsigtig I den Mægt, som sette det]” (SD, 147; translation modified). The primal responsibility of the subject is not autonomous self-determination, but the ability to respond to the Other without whom one would not be. This response must be a free (i.e., “unconditioned [uvilkaarlig]”) decision. Kierkegaard’s already tangled argument does not end here— there are several other aspects of the event of decision through which the self becomes itself. The self is freely created as a singular subject in a given world at a specific time. So situated, the subject, who is conditioned by his or her actuality (finitude), faces alternative possibilities (infinitude) that he or she is free to actualize. In terms discussed above, the self is the freedom to synthesize actuality and possibility. These three aspects of selfhood are correlated with the three modalities of time: actuality and finitude are the past moment, possibility and infinitude are the future moment, and the positive third modality is freedom, which is exercised by bringing together actuality and possibility in the present moment. These three moments are dialectically related— the past with its recollection conditions the present as well as future possibilities, and the expectation of the future conditions the present as well as the memory of the past. When understood in this way, time comprises, in Augustine’s classical formulation, the present of things past, the present of things present, and the present of things future. However, for Kierkegaard as for Heidegger, the three moments of this time are given by the more primordial temporality that Heidegger labels the fourth dimension. This supplementary dimension is the immemorial past that eternally returns as the in-breaking kairotic Ojeblikk. This instant “is that ambiguity in which time [Tiden] and eternity [Evigheden] touch one another, and by this posit the temporal [Timelighed], where time constantly intersects eternity and eternity penetrates time” (CD, 80; translation modified). The future holds unforeseen possibilities incommensurable with the past, and hence is discontinuous with antecedent reality. Inbreaking futurity invades the present and penetrates the past by posing radically new possibilities that shatter the deterministic chain of immanent development. For Kierkegaard, to believe that the future is open is, in effect, to believe in God: “God is that all things are possible, and that all things are possible is God; and only the man whose being has been so shaken that he became spirit by understanding that all things are possible, only he has had dealings with God” (SD, 173– 74). There are, then, four levels of decision, each of which presupposes those that come before it:

Abiding / 239 1. The free acceptance of one’s absolute dependence on an unpresentable other. This entails the ability to respond to that which is ganz Andere. 2. The capacity to “choose oneself in one’s eternal validity.” This is the ability to accept responsibility for oneself by freely choosing oneself as a freely choosing being with a determinate actuality (finitude) and, correlatively, specific possibilities. This choice requires the acceptance of the given aspects of selfhood that one did not choose in the first place. 3. The choice of the framework, perspective, or “stage on life’s way” that frames one’s life. Kierkegaard describes this as the “madness of decision,” which Derrida identifies as the “abyss of responsibility.” Commenting on Kierkegaard’s interpretation of Abraham in Fear and Trembling, Derrida writes, “He [Abraham] decides, but his absolute decision is neither guided nor controlled by knowledge. Such, in fact, is the paradoxical condition of every decision: it cannot be deduced from a form of knowledge of which it would simply be the effect, conclusion, or explication. It structurally breaches knowledge and is thus destined to nonmanifestation; a decision is, in the end, always secret. It remains secret in the very instant of its performance, and how can the concept of decision be dissociated from this figure of the instant? From the stigma of its punctuality?” (GD, 77). Kierkegaard repeatedly insists that there is no “Archimedean point” from which finite individuals can survey the multiple norms and criteria with which they might guide and judge their lives. In different terms, there is no rule to choose the rules by which we choose the rules. The norms for action and criteria for thought are internal to perspectives, and there is no meta-rule for choosing rules. And yet, decision is unavoidable and the stakes could not be higher because the self is nothing other than what it becomes through its decisions in time. For Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Derrida, as for Goethe and Freud, “in the beginning is the deed.” This originary de-cision marks the arationality at the heart of reason and the amorality that makes morality possible. 4. The choice among specific alternatives and options within the framework, perspective, or stage on life’s way one has chosen. While the rules and norms within a particular framework make sense of experience, the framework has no secure ground.

The modern search for certainty that began with Descartes’s inward turn to the subject ends with the radical uncertainty of Kierkegaard’s knight of faith, who reveals every decision to be a blind leap.

Trembling The seminar that became The Gift of Death was about, all about the secret— the secret (hemmelighed, hjem, “home”) that leaves everyone and everything

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mysteriously uncanny (hemmelighedsfuld). If Derrida has taught us anything, it is to look for the overlooked, to attend to what remains after (the) all has been said and done. In his meditation on Fear and Trembling, Derrida overlooks the very first words with which Kierkegaard’s authorship began. Under the guise of his pseudonym Victor Eremita, Kierkegaard begins the preface to Either/Or: “It may at times have occurred to you, dear reader, to doubt somewhat the accuracy of that familiar philosophical thesis that the outer is the inner and the inner is the outer. Perhaps you yourself have concealed a secret [Hemmelighed] that in its joy or in its pain you felt was too intimate to share with others. Perhaps your life has put you in touch with people about whom you suspected that something of this nature was the case, although neither by force nor by infatuation were you able to bring out into the open that which was hidden” (EO, 1:3; translation modified). The focus of this suspicion is, as always, Hegel’s speculative philosophy, whose aim is to disclose all secrets in the total transparency of absolute knowledge. Derrida was also wary of sharing secrets; indeed, he was given to secrecy. Why? Why was Derrida so captivated by secrecy? What was he hiding? What was he saying by not saying? What was he revealing by concealing? Why did the secret make him tremble? He begins his meditation on Kierkegaard by confessing his own fear and trembling: Whom to Give to (Knowing Not to Know) Mysterium tremendum. A frightful mystery, a secret to make you tremble. Tremble. What does one do when one trembles? What is it that makes you tremble? A secret always makes you tremble. (GD, 53)

Secrecy was such an obsessive preoccupation for Derrida that he decided to devote his final public remarks to it. Returning to thoughts he explored more than two decades earlier in The Gift of Death, he admits, “The secret always makes one tremble.”39 Inasmuch as what occasions trembling remains a secret, “the thought of trembling is a singular experience of non-knowledge [non-savoir]”, which “is always the experience of a passivity, absolutely exposed, absolutely vulnerable, passive before an irreversible past as well as before an unforeseeable future.” To elucidate this trembling, Derrida turns to Paul by way of Kierkegaard: “If Paul says ‘farewell’ [à-Dieu] and takes his leave while asking [his addressees] to obey, while commanding [them] to obey (for one does not ask for obedience, one commands or orders it), it is because God himself is absent, concealed, apart, hidden— [at] the very mo-

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ment one must obey him.” Repeating a term borrowed from Rudolph Otto’s important but overlooked book, The Idea of the Holy, Derrida describes this secret as the “mysterium tremendum.” “God,” he explains, “is the cause of the mysterium tremendum, and given death [la mort donnée] is always what makes one tremble and also what makes one weep” (GD, 55; translation modified). In his final public presentation on Kierkegaard, he elaborates this point: “What makes one tremble in the mysterium trememdum? It is the gift of infinite love [emphasis added], the dissymmetry between the divine gaze, which sees me and my own, which does not see the same one who sees me, it is the given death [la mort donnée] and bears the irreplaceable, that is the disproportion between the infinite gift and my finitude, my responsibility as culpability, sin, salvation, repentance, and sacrifice.” Love will return unexpectedly at the end as the end. The term mysterium tremendum, like the title of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, carries an indirect reference to Paul. “Jewgreek . . . greekjew” (WD, 320n) and something in between. Once again, Luther’s saving text, Romans 1:17.: “For I am not ashamed of the Gospel. It is the saving power of God for everyone who has faith— the Jew first, but the Greek also— because here is revealed God’s way of righting wrong, a way that starts from faith and ends in faith; as Scripture says, ‘He shall gain life who is justified through faith.’” This is the gift that shatters the law of every closed economy and creates the opening of abiding grace. How can the circle of redemption characteristic of every closed economy be broken? Derrida begins to answer this question in Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, where he asks, “What is economy?” (GT, 6). The law of return orders not only the circulation of money and markets, but is also the foundational structure for other psychological, social, and religious systems of exchange. Developing his answer to his own question, Derrida suggests that the roots of current forms of this law can be traced to ancient Greece: As soon as there is law, there is partition: as soon as there is nomy, there is economy. Besides the values of law and home, of distribution and partition, economy implies the idea of exchange, of circulation, of return. The figure of the circle is obviously at the center, if that can still be said of a circle. It stands at the center of any problematic oikonomia, as it does of any economic field: circular exchange, circulation of goods, products, monetary signs or merchandise, amortization of expenditures, revenues, substitution of use values and exchange values. This motif of circulation can lead one to think that the law of the economy is the— circular— return to the point of departure, to the origin, also to the home. So one would have to follow the odyssean structure of the economic narrative. Oikonomia would always follow the path of Ulysses. (GT, 6– 7)

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To interrupt this circuit of exchange, it is necessary to “[suspend] economic calculation.” “If there is [a] gift, the given of the gift (that which one gives, that which is given, the gift as given thing or as act of donation) must not come back to the giving (let us not already say to the subject, to the donor). It must not circulate, it must not be exchanged, it must not in any case be exhausted, as a gift, by the process of exchange, by the movement of circulation of the circle in the form of return to the point of departure. If the figure of the circle is essential to economics, the gift must remain aneconomic” (GT, 7). “Aneconomic” rather than noneconomic or antieconomic because the repetition of such a binary would reinscribe precisely the structure of exchange the gift is intended to interrupt. A gift, then, would be something like a negation that cannot be negated, a crucifixion that is not followed by a resurrection, or a signifier that cannot return to a transcendental signified. But is such a gift possible? Can the circle of exchange be broken, or is the gift’s expenditure always amortized? The problem is that the very acknowledgment of the gift by either the donor or the recipient would seem to establish a debt (Schuld, “debt, guilt”) that is a return on the donor’s investment. Derrida acknowledges this difficulty when he suggests that perhaps the gift is, after all, impossible; or, more precisely, “the impossible.” Every true donor, it seems, should follow the biblical maxim “When you do some act of charity, do not let your left hand know what your right is doing; your good deed must be secret” (Matthew 6:3– 4). A gift that is an absolute secret would be “a gift that cannot make itself (a) present [un don qui ne peut pas se faire présent]” (GT, 29). To explain the paradox of the gift, Derrida turns to Heidegger’s analysis of the givenness of Being expressed in the phrase es gibt. It is important to stress in this context that es is neuter, that is to say it is gender is neutral— neither male nor female. Derrida also notes that in Freudian psychoanalysis, es is the German term for what is translated in English as “id,” and in French as ça of ça donne, or the il of il y a. The “enigma” of the gift “is concentrated both in the ‘it’ or rather the ‘es,’ the ‘ça’ of ‘ça donne,’ which is not a thing, and in this giving that gives but without giving anything and without anyone giving anything— nothing but Being and time (which are nothing)” (GT, 20). If the true gift is (the) impossible because it is an absolute secret, then it could not be recognized as such; not only would the donor and recipient both have to forget the gifting, but they would also have to forget that they have forgotten it. This would mean that the gift could be experienced only as a certain “non-experience,” which resembles what Blanchot describes as the nonexperience that is “l’instant de [la] mort.” “This forgetting of the gift,” Derrida explains, “cannot be a simple nonexperience, a simple non-appearance, a self-effacement that is carried off with what it effaces. For there to be [a] gift event [emphasis added] (we say event and

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not act), something must come about or happen, in an instant, in an instant that no doubt does not belong to the economy of time, in a time without time, in such a way that the forgetting forgets, that it forgets itself, but also in such a way that this forgetting, without being something present, presentable, determinable, sensible or meaningful, is not nothing. What this forgetting and this forgetting of forgetting would therefore give us to think is something other than a philosophical, psychological, or psychoanalytic category” (GT, 17). What philosophy cannot think, theology or a/theology thinks otherwise. Kierkegaard returns to the question of the secret in the third part of Fear and Trembling by way of a critical reading of Hegel through the story of Abraham and Isaac. He begins his consideration of this issue by posing a question: “Was it ethically defensible for Abraham to keep secret [fortiede] his undertaking from Sarah, from Elizer, and from Isaac?” He then adds, “The Hegelian philosophy assumes no justified hiddenness or concealment [Skjulthed], no justified incommensurability” (FT, 82). In attempting to plumb the depths of the secret, Kierkegaard identifies two points of incommensurability— one human and the other divine. Each person is, for Kierkegaard, a “singular one [Enkelte],” and God is, in the words of Ockham, the “Ens Singuliarissmus.” That which is radically singular cannot be translated into the generality of concepts or expressed in language. Since the singular cannot be articulated as such, it always remains other; the most radically other is the tout autre, and one name of this unnameable other is God. Derrida develops this insight in his discussion of Kierkegaard’s interpretation of God’s command that Abraham sacrifice Isaac: “God is himself absent, hidden and silent, separate, secret, at the moment he has to be obeyed. God doesn’t give his reasons, he acts as he intends, and he doesn’t have to give his reasons or share anything with us: neither his motivations, if he has any, nor his deliberations, nor his decisions. Otherwise he wouldn’t be God, we wouldn’t be dealing with the Other as God or with God as wholly other [tout autre].” (GD, 57). It is precisely the radical altarity of the ganz Andere that is so unsettling. “We fear and tremble before the inaccessible secret of a God who decides for us although we remain responsible, that is, free to decide, to work, to assume our life and our death” (GD, 56). The radical otherness of God is mirrored in the radical otherness of the self from itself as well as from all other selves. This is what Derrida means when he writes, “Tout autre est tout autre”—“Every other (one) is every (bit) other” (GD, 82). If there is a secret that cannot be shared (partager), an exteriority that is not incorporated, a remainder that cannot be assimilated, remains that cannot be resurrected, then the endless tautologies of speculative philosophy give way to a “radical heterology” that “introduces the principle

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of the most irreducible heterology” (GD, 83). As secrets proliferate, mysteries deepen. There is a mysterium trememdum “within” the self that divides the self from itself as well as an altarity that separates different subjects from one another. “God,” Derrida explains, “is the name of the possibility I have of keeping a secret that is visible from the interior but not from the exterior. . . . Once I can have a secret relationship with myself and not tell everything, once there is secrecy and secret witnessing within me, then what I call God exists, (there is) what I call God in me, (it happens that) I call myself God— a phrase that is difficult to distinguish from ‘God calls me,’ for it is on that condition that I can call myself or that I am called in secret. God is in me, he is the absolute ‘me’ or ‘self,’ he is that structure of invisible interiority that is called, in Kierkegaard’s sense, subjectivity” (GD, 108– 9). This interiority is “within” subjectivity as an imminence that is never precisely immanent. In contrast to Hegel, for whom the God within establishes the identity of differences, for Kierkegaard and Derrida, the inner mysterium trememdum is the solicitation (Latin sollicito, “to move violently, disturb, shake, agitate”) of absolute difference that preserves the difference of identity. God’s call to Abraham is the call of the Absolute Other who gives the gift of life, which is the gift of death— not only Isaac’s death, but also Abraham’s death as well as the death of Israel’s future. Abraham’s responsible decision presupposes his response-ability to the originary de-cision, Spring/Sprung, Ent-scheidung, or difference that opens the future that is the unfathomable abyss of the present. In the absence of any secure ground or certain laws and principles, “the instant of [his] decision is madness” (GD, 65). This is the madness that tears reason apart, and in this tear, fissure, fault, civilization with all its discontents emerges. Given time by an incomprehensible Other, the singular one, poised at the instant of decision, is a mystery to himself and is surrounded by others who remain incomprehensible. At this point of no return, every decision is a “leap of faith.” Abraham’s decision is absolutely responsible because it answers for itself before the absolute other. Paradoxically it is also irresponsible because it is guided neither by reason nor by an ethics justifiable before men or before the law of some universal tribunal. Everything points to the fact that one is unable to be responsible at the same time before the other and before others, before the others of the other. If God is completely other, the figure or name of the wholly other, then every other (one) is every (bit) other. Tout autre est tout autre. This formula disturbs Kierkegaard’s discourse on one level while at the same time reinforcing its most extreme ramifications. It implies that God, as the wholly other, is to be found everywhere there is something of the

Abiding / 245 wholly other. And since each of us, everyone else, each other is infinitely other in its absolute singularity, inaccessible, solitary, transcendent, nonmanifest, originarily nonpresent to my ego. . . , then what can be said about Abraham’s relation to God can be said about my relation without relation to every other (one) as every (bit) other [tout autre comme tout autre], in particular my relation to my neighbor or my loved ones who are as inaccessible to me, as secret and transcendent as Jahweh. Every other (in the sense of each other) is every bit other (absolutely other). From this point of view what Fear and Trembling says about the sacrifice of Isaac is the truth. . . . At the instant of every decision and through the relation to every other (one) as every (bit) other, every one else asks us at every moment to behave like knights of faith. (GD, 77– 79)

Abraham is everyman, and everyone who can sustain “the unbearable lightness of being” is Abraham. Leaving early before the sun rises, he rides slowly for three days . . . delay . . . deferral, no apocalypse, not now . . . three long days. “All human calculation ceased long ago” (FT, 36). What is Abraham thinking? Does he say anything to Isaac? What does he say to Sarah? What can he say even if he wants to speak? Is he resigned, infinitely resigned to what he can never understand? A gift from God when he and Sarah were far too old, Isaac is not only their future but also the future of the Jewish people. This is madness, sheer madness. But Abraham believes . . . believes even if he cannot understand. Willing to sacrifice Isaac, he lets him go, yet believes God will repeat his gift by giving him Isaac a second time. The gift is doubled not because of Abraham’s action, but because it is the event of the absolute Other’s sheer grace. Faith for Kierkegaard is a double movement of resignation and acceptance. Recognizing their absolute dependence on the Wholly Other, knights of infinite resignation renounce everything they once thought their own and withdraw into themselves and from the world. Kierkegaard’s poet Johannes de Silentio explains, “The knights of infinity are ballet dancers and have elevation. They make the upward movement and come down again, and this, too, is not an unhappy diversion and is not unlovely to see. But every time they come down, they are unable to assume the posture immediately, they waver for an instant, and this wavering [Vaklen] shows that they are aliens or foreigners [Fremmende] in the world” (FT, 41; translation modified). Knights of faith, by contrast, make a second movement; after accepting their finitude and mortality by letting go of everything, they receive it all back as the free gift from an Other they cannot know. Though the ground has been taken from beneath their feet, they nevertheless do not waver when they come back to earth. “One needs only to see them the instant they touch and have

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touched the earth— and then one recognizes them. But to be able to come down in such a way that instantaneously one seems to stand and to walk, to change the leap [Springet] into life into walking, absolutely to express the sublime in the pedestrian— only that knight can do it, and this is the one and only wonder” [Vidunder]” (FT, 41; translation modified). To be able to express the sublime in the pedestrian— this the gift of faith. Faith, however, transpires at such a depth of inwardness that it remains a secret that cannot be shared. Passionately holding together opposites that tend to fly apart, the faithful individual is as paradoxical as the absolute paradox whose passion the believer imitates. Kierkegaard always insisted that he fell short of genuine Christian faith because, he confessed— he could make the movement of infinite resignation but not the second movement of acceptance. That is why he could not marry Regina Olsen; he broke his engagement to her and spent the rest of his life writing about the dilemma he faced but never could resolve. Reflecting on this experience or nonexperience, he writes indirectly, “Now let us meet the knight of faith. . . . He does exactly the same as the other knight did: he infinitely renounces the love that is the substance of his life, he is reconciled in pain. But then the wonder happens; he makes one more movement even more wonderful than all the others, for he says: Nevertheless I have faith that I will get her— that is, by virtue of the absurd, by virtue of the fact that for God all things are possible. The absurd does not belong to the differences that lie within the proper domain of the understanding. . . . The instant the knight executed the act of resignation, he was convinced of the impossibility, humanly speaking; that was the conclusion of the understanding, and he had sufficient energy to think it. But in the infinite sense it was possible, that is, by relinquishing it [resignere derpaa], but this having, after all, is also a giving up [den Besidden er jo tillage en Opgiven] (FT, 46– 47; translation modified). The gift of faith is the belief that with the absolute difference, which is wholly other, all things are possible— even the impossible itself. Despair (dés-espoir) is hopelessness; the opposite of despair is hope . . . hope even (perhaps especially) when all seems hopeless. Hope that all things are possible is the faith that the future is not programmed by the past, but forever approaches bringing both the joyful expectation of life and the dreadful apprehension of death. To accept the gift of life is to accept the gift of death. Time, what precious little time remains, is always given and therefore is never ours to spend, save, or waste. The person who makes the leap of faith— not once, not twice, but at every instant— makes the double movement in which he or she confesses that having is, after all, also letting go. To take this absolute risk of this irrevocable decision is to dwell with abiding grace.

NINE

Ending Ending

The rose is without why; it blossoms without reason. —Angelus Silesius

Connecting Dots in a Nonlinear Web ● ● ●

Unphilosophical Postscript o o o Ending Ending ● ● ●

Retro-Reading Endless Fragments Philosophiske Smuler Collected Not Re-Collected ●●●

Line ooo Circle ●●● Chiasmus ooo ●

o ●

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Figure 23. Genealogical Matrix.

1967 Seminar: The Dialectic of Alienation and Reconciliation in Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx 1968 Seminar: Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Existence 2018 Book: Abiding Grace: Time, Modernity, Death ↓↑ Half a Century ↓↑

Ending Ending / 249 o ●

o Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship: A Study of Time and Self ↓↑ Religion and the Human Image ↓↑ Deconstructing Theology ↓↑ Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (L’errance: Lecture de Jacques Derrida) ↓↑ Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy ↓↑ Altarity ↓↑ Tears ↓↑ Double Negative ↓↑ Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion ↓↑ Nots ↓↑ The Réal, Las Vegas, NV ↓↑ Imagologies: Media Philosophy ↓↑ Hiding ↓↑ The Picture in Question: Mark Tansey and the Ends of Representation ↓↑ About Religion: Economies of Faith in Virtual Culture ↓↑ The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture ↓↑ Grave Matters ↓↑ Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World without Redemption

250 / Chapter Nine ↓↑ Mystic Bones ↓↑ After God ↓↑ Field Notes from Elsewhere: Reflections on Dying and Living ↓↑ Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities ↓↑ Refiguring the Spiritual: Beuys, Barney, Turrell, Goldsworthy ↓↑ Rewiring the Real: In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo ↓↑ Recovering Place: Reflections on Stone Hill ↓↑ Speed Limits: Where Time Went and Why We Have So Little Left ↓↑ Last Works: Lessons in Leaving ↓↑ Abiding Grace: Time, Modernity, Death ●

o ●

A Secret Life after Death Abiding Temporal Ambiguity of Present/Presence: After, Subsequent to (Past); After, in Pursuit of (Future) Time/Modernity/Death Time: 12:00 PM, December 5, 2006 Place/Space: Hamilton Hall, Columbia University Last Class for “Religion and the Modern World” Last Text: The Gift of Death Dancing with Death— Being Timely, Being-toward-Death Time: 7:10 PM, December 6, 2006 Place/Space: St. Luke’s Hospital, New York City L’instant de ma mort o ●

o

Ending Ending / 251 Letting-Be The Leap/Der Sprung Take, throw and shelter and be the leap from the most remote memory into an ungrounded realm: Carry before you the one “Who”? Who is man? Say without fail the one “What”? What is be-ing? —Heidegger, Mindfulness

Post Ages: postwar, posthistorical, postindustrial, posthumous, posthuman, post-God, postreligion, post-Christian, post-Western, post-real, post-truth, postbiological, postmodern, post-Post. When will it end? Where will it end? How will it end? What is the ending of ending? It is, of course, impossible to know. We live in a time obsessed with ending. For some, the future looks bright— a technological utopia in which human desires are fulfilled and those with excessive financial resources believe, like the medieval faithful purchasing indulgences, they can buy immortality. For others, the future is dark— a social dystopia brought by true believers who cling to outdated ideologies. The question that remains at the end of the end, is whether there is a third altarnative between utopia and dystopia that might be an opening for hope. The epoch of so-called postmodernism and posthumanism, we have discovered, marks the closure of modernity. In a work entitled simply Bestimmung (Determination), Heidegger directly addresses Die Vollendung der Neuzeit—“the completion,” “accomplishment,” “ending of modernity.” The project of modernity, he argues, has been to transform the world into the image of man through constructive activity expressed most powerfully in science and technology. Nature and other human beings become resources to be exploited for personal gain by those who possess power. The completion of the metaphysical epoch raises being in the sense of machination to such “domination/mastery” [“Herrschaft”], that within machination

252 / Chapter Nine being is indeed forgotten, and yet the beings of such a nature are pursued as the only unconditionally secured representing and producing [Vor- und Herstellung]. . . . The construction [Machenschaft] of beings that produces and makes up everything is machination, which predetermines also the nature of the effectiveness of beings and provides actuality with its unique meaning. . . . Machination prevails at the same time as the ground of interpreting the actual as “the will to power” [“Willen zur Macht”]—the ground that is not known in its essence [Wesen] and is also unrecognizable by all metaphysics. . . . . Planning, calculating, arranging, and breeding foster a being that has come to domination or mastery [Herrschaft] in this way and thereby fosters the affirmation of “becoming,” but not with the intention of progressing towards a goal and an “ideal,” rather for the sake of “becoming itself.” (M, 19; translation modified)

The will to power becomes the will to control, which, in turn, becomes the will to mastery that turns everything other than itself into a means to its own ends. Writing in the shadow of Hiroshima and with the “MAD” doctrine of mutually assured destruction the primary hope for deferring the apocalypse, Heidegger’s chief concerns were the atomic bomb and cybernetics. While these dangers have not disappeared, another looming threat has emerged: accelerating climate change. If disaster occurs, it most likely will be environmental. Modern science and technology, which have brought so many benefits, now are making the survival of the human race as well as other forms of life increasingly perilous. Heidegger’s analysis can be effectively extended to this imminent danger. The will to power, control, and mastery has led to what many critics have labeled “the Anthropocene” in which human activity has become the dominant factor affecting both the natural environment and the climate. Through “predatory hubris,” the world that “man” had sought to domesticate is turning on him and becoming so strange that it has created what Amitav Ghosh aptly names “the environmental uncanny.” In his important book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Amitav Ghosh reflects on his near-death experience during a “freak” cyclone in Delhi in 1978: But what is it that you are communicating with, at this moment of extreme danger, when your mind is in a state unlike any you’ve ever known before? An analogy that is sometimes offered is that of seeing a ghost, a presence that is not of this world. In the tiger stories of the Sundarbans, as in my experience of the tornado, there is . . . an irreducible element of mystery. But what I am trying to suggest

Ending Ending / 253 is perhaps better expressed by a different word, one that recurs frequently in translations of Freud and Heidegger. That word is uncanny—and it is indeed with uncanny accuracy that my experience of the tornado is evoked in the following passage: “In dread, as we say, ‘one feels something uncanny.’ What is this ‘something’ and this ‘one’? We are unable to say what gives ‘one’ that uncanny feeling. ‘One’ just feels it generally.”1

Ghosh argues that modernity has long repressed this disruptive “something” through “patterns of evasion” designed to secure the continuity upon which perpetual “progress” depends. This is the primary purpose of historical narratives that connect the moments of time, and systems and structures intended to include everything in a comprehensive and comprehensible whole. For Ghosh as for Kierkegaard, this quest for security and certainty is symptomatic of risk-averse people who are preoccupied with “the regularity of bourgeois life.” Every such strategy of avoidance, however, fails because, as Freud has taught us, the repressed inevitably returns to disrupt everything constructed to control it. What most threatens modernity’s will to mastery is the uncertainty of the future. Ghosh traces the will to control whatever resists humankind’s purposeful striving to Protestantism: “It was not until the advent of Protestantism perhaps that Man began to dream of achieving his own selfdeification by radically isolating himself before an arbitrary God.”2 As the locus of power shifts from heaven to earth, primal temporality in which finite human beings are exposed to a future that can be neither anticipated nor controlled gives way to “secular teleologies, like those of Hegel and Marx.”3 But just when the modern will to mastery seems to triumph by turning both nature and other human beings into a standing reserve to be exploited, the Anthropocene undergoes a quasi-dialectical reversal in which the uncanny other returns. This disruption involves an (dis)order of time that runs counter to le temps moderne. Ghosh makes this point in an observation crafted to startle: “The Anthropocene has reversed the temporal order of modernity: those at the margins are now the first to experience the future that awaits all of us; it is they who confront most directly what Thoreau called ‘vast, Titanic, inhuman nature.’”4 To confront “inhuman nature” is to face death— no longer, as for Kierkegaard and Heidegger, the death of the singular individual, but the death of humanity as a whole and perhaps the death of all life on this planet. Ghosh names this unnamable future “the unthinkable,” which harbors radical climate change. As we have discovered, this disruptive other bears many different “names”—the Real, ganz Andere, the Absolute, absolute difference, altarity, the infinite and qualitatively

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different, In-differentz Punkt, la différance, das Nichts, even God. What Ghosh does not realize or overlooks is that another Protestantism runs counter to the dominant currents of modernity. Far from attempting to master time by programming the future, the theologia crucis willingly suffers the gift of the future, which is the groundless ground of being and nonbeing. Long before Nietzsche and Heidegger, Hegel argued that the overpowering will to master the other is nihilistic. Affirming identity by negating all difference and every other, the will to mastery leads to the “fury of destruction,” which obliterates the very conditions of its own identity. This violence, which lies at the heart of modernism, was unleashed in the reign of terror that is memorialized by the obelisk in the middle of the Place de la Concorde at the site where the guillotine once stood. The Cartesian quest for self-certainty is expressed in the foundational principle of the Enlightenment— instrumental reason or utility. The Useful is the object in so far as self-consciousness penetrates it and has in it the certainty of its individual self, its satisfaction (its being-for-self); selfconsciousness sees right into the object and this insight [Einsicht] contains the true essence of the objet (which is to be something that is penetrated [durchschaute], or to be for an ‘other’). This insight is thus itself true knowing, and self-consciousness has equally directly the universal certainty of itself, its pure consciousness, in this relationship in which, therefore, truth as well as presence [emphasis added] and actuality are united. The two worlds are reconciled and heaven is transplanted to earth below. (PS, 355)

In the revolution that created the modern world— which, it is important to recall, Marx insisted began with Luther— the creative will of the transcendent God becomes the destructive will of man sweeping up everything in the vortex of self-assertion. “This withdrawal from the form of objectivity of the Useful has, however, already taken place in principle and from this inner revolution there emerges the actual revolution of the actual world, the new shape of consciousness, absolute freedom” (PS, 355– 56). With these developments, the struggle for mastery [Herrschaft] becomes a sociocultural revolution that still continues. Unknowingly pursuing their own destruction, human beings wage perpetual war on the natural world and each other. For the modernist project, the final other to be mastered is death. The modern will to power ends with the effort to negate finitude through the will to immortality. If to be human is to be mortal, then to be immortal would be to be posthuman. If this dream of immortality were ever realized, it would sound the death knell (Glas) for future generations. The eternal

Ending Ending / 255

presence of one generation would truly be the end of history. Needless to say, Hegel could not have foreseen the emergence of today’s global digital networks and virtual media. However, as Hyppolite has suggested, the dialectical structure of Hegel’s foundational logic prefigures the digital webs and networks that are the infrastructure for the society of the spectacle and today’s network culture. While Hegel acknowledged the terror at the heart of freedom, he firmly believed in a redemptive narrative of history. Just as resurrection follows crucifixion, so negation is negated through “the cunning of reason.” Though history is a “slaughter bench,” good inevitably emerges from evil in a secular theodicy realized through the machinations of the modern state and the providential invisible hand of the market. Hegel is convinced that the effort to assert self by negating the other eventually issues in the mutual recognition of self in other, which is the life of spirit. But this dream never becomes a reality. Hegel is wrong when he insists that this constitutive interrelationality is self-grounding. Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Derrida are right— rather than autonomous, human being is radically heteronomous because it is always given by an un(re)presentable other. Kierkegaard, however, is wrong when he argues that a subject comes into relation with the Other in absolute isolation from other human beings. The experience or nonexperience of the Wholly Other is inseparable from the shared solitude of everyone who remains a secret to oneself as well as to all others. This is Derrida’s point when he insists that “tout autre est tout autre.” No apocalypse, not now. Can disaster be delayed and deferred, perhaps indefinitely? The will to power, control, and mastery cultivated by modern constructivism cannot be undone by directly opposing it because, as Kierkegaard once observed, doing the opposite is really a form of imitation. Since constructivism is grounded in the logic of negation, to negate it is to confirm it. It is, therefore, necessary to deconstruct constructivism indirectly by soliciting a nonassertive will that is, paradoxically, the will-not-to-will. Heidegger is convinced that all beings are “absolutely dependent” on the decisions and resolutions of such a will. This counterwill can be glimpsed (which is not say be seen or fully comprehended) by thinking about identity and difference differently. Heidegger labels this altarnative thinking Besinnung, which is best translated “meditative thinking.”5 Heidegger had been intrigued by the “will-not-to-will” since his early study of Duns Scotus and Meister Eckhart. Attempting to deconstruct modern constructivism, which, he believes began with the Hellenization of Christianity, he returns to the turning point where human creativity displaces the divine Creator: Kant’s analysis of the transcendental imagination. His argument depends on the distinction between meditative thinking and

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representational thinking. In Country Path Conversations (Feldweg-Gespräche), Heidegger clarifies this point in a three-way dialogue among a scholar, a scientist, and a guide. The following exchange contrasts Besinnung and Vorstellung: guide: . . . If thinking is the distinguishing mark of the essence of the human, then what is essential to this essence, namely the essence of thinking, can be first properly caught sight of only insofar as we look away from thinking. scholar: Yet thinking, conceived of in the traditional manner as representing, is a willing [als Vorstellen begriffen, ein Wollen]; even Kant conceives of thinking in this manner when he characterizes it as spontaneity [Spontaneität]. Thinking is willing, and willing is thinking [Denken ist Wollen und Wollen ist Denken]. scientist: The assertion that the essence of thinking is something other than thinking, then, says that thinking is something other than willing. guide: That is why, in answer to your question as to what I really will in our meditation on the essence of thinking, I replied: I will non-willing [ich will das Nicht-Wollen].6

To understand Heidegger’s position on this crucial issue, it is necessary to recall his argument about willing as such, which he describes as a willing that is not the expression of a divine or human agent. There are two sides of willing nonwilling. The first is the free release of determinate beings into presence (space) and the present (time), and the second is determinate beings’ free release of other determinate beings. As we have seen, originary decision creates the clearing in which particular beings emerge. Heidegger distinguishes this originary event from the self-assertive will to power: Be-ing: in the first beginning the rising [Anfang] . . . , the self-unfolding (opening) presencing [die sich entfaltende (offende) Anwesung]. Being: at the end of this beginning, in “life,” the last vapor of an evaporating reality, the self-overpowering machination as the authorizing of power [die sich ubermachtigende Machenschaft als Ermachtigung der Macht]. Be-ing: in the other beginning is the e-vent, the struggle of opposites and strife as the clearing of the ab-ground of the “in-between” [Kampf der Entgegnung und des Streites als Lichtung des Abrundes des Inzwischen]. (M, 68; translation modified)

This “de-ciding [Ent-scheidende] prior to thinking” is the in-between/Inzwischen of “temporization.” Since being is always given, it is inescapably temporal— being, in other words, is time. That which gives time is “in” time as the

Ending Ending / 257

“outside” that is the “non-originary origin” of temporization. As such, it is the “an-archic” [an, “not” + arche, “beginning”] Spring/Sprung that releases beings by withdrawing the ground that had long seemed to support them. Heidegger borrows a term from Eckhart’s suggestive term Gelassenheit to describe this event of absolution. While Gelassenheit is usually translated “release” or “releasement,” “letting-be” is both a better and a more suggestive translation. In his commentary on Heidegger entitled Wandering Joy: Meister Eckhart, Mystic and Philosopher, Reiner Schurmann explains the multiple nuances of this letting-be: During a seminar held in Le Thor, France, in 1969, Heidegger distinguished between three acceptations of “letting-be.” To let be, lassen, he said, may be understood in relation either to a being, or to its presence, Anwesen, or to its coming-to-presence as such, Anwesen lassen. The first of these meanings points towards a singular being and results from the attitude which “lets something be.” Phrases like “there are peasant shoes,” “there are corn and wine,” and “there is a jug” show the familiarity of our language with this form of releasement. In the second sense, attention is drawn to that which makes things present, to their presence in general, to their beingness. To “let all things be” is to experience their presence for its own sake; Meister Eckhart said, it is to experience the iht that is God in creatures. Heidegger writes one word, Anwesenlassen, and emphasizes the Anwesen. These two meanings signify the ontological difference between beings and their beingness as occidental philosophy is accustomed to think it. In the third acceptation of “letting-be,” Heidegger hyphenates the word Anwesen-lassen in order to emphasize the Lassen. This is releasement in its nonmetaphysical sense. The difference that is now thought of is between being and beingness (wesene as accomplishment and iht in Meister Eckhart, and Sein and Seiendheit in Heidegger). Being is understood as letting beingness be. This letting-be is already hidden in the Wesen [essence] of Anwesen; it is . . . the “excess of presence.”7

Letting-be is a letting-go that is the originary gift of being. This gift, if gifting is possible, must be freely given with no expectation of return. In this way, the decision that lets beings be breaks the closed circuit of exchange that is bound by the law of returns. Every restricted economy works according to the rational principle of quid pro quo. In the aneconomy of grace, weakness is strength and strength is weakness. Gelassenheit shatters the rationale of this law in an e-vent that is, like Angelus Silesius’s rose, “without why.” Always already “before the law,” letting-be is the abiding grace without which life and death are impossible.

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As an absolute gift offered with no expectation of return, abiding grace is the gift of the Absolute itself. The Absolute absolves beings of debt (Schuld) and guilt (Schuld) and releases (the) all in the “innocence of becoming,” which is “beyond good and evil.” The spacing-timing of letting-be creates the clearing for a play that is deadly serious. If play is to be thought radically, it must, as Derrida insists, “be conceived of before the alternative of presence and absence.” Abiding grace is the gift that is not (a) present, which makes all affirmation (giving) and negation (taking) possible. Always “before the law,” grace eludes all systems and structures that are parasitic (parasites, “static, interference”) upon it. This is the play that Derrida described as early as 1966/67 and repeatedly returned to until his dying day: “Turned towards the lost or impossible presence of the absent origin, this structuralist thematic of broken immediacy is therefore the saddened, negative, nostalgic, guilty, Rousseauistic side of the thinking of play whose other side would be the Nietzschean affirmation, that is the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation. This affirmation then determines the noncenter otherwise than as loss of the center. And it plays without security” (WD, 292). Such play leads to no certain conclusions, nor does it close the circle of becoming by returning to the beginning and knowing it for the first time. Like a woodland path (Holzweg), the play that matters leads nowhere but deeper into the forest that becomes ever more mysterious. To follow this path is to err without end.

Letting Go De-cision within de-cision, leap within leap, willing non-willing within willing non-willing. The way to let be is to let go. Letting go ends the projected endings of the Post Age by waiting patiently for the future that is forever zu-kommen . . . à-venir. Letting go is impossible without thinking deconstructively by thinking meditatively. When the willfulness of Vorstellung yields to the unwilling of Besinnung, thinking becomes thanking. guide: Thanking and attentiveness [Das Danken und die Achtsamkeit]. scholar: Whenever I have been able to be attentive, I have long heard the word “thanking” [“Danken”] in the word “thoughts” [“Gedanken”]. scientist: So would thinking be a thanking? guide: Presumably we could tell if we were to know what thinking is. scholar: We are yet still on the way to this. . . .

Ending Ending / 259 guide: The thinker even says more than he himself can know, such that he is surprised and above all surpassed by the inexhaustibility [Unerschopflichkeit] of his own word.8

Because a thinker always says more than he or she knows, works have a future that can never be anticipated. The arrival of this future is an unexpected gift that surprises (sur, “over” + prendre, “to take”) and sometimes overwhelms the author. The works that abide by repeatedly returning unexpectedly are never easy, because they make endless demands. This is why meditative works must be given time and read slowly. Heidegger explains this de-cisive point in a passage that resists translation: This meditative thinking is not a means of knowledge, it is not a reverting to a thinking that has come to a halt in the direction of knowledge, and is left behind, and organized like what is present-at-hand. Rather, meditative thinking is the deciding leap ahead into the extended approach for leaping into the origin, into the “leap” (rift) [Riss] that is the abyss that opens, clears, which as be-ing sways “in between” beings, so that beings as such may be preserved and forgotten; so that at times beings may join the concealing of be-ing and its decisions, at times evade the concealing, and at times sink into a lack of decision. (M, 41; translation modified)9

Leaping into the rending Ze-riss-enheit of be-ing, the meditative thinker lingers with the negative but, unlike the speculative philosopher, does not negate negation. In the opening of this aneconomy, losses are not amortized. To live responsibly in a world without redemption, is to live responsively by always being grateful to the graciousness of every other who lets beings be. Time— what little time remains— is never our own; to the contrary, it is always given and might be taken at any instant. As we have discovered, to accept the gift of life is to accept the gift of death. As the possibility of my impossibility, death is not a distant event, but is the elsewhere that is always near. Far from weighing one down with the inescapable gravity of life, dancing with death releases one for the levity of the bearable lightness of nonbeing. The challenge of living is not to master death, but to accept death’s inevitability through a double movement of resignation and acceptance, release and return. The acceptance of my death is the gift of the future for others. Tout autre est tout autre. The way to accept the gift of letting be is by letting go— letting go of the will to power, control, and mastery by letting the other

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be other. As Luther long ago realized, grace, abiding grace, makes works possible. “Works of love” are not really works— they are gifts to and from others. Grace exposes a primordial passivity that reveals the abiding fragility of life whose acknowledgment tempers all actions. Only when released from the law is it possible to fulfill the law by serving the other as other and not using the other as a means to one’s own ends. One name for living gracefully is generosity, the absolute generosity of spirit. Giving with no strings attached is not the expression of a religion that is binding or rebinding (religare: re, “back” + ligare, “to bind”) as it was for Abraham and Isaac; to the contrary, generosity is the expression of religion as an unbinding that releases other selves to live errantly in the face of a future that is as hopeful as it is dreadful. The other name for this abyssal generosity is love. Not erotic love, which seeks to gratify human desires by filling the void of some primal loss, but a-gap-e, which is the freely given love that “passeth knowledge” (Ephesians 3:19).10 “Philosophy,” Heidegger reminds readers, “means ‘love of wisdom.’” Let us think this word out of essential meditative thinking [Wesensbesinnung] by letting go of the circle of representation [Vorstellungskreis] of everyday life, erudition, cultural concerns and doctrines of happiness. Then the word says: “love” is the will that wills the beloved be; the will that wills the beloved finds its essence therein. Such a will does not wish and demand anything. Through honoring, and not by trying to create the loved one, this will lets above all the loved one— what is worthy of loving— “become.” The word “love” calls what is worthy to be loved “wisdom.” “Wisdom” is the essential knowledge; the indwelling truth of be-ing [wesentliche Wissen, die Instandigkeit in der Warheit des Seyns]. Hence that “love” loves be-ing in unique “fore-love” [Vor-liebe]. This: that be-ing “be” is the love’s beloved. What matters to this beloved, to its truth and its grounding, is the will to essential knowing-awareness. But Be-ing is the abyss [Das sein aber— ist der Abgrund]. (M, 49; translation modified)

Being is the abyss— the abyss of love. This is the wisdom of Paul, which led Luther to discover abiding grace. Love is patient; love is kind and envies no one. Love is never boastful, nor conceited, nor rude; never selfish, not quick to take offence. Love keeps no score of wrongs; does not gloat over other men’s sins, but delights in the truth. There is nothing love cannot face; there is no limit to its faith, its hope, and its endurance. (1 Corinthians 13:4– 7).

Ending Ending / 261 ● ● ●

How to hope in a hopeless time? Through the decision to choose hope, one thereby chooses infinitely more than is apparent, for it is an eternal decision. —Kierkegaard, Works of Love Take, drink, this is my mind offered to you. o o o The last look is over. Nevermore will I be able to say “thank you.” Thank you for this or that, for this miracle, for the turbulent sea and the fuzzy horizon, for the clouds, the river and fire, thanks for heat, fire, and flames, thanks for winds and sounds, for the pen and the violin, thanks for the enormous meal of language, thanks for love and suffering, for sadness and for femininity . . . no I’m not done yet; I’m just beginning to remember who must be thanked; I’ve barely begun my hymn of thanks and my turn is over. —Michel Serres, The Parasite ● ● ●

Mazing Grace Whisper words of wisdom There will be no answer Let it be Let it be, let it be, let it be o o o

NOTES

CHAPTER ONE

1 2

3

4

5 6 7 8 9

10

11 12 13 14

15 16

American Heritage Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1970), s.v. “series.” See Wassily Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane (New York: Dover, 1979). As we will see in chapter 5, Kandinsky was the uncle of the highly influential interpreter of Hegel, Alexandre Kojève. See The Fourth Way: A Record of Talks and Answers to Questions Based on the Teaching of G. I. Gurdjieff (New York: Knopf, 1957); and Kasimir Malevich, The Non-objective World, trans. Howard Dearstyne (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1959). The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. Rex Warner (New York: New American Library of World Literature, 1963), 267. The Confessions is considered by some to be the first autobiography ever written. Augustine, The Confessions, 227. Augustine, 273. Augustine, 218– 19. Augustine, 228. The spelling of altarity rather than alterity repeats Derrida’s replacement of the e with an a to form difference. For a elaboration of the implications of this change, see Mark C. Taylor, Altarity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). T. S. Eliot, “East Coker,” Collected Poems, 1909– 1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 196, 204. Eliot wrote a dissertation on the British Hegelian F. H. Bradley while at Harvard. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 11. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 12. T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” Collected Poems, 1909– 1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 223. The metaphor of the rose and the cross is borrowed from Rosicrucianism. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 12. Knox translates Eigensinn as “obstinancy.” Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (The Philosophy of Right) was published in 1821; Hegel died in 1831. Jacques Derrida, “Outwork,” Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 5. Derrida, 9.

264 / Notes to Pages 7–20 17 18 19 20 21

22 23

24

25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37

38 39

Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 16– 17. Oxford English Dictionary (1971), s.v. “modern.” Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I (New York: Random House, 1968), 26. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Penguin: 1999), 628. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Hegel’s Existentialism,” Sense and Non-sense, trans. Hubert Dreyfus and Patricia Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 63– 64. Merleau-Ponty, 63. The closely related khiasma means “cross” or “piece of wood.” In anatomy, a chiasma is “a crossing or intersection of two tracts, as of nerves or ligaments,” and in genetics, it is a point of contact between two homologous chromosomes, considered the crytological manifestation of crossing over.” American Heritage Dictionary (1970), 2nd ed., s.v. “chiasma.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 149; Merleau-Ponty, “The Intertwining: The Chiasm,” in The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 143. Merleau-Ponty, “The Intertwining,” 147. The word tissue is particularly suggestive in this context— it derives from the Old English tissue, “a rich cloth, fine gauze,” which can be traced to the Old French past participle of tistre, “to weave,” and the Latin textere. Textere is also the stem of text. Merleau-Ponty, “The Intertwining,” 132. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Interrogation and Intuition,” in The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 122– 23. Merleau-Ponty, “The Intertwining,” 146. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 70. Derrida, 45. Derrida, Dissemination, 27n–28n. Derrida, 44– 45. It is important to recall that speculation, like the Latin word for “mirror,” speculum, derives from the Latin specere, “to look at.” Though Derrida uses this term only rarely, Rodolphe Gasché organizes his insightful study around it. See The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Avon Books, 1965), 143. Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 19. See also Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). Rheinhold Niebuhr’s nephew, Richard R. Niebuhr, directed my doctoral dissertation at Harvard. Steve died far too young and never published as much as he should have. His two primary books are directly related to the work I have done over the years: In the Twilight of Christendom: Hegel vs. Hegel on Faith and History (Chambersburg, PA: American Academy of Religion, 1972); and Dialectic and Gospel in the Development of Hegel’s Thinking (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1998).

Notes to Pages 21–38 / 265 40

41 42

43

These works were published: Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship: A Study of Time and the Self (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975); and Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), xvi. See Mark C. Taylor, “Text as Victim,” in Thomas Altizer et al., Deconstruction and Theology (New York: Crossroad, 1982); Taylor, Deconstructing Theology (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1982). See Mark C. Taylor, Last Works: Lessons in Leaving (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018); and Taylor, Field Notes from Elsewhere: Reflections on Dying and Living (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). C H A P T E R T WO

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18

Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 320, 314, 379. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), xi. Fukuyama, xii. Fukuyama, xiv–xv. Fukuyama, xv. This is a parody of Hegelian language— the word ophæve is the Danish translation of the German aufheben, which plays a crucial role in Hegel’s argument. Søren Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 89. Marcion was the founder of a radically dualistic second-century sect that was similar to some versions of Gnosticism. He rejected the entire Old Testament, as well as any books in the New Testament he thought bore traces of Judaism. His canon gave a privileged place to Paul’s letters. I will consider the relationship between Schelling, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger in chapter 7. Quoted in Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic, trans. Lisabeth During (New York: Routledge, 2005), 104. G. W. F. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, trans. Walter Cerf and H. S. Harris (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977), 190. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), 181. Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Harper and Row, 1947), 17. For further discussion of the relationship between anthropology and theology, see Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (New York: Harper, 1957). Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmannn, trans. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1968), 267. Nietzsche, 326, 327, 267. Nietzsche, 326. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970), 328. Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?,” in On History, ed. Lewis White Beck, trans. Beck, Robert E. Anchor, and Emil L. Fackenheim (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), 3.

266 / Notes to Pages 38–56 19

Dieter Henrich, Between Kant and Hegel: Lectures on German Idealism, ed. David S. Pacini (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 59. CHAPTER THREE

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Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the PlaceWorld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 4. James Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of Information Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 7. “Lucy’s Famous Chocolate Scene” (clip from I Love Lucy), posted May 19, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NPzLBSBzPI. Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 4. Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869– 1920 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); and Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 36. Feuerbach quoted in SS, p. 1. Hereafter references to numbered aphorisms in this book are given in the body of the text. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 2. Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Sage Publications, 1993), 6– 7. Baudrillard, Simulations, 43. Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford University Press, 1988), 139. Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 57. Kennedy quoted in Thomas Rid, Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History (New York: Norton, 2016), 100– 101. Evan Osnos, “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich,” New Yorker, January 30, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-superrich. All quotations in the following pages of this chapter are from this article. Moravec teaches at Carnegie Mellon University, where he is a member of the Robotics Institute. For Moravec, the notion of brains in vats is not science fiction. He writes: Picture a “brain in a vat,” sustained by life-support machinery, connected by wonderful electronic links to a series of artificial rent-a-bodies in remote locations and to simulated bodies in virtual realities. Although it may be nudged far beyond its natural lifespan by an optimal physical environment, a biological brain evolved to operate for a human lifetime is unlikely to function forever. Why not use advanced neurological electronics, like that which links it with the external world, to replace the gray matter as it begins to fail? Bit by bit our failing brain may be replaced by superior electronic equivalents, leaving our personality and thoughts clearer than ever, though, in time, no vestige of our original body or brain remains. (Hans Moravec, Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind [New York: Oxford University Press, 1999], 169– 70)

15 16

Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, ed. Slyvere Lotringer, trans. Bernard Schutze and Caroline Schutze (New York: Semiotext(e), 1987), 18. Quoted in N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 1. For Hassan’s reading of postmodern literature, see The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987).

Notes to Pages 56–61 / 267 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

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Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 2– 3. Quoted in Wikipedia, s.v. “Transhumanism,” accessed February/March 2016, https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism. “About Alcor: Our History,” Alcor, accessed February/March 2016, http://alcor.org/ AboutAlcor/index.html. Wikipedia, s.v. “Zoltan Istvan,” accessed February/March 2016, https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Zoltan_Istvan. Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 22. Quoted in Bostrom, 4. See Bert Gordijn and Ruth Chadwick, Medical Enhancement and Posthumanity (New York: Springer, 2008). One of the most insightful critics of the developments discussed in this volume is Francis Fukuyama; see especially Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (New York: Picador, 2003). Didi Kirsten Tatlow, “Doctor’s Plan for Full-Body Transplants Raises Doubts Even in China,” New York Times, June 11, 2016. According to Tatlow, Ren is not the only one experimenting with this procedure: “Dr. Sergio Canavero of the Turin Advance Neuromodulation Group in Italy, is a prominent advocate, and scientists at the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Biophysics at the Russian Academy of Sciences are also researching aspects of the procedure” (ibid.). Bostrom, Superintelligence, 49. Bill Joy, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” Wired, April 2000, https://www.wired. com/2000/04/joy-2/. Joy, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.” In one of the more bizarre intersections I have ever come across, Ted Kaczynski’s analysis of the ills of industrial society anticipates many of Joy’s concerns. In his “Unabomber Manifesto,” Kaczynski writes, If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can’t make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. . . . As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide. (Quoted in Joy, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us”)

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Bostrom, Superintelligence, 99. Vinge popularized but did not create the term singularity. It was introduced by Stanislaw Ulam in his 1958 obituary for John von Neumann, where he describes “the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which give the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.” Quoted in Wikipedia, s.v. “Technological Singularity,” accessed February/March 2016, https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity. Vernor Vinge, “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the PostHuman Era,” in “Vision-21: Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering in the Era of

268 / Notes to Pages 61–77

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34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

Cyberspace,” NASA Conference Publication 10129, March 30– 31, 1993, 11, available at https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-5-JeCa2Z7hN1RfRDlqcXpVYzA/edit?pref=2 &pli=1. Vinge’s report was published in the ’60s counterculture bible Whole Earth Review. Though usually associated with hippies and the back-to-the-land movement, Stewart Brand, editor of the publication Whole Earth Catalog, was an early and enthusiastic supporter of information technology. He saw a liberating potential in distributed and decentralized networks. His vision was very close to the outlook of the kids creating the Information Revolution in their garages down the street from Haight-Ashbury. Vinge, “The Coming Technological Singularity,” 12. Vinge, 14, 19. Quoted in Raffi Khatchadourian, “The Doomsday Invention,” New Yorker, November 23, 2015, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/23/doomsday-invention -artificial-intelligence-nick-bostrom. Nick Bostrom, “Are We Living in a Computer Simulation?,” Philosophical Quarterly 53, no. 211 (April 2003), 253. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking, 2005), 375. Kurzweil, 389. Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever ([Emmaus, PA]: Rodale, 2004), 3. Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near, 371. Kurzweil, 323. Kurzweil, 29. Khatchadourian, “The Doomsday Invention.” CHAPTER FOUR

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Karl Marx, “Toward the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law,” Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, trans. Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1967), 258, 251. Erik Erikson, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962), 13. Quoted in Erikson, 202. Quoted in Luther: Lectures on Romans, ed. and trans. W. Pauck (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1961), xxxvii. Luther, “Commentary on Galatians,” 101. Thomas Aquinas, Introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas, ed. A. C. Pegis (New York: Random House, 1948), 193, 215. Recognizing the importance of Ockham and the tradition he started for Derrida’s work, Derrida’s son published a book on Ockham under the pseudonym of his mother’s maiden name: Pierre Alféri, Guillaume d’Ockham le singulier (Paris: Éditions de Minuit), 1989. Sartrean existentialism is, in effect, nominalism without God. Martin Luther, “Exposition of Psalm 147,” quoted in Gustaf Wingren, The Christian’s Calling: Luther on Vocation, trans. Carl Rasmussen (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1958), 138. Søren Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 92.

Notes to Pages 77–91 / 269 11 12

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Søren Kierkegaard, The Point of View for My Work as An Author: A Report to History, trans. Walter Lowrie (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1962), 135. E. G. Rupp and Benjamin Drewery, eds., Martin Luther: Documents of Modern History (London: Edward Arnold, 1970), page unknown, quoted in “Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants, Martin Luther,, May 1525,” available at http:// zimmer.csufresno.edu/~mariterel/against_the_robbing_and_murderin.htm. William James, Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (London: Longmans, Green, 1902), 245– 46. “Treatise on Christian Freedom,” Martin Luther: Selections, 57. Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, 33. This was in part the result of the fact that Denmark was something of an intellectual and cultural backwater and few people knew Danish. Kierkegaard’s works were not translated into German until the first decade of the twentieth century did not start appearing in English until the 1940s. Karl Barth, preface, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), 10, 110, 99, 98. John van Buren was the first to point out this connection in, in YH, chap. 15– 16. Throughout this section, I have drawn on John van Buren’s excellent book, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King. Van Buren is the first person to my knowledge to have demonstrated the importance of Paul and Luther for Heidegger’s early work. His study of Heidegger deserves much more attention than it has received. Much of his argument is based upon untranslated texts of essays written before the publication of Being and Time as well as unpublished writings, seminars, and lecture notes. Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Heidegger’s writings in section are drawn from van Buren’s book. Wikipedia, s.v. “Martin Heidegger,” accessed February/March 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Heidegger. S. J. McGrath, The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006), 89. McGrath’s study offers the best analysis of the importance of Duns Scotus for Heidegger’s philosophy. Unfortunately, this book, like van Buren’s work (see note 15, above), has not received the attention it deserves. Though context of my analysis is different, my understanding of the relation between Duns Scotus and Heidegger is indebted to McGrath. McGrath, 92. Bacon, like Ockham and Scotus, was a Franciscan and studied at Oxford. After Oxford, Bacon taught at the University of Paris. When Ockham’s writings were declared heretical and he was excommunicated, he sought the protection of Emperor Louis IV of Bavaria. Scotus also went to the University of Paris after Oxford, but political circumstances forced him to leave France for Cologne, where he remained until his death. McGrath, 104. Quoted in McGrath, 111. McGrath, 102. Theodore Kisiel and Thomas Sheehan, Becoming Heidegger: On the Trail of His Early Occasional Writings, 1910– 1927 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press), 191, 190. Kisiel and Sheehan, 190– 91. Martin Luther, “The Heidelberg Disputation,” Book of Concord, accessed February/ March 2016, http://bookofconcord.org/heidelberg.php.

270 / Notes to Pages 92–122 29 30 31

Wikipedia, s.v. “Kairos,” accessed February/March 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Kairos. Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 41. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 7. CHAPTER FIVE

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G. W. F. Hegel, “The Tubingen Essay of 1793,” translated in H. S. Harris, Hegel’s Development: Toward the Sunlight, 1770– 1801 (New York: Oxford University Press), 484. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 2:22, 21. Kant, 2:31. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, trans. E. B. Speirs and J. B. Sanderson, 3 vols. (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), 3:73. Hegel, 3:99– 100. Augustine, On the Trinity, in The Basic Writings of Saint Augustine, trans. Whitney Oates, 2 vols. (New York: Random House, 1948), 2:792 G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, ed. Peter C. Hodgson, trans. R. F. Brown, Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart with H. S. Harris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 3:219. Josiah Royce, Lectures on Modern Idealism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1919), 87. G. W. F. Hegel, The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, trans. H. S. Harris and Walter Cerf (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977), 90. Royce, Lectures on Modern Idealism, 21– 22. Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), 75, 77. See Wassily Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane (New York: Dover Publications, 1979). Kandinsky was the uncle of Alexandre Kojève; I will return to this relation in chapter 6. Hegel, Difference between Fichte and Schelling, 91. This is Walter Kaufmann’s translation. Hegel: Reinterpretation, Texts, and Commentary (New York: Doubleday, 1965). Verweilen can also be “stay,” “tarry,” or “linger.” I have chosen to translate it elsewhere as “abide” or “dwell” to suggest a connection to Heidegger’s notion of dwelling in his late work. I will consider this issue in chapters 8 and 9. Hegel quotes these lines from Schiller’s “Die Freundschaft.” It is also important to underscore Hegel’s use of “truth and certainty [Warheit und Gewissenheit]” in these closing lines. As I noted in chapter 2 and as we will see in more detail in chapters 7 and 9, Heidegger argues that Descartes’s reduction of truth to certainty reaches its logical conclusion in Hegel’s speculative philosophy. CHAPTER SIX

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The French reception of Hegel has been the subject of several informative works, which include: Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in TwentiethCentury France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987); Stefanos Geroulanos, An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought (Stanford, CA: Stanford

Notes to Pages 122–148 / 271

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University Press, 2010); Rory Jeffs, “The Future of the Future: Koyré, Kojève, and Malabou Speculate on Hegelian Time,” Parrhesia 15 (2012): 35– 53; Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927– 1961 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic, preface by Jacques Derrida, trans. Lisabeth During (New York: Routledge, 2009); James Nichols, Alexandre Kojève: Wisdom at the End of History (New York: Roman and Littlefield); and Michael Roth, Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). The three most significant studies— Butler, Kleinberg, and Roth— all have a connection with Wesleyan University. This is no accident because there has been a long tradition Wesleyan faculty members doing significant work on Continental philosophy in general and Hegel in particular. During the 1960s, Louis Mink and Victor Gourevitch joined Stephen Crites in introducing undergraduate students to the rigors of serious philosophical thought. Michael Roth is currently the president of Wesleyan, Ethan Kleinberg is professor of History and Letters at Wesleyan, and Judith Butler did much of the work for her study at Wesleyan’s Center for the Humanities. In my account of the French scene surrounding Koyré, Kojève, and Hyppolite, I have been especially guided by the fine work of Roth and Kleinberg. Geroulanos, An Atheism That Is Not Humanist, 81. Geroulanos presents the list of philosophers and theologians that Koyré studied in this excellent study. Kleinberg, Generation Existential, 60– 65. Quoted in Roth, Knowing and History, 97. Kleinberg, Generation Existential, 66. The quotation is from Bataille’s On Nietzsche. This essay first appeared in a journal Koyré edited: Études d’histoire de la pensée philosophique (Paris: Librarie Armand Colin), 1961, 135– 72. It has been translated and recently published by Doha Tazi Hemida. I would like to express my appreciation for her important contribution— I could not have written this pivotal chapter without it. All the quotations from this essay in this section are from her translation. “Translation and Introduction: Alexandre Koyré’s ‘Hegel at Jeng,’” Continental Philosophy Review, April, 7, 2018. I will consider this issue in chapter 8. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 56, 14– 15. Marit Werenskiold, “Kandinsky’s Moscow,” Art in America 77 (March 1989): 98. Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, eds., The Blaue Reiter Almanac, new documentary edition, ed. Klaus Lankheit (New York: Viking, 1974), 250. Geroulanos, An Atheism That Is Not Humanist, 131. Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire, 71. As I have noted, Lacan heard Kojève’s lectures. This interpretation of desire is the genesis of his notion of desire as it is first formulated in his essay “The Mirror Stage,” Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 1– 7. Alexandre Kojève, L’athéisme (Paris: Gallimard), 126. Quoted in Roger Devlin, Alexandre Kojève and the Outcome of Modern Thought (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2004), 136. Matthew Price, “The Spy Who Loved Hegel,” Lingua Franca, March 2000, 54. Price, “The Spy Who Loved Hegel,” 54. First published in Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger (1954), 144, 457– 60. Reprinted as an appendix to LE.

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Jean Hyppolite, “L’existence dans la phénoménologie de Hegel,” La société des études germaniques, February 1946; my translation. Quoted in Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 12. The French title of this work is Le même et l’autre (1979). Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 79– 80. The French edition of Écrits was published in 1966, the same year as the Johns Hopkins conference, and one year before the publication of Derrida’s three major works, Of Grammatology, Speech and Phenomena, and Writing and Difference. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 7 – 8 . Ferdinand de Saussure, “Course in General Linguistics,” in Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 166– 67. Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, 8. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1967), 31. Quoted in Lévi-Strauss, 31. Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, 11. Lévi-Strauss, 12. For a suggestive discussion of Hegel’s notion of plasticity, see Malabou, The Future of Hegel. CHAPTER SEVEN

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Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), 181. See Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), chapter 5, “Divine Milieu: A Middle Way.” Dieter Henrich, Between Kant and Hegel, 223, 287. Martin Heidegger, Hegel’s Concept of Experience, trans. Kenley Royce Dove (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 48– 49. Henrich, Between Kant and Hegel, 211, 250. Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 1. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 264. Mark C. Taylor, Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 264– 65. In his more recent translation, Reidar Thomte titles the book The Concept of Anxiety. The Danish title is Begrebet Angest. Angest (German, Angst) can be translated as either “anxiety” or “dread.” Walter Lower uses “dread,” which is stronger and better captures the point of Kierkegaard’s analysis. There is also disagreement over how to translate Øjeblikket. Thomte translates this word “moment,” but Lowrie’s rendering “instant” is more accurate. Øjeblikket, like the German Augenblik, suggests the blink or twinkling of the eye. In general, Lowrie’s translation is preferable to Thomte’s. Finally, I should note that The Concept of Dread was the subject of my first paper on Kierkegaard in 1967: Kierkegaard’s notion of sin in The Concept of Dread. At that time, I

Notes to Pages 180–208 / 273

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knew the pivotal footnote was important but did not really understand Kierkegaard’s argument. I will consider how this understanding of temporality leads to Kierkegaard’s account of repetition, which informs his interpretation of Christian notions of repentance and forgiveness. See Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper, 1971), 163– 82. I will consider aletheia in more detail in the next section. Maurice Blanchot, The Instant of My Death, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 7. Blanchot, The Instant of My Death, 9. See also Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond. Maurice Blanchot, The Instant of My Death, 11. Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000, 73, 90– 92. These fragments have been translated into English in Martin Heidegger: Hegel, trans. Joseph Arel and Niels Feuerhahn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). I have drawn the details of Heidegger’s teaching during this important time from the introduction to this book. Similar connotations can be seen in the English word decision, which derives from the Latin decision, meaning “cutting down.” Martin Heidegger, Hegel, trans. Joseph Arel and Niels Feuerhahn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 37. Heidegger, 34. Heidegger, 36– 37. Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 183. The best study of the relationship between Heidegger and Eckhart is John Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986). I have drawn the details of Heidegger’s engagement with Schleiermacher from van Buren’s work: The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), styled as YH in citations. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Speeches on Religion to Its Cultured Despisers, trans. John Oman (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958), 42, 41, 43. Slavoj Žižek has developed a very interesting study in which he reads these works of Schelling through Lacan, and Lacan through Schelling. See The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). I will discuss Heidegger’s use of Eckhart’s notion of Gelassenheit in chapter 9. F. W. J. Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, ed. and trans. Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 31. Schleiermacher, Speeches on Religion, 43. Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: El, or The Last Book, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press / University Press of New England, 1991) 2:341, 346. Schelling, Philosophy of Art, 85. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 255. Cassell’s Latin Dictionary, 5th ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 597. Wallace Stevens, “The Snow Man,” The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1981), 10.

274 / Notes to Pages 209–227 CHAPTER EIGHT

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Quoted in Martin Nicolaus, foreword to Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Nicolaus (New York: Penguin Books, 1973), 26. Marx, Grundrisse, 271. Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 50; Marx, Grundrisse, 221, 146. Karl Marx, Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, trans. Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1967), 266; Marx, Grundrisse, 225. Writings of the Young Marx, 267. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, ed. Friedrich Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 1:86. Marx, 1:95. Marx, Grundrisse, 226. Marx, Capital, 1:104– 5. Marx, 1: 111. Marx, Grundrisse, 255. Marx, 250. Marx, 260– 61. Marx, 258. Marx, 259– 60. Marx, 516. Derrida, Positions, 40– 41. Georges Bataille, L’expérience intérieure (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 56; Bataille, “Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice,” Deucalion 5 (1955), 30n; my translations. See also Alexandre Kojève, L’athéisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1998). Bataille, L’expérience intérieure, 129, 130, 129, 36. Georges Bataille, Death and Sensuality: A Study in Eroticism and Taboo (New York: Arno Press, 1977), 168. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927– 1939, ed. A. Stoekl, trans. A. Stoekl, C. R. Lovitt, and D. M. Leslie Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 220. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Pit and the Pendulum,” in Poe: Poetry and Tales (New York: Library of America/Literary Classics of the United States, 1984), 491. It is interesting to note that in the last year of his life, Poe was obsessed with Schelling and used his philosophy of art to structure his last work, the prose poem entitled Eureka. For Poe, the Indifferenz Punkt is the sea or South Pole, where all differences collapse in an identity that is completely black or totally white. Pure darkness and pure light are indifferent. Jacques Derrida, Positions, 77. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 26. For the translation of this crucial text, see chapter 5. Derrida, Positions, 77. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Hegel’s Existentialism,” in Sense and Non-sense, Sense and Non-sense, trans. Hubert Dreyfus and Patricia Dreyfus (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 63. See Emmanuel Levinas, “The Trace of the Other,” in Deconstruction in Context: Litera-

Notes to Pages 228–259 / 275

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ture and Philosophy, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 345– 59. Where Poe, who had inspired “The Pit and the Pyramid,” died in a non-ecstatic drunken stupor. Alcmaeon quoted in Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction with a New Epilogue (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 164; Kermode, 5. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, 2 vols. (University of Chicago Press, 2011), 2:1, 258, 273, 285, 290. Jacques Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives),” Diacritics 14, no. 2 (Summer 1984): 20. Filippo Marinetti, “Futurist Manifesto,” in Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1967), 43. Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now,” 20. Derrida, 28. Comment penser l’argent, ed. Roger-Pol Droit (Paris: Le Monde Editions, 1992), 386– 401, 90– 102. Agacinski’s book Aparté: Conceptions et morts de Sören Kierkegaard is one of the best books on Kierkegaard’s work. I arranged to have it translated and published in another series I edited, Kierkegaard and Postmodernism. Aparté: Conceptions and Deaths of Søren Kierkegaard (Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida, 1988). Jacques Derrida, “Comment ne pas trembler?,” Annali della Fondazione europea del disengno, 2000, 19– 104. All the following quotations from the essay are my own translation.

CHAPTER NINE

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6 7

8 9

Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 29– 30. Ghosh, 65. Ghosh, 70. Ghosh, 62– 63. In their translation of Besinnung, Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary render this term as “mindfulness.” While not completely incorrect, this translation is misleading because of its associations with New Age stereotypes. Heidegger’s interpretation of meditative thinking involves nothing like a feel-good spirituality in which one is all and all are one. Martin Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, trans. Bret Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 68. Reiner Schürmann, commentary in Wandering Joy: Meister Eckhart’s Mystical Philosophy, by Meister Eckhart, trans. Schürmann (Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Books, 2001), 206– 7. For a more detailed reading of Eckhart, see Schürmann’s study Meister Eckhart: Mystic and Philosopher (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978). He has also written what is, in my judgment, the best book on Heidegger’s philosophy: Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, 64. This is the German text: “Diese Besinnung ist keine Ruckwendung auf das hierbei still-

276 / Note to Page 260

10

gelgte und wie ein Vorhandenes zurechtgelegte Denken al sein Erkenntnismittel, sondern der entscheidende Vorsprung in dem langen Anlauf zum Einspringen in den Ur-sprung, in den abgrundigen lichtenden “Sprung” (Riss), der als seyn inzwischen den Seinden west, damit dies al sein soche verwahrt und vergessen werde, bald der Verborgenheit des Seyns und sienen Entscheidungen sich fuge, bald ihr sich entziehe, bald in der Entscheidungslosigkeit versinke.” Martin Heidegger, Besinnung, Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1997), 66:53. See Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans. Philip Watson (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953).

INDEX

Note: References to figures and tables are denoted by an “f” or “t” in italics following the page number. Abernathy, Ralph, 20 abiding, 207–46; and debt, 207–21; of grace, 15, 88, 184, 241, 246. See also grace advertising, 44–47. See also capitalism; images; media Alcmaeon of Croton, 229 Alcor Life Extension Foundation, 57 alienation, 46; negation of, 47; and reality, 48–49; in the world, 83. See also negation altarity, 244, 263n9; forms of, 76; radical, 4, 92, 160, 243; and the self, 182. See also self Altizer, Thomas J. J., 84–85; The Gospel of Christian Atheism of, 84; The SelfEmbodiment of God of, 84; Total Presence: The Language of Jesus and the Language of Today of, 84 Aquinas, Thomas, 71–72, 79, 87 Aristotle, 4, 9, 71, 106, 210 Aron, Raymond, 147 art: as the expression of divine creativity, 198–99; and the future, 16; images of, 191; in-difference of, 192–200; opening of, 201–6; and philosophy, 96, 191; reflections on, 183; and religion, 96; timelapsed, 43; works of, 16, 101. See also beauty; images; photography; truth artificial intelligence, 55–60. See also information technology; superintelligence

Athanasius, 34 Augustine, Saint, 4, 9, 115; on memory, 3–4; on time, 3–4 Augustine, Saint, works of: The City of God, 4, 26; The Confessions, 3–4; On the Trinity, 36, 103 autonomy, 23, 38; and desire, 140; and freedom, 74–75, 78, 99, 189, 235; and heteronomy, 255; the quest for, 39; as self-legislation, 99. See also freedom; self Badiou, Alain, 150 Bakunin, Mikhail, 34 Barthes, Roland, 26 Barth, Karl, 83–84, 92, 121; The Epistle to the Romans of, 83, 93; on Luther, 84 Bataille, Georges, 212–17; “La différance” of, 212; “Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice” of, 214; on Nietzsche, 216 Baudrillard, Jean, 48–51, 55; “The Precession of Simulacra” of, 48; Symbolic Exchange and Death of, 49 beauty, 99–101, 199. See also art; truth beginning, 1–2, 256–57. See also ending being, 178–91, 256; as the abyss of love, 260; as decision, 188–89; as gift, 191, 233, 257; of nonbeing, 233; as temporality, 190; as time, 178–91, 256; of time, 188; as Will, 196. See also difference; metaphysics; time Beneviste, Émile, 151

278 / Index Beniger, James, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society of, 43 Benjamin, Walter, 170: “Theses on the Philosophy of History” of, 169 Bergson, Henri, 122, 124 Bezos, Jeff, 64 biotechnology, 63. See also technology Blanchot, Maurice, 158, 214, 224; Death Sentence of, 218; “The Instant of My Death” of, 182, 232; The Step Not Beyond of, 169 Blavatsky, Helena, 123, 135, 190 Bloom, Harold, 18–19; The Closing of the American Mind of, 25, 134 body, 11, 56; escape from the, 61; mind and, 59, 63; the pattern of the, 63 Bostrom, Nick, 55–62; Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies of, 56 Branson, Richard, 64 Brunschvicg, Léon, 122, 124 Bultmann, Rudolf, 84–85, 88, 92, 121 Burckhardt, Jacob, 34 Butler, Judith, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France of, 140 Canguilhem, Georges, 150 capitalism, 27–28, 222; Calvinism and, 67; consumer, 44–45, 50, 52; and exchange, 209–12; financial, 50, 52; forms of, 40; global extension of, 42; industrial, 44–46; libertarian ideology of, 61; and literacy, 75; new form of, 49; subversion of, 46. See also advertising; consumerism; Industrial Revolution; tokens of exchange Carlson, Thomas, 23 Chaplin, Charlie, Modern Times of, 43 Christianity: death of God in, 34; early, 174, 265n8; Hegel’s interpretation of, 77, 95–98; Hellenization of, 255; original, 78, 176; primal, 192; as a religion of love, 98–100; and secularism, 77–78. See also God; Judaism; Protestantism; religion; Roman Catholicism; theology; trinity climate change, 252–53. See also fossil fuels Coffin, William, 20 Cold War, 232 concept: conception of the world of, 36;

philosophical, 191; time and, 141f. See also philosophy; representations; thought consciousness, 56, 60, 193; experiences of, 157; observing/observed, 116–18, 117f; of posthumans, 64; unhappy, 32, 80, 149, 170; as a unified whole, 123; of the world, 63. See also posthumanism; selfconsciousness; unconscious constructivism, 140, 255. See also social constructivism consumerism, 55. See also capitalism; society contretemps, 8–18, 132. See also time Crary, Jonathan, 44 Crites, Stephen, 19–20, 23, 114, 264n39, 270n1 culture: collapse of, 25; and revolution, 66. See also media; society cybernetics, 154, 158–59. See also information technology; internet; technology death, 2, 6, 147f, 186, 206; absolute, 212, 232; avoidance of, 39; Derrida on, 22, 183, 214, 228–30, 232; gift of, 18, 259; of humanity, 253; and immortality, 54– 55, 57, 62–63; the instant of, 182–83, 186; life and, 11, 170, 257, 259; and selfhood, 143; shadow of, 228–33. See also ending; immortality; self Debord, Guy, 35, 46, 150; Society of the Spectacle of, 45–47 deconstruction: criticism of, 26; in history, 134–35; and structuralism, 22–23. See also Derrida, Jacques; literary criticism; philosophy; structuralism Deleuze, Gilles, 148, 150 DeLillo, Don, Zero K of, 64 democracy: and information technology, 27–28; liberal, 26–27; retreat of, 28 Derrida, Jacques, 4, 6–7, 18, 23–26, 66, 70, 134, 207, 221–33, 240–42; on aesthetics, 201; and the chiasmus, 12–14; on death, 22, 183, 214, 220, 228–30, 232; deconstruction of, 22–23, 85, 91, 126, 150, 186, 225–28; on différance, 223–28; on dissemination, 12–13; on Hegel, 96; on Hegel’s semiology, 210; on Heidegger’s notion of Abbau, 85; on Kierkegaard, 96, 240–41; on Kojève, 134–35; metaphysics of presence of,

Index / 279 131, 131f; and Ockham, 268n7; on play, 228, 258; and structuralism, 22, 228; on time, 170 Derrida, Jacques, works of: The Gift of Death, 233, 239–40, 244–45; Given Time, 241–43; Glas, 218; “Hors livre: Prefaces,” 13; Of Grammatology, 22, 223; “The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel’s Semiology,” 16, 109, 218, 221; Speech and Phenomena, 22; Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, 93–94; “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” 22, 225; Writing and Difference, 22, 150, 199–200, 212, 214 Descartes, René, 14, 32, 35, 37, 142; dualism of, 55; rationalism of, 38; reduction of truth to certainty of, 159, 254, 272n16; turn to the subject of, 64, 69, 74, 239 desire, 139–40, 142, 146, 147f. See also autonomy; freedom difference, 182; absolute, 180, 244, 246; irreducible, 223; ontological, 188; seminal, 14; sublation of, 14, 226. See also being; metaphysics Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 37 dread, 176–79, 272n9. See also trembling Duchamp, Marcel, 43 dystopia, 53–54, 62, 251. See also utopia Ebeling, Gerhard, 92 Eliot, T. S., 4–5 ending, 1–2, 19, 247–61. See also beginning; death; history; Post Age Engels, Friedrich, 34 Erfurt, Thomas of, 85–86 Erikson, Erik, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History of, 68 eschatology, 9; as the end of history, 4–5, 9–10, 16, 26, 28, 53–55; and history, 27; realized, 132, 170; religious, 144. See also history; immortality; posthumanism; religion evolution, 60, 62 exchange. See tokens of exchange existentialism, 21, 84, 125, 166, 268n8 extropianism, 57. See also transhumanism faith: culmination of, 99; gift of, 246; and knowledge, 84. See also grace; knowledge; religion

Feuerbach, Ludwig, 18, 35, 46; The Essence of Christianity of, 46 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 6, 161, 164–66 forgiveness, 15, 70. See also grace; religion fossil fuels, 44. See also climate change Foucault, Michel, 26, 38, 149–50. See also literary criticism; philosophy Frankenstein scenario, 59 freedom, 38; absolute, 254; as autonomy, 78, 99, 152, 189; awareness of, 176; and “de-cision,” 197–98; desire as an instrument of, 140; and dread, 177; feeling of, 196; finite, 197; of God, 75; Hegel on, 74–75, 78, 235; and heteronomy, 152; Kierkegaard on, 78, 175–76, 235–36; Luther on, 74–81, 236; political, 79–81; primal, 189; the self as, 235; as spontaneity, 78; system of, 195; universal, 76. See also autonomy; desire French Revolution, 67, 79, 254. See also history Freud, Sigmund, 3, 13, 16, 152, 177; psychoanalysis of, 68, 242; on repression, 216; Totem and Taboo of, 19; on the unconscious, 227. See also unconscious Fuchs, Ernst, 92 Fukuyama, Francis, 25–29, 147; “The End of History?” of, 25; The End of History and the Last Man of, 25, 134, 159, 231 future, 3, 15, 18, 33, 116, 130, 172–74; gift of the, 254; openness of the, 132; and the past, 24, 35, 133; priority of the, 133; technological, 61; transformative capacity of the, 15, 24; waiting for the, 258. See also past; time game theory, 150–51 Gates, Bill, 59, 62 genealogy, 248f Geroulanos, Stefanos, 122, 137, 270n2 Ghosh, Amitav, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable of, 252–54 Gibson, William, 55 God: as creator, 35, 105; and death, 233; the death of, 14, 34–35, 38, 87, 103, 136; deist concept of, 41, 100; dependence on, 197; Derrida on, 244; as the disruptive other, 254; the eternal life of, 174; and evolution, 62; immanence of, 32, 99; infinite separation of humanity

280 / Index God (continued) and, 84; of Kierkegaard, 78, 238; kingdom of, 6, 9, 78, 82, 93, 95, 121, 145; obedience to, 240–41; as Other, 4, 137, 181, 233, 243–44, 255; radical freedom of, 81; revelation of, 75; and self, 99; and the technological singularity, 62; transcendence of, 83, 97–100, 103–4; Trinitarian, 36; visions of, 46; the work of, 76. See also God-Man; religion; superintelligence; theology; trinity God-Man, 137f. See also God Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 118 Good, I. J., 58 grace, 172, 260; abiding, 15, 88, 184, 241, 246, 257–60; aneconomy of, 257; doctrine of, 81–82; and law, 18, 81–82, 136; the moment of, 70; and salvation, 75. See also abiding; forgiveness; love; religion Grossman, Terry, 63 Harrison, John, 42 Hart, Ray L., God Being Nothing: Toward a Theogony of, 23 Hassan, Ihab, 20, 55–56 Hawking, Stephen, 59 Hayles, N. Katherine, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics of, 55–56 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 4, 6–7, 12–14, 18, 21–27, 34, 67, 211–12; on beauty, 99–100; on consciousness, 116; on the death of God, 34, 74, 103; dialectic of, 36, 83, 98–99, 110, 113–15, 143, 155, 159, 226, 235, 255; dialectic of self-consciousness of, 142; on double negation, 126–28, 131, 141, 179–80, 185; eschatology of, 170; on freedom, 39, 74–76, 235, 254; French interpretation of, 121–57, 213, 226, 270n1; gnostic pantheism of, 77, 82; idealism of, 72, 105, 155, 164; on the imagination, 219–20; on the incarnation, 102, 136–37, 213; on Kantian morality, 99; logic of, 151–52, 154–57, 179, 210, 255; logocentrism of, 103, 149, 152, 154; on Luther, 73–77; phenomenology of, 210; philosophical system of, 6, 10, 34, 95, 106–7, 110–16, 130, 151, 193; principle of homogeneity of, 215; on Protestant-

ism, 32, 35, 76; on religion, 95–99, 137; on space, 107–8; speculative philosophy of, 31, 35, 46–47, 64, 76, 92, 92f, 136, 214, 240, 272n16; on spirit, 233–35, 255; structuralism of, 72; on the subject, 36; system of fractals of, 107f; on time, 108–9, 126, 131–34, 138–39, 184–85; trajectory of, 77f; on the Trinity, 102– 3; on the will to mastery, 254. See also Hegelianism Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, works of: The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, 111, 125; Early Theological Writings, 125–26; Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, 5, 125, 133, 185, 218; Faith and Knowledge, 34; Jena Logic, 126–30, 185, 226; Phenomenology of Spirit, 5–20, 34, 46, 77, 111–26, 135, 142–60, 194, 212–16; Philosophy of History, 73–76, 102; Philosophy of Nature, 107–9, 111, 126; Philosophy of Right, 5–6, 263n14; “The Positivity of the Christian Religion,” 96; Science of Logic, 8, 101–10, 125–28, 131, 141, 151, 157, 160, 184, 212, 219, 235; “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate,” 96 Hegelianism: American, 104; Danish, 146; in France, 122–34; Kierkegaard on, 77; the spread of, 34. See also Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich; philosophy Heidegger, Martin, 1, 4, 14, 18, 23–39, 81, 95, 122, 139–40, 180–82, 259, 275n7; on aesthetics, 201–4; and Bultmann, 85; on cybernetics, 40, 51, 158–59, 252; on death, 143, 184, 230, 232, 237; on the death of God, 35; and Duns Scotus, 269n21; on the fourth dimension, 190; on imagination, 163– 64; on Kierkegaard, 88; on language, 152; on letting-be, 257; on Luther, 83–94; on the modern will mastery, 63–64, 252; and mysticism, 122, 192, 197–98, 273n23; on Schelling, 18, 34, 196; on Schleiermacher, 192; on selfconsciousness, 165; on self-reflexivity, 140, 164; on technology, 159; on time, 167–68, 178, 184, 190–91, 191f; on the will-not-to-will, 255–56 Heidegger, Martin, works of: “The Age of the World Picture,” 36; Being and Time, 4, 126, 152, 160, 170, 178, 184–89,

Index / 281 226, 232; Bestimmung, 251; Country Path Conversations, 256; “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” 51, 158, 178; Identity and Difference, 221; Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 160–62, 166–67, 219; Mindfulness, 251; “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 188, 201; “The Problem of Sin in Luther,” 88–89; Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, 34, 194–98 Hellenism, 171–73 Henrich, Dieter, 38, 164, 166 Hernu, Charles, 148 history, 4, 28; completeness of, 15; cultural, 23; the divine incarnate in, 76; dualistic understanding of, 82; economic, 44–45; the end of, 4–10, 16, 26, 28, 53–55, 65, 78, 116, 134–48, 170, 182, 255; intellectual, 122; logic and, 170; Marxist view of, 27, 67; personal, 23; philosophy of, 134, 255; profane, 83–84; progress in, 27, 84, 121, 124, 255; sacred, 83–84; social, 23; teleological vision of, 135; and time, 12, 15, 172–73; universal, 26–27; and the will to power, 144. See also beginning; ending; eschatology; time Hjelmslev, Louis, 151 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 33, 39 humanism, 56, 148. See also humanity; posthumanism; transhumanism humanity: death of, 253; temporality of, 65. See also humanism; posthumanism Hume, David, 104–5 Husserl, Edmund, 122, 150, 159 Huxley, Julian, 57 hyperreality, 49. See also images; postmodernism; signs; simulacrum Hyppolite, Jean, 21, 32, 72, 122, 150–57, 218–19, 255 Hyppolite, Jean, works of: Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 124, 134, 149; L’existence dans la phénoménologie de Hegel,” 149; Logic and Existence, 124, 134, 148–49, 154– 56, 210, 218 idealism, 104, 123, 140, 155, 164, 184, 194–96. See also philosophy ideology, 26, 61. See also capitalism; Marxism; Situationism images, 46–47; autonomous, 47; and capi-

tal, 48; coding of, 55; deception of, 46– 47; and signs, 49–50, 55; the value of, 50. See also advertising; art; hyperreality; media; signs; spectacle imagination, 164–66, 164f, 170, 178; productive, 219–20; reproductive, 219–20. See also concept; images; thought immortality, 54–55, 61–65; the dream of, 254; as a luxury, 64, 251; obsession with, 63; practical account of, 62; technological, 65. See also death; God; posthumanism; religion; self Industrial Revolution, 40–44; Information Revolution and, 42–43; three stages of the, 42. See also capitalism; history; science; technology infinity, 16, 109. See also space; time Information Revolution, 42–43, 268n30. See also cybernetics; information technology information technology, 27–28, 50–52, 57, 154–55, 268n30. See also cybernetics; Information Revolution; internet; media; technology internet, 59, 155, 232. See also information technology; media; superintelligence interpretation: and fact, 36–37; and perspectives, 36–37 Jabès, Edmond, 199–200; Book of Questions: El, or The Last Book of, 199 James, William, 80–81 Jaspers, Karl, 123 Joachim of Fiore, 5 Joy, Bill, 59; “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us” of, 60, 267n27 Joyce, James, Finnegans Wake of, 9 Judaism: Hegel’s interpretation of, 96–98, 102; Marx’s interpretation of, 209; as a religion of law, 98–99. See also Christianity; religion Kandinsky, Wassily, 108, 123, 135, 145, 190, 263n2, 272n12; Der Blaue Reiter (preface) of, 135–36 Kant, Immanuel, 26–27, 67, 83; aesthetic philosophy of, 100–1, 201–2, 209, 211; on art in the soul, 192; deduction of the categories of, 104, 154; epistemology of, 104–6; on the Epistle to the Romans, 137; on freedom, 38, 99, 104; on the

282 / Index Kant, Immanuel (continued) French Revolution, 67; idealism of, 105; on the imagination, 163, 178, 192, 219, 255; interpretation of space and time of, 104–6, 167; practical philosophy of, 100, 104; on teleology, 101; theoretical philosophy of, 100, 104; on time, 137– 38, 178 Kant, Immanuel, works of: Critique of Judgment, 100, 192, 195, 201–2; Critique of Practical Reason, 100; Critique of Pure Reason, 100–1, 104, 106, 138, 160–61; “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” 26, 39; “What Is Enlightenment?,” 38 Keats, John, 99–100 Kennedy, President John F., 51–52 Kermode, Frank, 229 Keynes, John Maynard, 27, 45 Khatchadourian, Raffi, “The Doomsday Invention” of, 64 Kierkegaard, Søren, 3–4, 18–36, 44, 121, 170–77, 213, 222, 233–34, 269n16; on the death of God, 35; decision according to, 237f; dialectic of, 83; existentialism of, 68, 72; on freedom, 78, 175–76, 235–36; journey to selfhood of, 170; on Luther, 77–83; poststructuralism of, 72; and radical uncertainty, 239, 253; on the revolutionary age, 66–67; and Schelling, 34; on the self, 233–35, 238, 255; on subjectivity, 233; on time, 184–85, 187, 272n10; trajectory of, 78f Kierkegaard, Søren, works of: The Concept of Dread, 170–73, 177–78, 226, 272n9; Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 7, 13, 80, 170, 182; Either/Or, 2, 177, 240; Fear and Trembling, 96, 233, 239–41, 243–46; Philosophical Fragments, 13, 170, 174– 76, 182; The Present Age, 66; The Sickness unto Death, 78, 113, 218, 233; Training in Christianity, 31; Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age, 28–29; Works of Love, 261 King, Martin Luther, 19–20 knowledge: absolute, 59, 64, 111, 116, 119, 157, 166, 195, 215, 223, 240; conditions of the possibility of, 105–6; and faith, 84; historical, 174; and interpretation, 37; Kantian view of, 105; rea-

sonable, 78; and wisdom, 260. See also philosophy; religion Kojève, Alexandre, 21, 26, 35, 121–24, 134–40, 145–48, 158, 271n13; on the death of God, 136; on Heidegger, 152; on Kandinsky, 136; lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit of, 9, 25, 124– 25, 135, 138–40, 213; philosophers influenced by, 26, 122–40; and Soloviev’s theology, 123, 136; as a spy for the Soviet Union, 148; theology of, 136–38 Kojève, Alexandre, works of: L’athéisme, 145; Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, 25, 134; “A Note on Eternity, Time, and the Concept,” 146f Koyré, Alexandre, 122–34, 270n2; on Hegel’s interpretation of time, 125–34, 139, 185; on the philosophy of Hegel, 125–32, 134, 226; on the structure of double negation, 131–32 Kulturprotestantismus, 83–84. See also Hegelianism Kurtzweil, Ray: on immortality, 62–63; religious beliefs of, 62–63 Kurtzweil, Ray, works of: Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever, 63; The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, 62 Lacan, Jacques, 25, 124, 151–52, 177, 271n13, 271n21 language, 151–54; challenging, 14–15; and cybernetics, 51; Hegelian, 265n6; and money, 49; Ockham on, 73; play with, 226; and speech, 153; and writing, 225. See also media; signs; thought law, 17–18; of power and mastery, 18; of singularity, 18; of weakness and darkness, 18 Lenin, V. I., 208. See also Marx, Karl Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 153–54; The Raw and the Cooked of, 153 liberal democracy. See democracy literary criticism, 23, 26, 150. See also deconstruction; philosophy love, 103, 241, 260. See also grace; religion Luther, Martin, 4, 6, 254, 260; on the death of God, 93; on grace, 81–82, 98–99; Hegel on, 73–77; Heidegger on, 34, 83–94; Kierkegaard on, 77–83; and mysticism, 70; on the peasant rebellion, 79–81;

Index / 283 privatization of the relation of self and God of, 74–75, 79; the reformation of, 67; the secularization of the thought of, 78; theology of, 31, 67–83, 136. See also freedom; Protestantism; Reformation; secularism; theology Luther, Martin, works of: “Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants,” 79–80; Disputation against Scholastic Theology, 89–90; “Freedom of a Christian,” 81; Heidelberg Disputation, 89, 91 Macksey, Richard, 150 Maguire, John, 19–20 Marinetti, Filippo, “Futurist Manifesto” of, 231 Marx, Karl, 18, 26–27, 67, 74, 122, 148, 254; borrowing from Hegel of, 46, 208–9; on capitalism, 46, 143, 211–12; on freedom, 39; on money, 209–11; theological language in, 210. See also Marxism Marx, Karl, works of: Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, 208– 9; “Toward the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law,” 67 Marxism, 46, 134, 222. See also Marx, Karl McGrath, S. J., 86–87 media, 28, 52, 154; criticism of the, 28–29; mass, 28–30, 46; new, 45; and society, 43–45; virtual, 255. See also advertising; images; information technology; internet; society; spectacle Meister Eckhart, 34, 70, 192, 198, 255, 257, 275n7 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 9, 227; “L’entrelacs–le chiasme” of, 10–11; “Hegel’s Existentialism” of, 10 metaphysics: critiques of, 87; Greek, 89, 91, 93; Platonic, 171; of presence, 160–61, 169, 186, 219; scholastic, 93; Scotist, 86; Western, 171. See also being; difference; idealism; nominalism; philosophy; realism; universals misreading: creative, 18–19; by Heidegger, 193. See also reading modernism, 9; and postmodernism, 41t; practices of, 9; project of, 254; and violence, 254. See also modernismpostmodernism; modernity

modernism-postmodernism, 41t; constructing, 40–65; ghosts haunting, 66–94; secularity of, 75. See also modernism; postmodernism modernity, 2, 9, 14, 30, 38, 44, 68; the closure of, 251; Hegel’s understanding of, 77f; Kant’s understanding of, 104; the project of, 251; and speed, 231; systems of, 195; two primary characteristics of, 194–95; will to mastery of, 253. See also modernism; postmodernity; secularism Monet, Claude, 43 Moravec, Hans, 55, 266n14 More, Max, The Principles of Extropy of, 57 Musk, Elon, 58–59, 64 Muybridge, Eadweard, 43 mysticism, 192–93 nanotechnology, 63. See also biotechnology; technology negation, 126–41, 146, 179; double, 126– 28, 131, 141, 179–80, 185–86, 213–15, 221, 259; logic of, 255; and nihilation, 180f, 187; in theology, 213. See also alienation; nihilation neoconservatism, 134 neoliberalism, 134 neo-orthodoxy, 83, 121. See also religion; theology Niebuhr, Reinhold, 20 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 14, 57, 215, 226; aphoristic fragments of, 48; dance of, 228–29; on the death of God, 34–35, 38, 162, 186, 216; on the eternal return, 216–17; on freedom, 39; The Gay Science of, 34–35; on perspectives, 36–37; Übermensch of, 62, 90; will to power of, 64 nihilation, 180f nihilism, 20, 23, 25 Nixon, Richard, 45 nominalism, 72–73, 86–87, 268n8. See also metaphysics Ockham, William of, 71–73, 79, 85–86, 105, 243, 268n7 Osnos, Evan, “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich” of, 54, 64 otherness: appropriation of, 14, 33, 38; of God, 74, 175–76, 243–45; and love, 82; negation of, 127; real, 33 Otto, Rudolf, Idea of the Holy of, 93, 241

284 / Index Ouspensky, P. D.: The Fourth Dimension: A Study of an Unfathomable Realm of, 190; Tertium Organum: A Key to the Enigmas of the World of, 190 Owen, Robert, 44 past, 3, 15, 18, 130, 168, 172–74; and the future, 35, 133; priority of the, 133; recasting of the, 116. See also future; time Paul, Saint, 4, 34, 81, 83, 93, 136–38, 171, 192, 241, 260, 265n8 Perle, Richard, 26 Petilos, Randolph, 23 phenomenology, 125, 150–51; and consciousness, 117; of Husserl, 86, 150; journey in, 118f. See also philosophy philosophy: the apocalyptic tone in, 134– 35; and art, 96, 191; concepts of, 16, 191; of culture, 23; dialectical system of, 5; the end of, 157–59, 186, 225; of existentialism, 84; European, 25; Greek, 171; history of, 101; and literary criticism, 150; as love of wisdom, 260; speculative, 14, 31, 33, 35, 44, 77–78, 88–90, 118–19, 197, 217, 259, 264n34; of subjectivity, 152; systematic, 6, 195; as thanatology, 229; and theology, 47, 243; truth in, 26. See also concept; deconstruction; existentialism; Hegelianism; idealism; ideology; literary criticism; Marxism; metaphysics; phenomenology; realism; reason; religion; theology; thought photography: innovative, 43; time-lapsed, 43. See also art; images Plato, 171–72, 220 Poe, Edgar Allan, 16, 114, 218, 274n23, 275n30 Post Age, 2–8, 24, 158, 251, 258. See also ending; postmodernism posthumanism, 55–62; epoch of, 251; life as pattern in, 63. See also biotechnology; immortality; superintelligence; transhumanism postmodernism, 2, 266n16; art and architecture in, 49; emergence of, 48; epoch of, 20, 251; modernism and, 41t; the time of, 2–3. See also modernism; Post Age; postmodernity postmodernity, 14, 38, 44, 68. See also modernity; postmodernism

poststructuralism, 21–22, 125, 134, 150, 153, 189. See also structuralism power: and exploitation, 251–52; positions of, 76; and weakness, 18. See also will to power presence, 3, 168, 172; deferring, 125–34; enjoyment of, 9; infinite deferral of, 132; metaphysics of, 90–91, 160, 186, 219; of the present, 4; total, 35. See also present; self-presence present, 3, 12, 15, 18, 168, 172; immediacy of the, 35; infinite deferral of the, 132; overturn of the, 116; past, 224. See also presence; time programming, 25–33 Protestantism, 6, 253–54; doctrines of, 136–38; fragmentation of, 79; Hegelian cultural, 32; liberal, 83; Lutheran, 35, 38, 75, 95; and the Reformation, 29, 41, 67, 75; voluntarism in, 197; writers of, 192. See also Christianity; grace; Reformation; religion; theology psychoanalysis, 24–25 pyramid, 16, 17f rationalism, 38, 70 reading: and chiasmic time, 18; retro-, 18, 24, 94, 131, 152, 222, 227. See also misreading; writing realism, 86–87. See also metaphysics; reality reality: the future as, 130; objective, 179, 186; subjective, 179, 186; virtualization of, 48, 55, 64 reason, 23, 26; Aquinas on, 87; constructive, 139–40; divine, 71–72; Hegel on, 104; instrumental, 37, 82, 139, 254; and intuition, 123; Kant on, 104; practical, 139; as a process of negation, 141; speculative, 215; and unreason, 121–25. See also philosophy; thought refiguring, 18–24 Reformation, 70–71; freedom and the, 74, 76; Hegel on the, 74–76; Protestantism in the, 29, 41; radical, 79; to Revolution, 66–73. See also Christianity; God; Luther, Martin; Protestantism; religion; theology relativism, 25, 105–6 religion: atheistic, 123; deconstruction for, 22–23; fundamentalism in, 28; Greek, Jew, Christian in, 96–98, 96t; Hegelian-

Index / 285 Marxist interpretation of, 46; of law, 99– 100; of love, 99–100; objective, 96–97; and philosophy, 95–96; positive, 97; of posthumanism, 62; revolution in, 83; subjective, 96–97; of the technological singularity, 61–62, 64; vocation in, 75–76, 95, 229. See also altarity; Christianity; faith; forgiveness; God; grace; immortality; love; philosophy; secularism; theology Religion and Postmodernism (series), 23–24 representations, 36, 48. See also concept; imagination; thought Ricoeur, Paul, 72 Rid, Thomas, Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History of, 51 Rist, Johannes, 34 Roman Catholicism, 80, 98–99. See also Christianity; religion Roth, Michael, 123 Royce, Josiah, 104–5; Lectures on Modern Idealism of, 104 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 73 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 124, 151, 153, 210, 220, 226; Course in General Linguistics of, 153 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 18, 34, 192; on freedom, 196; philosophy of art of, 34, 194, 198–200; philosophy of revelation of, 34; positive philosophy of, 194 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, works of: The Ages of the World, 194; On Human Freedom, 34; Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom, 194; “Philosophie der Mythologie und der Offenbarung,” 34; System of Transcendental Idealism, 34, 194 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 192–93, 196–99; Speeches on Religion to its Cultured Despisers of, 192, 198 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 57 Schurmann, Reiner, Wandering Joy: Meister Eckhart, Mystic and Philosopher of, 257 science, 14, 27, 36–37; of cybernetics, 51; and dystopian visions, 53; Hegel’s criticism of, 107; in the modern world, 39, 251–52; and utopian visions, 53. See also biotechnology; technology

Scotus, Duns, 85–87, 255, 269nn21–22 secularism: and Christianity, 77; modern, 78. See also modernity; religion self: and altarity, 182; definition of the, 233–34; as freedom, 235–36; God and, 62–63, 99; as a heteronomous being, 175; as negativity, 141; presence to itself of the, 76; theories of the, 166, 227; time and, 137; and world, 35, 97. See also altarity; consciousness; God; religion; self-consciousness; subject self-consciousness, 3–4, 64, 193; Fichte on, 164–65; of God, 103; Hegel on, 143, 215; Heidegger on, 165; of an individual human being, 95; interpretation of, 142; Protestantism and, 76; self-reflexivity of, 160, 189. See also consciousness; posthumanism; self self-presence, 3, 225. See also presence; self series: ending, 1–24; the question of the, 2. See also beginning; ending Serres, Michel, 261 Shattuck, Roger, 9 signs: Hegel’s theory of, 219–21; and images, 49–50, 55; immaterial/material, 210. See also hyperreality; images; language; media Silicon Valley, 54, 61, 63. See also information technology; internet; superintelligence simulacrum, 48–49. See also hyperreality simulation, 40–53, 62. See also information technology; technology singularity. See technological singularity Situationism, 45–47. See also social justice; society; spectacle; technology social constructivism, 140. See also constructivism social justice, 19–20, 54. See also society society: bourgeois, 44; development of, 27; industrial, 43; information, 43; leveling in, 29–30; media, 43–45. See also media; social justice; spectacle; technology Soloviev, Vladimir, 123, 136 space, 40, 256; and the body, 11; selfcontradiction of, 131; spacing of, 11; standardization of, 41. See also spacetime; time space-time: of the Being-in-Opposition, 162; double negation of, 131f; of the opening of art, 205. See also space; time

286 / Index spectacle, 40–53. See also images; media; society speculation, 40–53. See also philosophy; thought Steiner, Rudolf, 123 Storr, Gottlob Christian, 34, 194 structuralism, 21–23, 125, 134, 150–53, 189; binary structure of, 232; and deconstruction, 22–23, 228; Derrida’s critique of, 22, 228; linguistic, 151; logocentric, 87; two types of, 153. See also deconstruction; poststructuralism subject: decentering of the, 152, 189; modern, 35; postmodern, 35; self-reflexivity of the, 153. See also self superintelligence, 58–61; collective, 60; danger of, 59–60; the emergence of, 59. See also artificial intelligence; information technology; posthumanism Tauler, John, 70 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, The Principles of Scientific Management of, 43 Taylor, Mark C.: art experiments of, 24; business experiments of, 24 Taylor, Mark C., artworks of: neXus, 16f; The Pit and the Pyramid, 17f; Point of the Pit, 217f Taylor, Mark C., works of, 248–50: Abiding Grace: Time, Modernity, Death, 23; Deconstructing Theology, 22; Erring: A Postmodern A/theology, 22–23; Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard, 114, 170; Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship: A Study of Time and the Self, 114; Last Works: Lessons in Leaving, 23 technological singularity, 61–62, 64, 267n29. See also posthumanism; technology technology, 14, 28, 31, 35, 37; communication, 43, 154; cybernetic, 51, 154–55; destructive tendencies of, 90; emerging, 54; the future of, 58–61; and immortality, 54–55; in the modern world, 39, 139, 154–55, 251–52; print, 41, 44; self-reflexive, 51, 53–60; telephonic and televisual, 48; transportation, 42; virtual, 55–57. See also biotechnology; information technology; science; technological singularity teleology, 101, 175; inner, 195; secular, 253

Tertullian, 34 theology, 5–6; and anthropology, 35, 265n13; Christian, 171, 192; constructive, 22; of the cross, 89–91, 93, 136–37, 254; of culture, 23; as a debate between Hegel and Kierkegaard, 84; deconstruction of, 22; economic interpretation of, 209–10; of glory, 89–91, 93, 136; of grace, 150; Hellenization of, 192; of the law, 150; of Luther, 68–71, 74–80, 93; of Paul, 83; and philosophy, 47, 243; of presence, 171. See also Christianity; God; philosophy; religion; trinity Thomas, Alan, 23–24 thought, 3, 29; as an afterthought, 227; apocalyptic, 229; Hegel’s rehabilitation of, 223; meditative, 255–56; representational, 36, 255–56; and time, 173. See also concept; imagination; language; representations; speculation time, 2–10, 14–15, 40, 147f, 238, 246, 256–57; being as, 178–91, 256; chiasmic, 10, 14–16, 15f, 18, 70, 92, 169; circular, 8f, 15, 185; complex, 15, 15f; and concept, 141f; contradictions implicit in, 32; cyclical, 4, 8, 8f, 10, 14, 18, 52, 92, 99, 145, 167; the end of, 116; escaping, 60–63; and eternity, 5, 7–8, 83–84, 86, 102, 109, 119, 133–34, 170, 173–76, 238; experience of, 43; gift of, 18; Hegel on, 126; historical, 4; kairological, 92, 192; linear, 4, 8, 10, 15, 18, 92, 167, 189; messianic, 170; nihilation of, 186; real, 130; self-contradiction of, 131; serial, 40, 51–52, 167; sketch of, 191f; spacing of, 11; standardization of, 41– 42. See also contretemps; future; history; past; present; space tokens of exchange, 52, 53f, 209–12. See also capitalism transcendence: of God, 83, 97–100, 103; and immanence, 35, 74, 77, 83, 99; the incarnation as the negation of, 213; radical, 78. See also God; religion transhumanism, 57–58. See also extropianism; humanism; posthumanism; superintelligence trembling, 239–46. See also dread trinity: doctrine of the, 98, 102–3; God as, 36, 102; logos and, 95–104. See also Christianity; God; theology

Index / 287 Trubetzkoy, Nikolay, 153 truth: absolute, 113, 156; in art, 36; as beauty, 99–100; certain, 37; in Heidegger, 152; as historical, 106; interpretation of, 112; in philosophy, 36; in religion, 36; reverence for, 37; as the way, 95. See also art; philosophy; religion unconscious: cultural, 24, 37; and information technology, 28. See also consciousness; Freud, Sigmund universals, 86. See also metaphysics university, 19, 25–26 unpresentable, 221–28, 255 utopia, 27, 53, 62, 251. See also dystopia van Buren, John, 88, 90, 93–94, 193, 269n19 van Ruysbroeck, Jan, 70 Vinge, Vernor, 61, 267n29 Vinge, Vernor, works of: “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era,” 61; Marooned in Realtime of, 61; Peace and War of, 61

voluntarism, 70 von Humboldt, Alexander, 34 Wallace, David Foster, 31 Weber, Max, 67 Werenskiold, Marit, “Kandinsky’s Moscow” of, 135 Whitehead, Alfred North, 21 will to power, 14, 35, 37, 64, 70, 90, 136, 190, 203, 206, 252, 254–56. See also Nietzsche, Friedrich; power Wolfowitz, Paul, 26 world: human work and the, 139; negative relation to the, 98; self-consciousness of the, 63 World Transhumanist Association, 58. See also transhumanism writing: oedipal struggle in, 18; the preface of, 14; and time, 19, 259. See also reading Wyschogrod, Edith, Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy of, 23 Xiaoping, Ren, 58–59