Touching Difficulty 9781935790587, 9781934542095

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Touching Difficulty Sacred Form from Plato to Derrida

Daniel Price

The Davies Group Publishers Aurora, Colorado

Copyright © 2009 by Daniel Price. All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this book may be reproduced, stored in an information retrieval system, or transcribed, in any form or by any means — electronic, digital, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the express written consent of the publisher, and the holder of copyright. Submit all inquiries and requests to the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Price, Daniel M. Touching difficulty : sacred form from Plato to Derrida / Daniel M. Price. p. cm. ISBN-13: 978-1-934542-09-5 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-934542-09-1 (alk. paper) 1. Knowledge, Theory of. I. Title. BD161.P748 2009 110--dc22 2008053667

Front: Installation of three sculptures by Tony Smith from left to right: Wall, 1964/2000, painted steel, edition 1/3 New Piece, 1966, painted steel, edition 1/3 The Elevens are Up, 1963, painted steel The Menil Collection, Houston, Photographer: Hickey-Robertson Copyright: Estate of Tony Smith / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Printed in the United States of America Published 2009. The Davies Group, Publishers 1234567890

A Note on the Title

Your attitude, etymologically speaking, has to do with the way you stand, or occupy a space relative to others. It is sometimes even appropriate to think of your attitude as a type of gesture — a way of holding yourself that conveys sense to the world, either for others, in the most ordinary way of speaking, or more fundamentally, for yourself, as one of the basic ways in which you frame what you encounter in life, and think about its contours. In that sense, social science is right to believe that surveys and opinions can give us clues to how people interpret the world, but wrong when they imagine that a basic set of beliefs, or a core bundle of values, constitute the origin of the stated opinions. These beliefs, instead, are merely symptoms of a more basic attitude, which will turn out to be only one gesture among many for engaging the world. The modern approach to philosophy begins in the idea that our presence to the world, from the appearances of objects to the interpretations of words, is produced by structures of either language or consciousness and that philosophy consists in the search for the most universal or basic frame; in this, it takes up the ancient quest for the simplicity of being, and instead of locating that simplicity in the fact of a divine light of creation, finds it infinitely repeated in the function of being human, and of producing meaning at the site of our individuation. Our basic attitude is technological, one could say, when it is oriented by the production for its own sake, oriented by the perfection of the functioning of meaning, and the reduction of all gestures to the single attitude of either perception or conception. In modern times, one has come to speak of the most basic function in terms of the framework of appearances — our perspective on the whole expressed in either linguistic interpretations or natural determinations of individual positions within the whole. Heidegger’s criticisms of technology come down to contesting the idea that framing the world counts as the true ground of our being and the element (either as medium or smallest unit) of every becoming. In other words, if we are to contest the most basic presuppositions of technology, and regain the sense of our most basic gestures, the simplicity of the light, which we had always presumed ourselves to belong within, should be replaced by the darker difficulty of engaging with the world. This book is dedicated to searching for a sense to those gestures of engaging with the world that do not take our participation in the light for

granted, and eventually finds a clue in the artistic gesture of staging abandon, of insisting on a gesture of engaging with the world in the absence of every frame; an attitude arrayed against both conceptual complexity and abstract simplicity; a gesture, when embodied in particular works of art, of touching difficulty.

Contents

The Sun The silence of art: Bataille’s babbling sacrifice A map, of sorts

14 22

Part One: Life’s Grave Traces The clarity of method and its demands Truths of displacement Aristotle and the trace of phenomenology Encompassing flow or receding deformation ... a first tracing The formal force of presence The creative force of form The force of an impotent demand Limitation and light: creatures of the possible The intellect moves as the necessity of exchange The trace as the force of the absent The trace and the gravity of words The trace as the absence—and the motion—of the intelligible Affirmation and absence

31 34 41 49 57 60 66 69 77 89 96 103 110 115

Part Two: The Sense of a Gesture Deformation of one hand rather than another The difficulty of gestures The subject as the site of the representation of possibility The unity of the place of a doubled reflection The displacing and transcending logic of the power of representation On the place of the subject The beginning of the subjective Movement and method Belonging to the necessity of the element The divine task of beginning The necessity of the hand

123 130 138 150 160 166 172 181 190 203 214

Part Three: The Difficult Gesture of Abandon The presence of an object—the force of a gesture The black box The vanishing compulsion The philosophical stakes of aesthetic form The dark gestures of the hand The presence of the frame ... and its gestures The originality of trust The silence evoked

227 236 241 246 251 258 270 278

Notes

285

Index

335

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank a series of readers, over the last decade, who have commented on one or another aspect of this writing,or encouraged me in the process. Andrew Cutrofello stands out on that list, having assumed the role of both dialogue partner and mentor, but I would also like to thank Thomas J. J. Altizer, Michael Naas, Peg Birmingham, Bill Martin, Laura Hengehold, David Mikics, Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky, Marion Picker, Ferit Güven, Elaine Miller, Angelica Nuzzo, Louisa Shea, Philip Wood, Marcia Brennan, Andrew Haas, Doreen Lee, Kristina Van Dyke, and Emine Fetvaci. In addition, I would like to thank J. Keith Davies at The Davies Group, Publishers for his painstaking help with a difficult manuscript. And finally, my greatest appreciation is owed to my wife, Carol.

The Sun

On January 21, 1951, the French philosopher Georges Bataille gave his first in a series of presentations on not knowing what to say.1 He began by evoking a scene where, somehow, he found himself already speaking about what cannot be said. The night before, he tells us, he had been out drinking with the previous day’s speaker—the analytic philosopher, A.J. Ayer—and Bataille had been provoked. Apparently the conversation had lasted until three in the morning, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the French phenomenologist, and Georges Ambrosino, a physicist with “encyclopedic” interests,2 were also involved. It is a surprising group of drinkers, representing on-going tendencies in philosophy that are still not often bridged, even by the inebriated. I imagine the conversation unfolding over the course of the night, each one struggling to communicate the respective differences of principle, each one asking about what counts as a starting point as such. With the exception of Ambrosino, their positions are well known, and we can reconstruct undercurrents of the conversation with considerable confidence, even though Bataille only gives us a few lines with which to piece together the actual story. All he really tells us, besides the names of the participants, is that Ayer maintained the ridiculous proposition that there had been a sun before there were any humans to see it. The philosophical issue at stake was where to place the human within the flow of time. For Ayer, meaningful statements gain independence from all specific time, and thus encompass both individual events and the time and space within which they arise, so that any particular human can situate herself relative to the rest of the world through propositional statements about her position within space and time. One speaks of what just happened, translates that experience into its completed form as object of a judgment, and then manipulates the symbolic language: the object was present at x at t. The meaning of the propositions transcends or escapes time, because we can speak of future positions on the t-axis from the same perfect tense (the object will have been at x at t), although we (both as speaking subjects and as the objects spoken about) remain very much within time’s flow. Accordingly, one does not transcend time by literally assuming the position

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of God, but by understanding that every point functions in the same way as part of the whole—and thus that every point can serve equally well in describing the whole. Consequently, in the full version of that analytic theory of truth, true functions describe relations between points as such, regardless of what exists at each point. Once we add in the proviso that every existence will have been at some point in space and time, there could be no more difficulty in situating ourselves after the sun in time than in situating ourselves outside the sun’s surface in space.3 The completed symbolization of language, Ayer would claim, depends on being able to separate an object from how we talk about it, but does not presuppose that the separation occurs before the objects come to be.4 Already with Ayer, that is, we do not have an illicit “museum” of meanings that our words attach to, like labels for the objects under glass in Quine’s famous analogy, but a way of understanding how symbolic language comes to function separately from the world in which it is spoken.5 What we will see is that the form of a single act, from which the idea of a function is understood, must be thought otherwise than as a form completely separated from matter—but also such that the priority of the form is not simply the priority of meaning, or of possible ways of speaking as such. The continuing draw of form, in its passage and its specificity, is the goal of the present writing, however, and not a position we are ready to occupy. The initial problem is that the neat dichotomy between timeless meanings and inconstant sense impressions, whether resolved by a better categorization of sense impressions or a resolute refusal to search for “meanings” outside of our language, which are the two options that still dominate today, casts the task of philosophy in terms of what we can say, legitimately, about that which has an independent existence—about something separate from our language. Even those who break with the Platonism of eternal ideas, in other words, continue to search for the way a language talks about the world. Even those who abandon the idea of an eternal soul, when they speak of a semantic support for language, a particular meaning sustained by the idea of meaningfulness, or the idea of an object being discernible as such, reaffirm the metaphysics of the productivity of light at the place of the human—the idea that the world becomes what it is through becoming visible, through becoming accessible to our knowledge, even where that accessibility doesn’t depend on any particular human self. In that sense, and in a way that remains true for most philosophers today, all the options for philosophy are constrained by the possibilities of light—by, that is, the

THE SUN

3

metaphysics of Plato and his successors, including Aristotle. We will find that Bataille, more successfully than Merleau-Ponty, contests the old idea of the proper task of producing light and clarity, as if that were the very definition of the sacred, and of thought, but we should begin with their shared difference from Ayer. In perhaps more familiar terms, the question for them is how the individual communicates reality and wholeness to the world, as the origin of its shared reality at any given time.6 To that extent, the question is not about the individual experience of change, but about the transformative originality of human gestures, and the capacity to effect change, or sustain durable forms within or as that originality; we are not, when we speak, merely observing (or even “embodying”) the rearrangement of objects in the given world. If we come before the sun, it is as sustaining its “reality”—a word one must constantly wrestle with—not as creating solar matter out of the void, or picking the sun up and moving it to the center of the solar system. If we come before the sun, it is because our original sustaining of time grounds the changes in space, although not as its enabling and invisible center. There is something strange—although it is a founding strangeness within Western metaphysics—about thinking that the reality of a circle is sustained by the invisible point, marked by the interior leg of a compass, around which we draw the circle with the pencil attached to the other leg. The idea of a function grounding meaning begins here, although it doesn’t take on its full import until modernity transformed the very idea of the function, making the yet more abstract (or algebraic) relation of one point to the previous one, as they extend a curve, replace the geometric and visual process of producing an entire figure, all at once. Our task, far from returning to the visual or holistic model, will be to understand how the idea of functioning fell into presupposing that an infinite determination of space, as the annihilation of time—as the technology of producing meaningful determinations in the present—constituted the element of all becoming (or of all functioning of singularity). Rethinking the element of becoming, in terms of a singularity that sustains its communication with others, we will find, requires a new thinking of how nothingness moves, or of how time is sustained against annihilation in the creation of new singularities. The element of becoming, in other words, is not the production of things from out of a static nothingness, nor the ceaseless rearranging of the eternally present, but an orientation away from presence in the creative work of language.

4

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But we are, once again, getting ahead of ourselves. In that long ago conversation at a French bar, I imagine a more or less patient attempt from all sides to explain, contest and defend the various presuppositions about the character of reality. Much of the conversation would have had to do with defining philosophy and its tasks. Merleau-Ponty would not want to have privileged the idea of predication, since he would object to the idea that humans speak primarily from the abstract position of subjects who judge predicates to be true or false. Although he allows space for definition and description, and thus for a certain type of science, he sees those endeavors as dependent on the movement of human reality. Language and world, he would insist, could not be separated in the way that the analytic tradition demands since that separation would reduce the world to a mute object that the subject speaks about and thus would rob both world and human of the originality of expressive and effective movement.7 Bataille, even more vexingly for Ayer, wished both to affirm the priority of the human and to contest the very idea that humans are positioned most profoundly as origins of language, no matter what form the language takes—no matter whether they are separated from the world, using a symbolic system, or supporting the world by producing meaning. In Bataille, instead, we are claimed both by the necessity of speaking and by not knowing what to say, and it is the more vexing claim, in the end, because it strikes against the notion that existence itself is “expressive,” is a function of moving forward into individuation.8 But we have not yet arrived at Bataille. Ayer, no doubt, was more in his element speaking with Merleau-Ponty, and would have wanted to demonstrate that the difficulties in reconciling their starting points could not be reduced to a question about time. Rather, some aspects of our experience were simply obvious, were foundational pieces of evidence, and could thus ground our questioning no matter what particular starting point we had. Perhaps the most obvious proposition for Ayer was that we are all positioned physically within the flow of time, and thus any other differences in our approach would have to begin with this admission. Even if, as some have claimed, time is discovered to have only been a subjective illusion, a nothingness occupied by consciousness, our place within time asking about our position would still constitute the starting point as long as one could speak about our position within time and space. The methodology of modern philosophy is grounded in the restriction of this practically infinite capacity to speak, and its corresponding sense of right: we are limited to speaking of only that which can be known, in one

THE SUN

5

way or another, from our own position. Any attempt to break with this methodological imperative will be almost immediately met with charges of mysticism, or with affirming an infinite freedom to speak, regardless of all right. Let us be clear: We are not claiming an infinite freedom, nor a mystical contact with immediate and transcendent meaning, but contesting the implicit characterization of the infinite power of being as the basic element of all becoming, within which individual position and its accompanying rights are to be placed. Merleau-Ponty is often associated with the argument that modern science employs too abstract an idea of method—that, accordingly, and as an antidote, we must find an embodied and concrete approach to science. Bataille accentuates the movement and force of embodiment, giving the body its sacred character back, but before speaking of the sacred, and its “force,” our more immediate task is to show how deeply the criticism strikes against modern technology. Beyond most readings of Merleau-Ponty, we will insist that one cannot stop at the attack on abstractions, because the very opposition of abstract to concrete depends on a technological conception of presence and force. The presupposition of modern method, of technology in the guise of epistemology, is that we begin from the forcefully produced determination of the present—of what is, now and here, as effect—and then reconstruct how that present must have been given to us. Such is the opposition of concrete to abstract at the place of human conceptual activity. We are framed, Ayer believes along with most modern science, by our position within time, because every position, as such, is framed by our language about how time is expressed in series of determinations extended through space. We speak, under that assumption about language, as positioned at a determinate point, as literally having been given a determinate instant that is transformed into an abstraction (a vanishingly small point) by our activity of speaking, and from which point the language, as abstract, comes to encompass all particular times without effecting their reality.9 If only Ayer and Merleau-Ponty had been there, the whole argument could have been restricted to these competing claims to a more concrete approach. But Bataille was making a more fundamental claim about time’s deformation in language. For his part, Ayer was no doubt stumped. He would at least have known how to argue against those who didn’t believe in time’s reality, those who believed that meaning was “mystically” separate from the rest of ontology,

6

TOUCHING DIFFICULTY

as long as they agreed to speak about themselves as part of some sort of meaningful whole. After all, he could have said, the priority of language, as the tool that mirrors reality, or that is framed through the same structure of part and whole that frames the deployment of facts within the world, rests in situating the human at the place of a voice that names what happens to be, and names it in accord with the structure of part and whole, individual fact and a world that is all that is the case. This is the deep complicity of the analytic tradition of epistemology and the idea of a nature that expresses itself through the instantiation of possibilities (like the idea that motion must follow the laws of geometry, or more broadly, that every meaning we employ must be contained, in advance, within the possibilities of our language). If we speak by assigning positions, or more broadly, assigning predicates to given objects, and if nature positions objects within a whole, allowing them to be named in terms of their predicates at a “position” within time, then the forms of our expressions can—at least as an ideal limit—match the forms of nature’s self-instantiations. If I describe the world by manipulating grammatical objects within language, and the world is a collection of objects related to one another, then analytic philosophy can reduce all science to linguistic analysis.10 Indeed, analytic philosophy began from the assumption that an analysis of our ways of speaking could provide insight into the world’s ways of being. By the time of this conversation in 1951, there were many complicated methods for addressing the myriad problems that had arisen since Russell (or Frege) began that project, but there was a continuing and widely shared sense that one must begin with the subject (or its functioning) as positioned, begin with the fact of speaking about a world that exists before us and that causes us to perceive it at a particular point in time. Even the Neokantians (and others) who explicitly returned to Plato, or to the ideality of time, still sought to understand the production of appearances at the place of the individual as a result of the forward movement of time. In the context of this conversation, Ayer probably felt that if he could just be granted the priority of the sun over humans, so that philosophy could begin from our position within time, he could find the appropriate footing for furthering the rest of his argument in terms of the forms of logic. In order to advance this first point, I imagine in my reconstruction of the events, Ayer offers the provocation that Bataille picks up and quotes the following day.11 Perhaps Ayer spoke even more simply: “Surely we know that the sun came before there were humans!”

THE SUN

7

Bataille records that Ambrosino, as a physicist, felt that it was certain in fact that the sun had not existed before the human world. Although it is possible that Ambrosino was giving a glib paraphrase of one of the still current interpretations of quantum mechanics to the effect that measurement “creates” the world, there is no evidence that this is the direction he took, and much to suggest that the act of determination in measurement was, in his mind, a derivative phenomenon, far less important than the expenditure of energy in the act of presence.12 The problem of time’s unfolding in one direction or another is one of the most vigorous areas of contemporary scientific and philosophical research, with a number of theorists since the beginning of the twentieth century pushing further and further away from the naive ideas of time either unfolding before us from past to future or carrying us along with it like a flowing river. The physicists often tend, however, to refuse any independent existence to time at all, sometimes even making the entire world completely dependent on our measurement, sometimes just making time emerge from matter’s “physical properties.” Although Ayer wouldn’t necessarily agree with these theorists, he would at least understand what they were arguing for, and accept the idea that they were still working from the same methodological suppositions about language and position. Bataille is moving in the opposite direction, insisting instead on the force of form13 as expenditure in presence (a claim both he and Ambrosino would recognize as Hegel’s) and thus insisting on the forceful and deforming reality of the now as the grounding movement of time. That such a force exceeds measurement, and that the determination in presence is derived from a more primordial deformation, is what Bataille evokes in the notion of the formless (l’ informe), and we are still working our way toward this thought. That this force is not simply God’s creative will before the divine mind takes shape, points to our need to think against the opposition of matter to soul, or rather to think against the idea that opposition allows us to characterize their difference in terms of limited versus unlimited, passive versus active. The deformation is immediate, even urgent; the deformation allows for neither transcending depth nor absorption into a continuously flat surface. The deformation at the surface does not allow for the instantaneity of a position, of a snapshot of what is at a given time. In the end, as we will see, the force of form is not destined to determination, does not provide us with the element of our truth, but with the darkness against which our truths, as fragile as they are, will come to emerge. But we are moving too quickly.

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More patiently, we turn to the methodological approach that is being rejected. The shape of our experience, Merleau-Ponty and Bataille will both claim, against the scientific ideal of description from the outside, is flattened by the sense of position that Ayer assumes is self-evident; it would be as if our experience only consisted of a surface, or the “shape of being” were to be understood in terms of the weaving of points of experience into an infinitely thin fabric consisting of “facts” and arrayed within some surface. MerleauPonty and Bataille have different ways of understanding a more robust and originary “shape” of experience against that reduction. For Merleau-Ponty, the event of being is given meaning in the way that the human body and mind bear out the possibilities of the world. The expressive force does not lie with the world alone, such that we only reflect or speak about what has already happened; nor does the world unfold mutely, only given meaning by virtue of the subject’s interpretation of its bare extension within time and space. We ourselves are expressive because united with that world; time itself unfolds from our possibilities, from our potencies within the “interlacing” of our spirit with the world. The original gestures of human presence, in the specificity of their enactments, thus generate a particular form of immanence; the attitudes and gestures themselves, both individually and in communities, set into work the sustaining force, the reality or intensity, of belonging together within those gestures. We will come to doubt the particular form that immanence takes—as a bearer of rectifying force, and thus a participation in the forceful expression of the world—but the first step is to understand the importance of the sustaining “force” that frames the particular shape either taken on within, or sustained as the immanence and reality of, the world. Many, including Ayer, could agree that the idea that the sun existed before humanity is only meaningful for speakers who actually exist, right now, and who thus can actually interpret the claim. Merleau-Ponty argues more: the world—in both its time and space—is supported by the directed activities of embodied subjects (the spirit or mind14) and does not “exist” independently of that human movement. A decade after this conversation, in the posthumously published The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty will be quite succinct: Setting against the mind, site of all clarity, the world reduced to its intelligible scheme, a careful reflection causes the disappearance of all questions concerning their relation, which is from that point

THE SUN

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on a pure correlation: the mind is that which thinks, the world is that which is thought, and one would not know how to conceive of their encroachment upon one another, nor the confusion of one with the other, nor the passage from one to the other, nor even contact between them—the one being to the other like the bound to the binding or the product of nature to nature’s productivity, they are too perfectly coextensive for one to ever be preceded by the other, too irremediably distinct for one to ever envelope the other. Philosophy rejects, therefore, as void of all sense, the surmounting of the world by the mind or of the mind by the world.15 Ayer, along with many who practice the discipline of philosophy today, would not accept this characterization of philosophy’s task. One perhaps should have some sympathy for those practitioners: by their rules of engagement, Merleau-Ponty is just toying with paradoxical formulations. He only affirms the distinction between mind and world in order to say they are both indistinguishable, after all. If philosophy’s task is to provide useful distinctions in terminology, or to analyze the ways in which our language divides up the world, then Merleau-Ponty has failed before he has even really begun. The difficulty stems, it seems, from the notion of possibility and potency that Merleau-Ponty attributes to the embodied subject since the priority of embodiment renders the work of making distinctions derivative compared to the creative force of bearing a world. Knowledge, for the tradition that sees symbolic language as a technique sustained by a complete separation from the objects, pretends to be the determinate and instantaneous measure of the relative positions of independent objects within the whole. Individual subjects know individual objects, in their determinate givenness, by relating that object to others (for example, by employing a common noun that asserts its identity with other objects of this sort) and by situating the utterance in terms of other individual subjects (for example, by using an already existing language in ways that cause others to “understand” what you say). For such an understanding of knowledge, it would be as if Merleau-Ponty were stubbornly insisting that measuring space could never be separate from the measuring rods we use, as if he didn’t realize that the “separation” is merely a mathematical technique for applying existing words to existing things. We choose between inches or centimeters, and we use the numbers we read off the ruler like any other numbers in our mathematical equations, without essential reference to the existence of what is measured.

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Of the many implicit and dubious presuppositions here, I want to draw attention to three analytically distinct “temporal” assumptions, although they all overlap in their deployments. First, the idea that the world already exists, and then that we measure it, depends on the temporal progression from existence in the past to measure (determination) in the present. Writers like Hegel will be of interest, below, because they pull the existence and the determination of measure into the same instant. The second and related presupposition is that, even if our capacity to represent something pre-exists what is encountered, the relating of that encounter to others comes after the experience of what is. In variations from Hegel to Lévinas, we will see that supposedly “common sense” characterization of intersubjective time turned on its head. The third, and most entwined, presupposition is that the relatively simple comes to expression in multiplication (or complication) as the single thing that is comes to be expressed in different ways by different subjects at different times. We live, for many Neoplatonists, in the “trace” of an original simplicity, searching for a way of returning into its unity and in a very broad sense, Galileo’s turn against Aristotelian science, and his reformulation of the sense of natural law, is a rediscovery (and reworking) of the Neoplatonic metaphysics of simplicity. Our task, in turning toward the difficulty of sustaining the world, of living in the demand of time’s passage, is to see the trace, instead, as a movement that demands our reticence, that demands that we stay with the difficult gestures of sharing a world and do not seek comfort in the simplicity of the eternal. Yet, again, we have moved ahead of ourselves; here we have only begun to motivate the change from position to deformative motion, as the grounds of expression, and have not even begun a careful account of reticence as a type of aesthetic gesture. Merleau-Ponty’s purpose, as opposed to the technique Ayer deploys in the service of describing the world, was to show what it means to constitute an object without assuming that descriptions are innocent, and innocently detached from what they describe. In other words, he refused to begin with a pre-given and simply encompassing realm where determination is always possible, instantaneous, meaningful and unitary, for both world and language. The geometry of subjective position, of each of us being given a point within the whole of being and time, must be abandoned, he argued, in favor of a language that is bound to the enveloping and developing world. We don’t just give an interpretation to the world, as if we were choosing to represent a length in one metric rather than another. We support its extension in space, the shape of its “oneness” (which has always been a

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prime candidate for the “form of forms,” after all) and the way that it exists within time and space as immanent to them, before it can be measured. The originality of the human doesn’t lie with language alone, but with bearing the immanence of the world as a form of encounter (a form that includes, but is not limited to, that particular gesture called language). The objects don’t exist without us; the sun doesn’t come before us. The modernist tradition, represented most starkly in this conversation by Ayer, takes all cause to be an unfolding within time such that the subject finds herself within that unfolding, and responds to it as given and as something that one chooses to name in one way or another. In that case, as Ayer wanted to point out, to say that we are the origin of a series of causes that move backward in time and create the sun is patently absurd. In order to avoid this absurdity, Merleau-Ponty’s thought must somehow strike against our conception of causality within time. The insight here is that the experience of past and future is framed by the form of our contact with the world, the form of being an embodied subject that stretches outward, so that the epistemological stance is seen to be an impoverished and derivative form of bearing the world, reduced to its spatial interpretation (within a space).16 Of all the gestures of human presence to the world, after all, knowing is perhaps the most sterile, the least friendly. The epistemological starting point does not avoid the subjective forms of interpretation; it assumes that they can be reduced to a transparent frame, or a flat geometry where the subject can enact an interpretation in its anonymity, an interpretation that effects neither the breadth nor the width of the original. One could offer a typology of philosophy in terms of the different forms of subjectivity—open, closed, pious, suspicious, cynical, unified, dispersed, authentic, inauthentic, etc.—but all such classifications would tacitly accept the opposition of language to the world, as if there were many forms of subjectivity, somehow existing before us, and we just happened to embody one rather than another, or could choose between them. Some continental philosophy has gone this direction, and all of it has been interpreted (either dismissively or approvingly) as being about different forms of subjectivity, or perhaps more charitably, about forms of encountering the world that subtend our capacity to become subjects. To speak of gestures, after all, makes it sound as if we are choosing between competing types of hand signals. I trust it is already clear that we are not going in that direction, and do not find the competing forms of subjectivity to embody the most basic questions. One should empathize, however and without following their

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lead, with those who want to embrace a greater freedom embodied in the “choice” of subjectivity, since it seems to offer a development of continental philosophy that would account for human action, and the efficacy and power of human gestures, as opposed to promoting a pious passivity in the wake of being. The following pages of this book are largely intended to refute the yet more basic framing interpretation of ontological complication, and thus to eliminate the sense that one is choosing between active and passive responses to being; we need not embrace either horn of the dichotomy. In a related, if somewhat broader vein, much of the derision directed toward continental philosophy in its early formulations rests on the apparent contradictions involved in representing the world if we can’t assume that a freedom of choice, no matter how limited in extent, or how conditioned by historical factors, grounds our particular decisions as individuals who represent the world through language. If nothing else, we must be free to write the philosophy, or to describe the world in the terms we have chosen. Since to speak of multiple forms of subjectivity apparently opens up the possibility of a new layer of freedom, like choosing to be free to choose, there must be an implicit level—the critics claim—where a free subject is presupposed. The derision takes complicated forms, each of which should be treated separately, but let us put it quickly in the terms before us now: if one chooses to speak of the world as if humans came before the sun, then, they will point out, one is choosing between different ways of framing the world. If there are different reasons for our choices, and we make a decision based on these reasons, the objection will continue, then there must be a place or time where the subject is free to make the choice; 17 if there is such a time, moreover, it will have come after the birth of the sun; the distinction Merleau-Ponty claims not to recognize between the subject and the world, they will easily continue, is instantiated in the moment of choosing to frame the world one way rather than another and is thus not foundational. Even if only realized in retrospect, the moment of freedom in naming is the ultimate form subtending all subjectivity, they will insist against Merleau-Ponty’s claims. Symbolic logic, and many of its derivatives, asserts its philosophical prestige explicitly on this ground of the free activity of naming. There need not be a pre-existing realm of meaningful choices, but the form of choosing continues to frame the whole as if there were. Philosophy, the tradition leading up to Ayer argues, is the freedom won through choosing the correct way of speaking about the world, and Merleau-Ponty is contradicting himself, according to that

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tradition, because he is both oriented by a correct naming and denying its possibility. The response, if we are to leave that derision behind, begins by showing that the problem of freedom is a bit more difficult than Kant had assumed when he opposed freedom to determination, and that the problem of freedom is perhaps even the defining characteristic of difficulty as such, at the place where thought lays its demand on us. The refusal to accept the idea that we come after the sun, as I read Merleau-Ponty, stems from the claim that we can’t evade our responsibility for the language about the world—and for what the language bears—by positioning ourselves either wholly inside or wholly outside the world. Both options rely on spatial representations of being. We must, instead, see our embodied actions as binding language and world into an expressive unity. The freedom of choice invoked by the modernist tradition is a latecomer to the scene; we are bound to the world’s language, according to Merleau-Ponty, before we can choose it. This means that the important question is not how to represent ourselves within space, but how a part may have primacy over the whole, how a point sustains the very surface on which it is found, how a human can precede the sun. To pretend to decide whether to bear the weight or not, Merleau-Ponty is telling us, is a delusion; a point without extension is an empty abstraction, incapable of bearing a world. The artistic gesture, in its originality and against the simple freedom of language, is not just one gesture among others. Already in his early Phenomenology of Perception, freedom is understood as the active appropriation of embodiment—the enlivening of a world, or the immanence of a meaning—and the later work announces the privilege of aesthetic gestures in the movement of a powerful embodiment that sustains the meaningfulness of the world. We turn to these gestures next. In the longer course of the book, we will not be following MerleauPonty, nor Bataille, although we will be occupying the contours of their questions. Here, with Merleau-Ponty, we have reached a certain culmination of an approach to the powers and potencies of being as the gathering or ordering gestures of human embodiment—the experience of a touch that immediately communicates its form to the whole because it sustains the whole in the intensity and imminence of that touch. We have already followed the sense of opposing this gesture to the epistemological stance, but now must take the step against the force, power and immanent clarity of human gestures—against Merleau-Ponty, and against the sense of an

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encompassing light shining through the work of art, like the expressivity of human creativity, immanent on the surface of being, taking the place of the Platonic sun, transcendent and separate from the world. The silence of art: Bataille’s babbling sacrifice In “The Eye and the Spirit” (L’oeil et l’ ésprit), Merleau-Ponty will speak eloquently of the ways in which the force of painting lies in its ability to communicate “depth, color, form, line, movement, contour, physiognomy” as “branches of being” because the artist’s gestures bear the force of immanence—of being within the movement of being, and thus of giving the lines their weight or thickness—by bringing all these elements into a single expression.18 In that sense, the infinite future of painting, the inexhaustibility of human creativity in contact with the world, comes from the unifying powers of creative embodiment. A painter does not represent a pre-existing world according to either optical rules or aesthetic choices any more than we recognize the already existing sun when we step outside. “A painter cannot accept that our access to the world is illusory or indirect.... [our experience of vision teaches us] that we touch the sun, the stars, that we are everywhere at once....”19 The unifying gesture of the artist, the creative force that changes the world, transcends all relations supposedly within time; the force of that unifying immanence lies in giving shape to the whole by bearing that wholeness in the singularity of the artwork’s form. The whole of the world, its time and space, will constantly be regenerated around these moments of human creativity. Against these powerful gestures of art, our task will be to see how the dissolution of the frame, of all the forms that give shape to our world, bears the passing of our lives. We will not assume the arrogant position of the detached free subject who represents the world by either whim or system, but neither will we celebrate the power of a connected and unified humanity to sustain a world. In other words, we need not return to Ayer even if we do not follow Merleau-Ponty. I will argue that the essential gesture, the shape of singularity from which the “geometry” of our world will be born, is instituted in a passing away of time, slipping through our hands, abandoning all position, dissolving before us, and undermining every claim to freedom or power. Freedom will not even come through contesting the passage, attesting to its injustice; nor will freedom arise through an affirmation of our bondage to irrevocable time, an amor fati that

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transcends time by identifying it with the will to power; the dissolution, in other words, is not the overcoming of the present through competing forces, but the inability of the present to sustain itself, or to find any other ground outside its own reticence in the face of the passage. Merleau-Ponty, unfortunately, has no sense of that dissolution of time, or of how an impotence—the inability to either speak or remain silent— might frame our approach to philosophy. Even if he will not accept the naive view of time’s unfolding, he will continue to believe that there is an unfolding, an expression of what is, an expression of the power to be and the potency of being. For Merleau-Ponty, the overflowing of what is, as the new comes to be, would be the barest and most encompassing sense of the movement of being, of its continuity with itself through the movement of overflowing, and this overflowing bears matter into its specific forms through the human gestures of creating meaning. Movement, in other words, is both the force of form and the way that form is created from force. The movement is never separate from us, and from the ways that we embody ourselves linguistically and practically as a community; the movement that communicates is always powerful and it always gathers the world together as inexhaustible horizon of more life. We are always faced with more, with an abundance that as abundance frames all of our interpretations of the world. Merleau-Ponty continues a few sentences from where we left off in The Visible and the Invisible, above: I am forever subjected to the centrifugal movement that makes there be an object of thought for a thinking, and it’s beyond question that I might leave this position and ask about what Being might be before it is thought by me, or, in what amounts to the same, by another, about what would be the interworld where our looks cross and our perceptions are confirmed: there is no interworld, there is only the signification, “world”…20 The human, that is, may well be given precedence over the sun—as the ideal signification “sun” precedes any particular instantiation even if it arises only with those particulars—yet we will still come after the “centrifugal movement” of “Being,” whatever that might be. In the same way, there is no place where we communicate with others; there is only the communication that produces that place as a signification, as meaningful beyond the individual who speaks.

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The expressivity of the contact between being and world troubles Bataille and leads him into more difficult and interesting terrain. Bataille’s problem is more difficult because he refuses the idea of a power that determines meaning or is achieved in abstraction: if we precede the sun, it is only because of our silence and not because of our expressive potencies. If there is force to our movement, it is only because we live in the deformation of the world, and set it back in motion, not because our voice creates new forms. Here Bataille announces a question that has only slowly and marginally been absorbed into continental philosophy, and is—to my knowledge— wholly absent from the mainstream of philosophy today. I take it to be a broadly Heideggerian question, or a question of how one proceeds after Hegel, if one accepts that Hegel was right to see himself as having encompassed all previous metaphysical positions by positing the creative unity of subject and substance. That is, if the shape of our contact with the world is instantaneous, and bears meaning by embodying a free spontaneity, as Hegel proposed in his thinking of the “now,” then the world’s meaning unfolds geometrically at the places where we measure or determine its effective force—in the places where we are meaningfully present as points of determination within the whole. (These are all terms that will occupy us in the reading of Hegel, below). If instead, and as Bataille argues, that contact is not meaningful, yet remains the substance or element of our world, then there must be an extended shape of time’s passage, a “thickness” or “weight” that keeps it from vanishing into the merely abstract ideal of a point. The very idea of an instantaneous contact, a place from which the transformations become meaningful through a dialectical movement of thought, must be replaced with an immediacy that extends, and does not transcend, time. Bataille, as we finally return to the brief presentation he gave on notknowing, is taking up what Merleau-Ponty has placed beyond question, and looking for an answer to “Why is there that which I know?”21 In that sense, he is asking the question of being, but not of the meaning of that being. His question, instead, touches on the contact with the silent movement of the informe—the unformed, or deformative and altering force of being’s motion as initiated in human presence, in the “useless gestures,” for example, of sex, art and sacrifice.22 Thus one finds in Bataille the intensity of a contact with the sacred where the language by which we submit the world’s movement to idealization, to the public accessibility and continuity of language, should come to a stop. The

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ritual of sacrifice constitutes the privileged example. The Catholic ritual of the Eucharist is taken as a refinement of a more original experience, a refinement suited to our more cowardly times. But the original experience, as sacrifice, is even still a gesture beyond utility or meaning. In the words of Bataille’s rather rambling presentation, in which the debate with Ayer had been recounted: The act of saying certain words over a piece of bread is just as satisfying to the spirit as cutting the throat of a cow. At bottom there is often enough a refinement [recherche] of horror in sacrifice. It seems to me in this respect that the spirit takes on as much destruction as it can stand. The atmosphere of death, of the disappearance of knowledge, the birth of this world that one calls sacred; here there is the possibility of saying of the sacred that it is the sacred, but at that moment language should at least undergo a time of cessation.23 This is a difficult moment of contact, an abandon to a sacred call—it is not like the encroachment of spirit (or mind) on the rights of the world that Merleau-Ponty would label as senseless. Nor is it a mystical contact with the beyond. It is not even the sense of justice provoked in language one finds in Lévinas and Derrida, where we are supposedly claimed by the sacred, or by time, and must speak determinately if we wish to respond with justice. With Bataille, the movement of idealization is set into work: that is, the frame of presence finds its immanence and the ideal is given its priority over the world. But the language thus set into motion is not itself expressive or powerful. Instead, language (as a negating, but not determining, movement) embodies a transgression against meaning, a violent and impotent silence. A movement of transgression against power, responding to the demands of the sacred, constitutes the birth of the world, precisely where one does not wish for infinite horizons, nor trust in the boundless clarity of the world—where one searches, instead, for “as much destruction as [the spirit] can stand.” Why destruction? The answer, it seems, concerns how we understand “movement”—that is, the altering of the shape of the frame, or of the form of form itself, and not the change in place of objects within the world. Movement, after all, must be the communication of form to the whole if it is both immanent and yet not contained within a frame. (This is the theme of the opening of part 1, and Heidegger’s reading of Plato and Aristotle, below). The sacred, Bataille will claim in his efforts to show how the immanent form of destruction bears the whole, must be opposed to the mundane, just as the human is opposed to the objects of utility within

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the world.24 Two ideas of wholeness, one based on an economy of objects that are given and the other based on the final destruction of those objects, the sacred economies of genesis and apocalypse, must have their traditional order inverted so that we can see that the destruction grounds the ordinary exchange. The destruction gives intensity to the exchange, makes it sacred or whole, precisely by robbing the ordinary economy of its authority as an exterior frame and giving the force of immanence to the sacred gesture of singularity, of the “immediacy” of the sacrificial act. The sacrifice, then, would hold the promise of a different ethical relation, a different moment of contact with others: no longer either transcendent or mundane, the world would rest on the intensity of human, sacrificial contact. Intensity would be communicated to others, and the world would take shape around that gesture. Instead of being a metaphor for the monad, shut up into itself, recipient and organizer of all impressions, intensity would be a synonym for movement, or life, up to the point where in sacrifice one faces the limit of mortality; in facing interior limits, that is, in intensity, sacrifice would constitute the place and form of communication as an instant that is not point-like, a limit that does not stand outside the things it frames, a limit that sets communication in motion instead of rendering a symbol eternal. In that way, sacrifice becomes the real shape of that which has no meaningful place within the geometry of the world; transgression, without form, constitutes the shape that opens us to our world and that communicates that openness. Bataille compares this intensity to a state of grace, where one has wealth in poverty, gain in abandon—in short, he invokes a long tradition of mystical experience or ecstatic contact with the divine.25 But the shape of that contact is what makes the difference. Instead of the expanding “thickness” of the lines, as one might imagine with Merleau-Ponty’s expressive language of being, we would be looking for the resistance of each point to its own vanishing, and the reticence in the face of a complete dissipation into nothingness. Transgression, when turned toward the sacred, is captured in the evocation of intensity—a thickness held against the immediacy of being, not originating from its overflow— and is not another form of creating abstract points by subsuming matter into the framework of the mind’s representations. But does this destruction that the spirit bears explain the movement of time? For Bataille, the sacrifice frames the world by giving shape to singularity, to the points that sustain its geometry. The dissolution that steals away the frame of our meanings, that marks the dissolution of time,

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however, is in danger of remaining a positive or affirmative force, like the ever-rising desires of the heroes in Bataille’s novels. In our examination of the aesthetic minimalism that abandons all pretense to the gestures of framing, at the end of the present book, we will begin to approach the idea of an abandon—of a sacred movement that is not tied to the powers of either voice or text. In the end, this is not a book about Bataille. The difficulty of abandon—of a singularity that is not supported from the outside, yet is demanded from us—speaks to us as a silent demand. The place where the movement of limitation, either as a point immanent to all geometry, or as a movement that gathers the parts into a whole, fails to think through the form of time’s passage, the difficulty of preceding the sun. The difficulty of letting go is not the complexity one sets aside when searching for the simple; it is the reticence one casts, uselessly and impotently, against time, as the only way of sustaining its movement. Speaking phenomenologically, certain moments of singularity give us access to a different shape of transcendence, without depth—the shape is not the enveloping presence of the benevolent divinity, nor our subjective voice imposing itself over the world as a master over a slave, but is the shape of remaining within the silence that opposes itself to that expressive envelope and thus moves toward the space of a boundless but not abstract, a limitless and still exigent infinite. Not the silence of a specious present, but the babbling of a voice suppressed, deformed away from the expression of a positioned self. The images we are used to calling transcendent organize the world within a space of possible representation, or within an economy of representation, even when the free creative subject is exempt from objectification because set into the position of producing the representations themselves. A truly sacred transcendence, on the other hand, would occupy the place where that everyday envelope of possible meaning either disintegrated or exploded; such is the apocalypse, where transcendence and immanence join. As thus both its interior and exterior limit, the sacred would mark the shape of the economy as such, and give sense to the movements of meaning—but only by marking the place where the sovereignty of the subject is not in any sense equivalent to the production of more meaning.26 The silence does not sustain new work; it sacrifices the old ones and bears the weight of that sacrifice. In the presentation with which we began, Bataille strives to speak of this contact, and invoke the motion of a communication. In his own short yet wandering discussion of the sacred, and of the refusals and demands of

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knowledge—which had begun with an aside about a late night drinking binge with Ayer, Ambrosino and Merleau-Ponty—Bataille emphasizes the contradiction in the task of speaking. That which I undergo in confronting not-knowing is that which comes from the feeling of playing a comedy and of having a sort of weakness in my position. I am in front of you at one and the same time blabbering on and giving all the reasons that I would have for staying silent: I could also say that perhaps I don’t have the right to keep silent, a position still more difficult to maintain.27 In opposition to all the evocative powers of our voice, many of which are celebrated by Bataille elsewhere, this blabbering weakness constitutes our theme. To live in the weakness of having to speak, in Heidegger’s terms, is part of the constitutive structure of being a mortal. But we are not compelled to limit this fragility to the fact of having access to only limited perspectives on an encompassing whole. Bataille already sees that the pretension of belonging to a greater power, of participating in another’s movement, would be the refusal of the generative contradiction at the heart of the task of speaking of silence, and thus the refusal of the sacred. It would be the refusal to precede the sacred, to precede the sun. To refuse that precedence would be to act as if the power of silence, and the encompassing whole that an infinite, albeit meaningless universe would represent, set the terms of our responsibility, and thus made sense of and framed our fragility as a limited power, restricted by a greater one that we don’t possess. By contrast, the task of belonging to the sacred, in its opposition to the world of utility, is found in the diffuse fragility of a communication that does not claim to know what is justified, to know the limits of its powers to speak; the task is announced, perhaps, in our contact with the superfluous gesture that art embodies. Announced in a sacrificial act, after the death of God. The originary force of art is not our theme. Instead, our question is how art accedes to its intimacy and its trusts—to the interiority and thus continuity of its movement—if nothing guarantees its power. One trusts that a sense will develop, in the most minimal terms, as a bare motion of encounter and letting go, an orientation toward sacred immanence, bearing sense through aesthetic presence in its reticent fragility. The supposedly secular certainty that there can be one enveloping style of communication, one form of meaning, as we will see in the second part of the present book,

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constitutes the ontotheological within technology, which is to say, the effacement of the imperatives of the sacred. The task does not stop at the limits of our language’s capacity for representation, nor even at the limits of art’s capacity for expression. We are not asked to do merely what is possible, and perhaps all art stages this overflowing demand as the abandon of place, the difficult abandon to a singularity deformed beyond all limits, to the gesture that trusts what it cannot say. Such an art stages the demands of an impossible responsibility, like bearing the sun. And yet, this art would thus only embody a fragile trust—a trust that is not certain of occupying the place of expressive power—precisely because the shape of trusting our own powers can no longer convincingly function as the foundation of a post-theological art. In other words, and going back to Kant, in a world where God’s presence no longer shares out meaning to all the participants of the world, where even the believer must learn to proceed as if God had no hand in the world’s movement, the beauty and force of artistic gestures was meant to embody the best of the human: we were supposed to be able to see ourselves in the graceful images of art, and supposed to learn to trust our native creative powers as artists of the world’s meaning. Even the invocations of the terrors of the sacred, it could be said of those late modernists that returned to a more religious language, were meant to situate our trust in the world’s movement, to teach us the way to affirm our place in the creative flow of the world as embodied in its artistic achievements. The shape of that trust— the experience of belonging to the infinite as part of the production of meaning—is the shape of a point that closes in on itself, that becomes part of the geometry of the world in sustaining its presence completely within its proper bounds. In that story about the power of art, to trust in the infinite is to know what the limits of one’s tasks are, to know that one is properly and by right only a point within the whole. For that reason, the atheist that is certain of a powerful and all-encompassing natural world would be no less an ontotheologian than the theist who believes God has created a world where everyone has been given her own proper place. The death of God, in this sense, must strike against the existing geometry of being a subject, no matter what form of subjectivity one is supposed to embody. The end of ontotheology doesn’t come in averring that God is not an object among others, but in renouncing the idea of separation: we do not create, as God was said to have done, and then allow the created objects to simply be. We must constantly generate the immanence that supports the world by

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abandoning the claim to having finished, by abandoning the claim to an ultimate simplicity that encompasses, completes or perfects all that is; we must assume, instead, the gestures that bear the passage without limits, the deformative demand of what is not yet, and the immediate contact with a world that cannot be separated into instants. However, if our embodied and physical presence to the world is not the place of an infinite trust—much less an infinite and overflowing power about which we are certain, even if not consoled—it is perhaps still the place where trust begins by communicating the shape of abandon to others. This shape, at least in its largest contours, may still be called aesthetic, may still, in some sense, be the embodied form of thought. The gesture communicates the passage of time. We will trust that a sense, a directedness or orientation rather than a meaning, will develop, not that a reader and a writer already share a world, or even that they share the affirmation of their creative presence to the world. Thus we may yet give ourselves over to a motion other than our own, we may yet be moved, for example, by a work of art. The originality of being moved away from oneself, the originality that somehow sets the reception of the work of art higher than its production, echoes the originality of that humanity that comes before the sun by abandoning all pretense to creation. And one is perhaps not surprised to find that such a gesture of abandon comes in the end to bear the sense of friendship, to bear the weight of sharing sense after a certain overly creative God has died (or at least finished his creative deed), and to bear, in the demands of community, the example of the sacred yet to come. And what of the sun? Perhaps we can say that only with abandon can we begin to see a shape of singularity where the future pulls us forward, instead of the past pushing us from behind; where the sun, origin of light and being, still lies ahead. A map, of sorts The following pages are divided into two large parts, both of which set the terms of our question historically, followed by an attempt to phrase the same question in explicitly aesthetic terms, and thus to allow for a new approach to how humans sustain meaning. The first part explores the metaphysics of presence as “formal force” as it develops out of Greek thought and striates the work of Heidegger, Lévinas and Derrida. The second part takes the same theme into Kant and Hegel, with Heidegger and Derrida serving as contemporary iterations of the problem of where the subject—and more

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precisely, the necessity of determinations—is to be placed. The final part asks what the element of art, in the broad sense of the gestures and traits of human presence, would be when we stop trusting in the transcendent power of expression determining our place within the world. One will quickly see that I take the 1960s to have been a crossroads—a time when a possible approach, reaching back into antiquity, but only hinted at in the conversation we’ve been following, had a brief life in popular consciousness about theology, politics and art. Unfortunately, it was also a time that manifestly failed to achieve its promise in those terms. For my purposes, and to speak a little more precisely, I see a converging set of questions about the individual’s relation to technology, and about the forms of life one can assume relative to technology, to have been forced upon mass consciousness, but then resolved in favor of a technology that makes individuality a fact—makes it the simple element of all becoming— and thus obscures the difficulty, the “sacred” dimension of form. As we will see, throughout, my intention is not to militate for a particular form of religious commitment, but to insist—and, in the final case in terms of art rather than philosophy or theology—that a response to technology that asserts the radical priority of human loss without nostalgia can set out the orientation toward the “sacred,” beyond individual personality, without becoming a technology of redemption or escape from that individuality. Sacrifice, in other words, can have a claim on us as individuals without offering a participation in a greater whole. I take Heidegger and the later Derrida to have seen the difficulty of the question about form that I here used Bataille to articulate, although without presuming that he had the correct answer; I will turn to their respective readings of the history of philosophy to both situate the importance of the question and to decide between their approaches, but we must always be aware of the challenge of speaking with urgency without overstepping the bounds of thought. Much of the difficulty in these historical readings stems from the fact that for most contemporary historical scholarship the question of formal force, in the “act” of presence, has become invisible—in an echo of the forgetfulness of being identified through Heidegger’s historical readings—and we will have to spend time construing readings of central historical figures in terms of the sustaining form of presence, in order to understand the criticisms and appropriations that Heidegger and Derrida made, as well as to evaluate any enduring relevance these texts may have for our question.

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The task at hand, then, is to accentuate the gestures of human presence at the place that the frame of powerful creative gestures dissolves and we are drawn, instead, into the work’s fragility and inevitable passage toward the future. Communication, in that sense, is not the conveyance of a content from a speaker to an audience, but neither is it the transfer of an expressive (and powerful) structuring form. Communication, in admittedly cryptic terms, is the way we share the destruction—the way we express a reticence in the face of the very same apocalypse we live within because it carries an orientation beyond us, beyond our life. The maps I offer, in those terms, are not even merely provisional: they run the risk of undoing the whole process, of undermining the sense that the entire approach to human knowledge must be radically regrounded in the difficulty of passage, the reticence in the face of any presupposed encompassing light. If my approach “works,” the form put in play draws thinking into its task, commences the movement of thought, just as the withdrawal of time deforms our present, prevents its closure or selfcompletion in understanding. If there is any “narrative” here, it is about the end of all narrative, the end of telling a story of who we are, and why. One does not master the history of philosophy by situating its claims within a map; one does not tell the story of how certain interpretations became accepted, effected other interpretations, and then became the ground of a common self-understanding; one evokes, instead, a broadly unformed set of concerns that show how the maps will come to sustain their particular weight, for the time that they can be trusted, in terms of how well they respond to the concerns. Philosophy’s commencing gesture, in other words, is no longer found in resolving the opposition of the one to the many, or of being to becoming, but in responding to the fragile demand to turn toward the places where our desires and our obligations begin, from out of our future, as we are called to share a world that is not yet; the task, in an aesthetic philosophy, would be to avoid betraying, in that beginning, the fragile shape formed by our reticence in the face of the demand to abandon ourselves to a future characterized by the infinite vanishing of the world. One must, in order to avoid this betrayal, give up any pretense to simply being. Philosophers, like artists, if they are to sustain a future, must be oriented by sacrificing ourselves to, giving ourselves over to, and most troublingly trusting in, the difficult reticence of this aesthetic gesture. In the following pages, we will be staging a question of how the whole is understood, and where it finds its sustaining force. We will find, in

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Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle against Plato, that the whole emerges as a motion of specificity—not as a motion of the whole, from which specificity is magically given, as many modern criticisms of Aristotle assumed. The movement of an emerging into presence that Heidegger associated with Aristotle is placed methodologically out of bounds by modernity. In the metaphors we have been deploying, the movement of presence, under the guise of the necessity of determination, or the necessity of positive givenness, is wrongly thought to be punctualizing. The subject, as developed throughout modernity, unifies many of those points over time, but only as the aggregation of those points in particular judgments related back to the whole subject, and thus only as having subsumed the shape of punctuality into the concept of subjectivity. As a consequence, the emerging movement of the whole is left to the divine, out of our realm of capacity or responsibility, so that the only legitimate response is to try to name what is: for this reason, in a broadly Kantian tradition the aporetic openness of the subject corresponds to the idea of the transcendent sacred and its consequent demands on the individual. (The permanent aporia is ontotheological.). For Hegel, this emerging movement of the whole, although Kant was right to see its connection to the shape of subjectivity, has to be radically rethought in terms of a sustaining shape that bears the responsibility for its reality by appropriating the active sense of meaningful gestures. We will treat this “thinking of being” under the terms of beginning, as the force of an interior articulation of that point of contact. Derrida’s early criticisms of Heidegger, although modified in later years, have successfully cast Heidegger as having subterraneously reintroduced a Kantian moment of wholeness, of the “gesture of gathering” that has precedence over any disseminative force of presence; the Hegelian moment of punctual determination is rehabilitated, in Derrida, by eliminating the suspect sense of self-conscious activity in the production of the surface, and speaking of a sustaining movement that locates the force of presence in its supplementarity—in the way that the coming to have a shape, after an experience, allows one to sustain what has happened. The originality of sustaining the whole, in that sense, comes after, but necessarily arises from the very “structure of passage” at the place of différance. (“Structure of passage” is in quotations, because Derrida’s way of conceiving the shape of the forceful movement of emerging into presence doesn’t presuppose the opposition of things to structures, but rather grounds the various ways in

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which structures, or originary forms of supplementarity, will come into relation with what they sustain.). My conclusions rest on the premise that, although in many respects one of Heidegger’s best readers, Derrida is guilty of having missed the more radical aspect of the question about the emerging movement of being as a movement of nothingness. That is, to concentrate, as Derrida did, on the Heideggerian movement of gathering as if it were only a substitute for the positive unity of apperception—to thus place himself to Heidegger as Hegel was to Kant—is to miss the sense in which the gathering is a reticence against the movement of participation, and does not either constitute the wholeness in some way, or participate in the wholeness. What Derrida misses, I take it, is the place the nothing assumes in the characterization of the movement of the emergence into singularity (one should note that Derrida is not alone in resisting Heidegger’s thinking here). On my reading, and without being confined to Heidegger’s formulations, the nothing is not the dialectical opposite of being; it is not the way in which the emergent movement is opposed to the more or less static moment of determination; the nothing, instead, should be seen as the style of resisting the completion of the movement, the form through which the time of our singularity is stretched out. To the extent, however, that Heidegger offered answers concerning the proper shape of this singularity, we will find ourselves— in counterpoint—using clues from Derrida’s aesthetics, especially where it relies on a sense of the “theft of the frame,” to think about this shape. And here, as with Heidegger, the argument takes a twist: it is not an argument for taking the nothing seriously to say only that we don’t want the world to be composed of only presence; we must somehow show why the thinking of nothingness claims us (although it cannot be necessary, at least in any traditional sense of compulsion, as we will see). Heidegger begins by trying to point, phenomenologically, to those places where the nothing is attested to in our lives (anxiety and boredom, primarily). However, the presupposition of phenomenology—the problem that Heidegger never fully resolves, and that the Derridean questions will help us think through—is that the place of experience is basic and given. The destruction, and our capacity to sustain that movement of destruction as sacred, as bearing an intensity beyond mundane economies of meaning, is at stake where one finds no support for that place, no contour to the silence that suggests a path back to the transcendent. Such is the driving question behind the various ways one will speak of a “trace” in Heidegger, Derrida

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and Levinas, and I will follow those competing approaches in their broad sweep, in the first part. The final meditations in this book are about ways in which we can think about this lack of mastery at the place where aesthetic presence—exemplified in the reticent gestures of minimalist art as it responds to the transcendent gestures of previous generations—continues to indicate the originality of an emerging movement in the human contact with the world without betraying the destructive grace of the movement that one must sustain. In his own work on art, Heidegger speaks of abandon, and evokes abandoned temples as well as ways of life abandoned by modernity, but I want to add a more apocalyptic tone to the considerations of shape. The nothingness of a merely constant movement of undoing, like the transgressive violence of an absolute revolution, one must underscore, betrays the difficulty of the shape. We do not affirm the pure joy of movement for its own sake, and insist, instead, on the continuing difficulty of touching the world, sustaining its fragile wholeness. The apocalypse, in other words, is not simply affirmed, even if it is not to be denied. The sacred, if we return to the metaphor of being situated on a transcendent or explanatory map appropriate to book introductions, is not captured by the fact that we are always encompassed within a greater power, always representable in terms of some greater whole; rather, the sacred only subsists in the fragile demand that we not betray our place too quickly, too eagerly embracing the power of the infinite, the eternal originality, either in the guise of an eternal God or the immutable laws of nature, that promises an end to all the difficulty and thus betrays the sustaining gestures of humans touching the world.

Part One Life’s Grave Traces

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Institution of a being that is not for itself, that is for everyone— both being and disinterestedness; the for itself signifying conscious of self, for everyone, responsibility for the others, support of the universe. This style of responding without previous commitment— responsibility for the other—is human fraternity itself, preceding freedom. The face of the other in proximity—more than representation—is unrepresentable trace, style of the Infinite. It’s not because inscribed or written within the approach there is the trace of the Infinite—trace of a departure, but trace of that which, beyond measure, doesn’t enter into the present and inverts the arché into anarchy—that there is an abandon [délaissement] of the other, obsession by him, responsibility and Self. The non-interchangeable par excellence, the I, the unique substitutes itself for the others. Nothing is play. Thus being transcends [Ainsi se transcende l’ être]. Lévinas.1 …but life is not grave.

A friend.

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The clarity of method and its demands Pity the author compelled to write in the wake of Bataille’s babbling silence—somehow compelled to defend its presuppositions, its call, from the judgments of those who believe in the simple clarity of words, and thus simply dismiss his provocation as senseless posturing. In his defense, then, one cannot imitate Bataille, nor trust his answers, but must strive only to sustain the gestures, in their difficulty. Thus, although Bataille’s insistence on the human’s priority over the sun adumbrates the entire thematic scope of my argument, the present task will be, more humbly, to reset that drunken provocation within a manageable number of contours from the history of philosophy. A contour is a shape that requires time to develop, that never exists in the instantiation of a single shape, but moves between different speakers or different times as a continuously deformed passage. The contour also requires a different approach to history—one must insist, literally stand within, a trajectory that somehow isn’t determined within any particular text, yet somehow isn’t separable from the texts that sketch that contour. We will say much more about this “somehow,” below. As we will find throughout this project, those contours have often been announced in the history of philosophy, in very broad terms, as the establishing gestures of a new approach to beginning as such. And, since we are in some sense involved in a discourse about how to begin, at all, we will have to be excused for arguing from the beginnings, and what they evoke for our thought, and not from judgments about the convincing force of the conclusions. We are not concerned, at this stage, with whether or not the frames thus established actually succeed at doing something we have all agreed in advance to call philosophy; we are not judging the validity of a set of claims; moreover, an emphasis on the beginning, I will argue here, constitutes the only approach that allows these gestures to actually transform philosophy, as opposed to merely articulating new spaces or techniques within an already presupposed project. The patient step-by-step explication of how arguments are deployed within the frame of the initial establishing gesture, whether attributed to Plato or Descartes, simply cannot tell us whether that initial gesture was “correct.” The convincing arguments given in accordance with the established rules for judging what is or is not convincing, as we will see, all rely on the frame of a subjective orientation that we wish to contest—to think against as deeply and carefully as possible. The naturalization of that philosophical frame, where we are supposed to be

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explaining the world that we already live within, giving determinate form to the truths we already implicitly know, is deeply entrenched in our current philosophical practice, despite the varied attacks of postmodernism, and my task—with the deliberate deployment of long contours of thought against the more usual accounts of their development through punctuated stages— is to begin a project of thinking differently about philosophy itself. But philosophy has long claimed for itself the position of explaining the life we already live, in terms of the clarity that we, somehow, cannot quite grasp, even if it is our most basic truth. If we are to contest that project of philosophy, the project of appropriating the power of the clarity we already own, we must cast our net yet more broadly than the debates between various factions of contemporary institutionalized philosophy. Accordingly, we do not begin by noting our perplexity within a situation that should be clear, and then reach for a method of clearing away obscurities; we do not pretend to rejoin an original simplicity by finding the most basic element of our thought, in those moments when we turn to the gestures of beginning; we turn, instead, to the difficulty of sustaining that gesture, in its originality, at and as the place where we begin. If we rejoin philosophy and everyday life, it is not on the grounds of a shared simplicity, a shared participation in the same world, but in the time of a shared difficulty, a need to sustain an individual moment of originality through extending that moment into a not yet shared world. To sustain, through extending, is what we will call a deformative motion, below, and it constitutes the basic gesture of sustaining a contour, but the language has taken on a paradoxical tone before it needs to. We still have at our disposal, if not the unfolding of an argument, at least the possibility of a real patience in our thought, and we should try to keep a manageable pace. The current project, if I may speak autobiographically, began from broad considerations about the continuing priority of the intellectual over the material, as that priority lives on in the various methodologies of modernity, with their implicit (and sometimes explicit) identification of intelligence and presence to determination. Even those practitioners who hold themselves to be resolutely anti-idealist would be living within the clarity of light— the presence of meaning, as expressed in the ideal of a text that captures the irruption of meaning into history, the irruption of a private or hidden world into the public realm as I tell you what I think. In broad terms, it is the question of how we write from within and about the world, given that writing is an intelligible (if not necessarily intelligent) pursuit. I was looking

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for a basic gesture of that sharing, of the intelligibility of what could be shared, separable from the atom of a determinate fact, or an assignment of a predicate or name to an object. The development of my project, however, pushed me away from even such modest claims for the priority of intelligence—and further away from the authors with whom I had begun. If it began in the impulse to better ground the postmodern turn away from systematic method, it ended with broader and broader denunciations of the new “methods” of postmodernism and their continuing dependence on a static moment of intelligence as clarity. The project, as one sees in the final discussion of minimalist art in Part Three, turns toward the sacred claims of darkness, of what resists conversion into meaning, but again, we should insist on a vigilant patience before such claims; we must not rush to judgments, in any case. The final segment of the contour I wanted to suggest came with a reading of Augustine, and with some of the philosophers and theologians who have been influenced by Augustine, as continued through Nietzsche’s understanding of the will to power.2 If I can phrase that suggestion succinctly, albeit schematically, it is to understand that the movement of intelligence is will. The movement of intelligence is, as I will try to show throughout this writing, the basic gesture of deformation, and thus of sustaining a contour of thought. If it is at all proper to say that Nietzsche’s announcement of the death of God opens a new type of sacred task, it is because the will to power, and its affirmation in the now, constitutes the movement of history as the embodiment of an “intelligence” that exceeds any particular human possession, without positing an existence “beyond” the human, or a divine intelligence that transcends our embodied world. Postmodern ideas of a feminine writing, of a seduction that pulls us into existence, or of the transformation of subjectivity through the exercise of power are all meant to speak to intelligent contours of thought at the place of embodiment or inscription, but one also sees this movement of intelligence—to borrow an example from Lingis—in the will to exhaustion in physical exertion, because that kenosis of will at the place of our embodiment renews our contact with the world as meaningful, as a place to be affirmed.3 There is no privileged moment of contact with a divine other in a hierophany in such an example; there is no presupposition of human nature expressing itself as essential, much less as the telos of a divine plan; it may be, still, that we are justified in addressing such mundane moments in terms once reserved for the sacred.

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Speaking of the sacred is not meant to endorse either a doctrinal or mystical approach to philosophy. Rather, it is to suggest that the temporal horizon of intelligibility—the clarity that is always “to come,” and which does not encompass or sustain us in advance—has been effaced by the articulation of a supposedly secular method that defines itself in opposition to the temporal. “Method,” as secular, was predicated on the presupposition that we already possessed the “natural light,” and found ourselves within a spatially immediate presence to the world (either shared or private). Our experience of time, in that model, is the ground for the method because it is the experience of our participation in the shared element of becoming— the shared space about which our method is designed to speak. A method, instead, that remains committed to the contours of a larger temporal movement, and the fluid demands on thought that arise over the course of responding to developing ideas, will assume that the movement of history is not an irruption of being into events, an instant of belonging within the element of an all-inclusive presence, but the sustaining of a claim on our thinking. The claim that one must bear time’s passage. The sustaining of time will be opposed to the instantaneous assigning of names to objects, but not by positing a mystical continuity of uninterrupted duration. The task of sustaining time will, for the first time, become the object of the discourse, even where contours of philosophy and theology, have long hinted at the need to turn in that direction. Truths of displacement In this section, we will turn to the problem of philosophical beginnings in language as set out by the Platonic idea of truth. Or rather, in speaking of beginning, we will see how Heidegger contests the idea that the form of speaking about an undeformed appearance of things—either as always what they are without beginning or as containing their own origins before or beyond the “originality” of language—constitutes the essential form of philosophical discourse. Here I wish to give contour to the framing gesture in Heidegger’s readings of Plato and Aristotle, with the eventual purpose of showing how to understand the movement of framing otherwise than as progressing forward through determination, creating more to be understood at the place of presence. The task of providing an undeformed account of how philosophy cannot begin from the presupposition of the undeformed appearance of things is

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already paradoxical, but one can yet speak to the ways in which philosophy will be framed as an account, as having a claim on us at the place of our singularity, such that we are claimed by the movement of intelligence, by the claims that come to bear on us in our attempts to communicate with others. By my reading, Heidegger’s hermeneutic circle, already in Being and Time, refers to this demand of being claimed, in advance, and does not imply the self-reference of unfolding one’s own existing conditions for existence. We who take this claim seriously are thus left with an approach that denies that the knowing subject can constitute her own original contact with the world and that insists that one find originality in the cracks of an inherited edifice that can no longer (and never could, as edifice) support the demands of bearing a world. If we may still speak in those terms at all, the “framing” must be interior, or constituted in the turning inward of the present at the place of appearance, and is not to be understood as an exterior force impressed upon the receptive interior space; I have already spoken of this interiority in motion in terms of reticence, and as a deformation “inward,” away from any encompassing light, yet still cognizant of a demand beyond the self. More on this, below. For now, we are approaching a reading of Plato as having instituted, as the very meaning of philosophy, an implicit frame at the place of the individual subject who trusts in the encompassing light. It is in no way an uncontentious reading, but I will try to cast the problem broadly enough to see that if we want to save Plato from the Heideggerian criticism, we must at least hold that the very project of philosophy as such is at stake. By my reading, Heidegger “frames” our existence within the world as a claim on us—as a claim on our words that arises from a movement away from the fullness of the self, or away from the givenness as powerfully meaningful (or self-contained) of the present.4 The frame is thus itself in motion—slipping away yet pulling us into its wake—and is deployed through the forms and gestures of our language. This movement of framing, as it slips away, prevents any static opposition, or the reduction of the world to a “standing reserve“ framed by our human projects. We are speaking of a frame, in other words, that is not, and thus that does not frame in the sense of setting out the world for technological appropriation. One further caveat: Much of this argument is involved with, and tries to disentangle itself from, the changing terminology of Heidegger’s work, as he makes more difficult the shape of turning toward the self in and after Being and Time. The very task of providing such an exegesis is famously

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troubled, with Heidegger denouncing all such attempts in advance, but a lack of time will keep us from even being tempted to provide such a reading. Nor would I defend the final pages of the present volume as “Heideggerian” rather than “Derridean.” Instead, the task will be to see in what way the deformation of the self arises as a Heideggerian problematic in his slightly later encounters with Plato and Aristotle, and then to see what kind of originary gesture “deformation” sustains throughout aesthetic and sensible contacts with the world. We will see that the traditional conception of truth, descending from Plato, depends on the idea that we already live within the claim of singularity on the self—the claim that things are what they are, each in its individuality, but only in the moment where the knowing subject respects that individuality—such that we are called to speak about our presence to the world in the moral terms of a subject who respects truth by supporting a language that presupposes a separation between the knowing subject and the objects about which she speaks. Heidegger’s sense of movement in the claim of being, in contrast, sees the “force” of the claim as deforming the present, and disrupting the form of selfreference precisely in instituting a temporal, and therefore deformed and incomplete, shape for a moment of language that, in spite of everything, still deserves to be called “singularity.” In “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth” (1931/32, revised in 1940), Heidegger denounces the change in the history of metaphysics that follows upon the allegory of the cave. Everything depends on Plato’s having made the appearance (Aussehen/idea) the new center or place of truth: one moves into the light of the sun from out of the darkness of the cave as one discovers the true cause of the shadows in the force of the light that produces them. The thesis about the force and precedence of the intelligible sun is not as decisive, however, as the change in orientation demanded from the human who has now been charged with the task of knowing. This movement of thought takes the form of correctness, of being directed by the ideas, beyond the mere shadows that are immediately present to us, toward the appearances of things in their truth. Rather than repeat the well-worn criticism of a representational idea of truth, Heidegger emphasizes that for Plato the movement of thought calls for the subject to take on a certain attitude with regard to what is true. Heidegger’s point, I take it, is that any competing attitude, or mode of subjective access, and no matter how carefully nuanced, would remain a type of Platonism.

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Already for Plato, one does not see “other” things, but sees what is here in a new way, framed by a new sense of self as independent of other’s opinions, and thus capable of the moral demands of seeing clearly, of seeing in the light of the true. Such a demand may have already existed, to some extent, in Homer, and runs throughout the Presocratics.5 For Plato, the move out of the darkness lets one see correctly, or rather, is constituted in becoming directed by the desire to see in the light of the correct, framed by what one can correctly say. The connection between seeing, knowledge and idea or form, although well known, remains obscure to most commentators, and the way that it plays out in Heidegger is not in terms of redeeming a first light, not yet named, through a name that captures that shining. The most basic form of Platonism may well be captured in the idea that we live within a light that we somehow ignore, and that philosophy is the task of being awakened to that world; to “teach,” far from being the conveyance of a technique, is to turn the individual knower toward that already existing truth. (Even in his later work on technology, as we will see below, Heidegger’s point is not to claim that Plato was a disguised Sophist, merely teaching techniques for manipulating words, but that the idea of truth as instantiated in human presence, even when its source is a divine and transcendent light, trivializes the claim of being, and thus allows technology, as that restricted interpretation of the claim of being, to frame the development of philosophy. If he is not merely reinstating Platonism, Heidegger must be somehow addressing the institution of truth, an institution of truth that cannot take the form of a subject’s greater awareness of what already is.) We are already close to the end of Heidegger’s essay, and have set aside many exegetical issues to offer something of a provocation concerning Plato’s legacy, as opposed to a summary of what Plato considered himself to be trying to achieve. Heidegger, instead of taking responsibility for a reading of all of Plato, picks out only the moment where the philosophy moves from a “place” inside the cave into the light of the sun outside the cave. (We will compound the sin, moreover, by only quoting one passage of Heidegger, as if it stood alone). The transition from one place to another consists in the becoming correct of the view. Everything depends on the correctness of the view, on the orthotos. Through this correctness the seeing and knowing become a rightness, so that it eventually leads to the highest idea and secures itself in its “orientation toward.” In this

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being-oriented the perception is made adequate to that which should be seen. This is the “appearance” of the thing. The consequence of this adequation of perception as an idein to the idea constitutes a homoiosis, a correspondence of knowledge with the thing itself. From out of the priority of the idea and of the idein over the aletheia a transformation of the essence of truth emerges. Truth becomes orthotos, becomes correctness of perceptions and propositions. In this transformation of the essence of truth a change in the site of truth is also achieved. As unconcealedness it would still be a fundamental trait of the being itself. As correctness of “viewing” however it becomes a human behavior referencing the being.6 Because of this change in the place of truth, the original essence of truth in unconcealedness [aletheia], in the fundamental movement or drawing into relation, as a fundamental trait [Grundzug] of beings themselves, has come to be forgotten.7 The human becomes the place of truth, and becomes such to the extent that the knowing takes a “restricted” form, the form of possibly true statements about what appears, the form directed by the way in which things can take shape ideally within the space of possible appearances and thus be subjected to the rules of identity and non-contradiction that ground logic.8 Heidegger, however, is not offering an “unrestricted” form of accessing truth—since that would just be another orientation of the human subject—but a way of thinking about the movement of truth that isn’t oriented by achieving the correct “view,” in the broad sense of setting into place the right interpretive frame for speaking about what is. Any approach that begins with the subject’s orientation, as the guiding model of correct knowledge, assumes that things are, independently of us, and that the task is to find the best place within the whole from which to see; the temporal horizon, by contrast, says that the time in which things appear depends on how we are drawn into the place of being, depends on how things take on their form over time when a subject is compelled to wait. The truth betrayed by the turn to the ideas is not the eternal (and thus instantaneous) appearance of glory, but a movement from darkness to light and back into darkness, a play of nothingness and presence, that claims us, and thus establishes us within a temporal horizon. As we will follow out below, this means that the subject is not positioned at the place of the present, somehow there in the truth of what is, only waiting to learn how to properly speak about what is. The radical nature of that claim is what we must struggle with, if we are to respond to Heidegger and not just reassert the correctness

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of a particular approach; we must, in other words, recast the entire project of philosophy around a new understanding of being. In the turn to a subject’s comportment, the question of being—and in the terms we will use below with Aristotle and Plotinus, the form of form as such—is lost. Heidegger’s criticisms of form cannot be understood without seeing that they strike at the deepest level of being present to what is. If truth is about the way that a subject is turned, the way that she takes herself to be in relation to what appears, then the form of all forms, or in Heidegger’s terms, the being of all beings, is reduced to the subject’s “having” of that view, or that form. The “multiplicity” of being, as a ground that arises from the specific character of singularity in existence, is lost. We will have to wait for Aristotle to examine the relation between form and being, and emphasize that we are not equating the two, but locating both being (as understood by Plato) and form within the same question about the way a subject takes herself to be the frame for the appearance of individual objects within the world. At this first level, Heidegger might seem to be repeating Nietzsche’s criticism of philosophy from the Genealogy of Morals. If, as Nietzsche argues, will is the imposition of form on the world, then the will to truth is a perversion of that imposition because while it still quietly imposes itself on the world, the will to truth publicly proclaims itself to be subservient to true forms that are ultimately peaceful, or somehow not imposed through violence. Philosophy thus worships an idol: a divine truth that it has projected, then refused to see as its own creation. As powerful as the criticism has turned out to be, it is not Heidegger’s. There is no original activity of the will toward self-affirmation that is then inappropriately redirected toward an affirmation of a mere abstraction. Aletheia is not a code word for God’s creative will, or for the grace of free becoming; nor is Dasein’s abandon to being the passivity of the mystic awaiting enlightenment. The temporal horizon for being, by contrast and following the language of Heidegger’s earlier work, asserts its claim on us in the emerging of a world into unconcealment. We do not face a thing in itself that is then spoken about; we do not “create” the things of the world, nor even constitute their appearances as manifest objects; we exist in the world in a way that allows time to pass and the world to appear as demanding the sustaining of a place. The orientation toward true statements about the world does not, then, misrecognize our true selves by blanching in the face of our own violent imposition of form on matter, as Nietzsche would have it; the orientation to

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“truth” betrays the deformation away from the self that opens us onto what has not yet come to be. There are matched sets of retranslations at stake here, and one can’t simply erase the history of equating intelligence with sight, and with a human capacity to “see the meaning” beyond the immediately present thing. The argument here is that the transformation of the place of the human within the expression of, or on the surface of, what is, even before taken to its fully spatial interpretation with modernity, grounds the language of vision as intelligence or perception. That one might see, instead, intelligence as a type of interiority—a type of movement away from what is publicly visible—is perhaps implied by the Greek word “nous” itself, with its possible connection to darkness and what is hidden. Often translated as perception, or as mind, nous may speak, more fundamentally, to the peculiar kind of inwardness that characterizes human intelligence in its originality, only becoming expression, and thus available to others in a shared world, because of the originality of turning inward. Such would be, temporally, the reticence of singularity, the difficulty that bears a future by ceding space, and not by instantiating events. More on that possible interpretation, below. Logos, by contrast, would stand for the public expression of being, its determination as intelligible and shared; only later, according to Heidegger, will logos be reduced to a possession of humans who assert things about the world.9 In our context, and against Nietzsche’s popular criticism that Plato’s ideals have rendered the world abstract by eliminating the force of human individuality, Heidegger says the deeper problem is that after Plato we took ourselves, as agents of effects, to be the proper frame for our inquiries and we took our presence to the given force of the world (or more precisely the form of that presence) as our only access to what is. With Plato, according to Heidegger, the very place in which one is present is deformed, in the sense of being emptied or flattened, by being the place of a correctness, a place that refuses to recognize the original deformation of being claimed by being’s absencing pull. In Plato, one is directed past the immediately present, but the reality is framed by a visual and conceptual model of the ultimate actuality, or effective force, of completed presence as such. In other words, one is directed “past” the immediately present to the fullness of that same present, to that which any given thing could be in its goodness, were it to be completely what it is. The mystical traditions of complete emptiness in contact with the divine and of complete fullness in an encompassing light both arise

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from this formal conception of being and participation, and we are trying to distance ourselves from that conception. But even for those who set themselves against mysticism, the affirmation of embodied presence as itself the site of fullness, in all its materiality as either scientific fact or lived body, would be equally based in Plato’s metaphysics. Our present task is to set out the breadth of the question about a movement that bears the world beyond the supposedly independent fact that the world is. The place the human takes in the unfolding of the world as a whole occupies Heidegger here and not just the shape the human subject assumes of its own, as if it were endowed with an independent nature or free capacity to name the objects it encounters. If that position within the motion, as a given shape or form of encounter with things in their appearance to humans, is fixed, then the question of the transformative movement of the whole cannot be asked: every affirmation, even the amor fati that affirms the eternal return of the same, would affirm the shape of belonging to an encompassing motion as a subject within, or in some sense as the skin or surface of, that motion. The amor fati, if taken as some do, as asserting a human position outside the motion, affirms the “fact” that only such a motion, as an affirmation of will or surface, can be real (have the force of an effect). If, in contrast, one sees the affirmation as the affirmation of the human belonging to the motion, and refusing any place “outside” of that motion, one commits to a world where there is only that motion and the perverse (but “all too human”) desire to refuse to participate in the only world that is real. In either case, the love of fate is grounded in the preference for fullness as the true meaning of reality. Nietzsche, in Heidegger’s attack, thus remains an inverted Platonist, still concerned with the orientation of human subjects toward the “true” (or the force of what is, as it is, in its “reality,” beyond truth or falsity), and unable to ask about the shape of deformation otherwise than in terms of human valuations (affirmation or negation).10 We ask, then, if Heidegger finds in Aristotle a model of language that does not fall back into a type of human comportment related to truth, or to the force of what is. Aristotle and the Trace of Phenomenology For the next several sections we will be drawing broadly from Heidegger’s work on Aristotle, “On the Essence and Concept of Phusis. Aristotles Physics B, 1” (1939), and not on his earlier attempts to present

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a phenomenological Aristotle. Here, Heidegger seeks to prevent the epistemological question of how we can be certain of our judgments from masking the ontological presuppositions behind the connection of form and truth at the place where language claims us. As we have just discussed, Heidegger does not accept the reading of Plato as having illegitimately posited reified ideas, but sees him as having reduced the movement of thought to the orientation a subject assumes as the proper form from which to speak, or by virtue of which language is grounded; that is, Heidegger objects to the subject of appearance being set up as opposed to the world, and of being capable of truth in the instant of that opposition (of valuing or affirming what is, for example). Aristotle is often read as having already prevented the ideas from being mere abstractions, because of his insistence on the singularity of substance and the importance given to material causes generally, in the account of the things that are. Such a reading makes Aristotle a Platonist who, like Plato, sees the turn toward the good in the idea of a completed or full presence, but who, against the master, insists on the specific materiality of that presence; the account of all the things that exist never achieves a separate status, but the giving of a full account remains the proper task of philosophy. Just as any reading of Heidegger on Plato will fail if it insists on the dichotomy between realism (or materialism) and idealism, and situates Heidegger on one side or another, any reading of Heidegger on Aristotle will fail if it doesn’t begin from the rejection of the subjective (and ultimately, moral) question of what constitutes the best form of comportment for the human who wishes to speak the truth, or account for the things that are. There is a cleft between the two approaches, and if we follow Heidegger, it is irrelevant whether or not Plato or Aristotle provides a better comportment toward truth, and we can legitimately set to the side the careful and nuanced readings of their successes and failures in terms of that project. Even in his early work, Heidegger will insist on a phenomenological and temporal interpretation of presence that prevents an undeformed divine presence in perception—the place where everything finds its proper position within the whole of what is as it really is—from counting as the ultimate truth of the things of the world. That is, neither the subject who knows the world to be dependent on ideal forms, nor the activity that completes itself in actualized forms can capture the way in which time pulls us out of abstractly given form—deforms us in claiming us—and thus gives contour to the appearance of what is. Time passes by keeping us from separating from its

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passage, by pulling us out of our possessed immediacy, and denying us the place from which we can control our orientation, denying us the possibility of speaking “truly” about what has already happened, as if events in time could be spoken of from the perfect (or past) tense, and the position of having had an experience, and thus the “standing outside” of physical presence through memory, were the proper form of orienting oneself toward truth. The passage of time, in various ways that we will now follow, comes to be thematized as a trace, and the difficulty of our hermeneutical task is that we are looking, in texts we have long thought to be familiar, for traces of something completely unfamiliar, something no longer there—no longer there, perhaps, even when the author was writing. At the same time, that which we are looking for must somehow be evident in the singularity of the writing, in the actual words on the page, as a trace of the Presocratics that is found in Aristotle, for example, and somehow separates Aristotle from Plato. Heidegger will find, in Aristotle’s treatment of movement in the Physics, a trace of an originary transformative movement of the whole that bears its intelligence otherwise than as perception, or as the instant of presence in the orientation of a subject toward the clarity and independent meaningfulness of what is at any particular time. Phusis, commonly translated as “nature,” would become the place of a certain exteriority or deformative movement, and would not be a static “fact” within which we live. We would not be speaking of a “naive realism” where the human merely watches what actually happens and either strives to speak correctly about that world of things or abandons all pretense to rational discourse. Rather than speaking of the possible ways of organizing or perceiving the organization of objects within the world, Heidegger situates the movement of appearance within the possibilities appropriate to the emergence into form of singular beings as a claim and not a fact.11 The motion of being characterizes the selfarticulation of the world at that place where the human assumes the weight of words, or of logos more generally, as an unfinished task, as something public whose singularity cannot be completed in a public assertion.12 To follow Heidegger at all in this direction, one must accept the sense in which logos and the verb legein from which it is derived do not indicate merely giving an account or reason, but speak from a motion that grounds our ways of speaking about the world—only then can we see how Aristotle’s renewal of legein, as the way in which we are claimed by the movement of being, leads to the real understanding of the being of beings.13 Thus, and as an explicit move against the modern subject’s position “within” the world, the

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movement constantly transforms the whole to which it belongs by allowing the intelligence of words to claim us, to give us responsibility for the being of particular beings, as responsible for bearing the meaningfulness of the world from out of this singularity. This is where the sun depends on us, and where the shape of singularity frames the meaning of the whole, instead of having the meaning derived from the structure of participation. In this self-articulation of a task, a different view comes into place, a view that comes from that which is in the process of emerging and vanishing. “The phusis,” the “nature” that like a tree determines its own form instead of being determined from outside like a bed that has been built by somebody, “is a going as gone out toward going and thus is completely a going-backinto-itself, to itself, that remains a going.”14 I’m here translating the German [gehen and its relations] with its closest English cognate, but one is tempted to translate the German word with “process” or “movement.” Heidegger is interpreting the definition of phusis that is given in the first two books of Aristotle’s Physics and is not far from a very literal translation of Aristotle at 193b17, at least if one were to allow “going” as a synonym for “growing” in the broad sense that is carried by phuein, the root from which phusis is derived. (The Greek text is in the following endnote.) We are standing close to the end of Heidegger’s article and he quotes 193b18 as “the decisive sentence, which steers the essential account” and which runs, in my unexceptional English translation of Heidegger’s German: “It is then, the framing in the appearance that is phusis” (“Die also dann, die Gestellung in das Aussehen, ist phusis”). The average English rendering of the Greek, without taking Heidegger into account, keeps morphe as “shape,” instead of “framing in the appearance,” so that the clause Heidegger struggles with runs, quite simply: “thus, shape is nature.”15 English readers of Heidegger find it all but impossible to map these terms back onto the Aristotle they’ve learned in the most common secondary sources, and most ancient scholars in German, French and English have been dismissive of Heidegger’s concerns. My present task is to make those concerns resonate with the broader project of understanding a temporal horizon for being and the ways in which Heidegger thinks that horizon was staged, and betrayed, in Aristotle. That said, Heidegger is actually translating Aristotle’s Greek more literally than the “unexceptional” translations we are used to, and he has made a case for his transformations of key words mostly in terms of internal evidence from the text. To consider Heidegger’s approach valid, unfortunately, would depend on the premise that language is transformative

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and is transformed around singular and forceful deployments of words; it depends on the premise that Aristotle may have said something “singular”— both contoured from the past and unexpected in the present—beyond what “one says” in Greek, or (perhaps) even what Aristotle believed himself to be saying. The words of the language sustain “meaning,” sustain a form of being, beyond what is “produced” by making a claim about what the word means. The returning into itself of form, the coming to rest that is—at its limit—the privation or steresis that defines rest as the limit of all motion, is thought at the place of the priority of form, but such that it never thinks of that place of rest as the completed absence of motion. In a claim about the world, the rest is achieved in the human subject, or her language; in a claim the world makes on us, the process of privation itself leads us forward, into an ever new language, sustaining the novelty of emerging and vanishing in becoming. We are not speaking about how Aristotle understood motion. If one insists on the premise that Aristotle is a theoretician of motion—of how to properly describe the phenomena associated with translating motion in space—then Heidegger’s approach is nonsensical. Heidegger is even forced to admit that, to large extent, Aristotle is strictly concerned with providing definitions of motion in space. Aristotle, in large part because of his inattention to the difficulty of language, beyond definition and categorization, has already betrayed phusis—which is why the later Heidegger turns increasingly to the Presocratics. What Heidegger wants to show us in Aristotle, though, is the “trace” of an early idea of how phenomena appear that precedes and frames all particular appearances within space. A thought that, because it withdraws from our grasp, gives contour to the history of responding to Aristotle without being present in Aristotle. It’s not a mystic claim about the original force of God’s creative gesture, or even a claim about the pure form of experience before interpretation, but (stated in its most humble form) a phenomenological insistence on the legitimacy of the question of how things come into appearance. (This is the continuity with the earlier project of providing a phenomenological reading of Aristotle, although further accentuated toward how the movement of access to the phenomena themselves arises as movement). The trace, as we will see below, and in several ways, is meant to show how we relate to the past as itself always having16 an incomplete future, as always having been oriented by an “imperfect” or “incomplete” future—so that we can speak of a human priority over the sun, and still make sense

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of saying that there were historical events in the past at which I was not present. Only in the trace, in other words, do we see how history can be understood without reinstituting a metaphysics of time’s unfolding through determination. Only thus can Bataille’s question about the sun be made philosophically independent of an irresponsible Romanticism. The trace gives a contour to time, against the specious present as a blank frame within which things happen; postmodern thinking about memory has rediscovered this problem, but too quickly associates the trace with a movement toward the absolutely exterior, so that the redemption of the present in memory replaces the specious present as the form of truth, but does not understand the contour or difficulty of sustaining the trace. Understanding how that trace follows a turning movement, without claiming to have accomplished a return into itself, like the Plotinian monad that flees into its own recesses and achieves eternity in the last line of the Enneads, will be the key to our own work, but more on that, below. Heidegger’s early readings of Aristotle were intent on showing Aristotle’s own proto-phenomenological inclinations; we have little evidence of how to link those early ruminations with the later work on phusis, which we are examining now, but we assume that just as Heidegger’s “turn from phenomenology to thought” doesn’t abandon phenomenology, the contour of his reading of Aristotle would remain committed to something of the phenomenological approach. Leaving the early work to the side, and in very general terms, the idea that nature is framed by appearance is phenomenological, and Heidegger is here making the claim that the many places where Aristotle links morphe and eidos (shape and form) are clues to understanding the priority of temporality in nature’s growth toward itself. Aristotle’s own text, as it approaches the naming of phusis, turns on the difference between artifice and nature, and the ways in which they produce new forms. A bed does not make itself, or even another bed, but a human makes a human (with the help of the sun, Aristotle adds rather cryptically, later). If a bed sprouts, after all, it will begin to grow a tree and not a new bed. In Aristotle’s text, this example is meant to show that both matter (wood) and form (humanity) must be taken as causes, although he leaves it to first philosophy (what we now call “metaphysics”; natural science is “second”) to decide if there is a final unity of all causes. Heidegger sees this demotion of phusis below metaphysics as Aristotle’s betrayal of the original philosophical impulse of the Greeks and he will construct his interpretation against such unities. In that sense, Heidegger is closer to the empiricists

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in their insistence on nature than to the idealists with their turn to the powers of a subject to unify appearances (more, below); such taxonomical or political distinctions, though, are distracting rather than helpful at this point in our investigations. There is a long history of Christian interpretations of Aristotle that make all natural objects into God’s handiwork, but Heidegger does not belong to this tradition and respects, indeed insists on, the distinction between artifice and nature. What Heidegger will do, though, is say that the sense of shape in Aristotle remains tied to an orientation toward presence to the extent that the fullness of presence—the entelechia which refers, literally, to something having an end in itself and which is often translated as actuality or perfection—completes the framing of what is as completely in itself, or as completely the shape that it is. If that framing can be given a temporal horizon, other than the presence of the full or complete shape, then Aristotle, in spite of his orientation toward “correctness,” can be of use to Heidegger’s larger project. Heidegger tries to accomplish this, with some caveats, by taking morphe to be a measure of motion, at the place where the individual is subjected to the claim of language, as opposed to instantiating the shape of a completed apprehension, or fullness of being in the instant of intelligent and intelligible self-presence, somehow outside of time. I have tried to call this shaping movement a “contour,” as opposed to the static shape assigned to a thing that moves within a given frame. (The force of the argument, in terms of a history of the reception of Aristotle’s ideas, is that the entelechia of knowing what a thing is, according to its presentation in appearance as having achieved a shape, is supposed, either implicitly or explicitly, to ground all the particular appearings—nous, in other words, is supposed to frame all particular moments of givenness by providing the place within which all particular productions are to be understood, the place where the movement of the world is received, is given shape according to its oneness as having been what it is. That most readings of Aristotle have naturalized that frame, and thus don’t even see that Aristotle was making an argument in terms of appearance, understood in the broadly phenomenological sense of morphe, makes Heidegger’s historical claims more difficult to see. That Heidegger, yet further, attempts to retrieve Aristotle from that reading, and give him a more subtle understanding of the process of appearance further complicates the task. That he, in the end, will still distance himself from Aristotle’s reading, requires some mental gymnastics, but is essential to understanding the task at hand. Let this

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excursus stand in parentheses, by the way, as an excuse for its blunt use of schema when nuance is called for at every step.) The essential movement of phusis, the growing according to an arche (an “internal principle” or perhaps better, a “leading,” as opposed to an aitia or “cause”), is a type of emergence that, in Heidegger’s translation, remains emergence even as it is steered through and toward its shape as a growing. Emergence is a temporal movement of essence within phusis and, in Aristotle, it lets the movement of morphe (shape or form as framed by appearance) take priority over hule (matter). This priority cannot be seen as the encircling of a mere formless stuff by a category, nor the imposition of form on matter through the volition of a knowing subject—rather, the movement of presence and absence stamps the place of our presence as a place of becoming, as a place to which we belong and by which we are claimed, within the movement of phusis. Because we are claimed by nature as temporally bound individuals, we must think of form and matter in terms of presence and absence. As framed by epistemology, we could say that Aristotle places the moment of knowledge in terms of a combination of matter and form that is individualized and directed by a final form, but to do such places us outside of the world, in a place where language can be used as a tool, without deformative consequences. The epistemological turn masks our responsibility for the achievement of shape. In terms of Heidegger’s phenomenological reading, we have here the question of what it means for human presence to be the place where form gains its force as a language bears the world—a question that Aristotle still lives within, because he sees the way that shape is formed at the place of appearance, but that he obscures because he replaces the original Presocratic sense of phusis with the orientation of the individual toward the achievement of a completed form. My larger claim is not that current readings of Aristotle don’t separate epistemological from metaphysical questions, but that they have drawn the lines in accord with a modern assumption about how the human is situated within the flow of time. That a language lays a claim on us crosses the lines between epistemology and metaphysics and does such by not opposing the subject to a world about which she speaks.17 Does this idea of movement, though, capture the whole force of turning to the temporal horizon of being that Heidegger sought, at least as the openness of a future beyond mechanistic translation of objects within space? Or, does it, too, rely on an idea of fullness that, in the end, reinstates a spatial horizon of presence?

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Encompassing flow or receding deformation In comparison to Heidegger’s reading, Pierre Aubenque’s classic work, The Problem of Being in Aristotle, will briefly underline the difference in conceptions of motion (or the motion of conceiving).18 We have already spoken at some length about the types of demands that frame Heidegger’s approach, and one may well be disappointed that—at least as a reading of Aristotle—everything turns on just a few words, supposedly indicating traces of a yet more absent and pervasive difficulty. The task of the commentator is yet more tenuous, as I look at only a few words of Heidegger’s, and at the difficulties they set out, as opposed to finding a powerful insight that grounds the whole of his thought in the movement (or simple potency) of intellectual clarity. For Aubenque, the passage in Aristotle’s Physics that would subsume genesis and kinesis as types of metabole (which is central to Heidegger’s account) is simply incoherent with the rest of Aristotle’s discourse since the terms are roughly synonymous in Greek and motion or movement, understood in a broad enough sense, can stand for each and all of these particular concepts.19 Most translations follow the same reasoning here, if they don’t simply exclude all deformation, and make Heidegger’s claims about the priority of transformative motion impossible to situate in the text. Heidegger, by the way, also uses the terms almost interchangeably as synonyms, but takes the deformative movement (Umschlag) of metabole as the leading and unifying meaning. Aubenque, like most interpreters in this respect, takes change in spatial position to be the leading meaning, and consequently the confrontation between a temporal and a spatial interpretation of Aristotle is encountered in the competing translations of these three words at very specific places in the text. The task Aubenque wishes to examine, instead of accentuating the distinction in the various uses of motion, is cast in terms of the infinite desire for knowledge, and for learning to speak of that which never lets itself be grasped in its unity. Movement, which is the central term of Aubenque’s analysis, is not the movement toward the proper potency of each thing, but is movement within the world as a permanently incomplete whole, incomplete in the sense that our language would always fall short of what is to be said. The articulation, even of what is “proper,” not just of the thing as determined, is “to come.”20 Such phrases are reminiscent of Heidegger himself, and have long been popular in continental circles, but a different place is given to the individual within each movement. For Aubenque, there remains a continuity between Plato and Aristotle around the power of words.

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The form (eidos) of each thing would correspond to what could possibly be said, to its potency as amenable to words, and Plato’s particular emphasis on the priority of this form would foreclose the proper and aporetic approach toward the true definition, as it arises in Aristotle, where the infinitely complicated specificity of the material is susceptible to being spoken about, but guides the connected forms of coherent and meaningful categories of discourse.21 It’s worth noting that Aubenque’s account, in addition to being another exemplary text from the approaches set out in the sixties, is of more value to us in the present context than the many more common accounts of Aristotle in English as simply providing the logic through which properties can be predicated to a substance. Aubenque, by thematizing the structure of aporia, makes the relation of specificity to substance more dynamic, more dependent on the activity of the individual, and thus more responsive to contemporary philosophical issues in the phenomenological tradition. Aubenque’s articulation of this aporia in Aristotle subsumes the movement of thought under the movement of the world, as one strives to account for that which is always beyond our conceptual grasp. Plato’s “intellectualism” would thus be avoided without eliminating the form of meaningfulness in our experience of the world. The infinitely aporetic structure of learning to speak of that which is, in the movement of its specificity, leads Aubenque to his conclusions concerning the relative positions of ontology and the human that speaks. Here Aubenque could be writing today, at least in continental circles, as he articulates the in Aristotle the weakness of ontology and the constitutive aporia of finitude: There isn’t really such a thing as ontology. The failure of ontology doesn’t appear on one level, but on two: on one side, there isn’t a unified logos [reason; word] about the on [being]; on the other, since being as being is not a genre, there isn’t even an on which is unified. If we may repeat for ontology what was said above concerning theology, that is, that it is exhausted, but at the same time realized, in the demonstration of its own impossibility, and that thus the negation of ontology is confounded with the institution of a negative ontology, we should add here that this ontology is doubly negative: negative, first, in its expression, but also in its object. The negativity of ontology does not translate only the impotence of human discourse, but the very negativity of its object. The consequence is that here these two negativities, far from combining to do nothing but make ontology into the shadow of a shadow, result, on the contrary, in

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compensating for each other: the perplexity of human discourse about being becomes the most loyal expression of the contingence of being. Being is no longer this inaccessible object which would be beyond our discourse; but it reveals itself in the groping movements that we execute trying to reach it; being, at least that being of which we are speaking, is nothing but the correlate of our perplexity. The failure of ontology becomes the ontology of contingence, that is of finitude and of failure.22 [My inclusions in brackets].

By some measures, the differences are slight—both he and Heidegger share, we should stress, the desire to make Aristotle relevant to the contemporary call for a philosophy that would be resolutely grounded in the finite. The visual relation to ideal forms is not taken to be the final measure of truth for either interpretation. Being is not hypostasized; the origin of movement is not separated from the movement of the world itself. The infinity of Aristotle’s being—always existing, always changing, and never created—is not reduced to a large container of all non-contradictory possibilities within which the “furniture of the world” is readily accessible and such that our only philosophical questions have to do with naming those collections of things accurately, or perhaps learning techniques for rearranging them in space. However, with Aubenque, as with Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of being, above, at least one aspect of Heidegger’s concern is not addressed. Instead of an original negativity, or a nothingness that nothings, we remain within the positive flow of being, of there always being more complexity to unfold, as we try to account for the many ways in which we experience the specificities, the perplexities, of the confusing or overwhelming givenness of the partial views of the whole.23 Nothingness is overcome in our groping movement toward the absent light. It is assumed that we, as humans, will never stop wondering, never stop inquiring, or discovering, and that this wonder itself gives shape to the world. That this presupposition actually blocks any understanding of the temporal horizon of being constitutes the difficulty and importance of Heidegger’s approach: he must show how that temporal horizon is not just the ever-expanding givenness of more being, of more to be shown. For Aubenque, we are called to live within the groping movement of human knowledge, moving as that desire, never completed of itself, that imitates the wondrous completion of the divine.24 Our desire for knowledge,

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which is part of the very structure of the soul’s nature (phusis), shows itself in the demand to keep moving toward the names that will never quite be given as completed in relation to the whole, although they will have their particular instantiation in a given shape. The desire is said always to be reborn in the perplexity that our failures to name the world leave us in, because of the world’s own constant transformations beyond our present capacity to conceptualize. Yet this means that the position of intelligence, in particular, will always remain subordinate to the shape of there being more motion, always more to be thought and said. And the demand, the ways in which we will be claimed by the desire to know, will always come to bear on us in the shape of contingent and partial views of that whole. In that case, and just as in our knowledge of the divine, our perplexities will carry us toward knowledge, and the structure of our own desire to know, as human, will provide the framing structure for finite and contingent being. Unfortunately, for Aubenque the shape of that desire, and therefore of the being that attaches to the finite, will not come into question. As with Heidegger’s account of Plato, the dominant form of the desire to know will remain one of situating the present in relation to its possibly correct articulation (and thus, in spite of any emphasis on aporia or praxis, remains technological). The demand to assume that shape of correctness, given in perplexity and the groping attempt to respond, supposedly would always be appropriately fulfilled by the attempt to speak, or to clarify the obscure, even though one knows that no clarity will achieve the perfection of accounting for all the specificity. Thus, the orientation instituted in Plato’s allegory of the cave remains the proper orientation of humanity, its proper shape as frame for what appears as such. In other words, the aporia itself is governed by the resistance and generosity of matter—of the shape of there always being more, and even of there always being more space, to be thought. (The connection to thought is essential: only thus can the wonder situated in the human be associated with the wondrous overflowing of the world.) In Heidegger, neither the resistance nor the generosity of the matter would institute the shape of the world’s emerging into its clarity and articulation; rather, the demand of that which lies at stake, the demand to move toward what can yet come into being, but is not present, would trace a contour within which the orientation toward the wondrous, like the orientation toward the descriptive fact, could be situated as a historical series of attempts to speak of nature. Each attempt, however, would begin by betraying the movement of nature because it falsifies the sense of the

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demand, not because it uses static snapshots to picture an underlying, and somehow more “true,” process. The most important result of the insistence on sustaining the demand is that the resolute comportment toward truth cannot begin by assuming that possibility (or potency) is infinite and infinitely productive. We are not always called upon to speak, articulate, or communicate clarity—as much contemporary art has discovered, the task is sometimes to communicate the force and the impotence of a silence. Heidegger attempts to give a new sense to the singularity of possibility, as it emerges already in Aristotle, although he will later in the essay push through Aristotle to a more profound understanding of the priority of possibility. The example of choice is a carpenter who makes a table, and we are drawing out what makes this reading different from one that depends on the form of opposition or givenness: However A[ristotle] does not mean the “movement” which the carpenter achieves as the result of the hand’s grasping, but rather with the emergence of the table he thinks even the movement of this emerging itself and as such. Kinesis is metabole, the transformation of something into something there present; the transforming of this itself in unity with that which transforms brings into form, that is, shines forth. The wood subjugated to the workshop is transformed into a table. What character of being does this transformation have? What transforms is the wood laying before us, not whatever wood as such, but this as appropriated. “Appropriated” already implies, however: tailored to the appearance of a table, to that then, wherein the emergence of the table, the movement, comes to its end. The transformation of the appropriated wood into a table consists in the potencies of the appropriated possibilities coming more fully to the fore and in the appearance as table the potency is complete and thus in the fore; that is, in the unconcealing production of the table, it emerges into its situation. In the repose of this situation (of the having-come-to-situation) the potency (dunamis) coming to the fore as appropriating (dunamei) is gathered and “has” (exei) itself as in its end (telos).25 More generally, what the language of coming into potency, appropriating (Eignung) and possibility does, on Heidegger’s part, is keep the position of the experiencing subject from being determinate without pretending

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to eliminate, through an appeal to a species of independent realism, the human’s responsibility in—or rather, toward—the space of becoming. The emergence of the table into its appearance as real, as possessing the force of being what is, happens at the place of appropriation, of reaching its end as the single thing that it is; the human does not choose the shape, nor cause it to come into existence. This does not yet differ from Aubenque’s account, however, if Heidegger gives transformation primacy within being. But Heidegger is emphatically not presupposing that givenness. Instead, as becomes clear in the further understanding of form, the demands of transformation make the structure of motion take the shape of a potency beyond what is, and not of a ceaselessly productive motion within what is given. The potency is not within the motion of form itself; the deformation is toward form, not already within it. This, I take it, is the deep connection between steresis, as the absencing of movement, and the coming to rest of thought in its own ground. The possible moves through the demand it places on thought, or form, as the demand to move toward thought as continuing in its emerging as absencing, as moving away from presence.26 We are no longer, consequently, asking about the different regimes of objectifying discourse—comparing paradigms or frames to each other— but asking about the character of the force that institutes frames, and finding that precisely where we expected the presence of force, as such, there is only absence. Here one finds the importance of characterizing nature (phusis) as absencing: we are not produced by, nor simply within, our nature, since that would make a conceptual or ideal entity out of nature. Only in situating the subject in the place of being claimed by phusis, and therefore of being claimed by the demand to subjugate the individual position to the motion of phusis itself, can the motion of being as it passes into its various forms be maintained as a motion, instead of as the implementation of a concept or the mystical production of more being. This displacing represents the complicity of a more basic motion with the nothing, or with steresis; it is a complicity in the claim of being, and not the movement of productive being within which we are supposedly claimed. The withdrawal of being, that which hides in phusis, is not the infinite complexity of material specificity that would remain constantly beyond the reach of the words, but the form that the specific intelligibility bears as a motion away from our own presence. It is the difficulty of the demand to live thoughtfully.

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In order to prevent being from taking the role of simply generative ground (as Lévinas, for example, has charged against him),27 the question for Heidegger is sharply phrased in terms of the nothing: that which represents our movement in the world is not the power that compels us blindly into ever more situations, all repeating, in their general form as parts of a whole, all the situations from before. The form of specificity, against substance metaphysics, would not be shared by every specific thing just as our movement through form, in presence, is not a single instantiation from out of the realm of all possible movement as such. Rather, this movement of form takes, on one hand, the shape of genesis in phusis—of the emerging into presence of that motion of the world that is not a product of our activity—and on the other hand it takes on the “form” of being deformed. In Heidegger’s language, morphe, as the essence and origin of phusis, is that moment when the becoming turns toward its own possibilities, when it becomes what it is, as nature, as capable of its own displacement (in this case, as kinesis). And in the second moment, the origin of phusis is in morphe, which means that it is always on the way to itself, as a motion of form, such that being placed into its essential movement precedes being set into any particular shape of representation, or being made into an object. The unity of phusis is then to be thought in the intwinement of morphe, phusis and arche: The morphe is the essence of phusis as arche, and the arche is the essence of phusis as morphe, insofar as it finds its own singular character in that the eidos [form or appearance as appropriated] comes out of itself and as such to presence [Anwesung] and does not, as in techne [technique], first require an additional poiesis [production], so that an otherwise available thing, e.g., wood, may be produced in the image of a “table,” which means that the produced thing is never on its way from out of itself so that it can be on its way to being a table. Phusis, on the contrary, comes from out of itself and toward itself for the presencing of the absence itself. As such absence remains a going back into itself, which going [Gehen], however, is only the path [Gang] of a going.28 One should see here the reworking of the translation of Aristotle’s “decisive” sentence, which we translated from Heidegger’s German, above, as: “It is then, the framing in the appearance that is phusis,” but which is familiar in English translations as “shape is nature.” Now the nothing of steresis characterizes the movement of framing, and not the fullness of

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presence or the determination in activity. Our involvement in the world, as a movement toward the possible as it becomes form, as it becomes something that can be thought, would then take the shape of a silent call from that which is nothing—both in the sense of not being a thing, since it is in motion, and in the sense of being the nothing, like steresis, toward which movement, as the movement of thought, or form, is pulled. Heidegger wishes to situate this movement by refusing the last step of the traditional model of participation, the move to a metaphysics of substance, where the nothing as such, in a purely formal shape, would characterize the possibilities of form and thus of movement within possibility (within the realm of all possible things that can be said or experienced). In his critiques of technology, Heidegger makes it clear that the formal opposition of the subject to the world—where the world becomes a mere resource for possible use, tailored to whatever plans we have and framed by our presence— represents the culmination of this logic of opposition because possibility is thus equated with what can be thought (either in God’s mind or our own) as opposed to, and separated from, the actual.29 Instead, the possibility intent on a different involvement in the process never achieves, and is not oriented by trying to achieve, the form of separation or of fullness in its concept—instead, it is always on the way to the form of thought enjoined by the becoming of the singular form, always enjoined by the motion of form toward that which is not a thing among others, toward that which does not move forward, but rather, slips away. Readers of Heidegger’s later work will immediately ask about the relation of Aristotle to the frame (Gestell) that is denounced so forcefully in his various critiques of technology. The temptation will be to say that either Heidegger is rejecting the Aristotelian approach of his early work or differentiating two types of frame, one of which is more “properly” human, and less technological. Instead of positing a disjointed development in Heidegger’s thought, the problem is to see, in the combination of these two approaches, that Aristotle is always being marshaled against himself at the place where the frame is instituted as the forward movement of actuality. The activity of framing—of the self-articulation of divine reality at the place of presence that Hegel gives us—misses the claim of being that results in the “frame” of appropriated appearance being enacted in a specific place. The claim is not an articulated proposition among others in the world, but the form of passage, as what is emerges into presence by virtue of the deformation in the frame of appearance.

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... a first tracing Remarkably, at the end of the article on Aristotle we have been following, Heidegger speaks of the deformative motion as a trace (Spur) of the originary thinking of phusis in our tradition—a thinking that precedes Aristotle and whose force is only barely distinguishable in Aristotle’s work. Several pages before, the trace as a palpable remnant of what is not there (like the absent heat we feel, according to Aristotle, when we touch something), explains how steresis understood as deprivation connects to the priority of morphe and phusis over substance (ousia).30 Only because steresis is felt as the absence of heat can we give form to the thought that it has become cold outside. Here the trace of an absence is felt in the text, and not in the weather. Aristotle himself, it would seem from Heidegger’s closing remarks, stood in a place where ousia (substance, essence or being) was accessible to becoming separated from the movement of phusis, and thus of being turned toward substance metaphysics as a doctrine of fullness, but where that separation had not yet happened. (This is what it means for the destiny of being to not yet have been determined.) In Heidegger’s own closing remarks, the emphasis is on the sense in which phusis, as still visible in Aristotle’s use of the word, emerges into presence and how even Aristotle has obscured this meaning by attributing it only to one realm of being, and even to a realm that is dependent on more profound research into “first philosophy” for its truths. In that sense, and following a clue from Heidegger, we are not pursuing a better metaphysics, but setting out the essential difficulty of making aesthetics, or intelligible contact with the world, into the ground of philosophy. “Trace,” as a word for steresis as it has passed from presence, turns on itself here as object. We are looking, within the thinking of phusis as emerging, for the trace of steresis in its originality. One could, against the tradition and perhaps even against Aristotle’s own intention, follow this trace of an original thinking about phusis backwards against the metaphysics of presence. One must learn, Heidegger concludes, that Heraclitus’ phrase, “phusis loves to hide,” does not call for strenuous efforts to disclose being or nature and to thus live in a pure light, but rather for allowing the motion of being to continue in its own passage as phusis, as that deformative displacement toward truth that claims our thought without even allowing us the security of a position from which to respond.31 Such is the difficulty of aesthetics, of what a forgetful tradition has long called simplicity, or participation in being.

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The key to the argument with Aubenque would rest on what the word phusis carried with it. If we live in a constant presence to phusis—as either intelligible or not—then Aubenque’s picture of our striving always operating within the perplexing whole would correctly situate Aristotle as a theoretician of motion without reifying substance beyond the process of form moving through presence. Further, the structure of that motion itself would always be available, always visible, within the event of each of our encounters with the world; the things of the world would always recede from our grasp, showing every attempt to have been inadequate. The trace of the whole would be present, as a mark of the aporia and thus of the generosity of being. For Heidegger in contrast, that phusis itself, that way and shape of being claimed by the movement of intelligence or form, is always to be moved toward, always claiming us by withdrawing from our grasp in advance, not being found inadequate after we have grasped it. We are structured, therefore, by the absence of something within our experience—by the ways in which that absence claims us—and not by the fact that we are, for some unknowable reason, never satisfied with what we have. We cannot see this trace as one could see the structure of the whole in every part, because the trace does not participate in that logic of part and whole: only traces of a now absent demand can be found. But if the claim Heidegger speaks of does not itself constitute part of the transcendent nature or true being of the species, is not part of the necessary structure of thought as such, then the claim must have been instituted at some point in history, and instituted in a particular way. And further, the structure or the traces of that institution of structure must itself still make a claim on us, even if we cannot locate it within our presence. There must, in other words, be a trace of the institution and continuing presence of that claim and that promise. For this reason, Heidegger does not turn to just any text, but only to the texts of our tradition—to the foundational texts, the ones that reach toward the places where these demands are instituted and articulated. To live in search of the nature of things is the destiny of those who follow the Greeks, and such a destiny cannot be justified outside of its own instituting gestures, only traces of which are still visible to us today. Moreover, there is no necessary continuity to belonging to this tradition; we may fail its promise. And we fail its promise, in exemplary fashion, by confusing the determination of phusis in Aristotle’s text with the steresis of phusis that institutes a demand on our thought as we wrestle with Aristotle’s text. The question of steresis, then, as the movement that claims our singularity, and

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“grounds” singularity as a movement, not as a part within a whole, would allow us to break with Platonism far more completely than a mere refutation of the duality of sensible and intelligible worlds. Before moving to Plotinus, and to the ways in which Plotinus may serve to contest Heidegger, the sense in which Heidegger’s understanding of movement challenges traditional metaphysics must be underlined. This sub-section has been intended to show that Heidegger is not merely saying that one or another type of movement has been forgotten. Rather, the movement of steresis, of passage as form, toward form, places the human in the site of the demand of language, as charged with bearing this motion. This demand, very likely, is not explicated as such in Aristotle’s own writing, and yet the presence of this demand would be palpable as the trace of the “original” Greek thinking that still cast its weight into the configurations of Aristotle’s thinking—most particularly in this case in the figure of phusis. The point, then, is that the motion is not infinite, and cannot be infinitely trusted, because we may fail the demand—because we cannot merely trust that there will be more given to thinking, that more situations will arise, in ever new configurations. We cannot trust that, by nature, the clarity we live in must, in some way, belong to a greater whole or encompassing clarity. We should not trust clarity, secure in our position within the natural light, but should strive to bear responsibility for the trust and movement toward the difficult and its fragile light. Bearing the weight of that trust, and thus of moving into the new, into a form of intelligence that we can come to trust, would be the piety of thinking in a time when the gods have fled—and such a piety, somehow, would rest in an attentiveness to the traces of an originary saying. Without dwelling on the choice of words, the problem indicated here points to a strategy within Heidegger’s writing that is often believed to be of dubious value and runs contrary to all “good practice” in the current academic climate—all of Greek thought, it seems, would be subsumed through Heidegger’s caprice in the course of a single paragraph through the evocation of the “trace” of an “originary” thought. The rules of offering a reading of the text are discarded in favor of large gestures that claim to reframe our various approaches to philosophical questioning; once originality, the argument goes, can no longer be associated with conscious intention, then the philosophical technique of looking for an author’s intentions is no longer compelling. Consequently, most postmodern thinkers refuse to countenance any privileged form of originality for any particular text.

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Heidegger dismisses the hermeneutic priority of intention and still insists on originality. Worse, Heidegger not only insists on the privilege of the Greek philosophical gesture, this more originary thought behind the intention of every particular Greek writer is apparently supposed to explain away the points where Aristotle’s own text disagrees with Heidegger’s interpretation as well as to dismiss less insightful (or less “originary”) secondary sources. Heidegger’s paradoxical claim is that we can yet find the resources for breaking out of our conceptual stagnation—a stagnation characterized by the belief that we face problems by manipulating the resources available to us—by turning to the tradition as it places demands on us, and not as if it were a resource given to us, to treat as being at our disposal. We do not gain our freedom, or a less restricted view of the whole, but bind ourselves to a trace of a promise, of an inwardness or singularity to come. This is thus not the dual strategy Derrida invokes (and invokes against Heidegger), where one both belongs to and breaks out from the tradition, but the turn back toward the potencies and weaknesses of that tradition, the turn inward to the demands sustained within the tradition.32 The effort to reinterpret our general stance toward texts, already acutely at issue for Heidegger, gains a different impetus from turning specifically to the very idea of a trace—of something that, in some way, is not clearly present, nor even to be demonstrated. The strategy of displacement, then, takes itself as a task in the question of the trace: can there be an originary displacement, arising from no other ground than itself, traces of which are still to be found? An originary displacement that enjoins the subjugation of the subject to the becoming of the world yet which makes the human, as bearer of language, necessary to the movement of displacement itself? Can there be a word—a word of pure absence or of silence—to which these traces refer, traces of the very motion of tracing? A sun whose absence calls us to bear the weight of all becoming, beyond the force of any present light? The formal force of presence As a first, if finally insufficient, response to our question, we turn to Plotinus (CE 204/5–270), the founder of Neoplatonism and intellectual forebear, most influentially of Augustinian doctrines concerning God’s creative activity and the idea that the emanation of the one is the constant overflowing of being. The “trace” is not a technical term for Plotinus, but his use of the word is cited by both Lévinas and Derrida in brief and

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evocative references from the early 1960’s in their attempts to respond to, or go beyond, Heidegger. We will begin with a brief analysis of how Plotinus culminates and reworks the Platonic idea that presence (or ideas as the ground of the look of things) has a formal reality that has precedence over what non-philosophers want to call the real world. I have referred to this as the formal force of presence because the moment of determination carries creative power throughout the many articulations of the metaphysics of presence; the term is especially apt for Plotinus’ Enneads. We should remember (as with Ayer) that this priority of form could be easily located in the immediate structure of being, such that the metaphysical issues are obscured, and the formal force is reduced to the form of things being present, in the broad sense of being accessible to predications. More colloquially: in that technological view, things are what they are, when they are one thing and not another; philosophical investigations are properly concerned with how to talk about such given things, not about how such things emerge into being at all. The form of form, in those terms, is the way in which a thing is given as being, in the broadest possible sense, and including both a physical presence and being merely the object of a proposition. Even in more recent approaches to empiricism and realism, with an emphasis on the variety of ways of speaking, or the plurality of frames for speaking, there remains a sense that a single event of determination constitutes the unit of analysis from which the whole of the world will be built up. The form of all forms, in other words, remains the form of speaking about what one encounters as given, in the broadest possible sense—for example, as “being the case.” Such an idea of unity may have already constituted the idea of form in Plato and Aristotle, although we have discussed some possible caveats, above, but the philosophical positions I am now approaching all take for granted, following Heidegger, that this still prevailing idea of oneness is unacceptable. If you will not follow them in rejecting the obvious idea of unity, at the place of a determination within form, you will not follow them along any of the paths they outline for moving beyond the metaphysics of presence—they are all, in the end, ways of trying to elaborate new approaches to the form of all forms, such that this unity is not presupposed. For example, Derrida’s responses to the tradition, and to Heidegger most generally, are often couched in terms of a “necessary violence” in the movement of presence that is belied by attempts to separate a good force (one that gives true forms) and a bad, or violent, force (that creates

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deformities). Derrida does not break with the tradition of metaphysics, and in fact claims that it is impossible to do so, but rather wishes to find within metaphysics the resources for escaping the stultifying sameness of that systematic philosophy that imposes a conceptual form upon the more fundamental movements of determination and destruction called différance. The force of giving form is located at the place of presence for the broad Platonic tradition (and here including Aristotle, even as read by Heidegger in terms of phusis), and the task is to find something within that act of presence that prevents the systematic assignment of names to objects, the conceptual form of being given as a determinate oneness, from eliminating all other forms of thought. Derrida, in this context, does not want to say that there are other forms, but that something about the movement of form includes an originary deformation, a movement that opens up a space for novelty beyond our previous conceptions, and yet is still destined for us in determinate experience. In the future tense, he speaks of a monstrosity to come; in the present tense, he speaks, following clues from Heidegger and Lévinas that we will try to tease out, below, of the trace of something that has never been present. The trace, which Lévinas and Derrida explicitly relate back to Plotinus, is the present mark of the fact that the movement has gone from shapeless to shaped—and that we no longer see the shapeless, but rather live inside of the frame of presence as having a given form—the form of being accessible to names, or to mathematical description.33 In the trace, we see how the act of giving form transcends the particular forms and thus how we, as capable of naming things, are situated beyond the world of mere things, because of the priority of that capacity, of the way of being, and not because of the actual existence of a thing somehow “outside” the world. In the trace we see the enactment of a singularity that is not oneness, or participation in a given shape, but that always takes on new forms, because of the deformative force and violence of the enactments. Each act of naming, for the privileged example, creates a new relation to wholeness, and thus deforms the “whole” that was already given. Lévinas speaks of this deformation in terms of the “interruption of the other,” and the “intersubjective curvature of space,” in Totality and Infinity, several years before he has introduced the idea of a trace, an idea perhaps meanr to locate the demands of alterity without reifying the face as an object.34 For his part, Derrida calls this locating movement an “iteration,” as opposed to a “repetition,” and thus suggests that we can embrace the metaphysics of presence and overcome it by

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understanding the deformative movement at the place where the violence of form is enacted. The formless is not the soul, or the pure noumenal, behind the scene of appearances, but the very element as which movement happens to the world. One has to see, before moving into Derrida and Lévinas for their own sake, that the universality of the force of presence—the idea that all other approaches, whether ignorant of the fact or not, depend on that force as the distinguishing movement of form, and thus as the ground for the unification of presence, and its oneness as object of experience, as such—is clearly articulated in Plotinus. (And, we will add later, this formal force is transformed in Kant into the work of individual judgments that unify the events of apperception in their relation to a ground.) The trace, in its turn, may be the necessary component of any Neoplatonism that doesn’t embrace the static unity of all possible presence, as recaptured in the overflowing one that understands itself in mathematical terms, and thus returns to its oneness—that is, only with the trace do we have a hint of a human priority over modern scientific conceptions of objectivity. Modern science also believes that the human supports the world at the place of determination, of the taking on of determinate form, but believes that the subjective “effects” can all be factored out and attributed to previous moments of determination, recaptured in the unity of all possible determinations insofar as they are all possibly named as determinate. Determination is thus robbed of its original (Greek) sense of human presence and allows a completely spatial metaphor based on the production of points of experience (of events) to be expanded throughout all time as if there were no human support for that expansion. Heidegger argues, without referring to Plotinus, that we can separate the earlier Greek sense of presence from that idea of spatial determination, and Derrida argues that the structure of the trace shows how the regime of determination never completely eliminates the temporal movement, and the creativity of human presence. But those are questions for later. Much is at stake, and much is recognizably connected to Plotinus’ concerns, even if there are only sparse clues in his own texts, to which we now finally turn. In the relatively few times he used the term, Plotinus spoke of the trace (ikhnos)35 in what would seem to be at least two markedly different ways. Sometimes the trace, as a mere leftover or distraction, seems to stand for that which one should look beyond, and sometimes, more positively, it takes up the place of the very thing which is to be seen, for example, where the trace stands for that which the good grants to the intellect and which the

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intellect in turn grants to the soul. The difference is not great: because the trace is the tangible mark of an originary force that is no longer present, it enters presence at the place of a division of sense, or direction, between potency and reality. Being at that place of a distinction—at that place where sense divides, and thus where time takes on the shape of a movement from past to future, through the now—grants a priority to the present as the productive force, or active framing of what can be related to the grounds outside of that presence. Our question, then, and possibly against Heidegger, is: Why would the trace, insofar as it is never present, carry this priority as a productive force of presence? In outline, being at the place of a distinction, of the articulation of shape, constitutes the force of presence in terms that privilege the intelligibility, or meaningfulness, of that presence. In physical terms, it is the moment where particles become discernible, become accessible to being named, and not the moment where names are imposed on already distinct objects. Such is the force of form as the opposition of a frame to a content, an enduring situating “force” opposed to a given determination, insofar as they arise together. The eternal is found in the activity of producing forms, not in the forms as already produced, and yet that activity still has a character, legible in each moment of presence, that indicates something about the eternal. (We must constantly remember that the Cartesian frame of an individual’s perception presupposes the more general movement of intelligibility that we find in Plotinus; the “structures of subjectivity,” or of perception of an event as meaningful, are not at stake, although the way in which the world is sustained as intelligible, at the place of human presence, can be addressed. Accordingly, we speak of the force of intelligibility at the moment of determination, and don’t speak of forces interpreted by a subject capable of imposing intelligible structures on an indeterminate substrate. The determinations are real, and not merely interpretations we cannot move beyond; yet, we underline once again, the determinations depend on an intelligibility, on the possibility of each thing achieving discernible identity as one thing rather than another, which in turn all depends on the force of human presence.) The dual directions that Plotinus takes us, in his use of the word “trace,” follow the contours of the problem of force and sense as articulated within the determinations of human presence, as the presence of an intelligence or meaningfulness, as such. First, yet all the while staying within the bounds of the question of this legacy of readings—of how form takes its priority,

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of how intellect sustains meaningful contact with things, of how eternity sustains the temporal—I will want to approach the priority of form in what here would be its broadest context, that is, in terms of the priority of the life of the eternal. This priority is tied directly to the correctness or rectitude of the frame, the directedness of the subject toward the eternal that Heidegger identified in Plato. However, in Plotinus and against the most common, if perhaps still unjustified, complaints against Plato, the subordination of the intelligible ideas to the shape of the whole prevents the praise of form from implying a degradation of the body’s presence. The orientation, in other words, has the determination itself as its telos, and not the conceptual and abstract grasping of the determination. This orientation, in its refusal to recuperate the meaningfulness of every determination, should be recognized as the original of the postmodern turn away from the subject that rests within itself: the claim is that a movement of knowing (a movement of determination as intelligible) can be separated from the subject’s ownership (or production) of knowledge, and Plotinus suggest how this might be understood as a trace. Our immediate question is whether that difference is sufficient for separating Plotinus from Heidegger’s critique of Plato. For Plotinus, commentators readily agree, the divine process of emanation is encountered in the movement and life of the body oriented toward overflowing; the body is not simply negated, nor is the abstract realm of reason granted absolute authority over meaning and truth. The resurgence of interest in Plotinus, in fact, seems largely indebted to the possibility of finding a celebration of bodily presence in the way in which the eternal, as the overflowing motion of being, is identified as a trace within every corporeal as well as intellectual presence. The arguments Plotinus sets out are open to multiple appropriations, and I would like to sketch the contours, within his own text, of one of the most evocative. In broad outline, Plotinus’ theory of emanation could be understood as an entry into understanding the abundance of being beyond its conceptual givenness, and thus as circumventing Heidegger’s problems with the metaphysics of presence, at least insofar as it can be reduced to a criticism of the conceptual. We have already indicated some of the ways in which Heideggers criticism is more difficult than a mere attack on conceptuality, but the final purpose is to see that the refinement of Heidegger’s criticism, by moving it into dialogue with Plotinus, carries us past the metaphysics of presence.

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The creative force of form For example, albeit for a quite privileged example, in one of several rebuttals of those who would see the basis of time in the motion of the sun, Plotinus grounds the particularity of the solar within the generality of motion—that is, of soul and then, further, of intellect’s repose within the good. In more contemporary language, the question touches on the nature of understanding and whether intelligence exists within time or outside of time. Plotinus’ answer is to situate intelligence at the place of time’s motion, as the eternal form of participating in that motion, of sitting at the surface and gazing back at the center. Thus, in a paragraph from “On the Three Primary Hypostases”—part of an exhortation for the soul to turn away from the immediacy of the corporeal and toward the spiritual within our embodiment—we find seemingly the same claim Bataille reiterated so many centuries later, about the soul’s priority over the sun: Let every soul, then, first consider this, that it made all living things itself, breathing life into them, those that the earth feeds and those that are nourished by the sea, and the divine stars in the sky; it made the sun itself, and this great heaven, and adorned it itself, and drives it round itself, in orderly movement; it is a nature other than the things which it adorns and moves and makes live; and it must necessarily be more honorable than they, for they come into being or pass away when the soul leaves them or grants life to them, but soul itself exists for ever because “it does not depart from itself.”36 That soul “which has become worthy to look by being freed from deceit and the things that have bewitched other souls” regards the “great soul” and thus can reason concerning the ways in which it—in its divinity, as soul, as part of that great soul—gives life to the universe. The great soul itself will give way to the intellect and to the one beyond intellect, as the soul contemplates the eternal motion of absolute reality, of that reality which, like the soul, “does not depart from itself.” The individual must participate in the turn away from the individual body, but recognizes herself as part of the motion of embodiment and not as the detritus of being, much less as the enactment of a static abstraction (an instantiation of a possibility). Being twists and turns in order to stay one; it froths and bubbles at its surface without allowing any escaping gas.

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The soul, because it constitutes the enduring frame, the unity of the surface as presence, knows itself to be more fundamental than any of the transient feelings located in the body; that structure of sustaining difference, however, does not imply a separation, but only a direction of emanation. Like the soul, the oneness of the universe sustains difference at the place of its emanation. In fact, the similarity of the soul to the one—both are formless agents of form coming into presence—suggests the priority of form must be sustained by the oneness of that which is beyond any particular form. That is the sense of a form of forms, and of a force that sustains that form in being directed by the production of presence as determinate singularity arising from the interior limitations of a formless unity. The possible interpretations of the meaning of this priority of an agent (or indeed, transpersonal agency) that creates form, and of the orientation of our view, as seekers of knowledge, beyond any particular form, constitute the grounds of much of the philosophical history attached to metaphysics. Plotinus’ innovation, in its most general terms, is to see this reality in terms of the overflowing or overfullness (huperpleres) of the one, and not as a separation of the material from the ideal. As with the Aristotelian project, the question of form leads the analysis, but the first cause is unformed, beyond intelligence (nous) and not identical with the completed form itself. In this way, the particular objects of the world depend on us, yet our presence to those objects is not the final measure of their meaning—the overflowing of that meaning passes through the site of human presence, yet is not contained within our gaze.37 And in Plotinus this very sense of overflowing presence, in the place that is the soul’s presence to temporal becoming, constitutes the form of the one, of that which provides the place of all measure as the differentiating movement at the surface of being; thus everything that would partake in the life of the one is a turning back into itself, existing as what it is during the time that it is given, yet always turned back toward that which is the ground of the difference—always turned toward the encompassing simplicity, and the unity of being. The dynamic simplicity of being, in other words, is found at its surface, in the place where humans live in and as the eternal movement of time. We will follow the logic justifying this understanding of motion and place below, but I would like to begin by emphasizing that the shape of this eternal contact, as overflowing, is a passage through shape. If the sun’s motion caused time, or more basically stood as a measure for our time, then the concept of motion itself would be rendered contradictory: the

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idea of causation, more specifically, would no longer be governed by the opposition of form to the formless. This priority of form, couched as it is in the idea of a motion that falls into form from formlessness, is the priority of intelligibility in the movement of being; that intelligibility is of principle concern to the present writing, and all that can be said at this point is that for Plotinus, following most of the Greek philosophical tradition, that which gives form, that which is active, takes priority over that which is formed, or is passive; the giving of form cannot originate with something that is “in” motion, but must find a way of standing opposed to things. Where Plato’s ideas could instantiate themselves in forms without being deformed, where Plato’s eternity could be given in single moments of clarity, Plotinus’ overflowing of the one deforms itself by undergoing an internal limitation, or an articulation, in the determination of the surface—of the instant of being as determinately what it is. (“Surface,” here, should be understood in a suitably broad and multiple sense: each point that can be used as grounding a perspective, for example, could have an infinite number of surfaces drawn through it, in terms of many different “frames” for determining the objectivity of what it encounters. Insisting on “oneness” as the meaning of the productivity proper to the formless, and thus as the framing of all particular frames, allows all those surfaces to be recouped into a single idea of a surface as such—and constitutes the most basic gesture of that metaphysics of presence we are trying to contest. Only if the formless actively deforms the whole, as opposed to merely articulating possible perspectives or positions within that one whole, can we break with the metaphysics of presence. Whether Plotinus can be said to do this, which is a question we will follow below, depends on a reinterpretation of the force of framing, the force of moving from the formless to the formed by creating determinations, so that the formless is not recaptured within the unity of a single form of framing: the framing that is accomplished through placing things on a surface, or seeing things in terms of a perspective. This can only be accomplished, however, through accentuating the absence at the place of human presence, the weakness of the human situation with respect to time, and not through accentuating the positive force of enacting presence. This is the problem of “touching difficulty,” of sustaining the difficulty of meaning, as opposed to “seeing simplicity,” as the mystical tradition from Augustine’s Confessions to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus would have it, as the wordless unity that grounds all words or meanings within its enfolding wholeness.)

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One need not assume the idea that eternal forms cause temporal things to enter into existence from out of a mystical potency; although such a reading of Plotinus is possible, it conflates the modern move to the priority of efficient cause with the sense of priority at stake in Plotinus. In other words, for Plotinus the articulating of form is the surface from which all the movements of being will be understood—and will be understood as the opposition to, limitation of, or articulation within, the formless.38 For this reason, the taking on of place as a response to, or limiting of, the formless (as the becoming discernible of individual things that emerge from out of indeterminate being insofar as they take on individuality in separation from the whole) situates intelligence in a secondary position in terms of originary causes, as coming “after” the formless, and yet in a primary position in terms of the force of coming into presence, as the individuation or “oneness” of each thing. Receiving what has past, in other words, becomes the mark of how the formal force of presence asserts its priority over the indeterminate. The unity of the idea of a formal force—expressed in the idea of the formless becoming formed as a single surface of being—thus reasserts the unity of the whole, even while affirming that the whole is, of itself, without form. The force of an impotent demand This assertion of unknowable but indubitable unity is found in Galileo’s dialogues and Kant’s practical grounding of pure reason, just to name some of the bright points of its lineage. Our interest in it, however, must begin with doubting the idea that form as such is unified by the fact of presence. One looks, accordingly, for a demand that one turn toward unity without a presupposition that the unity is given, either in language, perception or nature. Lévinas, to my mind, is one of the first defenders of metaphysics to insist on rising in response to Heidegger’s attack on the unity that grounds traditional metaphysics; he insists, that is, on finding a structure of demand that still gives us the necessary unity, without even falling back on the admittedly minimal Neokantian sense that we find in the nature of experience that there must have been a demand that created its unity. The demand structure that Lévinas needs to capture from out of Plotinus, accordingly, when he locates an “ethical” structure within the irruption of time into space, stems from the positioning of the human in terms of the passage through place—as a trace of the divine and formless passage, a “style of the Infinite,” and not as a mere shape achieved in a punctuating

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moment within the flow of time. The “movement” of intelligence, in Plotinus, takes the form of occupying this “place” of motion in opposition to the punctuated motion of individual forms: the tension inherent to the opposition as a place oriented beyond that which is immediately present, gives the shape of life to the contact. In that way, each soul’s life, as the vision that seeks to exceed the present motion, is the place of that motion of exceeding—the soul is both opposed to motion and its cause, both separate and encompassing.39 This duality of function, achieved by taking on the task of sustaining a place that mediates between eternal and temporal, justifies the use of the single word “form” to characterize three moments: appearances, the way in which the soul occupies space in relation to those appearances, and the truth of that appearance in its relation to the eternal. This essential ambiguity in the place of form within the logic of the whole is the problem of the relation between intelligibility and intelligence, and to starkly divide the sense in which form enters into this logic, as we pointed out with Merleau-Ponty in the opening pages, would be to risk severing the connection between human intelligence and the intelligibility of the world. The response, in Plotinus, is to look for the form of form, the shape of form being opposed to the formless. It is the force of form’s presence, as resolutely situated at the surface where human activity sustains itself in the demand of intelligence (as opposed to being within the fact of an encompassing light). In brief, Plotinus gives us a model of simplicity complicated, where the simplicity accounts for the force of the complication, at the place where things become discernable, become what they are for an intelligence that sees; the extension on that model, from Hegel to Derrida, is to privilege the force over the simplicity, and to renounce recapturing the simplicity within a single conceptual grasp. (Already in Plotinus, seeing the one was a formless insight, and not a conceptual understanding). The demand placed on the individual, that which makes the search for unity compelling, may be the proper object of psychology (for example, in Freud and Lacan), but may also be theological in its contours (a fact not lost on Freud or Lacan). For the longer course of the present writing, we are aiming for a sense of the difficulty at the place of passage—a way that form is sustained against the simple, against the supposedly encompassing motion, and against the supposedly necessary violence. The question, for our present purposes, is whether understanding the place of intelligence, the place where objects become discernible, as itself a

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place of movement, obviates the Heideggerian criticism of the structure of the view in Plato that we followed above. Before deciding on that question, the way in which the place of movement takes on its shape deserves more attention. The argument has two steps that can be clearly differentiated, both reflecting the priority of the soul over the temporal sun. In the first step, the place of being “other” than the temporal is seen as the perfected being of potency: the real and enduring existence of that which can cause a particular to be intelligibly present in a particular shape at a given time. In the second step, the way in which the form of intelligible presence is dependent on the unformed must also be tied to the particularity of place— this means that the motion of taking on that particularity, as the life of the individual soul, will also precede the meaning of any given object within that place. As a clue to both of these steps, I will follow briefly the argument in Plotinus’ “On Eternity and Time” (Ennead III.7). In outline, the first step corresponds to being beyond movement and the second to being that movement. The unity of the two, in Plotinus’ terms, is the life of the eternal. The force of becoming, in the place the soul occupies, is a force of form or of intelligence insofar as it participates in this life, as the shape of the eternal’s participation in the temporal. Not to see this shape, in the passage of things, is to live in the traces of the one’s power without seeing or recognizing the power itself.40 It would be, to borrow and bend a metaphor from Augustine and Proclus, to live on the skin of the great sphere of being, turned away from its center toward its shadows, and thus wallowing in a freely chosen sin. “On Eternity and Time,” like the passage quoted above, refutes the idea that time is to be measured in the motion of the stars. The nature of eternity, of what one sees when one turns away from the appearances here below, is seen in the life of the eternal, in life that abides in the same and always has the whole,41 not now this now the other, but all things at once, and not now some things and then again others, but a partless completion, as when everything is gathered into a point, and has not begun to go out and flow into lines; but abiding in the sameness in itself not changing always with being since nothing of it has passed away, and nothing in it first comes into being, for rather it is that which it is.42 Thus eternity is not the substrate, but that which comes out of the substrate as the radiance according to its sameness—not to what it would be, but rather already is—that it is this and nothing other.43

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The apparent opposition to change here is driven by the problem of understanding place and causation as sustained by form, and not as selfsustaining relations between self-sustaining objects, like atoms in the void. If the one, as the simple unity of all being, is truly all-inclusive, then all change must be a change within that one. That means, however, that the changes associated with time must be in some sense related back to an overarching non-temporal unity. Although this unity is central to ontotheology, it does not reference an anthropomorphized God who holds everything in place; rather, the mere fact that there is something rather than nothing, this rather than something else, instantiates a unity to be explained, and makes the explanation of change dependent on that unity.44 The intelligibility of things—the fact that they are discerned in relation to a whole from which they emerge—is presupposed in the idea of explanation, of laying out how things unfold. The priority of the soul, in some way, already rests on understanding the moral command of turning toward what needs to be explained, toward understanding what is given as it is in its intelligibility. Augustine’s Confessions are the great testament to that unity of morality and intelligence in the implacable unity of God’s light, but Anselm’s ontological argument is not far behind. One might attempt to reduce explanation to the process of categorizing what already is. If one speaks of eternity, where everything is already complete, as a separate and always existing substrate, and mere images or appearances of motion are thrown off like shadows, then one turns away from the shadows by refusing to grant any reality to independent things. To do such, however, would place the human, and the experience of specificity, somehow outside the one, as a place of images that were separated from their eternity (and, as separate, enjoyed an uncertain ontological status). This, according to Plotinus, would be the mistake of the Gnostics and would explain why they merely shunned the body instead of seeing a trace of the good in all presence.45 Plotinus, instead, makes the radiance or flowing passage of the one part of the sense of the perfection of being, and thus includes all the motion of appearances, of thought in general, within the movement of the one. The priority of the form of presence is established here as the form of including all that is, but as an ever-radiant completion, as the life of the eternal, and not as a dead form.46 The argument that proves this priority, in the course of Ennead III. 7, stems from the measurement of time and space. The endurance of form, of being able to say something maintains its identity in such a way that it can

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be measured, or have sense, has priority over the present instantiation just as the measure (that which provides or grounds measuring) has priority over the measured. The difficulty comes with the sense of that priority as a force of form: the substratum is not a form that causes particularity, either in the sense of the efficient or the final cause. The substratum is the place where the unity of the world takes on its form—where that unity takes on the form of being what the whole is—as the passage through form, as an overflowing within itself, of that which is. This absolute place, the event of the one, is the fact that there is being and not nothing, and the sense of there being multiplicity within that one constitutes part of the shape of the fact that there is being. This fact, the eternity of the world’s being, occupies the place of the unity of all things, in all times, as the form of becoming. It is not the completion of that which we move within, of the givenness of that which is to be thought, but rather the way in which the giving to thought passes necessarily through some particular shape from the perspective of the eternal. If that shape of particularity is the shape of being present to the knowing subject, then the form of all becoming is reduced to the shape of a subject’s presence to the world. If that shape is the constancy of overflowing, as the life of the eternal, then that form of becoming may take the shape of any power of expressivity, and not just the ones associated with clarity or conceptuality. In this sense, the form carries the force of causing the world to take its particular shape, although the sense in which the human subject participates in that force remains unclear. In terms of the longer trajectory of the present writing, we are looking at two basic ways of situating singularity within motion, both opposed to reducing motion to the movement of singular things within a conceptual or abstract frame (for example, an entity called space as such, or the realm of all possible meaning, or of all possible worlds). The first one, which we have already followed in Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle, sees that singularity as the movement itself, as the place where the world emerges into its being, and the movement is the very movement toward singularity; the second sees that movement as constantly passing through the shape of singularity, never staying with any given form, yet essentially living within that movement of singularization. The first sees a nothing at the center of the movement, a permanent lack, a silence; the second sees an overflowing of being at the center of the movement, a constant movement through the expressivity of voice.47 In that first model, the force of form lies with the demand it places, in language, on the forms of being’s coming

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into presence, as the demand to support the possibilities of a becoming that is beyond the subject’s own powers. In the second, the possibilities of all becoming are in the range of the human’s power, but the force of all becoming, the form of the good, exceeds every particular that the human may produce. However, if that good force merely encompasses, merely generates a world, and a time, within which we live and move, then the human has no place of necessity within the good. How that force of form bears a necessary demand on the human, then, is the question of the shape of presence as a productive force that does not refer to itself, as the place of its own truth—or more precisely, it is the search for the creativity of a force that bears presence constantly beyond itself. In this way, Plotinus’ thought is amenable to a radical otherness, and may escape the most pernicious consequences of a metaphysics of the same. In Plotinus, these arguments are intertwined with the arguments for the immortality of the soul, but also with the more general priority of reason, or of grounds and causes as explanatory of events or singularities. If he is to be of use in responding to Heidegger, it will be where the activity of the soul can be disentangled from a dogmatic conception of either consciousness or the soul. In the penultimate section of Ennead III.7, Plotinus begins by insisting that the nature or essence [phusis] of the eternal is time, in ceaseless progression and possessing continuous actuality. Plotinus is, here once again, explaining why the heavens can’t be the cause of time: For the heavenly sphere itself would not be there, since it’s not the first origin, for it exists and moves in time, and, if it comes to a stop we shall measure the duration of its stopping through the activity of soul, provided that the soul is beyond eternity. If, thereby, when soul withdraws and returns to its unity, time is abolished, then it is clear that the origin of this its movement here, and this life, generates time. This is why it is said that time arises together with this totality, because soul generated it along with this totality. For it is in activity of this kind that this universe has come into being; and the activity is time and the universe is in time.48 In paraphrase, the measure of time is only to be given in the soul whose activity, or “reality,” exists in the life of time. It would be possible to imagine a soul wholly turned beyond time, existing within the one, but then there would be no universe: only the motion that moves through the soul, in the creation of the universe and of time, can constitute the life of the universe.

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In terms of spatial motion, which is perhaps still the metaphor that best captures the sense of overflowing emphasized here, no moment of dispersion—physical, spiritual, ideal or otherwise—can exist without the whole on which it depends. The structure of that dependency announces, in its turn, the priority of thought as the limitation of the formless one: only in the life of thinking does limitation come to announce the parts (and thus the structure of the partition) of the whole. Only thus does thought precede any particularity as the fact (or real force) of relating precedes the things related within some particular set of facts. Motion here would not be the translation of position within space; nor would it be the transformation of coming into being that Heidegger found in Aristotle; motion, instead, would be the becoming related of transformation within a whole. Motion, given in the particularity of my position, is known to the individual as a trace of the transformations of the whole. One does not look to one’s own powers to explain a particular position as much as look to the ways in which individual powers announce the relatedness of every particular position to the potency (or transformative force) of the whole. That is, in Plotinus’ language, one looks to the intellect whose life is announced in the motion of the universe—in the life of the great soul that gives of itself to every particular, that precedes by virtue of its abiding within itself, as generating force of all individual being. The negativity that is time, that robs every particular of its force, is gathered into the continuity of that negativity, and its encompassing of all that passes. This sense of negativity is what gives some versions of “negative theology” their sense of possessing an essence beyond essence, or a unity of mind that is simply unnameable. Our task, by contrast, is to renounce even this unity of nothingness—to renounce the certainty, for example, that all things shall pass, and that all life shall be received into nothingness—and to see the type of demand put into play by a more fundamental movement of nothingness, and of the trust we strive to live up to in responding to its demands. The problem, then, is to bring this all to bear on contemporary debates, and Lévinas’ critique of “subjectivity’s creative gesture” (geste créateur de la subjectivité), specifically in Bergson and Merleau-Ponty but perhaps in any thinking of signification that would begin from the standpoint of the embodied and expressive subject, will help to clarify the stakes here.49 Lévinas understands Merleau-Ponty, in particular, to be relying on a thinking of the community of expressive action, as the place where the becoming related of the whole takes on its function as clarifying the shape of individuality. To

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the extent that the individual is engaged in that whole, and participates in the culture through the expression of meaning, then the correct shape of truth is given in the directedness of each word, gesture, or activity of the body toward the meaningfulness of the whole.50 Lévinas then asserts that the presence of the other, of the one to whom you speak, is necessary for it to be possible that this “cultural gesture of expression be produced,”51 taking on the sense, or direction, of the production of meaning. The presence, or proximity, of the other must enter as a direction or sense to expression, beyond the horizon of what can be expressed. This presence of one who speaks constantly unmakes [défaire] the form of expression, the particular words, gestures or comportments, and thus deranges the order of expression itself by overflowing any present manifestation (captive and mute) within the world: “Its manifestation is a surplus above the inevitable paralysis of manifestation.”52 Against Merleau-Ponty’s totalizing gesture, the effort to speak would not be directed by meaningfulness, embodied in the goal of corresponding to the force of the expressive center of meaning or sense; rather, it would be the permanent displacement of every particular meaning, as it passed, in the very act of expression, toward one whose proximity could not be expressed. The form is communicated in the openness of the gesture, not in the words spoken. Lévinas, in that sense, is closer to Plotinus than to either Plato or Aristotle. The fact that the shape of responding is directed by the ones we speak to, beyond what is already manifest, means that our own expression cannot take the shape of expression itself as an already given shape: it is, instead, a deformation, and a passage past what is given precisely because one cannot possess the standpoint of clarity with respect to one’s own expression. One cannot even know that attaining clarity is the purpose of either thought or language. And yet one is pulled toward expression in the proximity of that other, in the shape formed by the presence of what is not given to the subject to know. Such a presence, Lévinas will clarify elsewhere, is to be understood as the trace of the divine, the trace of what Plotinus would call the one.53 One should see here the origins of a question about the shape of light. If the force of presence were merely in one direction, as in God’s expressive word setting the standard with which we should strive to accord, or with a community of researchers guided by the same ideal, then the shape of our lives could be said to be good insofar as we followed that direction, insofar that is, as we lived in accord with the overflowing (characterized either as transcendent reason or constant bodily expression). The same logic of shape

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would apply, however, if God’s silence set the direction, and yet continued to demand that we speak, without divine assurance, but always in the name of the clarity, the good light, of what could be said. The sense of shape is what will concern Lévinas and Derrida, as we will see at the end of this first part, in the various ways that clarity might be justified outside of its own presumed identification with the true direction of the world’s unfolding, and Plotinus’ configuration of the problem will occupy part of the next section. In the longer trajectory, the demands of shape that Heidegger saw in the becoming singular of the things of the world tries to stay this side of conceptual domination—he always refuses to enter into the completion, and thus never sees our presence to the world as an “inevitable paralysis of manifestation.” Clarifying the ways in which a movement of being comes to bear on us otherwise than in terms of manifestations will be central to the second part of the present writing. The ways in which this opposition between approach and passage does not exhaust the configurations of the demands of motion will then constitute the importance of the work of art in the third and final part. Limitation and light: creatures of the possible With the question of the shape that light itself most properly takes on in its individuation, the turn toward the trace indicates a different possible criticism of the presupposed form of self-relation grounding the meaning of individuality. Unlike Heidegger’s original criticism, however, one would here retain the overflowing productivity or activity that, in its emphasis on the movement of form, Plotinus has given us. Yet, as we will see with both Derrida and Lévinas, this productivity, in its movement from formless to formed, could perhaps be separated from the ideal unity of all light (and thus would not efface every trace of the singularity of light), as long as the form of self-relation in intelligibility is not privileged.54 In that sense, if one may extrapolate from the work done above, the unity of the world, expressed in the bare fact that we live in a world of motion and are to find our truths here, if anywhere, would not be put in doubt as much as the presumption that the shape of the functioning of light is adequately captured in the form of reflection, or in terms of the conceptual or ontological in general: the unity of the world does not express itself as a conceptual oneness. The movement of form, in Plotinus, is the transcending of matter by thought; the unity of that place of thought is guaranteed by the shape of reflection,

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or by the fact that one turns toward the origin of thought as such (in the potency of the real, or in its susceptibility to being thought about). One thus establishes the form of turning inward, at the place where the world becomes a surface, as the form of immanence becoming transcendence—the place of a surface coming to sustain itself in its force as presence. The shortcomings of that approach, as we question the idea of a necessary movement through manifestation, will occupy us in the succeeding chapters. There are two directions, at least, that one may initially turn within a critique of the form of self-relation. The first contests the idea that the world is somehow complete of itself, somehow holding its own form beyond the moment of presence or temporal position, and thus contests the idea that the task of philosophy is to correspond in words to the form of that which really is. The idea that there is an infinite realm of possible states of affairs or matters of fact, this our world only being one instantiation of that realm of possibility, would constitute one of the more common forms of this idea of self-reference. The further and more fundamental step is to contest the idea that in thought, in the form of being present to the world as reflecting the meaning of the world’s movement, the self-relation of meaning to its place of production can be completed. The production of possibility and actuality would be contained within a process, but that process in its turn would be regulated by the form of a production as such, the form of a unified world carrying its possibilities into effect. Following Heidegger, one is asking of the place, and the shape, of the human within the world: the metaphysical assumption that language can be separated from its place, which lies at the base of language’s possible self-enclosed all-encompassing relation to self, would prevent that question of place from even being asked. The sense of this question—of the place of the human, of the priority of form, of the imbrication of language and world— is what we are searching to establish through following the development of the theme through several contours or trajectories. These trajectories are not meant to instantiate or embody possible facets of the whole (of all possible ways of construing our relation to being, for example). Indeed, the claim that we are within a whole, or embody or instantiate one of the possibilities that belong to the whole, is precisely the starting point that a critique of the metaphysics of participation would put into doubt. Accordingly, we cannot claim at this point that Plotinus is captured within a restricted metaphysics, nor that he falls prey to a dubious distinction between language (or, more broadly, logos) and the world.

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With Plotinus, who also articulates one of the classic facets of the metaphysics of participation itself, the power or force of thought is announced in the temporalization of place, or of sensual presence within the multiplicity and dispersion of appearances—the power of thought arises with the deformative motion of passage as it lays a claim on our intelligence to think in that place of passage. In that sense, the potency of thought is the claim this motion lays on us to think and not the capacity a subject has to produce images or concepts. The fact that thought arises, that it is possible to think about the formless against which intelligibility is opposed, constitutes a fundamental structure of our presence to the movement of the universe. The formal force of thought thus embodies the universe as capable of truly transformative motion, or of real change, and not just change in position within an always already given whole. Such is the attraction of Plotinus for postmodernism. Such is the overflowing force of the one as it turns toward intelligibility and intelligence; such is the place where human thought exceeds what was prefigured in the material configurations we confront within the world. The intelligence does not precede and ground the material, however; rather, the force of thought, of form’s entering into presence as movement, is announced in the body’s meaningful, and meaningfully transformative, contact with the world.55 Precisely in that announcement, moreover, one also finds something beyond, or other than, temporal dispersion—one also finds the unmaking or dissolution; that is, one finds the passage of form through time. The power of thought would pertain to the possibility of grasping relation and thus of understanding how the images we confront bear the trace of the unformed whole. In that sense, temporalization is the form of time’s becoming, of the now being related to the eternal without the presupposition that the eternal is itself intelligible. The form of a particular slice of time belonging to a whole is the form of time’s motion within the self-relatedness of the whole; the world becomes intelligible in that moment; the trace of the eternal, in its turn, is beyond that intelligible motion. The slice provides measure, and is articulated at the place of being-measured, of participating in the process of measuring. That participation, as slicing, as determination within overfull presence, does not assume the shape of the circle except at the final level, where God would recognize himself in his own thought. Not to allow that motion to rest in God’s eye, to insist on the priority of the deformative motion, perhaps beyond Plotinus himself,56 is to prevent the shape of the motion from being regulated by the rational unity

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of the, or supposed bare fact that there is a, whole. The first step, in light of the opposition of form to the formless, is to see at what point the light is shared, and at what point it would separate us from each other. There is no necessity, after all, to every soul sharing the same world, if the world is merely a set of images created by the individual mind and thus possessed by individual souls. For the Neoplatonic tradition, the divinity of the human soul lies in that structure of communication and thus participation, of being the ones who possess reason, or language, and thus of being the ones who live at that place where the world takes a communicable shape. Our question, in the end, will be whether even that introduction of constant striving, and orientation toward what is desired, even when stripped of any hint of possession, is still held captive by the logic of production, and thus of ontotheology and the metaphysics of presence. Part of the question, then, will have to do with the connection between production and actuality. Drawing on the active sense of energeia (actuality) as a work, or an effecting of the real, Plotinus would seem to follow Aristotle and presage Hegel by giving the place of truth to the production of the actual at (or as) the surface of being. Actuality, then, becomes productive activity, becomes the activity of becoming in (or as) time, as spatially expressed. That self-referencing productive process, as Heidegger argues, I think convincingly, reduces our presence to the world to the experience a subject has of an object. If Plotinus will provide us with an honest response to Heidegger, then he must have some way of construing actuality without enclosing it within itself. As Lévinas and Derrida both recognized, the language of the trace—barely noticed in Plotinus’ text—suggests precisely this opening beyond, or otherwise than being as production. The present task is to give that contour more gravity. Actuality, in its now current acceptation, implies that something at a given time has a given shape. The intellect, in that sense, would have no actuality, or only a borrowed actuality, since its shape is always in tension with the becoming of which it is the form. And yet to eternally have the shape of that tension, of the becoming form of the whole, is the role and greater “actuality” of intellect. This is where philosophy has so often valorized an “inverted world,” where real being is elsewhere, is somehow a creature of eternity. The problem comes in at the level of a recursion of shape, at the place where the return to self would define the proper shape of activity itself—even if that activity were then to be thought of as overflowing

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since it would always be the source and efficient cause of that overflowing. Plotinus, in his turn, speaks of this shape of overflowing as the simplicity of the one, or the simplicity of vision, and it has to do with a particular way of seeing. That sight, or that possibility or potency of sight, is based on the shape of actuality and the priority of the actuality of a cause over its effects. Plotinus puts it this way: The being of intellect, therefore, is activity [energeia], and there is nothing to which the activity is directed; so it is directed toward itself. Thinking itself, it is thus with itself and holds its activity directed to itself. For it had to be first in itself, then also directed to something else, or with something else coming from it made like itself, just as it is since fire is previously fire in itself and has the activity of fire that it is able to produce a trace of itself in another.57 The current oppositions of possibility to actuality are not at stake in such passages.58 We should not, for example, think of the mind as a pre-existing slate, or field of possible experiences, upon which the determinations of the world will come to be scribbled. Instead, he would point to the existence of the one as the field of the potency of all that is—as the whole “is” in its dynamism, its powerful becoming. The metaphor of the sun is tempting here because it captures the duality of the potency—first as the source of (or power behind) all light and second as the infinity of the field (the encompassing light). Every individual soul has priority over the particular forms of particular beings that fill its awareness. Or, in other words, the self-abiding life of the universe, its motion as the temporal unfolding of particularity, causes each individual life to take its shape within that whole as bearing the sense to which it strives to respond. Thus, in analogy to the priority of the self-directedness of the fire over the traces it leaves, one finds the intellect, in its self-abiding actuality, privileged as the place of reality which precedes, in turn, all particular becoming. But this is a strange and difficult example, combining light and destruction in the figure of fire. In what sense does it give its traces, or cause effects? As that which gives warmth, which spreads fire, causes light, or reduces to cinder?59 In the somewhat selective reading that privileges the form of completion, the fact that having passed through presence destroys the present object on its way to an eternal shape of becoming is equivalent to the shape of spirit’s becoming in, or consumption of, the world—the truth of the world is its becoming what it will have been.60 The fact of how everything is

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articulated—as seen from the standpoint of eternity—is equivalent to its being “perfected,” its having passed through time into its true articulation. However, because of the motion implied through specificity, through the time of being measured, such a role is not found in the intellect that merely accords with the facts that it responds to, but in the intellect that recognizes its own role in the production of those facts. For Hegel, for example, the affirmation of that production occurs in the thinking that a community enacts, in its practical life, and that which is recognized as productive of sense (or value) occupies the place of the good. In the reading, also somewhat selective, that privileges the shape of overflowing—as a contestation of every conceptual grasp, even the one whose only rest is found in grasping itself as that which grasps, and thus as neverending process—the affirmation of that overflowing precedes, as shape, the particularity of any given form. The good, then, would be beyond the presence of that which is recognized as good, precisely by calling for an affirmation before, or perhaps identical to, the recognition of our finitude.61 The trace, in other words, is constituted in the recognition that we ourselves don’t occupy the place of the good. For the ascetic tradition, that means that we must look past our present bodily images in order to “see” that good; more broadly, we constitute the good as already having passed, yet as having left us in its traces, following its passage and may not “see” it or recognize it at all. For Plotinus, then, the place of the human soul would be the place of confrontation that provides measure, because it lives within motion, in the possibility of being able to speak about the world, and thus gives form its force. This is not to impute a mystical spiritualism to the motion of the universe—as if a divine being were thinking and we existed as the audience of those thoughts. Rather, that the world is accessible to thought, that we can speak of the world, is structured as a motion of parts becoming related to a whole—a motion that must also attach to the general structure of becoming, independent of any particular human’s grasp as such. That there is something rather than nothing—because the being of something requires motion through form—tells us a lot both about the nature of becoming and about being part of that becoming. That we can trust this givenness, its self-enclosed and all-encompassing presence, is the mark of a certain philosophical conception of the sacred, of a piety circumscribed by the contours of ontotheology. The claim is that we each live within a single, unified and infinite but non-conceptual universe, and Plotinus’s insight, it would seem, is to see

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that the intellect, in standing opposed to the one, infinite and unformed, is the place where form passes through singularity. And to pass through singularity, in its simplicity, gives us a trace of the force (energeia) of the good toward which we are oriented. But “force,” here, cannot be the efficient cause, nor even simply the final cause: force is that which makes taking on the form of a particular type of response binding or convincing.62 Force is that which compels us to look toward the good and beyond ourselves. The insight, then, is that life within the whole passes through particularity in such a way that the wholeness of presence—the fact that thinking may arise against and deform each and every static image without being constrained by any single moment of presence—constitutes the field and ground of the intelligible life of individuality. I can understand where I fit into the whole because my “soul,” itself a trace of the self-referencing intellect, gets its orientation from a trace that never enters presence as an effect, from a trace of the gentle enfolding force, the persuasive or compelling shape, of the good beyond the world. We must note at this point that Derrida and Lévinas do not share the same understanding of the trace, even if one can find agreement in the broad contours given up to this point. The specific differences, as we will see in detail below, stem from opposed estimations of the violence or force of determination: to belong to one light, for Derrida, is to belong to its necessary and inescapable violence; for Lévinas, the universality of light shines in the face, and its call to end all violence. The origin of both positions, however, is found in the possibility that one may yet escape the dominance of ontology, and their subsequent turn to the idea of the trace indicates a moment where that escape was deemed more difficult, and more pressing.63 In Plotinus’ particular case, the trace takes the simple shape of participation, of finding that all things will relate to that one, formless and productive, from which they arise—all things, no matter how separate or disperse, bear the trace of somehow fitting within the potency of an encompassing one. In his words, the fire must have actuality in order to cause a trace—the very order of causation privileges the real, and thus gives precedence to that which is complete unto itself. In contemporary language, even our thinking is part of the single world’s progress, in all its possibilities and potencies, within becoming, as each moment takes on determinate shape or singularity as related to the whole. In looking beyond the immediate existence of things, in very general terms, life finds itself to be situated, limited, and not in possession of the

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good itself. The movement toward the whole, considered as a directed movement, as a movement with sense, must be given that sense just as life must be given its actuality as part of the greater actuality of the world. In Plotinus’ own words, but following a typical translation that resonates with Lévinas and Derrida, and does not follow Heidegger’s translation strategies: Intellect therefore had life and had no need of a giver full of variety, and its life was a trace of that [good] and not its life. So when its life was looking towards that it was unlimited, but after it had looked there it was limited, though that good has no limit. For immediately by looking to something which is one the life is limited by it, and has in itself limit and bound and form [eidos]; and the form was in that which was shaped, but the shaper was shapeless [amorphon].64 This priority will serve, among other ends, to show that the first or highest nature of beauty is formless [aneideon], since what is esteemed is not matter, but that which is formed by form, that which comes from soul’s forming of matter. The shape, as an effect of limitation, of a turning toward the formless source, comes as a trace of the shapeless. “For the trace of the shapeless is shape.”65 As we will see below, Derrida will twice evoke Plotinus, and more precisely this very sentence, in service of his own developing understanding of the trace. For now, we are following the sense of a limitation being secondary, and yet an originary force, the very force of form. Thinking does not cause the world to take on its shape—the formless one has a life before thought. Yet thinking, too, has the actuality that pertains to a life without form, and that carries its own potencies. The motion that carries shape has precedence over the shapes it carries, even if it is identical with that passage of shapes. The gaining of limit, for intelligence, is the turning toward its own cause, the one from which it arose. To be a trace of the good, then, is to be a life limited by the desire for the formless one, by a shape of intelligence turned toward what is present in its overflowing. That which is beyond being is not an exterior force. To exist is to turn, within the unlimited life of intellect, toward the one in its potency or motion and thus to gain shape, or form, as having turned toward the cause, or more specifically, toward that which is perfectly actual, containing all potency, and thus all generative power— power turning in on and sustaining itself is thus the motion of the whole, a motion characterized as amorphous and as the giver of shape.66

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In terms of art’s elementary gestures, we wouldn’t demand a representation of the real as much as expect a gesture of unity, of bearing the sense of representation. The medieval artist wasn’t, it seems, looking for a photographic image of Christ, but for a representation of the eternal force or meaning of divinity; yet more generally, in such artistic gestures, one looks for the unity and power, or the goodness, of what is portrayed. To bear the task of that good, in turn, represents both the force of portraying, or of giving form, and the essence of what is to be portrayed. The artist exemplifies that bearing—the gesture of turning toward the original, toward the good itself—by being attentive to that which is beyond the sensuously given, by accentuating the traces of that force, through the effects available to the medium in the present, and very physical, representation. Plotinus himself continues, a few lines further down from the previous citation, by making the general point concerning power and intellect, without the limitations of the aesthetic example: The life of intellect, then, is all power, and the seeing which came from [the good]67 is the power to become all things, and the intellect which came to be is manifest as the very totality of things.68 But it [the good] sits enthroned upon them, not that it may have a base but that it may base the form of the first forms, as formless [aneideon] itself. And in this way intellect is a light upon the soul, as that [good] is a light upon intellect; and when intellect also defines and limits the soul it makes it rational [logiken poiei69] by giving the soul a trace of its reason. And therefore intellect is also a trace of that good; but since intellect is a form and has extension and multiplicity, that [good] is shapeless and formless; for this is how forms are made [eidopoiei].70 A trace, here, would be quite different from that which possibly clouds the mind or tempts us into the bodily and sensuous existence of deceit and error.71 Yet in all cases, the trace is something derived, something that proceeds, multiply, from a more powerful—or more potential—actuality. The trace is the place of form’s imposition: the limit given by the more actual but receding power, as heat is a trace of fire. And eventually, against the modernist inclination toward the unfolding of material cause, all traces come from the infinite self-subsistent, self-abiding power that is given to the intellect, as a trace of the actuality or activity of the good, by the one. The oneness of matter precedes and grounds all other aspects of material unfolding. The form of the fire, in its self-presence, is given to intellect: the

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good which gives that form, in being the direction in which the intellect turns, doesn’t belong to the same immanence because it is not itself a shape within this turning. Instead, and precisely because it gives shape to the intellect that, in its activity, makes all the forms, the good is formless in itself. The good is not productive like a machine, nor like a ceaselessly generous maternal nature, but as a unified fact without a conceptual immanence, as a radiance that becomes intellect—that is, in a statement that sounds obvious to modern ears, but is in fact what we are trying to understand and eventually contest: there is a world that moves within its powers, and its possibilities, and allows itself to be thought in this motion. The first actuality is the fact that there is a world and a multiplicity within the world.72 For this reason, the fact that the world may be thought, that the formless one may take on the shape of human thought, of human passage, constitutes the shape of the radiance of life itself, without however, necessarily identifying all passage with that which happens in the human mind. In Plotinus, the act of vision epitomizes this relation of overflowing and all-inclusive light, but it may equally be understood in the shape of opposition that a corporeal gesture takes as it assumes a specific shape or orientation within the world. With Plotinus, we have not taken the step toward the human subject that will only be made (as a turn, specifically, to the powers of a subject as such) with Kant and for this reason many of the questions involved in how Lévinas and Derrida wish to counter Heidegger cannot yet be answered. Yet with Plotinus we are already asking of the place of the human within the unfolding of the universe: a place, more specifically, that is found in the fact of being borne by the traces of a higher actuality, in the traces of a good that grants a sense to the motion of the human soul and yet transcends all form and thus all articulable human understanding. In this case, I would find the meaning of my existence, the interiority of my self-reference as the force and power of being what I am, in looking toward the good, toward the best of what may be, given the powers (the whole) within which I move. I would recognize that good itself in the clarity that transcends and supports the particular. All those philosophers who praise clarity, the argument goes, would be—whether they knew it or not—believers in the divinity of this light. This evocation of clarity, however, like the evocation of a force that resides in the fire that causes effects, is not without its ambiguity. The good beyond being, after all, could be the light of the divine force of the creative word. Or it could be the life of God, other than or beyond his own

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understanding.73 Or it could be the memory of the word’s passing, the shape of the completed word to come, the way in which God or humanity as such will have had a plan, or at least made a judgment, that will have given sense to the whole of time. Each of these strategies finds its counterpart within some facet of contemporary continental philosophy. For his own part, Plotinus emphasizes the passage and the abandon of the particularity in the motion that seeks its repose in the potency, and possibilities, of thought and vision. The good, beyond being, is the sight that sees that which can be, and all the possibility and potency of that becoming, above that which is: This phrase, “beyond being” [epeikeina ara ontos 74] does not mean that it is a particular thing [tode]—for it makes no positive statement about it—and it does not say its name, but all it implies is that it is “not this.” But if this is what the phrase does, it in no way comprehends the one: it would be absurd to seek to comprehend that boundless nature; for anyone who wants to do this has put himself out of the way of following at all, even the least distance, in its traces; but just as he who wishes to see the intelligible nature will contemplate that which is beyond the sensible and have no mental image of the sensible, so he who wishes to contemplate what is beyond the intelligible will contemplate it when he abandons everything intelligible; he will learn that everything is by means of the intelligible, but what it is like through abandon [apheis].75 The direction one takes in the form of thinking is not the abstraction of finding ever more general forms, but the abandon that finds the structure beneath all forms by letting go of the present, by turning to the passing, and the absolute past, of all presence. One deserts specificity, and thus moves to the level of the movement of thought; the question of what something is would be thereby replaced by how it passes through the element of the world—through the place, that is, where we have access to its passage. The very structure of thought is captured in the permanence of letting go. And succinctly, if schematically, our final question, at the end of this book, will be whether that permanence is a remnant of ontotheological presuppositions about the power of form and the production of reality. For now, one should understand that the permanence is embodied in the givenness of possibility to thought—that there will always be more being, in Merleau-Ponty’s sense, or that there is, simply and uncontestably, something rather than nothing. Once we are given that shape of permanence, of reality

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as the constant and necessary passage through form, to follow in the traces of the good is to take on the shape of passing, not of maintaining, nor of residing in the power of producing images. To move “beyond being,” then, is to follow in the traces of a good that lives eternally in the self-repose of a perfected relation, in the past tense of having been a true and faithful part of the one, of having passed into history. Our mortal life, in turning toward that eternity, is lived in that passage, or the trace of that passage, constantly relating itself, in the present, to that eternity. Constantly, in other words, passing away. And if this successfully avoids substance metaphysics, it is still a claim about the permanence of the world. The next section, accordingly, will follow something of this logic, in particular Hegel’s specific way of relating the knowing and acting subject to the passage of time, and then, in the entirety of the second part, we will look for a slightly different understanding of the force of presence in Kant, Hegel and Heidegger before turning to the third part and its tentative reformulation of the moment of sensible contact with the world. The salient matter here intersects with the question Lévinas posed against, and in the wake of, the “cultural gesture” of expressing meaning. Merleau-Ponty assumes the dialectical model of cultural production and thus takes the shape of the multiplicity of the one to be essentially related to the multiplicity of voices, of individual subjects thinking in relation to the whole, such that a new unity of self-conscious expression can be attained in the realization of a free community of equal political actors. The “cultural gesture,” that is, would be the process of the culture gaining the right to its own identity, as capable of its force and as capable of maintaining the continuity of its presence. For Lévinas, as we just saw, such a moment of recognition misplaces the human that would have been subject to the good—to a good that was precisely not expressive, not mine, and not powerful. And yet, some sort of exchange with, or rather “proximity to,” the other is necessary; one must have some moment of contact with a community that shares a time.76 By looking to Hegel’s appropriation of the logic of limitation and light, we will then be able to better assess the importance of Lévinas’ move toward Neoplatonic themes. After all, one should find it strange that a thinker of otherness could find shelter within Plotinus’ all-encompassing one, and his state of beatific solitude.77 Or, perhaps, one should find here a reason that thinkers of difference, so often associated with secular political traditions, could find themselves drawn to religious themes.

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Although we have not resolved the issue, we may now phrase a decisive question very precisely in terms of the encompassing clarity that Plotinus identified with the good. If light has only one transcendent “shape”—for example, the shape of limitation, or determination—then all individuals can be oriented by the same power or light.78 If, however, that limitation must include the commerce between individuals, and a motion of communication that is not essentially determining, or productive of determinate positions, then the final shape of light would not be equivalent to the productive life of the whole. Accordingly, we would not insist that every word bears its violence, nor that every face marks an irreducible singularity and call for justice. We would not insist on the permanence or necessity of our passage. Even if each individual act of knowing carries with it some sort of transcending clarity, we may find that the task it responds to—in communicating itself to the world—is not encompassed by the overarching task of achieving public, universal, or sustainable clarity. We may find that we can no longer be in the audience of the divine light, nor even imitate its power or nature, but must instead bear the weight of turning our own light toward the divine; we may find that we must sacrifice ourselves, or risk a static and unchanging embodiment as a fact of the world, no longer guaranteed even the limited redemption, or weak messianic promise, of being necessarily consumed by the fire. Our light, carried beyond itself in a silent and evocative gesture, a sacred and impotent gesture, must precede the sun and all its powers, both productive and apocalyptic. The intellect moves as the necessity of exchange Hegel’s dialectical understanding of the production of meaning situates the good at the point of the expressivity of rationality, of that which may be recognized, as communication or participation, within the community of rational beings. For this reason, Hegel emphasizes the active force in the form of presence, and thus effaces the trace—the deformed motion of temporal passage—in the name of the ideally undeformed motion of the actual in its becoming.79 The importance of Hegel’s move, within the trajectory of philosophy I am proposing, is that it sets the transcendental structures—the form of form—into historical movement, and into the place where human activity knows and influences these structures, instead of taking them to be included in advance within human capacities, or structures of intelligibility in general, that exist beyond or before us. The transcendental structures

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have an actual existence exemplified by the productive form our activity takes in the material world of production. The potencies, and possibilities, within which we live will find their place in that community of activity. This structure of productive activity has a well-known connection to the religious story of Christ’s passion and crucifixion, and one should not take lightly its connection to the largest trajectories of technology, globalization, and colonization most generally.80 For Hegel, clarity is not assumed from the beginning to belong to the shape of all intelligence as such. The move to a system, to the system, is situated within the progression of a community that becomes morally capable of the clarity of science. Clarity, like a fire preceding all effects, is the force and sense of intelligence in all its muddled forms.81 Only in achieving this central force—and becoming convincing to the world, being recognized as bearing the compelling shape of truth—does science gain the right to separate truth from falsity. Only at the achieved level of articulation, and the recognized right to speak, does the one-sided clarity of a partially false idea join the movement toward the universal and reside in the force of the clarity of the whole; only at that point does understanding become reason and every trace become realized in its return to the true origin. Only then does the truth within the muddied expression come forward. The movement of progression, perhaps, is biased by a more general idea of humanistic progress—something, for example, which has served to mask the pretensions of the white European male. If this is true of Hegel, however, it is true at the level of the spread of technology itself, where the force of the form of clarity, the ideal of which is embodied in effective and working rationality, leads the sense of the shared task of scientific endeavor. The process of limitation is seen as the way in which a multiplicity of voices enters the scene and becomes the element within which activity can be recognized, thus completed or given final shape, and thus become the concrete place within which we act, as the substance supporting our activities. The clarity at the center of our activity only itself becomes clear in the course of its action, as it becomes capable of fully articulating itself, and thus of being, in its full potency, self-aware science. 82 The unity of the multiplicity of individual acts—thus returning to the structure of limitation and light we followed with Plotinus—is the divinity of thought and there are some communities that better embody the transcendent truth of that divinity. Since we are all turned toward that place of activity as a place of the potency and the possibility of activity, of determinations in accord with our

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plans and projects, the element within which we live has the intersubjective character of the place of human activity as such. The task of philosophy, then and following Hegel, is to indicate what the conditions and contours of such a place, the very substance of our being, and of our being historically and physically situated, would be. In the political realm, we would speak of the shape of an individual, one who is responsible for positioning herself, who responsibly enacts that position in relation to the whole, and strives to make the shape of determinate individuality itself into the proper shape of all activity. We are free to choose our roles, as long as we choose to be productively working toward the good; we are free to express ourselves, as long as the expression has the force of communication, of being recognizable and clear. In the artistic realm, such freedom would correspond to the work of art achieving independence, or its own true meaning, beyond the one-sided subjective appraisal of particularity—the work, we are told, must carry “convincing force” in its meaningful presence. The longer discussion of Hegel will be postponed until the second part, and we will speak of the independence of artworks in the third, but before moving to Derrida and Lévinas, I want to situate adumbratively the understanding of the shape of individuality to which they are responding. The task is to see within this shape the resources for contesting the destination of all shape, and of all forms, in the shape of an absolute opposition between the subject and the object, an opposition or form which would thus subsume all materiality under the motion of form becoming complete—albeit the form which has achieved the state of perfected synthesis with its matter.83 Of particular interest here is the shape of the passage through thought and determination—for Hegel, it is a passage of determinate negation, and of the vanishing of the particular, in the movement toward the singular consciousness. The necessity of this movement, against the pantheistic understanding of the self-determining motion of the whole in Spinoza, or against Kierkegaard’s caricatures of the anonymity of the system, has to do with the demand that individual consciousness carries with it. Only in this individuality, only in the determinate force of the individuality that thinks and acts in the world, is the “monstrous power of the negative” effective in creating the realized motion of thought, and thus being both substance and subject of the world.84 The effects at stake here, however, are to be understood in the priority of the form of becoming individual as always oriented toward the whole. A similar version of identity in tension, of form

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stretching toward the eternal, constituted the priority of the soul in Plotinus. Hegel sought a greater force—and a clearer point of access to that force—by turning to the specific motion of the knowing subject. Such a turn adopts the standpoint of modernity—it is a turn to the place of evidence that trusts in the capacity of the subject to account for, and sustain, its own precedence. Following Descartes, one may be certain of that position, because the light is held in common, and is natural to all. With Hegel, the process of gaining the right to this trust requires careful attention to the logic of place, and of how particularity relates to the encompassing whole. It is not merely beginning in sense certainty, in knowing yourself as a place of thought, but of finding that certainty raised to the level of science; it is not just beginning in certainty, but gaining the right to that beginning.85 In a famous passage from the Phenomenology, following the point in the “Introduction” where he is justifying the examination of the processes of knowing and cognizing in the development of a system, Hegel remarks on the fact that our very acts of knowing are transformative of the objects they touch. The evidence—and the proof—of knowledge, would be a tool whose results could not be innocently taken away and used in the construction of a science: Yet if the trial of knowledge, that we represent ourselves as a medium, teaches us the law of the refraction of the streaming ray, it is not necessary even so to draw out its results; for [knowing] is not the breaking of the stream, but rather the streaming itself, through which truth touches us, and with this abstracted away, the only [thing] left to us would be pure directedness or empty place.86 The element of thought, the medium that we represent ourselves through and as, is touched by the motion that our transformations of the world embody. It is not a question of looking for an abstract concept, but of seeing the concrete activity of abstraction at the place where knowledge takes its form. Knowledge is a tool, a way of relating to the becoming, and it is not innocent in all the violences it may assume—yet, for Hegel at least, there is a good violence, a transformation in the structures of thought itself that the painful passage through specificity accomplishes.87 That violence is redeemed when the form of the divine community takes shape on earth, a shape carried in the motion and rigorous commitments of science. Hegel is finding the clarity, or orienting the activity of clarifying, of being related—clearly, conscientiously, and in ethically responsible freedom—to the effective force of rationality; he will also find that we already live in the

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element of reason, by virtue of possessing these tools, these specific acts of knowing, acting and transforming the world, but that we aren’t necessarily already oriented by the true force, the good and universal rationality or proper orientation, of these activities. To learn that orientation is to learn to be free subjects acting in the world in the light of, and with the end of achieving, freedom itself. Hegel seeks, in other words, to maximize the possibilities of human existence through understanding the specific and individual necessity of belonging, as thinking subject, within finite existence; consequently, the various questions we are presently addressing regarding possibility, and belonging to possibility, intersect with the most general ways in which we will characterize our tasks in the face of existence, our position relative to the world. There is a different movement in Hegel’s Logic, one that takes the view achieved here as its starting point,88 and that thus doesn’t take the shape of sensuous presence as foundational, turning instead to intellectual presence as such.89 The earlier work is concerned with what our sensual presence to the world teaches us about the form of thinking; the latter, although in some sense dependent on this same movement through sensuous presence, takes “logic” to be the encompassing element. The difference shouldn’t be too quickly schematized, however. In the earlier language and as he will say at the very end of the Phenomenology, the form of being ourselves the immediate process of mediation—as the identity of knowing and being at the place where becoming is understood as motion through form—is the moment of the self’s externalization, of the free relating of thought to the real.90 The structure of thought, as the certainty of being part of a whole that is also in motion, is enacted in the form of a subject, or a consciousness, becoming aware of the meaning of being situated in a very determinate form. As with Plotinus, the soul stretches toward the light—toward the meaning that encompasses and supports our particularity by enacting its externality, its materiality, and its finitude. Hegel adds, slightly later: “The pure movement of this externalization, viewed as content, constitutes its own necessity.”91 The necessity of this movement is what interests me here since it constitutes a point where Hegel is much closer to Plotinus than to Heidegger. The relation has to do with the fact that one must move through nature, through the fact of having a particular shape, in order to attain the shape of spirit as free and contingent existence, as that which has moved through this shape and is what it is. The spirit that moves through the necessity of externalization is not yet

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completed, because it has not achieved the freedom of knowing in what way it is exposed to the movement of nature. It knows the meaning of this exposure, however, because of the shape of being subject to the movement of time and space, to material specificity in motion, and thus to the necessary externalizing activity of spirit. Hegel is succinct in his concluding pages to the Phenomenology of Spirit: Science knows not only itself, but also the negative of itself or its limits. To know one’s limits means to know how to sacrifice oneself [sich aufzuopfern]. This sacrifice is the externalization [Entäußerung] in which the spirit represents its becoming spirit in the form of free contingent happening, intuiting its pure self as time exterior to it, and thus equally its being as space. This its last becoming, nature, is its immediate living becoming; nature, externalized spirit, is in its existence nothing but the eternal externalization of its persistence [Bestehens] and the movement that produces the subject.92 In Plotinus’ terms, we have the constant overflowing of the one, and our participation in its movement by abandoning our sensuous presence. But against the Plotinian idea of the trace that Lévinas and Derrida pick up, Hegel would have all abandon contained within the necessity of self-sacrifice, as redemption of the ground, of the life of becoming. Our task will be, as the present writing progresses, to see in what sense abandon—the difficulty it demands, in its insistence on singularity, in the trust that we bear in abandon—is not a sacrifice to a more fundamental grounding movement, even as it remains a sacrifice. There is an important exegetical question at this point in Hegel’s text concerning Christ’s passion, and how each life is said to be exemplified in that divine movement through mortality. For Hegel, in the broadest strokes, Christ’s passion exemplifies the structure of externalization, as God’s becoming flesh, just as every mind thinking of its own position in the world must make the accidental shape of its flesh unite with the essential meaning of being human, not “as such,” but in her own specificity. The completed form of specificity is the reality of each thing, a reality that is essentially related to the whole of all possible realities by a common shape: the shape of being completed, of having assumed a concrete form. As with the story of Christ, however, that form is not given with the first birth, but only with the rebirth into spirit (in the life of the church and its faithful).93 Such a movement, through specificity and toward eternity, is characterized by Hegel as a movement inwards—it is the return of what has

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been externalized into its origin and source. All that remains at the end of the Phenomenology is to achieve the viewpoint of history—where consciousness comes to possess (or redeem) the meaning of its own procession through (or sacrifice of) these shapes of specificity. For this redemptive self-sacrifice to reach truth, however, it must take these shapes back into their source, which is to say, into the meaningfulness of the motion of the whole.94 From that perspective of the whole, as it is turned toward its meaning, the internalization of all the stages allows one to abandon the specificity of existence in favor of the achievement of—which is the redemption of—the whole. Hegel, again from the Phenomenology of Spirit: In that its perfection [Vollendung] consists in knowing [Wissen] what it is, its substance, completely, this knowing is its movement into itself, in which its existence [Dasein] is abandoned and it is given over to the shapes of memory. In this movement into itself, it is engulfed in the night of its selfconsciousness, its vanishing existence however is preserved in this; and this subsumed existence—the former, but newly born from knowing—is the new existence, a new world and a new spiritual shape.95 In terms of the exegetical arguments, one doesn’t seem to know if the new world will be the life in heaven, or heaven on earth, or just the endless restlessness of spirit through ever new forms.96 No matter which, however, the form of that motion is the form of achieving the shape of having passed through the specificity of experience; it is the shape of coming to know who we really are, in our specificity as part of the motion of the whole. Although the achievement of the form of recognition turns out to be quite troubling—as we will see in detail in the second part—the emphasis on form keeps Hegel from relying on a concept in God’s mind being externalized as true, the human being reduced to the position of receptive audience of a divine message. The human is necessary, and the human as turned toward the good, in her faith in God’s meaning as actualized on earth, is the place where that meaning is given its shape—the shape of spirit acting in the world, through activity thoughtfully oriented by meaning. Each of us acts, that is, with others as our audience, and the rationality of that activity depends on those others being capable of receiving, as rational, my actions. For this reason, an economic and political system of exchange, albeit one that lives within the element of signs and of language, is a necessary precursor to any individual’s freedom.

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A number of thinkers have worked through this side of Hegel’s understanding of specificity and recognition in exchange, expanding and deforming its various trajectories. I would like, very briefly, to see how Derrida takes this moment of the necessity of passage through specificity as a fundamental clue for understanding the structure of the trace. It has, especially at that point where it relies on an understanding of Hegelian specificity, a very different sense than Lévinas’ slightly earlier use of the idea of a trace, to which we will turn next in the final sub-section of this part. The trace as the force of the absent Derrida’s most concise evocation of Hegel, necessity and the trace comes in his 1969 paper, “Ousia and Gramme,” where he uses the idea of the necessary passage of the trace to develop his understanding of the movement of différance in its fundamental traits—as tied to neither Hegel nor Heidegger alone, but as arising from the intersection of their projects.97 Much of that presentation takes on the form of defending Hegel against Heidegger’s charge that Hegel has reduced all temporality to a type of spatiality. Derrida’s strategy is to show the necessity of that movement through spatiality—or of exteriority, number, sign and inscription more generally—and then show that the structure of the trace keeps the movement from achieving the form of redemptive self-identity in the enactment of rationality to which Heidegger would rightly object. Hegel’s “necessary effacement of the trace” which is to be thought as a type of “inscription,” will constitute for Derrida the very place and force of the history of philosophy as a continuing question—as a demand on our thought.98 The form I had been concerned with developing in my presentation of Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle, above, was the demand that possibility placed on the human in the shape of the coming toward presence of language—a motion characterized as a passage toward the possible and not within the real. In Hegel, the passage takes a necessary shape in the demand of sacrifice (necessity, in its motion through time, is the form of form). Derrida situates that necessity in terms of the passage of time through its various particular shapes, multiplying the points of completion, never exhausting the iterations of shape; my present purpose is to accentuate the distance between this necessary passage and the movement of thought Heidegger locates in the incompletion of the possible. As we will see, this emerges with Heidegger’s contestation of the idea that we live within

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thought, or that thinking takes the form of partial views of a whole, and yet it seems we must still see the demands of thought and intelligence at work in the movements of the world. Part of Derrida’s “necessity,” when he speaks of a necessary violence in language or thought, stems from the necessary multiplicity of thought, and the necessity of thought’s passage through the other, in order to gain force and shape as language. In simpler terms, in order to speak to others, you must articulate your claims, and they must enter into language as finished forms—and for that reason, in the necessity of exchange and recognition, of passing through limitation, the form of completion, as determination, takes priority over all others. Derrida’s advance over Hegel, here, is to see the necessity of the emptying, or of the “using up” of the sign, the expenditure of language or world that cannot be recouped, as more essential than the recognition of its completion. Of the many places this necessity is articulated, I would like to now turn to Derrida’s “Ousia and Gramme.” The full title of the essay is “Ousia and Gramme: Note on a note to Being and Time,” and the note referred to is a long and rather involuted footnote at close to the very end of Heidegger’s famously truncated opus magnum. Some of the points Heidegger makes there are now available in more fully elaborated form, due to the publication of his seminars from around the period of Being and Time.99 Although he may have had access to archival material, Derrida only explicitly mentions the published material, and it should be emphasized that he was responding to broad trajectories within Heidegger’s thought as well as to issues intimately bound up with the note itself. The footnote had somewhat dismissively tied Hegel to Aristotle’s conception of time as a “now,” or a point, and then shown such a conception to foreclose an authentic understanding of temporality. Heidegger himself, pointing to a slightly different section in Being and Time three and a half decades later, says that his own more general effort to derive spatiality from temporality never succeeded.100 At that point, he intimated that perhaps the division between time and space itself should not be thought as originary and suggested reworking the history of metaphysics from a new, or “second,” beginning.101 He didn’t, however, explicitly retract his criticism of Hegel, and I believe for good reasons. Derrida’s goal is more restrained—or rather, it takes the motion of reading, and of restraining a text to a particular meaning and to a specific place within the history of metaphysics, as counter theme to Heidegger’s conception of an ecstatic temporality and, further, as a counter against every

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claim to stepping outside of metaphysics. The difference between retracting into determination and opening into time constitutes the programmatic difference between Derrida and Heidegger, as Derrida sees it early in his career, and should be read on both methodological and ontological levels. We are beginning with Derrida’s Neoplatonic construction of the debate, only later to turn to a possible necessity, without the presupposition of productivity in and through determination, which we’ve spoken to, above. As with the very strategy of situating the reading and contestation of the whole book within the text of a footnote, the point is to emphasize a certain necessity to both belonging within and rupturing with the whole as such—a belonging whose necessity Heidegger contests. More specifically, the structure of number and of specificity inherent to that “vulgar conception of time,” which Aristotle and Hegel embody for Heidegger, points to this necessity of motion through specificity in both the particularity of our physical presence to the world and in the forms in which we would attempt to understand the meaning of this presence. In other words, in the moment of contact, where form takes on its specificity, the giving of shape takes precedence as measurer over measured, as the efficacity and real presence of the force of form. The movement that inscribes, as a line, the relation between two points, is the coming to meaning or presence of the line itself. The points are merely ideal and only gain their truth, as constitutive parts of the line, in being drawn into the ideality (the giving measure) of the gesture of drawing—that is, the points, like moments of perfected exteriority in Hegel, are necessary and always in motion toward a meaning outside of their own specificity. The point, as that ideality of specificity as such, occupies the place of the potency of becoming: only because the possibility of pure exteriority supports the effective existence of the ideal can the movement toward exteriority characterize the real force of becoming. The remarkable insight here is that the understanding of the necessity of presence at the place of the articulation of sense has everything to do with the structure of measure. Plotinus, as we saw briefly above, also saw this problem of measure in terms of cause (as did Plato and Aristotle before), but the unity of the act of inscription with the structure of the trace is not given in Plotinus—it is only explicitly given in Hegel, although Derrida finds it in Aristotle as well. And that act of inscription is always the movement through ideality, toward an externality that is never achieved. As Derrida will say elsewhere, the passage through time, to the realization of the divine plan, would not stop at the structure of individual humans

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as they assume responsibility for their meaning.102 The fact that meaning is not achieved, then, will leave open a relation to possibility beyond the conceptual powers of each individual and will situate the individual in terms of the demands of thought. And yet that motion toward form is not, as in Heidegger, held out as a demand to move toward the singularity of form; rather, it is the demand to move through form, toward new forms. Breaking with the context of the footnote, Derrida locates this question in Heidegger’s late text on Anaximander, and on the originary thinking of presence articulated in Heidegger’s general reappropriating look at the Greeks. Although Derrida will frequently return to this text, and to the questions of justice and necessity contained in it, in “Ousia and Gramme,” his approach is quite tentative, and the concentration falls on the one place where Heidegger invokes a “trace” of the dawn of the difference between being and beings.103 In this particular text, Heidegger’s own effort had revolved around understanding use [Brauch], need [Not], and the claim [Anspruch] that lay at the center of Greek thought as he saw it. We will turn to Heidegger’s text itself at the end of the second part, but here it is appropriate to note the important strategic move Derrida sets into motion. Derrida does not directly contest Heidegger’s interpretation, but he insists that for one to be able to see the traces of such a reading—a reading that is itself designed to displace the modern conception of necessity in its relation to being by turning to a more originary source—it will be necessary that this originary thinking have been inscribed in the “text of metaphysics.” For this reason, the necessary motion of tracing, and of the trace effacing itself, is said to be more originary than Heidegger’s difference between being and beings—a difference that in Heidegger turns back to the place and meaning of that originary force that belongs to leaving a trace, or beginning the path toward science and philosophy itself.104 Perhaps in recognition of the necessary failure of any attempt to set one interpretation out against the other, as if two positions could be articulated in opposition within a single encompassing space of meaning, Derrida has drawn attention to the strategies employed in enacting a reading and not directly contested the reading or its justifications.105 In doing such, he has forefronted the deep complicity between the metaphysical force of presence and the evidence that makes an explanation rationally compelling—showing famously that rhetorical flourishes and supplements bear surprising responsibility for the compelling force of both meaning and presence. The necessity of the strategy, of being turned one way or another

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in the reading, makes the movement of idealization take a shape of passage beyond any given point of exteriority. This understanding allows a certain linkage between Heidegger and Hegel to take place, a linkage in terms of the structure of difference and the subjugation or enjoining of presence to a motion. Derrida’s particular way of working out the structure of this subjugation, against both Hegel and Heidegger, is to insist on the necessity of the iterability and iteration of the trace as effacing presence. To be part of the motion of language, of the putting into form of the world, is to be part of the motion of the effacement of the trace, of the determination of a form, in words, that will circulate beyond its point of contact with the world. It is to know how to sacrifice oneself to one’s language; or rather, to know that one will always have been sacrificed, in language. The point about circulation is made elsewhere in Derrida’s work, insistently, and here it takes the shape of an insistence on the possibility of language reaching beyond its own limits: Presence, then, far from being, as one commonly believes, that which the sign signifies, that to which a trace leads back [renvoie], presence then is the trace of the trace, the trace of the effacement of the trace. Such is the text of metaphysics for us, such is, for us, the language which we speak. It is on this sole condition that metaphysics and our own language can gesture [faire signe] toward their own transgression. At this crucial point about transgression and language, we find the following footnote: Thus Plotinus (what becomes of Plotinus in the history of metaphysics and in the “Platonic” era, following Heidegger’s reading?) who speaks of presence, which is to say also of morphe—as the trace of nonpresence, of the a-morphous (to gar ikhnos tou amorphou morphe106). Trace that is neither presence nor absence, nor, in whatever way, a derivative compromise.107 Never having reached completion, never having passed through the place of determination, the necessary movement of determination continues, as the vanishing ground for all the determining movement and all the grounds that will be inscribed within this movement. We are not authorized to tie Derrida to Plotinus, but one moment stands out in relief: the place of the restriction of being to its presence has a necessary shape, a “violence,” a

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movement that will make all other differences possible, as the coming into place of a self-differing—of that which Derrida calls différance.108 As such, we are not speaking of an ultimate substratum or final structure, but the necessity that the movement into substratum and structure be a motion through specificity and interpretation and not an achieved fact, as reality or as final resting place of meaning. This evocation of Plotinus is not singular, although it is not prepared for as such in the course of this essay. In another work from roughly the same time, the Greek text cited here will be used as an epigraph, with only a few words in the concluding footnote to that text explaining its significance. This time, in “Form and Meaning” the particular understanding of the precedence of the amorphous is at stake beyond the effacing movement of the trace—the self-effacing motion that was at the center of “Ousia and Gramme.” “Form and Meaning” looks at the structure of expression in Husserl, and not in Hegel, and bears an important difference, or perhaps elaboration, in how the trace is understood. In Hegel, we remember, the being of the whole was expressed in its determinate simplicity by being turned in toward its completion in spirit—in the place where the movement gains its reason as real and effective activity in the world. This completion can be understood in terms of the acts of understanding, of meaning being assigned in the activity of comprehending what is happening, as it is turned toward its meaning and toward practical activity oriented by giving spirit shape, and life, on earth. This shape and life of spirit is the negativity and freedom of thought, and thus the specific motion of the real passing into each consciousness, as well as the directedness of each activity toward the reality and the truth of the spirit of the community. Because—in those communities oriented by language, consciousness and truth—all negativity will share this shape, there will be only one universal rationality, even though our thought is not shared except in language and not all languages are the same. This would give a shape to meaning that would correspond to the effacement—in the completion or realization—of the movement of the trace and Derrida will insist on deforming even this necessity held in common. In the text that uses Plotinus for an epigraph, dedicated to a reading of Husserl’s theory of meaning (Bedeutung), he is asking of the relation between being and form and of the direction of abstraction, or of “formal impoverishment,”109 that grants meaning its precedence. This moment of the form of presence—where the presence of form itself, of

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that pure impoverishment, or perhaps steresis, is complete—could not even serve as regulative ideal, or source of meaning. In Husserl, it would seem, presence and form, matter and meaning, must be thought in a circle where none comes before the other. The limit experience of evidential clarity must be understood as both the most general structure of givenness and the particular givenness of that which is—of, that is, being as such, or presence to pure sense or form. Derrida does not suggest escaping the circle, but rather turning it into an ellipse—“allowing perhaps to be produced, in the difference of repetition, some elliptical displacement.”110 The form of our presence is not the identity of what is within our perceptual and conceptual systems, but the deforming movement of abstraction away from that givenness—we would not seek to accord with the physical presence of the mark or inscription, but with the movement by which that inscription became form, and thus gained its priority. And one would only “accord with” such a movement by deforming the circle, or the identity, of form and presence. The clues as to what such a displacement and deformation might mean are scarce in this particular text; Derrida invokes, instead, “a completely other question.”111 The last footnote provides a clue that I will want to follow into the next sub-section: Form (presence, the evident) would not be the last recourse, the final instance to which every possible sign would turn, the archè or the télos. Or rather, in a perhaps unheard of sense, morphè, archè and télos would still signal, or gesture toward [feraient encore signe]. In a sense—or a non-sense—that metaphysics would have excluded from its field, nevertheless maintaining a secret and incessant relation with it, the form would already be in itself the trace (ikhnos) of a certain non-presence, the vestige of the unformed, announcing-recalling its other, as Plotinus perhaps did, to and for all of metaphysics. The trace would not be the mixture, the passage between the form and the a-morphous, presence and absence, etc., but that which, withdrawing from that opposition, makes it possible from the irreducibility of its excess. From then on, the closure of metaphysics, that which seems to indicate, by transgressing it, the audacity of the Enneads (but one could mention other texts), would not happen around a homogenous and continuous field of metaphysics. It would disrupt the structure and the history, inscribing there, organically, articulating there, systematically, and from within the traces of the before, the after

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and the outside of metaphysics. One thus proposes an infinite, and infinitely surprising, reading. It can always be produced within the interior of an era, in a determined point of its text (for example, in the “Platonic” tissue of “Plotinism”), an irreducible rupture and excess. Probably already in the text of Plato…112 The footnote ends on the ellipsis, itself somewhat elliptical, that would point us to Derrida’s Khôra (1993), perhaps even more than to his Disseminations (1972). Somewhat tentatively, this will have to do with the way in which Derrida sees possibility, iteration, and then impossibility linked to motion—to the deformation of a thought put into, and allowing, motion. Because of the trace, the shape of passage has necessity, but not the intelligible or rational necessity of having been completed, of having had some particular shape— even as its telos—since the passage is not turned back toward the whole, not in toward that which has a shape as the one because it is a turning inward. Rather, the necessity belongs to the deformation and the determination of singularity as dissemination, to the necessity of that which is not yet finished. The trace and the gravity of words The broad question, in the terms I’ve been developing throughout, is how is thought a motion, and more specifically, a motion that claims us and our powers of being—our decisions, words and actions in the world, as individuals related to other individuals? To respond against Western metaphysics requires seeing that presence is only one of many ways we could situate the human in the movement of the world, the one where—following Parmenides—thought and being are caught in that same motion, that same claim on thinking. Only one such motion would turn on its origin and transcend and unify the material world, as the transcendence of being finds itself instituted in human presence; only one such motion would culminate in the opposition of form to content. The break I am proposing is radical, in the sense that it strikes at the root. The special case in which that which is can also be thought, where the possible transcends the real by turning back to its source as the potency or movement of the real, defines our traditional metaphysics, but it represents only one model of the possible configurations of motion, being and thought. Beginning with Heidegger’s rereading of

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Aristotle’s conception of steresis, as the movement by which a concept comes to rest in its singularity, we have been searching for an alternative for bringing thought, form and motion together. By making the problem of motion explicit and turning to the trace of a passage, as opposed to a moment of presence that is merely found to be unstable, or fleeting, Lévinas and Derrida would offer an alternative to Heidegger’s “rooted” conception of the singular and the possible. For the strategy to succeed, without falling back into the metaphysics of presence, they must not merely place the human within the realm of the possible or the potent as such. In this section, I would ask how this transformative motion—as thought, as possibility, as the place of a potency becoming what it is—sustains a world. The same question, the question of the element of becoming, can be asked by pitting silence against speech, or asking of the shape of a silent motion, beyond every speech. The sustaining must be, as we have already seen, a response to the demand that we inhabit a place of singularity as such, without pretending to a simple transcendence, or even a partial participation in a greater whole. Our particular question posed to Lévinas and Derrida, then, is simply whether they have betrayed something about the demand to sustain place when they cast the determination of justice in the role of the light—of the messianic promise, the hope for the redemption of what passes because of the necessary force of its passing. In the course of a long and early essay on Lévinas, Derrida frames the history of metaphysics as the history of violence and light—Lévinas’ famous invocations of ethics over ontology, for example, are to be understood as resting on the priority of an intelligible light that is opposed to the violent power embodied in the activity of giving names and order to the world of things. The oppositions Derrida employs, as we will see, have everything to do with the connection between determination, voice, and the power of thought. Derrida underscores the radical character of this frame by pointing to the place where one might just opt out against Lévinas’ entire project. … if one doesn’t follow Lévinas when he affirms that the true resistance to the same is not that of things, is not real, but is intelligible, if one rebels against the notion of a purely intelligible resistance, then one will follow Lévinas no further.113 The deformation of intellect, of expression always oriented toward the other, away from the self, as the movement toward the other, Lévinas tells us, is the

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movement away from presence, and from the immediate situation in which we find ourselves.114 That movement is demanded of us from within our situation; that demand is the condition that makes the situation take shape. It is the demand of the universal, of thought, or of justice. Lévinas, it would seem, is offering a fundamentally new defense of an old idea about reason and the priority of the intelligible over the real— which is why, although he accepts the need to work through Heidegger’s criticisms of the representing subject, against the supposedly free-floating subject of traditional reason, he will defend technology and metaphysics against Heidegger. He would not defend the old idea that the rational serves as a ground for the actual, however, but he would see the priority of reason instituted in the multiplicity of light, and the directedness toward transcendence instantiated in each individual and implied by the very structure of intersubjective life. He does not believe in an already given power to transcend or to give light, either divine or human. The things of the world, according to Lévinas, live from a borrowed light, from our human understanding oriented by the expression of transcendence but enclosed within an economy of the same, while the nudity of the face carries its own light, beyond the system that a unified or overarching luminosity or radiance that preceded or encompassed the multiplicity of speakers would constitute.115 That exterior light approaches us with “empty hands,” commands us without the content of a command or of a power that contests our own, and yet gives shape to the passage of our time. The direction multiplicity grants to reason gives a shape to the motion of thought—“ethics precedes ontology” as the directedness of an expression precedes the expression, as the metaphysics that “lives for a time without me” gives contour to my life. The question is not about how every human can be understood as having a different perspective on the whole, or how we must respect the multiplicity of perspectives relative to the whole; the question is how an original and impenetrable multiplicity of others claims us, demands a unity from us as the “proper” shape of our thinking. Although the actual event of otherness exceeds my possibilities, within the types of evidence Lévinas wants to put in play, after accepting the Heideggerian criticism of the metaphysics of presence, the very possibility of being confronted by an exterior light, a light that is neither mine nor essentially like mine, would prove the precedence of ethics over ontology and thus constitute the limits of the regimes of potency and possibility; the motion I constitute within my possibilities, in terms of the power of my

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reasons and acts, takes its shape in expression, and in being turned away from itself toward that other light. One speaks to another, to that within the other that responds by thematizing the world, but which does not itself enter into thematization.116 Even in the phenomenological language of Totality and Infinity, the Neoplatonic return toward the unformed that produces new shapes is given. Because of the shape of this exteriority, never situated within my representation as a closed figure, we are not looking toward a metaphysics of participation within the single, unified and omnipotent, all-informing light; Lévinas may be most profoundly contrasted with Neoplatonism, at least in its normal acceptation, on this point. For Lévinas, the other source of light is not the origin, as power, condition or ground, of the same and we do not live up to its moral claims upon us by participating in its sameness, or by imitating the shape of a self-referencing subject. We do not merely do what we are asked to do. Rather, the shape of separation from the divine, of not being part of that process of a single unfolding power, refuses the shape of reflection, or completion—traditionally taken to embody the part-whole relationship because it provides the image for the human participation in the divine understanding—and thus refuses the limitation of our responsibility within the bounds of reason. The demand of the other is infinite. But the priority or precedence of the formal, as found in the very shape of this separation oriented by the other, is said to be given to us within our own experience, as our own light. Lévinas will work through the refusal of participation, of the priority of the individual as place of thought, so that the shape of participation is never the abandon of the responsibility for the singularity of place. Rather, the shape at stake, as the very shape of singularity, is the openness toward the infinite that a distance from being, or a separation from God, would entail. Lévinas captures the main themes, in their connection, in just a few lines: The distance with respect to being—by which the being exists in truth (or to infinity), is produced as time and as consciousness or yet as anticipation of the possible. Across this distance of time, the definite is not definite, being, even though existent, still is not yet; it remains in suspense and may, at any instant, commence. The structure of consciousness or of temporality—of distance and truth—belongs to an elementary gesture of being that refuses totalization. This refusal

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is produced as a relation with the un-encompassable, as the welcome of alterity, concretely, as the presentation of the face. The welcome of alterity therefore conditions consciousness and time. Death does not come to compromise the power by which the infinite is produced as negation of being and as nothingness; it threatens power by suppressing the distance. The infinition by power is limited in the return of the power to the subject from which it emanates and who ages in making the definitive. The time where being is produced to infinity reaches beyond the possible.117 As with Derrida’s contestation of Heidegger, the necessity of passage is situated beyond the power of constituting that passage or its meaningfulness. Yet for Lévinas, the necessity belongs to a time that passes—as the aging of the subject, the passage from interiority into the infinite—and not to an inscription and effacement that takes place in the exteriority of the world. The necessity, the “elementary gesture of being that refuses totalization,” belongs to the shape of welcome, as the shape of truly existing, or of intelligibly transcending particularity, because it names the place where determination commences, the place where the shape of determination, its contour as a movement of thought, precedes the existence of the sun. For Derrida, on the other hand, the necessity belongs to the passage through particularity, with only that passage granting shape to the subject who would then exist in relation to the possibilities of transcendence. Derrida, it would seem, is not so much doubting the priority of the demand that refuses totality as wondering why this resistance, or this form of opening against the systemic powers of the universal, would be accorded to the intelligible face and denied to the real things of the world in their motion (or spatiality): why, after all, wouldn’t the exteriority of the written, of the exterior as violent carrier of expressive force, also carry the deformative movement toward transcendent thought, and indeed toward the multiplicity of light?118 Why wouldn’t the very “play of the world” already carry the resources for putting new forms into play—and precisely at that juncture that makes a separation between empirical and transcendental forms of experience impossible to sustain? And why wouldn’t our presence to the world continue to contain the traces of its originary play?119 For Lévinas, the non-violent, the place of peace and of the good as the withdrawal from violence, would be the infinite, the place where power has meaning because it claims us, beyond all our powers, in the place of a

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redemption that belongs to others, to those others, like our children, who will speak after us. We are subjected to a deformation, but a deformation away from our situated material presence or place, toward justice. This is the “form” that persists as the passing away of time. That form, the form within which all particular shapes must be thought, is given to us in our finite presence to the world as the structure of being pulled toward the other, the one who approaches “with empty hands” and teaches us the structure of being open to meaning beyond the economy of power and control. Yes, Lévinas will say, we find ourselves subject to a contingent existence, within the “anonymous murmuring of ‘there is,’” yet we find ourselves in an intelligent motion as well and that intelligence, as expression toward others who exist in their own separation, has a shape, as a gesture of welcome, or of reaching out, that precedes the real.120 Belonging within a place of being or of welcome is not taken for granted, as it would be in the metaphysics of participation that Heidegger criticizes: in fact, according to Lévinas, it would be precisely the Heideggerian conception of the possibilities of place and existence that would fall back into such a metaphysics by embodying participation in the site of the powers of form (of “being,” but Lévinas understands Heidegger’s being as a formal force that encompasses the individual, as do most of Heidegger’s followers, instead of seeing the force of the claim). Reason is not, for Lévinas, the power of thought to constitute a world, but the demand to respond against the supposed unity of that power; as we will see, with Kant below, the unity must be seen in terms of its demand on the individual, and not in terms of the fact of there being only one world. The fact of there being something rather than nothing. Lévinas sees the logic of an infinite opening operating already in Descartes, and in the modern turn to the subject as the situated yet expressive voice that Kant champions, as the subject that finds the idea of the infinite placed within itself.121 The modern subject is the one who thinks by responding to the world, the one who moves in language and reason and not merely within the things of a material existence. Like Plato’s cave dwellers turned toward the light of the sun, one does not leave this world, but learns to live within the same world, only now oriented by a different truth—by its form as rational and not by its physical force and presence. But Lévinas is not championing maieutics, the Platonic uncovering of that which was always already contained within the mind of the student, but thematizing the openness toward the infinite itself—it is time or aging, the receptivity of

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being taught or of being subject to the passage of forms: neither the violence of the contingent, nor of the chance event, but the non-violence of an ethical relation, moving past all contingence toward justice.122 And to that extent, the face announces a non-violence that deforms our self-reference, and calls for justice toward the other’s singularity. It is the “good violence,” the responsibility for the other that tears us up from ourselves, and it may already belong to the long history of Neoplatonism and its insistence on the sacred call of philosophy. Derrida denounces the pretension to “chase negativity, labor, out of the infinite,” where one would supposedly have access to the true sense of justice or of peace—where one would merely be encompassed by God’s peace, by the pure force of being in the presence of a world oriented by reason and not by contingency.123 Against Lévinas and Descartes, Derrida refuses to see God as having put the idea of the infinite, the form of always being open to more, and to thus transcending particularity, within us: to do such would imply having separated thought from its physical embodiments in the world, from the form of the real language and intersubjective gestures and movements within which, or as which, expression is enacted. It would not be that he accuses Lévinas of a simplistic adoption of the a priori: he understands that the infinite is taught, that the presence to the overflowing movement teaches us the priority of possibility over actuality, of the formless future over the formed presence. But Derrida will not want that movement to necessarily imply that the priority of motion rests solely with the opening gesture of welcome. Necessity, in fact, and as violence, will play a role before opening can be instituted as such. It is not the opening to a future that is necessary; it is the necessity of passage that opens a future. And it is that necessity that we are bringing, eventually, into doubt. The question, simply put, is why time’s passage, as the transcending of all spatiality, and thus as the element of all individual becoming, would carry the structure of meaning or sense.124 In Lévinas’ Totality and Infinity, the sense belongs to the motion of infinition and commencement; with the thinking of the trace, the singularity of the anarchic relation as the demand of assignation and commencement structures the motion and does not already belong to it. One could almost say that in Lévinas’ later work, on the other hand, we do not respond to the nudity of the face, as passively confronted by its deformative demand; rather, we find ourselves responsible for the derangement that pertains to the fact that the face has already passed.125

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The trace as the absence—and the motion—of the intelligible Some have argued that the introduction of the idea of the trace between Lévinas’ Totality and Infinity and his Otherwise than being responded to a need to understand the movement of access to the transcendental structures of understanding. I would say, instead, that the trace responds to a different conception of the infinity of movement—one that does not call us toward responsibility for our powers, in order to justify our freedom, but calls us to become responsible for the openness within which freedom would come to have bearing and sense. The trace represents the orientation of the weight or gravity of being and not, as it would in Derrida, the necessity of its play or chance—it is for this reason that Lévinas would not say, with Derrida, that all language is violence and that such violence is necessary. For Lévinas, the shape of openness, as the teaching of the infinite, could not of itself be taken as given in advance. The question, in his earlier work, stems from whether the formal itself constitutes a demand, and thus a shape of “openness”—whether the demand of openness, as the most basic form of the transcendental, precedes or only first comes into being in the “play” of the world. In an early essay, Lévinas had tried to find the shape of transcendence in the desire to escape finitude each individual supposedly experiences.126 Something of this question continues throughout his career, but the methodological exigencies become more acute. Far from stopping at the psychological claim that everyone, as a matter of fact, experiences a desire for transcendence, or lives within the desire for knowledge more generally, Lévinas moved toward understanding how the fact of finite presence itself displayed the displacing motion toward the infinite. In Totality and Infinity, under the aegis of a careful explication of the economy of being present to the world, in the company of others, we find that in a world of “common places” and gentle “discretion” each subject is taught the desire for transcendence.127 The structure of the trace introduced in the later work, by contrast, is the passage into the irretrievable past—not the positive production of more, even as the “gentle radiance” of the world of enjoyment, but the absencing and withdrawal that precedes, as the very structuring of precedence, the given.128 One will have been powerless in the face of time’s passage; one will have seen how everything becomes passage, and formless intelligence. The structure of time, instead of indicating our appurtenance to the powers of temporalizing discourse that Lévinas sees in Heidegger, indicates something

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about our passivity, and about the structure of being receptive to alterity.129 More than the passivity of the situated subject, more than the passivity and receptivity taken as theme in Totality and Infinity, one lives in the passivity of passivity, of being exposed, of being the one who will respond, and who thus will have lived in the gravity of passage and not in the play of ceaseless production. The face of the other, for the privileged example, captures Lévinas’ response to a thinking of the same by evoking the presence of that which constantly transcends all immanence. Thus, in insisting that the “beyond from which the face comes” “is not an ‘other world’ behind the world,”130 Lévinas avoids positing two orders of existence, but still opposes ordered givenness to the formless exceeding of all order—even the Parmenidean being, the self-enclosed system of reference that would pretend to a complete representation of possible events, if given, would still need the formless “depth” of a passage in order to be granted its gravity, direction and sense. This formless “beyond” precedes all order and yet gives the shape of seriousness and truth to the demand for thought and expression it leaves as a trace of its own passage. The “beyond” invoked is Plato’s, as well as Plotinus’, and Lévinas speaks of it in order to contrast the opening of sense to the comprehension of meaning within the world. It remains “intelligible resistance,” as Derrida says, yet in the unadorned service of a contestation of totality, a directedness toward the movement of thought in the world. We are not looking for the trace as a more situated moment of evidence, standing in for the methodological exigencies of the face, but for a way of situating the sense of the singular and singularizing demand of the face as the very form of openness: The face is precisely that unique opening where the significance of the Transcendent does not annul the transcendence in order to make it enter into an immanent order, but where, on the contrary, the transcendence is maintained as transcendence always turned back to [revolue] the transcendent. In the trace the relation between signified and signification is not correlation, but irrectitude itself. The supposedly mediated and indirect relation of sign to signifier is still rectitude, since it is an unveiling that neutralizes transcendence. The significance of the trace puts us in a lateral relation, inconvertible into rectitude (which is inconceivable in the order of unveiling and of being) and which responds to an irreversible past. No memory would know how to follow this past to the trace. It is an immemorial

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past and it is perhaps this as well that would be the meaning of eternity, the significance of which is not foreign to the past. Eternity is the very irreversibility of time, source and refuge of the past.131 In just a few words the themes of overflowing are brought into the space of expressions, signifying meaning, and the irrectitude that always shows the priority of that deformation of sense, toward overflowing expression, which an orientation toward the face needed to show. The “significance of the trace consists in signifying without making appear” (199) such that “the authentic trace disturbs [dérange] the order of the world” (200). Signifying is not the same as constituting an object—at least at one point, at that point where the trace indicates an order that belongs to a different light, a separated, formless intelligence in motion. In this way, the multiplicity of light, or of being, had been key to Totality and Infinity, as a way of understanding how others are exterior to our own powers, yet somehow existing in such a way that we are affected by that other presence. We share a mute or silent presence within the murmuring existence of that which is, a murmuring that is closed off to the light.132 Only that world that has been given sense bears light—only with the subject does the world move through determination into sense. But where that other represented the constant potency of commencement, of birth beyond the self, in Totality and Infinity, the other here is given shape in a passage into depth and sense and not a surging forth or overflowing. The idea of the trace, and of the passage of the “he” that Lévinas renders as he-ness (illeité), are introduced shortly after Totality and Infinity, in order to capture the sense of the withdrawal of the face from all presence. That which within each trace of an empirical passage, beyond the sign that it can become, conserves the specific significance of the trace—is only possible by virtue of its situation within the trace of this transcendence. This position within the trace—which we have called illeité—does not commence in the things, which, of themselves, do not leave a trace, but rather produce effects, that is remain within the world. A rock has scratched another. The scratch may be, certainly, taken for a trace; in reality, without the man who held the rock, the scratch is nothing but an effect. It is just as little a trace as the fire burning in the forest is a trace of the lightning. The cause and the effect, even if separated by time, belong to the same world. Everything in the things is exposed even what they don’t know: the traces that mark them are part of this plenitude of

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presence, their history is without past. The trace as trace does not lead only toward the past, but is the passing itself toward a past more distant than any past and than any future, since they would still be placed within my time, toward the past of the Other, where eternity is drawn—absolute past that reunites all times.133 The difference can be captured in terms of the actuality Plotinus speaks of, in the Enneads that both Lévinas and Derrida point to as the origin of the idea of the trace, in the metaphor of a fire that causes effects and leaves only traces—or ashes—behind. Unlike the ontotheological position where the first cause creates the other causes, the cause here, the greater actuality, is the consumptive movement of the fire itself—neither efficient nor final cause, it is the form of all things moving through presence back into the formless nothingness from which they arose. Thus the basic structure of thought, or of the giving of form to the world, is understood as the first motion within the determination of the whole, and yet not itself productive of that whole. One doesn’t participate in the forms, but in the movement of form, and thus one avoids the substance metaphysics Heidegger denounces. Part of the problem is that in the overflowing motion of a world in the play of creating sense, always belonging within the positive flow of being, we would be incapable of responding to Heidegger’s criticisms of the form of productive presence. Derrida—in his reading of Heidegger’s criticism of the vulgar (productive) conception of time—doubted whether it was possible to avoid the movement through partiality (specificity or determination) and thus through a corresponding “spatiality” of givenness. According to Derrida, Lévinas is also looking for a way of avoiding that passage through what alternately gets called finitude, violence, economy or labor, by taking the form of openness for granted—as the form of the infinite, as the form instituted by God in the creation of language and reason.134 This institution of the shape of signification or sense means that for Derrida the resistance is not “purely intelligible,” but rather has the form of an inscription—it has, that is, a form outside of the mental or intelligible space of expressivity or intention as such. It is exteriority, the place in which we live, and the space that Hegel, as accentuated in Lévinas’ criticisms of Hegel, would identify with the labor of the same or of the whole. Derrida’s use of the trace at this point in his career is perhaps best represented in Of Grammatology, where it plays a central role. Although he marks a debt to Lévinas, he ties it back to “a Heideggerian intention,”

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instead.135 This is the modern thinking that will not separate thought from language, being from representation, or in its Saussurian version, sign from signifier; consequently, no human hand is needed to have made a mark in order to serve as origin of the trace. Rather, the very mark itself, the written supplement to the underlying intention or meaning-giving act, already carries with it the form of the trace—and thus of producing the meaningfulness or articulation of the world. That the signified would be originally and essentially (and not only for a finite and created mind) trace, that it would be always already in position of the signifier, such is the apparently innocent proposition where the metaphysics of logos, of presence and consciousness, should reflect writing as its death and its resource.136 Although Derrida’s sense of passage here is very close to Lévinas’, the separation that Lévinas insists on is not articulated—if anything, that separation corresponds to the very structure that Derrida militates against as part of the remnants of a theological or metaphysical prejudice. In this sense, Derrida is closer to Plotinus, and to the ways in which the trace marks the element of passage—of the inscription of traces—to which all specificity, human or material, would belong. Every scratch, on every rock, would have to be originally a trace. That is, unlike either Lévinas or Plotinus, Derrida insists on the positive or affirmative moment of bodily—or aesthetic, or finite— contact as constitutive and deformative. We followed part of this movement in Derrida’s reading of Husserl, but it now carries a slightly different weight in consideration of Lévinas’ articulation of the trace. In other words, the movement of power as transcendent and grounding deformation of our material contact with the world, within its context or intelligible foundations, is not equal to the very project of understanding or manipulating the world. But since Derrida will not countenance a foundational separation, the difference must arise from out of the motion and not be, from outside the motion, that which grants the shape of sense as such; the trace is not the mark of an originary, now absent, creative act, but the form in which one assumes one’s possibilities, the form of being moved by the impossible event of a world wherein one will move toward the possible. The development of the concept of a trace, then, allows for a shift away from the opposition between intelligible and real toward the ethical shape—or the moral demands—that respond to the absence of meaning, as well as to its promise.

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Affirmation and absence Importantly, Derrida’s understanding of affirmation also changes in its trajectory from the “affirmative deconstruction” announced in Spurs and in Of Grammatology’s reading of Nietzsche—where the play of forces is affirmed—to “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” more than a decade later, where the play of absencing (of avoiding speaking) is itself the affirmation that precedes and constitutes the play of force. For both, the sense, or orientation, that affirmation itself would represent must be separated from the form of a subject that knows what it means to affirm the world, or to live in the light of that affirmation, but for the later articulation, that form of imposition, the form of the inscription of form treated under the rubric of grammatology, is replaced by the inability to make present, and by the absence that gives form to that impotence. The motion to be affirmed, in Derrida’s earliest writings, is the play of God within the world, as the reality and violence of that world. For Lévinas, the structure of “he-ness,” the fact that God has always already passed and is not accessible as a “thou,” means that the passage has the form of thought’s motion—that reason and justice are grounded within the shape of the passage from material into thought. For Derrida, as he made clear repeatedly in his last works, it is the messianic promise that grounds this latter shape, and it must always contain a spectrality that would prevent either the reality of the material or the exigency of the spiritual (or rational) from dominating the proper shape of understanding. The infinite must be enacted, or performed, in the place of the impossible demand to “set the time right”—the time that is, somehow, always “out of joint” and always, in the very structure of experience, promising a sense beyond itself.137 God’s play, in other words, is only promised and not what we already live within. This promise, it seems, must have been impossible—must have been congruent with the chance and play, or the contingency, of the world’s real presence—and the movement instituted by that promise will deform the contours it supposedly put into shape. For that reason, the promised justice will neither be the moment of the juridical that Heidegger contests in the Latin, nor will it be the gathering of sense into thought that Heidegger revives from the Greek. Rather, it will be the promise of dissemination and deformation itself—the faith that in every movement of specificity the deformation is also there, as the motion that we may affirm, even if that motion is the passage into oblivion, or desertion, that finitude would

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signify.138 Such is the promise of the trace, and of its precedence over all merely human intentionality. More, the movement into that desert of oblivion—into the silent spaces others will occupy by speaking beyond our place of presence, and beyond the proper place of the words they will have taken up—constitutes the transcendence, or the promise of an impossible future, and thus an intimacy or friendship beyond the shared word. That every event necessarily implies this promise, however, continues the thinking of necessity that had begun with “Violence and Metaphysics,” although with a more careful understanding of how the passage constitutes the element of our becoming. Such positions, although defended throughout Derrida’s last works, tend to be evocative of large trajectories, and resilient against all further summarization. The final pages at the end of “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” for example, put Heidegger structurally into the enormously weighted position of contesting the Christianization of Greek thought—in the third moment of the essay’s deployment (labeled “C”), where one is somewhat led to expect a discussion of negative theology in Arab or Jewish traditions, those traditions are excluded, cryptically, because of the “filter” of the “psyche” that has been at the core of the discussion of the Greek and Christianized Greek traditions. And without being tempted to simply unfold the content of this last, elliptical and dense treatment of Heidegger’s understanding of the “place” of the “nothing,” allow me to say that the stakes of the work have to do with contesting the philosophical priority of unfolding: the evocation of reading yet to be done—of thoughts that will not be articulated sufficiently to match the task evoked, and yet which do not then simply avoid the task of saying, which avoid the proposition by evoking the prayer, or the apostrophe—represents the work of the trace itself. Of the trace: a word used somewhat sparingly in this essay that opens with the promise of being dedicated to the “‘trace’ in its relation to what is called, sometimes abusively, ‘negative theology.’”139 No longer working within the clarity of belonging to a world, no longer pretending to begin by describing the place we find ourselves within, the promise of clarity precedes and structures all the potency and force of light. The act of writing is formed, intelligibly, by the structure of a delayed promise: I promise that if I were to write, I would write without betraying the task. In the deformation of a conditional, directed toward a divine task, the verbs of being are thus enjoined to the adverbs. The time of enactment is delayed, stretched toward a form that cannot be present. It is a famous saying of

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Eckhart’s, itself in a subjunctive mood: “Man would be an adverb of God.”140 One will have wanted to have unfolded all the references; more, one will have wanted to be able to trust the play, the force of the evocations, and the rhythm that they establish for reading and thinking. One will have wanted to have begun well, to have given a shape to the endeavor, to have played the game with the appropriate gravity and grace. This evocation, the promise that the clarity will bear fruit—no matter how monstrous it may at first appear in our own eyes, no matter how free from our own intentions—will bear all the weight of the divine, or of the affirmation of life’s own progress through time. In regard to the questions posed by Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle, and specifically the motion of steresis, Derrida is at once very close and very far. The passage of the trace, after all, is explicitly a way of appropriating Heidegger’s sense of originary motion and withdrawal—the divine occupies the place of the play of the world and is not represented as the formless yet productive being of a divine (or human and collective) mind. And yet the shape of that transformative motion in Derrida emphasizes the infinity of a movement through the determinations and deferrals of finite life. Every finitude will promise more deformation, further iterations beyond one’s own being, and not, as with Heidegger, one’s own shape and finitude, one’s own fragility at the place of being. The fragility as Derrida represents it lives within the promise that another birth—monstrous and deforming—will come beyond me, beyond my possibility. With Derrida, the various oppositions that would allow one to contrast form to content, frame to instantiation, or universal to exemplar, are consistently exposed at their intersecting points of “contamination.” But what would make each “act,” in its punctuality, move necessarily toward a deformation—or a transcendence of redemption? Why, in other words, would an act of presence carry the weight of thought, and more specifically, of the multiplicity of thought? The worry that Heidegger would voice, as we will see more slowly developed in the second part, is that this understanding of the structure of an act involves a trust in the power of God to form our world—and a trust that is obliterated, in its divine character, at the point where we are certain that God is his own cause, or that the play just happens. To trust in the production, to trust that the affirmation should be doubled, the passage affirmed, is to abandon oneself to the serious gravity of a constantly transformative play. It is a trust in the traces, in the passage into multiplicity that iterative structures announce, and thereby a trust in the promise of life.

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Such a question of necessity and trust, as it takes on methodological weight, is mirrored in Derrida’s criticism of Heidegger—in, specifically, the refusal to allow Heidegger to merely exit the metaphysical scene. As we continue to follow Derrida’s own thematics, the last few pages of “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials” carry an important emphasis on the motion of avoiding—and on Heidegger’s attempts to avoid relying on the concepts of “being” or of “God” within his writing. These pages no longer—as one would expect from Derrida’s earlier writings—celebrate the necessity of belonging within the dissemination, within the fruitfulness or bearing of the world, but rather they speak of belonging to the desertion or abandon at the center of the desert. Such, it seems, is the motion of all specificity, and of all passage into form. We, perhaps, would belong to the necessity of that passing, and of that avoiding as much as to the necessity of passing through contamination. Heidegger, as we saw briefly in relation to his reading of Aristotle in possibility and nature, on the steresis that characterizes a motion toward the singularization of the possible, would seem to occupy the same philosophical ground—or rather, motion. One is troubled, however, by these metaphors— of ground and motion being held together—when it comes to reason or thought. And to the shape of the rational or thought as such. In some sense, hinted at in much of Derrida’s last work, this problem of trusting in the shape of affirmation has been explicitly rethematized in relation to the problems of space and receptivity. For Derrida, the deformative presence of the impossible contains and grants all the motions of possibility to which it stands opposed. And yet that very motion of containing—whether possible or impossible—takes the place of the subject to be within a motion whose truth is constituted in and as motion. Such is the necessity of the bet, and of not betting against the bet, already found in his earlier work. Later, he will also speak of this motion as survival, and as mourning, in relation to the passage of the friend or of the other—the motion affirms the passage of life, in its specificity, into memory, at the place where one would expect the affirmation of life itself. Why? Why affirm life? Or its motions of passage? Why identify that motion with the impossible event of the contingent, and the equally impossible promise of a sense, not yet given, within that impossible event? Why link this affirmation to the divinity, the messianic structures of thought? For Derrida, the motion into thought is the motion through multiplicity and thus necessarily carries the deformation of any pretended

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singularity—in this respect, he would be profoundly Plotinian. The demand of thought, as with the long tradition of metaphysics, would be the demand of transcendence, but the demand would only be matched in turning away from the singularity of any particular shape. I would want to look for a different sense to the demand of thought—no longer tied to the trace, and its correlated idea of fullness in the passage of time, yet oriented by the same claims of multiplicity on our thought. This new understanding of that claim will be evolved from out of the multiplicity which has been associated with determination and the presence of the subject since Kant, where Kant’s understanding of determination in the form of the judgment fundamentally transforms the logic of overflowing that led us to our present questions. If Hegel completes metaphysics, as we will see, it is because he radicalizes this determining motion. By understanding Heidegger’s criticism of subject metaphysics as being directed against this very particular conception of determination, I wish to point to a different movement of the demand of the demand—the doubled exigency—of thought. A demand, in other words, without even the continuity of its own withdrawal, without the assurance that, no matter what, more will be given to thought, more resources will become available to our thinking and thus to our world, because we will always and continuously be called into the place of that withdrawal and thus of providing that deformative motion. What if, for example, the trace has not yet passed? The abandon has not yet been set into motion? What if, finally, the abandon is not the simplicity of time’s incessant stealing away into the past, but the difficult demand to bear shape within that passage, and withdraw from the power of the world’s presence?

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Part Two The Sense of a Gesture

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But the relationships between mind and hand are not, however, so simple as those between a chief accustomed to obedience and a docile slave. The mind rules over the hand; hand rules over mind. The gesture that makes nothing, the gesture with no tomorrow, provokes and defines only the state of consciousness. The creative gesture exercises a continuous influence over its inner life. The hand wrenches the sense of touch away from its merely receptive passivity and organizes it for experiment and action. It teaches man to conquer space, weight, density and quantity. Because it fashions a new world, it leaves its imprint everywhere upon it. It struggles with the very substance it metamorphoses and with the very form it transfigures. Trainer of man, the hand multiplies him in space and in time. —Henri Focillon1

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Deformation of one hand rather than another Throughout his philosophical work Hegel is at pains to articulate the structures of struggling with form, the processes of giving shape to the space we live in and of being shaped, in turn, by the resistances as well as the metamorphoses of that communal space. We struggle with nature to unlock its secrets, exploit its resources, but find that we, too, are part of that nature, and in the course of our struggles, both human and nature have been changed. This multifaceted and reciprocal engagement itself is said to constitute the structure at the heart of the passage of time—the structure of belonging to life’s own structuring motion. The free subject is neither master nor slave, but the movement that brings the work of the mind and the work of the hand into their dialectical unity. Such is the joining of activity and passivity in the aesthetic movement of a hand that Focillon evokes, in our epigraph, and that provides more than just an example of how Hegel transforms our thinking about human presence. No longer passive minds enjoying the transcendent luminosity of the divine, our becoming within the world itself carries the force of the divine light as impressed on the world; we are the mind of the world made concrete in the moment of human presence. (As we will see, this does not mean that Hegel is a pantheist, but that the structure of light as communication, or exteriorization, means that the relation of the individual to others, all immanent to the world, replaces a relation to a transcendent other; we are not the light, Hegel could say, but bear witness to its fullness among us, its fully illuminating presence2). But further, in that articulated process of engagement and metamorphosis, Hegel shows us what it means to open onto the future from out of that presence—and shows us where and how such an opening coincides, perhaps, with the very possibility, and thus the force and potency, of human thought as it actively shapes the essence of its own existence as moving forward.3 We are open, it would seem, to and as the transformative movements of spirit itself—open to and as the ways in which we, and all the others who inhabit our world with us, transform reality. We are open to and as transformation because transformation is opening, is the active appropriation of the world as meaningful. The necessity of that constantly transformative openness, as a structure of possibility and of our engagement with the potency of what can be, would itself only come to be seen under the tutelage of Hegel’s dialectic of advancing light, even if adumbrated in Plotinus’ “life of the eternal,” above.4

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The orientation of every action of relating to the world is given, following Hegel, by the necessity of productive determination. The action must be determinate because only thus is it seen by others as oriented by the expressive openness of recognition, and the unity of that orientation with the very function of productivity engaging with the world is what characterizes the good as such. The fullness of the functioning is the goal. That is, the good is no longer transcendent, but is the rectification of every moment of immanence, of being fully illuminated as what one is, so that one can be oriented by the good as present in the world as the way things are done, and not as merely one thing among others.5 This fact is why many Hegel interpreters find it impossible to think of Hegel as guilty of ontotheology, although my purpose is to show how that sense of orientation, or rectification through the function of time’s production or reception, continues in the ontotheological mode. Hegel completes the project of reason because he sees that we must become converts, individually and communally, to the cause of reason, and thus morally commit ourselves to the open spirit of unprejudiced inquiry into the dynamic nature—and transformative force—of the world. His philosophy recognizes its task in the articulation of openness as the real and effective force of the possible as shared presence to the world through the actuality of a shared language. In that specific sense, then, Hegel would be said to open a rich and full thinking of possibility at the place of human situated presence, especially if one expresses a healthy skepticism about the necessity of the passage into a system.6 More on this, below. As should already be clear, we are setting ourselves against this enabling light, not only in the person of Hegel, or of Hegel stripped of systematic pretensions, but also in the myriad ways that contemporary philosophers follow him, joining the human with the divine in the place of a sparkling presence—a human who produces meaning—even when that spark is restricted to the bare firing of a neuron in response to a stimulus. This is not a criticism of a supposed visual prejudice in Hegel; I am convinced that the conceptual is embodied, and not abstract. Nor will I insist on a more stark division between phenomenal and noumenal realms in order to clip Hegel’s wings, as if he should have seen that philosophy is basically an epistemological endeavor, and strayed when he claimed that nature itself was also transformed by human activity. I take Hegel to be working from a more basic framing presupposition; a frame that connects him loosely to the Neoplatonic tradition,7 but takes into account the new understanding of

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force arising with modernity—an understanding of force within a natural and continuous presence that had eclipsed the very possibility of a force of presence sustaining mechanical causation from the outside.8 If the world is a place susceptible to change, and not just to the reorganization of prime matter, the work of the hand as it gives shape to the objects of the world evokes the humanity of our situation within the world. In a spiritual slide that seems to echo the growth and detachment of technology itself, the connection between the form given to matter and the work of the hand is often effaced, just as the production of meaning is frequently reduced to nothing more than the manipulation of information; “manipulation,” in other words and against Hegel’s protestations, has become nothing but the reorganization of given things, so that transformative change is only an illusion, an “epiphenomenon” that emerges as a result of the reorganization. For the privileged example, one no longer recognizes the categories of creation and of making art as inextricably bound to their historical roots in the crafts, even as the continuity of the unfolding logic of artistic endeavors remains tied to those more plastic origins. From this perspective, one understands why Arthur Danto is able to announce the fulfilment of the process of artistic creation in Hegelian terms as the project of “creating art explicitly for the purpose of knowing philosophically what art is”—that is, in moving to a level of conceptual freedom embodied in the continuing process of making art after all the material and technical resources have been made available to the artist for exploitation. Art, according to Danto, was no longer bound by “ideologies” after modernism, “and artists, liberated from the burden of history, were free to make art in whatever way they wished, for any purposes they wished, or for no purposes at all.”9 Freedom, in Danto’s extension of Hegel, had been realized in world history by artists taking on the situation of humans who choose, in self-conscious gestures, without “exterior” conceptual constraints, and working at the very limits of the capacities of the material. The self-consciousness of the gestures, because oriented by freedom, constituted the completion or fullness of the gesture as illuminated, and thus rectified by the ideal unity of freedom and action. Such an emphasis on the free play of the conceptual would seem to have no space for the quaint gestures of artisans and handworkers, and yet, Danto’s work also implies that what a piece of art is, in some fashion, is a change or a manipulation of the world capable of being recognized as an artistic gesture.10 The idea of a gesture as such is not a central theme in Danto’s work, although he goes to great lengths to explain what might constitute the

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successful enactment of an aesthetic gesture in contemporary art markets, that is, such that the gesture can be recognized as art.11 The question I want to pose, against Danto but more broadly against the idea that technology fulfils our essence as a creative species, concerns the gesture that finds its end in being understood as pure gesture, or as pure self-referencing concept (that is, as having no necessary purpose outside its own enactment, and thus as self-rectifying, or immediately valid12). The creative gesture, I will argue by contrast, must sustain a space of difficulty against the resolution of the movement within the conceptual, or as an externalized product that can be conveyed as a fully self-sufficient sign; the rooted finitude of human creation, in other words and against the Hegelian reading, is not a species of creation as such, a participation in the infinite world of what is.13 The movements at stake here are historical and multiply striated. I have announced myself, in opening this part with Hegel, as concerned with a contour of thinking about the place of the human that moves between Kantian and Hegelian articulations of what can be learned by virtue of our having been situated. The rhetorical styles that instantiate the different points on the curve of this historical development have themselves taken center stage in much of the most compelling work of the last generation, although a reassertion of the more modest (“Kantian”) claims about the relation between language and world has been accompanied by a turn against the deconstructive readings and toward more traditionally “constructive” readings. Although I consciously avoid the style of deconstructive readings, even when offering accounts of Derrida himself, I would argue it is a mistake to return to a style that assumes a text speaks for itself by constructing meaning (and a second mistake to believe that our task is to reconstruct that meaning). The mistake lies in believing that the style was the point in Derrida’s writing, as if deconstruction were a type of mannerism; by contrast, one should see the style as a consequence of the understanding of the human situated at the place where history is instantiated as the irreducible complexity of articulation—a complexity sustained, Derrida argued, in various styles of approach, and not in propositional statements about the situated things of the world. We are in the midst of trying to show how that complexity is understood, although I will eventually suggest, against Derrida, that the difficulty of sustaining being is more fundamentally at stake than the irreducible complexity of being as enacted on the surfaces, or within the texts, of the world. (A “contour” is meant to speak to the ways in which styles of approach are sustained, and not to how they are individually

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enacted, so that the difficulty of sustaining contact with the world replaces the “irreducible complexity” of the enactments.) In the contour I would offer, instead of pretending to either recapture the simplicity that causes the complexity or accepting the life within the complexity for its own sake, we find a way of sustaining ourselves between the simplicity and the complexity. The Kantian readings of the last two centuries allowed for a movement of language separated from the world, at some point, and thus put the burden on the researcher to control the style of approaching an argument, in accord with the moral norms of the researcher’s community, and with the goal of achieving a shared language capable of sustaining a shared meaning, even if the objects of knowledge never achieved independent meaning outside our language. We are, it should be noted, leaving many “realists” off to the side, although one would have to eventually account for the various ways in which they have tried to wed their style and their philosophical arguments. For the Hegelians, especially as taken up in France after Kojève and through structuralism and post-structuralism, the construction of a surface allowed language to sustain meaning at the instant of its articulation, without a deeper ground below that moment of articulation; this is the surface that Derrida’s Of Grammatology named “the text,” and deconstruction began in the attempt to show the general forms involved in the movement of the text, although it also showed that the surface could never by simply enacted, and instantiations of meaning could never be placed permanently and irrevocably within any conceptual frame. The idea of a gesture—the contours of which will take us through the end of the present book—is in a broad sense borrowed from Heidegger, although it takes on a life of its own in many French structuralists, and was deployed early on by Derrida as a way of marking how the surface cannot close in on itself in its immediacy.14 We will follow some of these uses much more closely, in the final part. The differing accounts of how the surface remains incomplete, as they develop through Derrida’s career, determine much of the contour of our reading here, but also demand of us a reading that is explicitly dedicated to the contours, and not to either the surface or to some depth that mysteriously “exists” below the surface. We are not allowed the comforting illusions of the close reading, and the idea that a surface can escape its sustaining gestures through the explosive freedom of a permanent deconstruction. The difference between a Kantian surface and a Hegelian surface, if we can speak in these terms, is found in where the

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human is placed relative to that surface, although in each case the human, as a speaker of language, sustains the surface. (Or, phrased in post-humanist terms: in each case, the speaking of a language follows a grammar that allows the human to arise in the place where language is articulated). That difference in how a surface is constructed is what will guide the following pages as we follow the contours of our self-understanding in terms of where we are situated with respect to being, and all with an eye toward thinking otherwise than in terms of individual acts of imagination being situated within a conditioning whole—although that contour absorbs the whole of this book, as we ask what it would mean to think of ourselves wholly without transcendent support, wholly without the frame of God’s hand in our lives. For now, we are asking how depth is opposed to surface by virtue of the work of language, even where it only suggests the rectification of each point on the surface, and does not posit a hidden depth below each instance. We cannot be satisfied with an account of a “founding decision,” or original articulation of a philosophical approach, because the attempts to answer the philosophical questions respond to these frames by transforming the frames themselves. It is naive, in other words, to think that the resources for resolving our philosophical difficulties can be found in the halfobscured recesses of a founding text—we must search, instead, for ways of sustaining the difficulty beyond its original instance, because only thus can we follow the ways in which varied frames can striate the same founding texts. The history of the transformations in these framings, insofar as they are constrained by terms that are not present of themselves, by traces of a question that is never fully posed, is what I would like to capture in the idea of a philosophical contour, without presupposing that there is a “will to question” that exists beyond any particular formulation of a question. Our purpose, presently, is to set out a broad choice in terms of thinking of a surface. For Kant, if we push an interpretation that is still prevelant, there is an absolute depth; the noumenal always grounds and sustains the phenomenal from “beyond” that surface of appearances.15 If that separation is taken as absolute, then we can act as if the surface is self-contained, as if God had no hand in everyday events, and still be sure of the final purposefulness of life, and its grounding in light. I take it that Nietzsche was right to denounce such a belief as ultimately nihilistic. For Hegel, the spreading out of the surface—the communication of meaning to others— sustains meaning in the way that depth at the site of each individual’s

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apprehension had sustained meaning in Kant. By my reading, if one correctly understands this sense of movement along the surface, one understands the grounding of the new spiritual, political and economic life that characterizes the contemporary capitalist world—at least in its technological aspect as the promise of freedom and the mastery of the material conditions of life. Very frequently phrased as a response against Descartes’ metaphysics, much of the twentieth century was spent denouncing various ideas of depth (from Ryle, Sellars, and Quine to Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Foucault), but Derrida’s insight was to see that Descartes’ metaphysics did not preclude beginning from the surface—as long as one thought through the originality that sustains the surface in terms of its movement beyond the self. Spirit did not have to be a soul, or a “ghost in the machine,” if one thought the originality of its movement, and did not have to be a “depth” if one thought through the movements of the surface. Derrida thus gives us a Hegelian reading of Descartes, now free of any metaphysics of depth, and thus grounds a return to modernity, and the resources of technology, without a return to a transcendent God. Between Husserl’s version of Descartes and the originality of understanding the meaning of the past from the present, and Hegel’s version of a community that shares an infinite surface as the production of interpretations, Derrida was able to articulate a more vibrant and powerful idea of a surface—a text that deconstructs itself as it moves forward in time—a text that embraces its own complexity as the very mechanism of its movement.16 That one must still make a space for the sustaining of a difficulty, as a contour of our contact with the problem, is what I will argue for, below. The “gesture” of sustaining that surface is what came to replace the idea of a spontaneous creativity arising from the depths of a subject (or a God mystically beyond the subject) and it is that work of sustaining that we will follow through Kant and Hegel, as they effected Heidegger and Derrida. We begin, though, with the framing question about frames—about how the “dialectical force” of being present to meaning is deployed along a surface—before turning back to its historical ground. The difficulty of gestures, as we will see, rests in how they are sustained and not in how they are enacted, or received: the gesture of openness need not be the mystical position of remaining open to all experience, as if one sustained oneself in a specious present; rather, the sustaining of a gesture has a particular contour, a movement “between” subject and object, as Heidegger will say, and that contour will then shape every particular instance.

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As we will see, the difficulty of letting go will eventually replace the simple power of constituting a surface, without instituting a depth behind the scenes, or insisting on the complicating necessity of spreading out along the surface. But all these terms still require time to develop as the contour of a reading of the last two centuries of philosophical work. The difficulty of gestures We may say, following Hegel, that the conceptual is the culmination of all the movements of the hand, since every grasping involves the interplay of subject and object, spiritual and material; conception and grasping are, after all, etymologically connected, and Hegel constantly invokes that connection in the German Begriff. This thinking of conceptuality avoids the abstractions of a visual model of truth, or a Cartesian model of a single person who possesses the truth in an instant of apprehension, because the gestures are essentially stretched out across time, and thus publicly available for others (or at least for the same subject at different times). The hand belongs to each individual, but the grasping requires that the hand take on a specific shape, responding to what is grasped, that it does not have when simply open; at the same time, unlike vision, the hand cannot pretend to see what is without touching, without “contaminating” the thing that is grasped. The hand, in other words, allows us to give contour to the phenomenal without positing a depth, to endow the surface with sustaining force, with a contour of movement along the surface, without necessarily presupposing a depth. That some gestures, however, do replay that sense of depth or transcendence, even against their avowed intentions, is part of Derrida’s great insight, and I wish to frame our reading of Kant with an understanding of how a metaphysics of depth can reassert itself in certain models of meaningful communication that are supposedly dedicated to the idea of an infinite surface. For Hegel, we remember, the concept is the tool that most purely grasps its object as formed by the grasping itself; for art, the conceptual artist is the one who understands that all tools are available, and that the “conceptual gesture” most effectively organizes the powers of the wide variety of particular techniques, as applied to the material. But taking on this understanding of the work of the hand, as extended through conceptual gestures, means that every properly constituted object will be oriented by the demand that it be acknowledged as conceptually significant (as an artistic gesture, for example);

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this brings in an intersubjective or communal demand to accompany the demand that one, as human, implement change, or impress form upon the world through transformative engagement with the material. To understand the radical resituation of the human in Hegel, we must underline that Hegel is not claiming to describe a flat space that the human knows as a set of facts in opposition to a knowing subject; the subject itself is constituted as supporting the demand in responding to the call to occupy the surface as meaningfully determined. There is a demand for communicability, and for the determinate forms that can be recognized as appropriate gestures within a genre, as well as a demand for originality, and for the reinscription of works of art above any pre-existing generic distinctions. The form of recognizable determination is already quite restrictive, and we will follow its specific contours throughout this second part, but there is also the demand that these gestures give shape to our lives as a whole, or produce effects within our shared experience, which is usually thought to encompass every sort of creative activity. And if this demand to create effects by manipulating the resources available to us—which Heidegger tells us is the demand of technology in subject metaphysics—is allowed to circumscribe all possible artistic gestures, from the works of genius to the mundane and derivative piece of kitsch, then no art could be called upon to contest the dominance of technology in our time. The full explication of these claims, and especially the relation between art, gesture and technology, will occupy the rest of this book. The third and final part will look for a non-technological way of understanding art and its foundational gestures. For now, I wish to point to the articulation of possibility within aesthetic gestures that Hegel would give to us. I mention Danto in this context simply because he so clearly allows us to see how possibility— and the developing possibilities of finding new forms of expression—comes to a close two centuries after Hegel without renouncing the basic model of progress through the unfolding of techniques. The “end of art,” just like the “end of history,” comes about with the self-conscious appropriation of the place of subjectivity. For Danto, who is here serving as a representative of Hegelian aesthetics in post-modernism, the artist recognizes herself as self-conscious producer of art, free to choose the means and the ends of her production. New forms of art may arise, but always within the self-conscious appropriation of experience (understood in the broadest possible sense) by the artist. For Hegel, beyond just the aesthetic experience, the world as a whole is susceptible to being formed, or transformed, and we humans always

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occupy the place of giving form to the world, bearing its sense. History is achieved when we fully grasp our task as creative producers of meaning, not when all the possible meanings are exhausted. The critique of Hegel as having eliminated the possibility of the future—or rather, as having reduced the future to an impoverished form of human grasping misleadingly linked to possibility—can be drawn back to Heidegger and to a certain extent Schelling and Kierkegaard. A different critique is proposed in the French tradition, around the axis of various conceptions of violence. For Hegel, the openness of the system was paramount, and any point of closure was said to be violent. With Eric Weil, Lévinas and Derrida, the violence of conceptuality itself is brought into question and renounced in favor of a yet greater openness, universality or justice, sustained in its specificity outside the system.17 After the end of humanism, one can no longer confidently say “I am open to experience,” but must strive to be “open” beyond all self-possession and even beyond the meaningfulness of names; openness must be more than liberal friendliness or encyclopedic inclusiveness, and must court the insanity of life without bounds, or the monstrosity of a birth beyond our conception.18 In other words, the specificity of determination is overcome in the further movement of spirit past that singular violent act of particularizing meaning. With Kojève, Bataille and again Derrida, the necessity of this violence was deployed against any closed system or restricted economy of possible sense, so that the very violence of the determining closure was deformed toward the eventual openness of (or rather, against) the system.19 With Derrida’s reading of Bataille, for a notably privileged example, one finds the articulation of the “final” Hegelian Aufhebung, the process itself as it takes account of itself, to be the stumbling point. That is, the Hegelian articulation of the Aufhebung is seen as fundamentally convincing as a description of the world’s progress through time, but as inappropriately bound by a “restricted economy” that would “submit the contextual attention and differences of signification to a system of meaning, permitting or promising an absolute formal mastery.”20 Bataille’s project, as an expansion on Hegel, is to understand the necessity of violence, the necessity of the movement of opening, without abdicating to the supposed “necessity” of a conceptual system that would account for and thus efface the violence.21 It is a question, already in Hegel, of what it means to think, and thus what it means to belong to the necessities of a thinking existence, a thoughtful struggle with the possibilities and facts life offers to those of us who share a world.

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I take Derrida’s appropriation and criticism of Bataille to be decisive for his own development, and for his criticism of Heidegger’s hands, which will occupy us at great length, below. Within the framework of the particular essay of Derrida’s on Bataille that I’ve just quoted, which belongs to some of Derrida’s earliest writing, we find the necessity of violence within the process of giving shape to the world to be itself limited by the sense of the movement through that violence. There are appropriate violences, necessary movements that open, transgress, and bring to a determination. The question of violence arises, as a problem of system and the dual demand of systematic and situated articulations of science, at that point where “the dialogue with Hegel is decisive” precisely for explicating the deficiencies and possibilities of Bataille’s “mysticism” of transgression. One wants to know when the sacred enters into the flow of thought, when a sense begins to belong to the necessity, or the need, of life instead of being a mundane part of the economy of everyday meaning. In my first part, in various configurations of the idea of the trace, the precedence of form was seen to stem from the positioning of the human at the place of time’s passage through particularity. In this second part, I will be looking for a different relation of force to form: that is, because the very idea of power, and of potency moving through the effects of determination, remains tied to the trope of spatializing force I will instead look for an alternative understanding of that movement. The generative process is not, under such a view, the assertion or spatial positioning of a power, but the abandon to what is “external” to power. The contours of such an abandon convey the trajectory of my writing—and I would not presently pretend to have adequately set out these contours. The permanence of such an inadequacy, in fact, touches on the very problem of a contourless task that still, and perhaps in its very lack of contour, claims our adherence—that demands, in some sense, our time, and thus gives contour to our lives by constraining our future development. Despite the important differences in approach, Bataille is apposite here since he would also have wanted philosophy to reconceptualize its relation to its task, and to the singular events it would take as its examples. This philosophical desire, in its turn, draws Derrida’s attention. The generative and powerful loss of control associated with art by Bataille is characterized as communication and as detatchment—it is the point where the subject is no longer individuated, and yet is still in communication with the forces that articulate the event as singular, as individual and individualizing. The .

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sacred contact with force supports all mundane articulations of meaning or truth. The form of that contact is sacred, and is found in the divine interdiction, since it gives shape to what may or must be done, and this form is most sacred, is most forcefully articulated as a contact, in the moment when it is violated. It is thus the original force of contact with form. But not the freedom of pure chance, of pure opposition between form and content, the human and that which gives itself to be thought. The importance of the interdiction, of the founding conceptual violence of the economy, lies in the law having been articulated, already and publicly, in the world—Bataille is not looking for an innocent or immediate contact with the physical, but for a generative transgression at the place where the world already bears force, a contact with the outside of the system of meaning that comes to us by virtue of a passage through that system. He’s looking for the transgression that founds the system of meaning itself in its innermost (secret) movement. Furthermore, the profound connection between force and articulation— epitomized with the separation of the subject from its individuality and its displacement into the position of the absolute—is said by Bataille himself to be Hegelian. Supposedly both with and against Hegel, Bataille transforms the necessity of thought into the need to transgress all of life’s supposed exigencies. The human lives within the sacred only when she opposes herself to the things within the economy, as the very form of that opposition, and thus lives within an absolute reality, silent in the face of all merely economic machinations. For Bataille, Hegel seems to be right about the structure of experience, and thus of the process of giving form to the world, but misunderstands the necessity of transgression, of that which cannot be said and which thus cannot find a place within the economy of clarity and light. Even though Hegel’s dialectic is indeed oriented by the force and originality of our participation in the world, the destruction or sublimation of every act, as it becomes communicable, would betray the force of the first contact in favor of the comprehension of that force. The monstrous power of the negative would be the comprehension that accounts for, or maps, every event in terms of the closed and systematic possibilities that pertain to its articulation.22 Every activity would be an articulation, and thus would belong to the progress of spirit toward absolute form. The circle of our clarity, of belonging intelligently to a world, ensures that the form of intelligent activity will always have been proscribed by the meaningful, by what it is possible to hear and understand.

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For Derrida’s reading of Bataille, at the mystic moment of the opening of meaning or sense, there is the promise of a direction to sense, of a vision or a gesture rising above the “tissue” of our everyday, rule-bound and economically regulated life. As the moment of mystical vision, achieving that sight would, it seems, be equivalent to death or insanity.23 The enactment of this sight would also be, perhaps surprisingly, part of the project of sense—of a direction or a being directed by, which would give “sense” to the world, albeit not as a conceptual meaning. Only within the frame of wanting to achieve this final, sacred, form of opposition, can one say that life has its own force, or its own direction, and consequently its own meaning. Only in affirming the direction of ecstasis away from the everyday can the gesture become transcendent; however, precisely in that moment, one also affirms a direction of transcendence, a “depth” or “height” that sustains every particular by saying that the “own” is the “proper” shape of sustaining the transgression against possession. One must, for the privileged example, sacrifice your own possessions (in the broad sense of the things that matter to you) in a potlatch. In a striking metaphor, Derrida likens the process to reading a map: Hegel’s embrace of the conceptual frame for all experience too quickly corresponds to the conceptual indifference of a map that could be read without regard to its particular context of being read, as if the map represented, in advance, all possible readings. It wouldn’t matter, more specifically, if the map were held in the left hand or the right since the gesture of reading subsumes the particularity of the hand. In more common terms, the violence of enacting a specific reading would be forgotten if one could pretend to self-consciously or universally account for the activity, and force, of the form of enactment itself. If the emergence into the light could be trusted, as the only proper direction of forceful movement, then we could live within its overarching space, and look diligently for the truth it gives us. We would know that the hand, as Focillon has it in my epigraph to the second part, always multiplies our presence, always creates continuities, always moves forward into meaning, albeit in the sense of an aesthetic form, and not in the concepts of science. However, if one is indifferent to that direction, and that force, then the deformations that constitute thought may not be given, and we may live within a closed space of mere repetitions, the “bad infinite” without the promise of transcendence, without even the promise of the deformation of those repetitions. We may face an existence without the frame, or at least the

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framing, our gestures convey to the world. The hand, in other words, may come to stand merely for the power to rearrange the material given to us, to transform the place within which we already live, and thus not be capable of opening up a space of communication or trust beyond its grasp. As with Focillon’s aesthetic theory, tied to the image of the handcrafts, Hegel would be right to have identified the necessity of the activity, but wrong to think that it only properly lent itself to production, creation and light. And Derrida sees Bataille himself as still guilty of a careless indifference with regard to his gestures, even if he refuses to privilege the map as a conceptual system. He points to this dangerous indifference, the flattening of sense, in his criticism of Bataille’s “empty form” of the Aufhebung,24 because it would rely on the continuity, or continual recurrence, of transgression and thus eliminate the space of alteration, deformation and transcendence that Bataille himself had thematized. Death, one would say, and even in Bataille’s conception of a distanced sovereignty, would seem to be anything but indifferent. Yet the rupture of death, in Derrida’s presentation of Bataille, is held within the space of the reciprocity of a hand, of the possibility of reaching into a place where the weave of this tissue of the world can be conceived of as reciprocal (and equitable) in the balanced movements of two hands, transgressing the everyday by rising above it. The parity assures that the rupture can be continuous, continually ruptured, so that the place of continuity can be displaced and trusted to do its work. Bataille speaks of this profound indifference as the sovereignty of the artist—or man of action—that knows himself to be above the mere utility of the everyday. We can always trust, Bataille seems to be saying, that our free artistic gestures, when violent enough, will separate from the everyday productive tissue of the world and thus achieve the space of sovereignty—such a possibility of response, of being capable of the contact with the impossible, depends on our trusting in power, or force more generally, as the absolute basis of the motion of the world. Bataille, for that reason, is not a thinker of the trace, but a believer in the forceful and enframing presence of a silence opposed to all words. The fragility of silence, the possibility of not being able to transgress, and thus transcend, is not considered. Derrida is approaching a critique and appropriation of Bataille—a criticism and approbation of the continuity of rupture that Bataille would instantiate, against every pretended discontinuity. The continuity of meaning, of the place where singular events are translated into iterable forms, was already understood from out of the continuity of our activity in

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the world by Hegel. To place that continuity a level higher, in the constant possibility of disruption, is to displace the question without resolving the issue. How is it, after all, that the limitations convey the sense of openness, or of possibility, that would give particular objects the space in which they are limited? The transgression of writing, according to Derrida, inscribes both those limits and those possibilities in a single stroke. Writing supplements thought at the place where possibility and form accede to their priority—at that place where the activity of articulation precedes every articulated thing. Yet what makes for the singularity of the inscription, for the motion of inscribing, if not something more original, less violent, than the articulation? My argument here—although it obviously cannot take the form of a traditional exposition of terms or the unfolding of a field of possible interpretations—is that the motion of deformation occupies the place freedom once had in German Idealism. In other words, the place of being a subject was once secured in the rectitude or integrity of occupying a position but now that shape or bearing must learn to convey its own weight, without the security of either truth or clarity, without knowing that one is supported within an encompassing whole.25 One bears the weight of transcendence in such deformations of the self—in such movements beyond simple respect, honesty and uprightness—and thus takes precedence, as form, over the sun’s own light. I am not looking for a greater realm of possibility, or hoping to have discovered a better way of tapping into the human’s own powers— instead, I seek to understand the form, and the deformations, that the “fact” of being claimed by such powers puts into the place of precedence. Such is already the question of reason and word captured in the Platonic orientation toward the eternal; such is the movement of thought as it arises from, or as, the world; such is the Heideggerian subjection of human thought to the absencing of the world’s forces. Breaking with the Plotinian trajectory of the first part, the second part will explore the methodological import of moving to the subject as the site of the representation of possibility and the power or force of forms. The methodological pretense to beginning in the security of knowing that one is in a partial relation to an encompassing whole masks the question of being’s force, the question that Heidegger revived and that Plotinus took up in the figure of the trace. Yet the turn to the subject carried with it a particular attitude toward the responsibility borne in thought, toward the best of what was potent within the world, and that sense of responsibility is needed to

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fill out our understanding of the trajectories of aesthetic form and sensible contact with the world. The subject as the site of the representation of possibility The slide between two immanences of power—of power’s productive activity and the power of its reception as a product, eventually realized in/ as a process of self-cognizant and coherent production at the place where the subject recognizes herself as part of the process of the world’s motion— allows Hegel to resituate the work of reason at the level of the absolute. It allows the “slide between,” the grasping of the task of moving from one level to another, understood as the form of human meaningful activity sustaining the world, to be itself thematized as the topic, and subject, of philosophy. No longer either the faculty of an apperceiving subject, as with Kant, nor the mere facts of the world, as with precritical dogmatic philosophy, the formative forces of thought are deployed in the world itself in the unity of theoretical and practical action. Such is the presence of Spirit grasping (wielding and understanding) its own force. Accordingly, the critique of Kant in Hegel’s Science of Logic is cast in terms of the problem of unity as such and of the transcendental unity of apperception. I wish to see the problem of the place of this unity in Hegel’s most general trajectory in the Science of Logic, specifically in his attempt to understand the self-formation of the concept [Begriff ] from out of the element of logic as it was first set in motion by a set of methodological demands—in order to demonstrate how the demands of a certain form of representation, as it begins the movement of unifying sense, are more carefully articulated in Hegel than in Kant. As we have already seen in the first half, the longer trajectory of the present writing searches for the sense, or direction, of these very demands of/for sense within the passage of time.26 Our first step is to see how they are put into motion as transcendent and singular, as the element of a shared becoming. In search of this end, the next several sections will treat Kant, and Heidegger’s response to Kant, in order to somewhat provisionally situate what I take to be the continuing stakes of Kant’s transcendental turn before moving on to the more complicated configuration in Hegel. The guiding question, however, may not be so much the completeness of the system of representation as the movement that system puts in play by situating the subject at the place of representation.

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The Critique of Pure Reason tells us that an unconditioned, a selfstanding, independent existing, is demanded by reason to complete the series of conditions culminating in individual sensual experience, thus compelling us—during the very act of rendering an account of who we are in terms of our experience—beyond the realm of that which we can directly experience.27 We are conditioned, and know ourselves to be such, but that implies that there must be an unconditioned that encompasses and sustains our existence. The unconditioned is beyond all access, given our capacity for knowing only the things of the world, and yet it serves to situate us in our finitude as ultimately living within the infinite power of reason. We find, moreover, that the contradictions involved in thinking directly of an infinite unconditioned fall away when we orient ourselves toward understanding how we ourselves are conditioned. The methodological imperative turns on our recognition of the partiality or specificity of our existence within the whole. Over the course of this section, the point will be to better understand the subsistence the infinite provides for the site of the articulation of a finite, conditioned event. Further perhaps, where one says “articulation,” one could as easily have said “method” and one thus broaches the question of how Kant belongs to modernity and to the scientific search for a continuity of language and being. Kant, for his part, is extraordinarily aware of this methodological horizon: his care in these questions, according to Köhnke’s influential historical treatment of Neokantianism, is the reason that the philosophy of “honest Kant” gained ascendency over Hegel and speculative philosophy more generally, after Hegel’s death.28 This requirement that the method correspond to its object, or be able to account for its articulation, in a broad sense, is the requirement that reason be situated—and situating. It would be my claim, however, that Hegel actually sees this situating force, in its reciprocal demand on the subject and process of expression, better than Kant does and finally, that both thereby remain within the frame of an ultimately unthought metaphysical bias concerning the relation of part to whole, actual to possible. In order to set out the stakes of the matter, however, I will turn to Kant’s approach. The general outline of the problem in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is well known, if still very much contested in its details. The “daring” of Copernicus’s method of accounting for the apparent movements of the sun by commencing with the motion of the “spectators”—against the immediate presuppositions of the senses—is compared to Kant’s own project where

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critical philosophy searches for and finds the “a priori basis of nature, regarded as the sum of the objects of experience.”29 In the language of the comparison to Copernicus, we should no longer look for our “knowledge to conform [nach … richten] to objects” but for the “objects to conform to our knowledge.”30 But this turning—this changing of the direction of the implication or of the conforming—leads to a methodological exigency that identifies the possibilities of experience and the possibilities pertaining to objects. Perhaps even more importantly in terms of the methodological demands for determination and determinate judgment,31 one finds the objects of experience to be objects only to the extent that they are determinable in time as objects of possible subsuming judgments.32 We don’t find the objects wholly contained in the images of experience, but the possibilities of our experience of the object are all represented, according to a priori rules, as preceding the actual objects experienced. The powers of representation provide the methodological key to the problem of the real meaning of the objects in the world—as real objects of apperception.33 Where Plato had called for us to see the sustaining force of the sun in our own participation in intelligence, Kant calls us to see the sustaining force in the subjective orientation toward the sun, as the possible grounding the actual. The truth is sustained, for Kant, in the unity and integrity of the subject imposing form on (or through) time, and no longer presumed to belong to the transcendent unity and integrity of the thing that is known, even though, for the sake of the system, that unity must be represented as belonging to the unconditioned, and ultimately unknowable, thing in itself, or nature as a whole.34 (In terms of Heidegger’s reading of Plato, above, the subject’s comportment is already seen as determining the idea of truth, but so that an individual act of knowing could be related directly back to its origin and source in the all-encompassing light. For Kant, that orientation toward the subject must be accentuated—the separation of noumenal and phenomenal means that one is not looking for an exterior truth, but is oriented by the self’s own being, by the “owning” of the self, or the proper orientation toward the real that is sustained by the speaker of an emphatically human language. The noumenal does not speak, as the origin of our phenomenal truth, but it does limit the ways in which appearances appear, and according to Kant, we may learn enough from that limitation, as it structures the appearances, to yet ground a system of science about the world “beyond” the immediate appearances.35)

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In the Kantian representation of the knowing subject, we shall find that we do not represent ourselves as having been the cause of our experience, or even of the forms of representations. We, in fact, represent our phenomenal selves as coming after, in time, the existence of the sun (to follow the Copernican trope) and we represent our representations as having arisen from that pre-existent and conditioning world. The terms of the movement of the “force” relative to time, however, are difficult to keep straight. One finds the reduction of the function of representation—of being the point where the representation itself has nothing permanent to it, and is only the productivity, or spontaneity (which is to say, the free “subject”), of the intuitions—playing the role of establishing the sense of the field of reason’s applicability precisely as a reduction to pure functioning.36 That is, reason’s access to itself is limited by the affective situation to the extent that reason is moved by the unities of experience as the force or limiting condition of the real, and yet the movement, as it produces the subject as situated, is only rational where it is oriented by the conception of the subject as function, and not as object; the subject is thus dynamically related to the noumenal, but with the proviso that one cannot know the source of our subjectivity except through its effects in the phenomenal realm. Understanding that source, then, implies that the subject turns away from the given objects, toward a freedom that belongs to the subject as self, as separate from the phenomenal in which it finds its only conditioned existence. Here, then, one finds Kant’s basic claims staked between two powers: first, the constitution of sense rests on the powers of the subject—the power to represent a possibility of sense and then to subsume a particular under one of the concepts thus represented—and second, sense depends on the power of the world’s forces, as the unconditioned impinges on us, on the human as the place where the chain of conditions is represented, from out of the causality somehow appropriate to the thing in itself. The world’s representations become meaningful at the site of the subject’s becoming—at the site of the intersection of the phenomenal and the noumenal, the finite in its determinate situatedness, finding itself always already in possession of, or as the subject of, an infinite power.37 (One should emphasize, since it remains the foundation of many readings of Kant, that we are not taking the imagination as the common root of sensibility and understanding, such that the imaginative construction and projection of schema actually grounds the possibilities of the becoming of the subject. Rather, the shape of potency grounds the thinking of the

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schema, as a form in which particular forms can arise: so that, for example, one knows, in advance, that every sensible seeing will be an individual perspective on an objectively given whole. The more general case for the schematism, including the move that allows for reason to take priority over both sensibility and understanding, depends on the model of enframing that moves, structurally if not temporally, from active and conditioning power to passive and conditioned appearance. This, as I would argue Heidegger began to understand after the period of fundamental ontology, means that even the powers of imagination remain ultimately grounded in subject metaphysics, or more broadly in the metaphysics of presence—more on this, in its turn, below). The unity and continuity of the enduring presence of the noumenal—of the substrate as ideal and generative self-presence—situates the meaningful presence (or occurrence) of the sun, as with any other phenomenal object, after our encountering it within our experience. Time, in fact, is only an inner form, even if it is the real presence of the form of interior intuition,38 and thus the very sense of saying “after” or “before” is dependent on our (capacity for) representing ourselves to be the place of time’s real becoming. Form carries the name and force of reality just as much as content would. Our presence, determined and particular, bears the weight of the real because the force of form belongs to the powers of representation—of the real taking on its reality as real object—where representation is not merely fantasy, but is the coincidence with the real possibilities of a reasonable, and phenomenal, world. It is not the coincidence with what is, as if we were oriented by the immediacy of appearance, but the unity with the power of articulation to sustain the world—and thus a coincidence with possibility and, as potent, turned toward the possibility of an ever-improving language, turned toward what is powerful in language as it progresses. The fundamental force is the unity of a world’s unfolding in time where the progression of that unfolding has its proper sense in the progress of human enlightenment. To bring forth light is to bear the force of the real. To live in that bearing or gestating force (Gebärende Kraft), as Eckhart called it at the beginning of the 14th century, is to coincide with the force and strength of the structures, the infinite power and form, of reason. In Kant’s language, it is to find yourself in the position of the noumenal subject—as, that is, the place of reason’s transcendence of place. Kant’s claim is that these structures themselves are accessible, as infinite, to the finite and situated subject who strives toward enlightenment—but only as a striving, or a motion, and not

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as an achievement.39 As Lévinas would also point out, albeit to slightly different effect, our contact with the infinite is a way of being, a form of contact, and not a physical contact with an infinitely large thing. The infinity of intelligibility—the precedence or absolute presence, that is, of the Platonic sun—precedes the determined presence of the bright yellow ball in our sky. This precedence, however, can only be maintained if determinations are not only in time, but somehow cause time, allowing all determinations to be represented or situated in accordance with the unity of an infinite reason. The logic of the priorities at stake is simple and familiar: only within the frame of representations that provide measure can the order of temporal succession then be applied, in turn, as a measure to the world. And yet, some force must close or unify the frame, give us the shape of being situated, in a world, as the unifying shape of thinking from our specificity as oriented toward wholeness. Such is the force of determination as the force of form, or the impress of being’s presence, in the unity of apperception. The thinking of beings as framed by this positing and encompassing “force,” by my reading, is “the metaphysics of presence.” The sense of “force” and “cause” here is precisely the problem, and precisely at the level where noumenal and phenomenal, practical and theoretical, are necessarily both separated and intertwined. If the fact that there is something rather than nothing already carries formal force, already situates us in being, before time takes on sense (directedness and thus meaning), then the form of our priority over the phenomenal is given. If, on the other hand, that “fact” is not itself beyond time, then the form of our participation within the world is not given as participating in a whole, not given as situated beings endowed with an infinite, or at least transcending, power of representation. Although there is some evidence that Kant found the former position to be true, I will follow Heidegger in locating a finite and temporal sense to the unfolding of the transcendental within Kant’s work. The question, then and repeating the question of the trace of a passage in the first part, is how time bears a sense with it in either its duration or instantiation, so that one can know what the proper orientation of the self in regard to future action should be; it is a question, in other words and no matter how strictly one ties human existence back to the survival of random mutations, without purpose or plan, of how we are creatures of time’s unfolding. If we are true to Kant’s methodological exigencies, we speak according to the possibilities of representation in order to be secure in our foundations

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for speaking about the objects that will come to be in experience itself. In principle, this does not prejudice in any way our judgments about the object, except by determining how we can coherently speak about that object. Following Kant, because there are structures that necessarily pertain to experience (if there is to be a sense, or even a direction, proper to experience), and because the determination of ourselves as finite presences within a continuity of worldly existence is one of those necessary structures, we are able to expand our knowledge of the world. The method does not establish the continuity; it lives within the presupposition that the continuity is given. We direct our experience toward the possible, toward the noumenal as the ground of the actual—conforming our science to that possible sense and to the promised direction. This means, however, that everything that can be thought from out of the change in method proposed by the “Second Copernican Revolution” descends from understanding the necessary structures of our possible experience as precedent to the givenness of any particular object. Thus the necessary structures of reason will precede the general space of possibility which precedes, in turn, the realm of the actual. The sense of the word “precedes” is the difficulty here, since it can’t, of itself, be temporal. If our experience has sense, or is directed at all, then such structures must precede both the formal objectivity of the given objects and that real force by which the direction is given, as tending toward coherence, toward the unity of the frame of experience itself, and thus toward intelligibility and enlightenment.40 More generally, even with Kant the presence of the subject to sense must be understood in the shape of that affective presence and not in merely formal categories. We must experience a situating “force” that precedes the temporal dispersion of objects in space, because only the affective feeling of being situated gives us the form of representation in general, as the shape of framing and making sense of the objects temporally dispersed through space. We must be present to the world, as cause of the unity of our presence, to begin making sense of it. The force that gives us sense, therefore, does not occur within the realm of possibility, or at least not within the realm of possible givenness; in other words, the “force” of sense cannot be the same as the givenness of a singularity within the realm of possible experience.41 The frame of presence is not caught up in the same philosophical problematics as the systematic exposition of the categories of thought: all that matters is that the subject is given in the wholeness of presence (an innovation attributed by Hegel to Descartes) and that an unconditioned can be inferred as the causal

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force of that present effect as unified form. In other words, already in Kant, force and form are thought in their unity at the site of their intelligibility. The metaphorics of the Copernican Revolution have been often enough rehearsed, yet the turn to the priority of experience is usually seen as merely the priority of the structures of sensual givenness or of situated (“critical”) knowing. One also finds here, although less remarked upon, that the intelligibility originates with the subject yet somehow accords with the way in which the subject knows itself to be, or to have been, determined—which means that the essential turn to intelligibility and intelligence requires that both the intelligibility and the intelligence be thought as (and through) determinations. The movements of determinations have to do with the possibilities of finding ourselves at the determined end of a causal chain commencing with the unconditioned by virtue of which we can argue back to the “sum of all possible experiences” constituting the ground for every actual experience and for the site of all possible experiences being properly mapped in terms of the subject, or more properly, the subject’s representations, insofar as the subject is responsive to the moral or noumenal claims of reason. The claim of reason is the demand that one produce an undeformed representation of the ground of experience as noumenal—as unified power or unconditioned ground beyond experience—and that one hold oneself into the position, or the demands of the position, as capable of that representation. The demand itself, however, is not given as phenomenal and therefore cannot be deduced from within the method.42 As we will see more fully below, this demand constitutes the force, the art and the contour, of form. Despite the distance between theoretical and practical reason, the moral dimension of the claim that reason makes on us—its directedness toward self-governing comportment in the practical world—can still be understood methodologically, in analogy to the Critique of Pure Reason’s process of grounding the experience of any particular spatially extended object in reference to the form of the intuition of space as such. For example, in “What is: To Orient Oneself in Thought?”43 Kant ties the cartographical process of orientation directly to the feeling of self [Selbst-Gefühl] of the subject that feels the necessity of making a judgment in accordance with the directions of reason. The specific determinations call for judgments in terms of the ever-widening field of secure knowledge. Any particular will then be accessible to an even-handed description, albeit only to the extent that we live up to the demand to provide such even-handedness.

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One must be able to tell one’s left hand from the right in order to represent (cartographically) the arrangement of objects in space; one must be able to separate, completely and with full certainty, one’s moral from one’s physical self in order to represent the meaning of events in thought as sustained by the unconditioned. Kant is succinct: Eventually I can yet further extend this concept, since it here consists in the power [Vermögen] to give orientation not merely in space, i.e., mathematically, but overall in thinking, i.e., logically. One can easily imply, following the analogy, that this would be a matter for pure reason, in directing its employment, when it proceeds from the known objects (of experience) in order to extend itself beyond all limits of experience, and finds no object of intuition, but only mere space itself; here it is no longer in the place, following the objective grounds of cognition, but solely following a subjective ground of differentiation in the determination of its own powers of judgment to bring its judgment under a determinate maxim. This subjective element [Mittel], that thereafter still remains out of use, is nothing but the feeling of reason’s very own needs [Bedürfnisses]. One can be secured against all error, if one does not undertake to judge, where one knows no more than that a determining judgment is required.44 The short essay from which this citation is taken, published in 1786, had a polemical purpose arising from the need to separate critical philosophy from pantheism and doesn’t rest solely with the articulation of the role of the demand of reason in establishing the subject as a place of certainty. In terms of the larger trajectories of the critical project, the specific sense of the separation between subject and world requires that the identity of the subject with the feeling of being situated not be a mere acquiescence to an exterior meaning—the priority of the subject’s act, as the form of positing, must be maintained even while the identity of the subject with her position in time and space is maintained.45 The requirements of a determining reason, in other words, require that the existence of a highest essence of the world, giving order and sense to everything, never be presupposed, and yet the “traces” of that ordering, or of belonging to the motion of that ordering and determining, must be found in the way in which we are situated in the world. The directedness of our existence must be present in our separation from God’s word—in the absence of determination at the heart of our feeling of self. Kant, in other words, needs Lévinas if he is to

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locate a practical reason above a technical reason, and perhaps even for the purposes of pure understanding. The sense of this demand—as culminating in a subjective feeling for the task of the infinite ideal as expressed in its practical more profoundly than in its theoretical employment—is directed by the need to prescribe moral laws which “lead everything, however, toward the idea of the highest good that is possible in the world, insofar as it is possible solely through freedom.”46 One “feels” compelled to make the phenomenal world determinate, in accordance with, following the sense or direction of, the best of that which is possible, even when it is not given to us, at least without theological considerations, to know that good itself. The possible, however, is possible only through freedom (and somewhat paradoxically, the force of freedom rests with the power of representation). The theoretical aspect of this need of reason is then conditioned by the presupposition of God’s existence (the freedom or spontaneity of the transcendental unconditioned, the force that precedes time), but the demands of reason itself are expressed in the grounds of the self-feeling of the moral subject (the transcendental, or transcending, as conditioned or situated in a single unitary instance). Kant thus remains this side of any divine content, at least as stipulated by religious dogma: only a certain form of reason’s needs, the need to belong to a world that has determination, that has sense in its wholeness, if thought is to happen, delimits our thought and our singularity. One withholds reflective judgment, knowing only that something is, in its determination. It is thus wrong to see the movement of achieving an undeformed or even-handed representation as an “abstraction.” Rather, with Kant, thinking becomes a certain type of limitation, or centering function, as one moves inward to the source or ground in order to frame experience as such, as produced through the work of the frame. First, one moves to the “middle” of the body (its element as support of movement), the “I” as determined center, then, second, to the subjective principle that responds to and generates this demand for centering, for an interiority, or necessary unity, of the representation of that which is. The principle (the logic) structures the whole—it is the innermost truth of each event, or of each object encountered, as it is displaced into its representation or placed onto its map. Only with the centering movement of interiority, the rectifying of each instant in terms of its fullness as what it essentially and inwardly is, can the spatial extent of the various appearances all be given as products of the same function of appearing, and thus be meaningfully related to the ground

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of appearing as such in the limitation of the noumenal by the phenomenal (in, to follow tradition, what we call history). A pre-existing subject does not, that is, cause the world to come to be (or to take shape)—instead, in finding ourselves situated, we find that the powers of representation bear a demand upon us. This demand, for Kant, is not a “condition” for the subject, but a “need” for reason: thought needs its subject, and needs its subject to be responsible at the “center” of the very thinking in which the subject lives. The subject must be responsive to the demand to sustain the center—to bear the motion that desires its repose through return into itself. The many ways in which the world of our practical comportments conditions the creation of such an auto-affective subject constitute the common terrain of psychoanalysis, sociology and Hegelian theories of subjectivity. We will touch more fully on the questions of that field, below, where eventually the question of conditions for the constitution of the subject—as the question of power or potency associated with representation, relation, and the directedness of sense—will also be seen to be prejudicial. At an important level of the present analysis, and against some of the most current understandings of the significance of his turn to the subject, I would not say that Kant presupposes the constitution of the subject.47 He does, however, see the methodological possibility of philosophy in the way in which the subject finds itself positioned practically according to a supersensible demand—a demand, even, to respond by accounting for or providing the grounds of the situation. The “I” that must accompany all of my representations becomes nothing but the slim “almost space” of that which is determined in time as capable of overflowing that determination and thinking about it.48 As we will see in more detail below, the point is not to understand the subject as a constituted object that happens to be in possession of a faculty; rather, the moment of a coincidence between the perceptions and the formative powers of apperceptive synthesis gives the form of unity (and thus of synthesis) as the basic shape of the world’s force (as demand or as directed movement, that is as a dynamic noumenal, and not as a physical “fact”). For Kant, at least, to be the subject is to be subjected to that force as its interior limit (as turning in on one’s own powers, or unities), as the place where the function of form is coincident with that force’s presence as unified. In more Kantian language, I am in the position of having a judgment demanded of me precisely where one experiences oneself as pure space, as a subject that will come to frame experience meaningfully because one feels the self to be compelled toward determination. The demand for

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determination is thus the dynamic aspect of interiority, or of intensive degree. According to this broadly Kantian reading, although Kant doesn’t recognize it, the basic structure of the noumenal is not productive, but demanding—although, at least in the regime of production associated with technology, the demand for production of determinate objects, with unified meanings only secured in terms of that separation, is the only proper demand. The exegetical task, as Heidegger moves further away from Kant, is to make sense of this demand without positing a transcendent subject, under the guise of the noumenal, who makes the demand. For our present purposes, the point is to understand how the conception of the human as limit to the world’s causal chains, as the place where the event is reflected into its sense, or more precisely into the interiority of its sense, determines Kant’s understanding of the effects and demands of form. To be the “determined end” of a causal chain, to be the unitary place where the forces of the world turn into representation, is to be human, to be subject to the moral (or more broadly speaking, intellectual) demands of the supersensible as unifying, but not unified, form. The critical project determines what can be deduced from understanding the structures of this place of representational force. The question of the young proponents of German Idealism thus remains pre-eminently Kantian: “How must the world be created for there to be a moral being?”49 That is, the question of a philosophical anthropology is not a descriptive question concerning who we, in fact, already are as humans. Instead, it is a question about how it is possible, within the constitution of the world, that a moral being arise in opposition to the physical world—i.e., it is the question of freedom and of the directions that freedom may pursue in responding to the infinite task that the world would be. For Kant—and against any idea that he merely presupposes that distinction between the human and the world—the real force of the universe has the structure, or movement, appropriate to the moral being. The question of grounding that unity, central to Schelling and Hegel, could only seem like empty speculation to Kant. The moral movement of existence, for Kant, is weighty and attractive, like a solar mass—that is, like planets, we are oriented by responding to an overwhelming, invisible, and all-structuring force. And yet, although we “spectators” all look in the same direction, the sun is only misleadingly named as the center of this force. Rather, the structuring movement itself is overwhelming—is the universal force of presence called inertial mass, or later interpreted in the frame of an all-encompassing energy, designating only

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that to which gravity, as a force, is somehow either opposed or attached— and the sun only represents the priority of relatively larger accumulations of forces within our calculations, our measures. The sun did not come first. We are, like the sun itself, original parts of the force of thought’s motion. In terms of the human, we are situated, given the weight of our specific determinations, and find that we are thus always already within the field created by, or as, that overwhelming force: a force, that is, that comes to have the form of an I with the capacity to think and that comes to have that form over all the objects of the world, as the priority of a field of energy itself over all the objects, including particular configurations of energy, to which it would give rise. To think of the force, then, in terms of the production of forms, as the unified place of the phenomenal, in its opposition to the noumenal, is the key to understanding the move to the powers of the subject and the subsequent framing of the appearances of the world. It is Kant’s insight into modernity’s implicit ground. Once again, the methodological exigency reproduces itself in the metaphysics: the separation of phenomenal and noumenal gives shape to the subject as ground of the phenomenal, yet as turned toward the coherence of the whole, and thus toward the encompassing force of the noumenal as dynamic origin of the real. More succinctly, the life of the universe passes into its determined appearances in the gaze—or more fully, the gestures and life—of the subject. It would seem, then, that the “Second Copernican Revolution” rests on a single truth—that to be situated requires that it was possible to have been situated—and consequently explicates the priority of fields over objects, structures over contents, frames over framed, conditions over conditioned by reference to the active structures of passivity and receptivity of the subject that is thus positioned. This priority, however, rests on the force and movement of determination, in general, being given as the proper sense to our reasoning capacities and the proper sense of the world’s becoming actual. For this reason, the prejudice of the possible would be—in terms I will explore more thoroughly below—the true place of the unseen ontotheological presupposition (and therewith the forgetting of the question of being) in Kant. The unity of the place of a doubled reflection As we will see below, Hegel understands Kant to be accepting a static (and unearned) distinction between noumenal and phenomenal, possible

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and actual, without understanding the true force and movement of the self-relating of the concept—as a whole—as the true place, or constant becoming, of that continuity and that demand. More concisely, as a problem of method, Kant’s reliance on the powers of representation misses the fact that logic is the general element and medium of becoming precisely as the unending power of that mediating determination of reality—in its unity as self-consciousness—and not as the negative realm defined by, or rather coterminous with the possibilities of, being affected (that is, of being a subject or an “I” in the “negative” sense of the specious present). That is, the logic that encompasses our self-orientation—as space as such “grounds” any particular given object—is supersensible in Kant, but only as the conceptual (and thus abstract and ideal) correlate of the sensible. French phenomenology largely accepts Hegel’s criticisms, but looks for different ways of characterizing the movement of being. For Hegel the self-production of the world as the place of the noumenal becoming phenomenal is not itself properly conceptualized in an immediately given universal, such as the human as such, or the a priori structures of physical perception. In Kant, the “spontaneity of concepts,” in the power to recognize or know [erkennen] an object—a power that is separate from the “receptivity of impressions” that absorbs or receives [empfangen] the “representations”—takes precedence over the aesthetic because it represents itself in terms of a corresponding opposition to the sensible. As practical, the sensible world would thus only have a borrowed power (or motivation), only fictively held to its “sense” as oriented by the good, in the practical realm.50 Heidegger’s late understanding of Kant is helpful here since he contests the idea that Kant has simply divided the possible from the actual, without warrant, and then illegitimately privileged the possible as the place of meaning and form. Heidegger sees the relation between the actual and the possible, between a position (or determination) and its formal and material conditions to be at the base of the Kantian transcendental turn.51 This situates Kant within a particular trajectory of the thinking of being, although Kant himself apparently doesn’t thematize this adequately.52 Before turning more directly to Heidegger’s interpretation, however, I would like to rehearse some of the best known moves in Kant’s own systematic approach. For the general purposes of establishing a system, the Critique of Pure Reason is divided, unequally, into a doctrine of elements (6/7ths of the whole) and a doctrine of methods. The practical principles of morality are

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excluded from the realm of transcendental philosophy since the concepts that ground even pure practical reason arise from empirical sources (they contain drives which are related to feelings and not to “pure speculative reason”53). Sensibility [Sinnlichkeit] and understanding, that which gives us objects and that through which they are thought, are treated respectively under the titles of a Transcendental Doctrine of the Senses [Sinnenlehre] (or Aesthetic), and a Transcendental Logic, both within the Doctrine of Elements. Sensibility only belongs to transcendental philosophy because it “contains a priori representations which constitute its condition.”54 The movements or motivations of sensibility and of practical life are fundamentally different, according to Kant, and this results in his systematic divisions. To have a ground in practical life is to be rendered systematically exterior to a starting point that can account for its own representational structure. To be human, in such terms, is to be at the crossroads of such capacities and limitations: to be subject to the demand to know where certain limits of representation place essential pieces of knowledge beyond our purview. We are the enduring place of that which has, of itself, neither place nor permanence—the fleeting, yet still relatively more stable, moment of temporal presence that will ground all particulars of space and time. Hegel, by my reading, will resituate that place of representation, that place of a necessary structure coming into play, and such a displacement will accordingly complicate the fashion in which philosophy can gain the right to a system that can work within these same, and always necessary, privileges of form. The a priori forms for the intuition of objects are, according to Kant, space and time. Space is the a priori condition for exterior objects to be given to us as objects, while time is the a priori condition for all objects of sense in general. Space and time are the forms of the transcendental logic of aesthetic, or senseful, existence. It’s important to Kant that both space and time be a “pure form of sensible intuition” and that neither be a “discursive or universal concept.”55 Space is a “necessary a priori representation, that lies at the foundation of all exterior intuitions” and not an empirical concept.56 The necessity of this representation of space grounds the apodicticity of geometry57 and thus privileges the form of a pure intuition of dynamic force over any conceptually governed encounter with the infinite extent of space. Refinements, caveats and rearticulations are ceaselessly multiplied in the Critique of Pure Reason, and the present task is to understand where the idea of a priority of form gets its force (as convincing, but also as dynamic).

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Kant’s general project, in terms of the sensible contact with the world, rests on the exposition, or placing in its proper extent, of the concept of space such that it shows itself to be dependent on the conditions of intuition (and thus of representation on one side, and of the noumenal as ground for the phenomenal on the other). Such a conception of the condition or the structure of providing measure, at the place where the subject is given as the limit of the objective field as a whole, would pretend to be able to separate language from intelligibility, exterior from interior intuitions. How that separation is achieved is what’s of interest here, since it points to the same way in which a situating force, because it is both situating and situated, shows itself to embody the form of form in the Neoplatonic tradition. In the terms of the transcendental aesthetic, the infinite extension of space cannot be thought conceptually because the infinite cannot be understood coherently in terms of concepts.58 It’s not important for our present purposes that more conceptually coherent representations of the infinite in general have since been proposed (Cantor’s, for example, although his is clearly a Neoplatonic extension of Kant, in any case). Rather, the point is that the principle of thinking of the infinity of space itself rests on the representation of space as such, within which any particular can be placed: the space of representation would thus enfold the infinite. One must remember that the work of representation is not the same as the subject’s work of forming images; the movement of the world, instead, is directed by the conditions of a thing becoming what it is, that is, by the conditions of the possibility of its being represented as an object. More succinctly, possibility and representation are directed by, or conform to, the same sun, the same form of being the subject of the aesthetic judgment, situated by an overwhelming force in a particular position. We are each supposed to be a finite and determinate being resting within an infinite and encompassing (gathering) power.59 The play between the forces of an object being given and the possible representation of that object turns on the precedence of a coherent representation of that external force only being possible within the “internal” powers of a subject’s representing of space as such. The “sense” of the representation of the external object is independent of its time and even of its actual apprehension in any particular subject. The internal is not inside a subject, but proper to a function—a reduction of the place of the functioning to the unity of an apperception—and therefore the true sense, that which coincides with its proper structure of givenness, is “internal.” The coherence or unity of the “whole,” of this coincidence with the force,

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with the structures of the forming force, precedes or conditions any particular given; the eternal “precedes” time, yet as the form of a unity or a whole—as what is thus interior to, or serves the function of centering, the representation, even when the representation gains all its force from outside the subject understood as a being, among other beings, inside the world. The temporal determinations, in a sense acting as the largest container from the side of subjective representations, are equally subordinate to the eternal and non-temporal form of the unity of “sense.”60 Further, time is more properly the interiority of representation and thus of the power and force of form (of containing, framing, or representing) in general. Kant himself is explicit, in terms of objects of sense: Time is the a priori formal condition of all appearances in general. Space, as the pure form of all exterior intuition, is as a priori condition restricted to merely exterior appearances. For the other part, since all representations—be they with exterior things as objects or not, indeed be they in themselves as determinations of the mind—belong to an inner situation, and these inner situations, moreover, belong to time under the formal conditions of interior intuition, time is an a priori condition of all appearing in general, and indeed the unmediated condition of the inner (our soul) and then through its mediation also of all exterior appearances. If I can say a priori: all exterior appearances are in space, and according to the relations of space determined a priori, then I can also express the principle of inner sense completely generally: all appearances as such, that is, all objects of sense, are in time, and stand necessarily within relations of time.61 More directly, time is “the actual form of inner intuition” because only within the realm of the representation of time as the site of my determinations, the place of my inner sense of the change and movement of external objects, can the coherent representation of my knowledge be grounded in its conditions.62 The method determines (or by some readings somewhat mysteriously corresponds to) the ontology, although Kant will not see the extent of this truth; one must wait for Hegel to find more extensive implications of method coming into play, in the deployment of language coming to be understood as founding ontology. The profound connection between time and language—as either play or as the instituting of method—constitutes the enduring theme of Derrida’s early work. The

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shape a subject assumes in the world, however, already takes on its full weight with Kant. We remember from above that Derrida questioned the ways in which the priority of time—here in Kant and later in Husserl and Heidegger—is based on an unexamined privilege of the supposed purity of the “interior” or the “proper.” Let me merely mark, deferring for the moment the necessary more detailed comments, that by my reading Derrida’s claim is adumbrated in Hegel’s response to Kant. Heidegger’s response to Kant is slightly different and I will begin by rehearsing his understanding of the Kantian problematic and his way of resolving the question concerning an unearned distinction between the interiority and exteriority of our belonging to the forces of the world. In Being and Time, Heidegger had opposed the world as a whole to Kant’s thought experiment on the subject’s feeling of self-presence grounding orientation in space, and thus one’s orientation in thinking. The element in Kant is thinking as such, that is, logic, and the possible is articulated in that element, bound by, for example, the principle of non-contradiction, and more specifically by the logic of possible and thus possibly coherent, judgments. This empty characterization of the element of thought leaves open the question of how being is related to thinking.63 For Kant, it is empty because it is formal, yet powerful because situated with time as the interior form that encompasses all other forms. If we are to take seriously the methodological demand that our descriptions (as forms of saying) coincide with the sum of all possible experiences (as forms of appearing), we must also take seriously the way in which the general notion of possibility structures the language it utilizes and puts into play—the thetic language, that is, of the proposition, of a subject referring to an object, speaking about a world, is not originally innocent, nor originally free from the world. More importantly, as we will see, the possible takes its shape from the force of being situated as unified in terms of what is determinable. First given as a presentation in 1961, “Kant’s Thesis Concerning Being” is Heidegger’s last in a series of attempts to understand how the question of being and thinking arises in Kant’s philosophy. For Heidegger, positedness [Gesetztheit] and objectivity [Gegenständigkeit] are dependent on the trajectory of allowing to come to presence [Anwesenlassen], where being is that which grants presence.64 Kant has not provided a final answer to the question of how to understand the connection of being and thinking, but the Kantian thesis that portrays being as pure position leads back to Parmenides,

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on one side, and on the other “points forward to the speculative-dialectical interpretation of being as absolute concept.”65 Position, as completed in the moment of givenness, thus defines the “inner meaning” of the history of metaphysics, the idea that presence creates a world through the force of its unfolding in determinate positions. The general problem of being and the force of presence points back in its turn to the method by which Kant secures the horizon of his explication of being in terms of the thinking subject: Even the mere recounting of the concept of reflection gives us clues to a more fundamental understanding of Kant’s thesis concerning being as position. Position shows itself in the conjunction [Gefüge] of form and matter. This gets interpreted as the difference between the determining and the determinable, that is, in reference to the spontaneity of the activity of understanding in its relation to the receptivity of sense perception. Being as position gets explicated in, that is, subordinated to the subjection [Gefüge] of human subjectivity as the site of its essential provenance [Wesensherkunft]. The access to subjectivity is reflection.66 The turn to the subject—methodologically in terms of both the project of attaining certainty and the ways in which the language of description, and the site of the powers of language, become more central—marks a turn to the necessity of a system of scientific investigation and progress. Of a system, moreover, capable of accounting for the constitution of the subject that constitutes. The problem, as with Heidegger’s more general criticisms of technology, stems from the leading position given to the single type of access to language that characterizes certainty and the consequent restriction of the field of language to the judgment form.67 In Kant, this restriction is explicit where the subject is constituted in the demands of knowledge. A page further in the text, Heidegger asserts that Kant’s thesis on being, as an explanation of the being of beings, rests within the power or force [walten] of “being in the sense of the granting presence” [Sein im Sinne des währende Anwesens].68 In other writing from this period, Heidegger will sometimes oppose Anwesenheit to Gegenwärtigkeit as two ways of understanding presence, although in Being and Time the emphasis had fallen on the Gegenwärtige.69 In the later writing, the Gegenwärtige seems to be connected to the presence of a determinate being [Seiende] while the true “presencing” of being, no longer merely the being of beings, would be “the

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presence granting” [das Anwesenheit Gewährende].70 Heidegger tells us that being, in Kant, is understood from a determinate affective situation and the thinking that relates to itself from out of that situation. Being as mere position is unfolded in modalities. The existent [Seiende] is posited in its position through the proposition drawn back to its sensible affection, that is, through the empirical power of judgment in the empirical employment of understanding, in the thus determined thinking. Being is elucidated [erläutert] and explained [erörtert] from its relation to thinking. Elucidation and explanation have the character of reflection, which comes to view as thinking about thinking.71 Of particular interest in our undertaking is the way in which the existing being, taken into the doubled reflection (thinking about thinking in the having been positioned of thought), is allowed to function methodologically such that it brackets the question of what gives being and allows thinking understood as “reflection of reflection” to set the horizon within which philosophy can operate.72 The question thematized under Anwesenheit by Heidegger is hidden by the way the method of philosophy is articulated in Kant—articulated, that is, by the possibilities of its destination, as completely determined, completely thought: that is, as posited. The fact that thinking can be related fundamentally to taking a position, to a thesis and a naming or a judgment, relies on the act of thinking somehow allowing the largest horizon of our encounters with the world to coincide with the realm, in thought, which we may use to describe those encounters. That is, the possibilities of language—in a slight variation on Wittgenstein’s phrase— are the limits of the world. In Heidegger’s view, the methodological demand of certainty reduces the human to an impoverished realm, where possibility is still caught in the arid dichotomies of metaphysics and the form of beingpositioned contains all the possibilities of thought. Where a language, with its own possibilities, and its own freedom, is opposed to a world because the form of opposition as such encompasses all the possibilities of what may come to pass in the place where language is produced. The unity of apperception gives sense to the a priori completeness of a frame in general by surreptitiously giving sense (orientation) to these uses of a situation being framed and produced—as the place where things happen, as the place where things can happen, and as the place where what happens is articulated. The unity of these three places is the problem of a site becoming

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intelligible through time and Kant sidesteps the question by invoking the spontaneity of the unity of apperception as punctual. We are not countering with the simple accusation that Kant reduces everything to subjective positing (the noumenal thing in itself, for example, remains exterior to these frames even if its force, as overwhelming determination, establishes their sense as such). Rather the unity of self, of apperception oriented by the freedom of the transcendental unity of apperception, by the noumenal freedom of the giving of sense, finds its horizon in the movement toward the self taken as noumenal subject, as the non-appearing yet subjectively felt demand to hold the place of the center of representation. What Heidegger sees in this form of opposition is that the Kantian understanding of transcendental explanation posits the frame of possibility—of possibly becoming an object—as higher than actuality without giving sense to the movement of transformation.73 The problem, therefore, will arise from the empty givenness of the possible as the unity of self-presence and a self’s presence to the world. Following Kants interpretation of the “is” one finds therein a connection [Verbindung] between the proposition-subject and predicate in the object. Every connection carries [führt] a unity with itself, in which it connects the given manifold. If however the unity does not emerge first from the connection, since this must refer to it as prior, from where does the unity originate? According to Kant, it must be “searched for higher,” over the connecting positing through the understanding. It is the all syn (together) of every thesis (positing) of the first letting originate of the hen (unifying one). Accordingly Kant calls it “the originary synthetic unity.” It is the representation in everything, in the perception it is in advance already there (adest). It is the unity of the originary synthesis of apperception. Since it makes possible the being of beings, or in Kant’s terms, the objectivity of the object, it stands higher, above and outside [hinaus] the object. Since it makes possible the very object as such, it is called “the transcendental apperception.”74 The priority of possibility, of that which makes understanding possible—which is thus the possibility of speaking of the possibility of objectivity—is guaranteed by the transcendence of the possible taken as possibilizing and transcendent power. The transcendent is thus identical with the intelligibility set into play within the limits of Kant’s method: the

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method, that is, of understanding operating within its limits, as the place of the situating, as itself the limit of the world’s unfolding power. The site of this transcendence is left unthought to the extent that its possibility is thought to be separable from the contours of that site, that is, as universal— and yet precisely as the situating force of taking shape. The noumenal must be separated from the phenomenal, but must still be the frame of the phenomenal; the subject cannot be known in itself, but must be the frame for what appears as a thing. The unification of these two enframings, as it pairs the subject with the noumenal, is what Heidegger finds lacking in its insistence on the instantaneity of position, and the vacuity of possibility. Here one understands Heidegger’s insistence on turning to Dasein as a different site of unity in Being and Time. One also sees why the turn to the subject in Kant, as Heidegger pointed out, already constitutes a doubled reflection, a doubled unity in the place of thought. We are the place that can turn toward ourselves in order to turn toward the true origin (or infinite power, the force of form, of forming)—to thus bear the weight of both the noumenal and phenomenal sun. Following Heidegger’s interpretation, Kantian transcendence arises with a desituating movement that pretends to account for itself in the same manner as the situating movement of individual appearance. And even if this improves upon the still current reading of Kant as merely presupposing all the distinctions, the Kantian project continues to operate as if the direction of “the movement of the hands” were indifferent to the understanding of the site, or of the weave and sense of the world. Further, and recalling the two hands in Derrida’s account of Bataille, I am tempted to say that one cannot, as Kant would seem to want to do, associate an empty gesture of opening with the noumenal and a closed gesture of determination with the phenomenal. That is, the hand’s powers are not circumscribed by the movement between opening (the force of presence) and closing (the articulation of our particularity in our determinate being). If such a distinction held, then one could immediately trust one’s language—one could simply speak about what happens (or designate, with some pretended rigidity, the world in its physical givenness). The effort to form, to move within the plastic, creates resistances and relies on powers that do not belong to the subject’s own possibilities. One gropes, perhaps, toward a future without its own sense. In the terms I’ve been developing here, the force of being situated cannot be translated into the unifying and determining force of creating a frame within which the particular

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appearances would embody determined givens. In the terms of the living, concrete, organizing powers the hands represent, the left hand cannot be assumed to share the same principles, the same orientation, or directedness toward sense, as the right, even if both can be said to both open and close. More challenging yet, because there is no shared possibility of orientation, no “logic” can be deduced, in advance, for explaining the general movements of the hands. The absence of that which is shared is more difficult than the absence of a center, which is the focus of most postmodern approaches, for in the latter case one could at least claim that we all share the structure of groping toward something (an empty gesture of symbolization, reaching towards an X, or an “objet a”; a shared destitution in the absence of God’s manifest presence, or a shared duty to account for ourselves, as adults, capable of an adult language in the face of the truth), thus all moving within possibility as such even if not our “own” possibilities. If nothing is shared, if we don’t somehow all belong to the same movement, or type of movement, then it is precisely the precedence of possibility as opening that is undercut: the hands may, after all, never touch, or may only live in the absence of contact. The question now comes to be one of understanding how the presence [Anwesenheit] of Heidegger’s late work is separable from—or perhaps merely oriented differently, conforming to a different movement, a different sun, than—the noumenal in Kant’s critiques. The possibility of a new thinking of possibility itself rests here with this metaphor of orientation, once it is no longer thought of as a human comportment, but evokes the real bearing of the world. Can our separation from God’s guiding word be understood from this idea of a sustaining orientation (two different things being named by their differing ends, their different bearings, within the discourse)? Or will the discourse give us the ways of changing those bearings themselves?— and precisely in not allowing us to step outside of the discourse in order to decide about it’s proper, or most interior, direction. The displacing and transcending logic of the power of representation Hegel’s complaint, directed against the supposed priority of a preexisting subject, would be that Kant sees the noumenal as abstractly supersensible, and thus misses the demands of the concrete universal, that is, of the specifically embodied life of a community, as the place where the moral or human element of life, as embodied intelligence, has its hold on us. Spirit has become real in that community, and power (either Vermögen or

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Macht) belongs to the movement of that Spirit, and to those who participate in it as oriented by the expression of what is powerful in its movement. In that sense, the “direction” or “sense” that Kant institutes is ascending away from the earth, drawing the determinations, as set into individual form by the force of reality’s enactment of this our world, into the wake of that transcending desire for the eternal good—such would be the desire to see form enacted well, or given the form of being fully what it is, as the desire to transcend (absent of any transcendent realm, but still operating under the sway of the “as if” there were such a possibility of transcendence, or of a language that escaped all contingency). Heidegger is also trying to approach the sense of the directedness of determinations in their fundamental orientation toward either reason or world—the sense of either authenticity or inauthenticity in the event of being. As in Hegel, the continuity of the realm of possibility is not separable from the continuity of the existing situation, but for Heidegger, the situation no longer produces all possibilities, expanding ever “forward” into more determinations. Rather, the movement of situating pulls the continuity into its site: the transcendence is not found in a separation, nor in a coincidence with the productive activity of a community, nor even in gaining the standpoint of freedom, but in maintaining the demand of the unifying directedness. One bears the world by sustaining a fragile unity, not by participating in the power of determining presence. We cannot say, as a certain type of Kantian might, that we are beings who are affected by the growing and imprinting presence of the being of beings—our aesthetic presence consequently determining the objectivity or meaningfulness of those beings. To do such would be to split being from the beings, and thus to reduce being to its function as productive of articulations. In abandon, if we may here introduce a Heideggerian term that will be increasingly important to us, form takes on the role of moving toward language as sustaining gesture: language moves inward as sustaining a place of intimacy and trust, but separates itself from the immediate force of aesthetic gestures. In responding to the demand, the language remains tied to the compelling passage of aesthetic contact but does not participate in the force or its supposed necessities. That difference in force, in where to understand the motion and sense of language and aesthetic presence, will occupy the final part of the present work. The movement that lets a frame dissolve—if we may use dissolution as a synonym for abandon—allows objects to take shape as fragile and dependent on our care.

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In both Hegel’s and Heidegger’s differing readings of Kant, the force of human presence is not separate from the movement of freedom. For this reason, imagination is important to both of them in their appropriations of Kant.75 After all, imagination allows the human to be in the situation of a fluid and dynamic force, and not just the place of a subject possessing static attributes. Yet, as Heidegger himself apparently realized, imagination cannot stand, of itself, for the problem of the creation of the space within which representation will operate: the “spontaneous receptivity” of human presence does not, in the end, serve Heidegger’s purposes because the activity of giving shape does not account for the horizonality of time, even if it had once seemed capable of accounting for the activity of time’s own progress. In both early and late readings of Kant by Heidegger, imagination is conceptualized in the production of that which is present (das Gegenwärtige) and where the question is really what ties the imagination to the world as the proper space of freedom’s own becoming—as the interiority and truth of our representations. The answer, it would seem in the early readings, is time—or rather, the demands that would stand at the base of the form of time, precisely as the unifications of apperception stand at the base of all a subject’s powers only insofar as the subject is in tension toward that power (as a situated and situating subject and not just as a situated object). And yet time cannot be held purely to the place of interiority, even in Heidegger’s earliest attempts to formulate his relation to Kant. Three decades after the first turn to Kant, and to Kant’s conception of imagination, Heidegger wrote “Kant’s Thesis Concerning Being.” After criticizing the reduction of possibility to its formal presentation, to the theses and positings of a subject, in the paragraphs of the essay that we followed above, Heidegger finds the “Gewähr” (the resources granted to us, like a land deed or a security) in Kant’s determination of understanding to be able to provide a richer explication of being than the turn to the judgment form of itself would allow. Heidegger examines a phrase from the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason: And thus the synthetic unity of apperception is the highest point, to which one must fasten all employments of understanding, even the entirety of logic, and following it [nach ihr], transcendental philosophy. Indeed, this power [the apperception] is the understanding itself.76

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After explaining what he takes to be the dependence of the “entire essence” [ganze Wesen] of “logic in its entirety as such,” on transcendental apperception, Heidegger moves to the relation of logic to the unities of that apperception: And what does this “following it” mean in the text? It doesn’t mean that all of logic would be of itself ordered in advance by transcendental philosophy, but rather says: first and only when the entirety of logic remains ordered within the site of transcendental apperception, can it function inside of the critical ontology drawn back to the given of sensible intuition, that is as the guide for the determination of the concepts (categories) and the fundamental principles of the being of beings. It stands thus because the “first pure knowledge of the understanding (that is, the being of being’s measure-giving imprint [die maßgebende Prägung des Seins des Seienden]) is “the fundamental principle of the originary synthetic unity of apperception” (§17, B 137). Accordingly, this principle is one of unifying, and the “unity” is no mere assembly, but rather it is unifying-gathering, logos in its beginning sense, although displaced and diverted toward the I-subject. This logos holds “the entirety of logic” as its captive.77 We should turn first, albeit only in a preliminary fashion, to the sense of “the being of being’s measure-giving imprint.” When the logic is oriented by transcendental apperception, or rather, by the site (Ort) of transcendental apperception, then the affective situation of the subject, as the site of the power of an articulation according to the critical method, can be thought through within the pure a priori structure of logic. The unifying synthesis of the originary apperception is emphasized because that movement of unification structures the possibilities of the subject bearing the demand of reason’s articulation: the moral position of the subject is determined in this “measure-giving imprint” of a movement toward uniting the subject as power of articulation (making judgments) and as subject of appearances (being the affective site of the event of beings coming to be determined from being). Two powers are here unified by a movement of imprinting (Prägung) that pushes toward synthesis—and that pushes toward synthesis by situating us, in our powers, as responding to, or at the level of, that situating and unifying force, as the place of being a subject. Such a claim accords with Kant’s general idea of transcendence, of giving form, in terms of the power of constitution (explicated, methodologically, in the various movements of

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the conditions for the possibility of meaningful presence in the phenomenal world)—it accords with the method, yet is itself not justified in terms of that method. As with the Copernican turn, we are looking for the movement in terms of the spectators, and thus looking for the logic inherent to the spectacle, to being subject to, as well as a subject of, force. The logic of being affected, however, depends on knowing that the force of the noumenal is a force that forms: that puts us into the position of responding precisely by terminating in our consciousness, as the limit of the chain of unfolding force—that is, as the unified and unifying site of the doubled reflection of situated and situating thinking. If, after all, the sun’s mass had not so overwhelmed the planets, then the methodological fiction of holding it still at the center of the motion (the logical element) would not have worked any better than the fiction of keeping the Earth still. If, in our present terms, the human did not occupy the site of the becoming of the world, dynamically filling its existent forms, as time’s interiority situating the play of external forms, then the subject’s noumenal existence could not center the phenomenal representations. The methodological bracketing of the question of being only works where the meaning of being—no matter what it is—can be thought from the forms and facts of the necessity, or necessary structure, of our access to meaning. That is, Kant gives us a proper understanding of the subjective movement of thinking (as oriented by reason, or at least by the possibility of the reasonable) only if the meaning (or movement, or force) of being can be assumed to result in the site of a unifying synthetic apperception. As we saw earlier, we must recognize in that presence, in the unity of our presence, the place of a trust in the unity of the world—its capacity to bear our determinations, and the force of our reason, in accord with the moral being of the divine. Hegel’s insight will be to see the process of achieving access to the site of this unity, of making logic real in the world, as the movement toward being (and being-conscious of) this centering force or inwardizing function of reason, only now made concrete in the world. Heidegger will look toward the more individuated event of this unification, eventually in the event (Ereignis) that “gives” both being and time, and will look away from the human subject as supposed bearer of this unity.78 The Kantian turn, instead, merely assumes that one can speak of a logic (of a form of thought) and that such a logic will have the shape of explicating the structures, and the possibilities of the best, without thematizing the way in which such an idea of structure itself depends on the force of logic—on the unifying

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force of a measure-giving imprint of, or from, the being of beings, of the form of the force of the sun and the planets being held into their orbits, all spectators looking, at least implicitly, for that which is most implicit, most interior to the functioning of reason. To be oriented by that configuration determines all being in terms of the employment of understanding, precisely where logic’s possibilities are determined by the unity of transcendental apperception. Even if Kant will mistakenly reduce this force to the form of a subject’s reflection on its own powers, Heidegger finds in Kant the resources for a new understanding of the form of a grounding force, even in this very late work, long after his “turn” away from fundamental ontology. Heidegger puts it quite succinctly: It (transcendental philosophy) grounds itself in logic. However, the logic is no longer formal, but rather the logic determined from out of the originary synthetic unity of transcendental apperception. In such a logic, ontology is grounded. This confirms what was said before: being and existence determine themselves from out of their relation to the employment of the understanding.79 And if such an employment of understanding, with a sufficient emphasis on the force of the understanding at the place of aesthetic contact, is controlled by the unity, and the structuring force of the unification, of the spontaneity of the concepts, then the logical representation of possible events can accurately portray the real force of being and existence. One turns, in other words, into an abstraction or ideal at the place where the point is understood as unified with the whole because one is the formless power of imprinting form; one exists, as a concrete or real point, that is, only in the unity of being part of that whole as it takes on form. The unification, or rather, the unifying force of the form of givenness, is thought in two places, each of which must be brought into the same unifying site: the instant of determination. The contours of this punctualization are achieved in terms of the representational powers of the subject that takes itself to be perfectly or instantaneously opposed to the world. The conclusion—against Kant only to the extent that another thinking of being had been excluded by his unthematized and presupposed methodological demands—is that Kant’s conception of the phenomenal will thereby always be reduced to the form of the proposition, and thus to the form of a subject standing opposed to an object: “being posited (position), that is, being, is transformed into objectivity” [Die Gesetztheit (Position), d.h. das

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Sein, wandelt sich zur Gegenständigkeit.]80 Heidegger is not merely contesting this objectification. Heidegger’s task, instead, is to see language as the place where being, as a claim on us, has possibilities other than position, where the demands on individuals are not punctual, not dependent on subjects who frame objects in instants of presence. Returning to the opposition of time to space as forms of inner and outer intuition, one sees quickly that the priority of time, like the priority of logic, is unfairly presumed since it doesn’t allow us to account for the forces that are embodied in forming in general. And yet this opposition of time to space, inner to outer, upsurging force and its limitation in a particular shape, is not an inconsequential presumption—it is the presumption of the distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal, or rather, of the noumenal’s priority over the phenomenal. We express reason as the call to be the moral beings capable of responding by taking on the function of situating, a function that limits the phenomenal, and that sees the demands of the noumenal as the demand to place oneself at that limit.81 An opposition between product and process, the phenomenal and the function of the subject, is presumed— the conceptual distinction between phenomenal and noumenal rests on this presumed distinction. Rather quickly, one sees that the distinction between inner and outer is at stake as well: the priority of the form of time, as the interiority of intuition, is coterminous with the presumption of the preexistent possibility of making, or existing in the (posited, reflected or thought) presence of, distinctions. Our method, Kant will still claim, is free, and lives within the freedom of being able to orient itself—by left hand or right, by sun or planets, object or subject. This freedom (the freedom to speak about the world in whatever way we wish, the methodological freedom to choose a method for describing that world, and for being true to that description), in spite of all the care with which each further distinction will be made, is the decisive presumption in Kant—and a mere prejudice of, in favor of, reason. On the place of the subject In a text that occupies a middle point between Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics and “Kant’s Thesis Concerning Being,” Heidegger explicates the relation between the rules of understanding and the constitution of an object. Although largely coherent with his other exegeses, Heidegger here explicitly moves to the question of how a time determination [Zeitbestimmung] is to be understood in Kant in terms of the analogy of

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experience.82 As we saw above, the supposed interiority and purity of time is difficult to maintain at the level of experience—and more specifically, at the place in which experience would carry the weight of providing measure. We should see this, in very broad terms, as the place where the argument against enframing (Gestell) holds simultaneously methodological and ontological implications. The idea that we begin from experience, and that experience is the fact that one is situated perspectivally relative to a transcendent whole, is what we are bringing into question, in one of its most pervasive forms. Here, Heidegger is making explicit what it means for the Kantian rules of the analogy of experience to be universal or general determinations of time: “Universal” time determination means that time determination preceded all empirical time measures in physics, and indeed necessarily precedes them as the ground of their possibility. So that an object in reference to its endurance, in reference to its sequence with others, and in reference to its simultaneity can stand in relation to time, Kant distinguishes “three rules for all temporal relations of appearances” (A 177, B 219), that is, of the existence of the appearances in time with reference to their relations to time.83 At first, this is only an exegetical comment concerning the structure of the analogies, although the presuppositions of that approach are what will finally concern us. The problem comes in where time is reduced, like the form of the intuition of space, to the transcendental aesthetic—that is, to the structure of being given with reference to temporal relation.84 What the form of the proofs gives to Kant, without warrant, is the infinity, the eternity of the structure, of time—or, more precisely, time as infinite (possible) continuity of (active) intuitions, deduced from the givenness of particular slices of time, where the productivity of time, that is, the fact that time has an “extent,” when expressed as space, is productive of the distinctions in various ways of understanding time. In relation to the general Kantian project of explicating the sense of being situated within an infinite power, this also performs the necessary unification of two powers, albeit without making it explicit how this unification is done. In Heidegger’s earlier terms, we would be asking about the “receptive spontaneity” that unifies sensibility and understanding as “transcendental imagination.”85 In Heidegger’s later terms, the unification of the two is no longer an experience of an event, although it is a matter of temporality, because of the many ways that possibility and actuality, form and content, thought and object

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of thought, are determined by the methodological decision concerning the place and movement of the ground within the displacements of Dasein. Against Kant, one must see that to make time as such, as the place where things happen, both infinite and continuous, is to rest the system on an empty formality—it is equivalent to presupposing the freedom of the system. (To pretend that it is discontinuous, however, requires that one think of discontinuity otherwise than as the absence of continuity; the problem of the nothing arises here, as well). In The Question of the Thing, Heidegger shows how Kant makes the very question of time invisible at the point where temporality takes priority over spatial intuition: Space is the form wherein all exterior appearances meet. Time is however not limited to this, but is also the form of inner appearances, that is, the entrance and the sequence of our modes of behavior and experiences. For that, time is the form of all appearances in general. “In it alone is all reality [that is, existence or presence] of appearances possible.” [In ihr allein ist alle Wirklichkeit [d. i. Dasein, Anwesenheit] der Erscheinungen möglich.] (A 31, B 46). That existence of that appearance stands as existing in a relation to time. Time itself is “unchangeable and persisting, “ “it does not proceed [verläuft].” (A 144, B 183). “… time itself is not changed, but something that is in time.” (A 41, B 58). In every now, time is the same now; it is constantly itself. Time is that permanence that every time is. Time is the pure remaining, and only to the extent that it remains is succession and change possible. Although time has a now character in every now, every now is unrepeatably this singular one and differentiated from every other now.86 For this reason, time is unable to escape being thought of in terms of its own determinations of time, as if it embodied the presence of that now, but only with the temporal designation of being permanently such. After moving quickly through the first analogy, and the consequent priority of substance understood as duration [Dauer], Heidegger explains how this gives substance its “objective reality” in terms of an opposition to that which changes.87 The problem, as it will also come to light in Hegel, is that the priority of the unchanging over the changing cannot be thought in terms of the opposition of the two. Rather, as Heidegger argues elsewhere, a better understanding of the giving of being and time would have to situate the temporal both outside of the “vulgar” conception of time as the succession of

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nows,88 and as other than the continually growing presence of a substance’s unfolding (as in Kant’s opposition between temporal and spatial intuition, with precedence accorded to the temporal or interior). Here, and in terms of the method at stake in Kant, the problem is that time is both given and not given, both that which plays the role of setting the standard for meaning and that which is said to be meaningful: time, occupying the place where presence as Anwesenheit should have been thought, is turned toward the object, and reduced to the (functioning of the) realm of that which is present as an object. All constancy stems from the relations of changing presence—of the presence of forces. However, all change is attached to a permanent substrate, something enduring, and thus a conception of permanence must precede the perception of an individual thing. And permanence is, according to Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant, the fundamental character of time as the progressive granting of more presence [fortwährende Anwesenheit]. Therefore, time provides the measure for thought in the guise of the constancy of objects.89 This explicit connection of presence and time depends on a merely negative determination being given to presence to the extent that it is not explicitly thematized and thought through by Kant himself: for Kant, it is only a question of what is permanent and of the precedence of the permanent, as the enduring force of form. That is, the force of the noumenal is understood, or regularized, by unifying the enduring place of thought and the precedence of the possible within the infinity of possible intuitions. The representation of such a place, as a place of thought or reason, is a subjective power, yet what makes such a representation possible? What is the character of being such that we, as humans or as rational animals, are the place of that possibilizing force?90 In brief, for Kant it would be the peculiar deformation of the sacred called ontotheology, the belief that one always already lives within an intelligible world for which we bear no ultimate responsibility. In Heidegger’s language, the fact that we must, in following Kant, see “that we must always move in between, between human and thing” will change how we may think of the movement of transcendence itself. The “between only is because we move ourselves therein” and therefore we must hold ourselves into the tension of the movement in order for that very movement to hold its bearing—that is, maintain itself within its situating force.91 We are not between the infinite and the finite, the divine and the thing; we are not at the place of the instantaneous event of eternity irrupting into space.

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For Heidegger’s reading of Kant, against the idea of possessing a moment of time, as ours to live out, our destiny lies in the tension—in being the place where the demand of displacement and deformation establishes its priority, as transcendent, over the form and content of appearing. Only thus is Dasein transcendence, as the original movement of sustaining what is. We are not positioned in the tragic place of incommensurability, of not being able to resolve the tension through achieving thought, yet subject to the blow that constitutes the movements of displacement themselves.92 For Heidegger, the decisive point is to recognize that the between is not the abstract or formal transcendence that would frame experience, or live always untouched by the particular movement, but the place of a deformation that must be sustained. Our existence itself must be grounded in the place where we grasp ourselves not as “human,” but as caught up in that movement between human and thing. The difficulty here, in terms of reading Heidegger, is that the movement cannot be a necessary development without duplicating the prejudices of subject metaphysics (we will follow this question of the force of the necessary, below). Rather, it must be the movement of displacement, of de-situating, that keeps the human in a different space than the one opened up by the human’s own representational powers.93 And yet that bearing, which is the sense of that de-situating force, must somehow carry the burden of thought—and the meaning of being who we are. Heidegger approaches this relation, providing us with a clue concerning his larger project, in the conclusion to The Question of the Thing: Kant’s question concerning the thing asks about intuition and thought, about experience and its principles, that is, it asks about the human. The question: what is a thing? is the question: Who is the human? That does not mean that the thing is turned into a human product [Gemächte], but means rather the inverse: the human is to be understood as the one who always already leaps over the things, but such that this leaping over is only possible in that the things meet and thus truly remain themselves—in that they send us back behind ourselves and our surfaces. In Kant’s question concerning the thing a dimension is opened that lies between the thing and the human, that reaches over the things above and behind the human.94 The human has always already leapt beyond the things by sending itself back behind its own surfaces. A dimension of depth is opened within which we are already moving away from our situated existence, already that

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power put into motion—as thought—by leaping beyond the surface into the middle of the things we live among.95 Although it is not clear whether Heidegger would subscribe to this optimistic of a view of Kant in his very late work, we do have a clue concerning the nature of the accentuation at work in the practices of reading Kant. To find what makes Kant capable of understanding the motion of thought, in its reciprocal determinations, may involve a rather deformative reading. One that responds to a problem, in this case at least, that is not circumscribed by a possible clarity achieved. One is not looking, in other words, for the enduring structures of meaning, but for the ways in which they are drawn into place, into movement, and away from the subject’s representations of categories or acts of subsuming judgment. If it is true that Hegel is responding to a similar difficulty in Kant— and a similar need not merely to sidestep the force of the transcendental turn—it is also true that he will seek, in terms of that very method, to leap into the middle of the tension or strife that characterizes the movement of the world. One situates the tension, however, in response to two differing conceptions of the place of position within the procession. As we saw at the end of the first part, the place of this tension for Derrida and Lévinas is the deformation contained within each act of singularity, or of passing through position. Thus two possible readings of Kant come into play, as well as two ways of situating the human in relation to a position. For Heidegger’s reading, the tension stems from the dimension between the human and the thing. That dimension is opened up by an encounter that sends us back into the sense of our motion. For Lévinas, it would seem possible to permanently subsume the motion of things under the motion of the human. For Derrida, this difference between human and thing would not make a priori sense—rather, the tension for Derrida must belong to the position taken on of itself. In that sense, he is very close to Heidegger; and yet against Heidegger, he would want the torsion to bear its force independent of any human support (of any voice). Derrida wants the articulation of the world (the text) to constitute the place of the possibility of others beginning to speak, beyond any possibility that would belong to the first speaker. The elliptical torsion of every position, deformed away from itself and toward those that are yet to come, generates significance, bears meaning. It is for this reason, because he wants the future to find its place beyond my possibilities, that Derrida will contest Heidegger’s understanding of possibility as still inhabited by the structure

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of subjectivity—of the powers of the motion of the world finding their proper place in the subject who moves between and not in the traces that are exterior to every possibility that would already belong to a site. We have already seen Derrida’s position drawn twice back into Hegel’s metaphysics and I would now turn yet again toward Hegel’s texts, and more explicitly toward his response to Kant, given that we now have some clue about how Heidegger’s reading of Kant on the force of presence plays out against the function of rectification through limitation and position. My question to Hegel—as an adumbration of Heidegger’s doubts—will be simply whether he can maintain this tension, as the dimension of depth, as that which cannot be simply accounted for topologically. This was, in some sense, already Derrida’s question where the simple reciprocity of the movement of two hands—even in Bataille’s attempted radicalization of Hegel—had seemed to eliminate the question of an access to the sense, or bearing, of the contact which would support the movement of the economy itself. More generally, if the subject is both opposed to and free from the movement of the possible, then the work of representation fixes our bearing toward the world in the relation of user to utilized; we represent the world in order to choose what we most value out of its possibilities, and the gestures of the hand represent a rising above the surface, creating enough distance from which to survey the tissue of life. If, instead, the language bears its depth through projecting an absence—through the movement of steresis, or abstraction, or promising, or evoking, for example—then we no longer need to pretend to the position of judge and measure of the world’s possibilities in order to see meaning sustained in language. The beginning of the subjective Where Kant had subjectivity—understood in its affinity with the noumenal, or the relatively more stable, and thus powerfully enframing— stand in opposition to the world of mere phenomenal appearances, Hegel will find a process of originary limitation, located in the infinite plasticity of a world striated by matter and spirit. This limitation could be understood as enacted, or actual, subjectivity as long as the ground of that actuality in the “rectitude” of the process of limitation was sustained, as long as thinking about being returned into the ground of the intelligibility of the whole. “Rectitude” is a shorthand indication of the difference between the “bad infinite” of mere repetition and the grounding “good” infinity that is both

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substance and subject—both the wholeness of an intelligible universe and the free and conscious participation of the individual subject in that clarity. The method that is properly grounded, therefore, will be the one that can sustain its orientation toward wholeness while participating in the process of building the whole. Instead of placing the subject at the limit of the whole, then, as if every point equally touched on eternity, every partiality, every event within the whole, is thought under the rubric of a developing process of limiting. There is a generalized, ubiquitous, and forward movement of grasping through active opposition—the immanence of the whole, which is the same thing as the orientation of each part in the instant of its actualization, is thought in the fullness of time (this idea of “fullness” is, I believe, a theological proposition, and a direct way of characterizing what Heidegger cryptically calls ontotheology; we will return to it, in detail, below). But we begin with Hegel, only later to turn to Derrida’s specific appropriation of the gestures of limitation. The process through which language becomes full, becomes a self-consciously clear and meaningul tool for expressing the orientation of subjectivity toward clarity and meaningfulness, will serve as our example. Hegel treats the isssues, from the beginning, as problems of method—of how to limit what one can say to what one should say, when properly oriented. Hegelian thought thus bleeds into the broad disciplinary fields concerned with language, and with the development of language, and gives us warrant for paying very careful attention to particular works of literature, as examples of how language forms our consciousness—the deconstructive impulse being only an accentuation of that sense of language, and an attempt to completely account for the unity of the method with the movement of language itself. (The accompanying sense that Hegel has nothing to say to the natural sciences, where language supposedly has nothing to do with the basic work of observation, rests on a series of misreadings and weak versions of subjective idealism, I would argue, and should be excoriated.) We are looking, for now, at where Hegel sees his own move toward science as determined, from the start, in its methodological universality as a theory of the deployment of language. At the beginning of the short section entitled the “The Universal Division of Logic,” with which he ends the introduction to the Science of Logic, Hegel explains that the method to be developed will have to be applied in a preliminary and inadequate fashion to the universal divisions of the text—that is,

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the division [Einteilung] of the text itself must stand in accord with the concept or much rather lie within [the concept] itself. The concept is not undetermined, but rather determined within itself; the division, however, expresses this its determinateness as developed; it is the judgment [Urteil] of this itself, not a judgment about this or that object taken up from the exterior, but rather the judging [das Urteilen], that is, the determining of the concept in itself.96 Although much work has been done on the sense of the originary principle of division or discernment in the judging [Ur-teilen],97 it well bears repeating that the immanence of the process of judgment within the meaningful presence of senseful determination marks the displacement of the unity of the method and principles of science away from the subject and toward the element of logic—an “element” constituted within, or by, the originary partitioning, or judging, of the concept as a self-moving, self-determining whole. The language is tortured, here, as already in Hegel, because the division between the world and how we talk about it is rejected in advance, so that we may see how we belong within a world, as its interior movement, although the world is constituted “externally,” given its exterior limits and thus produced as a “surface” of real events, by the community of speakers. Because this immanence requires that the individual self-consciously appropriate her position within the process of coming to determinate, exterior and meaningful judgments, Hegel is not indifferent to the process by which the words and meanings of philosophy, and not just everyday language, as we happen to speak it within a community, come to bear a demand on us as thinking and speaking beings. The trajectory of these demands as they pass from speaker to speaker, across generations, constitutes philosophy as historical. Thinking itself arises from the determining flow—is tied to the identity of the determining act and not to the identity of the subject who names—and thus the truth is no longer found in the eternal structures of identity, but in the momentary structures of determination and in the logical element (the whole as internally developed, or “full”) within which these determinations take shape. The unity belongs to the world and is not the property of an individual who would presume to first possess a world and then speak about it afterwards, just as the speakers of a language are limited by the possibilities of that language and not free to speak outside of what can be meaningfully communicated. To “have” a world at hand,

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to live in a world where movements of the hand can result in contact with objects, requires living within the “element” of the world as constituted by the shared gestures of a community. We must already live within the give and take of meanings, of ways in which language can be effective, if we are to produce anything new, including a bare moment of a “new” contact with the world. Hegel is not trying to account for his language in order to efface the effects of its deployment, but to deploy a language capable of bearing those effects into the shared spaces of the world—capable of effecting change, of bearing unity in the plastic space of a community self-consciously bound within the element of communication and judgment. Most broadly, the attention to the motion of having been claimed by the truth, or rectitude, of a language—such that language becomes the fluid support of truth as such—allows the Science of Logic to take into account the “concrete living unity” of subjective and objective logic instead of positing a “dead and unmoving” abstraction, exemplified by the separation of subject from object, noumenal from phenomenal, or a priori from a posteriori. This attitude of “having been claimed”—captured in the ways in which we are turned toward a determination of truth, a grasping and grappling with the world’s matter that is in turn oriented by nurturing the best possibilities into fruition, toward the fullness of time, and thus bearing the force of the world’s very becoming—this structure of human comportment is an open gesture, a moving toward and not a completed grasping. Less than the conscious activity of a self-caused agent, it is the response that begins to belong to the world. One becomes part of the motion of history; one gestures toward what is not yet present; one makes a gesture of integrity, or kindness, and in that gesture one acknowledges one’s place in the world. The constant beginning of human grasping is the permanent origin of the world, its sustaining force or element. Hegel, accordingly, is not guilty of simply privileging an abstract concept of the self, or of “the same,” as an imposition of a single form of subjectivity; he is guilty of casting the element of becoming solely in terms of enactment. The problem we will pursue against Hegel is thus not with the form of subjectivity, but with the form of the event of singularity—of being an active element of becoming. For Hegel, the philosophical divisions bear force as convincing because they are real; they are real, however, because they bear convincing force, and oblige us to turn toward and bear their truth. Such is the force of a language coming into its own through historical processes of progressive

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self-awareness. Consequently, instead of asking how one names the world, we ask how the human belongs most essentially to the intelligibility that puts names into motion. More, the fact that motion implies intelligibility entails all the contours of a system, at that point where the human takes the position of limit, and sustains that position as the turning “inward,” or the conscious appropriation, of the motion of thought. That place of opposition and communication becomes generative of meaning, and in the hands of a number of post-structuralist readers of Hegel, has allowed the semantic field, as ultimate space of articulation, to exercise the powers of spirit’s productivity, because the “inwardness” of the subject is only the moment of self-reference in the production of the text, the reference to rectitude or wholeness that prevents the production of a text from becoming the merely blind repetition that characterizes the bad infinite. My question to Hegel is simply whether he has understood this movement of limitation only in terms of force—such that, for example, the passage of time is only thought from the side of the plenitude of passage and not from its fragility. After all, if the plenitude, or the violence, is necessary, then the plenitude itself would serve a normalizing function—one would be certain, at least, of the limits or contours within which life is necessarily lived as production, as either internally violent, or as overflowing, or as both. In the language of the trace, the philosophical task would be clear: that which may be recognized, as a trace of the originality of life, should be nurtured into the future, as the health or fullness at the core of our lives, or of our thoughtful activity. Such would be the “essence” of our lives or of our being. Lévinas and Derrida, accentuating a moment in Plotinus, gave us two different ways of contesting the equivalence of the shape of productive participation within a whole with the shape of transcendence associated with the self-standing, or independent, good. For them, instead, only the deformation or displacement away from the self would follow in the passage of the always already absent trace. The extent to which such strategies repeat some of the problems of a metaphysics of participation remains the horizon of our question; here, we will ask whether living within the continuing element of finite determinations can be equivalent to living within the fragility of passage. If a geometric metaphor helps, the difference is between a Hegelian participation where every point is real, because it bears effects, and simultaneously ideal because it vanishes into an abstraction insofar as it participates in the space as a whole, and a Heideggerian region of ground

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that only bears relations to the extent that it remains oriented by sustaining that ground. The “nothing” in Hegel is the movement that sacrifices the material point and progresses into the abstract, the determinately meaningful; it exchanges the material for the spiritual.98 The “nothing” in Heidegger steals away the material and the spirtual presence—the point is only sustained against the vanishing, even where the ground is still to be understood as the movement of the nothing, away from the material. In other words, the spiritual moves forward in Hegel, by sacrificing the material, while the nothing steals the material away in Heidegger. The finitude of life, in one version of Hegelian dialectics that remains popular, stems from the relative incompletion of each determined position—I may know something about my view of the whole, but only in a limited or partial way. Still, in that partial and finite act of knowing, I partake in the life—the power and health—of the whole. The plenitude of the whole is given, be it in a mystical reconciliation of self and nature, or be it only as the enigmatic or perplexing situation of frustrated desires. Be it, even, the constant surpassing of self, of knowing only that the future will come. On the other hand, the fragility of the second version of finitude, which I am suggesting is Heideggerian in its contours, stems from our more basic inability to infinitely trust such plenitudes—this fragility would respond to the risk of not being able to live within a world, not being able to support or bear its demands. The world does not slip past us, fleeting but also fleetingly possessed, nor do we find ourselves partially in possession of a world, tragically striving to own it all—we are drawn, instead, toward the intimacy of a fragile world, always reaching for a space “in between” where our motion may take on a good contour. One should remember, first, that the difference between form and content is not foundational nor already given for Hegel—the very movement of assertions, of judging that one thing is a property of another, is in fact secondary to an element of (or for) language that is spoken with an eye toward the movement of the world, toward the place where the movement of relationality, potency—thought—unfolds. And because the universal logic of unfolding moves with the imparting and enacting of judging, the language that communicates to others in mutually founded determinations fulfils the universal demands of the system. Against the static understanding of the categories that some have derived from his dialectic, a focus on the motion of thought, and of the concrete possibility of action in the world, allows the Hegelian system to embody a dynamic

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principle. The possibility—or better, the actual movements—of originality, or of commencement, motion, change and life, must be constitutive parts of the communication and dividing of the system itself and cannot be eliminated by the motion of the system at that point where it achieves a state of rest or of fully recognized or public articulation. The very methods of science must be constantly revisable. In giving attention to the forms of subjectivity, Hegel tells us, Kant had already made the first step. Thus, in Kant, the form of possibility, as it relates to the form of thought, arises in the sensible presence of a self to the rational or intellectual force of the world. The fact of our presence lies within— and thus endows—the possibility, or potency, of our experience. As we saw above, the separation between form and content gained by virtue of that conception of the relation of the human to the world as the presence of a subject to an object had allowed Kant to make the methodological move to the powers of subjective judgment [Urteilung]. The separation between the judging and the judged, however, is in Hegel’s eyes merely abstract since the whole is no longer seen to be related to itself precisely at the point of what should have been understood as its greatest (most “forceful,” determinate, and convincing) contact—precisely when the subject is in the presence of the force of the world as the relating of part to whole, as accomplished in the work of partition and communication [Teilung]. Hegel, then, treats the sense of this form of a subject’s presence in terms of its historical development—a development achieved in the freedom that the Kantian project merely assumes when it divides the phenomenal from the noumenal, or intuition from concept within the phenomenal. This sense itself, as the form of movement toward the conceptual, takes the intersubjective form of concrete spirit, and the historical form of being achieved only after a certain trajectory of concrete spirit has been completed. We think of it as science, still, and as the achievement of a form of societal interactions where each individual is free to set and pursue her own goals. History, in its old sense, ends when this form is achieved and all action is properly oriented by the self’s interests as freely self-determined. My attempt here is to show some of the ways in which Hegel’s response to Kant allows us to see human freedom as belonging to a movement instead of as belonging to a power—which is a distinction that Hegel himself would deliberately collapse. The distinction allows us, however, to think of the demand and task of language otherwise than in terms of the powerful relational clarity of science [Wissen]. Eventually, and against

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Hegel, to think of freedom from the place of movement is to understand the force of a demand above, or as prior to, the spontaneity (or pure freedom) of an occurrence of that which just happens to be, even if it also just happens to be in motion. For Hegel, because the movement and the demand find their unity in the freedom of spirit—as it powerfully turns toward its contingent being and recognizes the sense of the motion—it is possible to achieve freedom in a moment of fully articulated recognition. But the unity only comes when one looks for recognition in the public spaces of articulated judgments of value or worth where the objective realm stands opposed to, limited by, or framed by, the subject who names or transcends the particular experience. And for any thinking oriented by the force of these articulations, their movement past the present, that which has value is that which has originary and transformative power—that which causes the world to take its shape and enter into the freedom of motion. This, then, is Hegel’s conception of the element of logic as the constant and enduring presence of beginning [Anfang]; it depends on an originary partitioning, communicating, or dividing that would constitute the system of philosophy itself—and more, that would constitute philosophy (or logic) as the process of living in the space of beginning. By turning to the structure of beginning, I would take up the motion of spontaneity, and not see Hegel as having privileged the presence of motion, much less the presence of human spirit to the divine mind. That is, I will not accuse Hegel of simply being blind to the future. Nor of simply “privileging the Same.” The somewhat paradoxical status of entering into that which one already is constitutes the difficulty and the force of Hegel’s dialectic. Against Hegel’s circles of appropriation, however, this place of entry will also constitute the point at which one could invoke the precedence of deformation over the purity of form—the point, that is, where I will want to invoke a different demand, even within Hegel, than the demand for clarity precisely because the demand is for taking a responsibility beyond position, beyond being responsible for that which one produces, or beyond, even, being responsible for that which one is. A demand, for example, to take responsibility for the sun. In terms of my larger project, it is a demand for trust, or continuity, and in terms of my polemics, the dogmatic presupposition that clarity can be trusted, and that one lives, always, within clarity, is precisely the enemy of the gravity of the sacred—that is, the enemy of both motion and thought at the place

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where our lives matter. To take responsibility for the sun would not be to overstep the bounds of human knowledge, for it would not be a relation of knowing or of limitation: rather, it is to contest the idea that the desire for the infinite is natural, and that we already live within the infinite, in the form of necessarily always responding to its motions and tasks.99 The hubris, in other words, of reaching beyond our limitations, constitutes the most basic metaphysical stance, and that hubris must be embraced if we are to think without the security of knowledge. More in line with Hegel’s own project, the question of the “element” of thought, which is a question about how we conceive of language, can be phrased as follows: What does it mean for the element to be the universal, to be that of which each individual will be an example, such that, in yet more general terms, the element is the source and destination of every particular? It is a question of how the world is accessible to intelligence, of how ideas are present in the world. This is a question we have already followed in Plotinus with the overflowing motion of intellect, but the turn to the subject, and the subject’s powers of representation, means that the particular way in which we understand that “element” is given a very specific, and novel, form. It is, one would say quite simply, the place of the becoming of the human: the place, following Kant, where the human and its representations gain priority, as measure over measured. The key for Hegel, I will suggest, is to be found in understanding the place of becoming, the place of the element of becoming that the human occupies, in the reciprocal relations of part and whole, and thus of the determinations that constitute the simplicity—the encompassing and constant constitutive tension—of the whole. This means (in the terms set up from Plotinus) that for Hegel the human doesn’t find itself confronting the formless, but rather already living within the process, or continual procession, of forms of opposition and the motion of forming objects (things opposed to the knower). And yet, the subject finds its truth as the constant and enduring limit of that procession of forms. In the structure of belonging to that process of limitation, one must encounter the sense of that truth in order for the subject’s opposition to the object to find its free (undeformed) shape—the end of the progression in the system must belong to the very structure of beginning in expressive encounters with the world. For Hegel, to be that limit where the subject knows itself as such, as free to express, corresponds to being at the place of limitation, determination, and thus of the constitution of the whole as a unity, but as a unity determined

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from within itself. My finitude is constituted in the partiality of my view, but I can orient myself past that partiality toward the element within which all partiality moves. Such are the gestures of integrity, honesty, and selfresponsibility appropriate to the man of science. The appropriation—by the life of spirit—of the “sense” of determination and limitation is itself, then, a movement, and a concrete reflection, and not a mere abstraction (not something formal in the sense of an a priori category) and thereby a particular by-product of the progress of Europe. In the metaphors we’ve been following, the element is not the static aether that supports all intelligibility, but the constant motion of becoming intelligible. For this reason, one isn’t in the position, as Kierkegaard would have it against Hegel, of merely making every individual into a paragraph within the system, precisely because that motion is never complete and never abstract. For Hegel, one is still being positioned by the force of the form of spirit’s movement, within the element of thought as a whole, although that force, the encompassing exteriority of that motion, perhaps, would still bother Kierkegaard’s sense of the interiority of individuality. In Hegel, the individual subject is essential to the constitution of the element, which is time, but which, in its freedom, encompasses and supports the subject who makes determinations in time— this means, for Hegel at least, that one could necessarily trust a life within this element that logic would be. One can be certain of the method, or of the system, if one trusts the gestures of determination to be original, to be capable of sustaining themselves in the element of a constant beginning. Movement and method Shortly after the exhortation to think the unity of the system with its process of division, quoted above, Hegel goes on to explain the sense of the division of the Science of Logic into an objective and a subjective logic. The explicit background is the comparison with Kant’s project. For Kant, the move to a transcendental logic (which corresponds “in part” to what Hegel will call an objective logic, that is to close to the first two-thirds of Hegel’s Science of Logic) allows the comprehension of concepts in terms of the universal rules for thinking of an object. Kant, in some sense, had already seen that far, even if it remains to take the final step. In Hegel’s appraisal, Kant’s single founding act of insight was to “move toward the origin of our knowledge, to the extent that [the knowledge] cannot be ascribed to the objects.”100 This knowing, as an act of mediation oriented

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by the logic of the world’s motion, is originary activity [Tun]. Although inspired by this Kantian project, Hegel’s critical philosophy will not be satisfied with the abstract forms of thought—a priori versus a posteriori, noumenal versus phenomenal, thing in itself versus appearance—and will move to understanding logic’s own structure of activity, and freedom, without limiting its position to the representations of an individual merely responding to the encompassing flow of the world. In Hegel, the epistemological is subsumed into its element, into its logic, as the motion of the world’s determined and shared appearance. In other words, precisely in seeing the position of this originality in knowledge more clearly than Kant, Hegel will be able to take the critical project beyond its receptive and reactive individual stage to its next level in the structures of the world’s intersubjective and projectively deformative motion. With Kant, the abstracting movement away from our presence to the world would constitute the basic movement of thinking—of our belonging to the obscure but potent “element” of the noumenal—as always responding to a more fundamental, and unknowable, activity. We are active in thinking, but only because we are situated, positioned, affected. The realm of potency and possibility would be an abstraction, although also that within which we actually lived. The motion, or bare sense of thought, for Kant, would be a negative image of the motion or force of the world as instantiated in individual position, although he pretends to “flatten” (or make logical) that space by reducing the subject to a pure center, without extent. Representation would live in the illusion of its innocence, as if description were not a form of control, as if left and right were coordinates within space and not activities of a subject in motion, grasping the world in the unfolding of time. Much of the contemporary philosophy of science, for example, continues to believe in the freedom to create models or theories about a world that one then tests against those theories; the Kantian version of such an approach believes that every individual position of knowing can be reduced to a pure form, an instantaneity that allows itself to be named, and that theories produced from any point within the whole can equally speak of how all points are constituted and related to the other, essentially equivalent, points; the theory is tested, most fundamentally, by asking whether something is or is not occupying a point as predicted by the theory. Measurement, in other words, is replaced by predication and the determination that something either is or is not the case.

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Kant would understand the structures of being present to and living within the force of reason’s demand and being’s movement, but, because he misunderstands the individuality of position, would not explain the originality of that movement as the unified emergence of the element, of the shared presence coming into language, itself. Even if a Kantian interprets the thing in itself in terms of the “wholeness” or completed feeling of the presence of the phenomenal—and thus as something in some way accessible to human presence and demanding productive activity—the human is put in the position of responding through knowing the meaningfulness of that presence and not through participating in the motion of that emerging into presence. In short, Kant has turned to the importance of cognition, but seen the form as opposed to content, like a subject opposed to, responding to, the force of the world. Hegel wishes to unite those two moments by understanding the originary force of the activity of affective (or receptive) presence to the world, that is, by understanding the force of thinking in terms of the force of the movement of potency—such is the monstrous power of the negative, the power of articulation within which our method becomes certain of its truth. It is, as we will see, a movement of thought (and more specifically of Wesen), and the priority of just such a movement coincides with the priority of the human over the material, over, for our example, the phenomenal sun. For this reason, the Science of Logic is articulated as defining what it will be defined by, judging and being judged in the very act of its partitioning and communication. For this reason, a book, or a writing, becomes the place of a living truth, beyond the author or the audience that would assent to its claims. (Derrida’s Of Grammatology is dedicated to identifying this force of writing, and its capacity to escape the limits of a living voice, in the structuralism that he wished to appropriate and supercede). Hegel thus resituates the human—or more properly, he regrounds the consciousness that Kant saw as emblematic of the human relation to finite knowledge—in the real movements of the concept. In the concept, thinking becomes activity, takes the shape of actuality, and thus belongs to and constitutes the motion and potency of the originality of our presence to the world. And yet for Hegel our originality rests in giving limits: only because our thought may exceed the sensuously present may our memory and our capacity to plan for the future take root in their precedence over material needs. Thinking, in that sense, remains opposed to the movement of the world, always turning back toward its source or origin, even as it marks our appurtenance to that very movement of turning back or

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negating—and, more, even as it marks the intelligibility of the place of belonging, or limitation, as such, as a place of movement and finitude. In Hegel’s own language, the movement to the level of thought as such, and thus as infinite form, takes us to the productivity of the movement of limitation and not just the form of the consciousness that belongs to that process of limitation: that is, the objective logic (encompassing the doctrines of being and essence) provides its own critique, in the bases set out already by Kant, moving us thereby into Hegel’s subjective logic (that is, “The Doctrine of the Concept”) where the productivity of self-consciousness, as pure thinking, is encountered. Thus, in continuing his appraisal of the relation of his own work to Kant’s, Hegel will say: For the real progress of philosophy, however, it was necessary that the interest of thinking be drawn toward the observation of the formal side, of the I, of consciousness as such, that is, of the abstract relation of a subjective knowing of an object, so that the knowledge of the infinite form, that is of the concept, in this manner could be introduced. In order, however, to reach this knowledge, the finite determinateness, in which the form as I is consciousness, must yet be cast off. The form, thus to be thought from out of its purity, carries in itself the determining of itself, that is the giving of content to itself, and indeed this very thing in its necessity—as system of thought determinations.101 This emphasis on the infinite form of subjective determination constitutes a remarkable movement within Hegel’s philosophy precisely where such a form, in its pure motion as part of the partitioning or determining of the system, is not opposed to a content, but is still, somehow, to be understood as the place where a content, as form, will come to be. Such are the gestures of a thoughtful existence, oriented by a truth that has not yet come, but which must be given a space in which to develop (to gestate). It is, perhaps, like beginning to speak, when you trust in your capacity to control the language, trust that the right words will appear. But not at the level of having spoken, since all that past particularity is erased, nor at the level of mastery of an achieved certainty, as much as at the level of beginning, at the point where you have determined, for yourself, that it is time to begin to speak clearly and correctly about the world. This is the form of movement, at its barest sense, before it is anything more than a deformation toward the future. (And remember: the good progresses as truth because the future becomes full through being understood, becomes the meaningfulness of

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having moved forward into the abstract; spirit is more real than matter, more capable of the sustaining of a world because it actively receives all objects as limited). For now, I would reiterate that this movement is not just the identification of the realm of appearances with the corporeal presence of images, but is the place where the traces of that movement contain the truth of the motion—i.e., the knowledge lives, as it moves into understanding its own productivity, beyond any fascination with the particular content of its consciousness, as the movement of the concept. And it does so by pulling back into the space of its commencement and originality—into the realm of spirit, or of thought as moving through the grasping of the world. Such is the potency of thought within, or as, the passage of time. And one knows oneself, in the bare sense of beginning, in this motion that passes through the life of the world. In other words, movement in Hegel is the development (or determination) of the relation of parts to whole in the possibilities, or potencies, of thought—in the possible ways in which the whole may bear its relations of potency toward the fullness of time. The infinity of that motion through finite corporeal existence, and not some pretended separation from time, constitutes the purity of its determinations and thus the pure structure of being a consciousness. In order to see this movement of determination at work in Hegel’s texts, then, I would turn to the figure of motion within the question of ontology itself: that is, I will turn toward essence [Wesen]. If we may draw the thematics back to Plotinus, this turning movement of essence corresponds to the fact that determination falls away from the one, or is the first movement of (“internal to”) the motionless one itself. In the few pages that we’ve been looking at in Hegel, the question is still phrased as a response to Kant. If we remain within the objective logic, that is, within the Kantian transcendental framework, then we remain within traditional metaphysics, that is, we remain in a thinking that places itself above the world, unable to explain our contact with the world itself. And yet that form—or motion—of placing oneself above the sensuous will provide a clue for Hegel. What we are searching for, within Hegel’s thought, is the way in which the move to Wesen constitutes a bridge between traditional ontology and the self-determining concept that lives in the motion of being. Hegel is clear on this point: If we take our bearing from the final shape of the formation of this science, it is thus first immediately ontology, to which place the

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objective logic attains—[it is] the part of that metaphysics which searches for the nature of the ens in general; the ens grasps equally within itself being [Sein] and essence [Wesen], the difference between them being fortuitously preserved in our language in these differing expressions.—As such, though, the objective logic also grasps within itself the rest of metaphysics, to the extent that these sought to attach the pure forms of thought to the particular, most simply from out of the naming representation of the substrate, as soul, world, God, and thus made the determinations of thinking constitute the essential mode of observation. However, logic observes these forms free from these substrata, the subjects of representation, and observes their nature and value in and for itself. That former metaphysics neglected this and thus drew the just objection of having utilized these forms without critique, without the precedent investigation into whether and how they would be capable of being determinations of the thing in itself, in Kant’s expression.—The objective logic is thus the true critique of itself—a critique that doesn’t observe itself according to the abstract form of the a priori versus the a posteriori, but rather that observes its own specific contents.102 The movement of the criticism implies a doubled reflection: only through the method, or guided motion, of having had all steps pass through the method, having observed, that is, the very motion of criticism itself, will the Kantian project find its true ground—its repose within the potency of thought. In other words, Kant shouldn’t have stopped before examining what it meant for the subject to be the substance of its own phenomenal becoming yet only a finite part of the motion of the whole—since, after all, the whole will have been nothing but the congruence toward unity expressed in the movement of the partitioning, of many actors being part of that whole. And yet that unity, that place where one recognizes that one is finite, and yet a finite part of the infinite whole, must have a place where it can be accorded its precedence: the place of embodied form (as the intelligibility of the powers of partition in the specific forms of determination). The move to the concept, then, is the priority of the function of providing measure, or determination, and not the assumption that each subject, by virtue of mystical powers, imbues the world with meaning. The subjective logic explains the sense of turning inward, as subject, toward the force that pertains to turning toward form as the element of shared presence. The “proper” shape of being a subject is not found in what the subject already

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is, or possesses inside, but in responding to the demand to turn inward, to sustain the integrity of an orientation toward the truth at the place of one’s individuality (which is why Hegelians can be so deaf to criticism of Hegel as a promulgator of Western cultural values, since they so rarely see how that very turn inward expresses a profoundly Western presupposition about the shape of meaningful determinations, and not a truth about what humanity’s greatest possible destiny can determinately be). Hegel continues: The subjective logic is the logic of the concept—of the essence [des Wesens], which has subsumed [aufgehoben hat] its relation to a being or its appearance [Schein] and is no longer in its determination exterior, but rather is the free and independent, self-determining subjective, or yet more, is the subject itself.103 What it means to be a Wesen here is not encompassed by the English word “essence”—although one approaches such an acceptation if a developmental progression is added to the sense of each word, or each event of saying (the problem lies with how an event “expresses” development, or “lives” in time). Even the additional temporal schematic, however, misses the turn within the word toward a particular type—or situatedness—of movement within time. To be human is to be that being [Wesen] that exists as relating itself to being [Sein] in the mode of a subject. To be a subject as such is to move beyond the particular Wesen to the standpoint of the concept— Wesen is the negative movement, the movement of responding to being as negation, or nothingness; it is to exist, as nothingness, in the place where being becomes appearance. When that Wesen grasps the essence of its own being as movement, then the move to the concept is achieved. To become appearance, as essence, is the negation of being [Sein] in its simple unity. The negation of that negation is what is called for in the move to the concept, the move to the place of the pure form of the potency of thought—of what can be thought within the forms of ontology—and the free contingent happening of the world, in its determined truth, is the ultimate expression of the motion of thought in its purity. The place of the truth, as determined in the spirit of scientific activity, must accord with the divisions of the logic, or more broadly with that which contains the originary principle of partitioning as such. Freedom, or the absolute, is attained in understanding that you are not the cause of your determinations, but the movement, in simple unity with these determinations, of the freedom of self-determining

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spirit (if one may so starkly summarize the last fifteen pages of the Science of Logic). You may not have willed your physical body, nor its limitations, but you are free to live in the truth of your situation, and thus in the thoughtful determination of your subjectivity—a determination, in other words, to begin in the rectitude of an orientation toward science, knowledge and truth. As the entirety of the second part (“The Doctrine of Wesen”) of the first division (“The Objective Logic”) attests, to be Wesen is to be in the place of determinate negation, as the movement of thought that responds by providing the element of motion. Wesen moves from the level of being first appearance, or reflection, into the determinations of reflection, and finally constitutes the ground from which to understand appearance and existence.104 Kant has only made the move to Wesen, and takes for granted the freedom of that move. In Hegel, the essence of Wesen is grasped positively as the activity of grasping or conceiving. It corresponds to the structure of becoming determinate, or of emerging into presence. The concepts, as we saw above, are not mere imaginings, but are the place where the truth of the process of partaking in the world of appearances is given. For this reason, Wesen need not be recapitulated, as a movement, in the conclusion of the Science of Logic—the task, instead, and for the whole of the Science of Logic, was to see how to free oneself from that first determinate negation precisely by moving to the negation of the negation. In brief, Hegel is accepting the move to the powers of the subject, but is accusing Kant of not having seen the unity of those powers with the determining structures of potency in general. We are creatures of the possible—such is the meaning of morality already for Kant. And we now have an answer to the question of the young Kantians, posed above: “How must the world be created for there to be a moral creature [moralische Wesen]?” Wholeness, in Kant, if we are to be allowed to extend his thought in this direction, would be carried in the judgment that the act corresponds with what is most potent—with what is best—in the motion of the possible. Kant’s subject does not possess the whole, but possesses the part in such a way as to indicate a proper, or most forceful, orientation toward belonging to the whole. The place of that judgment is withdrawn back into the subject, and assigned to the fact that the subject posseses certain powers or faculties. The wholeness in Hegel, however, belongs to the world, is situated in that place where the judgments become public, pass through determination, and thus take on reality. A work of art, for example, becomes powerful only

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when recognized by a public, when received into a powerful, which is to say, effective and actual, movement of spirit. The truth of that motion toward public determination, however, is found in the form of the subject—a form that, by Hegel’s lights, Kant had correctly seen in the act of providing measure, or a sense of wholeness, justice and rectitude in the judgment, but had restricted unduly to the individual realm of apperception and not the public space of shared language. The second negation, in Hegel, finds the motion of subjectivity to be essentially a motion of passage through the public into and then through the specificity of determination, and resulting in the consequent appropriation of that specificity by subjective consciousness. That appropriation makes the move through specificity true, because it enacts the most potent form of that passage, the fullness of Wesen expressing itself, on the way toward the priority of form over the sensible. One discovers the truth of one’s subjectivity in the actual force of public recognition, and of the form of that subjectivity taking its place in the world as truth. We live in the element of these appropriated determinations and not in the abstract realm of pure possibility—such is the reality, and the transcendent meaning, attached to the life of a community. In somewhat general terms, we are speaking about how to characterize that movement, the potency of being moved, that belongs to the aesthetic. That belongs, more precisely, to the force of the event of the reception, and productive incorporation, of a form into and as the element of the world. The question of the function of art gains its philosophical weight in this motion as it becomes productive, as it becomes effective and not just affect. And, more precisely, this difference tells us what it would mean to attain the proper standpoint for understanding the work, in art, of “attaining” the standpoint of the proper, or of the free—to be able to say, that is, that this piece of art moves me, as it should. This difference tells us what it would mean to say that I am free to choose my form of representation, to move in the world, in control of my time—perhaps, thereby, “after the end of art.”105 In anticipating the rest of my trajectory, then, there are only a couple of major formulas to keep in mind: To think is to be moved, to think correctly is to think in accordance with the sense of the motion (the “trace” of the originary force within that motion). So much, already, in Kant, at least as read, above. But that motion, in its essence, withdraws from immediate aesthetic sensibility, toward the measure and meaningfulness of the object—Hegel even finds here the meaning of the turn to the subject as

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a demand for the production of more movement and thus exceeds Kant’s positioned subject. To make this movement true, the subject must assume the shape of self-determining freedom; therein lies the riddle of freedom as participation instead of as the empty abstraction of separation; therein lies the riddle of freedom as movement and as clarity attained. The questions, accordingly, become: what is the sense of motion after the idea of a proper essence attached to power or potency is abandoned? And where do we look for the traces of the beginnings of thought if we no longer trust—as Hegel still did—in the intelligible force of our presence to the world? What if, in other words, we abandon the idea of correctness—of a rectifying movement of either thought or being—and turn to the forms of trust? Belonging to the necessity of the element In several attempts by Derrida to secure a place for Hegel’s understanding of the production of signs secured from, if not explicitly counter to, Heidegger’s critique of technology, the argument flows between the element of language, the exteriority of space, and the functioning of appropriation. This movement, which is emblematic of much of Derrida’s work, at least through the mid-1970’s, finds perhaps its most refined formulation in “The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel’s Semiology,” which dates from 1968. In an untitled page, between the title sheet and what would seem to be the beginning of the text, Derrida announces his interest in the contraction or restriction [rétrécissement] that moves from the element of the sign in general to the element of language. Although I intend to look carefully at the meaning of a rétrécissement below—in the context of the relation of two “types” of presence (Anwesenheit and Gegenwärtigkeit) in Heidegger, a relation which is also characterized by Derrida as a rétrécissement—the purpose here is to see the broad contours of appurtenance that allow this question to arise in Hegel. Derrida begins this article, in fact, with a citation from the middle of the Science of Logic’s “Doctrine of the Concept” and, before moving back to what I take to be Hegel’s own idea of beginning, I wish to look at the context, of only a few more sentences, within which Derrida’s citation arises. The part Derrida quotes begins with “Since the real difference…” and goes until the end of my citation. Hegel is speaking, generally, of how separate things maintain their individuality and yet exist in community with each other.

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To the extent that each one is posited as in itself self-contradicting and subsuming, they are thus held in their separateness from each other and kept from their mutual fulfilment only through exterior force [Gewalt]. The medium, through which these extremes are now thrown together, is primarily the being-to-itself nature of both, of the whole concept, which contains both within it. However, secondarily, since they stand over against one another within this existence, their absolute unity is also distinct from them, existing, yet a formal element—the element of communication, wherein they meet with each other in external commonality [Gemeinschaft]. Since the real difference belongs to the extremes, the medium [Mitte] is only the abstract neutrality, the real possibility of those extremes—likewise the theoretical element of the existence of chemical objects, its processes and results—in the corporeal realm water has the function of this medium; in the spiritual, to the extent that the relations of such an analogy can be found there, the sign in general, and more precisely [näher] language [Sprache], is to be seen as such.106 The questions Derrida asks attach to the word “näher,” [literally, “nearer”] and to the way in which Hegel attempts to make more precise the function of language as a medium, where the process of moving in meaningfulness constitutes the medium of contact between individuals. We are, that is, making more precise the question of “method” at the place at which following the method unifies presence and language, and asking what it means for the forms of language to be sustained within an element that moves. Derrida announces his questions, all in italics, before he begins the main body of the paper: What must we understand here as medium [milieu]? As semiological medium [médium]? And more precisely (näher) as linguistic medium, whether it is a matter, under the word Sprache, of a speech [langue] or a language [langage]? Here we are interested in this contraction’s difference [la différence de ce rétrécissement], in order to discover here on its way, probably, only a contraction of difference: another name for the medium of spirit.107 This is a provocative, and programmatic, announcement: that which will interest us, in a yet further restriction of Derrida’s constricting approach, is how the medium or element that supports spirit’s motion is the restriction

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or contraction, or perhaps even a species of the withdrawal or retraction, of difference. That is, a certain production, or making appear of the word, in the labor of speaking, will form the place within which spirit moves, individually, communally, and effectively, as the freedom of subjectivity and thus as the movement of spirit. In the terms we developed above, this freedom, embodied as the necessary self-effacement of presence (the trace of that which is never present), in the motion that grants form priority over matter without assigning a “separate” sphere, or mode of existence, to that realm.108 Belonging to an exterior motion characterizes the place of passage within which we live, as the claim on our becoming, on the “interiority” of becoming that freedom represents when it is related to the world beyond the self. More recently, as we turned to Hegel, we saw this same motion characterized as a beginning. Derrida wishes, against Heidegger, to insist on the passage through this effacement and, against Hegel, to contest the supposed completion of the effacement, the perfect erasure of the trace. By refusing the completion, in other words, Derrida will accentuate the originary force of language—of the element of beginning—in the place of its coming “after,” and thus both accept Heidegger’s characterization of Hegel as the culminating figure in the metaphysics of presence and reject the idea that we must abandon that metaphysics. As with Plotinus, the movement of thought, which institutes the priority of form, precedes all other movements, gives originary force to being, and yet comes “after” presence, as limit and as fall. We are positioned as thinking from the standpoint of our finitude, as having already betrayed the purity of being without determination (or position) and yet as capable of atonement, of orienting oneself past the fall. Without pretending to have exhausted Derrida’s position, I would begin by remarking the fact that Derrida’s excerpted text excludes the tension between part and whole announced by Hegel—or more precisely, relocates that tension away from the work of the whole expressing itself in particularity and finds it in the work of the individual enacting the individuation, as in the speaker who uses the preposition “näher,” and thus evokes the “contraction of difference: another name for the medium of spirit.” The element for Hegel, in his own more dilated language, is only secondary to the absolute unity (and thus freedom) of the concept, a unity wherein external characteristics communicate with each other only derivatively, that is, only in external community, in the element of

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communication, or mutual participation (Element der Mitteilung), and thus in that neutrality which bespeaks the real possibility of the element. We are not speaking, I would emphasize, of an oversight on Derrida’s part, but of a polemic—and moreover, a polemic with Heidegger, as we find out, really, only on the last two pages of Derrida’s essay, purportedly dedicated to Hegel’s semiology. My point in this section is to understand what the element of communication would be for Hegel—attempting to understand it, moreover, from out of the sense of the unity of the concept, in its imparting [Teilung] and commencement, as we saw in the previous section. In the part of this citation preceding Derrida’s excerpt, the sense of passage or of contraction involved in the fact that everything set into the moment will both contradict itself and bring itself into the larger unity of the concept, sets the stage for the element being understood either in terms of the pure motion of passage or in terms of the achieved externality of a space within which the passage would find its place. The sense of the unity of the concept, as a sense for where and how to place the human within the unfolding power of the whole, is the unity of this place with the innermost purpose (or sense) of the expression of the whole. In an older language, it is the goodness, the perfection or the overflowing fullness, of being. In a modern language, it is the being-to-itself, the imminent being, of that which is, really, as we encounter it within our presence to the world. That every point is within a whole that is properly constituted as a realm of being depends on the integrity of every point being sustained from somewhere. The voice that sustains each point, that assigns each point a place within the whole as a representational frame, or as elements within a set, or even as the originality of the force of emerging into presence, is what Derrida calls into question with his critique of logocentrism—without, however, calling into question the priority of language, or its forms, in the constitution of the element of our becoming. What we will see, below, is the deformative movement must be a reticence, not a “forward movement” of presence, of participating in the movement of time through presence. The deformation must resist the passage, a fragile counter-movement, without guarantees, nor promises of redemption, no matter how “weak.” The Derridean polemic rests with how much the originary force of language upsets the pretension to capture the true and imminent being of the world; it is a question of whether language intervenes within a formal whole whose contours are permanent, and permanently set within the frame

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of the reality or actuality of the force of presence, or whether its intervention brings those contours into play, into the singularity of a place whose sense is not the gravity of transcription, but the originary force of emerging into, and as, the world. In overview, that sense—or place—of passage is what Derrida called the play of the world in reference to Lévinas. Such a play would not be understood as a unity in the sense of a completed map of all possible meaning, but should be understood, instead, as the place wherein all meaning will find its mapping onto the potencies of the world’s movements. Derrida identifies this movement with the process of differencing, with the very concrete play of the world as it splits into its variety, with the play of the forms, in their originary supplementarity, as they precede the pure forms of which they would have only been copies. Hegel would be a thinker of this play, Derrida says repeatedly, and the point is to understand play without the “conceptual schema” that would control it in advance—it would be, that is, the play of the world without God’s plan controlling the meaning of the production; it would be the play of communication preceding the self-presence of God.109 And yet, as we noted in Derrida’s reading of Bataille, in movement there must still be an understanding of sense—of a gesture of control, or of sovereignty—leading the way, guiding us toward one hand or the other. The originary gesture, the force of form’s precedence being established in the world, as the motion of that contingent fact that is the world’s play, must be called for and enacted. We cannot trust the world to take shape on its own; we must earn that trust, through the serious work of reading and writing—through the deforming gravity of play. All of the style of deconstruction, its insistence on the explosive (apocalyptic and messianic) power of the close reading, is announced here and grounded in the productive force of language at the place of a shared presence to the world through belonging to the same community of speakers. In his later writings, Derrida changes his style in accord with a more profound understanding of how a world comes to be shared, specifically, in the work of art, and then later in religious and ethical contexts, but we will stay with the earlier work for now. Before moving back to Hegel, therefore, and in order to set in place several polemical goals, one should see why Derrida would propose to read Hegel from out of this particular, and admittedly slanted, perspective— specifically, from the conscious exclusion of the standpoint of the concept’s unity. As we have seen in other contexts already, it would not be the formality (or abstractness) of that unity, but the fact that this formality is

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identified with the presence of the shared element as potentially unified in the thought of that shared “fact” of being, that would disturb Heidegger and that Derrida would avoid through accentuating the sense of play. The confrontation with Heidegger, in fact, should prove exemplary as the product of a marginal movement within the essay—here Derrida exemplifies stylistically the instance of something which is not whole, not present as part of a whole, but which disrupts the articulated unities of the texts themselves. As such, the references to Heidegger are brief and evocative rather than explicative. The style of deconstruction as explosive close reading is not at stake, although it is what we find explicitly defended. How one might move the evocation from the margins to the center, however, is not our question; instead, we are asking how the evocation can serve to remove the pretense of a center, or of a reading that is “properly” oriented. For our present purposes, there are only two main components to Derrida’s argument—the first is the contestation of what would appear to be Heidegger’s privileging of time over spatiality and the second is the identification of an essence within, or proper to, technology. For that first moment, Derrida puts into play, in terms of the figures of the pit (or the well or source) and the pyramid (as monument to the dead), the functioning of the reproductive imagination in Hegel: a functioning that makes it impossible to begin from the productive imagination, as faculty, precisely because that productive functioning is situated in the finitude of a subject’s faculties. We’ve just followed the very general contours of this theme in Hegel as a response to Kant. In the more specific terms Derrida is turning toward, it is the question of why Erinnerung, the process of memory as interiorization, would carry the weight of the Aufhebung to the concept. In Neoplatonic terms, it is the question of why thought redeems the body, or why confession absolves sin. Representation, the capacity for which constitutes the basic trait of the human, is the intuition that has been interiorized (er-innert). It is the meaningfulness of our presence to the forces of the world. But as “mere” representation, as typically attributed to Kant, the mental act is tied to the reproductive imagination, and thus can’t explain its own productive force. That productivity is explained in the productive imagination, which is to be thought of in terms of the capacity, the almost mechanical capacity, of the human who stands opposed to the natural process (and who is thus technique, as epitomized in the pyramid) precisely by having been situated as a free subject. This technique, moreover, will be

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inseparable from the process of temporalization itself, understood as the free expression of spirit through and as iterated spatial positionings.110 Derrida will take some pains to work through Hegel’s semiological system, in order to return to the claim that temporalization is the process of the sign’s Aufhebung into a system, but that conceptualizing movement is less important to the polemics with Heidegger. By showing the necessity of that externality as spatiality, and of the way in which the sign must occupy the originary force of being secondary to the pure element of freedom (what Derrida calls “originary supplementarity”) he situates the force of Hegel’s thought in the displacement of the power of the subject into the motion of the world. We earlier followed the sense of that displacement in Hegel, but Derrida accentuates and deforms that movement in order to prevent Hegel’s theological transference of that productivity, where he would imbue God’s mind with a precedence over the “play of the world” that constitutes its truth. In the more restricted polemic with Heidegger, which is meant to find a Hegelianism without ontotheological overtones, Derrida is saying that in the general schema of moving to productivity, that is, in moving past the passivity of intuition toward the productivity of spirit, Hegel captures the process of spirit as temporalization and intelligence. Hegel thus moves the power of productive imagination “outside” the subject without reifying another subject, or deity, in that exterior space. The interior intuition that had constituted temporality as the interior form of duration in Kant, in other words, gains a place within the spatial expressivity of the world—as the movement, and thus intelligence, of that space or that exteriority. That movement, however, is constituted as the motion by which the potency of exteriority takes on the shape of its specificity in communication and action—in each subject contracting into a shared “now” through the effective deployment of the sign. The movement of negativity, then, as intelligence, or Plotinus’ first emanation [nous], would constitute the priority of time as expressive. This combination of intelligence and time is what Derrida marshals in Hegel against Heidegger. Intelligence is therefore the name of this power that produces a sign in negating the sensible spatiality of intuition. It is the subsumption of spatial intuition. Yet, as Hegel demonstrates elsewhere, the subsumption (Aufhebung) of space is time. This is the truth of that which it negates—space—within a movement of subsumption. Here, the truth or the teleological essence of the sign as subsumption

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of the sensible-spatial intuition, will be the sign as time, the sign within the element of temporalization. … The Dasein in der Zeit, the presence or the existence in time, this formula for a mode of intuition should be thought in relation to the one that says that time is the Dasein of the concept. Why is the Dasein in time the most true form (wahrhaftere Gestalt) of the intuition in such a way that it lets itself be subsumed in the sign? Because time is the subsumption—that is, in Hegelian terms, the truth, the essence (Wesen) as being past (Gewesenheit)—of space. Time is the true space, essential, past, such as it will have been thought, that is, subsumed. What space will have meant is time.111 One would have to expand on this reading, in terms that Hegel would have wanted to treat in reference to freedom and the spontaneity of the subject but which Derrida will not want to follow, in order to see how time fits into Hegel’s overall project—as well as to see why Derrida’s always polemical presentation would lead us to deform Hegel’s writing. My own reading would emphasize that, already for Hegel, the question is not what does a text, or an event, or a representation, mean—nor even, what function does it serve—but to what exigencies does it respond? Here the exigency is one of expression, of a motion of finding voice in the articulation of the possible. It would be a contraction of that flat space of freeplay into the weight of meaning: the contraction takes on the weight of temporality because of its inward movement, into the place where the subject is constituted as the form of thought. Such is the sense, or directedness, of the movement of spirit. It is only by a sleight of hand—an accentuating gesture of which Derrida is a master—that one calls this structure time, since it is what one can point to in the realization of the demand as the element that supports the demand (it is, in Kant’s terms, the condition of the possibility for the demand). In the negation of the negation, in the Aufhebung that understands itself, the proper form of this expressivity is given, and the questions of meaning and function find their (eternal) ground. What I wish to explore here, given that there will neither be time, nor in a certain sense the resources, to flesh out all of Derrida’s reading of Hegel, is that this same presentation, although almost in the manner of an afterthought, or perhaps more honestly as the partly hidden frame, is also used as a criticism of Heidegger, or as a defense of Hegel against Heidegger’s

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criticism, a version of which we followed above in the account of the metaphysics of presence as formal force. For Derrida to support a reading, or a defense, in such an oblique fashion is precisely to refuse the priority of the judgment as the supposed embodiment of the demand for the unity of the concept. In other words, Derrida refuses to grant priority to the ideal of an agreement, where a community of speakers constitutes the rational element of all particular utterances to come, of all future times within the life of spirit, as the commitment to the rectitude of discourse.112 One contests, that is, the ideal of critique’s identity with the judgment form, and with the possibility of progress in thought. (One should emphasize, against still popular misconceptions, that Derrida doesn’t abandon all judgments, but instead refuses to identify rational judgment with presence as such.) Hegel had already seen, beyond Kant’s conception of the human subject with the power to judge, that the element was not the mere possibility of speech, but the concrete life of language creating its own interior possibilities—for this reason, and only to cite the most famous of Hegel’s own inversions, the element of logic is not constrained by the logic of non-contradiction, which would only hold for the abstraction of speaking as such, and not for embodied and unfolding language. For now, one remembers that Heidegger had also seen Hegel as a thinker of time, and even of the precedence of time in the motion of spirit. The problem with Hegel, most simply, was that he reduced (it is thus also part of the question of rétrécissement) the form of time to the now—to the “now” as eternally unchanging form of existing within this element of limitation, retraction or contraction called time. But Heidegger, according to Derrida’s reading of the late 1960’s, is still looking for a pure interiority of temporality that wouldn’t have to go through the process of externalization in, or contraction through the point of time—he is supposedly looking for a human productivity without, or at least untainted by, technology. His supposed phobia of vulgarization and technology, it seems, attests to this fact. In the language of Derrida’s critique of Heidegger that we explored above, the productivity of the moment of effacement—which then allows the flat space of mutual contestation to take its sense or direction in time— is ignored in Heidegger because he wants the sense of the originality to precede the effacement. Heidegger claims, in other words, and per impossibile according to Derrida, to be able to recognize the originary trace of the foundational words of thought without accounting for the structure of their inscription and effacement, and thus claims to escape the element that time

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would be as the passage through space. Although there are reasons that this way of phrasing the problem will not retain its force within Derrida’s own polemics, reasons that have to do with an increasing discretion, or silence, entering into the very sense of the movements of his thought, it sets the stage for a long trajectory of encounters with Heidegger across Derrida’s career. In my terms, Derrida would be claiming that both Heidegger and Hegel want to understand time as the medium of thought (and existence), but that only Hegel saw the necessity of going through succession in order to achieve the effective force (and support) of the medium. Without the passage through this element—an element and a passage that, in some strong sense, is itself impossible—no development of sense, no possibility, no being, could take shape. Derrida, then, is offering a slanted appropriation of Hegel in order to defend a certain thinking of the motion of time—a motion Derrida will call the play of the world, and the affirmation of which he will call for at various points in his early writings. Heidegger, in reacting against the Hegelian metaphysics of production, then, would be refusing the play, although not in the same way that Hegel himself does. This leads to Derrida’s second contestation of Heidegger, namely, the contestation of Heidegger’s notion of an essence [Wesen] proper to technology—as if, when looking at our technological world, we could identify what was the best aspect within it, and choose to accentuate the best within technology. As if our current world carried, that is, the trace of an authentic beginning, the kernel of a good technology, of a proper place for the human in relation to the natural. At the end of this essay on Hegel, Derrida will simply invoke the possibility of a technology that will not be recuperated into a system. This would be a machine, that is, that works in terms of a negativity, a process of time’s passing, that is not in the service of sense or of meaning, and that would involve, therefore, a pure loss beyond all recuperation.113 The process of interiorization, where the Aufhebung would constitute the move into the conceptual immanence of a system, is overpowered by the movement of effacement called time: our finitude, our inability to hold onto the whole that we were oriented by, would constitute the originary force of our activity. In the fact that we will not control how the specificity of our articulations are taken up by others, the machinations of technology will always succeed at “not arriving”—will always carry the liberating force of a deformation away from the merely conceptual realm of the already possible. This passage of time, in the place of the affectivity of a responding that exceeds (that thus becomes an originary supplement) marks Derrida’s alliance

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with Hegel against Heidegger. Without identifying a “proper essence” to technology, its most originary force would still be set into play—precisely by interdicting, in fact, Hegel’s own attempted recuperations. That is, an alliance with Derrida comes at a price for Hegel: the conceptuality of the concept cannot recuperate, in terms of meaningfulness, the movement of the concept. Hegel’s system cannot work; or rather, cannot stop “working” merely because control or reason has been established—in other words, for Derrida, we can be certain that the specificity that carries the force of this reason will, in being taken up into the progress of time, be deformed away from the sterility of the same. We will always move into a new space within the text, so that form always asserts its priority, even when the concept cannot grasp itself in the form of form itself. Accordingly, one can trust the violent force of the promise enacted in every text. One must affirm, therefore, the productivity of the spirit, in ceaseless differencing, and unending self-articulation, if one is to follow Derrida. The movement inscribes itself beyond control, but not because control is renounced. In play, then. In contingent happening being set into motion and gaining its own essence from its opposition to our light—our constantly setting ourselves into an enveloping and light-bearing motion. Following Derrida’s early language, set out in 1964, in “Violence and Metaphysics,” where Derrida defends something of Hegel (and Eric Weil) against Lévinas, we would speak neither of “finite totality” nor of “positive infinity” but of an “infinite totality.”114 Or, in other words, an economy: violence against violence, light against light: philosophy (in general). Of which one may say, in transposing Claudel’s meaning, that everything is here “painted on light as if with a condensed light, like the air that becomes frost.” This becoming is war. This polemic is language itself. Its inscription.115 Or its contraction. Or rather, more precisely, contraction’s difference as the place where form asserts itself within motion as the determining movement of inscription. And whether inscription and light, contraction and withdrawal, difference and subsumption, amount to the same thing is Derrida’s question, under several guises, across his career. Here, more specifically, Derrida is worried about two ways of escaping time. One is Hegel’s, and all those that Hegel can claim to subsume in his thought, and it takes the position, within the absolute concept, of all

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determination having passed, or have become true, in such a way that the determination remains present to spirit, and thus allows for the recuperation of all sense. It would be an economy, beyond war, dominated by the element of a single, unifying, light; it would be the original peace that allowed war to be secondary, to be only the mediated place where signs, for example, were produced—necessary, but always subsumed. The other escape would be to avoid entering the battle. Each of us would somehow guard the interiority of temporal passage from the contamination of the “now” of the human economy in order to carry, or bear, something like sense (even though this would not be “meaning” as much as a direction, or bare motion of the world). To pretend to live within this interiority would be to live outside of time’s true element, without its force supporting the movement. This is why, at the end of “The Pit and the Pyramid,” Derrida will insist that it is impossible to think otherwise than in the determinations of time, otherwise than in the production of succession—the contraction of difference—through the “now” that Heidegger wished to avoid. The infinity of the production of difference would not be the positive infinity of an all-powerful, all productive God, but, as we will see, the necessity of Hegel’s beginning (Anfang). The necessity, that is, of thinking of being as a connection to, and transformation of, the movement of the world. The necessity of beginning as a particular orientation or sense given to the world. That is, as a movement of time that necessarily passes through the “now” of technological thinking and the mutual limitations of the economy of reciprocal violence. And yet, according to Derrida, there is no essence attached to this necessity—it will always take a new shape, depending on the ways in which the beginning is articulated. Such is the conjoined contingency and necessity of violence. For this reason, Hegel need not presuppose the existence of a moral divinity in order to warrant the sense or meaningfulness of the world guided by human action (embodied spirit). One lives, of necessity, in time—one thinks, because it is impossible to do otherwise, in the passage of time, in its always moving forward and always vanishing into the past. In Plotinian language, we would speak of the form of forms, not of the universal value of one particular form above all others. Such is the form of turning to the good, toward the originary force of form. The turn to the subject—which is a doubling, after all—asks of the form that instantiates the second turn to form, toward the truth of form as such, as the place of form’s passage, truth and sense.

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Broadly speaking, and rehearsing our trajectory, the place of the contraction toward sense is the place of the inscription or imprinting that Heidegger attributes to Kant’s aesthetic. The force of form as turned inward. It is the place where a form takes precedence, as force, as the motion of the world, in its representations as intelligible. And with Hegel one would ask why that bare shape of beginning, so important to Heidegger and Derrida, wasn’t already what he had been working toward, where he articulated the identity of essence and necessity—and yet if Hegel could claim this, it would be at the cost of accepting an accentuation of the system away from its concepts and into the bodily specificity of its enactments. A deformation, that is, of that which should have embodied the truth of rectitude and sense. Singularity, in other words and against all Hegelian recuperations of its meaningfulness, is constantly deformed—and only thus capable of the force of its singularity, the form of its truth, as the individual subject maintains her place within the element as the integrity or immanence of the movement of language. I will not pretend to defend either Hegel or Heidegger here. Rather, allow me to introduce another arm, with another hand, where the critique of the production of situated movements, of being in the play of the world, is not an attempt to think of the purity of an essence. Where Wesen, the movement of thinking, is not already within time and is not, therefore, the production of time—either as a now or as a pure, untouched, essence. This is the Wesen that does not take its position, even in the mere fact that it will always be in a position of some sort, for granted. Even the contingent fact of being, after all, may come after the evocations, or the silences, of the demand to express. The attempt to root thinking, in terms that Heidegger will push to their extreme in writings from after the Second World War, is the attempt to understand being otherwise than as a disposable resource (Bestand) for technology: that there will always be more, perhaps, is not the fundamental structure of motion, or rather, is such only as a structure opposed to its content, and is not a content that imposes structure. To move toward thinking, in response to a call of the necessity of thought, is to become Wesen—it is not to explicate what it means to already be in the movement of the world; it is not to describe the structures within which one already lives; it is not to take on the position of the subject that knows herself to be contingent, partial and finite. One doesn’t live within an overflowing infinite, positioned within an infinite surface; one sustains the demand to overflow, to move past the surface. It is not, in other words, a nostalgia for a depth behind the surface, or a center to

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the great sphere of being, but a sustaining that adds depth to the surface by sustaining itself past all position, by embodying a reticence in the structure, and not just moving “beyond” the surface. Against the Kantian subject, aware of her tasks and her limits, we would no longer seek to choose the best aspect of technology, accentuate one “good” part against all the fallen aspects, in order to recreate the potency of a divine (or human) meaning. In the language of the sacred, in a language that both Heidegger and Derrida turn to increasingly over the course of their careers, one must evoke the divine in order to begin—one learns, that is, the practice of prayer as inward transformation. One thus also learns the fragility of thought in the absence of the divine—a fragility not captured by the limitation of our powers, as in the merely partial presence of a small power within (or responding to) an infinitely powerful divinity that exists, powerfully, beyond our grasp, but a fragility from “within,” a nothingness that is betrayed by every turn to power. The one thought that runs through this book is that fragility sustains depth, as a relation to the sacred, while power betrays depth and renders life unsustainable. More immediately, and in terms of the polemics surrounding Hegel, the question is simply: To what extent is the beginning, as a movement of thought, already absorbed into the structures of ontotheology, regardless of its being taken up into a conceptual system of thought, because the sense of movement is powerful, situated within the powers of language or the subject who names? The divine task of beginning It is recognizeably, then, a question of the whole and a question of beginning. Following something of a hint from Derrida, we here trace the conception of beginning back to Hegel, and to Hegel’s sense of the complicity of the method with the form of beginning as the original force of the concept. As with all of the texts from Hegel we have been looking at, the context is to be understood in terms of the response to Kant. In the course of turning to Heidegger and Derrida, we have only skipped a few pages within Hegel’s Science of Logic, and we are now at the beginning of a section entitled “With what must the science begin?” If the earlier abstract thinking only interests itself with the principle [Prinzip], but in progressing through its formation, is driven to the

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other side, to consider the behavior of the knowing, then the subjective activity [Tun] is grasped as an essential moment of objective truth, and thereby leads to the necessity [Bedürfnis] of unifying the method and the content, the form with the principle. Thus the principle should also be the beginning [Anfang], and that which is the prius [the precedent] for thinking should also be the first in the movement [Gange] of thinking.116 In connecting this sense of movement and of commencing a system capable of understanding its own originality in history, one sees here that the form within which time passes is the forward movement of sustaining intelligence as forward movement, or as the subjective activity of embodying the form of our thoughtful activity. Here one finds the formal force of Derrida’s insistence on the element thought in its specificity as language, and in the movement of that specificity as text, or exteriorized spirit, and thus as “originary supplement.” Hegel puts it simply in terms of the identity of the mediated and the pure. The element of these articulating movements is the purity of knowing; the element, however, lives from the mediated result of that movement through the determinations of consciousness. The expression of this mediated purity, or of the freedom of beginning, is logical. “Logical is that beginning in which the beginning is made in the element of a free, present [seienden] for itself thinking. The beginning is mediated [Vermittelt] by the fact that the pure knowing [Wissen] is the final, absolute truth of consciousness.”117 That the final shape of consciousness will carry the weight, as support or element, of the presence of the beginning, lives from the same mediation of form and movement that we have already seen characterized in Hegel’s approach to method. We recognize immediately the movement, or the tension that constitutes the movement, as the same movement that Heidegger and Derrida identified with Hegel’s conception of time. The element that supports the beginning, as mediating, is the purity of the infinite process of inhabiting that element— an element that must, in addition, have the priority of its beginning respected within all its mediations. The rectitude of the system, its orientation toward the integrity or fullness of judgments, sustains itself as the originality of the movement—its actuality as the novelty of being.118 Heidegger, if we may so summarize his position, sees the move to the result, to the pure science or knowing (Wissen), in which one returns to the element of the beginning,

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as the reduction of time to its spatial givenness or presence—its immediate and forceful presence to a consciousness, or to consciousness as such, in the field of the potencies of thought. In spite of Hegel’s historicizing of thought, he would be said to have failed to see that this interpretation of the fullness of consciousness—of the presence of the whole in the part, even if only as a trace—is only one of the possible inscriptions or imprints [Pragüngen] that being may enact from out of its errancy. This particular critique of Hegel, it should be noted, belongs to the second of the two essays that make up Heidegger’s Identity and Difference, namely “The Onto-Theo-Logical Constitution of Metaphysics.” The section on the structure of beginning in the Science of Logic, as taken up briefly by Heidegger, plays the key role of introducing the sense of why metaphysics in Hegel remains ontotheological—remains, that is, tied to a God that is identified with being a cause or a force of becoming. The explication is, if anything, too sudden. Heidegger recalls, first, that Hegel says “The beginning is the result,” and then on the next page notices that Hegel, in parentheses, accords the right of this beginning to God.119 Heidegger’s reading of that section is rather abbreviated, to say the least, and is far from being an explication. It is given, instead, as a first movement toward explaining the principle statement to which Derrida objects at the end of “The Pit and the Pyramid.” Heidegger had said: The step back out of metaphysics into the essence of metaphysics is, in view of the present [Gegenwart] and taken up from out of our insight into it, the step out of technology and technological description and clarification of the ancients into the first thinking essence [das erst zu denkende Wesen] of modern technology.120 Heidegger had been speaking of Hegel, but had moved quickly through the transformations to his understanding of technology. Derrida, in fact, says very little specifically about Heidegger where he invokes this passage, even less than Heidegger had said about Hegel’s conception of the beginning. Rather, Derrida ends this essay on Hegel with a short paragraph insisting that the attribution of an essence (Wesen) to technology will not suffice to “change terrain,” or to escape the necessity of thinking in terms of the succession of acts of thinking that Hegel had thematized. For Derrida, then, Heidegger could be said to have misidentified the essential trace at the center of technology (or Greek philosophy more generally) precisely because

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he continues to look for traces of its originality at its center, and not for the generative power of the passage through specificity, at all of its margins. Derrida is saying that one cannot think without that movement of force, or violence, that Hegel has identified with the self-determination, and Aufhebung, of time’s progression. Such is the contraction or restriction of rétrécissement; such is the movement of the fall, of something having determination, or flesh, in Neoplatonism across its many forms. Only from this contraction will the imprint of aesthetic sensibility have the subjective shape of grasping the whole in the part, of inscribing itself at the limit, and thus as the measure of what is, and thus be capable of grounding Kant’s transcendental logic. For his part, Heidegger is not contesting the need to push past a merely transcendental reading of Kant, but rather questioning the way in which one positions force, and more specifically the force of the human who is called into the place of a specific articulation, in the play of the world. Or, yet more precisely, the way in which one is supposedly positioned by force, and thus supposedly always responding to what is true in the process of positioning. After all, if essence (Wesen) is a movement, and not a position, nor even a punctuation of movement, then thinking may have no such security, no place, or position, from which it is sure of its necessities, or even of its beginnings within the possible. In one place, Heidegger will in fact emphasize that the “real step back onto the way of thinking, is the breaking [Zerbrechen] of the word,” its fragility in the face of its tasks, and not its power of articulation.121 Only an unjustified equation of the form of movement as such with the form of a subject taking a position in relation to the whole had made it possible to see the constancy of motion as itself constituting the trustworthiness of the form of determination. By abandoning that sense of the constant motion of thought, consequently, we are never certain that we are already thinking—never allowed to think, moreover and against Descartes and all his heirs, from the certainty of having thought.122 Hegel, however, also has more to say. For Hegel, the turn to the subject is not achieved as the identity of the finite subject with the completed system. Rather, just as the traces of the divine in Plotinus return to their source in the formless, all the forms of determination, in individual consciousness, return to their source in the determined emptiness of the motion of beginning for Hegel.123 Such is the “restlessness of spirit”— always in movement, yet always a further movement of spirit itself, and not a movement sustained by a mysterious depth beyond our access. This

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return into nothingness is why the right to the beginning (the orientation toward the goodness of form as the precedence of thought) would be accorded to God. Derrida wishes to tie the tension in the conception of the element yet more essentially back to its productive force, eliminating the final recuperation into a meaningful or centered essence or preserved trace—eliminating the moral God who provides the final conceptual unity of spirit in the form of a creative grasping of the whole. The subject, which is still a term one can use with Derrida, at least here, is not present to its own meaning as spontaneous self-presence, but is always dependent on the particularity of the contraction of presence, always responding, originarily, to that presence: such is “originary supplementarity” as the promise of a future. By separating Hegel’s production of difference from the conceptual idea of cause controlled by possible meaning for a subject, Derrida believes himself to have sidestepped Heidegger’s critique of ontotheology (a critique which, in many guises, Derrida shares and promulgates). The excess of productive force, more specifically, is said to escape any final recuperation in a system of meaning, thus keeping the system from closing itself off to a future and preventing the identification of that production with the perfection of presence that would mark the free overflowing of the divine. The mere repetition denounced in calculative thinking by Heidegger, in short, is found to be productive of difference and not just a product of the self-identical subject that would be Hegel’s God. In terms of the spatialized understanding of time that both Heidegger and Derrida find within Hegel’s texts, it should be admitted that many Hegel scholars fail to see any basis for criticism. Why shouldn’t one be able to speak of a whole within which time or individuality occurs, or rather, is found to have occurred, once we turn back to look at our own experience of history? The truth of our articulation of singularity, in other words, must be thought from the ways in which what we wish to say, or enact, or create, is always yet to come, and never a thing we have, or have an idea of, but can’t quite make perfectly present within the world. The emergence is not the coming into particularity of one of the possibilities of the whole, but the movement of fragility whereby the whole shows itself to be absent, and yet still comes to have a claim on us, as the movement of that absence. As a deforming singularity. Heidegger and Derrida agree that we cannot possess presence, yet disagree about the movement by which we are claimed. I am here setting out the contours of their agreement—in the criticism of the subject who possesses form or intelligence—and the possibility of deciding

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between two different models of absence, or of time as still yet to come, still oriented by what is absent. If, as one might assume from the structure of the trace as both Lévinas and Derrida see it, we must pass through the process of inscription, if that fact of time’s passage compels us, then the structures that pertain to finding ourselves compelled to move through presence would remain structures of forceful imposition, acts of determination: the moral demands of modernity, where the subject is to find her destiny in the determinations of her specificity being taken up and transcended, would remain in place. The cosmopolitan sense of justice, for both Lévinas and Derrida, is reclaimed against the “pagan” and parochial views of Heidegger precisely in that affirmation of the individual as origin and goal of time. In turning away from Hegel and toward questions of psychology, and later of mourning, Derrida seeks to address these very structures of destiny, specificity, and the shape of bearing an interiority. For reasons of space, however, such developments in Derrida’s thought—although my understanding of them in many ways leads my present writing—must be left to the side. For Hegel, the movement of beginning, as the “grasping” of the meaning of going forwards, is also “a going back into the ground” [ein Rückgang in den Grund].124 This forward motion of return into the place of determination is what enables us to think of the absolute ground— as the shape of consciousness in its absolute freedom—as the result of the determining motion. Herein lies a demand to position the work of subjectivity in reference to the whole, to that which can account for the specificity and destiny of the individual. For that reason, in Hegel’s words, “the forward motion [or progress] away from that which performs the beginning, is only to be seen as a further determination of the same, such that that which begins remains at the base of all that follows and does not vanish from there.”125 Now, let us admit that neither Heidegger nor Derrida could abide by the demand that the system not allow any loss. Such a demand for the infinite, and for the continuing presence of the infinite, is wholly out of place in Heidegger and for Derrida (at this early point in his career) can only be understood out of the infinity of the production of difference and thus of the loss which is characterized in the structure of the trace. The divine is not given in the demand for the infinite retention of meaningful presence; our continuing desire for scientific, or encyclopedic, knowledge, no longer promises redemption, yet still claims us, constitutes us as subjects.

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But perhaps, already in Hegel, the presence of that which begins [das Anfangende] is more complicated than the invocation of a self-present, free and somehow eternal, determination of what is as actuality and freely selfdetermining subjectivity. Hegel continues: The forward movement does not consist in the derivation of another, or in being transformed into another;—and insofar as this transforming [Übergehen] arises, it is equally subsumed again. Thus the beginning of philosophy is present [gegenwärtige] in all subsequent developments and preserves itself as the foundation, so that all its further determinations remain immanent throughout.126 This movement of beginning bears striking similarities to the productivity of the one, understood in terms of the constant passing of the trace, in Plotinus, although historical research indicates Hegel was not directly influenced.127 We are not speaking of a simple production—as if we were in the audience of God’s infinite spewing out of individuals—but of the infinity of the thinking that will take each individual up into the process of overflowing. In that sense, there is no pure upsurging presence of more force, but only the infinite insubstantiality128 of, and infinite exigency that weighs on our lives. Such is the nothingness that emerges as ground, as what sustains the priority of the human over the sun. Pushing against the ontotheological readings of Hegel, we can affirm that we are always only beginning to think that emptiness, or that process of becoming through desertion. And yet, no matter how much we distance this thought from the metaphysics of presence, or of a subject who produces meaning from its own powers, we are still speaking of the force, and the communication, of form as the determination of the element. In other words, we can accept that it is the shape of our presence, and not the force of presencing, that will be of importance to the structure of science, already in Hegel. But that shape, as we will see, gains its force from the necessity of belonging to the structure of thought—of passing into form, as determinate, or as articulated—and would not carry its force, as shape, without that particular shape of belonging to a whole in the form of subjectivity (or of the proper individuation of the event). As difficult and compelling as such a reading of Hegel could be, as much as it has spanned and sustained the movement of continental philosophy for the last four decades, this is still where Heidegger is right to speak of Hegel as having perfected ontotheology—having found

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the purely abstract force of presence as the manipulation of what is at hand. If one is to respond otherwise than by embracing the ontotheology, one must think against the very idea of limitation, force and light. We need not see Hegel as the prophet of triumphant capitalism, but we must see why there is a tyrrany in the form of beginning, a presupposition about the rectitude of light, as it moves forward toward its determination as produced in time. The ontotheological presupposition is that the production of time is what claims us, at the site of our individuality and truth, and it is this presupposition that keeps us from understanding the gravity of darkness, or the demand that we not betray the fragility of our singularity. But for now, we are still thinking through the force of the light, and its claim on us, beyond every physical demand. Thus, at the end of the long trajectory of the Science of Logic, Hegel will look back to the determination of the beginning: In fact, the demand that being come to be shown [aufzuzeigen] has a further, more interior sense, wherein not merely the abstract determination is found, but rather where the demand for the realization of the concept in general is intended. This doesn’t lie in the beginning itself, but is much rather the goal and the task of the entire further development of knowledge. Futher, in that the content of the beginning is to be justified [gerechtfertigt] and attested to as something either true or false in inner or outer perception, the form of universality as such is thus no longer intended, but rather its determinateness, of which we will presently have to speak. The attestation of the determined content, with which the beginning was constituted, appears to lie behind itself; in fact, however, it should be seen as moving forward, if it belongs, that is, to a grasping knowledge [begreifenden Erkennen].129 The attestation, the trust one may earn in the beginning, must lie before us, even though our activity may seem to already take the truth of the motion, as such, for granted. Such is the promise of thought, or even of an infinite deconstruction. We must learn to actively assert our precedence over the sun—only in that infinite demand toward activity will we have been able to live in the light of the sacred. Only in the communication of that demand, and not in the articulation of a judgment about the facts of the matter, will the aesthetic moment of contact with the world take shape as the place of transcendence (as showing the divine calling of human existence). Only in

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that element will thought become the logic of the concept in motion. Such is the unity of ontotheology in Hegel’s system. But let us return to a more patient explication, if only to understand how—in the third part—we could expect a question about aesthetics to resolve a foundational question about the demands of intelligence, or of embodied form and intelligible being. For example, to stand in front of a great piece of plastic art and to say “I am moved” is to feel the force of situating intelligence as a temporal determination communicated through spatial representations. It would be to turn toward the essence (Wesen) that occupies the place of passage, to turn to that moral creature (moralisches Wesen) that can be moved. The demand to participate in intelligence thus provides the place, or shape, of its own potency. To see that potency, that possibility of being moved, as already in motion, would be to identify the beginning of articulation with the motion of potency. To see that place, that is, as always turning toward the potency and the truth, always beginning, already looking for that which can be moved. To see yourself as the ground, or as one with the ground of that motion, in the element of communication is the next step—”every man an artist,” Beuys said. But the “every man,” here, is the commencement, the multiplicity of voice, of a shared activity in the world—all of us would share in the production of meaning, even if the forms of production varied. Production would be the form of forms and our emerging into that presence would only be understood as a repetition of a divine creativity. Heidegger, then, would see this as a technological distortion of the true place of the human—the belonging to the force, in other words, would not succeed in questioning the position of the human as essentially only a carrier of metaphysical force, a subject positioned by the movement of presence. The artist that produces, in absolute freedom, would claim freedom as a possession, ignoring the ways in which the shape and bearing of our activity comes from being claimed by, or possessed by, freedom.130 Elsewhere, he will say that this structure of questioning in Hegel obscures the problem of the emergence into form by assuming that the passage happens as the productivity of forms—that, in other words, the meaning of the passage is to be understood from the determination of forms produced by the subject in the place of time’s passage.131 For Hegel, Heidegger complains, we are finitely situated within an infinite ground that is reduced to rationality, to the intelligibility of the ground in its commencing force. Which is why God, for Hegel and against Spinoza, would have to be personal, and be the productive ground of His

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own intelligence. Like Derrida, Heidegger will object to the proposed unity of being and thought, even as end, but unlike Derrida, Heidegger will not see the process as overflowing itself—rather, that supposed process itself, because of the structure of motion it puts into play, is the problem. Yet how can it happen that “being” in general can be represented as “thought” [der Gedanke]? How else than by virtue of the fact that being is imprinted [vorgeprägt] with the form of ground from before, and yet the thinking—as long as it belongs together with being—connects [versammelt] itself to being as ground in the mode of probing and grounding [Ergründens und Begründens]. Being is manifested as thought. This means: the being of beings discloses itself as the self-probing and self-grounding ground. The ground, the Ratio are following their essential heritage: the Logos in the sense of the gathering that lets lie before: the Hen Panta. Thus “logic” for Hegel is not therefore in truth “the science,” that is metaphysics, because science has thinking as its theme, but rather because the matter of thinking remains being, but this has since the early times of its disclosure in the imprint [Gepräge] of Logos, taken probing as the grounding ground of thinking as its charge [Anspruch].132 In other words, it’s all a matter of responding intelligently (graspingly) to the potency of the givenness, to the way that I am situated as thinking, as being in the motion of thought toward its ground in the element that thought itself constitutes. The identity of thinking and being is to be achieved, but the place at which that task is set remains obscured by the fact that Hegel keeps being—the force of the fact that “there is”—tied to the motion of probing and grounding. Which is to say that, because Hegel doesn’t see the way in which the call works, he takes for granted that we live within the motion of grounding presence, of already being called toward the claim, or charge, of thinking, of the thinking that we are already partially engaged within. He takes for granted that whatever we may call divine, whatever the shape of the determinate intelligibility, or the clarity, of the world, we are the ones who bear the weight of being present to that shape. Such is the move to the priority of form—and the presumption that such a move is justified, because of the force of beginning to think, of beginning within the shape of our determinate experience, our communication and partition of the world, rests on our belief that the motion of clarity, like the probing that grounds

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our thought in being, constitutes the good which we already possess as potency, even if its actualization remains an open task. Heidegger may have been wrong to think that Hegel was merely invoking the priority of the mental, or of the determinate as expressed in the vulgar conception of time, but the more general sense of the move to the precedence of form would still be troubling precisely here where the participation in light remains the guiding presupposition. But what could make us rethink the nature of thinking, that is, of the place where form takes precedence because of its function as measure and place of shape? If God is continually present, like the wholeness of a universe that extends beyond all particularity, then God enters philosophy as forceful ground, as the way in which the world’s motion situates us within our destinies. If that continual presence of the beginning, however, is our own most elementary gesture of thought—of emerging into the forms of presence—then our destinies are free from God’s decree, from the force of the divine. This is the temptation Hegel’s ontotheology offers us, for it allows us to retain the idea of the sacred without positing a transcendent God. And yet, would that freedom be anything but the completion of our already given destiny, of our being already divine creatures, already living, albeit perhaps inattentively, within the divine light, and thus only in need of grasping the truth of our originality? That is, wouldn’t a rather troubling represenation of God’s productivity be snuck back into the very idea of originality, or of creativie individuality? In a Heideggerian vein, against this ontotheology, we ask about the nothing, and about the dangers of presupposing the self-evidence of the “fact” that there is something rather than nothing. Why, after all, would the most important movement still be associated with the emergence of the new, with the creation of more motion, or of a new articulation or determination? Why is the productivity of the world tied to the possibility of our achieving the good as the fullness of meaning or presence? Here, and as a conclusion to our consideration of Hegel, I want to turn to the elementary gestures of thought—to the moments when thought takes one form rather than another. Already, we find ourselves cast against the smooth functioning of a necessary passage, as if the hand were easily controlled, like a “docile slave,” by the projects of the mind. But further, we don’t yet know why the opposition would be forceful, like the resistance of an exterior presence, and not be—in fact—too fragile for our manipulation. Too easily lost within the movements of time; too easily consumed within

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the passage. We have no reason, after Hegel, to believe in the beginning that God would be, no reason to believe in anything but the absence of the sacred, when we come to see that it is the human hand that bears the most awesome, and heedless, force. We could turn to the powerful grace of a transcendent God, in full retreat from modernity, or we could look for the grace of a human gesture that lets go—that allows a community to form, in its fragility, around the sacred absences, the gestures of a meaning that cannot be present, the gestures that striate a life with others. The necessity of the hand It is a question, again, of the place of the human—or of the language that claims and moves the human—within the world. Heidegger will not accept the ways in which Hegel situates the unity of thought and being in the necessary progress of thought through limitation and determination, as supposedly the vert element of thought and being. Unlike Derrida, Heidegger refuses to cast the motion of presence in terms of determinations. Derrida takes that to be a type of wishful thinking, a reflection of the desire to escape being. Yet Heidegger will argue, in some strong sense, for the unity of thought and being in Parmenidean terms, and for the truth of the demand for that unity in the early Greek thinkers. Perhaps, then, the problem is not so much the fact of being, but how we are to characterize our place relative to the demands of being. It is the supposed necessity of the limit as determination, then, that will draw our attention, because for Heidegger the human is no longer, as a matter of fact, situated at that limit—or within that necessity—but finds itself in the disjuncture of a movement that makes the limit the place of our desires, our needs, our future. For Heidegger, our participation in the world no longer translates into the rationality of that activity, no longer participates in the necessity of light. Not because we have embraced the irrational, but because the identity of being and thought does not occupy the same limit (in the place of determination) as the finitude of the subject who partakes in the presence of the world. Heidegger’s “Anaximander Fragment,” which has served as recurrent touchstone for Derrida’s encounters with Heidegger and with Greek thought more generally, slowly approaches a single saying attributed to Anaximander, at the historical “beginning” of philosophy itself. We will find here a contestation of the juridical and anthropological grounds of philosophy, as well as a hint concerning the gesture of what is necessary.

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The movements of a hand that do not belong to the necessities of force, but respond to what is needed, to what being and thought ask of us. The entirety of the essay works toward a deformation of the standard translations, but a brief look at that familiar context may be appropriate. The fragment is preserved within the context of a citation from Simplicius, who provides an interpretive framework borrowed from Theophrastus. Kirk and Raven offer this translation of the relevant passage: Of those who say that it is one, moving, and infinite (ap ei r o n), Anaximander, son of Praxiades, a Milesian, the successor and pupil of Thales, said that the principle and element of existing things was the apeiron [indefinite, or infinite], being the first to introduce this name of the material principle. He says that it is neither water nor any other of the so-called elements, but some other apeiron nature, from which come into being all the heavens and the worlds in them. And the source of coming-to-be for existing things is that into which destruction, too, happens ‘according to necessity [c r e o n]; for they pay penalty [d i ken] and retribution to each other for their injustice [a d iki a s] according to the assessment of Time,’ as he ascribes it in these rather poetical terms.133 The “rather poetical terms,” it would seem, applies to the archaic use of “according to necessity,” since “c r e o n retained a marked poetical coloring … until the expression to c r e o n became popular in the Hellenistic period as a circumlocution for death.”134 Although disputed, it’s not uncommon to accept that only the part here enclosed in single quotations is an exact quotation, and Heidegger would further exclude the “according to the assessment of time.” The stakes for Heidegger are high: he wants to find in twelve words the traces of an originary thinking of being without falling back into the Hegelian (or Christian or ontotheological) sense of a creative God. First, those twelve words of Anaximander must be able to contest the logic of the traditional frame within which they have been handed down. Aristotle’s characterization of the earliest thinkers as theoreticians of the parts of nature—ceaselessly repeated in the tradition leading down through Kirk and Raven—mistakes the opposition they put in place, because it takes Anaximander to have founded the sense of being as determination of the indeterminate, as later adapted to modern subjectivity, and thus to have made all presence into being an object. Thus, the traditional reading adopts

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the frame by which the correct and proper philosophical question is one of categorization, or of true and false statements about the world from the standpoint of a knowing subject. As we have seen, Heidegger had found a trace of originary thinking in Aristotle’s use of f u si s, against perhaps even Aristotle’s own selfinterpretation. Here, he will go even further, it seems, in his search for the most originary within the philosophical gesture itself. What evidence could possibly be mustered for such a task? Such is the knot of the question of the priority of presence within our understanding of sense. If, with Kant and Hegel, we take the forthrightness and rectitude of the representation or judgment to carry the essential weight, then no trace could run against what the thinker “really” meant. The essential gesture of all thought would be the honesty embodied in self-presence, in desiring to live within the clarity of one’s own destiny—even if that destiny, in the secularized version, merely entailed the finitude of life, and the fleeting autonomy of being a finite creature. For either the divine or the secularized version, even if a particular thinker expressed herself incorrectly, the originary or fruitful within her discourse would have belonged, essentially, to the shape of her orientation— the rectitude or justice that ruled her thought, or more broadly, the entirety of her presence to the world. And in those twelve words, Heidegger finds place to question that shape of justice, and the idea that justice would reside in the proper distribution of the parts of the whole. Key to that juridical interpretation was the idea that each of the parts contested the others, paid penalty or recompense, for the injustices performed in their existence. Rectitude, in an obvious interpretation, would already implicitly sustain the movements of emerging and passing away. Balance, in the order of time, was to be restored by an over-arching destiny—or simply by the absorption of all parts back into the formless or limitless (apei r on) whole. Heidegger notes, however, that there is something deeply out of place in the juridical model by which the phrase is translated.135 He takes the fragment to clearly say that that which comes into presence is in the absence of justice, that is, “out of joint” (aus der Fuge).136 The phrase translated as “for they pay penalty [d iken] and retribution [tisij] to each other for their injustice [ad ikiaj],” should be translated, Heidegger concludes: “they let belong the enjoining order as well as the regard for each other (in overcoming) the unjointed.”137 The power of coming to be and of destruction, in other words, is no longer attributed to the formless one as generative of all presence, of all generation and destruction.

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The justice of all things, understood against a juridical model later added to our understanding of the meaning of the world’s movements, calls us to pay attention to the enjoining order without promising us that this order stems from the productive (ontotheological) force that was supposed to have founded all truth.138 Truth would consequently no longer be the correspondence of our words (or thoughts) with the world, but the errancy of a deformative movement, always seeking the place where truth may find a momentary repose—as the dwelling that provides place, and not as the gestures of a sovereign who already lives within a space that she commands and parcels out according to the dictates of her judgment. Against Plato, truth no longer commands justice—no longer gives sense to the direction our judgments must take—but is itself deformed by a passage through or toward justice, a passage between the ontic and the ontological, within the difference. One can also read this as a commentary on the structure of the trace. The limitless or unformed and unbounded (apeiron) that Anaximander places at the origin of all, like the “amorphous” one beyond being in Plotinus, is the eternal origin of all appearances. If there is justice in the process of producing the individual things of the world, and we are oriented toward the truth of that process, then the trace of the productive— of that productive force beyond being—is accessible in all the things of the world. But Anaximander speaks of our place as unjust, as out of joint. Giving limit, and producing determinate judgments, does not coincide with the good of all becoming.139 Derrida’s later work on Heidegger, and especially the long “Geschlecht IV,” with which he concludes the French version of the Politics of Friendship, concentrates on the possibility of establishing a relation with meaning and community that is not based on the mutual contestation of terms within logical space. Derrida himself draws his work into the orbit of the question of thinking outside of the juridical model of presence, although he continues to contest Heidegger’s use of “gathering” as the proper mode of presencing, its transcendent and sustaining shape. And unmistakeably, in this article on Anaximander, Heidegger wishes to assign the word Gegenwärtigkeit to the type of presence that would set out in opposition the meanings or categories within the whole (that is, a juridical or conceptual model) while reserving to Anwesenheit the joining, gathering, and emerging presence of undisclosedness.140 And yet Heidegger’s retranslation of the second clause in Anaximander, and his insistence on its refusal of the schemas of opposition that would mark out conceptual space, is not where Heidegger locates the

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work of Anwesenheit. He does not, as Derrida suggested at first, associate the forgetfulness of the ontological difference with the fact of having fallen into, contracted toward, a conceptually dominated philosophical schema. Instead, Heidegger says we have forgotten the difference between being and beings because we have misinterpreted the three words that precede the phrase we’ve just retranslated. One usually translates those words—… kata to c r eo n—as “… according to necessity.” But what would it mean to have everything turn on this clause? In the Aristotelian tradition, it already speaks the necessity of taking up a position, or of speaking in the language of contraries, and thus of rationality. The domination of this understanding of necessity, its falleness into the juridical and the accompanying call for a judgment, ensures the forgetfulness of the question of the emergence of being in the move to the categories by which we necessarily participate in any possible clarity. We just followed the extreme consequences of this idea of necessity, and of the relation of necessity to the work of conceptuality and articulation, above in Hegel’s understanding of the movement of the element of thought. The problem with this understanding of necessity, in Heidegger’s eyes, stems from reading necessity in connection with the cause and then placing the necessary and the force of causation in the same place—as though the logic of unfolding already corresponded to the presence of the world, so that we participated in the same logic by taking up the position of the limit, of the one who articulates the extremes through the process of opposition or dialectic. As the one who lives within the truth of an undeformed singularity—as the origin of thought. What if, Heidegger suggests, we were to understand the articulation without the logic of contraries—without the presupposition that names can be given place at the limits of all possible cases and thus enclose every truth (as black and white are supposed to contain all intermediate colors). Without the encompassing logic of the contraries, and of the judging subject who then established the sense of the singular case, the idea that every articulation was an act of producing a position would cease to rule our interpretation of presence. Thus, the reference to Anwesenheit is not meant—as Derrida had said in 1969 and as we followed above—to refer to a free flow of productive force, somehow kept pure of determination. Derrida, we remember, had seen Heidegger as trying to separate two different kinds of productive force by referring to the difference between being and beings, presuming that Anwesenheit would be connected to the presencing force of being and Gegenwärtigkeit to the determinate

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presence of beings. To do such, however, was to have misunderstood why Heidegger was contesting the juridical model of presence—a model that Derrida, as I’ve just indicated, began to significantly rethink in his last years (more on this, below). For Heidegger’s part, the crucial distinction at the end of the essay is no longer, as it in fact had been very explicitly in a lecture course before the publication of Being and Time,141 the distinction between two types of presence, but of two forms of one of the two root words: the presencing (Anwesende) and the presence (Anwesen). The ambiguity between the Gegenwärtigkeit and the Anwesenheit is essential to Greek thought, Heidegger tells us, and not to be avoided.142 Leaving the Gegenwärtigkeit to the side, however, the destiny of the Anwesen is what concerns Heidegger here since it may be useful in breaking with the history of thinking concerning being as the production of things. In this translation into English, it must be emphasized, the issue at stake is not determined solely by the words on the page. As with the distinction between Sein [to be] and Seiende [to be in being], the opposition between Anwesen [to presence] and Anwesende [the present in presencing] asks us to look at the difference between two forms of a verb. The German language does not carry the full sense of the distinction of itself; rather, the question Heidegger poses has to do with what we hear in the verb of what comes to be present and we cannot forget that our understanding of grammar has developed as a result of our understanding of metaphysics. When we hear a verb, especially a verb of presence or of being, do we hear a production, or even a process of production, where objects are thrown up against a subject, framed by that limitation “against” the knowing subject, or do we hear the difference between presence and what is produced as present? It is true that Heidegger here contests the objectification of presence, but adding an explanatory “thing” to differentiate Anwesen [presence] from Anwesende [present thing], puts too much emphasis on the idea that Heidegger is concerned with creating a pure process, without objectification. Instead, the point is to see the verbal forms that have obscured our understanding of the place we are asked to occupy within the world’s motion. Heidegger speaks of it as the difference [Unterschied], and sometimes divides the word so that one hears the cutting or partitioning [scheiden] that bears on the difference. Here I attempt to use slightly varied English participles to get at the important movement in Heidegger’s eyes. We are meant to leave behind the idea that presence is a verb of production

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and see how we are claimed by the difference between presence and what is produced in or as the present. Thus, the history of early Greek thought can be retold: Early on it appeared as though to presence [Anwesen] and the present [Anwesende] were each separate for themselves. Unnoticed, to presence itself became present [Anwesenden]. Represented from the perspective of the present, presence came to be placed above all present [things] and thus to be the highest presenting. When presence comes to be named, it is already portrayed as present. Fundamentally, to presence as such is not differentiated from the present. It counts only as the most universal and highest of the presenting and thus as present as such. The essence [Wesen] of to presence, and with it the difference between to presence and to be present remain forgotten. The forgetfulness of being is the forgetting of the difference between to be [Sein] and what is [Seiendes]. …the history of being begins with the forgetting of being, such that to be along with its essence, its difference from what is, keeps to itself. The difference escapes us. It remains forgotten. First the differentiated, the presencing thing and the presence, are disclosed, but not as the differentiated. Rather, the early trace of the difference is thereby effaced, where presence appears to be a presencing and finds its provenance in a highest presencing thing.143 We have already seen that no mere refusal to reify the productive agent would suffice to quell Heidegger’s concern. It’s not that God’s productivity must be “beyond being,” but that the response to the world—the gestures it calls for, and the places we are called to occupy—must be attentive to the difference between our presence and the production of presence. The sacred enters when we occupy that space of difference, and not when we bow before the insuperable power of God’s production. We must sustain the whole, even if we don’t possess, or even participate in the possession, of a power capable of bearing the whole. It will be necessary to find the trace of this distinction, present to us in the ancient writings we have before us,144 as an imprinted trace—as that which carries its force as forgotten, and not as present. It will be necessary to remember, to fight against the effacing, in order to see the difference between what is present and what causes presence. We must come to see that our thinking, in the broadest sense of our articulation of the world, does not carry with it the force of already existing within its own positive motion, within the creative force

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of that which causes presencing. Instead, the motion we belong to, or that draws us into its necessity and does not already encompass us, is the motion of absence. Such an absence, as we have seen above, would belong to the thinking of the trace throughout its history, and attracts both Lévinas and Derrida. The question that Heidegger adds, here, stems from the instance or inscription of this forgetting. It would have been “necessary,” in a metaphysics of participation, for the element to serve the function of ground, of place of return and support of all beginning: the necessary itself must occupy the place of passage, and as a passage that necessarily returns into itself. And indeed, the standard translation of the fragment, together with “according to the assessment of time,” would generally be glossed as an early expression of precisely that understanding of destiny and the justice of the world. Heidegger, however, has taken the work of overcoming the disjointed essence of our being—of our being the ones of monstrous and deformed essence, a plight or scourge against the divine—to be situated in the work of the hand, of the directedness of our activity, and not in the already given structure of return into the power of the presencing. The form of our activity, in other words, is not found in the structure that assumes that all our activity is directed back toward ourselves, or toward our ground in being, in the divine, or the embodied in determined presence, or in the ontotheological structure of originary production. Heidegger is succinct: One usually translates the word cr eèn with “necessity.” One means thereby the compelling, the inescapable duty. Yet we err when we stop exclusively at this derived meaning. In cr eèn lies cr£o, cr£o ai. From this one hears ¹ ce…r, the hand; cr£w means: I handle something, reach for it, go to it and put it in my hand. Thus cr£w means equally: to put into the hand, to hand it over and thus surrender it [einhändigen und so aushändigen], to abandon a possession. Such a surrender however is of the type that retains the abandon in the hand, and with it the abandoned. That is, in the participle cr ew vn nothing of compulsion or duty is originally implied.145 In place of necessity, then, we should speak of the use, and of the gestures of the human hand. But why would the interpellation of “necessity” in the place of “use,” in the long history of our interpretations of this fragment, have caused the forgetfulness of the ontological difference? Could simply reading the same

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fragment, with an attention to the traces of what has been once handled, but is now abandoned, revive our sense for the ontological difference? Or are we called, instead, to learn the gestures of abandon, and of handing ourselves over to a necessity that is not our essence, and that does not compel us from out of its force? It doesn’t seem that Heidegger wishes to eliminate all talk of necessity, as one might expect in the name of a higher freedom or a higher activity. In other works, it is true, Heidegger will play with the etymological roots of the German word for necessity (Notwendigkeit) to speak of turning toward what is in need (Das Dasein ist die Wendung in die Not).146 I don’t wish to embark on a defense of Heidegger’s reading at this point—to do such, even, would seem to miss the movement of displacement at stake in the reading—in the movement of a hand that surrenders its possessions. To turn towards a hand that, without the unity of justice and its activity in the world, manipulates the things of a life in the finitude of an allotted time is to insist on the difference between the sacred and the compelling force of logic, or of the light. We are not, that is, by essence and birthright, at one with the expressive force of the world’s unfolding. We do not live in the imitation of God’s creative rectitude; we do not determine our lives as moral by striving after the fullness, or integrity, of our powers. The difference, the separation between the divine and the human, however, still draws us into a world. It is, as Bataille had pointed out, the absurd requirement that one blabber on about the silence. The refusal to believe that the hand may rise above the tissue, yet the insistence that the hand struggle against its bondage. Allow me, then, not to draw any conclusions, except to say that although the descriptions and delimitations of the world may continue, they will not carry the weight of the movement of truth. What, then, will allow us to move toward that gesture, that movement, that truth? Such, I contend, is the difficulty of abandon—such is the “necessity” of the aesthetic gesture as an abandon, handing over what needs to be said. For the rest of this book I will explore that question in the very limited horizon of a single moment within the history of art. The modernist impulse toward discovering and exploiting fundamental aesthetic gestures, freed from all artifice and representational determination, gave way to a postmodern rejection of all pretence to fundamental or timeless gestures. In between, minimalist art made the claim that we had misinterpreted what kind of work these fundamental gestures were performing and thus that we need not renounce their use. There is no consensus among aesthetic theorists concerning what

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the transformation would consist in, but there are a few places where the difference comes to the fore, and thus where a gesture that evokes the ontological difference can take on aesthetic weight. The primary example I will want to explore is in one sense not an example of a work of art at all—it is a manufactured box, and involves a story about how we would have such objects occupy, without representing, the abandoned spaces of our lives. To that extent, this box is no longer an example, but rather an evocation, a displacement of the direction one looks for the sense of the elementary gestures of our relationships to the world.

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Part Three The Difficult Gestures of Abandon

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Spacing is the freeing of the sites at which a god appears, the sites out of which the gods have flown, sites, in which the divine still reticently appears. Heidegger.1

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The presence of an object—the force of gesture Michael Fried begins his “Art and Objecthood”2 by invoking God; the existence of the divinity, it would seem, is displayed to us in nothing less than the constant appearing of the world. Fried’s epigraph tells us that one of the great Protestant thinkers of colonial America, Jonathan Edwards, had written in his diaries that one can be assured of the existence of God since “we every moment see the same proof of a God as we should have if we had seen him create the world at first.” That is, the divine presence is shown through the integrity or continuity of meaning across, or as the force and grace of, the created things of our experience. Fried uses this invocation as an entrance into his question, but not exactly as a frame; he doesn’t return, at least not explicitly, to God. He speaks, instead, of the situation of art and of “objecthood” in art, especially of the art of the 1960s, the art that was still in the midst of its development as he was writing his essay. This single essay, as foil and prop, will be at the center of much of the subsequent development of art criticism, and gives determinate shape to now common standards of judging art, especially as it brings to light the ways in which art is supposedly constituted in and as productive experience, and as thus capable of returning the aesthetic gesture to the productivity of human gestures without artifice.3 In our terms, the turn to the subject in modernity is most clearly seen here as a problem of shape and gesture—of the basic movements through which a world is given its originality, as the novelty of a world that must sustain its intensity both as beginning and as oriented beyond itself in order to be at all. Our problem is to think that basic movement of being otherwise. Fried opposes a still common interpretation of the critical function of art, drawn loosely from Clement Greenberg, which sees the progression of modern art in terms of its ability to situate the constituting gaze of the subject in terms of its proper form or orientation. In Greenberg’s still familiar terms, the avant-garde artist was supposed to play the role of the revolutionary, liberating society by giving each of us the form of our true, absolute, contact with the real, free of all “external” ideological interpretations. Greenberg speaks of politics, but as with much of the humanist tradition when it speaks of culture, the nature of divine creation is at stake. Yet it is true that once the avant-garde had succeeded in “detaching” itself from society, it proceeded to turn around and repudiate

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revolutionary as well as bourgeois politics. The revolution was left inside society, a part of that welter of ideological struggle which art and poetry find so unpropitious as soon as it begins to involve those “precious” axiomatic beliefs upon which culture thus far has had to rest. Hence it developed that the true and most important function of the avantgarde was not to “experiment,” but to find a path along which it would be possible to keep culture moving in the midst of ideological confusion and violence. Retiring from public altogether, the avant-garde poet or artist sought to maintain the high level of his art by both narrowing and raising it to the expression of an absolute in which all relativities and contradictions would be either resolved or beside the point…. It has been in search of the absolute that the avant-garde has arrived at “abstract” or “non-objective” art—and poetry, too. The avant-garde poet or artist tries in effect to imitate God by creating something valid solely on its own terms, in the way nature itself is valid, in the way a landscape—not its picture—is aesthetically valid; something given, increate, independent of meanings, similars or originals. Content is to be dissolved so completely into form that the work of art or literature cannot be reduced in whole or in part to anything not itself.4 This rather programmatic statement, from 1939, opposes avant-garde gestures to the “philistinism” of Hitler and Stalin, and more broadly to the thoughtlessness of kitsch and self-indulgence in mass culture. Art that doesn’t insist on its singularity becomes accessible to political manipulation since it has no integrity as expressive gesture. It is ironic, and provocative, that so many artists a generation later came to see the avant-garde of New York’s Abstract Expressionism, and Greenberg himself, as “totalitarian.”5 Unlike many of the art critics that have since announced their distance from Greenberg’s emphasis on formal unity, Fried does not simply dismiss all of the premises of Greenberg’s historical interpretation of the trajectory of art. He wishes instead to accentuate the sense in which there is a proper form of responding to an artwork—or of sustaining the integrity of the work of art—so that we may still exclude as ideological all art that merely pandered to its audience; however, instead of seeing the work of God in the absolute indifference and self-sufficience of each individual thing, Fried locates that divine creativity in the real presence of meaning. An artwork, in Fried’s terms, could not be judged successful if it left the audience with the impression that they were disconnected subjects watching events on a stage, providing only their individual interpretations. The movements

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through which the subject becomes intertwined in the meaningfulness of the world, and of the work of art, Fried insists, are far too rich to be reduced to such a banal brand of theater. And our connection to God’s creative act is far too sacred—even if we are no longer “believers” in at least the traditional sense of the word. Even if we find the sacred only in the “validity” of nature, beyond all human appraisal. Fried was responding to developments in the New York art scene. Abstract Expressionism, slowly giving way to Minimalism, was grounded theoretically in the articulation of an object that expressed itself as the unity of its possibility and its actuality: the possibilities most appropriate to the chosen material of expression were best exploited in the work of art that restricted itself to the possibilities arising from the medium itself. Such a work would be capable of its own integrity as an artistic gesture— capable of standing on its own as that which it most properly is. For Fried, truth is not correlated to the thing, as object, but to the form of a thing’s self-reference as that which is what it is—that which expressed its true substance in being a being, sustained through time in the shape of being a self. He understands that the object is secondary, and thus he is not (as is often claimed) stuck in an object-based aesthetics, but he still thinks there is a proper form of the performance of objectivity— an integrity of being. As we saw with Hegel, the discovery that truth depended on human presence, on political practices, language games or temporal ecstases, meant that the substance to be explicated, if one were to live in the truth, had to be captured in the myriad gestures of giving shape to the world—of drawing out, for example, what was implicit in an artistic medium. The pious task of the artist was then to unfold what was most essential to the singularity and separate identity of the particular art form she practiced. One continued, in other words, the form of responding to what was singular, and self-standing, even while giving importance to the artistic gestures—the manipulations of human hands, intervening in the shape of the world—that would seem to contravene that supposed ontological self-sufficience. In that sense, the modernist movement was deeply humanist, deeply convinced of the power of human activity, and yet never broke away from the religious structures that gave meaning and value to that activity. We had externalized our powers, placing them in the hands of God, according to Feuerbach, but even after “correcting” that mistake, we continued to interpret those powers we now attributed to humanity in forms of production

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appropriate to the modern conception of the divine producer—in the terms of ontotheology. Aesthetic theory rarely touches explicitly on such themes, however. Instead, the analysis of the value of works is produced within the structures borrowed from the religious tradition. The meaning of the art was said to be independent of the subject, beyond any interpretive act that would give it meaning, because the art expressed the internal coherence of the artist’s method and material just as God’s presence was said, in the quotation from Edwards with which we began this part, to show itself in the unity and coherence of His creation. Paintings, in order to bring their audience into the position of the faithful encountering the absolute, would strive to make the conditions of their artistic production apparent—all of the material conditions behind their literal production were made manifest and no longer hidden within some representational artifice. In the same way, the revolutionary politics of the avant-garde would consist in transcending all merely particular differences between religions, seeing only the material (human) conditions of religious feeling and the embodied movement of transcendence. Lastly, because they were painted on canvas, the paintings were flat, without narrative, or the other illusions of hidden depth, thus embodying a purely expressive affect in their gestures; they were human creations, and carried the marks of their creation with them, yet still transcended merely human valuations. In other words, with the expressive unity enacted in the work, the place of the subject was absorbed into its true relation to the world, its true shape of singularity, of existing honestly as human, at the place where meaning becomes present. Interestingly, in Greenberg’s eyes, sculpture was in the position to embody this broadly modernist aesthetic better than either painting or architecture, as he puts it at one point in 1948, because “[a] work of sculpture, unlike a building, does not have to carry more than its own weight, nor does it have to be on something else, like a picture; it exists for and by itself literally as well as conceptually.”6 At the time of the writing, unfortunately, sculpture was still said to be lagging behind the force of this insight into its proper condition, and thus behind the best work in painting, although sculpture seemed likely to take the lead again soon.7 By the 1960s, perhaps that time had come. The historical argument was simple, and its basic contours were accepted by both Greenberg and Fried: the artifice of art was being eliminated in the work of the best modernists, the ones who rebelled against the illusions of depth, representation, or mere charm. One eliminated the traces of illusion,

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of intent or authorial control, in order to get at the more essential force of immediate presence. The subject who responds to the force of abstract art does so by participating in the element of art itself, stripped of all mere reference to particular judgments of pleasure, of all pretence to taste. The artifice, if any is to be found, is solely the constituting activity of the most basic shape of meaningfulness; only the artifice that is natural to human creativity would remain. (The naturalization of this frame ties Fried’s work to the broader philosophical movements of his time, and is that which we must most vigilantly question, below). What Fried considered the best modernist art consists, given his conception of meaning without artifice and because of the passion of our times for “the immediate, the concrete, the irreducible,” in the artists trying “to confine themselves to what is most positive and immediate in themselves.”8 The experience of sculpture, stripped of all adornment, was meant to eliminate the work of interpretation—the essence of aesthetic experience was to live in the element, and the multiplicity, of the raw contact with the world, the pure emergence of shape into material presence. That there is also an historical element to this thought—that the sculpture must respond to its times as well as to its natural frame—is a difficulty that was never fully resolved in art theory or practice. This historical element of the basic gestures of our contact with the world points back to an Augustinian sense of grace, and of the advent of a universal form in Christ, articulated in Hegel’s Christology for modern times, and any deep contestation of ontotheology, I would argue, must commit itself to a new resolution of that problem, as a sacred gesture responding to the history of art.9 The elimination of the act of interpretation took on the form of an automatism, of a deliberate loss of control, that in turn accentuated the singularity of experience as such—and as Stanley Cavell puts it, summarizing the trajectory of modern art by drawing explicitly on Fried, such art shows us how to become free in the acknowledgment of the autonomous, and fleeting, beauty of our presence to the world. In that acknowledgment, we learn something about our place in the world that Greenberg would not yet have given us. Cavell, as always eloquent in his approach to the human situation, is speaking, some years after Fried’s article, of the abstract painting that immediately preceded the sculpture that constitutes our theme: It is true that their existence as instances is carried on their face; labor is not in them; they look as if they might as well have been made instantaneously, and that their use should take no longer.

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But the fact about an instance, when it happens, is that it poses a permanent beauty, if we are capable of it. That this simultaneity should proffer beauty is a declaration about beauty: that it is no more temporary than the world is; that there is no physical assurance of its permanence; that it is momentary only the way time is, a regime of moments; and that no moment is to dictate its significance to us, if we are to claim autonomy, to become free. Acceptance of such objects achieves the absolute acceptance of the moment, by defeating the sway of the momentous. It is an ambition worthy of the highest art. Nothing is of greater moment than the knowledge that the choice of one moment excludes another, that no moment makes up for another, that the significance of one moment is the cost of what it forgoes. That is refinement. Beauty and significance, except in youth, are born of loss.10 The acknowledgment that some work expressed something beyond itself, in its mute singularity and stubborn autonomy, was meant to capture the truth of the ontology to which modernism subscribed: the instant captures a moment of our human presence to a transcendent whole, and represents that presence as the beauty that endures, “if we are capable of it,” as the expression of meaning in the fleeting moments, absolutely free of all artifice, of our contact with the world. The gestures are basic; it is their shape we will have to bring into doubt. Already for this late modernist tradition, the intelligible light no longer carries God’s word to us—no longer signifies the divinity of human participation in the light—yet the light still carries beauty, just as it carries (and has carried, since Plato) the corresponding moral demand of becoming capable of seeing in the light. But this turn to the power of a subject was not an appeal to the interpretive faculties of human beings, as we have seen already back in Kant, since the singularity of art was inscribed in the determinate and truly articulated forms of the enacted work and not merely in an individual’s brain. And the singularity of these sacred gestures of belonging to the light, for essential reasons, demanded our loyalty as the utmost expression of what was real—beyond all personal preferences, subjective interpretations, or cultural and social frameworks—as the truth or force of these subjective positions, carried into the meaningful position of holding a claim, as meaningful, on all individuals. The demand of presence, of being bound by what is, culminates in the transcendent gestures of the late modern artist.

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In art with integrity, the basic unit of expression, the single line or shape, had to carry its effects before the conceptual apparatus of the subject was allowed to come into play, and yet, Fried insists, the expression must be such that it produces an effect in the subject. The shape of that effect— the freedom of the moment, or convincing force, that the artwork was capable of articulating—called the autonomous subject into play, and thus achieved the goal of an art bent on displaying the essential conditions of bearing an audience, and not merely satisfied with the solitary play of surfaces. Showing the absolute superficiality of a work of art, ironically, would sometimes be the best way to display this continuity, this single line or contour, that draws the human into the element—the human element—of its aesthetic contact with the world. Not as the subject who brings schemas into existence, as if framing experience, but as the human who bears the meaningfulness of the world, oriented by the unity and grace—the beauty—of these singular moments of (and beyond) contact between material and form. One need not judge that a piece of art means something; one only need acknowledge its standing as independent and as bearing convincing force. For Fried, the “acknowledgment” that art would call for, as the recognition of the human condition of aesthetic gestures as such, would be needed to keep the aesthetic from becoming merely “theatrical”—if the art did not attain to the independent force of its articulation, then it would be reduced to the level of a mere object, dependent on us for achieving its meaning, and thus incapable of expressing the freedom of the moment, and of the power of the moment beyond “the momentous.” Greenburg’s insistence on the self-standing work of art is not rejected, but must be supplemented by the “meaningfulness” expressed, albeit non-conceptually, to an audience that feels itself to be in contact with a powerful and convincing presence—with the very same proof of the divine that Edwards evokes. Although Fried has always had numerous supporters, for many at that time this way of phrasing the purpose and essence of art failed to make the full separation from the subject because it insisted that the art be acknowledged as such, and that it take place in a human community. The unifying syntheses of the human subject, according to those opposed to Fried’s interpretation, were the last artifice of the representational artist— to appeal to that subject for an acknowledgment was to misunderstand the force and immediacy of what artists such as Robert Morris had called a Gestalt in art.11

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Morris and Donald Judd, among others, were theorists of the aesthetics of pure experience, before representation, before ideology. The true element of our contact with the world was not our imposition of conceptual shapes, but the simplicity of geometric objects, of things wholly and completely given within simple acts of immediate contact. Artists, we were told, had long before given up the idea that one simply represented meaning in art; to do such would place the subject in the position of providing the unity of aesthetic experience, and rob the object of its own proper force. To do such would be to blithely place ourselves in the position of the sun, as the center of all meaning, without having noticed that this position was no longer guaranteed its force and truth by a creative and intelligible God. The task of minimalist art was thus more profoundly anti-metaphysical than even Fried’s project, at least according to the more postmodern wing of aesthetic theorists, as minimalism sought to place the human squarely within the world of objects, a world that is “all that is the case.” A triangle or a cube might only exist for the constituting subject, but the simplicity of such objects guaranteed the immediacy and universality of that act of constitution—the artifice of invoking a more complicated personal history in order to frame the act of constitution was thereby eliminated, and art was perfected, reduced to its essence. The audience member, no longer tied to the ideological intent of the author, was free to respond as she saw fit, and thus the position of the serious viewer—treated with the perfect respect due to indifference—was also perfected. Art’s objects had always been, it was said, merely objects, and the simplest presentation of the force of their presence best conveyed the elementary gestures of aesthetic presence to the world. Of the freedom of that presence. All internal reference, since it evoked the contours of an exterior frame and thus imposed meaning, would have to be eschewed. The presence of the object was assured in the simplicity of its wholeness; it exceeded the viewer’s gaze by perfectly exhibiting its literal subjugation to that gaze.12 In schematizing the difference between these two extensions on Greenberg’s understanding of the historical issues, one sees the elimination of the subject’s intentions carried out in two directions. In the first, which we are associating with Fried and Cavell although it embodies a much longer trajectory, the presence of an aesthetic gesture demands of us that we acknowledge a piece of art as bearing its force beyond us— beauty, fleeting and beyond our subjective control, is borne in the human gestures of grace, which is why God is so properly evoked in this otherwise

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very secular context. In the other, which in various forms has come to emblematize postmodernism’s self-understanding, the acknowledgment is not necessary—the art need not bear the sense of directing or orienting the viewers beyond themselves, since the sense or meaning of the object is carried completely within the individual subject and the immediacy of her singular existence. The viewer, in this postmodern version, discovers herself to be the final condition of art, and of its objects. It is not necessarily a return to the subject, however, but a rethinking of the nature of an event, such that the integrity of an event is not carried in the exteriority of its wholeness, but in the punctual immediacy of the participation on the surface.13 We will, below, try to find in Tony Smith’s work (and in ways that could include Judd and others, although perhaps against their own formulations) an alternative to these ways of situating the “integrity” of an event. The movement of time in its withdrawal will make the difference because only the reticence in the face of that withdrawal keeps the event from being instantaneously framed; however, we are getting ahead of ourselves. According to Fried, the contemporary art of the 1960s did not reveal a pre-existing structure of objectification but—illegitimately—reduced the function of art to its theatrical staging (or objectification), and thus created, for the first time, a false structure of objectification, or “objecthood.”14 The reduction of art to its purest element, accordingly, would not be achieved: an anthropomorphism would be slipped in the backdoor since the art would continue to reference a subject who individually acted as a support, without the continuity and conviction that constitutes the true element of meaning, insistently before conceptuality. For Fried, as it had been for Hegel, the subject only constitutes the place of meaning in being called into an exterior motion—into the efficacy, as Fried would have it, of the artistic gesture. Such is the multiplicity of reception and production: it takes more than one to constitute communication or transcendence; it takes more than one for a gesture to be acknowledged as art. A fateful question is posed, and deferred, here: can art play the role of articulating a new sense for a shared world? Can art turn us toward our own powers precisely where our old beliefs in a divine plan have failed us? Can art turn us toward a singularity of experience that doesn’t fail to communicate beyond the limits of our own singularity? The stakes, then, have to do with where the meaningfulness, or worth, of works of art is decided. Minimalist art (which Fried here calls “literalist”) supposedly assumes that meaning is decided in the “theater of the mind,”

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that is, in the individual perceiver’s experience, and thus its aesthetics are “theatrical.”15 Such an aesthetics, according to Fried, seeks to sustain the “interest” of an immediately “present” individual through the subterfuge of isolating the viewer in front of a merely “present” object, robbed of all sense. “Like the shape of the object, the materials do not represent, signify, or allude to anything; they are what they are and nothing more.”16 The “mysterious and inscrutable” quality of “literalist” art is admitted, but dismissed as “merely interesting.” It is proof of its dependence on the subject, and thus on an anthropomorphism they only claimed to avoid; the form of responding to a work was one that returned the subject into her complacence, her previous world, and did not move her toward the beauty, or the grace, that she might have been capable of within the world. The further development of art after the 1960s showed, according to Fried, the truth of that solipsistic, self-absorbed reference to the subject, as art became increasingly subjugated to the logic of theater and Fried, at least for a time, lost his plea.17 The value of art—it seemed to Fried—had been reduced to the viewer’s estimation of the work’s interest or charm. The universal gestures of beauty, reserved for the artist who had made the critical turn in the Kantian sense, were abandoned; the sublime gestures of an art capable of Edwards’ sort of divine presence, were completely absent. Let’s try to make the problem a little more difficult, as we search for a different shape of that sacred contact borne in an aesthetic gesture. The black box The preferred negative example, for Fried’s polemical purposes in 1967, is a black box of “modest” dimensions (22 ½” x 33” x 25”) manufactured of wood at the request of Tony Smith in 1961, and coupled with a short account of an experience that, in some fashion, is supposed to explain the box’s aesthetic import. Smith quite simply drove, late one night and with a couple of students, on the New Jersey Turnpike before it was finished. Fried describes this experience, in a series of questions that are both derisory and rhetorical, as instituting an aesthetics of mere theater, of “empty, or ‘abandoned,’ situations.”18 Smith himself is at the origin of this description, but he situates the emptiness in the intensity of personal experience and not in the mere absence of the public realm of meaning. Within the account, also included by Fried in his essay, the emptiness of the turnpike liberates Smith from an old conception of art as “pictorial”

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and framed. Smith is speaking about his thought process after the late night drive: I thought to myself, it ought to be clear that’s the end of art. Most painting looks pretty pictorial after that. There is no way you can frame it, you just have to experience it. Later I discovered some abandoned airstrips in Europe—abandoned works, Surrealist landscapes, something that had nothing to do with any function, created worlds without tradition. Artificial landscapes without cultural precedent began to dawn on me.19 Fried summarizes, simply, “the experience alone is what matters.” Smith’s own theoretical writings were not taken into account, but Fried takes Smith to be representative of the theories of artists like Judd and Morris. As we have already discussed, in those theories the movement within minimalist art toward sculpture was meant to emphasize the force of “presence” as “wholeness” without relation, where shape or “Gestalt,” as the purity of that force, was displayed in the work presented without a framing device. Art, according to Fried, thus became literal: objects were simply objects of our constituting gaze and nothing more. Fried, on the other hand, will call for something like a frame, although he doesn’t name it such, when he looks for the natural gestures of producing meaningful relations. As with Hegel’s critique of the Kantian subject, we will no longer look for the spectators to ground the meaning of the sun, but see the continuity of the process of achieving meaning in the world, of successfully expressing meaning to others, as the true place of aesthetic (sensible) effect, and (beyond Hegel) thus as the true goal of all artistic gestures. Given that ontological commitment to the structures of meaning, the absence of a frame that Smith evokes becomes the empty assertion of truth without meaning, without voice. Such an art would be mute, or merely the babbling of a solipsist. As with many in the audience of Bataille’s presentation on the priority of the human over the sun, one doubts that anyone would feel compelled to “produce” such gestures of silence—of an instant, personally compelling, yet robbed of the power to bring our subjectivity into the true and proper form of our meaning-giving contact with the shared world. Without the force to make us see what is really meant. Instead of the merely interesting, or theatrical, Fried therefore calls for a “conviction” that awakens the consciousness of an “instantaneousness”—of a “continuous and entire presentness”—where sense is given and mere theatricality is defeated in the move to true meaning.

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Here one finds the structure of communication, or of belonging to a community where things make sense and where the essential gestures of art capture the essence of that communication, although the conceptual grasp of meaning is no longer at stake (we don’t need the art to represent a narrative, for example). The true gestures of art, according to Fried, are not representations of meanings in our heads, but elicit meaningful responses from their viewers; they elicit, minimally, the acknowledgment that an artistic gesture has been made. Here the communication bears the weight of meaning, supports the gestures of our presence to a world beyond our possession and returns us back into a world made more rich by the force of these public gestures. Here, albeit slightly concealed, is where God enters again, now in the persona of a community of believers who stand convinced of their shared humanity as artists, and for this reason Fried can end, rather abruptly, with “We are all literalists most or all of our lives. Presentness is grace.”20 That there may be something like a destructive grace, a “silent voice” that sings nothing but the apocalypse, is what we wish to explore; we will not want to return to the merely literal, to the theater for its own sake, even if we actively eschew all participation in an overflowing and omnipotent presence. Fried tells us, before reaching his just quoted and famous conclusion, that there is sculpture that combats theatricality, that has the positive grace he seeks. Anthony Caro, “since 1960” (Fried published his piece in 1967), had created an art where the “syntax” and the meaning of the work would transcend the empty specificity of Smith’s “Black Box.” By virtue of “the mutual and naked juxtaposition of the I-beams, girders, cylinders, lengths of piping, sheet metal, and grill,” by virtue of the “mutual inflection of one object by another,”21 the object is put back into relation with the act of meaningfulness. Mere shape, like merely personal experience, is not yet meaning. The space of meaning is external, or transcendent, precisely where it transcends the merely internal moment of presence as force and sees presence as the transcending act, the truly human force, or efficacy, of giving and receiving sense. We are not speaking of individuals granting meaning through a constituting appraisal, but of the fact that the element of our experience is already charged with meaning—with the ways in which humans, individually and communally, live within these moving and vibrant structures of meaning.22 Fried ties this meaningfulness to the work of the human body, and not to God, but the functions are more than externally similar. The entirety of the world is not at stake, but the continuity and

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reference that transcends specificity is given a certain contour—a shape that we can trust in, beyond ourselves or our own experience—and thus the whole is implied. Shape is borne in art as an element, a conviction; we respond by taking up the conviction, in being convinced of the grace that we always live within yet too seldom notice, now convinced (aware in a deeper sense) of the ultimate meaningfulness of life in that element. The wholeness is not found in the simple givenness of the object, but in the simplicity that enfolds, as graceful power, any work imbued with meaning. Thus, in spite of certain similarities with sculptors who merely stage the “objecthood of the object,” Caro’s works …defeat, or allay, objecthood by imitating, not gestures exactly, but the efficacy of gesture; like certain music and poetry, they are possessed by the knowledge of the human body and how, in innumerable ways and moods, it makes meaning. It is as though Caro’s sculptures essentialize meaningfulness as such—as though the possibility of meaning what we say and do alone makes his sculpture possible.23 What is perhaps most startling here, most difficult to comprehend in Fried’s work, are the shifts between plural nouns (“gestures,” “innumerable ways and moods”) and singular nouns (“the efficacy of gesture,” “the human body,” “meaningfulness as such”). Perhaps, most of all, it is a remnant of the monotheism that Edwards saw lying beyond any merely “animistic” belief in the divinity of present things; a remnant of the riddle of one God, dispensing one grace, and yet only redeeming some of his people. The “continuity” of presence, its transcendent sense, is the divinity, or grace, of the world; our damnation, in religious terms, is found in being blind to the true contours of that grace. For the tradition that Fried wishes to speak for, the proper contour of our contact with the world, even if we no longer believe in God, is given in the trust we extend toward meaning in the gestures of communication. One once spoke of being righteous in the sight of God, but more subtly we need only speak of holding up our end of the conversation—of speaking, truly and honestly, from the position of one who wishes the other to understand. The force of presence is achieved, has its efficacy, only where it transcends the mere presence of an object. The great works of art, transcending all objecthood, are capable “of existing in, indeed of secreting or constituting, a continuous and perpetual present.”24 Or perhaps “the” present. The insistence on the singularity of the structure of the real, after all, is continuous with the move from local

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deities toward monotheism, from fetishes to true art, from, that is, a merely superstitious attachment to personal experience toward a transcendent and true grace—the difficulty, and importance, of the distinctions lies in the fact that one only “experiences” the event, or completed efficacy, of grace; one doesn’t “experience,” in an originary sense, mere objects on the stage of the mind. They don’t really effect us, “as” true, Fried tells us in the name of that tradition, unless the gestures themselves carry the force of transcending us, and our interpretations. Our task, below, is to understand how deeply the postmodern critique of the metaphysics has to go—how fundamentally it must strike against the very idea of meaning as participation in a shared light—if it is to respond to Fried. True experience, or rather experience of the truth, for the metaphysics of presence, is independent of any attentiveness or interest on the part of the subject; that freedom, in Fried’s version and beyond any particular subject’s force, is achieved through the efficacy of the gesture of art (and perhaps of religion and natural science as well). We live within a grace that we are charged with recognizing, even if it is only the grace of purely human meaning; art is what turns us toward the recognition of the place we already live within, as greater than our own production. Thus, the restaging of the event of presence beyond theatricality is what one finds between mortal and God, as our movement toward the divine (even if there is no particular God, no particular dogma concerning the divine beyond the continuity and presentness of sense itself). Supposedly, we mortals are always looking for meaning in the present. But here we might have to say, in playing a little bit with Freud and Hegel, that art is where God was. That displacement, a bit mysteriously, justifies and institutes the work of art as art, as the human gesture of wholeness and presence; that displacement, as a sleight of hand, may be the most subtle gesture of ontotheology. In the efficacy of the world’s presence, each individual act of creative grace bears the traces of the divine act of creating the whole—and our presence to that grace displays the sacred nature of our presence to the world. It’s not the invocation of the knowing subject, already endowed with powers of synthesis and meaning-constitution, but the way in which the subject is implicated in the motion of the artistic production that Fried wishes to thematize, and he does so in order to make the motion of the subject and the efficacy of the gestures of meaning take precedence over any supposed immediacy of presence, any immediate effect of experience that isn’t taken as part of a whole, and thus capable of reference and efficacy.

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The vanishing compulsion Against the essence of painting as such—the essence Greenberg militated for in the gestures of wholeness and integrity proper to art—Fried wants us to look for the essence of what “compels conviction.”25 It is the force of meaningful expression, before articulated conceptions, present in the work as such. This force is the movement of history, and in Kantian terms, poses the question of what constitutes the condition of a piece of art being seen as such; we are not asking a question about an eternal structure of art. The acknowledgment he looks for is not the moment of completed recognition, situating the subject in the place of owning her truths, that a strictly Hegelian aesthetics is often thought to imply, but rather the contour of a piece turning beyond itself, beyond its surface and away from our personal interpretation, but without positing a new depth. The intersubjective contours of the place of meaning, one finds, constitute the true place of art, without thus instituting a conceptual system, because the wholeness of a community of speakers sustains meaning along a surface of communication without succumbing to mere theater, or to a surface of private experience without wholeness or grace. Fried, in this respect following Cavell and the later Wittgenstein, will not allow for either an eternal essence or the simple givenness of facts without human presence: the movement of things taking on shape, the contour of assuming essence, is the element of aesthetic contact and isn’t already constituted as a conceptual structure within which we move. Fried is right to say that my purely personal experience of the matter, of its immediacy without relation, is not of importance. However, and against Fried, one effaces the deformation of the event of singularity when one seeks the continuity of the element—the “efficacy of the gesture”—as an antidote to the emptiness of solitary experience. One trusts, according to Fried and the vast majority of Western metaphysics, in the power of meaning, in the continuity and strength of the world we already live within. One trusts in the convincing formal force of the world’s meaning as a human antidote to the brute force of matter rearranging itself in time, impinging on our senses in instantiations of various shapes. Our task, now, is to undermine the supposedly obvious side of Fried’s dichotomy between the form of full meaning and the mere facts of empty experience, and to look for a new way of understanding the singularity of aesthetic contact with the world that neither embraces the force of

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producing presence nor the merely technological rearrangements of objects on an infinite surface. To draw the line between the power of meaning and the force of mere effects is to obscure the element of trust—of what moves us without force. The element of fragility that corresponds to trust, of that which draws us into a work of art, I will say somewhat timidly but in the starkest possible contrast, cannot be the strength of its articulation of space. To simply be certain of one’s own divinity, the grace of one’s own gestures as meaningful, is to refuse the gravity of the task of the sacred. To “recognize” grace, as the power of form, is to displace the demand of the sacred away from ourselves—it is to see ourselves as simply blessed by presence, and by meaning, if we just allow ourselves to become aware—and thus the presupposed simplicity misses how we are claimed by the fragility of grace itself. We betray grace when we believe that we always already live within its power.26 The possibility of thinking otherwise, without embracing either side of this traditional dichotomy, is what we have been chasing throughout the long contours of this book. Georges Didi-Huberman’s Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde (That which we see, that which looks at us),27 which insistently and polemically resituates Smith’s sculpture outside of the framework of Fried’s interpretation, sees the value of Smith’s work in terms of Freud’s very secular observations concerning the play of Fort/Da in the constitution of a subject (Freud’s grandchild) who must accommodate for the lost presence of the mother by moving to the symbolic presence of language. The bobbin, which at the “slightest of compulsive gestures”28 disappears beyond the field of vision, is connected to a string held by the child. But the risk of the loss is staged so that the move to the symbolic, to language, can be attained. Moreover, in the identification of the subject with the bobbin, the subject (of meaning and language) is also at risk of being lost. This “dialectic” is found, according to Didi-Huberman, “set into play again” in the “fundamental connivance of seeing and losing” that one experiences as set into the work of Tony Smith. 29 Again, the question concerns where to place the force and sense of presence. The unity, coherence, and tradition associated with Fried’s idea of presence, a frame or element of continuity achieved in the efficacy of its deployment in the work of art, is admittedly not invoked by the simplicity of Smith’s work. Fried seems to be assuming that Smith shares a common conviction concerning the nature of the universe—that is, that there is an originally nameless world that people individually and as a community confront by giving meaning—and then that Smith refuses to take the step,

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essentially human, of providing or staging that meaning publicly, at least in the bare movements of relating and giving shape. Smith, apparently, would want to find simplicity in the single object, and not in the structure of wholeness, traditionally associated with the divine, that supports all singularity within its efficacy. He stages only empty experience (it is literal, immediate, theatrical); he does not stage the force of form, the conviction that shape carries as the element of our collective movement through the world. Didi-Huberman, instead, sees the force of Smith’s art in terms of the insistence of the emptiness—of the “hollow” within these simple shapes— as it restages the movement into the game instead of staging the meaning of the result (language, symbolic mastery, transcendent presence). The force is not in the achieved presence of the effective gesture, but in the risk, or the compulsion toward the risk, in the slightest of gestures. It’s enough to regard at length a sculpture of Tony Smith, entitled Die or maybe We Lost, to comprehend at once the very dialectic of release [dessaisissement]. It’s enough to apprehend these public objects, these objects displayed today in museums, to understand the insistence of the voids in them, to understand the private experience that they place or, more precisely, replace in play. Fortunately, these works are not at all introspective: they represent neither autobiography nor the iconography of their own hollowing. That is what gives them this capacity of insistence before us in posing the emptiness as a visual question. A silent question like a closed (that is, hollow) mouth.30 Of the many directions one can take these evocations, we will only follow the sense of a work of art posing a question—or rather, insisting on the private force of a question—where the relation of the subject to experience is at stake. Or more precisely, where the site of experience is in question in such a way that it restages the movement of, or toward, the subject as the intensity of the sacred. For in emphasizing the risk of the gesture, one relocates the force of the play. A fundamental substrate is not being framed by human cognition; the movement of the gesture, toward the insistent emptiness, draws all the forces to it. At last, we have a response to Bataille, even if only preliminary: the artistic contour of transgression that can sustain the intensity of silence is not the violent gesture of rupture, but the insistent gesture of restraint, of sustaining a presence that hollows itself out. In a theological context, one could speak of a strangely reserved apocalyptic

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gesture, a call to the need to sustain, at the place of your singularity, the end of the world; a call to be true to, and trust in, the destructive grace that apocalypse announces. As with Freud’s bobbin, the move to language, and to a symbolic manipulation of the world, is figured in the risk of the gesture, and the subject arises in that interplay of risk and control that language would be; yet against Freud, the presence of the mother in no way dominates the exchange between presence and absence here with Smith’s sculpture. One does not risk the word in order to gain back the mother’s presence, now transformed into symbolic mastery. One confronts the insistent void, emptying experience of all fullness, as the fundamental motion of steresis giving form to all experience precisely by robbing determinate presence of its force. That is, we are not speaking of steresis as privation relative to a given concept, but of a “not yet present” within each thing, that constitutes its future as potency and possibility, but only in the fragility of the “not yet,” and not in the necessity of an unfolding determination. The unity of experience is found in the demand—the insistent question—and not in the real force, the true meaning, of the work. In this way, the brute reality the gesture confronts is always subordinate to, always lags behind, the question posed by the voids that vanish and yet promise to loom up again. After all, that a “void” may vanish and loom up is precisely the mystery of the absence of the gods, the withdrawal of their force and of their efficacy. That one may trust in what is absent is the riddle of the sacred after ontotheology. The movement of being, in other words, still constitutes the question of the form—as it had for Fried, who looked for the form of efficacy and the support of meaning—but here the form is found in the opening outward of a question being formed, of the “hollowing of desire” (in Lévinas’ phrase) that would move the subject into the position of bearing the responsibility for that efficacy instead of merely responding (or not) to its force. Bearing the shape of a subject, the gestures of forming a world, in other words, comes before the world’s force as presence. In that sense, as with Fried, the motion is at stake: what is staged, however, is not the efficacy of my experience, of my capacity to shape, but the demand to enter the element of the world as it moves, the “demand” to trust in risky gestures of loss and abandon. Although he sees the ground of the difference in two ways of producing meaning, and thus eclipses any question about why meaning as such comes to claim us, Fried himself is quite clear about the breadth of the

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issues at stake. Fried, following Wittgenstein and Cavell, but in this respect similar to Hegel as well, wants the element of presence to be located in the community of language, in the widest sense of meaningful gestures of forming sense, as it constantly establishes the continuity of our contact with the world. Caro, in that case, would represent the originary force of the first entrance into that already functioning community. In an account from 1963, Fried explains how to situate ourselves within a room filled with Caro’s sculpture, with the abstract and powerful gestures of a meaning that is not yet accessible to us, like the conversations a child attends to without yet knowing how to grasp their full import. It is often clear enough, in such circumstances, that the child grasps something of what is going on around it—much as we ourselves may be moved by Caro’s sculptures. Here the question arises, to what does the child respond, if it is still ignorant of the meaning of individual words? And the answer must be, to the abstract configurations in time made by the spoken words as they are joined to one another, and to the gestures, both of voice and body, that accompany, or better still, inhabit them.31 Although this account precedes many of the important advances in his thought articulated in “Art and Objecthood,” the continuity of this idea of language seems assured. Smith’s box, and the “empty experience” it stages in contrast, would not respond to the connectedness of human gestures— the motion of abstraction as connecting and joining—and therefore would not serve to situate the subject within the grace of the efficacy of gesture, within the communication and movement that characterizes the world that humans live within (it is supposed to include, we remember, an atheist’s sense of grace). Didi-Huberman’s point, then, is that the “slightest of gestures,” carries us into a different place of transcendence, a different shape of grace, without returning to its own starting point. It would not be the self-enclosed experience Fried denounces, but neither would it be the public articulation, the movement of meaning in the world, that Fried celebrates. The subject is deformed by the desire, moved by the possibility of risk, transcended by a “possibility” (if one can call loss a possibility at all—in the metaphysics of presence, founded on the potency of becoming, another force displaces the present one; nothing is simply lost); the contours of power do not belong to the subject’s nascent powers, only waiting to be given efficacious shape. The shape the subject takes is not oriented by the

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shape of the public to which she belongs, but to the fact of not being capable of bearing the weight, not possessing the power or potency, she is yet called to bear. She is called, in Bataille’s terms, to “take on as much destruction as [she] can stand,” and not, as Cavell had it, possessing a moment of beauty and striving to be capable of it. The simplicity of the shape of Smith’s box marks the encounter as fundamental, as the place where the drawing of lines itself stages the question of their movement and force. The difficulty of sustaining this shape, since we can only be reticent in the face of an overwhelming movement, and cannot hope to transcend its nothingness, is conveyed in the simplicity of the shape. And, if we may extend the lessons from above, the aesthetic encounter as such is not a free play of shapes resolved by the powers of the subject, but a constrained play, where the compulsion is re-enacted as the compulsion that the site has over the subjects who supposedly inhabit it. As the compulsion to inhabit—or, in theistic or ideological terms, the compulsion to trust in an exterior movement, in a force that is not, as Edwards’ God had been, present in the wholeness or grace of every part of the creation. Not already present, not already trustworthy, yet still calling us toward it, toward its risk, its absence and its “not yet.” Toward what is sacred in the risk of communicating with others, moving beyond yourself, and what merely is, but remaining within the difficulty of sustaining a world. About the same time as Fried evoked a God present in all creation, Thomas J. J. Altizer announced the death of God as a Christian gesture of kenosis—the apocalypse of all transcendence, as the absolute destruction of transcendence, is also the genesis of God’s embodiment and presence.32 To go through the apocalyptic destruction into a new community of believers, however, would miss the point; only staying within the difficulty can sustain the apocalypse as the absence, the darkness of a God who creates by destroying. That all such gestures are atheistic, by the way, and as Altizer sees, need not be denied; we must trust, in any case, before we can possess faith, whether in others, in God, in science or in art. The question of that trust, then, must occupy even the most daring gestures of theology, philosophy, and art. The philosophical stakes of aesthetic form An abandon to the absencing of the world, and the corresponding loss of a strong center for human meaning, might seem to lead to the end of all the projects—from art to the academy—dedicated to the value of introspection

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or critical intelligence, in the broad sense of examining our situation in the world. I am claiming, instead, that this understanding of absence leads to a new conception of the project, a new way of understanding the demands of intelligence. If we are to reassert a place for a thoughtful existence, at all, the organizing task can no longer be to recognize the already given intelligible structures of the world—be they given in eternal forms which find instantiation here below, be they the processes of matter taking on shape, or even just the grammar of the language we happen to speak (or embody). The response most often embraced against the perceived nihilism of postmodernism, at least by those who wish to defend postmodern gestures in their seriousness, is to celebrate the novelty of human creation—as if, in an extension on Greenberg’s avant-garde artists, we could stand in for an absent god through the strength and integrity of either our moral uprightness (in the ethical postmodernism we now find) or the pure force of our individual creativity (in the earlier versions of postmodernism). Much of the most fruitful work of postmodernism still sails under the broadly romantic flag of creativity, and finds an “ethical” orientation in that very originality. And yet, to embrace the accompanying idea of position, and of the productivity of creative acts at the position of human presence, would be to make light of the death of the sacred, as if the passage into the past of all the forms of meaning that have preceded us were inconsequential, or as if every form could be created anew in our own—forcefully present—artistic gestures. As if we could succeed in recreating the meaning of the past, or of the dead, for example, by memorializing their presence in our art. As if we could cause the sun to come into existence, in the past or in the future, by redeeming its passage, and recreating its meaning in the present. We have already seen, in our reading of Hegel, that the return of possibility into the space of the subject means that every thought, in the end, would be contained within the same final frame—within that which was possible to think, or that which arose from contact with the same material world, no matter how different our modes of expression. Against Hegel, we often hear that the singularity of others, and of the possibilities that they do not share with us, the movements that they cannot communicate to us, disrupts the frame of that meaningfulness as such—in the absence of all merely ideological frames or interpretive contexts. The problem is whether what we don’t share can be meaningful, except under the rubric of affirming, or positing, an absolute difference (although we must also remember that “meaning” can constitute a trick question). Reticence, which is the

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temporality of abandon, of not acceding to the power of position, resists participation in the movement, prevents us from shedding the responsibility for sustaining a world by claiming to simply possess knowledge of the “fact” that, at some point in time, there is a world. As we saw above, to refuse to position the human, as subject, at the place where presence is produced as a restriction of immediacy, is to suggest a different movement sustains the world—one where the responsibility for singularity, and for the world that then can come to meaning, precedes the fact of meaning. Such is the call of being as it insists on the originality of resisting the passage instead of claiming to accede to the primordial power of memory by having passed through presence and returned to the place of subjective will or action. But this singularity of what cannot be shared may also give us a clue to a new appraisal of the sense of abandon we are seeking. The singularity that has passed, the meaning that has taken shape within our world, can be seen as the key to the structure of passage as such—the necessity of time is found in the fact that singularity will happen, but that no singularity will be capable of sustaining itself against the passage of time. Unfortunately, an insistence on the positive force of singularity misses the question of what calls us to respect the singular as the place of passage. To say that the determinations are the element of time’s motion is to insist falsely that the abandon, or the structure of time’s passing as a demand on us, is secondary to the presence or to the force (the fact of singularity, given over and over again as position) that will come to be abandoned in the flow of time. To say that the determinations are the element of time’s motion is to say too simply that, by necessity, we respect the singular, and live within the grace of a world that creates at the place of singularity, although we fail to recognize that grace. Every trace, we are told, will bear the weight of a determinate passage and the determinations will convey the truth of time’s motion, even if they don’t claim to represent a truth, or a single proposition about the facts of the world. Such a thinking of the trace, I am arguing here, remains ontotheological, and betrays the intensity of the sacred, because it believes in the necessity of the motion of determination. The supplementarity that Derrida speaks of, most pertinently for our discussion, and as we will follow below, will very explicitly insist on this direction of precedence, of the force of a writing that supplements, yet bears the precedence of form over, any pure movement of time—the determinations that différance enacts, in other words, are the form of the passage of the trace. They are not the engine of that passage—as they would

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be for a certain reading of Hegel—because that machine-like production would depend on an identity of process and result that would eliminate all effective alterity. Instead, it is precisely in the promise that the result will be deferred as well as different from what you yourself have planned that we find the justice behind our actions and words. It is only in trusting that the work of alterity will happen in spite of this passage of determination—and that thus the forms of encountering the world will necessarily change, never satisfied with any particular form of subjectivity—that transcendence, grace, and justice become imaginable. What if, however, the promise was not that every determination will become accessible to future iteration, or to further determinations that will distort its supposed unity? What if, instead, the abandon that we are promised is closer to the permanent distance between our words and the things we are called to say—a distance never bridged, nor even lived within? A distance that always moves, like the gods, by deserting us, leaving us within our solitude? And yet, a distance we are not even allowed to define through the certainty of knowing the limits of our potencies, or by acknowledging the necessarily violent force of our presence. After all, the possibilities— as we have seen with Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle, and with Bataille’s imagined critique of Merleau-Ponty—do not belong to the whole, ceaselessly producing raw material accessible to the forms of our presence as it arises from potency into determination. Rather, the possibilities arise singularly, like the impossible absences that give the world its shape, that move as the dark “not yet” of the future, without giving it the unity of a single world, or even an encompassing map of that world, in all its possible representations. In the language of our aesthetic gestures, it is a wonder above all wonders that we succeed in communicating the beauty of the world, one person at a time, with gestures that do not contain any compelling force as present. The wonder of a singularity that remains, and that sustains a world in the reticent gestures that delay the passage. The beauty is not like a well we draw from, or a resource we exploit, but a site where the passage of the gods is evoked, a form always announced and never merely present, at least where one strives to see the absence, its difficulty—the movement that calls forth the communication and the beauty. And let us admit how strange this beauty—the “efficacy” of an aesthetic gesture that doesn’t produce effects on an audience—would be when constructed toward the silences of others. “There is no way you can frame it. You just have to experience it.” But these are not originary forces exceeding

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all frames; they are “abandoned landscapes,” deforming the places of our presence. It is the efficacy of a world touched more deeply by our desires than by what we have actually lived through; a world formed more delicately than any discourse about our capacity to make meaning would ever understand around the singular movements of humans living toward what may yet become possible. Such is the fragility—the sacred form—of a meaningless gesture, a contact with silence. Let us reformulate the contours we have followed up to this point, because although it may seem that we have regained our first gesture, and rejoined Bataille’s questions, we don’t wish to follow him in the affirmation of transgression as the imposition of new form. The question of form, as we followed beginning in Plato, is robbed of its force when simply understood from out of a subjective opposition to matter—when form is either the eternal “reality” untouched by matter, or merely the ways in which our presence is arranged within the whole motion of the world. First, and already with Plato, the forms carry an ethical imperative: a “good” person is oriented by the correct, by the light of the sun, and not by some image, even if that image had been found in the mind of God.33 One is called to take on the stance—the moral and epistemological stance—of living within the truth that is beyond all particularity, separated from all distractions. The Aristotelian misunderstanding that asked where the forms could be if not in the actuality [energeia] of the world’s own present processes, occludes the question of a form that brings all presence into and through the light—that is, it occludes the structures of human becoming because it insists that all becoming is already contained within the possible, and all possibility within the real. Heidegger’s emphasis on absencing [steresis, in the particular sense explored, above] as the form of an emerging, unforetold presence— since steresis does not participate and is thus not part of the whole—is consequently bound to strike modern interpreters as anti-Aristotelian. The deformation away from the already given whole, after all, and as Heidegger admits in other contexts, leads possibility to take precedence over actuality, and thus runs contrary to Aristotle’s apparent self-interpretation. Thus the orientation toward the correct in Plato’s allegory of the cave also fails to understand the movement of form—it wants the form of openness to be the basic trait of our awareness, our intelligence or our reason, as it makes contact with the intelligible ground and openness, the power and possibility of our world. To correlate that openness with the truth of what is, however and as we saw with both Kant and Hegel, is to presume that we

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share in the productive intelligence of the whole—that we should look to the efficacious gestures of creating more meaning, or of existing in the light, just as the world is the constant production of more being, of more that enters into light. More specifically, the gesture of openness, or of respect for otherness—assumed as the proper positioning for a subject oriented by the light—presumes that being in the present moment, in sensible contact with an intelligible present, indicates the presence of a whole world, unitary and continuous, beyond the particular aspect we are privileged to see. And it sees that whole as the ground or cause of the part. Even if space and time are not found to be continuous, a thinker of openness can claim, the very meaning of their discontinuities will be found to rest in our openness to what is—found to depend on our continuous openness to registering the very discontinuity, in its singularity as an event of discontinuity, an instant with its own meaning. Before we can confidently move past this sense of automatic or natural openness, and toward a sense of what a reticence in the face of time’s passage can establish as the space of our trust, we still need to sort out the sense of being claimed by being—of having our singularity staked in the risk of speaking, when no redemption is guaranteed. Not even the simple “redemption” that memory provides, available to every atheist and believer—the sense that someone will have heard my words, will be able to make sense of what I was, as long as I speak honestly enough, and thus I will have regained or redeemed the word that had been spoken. Grace, in that case, is cheaply bought, and hardly worth the search. If, therefore, art is to “save us,” after the death of God, it cannot be so lightly considered as a repetition of a divine grace streaming from beyond; the gestures of art cannot represent a return of the powers of God back into the community that gives redemption and makes memorials. The difficulty of a gesture of abandon, of turning toward a place that one can trust as original, as capable of bearing a world, will be, and as a conclusion to our meditations, the final theme of this writing, and it will be decided, as straightforwardly as possible, in the choice between several ways of understanding the gestures of art, all touched on in a polemic Derrida directs against Heidegger. The dark gestures of the hand The attempt to sort out the implicit confusion of temporal and spatial structures in traditional philosophy exercises much of Heidegger’s early

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work, as he strives to understand the form of meaningful presence out of the structures of human temporality. Such a project, broadly construed, would find many resonances in Fried’s work. At that point, the traces of the Greek beginning would remain present to us, as indicators of our continuity with the tradition, with its meaningful trajectory. We would live in memory of the original force and power of those words. However, especially in Heidegger’s late work, the poets and the Presocratics do not represent the exemplary productivity of creative existence; the passage of the gods leaves the poet with a task that cannot be solved through celebration, or through the affirmation of one’s subjective position, but must be sustained through the dark.34 Before addressing that configuration of the role of the poet, however, we should see that the continuity of Heidegger’s question of being is not drawn around the meaning of being, but rather around the nothing that empties being of the form of its presence. It is not the emptying of being into form, but the emptying of form itself: the nothing that will not allow form to sustain itself in its completion as present. This nothing sustains being across time—for otherwise there would be only extension without time—and the poets of a difficult abandon set out the demands of sustaining a world without the presence of God to support it. The fragility of being is set out as a reticence against the emptying of form, but the reticence only has its force, as form, when communicated, when sustained beyond the present instant. The place of the nothing, in its distance from any determinate negation, or limiting of the whole into its part, is transformed. As death, the nothing calls us to an authentic appropriation of our true possibilities and thus our singular meaning as individuals (in, for example, Being and Time). As steresis, as the incompleteness of the whole, the nothing stakes a claim on our life, in the conscience that knows that something is left undone. As the reticence in the face of the passage, the nothing is cast against the encompassing light— not as the origin of a new light, but as the refusal to be converted into light. The nothing, in other words, becomes the strange and stubborn darkness that deforms the movement of the light without merely delimiting the realm of the light—without, for example, announcing a mystery beyond all light. But, again, we are getting ahead of ourselves. This deformed and reticent orientation toward light is instituted, given shape, in the work of art—in the ways, for example, the work compels us to follow what is absent without declaring death itself to be the beauty and force of all form. In the language of the trace we followed in part one, the steresis of being lets our thought take the form of a balance, or a purity as thought,

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that undercuts the privilege of actuality over potentiality (against Aristotle). As opposed to the movement of producing presence, that movement of absencing claims us without allowing the production of presence to redeem our activity because self-contained or whole in its presence; the wholeness we are offered, instead, is only within that reticent movement that we sustain against the passage. In the context of “The Anaximander Fragment,” taking up again the polemics from the end of part two, the ontology does not precede or ground the justice; a judgment about what is true will not stand in for the very movement of the world, will not redeem the violent past in the understanding present. The deeply correlated complicity between the theological conception of God’s grace fulfilled in judgment, in the perfection of what is through the assignation of meaning to what has passed, and the human awareness of what is, in respect for its beauty as created by God, keeps us from seeing that a destructive grace would have to be the true grounding movement of embodiment, because only that movement situates the difficulty of embodiment, as the task of thinking in a time after God has died; only the destructive movement of grace retains the importance of a thoughtful existence, and avoids the “grace” that sacrifices the body for the fullness of meaning; that sacrifices the body for the fullness of meaning; only the destructive grace can allow the reticent gesture of embodiment; only such a gesture of refusing participation avoids situating the human, as spirit or soul, in the place of recognizing how God has already created the world. But we still haven’t situated this language in terms of Heidegger and Derrida, or the problem of a basic aesthetic gesture that can orient our practice as thoughtfully embodied beings. If philosophy can no longer start from the subject, one asks, in very general terms, how to think through the various compulsions that striate a situation from which a subject will emerge. Heidegger’s famous example, or rather reappropriation and refutation of the Kantian example, of orienting yourself in a dark room already showed that merely having a self-referential inner feeling for where your left and right hand were to be found couldn’t explain how the Dasein was directed in the world.35 The essential directing [Ausrichtung] and distancing [Ent-fernung] of Dasein precede a subject’s self-intuition of its own body where that spacing allows for the free play of the ready to hand [Zuhanden] in its spatiality.36 That free givenness of the spatiality associated with the ready to hand, with the objects that lie at hand and are ready to be used, makes possible the coherence of tools

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or products [Zeugzusammenhang], which makes possible in turn the selforientation of the body in terms that make sense of having a right and left hand.37 The world we live in, in its organization around the movements of our hands, precedes and structures the consciousness that would know something about this world—and yet that world is dependent on the time of that existing, on the movement of Dasein toward its singularity, its unity or sense. This provisional, somewhat dispersed “unity” (or coherence) of Dasein, which is not the grounding unity of the always already given apperceiving subject that was so important to Heidegger’s neo-Kantian contemporaries, is assured by Dasein’s essential tendency toward nearness, or the bringing things near in order to have them at hand.38 In Derrida’s 1968 article, “The Ends of Man,” we read that despite the fact that the “Da” of Dasein speaks as much of distance as nearness, one finds a residue of the metaphysics of presence in Heidegger where “everything happens as if it were necessary to reduce the ontological distance recognized in Sein und Zeit and proclaim [dire] the proximity of being to the essence of man.”39 In other words, the problem of the compulsion toward presence would be effaced in favor of man’s essence in its essential (or necessary) inclination toward being—the compulsion is reduced to the “essential tendency” to be near (and to be near to what is essential). One is tempted to say that the criticism is best understood as a critique of the presumption of situating the human as ground. That is, Heidegger is supposed to be making the condition of all possible meaning rest with the human, in an echo of Kant, and thus slipping in a new humanism. But one cannot stop with that rather external account. After all, the very logic of the condition of possibility—and of the meaningfulness of presence as the engine of the production of true statements, all nested within a coherent whole by the moral subject who takes meaning upon herself as a task—has also been abandoned by the time of Heidegger’s famous letter against Sartre’s humanism. We have followed this, above, in the idea that the movement through production, the movement from an unconditioned ground to a conditioned product, or situated subject, is not necessary in Heidegger’s account, and thus one cannot resort to the general tactic of finding the context, or historical facts, or natural constraints that provide the condition for the possibility of the present instance (the passage remains necessary, for Derrida, throughout his career, and we are currently following the contours of the varying approaches). Derrida himself, fortunately, greatly complicates this rendering of Heidegger’s position as a preference for nearness in “Restitutions,” an article

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from 1977 about what happens when you undo the lacing in a picture, and which culminates his Truth in Painting, when he asks of the interlacement [entre-lacement] in Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art” (originally given, in shorter form, in 1935). Now, Derrida tells us, “under the name of Geflecht” Heidegger will treat the question of interlacement explicitly only in the 1950s.40 The related Verflechtung shows up once in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in terms of the prevailing “intwinement” of form and material, but is not treated at length by Heidegger.41 Instead of following Heidegger’s own deployment of the idea, and as one sees throughout the trajectory of “Restitutions,” Derrida is making the word work both for and against Heidegger’s thought as a whole. Thus Heidegger’s thinking of interlacement is already tied up with the strategies (the interlacings) of Derrida’s translations, and refusals to merely translate. Like a black box turned into an aesthetic gesture, the frame disappears and yet the shape remains as a demand on our time. For example, against the voice within Derrida’s text that would claim that Heidegger’s thinking of interlacement would be more complicated than Freud’s thinking of the Fort/Da, another voice responds that all “connection to a pictorial text implies this doubled movement, doubly interlaced with itself.” There would be, more precisely, a certain Fort/Da that belonged to Heidegger’s thought itself: And the entire path of thinking, for Heidegger, leads back, by virtue of dis-tancing, to a Da (thus the Da of the Sein) which isn’t simply close, from which the proximity allows in itself the play of distance of the fort. The relation isn’t an opposition, each value offers an eyelet across to the other side, to the figure or measure of the other. Fort: Da. Double eyelet, here’s what it takes to renew it in writing.42 Here we find an essential development of Derrida’s relation to Heidegger: Heidegger is not, as claimed in 1969, merely avoiding or disdaining as vulgar the disseminating movement of writing. Rather, the work of the everyday, and of trusting in the everyday, involves the gestures of inflecting a world, and Derrida sees that the element of that Heideggerian gesture is not to be simply reduced to the “essential nearness” that he had criticized a few years before (Derrida continues to contest the priority of “gathering,” throughout his career; however, the caveats are what interest us here, and not the summary conclusions). Even in Heidegger, Derrida says at this point, not all activity, not all of the motion of being is reducible to the movements of a

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proto-subject, a Dasein with no destiny other than subjectivity, who gathers the things of the world into the nearness of presence. The form that supports the movement of being, in the terms of part two’s discussion of German Idealism, above, is not essentially the bringing into presence that Hegel saw in the partitioning and communicating of judgment, the grasping gesture of the concept in movement—after all, that form of giving form would constantly and reliably position the subject at the place of form’s asserting its precedence over matter (the place where being overflows itself and becomes the surface of determinations called life by Hegel.) The freedom of the system, in Hegel and his followers, is attained in the systematic language that knows how to account for itself as the free giving of form to the world—as the process of becoming capable of the form of freedom itself. The life of spirit on Earth is, if one follows this same logic, this same free becoming of truth, and is associated with the triumph of the Christian church over paganism, finally achieved when culture moves to the level of philosophy.43 For the Hegelians, one is caught up in the material process of the world, but the form of freedom always stands outside as the promise that institutes the truth toward which all progress is oriented. For this reason, science and clarity are both moral and practical tasks. We do not know ourselves, by necessity, to be operating in the position where the words should become free of their mooring, should become actively appropriated by a subject. We do not live in a world already overfull in its grace, only waiting to be recognized. Nor can we assume, as ontotheology had, that we rest wholly within an infinite power, within the infinite fact of what is, existing meaningfully in its unconditioned event as the one real universe. To say such presumes that the form of self-identity—of something being what it is—grounds the contact we have with the world and that that ground only comes to be true where we our capable of separating ourselves from the matter, thus free to manipulate the words, images, or concepts with which the economy of values functions. One may not, in the end, be capable of assuming that place of precedence, of the unconditioned precedence of form over the material from which it arises, even temporarily. The movement of thought may well be more difficult than the achievement of conceptual freedom—the holy grail of a presuppositionless logic or language—because the place the subject occupies cannot be trusted to bear the meaning of the whole, nor to bear its own meaning toward others, in communication with the world of others.

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And yet, one does not stubbornly retain the silence of an unnamed singularity—the external shape of that darkness could be pronounced, after all, simply and comnpletely. One leans toward the light, yet lingers against the completion of the passage. The redemption of form, after all, is only accomplished in death, and the movement of the nothing even empties that “redemption” of any lasting force, of any victory as accomplished and thus eternal. In the more familiar language of our religious tradition, it is to believe that damnation is real, in the sense that one lives in exile from the light, but that it is not necessary; it is to believe that grace is found only in that movement that destroys forms, and thus that moves against the light, by insisting on a singularity that cannot be redeemed. In that still familiar language of the religious tradition, transformed by Nietzsche, it is to affirm the suffering of a fate as one’s own, but—against Nietzsche—to refuse to call that fate happy just because it has been transformed, or renewed; it is the stubborn insistence on damnation, on the gravity of a life that is oriented by a light it cannot possess, a stubborn insistence that alone is capable of not betraying that life, if only for the short time in which it can delay the passage. The dark room that Kant moved confidently within, and that Heidegger imagined framing any possible emerging of a self, became a place of dispersal and regathering in Derrida, and thus a place of ever-renewing light. We have only suggested, in recasting the gesture theologically in terms of the sacred, that one does not leave the darkness by mastering the location of the objects in the room, or by learning their architecture and form or their “abstract configurations in time.” One must live the darkness as darkness, as sustaining the movement through which an orientation toward the light might yet come to be trusted; otherwise, the light will always already have passed, and the duration of our lives, in their difficult refusal to pass, will have been betrayed by the instantaneity of a form. The question, thus, and for Derrida as well as for us, is how to read Heidegger against, and within, his own writing, within that same dark room; and the task is to do such precisely where Heidegger’s question was already how to think the “against” and the “within” in being and thinking. Such would be the inflection or contour of reading, or living toward or beginning to trust a world. But what of Derrida? What is one to make of the reference to writing, and renewal in writing, especially as grounds for understanding the originality of the gestures of art? The play of distance associated with the fort, we should remember, could not be simply the play

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of a subject, and yet what else could it be except that compulsive gesture, individual and individuating, of commencement and loss? What else could it be besides the staging of the destiny of the subject? A black box where a subject would have been—the black box where the subject will have been abandoned. Where the subject will not be capable—nor asked to be capable—of its freedom. Where the demand instituted by the divine is not the demand that one belong to the force and efficacy of the real world. Where the demand, instead, is to belong to the loss and commencement of a constant disarticulation and, in the same gesture of sustaining that demand, to not betray the desire to move toward the articulation of space. One may, against Fried, belong to the movement of the flight and the abandon of the gods as reticent over the irretrievable loss; one may confront, instead of the demand to believe in the grace and meaning of the aesthetic gesture that redeems us from the nothing, the compulsion to face the alternately vanishing and looming voids of the sacred as absent. The presence of the frame… and its gestures Using the same problem of “interlacement” in an earlier article of The Truth in Painting, Derrida had also doubted the simplicity of the Kantian separation between the free play of the imagination and the dependent work of understanding in judgments of beauty and charm. The interlacement of these functions ensures that there can be no movement back from experience into an idealized realm of pure interiority where the framing activity of understanding doesn’t come into play. We have, in fact, followed that logic with Heidegger’s reading of Kant and the doubling of reflection, above, but Derrida is insisting on the necessity of the move and, further, inflects the doubling of the frame, so that we can escape the Heideggerian criticism. That is, in the interlacement between representation (in the mathematical sublime), the force of presence (in the dynamical sublime), and the play of inner and outer (in the problem of the frame), Derrida prevents Kant from establishing the free play of the work of the mind, in its form as independent, as cut off (or cutting itself off) from all dependence, from granting the human, as such, superiority over all mere nature.44 Derrida shows us that the Kantian movement that encounters a force, experiences it in terms of a context or frame, and then apparently subtracts the contaminating effects, is not able to complete its own effacement. Derrida seems, moreover, to take on this dilemma as itself the definition of deconstruction:

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But that which produced and manipulated the frame puts everything to work in order to efface the effect of the frame, most frequently in infinitely naturalizing it, in God’s hands (we will be able to verify this in Kant). Deconstruction should neither reframe nor simply dream of the pure and simple absence of the frame. These two apparently contradictory gestures are themselves, and are systematically indissociable from, that which is deconstructed here.45 But one must take the “here”—the singularity of the written work of philosophy—seriously. The work of deconstruction isn’t always linked, as it is here and four pages earlier, to the violent “gesture of enframing.”46 It is tied, for example in “The Withdrawal of Metaphor,” to the translation which makes language, discourse and text “violate in the same gesture their own maternal tongue at the moment of bringing to it and carrying away from it the maximum of energy and information.”47 Is this to say just that Derrida changes strategies, depending on whom he encounters, attentive, one might say, to the context? Or that enframing is just the same thing as translating? The play of the “gesture” seems, if anything, to be more encompassing than either framing or translating. Speaking of Ponge’s Fable, in an article from 1984, Derrida says that the work “forms a commencement and speaks of this commencement, and in this indivisible double gesture, it inaugurates.”48 Speaking of Lévinas, the problem becomes how to be attentive to a “gesture” of a giving that “escapes the circle of restitution,”49 that is, to be attentive to a gesture that works against itself. And then, still speaking of Lévinas, to be attentive to the “two different gestures” in the “in this moment” where the connection between the thematising act and the conditions of its possibility, the conditions and forms of attentiveness, are also in play. The references— possibly just occurrences—of “gesture” multiply among many, but not all, of Derrida’s writings. Although it is not explicitly thematized by Derrida as changing, it also seems to have a trajectory, even if somewhat limited, across his work, as well as varying contours within individual uses. For the purposes of our writing, we only indicate that the ways in which deconstruction cannot escape its context would seem to have changed, and changed around the understanding of aesthetic contact, around the understanding of the place where the frame would have found its force and necessity as artistic gesture.

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Of course, it must be emphasized that the theme of a doubling is found throughout Derrida’s texts. The characterization of the doubling itself as a gesture, however, interests us here. The early articles from Writing and Difference, for example, use the word “gesture,” but infrequently, either as an indication of an almost “literal” function,50 or more “metaphorically,” as the “audacity” of a philosophical intervention.51 As we saw at the beginning of the second part of this writing, he spoke early in his career rather enigmatically of “two hands” in Hegel and Bataille, but the evocations were left very open. The “Cartesian gesture,” from his 1962/3 examination of Foucault’s criticism of Descartes, is associated with the situating of the subject—that is, with the aesthetic condition of being present to the sensible world—and marks the way in which that founding gesture escapes conceptual control. It is not, however, that the gesture is doubled, but that the extravagance of the gesture exceeds the control it had seemed to promise. In the roughly contemporaneous Speech and Phenomena, the gesture is central to the explication of the problem of spatiality as a contamination and supplement (thus, perhaps, a doubling), but it is always linked strictly to spatiality—even though it thus demonstrates the failure of interiority to constitute itself, as pure voice, as the origin of sense.52 From the moment he began, Derrida shows a commitment to the idea that “[d]econstruction should neither reframe nor simply dream of the pure and simple absence of the frame.” Our question, in the remaining pages, is whether the “gestures” are themselves a type of “frame” within the frame. The uses of the word “gesture,” during those years seem, at least, to be rather simple, if already pregnant; they are never of themselves gestures of doubling, and tend to speak, instead, to the instituting of a frame from outside. In “Ousia and Gramme,” just a few years later, although the forthcoming publication of this article is announced already in Of Grammatology, the use of the “gesture” has become more complicated. Hegel had a gesture, in a specific context of responding against (or merely appropriating? that is the question) Kant’s thinking of time as auto-affection; despite Heidegger’s claims, it seems that he, like Hegel, repeats Kant’s gesture. A page further on, the Hegelian thinking of time is identified as a “fundamentally Greek gesture.” “Gesture” here would be, perhaps, something like a characteristic or a trait. But here the gesture, as a gesture of philosophy, becomes somehow more important, as the gesture that institutes the thinking of time at the origin of our metaphysics, since it “permits thinking the present, the very form of time, as eternal.”53 But the gesture remains interior only to the

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history of thought, even if the relation of thought to presence is part of the stake. This is where Heidegger’s connection to this gesture, as Derrida construes it, is no more simple than Derrida’s own. Derrida begins to show us Heidegger’s distance from the Hegelian gesture he had simply seemed to repeat, precisely where the evasion of the question of time, in its relation to presence, is considered in its force—where, that is, the forgetting of a question has a force (or compulsion?) and is not merely privative. Such is the steresis at the heart of historical being. Such is the force of a non-present trace, of the passage of what compels us, because of its very fragility. “If the entirety of metaphysics is engaged in this gesture [the evasion of time], Being and Time, in this respect at least, constitutes a decisive step beyond, or this side of, metaphysics.”54 In the traces of the metaphysical gesture, Heidegger may still succeed in contesting the logic of a self-encompassing presence—the pretense to having always been conscious of the force of one’s own gestures, one’s own thoughts. Even in this contestation, however, “the destruction of metaphysics remains interior to metaphysics,” because “Heidegger’s ‘resumption’ of the Kantian gesture” “was prepared” by Aristotle himself.55 The gesture, here, is at the interior of the trajectory, is somehow the force itself, of philosophy. Thus, perhaps, a gesture is what Heidegger would call an institution or investiture (Stiftung) of meaning, but also, somehow, part of what Heidegger would call a project, or projection (Entwurf ), of a trajectory such as Occidental metaphysics in general. The gesture, in some sense, embodies the force of a trace, the formal force of presence, that we had reason to bring into question at the end of the first part. In some unclarified way, the gesture would also be involved in the force of the evaded question, of the continuing evasion of an obscured question. How would we separate this force from the “slightest compulsive gesture” of the child? The connection to throwing, as it relates to the Fort/Da—to its compulsions, repetitions, fetishes and specificity—is important, and will grow in importance for Derrida (although apparently in ways that Heidegger would seem to wish to evade or efface). (The sense of saying there is “one” metaphysics, or even “one” gesture that would be appropriate to philosophy, constitutes our problem, however, and I would not pretend to have already explicated this universal singularity— the monotheism of philosophy. We are not speaking of an extension of the simple gesture of learning to orient oneself within a world already pregnant with meanings, critically discerning and appropriating what needs to be

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learned, as Fried would have the child in a room full of Caro’s sculpture do. Rather, the very evasion of meaning—what I take to be the refusal to too quickly accede to the demands of light—is the unifying gesture, the gesture that insists on belonging to the tradition and refuses to pass over into its pure forms or instantiations.) However, even this account of the myriad uses of the word fails to capture all of Derrida’s gymnastics around the idea of a “gesture.” The reappearance within this same article of the word “gesture,” this time with a telling irony, is particularly interesting. The “gesture” of saying that the tradition has not responded to the problem of the “physis of time” is “obsessively” (inlassablement) repeated at the interior of the tradition.56 Heidegger, in other words, belongs to metaphysics, to the interior of metaphysics, precisely where he steps beyond its tradition—where he marks and sustains the lack of wholeness, the steresis, that orients that tradition beyond what it already is. Metaphysics, a Hegelian could see, progresses because of the gesture of returning, restituting, and redoubling, the question of time and what we have forgotten about time’s “nature.” The most telling usage of the word “gesture,” finally, comes closer to the end of “Ousia and Gramme.” Derrida tells us that he is situating himself “interior to Heidegger’s thought” by “interrupting Being and Time.” An interruption, that is, which comes with the question, after time has been established as the horizon of this thought, of “what then will there be of presence?”57 Derrida sees the outline of an answer in terms of the difference between presence as Anwesenheit and presence as Gegenwärtigkeit. In his words, somewhat paraphrased: “Beyond Being and Time” Heidegger spoke of an “ungegenwärtig Anwesende” (in “The Anaximander Fragment”) which remains rather obscure: how would you translate it otherwise than as “non-present present”?58 Gegenwärtigkeit seems to be a “contraction (rétrécissement) of Anwesenheit,” but the sense of such a contraction or restriction is impossible to pinpoint for the moment. We have opened the same pages repeatedly over the course of this writing, in a continuing effort to understand what the movement of being, as the force by which form takes precedence as motion, has to do with the presence of the human, in the specificity of a situation, as a thinking being. In this essay, Derrida approximates an answer, it would seem, by speaking of two gestures (not yet doubled). Is it possible that after this critique a new question will orient at least one major axis of Derrida’s thought? One should look at the whole passage, from the end of Derrida’s article:

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The Heideggerian de-limitation consists as much in questioning the more restricted determination in terms of a less restricted determination of presence, thus to return from the present towards a more original thinking of being as presence (Anwesenheit), as it consists in questioning this originary determination itself and giving it to be thought as a closure, as the Greek-Occidental-philosophic closure. According to the latter gesture, it would be a matter of thinking a Wesen or of soliciting thought by means of a Wesen that would not yet even be Anwesen. In the first case, the displacements are held to the interior of metaphysics (or presence) in general; and the urgency or extent of the task explains why these intra-metaphysical displacements occupy almost all of Heidegger’s text, in here being given as such, which is already rare. The other gesture, the more difficult, the more unheard of, the more questioning, the one for which we are least prepared, can only be sketched out, announces itself in certain calculated fissures of the metaphysical text. Two texts, two hands, two looks (regards), two listenings. Together at once and separately.59 Three immediately pressing questions arise in transplanting this double movement of presence into the aesthetic context just established, above. First, does the “presence” associated with Minimalist art, or with the uncompleted New Jersey Turnpike, refer to this less restricted presence? As we have already seen, that question recurs on itself, in terms of the difference between Fried and Didi-Huberman—the supposed force of the mere presence of an object is displaced by the force of an enframing gesture, and then displaced, again, by the compulsion, within some first, already framed, presence, toward that restriction (or closure), towards the disarticulation, articulation, and rearticulation, of presence. The second question is, if such a question can be phrased this bluntly, simply: is the Anwesen supposed to serve as a frame of the Gegenwärtigkeit, or vice-versa? Kant, it would seem, would have wanted the indeterminate presence (intuited in time) to frame the determined present; Hegel would have found the determining to constitute the element from which all else would be thought, thus preceding, or ruling out, any indeterminacy. At the very least, the simplicity with which one once located the interiority of the force of presence, that which is proper to the present in its metaphysical trajectory, is undoubtedly troubled by our inability to fix the opposition or the hierarchy. It is as if we were not certain if we were inside or outside the black box.

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Finally, the third question arising from the opposition of Anwesenheit to Gegenwärtigkeit: how is the “doubling” of the gesture we spoke of above, holding the two gestures together in one inflection, related to the two gestures of presence Derrida addresses here? The gesture of joining, of tying two things into one, continues the trail we wish to follow for the moment. It might be, after all, the place of the doubled unity of force and form as they enter into the logic of aesthetic presence to the world. And if we can understand why form carries this force, as the compelling force of an openness toward the world, expressed in the beauty and power of art, then we will better see the form of abandon, and the compulsions that a form without force might still bear. Then, in the long contours we have been setting out, we may yet find a path that is neither Derridean nor Heideggerian, yet thoughtfully sustains the difficulty they struggled with. In The Truth in Painting, Derrida twice points to “Ousia and Gramme” as commencing a question concerning Heidegger which, since then, had been displaced.60 In Glas, the major work one might most obviously look to for the performance of this displacement, the question had been posed of how the work on signatures and proper names had stolen the criteria of a rigorous enframing, a theft, then, “between the within and the without” where one was “deprived solely of the frames, or rather the joints, and of all possibility of reframing.”61 This sense of displacement makes a certain type of sense in terms of the Kantian discourse, where the frame is admitted and “naturalized to infinity,” but it is not as clear where it fits in the Heideggerian discourse that seems so intent on refusing the separation between subject and object, form and content, that the trope of the frame of experience would imply. Would not the “between”—albeit as the place of the unity of the motion of being called into the between, and not as an already given unity or form of unifying—be completely different from the “framing” of a content by a concept? The problem, as with the motion of absencing itself, is what gesture institutes the absence as a trace—as compelling and ordering our experience, precisely in its absence. Derrida speaks of that movement, and the philosophical gesture that embodies it, as a theft. More than the singular—and singularizing—gesture of a violent and forceful interruption, even “doubled” in its dual orientation, then, we will find the interruption that makes something present in its absence, and thus obvious in its fragility. In the reading of Heidegger’s “Origin of the Work of Art,” what is stolen by Derrida, from Heidegger, is the enframing provided by the example of Van Gogh’s shoes within Heidegger’s own essay, at a point one would have

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thought separable from the philosophical argument itself. It is an example, after all, that is not even found in the original version of Heidegger’s essay, given as a presentation in 1935. The displacement forces us to see what type of work is done through the article—through the article as art, handicraft, or grounding; as painting, cobbling or farming. The difference between art and philosophy of art, event and description, is itself at stake. The specificity of the example displaces the question of presence, or rather of two presences—of the force of singularity and the force that sets that specificity into a true, not merely singular, presence. The simplest of objects, a black box or a pair of shoes, for example, is no longer easily incorporated into the movement of an essay. As we were robbed of the natural frame that God’s hands or “the” human body provided, here Derrida steals the “natural” association of left and right, shoes and feet, sole and ground; which is only to say that there is more to be thought in the contours of the things than their utility as examples. The instituting motion of this theft, in its turn, will structure the accentuations and deformations of Derrida’s encounter with Heidegger in its singularity. Derrida has not embarked on an explication of the work of Anwesenheit in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” as one might have hoped for after the promising ending of “Ousia and Gramme.” Heidegger’s essay itself doesn’t oppose the two words for presence (it speaks almost exclusively of Anwesen), and seems, if anything, involved in the process of finding an “unrestricted” meaning of presence—that is to say, of what Derrida had associated with the first gesture. It may, in that sense, support Derrida’s reading, but only from the one side. The problem of the second gesture, of the closure in thinking, seems to be set aside by Derrida in favor of the specificity of the example— or rather, of “soliciting,” in the “specificity” of the example, our inability to trust that singularity. In other words, the problem is not the necessity of the closure, of the movement toward determination, but of the trustworthiness of the singular. He doubts, that is, whether we can be oriented by the certainty of a determination, or must, instead, be moved into a place where one trusts a singularity that is not, of itself, fully determined. The trust, or rather the form of trusting, will have to be balanced against the risk and the compulsions that move us toward destructive gestures. Many of Derrida’s followers, in fact, have embraced the idea that one can trust the destructive gestures because one can be certain that there is an infinite future of determinations—that it is inevitable or necessary that every determination will lead to another one. What Derrida tells us here, against that reading,

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is that one must always contest a movement that pretends to naturalize the frame “to infinity.” One “must” always see the movement of displacement as produced in its specificity, and the task of the displacement produced in Derrida’s reading of Heidegger, is around the idea of production and whether one can be certain that every production will also include a future. The displacement, then, since “Ousia and Gramme” is accomplished along the Heideggerian lines of Zeug and Verläßlichkeit. Of that which we trust, and our abandon in that trust. One should, to begin with, remember that the context of “The Origin of the Work of Art” emphasizes a move away from both the idea that God has already finished all the objects of the world, presenting them to us to take up, and also away from the idea that we create the objects of the world through acts of constituting apprehension built up around sense data (the natural frames of God and human body are thus dismantled already in Heidegger). But more, as Heidegger says, “We are nearer to the things themselves than to sensations.”62 This nearness is not the absolute self-proximity of auto-affection, of giving yourself the space within which objects appear; rather, it is the nearness of that world which is not merely already finished (Anfertigung), but is somehow available in the grasping of our hands. Accordingly for Heidegger, the simple contour (Umriß ) of a granite block is not really completed in its own self-reference—its form, too, must be thought in terms of the more primordial configuration of strife between earth and world. The raw experience of a pure mass is not where the force of experience is located. Instead, one finds the truth establishing itself as, and in, strife in such a way that the Riß, the rift, fissure, or tear, between earth and world is where the truth confides the true character of the things of the earth—it is where, that is, truth is established in terms of the world that guards the earth in its reticence and its continuity.63 The moment that minimalist sculpture captures in its “Gestalt,” the confluence of phusis and morphe, the force of a presence as formed, is presented in its force, as occupying that space in between earth and world, in the work of art “as such.” Derrida uses the French word “trait” (stroke, feature, characteristic, trait) to translate a whole group of German words related to Riß.64 These interwoven translations, it would seem, serve as frame and theme of the book,65 but it also enacts the movement of the Riß as that that institutes a figure as such, and as absence. That is, when encountering a theme resistant to translation, one translates so that the resistance is figured in

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the translation, carried over into the tension of the translation, and neither effaced nor simply avoided. The resistance, however, may not be the presence of a different force, or of multiple meanings, but precisely the way in which the original responds to the absence of, the constitutive theft of, its frame. But this is also a question of how to think the first stroke of the hand, and what type of space is given after that encountering movement or imprint—after the tracing of a line. The tool, technology more generally, reaches into a space already opened by the hand, following and elaborating on what the hand can do; the gesture of the hand is, we are often told, the instituting gesture of technology. The stroke of the brush begins the work of art, and the cohesion of the work, in terms of that first stroke, is what holds it into the strife between the paint on the canvas and the work as a (meaningful) whole. The question of the product or tool is strangely interior and exterior to Heidegger’s essay, as the movement of the hand is both interior and exterior to the sketch, or the imprint. The product [Zeug] occupies a space in between a supposed mere thing and the work that is in no way just a thing. But, then, the fact that the product is represented in a painting—where the lack of utility will, famously, highlight the way in which the work of art is for itself, as the establishing of itself apart from all common references66 —shows us that Van Gogh’s painting, when it shows the shoes as they really are, restores them to their originary trait to the extent that the originary force of that movement, or rather that strife and its withdrawal or absencing, is what is displayed. The steresis becomes present as absent. The fact that it is a painting, then, has the utility of underscoring the inutility—or more precisely, the resistance to utility—which gives us the truth of the work beyond the utility that would seem to frame our everyday “meaningful” interpretations of the world. The event of being, as we have seen above, was to be constituted in the withdrawal [Entzug] of being into its trait [Zug], as the human was drawn into the “between,” between content and form, as the place of that tension. So, although the example is inutile to the argument of Heidegger’s essay,67 it still has something of a product-like character—thus justifying, in part, the whole move away from translating Zeug in terms of tools and utility. It accentuates the displacement away from the proximity of man to himself toward the place where truth itself arises—a displacement, it would seem, that is also present in Heidegger’s published essay. But then, perhaps the almost random (or essential? or compulsive?) character of choosing and

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explicating an example, of manipulating and reworking the material one finds on hand, would also be, as the artisanship of thinking [Handwerk des Denken], its “feast” precisely where that movement of connecting, and not the “free event” of human presence, constituted the essence of thought.68 One would not say thinking occurs before an event; rather, the form of drawing an event into its character as “produced,” as dependent on a human gesture, is the movement of nothingness that claims our thought. Derrida situates the question in terms of Heidegger’s concerns at that moment in the essay where the example of “a certain well-known painting” is introduced: [Heidegger] wants to interpret the being-product without or on this side of the matter-form couple, convinced that one won’t reach this remains by subtraction from the “product” but in opening another path towards that which is properly product in the product, towards the “Zeughaften des Zeuges” One should follow, if there were enough time, all the paths that lead Heidegger to rethink the site and character of production—but it would be difficult to separate the attempt to open up “another path” from his work in its entirety. Derrida is emphasizing, though, the sense in which the human, or more properly formal or intelligible, element of production remains essential, but the conceptual or publicly produced—and thus “humanist”— sense of meaning is avoided. The difficulty is rendered almost insuperable by the various translations, circulating here through French and English, but also back to the renderings of Greek and Latin. For this practical reason, we would already be justified in searching for a new technique of representation, a new way of enacting a reading or approaching a decision between the texts. But one must see the trap here: a new technique of making public, of determining the form of what is shared, will not carry the sense of intensity that one must think at the heart of what is shared in the artistic gesture. The urgency and immediacy of the world—borne in our relation to products that have the character of tools, or in our relation to the texts that most carefully construct a world within which we may trust our movements— must be carried over into the gestures of art, and of a philosophy about the urgency of art, without betraying the intensity at the site where singularity emerges as bearing a whole world. One risks, in a preparatory step, a word that isn’t precisely right—a deployment that deforms the way the language is “normally” spoken by

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those who have learned how to move within the already given room—and searches for the singularity of the thought coming to the fore in the process of thinking. One is not searching for the animating spirit behind the word, nor the meaning of its achievement as a speech act, but for the movement that opens up the paths upon which thought will move. As Derrida will point out elsewhere, such is the movement of avoiding speaking, of instituting an absence in the frame of philosophical discourse itself. As we saw above, it would be difficult to see the desire to “switch terrain” as anything but the refusal of the necessity of the contraction through presence, and thus a refusal to see what is originary in the movement through determination and economy. If the gesture were simply the contraction of specificity, however, or simply the movement of determination, then it would only carry the force of doubling—and all gestures would share that characteristic force, all singularity would already necessarily bear its transcendence, its determination. The doubled gesture, in contrast, includes the theft of that determining force, the abandon of the specificity it would presume to put into its originary force. Only in that theft, in the doubling of the gesture of enframing by turning to the interiority and intensity of the absence, can Derrida see the violence of an imposed frame without having the frame be merely the exteriority of the subject, its opposition to the object, as one finds in technology as Heidegger describes it.69 In this essay of Derrida’s, the “product” occupies a space between a supposedly “mere” thing and the work of art that is not at all a thing—but as thus in the place of the middle, the Zwischenstellung,70 it reduplicates the stance that thought itself takes relative to an example that is taken up and fashioned, where such artisanship (thinking and cobbling) is not yet art. Derrida continues: The reference to Van Gogh is inscribed in this movement, in that which it can have of the strictly singular. That means, at the interior of the movement, Heidegger’s gesture, with the crafted subtlety of a cobbler working with the short needle and passing quickly from within to without, speaks as much of the painting, in itself, and as much of a completely different thing, outside of it.71 The metaphors, if that is what they are, are mixed. The gesture, as movement of the hand, speaks. Now, although he does not do it here, in “Heidegger’s Hand (Geschlecht II),” from 1984/5, Derrida denounces Heidegger’s too easy association of gesture and word.72 One should remember that the

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movement Derrida is explicating in “Restitutions” is, in Heidegger, the one from the artisan’s work to the art work as a move from what is available and at hand toward the poetic essence of all art. The disruption, or theft, then lies in the insistence that the example enframes the essay73 and thus that the character of products, of the crafted work of thinking, cannot be merely effaced in moving to the level of thinking the character of the work of art as separate from technology. The originality of trust For Heidegger, as here read by Derrida, the gesture of gathering into the efficacy of the instituting work grounds singularity in the object as originary—it is as if, in simpler terms, Heidegger had been speaking of those gestures that then made possible the type of art that Fried celebrates as displaying presence. For Derrida, further, the dispersion of forces is effaced whenever the “proper” movement of dispersion is already given as the originary force of setting into work; if the work, in other words, is seminal because it establishes a way of interpreting later work, then the force of dispersion is “naturalized,” and its violence is obscured. It would be to privilege the gathering interiority of an artist’s brush stroke, or otherwise physical moment of contact, and to miss the deforming disruption of a word (or other tool) used against the grain. That important aspects of each of these “strategies” comes from Heidegger, however, is not lost on Derrida—it is how the two moments are understood in relation to each other, in their interlacement, that is at stake, not the simple introduction of a technique that Heidegger had never properly considered. For Derrida, then, the dissemination and multiplication associated with writing are what need to be thought out of the choice of the painting as example in such a way that the writing is not returned to the actual painting, as its source and legitimation; the gesture of art, in broader terms, is not to redeem the experience of presence.74 (The purpose of the polemic against Meyer Shapiro, in Derrida’s writing, is to separate Heidegger from the humanism that redeems experience.) But why is it that Heidegger sees the work of art in terms of its gathering articulation in the first place? Heidegger’s own essay purports to show this— and the contours of this gathering—and does not just take the goodness of unity for granted. The move to the work of art, away from the mere product [Zeug], is established in terms of the work gaining independence

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and self-reference through the effect of the motion.75 However, as we have already seen with the logic of the Riß, we are not speaking of a selfreference to the completed imprint as object, but of a movement in which the encounter with objects will have been stretched out: the self-reference is to that which is most proper to the strife that articulates that piece of art in itself, as being there, in that stroke, as the tear or gap that institutes an exigent nothingness.76 There is no reason to return to a subject, of any sort, and even in disguise, because the movement of the world at the place of its determination within an element is the issue—things like subjects, meanings, and conceptual frames will all come after this initial emergence into shape. The difference between gathering and dissemination, most schematically, can be translated into the difference between a strife that embodies a reticence in the face of the passage and an instantaneous impression that gives a particular form, but then immediately finds itself moved beyond that instant and into the next. Everything turns on this difference, but it remains to set out more patiently the form of the movement of the nothing, as a movement of that which we may yet come to trust, as the reticence in the face of time. If it takes on shape at all—for the movement is uncertain, and nothing has promised its completion, or promised us to any sort of power. Rather, all that is promised in the movement is the destruction of what has emerged: after all, the sacred character of grace, at the beginning of a new emergence into shape, begins apocalyptically. Begins as a revelation of a movement away from being. Our task, in recognition of this destructive grace, of a world that is only shared in these most basic contours in its apocalyptic voice, is to set out the shape of moving away from being as the sustaining of a presence in its reticence to that passage. The turning away from grace, in other words, is not the turn away from God’s emanating power, into the evil of our self-determinations, but is the turn away from the passage into nothing, without the pretense of finding some greater power within which we may rest. We are not searching for a more secure place to locate and defend the immortal soul, but to understand what it would mean to live a life turned toward the sacred after that soul—and its grandchildren in the various instantiations of subject metaphysics—have all lost their independent claim on us, have all been subjected to an apocalyptic destruction. From out of the example that Derrida is analyzing, an example that only seems like it can be discarded without changing the thrust of Heidegger’s article, the “originary abandon” that the peasant woman lives within, in her

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trust of the world of products that surround her, allows us to see where the force of our being in the world is already situated. Derrida, again, situates the problem, which is also the problem of situating, in the work of translation: Verläßlichkeit. The word is difficult to translate. I laboriously specified “by the grace of which,” “by the force of which,” “in virtue of which” since the connection [kraft] is not one of a formal condition of the possibility to its conditioned or of a more profound ground to that which it founds but of a sort of experience. Experience, we say for the instant, of dependability: one can count on the product. The product is dependable. It’s not useful unless we confide in its dependability.77 It would be a mistake to see the force invoked here by Heidegger as an elegy to the power and grace of peasant life. Rather, in the abandon, in the direction that one takes up in respect to life, one sees what is essential to the proximity—to a moving toward the world as that space where all powers, possibilities, and forces, will have their deployment. In Heidegger, as a response to the idealist’s resolution of the problem of time in the subject who knows herself to possess an instant, and thus trusts in the fullness of the whole of all possible instants, trusts in the sensefulness of her finitude being opposed to the boundless infinite, we find a trust whose basic form contests the certainty of modern subject metaphysics because it insists that the space of trust is not necessarily trustworthy—that the infinite, the greatest product and tool of ontotheology, may, in fact and regardless of whether one thinks of it in its actuality or its pure abstraction and negativity, fail. The nothing may stop moving, may stop contesting being. Our experience of the world shows itself in terms of the “products” that help us sustain this movement of the world, the motion that attaches to life lived within reliability, within the room that already has meaning, and thus leads us to think the essence of the originality, and force, of art as the essential gesture of thought in those places where it brings out the dependence of our lives on that unobserved, and taken for granted, world. For Derrida, then, the “experience” of trust precedes the technological oppositions within which subject metaphysics moves, within which an “experience” is defined as the imposition of meaning, and thus where the essential gestures of art would be those that most powerfully imposed a frame on the world (or most powerfully participated in a “natural” frame of the world78). We must, however and against Derrida’s reading of Heidegger, see that our experience of the world, in the place where trust

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breaks down, leads us away from experience as such, away from the powers and capacities of experience, and not toward a new, mystical, and higher type of experience. The nothing, in other words, must teach us how trust is not won through an analysis of experience. Does that lead us back to Heidegger’s Augustinian roots, or to a thinking of grace (pure presence) beyond works (beyond mere objects “produced” by perception)? If so, it is far less direct than Fried’s path through Edwards; rather, the problem of becoming capable of grace, of being able to sustain a movement beyond experience, is what Heidegger is bringing forward, and what I would characterize in the difference between a productive grace and an apocalyptic clearing. Grace, if any there is, and perhaps already in Augustine, would have to be absolutely destructive if it were to come from a nothingness within the movement of the world, and not as something exterior to the world; this is the riddle of art that we are approaching, the difficulty of sustaining grace as the very element of our world. One must see Heidegger’s own next moves in “The Origin of the Work of Art” as more cautious than what I just outlined for an ultimately destructive grace at the place of artistic gestures, in spite of his radical break with the tradition, as he gropes more carefully toward a new thinking in which art could provide that shared space within which an authentic trust could develop. That a yet more radical gesture is called for, and what that would even mean, is—in a very strong sense—the question we have been following with Derrida’s reading of Heidegger. Returning to our very first example, we can only claim to come before the sun, assuming we do not adopt a bizarre and hyperbolic hubris, if we accept that the form of that sustaining is “grounded” in the movement of nothingness, grounded in accepting the passage even as one sustains a form, reticently, against the passage. Only then, that is, can the form of sustaining the world, before any event of meaning, also provide an account of what it means for something to have had a presence beyond our own determinations of meaning. But we have still not quite reached that point in our argument. The promise of modernism, in philosophical terms, was to have displaced (or effaced) the problem of plurality by evoking the solution of technology—the redemption of individual experience in the communal experience of a world. By articulating an experience for the public in its flatness, the support of the canvas, and thus the fact of representation, the fact that the painting was produced as an object by human action, was to become clear. An absolutely shared world, without illusion, was thus to

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be born and sustained as available to anyone who could encounter it. For such a modernist reading, which is echoed and not renounced by much of postmodernism, no one could deny, no matter what language they used to express the idea, that a manufactured box was present in the room. The art represented the world as the artist saw it in its most basic units, and the audience experienced the feeling of the art—the feeling of exceeding all utility or determined content—instead of some represented thing or some ideological content. The art was the limit, or the contour, given to a produced thing by another subject, as it bore an accentuation toward form, or experience, or the purity of expression, and not as bearer of a message. The subject that lived up to the encounter with such art was multiple, free from everything but the emotion of the contact, and thus of the position expressed in its purest form, its most inwardly forceful movement. The subject was universal, unprejudiced—oriented solely by the truth as a fact that all could recognize. The material, the element within which all possibility will have shape, will have been accentuated but not exhausted: the object remains available, as infinite resource for future experience, to the multiplicity of subjects within the world. The example, as contoured by the artist, stood on its own and called others into the position of seeing, as well, what was to be seen. The modernist democratic ideal was thus not based on a shared ideology, but on the community of people capable of standing on their own, assuming the position of seeing—of seeing with the eyes of an artist, of sustaining the aesthetic gesture from the side of the audience. We have already seen, however, how bad a reading of Tony Smith’s box such an ideal of the presence of an object would represent. Here, in an attempt to respond to the demand of a difficulty that cannot be made accessible through a technology, we are also asking of the movement of the philosophical intervention—of the movement toward and through form that one locates in the transformative or originary power of the gestures of either art or technology as performed in writing. The example, in this sense, bears the weight of the frame without having articulated a particular frame: no ideological or meaningful interpretation attaches in advance, but the accentuation or deformation of the singularity in one direction or another (but most generally, toward some particular form) is given. One speaks, but one does not make present a determination of meaning, or even a bare contour of appearing; one speaks of a demand that arises where the example is reticent to emerge.

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For that reason, and against Derrida’s articulations of his position, I would not read Heidegger as having prioritized an event of the shining forth of the truth in the work of art—the gesture, rather, is to be read in the movement of absence, the form of speaking toward what is absent, giving space and time to the absent, as the movement toward the world. An Ereignis is not an event of determination, but—in the evocative terms of his late work—the giving of time and space in its sacred contours, as a place where “the appearing of the divine yet lingers.” Derrida’s theft of a frame, then, is itself most properly the institution of a work of art as the movement of nothingness, as long as we can sustain that artistic gesture against any presupposed necessity of moving through determination. If examples frame, and if frames can operate within frames, then perhaps the Greek temple is the example whose framing best characterizes the unity of the first version of Heidegger’s essay (where Van Gogh is not mentioned) and the longer published version to which Derrida is responding. The question posed by the temple in both versions is how to understand the relation of work to world in terms of consecrating [Weihung] and praising [Rühmung]. It is a question, one also notes, of abandoned spaces, “abandoned landscapes”—of what “yet lingers” in a space whose context has become closed to us. In the published version of Heidegger’s essay, the erecting [Errichtung] of a temple is tied to artwork in general, where the giving direction or sense [Richtung] is emphasized. Where, in other words, and against Lévinas and most readings of Derrida, the rectitude of overflowing presence does not ground the gesture (or its efficacy or its justice), but is only in its turn grounded in the gesture’s own protean and singular forms.79 The temple is essentially an instituting art work because its being a work, as opening a world and holding it in its force, demands that it be set into work as consecrating and holy—that is, that it institute the measure and direction [Weisung] of the world.80 As this example unfolds into an explanation of how “world” is essentially opening, essentially allowing for the Anwesen of the gods, of the giving of measure and direction that the sacred provides, Heidegger adds, only in the later version, and in an echo of the analysis of the tool or product [Zeug] in Being and Time, that “the product [Zeug] in its reliability [Verläßlichkeit] gives this world a proper necessity and nearness.”81 The textual evidence is not sufficient to say more than merely the emphasis on nearness, as a characteristic of the world, needed to be better underscored, and that the analysis of reliability lets one see that. (One should also suggest that Heidegger may have meant both the

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temple and the peasant shoes to stand for worlds that are now only available to us in ruins—in their absence, and no longer in their positive role.) But the addition of the product, or tool, also gives a contour to the published version, a contour that Derrida is worried about. That is, the force of abandon is linked to the world where openness and gathering are tied together as essential to world—to what humans have and plants, stones and animals don’t have.82 In the flight of the gods, we are called towards something of the force of their originary gathering—a force that our faith in the world of products (as ready to hand, not as present to hand) still displays as the essential directedness of world. Having a world, producing in a world, if one sees the originary force of that “worlding,” is good and holy—is what the giving of room, as a free giving of space, as essentially Dasein’s activity, in its proper nearness, is. Derrida thematizes this movement, where nearness is still privileged, as the movement of restitution—of naturalizing the choice of the example, and the work of the hand, in their opening of human spaces. The question for Derrida is why the gesture of art should be tied to the force of that “gift or originary abandon” called Verläßlichkeit, and to which all reattaching returns83 and not to the force of the movement of the hand as dissemination, as impact, rift and closure, as potentially, even necessarily, a risky and monstrous birth84 —as a force that is not foreign to us, but which we have always refused to see except in its pre-figured conclusions. To see the diffusive power in the figure itself, perhaps, is yet the uncanniest of arts. If, in other words, Heidegger was trying to find an essence to technology within the movements of reliability that pertain to the hand, as the movement of belonging to or within a world, Derrida will want to say that no such place of essence can be secured—rather, the risk that compels us to form, to move toward the immanent absence (the interior steresis) that language would be, and thus to abandon both the certainty of the epistemological subject and the openness of the Dasein in its world, is not a movement within our essence. It is, instead, and as we have seen in various ways in terms of Derrida’s encounters with Hegel, the movement at the limit of that space. But Heidegger is a thinker of the Riß, of the absencing in presence, and not of the limiting of space. The clue lies with the unnerving presence of that which is not of a world—that is, in other words, with what Heidegger called art in its originary force as disclosive of beings.85 But the Riß demanded by, called for, joined to, the appearance of this truth, is the rift of earth and world and the stroke that holds the form together.86 Stated

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positively, it is the way in which the world itself claims our trust—claims us, that is, as the site of its unfolding. Derrida steals the frame, or prevents the effacement of the frame, of the reliability—a frame that would ensure the proper direction of the institution of the form of belonging to a world. The violence, and unnaturalizeable exteriority of this “framing gesture,” of the Gegenwärtigkeit and Anwesenheit of the simplest line or most natural example, is what cannot be effaced in the return to the nearness “proper” to the world as gathering—this violence, perhaps, is nothing but the unsettling proximity of that abyss at the edge of the simplest of forms. The trust that replaces modernity’s certainty—as a movement of sustaining oneself within a ground would replace, as the more sacred form, the justified true belief in the God of ontotheology—may not call us to assume the powers of providing a place for meaning. In that sense, one does not return into the space of the same trust; the shoes are neither restituted to the peasant woman nor to Heidegger (nor to Van Gogh, or even to his actual painting). The trust, in other words, may not be a trust in singularity and the truth of the unitary trait. It may, with Derrida, be the trust that every singularity will be accessible to iteration—that it will be transcended and deformed— and thus renewed “in writing.” It would be, then, a trust in novelty, in the “to come” as such. And yet, both the trust in a proper being of the present and the trust in a necessary future (not a necessary shape to the future, but of a future at all) would exclude the silence of friends, their darkness, at the place where experience loses its frame and its certainty. To trust, not in God or salvation, but that a world may come to be shared through the meaningless contact with a vanishing presence—is this not more difficult than even bearing responsibility for the shining of the sun?87 And perhaps—in that difficulty and against returning either to a place where we once trusted in the world or moving forward into a place where we hope to become capable of that trust (where we risk, as Derrida says, without reserve)—the silence of others is what allows us to understand our specific, and not merely infinite, responsibility? Perhaps, that is, the task of sustaining a world can still claim us, beyond what is possible to accomplish. How do we come to trust, then, in such a difficult abandon? How do we come to trust a singularity, or an instant, within which we do not belong, the truth of which we cannot bear? How do we come to trust that beauty, which, as Rilke says of his terrifying angel, “disdains to destroy us”? Didi-Huberman several times emphasizes the way in which something seems to lie hidden in Tony Smith’s sculpture—he thinks of it as the

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possibility of loss, of the Fort/Da as an uncanny game of chance. It draws us toward making that gesture, compels the loss, the closure and the dispersion. But is it simply because the game of seeing and losing is “natural” to the species, or constitutive for consciousness as such? Or, even, is it that the game is the most essential moment of all presence—the Anwesen of distancing at the heart of Dasein? Does the presence of a world, beyond the particular given thing, call for the efficacious gesture of granting meaning, or does the thing itself, in its reticent contours, its refusal to either simply belong or absolutely separate itself, call forth a world? In the absence of a world, perhaps, in “empty or abandoned landscapes,” things begin to compel us toward them, where they don’t reference our capacity to make sense in the world, where they nonetheless carry the weight of their form. The silence evoked At this point, then, I would like to speak to the contours of a reference that refuses its completion, that refuses its perfection or return into its original and proper place, its becoming reliable or certain, in form. In the presence of the black box, the element of aesthetic contact, perhaps, would have been contained in its “simplest” or most elemental force. But, against many of the self-interpretations of minimalism, the gesture does not so much present the force of an object, already sufficient unto itself, as underscore the difficulty of presence, the not simple presence of an object that constantly contracts back into itself, into a space of reticence that would not belong to the subject’s powers, and yet which would not exist without the subject delaying the passage. The motion of absence orders the subject, as the form of belonging within, or more precisely, of “trusting” that motion, and the absencing motion thus constitutes the continuing precedence of form. That precedence, however, is not simple—it is not congruent, for example, with the supposedly simple fact that all that is can be thought, or given form. The precedence is not the result of trauma, of the striking impressions of earlier life, or even the forceful impressions achieved in the present.88 The movement toward form is itself stretched—deformed—toward that difficult and ultimately unsustainable precedence, toward the place where thought will be given its charge and bearing, its sacred gravity. The form, as a motion of absencing, of abandon to a trust in the world that cannot be justified, is the “element” of our being drawn outside of ourselves. Beyond the constitution of the self, we exist in an element that is

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not ours, not a product of our activity and yet not the site of our passivity in the face of a natural (or divine) activity that we can only witness. Perhaps, in the language of the trace as used by Lévinas, the substitution for the other would be the very movement of an element, would constitute the good for a motion that is not oriented by possession or determination— the place of our hollow, open, and ever-increasing desire. If so, and against Lévinas, the element would not be sustained as the trace of a powerful formlessness, causing form to come into being, or even “weakly” calling for us to use our powers to carry form into presence,89 but only as the movement that steals away form itself—the call is thus heard as apocalyptic, as the coming of a destructive grace, not as the nostalgia for a long lost origin or return home. For Tony Smith, the element of the displacements, it would seem, draws us back toward the students with him in the car, in a silence maintained between people travelling together through an abandoned landscape. Such is the end of art, not as its fruition into the freedom of an expressive humanity, even if no longer working out the implications of a grand narrative, but the end of art as the staging of the limit. Thus, perhaps, such a gesture would even be the end of staging the difference between the finite and the infinite at the place of the human; thus, perhaps, a reticent gesture of presence could even establish a “sacred” character to human endeavor precisely by robbing us of the frame of ontotheological production, the frame that had ultimately separated us from the sacred. No creative voice is shared; no paradigm or way of speaking is established. One finds only a terrible and urgent silence, a silence that moves us toward a shared destruction, an end of humanity. In the story Smith recounts, and breaking with his own interpretation, the experience “alone” is not all that matters—for the experience, in some sense, was shared by those others also in the car, the students riding silently along with him. What might it mean to evoke the presence, in an offhand way, of a couple of students in the car, never even given their own names? What would it mean to feel compelled to communicate a silence, both to say more about those others and to speak to those others? Would either their presence or their absence tell us anything about “abandoned landscapes without cultural precedence” or “created worlds without tradition”? It seems, instead, that both the gesture of art and the gesture demanded by art seek to join us within a shared abandon—a shared movement of destructive grace. Or, in somewhat less universal terms, an art after the end of our infinite trust in presence, in all its forms, must

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somehow include a gesture that trusts the abandon and is reticent in the face of the passage. In the terms we have just seen with Heidegger and Derrida, the gesture that neither gathers nor disseminates, but that seeks to sustain a place of shared trust, without betraying the movement, constitutes the basic shape of our singularity—both in art and philosophy. I see in an unadorned and anonymously manufactured black box, with the slim evocations of Tony Smith’s story about his work, a different and more difficult demand for the unity of the aesthetic gesture: the technological movement of appropriating possibilities, at the heart of our conceptualization of the place of the subject in traditional metaphysics, calls for the subject to oppose itself to the world, as form to its matter; the end of that opposition then found the unity of form and matter to precede all judgments about a particular form; and finally, the attempt to locate that unity within the efficacy of a work of art gave way to the realization that one addresses a silence, in others and within oneself, and not a force or capacity. The unity claims us as absencing, not as the simple fact of absence, or the enfolding force of presence. The unity, in other words, is carried in the claim, and in its multiplicity as we turn toward sustaining that claim; it is not a claim that comes to us in the name of a unity that is simple. The community we share is based, if we can put it this baldly in terms of Smith’s work, on the difficulty of a gesture that captures the singularity of presence without betraying the movement of absence. No longer: What can we do? How can the best be actualized, or most efficaciously realized, from out of the possibilities available to the material or medium? Instead: How are we drawn into the spaces of our trust? How will our gestures have taken the shape, in the difficult abandon of an aesthetic motion, of that which will bear our trust without pretending to eternity? We “must” trust our time, and not our being, or our power to be, because we don’t possess our own time in the way that we are supposed to have possessed our position within the whole. We must trust our time, even though neither the trust nor the time itself is necessary; trusting time is not even, as a matter of fact, what we are always already doing in our practically oriented world. To betray that movement of trust is an ontological fault, and exceeds questions of being punished by a greater power, either political or supernatural, for not complying with a moral law. And yet: To understand the radical nature of this transformation is to see how a destructive grace can still claim us as a sacred task. To understand this transformation, however, is also to understand that the difficulty of a trustworthy aesthetic

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gesture is even more difficult than sustaining the sun. We must declare the death of God without believing that we can simply step into his all-creative shoes. We must renounce, even, the belief that the simplicity of the world’s creation—its unity as one creation—allows us to honestly touch every part of the whole. Where we experience immediacy, in other words, it is as the immediacy of a difficult task, and not the punctuality of an instantaneous fact. Touching that difficulty, somehow living within the difficulty of a presence constantly stealing away, is the most fundamental movement of sustaining the world. There are perhaps only a few things left to say, as the absurdity of speaking about silence gives way to the evocations of silence, of that absurd movement, and I stop writing. If that act of speaking is not the freedom of the artistic gesture, not the creative efficacy of producing meaning or shape, then that movement, no matter how loud it is, will only be silently compelling; we will have rightfully become indifferent to the determinate demand of a present voice, the expressive voice of an infinite productivity (no matter how construed) that would encompass all particularity. If we may speak of a “voice,” at all, it would have to be an apocalyptic call; the voice would have to announce the common spaces of the end of the world, and the “actual nothingness” that moves within, and as, our lives. In the temple that Heidegger evoked, a people learned how to pray and how to belong to the abandon and the trust one places in a world. In the almost method that deconstruction apparently constitutes, one learns to trust the evocation, the force that plays itself against the center, and against the places of our already gathering trust. Against any simple opposition of two methods for speaking about art, both Heidegger and Derrida are reaching toward the place where we, as capable of thought, belong to the movement of form—and thus, to the passage of time. And in that order of belonging, after all, we precede the existence of the sun. But what constitutes the place of trust, if the movements precede the constituted spaces of logical and temporal progression? An artistic gesture, perhaps, that evokes the silence of this belonging, and not its hidden voices. Not, in other words, the motion that one will have always already passed through, as the future that has always already been promised. Rather, “an attempt at something,” as Virginia Woolf once characterized an ideal art, that does not succeed, nor represent, but that puts absence into play. If we are promised anything in our experience, as it has become fashionable to affirm in messianic tones, it is only the apocalypse, the destructive grace of absolute nothingness, and

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not the presence of a new form of sacred life. Such would be a world of silences—a world where one trusted in the silence of others, in their varied attempts to reach the form of an aesthetic or sensible communication that honestly sustained that silence—even when one was never certain of the logic of the articulation, nor the force of producing a meaning. Thus, in our trajectory, the acknowledgement that Cavell and Fried called for must be transformed, and not merely refuted. Art no longer takes its clues from the powerful gestures of humans who make meaning, and who are certain of the beauty of such created moments of presence, but rather, art seeks an audience that can begin to trust the fragility of experience—the absent traces that draw us out of ourselves and into the spaces between the world’s absence and its productive forces. The final problem, then, was how to keep the positive movement along the surface from itself creating a new metaphysics of transcendence—of a necessary movement that gives a necessary orientation to every singularity, and thus allowed us to shed the responsibility for our contact with the world. The sun, in other words, is slipped back in as permanently precedent to us in any metaphysics where the movement itself can be infinitely trusted. The movement of nothingness, then, cannot be the abstract and infinite nothingness embodied in the dubious insight that everybody dies. Rather, the movement must be a deformation of the positive movement—a reticence that deforms that movement without any cause outside of itself— and thus a nothingness that sustains its nothingness, instead of too quickly transforming itself into position. At the site of our singularity, we no longer have the determination of a fact, of a thing among the infinite possible things one could encounter, but must respond to the specific demands that striate our being, must respond to the urgency of a world that is receding and that cannot be recaptured. No longer the experience of the limit, the place where I know myself as finite, partial, and therefore encompassed by a formless support, I am responsible for the deformation, the movement into formlessness, and the fragility of the sojourn within form. I assume the shape of a place that has been abandoned by the gods—betrayed, even, by the efficacy of gesture as such. I am responsible, then, for the fragility of the silence, the transcendence it offers, and cannot assume that the places of my intimacy will continue, no matter how forceful my words. The task of sustaining the sun becomes more difficult—not a more complicated task requiring simple steps, but a task that is not to be simply completed.

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I can fulfill my responsibilities only in words, and they are the wrong tools for establishing a space of trust, a space where the underlying nothingness is not betrayed—this need not be the tragedy of representation, of the “inevitable paralysis of manifestation,” however. The word may take its specific shape as an unending abandon, a motion toward others without hope of redemption; the word need not be the tragically inadequate, or necessarily violent, framing of the matter at hand. The shape of our art, of our aesthetic experience, in other words, may yet be capable of bearing the fragility, and the needs, of thought, but only where it resists the passage through the difficulty, and thus remains within the aesthetic gesture in its terrifying and destructive grace, in the contours of a sacred task that cannot be shirked but can be failed; such is the yet more terrifying and compelling silence of touching difficulty.

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Notes Notes to Introduction 1. Bataille, Œuvres Complètes, vol. 8 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 190–96. The lecture is from the same time period, and with similar themes, to pieces collected and translated in The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, Stuart Kendall, Ed., Stuart Kendall and Michelle Kendall, Trans., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. 2. Although Ambrosino’s name is not familiar, he had been a constant presence in the milieu that Bataille inhabited. He was trained as a physicist but read extensively in philosophy and was a founding member of Acéphale with Bataille and Pierre Klossowski in 1936. An elegy on the occasion of his death by Francis Marmande can be found under the title “Georges Ambrosino ou le savoir encyclopédique,” Le Monde, Vendredi 2 novembre, 1984. 3. The semantic conception of truth is based on taking the sentence as the bearer of truth, as opposed to having a psychological judgment or belief count as true or false. One then has to have a framing language—a “meta-language” that speaks about an “object language” in which you actually speak about things— that tells you the meaning of a sentence being true in a given language, so that, in the course of providing techniques for symbolization, one doesn’t confuse how sentences relate to each other with how they purport to represent the world. Tarsky’s classic example is the proposition that claims to be false—the “Liar’s paradox”. Good liars, after all, are not refuted around a single sentence, but concerning a net of interrelated activities and assertions that fail to sustain a full and meaningful contact with the world. Post-positivist analytic philosophy recognizes something of this with their talk about theory-laden perceptions and holism in language and theory construction, but the question about the movement of language is not asked: rather, they ask about the development of series of frames which in each particular instance are punctuated or static. 4. A recent example with detailed summaries of current positions, and which is quite explicit in the reliance on spatial models of predication, is The Ontology of Time, L. Nathan Oaklander, (New York: Prometheus Books, 2004). 5. I will speak to the development of analytic philosophy in other contexts. Very quickly, we note, as a privileged example, that Quine’s “ontological relativism” is really a theory about how meanings are always contained within a language, although there is a contact with “empirical” reality at the “periphery” of that whole way of approaching the world. Thus, “ontological relativity” is “[p]araphrase in some antecedently familiar vocabulary.” (Quine, “Ontological Relativity,” Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982, p. 54.) That the speakers of the language are contained within a physical world, unfolding in time, is never

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questioned; rather, the world allows itself to be spoken of in many ways, and without determining which way is uniquely true. Most attacks on Quine have taken the form of defending a unique “best way” of speaking about the world, but the issue from our standpoint is how the world, in any of its “possible instantiations,” is sustained within time—a problem, I argue below, that requires abandoning the very idea of an instant, or of a determination of time at a particular point. 6. My eventual answer is that the sharing must be understood as destructive, but we will have to sort out the dialectical transformations of our understanding of genesis to make this claim philosophically sound. Thomas J. J. Altizer, by my reading, suggests something in this direction, when he ties genesis to apocalypse in his theological interpretations of the death of God (cf. Altizer, Godhead and the Nothing, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003). My worry, even with a strong reading of the apocalyptic voice, is that he remains committed to a redeeming light—which is perhaps only to say that he remains theological in his orientation. 7. The notion of a frame creating a situation where things become true or false, instead of humans immediately living within the truth of their perceptions, recently championed by Hacking and in some ways already in Kuhn and Foucault, captures some of what is at stake here, but leaves open the problem of how communicating with others at a particular time expresses the originality of framing a situation. Only if one is compelled into the frame—only if the frame has some “formal force” can we avoid a relativism where we pretend to choose between frames, between subject positions, between styles of discourse, etc. The frame, in other words, cannot bear reality without sustaining an emergence into form as such at the site of the individual. We are not looking for the account of how great men changed the frame, but of how each individual sustains their place. That even the language of “framing” must be abandoned, or rather that we should speak of an “interior” framing that resists participation in an encompassing movement, instead of somehow constituting that participation, will be the key to our final chapter on the difficulty of aesthetic gestures. 8. One could perhaps say, more carefully, that existence lends itself to expression at the place of time’s becoming. That existence itself is “expressive” is only meant to suggest that they both believe, independent of their opinion about the direction of time, that existence “pushes out” into a diversity of forms. Even, that is, if the expressions are all “interior articulations” within the great sphere of being, the expanding diversity of what is—through the functioning of determination—counts as “expressive.” 9. As we will see in our treatment of Kant, below, this transformation is grounded in an implicit form of transcendence, and, as with Kant’s criticism of transcendental realism, any empiricism that ignores the question of the transformation into the ideal will remain obscure in its very foundations. Recent

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adaptations of Kant within the realism/anti-realism debates all play on the various ways in which objectivity as such is itself constituted, and the return to Kantian questions without reaffirming transcendental idealism as pejoratively understood. Andrew Cutrofello, Continental Philosophy: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2005), makes the interesting case that analytic philosophy grew from the priority of the idea of spontaneous receptivity, and all the manipulations of logic made possible by the freedom from determination inherent in that idea of spontaneity. Although it would take a good deal of time to work through all the philosophical development, he has a very good case through Ayer (and perhaps up through today), and my purpose is only to accentuate the sense of formal priority assigned to the moment of separation between language and speaker. 10. It is important to note that we do not mean that analytic philosophy is committed to a naive realism: the objects of the world, in fact, need no more “substance” than the objects of the language. With Davidson, for example, one has “reference without reality,” and yet every reality still depends on an event of being, an “anomalous monism” that gives force to what is as real. My intent, relative to such projects, is not to reinstate the knowing subject beyond every collection of events, but to see how the events are striated by demands on speakers and never fully emerge into being; much less should they be said to constitute the basic elements from which building is constructed. 11. To my knowledge, Ayer doesn’t speak of Bataille, but a decade later he mentions Merleau-Ponty in his overview, Philosophy in the 20th Century, and uses the same example, with the same sense that it is simply inconceivable that one would give priority to the human over the sun. Ayer, A.J., Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, (New York: Random House, 1982), pp. 224–25. 12. If, as Bataille suggests, Ambrosino was behind the idea of expenditure he was developing at that time, I am assuming that Ambrosino would also have looked for physical consequences to the idea. In our terms, as we develop them below, the problem with absolute expenditure is that it flattens the sense of movement by presupposing the expansive sense of expenditure. 13. We will have much to say, in the first part, below, about the “force” that form can claim—it is a sustaining within, or a way of giving shape to the dispersed, and not a capacity, within a given frame, to move an object out of its “natural” trajectory. Yet, even if it doesn’t equal mass times acceleration, “force” is the right word for capturing the strength through which relations are deployed through a region (as existing, or as real). In terms of the analogy to physics, we are speaking of the force of a field before the object is affected by it. But even that analogy is too dualistic. One should speak, instead, of the way in which the impressing of form onto matter is not “innocent,” but is necessarily deformative—one should speak of a field that only comes into being when the object enters into its range.

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14. Like the German word Geist, the French word ésprit can be translated as either spirit or mind. Merleau-Ponty wants to give it the full resonance of an embodied invigoration while retaining the sense of a cognitive capacity. One must keep this resonance in play for Bataille, as well, when he speaks of destruction, below. 15. Le visible et l’ invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 71–72. Except where otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 16. The criticisms should have been familiar to Ayer, already, through Heidegger’s Being and Time and Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. Much of contemporary continental philosophy follows in these criticisms, but a clear and intelligent account of the historical stakes and its recent incarnations can be found in Edward S. Casey’s The Fate of Place (Berkeley: University of California, 1997). 17. Freedom, although preeminently a political idea, is taken up into modern science as freedom from prejudice and not freedom to perform an act, although the freedom to frame the interpretation has shown itself to be the true basis for any system of naming that can claim to be free from presuppositions. That modern science misunderstood the problem of freedom, when it assumed the ground of symbolic manipulations are given as the freedom to set a frame into place (to establish a system of representations), is widely, but not universally accepted among contemporary philosophers of science. What it would mean to understand freedom correctly, though, is not well understood, and as of 1951, the question had barely been posed. What one must avoid, I will argue here, is simply returning to a model of conceptual frames determined by previous conceptual frames, taken up successively within the course of a determinately unfolding history. Freedom, in other words, must continue to be a difficult problem—neither denounced as an illusion nor reduced to a possession of the subject as such, if we are to understand how the scientific enterprise is sustained through its transformations. 18. p. 88. 19. p. 83. 20. Le visible et l’ invisible , (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 73; translated by Alphonso Lingis under the title The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968). 21. Œuvres complètes, vol. 8, 192. 22. Georges Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance informe (Paris: Macula, 1995) gives a thorough account of the Hegelian and materialist side of Bataille’s early work. Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois, who consider themselves opposed to Didi-Huberman’s reading, organized an exhibit at the Centre Pompidou around Bataille’s conception of the informe, the catalogue for which has been published in English as Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997). One will see, below, that the movement from formlessness to form is what

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grounds the idea of a trace in Plotinus, and our problematic is in many ways encapsulated in the project of understanding a basic gesture of aesthetic contact that is not about following that direction of the production of meaning— Bataille, again, suggesting the direction, but not having fully understood the difficulty of changing that basic gesture of formlessness. 23. Œuvres complètes, vol. 8, 194. 24. Thus, in the book on the cave paintings of Lascaux, Bataille will identify art with the moment of ritual sacrifice and transgression, but also with dance and play—in short, with that which affirms communication outside of its utility: “The important point here is that, in its essence, and practice, art expresses this moment of religious transgression, that it expresses it alone seriously enough and that it would be the only outcome of it. It is the state of transgression that commands the desire, the demand, in a word, of a sacred world. Transgression was always translated into prodigious forms: such were the forms of poetry or of music, of dance, of tragedy or of painting. The forms of art have no other origin than the celebration of all time, and the celebration, which is religious, is tied to the deployment of all the resources of art. We can’t imagine an art independent of the movement that engenders the celebration. Play is the transgression in a point of the law of labor: art, play and transgression only meet when bound together, in a unique moment of negating the principles presiding over the regularity of labor.” Œuvres complètes, vol. 9, 41. 25. Œuvres complètes, vol. 8, 196. 26. Bataille insists on the sovereignty being tied to the fact that the subject recognizes itself “at stake” in the “play” of the world where it is equivalent to “the void and the absence of limit” of a “subjectivity without content,” a “sovereignty of the instant” that must be communicated, but as “sacred, having no object, escapes our apprehension” (Œuvres complètes, vol. 8, 410–11). 27. Œuvres complètes, vol. 8, 194. Notes to Part One 1. Emmanuel Lévinas, Autrement qu’ être (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974, 2nd ed., 1978), 184; my translation. Also translated by Alphonso Lingis under the title Otherwise than being (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1981), 116–17. 2. The closest contour within the present writing will turn out to be Heidegger, whose move from early Augustinian commitments to later Nietzschean concerns is much discussed. The particular insight I refer to here, however, is more overtly theological in tone, although I would say precisely at the point where the supposedly secular claims of modern philosophy are most dubious, and thus where the distinction between theology and philosophy is most troubled. In the Jewish tradition, Franz Rosenzweig’s Der Stern der Erlösung (Frankfurt am Main: Bibliothek Suhrkamp, 1988, 20; translated by Barbara

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Galli as The Star of Redemption [University of Wisconsin, 2005]), claims to have taken his conception of God’s nature from Schelling, and his conception of God’s freedom from Nietzsche; that the actual existence of the Jewish people represents the feeling of God (453–59) culminates the movement because it allows one to see the unity of that creative nature and the immediacy of the divine will in the feeling of freedom in existence. In the Christian tradition, Thomas J. J. Altizer is perhaps the strongest exponent of the death of God allowing for the freedom of a radically new Christianity, explicitly in his early Gospel of Christian Atheism (Westminster, 1966), chapter 5, and somewhat more carefully in terms of the idea of a divine Trieb and history as beginning in Genesis and Apocalypse (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1990) and in The Genesis of God (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993). Already for Hegel, and as both Rosenzweig and Altizer deeply understand, the possibility of radical transformation in beginning a movement of and as history has a “religious” content, because the orientation toward the will is not given without a represented history (a tradition), which is what suffers the deformation of a new beginning. Although we will speak to the myriad aspects of this question, which is central for any confrontation between the thought of Heidegger and Derrida, one notes, immediately, that the human community at stake is not an already given ground—the movement of that community, in its signifiers, and its self-deformations, constitutes the basic question. The gesture is not possessed by a human, but comes to define what a human can be (we are not, in other words, returning to a model of humanism based on a presupposition about human nature). The idea of movement allows us to see both “mystical” religious belief and Nietzsche’s affirmations of the will to power otherwise than as “irrational,” and I will limit my observations to showing how we might frame the question of intelligence independently of the presuppositions of modern rationalism, holding admittedly urgent theological questions at bay for other occasions. Speaking of spiritual movement in terms of Augustine only came to seem essential in contrast to the recent readings of Paul—notably by Badiou, Žižek and Agamben—that make the enacted distinction between will and intellect, both enacted as such in the subject, foundational for universalist thought. 3. I have spoken at length of the postmodern idea of an expressive movement, and of my problems with it, in Without a Woman to Read: Toward the Daughter in Postmodernism, and Lingis often evokes variations on this idea of emptying the self, but the most pertinent work of his, in the present context, is The Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). 4. I’m using the English word “claim” or phrase, “claim on us,” to think through a constellation of ideas in Heidegger. Primarily, as a matter of interpretation, the German “Anspruch”—which is also translated as “address” or “call”— stands in the center of Heidegger’s own writings on these issues, especially in

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his late writings, in the phrase, “Anspruch des Seins.” The language of the “call of being” has come under extraordinarily virulent attacks, and much like the idea that “the nothing nothings,” has found many professed Heideggerians marginalizing that language in their accounts of his work either from fear of attack or misunderstanding, as if such talk were a mere tic or eccentricity to be ignored in the master. The most common worry is that Heidegger has reified an idea of God, behind the scenes yet all-powerful, and then placed words in His mouth—the “call of being” would be nothing but the voice of God, in that case. Others have seen Heidegger’s approach as too death-centered, and as refusing to see the patently present voice of an encompassing life. A patient defense of how the idea of a temporal horizon is played out in terms of the claim being has on us, which would be necessary if our only purpose were to render a reading of Heidegger, would have to follow the sense in which the form of bearing the world as meaningfully human cannot be reduced to the act of producing a world. Belonging to a movement beyond the present is the essence of having a temporal horizon for being, and if some of the language is borrowed from previous ways of speaking about transcendence, this has to do with the way in which the traces of the past constitute the horizon. The claim of being, on the other hand, is the movement such that we are asked to take on the form of bearing that movement. We’ve already made a case for this only seemingly paradoxical language in the account of Bataille’s presentation on not-knowing, but let a small later piece of Heidegger’s ‘Technology and Turning” stand in for the more patient, and still needed, explication: “Where and how does disclosing happen, if it is not the mere product of humans? We don’t need to look far. We only need to see without presuppositions that which has always already staked a claim on humanity, and thus decided that only as claimed in this way can we be human.” Die Technik und die Kehre, 18. That the event of being in Ereignis is a way of speaking about how this claim bears temporality is an extension of the original question, and not a break with the attempt to think from out of a temporal horizon. Thus, in the last lines of “My Path to Phenomenology,” from the very end of Heidegger’s writings, one finds that phenomenology is the “enduring possibility that thought respond to the claim of what is to be thought.” 5. Schürmann has the most accessible, if simplified, Heideggerian account, in Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, reprint, 1990); the force of becoming implicit in his understanding of the conflictual event, and reflected in his readings of Heidegger and the Presocratics, however, fails to see the difficulty of appearance in the light of the nothing, or of steresis, as we speak of it, below. A careful account by a scholar of Ancient Greek Literature, predictably unfriendly to Heidegger, can be found in Raymond Adolph Prier, Thauma Idesthai: The Phenomenology of Sight and Appearance in Archaic Greek, Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1989. As with many other readings unfriendly to Heidegger on this topic,

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much of the disagreement seems to rest on a misunderstanding of how deeply the contestation of the subject in Heidegger must run: if he is saying that ancient Greek subjects experienced truth and appearance in terms of concealing, then he is—as Prier notes—manifestly mistaken (280, n. 70). If, instead, Heidegger is saying that the demand for light has a structure of urgency that precedes and sustains the subject and is not, itself, light—then much can be made of the clues in Homer. The problem, as with the rest of the present writing, as well, is to identify what calls to be thought without identifying it with the effects produced for a subject who receives an idea from outside. 6. Translations are my own. I have tried to err on the side of English syntax, rather than reproducing all of the family resemblances at stake in Heidegger’s renderings of Aristotle. This citation is from Wegmarken, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 9 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1976), 230–31 (also translated under the title of Pathmarks, [William McNeill, Ed.], Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 177) 7. In “Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens,” from 1964, Heidegger will clarify his position by admitting that even in Homer the word aletheia, as an expression of truth, refers to correctness and reliability and not to the originary disclosure or openness of beings. What is to be seen, in the essential change in truth, is that this openness stems from the ways in which we speak of correspondence between a representation and the thing coming to presence and that the reduction to the single form of correctness or reliability makes it impossible to experience truth understood as disclosure. Zur Sache des Denkens (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1969), 77–78, translated under the title “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” in On Time and Being (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 70. See also, John Sallis, “At the Threshold of Metaphysics,” Delimitations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995, 2nd ed.). 8. A remarkable account of this historically fateful transformation as represented in Heidegger’s later work on language can be found in Cathrin Nielsen, Die Entzogene Mitte: Gegenwart bei Heidegger, (Königshausen & Neumann: Würzburg, 2003). Against the broadly Gadamerian reading of continuity in historical unfolding, she emphasizes the ecstatic character of belonging to time in Heidegger and the ways that keeps us from simply belonging to the unfolding of the Good—cf. Gadamer, “Die Idee des Guten zwischen Plato und Aristoteles,” Gesammelte Werke 7 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck Verlag, 1991); translated by P. Christopher Smith as The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). 9. Cf., Catherine Malabou, Le Change Heidegger: Du Fantastique en Philosophie, (Paris: Éditions Léo Scheer, 2004). 10. Cf., especially, “Nietzsches Wort: ‘Gott ist tot,’” Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1950); translated by William Lovitt under the title “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead,’” The Question Concerning Technology

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and Other Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1977) and more recently by Kenneth Haynes in Off the Beaten Track (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 11. Wegmarken, 282–83; Pathmarks, 215–16. 12. “Given Aristotle’s understanding of the revelatory function of logos as a categorial-assertoric ‘making-present’ of entities, for him the analogical unity of the many modes of the presentness of entities was pure presentness as such, pure energeia. If Heidegger hoped to justify his claim that such a formulation does not disclose the authentic meaning of being, he would have to reformulate critically the fundamental meaning of logos at a level deeper than the categorialassertoric unity of synthesis and diairesis, at which Aristotle stopped. If it could be shown... that the apophantic logos of Aristotle is a derived form of a more basic ‘dynamic’ or kinetic (Heidegger says ‘temporal’) form of disclosure, then the way would be opened for stating the unified meaning of being not as pure energeia but as dynamis and movement, that is, as energeia ateles.” Sheehan, Thomas, “On the Way to Ereignis: Heidegger’s Interpretation of Phusis,” Continental Philosophy in America, edited by Silverman, Sallis, and Seebohm, (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1983), 142. (My ellipse). 13. Paraphrasing Wegmarken, 283; Pathmarks, 216. 14. The idea of a process, here, should not be read mechanically; the play on the German words for process, access and going is untranslatable, but it is key to the sense in which the motion of thinking is tied to the process of articulating and belonging to a world. The German reads: “ist Gang als Aufgang zum Aufgehen und so allerdings ein In-sich-zurück-Gehen, zu sich, das ein Aufgehen bleibt,” and is found on Wegmarken, 293. The Aristotelian phrase itself has often been attacked as incomprehensible, but a number of interpretations of Aristotle’s idea of movement in a Heideggerian vein have been attempted. Cf., for an exceptionally clear example, Rémi Brague, “Note sur la définition du mouvement (Physique, III, 1–3)” in La Physique d’Aristote et les conditions d’une science de la nature (Paris: Vrin, 1991). 15. David Ross’ commentary on, and at times translation of, the relevant sentences runs, in its somewhat larger context: “If the fact that a bed would not produce a bed shows that not its shape but its material is its nature, the fact that a man produces a man shows that his form is his nature. Phusis in the sense of generation is a process toward nature. True, healing, is a process not towards the healing art but towards health, but phusis in the sense of generation is a process toward nature. That which is growing is as such passing from something towards something, and what is produced in the process of growth is that towards which, not that from which, the growing thing is passing. Therefore shape is nature.” 16. Not even “having had” a complete future, since that would suggest we can at least know what about the past wasn’t finished.

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17. Giorgio Colli’s early defense of the Presocratics against Aristotle, La Natura ama Nascondersi (Milano: Adelphi Edizioni 1988 [originally published in 1948)] offers a lucid critique of the Aristotelian prejudices considering shape, power and possibility. Aubenque, as we will see below, confers something of this conception of phusis upon Aristotle himself while Heidegger will contest the sense of a constant and purely natural striving within phusis toward the truth. 18. In the choice of this work, one should see that certain problems striate generations of work—not that Aubenque somehow shaped succeeding generations. (He has had a great influence, notably in France, but belongs to larger movements of thought). He represents the state of the thinking about Aristotle, in contrast to Heidegger, at the time that Derrida and Lévinas are writing about a “trace” that could contest Heidegger’s Aristotelianism. 19. Aubenque, Le problème de l’ être chez Aristote, fn. 1, 420; Wegmarken, 249f.; Pathmarks, 187f. 20. The theme of the “to come” has been appropriated in manifold contexts, many unfriendly to Heidegger’s sense of articulation. Ten pages, constituting all of the sixth section, treat importantly of the “to come” (“Die Zu-Künftigen”) in Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), Gesamtausgabe, vol. 65 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1989). Schürmann’s Des hégémonies brisées (translated by Reginald Lilly under the title Broken Hegemonies {Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003]), ends on a discussion of the absence of articulation here, and the ways in which it is held out as the singularization to come (750–762; translation 575ff.). The originality of our project lies in giving sense to a shaping gesture that does not take the singularity of determination as its model—a gesture that communicates the loss of singularity rather than its achievement or even affirmation as “to come.” 21. Aubenque, Le problème de l’ être chez Aristote, 459–60. 22. Aubenque, 488–89. 23. This is against Aubenque’s own claim to have subsumed Heidegger’s question of being within Aristotle’s question, 417, n.1. 24. Aubenque, 402. 25. Wegmarken, 285; Pathmarks, 217–18. 26. Heidegger repeatedly addresses these questions at the point where the transition between Leibniz and Kant becomes fateful for his understanding of the movement of being. Leibniz’s dynamic understanding leads to Kant, but both suffer a similar blindness concerning the demand for the unity of thought and its possibility. Cf., especially, Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund (Stuttgart: Neske, 1957); translated by Reginald Lilly as The Principle of Reason (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 27. This accusation of having hypostasized being has been often leveled against Heidegger. In Lévinas, for example, the attack is against the tyranny of ontology,

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as one is subjugated to an anonymous demand to be. Cf., Totalité et Infini (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1961, 4th ed., 1984), 17–18; translated by Alphonso Lingis as Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 46–47. See also, John Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), with an interesting defense of Heidegger against some of its main themes in William J. Richardson, “Heidegger’s Fall,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly (Spring, 1995). 28. Wegmarken, 299; Pathmarks, 228. 29. “Die Frage nach der Technik,” Die Technik und die Kehre (Pfullingen: Neske, 1962); translated by William Lovitt under the title “The Question Concerning Technology,” The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1977). 30. Wegmarken, 296. The usual reading is that Aristotle insists on the priority of positing or affirming a characteristic, so that illness is the absence of health and therefore only has a dependent existence. Cold as the absence of heat is the way that physics speaks of the two, but is phenomenologically troubling and Heidegger is playing off of the possibility of an originary steresis—something that leads our thinking and not something that only responds to what is already given (by which reading, though, Aristotle’s prime mover must still somehow operate from an originary steresis, even though it is denied to more mundane processes of form). 31. This is a close paraphrase of Wegmarken, 299–301; Pathmarks, 228–30. 32. One must contrast this sense of return to the Kantian return into the powers of representation, or insight into the “correct” representation. As we will see, at length below, the task is to prevent the return into representation from constituting a proper place of truth in the determination of meaning; the absent place of truth, in a tradition that never grasped the demand it instituted, never allows one to redeem the search by possessing a meaning, or even a proper place for the aporia. Heidegger and Derrida will be opposed to each other, on this issue, in their respective readings of Kant, Hegel and the aesthetics of originality. 33. In a purely geometric context, the trace is the marker of an orthogonality to every point—a “rectification” such that the meaningfulness of the extension of a line within a plane, for example, is guaranteed by the sense of the plane as a whole being flat. The line depends on the underlying space being rectified (if we are speaking of a function) in terms of the underlying logic of the representation. Before speaking of it as a function, one could say more straightforwardly, that the underlying space had to be fully given before a representation within that space could be trustworthy. 34. This is, unfortunately, one of the least well understood areas of Lévinas scholarship. Cf., for notable exceptions, the discussions in Robert Gibbs’ Why Ethics? Signs of Responsibility (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)

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and Bettina Bergo’s Lévinas between Ethics and Politics: For the Beauty that Adorns the Earth (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2003). I will take the fairly neutral stance that Lévinas wishes to keep the “human” from ever being present, as such, and yet wants to mark the present with the human hand (we will speak to this metaphor, at great length, below) that creates meaning—that moves from the formless to the formed. Derrida’s treatment of the trace in Of Grammatology, by contrast, is attuned to the problem of inscription, and the more general sense in which exteriority indicates a having been inscribed in presence, such that the “human” cannot be that which never enters into presence, as with Lévinas, even if the movement of presence is always about bearing meaning through impressing form onto formlessness. 35. English translators will sometimes use “vestige” or “impress” instead of “trace,” without serious damage to the sense. Here I will invariably translate with the word “trace.” 36. Ennead V.1.2, 1–10. All the citations from the Enneads follow Plotinus, The Enneads, 7 vols., trans. A.H. Armstrong, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966–67, 1984, 1988), unless otherwise noted; in all cases I have favored the lower case for substantives and made minor alterations for style and continuity. The last phrase, according to Armstrong’s note, is from Phaedrus, 245C9. The relevant context in Plato is brief: “Every soul is immortal. For that which is ever moving is immortal; but that which moves something else or is moved by something else, when it ceases to move, ceases to live. Only that which moves itself, since it does not leave itself, never ceases to move, and this is also the source and beginning of motion for all other things which have motion.” Plato, Phaedrus trans. Fowler, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1914, reprinted 1995). 37. Cf., Hadot, Pierre, Plotin ou la simplicité du regard (Paris: Gallimard, 1997 [Plon, 1963]); translated by Michael Chase as Plotinus or the Simplicity of Vision (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998). 38. The interpretive issue, here, is whether the movement of the articulation, or the shape of the articulation as achieved, constitutes the interesting insight. I am concentrating on the sense of the movement, from unshaped to shaped, as both Lévinas and Derrida mean to do with the idea of a trace; the more natural reading, because it works so well with our ontotheological tradition, is to see the visible shape taken on by the mind as dialectically conditioned by contact with the concrete world, but then to see the shapeless side of the mind—that which is not externally available—as finally the condition for all of natural becoming. There is a movement of transition between the shapes, but a clear sense in which the movement is a product of activity exerted through the imposition of the given shape. To see mind in this way, however, can lead to a reification of wholeness beyond experience—as if every activity happened within the pre-existing possibilities of mind, even if not within the possibilities

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of reason. Thus, the movement where mind asserts its priority over the natural world would “destroy” the world, but immediately redeem it in the mind (even if not in reason); the shapelessness, as recipient of all passage through time, would redeem all individuality that has been achieved because it would always reference the future comprehension of the present. I take it this theme is pervasive in the many reappropriations of Benjamin’s work on the messianic, but take special notice of John Shannon Hendrix’ Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Spirit: From Plotinus to Schelling and Hegel, New York: Peter Lang, 2005. In it, we find his summary of Hegel’s “Spirit in mind,” as a gloss on both Derrida and Hegel in regard to Plotinus: “Spirit in mind is an infinite and absolute actuality, as opposed to a realization, because it is not governed by self-differentiation or universalization in abstraction. Spirit in mind is the element of thought which is not self-differentiated or universalized in reason, which precedes selfconsciousness as an always already, as in the chôra of Plato and the diffèrance of Deconstruction. Spirit in mind is manifest to itself in itself as other than reason, as other than the scaffolding of its perception, as other than that which ‘is poured out into the asunderness of Nature and only ideally present therein...’ (§ 383, Zusatz to Philosophy of Mind). In being-for-self mind converts the other of itself to itself; it reinvents the real as within the ideal. In its manifestation of itself in its other, it destroys the other (the real) as an independent entity, and re-affirms itself in the negation of the other as other. What is left of the other is the sublime, the trace of the absence of reason within reason and within the real. Mind converts the other to a form which corresponds to its own content, through abstraction in language, and perception.” (242–3). With the present writing, by contrast, I believe that we should be working without a net: we must think of the movement of nothing without trusting, in advance, that everything will have been produced, will be recognized as having a meaning, and thus will have been received as an externalization of Spirit’s activity. The trace, in that anti-Hegelian sense, may be better understood as the remnant of a demand for understanding, without its own power, rather than as the remains of a power that is not properly expressed by the individual words, but somehow is indicated through the production of those words and, itself, always remains beyond those words. The gravity of the trace, in the epigraph from Lévinas that begins this part of the book, is thus a style of being commanded by others, of being commanded into the external, and not a promise that the externalization will have been received, somewhere, as meaningful. 39. Schürmann, Des hégémonies brisées, sees this motion at the origin of a conflictual event (cf., 213–15). There are, one should emphasize, numerous ways of characterizing the duality of that function; Schürmann tries to account for ways the idea of conflict will be of importance to both Heidegger and Derrida, and thus provides something closer to an understanding of the problem of the force of form at the place of subjectivity.

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40. The power, unlike in Hegel, is not yet situated in the force of the recognition—in some sense, the subject is placed at the point of mediation between infinite and finite, but the recognition of one’s eternity is a movement toward the inwardness of self, and not, as in a dialectic of recognition, a movement through exteriority that articulates itself in the force of recognition (and of the community as the spirit of the subject’s self-recognition). Werner Beierwaltes, Platonismus und Idealismus (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1972) provides a useful general overview of the varying issues at stake, although his polemical purpose is to emphasize the continuity of questions. Although he points to these very differences in the force of recognition (cf., 67–70), he allows the modern sense of the subject to determine his trajectory. 41. The problem in translation here comes from the desire to translate ekousan as “having presence.” Having the whole, on the other hand, already conveys the dual sense of the force of possession. The being, that is, has its beingness as presence, in the standard translation, and thus introduces a third term (presence) which ends up explaining the self-enclosed possession of the shared ousan in menousan and ekousan. 42. Again, the standard translations introduce some idea of presence to explain the force of having the whole—one has the whole present, now, but that makes the place of the passage be the subject, as one who constitutes the truth of that force of presence, and not the structure of that force itself, as it follows the contours of its self-pertaining being. 43. Ennead III.7.3.17–23. The translation is significantly altered. 44. In contemporary terms, it would be closer to the conservation of mass and energy for the system as a whole than to the idea of a divine plan having been written in an eternity somehow separate from the balance of the system itself. 45. “Against the Gnostics,” Ennead II.9. Hadot, Plotin ou la simplicité du regard (Paris: Gallimard, 1997 [Plon, 1963]), especially the sixth chapter (“Douceur”), provides a compelling and sometimes lyrical account of the reasons that Plotinus is not simply rebelling against the body. 46. Here one recognizes a major thematic in neo-Platonism, namely, the identity of the generative principle with the place, as eternity, within which all determination has already taken place, already been given its proper form, or judged concerning its justice. 47. Lévinas speaks of this second moment, from relatively early within his career, as the weight of being that would counter Heidegger’s thinking of the nothing. Cf., in the early work, L’ éxistence et l’ éxistent (Paris: Vrin, 1986, 3rd ed.); translated by Alphonso Lingis under the title Existence and Existents (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1978), and the discussion of hypostasis, as well as the discussion of the il y a in Le temps et l’autre (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989); translated by Richard Cohen under the title Time and the Other (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987) and then as it is developed

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in Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than being. A long and informative comparison of this problematic in Blanchot and Lévinas can be found in Simon Critchley, Very Little… Almost Nothing (London: Routledge, 1997), although he ends unsatisfyingly with the invocation of an infinite demand to speak encompassing our finitude (83). For reasons that will become clear in relation to the presentation of Kant and Hegel in the second half, the movement of being that finds itself situated by the force of an anarchic event of being will not sufficiently address the movement toward the demand to speak—it would be precisely the gestures of that demand that would prevent the event of being from giving us the starting point for philosophy in general. 48. Ennead III.7.12, 16–25. Translation significantly altered. 49. Lévinas, “La signification et le sens,” Humanisme de l’autre homme (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1972), 24; translated by Alphonso Lingis as “Meaning and Sense,” Collected Philosophical Papers (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1982) and as “Signification and Sense” by Nidra Poller in Humanism of the Other (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003); but one should also see Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism” and Derrida, “Les fins de l’homme,” Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Les éditions de minuit, 1972); translated by Alan Bass under the title “The Ends of Man,” Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982) for a clear understanding of why the move to creative subjectivity had become suspect more broadly speaking. Large portions of “Meaning and Sense” were taken up into Otherwise than being and represent part of the logic behind the more explicit Neoplatonic references of the later work. 50. Merleau-Ponty, “Le langage indirect et les voix du silence,” Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960); translated by Richard C. McCleary under the title Signs (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964). 51. Lévinas, Humanisme de l’autre homme, 50. 52. Lévinas, Humanisme de l’autre homme, 51. 53. Lévinas, Humanisme de l’autre homme, 68f. 54. Cf. Edith Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), which uses Plotinus as a marker of the possibility of thinking of time in its restless progression— where the one sends “time forth in errancy to escape the sameness of eternity” (92). If time can be separated from the causal structure of agency, then such a thinking of progression would be capable of capturing the heart of postmodern reconceptualizations of time. Her addition of the passivity inherent to the saint—which draws on an interpretation of Lévinas and Bataille, among others—complicates the sense in which errancy would be a productive procession from the one. In general, one finds Neoplatonism in the background of Lévinas’s later work, as well as Derrida’s work throughout his career. In a chronology, apparently established with Derrida’s help, the possibility of contesting a dominant scholasticism “Sartre, Marcel, Merleau-Ponty, etc.” was

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encountered in the “Plotinian” work of Étienne Borne and dates to 1949-50— twelve years before his earliest publications (Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Paris: Éditions du seuil, 1991), 302). In contesting, while appropriating, certain structures from German Idealism, the turn towards the Neoplatonic themes of a good beyond being (which we examine at length, below) has served to contest the humanist equation of procession from the eternal with the productive activity of the human. 55. Nietzsche seems to have discovered this, in some sense, but the task of deploying this insight such that the body is not merely the senseless, or meaningless, opposite term requires a step beyond “inverting Platonism.” JeanLuc Nancy, Corpus (Paris: Métailié, 1992) and Etre singulier pluriel (Paris: Galilée, 1996)(translated by Robert Richardson and Anne O’Byrne as Being Singular Plural [Stanford University Press, 2000]); Jacques Derrida, Le Toucher: Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Galilée, 2000)(translated by Christine Irizarry under the title Touching Jean-Luc Nancy [Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2005]); Alphonso Lingis, Foreign Bodies (London: Routledge, 1994); Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994) provide a broad spectrum of approaches to corporeal formation of meaning, each attentive to the necessity of avoiding the metaphysical trap of merely inverting a dyad. 56. Cf., Edith Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism, 89–123, for a detailed explanation of the relation between the abandon of power and the movement of time in Lévinas and Blanchot as arising from Plotinian insights into motion, especially where the Neoplatonic substantialization of time is avoided (92–3). 57. Ennead V.3.7, 18–26. Cf., also, Ennead VI.7.18, 1–15. 58. Werner Beierwaltes, All-Einheit, especially, 49–50. Within Plotinus, especially Ennead V, 10–13. 59. Derrida will connect the question of ashes or cinder to the il y a and the trace expressly in Feu la cendre (Paris: Éditions des femmes, 1987); translated by Ned Lukacher under the title Cinders (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1991). 60. Such is Hegel’s reading of consumption, although its importance to the rest of his system is contested. Cf., Hamacher, Pleroma (Stanford University Press, 1998); Derrida, Glas (Paris: Galilée, 1974); translated by John P. Leavey, Jr. and Richard Rand under the title Glas (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1986); Wyschogrod, Spirit in Ashes and Stuart Barnett, “Eating My God,” Hegel after Derrida, ed. Stuart Barnett (London: Routledge, 1998). 61. Although much of the contemporary interest in affirmation is born from Nietzsche’s “tragic affirmation,” the Neoplatonic articulation, taken up quite beautifully in Franz Rosenzweig, would insist on the creative force of the movement of recognizing the good and not on the tragic situation of being incapable of escaping our finitude. Franz Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlösung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996, 5th ed.); translated by Barbara Galli under the title The Star of Redemption(University of Wisconsin, 2005). A

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substantial English language treatment of Rosenzweig and Lévinas is to be found in Robert Gibbs, Correlations in Rosenzweig and Lévinas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), although the issue of affirmation is better treated in his Why Ethics? Signs of Responsibility (Princeton University Press, 2000). Derrida speaks of Rosenzweig as a thinker of the double affirmation, without saying much more, in “Nombre de oui,” Psyche (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 644–45. The ways in which that doubled affirmation would break with the Hegelian dialectic of recognition, of merely recognizing what is already effectively present as good, depend on the movement of possibility resting with the community that receives the word—and thus that exists beyond the place of expression. And that displacement, already in Rosenzweig but accentuated in Lévinas, moves the demand of the possible above the demand of the real, or of the recognition that the real would claim as its right. 62. So that, if we take Aristotle’s sense of final form to be about the completion of what an abject can be, and even accept the broadly “phenomenological” interpretation that allows that completion to be our moment of meaningful presence to the object as given, the trace represents the permanent incompletion of what we hold to be meaningfully given. 63. Only with the thinking of the trace did Derrida’s différance take its full weight as opposed to the dominance of ontology—that is, only at that point did Derrida’s distinctive thought take mature shape, even if a combination of issues had to congeal in order to make this possible. The distinction is even more clear in Lévinas, where the work after the 1963 appearance of “The Trace” takes on a profoundly altered stance toward the problem of abandoning ontology. 64. Ennead VI.7.17, 15–20. 65. Ennead VI.7.33, 30–31. The nature of beauty is argued between here and the end of VI.7.33. 66. Ennead VI.7.17, 20–26; this would also seem to be the origin of Derrida’s epigraph, discussed below. 67. “From thence”—the reference is less clear than the translation makes it out to be. For Plotinus, the point is to see the good in the unity of passage, without beginning, and not, as it was in Plato, the temporal as a model of some other good (Beierwaltes’ commentary on III.7, Plotin: Über Ewigkeit und Zeit, 212; see, Plato, Timaeus, 29e, 1–4). For this reason, I would want to keep the good as an implicit reference, and not substantiate its presence, as Armstrong’s translation does. Nevertheless, “the good” is not a wholly unjustified interpellation. VI.7.18 begins with an explicit reference and VI.7.16 has references to the good. But no form of agathos is found at all in VI.7.17 and the broader context within which the good is understood as the wholeness of the unfolding should be kept forefronted throughout. Pierre Hadot’s popular account of Plotinus, recently translated into English but dating back to 1963, concludes on a beautiful, if somewhat lyrical account of the relation between

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the good and solitude, that is, on the simple vision of the whole. Hadot, Pierre, Plotin ou la simplicité du regard, op. cit. 68.“All things,” and “the totality of things” are clumsy ways of capturing the relevant idea of a whole. The point to capture in this passage is that the transition from a whole as formless and generative to the totality of things is not a transition into a different place, but the way that the multiplicity of the whole relates back to its unity, each moment striving for its vision, or its place within that unity. 69. Heidegger has often contested the translation of the categories of rationality back into earlier Greek thought. Plotinus, perhaps, was already part of the milieu of the treason against what Heidegger would consider originary thought. He might also represent a strategy since eclipsed, neither tied to the first beginning nor simply blind to the development of modern technology. 70. Ennead VI.7.17, 32–42. 71. This is where one finds the argument for the priority of the intellect imbedded in the priority of the actual, yet as an actual, and thus preservable, form. That is, the intellect’s ability to preserve the truth and life of the reality it watches over stems from containing the true life and motion of that which is. Cf., Ennead V.5.2, 1–13. In historical terms, one should also see here perennial arguments about the claims to knowledge or immediate participation that pervade Gnosticism and its various refutations. 72. Beierwaltes, Plotin: Über Ewigkeit und Zeit, in introducing his theme, uses this insight as a contestation of Heidegger’s question of being—that it would have been profoundly at odds with Derrida and Lévinas, however, means that a detailed treatment of his approach can not be taken on in the present context. 73. Such would be Schelling’s remarkable insight in the freedom essay, which did not fail to have its impact on Heidegger. Schelling insists on seeing God as “more real than a mere moral world ordering,” and thus searching for the inner motion of divinity in a desire or longing that precedes the understanding. Martin Heidegger, Schellings Abhandlung über das Wesen der Menschlichen Freiheit (1809), ed. Hildegard Feick (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1971, 2nd ed. 1995), 124, 191–95; translated by Joan Stambaugh under the title Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1985). 74. Armstrong cites Plato’s Republic VI 509B9. 75. Ennead V.5.6, 12–23. 76. Notably, among many others, Jean-Luc Nancy, La communauté désœuvrée (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1986)(translated under the title The Inoperative Community by Peter Connor [University of Minnesota, 1991]), Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Jacques Derrida, La Politique de l’amitié (Paris: Galilée, 1994)(translated by George Collins as Politics of Friendship [London: Verso, 1997]).

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77. For Plotinus, the blessed life is the “flight in solitude to the solitary.” Ennead VI.9.11, 51. 78. In Plotinus, the shape of opposition that gives the soul its priority, as occupying the position of intelligence in the figure of the potency and possibility of the formless, is attentive to the particularity of passage. However, that passage must take the proper direction of communication to be with the self. The problem is that this direction of communication, pertaining to the ways in which things are said puts silence in the place of the productivity of the one, as beyond the words that are given. The constant overflowing of being is always toward more silence. To keep this form of opposition from taking on the attributes of a metaphysics of participation—of the proper nature of our thought being determined by our participation in a structure that generates thought as such, independently of us—it is not sufficient to situate the productivity with the individual subject. The shape of the good must be itself transformed through the passage, through the acts of communication, that make the place of the human take on the priority of form over matter within the structure of opposition that Plotinus articulates. 79. There have been many attempts to think through Hegel’s process as aporetic and not as having achieved any “effacement.” The language of the effacement of the trace is borrowed from Derrida’s “Ousia and Gramme,” and “The Pit and the Pyramid,” which we will examine below and generally speaking Derrida looks for a way of reading Hegel against himself. DeMan, for example in the texts on Hegel and Kant in Aesthetic Ideologies, ed. Andrzej Warminski, looks for a force to material enactment that would exceed all closure. Derrida’s doubts about DeMan’s reading of Hegel, and the fundamental tasks of deconstruction rest with issues concerning this force of enactment and perhaps represent some changes in Derrida’s own thinking. Derrida, Memoires pour Paul de Man (Galilée, 1988); translated by Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, Eduardo Cadava and Peggy Kamuf under the title Memoires for Paul de Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, revised edition) A thoughtful position on the debate, in terms of Hegel and Heidegger, can be found in Warminski, Andrzej, Readings in Interpretation: Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), cf., 133 on ways that the effacement remains aporetic. In a very different direction, Ernst Bloch Subjekt-Objekt: Erläuterungen zu Hegel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1962), 510–20, ends on a rousing plea for reading Hegel as open to a future beyond the machinations of the real—one searches, within Hegel, for that within the real which bears the possible beyond the real. These issues will be broached again, with a more complete bibliography, below. 80. Derrida’s “White Mythology” in Margins of Philosophy was one of the central texts of the movement to question this conjuncture of issues in Hegel, but he was not alone.

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81. And one would want to keep in play all the questions of the sort Hume introduces, trying to separate will and desire (and all the force of our decisions and thought) from reason. For to do such is to limit reason to its representational functions at a given point of givenness (speaking about a world, within which our speaking happens, in whatever shape it takes on)—to see the progression through time as conditioning the ways in which we represent, and thus represent to ourselves our possibilities of action, our volitions toward actions, etc., is to see a force in the movement of intelligibility. The argument, in other terms, is not whether there is force to reason, but whether clarity (the reason of reason, like the form of forms in Plotinus) is the bearer of that force or whether the impulses of volition would bear that intelligible force. 82. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, Werke 3, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Marcus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 29–30; translated by A.V. Miller under the title Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 14–15. 83. Angelica Nuzzo, Logica e sistema sull’ idea hegeliana di filosofia (Genova: Pantograf, 1992) is perhaps the most ambitious recent attempt to prove that Hegel has the resources to actually carry this out; the majority of interpreters have been far more concerned with accepting the impossibility of a system of philosophy and then attempting to show that Hegel still has something to say. 84. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 36; Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 19. 85. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 588; Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 491. 86. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 69; Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 47. 87. The reading of Hegel here need not take on the extreme formulations of Kojève and Bataille: one need only speak of determination as the element and truth of succession, as the place of finite becoming. Cf., for a complete and careful account, Angelica Nuzzo, Logica e sistema sull’ idea hegeliana di filosofia, 189–218, 370–73. 88. This is one of the places in Hegel where the movement differs in the Phenomenology and in the Logic. In the Logic, one begins in the element of already free knowing, whereas the Phenomenology purports to achieve that position of free self-relation within the element of knowing. Hegel explains in Wissenschaft der Logik, Werke 5 and 6, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Marcus Michel, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), vol. 5, 67; translated by A.V. Miller under the title Hegel’s Science of Logic (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1989, George Allen and Unwin, 1969), 48–9. 89. Christoph Menke, “Der »Wendungspunkt« des Erkennens: Zu Begriff, Recht und Reichweite der Dialektik in Hegels Logik,” Vernunftkritik nach Hegel, ed. Christoph Demmerling and Friedrich Kambartel, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992), esp. 23–4. 90. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 588–591; Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 491–93. Georg Lukács, The Young Hegel, trans. Rodney Livingstone

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(Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1976, London, The Merlin Press, 1975), 537–67 is insightful here. 91. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 588; Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 491. 92. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 590; Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 492. 93. The sense of a revealed religion, however, depends greatly on the achievement of a state from which the subject can understand itself from out of its own separation—and thus its position as finite subject. Cyril O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), part 1 gives a good overview of the basic problems at the intersection of doxa and philosophy. JeanLuc Nancy points to the moment of the birth of the subject as the event of the surprise—of that which is not determined by the unfolding of the one, but which “surprises itself” in its event as the nothingness of thought. Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Surprise of the Event,” Hegel After Derrida, ed. Stuart Barnett (London: Routledge, 1998). What Nancy doesn’t account for are the reasons that Hegel would want to insist on the passage through Western thought— and through Christianity more generally. For Hegel, the nothingness takes its shape, as demand, from this passage and cannot be attributed to the a priori structures of the human as such. 94. This identification of shape and presence holds, for example, where recognizing the truth of a particular statement depends on a commitment to the truth—on being oriented by the whole from which the particular arises. Only in seeing the present as part of a whole is it oriented by belonging to a motion, and thus to a form, and thus accessible to being spoken about. The shape of presence, then, is the shape of this motion being present (albeit as negativity) in each particular. In Hegel’s eyes, this structure is perfectly general, and pertains to every attempt to achieve clarity. Only that consciousness that realizes that in the particularity of its destiny there is this demand for clarity will one recognize how that demand structures presence; only that subject who has grasped the truth of the revealed religion may proceed to the standpoint of absolute knowing (Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 529–74; Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 439–78). This is the exigency of faith for those who have reached self-consciousness: God demands our faith in order to be recognized as the force and presence of meaning. He is not immediately present so that we may recognize His presence in our own motion. Hegel is not a pantheist. 95. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 590; Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 492. 96. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 588; Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 490. 97. Derrida, “Ousia et Grammè,” Marges de la Philosophie (Paris: Éditions de minuit, 1972), 73–78; translated by Alan Bass as “Ousia and Gramme,” Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 62–67. See also, in the same volume, “Différance,” in its entirety. 98. He puts it succinctly in term of the trace in a meditation on apocalypse: “The only absolutely real referent, therefore, is at the level of a nuclear catastrophe

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that would irreversibly destroy the total archive and all symbolic capacity, the ‘survival’ itself as the heart of life. The absolute referent of all possible literature is at the level of the absolute effacement of every possible trace. It is therefore the only ineffaceable trace, as trace of every other.” “No apocalypse, not now,” Psyche: Inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1987), 379. One needs to correlate this to the idea, brought to bear against Heidegger, that “there is no trace itself, no proper trace.” Marges, 77; Margins, 66. 99. Heidegger, Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 21, Marburg Lectures, Winter Semester, 1925/26, ed. Walter Biemel (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1976, 2nd revised edition, 1995), 192–205, 403–5. 100. Zur Sache des Denkens, 24; On Time and Being, 23. 101. The theme is central to Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), especially, 56, and 175–205. 102. “Les fins de l’homme,” Marges, 161; Margins, 133–34. 103. “Der Spruch des Anaximander,” Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1952), 336/365; trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi under the title “The Anaximander Fragment,” Early Greek Thinking (New York: Harper and Row, 1975, 1984), 50–51 and translated by Julian Young in Off the Beaten Track (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 275. 104. Marges, 76; Margins, 65. 105. Marian Hobson, Jacques Derrida: Opening Lines (London: Routledge, 1998). 106. In Latin characters in Derrida’s citation. It’s not marked but would accord with Ennead VI.7.33, 30–1, mentioned above. 107. Marges, 76–7; Margins, 66. 108. I use the language of “making possible” with some reservation. It seems to me to be more fully appropriate to Derrida’s early work—especially as popularized in Gasché’s The Tain of the Mirror (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986) and Petrosino’s Jacques Derrida e la Legge del Possibile (Milan: Editoriale Jaca Book, 1997 [first published in 1983])—and Derrida is more careful to distance himself from this language later. The preface (“La Scommessa, Una Prefazione, Forse una Trappola”) Derrida provides for the second edition of Petrosino’s book is particularly clear on the dangers of the language of possibility. Derrida was never guilty of merely adopting a Kantian understanding of the ground of becoming, but he saw himself as articulating an approach to that same problem. 109. “La forme et le vouloir-dire,” Marges, 202; “Form and Meaning,” Margins, 169. 110. Marges, 207; Margins, 173. 111. Marges, 207; Margins, 173. 112. Marges, 206; Margins, 172. 113. Derrida, “Violence et métaphysique,” L’ écriture et la différence (Paris: Éditions du seuil, 1967), 140; translated by Alan Bass under the title of

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“Violence and Metaphysics,” Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 94. 114. In Lévinas’ own work, this sense of passage is accentuated across his career: it moves from the fundamental orientation toward otherness, as in Totality and Infinity, toward the responsibility for that openness as it bears an orientation. Compare Totalité et Infini, 190 and Autrement qu’ être, 189. 115. For this reason, the difference between objectivity, as the intentional relation of giving sense, and transcendence, as the overflowing of all givenness of particular ideas in the face of the other that expresses, of itself, in a light exterior to my own, can serve as the foundational guide for the entirety of Totality and Infinity. Totalité et Infini, 20; Totality and Infinity, 49. 116. Totalité et Infini, 9 and 20–23, inter alia., for a succinct treatment; Totality and Infinity, 39 and 50–52. 117. Totalité et Infini, 257–58; Totality and Infinity, 281. 118. The understanding of violence first elaborated as a critique of Lévinas has proven to be one of the most enduring and fecund thematics within Derrida’s work. It has a complicated background in the reception of Hegel, and the violence of the dialectic. In an influential book first published in 1949, Éric Weil, [Logique de la philosophie [Paris: Vrin, 1996], 20f.) identifies the task of philosophy with the elimination of the violence of particularity. In one sense, Lévinas places the violence with the move to generality—and thus is diametrically opposed to Weil—and in another, the demand of the move to justice, as a move beyond the corporeal toward language, would redeem the same promise to fight against violence. The question of violence arises textually between Lévinas’ commitment to the non-violence that refuses murder, and that puts into question its own subjective liberty, in Totality and Infinity, and the violence of being beset by the good, or elected and chosen by a violence that displaces us in Otherwise than being. In the former, the demand of nonviolence is a fact within which we live, by which we are overcome. In the latter, the demand of non-violence is experienced as itself a type of persecution or violence, thus accentuating the sense of the movement it puts into play. I would therefore not agree with the somewhat common reading that Lévinas saw the truth of Derrida’s dictum that the ontological violence was necessary, and thus changed his approach. Rather the violence that elects me compels me toward substitution, and not toward the embodiment of my own singularity; it compels motion away from my own powers, my own position, toward an expression beyond myself. Cf., Autrement qu’ être, 32; Otherwise than being, 15, and quite elegantly, “Le judaism et le féminin,” Difficile Liberté (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 1963 and 1976); translated by Seàn Hand under the title Difficult Freedom (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1990). To my eye, the best critique of the position is still Luce Irigaray, “The Fecundity of the Caress,” An Ethic of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell

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University Press, 1993). It would not be a question of outrage at the violence of the world, nor of its thoughtlessness, but of the pretension to stop at a place of self, or enjoyment—the violence, for Lévinas, would pertain to the refusal to move and for Irigaray, it would attach to the willingness to abandon the lover discovered in the caress. 119. “Violence et métaphysique,” L’ écriture et la difference, 168–69; “Violence and Metaphysics,” Writing and Difference, 114–15. 120. Derrida’s treatment of the movement of welcome, as the first gesture toward the other, captures the problem: “Is it even a gesture, this welcome? Rather the first movement, and an apparently passive movement, but the good movement.” Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas, (Paris: Galilée, 1997), 55; translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas as Adieu to Emmanuel Lévinas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 25. One is involved here in a polemic between Lévinas and Heidegger, or more broadly, with all those who would subjugate the movements of the subject to the articulating force of the world’s being. If that movement is to be the place of the compulsion of the subject, where the subject is completely given over to the exteriority of that “gesture” or “pull” of being, then one is pulled beyond welcome or response into rapture and participation; one belongs, that is, to the realm of the possible, and ignores the impossible event of welcome. Cf., very succinctly, Lévinas, “De la déficience sans souci au sens nouveau,” De Dieu qui vient à l’ idée (Paris: Vrin, 1982), 82–83, which dates from 1976 (translated by Bettina Bergo under the title Of God Who Comes to Mind [Stanford University Press, 1998]) and more generally, Dieu, la mort et le temps (Paris: Grasset, 1993), 66 and 190–194, (translated by Bettina Bergo as God, Death and Time [Stanford University Press, 2000]), which stems from the same time and seeks to find, with Bergson, the place of the subject in the impossible weight of being as opposed to finding, with Heidegger, the subject compelled into the place of the possible. Derrida expands on his position in “Apories: Mourir-s’attendre aux limites de la vérité,” Le Passage des frontières: Autour du travail de Jacques Derrida (Paris: Galilée, 1993); translated as a book by Thomas Dutoit under the title Aporias (Stanford: Stanford Unity Press, 1993). Derrida, against Lévinas, will tie this to chance and the “law of the impossible.” To my eye, “Psyché: Invention de l’autre,” Psyché (Paris: Galilée, 1987), 26–35, is the place where Derrida’s understanding of possibility takes a crucial turn by linking the affirmation of the experience of the impossible, as an invention of the other, to the practice of deconstruction. It is a matter of affirming the moment of reserve or of the secret within reflection. 121. Totalité et Infini, 185–87; Totality and Infinity, 210–212. See also, “La philosophie et l’idée de l’infini,” En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger, (Paris: Vrin, 1967, expanded edition); translated by Alphonso Lingis under the title “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity,” Collected Philosophical

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Papers (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1987). In the later work, the emphasis is not on the infinity that overflows me, but on the compulsion that the trace of the infinite performs by passing beyond my powers and yet obsessing me. Autrement qu’ être, 148–49; Otherwise than being, 93. 122. Totalité et Infini, 178–9; Totality and Infinity, 202–4. 123. “Violence et métaphysique,” L’ écriture et la difference, 168–70; “Violence and Metaphysics,”Writing and Difference, 114–15. 124. For Lévinas, because we are separated from the interiority of the other to whom we speak, the burden of expression is to establish the common spaces of language as shared. Totalité et Infini, 171; Totality and Infinity, 197. 125. Autrement qu’ être, 137–42; Otherwise than being, 86–89. 126. Lévinas, De l’ évasion, ed. Jacques Rolland (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1982). Much of his understanding of the problem is indebted to Jean Wahl. Lévinas has an interesting letter appended to Jean Wahl, Existence humaine et transcendance (Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1944). Wahl remains within a Kierkegaardian framework with which Lévinas increasingly breaks (but see, already, Totalité et Infini, 10; Totality and Infinity, 40). One does not start with the subject, but with the shape of being separated from the divine. In the letter to Wahl, Lévinas says: “To exist is always already for [modern man] to know solitude, death and the need for salvation. Even when the soul knows no consolation from the presence of God, it has a positive experience of His absence” (136). 127. Totalité et Infini, 127–29; Totality and Infinity, 154–56. 128. Again, Autrement qu’ être, 137–42; Otherwise than being, 86–89. 129. Totalité et Infini, 252–53; Totality and Infinity, 275–76. 130. Lévinas, “La Trace de l’Autre,” En Découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: Vrin, 1994), 197. The same material is in “La signification et le sens,” Humanisme de l’autre homme (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1972), 63; translated by Alphonso Lingis as “Meaning and Sense,” Collected Philosophical Papers (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1982), 102. 131. En Découvrant l’existence, 198; Humanismse de l’autre homme, 64; Collected Philosophical Papers, 103. 132.Totalité et Infini,11–12 and 35–42; Totality and Infinity, 40–42 and 64–70; Autrement qu’ être, 253–56; Otherwise than being, 162–65. 133. Lévinas, En Découvrant l’existence, 201; Humanismse de l’autre homme, 68–9; Collected Philosophical Papers, 106. 134. “The positive infinity (God), if these words have any meaning, cannot be infinitely other. If one thinks, with Lévinas, that the positive infinity tolerates or even demands an infinite alterity, one must renounce all language, and to begin with the word infinite and the word other. The infinite isn’t understood as other except under the form of the in-finite. From the point where one wishes to think infinity as positive plenitude (pole of Lévinas’ non-negative

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transcendence), the other becomes unthinkable, impossible, unsayable. It is perhaps toward this unthinkable-impossible-unsayable that we are called by Lévinas beyond being and logos (the traditional one). But this call must not be capable of being thought nor of being said. In any case, the fact that the classical positive plenitude of the infinite cannot be translated into language except in the traitorous negative word (in-finite) situates, perhaps, the point where, most profoundly, thought breaks with language. A rupture that cannot but resonate across the whole language. This is why those modern thoughts that wish to no longer either distinguish among nor hiearchize thought and language are essentially thoughts of originary finitude.” Derrida goes on to explain how to think of this originary finitude, especially at that point where the face of the other would have to be the place, in givenness, from which the positive infinity of the other was thought: “… to want to neutralize space in the description of the other, in order to thus liberate the positive infinity, is that not to neutralize the essential finitude of a face (gaze-speech) that is body and is not, Lévinas insists, the corporeal metaphor of an ethereal thought? Body, which is also exteriority, locality in the fully spatial sense, literally spatial, of this word; zero point, origin of space, certainly, but origin that has no meaning before the of, that cannot be separated from the genitive and the space that it engenders and orients [before the second publication of the essay, in 1967, he adds]: inscribed origin. The inscription is the written origin: traced and from there inscribed within a system, within a figure that it no longer controls.” “Violence et métaphysique,” L’ écriture et la difference, 169; “Violence and Metaphysics,” Writing and Difference, 114–15. 135. De la grammatologie, 103; Of Grammatology, 70. 136. De la grammatologie, 108; Of Grammatology, 73. By 1980, the trace is placed within a question concerning the moment of deformation that pertains to the unrepresentable structure of surviving. The signifier, like the law, might be borne out of an ambiguity that turns one toward the trace, and not out of the fecundity of determination. Unfortunately, this is not the place for a full examination of these issues. See, “Envois,” Psyché: Inventions de l’autre, 142, for the reference to the ambiguity of the law and the survival within the trace. 137. Derrida, Spectres de Marx (Paris: Galilée, 1993); translated by Peggy Kamuf under the title Specters of Marx (London: Routledge, 1994). 138. Derrida, Khôra (Paris: Galilée, 1993); translated by Thomas Dutoit in On the Name (Stanford University Press, 1995). 139. “Comment ne pas parler: Dénégations,” Psyché, 535; translated by Ken Frieden under the title “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989) and reprinted in Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 73.

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140. Although Derrida evokes this sense of the adverb, it is not explicated as Eckhart’s idea at the conclusion, the references to his “Quasi stella matutina” (German Sermon 9), were made earlier in the text. (Psyche, 577–78). Notes to Part Two 1. Focillon, Henri, La vie des formes, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1934); translated by Charles Hogan and George Kubler under the title The Life of Forms in Art, (New York: Zone, 1989), 184 (their translation). 2. Augustine, in The Confessions, Book VII, replaces the Gospel of John’s opening account of John the Baptist—who “was not the light, but bore witness to the light”—with his own account of the position of the Christian as such. The problem, in larger terms, goes back to what it would mean to have light’s originality borne by the “witness”—by the one who recognizes that the light is not their own. The “fullness” of time is what accounts for the understanding of that activity of witnessing as placed within the immanence of time, and not provided by an exterior or transcendent sun. 3. Although the vast number of Hegel interpreters fall in this line, Thomas J. J. Altizer’s The Genesis of God (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), cf, inter alia, 109–112, so accentuates the movement of kenosis in and as nothingness that the shape of existence is no longer the fulfilment of a previously empty, but real, force. One will find, in the final considerations, below, that my understanding of that shape of “stealing away” replaces the productive gesture of creating presence. 4. There is a widely held interpretation of Lévinas’ reading of Hegel as the thinker who closes off all possibility, in the first pages of Totality and Infinity, that has led to a return to Kant, and to the purely regulative ideal of a future, as something beyond us and toward which we must comport ourselves with respect (openness). Besides being a poor reading of Hegel, I believe the return to Kant underestimates how thoroughly Lévinas wishes to break with the tradition that associates power and the possible, even in the guise of the question about under what conditions a judgment is possible. A sophisticated version of that fairly common Kantian reading of Lévinas can be found in Ricoeur’s work. For a particularly succinct example, in the chapter “Hope and the Structure of Philosophical Systems,” in Refiguring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, (Trans. David Pellauer, Ed. Mark I. Wallace), (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), Ricoeur asserts that reason—if understood as an unattainable but still structuring horizon, because permanently separated from human understanding—allows Kant to maintain a phenomenological openness toward the future that Hegel loses in his systematic identification of the activity of understanding and the underlying rationality of what is present. I take it that this is a broadly Neokantian move, embraced in many forms,

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and represented above in Aubenque’s idea of an aporetic relation to ontology in Aristotle. The problem, again, and particularly clearly in Ricoeur, is that the two horns of the dilemma are both comportments of a subject toward the world—a system of human knowledge that takes spatio-temporal presence to be ultimate or a claim of faith upon the individual that gives us hope for a future beyond the present by making sense of our dissatisfaction with the present (a dissatisfaction captured, for Ricoeur, in the problem of evil). One can, perhaps, take Hegel in this direction, but I prefer to see him in terms of a new understanding of the relation of possibility to power, one that insists on the sustaining force of presence—a force captured in the idea of dialectic struggle—and not one that rests content with the idea that the subject sustains interpretations and our task is to find which one best corresponds to our proper orientation as subjects within our situation. That Kant, too, has an implicit idea of the force of presence, and is not naively assuming the Cartesian subject, is one of the key insights of Heidegger’s readings of Kant—which we will pursue, in part, below. 5. Robert Gibbs’ account of Rosenzweig is interesting here, as a way of entering into an understanding of justice as the redemption of time. I mention his reading because it so keenly brings together the call for a revolutionary social practice based on community and the sense of rectitude in a sacred orientation toward the community. The key, for that thinking, is to see that the public nature of time is, itself, also in need of an orientation toward the sacred (toward “the interruption itself”). In this way, Rosenzweig allows for a stronger answer than the pragmatists who take the givenness of the community as, of itself, self-orienting, while he also avoids the reifications of an essentially private time. “Unlike Heidegger and Bergson, Rosenzweig sees the public nature of temporality as redemptive, as inclusive, and as liberating. Not SECRET TIME, time restricted to rulers and priests, but a public cult and public prayer is produced through the law of the week, and through the organizatio nof the cult. From the human side we have the ground of astronomy and THE LAW OF LABOR. Redemption itself will work upon this commonality, this foreshadowing of community. Public time is not a falling away from the authentic inward experience of time but is the stepping forward as equals in common with others. The power of prayer, for Rosenzweig, is not merely to transform the self, but also to transform the community by transforming communal time. To hasten redemption is to make time ready and to invite eternity into time: which is not merely to speak with God, but is to make time accept eternity, to build a clock and a calendar, a nunc stans, in which all together can rest from labor and contemplate the interruption itself.” Why Ethics? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 360. The contrasting sense in which the singularity of time is not private comes from the structure of steresis, as we cast it above, and its capacity to move us thoughtfully without

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orienting activity toward its fullness as complete. The communication, as we will see in the final part, and against the broadly Neoplatonic model, is not expressive of a foundational commonality, nor oriented by the redemption of singularity, but seeks to sustain the trustworthiness of a reticent gesture; the difference, in the end, comes down to how one sees the trace, and what it means to recapture the originality of the beginning in the gestures of communication. 6. This particular formulation of the question, as more specifically a response to Heidegger and Derrida, comes from Catherine Malabou, L’avenir de Hegel (Paris: Vrin, 1997). In Le Change Heidegger: Du Fantastique en Philosophie (Paris: Éditions Léo Scheer, 2004), she makes the connection to Heidegger’s understanding of movement as a type of deformation explicit, and if anything, brings Heidegger and Hegel too close to each other. Her insistence on “plasticity” is importantly related to the “deformation” I wish to examine, but she valorizes the power of the impression in both authors. One finds similar formulations, in terms of contesting the perceived attacks against Hegel and valorizing the power of human impression, but usually the commentators will rely on the necessity (and thus the rational, and undeformed impulse and guiding force) of the development of the system. John McCumber provides the deep insight that the necessity of a system is a necessity of philosophical friendship where one seeks reconciliation within the plasticity of language, and more specifically in terms of aesthetics. John McCumber, The Company of Words: Hegel, Language, and Systematic Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 8–11, see also his, Poetic Interaction: Language, Freedom, and Reason, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). Andrew Cutrofello, The Owl at Dawn, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), provides a wonderfully imaginative sequel to Hegel’s Phenomenology, a much needed introduction of the possibility of play within the workings of the necessary and a thoughtful account of the many ways in which the history of philosophy after Hegel remains a response to Hegel’s thought. Angelica Nuzzo, in Logica e Sistema sull’Idea Hegeliana di Filosofia (Genoa, Italy; Pantograf, 1992) insists on a strict assignation of necessity to the realm of the form of presence as such, and thus clearly articulates the importance of form in the encounter with the real. To see that comprehension is not in innocent opposition to the event of the real is Hegel’s great achievement and Nuzzo’s work makes clear how that still remains a question of form. 7.   Hegel’s status relative to Neoplatonism is a matter of some discussion. Beierwaltes makes a convincing case that Hegel’s connection would be to Proclus and not Plotinus, in Platonismus und Idealismus, op. cit., although the broad sweep of the opposition to certain forms of rationalism allows John Shannon Hendrix, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Spirit: From Plotinus to Schelling and Hegel (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2005), to make a case for at least family resemblances. That tack, although it renders many important issues accessible,

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remains too broad to capture the underlying problem of a shape of contact—a problem that is, in some ways, internal to the workings of the dialectic, and not a matter of how the dialectic is different from non-dialectic approaches to philosophy. Cyril O’Regan makes the very interesting argument that Hegel should be understood in terms of Valentinian Gnosticism, and not in terms of Neoplatonism, precisely because of the structure of opposition at the place of presence (The Heterodox Hegel [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994] and Gnostic Return in Modernity [Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001]). The problem with that model, in terms of our current approach, is that it insists on a narrative structure that still affirms a transcending will as divine affirmation—the movement of each determination, that is, remains positive and positing as it moves from indetermination to determination. 8. Eric Watson, Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) gives a very nice historical account of the ways in which Kant’s model of causality is not mechanistic, and relies on a dynamic sense of “filling a determinate region of space,” that is ultimately atemporal, but he judges Kant to have been ambiguous in his use of Transcendental Idealism precisely where he should have been most clear about what it means to occupy a position (cf. 317–25); we will take this up, in our terms, with Heidegger’s criticism of being as position, below. 9. Arthur Danto, After the End of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 15, 31. We will have to argue, in other contexts, that “ideology” is a misleading and still overused concept—that the framing of being is neither so abstract nor so mechanical a function as ideology is supposed to be. 10. Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), see the concluding paragraph, 208. 11. There are questions about how post-analytic philosophy came to endorse the Peirceian idea of verification in the community, as an ameliorative against Cartesian presuppositions, but Danto takes this to be compatible with Hegel’s general sense of the achievement of a position for humans, as such, as artists— the “art market” only coming in, after the case, to regulate exchanges that no longer constitute “history,” in the quaint sense we once learned in art history classes as new productive techniques were introduced, exploited, and then placed in the collective toolbox. We will take up the question of an acknowledgment from the community in our treatment of Fried and Cavell, in the third part, below. 12. The question of evaluation, or of assigning value, replaces the sense of rectification in most secular readings of Hegel, in many respects echoing Marx and opening up to social and political implications of Derrida’s work as it emanates from Hegel. That it must be separated from the structure of judgment associated with subject metaphysics is the difficulty we face, here and below, in terms of eliminating the frame of the active self that imposes shape on matter.

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13. There is always a question of whether Hegel had the resources for a sustaining difficulty, even if those resources went unnoticed by his followers. In the contour I am setting out, the question has less to do with being true to Hegel’s resources, than putting into question the very Hegelian sense of what it would mean to be true to philosophical resources as such. That there is something like a betrayal at work in the movement to the system is what we are attempting to show. To remain true, not to the resources, but to the emptying movement of nothingness, because one shapes the gestures of presence without pretending that they are self-sufficient, is the task. 14. In some ways, and as I will note below, the word is simply available within the French language in slightly broader connotations than in English, where it sometimes sounds forced. The pull toward its use, though, takes on some urgency by the time of Merleau-Ponty and then Foucault. I take it, for those like Derrida who would be carefully following Heidegger, the connection of gestures to the bearing of things into the world, for example in “Die Sprache,” Unterwegs zur Sprache (Stuttgart: Neske, 1959, 11th ed., 1997), translated by Peter Hertz as On the Way to Language (New York: Harper, 1982/1971), would have further accentuated the use of the word, and would have eventually led him back to Eckhart’s version of God bearing a son through a gesture (an act of communication) that is also a gestation of the new. 15. There are many attempts to save Kant from this reading, mostly because the idea of depth has come under such disrepute in ontological discussions. At the same time, the idea that language is separable, and that language has a logic of appearing, or of phenomenality, that operates separately from the underlying reality (however that ontology is configured), remains fundamentally Kantian. Ricoeur, for an influential but not solitary example, simply embraces the difference as a way of saving space for God, and for his transcendent support, albeit no longer a support of particular beliefs, but only of the being of the individual as such. Cf. Oneself as Another, (Trans. Kathleen Blamey)(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), p. 25. 16. John McCumber makes an argument that all analytic philosophy remains atemporal, despite its recent attempts to account for time, in Reshaping Reason: Toward a New Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). I take it that merely opposing a philosophy that is resolutely within time to a philosophy that seeks to annul time is not enough: one must fight against the sense that a participation in time is a necessary fact. For that argument, see below, in terms of Derrida. 17. Éric Weil’s Logique de la philosophie (Paris: Vrin, 1996 [2nd ed.]) provides the framework for this reading by casting the moment of individuality as the moment of violence where one refuses the unity of sense. His reading of Hegel then casts peace in terms of the desire for the universal that is made manifest in all human activity to the extent that we recognize that we already belong to the

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work of logos (cf. 68–9, and 73–6 for particularly succinct summaries). Lévinas’s Totalité et Infini (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961) accentuates the demands of that desire for peace—as expressing peace itself—in that which is external to all systems, even those systems of expression that Weil would privilege. In that sense, Lévinas is not simply opposing himself to Hegel, or at least to Weil’s reading of conceptual closure. Derrida’s “Violence et métaphysique” (L’ écriture et la différence [Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967]), has set the terms of the debate for those following in the deconstructive line. The long footnote opposing Weil and Lévinas on discourse and violence (171–72 of the French, English, n. 42, 315), is of particular interest. At that point (1964), violence is seen either in terms of the reduction of alterity to discourse (in Weil) or in terms of the discourse of the other which infinitely resists reduction to the same (in Lévinas). To my eye, Claudia Dovolich’s Derrida tra Differenza e Trascendentale (Milano: FrancoAngeli, 1995) is here of particular interest as a reading of Derrida in terms of the “movements of structure” (cf. 58) that are indicated in the trace. 18. A signal work on this long-standing metaphor for creativity, as reworked through recent continental philosophy, is Ferit Güven’s Madness and Death in Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005). 19. This transgressive reading has been a generative moment in recent intellectual history, partly because of Foucault’s early text, “Préface à la transgression,” Critique 195–6 (1963). An emphasis on transgressive desire, arising from Butler’s appropriation of Kojève (Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France [New York: Columbia University Press, 1987]) has been able to resituate both Derrida and Bataille by concentrating on the action, or performance, of the real. I am, it should be clear, trying to suggest something about that basic shape that keeps the model of activity from being determinative—or the determination of activity from being the model. 20. Derrida, “De l’économie restreinte à l’économie générale—Un hegelianisme sans réserve,” L’ écriture et la différence (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967), 401; translated by Alan Bass under the title “From Restricted to General Economy,” Writing and Difference (Chicago: Unviersity of Chicago Press, 1987). 21. A number of commentators have argued convincingly that this violence opens and describes the progress of determination through time in its particularity and thus keeps a simple opposition between passive and active, written and writer, from emerging. Cf., notably, Marian Hobson, Jacques Derrida: Opening Lines (London: Routledge, 1998). 22. “De l’économie restreinte…,” L’ écriture et la difference, 405–6; “From General to Restricted Economy,” Writing and Difference, 275. 23. L’ écriture et la difference, 406; Writing and Difference, 275. 24. L’ écriture et la difference, 406; Writing and Difference, 275. 25. Alison Brown, Subjects of Deceit (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998) enacts an interesting critique of this conception of freedom and truth.

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26. I first formulated this question in terms of Kant in response to Andrew Cutrofello, Imagining Otherwise: Metapsychology and the Analytic A Posteriori, (Northwestern University Press: Evanston, 1997). I also benefitted from extended conversations with him at the time he was finishing his writing. He is examining similar questions concerning the demand for system in terms of Kant, Hume and Lacan and looking for an ego, as opposed to the Kantian superego, that could enjoy its ethical obligations and not fall subject to a deadening command for the “annihilation of everything that falls under the name of passion, chance, and love.” (158). His understanding of the relation of the “Kantian cognitive drive” to the “Lacanian symbolic order” (esp. chapter 3, “Logics of Perversion”) serves as one of several horizons for the present work. 27. The Critique of Pure Reason, B XX. 28. Klaus Köhnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus: die deutsche Universitätsphilosophie zwischen Idealismus und Positivismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986); translated by R. J. Hollingdale under the title The rise of neo-Kantianism: German academic philosophy between idealism and positivism, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 29. The Critique of Pure Reason, B XIX. 30. The Critique of Pure Reason, B XVI. 31. If Cutrofello, in Imagining Otherwise, op. cit., is right to say that the judgment that aligns the subject with the noumenal is an infinite judgment and not a determinate one, that still doesn’t contradict the methodological claims of the determinate judgment—in fact, it further serves to situate the claim that judgments act as mediators of the demands of the infinite as they bear on the finite subject. 32. Cf., The Critique of Pure Reason, A 247–49/B 304–5, which lies at the core of the discussion of the distinction between phenomenal and noumenal, for a particularly clear example. The discussions of the transcendental aesthetic in general also have this structure (cf., A 27/B 43), but at that point the claim is supposed to be merely methodological—only, that is, a matter of whether or not a judgment can be said to hold as valid. 33. The “reality” of an object attaches to the question of what it is and not to whether it “really” exists (cf., The Critique of Pure Reason, A 143/B 182); the difficulty lies with the fact that this “what” in some ways carries the force of reality in its presence as form—as “intensive Größe” or “Grad” (A 166/B 207)—and thus as the form of a unity of experience, of something being given to thought. A full discussion is available in Heidegger, Die Frage nach dem Ding (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1962, 3rd ed. 1987), 166–70. Cf., for an extension of the sense of demand in givenness itself, Alphonso Lingis, The Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), and, in an epistemological sense, and perhaps from the principle figure in Neokantianism, Hermann Cohen, Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, (Berlin, 1872/1882).

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34. Where the slipperiness between an individuated thing in itself and a perspective on the whole, as the thing in itself, shown in parts that must always be related past individuated givenness, spawns many of the succeeding questions of Idealism. 35. I understand this, in the current language of philosophy of science, to begin with a position that is no more controversial than to say that theories account for observables by postulating processes or entities that are not directly observable; the extension is only to have insisted that the structure of limitation tells us how observables become such, in general, and thus frames all theories about experience. The anti-realist position, in the end, embraces a “deflated” version of Kant—insisting that realism be grounded in an understanding of how observables, as such, are constructed, but not feeling that any a priori structures of possible experience should be posited to explain this process. Bas C. Van Fraassen, The Scientific Image, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980 introduced “constructive empiricism” as one way of introducing this broadly Kantian question without taking on Kantian categories; Wilfrid Sellars Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes, Atascadero, California: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1982 (1st ed., 1967) tries something similar, with more explicit Kantian borrowings, and recent philosophy of science has been permeated with yet further variations on the constitution of objectivity as such, many explicitly related back to Cassirer’s version of Neokantianism. 36. Dieter Sturma, “Self and Reason: A Nonreductionist Approach to the Reflective and Practical Transitions of Self-Consciousness,” The Modern Subject: Conceptions of the Self in Classical German Philosophy, ed. Karl Ameriks and Dieter Sturma (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), has an interesting expansion on the automatism of this placement within reason. 37. But is this Kant’s own self-understanding? It seems clear that Kant himself— for example in insisting on the contingency of space and time—believes that a certain power, if not of abstraction then at least pertaining to that which is abstract, is independent of the facticity of our given situation. The point, however, must be that this taking on of a certain meaning has the structure of becoming determinate—that is, of becoming structured. This is the logic of being-posited and is thus at the base of the precedence of the structure, precisely as the logic of a certain kind of movement. Sallis will say that the attempt to gather meaning from out of pure imagination will fail: it can thus be employed either in the service of the practical or in “service to understanding, in which reason’s positing of unity becomes a positing of systematic connection which can serve as directive for understanding, which can thus promote the utmost extension of the empirical employment of the understanding. In regulative employment the conflict over the disparity between the two sides of the gathering is, in effect, replaced by a directedness of the manifold toward the unity. Conflict is resolved by being transformed into a striving.” John Sallis,

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The Gathering of Reason (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1980), 150. 38. The Critique of Pure Reason, A 37/B 53–4) 39. Cf. Kant, “Das Ende aller Dinge” (variously available; I used the inexpensive Werke in sechs Bänden, Band 6, Herausgegeben von Rolf Toman, Köneman: Köln, 1995). The connection between the moral and the epistemological is of deep import to Kant here. That this is also precisely a matter of time already for Kant is of interest to my reading. In the context of the Critique of Pure Reason, the canon of pure reason that sets out the highest good as the ultimate goal of pure reason looks for the unity of the systematic ordering of the world in terms of the principles of freedom—the world must be represented as having sprung up from an ideal of the highest good that accords with the dignity and purpose of reason (cf., esp., A 815–16/B 843–44). That ideal, which is eternal, demands our finite motion be turned towards its unifying presentation and thus places a moral or ethical charge—an orientation of human activity— before all epistemology. 40. Cf., again, Sallis, The Gathering of Reason, op. cit., esp. chapters V and VI. For a general treatment of Heidegger’s reading of Kant, and of Sallis’s interpretation in particular, see Frank Schalow’s The Renewal of the HeideggerKant Dialogue: Action, Thought and Responsibility (Albany: SUNY, 1992). 41. Although tempting to see this as an invitation to introduce a new distinction—somehow marking the difference between a formal force and an effective force—one must see how the conflation of the two operated in Kant’s own delimitation of the task of philosophy as situated critique of the possibilities of human knowledge. In other words, and I believe this is Derrida’s insight, a distinction between the two would not be able to arise from out situation in the deformative movement of the world, since their permeanent intwinement is the very sense of being thus situated (cf. Rodolphe Gasché, The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003 and his earlier, very Kantian, readings of Derrida). The final question of the present book is whether “abandon” speaks to this unity without reifying or glorifying both the idea of violence and the picture of situated knowledge as participation in the world’s forceful motion. 42. Lingis’ The Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998) is particularly good here. 43. Werke in sechs Bänden, Band 6, Herausgegeben von Rolf Toman, (Köln: Köneman, 1995). 44. Werke in sechs Bänden, 6, 193–4. 45. A brief and interesting account of the sense of position identified here— and independent of the Heideggerian reading offered below—can be found in Eckart Förster, “Kant’s Selbstsetzunglehre,” Kant’s Transcendental Deductions, ed. Eckart Förster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989). 46. Werke in sechs Bänden, 6, 197.

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47. Dieter Henrich has a particularly interesting historical account of the problem of the unity of the subject and its originary powers, simultaneously setting the question of unity in Heidegger and Kant, in “On the Unity of Subjectivity,” originally published in Philosophische Rundschau, 3 (1955), translated by Guenter Zoeller as the first chapter of Dieter Henrich, The Unity of Reason (Cambridge: Harvard Univerity Press, 1994). 48. For example, in the refutation of idealism, the sense of being a subject must be determined, in time, as the place where determinations culminate, in time, as the inner sense, not having its own predicate in intuition, within which the representations of all external objects can be carried through. Cf. B 277–78. 49. Which could almost be translated as: “How must the world have been created for there to be a moral creature”? “Wie muß eine Welt für ein moralisches Wesen beschaffen seyn?”Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus, (In Hegel’s handwriting, but of contested authorship). The debate is summarized and the text is reproduced and translated in David Farrell Krell, “The Oldest Program Towards a System in German Idealism,” The Owl of Minerva, Vol. 17:1 (Fall, 1985), 5–19, this quote on 9. The original has been included in all three of their collected works and it exists in several English translations. 50. Žižek relates the formality of the subject’s orientation to the psychic structures of symbolization: “the transcendental object is the “in-itself ” insofar as it is for the subject, posited by it; it is pure “positedness” of an indeterminate X. This “empty synthetic gesture”—which adds to the thing nothing positive, no new sensible feature, and yet, in its very capacity of an empty gesture, constitutes it, makes it into an object—is the act of symbolization in its most elementary form, at its zero-level.” (Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 151). In Imagining Otherwise, op. cit., Cutrofello (who quotes this passage on his p. 68) sees the work of this empty gesture in terms of the infinite judgment and not the determinate judgment. In the Heideggerian terms of the Kant book, that would be to look towards the openness of imagination and thus towards a greater role for symbolic fantasy (p. 79). It’s not clear to me that the very idea of possibility can be coherently expanded without taking into account the problem of establishing a unity of possibility as such (a continuity, that is, of a gesture and a directedness toward, as openness). By my reading, what makes the subject, as subject of language, possible, is not having the faculty of imagination, but being situated as having the demand to imagine. One is wrenched into the imaginative, and not into the empty gesture of a space of possibility. The subject is not, that is, capable of desire, much less of enjoyment—one does not become the subject in the space of possibly desiring an object, nor of making any of the empty gestures of reception that would constitute the contours of desire. Possibility does not conform to the open.

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51. “In the elucidation of being possible as position, the relationship to the formal conditions of experience come into play and there with the concept of form. With the elucidation of being actual, the material conditions of experience were expressed and thereby the concept of matter. The elucidation of the modalities of being as position is accordingly accomplished with a view to the difference of matter and form. This difference pertains to the situational context belonging to the site of being as position.” Wegmarken, 300–1; Pathmarks, 358. In a decidedly non-Heideggerian approach, Stephen Houlgate also sees the turn to matter and form, as foundational principles, to be central to Kant’s project and to his understanding of the role of the subject (although Houlgate finds that subject to still be an object (Gegenstand) and not enough of a functioning in the practical world). Stephen Houlgate, “Hegel, Kant, and the Formal Distinctions of Reflective Understanding,” Hegel on the Modern World ed. Ardis B. Collins (New York: State Univerity of New York Press, 1995), 133–35, and 140. 52. Heidegger, Wegmarken, 478–80/306–7; Pathmarks includes the original pagination. 53. The Critique of Pure Reason, A 15/B 29. 54. The Critique of Pure Reason, A 15 and A 50/B 29 and B 74. 55. The Critique of Pure Reason, A 24/B 39 and A 32/B 48. 56. The Critique of Pure Reason, A 23–24/B 38. 57. The Critique of Pure Reason, A 24–5/B 40–1; Heidegger, Die Frage nach dem Ding, 149. 58. The Critique of Pure Reason, A 25/B 40. 59. Paul de Man, for example (he’s speaking to the specific context of the sublime and the ways that it enters into the forms of judgments): “The language of the poets therefore in no way partakes of mimesis, reflection, or even perception, in the sense which would allow a link between sense experience and understanding, between perception and apperception. Realism postulates a phenomenalism of experience which is here being denied or ignored. Kant’s looking at the world just as one sees it (“wie man ihn sieht”) is an absolute, radical formalism that entertains no notion of reference or semiosis. Yet it is this entirely a-referential, a-phenomenal, a-pathetic formalism that will win out in the battle among affects and find access to the moral world of practical reason, practical law, and rational politics. To parody Kant’s stylistic procedure of dictionary definition: the radical formalism that animates aesthetic judgment in the dynamics of the sublime is what is called materialism.” “Kant’s Materialism,” Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, 128. 60. Cf., Werner Hamacher, “The Promise of Interpretation: Remarks on the Hermeneutic Imperative in Kant and Nietzsche,” Trans. by Peter Fenves, Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996). 61. The Critique of Pure Reason, A 34/B 50–51.

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62. The Critique of Pure Reason, A 37–8/B 54. 63. Heidegger, “Kants These über das Sein,” Wegmarken, 303/476; translated by Ted E. Klein Jr. and William E. Pohl as “Kant’s Thesis about Being,” Pathmarks, 360. 64. “Sein—eigentlich: das Anwesenheit Gewährende.” Wegmarken, 306/479; Pathmarks, 362. 65. Wegmarken, 307/480; Pathmarks, 363. 66. Wegmarken, 302/474; Pathmarks, 359. 67. Cf., “Nietzsches Wort: ‘Gott ist tot,’” Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1950); translated by William Lovitt under the title “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead,’” The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1977) and by Kenneth Haynes as “Nietzsche’s Word: ‘God is Dead,’” in Off the Beaten Track. 68. Wegmarken, 303/476; Pathmarks, 360. 69. Being and Time, §65–§69. 70. I will have to insist that this is not an exegetical claim relative to Heidegger’s text—it is, instead, a heuristic device, introduced by Derrida in “Ousia et Gramme,” for explaining the distinction between two types of questions, or in Bataille’s terms, in the difference between a restricted and general presence. In Was Heisst Denken? (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1984 [4th ed.; 1st ed., 1954]), Heidegger will accord the broader role to Anwesen: “Das Vergangene, das Gegenwärtige, das Kommende erscheinen in der Einheit eines je eigenen Anwesens.” (p. 92). This is opposed to the attempt to think all temporality from out of the Jetzt, where the Anwesende is reduced to the Seiende (cf., p. 41, p. 144f.), but is not, as in Derrida’s case, an attempt to think a constant opposition between the Gegenwärtige and the Anwesende. The most systematic attempt to think through their opposition, on Heidegger’s part, would be in “Zeit und Sein,” published after Derrida’s critique in “Ousia et Gramme” (1969) had been formulated. Derrida’s analyses center on the earlier “Der Spruch des Anaximander,” published in Holzwege in 1950. 71. Wegmarken, 303–4/476–77; Pathmarks, 359–60. 72. Wegmarken, 304–6/477–79; Pathmarks, 360–63. 73. We should remember that Being and Time also situates possibility higher than actuality: the sense of such claims is what we are looking for, in the first place. That Heidegger may have changed some of his views precisely concerning the question of possibility will have to remain, as an open question, in the background. 74. Wegmarken, 287–88/460; Pathmarks, 347–48, although this part of his interpretation is fundamentally unchanged from the Kant book. 75. See, for example, Dieter Henrich’s 1955 review article of Heidegger’s Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik for an influential if somewhat opposed account of the problem. “On the Unity of Subjectivity,” The Unity of Reason, 44–5.

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76. The Critique of Pure Reason, B 134 77. Wegmarken, 289/461; Pathmarks, 349. 78. Reiner Schürmann, Des hégémonies brisées, 641–772; Broken Hegemonies. 79. Wegmarken, 290/462; Pathmarks, 350 80. Wegmarken, 290/463; Pathmarks, 350. 81. The logic of philosophy “is only possible beginning from the moment where violence has been seen in its purity and where, consequently, the will of coherence, as a violent decision (free and not justifiable) of man against violence (“natural,” up until then), is understood as the center of the world within which this decision is taken.” Weil, La logique de la philosophie, 83. 82. The Critique of Pure Reason, A 176–81/B 218–24). 83. Die Frage nach dem Ding, 177–78; translated by W.B. Barton Jr. and Vera Deutsch as What is a Thing? (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1967), 228f.. 84. Die Frage nach dem Ding, 178; What is a Thing? 228. 85. “In the essence of pure understanding already lies freedom, if by this we mean placing oneself under a self-given necessity. The understanding and reason are not thus free because they have the character of spontaneity, but because this spontaneity is a receptive spontaneity, or in other words, transcendental imagination.” Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, GA 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1929, 6th ed., 1998), 155. 86. Die Frage Nach dem Ding, 179; What is a Thing? 230. 87. Die Frage nach dem Ding, 181; What is a Thing? 233. 88. Being and Time, §82, against Hegel. 89. Die Frage Nach dem Ding, 181–82; What is a Thing? 234–36. 90. Die Frage Nach dem Ding, 188; What is a Thing? 242. 91. Die Frage nach dem Ding, 188; What is a Thing? 242. 92. To be such, in the end, would be to be contained within a transcendence, a life that encloses us and conditions our particular appearances. Much of the argument against Heidegger’s “obsession with death” stems from the idea that we must be conditioned by participation within a whole, before we can claim our own individuality; rather than attributing a psychological morbidity to Heidegger, I see here a deep connection between the identity of Dasein with transcendence and the possibility of having a whole only in the death analysis. 93. Cf., “Brief über den Humanismus,” Wegmarken, 316–17 [148]; translated by Frank A. Capuzzi as “Letter on Humanism,” Pathmarks, 240–41. 94. Die Frage Nach dem Ding, 189; What is a Thing? 242. 95. Daniel Price, “Poor Alice: On the Idea of a Field in Lacan and Deleuze,” Being Amongst Others: Phenomenological Reflections on the Life-world, (ed. Eric Chelstrom), (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006). 96. Wissenschaft der Logik, vol. 5, 56; Science of Logic, 59. 97. Cf. Andrzej Warminski, Readings in Interpretation: Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). See also,

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Heidegger’s criticism of the thinking of being in terms of the present participle, Heidegger, Was heisst Denken? cf., esp., 136, 148–9, and more generally, all of lectures X and XI of the Summer Semester, 1952; translated as What is Called Thinking (New York: Harper and Row, 1968). 98. The metaphor of the point is important here, in its religious and aesthetic context. Mark C. Taylor has an interesting account of the development of abstract art as a response to the religious sense of presence in place—God reveals Himself as a point, in Jabès’ phrase, and Taylor understands the Abstract Expressionists, such as Barnett Newman to understand the withdrawal at the heart of revelation: “But this revleation is also a concealment. In order to allow creation to appear, God, who once filled the entire universe, must withdraw— into a point. Thus the fullness of Being never arrives and Onement is never present.” Mark C. Taylor, Disfiguring, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, p. 91. The meaning of God’s presence, because of this withdrawal into the point, is never given, but the orientation toward that determination is the proper role of art in Abstract Expressionism. (Taylor does not stop with High Modernism, however, and turns to the postmodern commodification of aesthetic gestures). We will return to these issues, at great length, at the end of the book. 99. Hermann Cohen, Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, (Berlin, 1872/1882), 661: “Das Ding an sich ist ‘Aufgabe’” (“The thing in itself is ‘task’”). Alphonso Lingis also takes this up in Imperatives, op. cit. 100. Wissenschaft der Logik, vol. 5, 59; Science of Logic, 62. 101. Wissenschaft der Logik, vol. 5, 61; Science of Logic, 63. 102. Wissenschaft der Logik, vol. 5, 61–62; Science of Logic, 64. 103. Wissenschaft der Logik, vol. 5, 61–62; Science of Logic, 64. 104. This is a paraphrase of Hegel’s own summary of the “The Doctrine of Wesen,” Wissenschaft der Logik, vol. 6, 17; Science of Logic, 393. 105. Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 106. Wissenschaft der Logik, vol. 6, 430–31; Science of Logic, 729. 107. Derrida, Marges de la Philosophie, 81; Margins, 71. 108. It is probably true that the best reading of Cassirer would already have avoided this type of mistake, at least in having posited a completely separate “realm” in thinking about the noumenal—the problem is what establishes the priority of form over matter. If it is the forward motion of the “force” of presence as medium, I argue below, we will fall back into ontotheology. More, if the “rectitude” of the process is guaranteed, for example, by the fact that every partial givenness will be absorbed into the whole (as already in Schleiermacher), then the form—without warrant—is given priority over the material. Derrida, I am arguing, does better than any of these approaches, but continues to have a general sense of motion as encompassing because moving from the past to the

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future. Here, again, one triangulates on his late approaches, where he is very careful not to begin from a historical presupposition, but continues to believe in the future of the process, without presuming we understand or comprehend its contours in advance. 109. De la grammatologie, (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1967), 367; translated by Gayatri Spivak as Of Grammatology, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974, corrected edition, 1997) 259–60, gives a good overview of the problem at stake. 110. This has been a rough paraphrase of Marges, 88–91; Margins, 76–80, although Derrida follows this movement in other places as well. 111. Marges, 102-3; Margins, 88-89. (My ellipsis). 112. In Derrida’s own words, see esp. “Tympan,” which is the preface to Marges. 113. Marges, 126; Margins, 107. 114. “Violence et Métaphysique,” L’ écriture et la difference, 171–76; Writing and Difference, 113–17. 115. L’ écriture et la différence, 173; Writing and Difference, 117. 116. Wissenschaft der Logik, vol. 5, 66; Science of Logic, 67–68. 117. Wissenschaft der Logik, vol. 5, 67; Science of Logic, 68. A common reading of Hegel would have equated the form of this absolute knowing with the form of Setzung and more generally of propositional sentences. McCumber’s The Company of Words shows why this is not the case. 118. D. G. Leahy, Novitas Mundi: Perception of the History of Being (New York: New York University Press, 1980). 119. “Die Onto-Theo-Logische Verfassung der Metaphysik,” Identität und Differenz, 43–44; translated in a bilingual edition by Joan Stambaugh as Identity and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 53/119. 120. Identität und Differenz, 42; Identity and Difference, 52/118. 121. “Das Wesen der Sprache,” Unterwegs zur Sprache (Stuttgart: Neske, 1959), 216. 122. The certainty of the cogito in Descartes is a constant target because it captures the sense of intelligibility being given with presence, in the same human gesture, and thus reduces presence to the production of meaning in a position. Cf., History of the Concept of Time, (T. Kisiel, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana Univ., 1985, p. 216. 123. “Was den Anfang macht, der Anfang selbst, ist daher als ein Nichtanalysierbares, in seiner einfachen unerfüllten Unmittelbarkeit, also als Sein, als das ganz Leere zu nehmen.” Wissenschaft der Logik, vol. 5, 75; translated by A.V. Miller as Hegel’s Science of Logic (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1989 [George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1969]), 75. 124. Wissenschaft der Logik, vol. 5, 70; Hegel’s Science of Logic, 71. 125. Wissenschaft der Logik, vol. 5, 71; Hegel’s Science of Logic, 71. 126. Wissenschaft der Logik, vol. 5, 71; Hegel’s Science of Logic, 71.

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127. Werner Beierwaltes, Platonismus und Idealismus (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1972). 128. Substance metaphysics, after all, consists in taking the real substance to be that which stands opposed to us, capable of sustaining whatever names and concepts we apply, insubstantially, to those things as their “secondary characteristics.” 129. Wissenschaft der Logik, vol. 6, 554; Science of Logic, 828. 130. “Wesen der Wahrheit,” Wegmarken; “Essence of Truth,” Pathmarks. 131. “Hegel und die Griechen,” Wegmarken, 267/439–268/440; Pathmarks, original pagination in translation. 132. Identität und Differenz, 47–48; Identity and Difference, 57/124–25. 133. Diels/Kranz, 12A9; G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 103 A. They have inserted “apeiron.” I have inserted the other Greek terms. 134. Kirk and Raven, 117. 135. Although we should take seriously the possibility that Heidegger is wrong about the historical context, or rather, about how Anaximander would have interpreted himself if allowed to see his context from the outside (which is the question historians so misleadingly ask in terms of the “intentions” of individual authors). Heidegger could be wrong, for example, about the social origins of juridical thinking, both in its particular shape and its date, without being wrong about what is betrayed by the juridical, and without precluding the possibility of finding a response against the juridical within Anaximander. 136. Holzwege, 326–7/353–54; Off the Beaten Track, 266–67. Cf., also, Derrida, Spectres of Marx. 137. “gehören lassen die Fug somit auch Ruch eines dem anderen (im Verwinden) des Un-Fugs.” Holzwege, 333/361; Off the Beaten Track, 272. 138. Walther Kranz, in a note added to the 1952 edition of Diels/Krantz Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Berlin: Weidmannsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1952), vol. 1, 487 f., dismisses Heidegger’s translation on the grounds that “dike” and its cognates had known juridical uses already in Anaximander’s time. The response one gives on Heidegger’s behalf is not that a pre-juridical meaning still coexisted at that time, but that the problem of understanding what position the human had relative to the claims the universe staked on the individual precede the idea of the court as space of adjudication. That we are enjoined to the order, as opposed to speaking about truth from the position of the judge, can arise from out of the sense of the language Heidegger examines. 139. Nietzsche introduces the idea that Heraclitus might be very close to Anaximander here. The only difference would be that Anaximander did not see the justice beyond good and evil that the play of contraries would announce. It’s worth mentioning that Nietzsche’s account has not won many adherents among Anaximander scholars either. Nietzsche, “Die Philosophie

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im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen,” Kritische Studienausgabe, Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1999), vol. 1, esp. 817–833. See, in response, Charles Kahn, Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960). Kahn gives a spatialized interpretation of the apeiron, but also notes its usage as something that cannot be passed through (cf. 232); by emphasizing the spatial sense, he can tie the development of an idea of mutual limitation to the unfolding of individual essence and thus the properly philosophic task of understanding the world. The movement of transformation that Heidegger sought—in short—is not to be found in this understanding of Anaximander. Once again, my task is not to justify Heidegger’s exegesis, but to sort through the sense of the question Heidegger seeks to phrase in the course of his examination of the original text. 140. Cf., esp. Holzwege, 322/349; Early Greek Thinking, 372; Off the Beaten Track, 263. For more on Anwesen, cf., also, 340–341. 141. GA 21 (Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit [Wintersemester 1925/26]), cf., 412ff. 142. Holzwege, 319–20/346–47; Early Greek Thinking, 370; Off the Beaten Track, 261. 143. Holzwege, 336/364; Early Greek Thinking, 50; Off the Beaten Track, 275. 144. Holzwege, 337/365; Early Greek Thinking, 51; Off the Beaten Track, 276. 145. Holzwege, 337/365; Early Greek Thinking, 51; Off the Beaten Track, 276. 146. “Wesen der Wahrheit,” Wegmarken, 93/197–98; “Essence of Truth,” Pathmarks, 151. Notes to Part Three 1. Heidegger, Die Kunst und Der Raum, p. 9. 2. Michael Fried, «Art and Objecthood» (1967), Minimal Art. A Critical Anthology, ed. G. Battcock (New York, Dutton, 1968), 116. Collected in Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 148. 3. Part of the aesthetic question of postmodernism is how much one embraces a new type of artifice, and how much one sees, in artifice become self-conscious, a new freedom, or culmination of the sacred nature of human gestures as they detach from their metaphysical grounds in ideologically biased modes of production. Cf., for a particularly good account, Mark C. Taylor’s Disfiguring, op. cit. 4. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961, 1981), 5–6. 5. This is often noted by post-modern critiques of the singular sense of mission announced in large part through Greenberg’s writing. Krauss’ The Originality

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of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985) provides a good example of the polemics after Greenberg. 6. Clement Greenberg, “The New Sculpture,” Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961, 1981), 145. 7. Cf., “Modernist Sculpture, its Pictorial Past,” “The New Sculpture,” and “David Smith” in Art and Culture. 8. “The New Sculpture,” Art and Culture, 139. 9. One could see this in terms of the death of God atheology, or of the absolutely new thinking that this death allows, in various ways in Thomas J. J. Altizer, Mark C. Taylor, and D. G. Leahy, as long as the transformation at the place of the novelty of the world exceeds the meaningfulness of belief, or of positioning oneself in terms of an encompassing whole, thought affirmatively or negatively. For that reason, only an apocalyptic voice, undermining all pretense to a natural order—even to the belief that there will, of necessity, be an order to come—can actually sustain a life within the destructive grace that marks time’s passage. However, a political answer that claims to find a purely secular dimension to the advent of meaning at the place of the “split” individual—of historical determination and universal being coming together—remains tied to the same ontotheology because it insists on the position of the individual within the infinite flow of more of that which is to be thought. 10. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (New York: Viking Press, 1971), 116–17. 11. Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture,” (1967), Minimal Art. A Critical Anthology, ed. G. Battcock (New York, Dutton, 1968), 228. There seem to be serious misunderstandings between the positions articulated by Morris and by Fried; at stake for Morris is whether the new sculpture extends on the logic of cubism or, as he argues, represents a new aesthetic. Fried’s argument defends a longer trajectory of aesthetic thought, and would not be limited to the defense of cubism (the polemics around the import of David Smith’s work would be important). Rosalind Krauss has shifted the grounds of the polemic toward the sculpture’s ability to “resist meaning,” in the trajectory since Rodin, and would thus largely belong to an accentuation of the aesthetic Morris was contesting, but without Fried’s insistence on the display of the conditions of meaningful activity. See her Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977), “No More Play,” The Originality of the Avant—Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), and “The Mind/ Body Problem: Robert Morris in Series,” Guggenheim Foundation Exhibit Catalogue, Robert Morris: The Mind/Body Problem (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1994). Morris’ own work, like Tony Smith’s, developed in directions that were not clearly adumbrated at the time of this debate. Interesting critical work can still be found taking up these themes, however. Whitney Davis, Pacing the World: Construction in the Scultpure of David Rabinowitch, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Art Museums, 1996),

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170 draws explicitly on the critique of Morris; the recent retrospective of Tony Smith’s work at the Museum of Modern Art yielded, in addition to the catalogue, an interesting debate between Yve-Alain Bois and Jean-Pierre Criqui “Matters of Scale,” Art Forum International (November, 1998). 12. Morris ties this subjugation to the situation of the art and not to the mental functioning of the viewer; in this way, the installation took on theoretical importance that a piece of art designed to stand on its own could not support. Cf, “Notes on Sculpture,” 233–35. 13. The function of subjectivity is here purely and completely relativized, so that the element of meaning (the economy) takes precedence over any given act of meaning (the self-standing conviction of meaning as transcendent). That one then celebrates that art that most essentially designates the semiotic exchange for its own sake, in the postmodern turn to aesthetic commodification, is an odd twist of fate, a return of high modernism redoubled on itself, like Kant’s subject turned back on its own functioning, above. By turning to the shape of every instant, whether the enactment of an exchange, or of the simple presence of an individual, we are asserting that it is possible to group both of these responses together—and then to find another shape in which these basic moments of contact between an element of thought and its singular cases can be thought. 14. “Art and Objecthood,” Minimal Art, 135–6; Art and Objecthood, 158–60. 15. Fried borrows this term from Stanley Cavell, and more specifically from the seminars that Fried attended where Cavell explicated ideas also found in his Do We Have to Mean What We Say? 16. “Art and Objecthood,” Minimal Art, 143; Art and Objecthood, 165. (ibid. p. 143). 17. Michael Fried, “An Introduction to My Art Criticism,” Art and Objecthood, 43. 18. “Art and Objecthood,” Minimal Art, 134; Art and Objecthood, 158. 19. “Art and Objecthood,” Minimal Art, 131; Art and Objecthood, 158. See also, Samuel Wagstaff, Jr., “Talking With Tony Smith,” Minimal Art. A Critical Anthology. 20. “Art and Objecthood,” Minimal Art, 147; Art and Objecthood, 168. 21. “Art and Objecthood,” Minimal Art, 137; Art and Objecthood, 161. 22. One should not underestimate the originality of Fried’s thought here; the semantic turn that had so fully transformed the understanding of human presence in post-positivist analytic philosophy is here applied to judgments about art. Only to the extent that they understood Wittgenstein as providing a ground for grace—as a reader of Augustine, and of the sense that meaning is not carried in the individual subject, but still calls for the individual to sustain it—could an artist claim to understand why “the world is all that is the case” is not simply a celebration of multiplicity. Here, if only in the notes, we have at last rejoined the conversation between Bataille, Ambrosino, Merleau-Ponty and Ayer.

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23. “Art and Objecthood,” Minimal Art, 138; Art and Objecthood, 162. 24. “Art and Objecthood,” Minimal Art, 146; Art and Objecthood, 167. 25. Michael Fried, “An Introduction to My Art Criticism,” Art and Objecthood, 38–39. 26. This is, perhaps, my most theological claim: as with the sense that an apocalyptic voice most forcefully communicates the shared character of nothingness, the sense that not every life is equally chosen, that some lives are destined for damnation (in that oldest of languages), need not rely on a sense that a personal God has created the world. It is, rather, the attempt to rid ourselves of the vestiges of ontotheology that forces us to reconsider the language of theology, and of how each individual is supposed to be claimed by the world. 27. Georges Didi-Huberman, Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde (Paris, les Éditions de Minuit, 1992). 28. Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde, 68. 29. Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde, 78. 30. Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde, 78–9. 31. Michael Fried, “Anthony Caro,” Art and Objecthood, 269. 32. Cf., Altizer’s Gospel of Christian Atheism (Kentucky: Westminster Press, 1967), and more recently, The Genesis of God (Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993). 33. Eugen Fink is remarkably clear on this point, in Metaphysik der Erziehung im Weltverständnis von Plato und Aristoteles (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1970). 34. Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language: Toward a New Poetics of Dasein (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004) attempts to draw Heidegger’s criticisms of the subject back into the scope of Hölderlin’s poetic subject, where that model provides for a “poetic dwelling” that eschews mastery of the will and representation in favor of Gelassenheit. 35. Sein und Zeit, 109; the various translations each have original pagination within. 36. Sein und Zeit, 111. 37. The Kantian language of “making possible” is only appropriate to a limited extent here, for reasons we will see later. Heidegger explains how the question has to do with the way Dasein exists and that the a priori structure of space is dependent on that mode of being: “Space is not found in the subject, nor does it observe the world ‘as if’ it were in space, but rather the ontologically wellunderstood ‘subject,’ the Dasein, is spatial in an originary sense. And because the Dasein is spatial in the described way, space is displayed as a priori.” Sein und Zeit, 111. 38. Sein und Zeit, 105. 39. Derrida, Marges, 153, Margins, 128.

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40. Derrida, “Restitutions,” La vérité en peinture, (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), 385; translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod under the title The Truth in Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 337. The term comes up repeatedly in later texts of Derrida’s on Heidegger. 41. Heidegger, “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” Holzwege, 17; “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Poetry Language Thought, 28. 42. “Restitutions,” La vérité en peinture, 408; The Truth in Painting, 357. 43. In perhaps the most complicated of the many dialectic turns one can associate with Hegel, Altizer associates this triumph with the apocalypse, with the knowledge that God is dead and thus that we are completely in the presence of what is. I am convinced that this final step is necessary to prevent the theological gesture from being a nostalgic return to a faith that grounds life because it is transcendent. (Mark C. Taylor accuses Altizer of precisely this nostalgia, Tears (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 76–77, but I think this misses the essential movement of Altizer’s thought as apocalyptic. The question is whether the presence of the sacred is an immanence because it is there to be grasped, like a divine will waiting to be recognized or given shape, or if that “presence” is the rending of our lives, through the constant dissolution of a destructive grace.) The final horizon of my question, however, has to do with whether the monotheistic presuppositions of such a philosophy don’t, of themselves, undermine the responsibility we bear for sustaining the whole (in theological terms, the reality of our sin and damnation). That the problem of contesting nihilism requires theological considerations speaks only to the fact that the advent of nihilism precedes and structures the divisions of the disciplines—what the symbolism of sin and damnation carries, beyond the technological symbolism of error and unexplained facts, is the sense of bearing responsibility for the place we occupy. 44. This refusal was not well understood in earlier readings of Derrida. David Wood, for example, praised Derrida precisely for establishing a realm of instantaneity, or free exchange of signs no longer tethered by traditional interpretations, such that “The text is a privileged site for the liberation of time.” The Deconstruction of Time (New Jersey: Humanities Press International, 1989), 331. 45. “Parergon,” La Vérité en Peinture, 85; The Truth in Painting, 73. 46. “Parergon,” 81; The Truth in Painting, 69. 47. Derrida, Psyché, 77. 48. “Psyché: Inventions de l’autre,” Psyché, 36. 49. “En ce moment même...,” Psyché, 162. 50. As in “Le théâtre de la cruauté...,” L’ écriture et la difference, 363–4. 51. “Cogito et histoire de la folie”, L’ écriture et la difference, 61. 52. Derrida, La voix et le phénomène (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967); translated by David B. Allison under the title Speech and Phenomenon (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). See Chapter 2.

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53. Marges, 49–50; Margins, 44–5. 54. Marges, 53; Margins, 47. 55. Marges, 54; Margins, 48. 56. Marges, 61; Margins, 53. 57. Marges, 74; Margins, 64. 58. See also Marges, 35–7, n. 2; Margins, 33, n. 6. 59. Marges, 75; Margins, 65. 60. La vérité en peinture, 22 and 433; Truth in Painting, 18 and 379. 61. La vérité en peinture, 22; Truth in Painting, 18. 62. “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” Holzwege, 15/10; Poetry Language Thought, 26; Off the Beaten Track, 8. 63. “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” 51–2/51; Poetry Language Thought, 69– 70; Off the Beaten Track, 43. 64. La vérité en peinture, 39; Truth in Painting, 32. 65. La vérité en peinture, 16; Truth in Painting, 11. 66. “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” 53/53; Poetry Language Thought, 71; Off the Beaten Track, 44. 67. “Restitutions,” La vérité en peinture, 384–402; Truth in Painting, 336–52. 68. “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” 8/3; Poetry Language Thought, 18; Off the Beaten Track, 2; and “Parergon,” 39–40. 69. The question here is complicated by Derrida’s subtly shifting approach to the nothing and separation—especially as he revives his conversations with Lévinas about death, the sacred, and nothingness after 1980. 70. “Restitutions,” La vérité en peinture, 339; Truth in Painting, 297, and “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” 18/14; Poetry Language Thought, 32; Off the Beaten Track, 13. 71. “Restitutions,” La vérité en peinture, 343; Truth in Painting, 300. 72. Psyché, 435. 73. “Restitutions,” La vérité en peinture, 325; Truth in Painting, 285. 74. “Restitutions,” La vérité en peinture, 352; Truth in Painting, 309. 75. This is quite clear in the original version (“Vom Ursprung des Kunstwerks: Erste Ausarbeitung,” Heidegger Studies, 1989, p. 15) but can also be found, in more complicated form, in the published version (“Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” 53–9/53–9; Poetry Language Thought, 71ff.; Off the Beaten track, 40–6). 76. Cf., among others, Mark C. Taylor, Tears (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990) and Andrew W. Hass, Poetics of Critique (England: Ashgate Publishing, 2003). 77. “Restitutions,” La vérité en peinture, 398; Truth in Painting, 348. 78. We must underscore the fact that “critical” art is designed to move us precisely in the direction of a “natural” experience—it demonstrates, that is, the dependence of our preconceptions on ideological frames that should be

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removed so that one can get to an experience free of illegitimate interpretations. A pure experience of framing experience in accord with what is. 79. This will be unclear to some readers: the traditional sense of rectification, for example in Augustine, is that one is rectified by moving into the past tense—by having been judged in the light of God’s grace. For Lévinas and Derrida, the rectification comes in the form of a future—in the form of a future judgment that is called to be made, a promise of future justice. 80. “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” 33/30; Poetry Language Thought, 44; Off the Beaten Track, 22; and “Erste Ausarbeitung,” 9. 81. “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” 34/31; Poetry Language Thought, 45; Off the Beaten Track, 23. 82. “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” 34/31; Poetry Language Thought, 45; Off the Beaten Track, 23. 83. “Restitutions,” La vérité en peinture, 404; Truth in Painting, 354. 84. The famous conclusion of “La structure, le signe et le jeu...”, L’ écriture et la différence, 428; Writing and Difference, 293, asks why we turn away every time that “a birth is in the offing,” but also insists that the birth can only come to term “under the species of the non-species, under the form of the unformed, mute, infant and terrifying, of the monstrous.” In his later work, in a further complication of his reading of Heidegger, Derrida explicitly confronted Heidegger’s association of gesture (Gebärde) with gestation (Gebären) in “Die Sprache” (“L’oreille de Heidegger: Philopolémologie (Geschlecht IV),” 349); Derrida’s own development in this regard is very much at issue in the reading I am offering, although—for essential reasons—one cannot approach the issue in terms of an exegesis of claims about the etymology. 85. “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” 59/60; Off the Beaten Track, 47. 86. “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” 52/52; Off the Beaten Track, 43. 87. Cf. my “This Rebellious Terrain,” Literature and Theology (December, 2004). 88. This view, which I take to be quite common, goes back at least to Freud, and can be found in Derrida’s readings of Geschlecht, and of memory, at least as commonly interpreted (cf. David Krell, Daimon Life [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993]). I am trying to find, within Derrida, a thought of originary absence that forms without passage through singularity; it is, admittedly, to think against Derrida’s own intentions. 89. Cf. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), although a number of variations on Benjamin’s “weak messianism” have recently emerged.

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1963]; translated by Michael Chase as Plotinus or the Simplicity of Vision. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998. Hamacher, Werner. Pleroma: Reading in Hegel. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998. ———. “The Promise of Interpretation: Remarks on the Hermeneutic Imperative in Kant and Nietzsche,” Trans. by Peter Fenves, Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996. Hegel, G.W.F. Phänomenologie des Geistes. Werke 3. Ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Marcus Michel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970; translated by A.V. Miller under the title Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. ———. Wissenschaft der Logik, Werke 5 and 6. Ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Marcus Michel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986; translated by A.V. Miller under the title Hegel’s Science of Logic. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1989 (George Allen and Unwin, 1969). Heidegger, Martin. Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), Gesamtausgabe, vol. 65. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1989. Translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly under the title Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. ———. “Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens.” Zur Sache des Denkens. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1969; translated by Joan Stambaugh under the title “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking.” On Time and Being. New York: Harper and Row, 1972. ———. “Die Frage nach der Technik.” Die Technik und die Kehre. Pfullingen: Neske, 1962; translated by William Lovitt under the title “The Question Concerning Technology,” The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York: Harper and Row, 1977. ———. Die Kunst und Der Raum/L’art et l’ éspace. Trans. Jean Beaufret. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2007. ———. “Nietzsches Wort: ‘Gott ist tot.’” Holzwege. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1950; translated by William Lovitt under the title “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead.’” The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York: Harper and Row, 1977; also translated by Kenneth Haynes in Off the Beaten Track. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ———. Der Satz vom Grund. Stuttgart: Neske, 1957; translated by Reginald Lilly as The Principle of Reason. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. ———. Schellings Abhandlung über das Wesen der Menschlichen Freiheit (1809), ed. Hildegard Feick. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1971/1995; translated by Joan Stambaugh under the title Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1985.

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———. “Der Spruch des Anaximander.” Holzwege. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1952; translated by David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi under the title “The Anaximander Fragment.” Early Greek Thinking. New York: Harper and Row, 1975/1984. Also translated by Julian Young under the same title in Off the Beaten Track. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ———. Unterwegs zur Sprache. Stuttgart: Neske, 1959, 11th ed., 1997; translated by Peter Hertz as On the Way to Language. New York: Harper, 1971/1982. ———. Wegmarken, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 9 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1976); various translations collected under the title of Pathmarks. Ed. William McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ———. Die Frage nach dem Ding. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1962, 3rd ed. 1987; translated by W.B. Barton Jr. and Vera Deutsch as What is a Thing? Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1967. ———. Was heisst Denken? translated as What is Called Thinking. New York: Harper and Row, 1968 ———. Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. 1929, 6th ed., 1998. ———. “Die Onto-Theo-Logische Verfassung der Metaphysik,” Identität und Differenz translated in a bilingual edition by Joan Stambaugh as Identity and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969. Hendrix, John Shannon. Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Spirit: From Plotinus to Schelling and Hegel. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2005. Henrich, Dieter. “On the Unity of Subjectivity.” The Unity of Reason. Trans. Guenter Zoeller. Cambridge: Harvard Univerity Press, 1994. Hobson, Marian. Jacques Derrida: Opening Lines. London: Routledge, 1998. Houlgate, Stephen. “Hegel, Kant, and the Formal Distinctions of Reflective Understanding.” Hegel on the Modern World. Ed. Ardis B. Collins. New York: State Univerity of New York Press, 1995. Irigaray, Luce. “The Fecundity of the Caress.” An Ethic of Sexual Difference. Trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Kahn, Charles. Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1960. Kirk, G. S. and J. E. Raven. The Presocratic Philosophers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957. Köhnke, Klaus. Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus: die deutsche Universitätsphilosophie zwischen Idealismus und Positivismus. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986; translated by R. J. Hollingdale under the title The rise of neo-Kantianism: German academic philosophy between idealism and positivism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Krauss, Rosalind. “The Mind/Body Problem: Robert Morris in Series,” Guggenheim Foundation Exhibit Catalogue, Robert Morris: The Mind/ Body Problem. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1994.

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———. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985. Krauss, Rosalind and Yve-Alain Bois. Formless: A User’s Guide. New York: Zone Books, 1997. Krell, David Farrell. “The Oldest Program Towards a System in German Idealism.” The Owl of Minerva, Vol. 17:1 (Fall, 1985). Leahy, D. G. Novitas Mundi: Perception of the History of Being. New York: New York University Press, 1980. Lévinas, Emmanuel. Autrement qu’ être. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974/1978; translated by Alphonso Lingis under the title Otherwise than being. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1981. ———. En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger. Paris: Vrin, 1967; translated by Richard A. Cohen and Michael B. Smith under the title Discovering Existence with Husserl. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998. ———. Dieu, la mort et le temps. Paris: Grasset, 1993; translated by Bettina Bergo under the title God, Death and Time. Stanford University Press, 2000. ———. De Dieu qui vient à l’ idée. Paris: Vrin, 1982; translated by Bettina Bergo under the title Of God Who Comes to Mind. Stanford University Press, 1998. ———. L’ éxistence et l’ éxistent. Paris: Vrin, 1986, 3rd ed.; translated by Alphonso Lingis under the title Existence and Existents. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1978. ———. De l’évasion. Ed. Jacques Rolland. Paris: Fata Morgana, 1982; translated by Bettina Bergo under the title Of Escape: de l’évasion. Palo Alto: Stanford, 2003. ———. “Le judaism et le féminin.” Difficile Liberté. Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 1963/1976; translated by Seàn Hand under the title Difficult Freedom. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1990. ———. “La signification et le sens,” Humanisme de l’autre homme. Paris: Fata Morgana, 1972; translated by Alphonso Lingis as “Meaning and Sense,” Collected Philosophical Papers. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1982. And as “Signification and Sense” by Nidra Poller in Humanism of the Other. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. ———. Le temps et l’autre. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989; translated by Richard Cohen under the title Time and the Other. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987. ———. Totalité et Infini. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1961/1984; translated by Alphonso Lingis as Totality and Infinity. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969. Lingis, Alphonso. The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. ———. Foreign Bodies. London: Routledge, 1994. ———. The Imperative. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Lukács, Georg. The Young Hegel. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1976. London, The Merlin Press, 1975.

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Malabou, Catherine. L’avenir de Hegel. Paris: Vrin, 1997; The Future of Hegel. New York: Routledge, 2005. ———. Le Change Heidegger: Du Fantastique en Philosophie. Paris: Éditions Léo Scheer, 2004. McCumber, John. The Company of Words: Hegel, Language, and Systematic Philosophy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993 ———. Poetic Interaction: Language, Freedom, and Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. ———. Reshaping Reason: Toward a New Philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Menke, Christoph “Der »Wendungspunkt« des Erkennens: Zu Begriff, Recht und Reichweite der Dialektik in Hegels Logik.” Vernunftkritik nach Hegel. Ed. Christoph Demmerling and Friedrich Kambartel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Signes. Paris: Gallimard, 1960; translated by Richard C. McCleary under the title Signs. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964. ———. Le visible et l’ invisible. Paris: Gallimard, 1964; translated by Alphonso Lingis under the title The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Morris, Robert. “Notes on Sculpture” Minimal Art. A Critical Anthology. Ed. G. Battcock. New York, Dutton, 1968. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Corpus. Paris: Métailié, 1992. ———. Être singulier pluriel. Paris: Galilée, 1996; translated by Robert Richardson and Anne O’Byrne as Being Singular Plural. Stanford University Press, 2000. ———.“The Surprise of the Event,” Hegel After Derrida, ed. Stuart Barnett. London: Routledge, 1998. ———. La communauté désoeuvrée. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1986; translated under the title The Inoperative Community by Peter Connor. University of Minnesota, 1991. Nielsen, Cathrin. Die Entzogene Mitte: Gegenwart bei Heidegger. Königshausen & Neumann: Würzburg, 2003. Nuzzo, Angelica. Logica e sistema sull’ idea hegeliana di filosofia. Genova: Pantograf, 1992. O’Regan, Cyril. Gnostic Return in Modernity. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. ———. The Heterodox Hegel. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Oaklander, Nathan L. The Ontology of Time. New York: Prometheus Books, 2004. Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. Fowler, Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1914. Reprinted 1995. Plotinus. The Enneads. Trans. A.H. Armstrong. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966–67, 1984, 1988.

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Price, Daniel. Without a Woman to Read: Toward the Daughter in Postmodernism. State University of New York Press, 1997. Prier, Raymond Adolph. Thauma Idesthai: The Phenomenology of Sight and Appearance in Archaic Greek. Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1989. Quine, W. “Ontological Relativity.” Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Ricoeur, Paul. Refiguring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Trans. David Pellauer, Ed. Mark I. Wallace. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995. ———. Oneself as Another. Trans. Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992. Richardson, William J. “Heidegger’s Fall.” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly Spring, 1995. Rosenzweig, Franz. Der Stern der Erlösung. Frankfurt am Main: Bibliothek Suhrkamp, 1988; translated by Barbara Galli as The Star of Redemption. University of Wisconsin, 2005. Sallis, John. The Gathering of Reason. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1980. ———. “At the Threshold of Metaphysics,” Delimitations. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Schalow, Frank. The Renewal of the Heidegger-Kant Dialogue: Action, Thought and Responsibility. Albany: SUNY, 1992. Schürmann, Reiner. Broken Hegemonies. Translated by Reginald Lilly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. ———. Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, reprint, 1990. Sellars, Wilfrid. Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes. Atascadero, California: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1982. Sheehan, Thomas. “On the Way to Ereignis: Heidegger’s Interpretation of Phusis.” Continental Philosophy in America. Ed. Silverman, Sallis, and Seebohm. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1983. Smith, Tony. [interview] Samuel Wagstaff, Jr., “Talking With Tony Smith.” Minimal Art. A Critical Anthology. Ed. Battcock, G. New York, Dutton, 1968. Sturma, Dieter. “Self and Reason: A Nonreductionist Approach to the Reflective and Practical Transitions of Self-Consciousness.” The Modern Subject: Conceptions of the Self in Classical German Philosophy. Ed. Karl Ameriks and Dieter Sturma. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. Taylor, Mark C. Disfiguring. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Wahl, Jean. Existence humaine et transcendance. Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1944. Warminski, Andrzej. Readings in Interpretation: Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

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Watson, Eric. Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Weil, Éric. Logique de la philosophie. Paris: Vrin, 1949/1996. Wyschogrod, Edith. Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. ———. Spirit in Ashes. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Žižek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.

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INDEX Altizer 246 Ambrosino 1, 6–7, 20 Anaximander 99, 214–221, 253, 262 Anselm 72 Aristotle 24–25, 41–59, 61, 80, 97, 104, 117, 249–51, 261 Aubenque 49–54, 58 Augustine 33, 60, 68, 69, 71–2, 231, 273 Ayer 1–12, 20, 61 Bataille not-knowing 1, 3–8, 14–20, 23, 31, 46, 66, 222, 237, 246, 249–50 Derrida 132–36, 159, 172, 194, 243, 260 beginning 31 abandon 272 apocalypse 271 activity 92 God 213, 227 intelligible resistance 104, 111 logic 174, 201 morphe 103 originary force 192, 201, 208–210, 227, 247 phusis 46, 48, 57–59 presence 178–181 subjective 173 trust 270–78 Work of Art, Origin of the 266–78 Bergson 75 Beuys 211 Cantor 153 Caro 238–39, 245, 262 cause 46–48, 69, 73, 113, 143, 149, 218 Cavell 231–32, 241, 245–46, 282 claim absence (steresis) 45, 58, 208 beginning 180 being 36, 45, 52–53, 99, 137 clarity 31, 134–35, 180

claim (continued) conviction 233, 238, 241 correctness 175 destruction 17, 26, 246 determination 146–47, 156, 161, 166, 184–86, 201 difficulty 246, 251, 277 externalization 94, 131, 197, 210 fragile 26–27, 136, 161, 203, 214 future 24–27, 107, 172 gesture 221, 258 grace 240 insistent question 244 infinity 147 moral being 149, 189, 232–33, 250 nothingness 268, 271 openness 110 others 76, 106 overflowing 203 sacred 20–21, 212–14, 257 singularity 36, 44, 107, 232–33, 257, 267–70 technology 131 thought 99, 105 tradition 60 unity 142, 151, 158, 162–63, 187, 194–95 (see simplicity) vanishing 241 correctness (orientation) 250, 275 Aristotle 47 Bataille 134–35, 137 freedom 166 Hegel 124, 134–35, 173, 205–6 Heidegger 37–41, 145–46, 275 Kant 145–46, 155 Plato 37–41, 52 Danto 125–26, 131–32 Derrida gesture 70, 259–63 inscription 99–100 Hegel 190–204

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Derrida (continued) Heidegger 23, 25–26, 60–63, 172, 190–204, 253–58, 281 Kant 259 Lévinas 77, 105 limitation 173 necessity 97, 100 resistance of intelligible 105, 108 sign as element 191 spatiality 96–100, 114 trace 177, 249 Descartes 31, 92, 108, 129, 144, 206 determination as force of presence 25, 61–63, 92–96, 119–20, 156–210, 248, 263 flow 175, 248 form 34, 133, 263 inscription 99 judgment 146–47 transcended in beginning 107–8, 211 Didi–Huberman 242–45, 263, 277 difficulty (see simplicity or claim) Eckhart 117, 142 Edwards 227, 230, 236, 239, 246, 273 element aesthetic 231, 239, 241, 278 becoming 3, 178, 182, 201 between 170–71 contraction 192–93, 201, 263–64 demand 245 enactment 176, 221 exteriority 114 formless 63 force of form 210 fragile 27 gesture refuses totality 107 grace 273 Hegel 91–93, 161, 173–74, 180–81, 190–94 Heidegger 273 light 32, 34, 37–38 logic 138, 163–64, 184 necessity 190–94

element (continued) noumenal 142, 182 originary partition 176–82 phusis 44, 48, 53–55 power of being 5, 13, 140–42, 170 reflection 151, 166 struggle 124, 181 spirit 161 subjective in Kant 146, 166–68 surface 8, 13, 67–68, 128–30 technology 23 trust 280 Wesen 187–89, 263 Focillon 122–23, 135–36 form abandon 161–62, 276, 280 absence 96, 208, 237, 247, 252–53 actuality 80–81, 86, 92, 182, 190–94 Anwesen 262–64 appearance 44, 55–56, 70, 76 being’s measure giving imprint 163– 65, 212 between 170–71, 267 convincing force 176, 233, 238, 241 correctness 36–41, 173 deconstruction 197–98 deformation 7, 15–16, 49, 62–63, 68, 103, 113, 137, 161, 170–71,185, 202, 254 desire 51–52 dissolution 15, 162, 246, 263 face 112 form of 61, 67, 90, 114–15, 153, 186, 211 force 7, 15, 23, 48, 55, 61–64, 66–69, 77, 98, 100, 135, 143, 150, 154, 161–66, 170, 181–84, 200–6, 233, 238, 241, 247, 252, 264 force of language 192–94 frame 17, 34, 44, 237 Gestalt 237 Good 84, 92 intelligibility 143

INDEX

form (continued) knowledge 140, 162–63 matter in Aristotle 42, 48, 52 moral being 149, 164 morphe 44, 84 movement, 185, 238–39 nothing 252, 281 overflow 67, 73, 80, 111 perfection 82, 87–88, 95, 197–207 play 242–43 position 165–66, 183 presence 40, 50, 227–28, 233, 262– 64 reflection 151–53 return to self 45, 67, 71, 95, 145, 158, 229, 256 reticence 252, 271 risk 276 singularity 10–11, 22, 25, 53, 61, 69, 73–74, 107, 134, 165, 176, 238– 42, 248–49, 265 Smith 237 steresis 45, 56, 244 struggle 123, 173 subject 25–26, 38–39, 73, 94, 137, 146–53, 162–65, 176, 181, 184– 85, 232–33 time 1–3, 6, 98, 154 trace 103 truth 38–39, 197 trust 190, 265–66, 272, 276–78 formless whole 67–69, 111, 113, 240 unifying 165, 228–29, 240 Wesen 263 will 39 Foucault 129, 260 frame (see also, surface) abandon 15, 87, 272 abundance 15, 52, 176 appearance 44–46, 55–56, 158 contour 47, 127, 233, 239, 266 dissolve 161–62 form 17, 44, 173 gesture 136, 259

347

frame (continued) Gestalt 237 Gestell 56, 167 interior 35, 145–47, 153–54, 167, 257 naturalized 231, 259, 266 nothingness 56 originality 31 representation 142–45, 153 self–feeling 145–46, 257 staging emptiness 243 technology 5, 9, 31, 156 temple 275 theft of 26, 246, 264–65, 267 trace 100, 266–67 freedom art 125, 212, 232–33, 240 language 12–13, 162 Hegel 93, 125, 162, 188, 256 Kant 162, 166 motion 137, 162, 178–79 orientation 166 possessing 212 Fried presence 227–236 Smith 236–44, 263, 270, 273, 282 Frege 6 Freud 242, 255 Galileo 10, 69 geometry a priori 152–54 Da as near 242, 254–55 depth 172 frame 5–6 human 2, 10–11, 13, 165, 170 individuation of points 5–6, 99, 156, 158, 165 light 1–3 points 183 self–orientation in space 145–46, 154, 254 surface 67–69 thickness of lines 16 trust 21

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gesture apocalyptic 238, 244, 246, 281 abandon 14, 22, 89, 95, 222 aesthetic 10, 13–16, 20, 24, 26–27, 85, 122–26, 189–90, 211–12, 227–236, 238, 240, 247, 249–53, 260, 270–73, 280 body 239–40 claim 221 conceptual 130, 173–80, 208 craft 53, 125 creative subject 76, 88, 122–23, 240, 251, 254 difficulty 130, 246, 251, 277 doubling 260–63 establishing 31–32 even–handed 135–36, 145, 160, 254 frame 136, 168, 258–59 gathering and dissemination 25, 127– 28, 155, 160, 255–56, 271 Gebärende Kraft 142 gift 276 grace 235, 238–40, 242, 253, 271 grasping 208–9, 211, 245 God 214, 227, 235 integrity 228 interlacement 255 light 232 limitation 173 manipulation 125 metaphysics 260–62 necessity 214 nothingness 268 presence 227, 261 refuses totality 107 reticence 14 sacred 231, 250 sacrifice 16–17 subjectivity 11, 25–26, 160, 254 transformative 3, 8, 31, 101, 123 trust 21, 246–47, 265, 276–77 violence 259 welcome 109–10 world 175–76, 227, 240, 251, 265

God Altizer 246 death of 232, 240, 244, 251 damnation 257 Edwards 227, 238–40, 244 geometry of subject 20–22 Hegel 213 Heidegger 226 Nietzsche 33 trust 118 Good beyond being 84–87 expressive 90 infinite 147 Heidegger 271 Greenburg 227–30, 233, 241, 247 Hegel 10, 16, 70, 80, 89, 249, 256 Christology 231 determinate negation 90–92 freedom 256 Fried 235 infinite 172, 176, 184 Kant 138, 151–53 light and art 123 limitation 173, 247 sacrifice 94–95, 177 Heidegger 23–27 Anaximander 215, 252 Anwesen 157, 167–69, 219 Aristotle 41–60, 97, 117, 249–51 clarity 34–36 Derrida 96–100, 114–17, 155, 172, 253–58 Heraclitus 57 Kant 154–72, 257 Lévinas 105 nothingness 117, 250, 252 Plato 36–41 Plotinus 73–74, 77–78, 94, 137 Hitler 228 Husserl 101–102, 115, 129, 155 infinite bad 135, 172, 176

INDEX

infinite (continued) Good 147, 184 representation 153 Judd 234, 237 Kant 69 aporetic openness 25 artistic gestures 21, 236 freedom in language 13 shape of subject 25–26, 109, 138–42, 146 Hegel 138, 151–53 Heidegger 154–72, 253–54 kenosis 33, 246 Kierkegaard 92, 181 Kirk and Raven 215 Kojève 127 Köhnke 139 Lacan 71 language abandon 161–62 analytic philosophy 2–4 cessation 17 destruction 17 determination 25, 34, 61, 140–43 developing 142, 173 fragility 206–7 freedom 12–13, 166–67 Freud 242–44 originality 192–94 representation 156 risk 244 soul 80 sustaining 3–4, 22, 39, 43, 45, 72, 82, 128–30, 142, 160–62, 172, 175, 238, 240 technology 5–6, 37, 125 trace 100–101 Lévinas 10, 61–63, 83–89, 94, 104–7 inevitable paralysis of manifestation 76–77, 283 intelligible resistance 105, 111, 177

349

Lévinas (continued) illeité 113 trace 279 light aesthetic gesture 232, 251, 253 affirmation 115 clarity 31–32, 59, 92–93 correct 37, 250 dark 252, 257 fire 81–82, 113 Good 87 geometry 1–3, 5–6 Hegel 123 human before sun 2–9, 13, 137, 139, 149–50, 164, 237 others 106 reticence 253 violence 105, 201 Lingis 33 logos 40 maps 22–25, 27 vs. history 24 hands 135–36, 145–46 method (see also, technology) 155–56, 164–68, 182 clarity 31–33 postmodern 33 Merleau–Ponty 1, 3–5, 8–15, 20, 70, 76, 88, 129 morphe 44–47, 266 Morris 234, 237 movement (see also, beginning) abandon 161–62, 252–53 absence 208 apocalypse 246 avant–garde purpose 228 concept 183 desertion 249 destructive grace 238, 244, 253 element 178–83 externalization 92–93 form 47, 103, 250 freedom 137

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movement (continued) groping 51–52 history 90, 95 infinity 110 intelligible 108 kinesis 49 meaningfulness 238–39 method 182 nothingness 56, 253, 257, 271 phusis 58–59 play of God 110, 116, 194, 244 Plotinus 66–69, 73–76 sensibility 152 singularity 59, 73–74, 262 specificity 97, 101, 161 spirit 161, 196–98, 207 steresis 45, 54–59, 104, 117, 244, 252 subject 240–41 theory 49, 58 thought 104, 172, 257, 269 trace 57–59, 110 transformative 49, 53, 108, 134, 201, 208, 246 unity 162–65 withdrawal 267 necessity amor fati 41 Anaximander 218 beginning 201 cause 218 determination 184–90 effacement 97 element 190–94 externalization 94 future 110 hand 214–23 needs of reason 146 others 76 representation 152 trace 100 transgression 134 trust 280, 282 violence 62, 71, 97, 101

Nietzsche 33, 39–41, 128 nous 40, 47 nothingness 56, 75, 209 Hegel 92, 134, 177 Heidegger 117, 177, 252–53, 268 Parmenides 156 movement 281–82 ontotheology 21, 72, 80, 124, 173, 248– 49, 272, 277 phusis 43–44, 54–59, 74, 262 Plato 36–42, 52, 61, 65, 68, 109, 111, 232 Plotinus 39, 46, 59, 61–89, 94, 101–102, 111, 124, 137, 180, 209 Ponge 259 power apperception 163 being 5, 13–15 faculty 146, 161, 196 grace 242 imagination 168, 195–97 impotence 14–15, 20, 27, 50, 69, 271 intellect 85, 105 language 172 light 124 measure giving imprint 164 promise 271 representation 140–42, 151–53, 161 risk 246 presence (see form) Presocratics 37, 45, 48, 156, 252 Proclus 71 Quine 2, 129 Rilke 278 Russell 6 Ryle 129 sacred 17–19, 23, 27, 77, 80, 83, 91, 95, 165, 170, 203–5, 211, 221, 226–27, 229, 238, 242, 257, 271, 275, 279

INDEX

Sartre 254 Schelling 149 Sellars 129 Shapiro 270 silence 19 apocalypse 279 aesthetic gesture 237, 250, 278–81 black box 243, 278–80 claim 20, 26, 31, 53, 238 God 77, 277 fragility 136 simplicity 10 complexity vs. difficulty 70–71, 120, 126–30 gesture 227 grace 239, 242, 257 Smith 245–46 vision 81 singularity 10–11, 22, 25, 53, 73–74, 257 Smith, 235–46, 258, 263, 278–80 Spinoza 92 Stalin 228 steresis 45, 54–59, 104, 117, 244, 252 subject aging 107 Aristotle 45 black box 242, 257 Derrida 172 Fried 227, 233, 237 Freud 242–43 Hegel 93–94, 137, 151–53, 155, 173– 90, 237 Heidegger 142, 151–57, 172 Kant 25–26, 138–42, 146, 151–56, 163, 170–73, 237, 254 Lévinas 76 Merleau–Ponty 76 passivity 110 possibility 138–42 Plato 38 reflection 156 technology 131 unity 162–65

351

surface 8, 13, 67–69, 127–30, 171, 174 technology aporia 52 Derrida 199, 206, 269 Hegel 92, 125, 206 Heidegger 156, 199, 206, 269, 273– 74 Kant 183 language 5, 9 Lévinas 105 manipulation 125 measure 9–10 Plato 37 possibility 56, 78, 81, 156 vs. sacred 23 unfolding in art 131 theology 75, 147, 244, 253, 257 negative 117 time abandon 248 a priori 154 beyond possible 107 contraction 192, 198 determination 143, 167, 196 enduring presence 168 experience 140 fire 81–82 form 1–3, 6, 98, 143, 197 human before sun 2–9, 13, 137, 139, 149–50, 164, 237 infinity 167–68 intelligibility 34, 110, 143 interiority 142, 152–54, 162, 168– 69, 198 irreversible 113 memory 251 movement 231–32 motion 66–69, 74–75, 162 nothingness 75 others 107 out of joint 217 perfection 82, 87–88 physics 7

352

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time (continued) phusis 262 play 200–1 priority of human 2–6, 64–65, 137, 170–71, 273 pull 42–43 reticence 40, 161, 248 sacred 247, 251 self-externalization 94 struggle 123 sustaining 2–6, 34, 168–69, 203 trust 280 vulgar 98, 199 trace 10, 26, 30, 177 absence 111, 208 Aristotle 43, 45–46 denial 117 Derrida 62–63, 83, 97–103, 114, 172, 266–67 disturbs world 113 effaced 97, 100–103 forgetfulness of being 220 form 103 Heidegger 217, 220 inscription 99, 208 illeité 113 Lévinas 62–63, 77, 83, 94, 110, 113 movement 110 ontotheological 248–49 Plotinus 59, 62–65, 81, 113 productive force 64–65, 81 Riß 266–67 signifier 114 steresis 57–58, 60, 172 trust 21–22, 27, 59 certainty 22 play 117 Van Gogh 265, 267, 269 violence language 17, 109, 114, 201, 259, 277 will 39–40 necessary 62, 71, 97, 101, 201

voice (see also, silence) 172 babbling 19–20, 31, 237, 281 gesture 270 Kant 109, 232 logocentrism 194 Wittgenstein 69, 157, 241 Woolf 282