6 PROPER ELEMENTALS

A. THE SPACE OF PROPRIETY

Need it even be said?

The question as such, the very posing of this question, of any question whatsoever, already attests to it, as does also the very possibility of need, to say nothing of the need to say or the need that it be said.

Is it not, then, indisputable from the moment any question about it is asked, indeed even before the posing of the question, obviating, it seems, the need even to pose the question, bringing everything to a halt with the mere question of need? Or even just with a display—unquestionable—of need?

The question of finitude cannot, then, simply be posed. In this entanglement it is not possible to evade the question of the question. It will always be a question of what preceded the question, of an attestation that will already have taken place—that cannot but have taken place-when the question comes to be posed.

These entanglements, though hardly unique to this question, are, in this case, highly conspicuous and obtrusive.

Questioning does not, then, begin with the posing of the question. Rather, it begins with open receptiveness to the anterior attestation and with patient, veracious response to what it displays. This double, virtually silent affirmation, saying yes twice to oneself and, above all, to what is attested, clears the site of questioning. This clearing may require only the briefest interval; or its spread may be protracted, may seem almost as if it were endless, were it not indeed an attestation of finitude.

If what is attested, what is displayed in and through the attestation, is minimally articulated, then the words will be: finitude—human finitude—that humans are finite.

This articulation gives space to the question, to a posing of the question, even if it still lacks a well-defined direction, even if it cannot but continue to grope for the appropriate words.

What is displayed in the attestation of finitude? As what is finitude disclosed in and through this attestation? Or simply, responding now more directly to the attestation: What is finitude?—assuming, at least as a beginning, that it has a what, that it can be appropriately interrogated by asking about its whatness, that it accommodates itself to this question.

And yet, initially the sense of finitude or the finite seems to depend primarily, not on its whatness, but rather on a specific opposition. Or if, in this connection, the question of whatness is to be retained, then it will be asked: What is the finite other than the opposite of the infinite? Is it not precisely as the opposite of the infinite that it is determined as such? Since opposition is not necessarily symmetrical, since there can be an order of priority between the two terms opposed, the question mutates into one of priority: Is it that each—the finite and the infinite—is simply what the other is not? Or is there a formal priority of one over the other? If consideration is limited to the mere formation of the words, the addition of the purely privative prefix to the root, then a formal priority can be accorded to the finite. Yet, semantically considered, the order appears to be precisely the reverse. Finitus is the past participle of finere: to limit, bound. Hence, the finite would result, constitutively, from the imposition of a limit or bound on something otherwise unlimited, unbounded. Thus, the finite would presuppose the infinite, and priority would need to be accorded to the infinite.

The instability in the opposition considered at this level is indicative of the need to pose the question in a less formal, more rigorous manner. Each term needs to be reoriented to that to which it primarily pertains, or at least to that in relation to which its theoretical determination has been carried out.

The question of the finite is thus brought back to the initial, minimal articulation. In the question it is preeminently the human that is in question, the human as such. Determining the human as finite has nothing to do with the incapacity to perform this or that deed but is rather a strategy for thinking the human as such, for delimiting human being in its very propriety.

Though brought to bear on the idea of the transcendent in ways that are substantial and consequential, the original locus of the concept of the infinite—at least as rigorously developed—is that of number. Even within the framework of Greek mathematics, in which number (ἀριθμóς) refers to a number of things, which can be counted (ἀριθμέω), even at the level where these countables are not actual things but ideal units, the unlimited extent of number is fully recognized: especially if the countables are ideal units, it is always possible to count further. The series of numbers is unlimited, endless (ἄπειρος), without (α-privative) limit (πέρας), infinite. And yet, the mathematical concept of the infinite has proven not so stable, so secure, as had been assumed since antiquity. Modern developments in mathematics have shown that it does not suffice to refer simply to infinity (with its single symbol ∞) as if there were only one kind of infinity, as if infinity—the kinds or degrees of infinity—could not be manifold.

There are many ways in which the concept of infinity has been extended beyond the domain of number and thus brought to bear on a substantial content. Though these ways are sufficiently diverse that they resist being gathered under a common rubric, the dominant orientation is to the transcendent, to the determination of the divine in its Christian-theological form. The extension may be carried out by way of transition from finite to infinite, from experienced, finite characters or attributes to those same attributes in unlimited, infinite form. The result is a doctrine of the divine attributes: God is infinitely good, infinitely true, etc., and the pertinent question is whether and how humans in their finitude are capable of comprehending the infinity of the divine.

The critical philosophy takes a different path, although, except for its skeptical moment, the result is not so very different. In the Critique of Pure Reason the concept of God is determined transcendentally as the ideal completely determined by the idea of the totality of all positive predicates (realities).1 From this transcendental ideal the attributes of the infinite can be derived (ens originarium, ens summum, ens entium, ens realissimum), though within this critical, theoretical context the question of the existence of such a being remains undecidable.

And yet, to Kant’s successors it became evident that the positing of the opposition between finite and infinite—perhaps even as in the first Critique, but most definitely as required by the developments broached by the other two Critiques and furthered in German Idealism—can only have the effect of finitizing the allegedly infinite. Hegel makes this effect explicit when he writes in the Science of Logic: “If the infinite is kept pure and aloof from the finite, it is only finitized.”2 A passage in the Encyclopedia explains: “Here infinity is set firmly over against [fest gegenüberstellt] finitude, yet it is easy to see that if the two are set over against one another, then infinity, which is nevertheless supposed to be the whole, appears as one side only and is limited by the finite.—But a limited infinity is itself only something finite.”³ What is thus required, according to Hegel, is the speculative move by which the simple opposition between the finite and the infinite would be cancelled and surpassed as such—in a word, aufgehoben. What is required is that the infinite not be merely opposed to the finite but that it contain the finite within itself. In Hegel’s words: “the truly infinite is not merely a realm beyond the finite, but rather it contains the finite sublated within itself.”⁴ In another passage he describes this containment as a matter of the infinite’s being—or coming to be—with itself in its other, its finding itself in its other. This true concept of the infinite—or concept of the true (or truly) infinite—he contrasts with what he calls the bad infinite, that which consists in endless progression: “But this endless progression [Progress ins Unendliche] is not the truly infinite, which consists rather in being with itself [bei sich selbst] in its other, or, expressed as a process, in coming to itself in its other. It is of great importance to grasp adequately the concept of true infinity, and not just to stop at the bad infinity of the endless progression [bei der schlechten Unendlichkeit des unendlichen Progresses].”⁵

If the task that now imposes itself—and there is perhaps no saying definitively how this imperative originates—is to forbear the sublated opposition without regressing to mere endlessness, then it is necessary to frame a third concept, one that resists even being designated as a concept in the strictest sense. It may appear that at least in the area of cosmology the concept of infinity as endless progression must, even if in disguise, remain operative, as ever more powerful and refined telescopes reveal ever more remote galaxies; yet even in this area, as further analysis will show, there are profound mutations that have the effect of dislodging the merely linear representation. Furthermore, this representation depicts the infinite as entirely disconnected from the self-showing by which the human, precisely as finite, is engaged; there is no single endless progression that shows itself as such. If this representation is to be transformed and the concept of infinity appropriately redetermined, then the manner in which infinity becomes manifest must be accorded a decisive role.

To be sure, modern mathematics has succeeded in determining the concept of infinity with rigor and precision (though not without significant and, it seems, unavoidable lacunae). Yet this determination cannot be directly taken over but must, rather, be submitted to the protocol governing such transition. The result will contribute significantly to the preparation of a third concept of infinity. In turn, the relation between the infinite and the finite can be shown to be other than one of mere opposition, and in this way the concept of finitude, too, can be redetermined.

The framing of this third concept must, then, steer a path between—and in a sense beyond—the determination of the infinite, on the one side, as endless progression and, on the other side, as the overarching concept that sublates the finite within itself, that passes through the finite in such a way that it draws the finite back into itself as itself. The itinerary must lie between the linear representation of infinity and its representation as a line that turns back upon itself to form a circle—or even, since the circling is reiterated, taking, as Hegel says, the shape of a circle of circles. Even though, because it is the figure operative in modern mathematics, the linear representation alone will be addressed at the outset, the analysis will eventually circle around to the Hegelian alternative. The definitive figure that, in this connection, will take shape will be neither a line nor a circle but rather a figure that combines—and transforms—these two. Yet even this figure, the spiral, is only a geometrical representation merely indicating, across the span joining and separating mathematics and philosophy, the originary determination that must be brought to bear on the sense of infinity.

The development through which modern mathematics has determined and investigated the concept of infinity has significant philosophical implications that cannot simply be passed over. Prior to this development it was assumed that there was only one infinity—only one type of infinity—without any further differentiation. This assumption was shared by mathematicians and philosophers, and it went almost entirely uninterrogated, even when, on the side of philosophers, the task of determining that which is allegedly infinite (the world as a whole, God, etc.) was strenuously undertaken. This situation is exemplified, in an aporetic context, by the Kantian antinomies. Even Hegel, in formulating his speculative concept of infinity, proceeded by opposing it to the single, common mathematical concept of infinity as an endless progression, exemplified, for example, by the series of natural numbers (positive integers).

But already with Galileo a development began that eventually would overturn this common assumption. What Galileo discovered was a peculiar equivalence: that, in his words, “the multitude of squares is not less than that of all numbers, nor is the latter greater than the former.”6 Though he does not offer further information as to how he came to this conclusion, one can surmise that what he grasped was the possibility of establishing a one-to-one correspondence between the series of natural numbers and the series of squares of those numbers. The correspondence would take the following form:

Since both series are infinite, there could be no point at which either series would lack a further number to correspond with a number in the other series. Thus, it turns out that the set of natural numbers is equal in number to the set of all squares of these numbers, even though the set of squares is a subset of the set of natural numbers. Galileo’s conclusion was that “the attributes of equal, greater, and less have no place in infinite, but only in bounded quantities.”⁷

The next step in this development was carried out by Bolzano and Dedekind. In effect, they took the property of infinite sets that Galileo had discovered, that such a set can be put into a one-to-one correspondence with a part of itself, and made this the very definition of an infinite set.⁸ Furthermore, Bolzano proved that this property holds for the dense numbers of the continuum (dense defined to mean that between any two distinct numbers there exists another number).⁹ The proof is based on the simple function y = 2x, by means of which a one-to-one correspondence can be set up between the numbers in the interval 0 to 1 and in the interval 0 to 2.

The most decisive stage in this development came in the work of Georg Cantor (beginning in the 1870s). Two conclusions that Cantor established were of unprecedented significance. Both had to do with whether certain sets of numbers are denumerable; a denumerable set is one that can be put into one-to-one correspondence with the set of natural numbers. The first of Cantor’s conclusions was that the set of all rational numbers (numbers expressible as fractions) is denumerable. In order to prove this, he used an ingenious method of diagonalization to set up a one-to-one correspondence between the set of natural numbers and the set of positive rational numbers.10 In this case it turns out again that the cardinal number of a subset (the natural numbers) is the same as that of the set to which it belongs (the positive rational numbers). Such numbers Cantor called transfinite numbers.

The question that arises is whether there is only one transfinite number, that is, whether all infinite sets are denumerable. Cantor’s answer to this question was the second of his major discoveries. His conclusion, that there are sets that are nondenumerable, altered once and for all the way in which infinity must be conceived.

Specifically, what Cantor proved was that the set of real numbers is nondenumerable. The real numbers include algebraic numbers (roots of polynomial equations with rational coefficients), which, in turn, include all rational numbers; and those that are not algebraic, which are called transcendental numbers. In other words the set of real numbers includes all numbers that can be expressed by an endlessly repeating or nonrepeating decimal. Cantor’s proof is limited to the real numbers in the interval 0 < x < 1, but since a one-to-one correspondence can be established between this interval and any other, the conclusion he draws is completely general. Here again Cantor employs a diagonal process in order to construct his proof.11

It follows that the transfinite number of the set of real numbers is greater than that of the set of natural numbers and greater than that of the set of rational numbers. Thus, not all infinities are equal; rather, there are at least two orders of infinity, two transfinite numbers. Cantor designated these by the Hebrew letter aleph: ₀, ₁.

The question that immediately arises concerns the difference between these orders: What, other than denumerability, distinguishes one order from the other? What, in other words, is the character of the ordering? What is the difference between the two infinities? In this connection Cantor established a result that even he found surprising and that—as with so much that concerns infinity—runs contrary both to common sense and to suppositions that seemed self-evident even to the mathematicians of the time. What Cantor proved was that the points on a square can be put in one-to-one correspondence with points on a line. To construct his proof, he began with the representation, in Cartesian geometry, of each point on a square by means of two coordinates. Taking a line segment from 0 to 1 and a square with sides consisting of line segments on the same interval (possible without loss of generality), he devised a method by which to transform each pair of coordinates into a single number (thus representing a point on the line).12 Cantor concluded that there are as many points on the line as on the plane. Using a similar method, he proved that the number of points on the line is the same as the number of points in a three-dimensional space, and likewise for a four-dimensional space and indeed for a space of any number of dimensions. In other words, the transfinite number of the continuum (= the number of points on the line = the number of the set of real numbers = ₁) is the same as that of the plane and of any n-dimensional space. In all these cases the set is nondenumerable. More specifically, all have the same transfinite number. Therefore, it follows that the ordering of infinities has nothing to do with dimensions.

Yet establishing a positive ordering principle, even establishing the ordering itself of the various infinities, has proven much more difficult. Cantor was able to determine one other order of infinity greater than the first two (those of the natural numbers and of the real numbers): this was the infinity of all functions (continuous and discontinuous) defined on the real line (= the continuum). Furthermore, he succeeded in proving that for any set there is always a larger set, namely, the so-called power set, consisting of the set of all subsets of the given set. For a set of n elements, the power set consists of 2ⁿ elements. Thus Cantor could conclude that exponentiation does have a bearing on the ordering of infinite sets; hence 2⁰ is a greater transfinite number than ₀. And yet it has not been possible to establish the precise order of the transfinite numbers. Though it is commonly supposed that the transfinite number of the set of real numbers is the next such number after that of the set of natural numbers, no proof has been found for this ordering. Indeed it was on the attempt to prove this so-called continuum hypothesis that Cantor labored so intensely and so long that he allegedly suffered, as a result, a mental breakdown. What has been proved, much more recently, is that the continuum hypothesis is undecidable, that it is independent of the postulates of set theory and thus cannot be deduced from these postulates.13

The order of the third transfinite number that has been determined also remains unestablished. No proof has been found that this number, that of the set of all functions, is the next transfinite number after the number of the set of real numbers.

Even though the continuum hypothesis and other questions concerning the transfinite numbers remain undecidable or at least undecided, what Cantor’s research demonstrates is that there are multiple infinities, multiple kinds of infinities, infinities that can be rigorously differentiated, infinities that are greater than other infinities.

Beginning in antiquity, there is a recurrent realization that the transition from mathematics to philosophy requires a decisive shift in the mode of thinking. The shift involves multiple factors: a transition from abstract to concrete, from quantity to quality, or from the abstractly quantitative to the concretely qualitative. If the quantitative moment involved is that of transfinite arithmetic, then, as Galileo recognized, the very sense of greater and less, that is, of quantity as such, is transformed. Furthermore, the description of the shift as a transition from the quantitative is quite insufficient. For, especially in view of modern developments (such as those dealing with algebraic structures), it is evident that the concept of quantity does not suffice to delimit the domain of mathematics; rather, a more generalized conception is required, for example, that mathematics is the science of abstract form or structure. The other term of the shift would also require generalization: it would be necessary to redetermine the qualitative so that it no longer refers to qualitative properties of things, but rather to any aspect by which something might show itself.

This shift can also be regarded as a transition from the less to the more originary or archaic, as a transition in which thinking would achieve an otherwise unattainable proximity to the origin (ἀρχή). Yet the origin from which all things come forth is self-showing, and thus the transition would be effected by reference to the self-showing through which aspects—aspects of things, but also other kinds of aspects, aspects of other kinds, even aspects of what neither is nor belongs to a kind—come to show themselves concretely.

To a degree it can be maintained that mathematics, too, refers to self-showing and proceeds precisely on this basis. For in mathematical proofs the sequence of steps requires that one apprehend the connections that become evident and that at the end of the proof one have insight into the result that has come to be shown through the proof. And yet, the result stands apart from the showing that the proof effects rather than emerging directly in, as well as through, the showing. In this sense the proof does not belong to the result itself but rather, once the result has been reached, is over and has disappeared and, as far as the result is concerned, can be discarded. Hegel points out that in the proof of the Pythagorean theorem concerning the relation between the sides of a right triangle, the triangle itself is taken apart, and each part is related to another figure constructed on it, namely, in each case a square with sides equal to the side of the triangle. Only at the end is the triangle restored; from the result that has then been shown about it, the various constructions and the proof based on them can be detached, and indeed in the theorem itself they can be left behind, allowed to disappear.14 On the other hand, what the transition to philosophy requires is that the externality of the showing be eliminated so that the showing adheres to the result, so that what shows itself emerges directly in and from the showing.

In broaching this transition, it needs, then, to be asked: How does infinity show itself concretely? What is it that shows itself concretely as infinite? To suppose that it is endless progression would be to ignore both Hegel’s incisive critique and the sense of what the transition to philosophy requires. An endless progression cannot show itself concretely as such but can be apprehended only abstractly, only mathematically. What shows itself concretely as infinite is, rather, whatever surpasses us immeasurably, whatever exceeds us indefinitely, without limit, as does, perhaps most manifestly, the diurnal sky. It is the ἄπειρον, considered in its bearing on the configuration of self-showing.

Human finitude is, then, to be determined as being indefinitely exceeded. The exceeding that is most manifest, most open to view, is that of the elementals in nature, of earth and sky, of sea, wind, rain, thunder and lightning, etc. In exceeding the human, these elements of the natural infinite are not simply aloof, not utterly beyond the human; rather, the human, precisely as it is exceeded, is bound up with them, encompassed by them, by each in its distinctive way.

In their manner of showing themselves, these elementals are quite different from things: they have no lateral horizons, and consequently they do not show themselves by holding in store and deploying one by one a wealth of further profiles so as to acquire bounds and density. Rather, these elementals show themselves as indefinitely expansive, and this expansiveness is bound up with their excessiveness. Their expanse is not the same as their extension; it does not consist in their extending endlessly. Imposition of a uniform measure could mark limits, though the expanse would retain an indeterminateness somewhat like that of the borders treated in fractal geometry, which vary with the measure of the measure. These elementals in their expansiveness are gigantic in that there is lacking all proportionality with things and with all that otherwise concerns the human;15 their gigantean disproportionality is bound up with their character as moments of the concrete, natural infinite. While belonging to nature, they are not things of nature, do not display the bounds and containment that nature imparts to things. In this sense these elementals of nature are both natural and unnatural; they surpass natural things, fall outside nature, yet do so precisely within nature, bordering therefore on contradiction. They are like creatures in which parts of different creatures are unnaturally—in a way counter to nature—combined—that is, monsters.

The elementals in—yet also counter to, outside, beyond—nature are, then, gigantic and monstrous. In indefinitely exceeding the human, they are therefore overpowering, overwhelming. It is from their expanse that the giants and monsters who are said once to have strode across the earth would have arisen. Yet it is also from this elemental expanse as it enshrouds itself that what is most enthralling can radiate and in its radiance let the gods appear. And what is the passing of the last god if not a return into self-enshrouding radiance? Or into a renewed gigantomachy?

In the pluralizing of the elemental in nature, there is already a hint at the kind of identity and differentiation that is analogous to the results of transfinite arithmetic. Just as the transfinite number of a subset can be the same as that of the set to which it belongs (as, for instance, in the relation between the natural numbers and the rational numbers), so the expanse of wind and rain can coincide with the expanse of the storm to which they belong.

The elementals in nature exceed the human indefinitely. But what is the human? What is it to be human? What is it to be—as each is—a singular being? Does the sense of these expressions accord with questions concerning whatness, with questions as to what it is, questions about its being? Does it suffice to ask: What is its relation to its being—as if in the is the very question posed were not repeated, as if the sense of the is were not necessarily assumed in the very posing of the question? Or does the question of its relation to being remain abstract? Do humans relate to their being in the same manner, at the same level of concrete self-showing, as when in the depth of the night they behold the starry heaven?

The human is centered in the proper. What is most properly human is the proper. The proper is what is one’s own; it is indeed what is one’s own in an absolutely unique, incomparable way and degree—hence one’s ownmost. Whatever else can be called one’s own is so only on the basis of this ownmost; the proper is the very condition of possibility of owning in the usual—for instance, material—sense.

The proper is not to be identified with the self: not because it is something other than the self but rather because it represents a way of thinking and saying the ownmost that is anterior to the formulation of the concept of the self. In fact, the concept of the self is of relatively recent origin.16 Even in Locke’s Essay, published in 1690, that which later will be designated by terms such as self-knowledge is repeatedly described as perception of “our own existence.”¹⁷ Though in the present endeavor there is no intention of returning to this earlier conception, there is an insistence on formulating the question of the human at a level prior to its encapsulation by the concept of self. Consistency in following up the implications of this formulation will require rigorous prescriptions regarding the semantics of certain common words in which the expression, if not the concept, of self has insinuated itself.¹⁸

The proper is the ownmost. What is ownmost is that into which nothing other than one’s own intrudes. It is that in which one is related only to one’s own, that in which one owns (as in owning up to a deed) what is one’s ownmost. Yet, what is decisive in this owning is that it is not such as to produce or enclose an interiority. It is not a circuit of self-consciousness that, constituting an interior space as such, would then be fulfilled through assimilation to this space; on the contrary, the proper is constitutively prior to the concept of consciousness, no less so than to the concept of the self. In its owning, indeed as its owning, the proper does not turn back enclosedly upon itself but rather opens the ownmost to the other in such a way that reflection from the other is possible without appropriation, reflection in which the proper of the other remains intact. The owning of the proper is also an opening out to the elemental, an opening in which the proper is given back to itself disclosedly.

Such return from engagement with the elemental in nature constitutes a reversion. As, in one direction, each elemental indefinitely exceeds the properly human, there occurs, in the opposite direction, a recoil back upon the human; thereby one is disclosed to oneself as enfolded, encompassed, by the elemental. In this self-disclosure it becomes manifest that one is continually reliant on the elements, most openly on the sky and much that comes from it, but also on the earth and its bounty. But equally it becomes manifest that one is exposed to the gigantic excess of the elements, as to the fury of a storm with its “tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning.”

This bidirectional relatedness to the elemental as natural infinity both belongs to the proper and transgresses the propriety of the human. It constitutes a moment of human finitude, which manifestly is no mere symmetrical opposite of infinity. In its bearing on the proper, this double relatedness turns the proper, in a sense, against itself; for in transgressing the limit of the proper, it installs impropriety within the proper, deforms it, as it were, into a propriety to which expropriation integrally belongs, an expropriation operative within the proper. In rupturing the sphere of ownness, this relatedness both robs one of ownness and yet belongs to the very constitution of one’s ownness, restores it. Because it is in relation to the natural elemental that the proper is thus shaped (in its misshapenness), this elemental can also be appropriately termed a proper elemental.

The expropriating relatedness to the natural elementals is perhaps most purely attested on those rare occasions when deliberate observation of nature is arrested in order to let natural elementals become completely engaging. One lets one’s vision be filled entirely by the sight of a towering mountain peak. One lets nearly all one’s senses be entranced by the sight, sound, waft, and coolness of the sea stretching to the horizon. On such occasions the engagement is not in discovery, measure, form, or essence. There is no intent to circumscribe what such elements are. It is only that one is prompted to let the senses be solicited by the elements, to abide with them, to linger there patiently and attentively. Such uncommon engagement can intensify into ecstasy: one is not only drawn beyond oneself but also restored to oneself as the elements resound in silence.

Whereas the framing of the third concept of infinity, as proposed at the outset, has, from that point, proceeded by concretizing and reorienting the concept of infinity as endless progression, the resulting determination of infinity as indefinite excess brings the exposition into a certain proximity to what Hegel designated as the concept of true infinity, in distinction from the bad infinity of endless progression. For it has been shown that the finite is not simply an opposite posited over against the infinite in such a way as to finitize the infinite. Rather, the relatedness is such that while the infinite indefinitely exceeds the finite, there is self-disclosive reversion to the finite. Just as indefinite exceeding is irreducible to mere symmetrical opposition, so reversion does not issue in containment. The finite is not sublated, is not enclosed within the infinite, not even (as with Hegel) in a way that, within the infinite, would preserve the opposition of finite to infinite. Rather, what is preserved is the distance across which the proper is expropriated, its limit transgressed. This distance of expansiveness and reversion is irreducible. It cannot be flattened out into an endlessly progressing line, into an infinity in relation to which the finite could only be entirely extrinsic. But also this distance and the bidirectional relatedness that spans it cannot be recast as a figure that would curve back upon itself so as, in its closure, to appropriate the finite to the infinite. The doubling back does not inscribe a circle enclosing the finite and reducing the opposition between it and the infinite to an opposition within the infinite. There is, rather, an open circulation that leaves both finite and infinite intact. In this connection the spacing consists in the circulation between finite and infinite by way of excess or expansiveness, on the one side, and self-disclosive encompassment, on the other. As a circulating determined by two points, this spacing has as its schema an ellipse, the two foci marking the finite and the infinite. Since the excess of the infinite is indefinite, the ellipse has no precisely determinable border (so that here again a reference to fractal geometry would be appropriate). In the same measure, as a circulation the repetition of which can concretize still further the excess of the elemental and further enhance the self-disclosure through reversion, the circling is opened up, and the ellipse mutates into a spiral.

Considered more concretely, the spacing governed by this schema is such as to prevent the assimilation of the properly human to the natural elementals. Since the elementals, especially earth and sky, delimit the region of nature itself (such is their monstrosity), the persistence of circulation between finite and infinite rules out any closure by which the properly human would be appropriated to the space of nature and, within that space, within nature itself, simply retained in opposition to the natural things, in an opposition that would have been sublated and hence enclosed by the elemental space of nature. No matter how inseparably the human may be bound to the natural elementals and thus to nature itself, the human in its propriety remains irreducible to the natural.

The concept of the infinite as the indefinitely exceeding breaks both with the abstractness of the concept of endless progression and with the closure of the speculative concept. Thus, it resists, evades, the very concept (or concepts) of concept: it passes between (and thus beyond) the static, abstract concept (of concept), on the one side, and the mobile, absolute concept (of concept), on the other. Because it is concrete yet open, because it is irreducible to the figure both of a line and of a circle, forming, instead, schematically, a focal point of an ellipse (which, together with the finite, mutates into a spiral), it functions otherwise than both the common and the speculative concept. It can, accordingly, be termed a protoconcept. This designation is also meant to affirm that, as further analysis will show, it is imagination—and not a faculty of concepts, not what has been called reason (among the many names)—that sustains it within its configuration.

Mathematically there are, as Cantor demonstrated, multiple infinities, different orders of infinity, as in the differentiation, in terms of denumerability, between the transfinite number of the natural numbers and that of the real numbers. The question is whether and how this pluralizing of mathematical infinity has a bearing on the philosophical protoconcept. If this result is to be taken over—in accord with what this transition requires—then it should be possible to identify multiple concrete infinities. On the basis of their differentiation, it should be possible then to identify the corresponding moments of human finitude.

The transition from mathematical to philosophical infinity requires enhanced proximity to self-showing, proximity not only in the sense that thinking must become more archaic but also in the sense that the aspect that comes to show itself must remain adherent to the self-showing itself. This connection must remain direct and enduring, unlike the relation between a mathematical proof and the result that is thereby deduced but that, as result, detaches itself from the proof. Thus, in philosophical purview, infinity is redetermined as what exceeds indefinitely the primary site of self-showing, that is, the proper. In this regard it is of prime significance that precisely in indefinitely exceeding this site, the infinite remains adjunctive to it; whatever exceeds cannot but remain also related to that which it exceeds. In redetermining the infinite as that which indefinitely exceeds the proper, a transition is also carried out from the abstractness of the mathematical concept of infinity to the concreteness of the protoconcept. Furthermore, there is effected a shift from quantity to quality, or rather, in more suitable and timely terms, from the abstractly formal concept of infinity to the concrete aspect in and as which infinity shows itself.

In order, beyond this differentiation and transition, to locate and articulate the domain of the question of multiple infinities, it is necessary to distinguish between the various ways in which proprietary self-showing can be ventured. There are two distinctively different ways in which such showing of oneself to oneself can be effectively accomplished, two kinds of showing in which one can come manifestly before oneself.

Yet both take place within a prior opening of the proper. To be sure, it has repeatedly been observed that an unmediated turn inward does not lead to the discovery of an abiding self, that in such an inward turn nothing is to be found but fleeting images. It is from such images or perceptions that, according to Hume, the very idea of the self is derived—that is, intromitted, invented—by the imagination. Hume concludes that “consequently there is no such idea”—except through “the action of the imagination,”19 which he tacitly assumes to be incapable of attesting to existence, hence nothing but sheer phantasy. Indeed for Hume the “self or person” is so thoroughly reducible to congeries of perceptions that without the latter the self ceases to exist, that is, ceases to have whatever pseudo- or phantastical existence it has. In a most remarkable passage he writes: “When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep, so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist.”²⁰ Sleep is temporary death (and in fact in the very next sentence Hume refers to death, in which all perceptions are removed). Also, it is as if, while sleeping, dreams could not have the effect of sustaining some sensibility to oneself, as if they could never appear as one’s own, as if one could never figure in one’s own dreams.

Hume compares what he calls the mind to a kind of theatre “where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.” Though he warns that “the comparison of the theatre must not mislead us,”²¹ precisely what is misleading here is that he fails to follow through with this otherwise insightful metaphor. What he fails to observe is that a theatre is not just a place in which the actors move about but rather a site where something comes to be shown: the character and consequences of certain actions, persons, beliefs—a showing that is significant because of its bearing on the world outside the theatre.

Even if the turn to oneself does not reveal a permanent self, to which perceptions would adhere as accidents inhere in a substance, it does open a space in which the proper can become operative as such. This turn to oneself must always already have occurred, though it can also be reenacted explicitly with specifically theoretical intent. It is not a turn inward, as though the proper were an interiority shielded from things and elements. Rather, it is a gathering and setting out of one’s own, of the ownmost, the owning, that constitutes the proper.

Setting out the proper so as to impel its owning constitutes the condition, the opening, by which the two primary ways of proper self-showing can become operative. The first of these ways is by reflection, by a mode of reflection that is mediated. In this mode the mediation can be provided either by something thingly in character or by another living being, preeminently—though not exclusively—another human. There is a reflection from the other (in the inclusive sense), a reflection as in a mirror, and in the reflection of the other one catches a glimpse of oneself; one is given back disclosively to oneself, while, in that very move, releasing the other, reaffirming its otherness. From things (which, as painters attest, look back at us), from instrumental complexes (from the machine that one can operate or the musical instrument that one can play), from the eyes of an animal (which display a fidelity or a ferocity of which we, too, are capable), from others (who speak to us and to whom we can make binding promises), we are reflected back to ourselves. We are shown where we are amidst things, what mechanical or musical skills are harbored in us, our capacity for certain affective intentions, our talents for engagement with others.22 Sounds, too, especially those of music, can resonate in such a way as to be revelatory of and to us. In appropriating these reflections from things and their complexes, from animals and other humans, from sonorous figures, proprietary self-showings are accomplished. Yet in the very move in which we draw from others a reflection of ourselves, we release the other, let it withdraw into itself, let it be what it itself is.

In every case that from which one is reflected back to oneself is set within limits. Things are of limited, measurable extent and occupy a uniquely determinable place. Sounds have a limited range and duration. Living beings, too, despite their mobility, can range and extend their senses only so far, though with humans these limits border on the indeterminable, especially if account is taken of the technological supplements that extend them ever farther. Still, the encounter with other humans always takes place within a complex of limits that shape forms of association and the possibilities and range of reflections. Because, when the foreign and the foreigner appear, the domestically operative complex of limits gives way to another, there is necessarily a discontinuity that distinguishes the encounter with the foreigner, no matter how hospitable one may be, and even though interaction with the foreigner can indeed prove to be disclosive in dimensions that would otherwise remain closed off.

Yet none of the modes of reflection are in any respect oriented to infinity, not even to infinity in the concreteness expressed in the protoconcept. In no case is the span across which reflection takes place infinite in any sense; neither do the terms between which reflection occurs involve, as terms of a reflection, infinity, though in quite different connections a comportment to the infinite may be sustained. Though indeed that from which reflection is cast back to the human is set within limits, as is the human itself as a term of reflection, this limitedness does not constitute finitude; for all modes of reflection lack the bidirectional relatedness to the infinite as indefinitely exceeding the properly human. In proprietary self-showing by way of reflection, neither the infinite nor the finite has any place whatsoever. They simply do not enter into reflection at all.

Multiple concrete infinities and the corresponding moments of finitude are not, then, to be found in reflective self-showing but rather must have their locus in another—the second—form of proprietary self-showing. Whereas in reflection the proper remains entirely intact and unexposed to expropriation, whereas in this connection its domesticity is preserved as it merely opens itself, as proper, to the look, the complex, the tone, and the proper of others, the second form of proprietary self-showing proceeds by transgressing the proper and thereby compromising it, installing impropriety within the proper. In this case there is a bidirectional relatedness to the infinite, which, precisely because of its relatedness to the proper, can fittingly be termed a proper elemental. The proper is both indefinitely exceeded by the infinite as expansive and overwhelming and, in the reversion, disclosed to itself as encompassed by elemental infinity. Human finitude consists precisely in this bidirectional relatedness to the infinite. Or, more precisely, this is the form that proprietary self-showing assumes insofar as the infinite is identified as the natural elemental. For it is the elements that are expansive and overwhelming and that encompass the properly human.

What other forms of infinity can be identified—assuming that infinities have a what (answering the ancient question: τί ἐστι . . . ?), that they have form (in a sense displaceable from the classical), and that each of these forms has a determinable identity? It is abundantly evident that the differentiation between these forms of infinity that pertain elementally to the properly human cannot, as in transfinite arithmetic, rely on such concepts as denumerability (even though Cantor’s discoveries have served here as a clue indicating the possibility of multiple concrete infinities). In order to avoid regressing either to the concept of infinity as endless progression or to that of a single, absolute infinity, the focus must remain on the open concreteness of the infinite, on its determination (in a sense reoriented to the nonterminating) as indefinitely exceeding the properly human. The multiple infinities can become manifest only through the manifold aspects in which infinities show themselves as bearing transgressively on the proper.

Although proprietary self-showing from the infinite is different in kind, different in its basic structure, from self-showing that proceeds by way of reflection, there is discernible in reflection from the other human a trace of an infinite other than that of nature. The primary instance is one in which reflection from the look of the other is overrun ever so discreetly. One catches sight of another as looking back, as returning one’s glance, as taking up in reverse one’s very line of vision. One gets a glimpse of the looking in the look of the other, the looking that comes from elsewhere than the mere look. In the gaze of the other there is a trace of a withdrawn depth, which thus is betrayed without presenting itself, without becoming present, without being captured even in the look. In this connection, discerning such a trace of recession is the only way of resolving the conundrum involved in seeking to reveal something intrinsically concealed, something that can be brought to light only at the cost of violating its intrinsic character. The looking of the other, this recession from all that can emerge through sense, must be disclosed without being disclosed. Here the time-honored pairing and effectiveness of intuition and presence loses its pertinence and is replaced by the momentary transgressive discernment of the trace.23

The trace of recession indicates without making present, without issuing in a self-showing, a depth that as such is secured against presence. It can be called retreat—the retreat into which withdraws whatever bears on the proper without being present and without showing its relation to the proper. It can be called seclusion or secludedness—the seclusion in which images are kept apart from being one’s own and from being such as to be also, duplicitously, of the object.²⁴ Though, while in seclusion, they do not simply cease to be one’s own, they subside into a depth that the proper cannot sound. Hegel calls it the nocturnal pit, mine, or shaft (Schacht) of slumbering images, the dark depth of images that lie concealed²⁵ Derrida glosses these descriptions by referring to images “submerged at the bottom of a very dark shelter”; or, turning these passages so as to allude to the shining of which images are capable when drawn up from the depth, he says that they are “rather like a precious vein at the bottom of the mine.”²⁶

This retreat, seclusion, or shelter indefinitely exceeds the proper and does so in the direction of depth. It constitutes a concrete infinity that is recessional, profound, and unfathomable in character—that is, a second proper elemental. The mode of finitude that consists in being exceeded by the infinity of retreat, of seclusion, lies in being exposed to the upsurge of images—and indeed not only of images—stemming from one knows not where, images sheltered from the probings of proper apprehension.

The depth of seclusion is set, as complement, over against the height of the natural elemental. On the one hand, there is the dark depth of retreat, while, on the other hand, there is the openness and brightness of the cloudless, diurnal sky, which, of all the natural elements, concretizes height as such most manifestly. A host of other elements are donatives from the sky: thunder and lightning, rain and snow, the alternation of day and night. Even earth and sea, while not directly displaying height, supply the base from which rises the dome of the heaven; they provide the lower bound of the domain within which living beings can aspire to ascend toward the heaven, the domain in which humans can stand upright and cast their vision above.

The spacing of all natural elementals is set within the all-encompassing enchorial spacing bounded by earth and sea and enclosed by sky. It is a spacing in which the enchorial space is opened, not as an opening within a space already there, presupposed as the site of the opening, but rather in the mode of originary engenderment. It is within this space that the spacings of all other natural elementals occur. Like enchorial spacing, the spacings of the other elementals have the character of encompassing, though each encompasses in its own distinctive way. Also, earth, sea, and sky, each taken separately and so in relative independence of enchorial spacing, have their own distinctive spacing: sky is spaced as open recession, sea as the transparency that conjoins surface and depth, earth as sealed-off opacity.

The spacing of seclusion shares with sea the moment of depth and with earth that of opacity. But what is decisive in its spacing is that its depth is abysmal and that its opacity has the effect of compounding its abysmal character. The spacing is such as to open originarily a depth beneath the proper, a nocturnal pit, where images—and not only images—are sheltered and from which they can well up and shine in the brilliance of the proper. Looking down into an abyss with the aid of a sufficiently powerful light source—the sun, for instance, directly overhead—one can see that the abyss goes ever farther downward as far as one can see; and then one can imagine that it is truly bottomless or wager that it continues downward so far that no available means would suffice to allow one to see its bottom, so that, in even remotely practical terms, it would be bottomless, a paradigmatic semblance of a true abyss. But the spacing of seclusion is otherwise. In this case what is decisive is the opacity that seals off the spacing, that keeps the nocturnal pit withdrawn from the proper, apart from it, and resistant to whatever soundings might be ventured. In short, the space of seclusion is so intensely abysmal that one cannot even declare whether it is (practically) bottomless, whether it is (a semblance of) a true abyss. Precisely as its downward plunge draws one on to look—or to attempt to look—ever deeper, its opacity interferes with—not to say blocks—the view. Whether it is truly abysmal remains undecidable, and this undecidability renders it more abysmal than the abyss as such, that is, a more than true abyss. There is, then, no saying whether the images—and whatever else—sheltered in this retreat lie at the bottom of the pit (as Derrida’s gloss suggests) or whether they float in an endlessly regressive space, which would, then, constitute a kind of inverse infinity within this proper, concrete infinity.

The proper is also improper. In its broadest aspect, this conjunction demonstrates that in the logic of the proper the alleged principle of noncontradiction has no pertinence. In its more specific bearing, it indicates that impropriety or expropriation belongs to the proper as the result of the double relatedness to concrete infinity, to the properly elemental. Concrete infinity both transgresses the proper, indefinitely exceeding it, and yet belongs to it through disclosive reversion. Thus, both the natural elementals and the seclusive, sheltering retreat indefinitely exceed the proper in the direction of height and depth, respectively. In connection with both of these proper elementals, there is also reversion from the infinite to the proper, though in these two connections the reversions do not display precisely the same form. From the natural elementals, one is disclosed to oneself as encompassed, as reliant on and exposed to the elementals. From the seclusive retreat, one is disclosed to oneself as submitted to an abyss more abysmal than an abyss as such, to a more than true abyss. In the disclosure of this submittal, it is shown how one comes to be disposed, drawn into a certain disposition, by the upsurge of images, by the emergence of content from the abyss. Even in the most direct cases, as when a remote memory image is evoked by a present intuition with similar content,27 there remains an abysmal moment: not only will the memory image have lain—or floated—in the darkness of the pit, but even the manner in which it is evoked—that is, the way in which similarity of content can prompt it to ascend into the light—remains undisclosed. It is this abysmal character at the heart of memory that makes it such a suitable subject for comedy, especially for Platonic comedy, in which—as with the example of the aviary in the Theaetetus²⁸—abstraction from the abysmal is feigned in such a way that it then comes to be revealed as such through the enactment of the resulting comedy.

Submittal to the abysmal character of the seclusive retreat involves, not only disposition, but also reliance. Without the resources sheltered in the abysmal retreat, memory would be limited to what has remained simply one’s own, that is, to what one can, purely through one’s own agency, call up. Even the enormous store of language would be limited to the sphere of the proper, as if we were not more possessed by language than language by us.

There is still another aspect in which the proper is also improper. There is another concrete infinity, another proper elemental, to which the properly human sustains a double relatedness. But in this case both the excess and the reversion are intensified. Though it remains indefinite, the exceeding is such that its term, the concrete infinity, cannot, in principle, be made present, in the way in which, most manifestly, the natural elementals can be made present. Its withdrawal, the force of the transgression, has in this case an absoluteness that is lacking in the case both of the natural elementals and of the sheltering retreat: it is entirely absolved from presence, from being presented. In this case the reversion also assumes a different form: rather than giving one back to oneself in the sense of a self-disclosing to oneself (for instance, as encompassed), this proper elemental gives one oneself as such. Though it beckons from its anterior remoteness, one’s own birth can be neither represented (without dispelling that very ownness) nor reenacted by means of memory or imagining. With respect to what is one’s own, birth both is absolutely anterior and is the onset of all enabling. The double relatedness to birth, as to an absolute excess that, in reversion, absolutely bestows, constitutes natality.

The other proper elemental is complementary: equally absolved from presence, death deprives one of oneself. In sleep one is for a while stolen from oneself, as attested in the words with which the poet lets Helena express her wish:

And sleep . . .

Steal me awhile from mine own company.29

So in death such theft is extended without limit: one is stolen from oneself absolutely. Like birth, it beckons from afar, yet from a posterior remoteness. And though, on the one hand, its posteriority is absolutely resistant to representation and imaginary enactment, it is, on the other hand, a posteriority that, like the anteriority of birth, stretches across the entire span of life. Relatedness to this proper elemental constitutes mortality.

The four proper elementals, namely, the natural elements, the sheltering retreat, birth, and death, delimit, in their transgressive bearing on the proper, the space of propriety. The character of these proper elementals, along with that of the corresponding moments of finitude, makes it abundantly evident that neither the proper (one’s own as such) nor the proper compounded (and expropriated) by its relatedness to the proper elementals is to be identified as an interiority. The properly human is not a “within” (which could be conceived, for instance, as an indwelling soul) that somehow has to break out from itself into a “without,” an “outside.” Rather, it is always already extended, stretched, between birth and death, which, no matter how dissociated they may be from biological occurrences, have nothing to do with interiority. In addition, it is always already engaged with nature and the natural elementals and does not have first to escape from itself, to turn itself inside out, in order to engage all that belongs to nature. Furthermore, this engagement cannot be separated from what has been called the body, which, almost always determined in subordinate opposition to the soul, would, with the dissipation of interiority, require unsettling displacement and thorough redetermination. Even in the case of the sheltering retreat, which could most readily suggest an interiority, its character as infinite exceeding and as abyss would require conceiving it as an interior of the interiority, disrupting its conception as simply interiority. For a consciousness (to introduce this now dubious designation only in this negative connection) exceeded by an abyss belonging precisely to it would not be simply consciousness; but, at the very least, such a conception would broach the enormous difficulty, not to say aporia, that necessarily haunts a discourse on the so-called unconscious.

B. SECLUSION

It has been called darkness, not just the darkness that descends in the night to enshroud all things, but that of an interminable night, a darkness that even the blinding light of the sun cannot finally penetrate and dispel. It is the darkness of a night that offers no promise of a dawn to come. Yet it condemns nothing unconditionally to eternal darkness. There is nothing—or almost nothing—that is totally incapable of escaping its shroud, if only for a time, nothing that cannot emerge into the light of day. Nonetheless, every emergence remains, as with Eurydice, bound to the threat of falling back into the nocturnal pit. The threat becomes uppermost at the moment when the madness of the day intervenes to turn its gaze back into the somber depths.

It has also been called the unruly: not only as the symmetrical opposite of rule, order, form, but also as what underlies all that displays the rule of order and form. It is an illogic that lies at the basis of logic; or, more precisely, it is a manifold that requires a logic twisted free of the demands of Aristotelian logic, that requires a logic extended into the exorbitant. In this case the directionality of the exorbitance is toward depth, toward ground, and the exorbitance consists in the persistence with which the unruly remains in the ground yet as though it could, at any moment, break through once again. Indeed it does break through in its most characteristic—if less disruptive—manner whenever a phantasy floats before the mind’s eye, or a memory wells up, or a word or expression comes to bear an intention and carry it toward fulfillment. It breaks through whenever something comes to light from one knows not where, whenever something from the enshrouded depth intrudes upon the proper, offering a display—if always from behind a veil—of both the infinity and the reversion of depth. Though the unruly has also been called ground, it is not the ground that invites and endures sunlight and rain, not the ground on which, self-possessed, humans can stand erect. It is a ground that, even more than a cave, is sealed off, verschlossen; or rather, it is a ground that has, from the beginning, already caved in under its own weight, a ground become abyss, an abyss become still more abysmal, a secluded infinite indefinitely exceeding the proper while also holding it in submission, installing impropriety within the proper, expropriating it.

Seclusion is this self-closing movement in which all that is sheltered in seclusion as well as the sheltering and the shelter itself are secured in their withdrawal from presence. Seclusion is both the nontopological place of enshroudment and the securing of all that will have descended into its depths or that will, from the beginning, have been confined there. Mythically it is Hades and its shades—except that it is no more the region of death than of birth. Put otherwise—still mythically—it affirms the possibility that Orpheus could have not turned his gaze back toward the abyss but through the power of love and music could have brought Eurydice back to the upper world of light.

Seclusion is infinite. It is not the infinite (for, as in mathematics, there is no single—kind of—infinite) but rather an infinite, the infinitude of which is to be differentiated from that of the elemental in nature. As infinite, it indefinitely exceeds the proper; its exorbitance lies in the direction of depth, of a depth that is self-closing, doubly abysmal. Though archaic, it takes place principally as concealment. In this word the same polysemy is displayed as in seclusion: it designates the space in which all that remains intrinsically concealed is sheltered in concealment, while also it includes in its semantic field both the operative spacing and the consequently concealed. Concealment is no less abysmal, no less radically abysmal: that something is concealed can itself be concealed—that is, concealment can be compounded through self-concealment. In this case concealment is sealed off, becomes imperceptible. As long as one sees the veil, one can venture to draw it aside so as to reveal what lies behind it. But when the veil itself becomes invisible, no direct strategy suffices to dispel the concealment; indeed what happens—except in very exceptional cases—is that one remains oblivious to the concealment, unaware that anything lies in concealment.

The relatedness of the proper to seclusion is, as with all proper elementals, bidirectional. This relatedness constitutes a moment of human finitude. As, in one direction, seclusion indefinitely exceeds the proper, so, in the opposite direction, there is reversion from seclusion. Through this reversion the human, exceeded by an infinite, is given back to itself, granted self-disclosure.

What is disclosed to the human in this fashion is sheer advent: something comes with no seal of origin; it comes without inscribing any legible trace of its genesis. It can, then, only have been released from behind the veil of seclusion: perhaps called up, prompted, by something apprehended, by something that calls for it; but perhaps, if the veil is invisible, by a more circuitous way. For instance, as one openly intimates a still shapeless and inarticulate concatenation, a word may come to crystallize the sight and the ordering that gives it sense. Or, a momentary glimpse of a landscape, the bouquet of an excellent wine, the night sounds of the woods in summer—all can prompt the arrival, as if from nowhere, of memories and sequences of memories, of phantasies, some of which are barely distinguishable from memories. Also, a brief, utterly insignificant everyday event or observation (a casual glance in a shop window) can, according to Freud’s analysis, prompt a dream in which “the dark powers in the depths of our soul” well up.30 The nowhere from which these all come, this unlocatable spacing, is seclusion.

Yet seclusion engenders not only fitting words, prompted memories, phantasies, and dreams; from behind the invisible veil, releasing what it will, it disposes humans in one way or another, gives them a certain bearing, a certain inclination, toward things and toward other elementals. It bestows on each a singular openness and directedness toward all that is encountered. It attunes each in a certain register, and it is precisely in this state of attunement, from out of it, that humans then—and only then—come to apprehend things. It is from out of—within the spacing of—this disposition that even the most direct and primary relation to presence, that of the sense-image,³¹ takes place. In its antecedence, disposition forms the proper by deforming it; and as such it constitutes the distinctive texture that belongs to seclusion.

As with all elementals, seclusion is to be rigorously distinguished from things. Indeed seclusion does not display even the affinity that natural elementals have with things, at least to the extent that such things belong directly to nature. The categories and principles by which, from Aristotle on, the field of things is determined have not the slightest applicability to seclusion. Since it manifests itself only as self-concealing source, nothing warrants ascribing to it such determinations as substantiality (even as οὐσία), causality, qualitative reality (Realität), or quantitative unity. Even more originary determination as the enclosure of a sense-image by various systems of horizons is entirely inappropriate. Insofar as the transcendental (in distinction from categorial) determination signified by the word being (in its various forms) extends only to things, discourse on seclusion and indeed on all elementals requires that the sense of being be accordingly displaced, not to avoid contradiction (which can be highly productive) but to maintain the minimal coherence needed for signification to remain operative. In the interest of a discourse accordant with the differentiation of elementals from things, it is imperative that the sense of being be made mobile.

But then the sense of negativity will also be mobilized. To being as a transcendental determination extending to the entire field of things, there is opposed nonbeing, negativity, or, in Hegel’s idiom, abstract negativity. When the sense of being undergoes the displacement from substance to subject, which is “expressed in the representation of the absolute as spirit,”32 then the sense of negativity undergoes a profound shift. No longer is it the mere opposite of being, something from which one simply turns away as a mere nothing and from which then one passes on to something else, to something substantial, something that truly is. Rather than such a mere turn away, what the new sense of negativity requires is endurance. Spirit is the power of such endurance. In an assertion so decisive that its consequences remain, even today, unlimited, Hegel writes: Spirit “is this power only by looking the negative in the face, tarrying [verweilen] with it. This tarrying is the magical power that converts [or inverts, turns upside down—umkehren] it [the negative] into being.”³³ No longer a mere opposite of being, negation is comprehended as determinate negation, as always the negation of some content, hence as turning into being.³⁴ In every sense of the expression: nothing is lost. Whatever is negated is recovered, given back to itself as a new form at a higher level.

Aside from his own multiple strategies for marking certain fissures in Hegel’s text (he once said, in fact, that he would never be finished with the reading and rereading of Hegel’s text),35 Derrida has set clearly in focus Bataille’s athwart resistance to Hegel’s concept of determinate negation and to the systematic structure that it makes possible. Over against the Hegelian imperative that “there must be meaning [sens], that nothing must be definitively lost in death,”³⁶ Bataille, to the contrary, calls for “the deepest foray into darkness without return.”³⁷ He attests—says Derrida—to an “absolute comicalness,” obliquely opposing comedy to the serious work of the Hegelian concept (as if Hegel had not elevated comedy to the pinnacle of art). What Bataille finds absolutely comical is “the anguish experienced when confronted by expenditure without security, by the absolute sacrifice of meaning: a sacrifice without return and without reserves.” He counters what is expressed in the concept of Aufhebung, namely, “the busying of a discourse . . . as it reappropriates all negativity for itself.” To engage such discourse is to blind oneself “to the groundlessness of the non-meaning [au sans-fond du non-sens] from which the ground [le fonds] of meaning is drawn and on which it is exhausted.”³⁸

It is, then, a question of appropriation, of whether it is possible to assimilate everything to the proper without loss, without remainder. The failure to comprehend the impossibility of such appropriation constitutes, according to Bataille, the blind spot of Hegelianism. Yet even to refer to a failure of comprehension, hence to the possibility of comprehension, is to appeal to meaning as the correlate of comprehension and thus is not yet an absolute sacrifice of meaning. Only in absolving oneself from meaning, only in embracing noncomprehension, could one regain one’s sight of the groundless nonmeaning. Yet such sight could not but be senseless, devoid of comprehension, an utterly nondisclosive comportment—in a word: ignorance, indeed an ignorance incapable of sustaining discourse on what would have been—almost blindly—seen. Little wonder, then, that Derrida marks the limit, the point of no return, “which no longer leaves us with the resources with which to think of this expenditure [without reserve] as negativity.”³⁹ Derrida concludes: “In sacrificing meaning,” he “submerges the possibility of discourse.”⁴⁰

There is a very remarkable passage in Inner Experience that could be read as Bataille’s appeal to his last resort. It is no accident that it occurs in a section entitled simply “Hegel.” The passage begins with Bataille’s confession that it is his last resort, his final recourse, or, as he puts it, “ultimate possibility.” Immediately he identifies this possibility: “That non-knowledge still be knowledge”—that is, that in the “without reserve” there remain somehow—but how?—a reserve of meaning. Then, most remarkably, he writes: “I would explore the night! But no, it is the night that explores me . . .” The ellipsis with which the passage ends belongs to it.41

The night cannot be made one’s own. It can be neither a possession nor something to be taken to heart. No one owns the night. It simply comes; and after nightfall one sees a more somber landscape and senses a depth that bears on, but exceeds, all that is most one’s own.

Darkness, the unruly, seclusion cannot be appropriated, absorbed without remainder into the proper. Yet the remainder is no fund of nonfundament, of non-sense, which would emasculate discourse, but rather consists in the removal of the infinite from the proper, in the indefinite excess by which seclusion is set apart from the proper, yet in such a way that, in reversion, its reserve comes to bear on the proper and thus is opened to meaning and discourse. It is in this birelationality that the negativity of seclusion consists.

Yet in the case of seclusion, negativity assumes the specific guise of concealment. The compounding of concealment provides the basis for a distinction that is parallel, though only up to a point, to the psychoanalytic distinction between the preconscious and the unconscious. Whatever is merely concealed is never entirely hidden from view, never inaccessible; rather, it is simply that which is not properly entertained, not truly apprehended (in the broadest sense), but which can be prompted to become so, which can be called up as if drawn to the proper. Such seclusive moments are exemplified by the word that comes to crystallize a vague conception or the figure that comes to inform a scene. These moments and their way of being called up correspond, in psychoanalytic conceptuality, to the preconscious.

Yet concealment can be compounded into self-concealment, into concealment that is imperceptible as such, into the invisible veil. In this case the seclusive moments are, like the locus and operation of seclusion, withdrawn into virtual inaccessibility. And yet, it must be possible—even if unaccountably, even if without direct prompting, even if only for an instant—for these seclusive moments to come to bear on the proper, and indeed in such a way that their more radical character is displayed, though its deciphering may well require a hermeneutics that hardly yet exists. The self-concealment to which these moments may—most indirectly—be referred is parallel to what psychoanalysis calls the unconscious.

In the relationality between seclusion and the proper, there are, then, both overt and covert moments. It is imperative, however, that what Freud calls the preconscious and the unconscious be rethought as overt and covert seclusion, respectively. This requirement stems, first of all, from the inadequacy of the concept of consciousness as such. There is no need to repeat once again the demonstration that to the degree that the concept of intentionality is thought in a radical fashion, it has ever more decisively the effect of dissolving the interiority by which the concept of consciousness is determined. The consequence, that the human is not to be conceived as an interiority, as an inner self, is extended in a positive fashion in the determination of the human as the space of propriety.

Yet even aside from these philosophical developments, many of Freud’s own remarks justify suspicion about the rigor—or lack thereof—with which this concept is determined in his analysis. For example, near the beginning of a text expressly meant to explain the unconscious briefly and as clearly as possible, Freud prepares his account by stating what is meant by conscious. The vacuousness and circularity of the statement are startling: “We would like to call conscious the conception which is present in our consciousness and which we perceive.”42 Another passage, this one in The Interpretation of Dreams, offers an equally inept, if less circular, definition of consciousness, which, says Freud, “means for us a sense-organ for the apprehension of psychical qualities.”⁴³

On the other hand, Freud cannot avoid granting to consciousness a certain privilege, identifying it as the starting-point of his inquiry. For instance, near the beginning of the text “The Unconscious,” he draws explicitly the distinction between the preconscious and the unconscious. He describes the preconscious as consisting of acts that are temporarily unconscious but otherwise no different from conscious ones; to characterize the unconscious in the strict sense and in distinction from the preconscious, he refers to repressed processes, which, were they to become conscious, would contrast strongly with conscious ones. Freud alludes to ways in which the distinction between conscious and unconscious (in the strict sense) could be rendered inoperative, but since, as he declares, these ways are “impracticable,” the ambiguity involved in using these words in both a descriptive and a systematic sense must be tolerated. He proposes to avoid confusion to some degree by using “arbitrarily chosen names” for the two systems, names that make no reference to consciousness; yet oddly enough it turns out that these names, alleged to be arbitrarily chosen, are simply abbreviations for conscious (Bw for bewusst) and unconscious (Ubw for unbewusst). In fact, just as he is about to introduce these abbreviations, he grants, in effect, the futility of seeking to avoid the ambiguity and confusion that surround these concepts and distinctions. He says that in distinguishing between the systems (Bw and Ubw) “one cannot evade [umgehen] consciousness, since it forms the starting-point of all our investigations.”44

Later in the same text, he reveals why consciousness has this privileged position in the investigations. Attributing various theoretical difficulties to the fact that the concept of consciousness is insufficient for differentiating between the systems, he interjects the assertion that consciousness is “the only characteristic [Charakter] of psychical processes directly given to us.”⁴⁵ And yet, the question must be raised: Who is the us to whom consciousness—and it alone—is directly given? Can it be anything other than consciousness itself (since only consciousness, as given, is present as that to which something—consciousness itself—can be given)? In this case, Freud is simply repeating—tacitly and less precisely—the position that accords priority to self-consciousness, the position that declares consciousness to be essentially also self-consciousness—a position that was affirmed and rigorously developed in German Idealism, indeed already in Kant’s concept of transcendental apperception. In any case, it is because of its character as the uniquely given that consciousness must constitute the starting-point of investigations. The difficulty to which Freud alluded is precisely that of starting (necessarily) with consciousness alone and from that starting-point differentiating the unconscious from consciousness. Granted that consciousness has this privileged position, there can be little hope of working out this differentiation without first having carried out a rigorous and precise determination of the concept of consciousness. Otherwise—though also for other reasons—one can hardly not agree with Heidegger’s judgment that “the unconscious is unintelligible.”⁴⁶ The question is whether developing such a determination will not inevitably have the effect of undermining the very concept of consciousness and a fortiori the distinction between consciousness and the unconscious.

But there is at least one way in which, beginning with consciousness, Freud undertakes to differentiate the unconscious from it. It is significant in this regard that to the initial section of “The Unconscious” Freud assigns the title “The Justification of the Unconscious.” Almost at the outset of this section he asserts that the supposition that the unconscious exists is both necessary and legitimate. He explains: “It is necessary because the data of consciousness are riddled with gaps [lückenhaft]; in both healthy and sick people, psychical acts frequently occur that can be explained only by presupposing other acts, but to which consciousness does not testify.” Among these presupposed acts, Freud mentions “slips” and dreams, but also, more convincingly, “thoughts of unknown origin and the results of thought processes whose workings remain concealed from us.” He continues: “All of these conscious acts remain incoherent and incomprehensible if we insist that all psychical acts that occur in us must also be experienced through consciousness.”47

In his conversations with Medard Boss, Heidegger directly addresses Freud’s alleged justification for the supposition that the unconscious exists. In effect, Heidegger rephrases the Freudian statement in such a way as to expose what he takes to be its primary—and highly questionable—presupposition. He says of Freud: “For conscious, human phenomena he also postulates an unbroken chain of explanation, that is, the continuity of causal connections. Because there is not such ‘in consciousness,’ he must invent [erfinden] ‘the unconscious,’ in which there must be an unbroken chain of causal connections.”⁴⁸ Heidegger concludes: “This postulate is not derived from the psychical phenomena themselves but is a postulate of modern natural science”⁴⁹—namely, the postulate, dogmatically maintained, that explanation consists in exhibiting thoroughgoing causal connections between things or events.⁵⁰ With the utmost irony, Heidegger adds: “What for Kant transcends perception, for instance, the fact that the stone becomes warm because the sun is shining, is for Freud ‘the unconscious.’”⁵¹

Heidegger’s criticism of Freud’s presupposition regarding causality is hardly disputable, as subsequent developments in psychoanalytic theory have shown.52 To posit the unconscious in order to fill the causal gaps in consciousness is no “justification for the unconscious.” But does the failure of Freud’s alleged justification warrant characterizing the Freudian postulate as, in Heidegger’s words, “the fatal distinction between the conscious and the unconscious”?⁵³ Or are there not, in what has previously been determined as consciousness, certain features other than causal gaps that could justify a supposition not entirely unlike Freud’s postulation of the unconscious? What about the interpretation of dreams as translation, which, regardless of the specific forces that Freud takes to be operative in the dream-work (displacement, condensation, etc.), presupposes that there is an “original” to be translated? Equally pertinent in this regard is Freud’s description (cited above) of certain specific psychical phenomena that provide, so it seems, some justification for postulating the unconscious: these phenomena are “thoughts of unknown origin and the results of thought processes whose workings remain concealed from us.”

But then, once the concept of consciousness has been thoroughly dismantled, how are that unknown origin and those thought processes whose workings remain concealed from us to be characterized? As it pertains to the interpretation of dreams, Freud describes this depth dimension (that is, in his terms, the unconscious) as consisting of dream-thoughts (Traumgedanken); these constitute the latent contents of the dream, which through the dream-work are translated into the manifest content. Yet the specific descriptive language with which he characterizes these dream-thoughts is most remarkable, indeed eminently questionable in the highest degree. He says, for instance, that they have “all the features of the trains of thought familiar to us from waking life,” and that they “are never absurd”; again, he says that they have “rational form.”54 He observes that in the interpretation, for instance, of absurd dreams, what is required is to determine the underlying meaning (Sinn), to go deeper into their meaning.⁵⁵ Thus, he takes the unconscious to be composed of thoughts that are rational, that have meaning; the only exception is (as detailed earlier) the so-called navel of the dream, which, significantly, Derrida marks as abysmal.⁵⁶ Among the most indicative is a passage that comes at the end of the crucial chapter “The Dreamwork”: “The dream-thoughts are entirely correct [völlig korrekt] and are formed with all the expenditure of psychical energy of which we are capable; they belong to our thinking that has not become conscious, from which, by a certain transposition, conscious thoughts also arise.”⁵⁷

Thus, the dream-thoughts belonging to the unconscious are regarded as the source from which certain conscious thoughts arise, in this case those that constitute the manifest content of dreams. But, in turn, dream-thoughts are taken to belong to the broader domain of unconscious thoughts as such (“our thinking that has not become conscious”), and it is from this domain that Freud takes conscious thoughts to arise. Though this passage is less than fully explicit about the range of the conscious thoughts that arise, it can most definitely be read as leaving this range unrestricted, as affirming that all conscious thinking arises by transposition from unconscious thoughts.

Another passage explicitly broadens the field beyond that of dream-content. In this context Freud refers, not to dream-thoughts, but to the “latent states of psychical life.” Proposing to concentrate on “what is known for certain about these problematic states,” he declares “that they have the most extensive contact with conscious psychical processes.” Referring again to the transposition of unconscious into conscious processes, he asserts that the unconscious “can be described using all the categories we apply to conscious psychical acts, such as representations [Vorstellungen], aspirations, resolutions, and so on.” Then, most remarkably, he adds: “Indeed, we must say of many of these latent states that the only way they differ from conscious ones is precisely in their not being conscious.”58 This lack of differentiation is indicated by what Freud says explicitly regarding dream-thoughts: that they are rational, meaningful, entirely correct.

From these passages it becomes evident that the unconscious processes, which are regarded as the source underlying many—if not all—conscious thoughts, are conceived primarily as duplicating the structure that defines the conscious processes belonging to sound theoretical cognition; or, even more broadly, as reproducing “the trains of thought familiar to us from waking life.” As, in the one direction, Freud maintains that conscious thought (at least to a large extent) arises by transposition of unconscious processes (such as dream-thoughts), so, in the opposite direction, it can be affirmed that the unconscious, in large measure, at least, arises—that is, is posited theoretically, is conceptually determined, and is generally described—by replication of paradigmatic (or even everyday) conscious thought. Though the possibility of slight incongruence must be left open, the implication is that to a large extent the unconscious is simply a projection of the conscious, a mere replication at an allegedly deeper level. Rather than exceeding consciousness, it simply duplicates its ideal or real structure. The unconscious is little more than a replication of consciousness projected as its source.

Thus, even aside from the energetic, economic, dynamic reductionism for which Freud has been subject to wide-ranging criticism, there remains this aporia even when, as in the texts examined above, his theoretical parameters are most appropriate to the human psyche. In effect, the unconscious is assimilated to consciousness rather than being set apart in its difference, that is, in a depth that would be other than the mere undetermined space of replication. As long as the unconscious is not thought in its proper depth, in its depth in relation to the proper, it will remain a mere double of consciousness, a specter, a ghost.

Yet, while the unconscious as such merely replicates consciousness at a level projected as one of depth, the translation of particular dream-thoughts into manifest dream-content is of an entirely different character. This translation is not replication but transposition effected by the dream-work. What is especially remarkable59 is the way in which Freud describes the transposition that the logical relations between dream-thoughts undergo: the logical categories that determine the relation between dream-thoughts come, through the transposition, to be replaced in the manifest content by spatial or temporal relations. In other words, the transposition has the effect of schematizing the categories, so that the logic instituted by the dream-work proves to be a logic of schemata, that is, an exorbitant logic. This result is perhaps Freud’s most impressive achievement in this connection: he shows that between the two levels (the conscious and the unconscious) there intervenes a transposition by which is instituted in the manifest dream an exorbitant logic. Though in proposing that there is a productive relation between phantasy and the dream-thoughts, Freud most certainly does not mean to imply (as the above analysis has shown) that the unconscious as such is little more than a projection of consciousness to an allegedly deeper level, the introduction of phantasy into his analysis does justify regarding the exorbitant logic of the dream-content as, within certain limits, a logic of imagination.

Among the schemata that belong to such logic is that by which contradiction, which is prohibited by Aristotelian-based, categorial logic (which presumably holds for the dream-thoughts), is tolerated; the schema is that according to which contradictory opposites are retained side by side (as in “kettle logic”). Such logic is what is required in relation to the proper. Because of its double relatedness to proper elementals such as seclusion, because these concrete infinities both indefinitely exceed the proper and yet, through reversion, bear on its very constitution, the proper is also improper; it is both at the same time, in the same respect, etc.—that is, the logic of the proper, indeed of the entire space of propriety, is an exorbitant logic.

Such exorbitance is displayed in the relatedness between seclusion and the proper: exceeded by seclusion, the human is self-disclosed (in reversion) as submitted to this abysmal elemental. Within this disclosure it becomes manifest that the unaccountable emergence of content from seclusion draws the human into a certain disposition, in which there arises also a reliance on resources sheltered in—but also, to a degree, released from—seclusion.

It is in this connection that what has been conceived as the body can be problematized and its redetermination launched. With only rare exceptions, the body60 has in previous Western thought been determined in strict hierarchical opposition to the soul, subjectivity, or consciousness; especially in modern thought the term that has been understood in opposition to the body has been interpreted as the interiority that constitutes the genuine self, while the body has been taken as the mere remains, as a mere receptacle for consciousness. Discourse on embodiment nearly always falls within the framework of this interpretation, implying in the very word embodiment that something quite other than the body comes to inhabit the body. And yet, with the dismantling of the concept of consciousness, the question of the body (including that of the pertinence of this very expression) must be reopened in detachment from the previously determining opposition.

Both disposition and reliance bear on the determination of corporeity (to transpose the designation, which also allows the the to be dropped). For it is primarily in one’s corporeity that disposition is not just passively exhibited but enacted; at the same time, the operation of disposition serves to reveal the character of corporeity. Humans open their eyes to things, look at them in a certain perspective to which they are disposed; and it is then that things, as it were, look back at us, that is, that we engage in self-disclosive reflection. Much the same can be said regarding human encounters with the natural elementals: in a storm one feels the wind and rain, one gets a glimpse of the lightning, one attunes one’s ears to echoing thunder. In all these corporeal responses certain dispositions are operative and indeed instrumental; such is equally the case when it is a matter of active initiative rather than response. At the same time, both response and initiative are thoroughly reliant on corporeity, on being able to open one’s eyes to things and to others, on being capable of running one’s fingers over the keyboard of the piano, on being equipped to hear the birdsong. Corporeity does not refer to something simply present but to a basis that is lived and that, as such, is directed by disposition and reliant on resources that come from beyond what is one’s ownmost. The resources of corporeity are deployed from out of concealment; and, like disposition and reliance, corporeity is situated within the relationality between seclusion and the proper. In short, corporeity takes place in the space of propriety.

Two points need to be mentioned as a kind of coda to the analysis of seclusion. The first is that in coming around to the locating and redetermining of corporeity, we have arrived at the very place from which the entire unfolding of the structure of manifestation began: for it is only through corporeity that one is enabled to open sense to sense, to take up the sense-image from which, through such structures as horizons, apprehension of things as such becomes possible. In arriving at corporeity, the analysis has returned to its starting-point and has exhibited what, in that initial moment, must already have been operative. Secondly, we need to note the way—by no means the only one—in which imagination can come to bear on corporeity. How otherwise would it be possible to transform corporeal gestures into dance and mere voice into music?

C. NATAL MORTALITY

Socrates is the sole speaker. It is through his remembrance and his words that the entire conversation of which the Republic consists is presented. The conversation, which—says Socrates—took place on the previous day at the home of Polemarchus in the Piraeus, is set between word and deed. Its course runs from the very first word, “κατέβην” (I went down, descended), to an account of how one named Er went down, like Odysseus, into the region to which souls depart after death. Conversely, the conversation extends from Socrates’ self-recounted deed of descent (“I went down yesterday to Piraeus with Glaucon . . .”) to the story of Er’s descent into the region of the dead. Word and deed both open and conclude the Republic. The entire dialogue is suspended between two moments at each of which a descent resonant with that of Odysseus is both carried out in deed and set out in words.

Toward the end of their journey through the region of the dead, all the souls made their way—so the story goes—through stifling heat to the plain of Λήθη (of forgetting or concealing). The plain was devoid of trees and of all that naturally grows on the earth, a place thus farthest removed from that of nature and life. At nightfall they set up their camp by the river of Carelessness. As each drank the water, some more heedless of measure than others, each forgot everything; all that had been observed on the postmortem journey was now hidden, concealed, from their remembrance. As each slept, nature returned in the guise of powerful elements, thunder and an earthquake, and they were carried up to their birth like stars shooting across the heaven. Only Er was prevented from drinking the water, and so the story was saved. Yet in what way and how he came into his body, he did not know.

As the story comes to its end, Socrates turns to Glaucon, who has accompanied him from the beginning. Addressing Glaucon directly, Socrates holds out hope that they may make a good crossing of (what he now calls) the river of Λήθη, that their remembrance will not be entirely obscured by concealment, and that they will accordingly be able to keep to the upward way.

Among all the remarkable features of this story, the most astonishing is that even though the mystery of death, the concealed region of the dead, was revealed to Er and his remembrance of it was preserved, nothing was disclosed to him about his birth, about the way in which he came into his body. In effect, the story declares that not even the descent into the realm of death is more concealed from humans than the upward way of birth.

In quite another idiom, each and every human could say truthfully: My life is not merely my own, but a gift the bestowal of which remains concealed. To be sure, it is possible to objectify birth, to abstract from its character as conferring one’s own life, to disregard its obscure bond with one’s very ownness, to pay no heed to its role as bequeathing one’s ownness. Then birth comes to be considered a biological event, and the connection of this natural event with others pertaining to the development of the generalized individual (such as the acquisition of language) becomes a theme of investigation. In a somewhat different direction the general character of birth can become a symbol of a new beginning, of the human capacity to begin something anew, to take initiative; construed in this way, birth provides a symbolic representation of what can become a major category of political thought.61 And yet, as soon as birth is objectified and conceived simply as a natural event, its most vital bearing on the properly human has been excluded, not to say concealed, even doubly so if, as the story of Er attests, birth is itself something that remains, at least in certain decisive ways, concealed.

Perhaps one never ceases to remember the sense of the limit of memory that comes upon one at some stage of childhood, the sense that there is an indeterminate limit beyond which one cannot—and realizes one never will—succeed in recovering oneself in memory. Except for its indefiniteness, this limit is like a wall through which one can neither see nor pass, a wall securing the citadel of one’s own birth from all intrusion. In Schelling’s phrase, it is as if there were a kind of “life before this life,”⁶² a life in which one would have been already oneself but which cannot be connected to this life in which one is simply oneself. No matter how far one reaches back, in remembrance, from this life, one will never touch the other life. There is still less hope—indeed none at all—that one will reach back to one’s birth. For one’s birth does not belong even to the life before this life but rather is bound to the moment in which one still is not and already is, the moment of the contradiction, not just of being and nonbeing, but of being and not being one’s own. It is the moment of the contradiction between ownmost and othermost. It is unimaginable.

One will, then, never reach one’s own birth in memorial reenactment. Rather, across the indefinite expanse of the life before this life, it withdraws to the very limit of life and absolutely prohibits being recovered, being made one’s own, being appropriated, being drawn toward the properly human. Birth indefinitely exceeds the proper. It has the character of a concrete infinity, of a proper elemental. Being submitted to birth in its elementality, along with the reversive self-disclosure from it, constitutes human natality.

How is one disclosed in reversion from this elemental? What condition is revealed in the natal finitude of being submitted to the infinity of birth? The condition is that of simply finding ourselves already engaged in life, yet without knowing whence we ourselves have come, without even the slightest sense of how, issuing from the corporeity of another—as we are told and as we can observe in the birth of others—we have come to be ourselves proper. It is not so much that one is thrown into this life, cast into it, for in our way of finding ourselves engaged, there is no sense of motion, of transition, no sense of having first been somehow (even just metaphorically or rhetorically speaking) outside life and then being thrown into it. Rather, one is born into it: one finds oneself always already having been born into it and having grown up into it.

Because, in reversion from birth, one is disclosed to oneself as having been set on one’s way, birth cannot be conceived as simply withdrawn into an inaccessible past. Rather, it is woven into life itself; it is textured in such a way as to give texture to the properly human. Birth exceeds the proper and yet also belongs to it, installing impropriety at the very core of propriety and thus rendering the properly human contradictory.

What is the texture that belongs to birth and that in this connection gives texture to the properly human? In most cases it is determined by the attachment to a place, one of larger or smaller extent and one within which other differentiations may be operative. One is born somewhere. Even in those cases in which the place is indefinite, as with nomadic people, this very indefiniteness produces a kind of texture; it is likewise with those who are cosmopolitan, those whose birthplace is without strict limits. In having been born in a particular place, one will always have grown into a variety of views characteristic of this place (what the Greeks called δóξα), views that span a broad spectrum of moral, cultural, and political beliefs. These are interwoven in such a way as to blur the distinctions between them and to link them to certain corresponding practices, thus producing a complexly textured fabric. Once critical thought comes on the scene, these views will be regarded as constituting a network of presuppositions; and such thought, which belongs to the advent of philosophy—especially as exemplified in Socrates—will take up the task of exposing these presuppositions and submitting them to questioning.

To be born somewhere is also to grow into a particular language and, within narrower limits, into a particular dialect. There is perhaps nothing that textures the properly human more finely and distinctively than speech. In the voice one can hear a location and even differences of circumstances within that location; such indications are conveyed, not only by dialects, but also by more subtle differences. In the case of those who have acquired additional languages, one will hear still (except where acquisition occurred at an early age) the sound of the mother tongue in the acquired speech.

While thus giving texture to the properly human, birth is excessive, infinite. In more conventional terms, it could be said that one’s own birth, the bearing of birth on the proper, is a matter of the utmost contingency. Bataille traces the lines of this contingency in such a way as to stress that the slightest deviation of these lines would have produced a simulacrum of death. The passage is not without hyperbole: “If I envisage my coming into the world—linked to the birth then to the union of a man and a woman, and even to the moment of their union—a single chance decided the possibility of this me that I am: in the end the mad improbability of the sole being without whom, for me, nothing would be, is thrown into relief. Were there the smallest difference in the sequence of which I am the end point: instead of me eager to be me, there would be as for me only nothingness, as if I were dead.”63

Yet it could never be other than semblance: as if one were dead. For one cannot be dead. One can be only if one has not already once and for all lost oneself, only if one has not yet entirely taken leave of oneself. It is even questionable how there could be a losing of oneself, a taking leave of oneself: for it would be necessary for there to be not only the one lost but also one, the same one, who would undergo this loss; and likewise there would be both the one who takes leave and the one, the same one, from whom leave is taken. Yet if one has lost oneself, none remains to sustain the loss, and if one has taken leave, none remains from whom leave would have been taken: not because of what is dictated by a general law of noncontradiction, but because of the absolute character of the loss, that it is a total absolution from presence. It can only be as if one had lost oneself, as if one had taken leave of oneself, as if one were dead—if even this semblance—itself sliding toward an abyss—can be thought.⁶⁴

And yet, one is bound to die. Like birth, death is a limit that bounds the properly human. It is a limit that splits apart, that divides itself, in such a way as to sustain the contradiction between belonging and not belonging to life. It is because of the strength of this contradiction that one cannot be dead. In another characteristically hyperbolic passage, Bataille expresses this contradiction: “For man finally to be revealed to himself he would have to die, but he would have to do so while living—while watching himself cease to be. In other words, death itself would have to become (self-)consciousness at the very moment when it annihilates conscious being.”65 Bataille adds that such a contradictory happening can occur by means of the subterfuge of sacrifice. In other words, sacrifice is a kind of simulacrum of intuiting one’s own death: by identifying with the sacrificial animal, one watches oneself die.

This contradiction provides a possible connection in which to read Bataille’s notorious declaration: “One must be a god in order to die.”⁶⁶ It would be a matter of construing this god, who alone would be capable of death, as the inverse of the god hypothetically posited by Kant as exemplifying originary intuition: as the latter, in intuiting an object, gives itself the very object intuited, brings it into being for the intuition, so the god capable of death would, in intuiting its object (namely, itself), deprive itself of the very object intuited (namely, itself).

Yet this declaration, that one must be a god in order to die, is to be met with a burst of laughter. Bataille knows full well that comedy must supervene, that one must “laugh at this simulacrum”⁶⁷ in which self-consciousness would appropriate even death, in which no negativity would escape the power of the concept.

This impossible—laughable—possibility can be transposed into a literary form that is primarily comedic, indeed earthy—as indeed it is in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. From the start, even before pa and the boys set out in the wagon to take their deceased wife and mother, Addie Bundren, to the burying-ground in Jefferson, Cash, “a good carpenter,” is sawing, hammering, and dressing the wood as he makes her casket: “Addie Bundren could not want a better box to lie in. It will give her confidence and comfort.” Meanwhile, “she is propped on the pillow, with her head raised so she can see out the window, and we can hear him every time he takes up the adze or the saw. If we were deaf we could almost watch her face and hear him, see him.” This is the comedic transposition of the simulacrum of watching oneself die: Addie watching the construction of her casket, watching in such a way that the sight and even the sound of the adze and the saw can be seen in her face. Thus: “It’s because he stays out there, right under the window, hammering and sawing on that goddamn box. Where she’s got to see him. Where every breath she draws is full of his knocking and sawing where she can see him saying See. See what a good one I am making for you. I said Good God do you want to see her in it.”68

Like the dying Addie Bundren watching her casket being built, so a god would see himself dying, would be capable of dying.

Yet those who die are not indeed gods but humans. They can die, not because they are capable—except comically—of intuiting themselves dying, of looking on as they lie dying, but rather because death is a possibility for them, a possibility to which, on the contrary, gods are not exposed. It is a possibility so lacking in generality that its semantic content borders on the minimal required for discourse at all. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as death in general, though, needless to say, there are ways in which it can be conceived as a general concept, for example by being construed as an event that occurs at the end of the life of the generalized individual, of a one who is no one, of a one that is not its own.

As a limit that, in bounding the properly human, is imminent, threatening, bound to come, and yet also uncertain, indeterminately deferrable, death both indefinitely exceeds the proper and yet bears constitutively on it. Death is infinite. It is a proper elemental, which comes to install impropriety within propriety without ever being assimilable to the proper.

It is distinctive of death that it is a possibility, indeed a unique possibility. Yet this mortal sense of possibility is not to be identified either with the abstract concept of possibility operative in Aristotelian-based logic or with the metaphysical concept of possibility as a modal category to be ranged alongside necessity and actuality. In order for its sense to be concretely determined, account must be taken of the way in which it emerges within and from the self-showing of things. As concretely operative, possibility has its source in horizonality. Indeed it belongs most directly to the very structure of lateral horizonality: each of the lateral images that together constitute the horizon represents a possible view that the thing could offer upon itself, a view of the thing from another possible perspective. It is likewise with the various other types of horizons belonging to the self-showing of things: the background to which focus can be shifted offers a further set of possible views, less directly attached to the thing. An instrumental horizon appends a series of supplements to the thing: that it can be used for this or that purpose, that it can be employed in order to actualize various possibilities. Possibility is not, then, something self-evident, simply to be assumed, but rather becomes evident in and from its way of being implicated in the horizonality of self-showing.

Regarded in this connection, possibilities bear reference to the properly human: they are possible views that, by assuming a certain position, one can take on a thing, or they are possible uses to which one can put something. Yet as soon as one takes a particular view or puts something to some definite use, its character as possibility, as what one can do with respect to something, is cancelled. In order for it to remain a possibility, one must restrain oneself from carrying out that of which it is the possibility. It must be held in suspension.

Possibilities can be freed from the horizonal structures of things, even though this original locus will remain a determinant of their sense. Yet in being lifted out of this complex, possibilities display a doubling; that is, it becomes manifest that possibilities themselves have possibilities, that there are possibilities of possibilities. Correspondingly, they can undergo certain developments. Most decisive among these is that by which, in being set out from the horizonal structures, they become, not just something that one can do with respect to things, but something the doing of which would recoil directly on the human; that is, they become possibilities that bear on oneself, possibilities that are one’s own, proper possibilities.

The unique possibility that constitutes death intensifies, radicalizes to the utmost, this genesis that began from the most elementary structures of thingly self-showing. Hence, this possibility is not just one’s own but one’s ownmost. Furthermore, just as at other stages possibilities must be held in suspension in order to remain possibilities, so this most intense possibility suspends all other possibilities in the most radical way: not by holding them in suspension as possibilities but by suspending them as possibilities, by suspending absolutely all other suspended possibilities, leaving them once and for all suspended. Death is the possibility that suspends all other possibilities; it is the possibility of losing all possibilities. In the words with which Derrida reiterates Heidegger’s: “Death is . . . the possibility of an impossibility.”69 The sense of the words remains virtually unaltered when, reversing them, Levinas says that death is “the impossibility of every possibility.”⁷⁰

Death can be called the seal of one’s possibilities: it closes them off, seals their lips, silences them. Death marks and enforces this closure like the wax seal with which, in former times, one sealed a letter; it closes off living possibilities, enclosing their silent traces in the letter it has sealed.

While death is one’s ownmost possibility, its suspension of all other possibilities sets one utterly apart from all that one could be or do; it separates one from oneself. As absolute loss of one’s every possibility, as absolute suspension even of oneself, death is the other than oneself, absolutely other, othermost.⁷¹ Death is the sheer coincidence of ownmost and othermost.

As absolute suspension, as absolution from every possibility of making something present (through becoming or doing something), death offers nothing that one can picture to oneself, that one can represent as something to be actualized.⁷² In other words, one cannot imagine one’s own death. On the seal of death, there is no image whatsoever.

And yet, to the infinity of death there corresponds self-disclosure. As death indefinitely exceeds the proper by virtue of being a self-divided limit and by virtue of the indeterminacy of its coming, so the properly human is disclosed as submitted to an absolute or necessary contingency (this conjunction of necessity and contingency posing an only slightly oblique contradiction). In this connection there is also disclosure of the utter fragility of life. As soon as one is born, one is old enough to die. Whoever is born is taken up into mortality, and in this regard the finitude of the properly human is a matter of natal mortality.

Such self-disclosure is inseparable from another character that belongs to this proper elemental. Despite the utter blankness of death, despite its being unimaginable, it is a possibility that announces itself—that is, it is not a pure possibility but rather a possibility that is textured. Even if there is no sensible showing of death as such (or, more precisely, of death as ownmost, since the as such structure cannot be maintained), there are concrete sensible showings in which this possibility announces itself, in which it announces itself as threatening, as bound to come. Even death has its texture.

There is allusion to death in pain and suffering, which arouse dread that, in proximity to death, they will intensify and which also perhaps prompt hope that with its approach there will come relief. More directly, illness, especially when serious or even life-threatening, attests to this certain, necessary—but by no means pure—possibility; in illness one anticipates, in partial measure, the unconditional disjunction that death will impose. This is the connection in which to understand Levinas’ dictum that “the doctor is an a priori principle of human mortality.”73 Schelling also expresses the character of illness as a disjunction; this disjunction, only partial in the case of illness, becomes absolute in death. In Schelling’s own idiom: “The feeling of illness arises through nothing but a loss of identity between the intelligence and its organism.”⁷⁴ Translated into the terms of the present project: illness is a loss of relatedness between the proper and corporeity. This description suggests that there is a specific connection (previously unmarked) between death and seclusion.

Death is announced still more directly by aging. In this case a sensibly manifest process becomes evident over a certain span of life, indeed over every relatively extended span of life. This process is no simple linear development but rather is such that a tension, an opposition, is operative in it, that between maturing and declining; it is primarily as the latter becomes dominant that, at the correspondingly reduced distance, death announces itself.

Even if, as Heidegger maintains, one’s relatedness to death cannot be enacted in relation to the death of others, the bearing of others on one’s own death cannot simply be dismissed as entirely undisclosive and wholly irrelevant to one’s relatedness to death. It is indisputable that when my living relatedness to death will only have been, when it will be no longer, my death will be posthumously attested by others who, in mourning and in remembrance, will call upon me. Even after I am dead—if one could be dead—my death will continue to announce itself through others, indeed to announce itself as having been my own. Yet the bearing of the other on one’s own death is not limited to such memorial invocations. The silence of the other can say more than the living voice. The silence of one who has died, the absolute negativity of irrevocable, total absence, especially the inconceivable awareness that a friend or a loved one will never again be there to meet us, cannot but bring us much closer to entering courageously into the relatedness to death that belongs to humans in their finitude.

And yet, no matter how one enters into one’s relatedness to death, the blank seal of death also seals off death itself. The seal is so dissimulating and so devoid of inscription that it can almost seem transparent (like the veil that itself becomes veiled, invisible). Then it may invite a look beyond or a positive belief in a beyond; or it may tempt us into believing that, like Er, we could pass through the region beyond death and return—without knowing how—to life. Yet again and again, from the ancients on (though by no means always), philosophy has contested this alleged transparency and attested to the utter impenetrability of death. The most profound of these attestations come from the ancients, from the words of Heraclitus: “There await humans after they have died things that they neither hope for nor expect”;75 and from Plato’s account of Socrates’ speech at his trial and the portrayal of the deeds that he carried out on the day of his death.

Death is set within a distinctive spacing. This spacing opens and sustains the expanse between death and the properly human. Within this expanse, opposite, yet complex directionalities are operative. Across the expanse, death withdraws from the proper, exceeds it so indefinitely that there is lacking a measure of the extent of this expanse. This lack of measure corresponds also to the character of death as a concrete infinity. Furthermore, it is across this expanse that the proper is drawn toward death and, in death, taken from oneself, separated abysmally and unimaginally from one’s own. In the opposite direction, death announces itself despite its retreat into the most extreme otherness, indeed from out of this very otherness. While indeed it is absolved from the possibility of one’s picturing it to oneself, it is only to this extent that it has the character of pure, remote possibility; for across the expanse that sets it apart from the properly human, it sets forth certain sensible and affective phenomena—pain, suffering, illness, aging—in which, without its becoming present as such, the trace of death can be discerned. It is with the same directionality that reversion takes place, so that from death there is disclosed to the properly human its fragility, uncertainty, and contingency.

Thus, to death there belongs a spacing that opens up the expanse across which these complex, opposed directional operations take place. In broader terms this expanse can be conceived as the space in which death as ownmost (death in its multiple ways of bearing on the properly human) and death as othermost (as unimaginably exceeding the human) are both held in their opposition and yet brought together. For death is both ownmost and othermost.

The schema of death prescribes its spacing, thereby outlining the expanse traversed by the complex, opposed courses or directionalities. In turn, the operation that inscribes this schema is one of holding opposites together in their very opposition. This hovering in such a way as to install what would have been called contradiction is what is to be called imagination. The logic of this—and indeed of each—proper elemental belongs to logic of imagination.

The spacing of birth corresponds in many respects to that of death. With this elemental, too, the spacing opens an expanse across which two complex, opposed directionalities take place. In one direction birth withdraws into untouchable remoteness, into irreducible anteriority; yet it is from birth—not in being drawn to it—that one is given to oneself. Furthermore, from birth there is set forth one’s attachment to a place and all that is entailed by such attachment; in this earth-binding phenomenon, birth is traced. Across the expanse from birth to the properly human, there comes also the reversive self-disclosure of oneself as always already having been born, unaccountably, into life, into certain engagements.

Birth, too, is both ownmost and othermost. Its schema, too, prescribes and outlines the expanse across which its complex retreat and bestowals take place. In this case, too, only imagination has the capacity to hold these opposite directionalities together in their opposition and thus to inscribe the schema.

And yet, in the case of birth the moments of bestowal outweigh those of withdrawal, primarily because birth, even as it withdraws, bestows oneself upon oneself, gives one to oneself. Birth is the most generous. Indeed it is absolute generosity, bestowing the gift that makes all others possible.

It would not be inappropriate to configure the schemata of birth and of death as two horizontal bands extending from opposite directions to the locus of the proper; each band would include oppositely directed vectors setting each in its complex relatedness to the properly human. The termini ad quem of the two bands would meet at the locus of the proper. If thus construed together, then the schema of the entire figure would require still another vector, one running across the entire double expanse from birth to death. This vector would schematize what could be called the course or connectedness of life, provided this expression is understood as the passage from the generous bestowal of oneself to the abysmal separation from oneself. In more rigorous terms, it could be thematized as an outstretching (Erstreckung), as a distention—or, as with the ancients, in the word ἐπορέγεται.76 This outstretching corresponds to the hovering (Schweben) by which imagination schematizes all that belongs to the proper elementals, whether each is considered alone or they are construed in their interconnections.

The spacing of seclusion opens an expanse bounded indefinitely at one extreme by this elemental that is doubly concealed, that conceals its very concealment, so that, of all the elementals, it is the most abysmally withdrawn, indeed to such an extent that it is itself the abyss of abysses, that it is nothing less than concealment itself. In the other direction it issues in sheer advent, yet without showing itself as origin; and its gifts to the properly human include disposition and corporeity.

Corresponding to the schema of birth and death, there is a vertical complementarity between the schemata—and hence the spacings—of seclusion and the natural elementals. In other words, there is also a vertical band compounded from those running, respectively, from seclusion and the natural elements. These two composite schemata, the horizontal and the vertical, cross at the locus of the proper. The entire figure constitutes the schema and hence the space of propriety as such.

The complementarity between seclusion and the natural elements also involves opposite directionalities: the exorbitance of seclusion extends into the utmost, abysmal depth, while that of the natural elementals opens toward the heights, gathering the various elements into this orientation.

At a more concrete, experiential level, a natural element can evoke in us a disposition, which will already have been shaped in seclusion; in turn, this disposition can serve to open us to the expanse, the encompassing capacity, of the natural element. Contemplation of the nocturnal sky with its myriads of stars cannot but evoke a disposition of wonder, which, in turn, opens us to the hope and joy of disclosing ever more, beyond the spectacle of the starry heaven above, the vast cosmos beyond.

 

1. The transcendental ideal is simply that “on the limitation” of which “the determination of each and every”—that is, finite—“thing depends” (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A 577/B 605). Kant points out that his analysis leading to the transcendental ideal presupposes “the principle of [non]contradiction,” or, more specifically, what he calls “the principle of determinability” It is on the basis of this principle, along with the principle of excluded middle (which Kant does not name but only alludes to by noting that his “principle of complete determination . . . does not rest merely on the principle of contradiction”), that Kant maintains that the determination of all existing things can proceed simply by negation of certain of the realities contained in the ideal (ibid., A 571/B 599).

2. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik I/1 (1832), 124.

3. Hegel, Enzyklopädie, §28, Zusatz. In this passage Hegel refers specifically to the question of the infinitude or finitude of the world; yet, as the context makes explicit, the conclusion applies equally to any case in which infinite and finite are taken to be related in this way.

4. Ibid., §45, Zusatz.

5. Ibid., §94, Zusatz.

6. Galileo Galilei, Two New Sciences, trans. Stillman Drake (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974), 41.

7. Ibid.

8. See Edward V. Huntington, The Continuum and Other Types of Serial Order (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), 6.

9. The more rigorous definition of this property is as follows: “If a and b are elements of the class K, and a < b, then there is at least one element x in K such that a < x and x < b” (ibid., 34).

10. The proof proceeds as follows. Arrange all positive rational numbers in the following array:

The first row contains all fractions (= rational numbers) with denominator 1 (= all natural numbers). The second row contains all fractions with denominator 2. The third row contains all fractions with denominator 3, etc. The array will, then, include every positive rational number. If the numbers are listed in the order indicated by the arrows, omitting numbers that have already appeared, the following series is obtained:

1, 2, 1/2, 1/3, 3, 4, 3/2, 2/3, 1/4, . . .

This series contains, without repetition, all positive rational numbers, and as a linear series it can be correlated one-to-one with the natural numbers:

Thus the set of all positive rational numbers is denumerable. (See Howard Eves and Carroll V. Newsom, An Introduction to the Foundations and Fundamental Concepts of Mathematics [New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1965], 254f.).

11. The proof is indirect. Thus, at the beginning it is assumed that the set of real numbers in the interval 0 < x < 1 is denumerable. Granted this assumption, then the numbers in this set can be listed in a sequence n₁, n₂, n₃, . . . Each such number can be written as a nonterminating decimal and thus the sequence can be displayed in this manner:

n₁ = 0.a₁₁a₁₂a₁₃ . . .

n₂ = 0.a₂₁a₂₂a₂₃ . . .

n₃ = 0.a₃₁a₃₂a₃₃ . . .

. . . . . . . . . .

where each symbol a_xy represents a digit ∋ 0 ≤ a_xy ≤ 9. But there is a number not display-able in this list. It can be written in the form:

0.b₁b₂b₃ . . .

where (to be specific) b_k = 7 if a_kk ≠ 7 and b_k = 3 if a_kk = 7.

This number, which lies between 0 and 1, must differ from every number n1, n2, n3 . . . , for it differs from n1 at least in the first decimal place, from n2 at least in the second decimal place, from n3 at least in the third decimal place, etc. Thus, the assumption that the real numbers between 0 and 1 can be listed in a sequence (hence in a one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers) is false. Therefore the set is nondenumerable. (See ibid., 255f.)

12. The transformation central to the proof proceeds as follows. If the decimal expansions of the x- and y-coordinates are represented, respectively, as 0.a₁a₂a₃ . . . and 0.b₁b₂b₃ . . . , then a single corresponding number can be constructed by alternating the successive integers in the two decimal expansions—yielding 0.a₁b₁a₂b₂a₃b₃. . . . Therefore, every point on the square has a corresponding point on the line.

13. See Eves and Newsom, An Introduction to the Foundations and Fundamental Concepts of Mathematics, 257.

14. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, vol. 9 of Gesammelte Werke (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1980), 32. The Pythagorean theorem is Proposition 47 in Euclid’s Elements. See Euclid, The Thirteen Books of the Elements, 1:349–68.

15. In the first scene of The Tempest there is both a depiction of the encompassing fury of the storm and, in the exchange between the boatswain and Gonzalo, an expression of the disproportionality between the gigantic force of nature and such human concerns as nobility and authority. Thus, when the king and his party come on deck asking about the whereabouts of the master, the boatswain exclaims:

What cares these

roarers for the name of king?

When Gonzalo replies:

Good, yet remember whom thou hast aboard,

the boatswain, addressing Gonzalo directly, continues:

None that I love more than myself. You are a councillor; if you can command those elements to silence and work the peace of the present, we will not hand a rope more. Use your authority!

16. “The origin of the concept of the self is quite recent. It is rooted in the Pietism of about 1700, when one spoke about the sinful and evil self [Selbst] and when the human being was thereby objectified [verdinglicht]” (Heidegger, Zollikoner Seminare, ed. Medard Boss [Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1987], 228).

17. John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding (New York: Dover, 1959), 2:304f.

18. Among the prescriptions most difficult to observe are those concerning such terms as oneself, itself, and themselves. These are to be understood either as formally reflexive (holding in abeyance the determination of that to which reference is made) or as intensifiers that limit the discourse more strictly to that which the word they accompany designates (as in things themselves, the earth itself). Even where the word self occurs more independently (as in self-showing), it is to be taken in a purely formal sense that leaves entirely undecided what the self is that gets shown in the self-showing, though the surrounding discourse may specify this (as in the sky shows itself).

19. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961), 228, 230.

20. Ibid., 228.

21. Ibid., 229.

22. See Force of Imagination, 208–14.

23. This is the point at which a productive, yet critical debate with Levinas could commence. Levinas affirms that the other overruns, surpasses, that which can emerge through sense. The way in which the other surpasses both my idea of the other and the image that spreads itself before my gaze, Levinas calls—and says that he calls it—the face (visage). He continues: “The face of the other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me” (Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961], 21, cf. 174). Or again: “He at each instant undoes the form he presents” (ibid., 37). Levinas says, furthermore, that “the face is present in its refusal to be contained” and thus is “neither seen nor touched” (ibid., 168). In other words, the face is not present, not at least in that sense of presence that, since antiquity, has been correlative to sense intuition; rather, it seems that it is a matter of beginning with such presence and discerning the alterity beyond it.

In this regard two questions need to be raised. In the first place, is the overrunning, the surpassment to the other, only to be accomplished starting from—though also surpassing—the face? Could one not also catch a glimpse of alterity by starting with the hands of a craftsman or of a violinist, which in the performance of their art also surpass the mere sense-image? If it is objected that Levinas does not in fact start from the face as it can be seen and touched, then it is difficult to understand why and how this word is used to designate “the way in which the other surpasses” both idea and image. Is there not operative here at least a minimal transposition of sense?

Second, and more generally, is it evident—or does Levinas make it evident—that “it is only man who could be absolutely foreign to me” (ibid., 46)? Is the other “an absolute upsurge [ressurgissant absolu]” (ibid., 62)? In short, does absolute alterity have as its locus—even its sole locus—the other human? Or are there not occasions when I sense in another human being, not the absolutely foreign, but rather the same spirit, the same fire—and spirit is fire!—that burns within myself?

It should be observed also that, despite the prominence of the word, Levinas offers no sustained inquiry concerning the determination of the concept of infinity or the possibility of multiple infinities.

24. See Force of Imagination, 90–97.

25. Hegel, Enzyklopädie, §§453–54.

26. Derrida, Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1972), 88.

27. See Hegel, Enzyklopädie, §454.

28. See Plato, Theaetetus 197c–200d.

29. Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, III.ii.435f. Expressions of the affinity between sleep and death go back to antiquity. Hesiod refers to “sleep, the brother of death” (Theogony, 755f.). The same expression occurs in Homer (Iliad XIV, 231), along with the phrase “the twin brothers, sleep and death” (Iliad XVI, 672). Again, in Virgil there is the expression “sleep, the brother of death” (Aeneid VI, 278). Among the many later expressions of this affinity, a very telling line is found in Shelley’s “Stanzas Written in Dejection, near Naples.” The line reads: “Till death like sleep might steal on me” (stanza 4, l. 33).

30. Freud, Traumdeutung, 581.

31. The term sense-image is meant “to signify that in and as which sense comes to be present to sense” (Force of Imagination, 78).

32. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 22.

33. Ibid., 27.

34. Most remarkably, Freud’s concept of negation reproduces the Hegelian structure of determinate negation, transposing it to the site of psychoanalytic practice. Just as Hegel grasps determinate negation as a negation that turns into (positive) being, so the psychoanalyst interprets negation as revealing the actual positive content, as overturning into that content. This is evident in the opening passage of Freud’s 1925 essay entitled “Negation”: “The manner in which our patients present their associations during analytical work gives us occasion for some interesting observations. ‘Now you’ll think I want to say something insulting, but really I have no such intention.’ We realize that this is a repudiation, by means of projection, of a thought that has just emerged. Or: ‘You ask who this person in my dream can be. It’s not my mother.’ Thus we amend: ‘So it is your mother.’ In our interpretations we take the liberty of disregarding the negation and seizing on the pure content of the thought. It is as if the patient had said: ‘My thought was that my mother was this person, but I have no desire to allow this thought to count [diesen Einfall gelten zu lassen]’” (“Die Verneinung,” in vol. 3 of Studienausgabe, 373).

35. Among those strategies there is the way in which Derrida puts in question the Hegelian question of the preface; also the way in which he insinuates “into the three of speculative dialectics” the marking of absolute alterity through différance (La dissémi-nation [Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972], 31).

36. Derrida, L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967), 377.

37. Georges Bataille, L’expérience intérieure (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 128.

38. Derrida, L’écriture et la différence, 377f. Derrida is exploiting here the affinity between fond (ground) and fonds (funds, security).

39. Ibid., 381.

40. Ibid., 383.

41. Bataille, L’expérience intérieure, 130.

42. Freud, “Einige Bemerkungen über den Begriff des Unbewussten in der Psycho-analyse,” in vol. 3 of Studienausgabe, 29.

43. Freud, Traumdeutung, 547.

44. Freud, “Das Unbewusste,” in vol. 3 of Studienausgabe, 131.

45. Ibid., 151.

46. Heidegger, Zollikoner Seminare, 233.

47. Freud, “Das Unbewusste,” 125f.

48. Heidegger, Zollikoner Seminare, 260. The word that Heidegger uses twice in this passage (Lückenlosigkeit, which is translated as unbroken chain but which literally means: state of being without gaps, condition of lacking gaps) evokes, negatively, Freud’s lückenhaft (riddled with gaps).

49. Ibid.

50. “According to Freud, only that which can be explained as a psychological, unbroken [lückenlose] causal connection between forces is real and existent [seiend]. As the world-renowned, contemporary physicist Max Planck said a few years ago: ‘Only that which can be measured is real.’ But, to this, one can justifiably object: Why can there not also be realities that are not susceptible to exact measuring? A sorrow, for example” (ibid., 7).

51. Ibid., 260.

52. See, among many pertinent sources, John P. Muller and William J. Richardson, Lacan and Language (New York: International Universities Press, 1982), esp. chap. 4. On Heidegger’s collaboration with Boss, see William J. Richardson, “Heidegger among the Doctors,” in Reading Heidegger: Commemorations, ed. John Sallis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).

There is the further question whether Freud’s own development of psychoanalytic theory after the 1915 text “The Unconscious” outflanks this criticism as well as some of the others discussed below. Though this question cannot be addressed within the scope of the present project, the intent is to show that these criticisms are valid as long as psychoanalytic theory remains within the basic framework set out in The Interpretation of Dreams.

53. Heidegger, Zollikoner Seminare, 319.

54. Freud, Traumdeutung, 310, 429, 566.

55. Ibid, 413.

56. Derrida, Résistances de la psychanalyse, 27.

57. Freud, Traumdeutung, 486; cf. 567.

58. Freud, “Das Unbewusste,” 127. Freud justifies the legitimacy of postulating the unconscious on the basis of the fact that in this postulation “we do not depart in the slightest from our customary way of thinking, which is held to be correct” (ibid., 128).

59. See the detailed analysis given above in chap. 3.

60. The use of the definite article is highly questionable, since it tacitly depicts (the) body as deprived of ownness (see Force of Imagination, 210). Yet even the expression one’s own body (le corps propre, in Merleau-Ponty’s terms) is inadequate, as will become evident in the analysis below.

61. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Garden City, NY: Doubleday), 10f. Extending Arendt’s line of thought, Peg Birmingham writes that the “source or ground of a principle of humanity is the ontological event of natality” (Hannah Arendt and Human Rights [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006], 16). Birmingham also explores and emphasizes the intimate relationship between birth as a natural event and what Arendt describes as “like a second birth,” namely, the acquisition of language, which is necessary for one’s insertion into the human world (see ibid., 23f.).

62. Schelling, Über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, in Ausgewählte Werke, Schriften von 1806–1813 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968), 331.

63. Bataille, L’expérience intérieure, 83.

64. In a remarkable passage in the Anthropology, Kant writes: “No one can experience his own death (for life is a condition of experience). . . . So the fear of death that is natural to all human beings . . . is not a horror of dying but rather, as Montaigne rightly says, a horror at the thought of having died (being dead) [vor dem Gedanken gestorben (d.i. todt) zu sein]; and the candidate for death supposes he will still have it after his death, since he thinks of his corpse, which is no longer himself, as himself lying in a dark grave or somewhere else.—We cannot get rid of this illusion; for it belongs to the nature of thinking as a speaking to and about oneself. The thought I am not cannot exist; for if I am not, then I cannot become conscious that I am not” (Werke, 7:166f.).

65. Cited in Derrida, L’écriture et la différence, 378.

66. Bataille, L’expérience intérieure, 86.

67. Derrida, L’écriture et la différence, 377.

68. William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (New York: Penguin Books, 1930), 8–15.

69. Derrida, Apories (Paris: Galilée, 1996), 124.

70. Levinas, Totalité et infini, 212.

71. Blanchot expresses this character in these words: “Do I myself die, or do I not rather die always other [than myself], so that I would have to say that properly speaking I do not die? Can I die? Have I the power to die?” (Maurice Blanchot, L’espace littéraire [Paris: Gallimard, 1955], 118).

72. Derrida writes of “the indeterminacy of the word ‘death,’ of which fundamentally one knows perhaps neither the meaning nor the referent. One knows very well that if there is one word that remains absolutely unassignable or unassigning with respect to its concept and to its object, it is the word ‘death’” (Apories, 49). In terms of the present project, Derrida’s remark says: the meaning or concept of death is problematic because there is no death in general that the word would signify; and that the referent is problematic because one’s ownmost death is not an event that one can represent. See also the citation from Kant in note 64 above.

73. Levinas, Totalité et infini, 210.

74. Schelling, System des transzendentalen Idealism, in Ausgewählte Werke, Schrift en von 1799–1801, 498.

75. Heraclitus, Fragment B27. The verb rendered as expect is a form of δοκέω (suppose—but also: seem, appear); the corresponding noun is δóξα.

76. In the Theaetetus (186a) Theaetetus, in response to Socrates, places being among those things “which the soul stretches itself toward.” He uses the middle voice form of the verb ἐπορέγω.