In number 44 of a text he titled, with a philosophical wink, “Faith and Knowledge,” a title that is subtitled, with another wink, “The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” a wink that could be considered double or triple if we reflect that “at the limits” constitutes a malicious, in the strong sense, and thus perverting allusion to “within the limits”—in that number 44, Derrida alludes to a wink, or makes a gesture in its direction that is as vague as it is precise (as the oxymoron of all winks must be). It is a theological wink, or rather, a theophanic one, since it is precisely a question, in that wink, of not speaking, which doubtless carries us immediately, in the twinkling of an eye, “to the limits of” -logy alone, whatever its prefix or pretext. Indeed, he quotes Heidegger apropos of the “last god”: “The last god: his occurring is found in the sign (im Wink), in the onset and absence of an arrival (dem Anfall and Ausbleib der Ankunft), as well as in the flight of the gods that are past and their hidden metamorphosis.”1
At least provisionally, I designate the German word Wink as “clin d’œil” [“wink of an eye”].2 This word is kept, in parentheses, in German in this translation [Derrida cites one by J.-F. Courtine]. It is not the only instance of German here, since it is followed by an entire German phrase. Nevertheless, this word captures our interest; we must retain and observe it, for two reasons. First, a more extended analysis of the entire sentence and its context in Heidegger would demonstrate that the terms in apposition to Wink—namely, “the onset and the absence of an arrival” (i.e., of the last god), and “the flight of the gods that are past and their … metamorphosis”—are, in truth, less appositions than explications of the Wink. That analysis will be carried out later, but I anticipate its result. Second, mention of the word Wink imposes itself on the translator, whoever he or she may be, in a far more imperious (dare I say “sovereign”?) way than does mention of the other terms. Wink, properly speaking, is untranslatable. In a conceptual context, and where the use of the French word signe [“sign”] is clearly unavoidable, it is the translator’s duty to point out the presence of this irreducible word. Clin d’œil, an expression to which we shall return, would introduce other connotations just as suspect, and of an order more fraught or more carefree than that of signe understood in the sense of Zeichen, of signifying sign, of sense-to-say—precisely because that is not what is involved here.
In a general sense, the mention of a word in the original language (as, e.g., to stick to German, the words Witz or Wesen) indicates that the word chosen as an equivalent translates the original one poorly or inappropriately. Thus the translator informs us of the impropriety, warns us of it, without going into all the intentions, implications, and idiomatic innuendos. When the translator must, or wants to, avoid an explanatory and hermeneutic note on the untranslatable that thus remains untranslated (a note that quite often would run the risk of becoming a philological, philosophical or, in my case, theological compendium), the translator must be satisfied with a gesture that does not produce sense but indicates, on the contrary, the proximity of a sense that is other, a sense that does not mean in the language into which the text is being translated, a sense that does not succeed in sense from one language to another. A sense whose arrival is suspended between its onset and its absence, to return to our original motif.
Now it is quite true that the general situation of translation is to be subject to the double postulate in the form of the double bind3 of an integral signifiability and a residual in-signifiability, which turns out also to be originary, an exception that makes the rule, since it exposes and imposes the irreducibility of the language, its idiosyncrasy, without which there would be no need for translation—nor any languages, for that matter.
To this consideration of the mention of Wink, that is, a consideration intended to open up a passage toward the thing or the role that is “essentially deployed” in this word and to which Derrida alludes here, two scholia should be added.
1. The translator’s gesture, indicating that the word is improperly translated, is itself a Wink, that is, a “sign” (the term used in place of a translation), in the sense of a “signal,” a “warning,” a “portent” [intersigne], as one used to say not so long ago. It is an indication given at once from afar and in passing, without explanation, without any true sense, evasive as to sense but specific as to direction: pay attention to this area. This should be translated differently, but later or elsewhere: for the moment, we’ll put this word on hold—awaiting its own true sense.
We will return to this question. The Wink is a sign of awaiting, or of putting expectation in the position of a sign. It is suspended between hope and disappointment. We must await its interpretation, but that waiting is, in itself, already a mobilization, and its mobility or motility is more important than its final interpretation. The most current model of the Wink (model in the sense of example or of modalization), is given in the clin d’œil. A wink is always to be translated, but at the same time it has already gone beyond its translation by its gesture. It has jumped in one bound, in the twinkling of an eye, beyond the sense it has prompted us to await. It is still, it will always be, to be translated. It will not have its own fully accomplished, determined, saturated sense. The Wink—and the word Wink, for the French translator, but also, in the final analysis, for the German reader … appropriates the impropriety constitutive of a sense that is defective or excessive, labile, evasive, allusive, or deferred. (As I write “deferred,” I add here, in parentheses, a word that is all the less translatable for not being a word: différance.)
2. The exception of the untranslatable constitutes the law of translation. The latter’s logic is a transportation of sense made possible by a general law of language [langage], according to which a sense can be said in multiple languages [langues], but entailing the fact that some sense, if not the sense, refuses or eludes that possibility. That retention or subtraction appears in exceptions, in the form of such and such a word, Wink, or Witz, or Wesen, but these exceptions reveal the truth of the language [langue], that is, the retreat of the idiomatic this side of or beyond the law of sense. Where there is exception, there is sovereignty. What is sovereign is the idiom that declares itself to be untranslatable. (And as we know, in the end it declares itself such in all of its words and all of its turns of phrase.) Each signifier in a language signifies and winkt at the same time. There is always excess, lack, or curvature of sense: winken is, in fact, first and foremost to curve or bow, to angle, vacillate, wobble, list. I speak here of the clinamen of sense without which there would be no languages, but only characteristics. I speak of the clinamen, which creates a world of sense, while hinting at its truth in non-sense.
Sovereign is the translator who decides to suspend the translation, leaving instead the word in the original. Equally sovereign, moreover, is the translator who, taking it to the next level, decides in favor of a solution by “equivalence,” as we say, or by periphrasis, analogy, or some other procedure. But the latter’s decision, too, consists in leaving the order of signification proper (if there is such an order) for a different one: that of sense in the sense in which each language is a world of sense, and in which translation jumps from world to world by winks, with neither instruments nor passageways. From the genius of one language to that of another there can be nothing but winks, blinks, and scintillations in the universe of sense, in which truth is the black hole into which all these glimmers are absorbed. Sovereign here is thus, as in the State, he who appropriates the absence of ownership, of a suitable foundation, an available code, of guaranteed attribution and secure presence.
Thus it is that we can establish, on the one hand, that the Wink is sovereign, and on the other, correlatively, that the sovereign winkt (as it can be expressed in German, a language in which it is impossible, however, to adequately render “sovereign”). (Herrschaftsbereich des Winkes is an expression used by Heidegger three lines further on the same text.) The fact is, a Wink departs from the established order of communication and signification by opening up a zone of allusion and suggestion, a free space for invitation, address, seduction, or waywardness. But that departure beckons toward the ultimate sense of sense, or the truth of sense. Here, sovereignly, sense excludes itself from sense: such is the wink’s monition.
But the fact is also, correlatively, that the sovereign winkt. Nothing is more specifically characteristic of sovereign majesty than the frown, the wink, the expression said to be “imperceptible,” the reply to which is called a “sign of complicity” [signe d’intelligence], in the sense that, in that complicity, connivance precedes and exceeds understanding, in the sense that complicity has already understood whatever it is that has not been openly offered up to the understanding, but is expected. The Wink opens an expectation at the same time as an impatience to which the decision to understand without waiting, in the twinkling of an eye, responds.4
To return to this topic for a moment, just as the mention of the word Wink is a sovereign gesture on the translator’s part, so this gesture confers upon the German word a sovereignty whose ambivalence is immediately obvious. It is a composite of a subtraction of sense and an access of (or to) literalness, according to one of those privileges regularly invoked by the Cratylism and the idiomaticity that are irresistible to philosophers (and of which Hegel’s Aufheben is the most outstanding example). It is by being untranslatable that the Wink takes on its (un- or hyper-) signifying charge. And it is by being noted, not translated, by the philosopher-translator that it acquires the force of a concept or thought. We may even note in passing the following remark: All the interrogations of the difference (with or without a) between philosophy and literature can be reactivated and deployed on the basis of the simple fact that a literary translator does not normally mention the terms used in the text being translated. Literature loses the sense essentially, while philosophy thematizes the sense to the point of excess, to the point of an incalculable exceeding that approaches literary expenditure.
Here, in this text by Heidegger to which we are led back by its translation, it is a philosophical sovereignty that is invested in the Wink:5 that is, a position in excess of sense (and, consequently, of “truth”). I could show, by appealing to the entire context of the Beiträge, that this word receives no sense more determinate than that of its current value in German. No conceptual work is performed on the regime of sense and signification designated by this “sign.” All one can say is that the Wink is regularly associated with several variants of the expression mentioned by Courtine and Derrida: Anfall und Ausbleib der Ankunft, an expression that is itself cumbersome to translate and that designates the double nature of sudden surge and sustained absence of, or in, the arrival of the last god (as well as in the “flight of the gods” prior to him, as the rest of the sentence goes on to say, which repeats nearly word for word a sentence from the preceding paragraph). Without exploring in greater depth what is at stake in this context, but in order to give a general sense of the approach, I will just say that the Wink has its concept, or quasi-concept, its insight, by and in its association with what Heidegger also calls, in these pages, Vorbeigang (“passage,” with the force of “in passing”) or, earlier in the same book, Blickbahn,6 a rare term with the sense literally of “pathway of the look” and bringing together the values of “perspective” and “glance.” The Wink, here, in its function of sign or divine signal—of god-signal, one would have to murmur—is identified as fugitiveness, as the beating of the instant according to which what arrives leaves and, in leaving (a word French can use here in a double sense)7 remains absent, remains outside its own arrival, while in the midst of or through this throbbing there is launched the glance that gives (and/or?) receives the signal. The privilege of Wink consists, in short, in the fact that its sense is spent in the passage immediately stolen away, in the hint suddenly hidden of a sense that vanishes, and whose truth consists in vanishing. This, then, is why the “essence of the Wink” (an expression used in §255) is analyzed or determined no further than as the batting or twinkling that harbors, hidden within itself, what the same text expresses as “the secret of the unity of the most intimate approach in extreme distance.” (Writing these words, can Heidegger not sense some evanescent allusion to Augustine’s Deus interior intimo meo, superior summo meo?8 I leave this question open for debate.)
Ambivalence, ambiguity, oxymoron, Witz as the affinity of opposites, Aufhebung, or even—why not?—the meeting of Witz with Aufhebung, and of the wink with the speculative: such is the character of the Wink as outside signification, which confers on it, in the original text, as in its mention maintained by its translators, this sovereign privilege that prompts Heidegger to write, in the same place, that it is a question of “the onset and absence of the coming and flight of the gods and of their sovereignty [Herrschaftstätte].”
Ambivalence is constitutive of sovereignty: it combines absolute power and excess over legality, which necessarily belong together. According to the formula of Carl Schmitt, law suspends itself in the sovereign act. In order to be all-powerful, omnipotence must extend to a point no power precedes, founds, or dominates. In order to be absolute, power must absolutize itself, that is, absolve itself from any tie or responsibility other than that of being answerable for itself and self-authorizing. Hence this omnipotence is absolutely not of the order of “power” in the sense of potentiality. It is not dunamis but energeia, an efficacious act that precedes all possibility, a reality of power that cannot simply be equated with a brutality ignorant of laws, since it is the laws, the juridical construction as such, that must not know the arcane secret of their unfounded foundation.9
If ownership is always de jure and never just de facto, if property (whether as sense or estate, wealth, consciousness, or body) is only such by the mediation of a right that signifies and guarantees a grounded and exclusive ownership, then the sovereign exerts—he actualizes and enacts, in the juridical sense of the term—an unmediated ownership that falls short of or exceeds any appropriation. That is why he winkt: he sets something in motion by means of a signal, instead of and before establishing it within a signification. The sovereign opens up possible sense, just as much as he closes off or suspends already available senses. That is why there is, in the Wink, or in winken [“to wink”], an energy that its sign per se does not possess. And that is why, definitively, a winken accompanies all bedeuten [“to mean”], all intending of sense [vouloir-dire] and sending of signals [faire-signe], which, unaccompanied by it, would not have the power to send a signal or, consequently, the power of its own “willing” [“vouloir”] or its own “doing” [“faire”]. There is in sense an active power that arises at the moment of the signifying act and that, in terms of sense, goes beyond it and gives way to it at the same time.
The Wink triggers; it acts and it activates a play of forces on the sly or in counterpoint to the sense. A wink, as we are well aware, can trigger the greatest of surprises, release an incongruous desire, disrupt the norm, just as it can confer favor or disfavor at the whim of the prince, whose “gracious majesty” is majestic precisely in proportion to his sovereign power to dispense favor or disfavor—a power whose specificity can be seen in that its omnipotence is exerted not only by, but in “the blink of an eye.” The rapidity of the wink engages the efficacy of presence in the very blinking of its passing instant.
At this moment I happen upon another passage by Derrida, the passage in a much earlier text in which he wrote, picking up on a passage from Husserl:
As soon as we admit this continuity of the now and the not-now, perception and non-perception, in the zone of non-primordiality common to primordial impression and primordial retention, we admit the other into the self-identity of the Augenblick: non-presence and non-evidence are admitted into the blink of the instant. There is a duration to the blink, and it closes the eye. This alterity is in fact the condition for presence.10
As we see, this is not just any passage. At issue here are structure and movement; movement—the wink—as the structure of différance, whose motif or motivation is in the process of moving Derrida toward what always motivated him: the absenting of presence at the heart of its present and its presentation, and, correlatively, the spreading open of the sign at the heart of its relation to itself, and then the hollowing out of a non-signifying passage at the heart or joint of the sign. The wink gives us the structure of différance, and more than the structure, it gives us its excess or lack of signification (it is “neither a word nor a concept,” as Derrida will later say), and it makes its eclipse shine forth. It suspends the present instant for an instant, for the time of a furtive duration during which onto-chronology is suspended.
We could follow in Derrida the destinies of the wink intertwined with those of différance, in which the a twinkles, scintillates, or winkt. In 1986, for example, in Parages the wink is introduced to qualify another decisive element, the “supplementary characteristic” that qualifies the genre of a work of art or of a text—the characteristic that itself belongs to no genre and that “belongs without belonging,” in such a way that the “without,” here, “appears as but the time without time of a wink.”11 We could, no doubt, let ourselves be guided by the hypothesis that the wink always gives the modality of donation of a supplementary or excessive truth.
Similarly, we could follow, in Heidegger, the pathways of the Wink. But my purpose lies elsewhere. As the reader will have understood, what concerns me, and what in my opinion should concern us in a necessary, or even imperious (sovereign) manner, is the relationship that must be discerned between this a and the Wink of the last god. Need I say it? Not only am I not attempting to theologize différance (which would be difficult, since it is clearly from the god of onto-theology that presence is being unsealed or removed); I am not trying theologize the “last god,” whose nature or essence, whose Wesung or Götterung, as Heidegger writes, I do not believe to be theological. It is not theist, in any event, and the same §256 makes a point of rejecting “all the theisms” as being allied with “metaphysics” and “Judeo-Christian apologetics.”
(The fact that Heidegger bypasses, intentionally or otherwise, another dimension of Judeo-Christian faith—and not “apologetics”—and that he either ignores or is unaware of what, within that faith, involves a Destruktion of theology is another question, which will have to be taken up elsewhere.)
The idea is not, therefore, to theologize but to discern what is divine in the Wink as different, radically different from theos, and at the same time as irremediably deferring its theological being. In other words, and consequently, it is a matter of discerning—even if by winking—a divine trait in différance—and yet in so doing to behave quite the opposite of what has accusingly been called a “theological turn in phenomenology.”12
This is, above all, because it is not a question of phenomenology. As I will show, with the Wink and the a, the a that winkt, phenomenology goes to the end of its own reversal. Not only does appearing become that of the non-apparent—which was already accomplished—but the whole problematics of (non)appearing opens the way for a dynamics of passing by, of the Vorbeigang of the Augenblick.13 The question is no longer one of being or of appearing, and it is no longer a question. There emerges an affirmation of passing by, that is, of the passerby. Not being and the individual being,14 but the individual being and the passerby.
But let us resume.
The écart of the wink, the lapse of its instant, the interval at once opened and closed, and, as it were, the self-sameness of the present, like the self-sameness of time itself, which does not pass in its incessant passing, and thus the identity to itself grasped in that other “to” [aà] that relates it to itself—that is what the a of différance makes scintillate, and what is made to scintillate by it—by the supplement of a grave accent (the affair is in fact grave; there is nothing more serious). (Scintiller, clignoter: these are the values of the English forms to twinkle and to blink, while in German ein Winker is a blinker [clignotant].) With and without the accent, positing and eclipsing in turn all the directional value of the ad—just as the value of the zu must be in Sein zum Tode, in the being-toward-death; that is, in the being qua being-in-passing—the a forms simultaneously the present’s adherence and expectation toward itself. It presents them and retains them.
This is what the Wink does, that winkt zu and winkt ab, that winkt uns zu dem von woher er sich uns zuträgt, if I may allow myself to rearrange another passage from Heidegger15 (it motions to attract, to brush aside, it motions us toward the place from which it came toward us). This is about access to the presence whose threshold, lapse, or wink [clin]16 opens the gap of the present’s own self-presentation. That access is formed, then, in excess of itself, or else in lack. Appropriation appropriates presence to itself by this wink, by this inclination that, in inclining the same toward (zu) the same, even in order to incline itself in this way, to give it that narcissistic inclination, separates itself from itself, renders itself absent and differentiates itself into the other.
The Wink stretches and curves the punctuality of the identical and the patent evidence of truth. The complicity of the wink, of différance and the Wink, is played out in this clinamen, in this batting and dynamic diagonal in the midst of the vertical fall of sense, falling infinitely back upon itself.17 It thus signals sense, it signals the proper signification of sense, its terminal truth, by way of a relation analogous to that which connects the moral law to Kantian freedom: a ratio cognoscendi intersecting a ratio essendi, which responds to it, but without the former being in a position to unveil the latter. It is ratio itself—ipsa ratio ultima et sufficiens, sovereign reason—that is curved, disfigured, not coinciding with itself. (The fact is—and I insist on clarifying this point—that this Kantian arrangement does not offer us a simple analogy; or if it does so, it is an analogia entis: it is a question of the same thing, just as it would be if we were to consider the relation between the singular and the absolute in Hegel. It is always the slant [clin] of the other in the same, which metaphysics never stops declining according to a ruse of reason that thus passes behind reason’s own back and from there, winks at us.
There is, then—but “there is” in the most matter-of-fact, chronological way, in the sense of es gibt and of that happens, that comes to pass, and that passes—there is a sovereign gesture18 that signals a literal sense’s own non-return to self. Différance is not a concept because it does not signify but only motions, because it is, or rather makes, a gesture. And because it makes rather than is, its gesture is that of one who passes by.19 So it is that, willy-nilly, whether inclined by an evil genius or not, Derrida will have (according to this future perfect he favors as the tense of différance), by a parenthesis of untranslatability, winked toward the Wink from différance. From différance, since the passage in which the Wink is cited concerns the future or the absence of a future, Levinas and Heidegger placed side by side as the double figure of the god who comes and the god who passes, and almost, if I may extrapolate, as two gaits of passing, toward presence and toward absence, zu and ab, or à with an accent, and a without one. As if Derrida were winking in putting them before us side by side, zu and ab the one for the other, the one with the other, apud, ad, in a proximity that dominates the infinitesimal calculus of the touch, the derivative of the difference with and without a.
In denouncing the sense of the sign that they are not, but that they make, in withdrawing truth from a present in favor of a prae(s)ens that exceeds being, in favor of a presence always shaken by a beating that separates it from itself, the Wink and différance engage one another in a sort of co-designation or co-appropriation of what, exceeding sense, must signal that very exceeding. What the passing designates is not something situated beyond being, or, in consequence, beyond the individual being, the being of which is merely being. It is not the sense of the other or of an other, but the other of sense and an other sense, an always other sense that begins freely—if freedom consists in the beginning, and not in the completion, of a new series of events, a new sending back and forth of sense. This inaugural and never terminal freedom accedes to that excess of sense—which is its sense, which is to say also the sense of being—as if to a climax, a supreme or a sublime that we cannot (and this is precisely the point) call “supreme being,” and that corresponds rather to the suspension of the supreme or of the foundation by which sovereignty declares itself.
Now, if the sovereign is not the Omnipotent or the Supreme Being, that is, if there is no extremity of being—but only the existence in which it founders—then the access in question cannot consist in accession to the end of a process, no more in the “ontological proof” than in the authorized attestation of some “witness of god,” martyr, prophet, or mystic. But access comes and withdraws. It comes in passing, in withdrawing. Such is the passage, the Vorbeigang. But this passage cannot be the passage of the god, either. If the god winkt and is not, if he is not even the non-being of being, or its withdrawal, since there is no such thing to “be,” it is because he only motions toward, about, and from a distance—that there is no such thing. (No such thing as the Supreme Being or the Supreme Entity, and nothing of the sort, absolutely, nothing that can properly exhaust (mean) the suchness [talité] or the quality: nothing that is properly in and unto itself.)
The god is therefore not the designated but only the designating, the making-a-sign. There is no passage of the god, but this is the passing of the passage, the passage of whoever makes a sign. The passage of the one passing by—whose coming becomes more distant in the instant—makes the gesture that hails from afar and that at the same time puts the distant itself at a distance: the ever-renewed distancing of the other in being, and of the absent in the present.
Why must this passerby be named god ? Why must the Wink and différance be declared divine? This is indeed the crucial question. It is obvious that one cannot answer by showing how winken and différer would be the attributes of god or of the god, since what is proper to the divine itself would have to have been presupposed. We must, on the contrary, establish the divine nature of both gestures by a transcendental deduction.
“The last god,” Heidegger specifies, is not to be understood in the sense of the last in a series—or not only so (for it does correspond to a turning point in history, after which there are no more gods). It is last in the sense of extreme, and that extremity, being the extremity of the divine, delivers the divine from itself in both senses of the expression: it frees it from the theological and disengages it from its own gesture. What one should probably understand from this is that the god is gesture: neither being nor a being, but gesture in the direction of the in-appropriable being of beings (an appropriation that Heidegger names Ereignis, whose analysis will have to begin by noting that it is toward the Ereignis that the Wink winkt and within it that différance differs, and that it consists, perhaps, in nothing but a wink).
Whether or not it is necessary to speak of a god is uncertain. Be he last, first, or whatever, nothing confers apodictic evidence upon the use of this noun—if it is a noun, and if so of what sort? (Common? If so, common to what class or what type of being? Proper? But to whom or about whom?) Here one can only lie in wait and hope to take by surprise the eventuality that this word, god, will turn out to be appropriate to designate the in-appropriation of the wink. Could we not say, in a preliminary way, that the word or name god cannot be said without some form of a wink or blink of the eyes? When we say “god,” whether we “believe in him” or not, as they say, we also declare, in one way or another, that we cannot signify properly or without remainder what we are saying or whom we so name. Only when reduced to the principle of supreme being does “god” have a sense: but then he no longer needs his name, and this is what is announced by saying, proclaiming, and shouting that “God is dead.” But the name God does not die with that supreme being. And that should perhaps make us decide to consider it a proper name. A proper name does not die; what’s more, the only thing proper to it is immortality. This proper name, God, insists, as if it should be the name that remains in the vacancy left by that individual being, in the vacant heart of sovereignty—and in this sense, as “the last god.” But that expression would then mean that “god” is always the last, the name of the last extremity of all names and all senses. The name, therefore, for an excess and an absence of sense that would not allow this noun to be properly meaningful, would on the contrary demand that it name the unnameable nonmeaningful. I have said that this disposition is valid for all, believers or nonbelievers, “theists” or “atheists” (by which it will be seen, moreover, that if it is simple and necessary to be an atheist, it is not so necessary to be “without God”).
Whatever the unnameable nonmeaningful may be, the retreat of being into its différance, the bearer of the name, signals it. (And perhaps all bearers of a name signal it—perhaps God is present/absent at the heart of every name; we shall have to return to this point.) It signals the unnameable nonmeaningful without signifying it. It signals it in passing, since it cannot be stabilized in a presence. He who signals in passing is the passer himself. The passer passes, and in order to pass, is someone. Some one who passes, is but the tread of the passing, not a being who would have passing as an attribute. One should not speak—Heidegger himself should not—of the passing of the god: but God is in the passing. God is the passerby and the step of the passerby. This step is his gesture, which, in passing, winkt and differentiates itself from itself (“the step negates itself and carries itself away,” writes Derrida, interpreting [I mean playing] Blanchot).20
Someone who passes: his unity and the truth of that unity are in the passing. The unity is that of the step, and consequently that of the wink, which forms a different step, a different beat, a different syncope. It is someone who is not a subject, or is only one with the proviso that he only exists (and it is, in fact, a question of ek-sisting) step by step, singularly step by step. But it is someone; it is who and not what. That is the first reason to name it. The name God does not answer the question “What?” But neither does it answer the question “Who?” It signals this: that there is no question “Who?” (unless it is a question that comes down to “What?” as when in asking “Who are you?” one wants to obtain a true, substantive identity, not differant from itself in itself). The name God, or some name of god, whatever it may be, or that way of saying the god of someone (the God of Akhenaton, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, the God of Jesus Christ, the God of Muhammad, and also “my God,” the God of myself, a God in each case mine, etwa eine Jemeingötterung). The “last god” would also designate the extremity at which the name god expires in that “my God,” in my utterance of a différance that is incommensurable and in-appropriable in me—to me, and to whomever.
It is, moreover, for this reason that différance is “neither a word, nor a concept”: it is a calling from one toward the other, from one to the other, the calling of a thought to itself as to the unthinkable that is its ownmost.
It is not, therefore, a question of the “ineffable being no name could come close to: God for example,” which Derrida contrasts precisely with the other “unnameable,” that of différance.21 If the last god is also the last, ultimate articulation of the name god, it is because this quality of ultimateness belongs to this word not as a signification but only as an utterance,22 and as “my” utterance to the precise degree that it comes to me from the other who, in passing, gives me a sign, and whose Wink I respond to with “my God!”—without my having actually to say this word, whose “sense” is to name or rather to mark, to remark, and to exclaim the passing itself and the passing not as a thing or a state but as a passerby whom I call to or address, having perceived his step and the signal of that step.
“To address” here does not mean to designate someone and require his or her attention, let alone submission. It only designates the exchange of signals, without which there would be neither signals nor winks. There is no assignment of persons or things. There is no intentionality. The wink in fact closes the phenomenological gaze and opens another one, or rather opens a regard [égard] in place of a gaze [regard]. The blink [clignement] is also the gesture of one who tries to adjust his eyesight in very bright light. Trying to adjust entails a focusing on objects, but blinking indicates that he is dazzled and discerns poorly or not at all. At most, he catches a glimpse. His blinking attunes itself with the luminous scintillation and loses the distance of vision. In the wink that has the value of a Wink, it is not a question of looking or of distinguishing forms; it is, on the contrary, a question of sending toward the other the light of the eye, the eye as lux. In fact, the wink brings about that modification or that modalization of the eye: it makes the eye into a signaling, not a seeing, organ. The wink belongs to all non-phenomenological looking, that is, to all looking that looks at the look of the other and takes the other into account in his or her look. Every reciprocal look is a wink that can go on and on, go to the limit of blurred vision as well as to the height of emotion, which is why it usually does not last, or lasts the length of an eternity in the midst of time. Thus I find myself both close to and far from Levinas …
This instant, withdrawn from the instant and from the triple determination of time within it, pulsates only with the difference between those dimensions, with the difference that time properly is and according to which it never catches up with itself and defers itself in its being as well as differentiating itself from itself. Now, that difference, as the tread of the passerby, forms the difference of gait, and of the passing as a putting in play of a difference of forces. One cannot take a step without activating the walking machine. But the difference between the forces makes force itself, its essence, if you like, since a force is never present but always raised, upright, activated against another (the foot lifted against gravity). Such is definitely the lesson of Deleuze that Derrida received explicitly in his analysis of différance.23 If, with the passing of the last god, it is only a question of glimpsing and interpellating, that is because everything comes to pass between ; indeed, everything takes place in the between (which also can be written with the a that is not heard).24 The silent force of the passerby activates the difference of gait. And the singularity of the passerby, the singularity of his or her personal unity, if you like—“one passerby”—articulates the singular unity that operates between the forces (between his foot and the earth, between his body leaning forward, off balance, and the machine that holds it back, that holds itself back in the advance itself; a machine ahead of itself, on the brink of itself).
If this passerby lets himself be addressed by this name-word (nonword?)25 god, by this thought that calls “god” in or to it, it is because this word, which appears to express ultimate power, omnipotence (differing only from the powerlessness of all his creatures),26 in fact says nothing more than a difference. More precisely, it says the difference between omnipotence and the feeble strength of the created. Still more precisely, and to say everything exactly, that is, to the last extremity of the act in question (i.e., of divine designation), it says that difference in the sense that the power of everything is nothing, nothing but the instantaneous act in which the world of beings “comes to be,” as we say, that is, comes from nowhere and goes nowhere, but thus passes or happens, takes place; it says, therefore, the difference between that power-outside-power of the totality and the feeble strength according to which an individual being ek-sists, that is, is outside of itself in order … not to be, but to find itself arrived, taken away, and dedicated to its own self-sameness. (I thus translate very rapidly ereignet, enteignet, and zueignet, while specifying that “dedicated,” which I have chosen to translate zueignet, was also meant to express “declare” and “reveal.”)
“God” says difference as the opening between the excedance of the outside-all and the eksistence of the someone (and/or the something). “God,” in fact, says the difference of day—dies—and night, the division light/darkness by which everything takes place, taking place between those two modalities, those two accents or those two sides of the same peak or the same height of being, of the same ontological sovereignty that thus reveals itself not to be, and not to be ontological any more than theological. Nor phenomenological, as I have said, and consequently, strictly, passing. The name god names the divergence and the step across the gap between nothing and nothing—let us call it the res ipsa, the thing itself.
The resource of the Latin divus/deus 27 should not produce any etymological or Cratylian illusion, not even any properly significant one, not even and especially not, since the name God would be the pro-noun of the Unnameable as the superessence of arch-significance. On the contrary, god is the common name of the separation between light and darkness, seeing and not seeing, day and night, something and nothing, without that—namely, that separation, that step—being properly named. God names, rather—and in all languages, according to their various resources—the opening of the name to its own non-sense, yet also that very opening as a calling out. As we have already seen, “God!” only takes on “sense” in calling, in being called, and even, if I may say so, in calling himself.
We are thus once again approaching a super-appropriate supernomination, where identity would be bound by the name of the unnameable, of the non-nomination of the Name—even the indefinite, poetic or musical, jaculatory, or arch-silent self-transcendence of nomination and of the sign in general. It suffices to point out that, rather than any of these ecstasies of beyond-sense, “god” proposes simply a common name in the guise of a proper name, and in a manner that does not subsume the common under the proper, no more than it assimilates the proper into the common. Let us say, rather, that “god”—with an exclamatory or invocatory intonation that gives it its wink, its accent, its verbal clinamen—sends its Wink sideways, alongside all names, from the most prestigious to the most modest. In a sense, it is the sovereign word, the name beyond all names, and in another sense it is the non-naming name that twinkles in the open space between all names—a space that is the same as the one that appears between the eksistant and the being that “-izes” it (transitive verb) and not that it “is” (supposedly a verb expressing a state).
The signal of the passerby is, then, nothing but his or her footfall. It is not a signalization or overarching signage. The twinkling does not come from a neon sign but simply from the ordinary alternation of days and nights, comings and goings, births and deaths. “The step of the truth becomes non-reversible into the truth of the step,” writes Derrida.28 Such is the divine truth of the Wink: it stems from the fact that there is no wink of god, but that the god is the wink. He does not do it, he winks himself there, just as he states his name in it, properly common and commonly proper—the name, in sum, of every person.
In the midst of the wink, the eye closes, and it is in the batting of the open/closed, the synthesis in syncopation of common sense and the call proper (“You!” goes the Wink, “Your turn!” “Come!” or “Go away!”) that the passerby passes by. The passing and the existent enter into a fleeting complicity, the différance of their senses, passing through the difference between them. When both eyes close at once, whether the eyes of both parties or just those of an existent in response, this is acquiescence. In Latin it is called conniveo, formed from nictor, the verb “to wink.” To wink with both eyes at once—and to wink in the being-together or in the being-with of the caller and the called, who can no longer be discerned (or barely can, since one has to blink)—is to enter into connivance. Man is in connivance with God. Connivance is mute; it is content with the Wink, and, in it, it exceeds sense, the look, and, finally, the god himself. That is the divine trait or gesture: God is exceeded in his own passage. In fact, he comes there and leaves from there; he is the passing of it. God exceeded is not the supreme individual being, put to death. It is god who succeeds God, as Jabàs wrote in another passage quoted by Derrida.29 But it is the succession that is divine. It is the passing—the passing of the witness and the passing of the step [passage du pas]. The step is the divine place, the only one, the place in which the power of the passing manifests and transcends itself. There remains, nonetheless, the possibility that the look, in the violence of its fixity, may catch and capture the connivance. Then the god no longer passes: he becomes God. Then différance turns—not into transcendence (for in truth, is transcendence not an echo of the movement of transcending [itself]?), but into transcendence installed as domination.
The god who passes is a passerby who is not us, but who is not “an other” either, in the sense of another subject or another being, or the “Other” of all beings and/or all sameness. Rather, an other than the other-of-the-same or than what could be called “the other same,” or, yet again, the Same-other (who is usually called “God”). An other who is only his step, and in this step, the Wink of/toward that alteration of sense: for, after all, what he shows is more an alteration than an alterity. His step changes even the coming or the advent of the event: it does not arrive, it passes. The Wink of the a and the a as someone who passes—and this passer as this god who passes. The passing of the god is identical with his retreat.
In this step, “the time of a wink [für einen Augenblick], the e-vent properly arrives, leaves, and is dedicated [das Er-eignis ist Ereignis]. This wink, this instant, is the time of being [die Zeit des Seins].”30 This could be translated: its eternal and instantaneous différance. Or again: the transitivity transfixed by which it is communicated to the existent as nothing. It is this sudden communication in the absolute gap that the passerby signals—and passes by.
Rimbaud, that “considerable passerby,” as Mallarmé called him, wrote:
It has been found again.
What?—Eternity.
It is the sea, gone
With the sun.31
Translated by Michael B. Smith