CHAPTER 7

The Erotics of the Intimate Universal

Opening on Erotics and the Intimate Universal

Some thinkers would not associate erotics with the universal. There is a long-persisting tendency, ingrained in tradition, to see eros as the foe of logos: when a person is overcome erotically, reason goes haywire. To be erotically charged is to be irrational, to be beside oneself, beside reason, hence out of the space of the universal. Erotics regresses to particularistic passion and turns vagabond to the rational sobriety of the universal.

Agreed: there is an intensity to erotics that can cloud reason and muddle its resolve to be univocally clear. Something about it also exceeds our sober self-determination. Eros can take over, can take us over, can overtake reason and relativize its pretentions to the selfless universal. Yet, equally, there is nothing more deeply embedded in the longer tradition than the view that erotics and philosophical logos are inseparable.¹ The desire, the quest of logos, of rational intelligibility, is precipitated by an erotic longing, is energized by an erotic striving that carries the soul from the inconstant fluctuations of the relative to the constant companionship of the truth of proven reliability. Erotics companions the energy of logos that carries us into the space of the universal. Reason itself is an erotic power of mindful transcending without which thought would never move from the spot, much less adventure on the strange seas of being in its otherness. Erotic reason risks itself, searches itself, tests itself, in intercourse (astonished, and perplexed, and loving) with all that stands other to itself. It may be that the more mathematicized rationality of modernity, the desireless desire of geometrical reason, may have been so ascetic with its own energies as to seem to renounce the deeper sources of its own ardor for naked truth. But this is a configuration of reason that by no means necessitates the recession of its erotic powers of surpassing. Quite the contrary, the recession of the erotics of reason is itself only possible for such an erotics turned against itself. And we might wonder too, turned from its intimacy with the universal, its passion for the more articulated realization of this intimacy. Were we to let the erotics come to outing truly, the outcome might be not treason to the universal but our being truthful to the intimate universal.²

A plurality of lines of approach is possible. We might connect erotics with the idiotics of being, and see the intimacy in light of an equally primordial “being with” (sunousia): already from the origin the primordiality of being at all is a “being with,” a sunousia. Or we might connect erotics with the aesthetics of happening. One thinks, for instance, of the erotics of naturing: not nature natured, but nature naturing—a source of happening, sourcing an excitation, a perpetuation bringing to an ordering of beauty in the nature/naturing of things. Of course, there are materialistic views, there are reductionistic views, there are economic, sociological views. There is an erotics of the political. There is an erotics of the aesthetic in a human sense, an erotics of the divine in a theological sense. There is an erotics of metaphysics in philosophy itself, from ancient to contemporary thinkers. Ask thus: In the relation of eros and idea do we have some suggestion of the intimate universal in Plato? There is an eros for the beautiful, an eros for the good beyond being. There is something of supreme form and something beyond form. Such erotics is not just sex; rather, sexualization is bound up with a crystallization of erotics. There is a (Freudian) reduction,³ a univocalization of eros to drive, secretly perhaps itself a ruse of hidden nature to procreation. The urge to procreation is not inconsiderable. The erotics of naturing is one of the manifestations of the plurivocity of eros.

There is always more, and this is the source of the agony and the ecstasy. The agon concerns the polarity, even polemos, of plurality in interplay. The ecstasy concerns standing outside oneself in the between that is open to plural intermediations, agapeic and filial, as well as erotic. There is the question of an intimate love, in relation to the dark origin, in relation beyond itself with others and with the divine. Erotics is intensely intimate and extensively related, selfish and ecstatic, energizing selving and beyond selving in community, lost in the other beyond selving, and tortured with loss when the beloved other is not: all these. And we must mark differences of directions: there can be a going up, there can be a going down. There is a vertical energy in being ecstatic; there is also a going down into depths of dark intimacy. There is a going out to ranges of extended community, and this not always to the cost of the intimacy. Erotics is a crossing, is in a crisscrossing of the between where intimate participation in partnership unfolds being in community, embodying and touching the universal.

My sense is that in more contemporary understandings of erotics, something of the going down has taken hold of us. I am thinking of the Schopenhauerian picture of the erotics of will as a dark energy prior to the principle of sufficient reason. Does this mean a prior universality? But what could such universality mean if prior to sufficient reason? There is the ontological intimacy to it also, but the intimacy suggests depths of darkness in our desiring, below the ground of desire’s own self-articulation.⁴ Are we then not rather articulated as desire by this darker energy, for it is most intimate to beings as desiring, more intimate to desiring than desire is to itself? It is the dark origin before it enters the space of articulated reasons.

The energy of transcending up, in the Platonic way, becomes perplexing. Suppose we are in the cave, suppose we are underground beings, why move up at all? Why not move down, and down into deeper darkness where there might reside a kind of inverse universal, inverse to the universal that arches over us above? While Schopenhauer does not explicitly pose the question thus, being close to things in Plato, especially his Ideas (as bringing peace to desire through beauty), there is no reason as such why we ought not to turn the energies of eros down again into the dark origin under the ground of the underground. Post-Schopenhauerian figurations of eros, be they Freudian or other, are haunted by this original belly of the underground, with the result that we grow uncertain about eros’s power to elevate, subscribed to by the Platonic tradition. We fear that the origin, more intimate to erotic desire than desire itself, is horrifying—one reason we have understandably shunned it, covered it over, reacted with dread at the prospect of facing its unsettling darkness. Without granting that horror is the first word or the last, I would say that the two directionalities have to be acknowledged and traversed: we must go down into the darkness, we must climb again into the light above us; there must be reversion to the idiocy, there must be the extroversion to the others of love; there must indeed be the superversion, if that is a word, the elevation of erotics to the superior. The intimate is never out of play, the universal is sometimes occluded but not dissolute.

To come to the point of community, political and transpolitical: granting the darkness of the origin, there is relativity at work, and there is also an excellence beyond serviceable disposability. Serviceable disposability produces a paradoxical servility in the very project to be beyond all servility. Erotics, more fully unfolding, is beyond such instrumentality and beyond servility, beyond abjectness, and opens a space of the commons where sovereignty is not impossible. I speak here of the community of erotic sovereignty, and its connection with political power has to be acknowledged.⁵ I will come more fully below to the community of erotic sovereignty, and its relation to the intimate universal, but crucial to it is a sense of the worth of the “ to be” in forms superior to the dominion of serviceable disposability, incarnated in individuals of outstanding excellence, and incorporated in communities dedicated to excellences beyond calculative use. The intimate intermediation of the general eros of a people is especially crucial. The community of erotic sovereignty is not the end of the matter, and there is an agapeic intermediation of the intimate universal more than servility and sovereignty.

Beauty, Erotics, and the Intimate Universal

Does the witness of beauty betoken something of the bond between the aesthetics and the erotics of the intimate universal? Eros comes to surface, beauty surfaces, but when a surface as aesthetic is saturated with significance, this is not merely material, not merely spiritual. It is the meeting metaxu of the material and the spiritual. Both sensuous and spiritual, it is not reductively concrete or abstractly general but intimately universal. There is an emergence, a coming out on the surface; aesthetic things open themselves, show themselves, appear. This apparition is not answered by the dianoetic univocity of rationalism that prises significance off the surface of things, separating it in a noetic abstract, or answered by the aesthetic univocity of an empiricist sensualism without sense, not able to see the surface as a figural sign that communicates.⁶ This togetherness of the surface and the depth is witnessed in the human figure itself, and by humans who “see” in the appearing figure a significance that cannot be fully determined objectivistically, while yet not being a matter of subjective projection onto some supposed indetermination of a material flux. The saturated immediacy, the replete surface itself as an aesthetic-ontological surplus, communicates to us something more, something overdeterminate.

Think of earlier peoples who saw things in nature as, in an almost immediate way, redolent of a significance that could not be objectified as in this or that determinate proposition. It was a communication. And yet it was “objective” in the sense of being other to the “subject”—it was not a matter of projecting subjectivity onto an otherwise indeterminate other, like a blank screen. The surplus immediacy surfacing in the event, and especially of beauty, is saturated with enigmatic significance. We often talk of such people as being very “intuitive.” They are alive in and to appearances as signs, their souls live in the communicating image, and what presents itself is resplendent with significance, and this in a trans-objective, trans-subjective way. They are able to catch the wave of the “trans” as it crests to a communicating surface. The wave of the “trans” is as an entrancing dance, epistemic and ontological, between self and other. The soul is swaying to a music that is more than subject or object, or even their relation, since the swaying of the dancers is in a relating, rather than a fixed and settled relation. It moves us and we are moved, by and as and into singing life.

The pleasure of beauty is deep and escapes the antiaesthetic asceticisms of many religious or philosophical moralities. Being pleased, hedonē, the sweetness of the “to be”: there is an ontological pleasure—the love of life lives deep down in pleasure. This pleasure is a complacentia: a being “pleased with.” We need to acknowledge the porosity and passio to understand something of this: in the ontological roots, there is a transience in the transition to being in coming to be at all: it is, I am, we are … God is. This is not understood by Schopenhauer in relation to beauty. His will: he holds we must negate it, it comes to nothing—life is a curse, hence to be negated. There is not the primordial pleasure in being. How then explain beauty at all? Beauty testifies to this primordial pleasure. Schopenhauer is right in his description of the way beauty releases us but his explanation of this cannot account for this ontological pleasure. One might think here of music and the porosity—music and the flow of sounds, the secret history of the will, as Schopenhauer somewhere calls it: But why is this often so lovely, if the will is the horror he suggests it is? Nietzsche understood the point better—half understood—when he directs us to the joy of creation, the “yes.” Yet his sense of the depths is not different from the Schopenhauerian horror. If we go under the underground, we need the surface of art to save us from the horrors of the depths. The surface saves us for life—but the more intimate truth of life is horror—under the underground. Dionysus is also Hades (Heraclitus). Orpheus comes to the surface but because he looks back into Hades—perhaps out of the impatience of love—he loses Eurydice.

If there is aesthetic pleasure as ontological complacentia, we must stand against the devalued thereness, void(ed) being, against the horror in the depths as the primal surd, against the self-regarding narcissism of superficial self-regard, against even transcendental self-affection. There is witnessed in beauty a love of being as worthy to be and to be affirmed—this is an ontological love, and this love is the secret of true beauty. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche get it only half right, and hence they are haunted by the so-called wisdom of the Silenus: “better not to be—and if in being, better to quit being, as soon as possible.” This is to turn from the ontological com-placency—being pleased with … beauty is complacent. Without this primordial ontological pleasure in life, of life in life, all our concerns are going to be harrowed by the suspicion of their own final futility.

Are we in the belly of the beast? Does the aesthetics of the intimate universal suggest the open whole, not a closed totality: the former a creation, the latter a kind of counterfeit creation, hell aping heaven? There is shine on things, on the surface of things. Beyond the barbarism of the senses, beyond the barbarism of reflection (Vico), there is an aesthetic restoring of the world. Important for the erotics of the intimate universal is a recovery of the sense of the worth of beings, the aesthetics of things, and not just human things but the aesthetic happening of being. This means restoration of creation to its worth as affirmative, to the gift of the “to be,” not as often soiled by use, and, with a bow to Hopkins, bleared, seared, smeared, wearing man’s smudge. The glory of the things is intimately worthy to be and to be participant in the great community of being. Being attentive to the intimate universal asks a redeeming of their worth, oppressed as they are by our exploitation, not redeeming as from a pawnshop but releasing things from the bondage of serviceable disposability. This is to allow us to be disposed toward them, as it allows their gift as disposed to us, and not as mere means for our exploitation but as an aesthetic icon of the reconciled world, a theos aesthetikos that hovers on the threshold of the mystery of the holy. In the community of the intimate universal, the things, the elemental things sustaining life, are consecrated, not desecrated. Consecration, not desecration, will bring in the communal aspect in more senses than one—religious, political, ethical, and yet elemental, and the question of poetic dwelling (Vico, Hölderlin, Heidegger).

The passion of being (passio essendi) is connected to eros, as giving freer range to the endeavor (conatus essendi), but as the Greeks wisely granted, eros can be heavenly or it can be tyrannical. And sometimes the tyrannical eros can mimic the heavenly, while the heavenly eros sometimes seems like the tyrannical, when it is beyond rational self-control, or moved by something beyond our useful mastering of it. It is not always easy to separate the tyrannical and the heavenly. There can be something tyrannical about beauty at times. The poet can suffer that tyranny. I think of Yeats’s passion for Maud Gonne.⁷ Out of that great passion powerful poetry flowed. The doubleness of aesthetic happening can arouse equivocal eros in us, and our passion can move up or move down, or move up to move down, or move down to move up. There is nothing univocal about the passion of being. Beauty is fertile with significant equivocity. There are ways of going up that cast one down: hubris and downfall. There are ways of going down that lead up: redemptive passage through Hell—see Dante conducted by Virgil. There are ways of going up that do go up, ways of going down that go deeper down and don’t come up. There are ways of going down that bring up. Up is down, down is up; the above is below, the below appears above. We suffer beauty, being exposed to what is other to ourselves: beauty opens and reopens the porosity of our being. But there is a vulnerability in being porous, and when the endeavor to be takes off, it can as much hate that vulnerability and seek to triumph over it as it can live out the vulnerability in love with finitude. Just as there can be a transcending upward, there can be transcending downward, and the latter can mean a descent into hell, though there are different ways of descending. There is agapeic descent of the holy servant.

The erotics of beauty may well have to come to terms with hell, even if beauty contains a trace of Eden.⁸ Is there something of the prelapsarian in it? A taste, or foretaste, of a redeemed world in it, an aesthetic sign of it? Is this why we are drawn to it, but also find it difficult to say what draws us toward it? Is this why there is something about it that is like a blank—and we are like sleepwalkers toward it? We cannot mark it in the normal determinate way, nor can we determine ourselves fully. The pages of happiness in history are blank pages, Hegel said, and not without a hint of dismissal. These pages are also the blank pages of beauty because they intimate a peace beyond war and peace—and we live in the struggle between war and peace. The end of art is peace, it is said, but this is the blank peace beyond war and peace. It is the white light that is too much for determination, that strikes us like the face of a child or a dead person on whom the traces of war have not been inscribed or are now at the end in repose at last. There is an idiotic intimacy about it, but there is also an idiot wisdom.⁹

The Bull of Phalaris and the Singing Cicadas

I would like to frame what is to come with two saturated images, reflecting eros moving down from the surface to the depth, and eros moving up from the depth to the surface.¹⁰ In these we encounter a mingling of mythic elements, aesthetic religion, political art, carnal love, and the carnival of the sacred. First: the story of the Bull of Phalaris as bringing into focus many of our themes: art, technē, political power, religious piety, anticipations of eros turannos and the erotics of the intimate universal. A version of the tale is told by Lucian. As a sacrifice to Apollo Phalaris the tyrant sent to the oracle at Delphi the statue of a magnificent bronze bull. In his communication with the priests at Delphi, Phalaris recounts how he was given the bull by Perilaus. Perilaus was an architect and sculptor and constructed the bull as a kind of torture machine. See Perilaus as contributing to Phalaris with his art: art outwardly beautiful and useless but instrumentally very politically useful for a tyrant. The artist is in the political business of serviceable disposability. A person could be put into the bronze bull and a fire lit beneath it, and as the heat spread and was communicated through the contraption, the person imprisoned would “feel the heat”—and begin to scream. The fiendish part of the construction had to do with the fact that reed pipes could be placed in the nostrils of the bull and they would transform the screams of the tortured prisoner into sweet music.¹¹ The screams of the tortured are turned into “the sweetest possible music by the auloi, piping dolefully and lowing piteously.”¹²

We can look at the bronze bull as a thing of beauty; and that it was offered to the oracle shows some aura of the sacred haunting it. “A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” John Keats said, but when we look at the fuller communication here, the bull is not a univocal example of beauty beyond serviceable disposability. To the contrary, it is beauty that can be put to political use, and by the artist in the services of the tyrant. Eros turranos is then dominant rather than eros ouranios. Qua technical contraption, the work of art transmogrifies into exquisite music the excruciating pain of those being burned alive, and all this designed to delight the tyrant. The shrieks of mortal despair serve as sources of aesthetic pleasure, but those who hear the music do not hear the shrieks.

That this is a torture chamber to ease the work of the tyrant touches on a point. Torture itself touches on what is intimate to us—it touches violently on the last idiocy of the soul by assault on the aesthetics of the soul, its body. Torture seeks the truth by violence to the passio essendi, by violation of the intimacy of being. It seeks the place of the most vulnerable porosity. Torture can impel revelation, if not of the hell of the tortured person, surely of the hellish soul of the torturer. Are we then tempted to wonder: Does the art work then serve, on the one hand, to reveal hell and, on the other hand, to conceal hell? This is the perplexity the story poses for us: Is this what beauty is—music wrong from hell, concealing hell as it is, and making it look like a heaven? The lovely sounds that the pipes bring forth disguise the shrieks of the tormented. Is this beauty then: a delicate gloss on dis-mal darkness? Music: Counterfeit of the shrieking of the damned? Does the surface of beauty hide the horror of hell?¹³

We give ourselves up to the enchanting music. We give ourselves up to what Coleridge called “the willing suspension of disbelief.” But is it so that all we need to do is show the mechanism of the enchantment and the enchantment vanishes? We have seen something of that sort of art in our own time—the self-reflexive art where the artist delights in breaking the illusion of art, taking us backstage, as it were, showing us the trick by which the magic spell is sustained. The enchantment is no longer sustainable because we know it is only a trick or a ruse or even a necessary illusion. Backstage of beauty we see the mechanisms of hell. Recall Nietzsche: we need the “lies” of art to save us from the “truth.” We suspect something of the old story: beauty is a seductress we must resist. We behold a beautiful woman but now know that silently, secretly, her liver, earlier the organ of divination, is cancerous. The organs of the body are hidden, and not just for protection. If they are exposed, they are not beautiful in the way of the outward body and they will die. The organs are profound—buried in the body. The beautiful body itself is superficial. This is very equivocal: truth may be a woman, as Nietzsche suggests, but woman is also Baubo. The self-reflexive mode seems profound and not superficial, but has it lost the wisdom of the aesthetic, and indeed the lightness of being, which is superficial out of profundity (to borrow an acute phrase from Nietzsche)? In one version of the story, Phalaris puts Perilaus himself into the bull. In a kind of self-reflexive gesture that redounds on the artist, he must be himself tortured in the instrument of torture he has created. Then his idiocy is assailed, his singular intimacy assaulted, and he is no longer exempt from the vileness of the counterfeit beauty he has created. Is the tyrant right to put the architect into the machine he has made? Is this the not-so-delicate irony of the tyrant: give the artist a dose of his own medicine, a sample of his own sickness?¹⁴

The question then: Is there quite a different sense in which the artist might turn hell into song—a redemptive sense? One is reminded of Orpheus and his music in Hades. There are different ways of being in the underworld. His music could bring tears even in the underworld, and melt hard hearts. Enchanting song reopens even in hell the primal porosity. This is another way of being in hell, and communicating a power that is more than hell.¹⁵ The same song might be sung in hatred or in love. Hatred may conceal love—for the lover is unable to confess his love and it comes out hatefully. Equally, love may disguise hatred—for the malignant soul more effectively works its malice when the victim thinks that before her is the face of love. The most effective enemies are those that come across as friends, but betrayal and treachery are still at hand. Intimate to the love is dangerous equivocity.

I come to the second story: the singing of the cicadas in Plato’s Phaedrus, a striking story, one beautiful and poignant. We find Socrates outside the city, as he almost never is. The trees won’t teach him anything as people will, he says (230d). For the most part he is illuminated by the conversation of humans, but here the space is other than the constructions of the city that reflect the human being back to itself.¹⁶ Socrates has already given a first speech about eros in which love is reduced to use, or serviceable disposability: the beloved is for me to use or be used, perhaps even to be abused in being so used. Before this speech we also heard Phaedrus deliver a speech dealing with, one might say, consenting instrumental adults, motivated by rational self-interest, who are in control of themselves and always attentive to advantage, present and future (“not being overcome by passion” is part of that calculation, 233c). Eros uses the other according to the terms of serviceable disposability. Socrates covers his head in telling his first speech (Phaedrus, 237a), which abruptly ends when he says: “just as the wolf loves the lamb, so the lover adores his beloved” (241d). One might say: calculative eros, motivated by serviceable disposability, is on the way to eros turannos; there is no wooing.¹⁷ These first two speeches are shameless speeches, impious speeches.¹⁸ There is a need for purgation and recantation. Then comes Socrates’s great speech in praise of divine mania—given by the gods for our greatest happiness (245 b–c). This is the sense of supreme usefulness beyond serviceable disposability, not instrumental as defined by its being for us alone. Quite the contrary, it is the porosity to the beyond of ourselves that allows reception of the offer of what is beyond our rational calculations of serviceable disposability.

It is after this second speech, spoken with uncovered head, that Socrates tells the story of the cicadas. The cicadas once were men before the birth of the Muses. When the Muses were born and music appeared, some of these men were so ravished with delight that they sang and sang, forgetting all food and drink, so in love with song that eventually they died. From them the cicadas arose, reborn but gifted by the Muses, and so overcome with the boon of music that they too seemed to forget to eat and drink. This is an image of the excess, of the too muchness, of the divine madness, such is the ecstasy: being sick with love. The story goes on to say: On death the cicadas go to the Muses. There they tell to the Muses of human beings, tell also of those who pass their lives in philosophy, and for whom the thought and the music of heaven are the sweetest.¹⁹

By comparison with the story of the Bull of Phalaris, here the origin of music is in the gift given by the Muses. Music is not the mask of hidden hell. There is an exposure and there is a passion, but both are taken into an ecstasy of love that exceeds the needs of life in food and drink. The love is consumed by something beyond these: something useless, but a sign of something more, something supremely useful for humans, a worthiness beyond serviceable disposability. And it is notable that Socrates enjoins Phaedrus not to fall asleep, like the sheep do in the midday heat, but to stay awake and converse. The cicadas seem to look down on us and perhaps we will receive something of the gift that the gods bestowed on them (258e). There is an invitation to readiness in hearing the song of the cicadas. The lovers of song will die but like the cicadas they will be reborn, and endlessly sing, tireless and nurtured by something more than ordinary food or nourishment. Consumed by a love that is not a sickness unto death, in love with what the gods give as gifts, instead of the tyrannical eros and the vile uses of art, the singers watch over human beings for the gods. There is a measure higher than the human measure.

For reasons not easy to explain, there is something deeply moving about this story of the singing cicadas. Useless and passionate as it might seem to be, the song makes the philosopher porous to something that exceeds philosophy. Useless beauty and the passion of being carry the philosopher into a sacred space that the philosopher can grant but not determinately explain. We can grant it as granted but as such it exceeds anything we can grant ourselves. With such beauty we find ourselves graced.²⁰ The cicadas become seers and one is reminded again of what King Lear became in his madness: one of “God’s spies.” This seeing is not the work of espionage. Lear as king was mad with eros turannos; now he is touched by a madness posthumous to that madness. Lear speaks of those spies as blessing and forgiving, as singing and praying and laughing “as gilded butterflies,”²¹ as taking upon themselves “the mystery of things, / As if we were God’s spies; and we’ll wear out, / In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones / That ebb and flow by the moon” (King Lear, 5.3.9). One might say: there is a commission to behold beyond use—a useless beholding, but one in which the passion of being becomes compassion. We sing in the sublunary world but the source of the song comes over us from above the moon.

Erotics and Self-Surpassing Intimacy

Returning more directly to the erotics, what is at issue is the self-surpassing energy of the human being. We must connect this with the porosity of being. Recall, once again, that poros is one of the parents of eros in the account of Diotima-Socrates in Plato’s Symposium. Poros sometimes is connected with “resource,” but one could stress it as offering a way, a way across. If penia or lack couples with it, there is a paradoxical mixture of poverty and plenitude, and one could see in both the poros and the penia an ultimate opening. For just as poros is not this or not that, it seems to be like a nothing—and yet it is the opening of the possibility of passage. Equally the poverty of penia seems also a kind of nothing—and yet it is not any univocal lack, since at work in it is the energy of going beyond itself. The lack is driven out beyond lack, and so intimate to it is more than lack. Since the lack of eros cannot be fixed to this or to that, there is a kind of intimacy of porosity in that lack. There is a doubleness and a redoubling, because in the porosity is crystallized something of power to surpass itself, power to surpass its own poverty. There is more than a mere destitution—there is a surplus, a richness, the promise of an overdeterminacy at work.²²

I connect the doubleness to the passio and the conatus. These are two offspring of the porosity—the one as a receiving, though in receiving as passion, it is also urge beyond self; the other as the endeavor that flies on the wings of the energy of the “to be” that flows in the passing. In the notion of erotic sovereignty, there is a sense in which the second assumes the primary place, offering at once a promise of both immense achievement and ominous danger. There is no way of avoiding this doubleness all the way along the line—the urge to sovereignty goes along with the danger of servility that debases. The two often are defined in a mutual dialectic. We must look at the equivocities hidden in this dangerous dialectic.

Self-surpassing here dips into dark resources of the idiocy, into deep sources of the intimacy of being. (I will come to the social aspects of this below, when I speak of a generalized eros.) There is a testing overdeterminacy/indeterminacy—the sunousian twinning of the poros and the penia. This might again seem like a “nothing” but in the “nothing” our most vehement energies stir and emerge from their caves and sometimes with a roar. How great an abyss is our bodied being? What comes to pass in its night? What strange beasts wander in its gloom? What reptilian shapes slouch forth from its hidden holes? What beautiful flowers sway in the air above its earth? What oak trees come to flourish in the sky of its upper reach?

In the flesh is the dark earth of the soul. Mutations take form in its occult recesses. One is reminded of the dull, unimpressive larva in the cocoon now suddenly breaking through its swaddling and then its feeling the first exhilaration of its wet wings and taking to the air as another form of itself—itself always but only itself as other than itself as before it was. We too can fly like the butterfly having undergone mysterious metamorphoses. Though taking to the air, Icarus-wise we fly close to the sun, though we are flimsy and blown about the sky. There is deep equivocity in this too in the gravity of the ground in being above the ground.

Eros surprises us—though it is not surprising. It comes over us more fully at a certain stage of our becoming, prepared for at a defined time in the maturing of the young body. It comes out of the most intimate depths and when it comes out, there is an arousal into waking the most intimate energies. Self-becoming is to become other. The release of this potent mix of passion and endeavor puts us astray and at sea. The mix must be mediated—mediated into a process of self-becoming that is inseparable from becoming together with others. The doubleness now: self-mediating selving in porous intermediation with other-being qua other. Out of recessed roots passion emerges that suffuses the whole person and bewilders and exhilarates it with disturbance and ecstasy. The selving must mediate with this new release, and this is never a solitary process, since this disturbing ecstasis puts us beyond ourselves with others—often against our will. This emergence has elements of an emergency, and after it, there is a different formation of the selving as willing. The energy of the “to be” has to be integrated into a new process of self-becoming. Before the emergence, the becoming was relatively asleep to itself; after the emergency, there is a becoming yes and a self-becoming, a self-becoming tempted to forget its more original coming to be as passio in the porosity of being and always born together with (conatus) other-being.

In the earlier emergences willing is strongly marked by self-insistence, mirroring a root of pervasive self-insistence in the conatus. This insistence spreads itself through the selving and beyond. I have coupled it with the transcending potency in Ethics and the Between, and this is right, but the transcending is not just an arrow to something beyond. In the emergence of transcending from intimate darkness in the flesh itself, the thrust beyond is implicitly open to all otherness though. Now at a more explicit level of self-mediating and self-becoming, the intimate universal is at work and comes out in the (sexual) singularization and sunousian doubling that leads to coupling.²³ The erotics of the intimate universal is concerned with what comes up and as coming up intimates an “above”—the superior in it that is also more than it. This is the connection with sovereignty, sovereignty not a mere given, but a given promise of something to be won out of the ambiguous doubleness of passion and endeavor. The self-surpassing goes not only outside itself, it goes above itself.

To what above it? In one sense, to itself again, insofar as it wants to achieve itself and its promise in a more fully realized form. A certain fidelity and truthfulness to self are required by this, a doing justice to oneself, something not at all easy in the ecstatic disturbance. For the prior sense of being true to self is easily overtaken by a passio muddied by its own self-emergence and surpassing. One must make allowance of emerging power, and allowance of it perhaps going astray, allowance of its temptation to self-deification or tendency for a kind of ontological-ethical violence to emerge. Much sifting of what has been allowed is called for, and this before the selving becomes itself or comes to itself differently. The coming to self in relation to the other: I take this as part of the erotic relation. Finding oneself again in the other—this does not mean the other is not found, but there is a self-finding in it that (for some) can become the point of it all. Alternatively, the arc of eros can open to the other beyond itself and not with intent to return the other to self, or return self to itself. The arc takes wing and can border more evidently on the agapeics—this is to come. How can this be? Because the intimate universal is at work in the idiotics and the aesthetics, and now also in the erotics—and as we shall see in the agapeics.

The infinite restlessness here in self-surpassing cannot be slighted, on pain of self-mutilation. There is something extraordinary about the sweep of human desire. It is not like animal desire, which is univocalized to a determinate objective. An indeterminacy opens beyond determination and the promise of self-determination in the open indeterminacy, and all of this is companioned by the promise of the intimate universal. The unfolding, in its phases, takes place within the intimate universal, which is no “within,” but is outside of itself. It is an outside and an inside at once—the fixed spatialization of determinate boundaries makes no sense.

The infinite restlessness makes us potentially the power that can determine, in a relative sense, other-being that is more determinately fixed. Finite fixed others do not quite so exhibit this immanent infinity. We might be inclined to say that, in principle, we might be the measure of these beings. I would not say this myself, since there is an intimate thisness to all beings simply as being, and we are never the measure of this. There is nothing merely finite—the overdeterminacy is always there. But in a relative sense we can be “above,” and stand over these more fixed univocal finites. A good part of the project of modernity consists in trying to increase that “being above.”²⁴ But as the environmental paradox indicates, we are dependent on that of which we claim to be independent. Our independence is dependent on that from which it claims to be free. The more interesting thing here is whether we can be the measure of ourselves. The purported measure of external finite others, are we the measure of our own immanent selving and immanent otherness? And of the otherness of being and beings like other human selves that also singularize the infinite promise? The answer must be no. Every effort to be that measure finds itself dropped back into the equivocity of itself. For such a univocal measure must be determinate through and through, but we as measure (measuring) and measured are marked in both cases by an indeterminacy and overdeterminacy. Our being a measure exceeds our being as measured. As measuring we are always more than what can be measured or subject to measure. We always escape beyond. This is simply our erotic being.

If this is true of ourselves, it is doubly true of the relation to other humans marked by an analogous excess. The escaping beyond is doubly redoubled without determinate limit. Immanent infinitude is itself infinitized. There can be no closed boundary around this. It is a between in the hyperbolic degree. We have to relate differently to this relativity.

Ages of Eros: Aging Intimacy

There is an aging to the time of intimate desire. With the child the porosity is at its first innocence. The passio is impressionable in a manner that can welcome insinuation and influence. The influences of the important others ring the child around, and give shape to the porosity. Meanwhile the conatus is perhaps more in abeyance in this age than in any other, though obviously not totally, since this is impossible. It is relatively in abeyance by comparison with what is to come. There can be children in whom the conatus surges with greater self-affirming force than with other children. Some of the latter are more timid, fearful, or excessively shy, and it is not simply that the conatus is weak, but that its distension outward is somewhat turned into itself, sometimes even choked on itself. Excessive sensitivity of the porosity makes the child timid about exposure, whereas the child who is more surging is not held back by this timidity. The bully seems to have none at all, though often the bully is a hollow porosity into which he collapses on being confronted by another child of firm or firmer conatus. The bully has finesse for those with feeble conatus and tries to torture the intimacy of their being, make their passio a passage way into a porosity that gives itself up to the invading conatus.

Here psychoanalysis is very right to stress the importance of parents. Whether the erotics of the child should be as determinately sexualized as the psychoanalysts tend to do is another question. In any event, the impress of the parents, or the image of the parents, on the porosity, this is indelible for the most part and can come back in situations of renewed exposure of the porosity. The soldier in the foxhole who cries out for his mother as he is about to die, this is the come back. Of course, the insinuation of the parent into the porosity can be fraught with equivocity.²⁵ The parent might be a bully, might be too feeble, might be one who lays a guilt trip. Many impressions are possible. At this level too, the importance of role models testifies to the mimetic side of the erotics: as we see others love us, so we tend also to love others. Thus the baleful effects of pornography on the innocent porosity of the very young—this is the corruption of the passio. There is a dearth of images of the goodness of erotics. In any case, the importance of significant others as impressive cannot be underestimated. One might think of good parents as others who respect the porosity, the passio, and conatus of the child. The evil of pedophilia is all the more evident as a violation of all of these counterfeiting “love.” This is an age of wonder and horror. The innocence of the porosity is haunted by the idiocy of the monstrous. Think then of night sweats: the shadow is on the wall, and the howl of the child in horror is at the nothing that is there. This is connected with the porosity. One should not forget innocent ecstasy.

With the age of the adolescent the conatus comes into turbulence. With puberty the transformations in the idiocy of the unruly flesh set off explosions of energy that are often more yearning than directed. They have a vehemence that overtakes and surprises the erstwhile sleeping selving of the young person. A more determinate selving in love, in due course, will come to form from out of this indeterminate yearning. Trepidation and excitement are together in it—a new tenderness of the passio and the porosity. Think of the self-consciousness that comes to the porosity—the sense of awkwardness of the adolescent, the sense of exposure. The sense of shame—What is defiance but the conatus reacting against this? I am I.

One might say here the conatus tries to outstrip the porosity and the passio. It wills to overtake them and can take over. The increased sensitivity to the other is hence insensitive, since it is not really concerned with the other as such but with itself as reflected back to itself in the other. Thus the phenomenon of infatuation: this is a kind of bewitchment of the passio and porosity in and through the conatus that, in surpassing itself, is reflected back to itself in the other it takes to be its true fulfillment. The instabilities of infatuating others are as a mirror to the instability of the infatuated self. It is the exhilaration of the conatus in its newfound energy of self-surpassing that is in the ascendant, and neither the stability of a true other nor the constancy of a true self is really the center. The flightiness of this instability can be an education in more patient constancy, but much erring may have to happen before a way is found in which a balance of porosity, passio, and conatus comes to be again. Finding the other—being found by the others: erotics reveals the back-and-forth play of these in the between, in the gap of the porosity. The gap may be filled when the other I find is the other that finds me. There can be a fit in the gap of the porosity between the two sides. Nevertheless, this fit is mostly unstable in this adolescent eros. There is no denying young love and in some cases young love can last and become mature love, can remain love in older aging. That becomes less common in an age when the self-appeasing distension of eros lacks the encouragement of stability and the anchoring of constancy (these last are considered outmoded virtues …). The new, the new, the new: a society in the dominion of serviceable disposability is perfectly suited to the manufacture of the ever-new and hence not conducive to constancy and its subtler senses of fresh newness. Not surprising, a society of serviceable disposability treats partners also as serviceable and disposable. This is not a recipe for constant love. It is more suitable for an adolescent society. It requires a kind of ethics of Don Juan, mirroring an existentialism for teenagers of the heart.²⁶

In the adulthood of eros, and in the ideal, love might seek and even attain the poise between the conatus and the passio—with a porosity mindful of selving and attendant on othering. But how slippery all this is. The male—Should we say that here there is more conatus? The female—And here say there is more of the porosity? But the passio is shared between them. The male might seem to be as endeavoring, the female as receiving, but both together as a back-and-forth. And in this back-and-forth, there is an exchange in which what before was endeavoring is now porous, or what before was receiving is now ardent striving. Of course, given the porosity on both sides, and the exchange back-and-forth, the erotics of giving and receiving, though potentially open to the promise of the generosity of the agapeics, can turn toward itself, close around itself, embrace itself, and spring up in altered form in the manner of the dominant and the submissive. There are many reversals and upendings.²⁷

The traditional postures are not without their truth, but since all humans are porous, passionate, and striving, in all, whether alone or together, there are fluidity, influence, influx between the three. So the “male” will be “female” and the “female” will be “male.” There is no univocal fixity, there is the equivocal passage of eros. This is not to deny determinate identity, but to qualify it by an indeterminacy that is there in the arousal of desire and that is the return to the shared porosity, such that one does not know oneself from the other, and the other from oneself. (This is carnal knowing.) Each is all three—porous, passionate, and endeavoring. “Male” endeavor is impossible without porosity and passio. “Female” receiving is impossible without striving and porosity. The overtaking, the taking over of the conatus, is not the thing for either, if it produces eros turannos. Erotic sovereignty with (loving) eros is not necessarily tyrannical. Both male and female can be tyrannical in their own ways. There is a tyranny of dominion and subjection, there is a tyranny of shame and abjection.²⁸ There is a tyranny of guilt, there is a tyranny of giving that won’t take “no” for an answer (one of its forms is now called “harassment” …). The triangulation of porosity, passio, and conatus can lead to a dialectic of mastery and slavery, can lead to the smeared collusion of sadist and masochist. And what prevents this? In the intimacy of the shared eros, a second “yes” to the first “yes” of the given good of the “to be”—incarnated in my own person and in the person of the other. Love (of life) living itself: and not in this, not in that. It springs up in the porosity, and subtends any divide into passio and conatus, and reaches beyond any opposition. The second “yes” of life, secret “yes” to life, “yes” of life to life, the other’s and my own, is seminal in the prior porosity, and now must fructify. There also is the opening where a more radical “no” can be seeded—and the monstrous takes form in this secret intimacy and perhaps has already poisoned the passio before it flowers further in the conatus, for the blooms seem to burst forth already blackened or blighted.

In older age the conatus as erotically energized can come to be mellower and to some degree in abeyance. There can be a significant renewal of the passio and the porosity. We encounter sour old age that envies in the young the still surging exhilaration of the conatus. Sometimes the envy can be a genuine sense of regret at the loss of a good thing, the unavoidable ebb of a tide bringing surprises and strange marvels. It can also be a pursed primness about the younger surgings of erotic energies—just because they are not one’s own. The violence of desire is not always the same as the vehement conatus. For in the withdrawal of the conatus the porosity might be like a dry well, if the person has not kept tapping into the source of water below or beyond the dust. There are dry desires, wet desires. There can be a dry lust that is more in the nature of a kind of envy that lies, so to say, in the spirit rather than the flesh. (There is no Viagra of the spirit that will cure this.) This desire is a covetousness in others of what begins to ebb in oneself.

Old people are cautious in husbanding their energies and this can be a life-denying thing, if it is a retraction into itself as into a protective shell. There is a different attitude to the porosity, as now presenting one with more immediate exposure to one’s own mortality, one’s impending death. The closing down of the porosity in the flesh occurs in response to this, though it is a closing down of the whole, the souling as well as fleshed selving. There can be, of course, a more mature wisdom that must give the porosity, the passio, and the conatus their appropriate due in this aging of eros. This closing down of the porosity can be paradoxically an extraordinary expanse of the porosity in a new exposure, of the fragile finite human being, to all things other, and especially the divine. In a new wonder at the gift of life, there can be eros beyond eros, touched already by a caress of the agapeic. But again one cannot forget the danger of the dry desire, the dry lust that would but can’t, and hence sours on life where the waters flow on. Its fear is of its own flow into death. It is a justified fear, since this flow into death is in truth impending.

Wooing and Generative Self-Surpassing: On Sadism/Masochism

The bond between lovers and the familial bond are familiar forms of the relativity of the metaxu. They are also revelatory of the self-surpassing of eros, as generating beyond itself. An eros closed in on itself is an incompletion of its own self-surpassing. If the erotics of self-surpassing is only to itself, it may seem to generate self, but the danger is a self-cloning that is really a counterfeit double of self-surpassing. This is quite common, in modernity. Even at a high, exalted level when Hegel talks of God as love disporting with itself—love loving itself—there is nothing per se wrong with the love of self and of self loving itself. This is not the issue. It is the self-surpassing to what is beyond itself that shows love as love of itself and more than itself. Hegel does say that this love disporting with itself becomes insipid without the negative. I do not think the issue is a matter of the negative, but there is an important point for human existence here, and it is Hegel’s point too, namely, that we must adventure in otherness to come to ourselves. This we do not achieve if we hug ourselves to ourselves. The self-surpassing hits on, or is hit on by, the resistance, even violence, of the other. We are called into this fraught middle by this beyond. This is true. Yet Hegel closes the circle again insofar as what we recognize in the other is ourselves again and so we end up still disporting with ourselves. So too does Hegel’s God, for whom the adventure through negativity in otherness is the passage back to itself again, now truly realized as the absolute whole, and reconciled with itself as such. This understanding is a version of the erotic absolute: erotic self-mediation in which the other is a middle to a more inclusive self-mediation. The other to self presents itself as not instrumental, not serviceable disposability, and yet it is not unlike it, since it is a higher way of making the other serve the self-becoming. It is not fully erotic self-surpassing that meets the other as irreducibly other, encounters the other differently, in their difference. This brings us to the border of the agapeic. The point about human eros can be applied only with qualification to the divine. Love disporting with itself in Hegel’s sense is not the overdeterminate divinity of surplus generosity that releases other being into its own otherness for itself, and that in loving thus this otherness is not simply disporting with itself.

Erotics points to a relation beyond self that is not a matter of negation, whether in an ordinary sense or Hegel’s speculative sense. The ordinary sense pits self over against other; the Hegelian sense sublates the ordinary sense, and while granting the otherness, subsumes it in a more inclusive self-mediation. The erotic relation to the other is moved by surplus. It is not that there is not lack seeking to be filled and fulfilled; rather the energy affirming itself as wanting is not just wanting. It is surplus affirmation of the “to be”—in search of the other as offering it the good of its “to be,” sometimes drawn in to serve the good of the “to be” of self, sometimes wondrously loved for itself, turning the selving head over heels.

The doubleness is there in the erotics of self-transcending, and it is so because the conatus itself emerges from the passio and the porosity where we find enabling sources that cannot be described in the language of lack and negation. We fall in love with an other and these more affirmative sources are called forth—giving fever to the conatus, setting it on fire yes, but through itself alone it knows not whence this fever is caught, nor how this fire is stoked. It only knows it is now different, for it has encountered the difference that takes it over. It is overtaken, it does not overtake itself—overtaken and also impelled to the generation of life beyond itself.

Illuminating this other relativity, consider something mentioned in the last chapter in connection with the poet and the muse: wooing. Wooing is bound up with a more delicate erotics. The wooing of the poet recalls Mnemosyne, memory, mother of the muses, hence there is always an other to be remembered. If one woos or is wooed, the approach and response cannot be forced. A courtesy before the other is asked, and where the initiative lies is not self-evident. It may not lie with the wooer at all, who may have to cede it to the other wooed. Certainly the wooed one must be invited into the between in a free communication that can be called but not dictated. The wooed one may also call to us, though we think we are doing the calling. We need to pause and listen. As we woo, we are being wooed. A seduction is not the same as a wooing, for a seduction might be a treason to love, while seeming to show itself with all the credentials of love. Seduction is the counterfeit double of wooing. In the seduction it is guile that snares. It is the feigning of a wooing that gets what it wants for itself. This is not love in the between. It might look like love but it would be loveless in the intimate respect asked: a use of the other in terms of serviceable disposability, and behind the patient wile of the seducer, nothing but impatience that plays at being patient. Wooing is truer to the passio essendi and so is willing to wait in love. The waiting is a distension of eros that is true to the intimacy of the passio essendi. There is a kind of readiness for gift in this, as when we truly listen to music. We hope to be hearers because we are ready to be patient listeners. There is a kind of obedience in wooing, and the porosity asked of the attendant is again not unlike a kind of praying.²⁹ It cannot be described in the language of self-insistent willing, though there is a purer willingness, or being willing, that precedes a determinate will, and that exceeds self-willing and all will to power. Wooing is the passio, faithful to the porosity of love, waiting in patient readiness for the surprise of the other, the gift of the secret beloved.

Each of us double: a togetherness of passio and conatus. Wooing is a courtship of the poise of the two. The equilibrium of the two can become unbalanced: Too passive, with feeble conatus—then there is the tendency to masochism. Too active, with little receptivity—then there is the tendency to sadism. The sadist is one in whom the conatus has overtaken the passio, to the degree of a hatred of receptivity in him- or herself. And this inner hatred is turned outward toward an other who would earth its charge in a disposable body. The sadist needs the disposable other; otherwise the hatred is more directly turned on itself, with resulting self-mutilation. There are others who are disposed to be the earthing body—in themselves they think they are nothing much, the vehement charge of the other charges them with a different life, and they welcome being overcome by the sadistic other. They are disposed to be serviceable to the dominating other/self, because there is not enough of the properly self-affirming conatus in their own passion of being. This doublet makes a perfect couple, but they are the conjunction of two deficiencies, certainly two imbalances, of the passio and conatus. The illusion of the masochist is that it is the pure porosity, since it is nothing and utterly subject to the injection of charge from the dominant other—this is void without the fertility. The illusion of the sadist is that it is the pure sovereign, since in relation to the nothingness of the other it seems to be everything, and porous to nothing beyond itself, for the nothingness of the masochistic other has passed without resistance into the envelopment of its power. Given its vehemence and the flightiness marking its going beyond itself, eros can easily unbalance one way or the other. The results are forms of servility and sovereignty, though each is not what it is without the other. The servility is less serviceable as abject; the sovereignty is less commanding as dictatorial. This collusion is not social freedom—it is not being released, either to the other, or to oneself, or by oneself, or by the other. For at the heart of either form, be it receiving or self-surpassing, is not love but hatred—not love of self, not love of the other—hatred of the other to earth the self-hatred of immoderate self-regard, and abjectness before the other to vivify the void self-hatred of defective self-regard.

Generation beyond self can take a biological form, though in the case of human beings this is more than biological, and this can mean new life in the intimate universal, such as we discussed in the chapter on idiotics. It is perhaps for this reason that we should speak of procreation rather than reproduction. What is generated is a new creation, not just a product. That said, sometimes one is struck how animals can seem more universal, or witnesses of the universal, than humans. They generate beyond themselves selflessly, thoughtlessly. Their universal life is in passing on the life of the species. You might say they are driven to it, while we supposedly are free to choose. But the choice sometimes made is that we do not want to participate in the procreation of life. One thinks of how people speak of “recreational” sex. But erotic fecundity is something else and in procreation participates in the intimate universal.

We find a paradoxical situation where, on the one hand, we block fertility and, on the other hand, never have such extraordinary and emergency techniques been available and used to promote unblocked fertility. In both cases, the danger is that the bodies of the couple and the child—now conceived as the product—are seen too much under the light of serviceable disposability. Indeed embryos are disposable if they are not serviceable. It is manipulation, not participation, but also manipulation through a kind of participation: the exploitation of life is the beneficiary of the gift of life that forgets the giftedness of what it exploits. These manipulations are ominous with respect to the deeper participation of the human being in energies of fecundity that come to it from beyond itself and that take it, help it partake of what is, beyond itself.

We are profoundly suspicious of any beyond and this affects how we relate to eros also. Eros can lead both to a sovereign king and to a tyrannical master. If we do not serve this sovereign king with love, we can end up in servitude to its other face as tyrannical master. This is tyranny that is not concerned to generate beyond itself in the modality of a gener­osity that offers life on to the next generation. The tyrannical eros reveals the imperious urge to reproduce the same, not procreate the newly different—and we may not always like the way it takes over our autonomy. Schopenhauer: Am I right to think that his philosophy of eros reflects the humiliation to this autonomy that the taking over of eros represented for him: we are victims of eros and chagrined? Our will is not our own. Is there a hidden hand, a providential urge in the imperiousness of eros? We have to be open to the opportunity of the occasion. Now we make occasions safe against procreation and then render the opportunity sterile. We are profoundly rooted in nature but we risk denaturing ourselves in claiming to make ourselves according to a second nature. The second nature is not a second “yes,” a redoubled “yes” to the first “yes” at work in the poeisis of naturing and our passio. More often, it is a “yes” to a conatus that has deviated from the subtle insinuations of the now sunken matrix of fecundity.

Fortunately, the giving source continues to give, our second “yes” or “no” notwithstanding. True, there are ominous signs that we have altered the avenues through which the gift before came without our bidding. One thinks of alterations in the environmental field, in the flesh of life itself, and the discovery that our bodies are porous to the alterations we have induced outside. We impose on other-being, for self-being’s sake, and the reflux of the other, degraded by serviceable disposability, passes back, through the impossible-to-close porosity, into the texture of our own being. We are not immune. What we think is outside has come through our porous bodies. The participation is unstoppable, for every effort to stop out what is other is itself a participation. The issue is the health of participation, not only vis-à-vis outer nature but our own nature. There is no outer nature separable from our nature—nor is our nature separable from the outer. There is a permeable boundary of flesh—a frail border in which the fragile singular carries inwardly the promise of ontological aesthetic intensity coursing secretly, idiotically through all that is.

Eros emerges out of that coursing. There is already an intimate universal in which we participate before individual desire for this or that erupts in our singular being. There is a fluidity of erotic energy that comes out, comes from below, that cannot be kept below, since again the boundaries of above and below are porous. We get a sense of its coming out and coming up in springtime, when the more generalized erotics of naturing break free with sometimes overpowering effect. This is naturing other to us intimate to us. In springtime a young man’s thoughts turn to love. But of course, this fluid energy comes out at all times in the human being, for whom one might say there is no true winter, no winter of the absolute freezing of eros. The rites of spring can be performed in all seasons, even in the depths of winter. That does not mean that spring might not be a time of special urgent intensity. Think of young love as a springtime in that sense—it is sweet sixteen. Once it is passed, there can be a springing forth at all times, and though the flood tide ebbs with age, this is, or can be, the conatus and the passio in poise, more true to the ever-giving fecundity of the porosity. Can be: there is dry lust, we saw, when in the well is only dust, but the source of selving in the well wants still what it cannot have. Its want is hidden hate of what still is given, lush in the springing leaf of the green other, but now no longer mine. The love of the second “yes” dries up and hates the first “yes” for its not being mine.

That we are always possibly in heat indicates a more extensive universality of the intimate in the case of human desire. It is not the thoughtless rutting participation in the animal perpetuation of the species. Eros in us is especially a witness to the fecund indeterminacy that exceeds all determinate desire, witness to an equivocal outgoing, ongoing that exceeds this determine desire and that, witness to an overdeterminate source out of which the affirmative energy to be beyond oneself springs forth, overdeterminacy as never a mere lack but always a surge out of a secret surplus of self-surpassing power.

Needless to say, there are equivocal intoxications in all of this. The intoxications are such that we often do not know what is of me and what is of you, there is a promiscuity of the two. I say I love you and I love myself in saying I love you—and you say something the same and you love yourself in saying you love me. The boundary of selving and othering becomes so permeable that we do not know who we are—we are both and we are none; I am nothing without the other, and yet I am more fully myself because the other is. And so this erotics is redoubled from my side, from the other side, and this redoubling on every side adds an almost infinite complication, a coimplication to the equivocal promiscuity. An issue can emerge from it that is not of either you or me. We are potentially agents of the transmission of the fluid self-affirming of life into new life in a singular being, or beings beyond ourselves. We are released as children of love into their own being for themselves; we can be intermediums of the new release of children of love beyond ourselves. Human eros mirrors and participates in the agapeics of being. This is often unknowingly so, though not always, since parents can sometimes come to be immensely self-less in the mindfulness of their children, let be, let go, into the full promise of their own being for themselves.³⁰

Erotics, Immortalizing, Being Beyond

The movement of erotic transcending takes us beyond selving in selving. This is evident in a number of ways, though we are always beyond selving, since from the origin we are participants in the intimate universal. Eros takes us decisively into the beyond of the intimate universal. That is why the urge to immortalizing is important here. There are different senses of this, and I lay out some of them.

Perhaps, first, the most evident one here, and the most democratic, is generational perpetuation. A child is born. Its parents are progenitors but he or she is given to the world as other and for itself. The child is brought to be in darkness and comes into the light as the gifted recipient of powers the parents cannot possess. There is the awe-ful origin of a difference that can never be abrogated. It can be intermediated. The guardians of life stand sentinel in this passage into time, and there will be joy and weeping, and as the parents are not the masters of the birth, the one born is no master of fate but companioned by inscrutable providence. The guardians are not tyrannical masters. Inscrutable providence proves the nest of its nurturing in the secrecy of the intimate universal, and when the born one comes more wakefully to be itself, what wakens in it is received from preceding others and awaits the giving on to new others what it has received on the threshold of dark and daylight. The secret of the intimate universal is not dispelled but passed on. In every imparting there is a parting; and our departure into distance must await in erotic distension its coming home, whether to itself or to those who are beloved. Giving leave, giving freedom, is leave-taking; and love taken in leave-taking carries the call—whether ignored, betrayed, re-called, or answered—of the return of love.

Second, there is the generational immortalizing that comes with children, grandchildren … This is archaic and elemental—and mutations have been introduced into this rhythm of nature through our manipulative relation to our own bodies and nature generally. The body is disposable and children as productions are equally disposable. The need for the generative immortalizing does not go away. As I said above, it lives us, we do not live it, and this is a good thing. In choosing our own life alone we can often then choose death in the long run. The child is a sacred “yes,” a new beginning, to borrow words from the childless Zarathustra. The dominion of serviceable disposability lacks this sacred “yes” and its hope in new creation. It may whoop with gush over new products, but this is not the immortalizing renewal of life.

Third, there is the less democratic immortalizing, when through great works we seek to outlive ourselves. These works can be individual, but most often they have a communal character. A community builds monuments to itself in time. This is a manifestation of the communal erotics of the intimate universal. The history of a people is composed as the secret story of their urge to immortalizing. This, I suppose, is a bit like what Nietzsche denominates under monumental history. The connection with erotic sovereignty is evident in the communal need for exemplars. These are not persons of individual distinction, but are exemplary: singulars who witness to something more communally universal, heroes who speak to the community as a whole. Something about their sovereign exemplification communicates not only in the present, but also from out of the past and into the future. They span time by exemplifying, in the intimate singularity of their sovereign excellence, something of the more general greatness of their community.

There is no separation of the singularity of the hero and the social nature of communal immortalizing. In fact, this is a case in which the two converge: an individual does heroic deeds, thinking even that he alone acts, or acts alone for himself. It turns out that he is not alone, that he is exemplary of the people and what has lain recessed in their general eros. And it is only after the deed that it is more generally recognized that there is an occluded communication between the singular and the community. This is an erotic manifestation of the intimate universal, operating beyond calculative deliberation, as it were, “behind the backs” of both the singular and the general community. The singular hero acts and hence is a creature of will and decisiveness; but the implication of the deed for the intimate universal is never the singular hero’s alone. The endeavor, the venture, the deed all tap into something out of which he comes. (I know I speak of “he,” but I need hardly mention that there are “heroines”: for the French, Joan of Arc, for instance.) Because instinctively, intuitively, she or he is in tune with this, what he or she does speaks to the larger generality of people. Heroic accomplishment is representative of the people at their sovereign best. In this instance, representative means exemplary of what the secret general eros of the people asks for—though they do not know it. They know it when they see it.

The case is analogous to the genius at the aesthetic level: creature of the threshold, opening downward into the intimacy, emerging upward into the light of articulation and the public space where the people can now see what was gestating in the darkness of the creative womb. A great leader has to be something of a threshold figure in an analogous sense: singularly self-affirming, in one respect, yet singularly attuned to the concealed stream of communal eros, like a diviner watching the dousing twig as it bends knowing there is water below ground. Such a singular one must direct the people, bringing forth the communal eros. Of course, the secrecy of the intimate universal is bubbling up from the underground of the general eros and far from being a magus, the singular one is more nearly servant of a flow that flows around and under and over him/her, and when its wave again becomes unruly, it will close over him/her and he/she may drown in the element he/she before commanded.³¹

This is the immortalizing of the public hero, but, fourth, there is also the immortalizing of the great artist. This poet is the voice of a people—the poet is also a threshold figure, figure of the imagination of the story that weaves a many into a people with a history and perhaps a destiny. Peoples have always had their poets in that sense. There are perhaps fewer and fewer such poets in our time. Why? Because the dominion of serviceable disposability does not foster the nurture of transition and the intrepidity of creative originality that can stand alone and outside and open itself to the more original porosity through which the secret eros of a people can be poured. The threshold is covered with commodities and things of serviceable disposability. There are no poets because there is no people. The people does not exist when there is no accessing these secret sources of erotic sovereignty. There is no poetic immortalizing because the immense sweep of time has been contracted into the immediacy of the “time bite.” Wording the between is overtaken by the buzz of meaningless sound bites. Think of William Butler Yeats as an immortalizing poet in the relevant sense here—not only immortalizing himself but making an image of Ireland appear on the threshold between nothing and being, bringing it to be, and in a poiesis that gives the many the images to see itself as a people. It is the secret eros of the people that is appearing on the threshold. On the basis of its coming to be there, there can be a social self-becoming on the part of the people, previously a mere many. Homer was the immortalizing poet of the Greeks in that regard, Virgil of the Romans, Dante of the Italians, Shakespeare of the English. One might inquire of other peoples also.

Not surprisingly, and fifth, eros is often connected with rituals of sacred immortalizing. One might mention mystical religiousness in which the spousal relation of the human and the divine comes to the fore. Some will abjure this since it would seem to blur differences, and yet there is something to its sacred promiscuity. How often has Bernini’s The Ecstasy of St. Teresa been subject to erotic cliché? There is the immortalizing of being subsumed in the sacred whole, as in pantheism. There is this even in Nietzsche in his Dionysian mysticism and his wondering that if perhaps there is to be a religion after the death of God it must be some form of pantheism, a pantheism of power without the good. One thinks also of passing the threshold down into the sacred earth and the realm of the dead who are not dead—the realm of the spirits and the ancestors. One thinks of the spousal relation that is inseparable from difference: while a mingling, it is not promiscuous in this sense of losing the relation in being in relation.³²

If there is an urge to immortalizing in eros and if this is self-transcending, sixth, there is the question of whether there is still a singular selving to be in the transcending and in the beyond of the transcending. One thinks of the immortality of the soul, whether there is singularity to this, or of the Christian view that stresses the singularity of soul and flesh, to the extreme of resurrection of the whole being, body and soul. The issue is prepared in the intimate universal: While we pass into and pass out of being, do we, in passing out, enter the intimate universal in a truer sense? If so, would death then not be the portal of true life? The porosity suggests we keep this portal open. Both the infinitude of the intimate and the unconditionality of the universal suggest something beyond the conditionality of finite coming to be and passing away. Eros surges in the conditional but surges with something more than the conditional. What is this “more”? Is eros obscurely in love with eternity? The surge is the leap of a release to the beyond of selving in the soul that swoons in love with the eternal. Is the intimate universal both intimate and universal because it is the between we participate in, a between that itself is at all because it participates in the eternal. The surge of eros is the praying desire of time for eternity—and this in both a singular and a universal sense. The singular as singularizing the intimate universal is the integrity of the universal power of soul and the particular concretion of flesh. In the Christian eschatology, each of us is resurrected—and in community: this has nothing to do with saving one’s miserable skin to hang on to it forever and ever. Consider the anguish we feel at the thought of being eternally deprived of the beloved other. Consider the thought of one’s own children dying after one—not their dying before one, for one has died, and this is the anguish of knowing that they too are destined to die. It is their death that one would want never to be. One’s anguish masks the love of the loved one as a promise of eternity, intimates the love that goes out and beyond one to eternalize the loved one. This going beyond life and death into the deathless is posthumous mindfulness that is posthumous love—and the urge of eros participates in this love.

Love of our own being: why should this too not be worthy to be affirmed into eternity, if there is also love of the being of the other beloved one also worthy to be so affirmed? Do we feel this unbidden affirmation in both cases? True, a lifetime of disappointment, of skepticism, of bitterness, of unbelief can dull the spontaneous surge of the love of eternity in us. It is so mysterious—as is our deepest self-love, and not only our deepest loves of others—that we come to find it hard to credit it.³³ A life has clogged the more original porosity of living; we think we more truly live, but the artery bringing blood to the heart of the soul is laboring to allow the flow. There are no boundaries in the true flow of life, not even the boundaries between life and what is beyond life now.

The issue of immortality relative to social and political concerns is not now much discussed but there is much to be said for the manner in which this matter was crucial to discussion in earlier centuries. I think, for instance, of Berkeley in relation to the “freethinker” of his day (in Alciphron, for instance).³⁴ Or of Dostoevsky and his worry, even certainty, that without immortality in the relevant sense something disastrous awaited humanity, in this world itself, just when it most anticipates the unparalleled perfection of life here and now. Perhaps Nietzsche had some suppressed dread of this to match his elation, though he had the consolation of the eternal return—an initially horrifying thought, he held, but then allowing one to look at every moment as in itself eternal, hence invested with all the weight of immortalizing. The circle revolves, the hourglass is turned over, and the moment returns. This is not necessarily a bad fatalism, but a looking on the utter necessity of the seemingly contingent within the circle of the whole—the eternal in time, being in becoming, the universal within the intimate, a self-becoming of time that is eternal—and each of us too is weighted with this totality.

Nietzsche aside, Dostoevsky felt perhaps that a “backup” for morality was needed: a spiritual constancy in the backup, a good one can count on. For why be moral in a world doused in evil and cruelty? There is not an evident self-justification of good, despite what the philosophers like Socrates might say. One might say that this way of thinking is to instrumentalize the immortal. Perhaps. But that this justification is used testifies to the deep-down worry that there is nothing that justifies itself. Everything calls out for a “more” and it cannot supply this more itself. Everything is caught up, despite itself, in an eros for eternity, but the eros cannot supply what it most desires. It cries out to something more, something other. In the great monotheisms, this beyond is absolute, not as nihilistic escape from life but to allow us to face the issue of the ultimate justice. Is the divide between life and death the end or is there a more inclusive sense of life beyond that divide? This question gives rise to the intimation of immortality that cannot be disjoined from the matter of justice. And this is so, not only in the classical theistic theodicies where the justice of God is at issue, but in the philosophical reflections on justice, such as Plato in the myth of Er, and Kant with the postulate of immortality. We may not be happy with all the details of their answers but to reject the question because we disagree with the answer is to cut off one’s nose to spite one’s face.

The question, as much as any answer, testifies to the eros for eternity. This is the question bearing on the point of it all, not least in the face of death and intolerable, even unforgivable evil. Eros gives rise to heaven, it also gives rise to hell. It is love of life that generates hell, because love of life is intertwined with a deep anticipation of the rightness of life, and this anticipation is not self-evidently fulfilled—here and now. An Augustinian theological vision of politics is not theological politics and is impossible without the opening to the transpolitical beyond. This opening is closed off by Hegel by being speculatively retracted into dialectical immanence. But do we not then create a circle in which the eros circles back to itself? This is love disporting with itself, and insipid, we recall Hegel said, if it does not extend to the work of the negative. But does it become any less insipid, albeit bloodied, even after that work? To disport with itself is to truncate the movement of self-surpassing—it is not to surpass self, but to return to self in surpassing, no matter how many dialectical negations and determinations in between, and hence it is not really to surpass. Think of the political analogue—the state that loves itself: the will willing itself in the form of its worldly social self-determination. This is indeed Hegel’s definition of the idea of freedom: social self-determination, a recollection of spirit but not as individual autonomy but as social recollectivization. The porosity of politics to the beyond of politics is closed down or clogged. Politics seeks the self-contained totalities of immanent absoluteness that the worldly state itself tries to enact. In coarser hands, the resulting immortalizing of earth does not create heaven but hell.

This is what ominously struck Dostoevsky. Earlier Burke was struck with prophetic horror in the face of the French Revolution. False freedom strikes out at the tender face of heaven itself—and in the denial of the chasteness of immortality, the choice of revolutionary negation is for the path of death. Destruction becomes, or will become, creation. And if the revolution does not seem to be succeeding in producing the dreamed-of change? We have not killed enough people. (Mao speaking of Hitler: “The more people you kill, the more revolutionary you are.”)³⁵ Death and immortality are issues radically intimate and yet have huge social and political repercussions. One might say these issues do not bother people now, but one wonders. Death and its finality always shake the imperturbable. It may not seem so to the comfortable bourgeoisie but that comfort is a provisional cocoon—a cocoon that in this instance is not preparing a transformation, but merely a defense against any demand for radical transformation. The butterfly does not want to come out of the cocoon; it does not want to die to one form of life because beyond it there is nothing; and yet it does die in the cocoon when this happens. This view is now more pervasive, and it thinks itself superior to the naive faith in immortality of earlier epochs. The radicality of the earlier and the call of radical otherness in it are stifled. This is to be on an edge—after all the word escathon can also mean “edge” as well as “last thing.” An edge is sharp. Something sharp may have to cut into the cocoon of comfort. In life we are busy generating a more and more efficient self-enveloping cocoon—the cocoon cocoons itself. Cocooning cocooning cocooning: we mimic the absolute, say, the self-encirclement of thinking thinking thinking (Aristotle’s god), or the willing willing willing (Hegel’s idea of the “good”), excreting the last cocoon of cocoons from the endowed “too muchness” of ourselves claiming to be nothing but ourselves. Fear of death is the cold air that comes through when the cut is made. The door is opened and we may perish in being so unsheltered, or we may be refreshed with the wind blowing from beyond. Awakening before death from such torpor or half-sleep might also be a surge in the erotics.

Erotics Beyond Autonomy

The denial of the beyond brings to the fore a stress on autonomy, indeed hyperautonomy. Autonomy itself can be seen as a form of self-mediating freedom, and hence in terms of the mastering of selving itself, as this emerges from the shaking of existential foundations that explicit eros brings about. There is a disarray in the selving, as the selving enters into more explicit self-consciousness, while at the same time there comes out a new call to self-shaping. This is the law of self, the nomos of to auto, and in a relative sense it is right and proper, but where in all this is the other, to heteros? Relation to the other in the relation of autonomy to itself is the real issue, not the self-affirmation of autonomy as such. The other might be seen as opposed to the selving and we are tempted with a Kantian dualism of heteronomy versus autonomy. Or the heteros might be seen as mediating the selving back to itself. This is something that often happens in eros, though there is more. I come more truly to myself in being in relation to the other, though the emphasis of autonomy as such is not on the relation to the other qua other, but rather on the medial role of the other in enabling me to come more fully to myself. Eros in autonomy seeks its own self-fulfillment, its own self-completion—even if, along the way to this, it finds it needs the other for this to be effected. Eros mediates with itself in and through autonomy and emerges in the form of a will that wills itself. Here emerges will in the sense of selving determining itself and its own direction. But if this will absolutely insists on itself, there is the surging up of the old Adam from the idiocy and the receptivity to the other is compromised, if not repudiated. The passio and the porosity are relegated into precursors of a conatus willing itself and striving to be itself. I find here an antinomy of autonomy and transcendence: absolutize the first and you must relativize the second; but if the second is absolute, there must be a relativization of the first. Eros enables autonomy, but is more than autonomy, both in its intimate sources and in its exceeding power toward the more universal. It empowers a maturer autonomy but it also relativizes it, for freedom cannot be self-determining outside of relation to the other. On the side of intimate origins, there is a self-surpassing that is not the same as autonomous self-determination; on the side of exceeding self, there is an implicit openness to all otherness, beyond every self-circling of autonomy. Erotics shows that this relativity to otherness need not be a curb or attack on freedom but it does call for openness to forms of freedom that are not purely autonomous. Out of eros, autonomy emerges, but in autonomy the urge of self-surpassing continues to ferment and out of this the desire for a higher and more ultimate form of erotic sovereignty comes. In this too the surpassing is not finished, since the relation to the other keeps impelling us in the direction of the agapeics of community. In the latter what is hidden in the erotics of the intimate universal comes most to light, comes most into the light.

All of this is a question not of denying autonomy but of questioning the identification of autonomy with freedom as such. There are freedoms before autonomy, there are freedoms beyond autonomy.³⁶ No simple contrast of autonomous master and heteronomous slave will do. There is always something neither servile nor sovereign. Even this is evident in autonomy as one form of freedom. In Kant autonomy leads to the postulates of immortality and God, and an ambiguous relation to the beyond of autonomy comes in again, but with not a few post-Kantian thinkers autonomy is hyper: the beyond as given, givenness as such, is either rejected or reconfigured, just as other. There is to be no received immortality, no God who gives. We must live as if there were no other life, no other ground of God, no “big Other” companioning our freedom. Absolute self-determination beyond all such others: this is the freedom of adolescent autonomy. It is foolish about the passio, led by the nose by a drunken conatus. Scoffing at the porosity, it loses all reverence, as if anything over it, anything superior to it, had to be pulled down for it to pull itself up. An envy of the divine superiority lurks in it. Insubordination to the superior becomes a way of life. Life is always more than our autonomy, now outraged at life’s givenness. If life becomes thus insubordinate to life itself, the outcome is a culture of death, marked deeply by an ontological refusal of the given conditions of life. We become full of metaphysical complaint that life is not as we would have determined it to be. We could do better than God; we would better God, outdo God; but that means undoing creation.

All this is false. It is a false absolutization of autonomy. And eros keeps breaking through, with respect to both its penia and its poros. Its ontological destitution is an opening of receptivity in the form of the need of the other. And the poros suggests a prior plenitude that allows one even to whine metaphysically that if God existed he did not do a good job, not as good a job as we think we could do. We fall to preaching at reality because it jilts us. A secret eros laughs at this. All we evince is the comedy of the false seriousness of the counterfeit double of God. If we cannot laugh at this we are lost. We harden into a ridiculous divinity. The glow of eros below the embers of this god will flare up again. And against the self-satisfaction of any happy mediocrity, excess will come out, excess beyond our autonomy.

This autonomy we claim is a bewitchment we cast on ourselves from out of the idiocy and from beyond ourselves where we secretly are, though we deny all beyonds. Since we deny any true beyond, the light cast from beyond is of a counterfeit double of God. And so we divinize ourselves thinking we are realizing ourselves. We are falling under the spell of ourselves—we are seducing and seducing, lover and beloved, a conceited parody of true self-love in the intimate universal. It is like holding a séance with oneself. There is food for comedy here. Eros is beneath this self-bewitchment, eros falls into this self-bewitchment, eros is beyond this self-bewitchment. It is almost as if it had to love itself wrongly to love itself rightly—wrongly while it thought it loved itself rightly. And in fact when it thought it loved wrongly—open to all—it loved more rightly.

Erotics, Pieties, and the Intimate Universal

The bewitchments of eros are fascinating, of course, and it is a fair question to ask if without them the enthrallment of love would be the poorer. Eros: “bewitched, bothered, and bewildered,” the song has it. Other than the self-bewitchments of autonomy, are there communal entrancements that bind us deeply? Bind us, but in an intimate belonging? These bonds used to be called pieties.³⁷ Beneath and beyond our autonomy circulates an eros that binds us intimately to what is beyond us, binds us also diversely. I will come again to the general eros (not general will) that is circulating in the communal intermediation of a people and that is bound up with the community of erotic sovereignty, but that obscure circulation of the general eros is connected with these bewitchments, these entrancements, and these pieties. I want to look at pieties as defined by special loves and loyalties that precede and exceed autonomous self-determination. Pieties surprisingly touch on the erotics of the intimate universal. Thus they can be also connected to the impulse to immortalize. They call on and call forth the underground love in the intimacy of being that we would perpetuate beyond ourselves because of a love first received from beyond ourselves.

The pieties range between the more intimate and the more universal, but none entirely separates the intimate and the universal. I will note these four: familial piety, local piety, political piety, religious piety. The piety of the family implicates the deep generational bonds of the intimate universal. Local piety shows us as grown in the flesh of a place on the earth, a place in the sun—there are deep attachments to one’s special place, a space all but consecrated in its singular specialness. This is intertwined with the piety of one’s people—intimate love for one’s own, deep beyond self-consciousness. Then there is political piety relative to a community larger than the family—the piety of the tribe, one form of which is patriotism. Finally, there is the piety of religion—at its most pure and absolute, this is the epitome of the intimate universal, the deepest and the highest bond with the divine, the darkest mystery and the brightest light.

Pietas was certainly one of the major manifestations of distinctive human honor and nobility in the premodern world. Perhaps with the Enlightenment and after there is the view among intellectuals that identifies piety with a kind of superstition, or abjectness, incompatible with our upright autonomy—a toothless crone, or a Crazy Jane jabbering away in an empty church. I think of Kant’s words to the effect that to be caught in a posture of prayer was perhaps the most humiliating, and indeed of his indignant outburst about groveling, even in the presence of the Most High.³⁸ Granted, piety sounds quaint or outmoded to many modern ears. And yet, how it astounds advanced commentators that old-fashioned habits like patriotism seem not to go away, sleeping perhaps for extended periods, and then astonishingly waking up in situations of crisis, such as the threat of war. This awakening is witness to our ultimate loyalties, most of the time taken for granted and out of mind. Sometimes different pieties clash; sometimes they are nested together more harmoniously; sometimes they require of us a finesse to determine what is fitting, with reference to patriotism or local allegiances, for instance. There is no one simple rule, no univocal principle.

Piety reflects reverence toward what we belong to in a special way. The specialness of the belonging evokes deep loyalty—loyalties to what we love. It is not easy to give a neutral justification of our loves. We love those to whom we belong—not that which belongs to us—and why we do, we cannot always articulate with univocal rationality. These loyalties are not to some faceless, anonymous universal, and yet as intimately particular they need not be in contradiction to a more universal openness. Perhaps this cannot finally be separated from an ultimate belonging in the religious universal, not itself to be identified with this or that institutional or sectarian form.

We now find it hard to understand the secret loves in the different pieties because, by and large, we have made privatized autonomy our “god,” and this god is a jealous god. The eros to be free is plurivocal and intimate but it can be univocalized and privatized, like modern religion, such that freedom becomes identified with my autonomy. This privatization does not quite open us to the intimate universal. Freedom is inseparable from the singularity of the human person, but the intimate universal constitutively invokes one’s relation to others. While Kant, high priest of a certain rational autonomy, warned that contamination by any trace of heteronomy risked the corruption of morality, the ruin of it, he does include all potential ethical others with the universalizability principle of the categorical imperative. I take this universality to obviate the singular intimacy that loses the constancy of an obligating rationality. Is the ideal of the kingdom of ends the intimate universal? One worries that it is closer to the faceless universalism of a rationalistic cosmopolitanism that “practically” loves humanity as such but no human being in particular. At most it goes half way to the intimate universal or splits it in half.

If the eros for self-determination is itself embedded in, and in some measure derived from, communal relations to others, some kinds of “heteronomy” must be reconsidered. The jealous monotheism of autonomy must be softened, and perhaps even rival gods given holier names. Pieties are very revealing because they communicate social overdeterminations (not self-determinations) between individual freedoms and bonds of belonging to something other than one’s own self-determination.³⁹ Without these bonds there are no human communities, and hence also no matrices of enabling value that allow individual autonomy itself to be freed. Autonomies are freed to be themselves in the ethos of these enabling matrices. The god autonomy mimics some features of religious piety: the one end in self, worthy to be loved as absolute for itself, even when the official story is that there is no god at all. I find allying evidence in the scourge of biblical religions—Nietzsche. He revised autonomy into supreme (erotic) sovereignty, beyond morality, and this god is not rational, as with Kant, but rhapsodic and sourced in dark Dionysian origins, an augur of our released creativity. Nietzsche gives us a polytheistic atheism of autonomy, aiming with this to explode the pieties of Judaism and Christianity, as well as Kant’s rational “piety.” In this polytheistic divinization, the truth of the god becomes plain, for even autonomy is a mask of the more ultimate god, and this god is now more nakedly revealed as will to power. The divinity of this autonomy reveals itself as will to power, for whom all things are nothing. To what then is the ultimate loyalty of freedom given? Are we left with impious freedom only? But how to make sense of impiety if there is not also operative some hidden sense of piety? One cannot be impious in a religiously neutral world, or a world neutered of its religious charge.

Turning now to the different pieties, we have already referred to filial or familial piety with the aesthetics of the intimate universal. This special bond of loyalty between parents and children is a spiritual bond based on the physical kinship of blood (consider, for instance, ancestor worship). Local piety signifies the special loyalty for one’s own place, one’s home—a spiritual kinship again closely tied to a physical reality (consider sacred kingship as wedded to a land in a hieros gamos, or the Doge of Venice espoused to the sea—Sposalizio del Mare).⁴⁰ Think of the homely example of how people are loyal to their home team.⁴¹ Think of the piety that, in such a sense, is enlarged by its love of a specific and special place: one loves this town, or this range of hills, or these four green fields. Think of the power of certain songs that celebrate place: I left my heart in San Francisco. Piety would hardly be the word on the lips of those thinking about this song; and yet a love of a place can steal into one’s soul, and it is not that the place then belongs to one, but something intimate in oneself belongs to that place. The heart is there, one leaves one’s heart there, even if one leaves. People who emigrate know this. One thinks too of students who study abroad: on leaving home, they learn something of what they took for granted at home, it being so intimate to their lives that they could not see it there; and maybe they come to know it in distance, perhaps even to love it more.

Civic or political piety in the past was closely allied with local piety,⁴² insofar as people were more sedentary in a particular place and communities were more circumscribed in demographical dimensions. This piety has to do also with marking boundaries in the earth. By contrast with wandering on the earth, a pastoral people will mark the earth as belonging to one’s people. It may be a family on what will be a farm, or a people gathered in a settlement or a town. One is native of a place or a nation, and one’s own are greeted as intimates in this circumscription of the aesthetic field. (Violence can occur, of course, in the division of the aesthetic field as one’s group makes its mark and stakes its territory.) There is something elemental here, and the intimacy of belonging can extend into the pietas of some of the great Italian cities—Florence and Venice, say. One could go further back to Rome, Athens, Jerusalem, and other places. The horror we feel at crimes like treason or patricide shows how deep these pieties still go, and the intimate love they violate. A like sense of a community of loyalty can be found in religious piety. As has been pointed out, by Augustine among others, the roots of religio imply a binding together, a bond of connectedness. Religious piety acknowledges our link with divine powers more ultimate than ourselves, our intimacy with the sacred. It need not be metaphysical abjectness but may be born in an ontological reverence, open to praise of the powers that vitalize, beautify, and perfect creation.

These pieties need not be an affront to our freedom. Our being embedded in often incognito loyalties gives the individual a commitment to values more ample than self-regarding self-insistence. Such piety is not an enforced abdication of our supine wills but an enlargement of willingness that is taken into the good of a community with what is beyond our lone selves. If a certain understanding of autonomy leads, at an extreme, to the weakening, if not destruction, of these bonds, we can paradoxically be left at the mercy of the tyrannical self-insistence of a particular social, or national, will to power, such as happened in Nazi Germany. One might be loyal to no one, but can there be a loyalty to nothing? To love nothing is to hate life, and free-floating hatred comes rather to hate others in whom the reversed negation of love condenses: say, the Jews as the reviled others.

There is tension, it is true, between freedom understood as individual autonomy and that loyalty of belonging that is of the essence of civic piety.⁴³ Insist on our own autonomy only, we must relativize this loyalty, we may cease to appreciate its call, and less and less we participate in it. We are shocked and stunned by its unexpected claim on us when it emerges, say, in times of attack or of a threat to a way of life. A claim to autonomy is not coincident with the claim to perpetuation that a way of life makes on us. The roots of the latter go deeper than what can be determined through oneself alone. The roots of these loyalties resist a completely rationalized account. They bear on what we love most intimately and most ultimately. To think one can lay them bare in a univocally rationalized way might be to kill them. Their work must be done out of sight, at least to a degree. The roots are in the ground but they are what enable growing (up), granting that the conditions above ground are also properly favorable to growth.⁴⁴ To insist that what is below ground, or on the ground, or home ground itself should be exactly the same as what grows above ground is disastrous for growing (up) overall. The upsurge of patriotism, say, in circumstances of danger testifies to sources of energy that are mostly hidden in the unexceptional conditions of everyday life but that flare up in situations of serious threat to a way of life. The flare up is as much expressive of the general eros ongoing in a way of life, mostly unnoticed and unnamed, as it is defensive of a commitment that is willed to continue to be.

Of course, in Western society the pietas we have inherited, even if it is often masked, or seemingly nonexistent in secularized forms of life, is rooted in religious traditions that are potentially universal in range. The places of the Western dialogue, Athens and Jerusalem, are cities of the universal, be it of reason or of revelation. Athens and Jerusalem both are cities of the promise of the intimate universal. That very germ of universality in each is itself in tension with the particularity of some more local pieties and commitments, as much as with a too-contracted individual notion of freedom as autonomy. And the freedom that comes from that more ecumenical piety relativizes many of the more local and particularized pieties. The question: Would this more ecumenical piety be a friend of the local pieties, or merely an alien power imposed on them or extirpating them? It seems to me that this tension of universal and particular springs up whether we take a more secular or religious view of the universal. That it is piety that is at stake in our fundamental loyalties indicates that a purely secular understanding of the difficulty is not enough to articulate the difficulty itself, much less address it with a persuasive response.

Hence again, the stunned amazement and rationalized irritation that some secular intellectuals exhibit when religious movements, or movements religiously inspired, show an extraordinary power of shifting attitudes on a large social scale—be this the civil rights movement or, more intransigently, a variety of fundamentalisms. The vehement erotics of the intimate universal is at work. No doubt, these surges of astonishing energy out of the secrets of the general eros are as often full of danger as they are sometimes full of promise. There may be formations of these surges of energy whose significance, once politically expressed, is death for the strange other: Nazism is an example. These surges of energy have to be understood, not just denounced. Do we have the terms to understand them? On the whole, since the religious wars of early modernity, we have not always had enough social finesse for the sacred secrets of the general eros, and have tried to dampen down, repress, even exterminate the dangerous aspects of these energies. And yet these energies also migrate into secular form, and instead of religious wars, we are fighting even more destructive wars against the idols of totalitarian regimes. But idolatry is a religious category, even when we claim to have superseded religion. Idols, or what I call the counterfeit doubles of God, seem to release the more dangerous equivocities of our eros and energies with sometimes massive power to affect all of life—and not necessarily for the good.

We can offer a vision of our being religious as the rich participation in the intimate universal. As with all things universal, we deal with our relation to what is more encompassing than our lone selves. But as with all things intimate, we deal with our great loves, what we love greatly, but also with our dangerous loves, what is greatly dangerous. For there are monstrous dangers here. One’s inarticulate loyalties, more often than not dark to themselves, can be given over to forms of life that trample the grapes of wrath into a wicked stew. Ethical finesses are corroded in this poisonous brew. Consider the pious language of Blut und Bodem. The earth of this blood is not wise. The general eros of a people dangerously excites itself in celebration of the passion of belonging together, a passion intoxicating the people with their power to affirm themselves, and with the humiliation, if not destruction, of those said to be not one’s own. One could say that the power of Nazism was a form of civic piety, in racist form; the place, or space, of Germania/Deutschland itself was sacralized as the space of singular destiny itself. This is an example in which a people’s loves, dark to themselves, can also be dark loves. (Heidegger speaks of the piety of thinking, but in the period of his dictatorial resolve to Nazism, his thinking fell under the spell of such a dark love.)

One might argue that this is a situation where the power of freedom as autonomy comes into its own. It might seem so, in that the individual seems called to stand for herself over against the powers of the social whole. Agreed, this standing fast is crucial. But is the concept of freedom as autonomy up to it? Is it just enough to stand for oneself? In some currents of thought, of course, it is not the individual autonomy that is the final autonomy: the last autonomy is that of the social whole. How then to guard against the mutation of this social autonomy into a kind of tyranny? The unconstrained autonomy of the social whole becomes hard to disentangle from a people’s will to power. Think of the Jacobinism of a kind of rationalism for which the human community is a faceless universal.⁴⁵ Where then is the ethical relation to what is other? And what form does civic piety, or any piety, occupy in such a tyrannous social holism? Is autonomy revealed in a will capable of terrorizing the other? The human community is not faceless: hence the importance of religion as revealing the intimate universal. Is “autonomy” a provisional mask in which a hidden will to power bides its time. Think of Nietzsche as in a line of inheritance from Kant: the rational will of Kant becomes the darker Dionysian will to power of Nietzsche, and insofar as both claim to be self-legislating, there is a line of familial continuity between them. The issue is not of heteronomous submission versus autonomous self-legislation but, and this might seem paradoxical, the question: What is freedom to obey?⁴⁶

Obedience entails a being given over, of giving oneself over, to something other than oneself.⁴⁷ One is not simply obeying oneself (the very word “obedience” contains a reference to hearing). Does this look all too like the dreaded “heteronomy” of the “big Other”? Kant may claim we obey the moral law, and he is not wrong; but then if we submit to the law, where is the self-legislation? How can we give ourselves the law if the law is already given to us and we must submit to it? Nietzsche is perhaps less disingenuous when he suggests that the philosopher of the future will give the law by creating it, affirming a sovereignty for which there is nothing higher than itself. And what then could one obey? Amor fati? Let Nietzsche say fate, but why obey that? Free obedience to fate looks like a peculiar self-canceling notion. Fate is not a god that frees. Fate is a “god” who makes us an offer we cannot refuse; even if we do not submit, we must submit.⁴⁸ Amor fati: we hide the equivocation between freedom that releases and obedience that binds by repeating it rather than answering it. While fate might be said to be a universal power beyond gods and men, there is nothing intimate about it, and hence the idea of loving it is questionable, to say the least.

Perhaps there is no univocal answer to the tension between freedom and obedience, so stated.⁴⁹ Perhaps the answer lies in a freedom released beyond autonomy and in an obedience that does not bind but graces. This would ask for the agapeics of the intimate universal. But to dwell for now with the more familiar pieties, if there is an answer in the practice of life, it would be less a matter of having a theory and more a matter of having the right religious and ethical orientation. This orientation bears on what we are and what we are to be. This we learn first by imitation, not self-determination or self-creation. Imitation is more basic than creation in (civic) education. Fecund social mimesis points to a delicate balance of freedom and obedience. Thus a child or young person can only learn in this matter by example and by witness. Civic knowledge may be diverse, but crucial is knowledge by imitation of an exemplary other, not first by study of a theory or by insisting on creativity or autonomy. There is a civil mimesis that is a covenantal binding across generations, learned more like learning a native language. We listen to others before we speak for ourselves.

Thus too an inheritance of civilizing form, a heritage, is communicated from one generation to the next. Pieties and being civically educated into them are bound up with what one might call an ancestral knowing. Ancestral knowing involves a covenant with human generations, both the predecessors and the descendants, those now gone, those yet to come (Burke knew this deeply). This has regard for a long time, not just the long ago. A true conservative is concerned with the future, not lost in the past, since his or her care is with what is worthy to be passed on in life (tradition as a handing on: tradere). The seeds of the new must be planted in the ground of the old, and this ground must be kept properly fertile, or else there is no growing. We see this need in the ecological conservation of nature. It is no less needed in the ecology of a human culture.⁵⁰ Mindfulness of the history of the becoming of a people will include ancestral knowing of those exemplars of its way of life, both those confirming what is inherently good in it and those who have heroically challenged its deficiencies and kept a people truer to its more authentic religious and ethical values.⁵¹

In the plurivocity of pieties, there is tension between more particular, local loyalties and the call of a more universal responsibility, such as comes to us, certainly in the West, from the great monotheistic traditions and perhaps their secular doubles. We are always in between the more local and the more universal, diversely stressed by different calls on our ethical, civic, and religious responsibilities. If civic education happens more in the moderate middle, this last piety comes from the extremes. In times of great disturbance, such as war, the extremes invade the middle and test our ultimate pieties. Our local pieties are not immune from a more radical accounting, which they may not always answer in their own terms alone. They too are not autonomous, but under the measure of a higher justice or mercy. This is again a religious-ethical matter, in which, yes, there is a singular responsibility on the singular individual, but that responsibility is not completely of its own self-legislation, or self-determination, even though only the singular self can choose for itself.

In such situations, perhaps what we most need are those singular witnesses who have the spiritual courage to stand against the social self-intoxications that threaten freedom, sometimes perhaps even in the name of freedom. I mean prophetic witnesses, those who place themselves at risk under the responsibility of an ultimate good that is even more ultimate than the immanent values here and now of prospering or not, of surviving or not surviving. Prophetic witnessing means living in obedience to the light of an ultimate good that is not of our own autonomous self-determination, whether individual or social. This is a piety that requires of us a courage for transcendence beyond ourselves.⁵² This witness may not be what is asked of us in civic education, but if civic education is not open to its possibility, then one might ask if civic piety can sustain, on its own, its own health. At its best it can intimate the loyalty of this other reverence.

This last universalism is not quite civic religion or quite the rational cosmopolitanism of a Kant or a Nussbaum. Because it is religious, it knows something of the kink in the soul and will. It knows the temptation of eros to hubris and tyranny. Its piety is inseparable from a humility that knows we cannot plan and construct our own absolute salvation. If this intimate universal chastens hubris and tyranny, it is not per se hostile to more particular pieties. Nevertheless, it is tempered enough to allow, so to say, the becoming glory that is fitting to the immanent pieties of family and place and people.

The Community of Erotic Sovereignty

Pieties, as communal loves, are inseparable from the secret circulation of the general eros, and indeed the even more secret community of agapeic service. The connection of pieties and the temptation to tyranny, just noted, ask us to look at the community of erotic sovereignty and the moderation of eros turranos by friendship, and to this I will turn in the next chapter. To round off this chapter I return to the connection, noted at the outset, of eros with sovereignty in respect of our seeking to be “above,” our desiring of the superior. The superior as above us can be diversely understood. It can refer to our exceeding to what is transcendent in goodness beyond ourselves (the prayer of Jesus to Abba—self-transcending with transcendence as other). It can refer to our desire to be our own superior, to being superior to ourselves in more truly being (above) ourselves (Nietzsche and the overman—self-transcending without transcendence as other). There might even be a meontological sense of sovereignty (think of a Buddhist surpassing of desire toward a serenity superior to suffering, or Epicurean sovereignty free from anxiety in a similar ascetic way, albeit in the garden that is extrapolitical).⁵³

The erotics of the intimate universal is articulated in the social intermediation of immanent excellence, and this touches on sovereignty when not exhausted by any network of instrumentalities. Social intermediations are subtended by the idiotic and the aesthetic, and because of the equivocity there, if the intimacy is warped so too will the universal be warped, just as also a warped universal will set out to suppress the intimate. How true to the porosity and the passio are these intermediations of intimate and immanent power? The dominion of serviceable disposability is predominantly shaped by a calculative exploitation of the aesthetic. It is governed by useful expedience rather than excellences beyond expedience. An insinuating and instrumentalizing univocalism seduces us, whether we homogenize life to exploit desire in the widest market possible, or whether we heterogenize life to exploit multiple differences and serve the same end. It caresses even the tender intimacies of eros, if this sells or helps sell. If a more intimate sense of excellences is dissolved, expedience itself comes to skate on the frozen lake of nihilism where the ice is not thick enough and we go under in the end. Serviceable disposability would be a social intermediation driven by many purposes but the purposes would be purposeless. Nothing would answer the desire for a more ultimate excellence, both singular and communal, both intimate and universal. We might generate a (quasi-)infinite multiplication of finite satisfactions but this is an always unsatisfied satisfaction. A community showing this joyless satisfaction hides its own lack of ultimate purpose from itself. Without the superior excellence, our desire bonds with the serviceable and disposable, and finds itself in bondage to what it consumes to fill up its emptiness.

We cannot but cry out for something more, even as we dare not cry out for something more. The community of erotic sovereignty intermediates something of this “more,” energized to transcend to what is “above,” what is superior. However, this too is redolent with equivocity. As there is a servile “being below,” there is a “being above” that lords over all beneath it. A true lord would not lord thus. The equivocity comes from a mixture of the passio and conatus, for in erotic sovereignty the conatus is to the fore, as seeking to come into one’s own powers, thereby to approximate something more supreme in itself, something justified for itself. If serviceable disposability is work, sovereignty is play. Not being just a means to an end, this is useless, and yet it is something supremely useful, since it communicates of a consummation of our most intimate and universal powers.⁵⁴

At the roots of sovereignty there is the idiocy of the erotic that is communicated in the social circulation of the (re)sources of a people’s power. Serviceable disposability often functions by means of a dianoetic universal that allows exploitation of the equivocities of our desire. Erotic sovereignty reveals a more dialectical intermediation of social power that dips into the idiocy, communicates and expresses itself in the aesthetics, and carries a many beyond its own equivocity. This social carry is the unnamed conveyor of the implicit call of the universal, even when a many does not know this explicitly, offering to it an incognito sense of itself as a communal whole. The intimate universal is at work in the instrumental universal and in the holistic universal. Thus with the striving for the holistic universal of erotic sovereignty there is the transformation of a mere many into the community of a people or the community of a political whole.

Relative to the political whole, sovereignty bears on the issue of power in society, and the center(s) of highest governing authority in a community. Generally, modern theory has tended to stress the univocity of that center but the intimate universal reveals the need to think of plurivocity here. The sources of sovereignty are inseparable from the idiocy or intimacy of communal being, where there is an overdeterminacy of reserves of social power. These reserves cannot be univocally identified with this power or that. The sources of social power are surplus (re)sources. There is a companioning endowment: given to the many before the many gives the power to itself, or gives itself to itself and so finds its own distinctive identity as itself for the first time. I say overdeterminacy in the intimacy, since this surplus (re)source of secret power is not always concretized as this determinate power or that. My sense is that the theories about sovereignty that invoke a contract or a general will make these secret resources much too determinate. Partners must already be determinate participants in a shared enterprise before they can enter a contract. Likewise, the notion of general will is more indeterminate than overdeterminate, and will always tempt us to make it more determinate than the (re)sources truly are. There is rather an intimate overdeterminacy of the reserves of power. I would relate this to our transcending powers, understood in a social sense, and allowing also the difference of erotic and agapeic transcending. Sovereignty is aligned more with the erotic than the agapeic, and so we might speak of a general eros rather than, with Rousseau, of a general will. Of course, if the universal is intimate, it is not a mere generality, but the point is worth making in these terms in any case. The general eros (equivocally a love of the universal) refers us to the intimate energies of desire circulating in a people, and does not at the outset immediately refer to the eros of (potential) rulers. This eros circulates in a community, and because we think it is inchoate we think it is indeterminate; but again I would say it is more overdeterminate than indeterminate, since the recessed resources are surplus rather than a matter of lack. A many may not know this eros more determinately, and understand its intimate connection with its own social self-determination, until a singular exemplar or groups of exemplars somehow succeed in incarnating it—incarnating it in an exemplary way, that is, concentrating what Hegel would call the social substance of a people. Sovereignty in the more explicit sense begins to crystallize itself in and through such exemplary incarnations. Even if it is a singular hero/heroine who embodies it, this incarnation is yet a social incarnation, an incarnation of the social togetherness with which the many were hitherto intimate but incognizant, beyond longing.

If “will” is a particular determination emergent from the overdeterminate eros, the sources of social sovereignty are not in a determinate will of the people. Sovereignty crystalizes from the overdeterminate energizing of the erotics of social being, at work prior to all determinate willing of this or of that. In an important sense, the “people” is ignorant of what is desired, and indeed of what it “wills,” until some intimate determinations of the overdeterminate eros are incarnated in exemplars, now denominated as having claims to be sovereign. More definite will comes to be out of the overdeterminate eros that, precisely because there is an excess to all determination about it, can be both inspiring and dangerous, and perhaps both at once. The erotic threshold on which the eros of a people is crystallized requires both the self-relation of a people and its relation to other peoples. But as the latter can be foes as well as friends, so also the former can be a communal self-willing that curves back to stress simply its own self-identity or a porous boundary on which a communal identity released beyond itself can be freed.

The sources are not in a contract, since contract represents the social expression of a people’s power in terms of too-determinate acts of calculated will. There is an unknowing social fidelity operative before calculative reason and its contracts. General eros is not a general will, for will is also too determinate. Nor is it divine will, if we think of this as an absolutely determining source that determines univocally all that flows from it, marking it with a univocally predetermined plan (which those in power claim to know, represent, and execute). The sources of power are more primordial than the determinate will. Humanly speaking, the sources have rather to do with the intimate eros of transcending power to be that is more than every determinacy, and that, as rooted in the intimacy of being, is finally never separable from the agape of being. Ultimately this has to be referred to the gift of the endowed power to be that is communicated into being by the overdeterminate origin. This source of power is more primordial than will to power. The intimate gift of endowed power does, it is true, allow the possibility of equivocity, since the power, as our own, can take itself as simply our own rather than as endowed. This equivocity also allows the overlapping of erotic sovereignty with forms of will to power that simply affirm themselves and nothing other than themselves. But this contraction of the affirmation is not absolutely necessitated, and indeed the originating eros as affirming from the outset beyond itself makes this possible.

This view of originally endowed power can be occluded by some of the connotations of the word “sovereign.” “Sovereign” comes from the French souverein, from vulgar Latin superanus, “someone who is above.” Hence the connection with “being above,” indeed being supreme. We are moving in the family of words such as super (Latin), or huper, or über. Being on top, being first, being number one, enjoying supremacy, not being subordinate; being in the position of height: this is to be a position of “being above.” If there is a being exalted, is “being above” a self-exaltation? How so “above” if the sources of communal power are deep in the intimacy of the general eros? If sovereignty emerges in the erotics of our self-surpassing being, every “being above” refers back to the deeper sources of power immanent in our being. These rock us back on the idiocy of the intimate universal. This idiocy might be the seed of our divine promise, but the equivocity of eros reveals a double potency, namely, the twinning of power and lack. Power is expressed in a process of self-becoming, whereby the lack is overcome, and desire comes into something of its own fulfillment. We seek a kind of wholeness in this, and erotic sovereignty communicates some achieved expression of a powerful wholeness. This does not eradicate struggle and suffering; indeed without them the achievement hardly makes sense; the achievement is most often an episode of resolved suffering, or suffering transfigured by the ingression of a grace from beyond itself.

Once more too individualistic a view is not fitting, since we stand on the shoulders of predecessors who show something of already achieved excellence. The erotic sovereign might claim exemplary supremacy but in fact then the humble mimetics of receiving from other precedent originals is occluded by ingratitude. Erotic sovereignty, even in the exemplary singular individual, cannot be understood without relation to the other. We can experience our porosity as a lack, like a hole, for there seems nothing there, a lack as more like a chaos, hiding perhaps hidden horrors, such that we feel impelled beyond the gaping void, going toward others, in a way to shield us against the reminder of our fragile finitude. In our vulnerability to nothingness, we secure ourselves through our own powerful self-affirmation, but we could never do this if we did not go toward the others who give us ourselves back. Given to ourselves, we surpass ourselves, but we do not come to ourselves until we are given back to ourselves. Our self-determining is bounded by these extremes: our being given to be and our being given back to ourselves. It is porous at the threshold of its own initiative and at the boundary of its own achievement. It is a between-being always. The intermediation with the others gives us back to ourselves beyond lack. Without intermediating and confirming others, we would throw ourselves beyond ourselves, again and again, beyond the ever-returning lack, exploiting our twin power always to “project” ourselves one more time into the void that will never return us to ourselves. Were this the end of the matter, desire would be a futile striving into nothing, out of nothing, swindled by the freakish flash of its own self-affirming power in the pointless between. We remain oblivious of the deeper participation in the intimate universal at the very roots of our being given to be at all, until we touch the other who, in return, touches us and returns us both to the love of being that is prior to us both. The return of our affirming power to itself as confirmed power is served by passage toward and into and through the others.

True, we ignore or forget the others who have given us to ourselves. Ungrateful autonomy thinks it has generated itself purely out of itself. The social intermedium, the ethos of relatedness that has enabled it to be itself, is forgotten. In fact, ungrateful autonomy may resent being entangled at all in the bonds of intermediation, given the doubleness of these bonds as communicating between erotic sovereignty (as for itself) and the enabling communal intermedium (as reflecting the desire of the others). This intermedium might seem a smart to its asserted claim to being free above the intermedium. The result can be that it is resentful of being given anything at all. It does not want to be in the position of receiver at all. So it finds itself at odds with the primal porosity, and contemptuous of any passio essendi. Accentuating its conatus essendi as singularly self-affirming, it recoils from being in the debt of any other, for debt shows it not to be absolutely above the others but, despite all protestations to the contrary, always to be in an incontrovertible solidarity with the others. There can be hidden hatred of the others for placing one in their debt. But hatred is incontrovertibly to be in a bond with the others, even in violently breaking the bond. This we often find with erotic sovereignty: its being stressed between its debt and its “being above,” between its need of the others and its being full of itself, between its sustenance by the intermedium of social relations and its desire to stand over all such relations.

Such an elemental ambiguity seems to be constitutive of erotic sovereignty. We cannot disentangle claims to singular sovereignty from a sustaining social intermedium. We cannot disentangle claims to superiority from indebtedness to hidden intimacies of endowed power. We cannot disentangle claims to supreme power from the powerlessness that is the other side of endowed power, since without the givenness of enabled power there is no being empowered at all. If we look at perhaps the two main traditional theories of sovereignty, we find a reflection of this ambiguity. The ambiguity mirrors something in the differences between erotic sovereignty and agapeic service. The old view saw sovereignty as ultimately deriving from the divine (non est enim potestas nisi a Deo, St. Paul, Romans 13:1). The more recent view sees the source as the will of subjects (popular sovereignty, for instance). These two views, of course, can be diversely related, and each is full of its own ambiguities. For what a people is and what its will is are by no means univocal, and much recedes into intimate, sometimes impenetrable equivocity when the (general) eros of a people is at stake. The power of God is mysteriously overdeterminate. So were one, on the other side, to grant that all power ultimately is a grant of the divine origin, the idea of the divine at issue is also not univocal, and diverse conceptions will be mirrored in diverse conceptions of powers, and perhaps vice versa, if our “god” is a projection of the will to power of a people (as Nietzsche, for instance, seemed comfortable to grant about the earlier Jews). An overt politics of worldly will to power can conceal a covert theology of nothing. Nothing is God. Depending on one’s “political theology,” there is no necessary connection between granting the divine grant and totalitarian theocracy, most certainly not, if the divine offers an agapeic grant. Carl Schmitt is famous for his manner of claiming that modern political concepts are secularized theological ideas. Not as much in evidence in these discussions, and this is true of Schmitt also, is finessed theology, theology that has an intimate feel for different conceptions of the divine. Our understanding of God will shape as much the theological side of “political theology” as the political. It makes a crucial difference if we have finesse for the agapeics of the divine in how then we approach the politics of erotic sovereignty, indeed how we also understand the ambiguity of erotic sovereignty itself. If there is only the empty space of nothing (rather than the enabling porosity of being) with respect to that agapeics, or if it is denied or pushed out of the picture entirely, erotic sovereignty will itself mutate, and the chances of a tilt toward a more dubious, even destructive understanding of (will to) power will ensue. Divine sovereignty will be viewed, say, as an ideological superstructure hiding the absolutist will to power of the monarch or the ruling few. Taking note of the agapeics of the divine reveals the impossibility of this view, or rather its mutilation of what divine sovereignty might be.

What of the medieval theory of the two powers, temporal and spiritual? Did it only derive temporal power from God to sanction an absolutism of temporal power in worldly immanence? That the theory might be used, or abused, that way may be so, but that it was meant to be taken that way does not make sense. What is to the fore is the divine measure as the highest measure, a measure hyperbolically superior relative to all measures of human power, a measure measureless and thus severely limiting any absolutizing of temporal power. One thinks of Aquinas: the point is not just the subordination of temporal power to spiritual powers, but perhaps a kind of apophatic reverence for the eternal law as prior to natural law, itself prior to positive law as proclaimed and enacted by the worldly sovereign. The difference was ultimate between delegated power and the ultimate source of delegating power. The sovereign was a servant. This is not at all Nietzsche’s “Roman Caesar with the soul of Christ,” for Nietzsche’s remarkable suggestion is governed by the economy of self-affirming will to power in which the agapeics of the divine ends up warped, as does the sense of the “superior” and of the “supreme.” The agapeics of the divine transforms the erotics of sovereignty. It calls to account any temptation to superbia. The service of the political sovereign is mediately a divine service, in between the superior God and world as both glorious and wretched, in being in service of the good of the people. It is not will to power that is sovereign but justice as the fitting governance of endowed power. The sovereign throne was not to forget that fear and trembling were the penitential thorns pleated into its coronation crown.

It is entirely consistent with the notion of erotic sovereignty that often our understandings of God and political power remarkably intertwine. I see this once again in light of the intimate universal. There is nothing more intimate than God, and nothing more universal, and we might anticipate a shift in each depending on how we understand the intimate universal. If we understand our own being in its intimacy in terms of a deep-down stress on conatus essendi without proper contact with the passio and the porosity, then we will tend to find the erotics as tilting in the direction of eros turannos. And this too will go hand in hand with an idea of God closer to the image of the tyrannical heteronomy, against which, as the “big Other,” modern autonomy is in revolt. Commentators have pointed out rightly that the idea of absolute monarchy is a modern notion, not medieval, and not Augustinian-Platonic either. One can see a version of divine sovereignty as absolutely unilateral and univocal determination as making a tango with modern monarchical absolutism, with its self-insistent urge to take over and centralize power (and there is a third too: nature no longer a creation but an absolutely determined machine).

I know that the standard picture of modernity is also one where the liberation of humanity from heteronomous powers is celebrated. But in fact the idea of a divine measure superior to political sovereignty is compatible with so-called popular sovereignty, said to be a creation of the modern age. There were thinkers who thought that God did not determine his worldly representative, in the absence of the mediate way of the consent of the people (I am thinking of Suárez, for instance, and Cardinal Bellarmine, but there were others). The worldly sovereignties might be less univocal and more plurivocal. With an agapeics of the divine the univocally centralized model of sovereignty is open to question, since with this agapeics one could suppose a communication of political power in accord with the adage omne bonum est diffusivum sui. This diffusion is not to be seen as a univocal determination by force of power, but a plurivocal overdetermination by grace of endowed enabling. Generally in modernity we find a univocalization of power and, with this, a form of monotheism where the same concentration of power is univocalized. If the human affirms its freedom, as conatus essendi, and indeed as to be the One in immanence, then the stress in erotic sovereignty is resolved on the side of giving all to ourselves and receiving nothing, of being in debt to nothing other than ourselves. The tyrannical heteronomy of the “big Other” must then be the enemy of the self-determining human being (Bakunin, for instance, is a classic example of this). The intimate universal in which we participate goes underground, and we claim to be the focus of a project of the universal, our own self-universalization, in the intimacy of immanent being, here and nowhere else. The divine, seen thus, is not the agapeic companion of freedom but the enemy of our erotic thrust for full self-determining being. It is not surprising that sexuality becomes such a contested space in relation to God, and the claimed liberation of the human. But this contestation is only a sexually accented form of a more pervasive war between human and divine power. If each of these is said to be the one and only source of significant power, one must subjugate or subsume or liquidate the other to fulfill the logic of univocity as applied to sovereignty. Spousal economics, spousal erotics become hard to credit.

It need hardly be recalled that significant trends in modernity drive toward the human consolidation of power as for itself. This cannot be uncoupled from a change in the meaning of justice which, previously referred to the divine measure, now is weakened in its priority to power. We univocalize nature as other, we try to univocalize God, and our own self-understanding gets caught up in the same project of univocalization, now enacted in our project of absolute self-determination. The absolutely determining God as other must go, and even nature as subject to determination is ultimately so determined as serving our project of self-determination. All of this is in the name of freedom, of course, the one god who seems to escape liquidation, perhaps because it seems to be the power to liquidate all other gods, and perhaps even itself. There is none other beside it. If this deification of freedom is governed by the law of the same (auto-nomos), how to prevent this apotheosis of autonomy leading to tyranny? We seem to have an absolutism that is its own law (auto-nomos) and hence above every law. If there is something of this in absolutist monarchy, how different is this from an atheistic totalitarianism? There might be fear and trembling in the first, while in the second fear and trembling become the means of indoctrination and redoctrination of what Hobbes rightly called the Leviathan, namely, the “mortal god.” Fear and trembling open the intimate porosity to unholy terror and the liquidation of the will of individuals. We see this with many modern masters of unholy terror, be they a Lenin, or a Stalin, or a Hitler, or a Mao, or a Pol Pot. The liquidation is deeply intimate, and the terrified porosity serves a project that, while claiming to be universal, is finally infernal. There is no reverence for the agapeic divinity as above and beyond all our world-historical projects. Fiendish music comes again from the Bull of Phalaris, though it holds us spellbound, and the singing cicadas have fallen ominously silent. We are in the belly of the beast and no one can answer to the name of Jonah.

And so we can connect the erotics of the intimate universal with the reconfiguration of the ground of power in modernity, insofar as this is inseparable from a will to power seeking autonomous self-determination. But the latter is not fully true to the erotics, in distorting the priority of the porosity and the passio, and hence also not true to the intimate universal that now mutates into a project of will-full conatus. Once having made God into a univocal, unilateral power to determine, we set out to negate that God as incompatible with our claims to be free. But our claim to be free thus is also under the spell of the project of conceiving all being, ourselves included, in terms of a more and more univocal will to power. As the spell of univocity spreads its disenchanting enchantment, God disappears or becomes incredible, and we become governed by a default atheism of which we are scarcely conscious. We live in the time of default atheism. The erotics of the intimate universal does not find itself then on the threshold of the agapeics of the divine that qualifies and obliges our exercises of enabled power. The erotics turns down into the darkness below the ground of the underground rather than ascending up to the surface of the earth and the light above us. The free air above us might take the wind out of the sails of our autonomous self-determination and we resent that thought as deflating our afflatus. We see in our self-made univocalization of divine power something that makes it appear as a tyrannical heteronomy but we have to ask if it is our own will to power that conjured this idol of divine tyranny. There is nothing but a dubious confusion between the human and the divine in this idol. Erotics (as sunousia) is not bereft of confusion—but this “fusion with” (con-fusio) of love is different from the fusion in which true differences are set at naught in the name of immanent sameness. Is it the God-man or the man-God? The time of default atheism has not answered this question. The man-God of our confusion is the inheritor of the mortal God—without the immortal God. This idol wastes the earth in the name of the idol of immanent confusion, when at the end of the absolute project we will create a new god of the earth who is to be all in all, though without wise blood, and shedding much, too much blood, in the name of counterfeit doubles of social wisdom.