The Intimate Universal: The Hidden Porosity Among Religion, Art, Philosophy, and Politics

The Recess of the Agapeic: Incognito Generosity

Eros has recurrently been a concern of philosophy; indeed as already suggested, there is an erotics of reason that might be seen as constitutive of the philosophical quest. There is also an acknowledgment of friendship in philosophy and something of the fastness of philia enters in the love of philosophy for wisdom. We do not find an analogous philosophical concern for agape. Perhaps this is because it is often held that agape is a specifically Christian concern, while supposedly philosophy is Greek and, in a certain sense, pagan. The thought would be: it is appropriate for Christian theologians to reflect on agapeic love, especially as present in sacred scripture, but for the rest, and especially the philosopher, this would be too confining by far, in an all-but-sectarian sense. And so we philosophers shift uneasily at the mention of the agapeic.¹ One even finds the theologian not entirely comfortable at the prospect that philosophical thought might address the agapeic.

The contrasts implied in these views are not, I think, finessed enough, especially if there is an agapeics of the intimate universal. The agapeic cannot be confined to one religious tradition, and though it may mark intimately a particular religious tradition, there is a promise of the universal in it, and hence there may be something to it that is also constitutive of our deepest and most ultimate seeking for truth and goodness. Of course, such seeking is not a matter of a theory or a system, but is of an ultimate love at work in our intimate being that finds communication in the possibility of agapeic mindfulness and community. As in principle open in an unrestricted sense, philosophical thought cannot ghettoize, or sectarianize, or declare beyond the pale of respectable reason the agapeic.

In initially broad terms the contrast of the erotics and agapeics might be put this way: in one there seems to be a desire lacking fulfillment, yet seeking it; in the other, there is a surplus love exceeding itself from a fullness already real. In eros the porosity of being is taken over by the striving to be of the conatus, seeking in and through the other to come to some self-fulfillment. In agape the love of being in porosity to the other does not need or insist on being self-fulfilled in relation to the other but offers the service of a compassionate goodness given for the other qua other. This contrast is not sufficient, however, if we set up a dualism of the two. We have already seen how the intimate universal is at work in the recesses of the idiotics, in the appearances of the aesthetics, and in the self-surpassing of the erotics. The presence of the intimate universal is already there as the promise of the agapeics. By way of absolving the dualism, one could remember that eros is not void of the promise of agapeic generosity. There is a porosity to the divine origin in it; the passio can participate in the deepest receptivity and patience; and the striving of the conatus can be the energy of a self-surpassing that knows it is most deeply energized by something more than itself. Eros seeks more than itself in seeking itself because its energized striving is already empowered by a secret agapeic surplus to which it is (called) to remain true, though it is free to turn it away and turn itself awry.

Perhaps another reason for the recess of the agapeic and its often incognito generosity of being has something to do with the following. It is often the case in modern (political) thought that the underlying motivation of all human association is seen in light of our lack and aggression. We are lack, given our vulnerability and exposure—this is porosity seen as open to the threat of what is other. We are aggression, given that in the exposure to threat we must secure ourselves over against the other—hence the porosity is closed with a security border. So we protect ourselves against what is other and this protection becomes the basis of other associative moves. Thus Hobbes and others following him (one might consult Carl Schmitt in our time): it is the fear of death rather than the love of life that moves all associative relations. Without the fear of death we might live in self-enclosed contentment or containment. But we are driven to make pacts or contracts with others, all with the purpose of securing the conditions of continued life against the threat of death. The other is a potential enemy, the condition of life is war, and eros becomes an eris. The eris is always on the verge of falling out of the affirming “to be” of eros and the course of this death governs without cease its want(ing) for power. Further to this, self-interest in some form rules all our motivation. Generosity is seen in this light as quid pro quo, understood on the economy of what comes back to one from what is expended beyond one. This is a self-circling economy—self-circling in the way the fear of death induces self-encirclement. Our contracts with the other merely widen self-encirclement. The mortal god is only the widest self-encirclement. We live not because we love life but because we fear death.

Against this, there is the agapeics of the intimate universal. There is an incognito generosity or surplus of affirmative “to be” as good that is always at work. This is driven out of the foreground of the picture with this stated way of thinking. Yet it is more elemental and original. We do not become socially associated; we are what we are in an always already at work association.² The meaning of this is something more than ourselves individually—it is also something more than the self-mediation of a particular community. It is participation in something more primal, a community more primal that this or that determinate or self-determinate community—this is the overdeterminate commons.

When we are self-circling selves, we wait for death; we do not live; and we are not awake to the gift of the incognito generosity; we do not thank that on which we now feast; we have encircled ourselves and we keep death outside the circle—for now. But this is not to live—as if life were only a prelude to postponed death, a prelude that precludes life. The incognito generosity allows us to live beyond death in life, before death comes to us. A person “full of life”: such a one we admire. And beyond death in life a truer sense of community can come to be—not out of incognito generosity but out of generosity with a face, and even one with a name.

Ultimately, the religious character of the issue cannot be avoided, and this will keep returning. The intimate universal is witnessed by the community of agapeic service, in which the metaxological relation to the divine, in its intimacy and its universality, comes to manifestation. The intimate universal has to do with this as the consummate community in which there is a commons of the divine, a sacred koinonia in which our most intimate heart is engaged in love’s quest and enjoyment. This agapeics of the intimate universal is beyond the dominion of serviceable disposability, and also beyond the power of sovereignty we find especially in the political realm. There is an original trust in the good, immanent in the idiotics, aesthetics, and erotics of the intimate universal, here most tested and most redeemed. We seem to come out of nothing in birth, and return to nothing in death. Is there an elemental trust in the good of the “to be” more than nothing? In our sojourn in the between, is there an agapeics of the intimate universal that is more than nothing, and more than us also? An agapeics of trust that, even in coming to nothing, is more than nothing? Death is a mystery, as is birth. To conclude we know it to be nothing is as untrue as to conclude that we know with rationalistic certitude that it is more. Birth and death are thresholds and transitions, and as the radical transition of birth is creation, the radical transition of death may not be nothing, but resurrection. In the face of the nothing, the agapeics keeps promise with life, is itself the love that gives life and the love that affirms life, even in its darkest hours. If one were to speak religiously, one would say the kingdom of heaven is among us: the agapeics of the intimate universal is now. Yet the kingdom of heaven is to come—this is the call of the agapeics to be true to its promise of the community of goodness, goodness human and more. We can make this into the kingdom of erotic sovereignty by drawing a boundary around the intermedium of the between. The porosity is appropriated as our space—to be guarded or expanded, as will to power desires or makes possible. Still Caesar and his empire come second, are derivative from the incognito of the agapeics.

Friendship, Intimate Universality, and Tyrannical Eros

Can friendship throw light on the intimate universal? Friendship is not quite eros or agape, and in some ways is between these two, but there is a long tradition in which friendship is of immense importance, from the Pythagoreans, through the major philosophers, ancient and medieval, through varieties of refractions of friendship in religious communities from early Christianity to the high Middle Ages and the threshold of modernity.³ Friendship seems to have fallen into relative neglect in modern philosophy, though it is not entirely absent, in Montaigne, for instance, in Kant,⁴ in Nietzsche. More recently, Derrida, has offered us his politics of friendship.⁵

I want to suggest that a kind of eros turannos has thrust itself to the fore in modernity, with consequences, not only for the thrusting to one side of the heavenly eros, but also for the recessing of friendship as well as agape. Of course, friendship as a human happening is not lacking in modernity. The reality of our condition is that we need, seek, and offer friendship in various ways. This reality may or may not be reflected in the concerns of thinkers, or even a culture at large. One senses that eros, or variations of it, is less and less recessive and reserved. Indeed in the last hundred years or so, the rejection of reserve has led to more and more shameless expressions of eros. Such unreserved expressions lead to a peculiar erotic result: the destruction of the very intimacy of the essence to eros. Unreserved eros produces a form of eros turannos, for which there is nothing intimate to be guarded. Everything intimate is to be broken into, even to the point of desecration. In this light, or darkness, the tyrant and the torturer are inseparable. Both hate the secret intimacy of love. Eros turannos is finally a hatred of the very love of eros itself. Does a culture that cannot tell the difference between the intimate love of eros and pornography show itself to be in collusion with such tyranny?

This recess of friendship has consequences for the expression of human power, and the meaning of its measure. Thinkers like Heidegger are not wrong in referring to modernity as an epoch of will to power, but can this claim be applied to the whole of the Western tradition? An important consideration is the fact that tyranny has been an abiding concern of philosophers since ancient times, a concern inseparable from an engagement with friendship. We find this, for instance, in Xenophon’s Hiero and, importantly for us here, in Plato’s philosophy. Running through his work is a horror of tyranny. Tyranny is something monstrous. And yet this monstrousness is what we humans manifest. Plato’s recounting of the savagery of our dreams is telling enough of our monstrousness. The tyrant wakes and lives his feral dream.

Consider Macbeth as a study of a tyranny that steps beyond good and evil and the moral measure. Before he commits his regicide, Macbeth hesitates, and says under provocation from Lady Macbeth: “I dare do all that may become a man; who dares do more is none” (Macbeth, 1.7.48–49). And then Macbeth does more. The result is not only the murder of the lawful king, God’s anointed, but the inexorable unfolding of a monstrous tyranny in which the daring to do more must lead in the end to nothing but death, lead to nothing. Tyrannical daring dooms itself, and death is its desert. And the question comes: What becomes a man? What is it to become a man? What is becoming for a man? The question is not only what we are to become. The question is: What is comely, what becoming, in the sense of the fitting? What is fitting, given the eros of the human creature as capable of surpassing itself? Of being itself, yet willing to be more, of becoming what one is by becoming what one is not? We cannot but become what we are, though what we are is not all that we can become. We are ourselves and not ourselves. This double condition is both unstable and powerful, and puts us to the question: What are we to become, what is it to become a man, what will become of us? Tyranny germinates in that double condition of instability and power.

Eros reveals that we are the exceeding of definite limits, but the measure of that exceeding is not univocally evident. What is becoming for us when we become what exceeds all determinate measure? How to find measure, if we exceed such determinate measure? The human being might be the measure of all things, as Protagoras averred, but is it the measure of itself? Is there not something about us that is not to be determinately measured? How then to find a becoming measure in our exceeding of determinate measure? How to be becomingly human, how to find true measure, in the exceeding of measure? Our erotic self-surpassing might seem to carry us to something higher, and yet we secrete our own monstrousness, in this exceeding of measure. Thus Socrates’s perplexity (Phaedrus, 230e): Am I a monster more swollen with rage like Typhon, or a creature of a more gentle or divine lot? Recall too the story of the magic ring of Gyges in the Republic (359d–360c). It bears on the tyrant, on the friend, on excess and measure. I mean: When we are not measured by fear of the other, or by exposure, or detection, as Gyges was when the magic ring made him invisible, does our desire become a boundless tyranny without measure?⁶ Or contrariwise, is there another measure that measures us, even though we are invisible to everyday exposure? Such a measure seems not to be amenable to “objectification.” It seems to be a recessive measure in the intimacy of the soul itself, there where also the temptation of the monstrous arises. Is this connected with the intimate universal?

One might read the Republic as a philosophical dialogue seeking to follow an Ariadne’s thread of logos to the intimate and invisible measure, exceeding us as the measure, and yet, while intimate, standing above us. This measure would enable us to see what often is not seen, and itself is not exhausted by what can be “seen” in any univocal appearance. Such a measure could not be determined in univocal geometrical terms. It would have to be discerned by means of a wise finesse. Finesse is needed to be mindful of the subtler insinuations of our deepest loves and friendships. Pascal, to whom I allude, suggests that this exceeding of the human is a token of our double condition of grandeur and wretchedness. What then offers the measure to us in our exceeding of measure? Can we offer it to ourselves? Must we be called by a friend to ourselves, lest our excess yield to its own monstrous possibilities? Is the friend needed to save us from tyranny? Is the friend enough to save us?

To say a little more about Plato: He is not only concerned about political tyranny, the more general, but about the tyrannical soul, the more intimate, where the germ of the tyrannical state takes seed. (Socrates and this intimacy: what we all hate most is the lie in the soul—382b.) The tyrannical soul begins to be shaped in a childhood (essentially friendless), where a lawless upbringing produces an uncontrolled and passionate nature. The genesis of this lawless nature is one of the reasons; Socrates reminds us why eros has long been called a tyrant (turannos ho eros, 573b7–8). We are offered the brutal image of the human being become a wolf. The tyrant reproduces the myth told at the shrine of the Lycaean Zeus in Arcadia: the story goes that he who tastes of one bit of human entrails minced in with those of other victims is inevitably transformed into a wolf (565d4–7, 566a4–5).

Plato offers us images, but he also presents us with dramatic figures. Thus the incarnation of the bluster of the tyrant, without the lethal power, in the figure of Thrasymachus. Thrasymachus hurls himself into the discussion like a beast ready to tear the others to pieces (336b6–7). He sings the praises of the tyrant for his power to overreach on a great scale (ton megala dunamenon pleonektein, 344a1). The contrast with Socrates dramatizes the issue. To the violence of Thrasymachus, there is the counterresistance of Socrates, who through the leading of words tries, in the long run, to make a friend, perhaps even of the truculent Thrasymachus.⁷ It is hard to put out of mind the perhaps subtler Nietzsche when listening to Thrasymachus, his perhaps cruder blood brother. A defect of piety, a defection from reverence, marks the tyrannical soul. In the Republic it is evident that the tyrant lacks filial piety—he is willing even to commit parricide. He is as lacking in the inner measure of sophrosunē as in the outer measure of piety. Socrates talks of the tyrant as expecting to rule not only men but also gods (573c3). We are reminded of the Nietzschean apostrophe: no God above me, and no man either! It is expressly said (576a4–7)⁸ that the tyrant has no friends, and no taste of true friendship. He lives surrounded by enemies. The only friends the tyrant has are his bodyguards. If these are friends, it is not the friendship of excellence, but of serviceable though violent disposability. It is either mastery or servility, but never friendship. And there seems no possibility of any service at all, certainly not in any agapeic sense.

For Plato, we are in an opposite situation with the philosopher. Injustice brings enmity and conflict (misē kai machai), while justice brings unity of mind and friendship (homonoian kai philian, 351d). The just person “becomes a friend [philos] to himself” (443d7); the best man is most kingly and a king over himself, not at all tyrannical (580b10–c5). The philosophical guardians’ care for the city and its justice is a matter of philia, not eros. It is interesting that when Plato talks about the three kinds of life, and the pleasure (hedonē) peculiar to each, these are each described as forms of philia. The three kinds of life (Republic, 581c) show the person as a friend of wisdom (philosophos), a friend of victory or honor (philonikos), or a friend of gain (philokerdēs). The philosopher as a friend is called to account, not only with regard to justice in relation to others, but as being under the measure of the Good. Only by being in relation to this as the absolute measure do we find measure ourselves, in the exceeding of measure. Clearly Plato was intimately familiar with this exceeding, given his own account of that other form of love central to human existence, as well as to the philosophical life: eros.

I stress a crucial doubleness in Plato. In the Republic, eros is dramatized in its tyrannical form; by contrast, in the Symposium, the philosopher, in Socratic guise at least, seems to bring to embodiment the ennobling eros that is not tyrannical. We need to recall the equivocal aspect of the doubleness—the mingling of instability and power mentioned above. We need to recall in the Symposium the double parentage of eros, from penia (poverty) and poros (resource). In the plastic mix of instability and power, eros can take on different forms, now tyrannical, now heavenly or ouranian. It would be false to Plato only to pay attention to his struggle against tyrannical eros; and yet it would be equally false to deny his familiarity with it. The Republic lays out a medicinal catharsis of the tyrannical possibilities of eros—its temptation to monstrous power. Yet the catharsis does not destroy eros, but enables right eros (on orthos eros, see Republic 403a7–9). It leaves the soul’s energy of self-surpassing more purely porous to the Good. It enables a poverty (penia) that is rich by being a porosity to the Good above it.⁹

What, then, of the recessing of friendship in modernity? We are familiar with Descartes’s dream of making us “masters and possessors of nature,” but where do friends figure in his fable about his own scientific destiny? Do we put friends on the rack to make them answer questions of our devising, as Bacon might have it? Where are friends in Hobbes’s world of war? Nothing but the perpetual inconstancy of our desire for power after power that ceases only in death. This is a sketch not of the friend, but of the tyrant. Perhaps there were voices speaking from other directions, Rousseau perhaps, though there is a tyranny of sentiment too. Suspicion seems to have taken root. It is the ethos of being that is devalued when the given otherness is stripped of any charge of inherent value. The promise of the hospitality of being is sent into recess as the threat of the hostile is made more and more express. Perhaps religious and aesthetic concern with the sublime is a reaction against this, but the reaction can repeat the problem if we lack requisite finesse. There is a way of thinking of ourselves as sublime that scores an own goal. In celebrating our grandeur we fake our finitude, and our sublimity can become a seedbed for tyranny. This we well know politically from the abuse of sublime aesthetics by tyrannical and totalitarian regimes. Counterfeits of the sublime in the dominion of serviceable disposability shock and awe the people, that is, terrorize them by the use of insinuating aesthetic means. Even more subtly, the circle of a people’s desire is closed back on itself to excite its sublime self-intoxication.

The tyrant, admittedly, has been one of the sublime intoxicants for philosophers. Plato did go to Syracuse, but if he went intoxicated he came home sober. Perhaps he went sober. Hegel thrilled to “this Emperor—this Weltseele, “astride a horse,” a colossus straddling the world, surveying it in reconnaître, on the day before the battle of Jena, the great Napoleon.¹⁰ What drew him was not exactly the same as what excited that assassin of the millennia, Nietzsche. Napoleon—“this synthesis of the inhuman and the superhuman,” he in whom Nietzsche finds “the problem of the noble ideal as such made flesh.”¹¹ The cunning of reason sometimes looks too clever by half. Marx’s critique, armed with weaponed concepts, anticipated the dictatorship of the proletariat, but incited worse tyranny than the czar’s, as Bakunin foretold. There are those who throw sand in our eyes when they tell us Nietzsche was prophetic. Those whose eyes weep without sand can see there are false prophets. One recalls also some left-wing sons of Hegel who were drunk on the terrorism of revolutionary theory. Lesser luminaries like Kojève were exoteric Hegelians but esoteric sympathizers of Stalinism. One might not go quite so far about Sartre but still he made no protest. All honor to Camus. His witness could not prevent others like Foucault, and Sartre again, falling under the spell of the great helmsman, Mao. A strategic accommodation, it will be said. By our friends we will be known, it will also be said. And also by our accommodations, temporary or not. If Plato knew the proximity of the philosophical and tyrannical soul,¹² his entire work might be seen as a therapy of philosophical finesse that seeks to offer a prudential inoculation. I agree, of course, that it would be churlish to mention Heidegger’s choice for Hitler. Are we not here dealing with a counterfeit of the sublime—intoxicating perhaps, but backed by nothing beyond the resolute say-so of Heidegger’s dictatorial will or Hitler’s?

Admittedly, then, something equivocal about the sublime suggests a hydra with many heads: no sooner is one snipped than another sprouts. Think of Kant’s moral inoculation: the good will is not the say-so of this resolute will to obedience. Kant moralized the sublime: the “object” as other is not sublime, we are sublime in our moral destiny; and by a “subreption” we attribute to the object the sublimity properly belonging to us. This moralization suggests a devaluation of the sublime as genuinely other, testifying again to a deep equivocity in our relation to the other. And though the categorical imperative is a way of bringing into consideration the other rational agent, when I test myself against the universal rational other, this universal other remains faceless, without a singular name, and so I am not being tested by the other in a more deeply intimate respect. The Kantian moral self’s claim to rational autonomy keeps its distance. Query: Does not the equivocity about the other seep into Kant as a worry about friendship, a worry of trust, a hesitancy about exposing oneself, about being betrayed?¹³ Is the homogeneous rational universal, beyond the intimate face of the singular person, the more trustworthy? How to expose oneself to such a universal? Is one exposed to anything other than oneself, finally, even oneself as other in the guise of homogeneous universal reason? But is this universal the more trustworthy if at the more intimate, elemental level no fundamental confidence is to be truly found? Is there also a kind of moral “subreption” in the categorical imperative: one tests oneself by attributing to the universal other what belongs to oneself? But if so, is not the whole strategy of homogeneous universalization shadowed by a more “subjective” autonomy, the very “subjectivism” from whose willful inconstancy the categorical imperative was supposed to release us? All these questions touch on the intimate universal, which remains, like friendship, recessed in Kant’s approach.

A deeper ontological confidence is at issue in friendship. One might argue that those who know genuine friendship are more open to, and more released into, the promise of hospitality in being beyond themselves. They are opened to, and released into, a living in which the goodness of being is more express and more expressed. Our more intimate enjoyment of friendship is not separable finally from a relation to being as a whole. Those who insist on their autonomy and that alone risk an autism of being. Autistic people are in straits when it comes to friendship, just because of the retardation of communicability with the other. Those who live in friendship awaken more often to being in the midst of friendship. The metaxu of life offers an intermedium of friendship.

One wonders if Kant’s cautionary attitude to friendship, warning of its disappointments and its failures, reflects a more general need first of safety, such as we find reflected in his discussion of the sublime. Again there is a kind of fear of exposure, a guardedness. Can one imagine Kant enduring the nakedness of Job, much less singing it in praise or prayer? Kant guards himself.¹⁴ One of friendship’s gifts is that it enables confidence. One can confide in a friend. Can one safely confide in a friend? This worries Kant. Confidence bears on the question of a fides con, a faith with. But this is not the faith for which Kant gave up knowledge, for his faith is the moral faith in autonomous morality. Kant retains faith with himself morally. By contrast, the confidence of the friend, in the friend, places us in a “with” by means of which we are beyond ourselves, and implicitly in relation to being as other to us.

Without this confidence of friendship, what ontological consequences follow? Suspicion of being that is other, diffidence, guardedness: these strike one as characteristic of Kant. Caution is a moderate mask of being on guard, and this is itself a halfway house to hostility, haunted by apprehension that the otherness of being does not answer to one, as one would have it answer to one. One cannot let go. The “subreption” of caution produces the suspect(ed) other. What is heteros is made to carry the blame for this and, in the long run, the consequence. While undoubtedly a prudent guardedness is sometimes needed, if being on guard takes hold and defines a basic orientation to what is other, seeds of a kind of tyranny are sown. Such a being on guard can hide a latent posture of oppugnancy, a hostility in timid waiting.

It is worth asking how such critical caution can coexist with the audacious slogan sapere aude! In some instances, caution may express aspects of a hidden tyrannical nature. What is concealed in Spinoza’s motto caute!—ostensibly the opposite of Kant’s sapere aude!? Again we should not be surprised if autonomy can mutate into tyranny. If to auto is the nomos, everything heteros may be a potential threat, and hence either included in itself or rendered harmless or assassinated. There are different ways of including the other in oneself. Moderate forms of autonomy relativize their own temptation to tyranny. Kant fits this to a degree, though he failed to think fully through the meaning of this relativization. There is also a Jacobinism of moral autonomy that acts as an incitement to ethical and political terrorism. This will be shocking to some defenders of liberalism who again and again are stunned by the emergence at the heart of the autonomy of these tyrannical terrors. They are blithely sleeping to the monstrousness in the darker intimacies of the free soul. Modern liberal critics of Plato decry his disparagement of democracy but they pay no attention to his hatred of tyranny. It is that second hatred which expresses the kernel of the matter. Plato’s fear of democracy is not a defense of tyranny but a genetic account of the tyrant’s coming to be—from the democratic soul. Democracy, as he understood it, lends itself to an unbound autonomy of desire, and a homogenization of all desires and goods. High and low become indifferently the same. All discrimination between the better and the worse is lost. There is still something to this. Friendship can offer a salutary equality but there are other reductive equalizations that are homogenizing in a flattening way. Eros turannos, deserting the finesse of both eros ouranios and agapeic generosity, leads to that equalization by reduction—in the extreme, by violence or death—in which all others are either possible means or threats, and then there are no friends, only enemies.

Today there are philosophers indoctrinated to recoil at the name of Plato, but perhaps the name of Shakespeare will allow us a less guarded response. I cite from Troilus and Cressida, where Ulysses speaks of the loss of “degree,” that is, loss of the difference of higher and lower. This, I would say, would be a loss of the measure of finesse. The communal intermediation of the intimate universal would be disrupted. Without “degree” it would be impossible for there to be “communities, degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities, peaceful commerce” (1.3.103–5). The world itself would return to chaos (1.3.125). What is said strikingly echoes some of the words of Plato’s Republic:

Take but degree away, untune that string,

And hark what discord follows. Each thing meets

In mere oppugnancy. The bounded waters

Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores

And make a sop of all this solid globe:

Strength should be lord of imbecility,

And the rude son should strike his father dead;

Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong,

Between whose endless jar justice resides,

Should lose their names, and so should justice too.

Then everything includes itself in power,

Power into will, will into appetite;

And appetite, an universal wolf,

So doubly seconded with will and power,

Must make perforce an universal prey

And last eat up itself. (1.3.109–24)

Who would speak as an enemy of freedom? Even tyrants speak of themselves as friends of freedom.¹⁵ The issue is surely the interpretation of the different forms of freedom and their significance. There is not just one freedom or one form. This is what asks for great care, namely, the potentially protean character of freedom. Plato knew this, but was disturbed by the monstrous possibilities in this protean character. This protean character is bound up with our being as porosity and passio essendi, as well as the plurivocal articulation of the conatus essendi.¹⁶ While human eros is not “geometrically” determinable, it is becoming that it takes form under the measure of the good. Unconsidered celebrations of its “creativity” would strike him not only as ridiculous but as dangerous, in certain circumstances, even sinister. Socrates, we saw, speaks of a flattening homogeneity that dissolves the difference of higher and lower. This is not exactly the homogeneity of the neutered universal, yet in all of this, the will to power can slyly lie in wait. For autonomy can take a rhapsodic form, as in Nietzsche, as well as a rational form, as in Kant. The moderating power of genuine friendship, its qualitative “evening,” proves important once again. It rescues freedom from both rationalistic calculation and the anonymous universal. The friend is a singular human, and the friendship of excellence is beyond faceless universality as well as utilitarian calculations of serviceable disposability. The friendship of excellence can also keep us from the baser equivocities of some rhapsodic forms. Why? Because it is bound to a personal name. The personal name of friendship gives anchor or ballast to the rhapsodic energies of joy. There are no anonymous orgies of friendship.¹⁷

Nietzschean Friendship and the Intimate Universal

It is not that we can be friends with everyone; indeed one of the warnings of the ancients (Aristotle) was against polyphilia: too many friends and one had no (true) friends. But the intimacy is crucial, as at least exemplifying a promise of generous openness to the other. Once again it occupies an intermediate position between the erotics and the agapeics. It is also revealing concerning the doubleness of instability and power in human desire. Nietzsche is a philosopher of erotic sovereignty and an enemy of agapeic service but he has revealing things to say about friendship. He is alert to the intimacy but hostile to the universality. His thinking has an intimate quality that sets itself against the universal that is a mere abstraction for him. Yet the intimate universal in relation to both friendship and eros is not comprehended by him (to say nothing of the agapeics). Kant was neither a utilitarian calculator nor an aesthetic rhapsodist, and there is something rationally anonymous about his ethical universal, for we do not directly find there the face of the friend or the neighbor, or the love of the God of biblical personalism. Kant was a transitional figure, a Janus between an ancestral linking of the moral law and God (in this ancestral link the intimate universal is hidden) and a postreligious autonomy that uncouples the two, giving successors courage to decouple the intimacy from the universal, and hence a harbinger of a sovereignty that would legislate through itself, and for itself alone.

The most insistent witness to that sovereignty is perhaps Nietzsche. He dares an autonomy said to be higher: beyond the moral law of good and evil. Nietzsche will not speak of the law (the universal), and it is as if behind his many masks, the will of the singular philosopher proclaims an ultimate intimacy beyond communal law. Thus his philosopher of the future does not submit to law, but legislates value, and will say, “I am the law, I will be the law,” and there will be none above me. Nietzschean intimacy overtakes, takes over the universal, since there is no universal as other (in the Platonic sense).¹⁸ The cautious Kant, by contrast, was not thus overtly daring, but his insistence that autonomy be itself universalized had something of the intimate daring, and he prepares the way for a Nietzschean intimacy that was not at all cautious, that indeed hated caution. There was something greatly hidden about Nietzsche and yet also greatly naked.

But do not a host of equivocations concerning eros turannos come home to roost? Intimacy and universality pass through Schopenhauer’s will, Schopenhauer who already saw through the nihilistic consequences of this eros turannos. Nietzsche reverses Schopenhauer’s evaluation of the will, but he accepts from him its basic ontological tyranny. The condition of life is just this self-assertive, self-affirming will to power. He exults in baiting his dovish bourgeois reader with the suggestion that tyranny is the “law” at the highest level of creative will to power. Tyranny is the law—this means that intimacy of will has no universal law above it. There is no universal, intimate or otherwise. One consequence is a reversal of both Plato and Aristotle when we are told that we should wage war for the sake of peace, for his Zarathustra tells us that “we should love peace as a means to new wars; and the short peace more than the long.”¹⁹ Polemos is the king and father of all things for Heraclitus, but there is a logos that runs through all things, a universal intimate in the course of things. Where finally is such a logos in Nietzsche? Deeper than logos is chaos. More intimate than the universal, logos itself at bottom is chaos. Nothing one reads in Nietzsche seems to have resources rich enough to prevent, finally, the collapse of the difference between eros ouranios and eros turannos.²⁰

There are things in Nietzsche that mirror, or mimic, a more divine desire, and forms of will to power that seem to be freed from their own tyrannical temptations. How freed, how released? That is the question. Sometimes Nietzsche reminds one of Lady Macbeth in her pitiless urging of Macbeth to dare do more than becomes a man, to screw his courage to the sticking place, to be hard and take leave of the milk of human kindness. But then with her, the regicide done, the evil proved sticky and smeared the soul indelibly.²¹ Lady Macbeth went mad, for she could not, in her sane mind, live up to her part in the sacrilegious crime. Nietzsche wanted to live up to religious regicide, the murder of God. Nietzsche talked himself up the way Lady Macbeth talked to Macbeth. Nietzsche’s “higher” amoralism seems to deny any sticky evil, and yet he too went mad. Can one be entirely convinced by rationalizations that reduce this madness only to some “physical” cause? Those who do so insistently remind one, so to say, of Job’s comforters—but comforters of an atheistic god, for their god is matter. They are the reverse of Job’s comforters: they want to say there can be no guilt, whereas Job’s comforters say there must be some guilt. Nietzsche dared spiritually to follow to the end the hyperbolic project of finally having nothing higher above him. He would not be a “just Prometheus under Jove”—Shaftesbury’s thought-provoking description of the creative artist—but a Prometheus above all Joves. No universal law above him, no God.

I confess to hearing echoes of Plato’s view of tyranny: the tyrant would have neither man nor god above him; he will plunder the temples, if need be (Republic, 574d4, 575b6). This last is a reference perhaps to Alcibiades and the desecrations of the Hermai, and one senses a kind of blood relation between Alcibiades and Nietzsche. The Hermai provided markers of the boundary (terminus in Latin) between life and death, mortals and divinities. The Hermai were tokens of the measure we must revere, even in our exceeding of measure, our being beyond or beside ourselves in eros. If we desecrate these markers on the way to our self-divinization, we destroy the medium between humans and divinities. We doom ourselves to the corruption of our intimate humanness. And this, even if all this audacity is enacted in the name of our higher humanness or even transhumanness, as with the Übermensch. There are forms of spiritual tyranny on the heights that intimately mean: corruptio optimi pessima. One could see Nietzsche as a daimonic seeker on the boundary between the human and the divine, but being daimonic is no guarantee of eudaimonia. “Beyond good and evil”: where is the good daimon (eu-daimon) that gifts us with divine temperance, that communicates measure in our daring to exceed measure? If Nietzsche’s hyperbolic daring was a provocation of the intimate powers that awakened a dissembling form of divine madness, why should its ending in mad madness surprise us?

What of Zarathustra’s deliverance on the friend? Interesting observations are offered, some true, some posturing, some just obiter dicta that are a bit silly. Here and there we detect something reminding us of Kant’s diffidence.²² “Our faith in others betrays wherein we would dearly like to have faith in ourselves. Our longing for a friend is our betrayer.”²³ It is there, the need to keep oneself secret, though more rhapsodically expressed than in Kant: hesitation about a kind of nakedness; an ambiguity in exposure; the need of silence and reserve yes, but the kind of reserve not entirely clear. There is something deeply intimate and yet guarded just in its intimacy. Is there not tenderness, and surprise, when Zarathustra asks if one has looked at the face of a friend asleep?²⁴ Zarathustra sees in the friend’s face what seems to recall an old understanding, say that of Aristotle: “It is your own face, in a rough and imperfect mirror.” Or is this rather Zarathustra’s “subreption” (with a bow to Kant): attributing to the other what is one’s own?²⁵

Zarathustra teaches the friend, not the neighbor, the friend who is to be, in an eloquent phrase, a festival of the earth and a foretaste of the Übermensch (der Fest der Erde und ein Vorgefühl des Übermenschen).²⁶ One notes the language of bestowing, recalling what Zarathustra calls the gift-giving virtue (see the discourse Von der schenkenden Tugend). One can give even to the enemy and not be the poorer for it. Finally, one notes a strong echo of Plato: “Are you a slave? If so, you cannot be a friend. Are you a tyrant? If so, you cannot have friends.” Then Zarathustra puts the cat among the pigeons: for this means woman is incapable of friendship; for the slave and the tyrant lie concealed in her; she knows only love (Liebe). “Woman is not yet capable of friendship: women are still cats and birds. Or, at best, cows.”²⁷ Interestingly here, the tyrant in Plato’s Republic (579b) is said to be unable to travel, “cowering in the recesses of his house like a woman.” He is, we might say, “housebound,” as women were then; but he is not at home. He is under a “house arrest” that is self-incurred.

When Nietzsche is having a laugh he can charm us with that twinkle of mischief in his naughty eyes; but he is not always doing the fool. Sometimes he is deadly serious. Does one’s friend as a foretaste of the Übermensch smack of something excessively earnest? Is there not an elemental lack of fuss in friendship: the gift of friendship is granted and, in a way, allowed to be taken for granted? It does not insist on itself, gets out of the way in the metaxological mode of simply enjoying the friendship. True friendship: you can count on its constancy. Friendship is being there with the other and joy in the being there itself, with no “project” in view, least of all the “project” of the Übermensch. “May the future and the most distant be the principle of your today: in your friend you should love the Superman as your principle.”²⁸ Has the faceless Superman replaced the faceless universal of the categorical imperative? And with something of the same earnestness? We say: enjoying each other’s company is elementally given in friendship. That enjoyment is not in the projected future “beyond” of the Übermensch. This rather looks like Nietzsche’s consoling dream for his present friendless earth.

There was, finally, something a bit too tyrannically earnest about Nietzsche, all his laughter notwithstanding. For all his diatribes against the Germans, he never outgrew some of his Germanic pieties. Tortured intimacy: his own company he both enjoyed and hated; his dithyrambs to solitude are both genuine self-affirmations and tokens of his despair. He protests too much about his love of his solitude. From what we know of his life, he had a tendency toward possessiveness in his bourgeoning friendships. One thinks of him as someone who would demand absolute loyalty from a friend. There is an intensity that it would be hard to live with. (One thinks of Wittgenstein: Was there not something tyrannical in his soul too?)

I sometimes wonder whether if Nietzsche had ever found a true friend, his spiritual odyssey might have been very different. The disaster of his relation to Lou Salomé threatened him with breakdown. From the dross of this disaster he held to have given birth to the gold of Zarathustra. I do not doubt something true in this. But gold out of dross is here still a song wrung from despair, and such a song is not quite the released “yes” on which Nietzsche had set his heart.

Enjoying the company of a friend is never a song wrung out of despair. It is being in an entirely different space of consent. It is a peace more primordial than war. Loss or deprivation of this other space keeps one pinioned within the equivocal double structure of instability and power in eros. If the tension created by this pinioning, more extremely the despair over release created by it, issues in a strong self-affirmation, we risk an even more thoroughgoing spiritual tyranny. Traces of this we certainly find in the later Nietzsche, not least in his curse on Christianity, such as we find in his Anti-Christ. His picture of Jesus there, striking for us in coming close to the idiotic intimacy of the agapeic servant, is not devoid of tones of respect, certainly more respect for him than for his followers. Nevertheless, in the end the issue of spiritual superiority is decided by Nietzsche in Nietzsche’s own favor. If Nietzsche is wrong in this judgment, and the relation to the universal is sacrificed in the name of an intimate singularity insisting on itself beyond all universality, or in revolt against it, then we are encountering a form of spiritual tyranny—not friendship.

The agapeic is not named by Nietzsche, and (Christian) love of the other is looked down on by him as the dissembling goodness of the feeble. Yet revealingly, the power of agapeic generosity is mimicked by him. I think Zarathustra’s “gift-giving virtue” (die schenkende Tugend) doubles for agapeic giving. This bestowing virtue is claimed as the superior successor to love of the neighbor. But is it by counterfeiting agapeic giving that it displaces it? It looks like this generosity, but it is not it really, since it is a fated overflow of abundant power, not a gift to and for the other as other, one even possible in radical poverty, as in the story of the widow who gave her last mite. The “gift-giving virtue” is more like an eros that has accumulated an excessive store of its own power by overcoming or vanquishing its own self. Its intimate selving has no particular regard for the singular face of the other as other. It blindly pours forth its force. But what is the difference between tyranny and blind force? Could one not have a kind of tyrannical “generosity” that would brook no opposition to its giving? What kind of giving would that be if you had to take it? A “gift” to which we are not allowed to say “no,” cannot say “no”: Is this giving at all? Mischievous Nietzsche liked to provoke the solider moralists, but behind the mask of the prankster is the deadly serious earnestness that stakes its claim to spiritual superiority. Instead of a blind force we cannot refuse, do we need a different blindness that has prophetic eyes for what, darkly, is above us?²⁹

Friendship and the Agapeic Moderation of Tyrannical Eros

There are different kinds of friendship, of course, but one of the great gifts of the friendship of excellence (Aristotle’s third kind) is the salutary moderation it offers to the doubleness of instability and power. Asymmetries can be present in the relation to the other with both eros and agape. With friendship we can find a more symmetrical reciprocity. With eros there can be an asymmetry from the side of our seeking to fulfill itself through the other. While the other must be recognized, the temptation is to make the other serve the stabilization of variable desire and the fuller expression of its power. If we yield to the temptation, we can pass along way stations that culminate in tyranny: the finally unbounded self-expression of power, rooted in nothing but the constant inconstancy of our lacking being. There is a different asymmetry in agapeic love. A plenitude of generosity serves the other; or we are recipient of gifts to which we may not be able to offer a commensurable return. The extreme opposite of tyranny would be the generosity of God, incommensurable beyond any return of the finite creature. This “too muchness” of divine generosity can be resented. We do not own ourselves. Resentment at the generosity of the other is an intimate source of the tyrannical soul, for the tyrant wants to be in the debt of no one other—flattering sycophants perhaps excepted. But what are these flatterers except false friends?

The moderating effect of the friend relates to a certain reciprocal symmetry in goodness between oneself and another. Symmetry need not mean homogeneous equality. Tyranny is more intimately connected with a certain homogenizing equalization—the tyrant being excepted by himself. Between friends there is a love that moderates any temptation to be either above like a master or below like a slave. Whether we see the friend as another self, or as one’s other half, or with a stronger emphasis on the difference even in the intimacy, there is a predilection for a kind of balance in the relation of giving and receiving. A friend who could only give or who could only receive would not be a friend. Reciprocal giving and receiving from oneself to the other and from the other to oneself are intimate to friendship. What is given and received is, most elementally, simply the company of friends. Again, it is not that in erotic or agapeic love there is no giving and receiving. But in friendship we move into a middle defined by a reciprocity more symmetrically balanced than we necessarily find at the extremity of tyrannical dominion over the other or the other extreme of goodness, namely, the absolutely free(ing) generosity of the divine.³⁰ And yet there is the companioning, sometimes incognito, of surplus generosity in the reciprocity of friendship also.

This middle of balanced reciprocity tempers the inconstancy of desire, for one finds oneself at home in the friend, in the company of the friend. Likewise, the temptation to excess in the expression of power has its sting drawn, and we find more the signs of peace between people rather than the preparations for war. This is its great salutary power in the twilight equivocity of our intermediate existence. At one extreme, we have visitations of absolute generosity that puncture our quotidian indifferences; and these may be what most shake us up, rousing us from the sleep of finitude. At the other extreme, there is the perennial threat of the dogs of war, in daily life relatively well chained, but let loose in, or unleashed by, those men become wolves. In the middle, friendship incarnates a kind of peace even in struggle, keeps us true to the peace of the agapeic good. It offers its benignity without fuss in the round of daily life. It may not make an issue of itself, and hence may pass unnoticed. Without friends we come to feel a threadbare coldness in life, a coldness that can enter our souls, converting them to a hardness that closes the porosity, whose last fruit is tyranny, whether in proximate relations like the family, or more publicly in the workplace or in the life of the city and state.

However, nothing is ever entirely unmixed in the equivocal intermedium of life. There is also a kind of give-and-take even in war, and even here, this give-and-take can reveal surprising power to be converted into some more creative outcome. One need not valorize war in a Nietzschean way. Think, rather, of dialogue, say, in the Platonic form. The Platonic dialogue is often a kind of agon, or “contestation.” As philosophical, it is also a mingling of polemos and philia. If it were only the former, it would be less dialogue than destructive eris. If it were only the latter, the balance would already have been struck. As Socrates shows, there must be some harmony between thieves if they are to be minimally effective in the pursuit of their crimes. Crime pays its debt to a kind of friendship. In the agon of the dialogue, however implicit this is, we must be friends of truth, even if we are not always friends of one another. This is not the eros turannos that would impose its truth, but the philia of the philosopher, and it too participates in the intimate universal.³¹

The balanced reciprocity of giving and receiving in friendship can be recessed in modern discussion by a foregrounded eros turannos. As already suggested, there can also be a second, deeper recessing, namely, that of agapeic giving. Not surprisingly, some thinkers display a suspicion, if not hostility, to the God of biblical personalism. Eros, engrossed in its tyrannical form, sends into recess the generosity of agapeic giving. But what is put in recess is not gone, and its power only seems to be suspended. The recessed is not any the less important, especially when it bears on what is intimate to our loves. In one sense, we find something more “Platonic” than “Aristotelian” about modernity. One thinks of The School of Athens by Raphael: we see the daring of transcendence signaled by Plato pointing upward, we see the calming moderation in Aristotle’s even hand. Plato tends to stress the vertical excess of eros, Aristotle the horizontal moderation, and this we find more often in friendship. If my stress here is Platonic vis-à-vis the excess of eros, it is Aristotelian vis-à-vis the moderating power of friendship. But Plato, of course, was quite Aristotelian in his own way. When I say there is something “Platonic” about modernity, I mean to refer to Platonic excess, but not always with Platonic sophrosunē. But as the difference of eros turannos and eros ouranios becomes more uncertain in modernity, so also does the character of orthos eros. The excess is directed to immanence, not transcendence. And if we are left only with immanent transcending, how do we deal discerningly with it? Initially, it seems, more with something like geometry, Cartesian or otherwise, than with immanent Aristotelian moderation. For the latter, as phronetic, asks for finesse, not geometry. But without finesse, or phronesis, how likely is geometry finally to escape the temptations of eros turannos? Descartes’s will to “geometry” and Nietzsche’s will to power lie closer to each other than the antithesis of reason and rhapsody might lead one initially to expect. If a tyranny of Dionysus replaces, in postmodernity, a tyranny of “geometry” in scientistic modernity, something remains the same, despite all difference.

Is an intimate mutation in human desire in the direction of a projected universal the more deeply energizing source of the modern project of mathematical objectification and technological manipulation? The tyrannical person hates equivocities because in all ambiguous signs he can only detect the possibility of hostility or threat. He is not attentive to communications of hospitality, for the intimacy of his being has closed itself off from porosity to such signs of generosity. Looked at now in light of such equivocal hostility, is not the world a threatening other to us? Or is it that our being in relation to the world has clogged our own porosity to generosity, placed this into recess, as, meanwhile, more and more expression is given to the inconstant power of desire, a desire that would be the full measure of what is other to itself? We desire to be more and more masters of the given equivocity of being, and we intimately project ourselves through the abstract universals of our scientific and technological projectings. The language of “projecting” is not the language of friendship. Yet what better way to make the world “friendly” or hospitable to our projectings than to strip it of the intimate charges of qualitative value? This projecting makes it objective and neutral, the better to be subject to the measure of our desire. We may seem to be the measure of the universe of things, but are we, can we be, the measure of our intimate selves?

The matter bears on two different kinds of measure, reflecting a more abstract universal and the intimate universal. Calling again on Pascal, one measure concerns an objectifying “geometry,” while the other bears more on finesse. Finesse is never something abstract, for it is incarnated as a living wisdom or “savvy” in this person or that. It is not merely “subjective,” yet it cannot be neutralized or stripped of the charge of value, that is, of its intimate relation to the good or what is of ultimate worth. Is it not evident that there is no “geometry” of friendship? Is it not obvious that there can be no such thing as a neutral tyranny? Should it not be equally evident that there can be no such thing as a neutral mastery of nature, even if the preferred mask of that master is mathematical?

Contrast with the cosmos of Plato’s Timaeus: there is geometry here, but the overall ethos of being is more than geometry. The Demiurge imposes form on matter, yes; a geometry concretized in the visible world itself; but the divine art is concerned with bringing to be the best and most beautiful cosmos possible, and so this art exceeds geometry. The cosmos is a hospitality of being to good and beauty. There is a judgment of goodness more ultimate than geometry. The divine art, while making according to geometrical measure, is moved by the more important measure of finesse. For this divine art is a determining of the becoming, a deeming of the fitting.³²

One might say that the modern project is not a project of the friendship of being. Once again, the language of “friendship” is not, cannot be, finally that of “project.” The modern project is not a philia of sophia in the ancestral sense. It is more a practical project to master mathematically the given conditions of life, and by such means putatively to ameliorate these conditions relative to human desire. If it is a “project,” it is one of eros—eros given shape through the theoretic power of science and the practical powers of manipulation going with technology. Ultimately, of course, the language of eros, like that of friendship, is also not the language of “project”; eros too is intimate with the porosity of being prior to, and in excess of, all “projecting.” Here, eros tries to harness its own power, with the ambition of overcoming its own inconstancy; and it seeks to do this through its own power alone. The otherness of nature in its ambiguous givenness is reformulated in terms of mathematical measure. Taken alone, and without the fitting measure of ethical and religious finesse, this seems to be a recipe for tyranny. Ontological tyranny will follow from eros unbound from a different friendship with what is other to its own power, eros lacking any respect or reverence for the agapeic service that loves the other.

Calling on ancestral language, the innerness of the soul still remains in its archaic tangle of power and instability. Its power over the outer otherness does not give it mastery over its own inner otherness. If this is not purged of its own tendency to tyranny, the results of this grand project can spell disaster.³³ This would be not only a loss of friendship, but a deformation of eros. Or rather, it would be the dominance of eros’s tyrannical form in which the more subtle coaxings of its ouranian promise are drowned by the outcries of a self-assertion become boundless. This would be our loss of measure in the exceeding of measure. It would be the dissipation of the promise of the human in finally formless frenzy; and this, even though the mask worn is “geometric” and technical manipulability presents itself as the acme of moderated practical reason. The mask of scientistic univocity dissembles its deeper source in this equivocal frenzy of eros. Why equivocal? It is because we sometimes here discern, so to say, a counterfeit double of theia mania. And this, even in the calm mask of scientistic reason.

The tyrant has no true freedom and no friends. He has only false friends and dissembling autonomy, or the bodyguard—the false double, for the bodyguard is the “friend” who is a mere weapon. In a world of tyranny there are only the counterfeit doubles of friendship. Everything finally is a mask of war. The tyrant is first suspicion incarnate; then the threat, ever anticipated, inevitably materializes; finally the tyrant stands revealed as hatred incarnate. The other, always suspect, now convicted and condemned, must henceforth be done away with, without mercy. The plight of the tyrant is desperate, encompassed by nothing but enemies, pent in a prison house, filled with excessive terrors and appetites, unable even to travel abroad or view the sacred festivals (Republic, 579b–e), “envious, faithless, unjust, friendless, impious, a vessel and nurse of all iniquity, and so in consequence himself most unhappy and making all about him so” (580a).

Suspicion, tyranny, murder, merciless war: Shakespeare’s Macbeth is the great dramatization that witnesses to their intimacy and inseparability. It also shows us what happens when the tyrant ventures forth from his house, where his woman has taken her own life. In Macbeth we are honored with Shakespeare’s superiority to Nietzsche in seeing that what is “beyond good and evil,” gained by sacrilegious crime, is not, can never be, the “innocence of becoming.” It is, and must be, the evil usurpation of what is becoming for a man. It all begins in the betrayal of hospitality, and the delivery over to war as more primordial than the peace of being. In such a world of will to power, which takes its true form as eros turannos, we can only find a community of counterfeit doubles. The friend is the enemy who has put on the mask of benignity. Benignity is only a mask of something malign. “Where we are / There’s daggers in men’s smiles; the near in blood, / The nearer bloody” (Macbeth, 2.3.141–43). There seem only dissembling masks: “fair is foul and foul is fair.” We might seem to hover, as if above, but it is always through the fog and filthy air. The only outcome of such a friendless world is death. We are then nothing but a being toward death. When the hurly-burly’s done, the battle “won” is also always lost. The last triumph of this will to power shows itself as a will to death, a death wish. This eros disguises the cunning of its last god, thanatos. The recessed place of friendship in modern thought cannot be separated from our being drawn to, sometimes our succumbing to, the diverse temptations of self-affirming power and the tyranny of its last god. Honesty asks that we come to the question: Do we need the different love of another God? Not a tyrant but an agapeic servant? Without such love, one wonders if one can even begin to see the monstrousness of eros turranos. With such love, perhaps there is hope of being restored to the roots of eros itself, where we might live again from the porosity of poros, and perhaps perceive our penia, our poverty, as a nakedness of majesty in which we are gifted with the astonishing openness to receive at all the gift of friendship. This too would be to ask a restored appreciation of the agapeics of the intimate universal.

Counterfeit Agapeics of the Intimate Universal: The Dupery of Political Theology

It is not uncommon that discussion of sovereignty and political theology has at best an ambiguous relation to religion, at worst an indifferent and dissimulating one. It is interested in politics, and only instrumentally or in a mediated way in religion for the putative light it throws on politics. Hence it proves difficult to see the exception that comes to us from the space of religious porosity and the revelation of the exception in terms of the agapeic servant. This inability is certainly a modern inheritance, whether in Hobbes, in Machiavelli, in Rousseau, in Kant, in Hegel, in Marx, in his totalitarian followers, in Nietzsche, in his postmodern flock, in Carl Schmitt in his right- and left-wing admirers, in capitalist Christians whose symbiosis of religion and politics corrupts religion rather than converts politics to the beyond of politics. The difference of the erotic sovereign and the agapeic servant evaporates in these discourses. The return to political theology on the Left has not much to do with theology, and when it makes feints this way or that, it shows itself either to equivocate or to betray the dominant tradition of Left ideology. Marx: the critique of religion is the premise of all critique—this is not the new coziness between religion and politics à la Left “political theology.” One shows oneself woefully superficial in one’s lack of theological finesse. On the Right, when politics tups religion, crude theologians are the purveyors of dubious gods but they do not think themselves duped by piety.

How seriously to take someone like the puckish Lacan when he provokes us with: “The non-duped err”?³⁴ We believe ourselves relieved of the fantasy of the “big Other,” but we fantasize in relief. Is there a salutary dupery? Think thus: Hegel, the left-Hegelians, Nietzsche all claim to free us of the “big Other,” or call to mind William Blake’s mockery of “Nobodaddy.” We project God or gods on the heavens, alienated by virtue of a subreption that attributes to the fantastic object what belongs to the terrestrial subject. The negative power of dialectic, or critique, or genealogy, or Blakean derision, or whatever makes us self-conscious of this and we can no longer continue projecting thus. We retract the projection, but we do not give up projecting. Now first we project ourselves, with the power repatriated from God to ourselves. Is the result the creation of the man-God or the superman? Or the implosion of self and the explosion of evil violence? And suppose the project of immanent projection becomes tyranny on the earth, on ourselves, and on others? Is not the next stage our reconsideration of whether we need these illusions? Indeed it seems we need lies to live, to save us from truth (thus Nietzsche). If there is no “big Other,” we need some such to be such, a new “ideal,” a new big “lie,” and then it is as if there is a kind of virtual “Nobodaddy.” Do we become postmetaphysical squinters—with one eye open, one eye shut? Once we become self-conscious of this need for lies, can we continue to lie—honestly? Is true honesty before ourselves even possible, given the honest confession of the necessity of the lie? Or do we exempt ourselves from the “noble” lie (the new “ideal”) we claim is necessary for the others. We discover we cannot impose the lie on ourselves, on pain of the lie in the soul—the worst thing for Plato. But is this also not like Plato’s noble lie? But there is truth for Plato, all things considered, and the noble lie is in the context of safeguarding ethical truth. In Nietzsche’s postmodern lie there is no such context. At bottom, there is finally no nobility in any case, hence no noble lie. There are lies that are not really lies because really there is no truth either.

A figure like Hegel’s unhappy consciousness haunts all this. This “projects” itself into the beyond, seeks the beyond that it cannot reach, for this is just the truth of the beyond. One’s gaining on this beyond must be one’s necessary distance from it. There is no reaching it, ever. We are a futile passion, like the Sartrean subject, and in ourselves split, like the Lacanian subject. In Hegel and in his immediate successors the beyond is reclaimed for the self, and versions of self-circling completeness are proposed. In Lacan, there is the return of the split subject—now unhappy without the Hegelian or the Nietzschean happiness. It is impossible to be happy, and this is to be something like Hegel’s unhappy consciousness, without relief. Nevertheless, something like the beyond is necessary to sustain the structure of the human psyche. This is a beyond more like a void than a god. The thinker knows the void, it seems, but comes to know also that human life needs to be duped in a salutary way to possibilize itself. As with Nietzsche, one of the conditions of life is error—without error life is impossible. The question then is what itself possibilizes error. Is error self-possibilizing? If one says life is the possibilizer, then error is part of the truth of life, and so there is a truth of life. Is the truth of life then a swindle in the sense of having to dupe us with ruses to lure desire beyond itself? The affirmation of life is itself a lie then—a world away from agapeic generosity. Human desire is a swindle; eros reveals an impossible desire; agapeic love is even more impossible. Nothing is to be taken at face value—there is no face value. Do we not have then a swindling universal without the value of the face, without the personal pathos of the intimate? And a view of the person as a nonpersonal pathology, without the truth of the passio essendi? Has not the porosity become a conduit to the horror of the void?

When we know this, can we continue as before? We can try to continue, saying we can’t go on, we must go on (Beckett). But if error were the truth, then life would be lived differently. Certainly any trust or faith in the goodness of being would be impossible to sustain. Suppose that such trust in life is also not possible—the trust itself is also a lie. If and when we know this to be true, we know life then is fundamentally a betrayal. This is nihilism—not on the surface a tale told by an idiot but rather a very subtle saga of treason told by nothing, but told as something noble, a noble lie. An idiot would not have the wherewithal to fool us thus; only a malicious intelligence could so swindle. To be duped is to be an idiot under the power of a superior intelligence. But how come this at all, if there is no superior intelligence in this way of thinking? Something about this whole supposition makes no sense. The thesis of absurdity is itself absurd. And then we are back at the beginning—trying to make sense. Unless perhaps the evil genius is the prince of this world of counterfeits. It will not be the blood of political revolution that will dispel these counterfeit doubles. While political blood counterfeits the blood of sacrificial generosity,³⁵ and while claiming to make sovereign and servant no longer master and slave but brothers and sisters, the outcome is counterfeit fraternity. The non-dupes do err.

Caesar, Christ, and the Intimate Universal: The Erotic Sovereign and the Agapeic Servant

It is hard, if not impossible, to speak of the agapeics of the intimate universal without crossing the threshold from the philosophical into the religious. This crossing need not be a farewell to philosophy. It can be an enactment of the porosity of thought to what exceeds thinking that would just only be autonomously self-determining. The intimate universal suggests that this latter ideal is a subreption of the wishful will to power of self-circling rationality. The threshold is an intermedium of mixing, a metaxu that opens the field for both philosophical thought and religious reverence. All thinking is in the mix of this saturated intermedium.

I have put the matter in terms of the contrast of the erotic sovereign and the agapeic servant: Caesar and Christ.³⁶ The Grand Inquisitor tries to confound the two but we must distinguish as well as relate. They are often confounded; hence discernment of differences proves all the more important. Manifestations of the agapeics of the intimate universal can be found in traditions other than the Christian. Again I think of the way of Buddha: first a prince, brought up to be king, but on being exposed to vulnerability, suffering, and mortality, he seeks home in homelessness, renouncing claims on kingship, becomes a wandering beggar, in quest of enlightenment, beyond serviceable disposability and erotic sovereignty.³⁷

Since we are in the between, we live in a mixed(-up) actuality, and consequently the agapeics of the intimate universal will also be mixed with the idiotics, aesthetics, and erotics. The agapeics particularly bears on the religious intimacy of the human and the divine, and it is especially within the monotheistic traditions of the personal God in its communication with the intimate depths of the human soul that we find the togetherness of the intimate and the universal. To the degree that this God is thought of as an agapeic absolute, in the paradoxical hyperbole of the agapeic servant, we find the reconciliation of the most abyssal intimacy of being and the most radical universal that transcends all while embracing all. Erotic sovereigns may serve in this community and be witnesses to a higher excellence, witnesses to transcendent good and not only immanent value. The sovereign hero might sometimes secretly be an agapeic servant of the intimate universal. The sovereign and the ethical servant know the self-surpassing energy of the conatus, but the ethical servant knows the passio and porosity more ultimately and lives this deeper intimacy in all things. There is ambiguity on the border between human transcending and the good as transcendent. The erotic sovereign shows the ambiguous mixture of self-transcending and transcendence itself; the agapeic servant is more porous to transcendence itself, just as also the passio enters more intimately into the self-transcending of the conatus. In the middle between transcending and transcendent good, the sovereign accentuates the self-transcending, the agapeic servant witnesses to the transcendent itself. If there were only the striving of the conatus, we would miss the meaning of the agapeics. The striving is released from self-insistence. From the more intimate passio the dispossessing surplus of agapeic generosity frees it toward the neighbor as other, indeed the otherness of creation as worthy for itself and not just for us.

It is not the sovereign who is the exception but the agapeic servant—exception to the economy of will to power. The servant is so not by defining political sovereignty but by being beyond politics—beyond political servility and sovereignty. This exception is beyond the law differently from the sovereign, by being a good that endows law, through agapeic generosity, not through imposing will to power. At issue is not quite political religion, not even religious politics, though both might be informed by the agapeics of the intimate universal. The agapeic servant is the way, the truth, the life. Agapeic generosity is incarnated in the between. The carnal communication is graced, becoming in turn a community that bestows good on others still estranged. A communal way of life may be formed wherein is intermediated this releasing communication.³⁸

If the servant and the sovereign can be taken as incarnated in the persons of Christ and Caesar, how to address Christ’s reply to an equivocal question that would entrap him in an impossible answer: Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, the things of God to God? If all things are of God, are not the things of Caesar also of God?³⁹ If the ultimate original of giving is God, we are to give all to God because God has given all to us. There is an asymmetry in God’s giving to us and our giving to God. This asymmetry is ingredient in the agapeics. We could not give to God if we did not receive in the primal instance what we can now give back to God. Without this first giving there is nothing at all. We are dependent on the divine for the first giving; the divine is not dependent on being given, since the being of the divine is in the agapeic giving of all. All things come to be from the giving from the surplus of overdeterminate generosity. Only the divine giving can free Caesar into the gift of finite being for self—being for self that is idiotic, aesthetic, and erotic, though not devoid of the promise of the agapeic, since its very being at all is this promise. That there is an asymmetry in the giving of God means that our giving back is always from what we have first received. In a way there is no giving back, and there is nothing but giving back. For there is nothing diminished in the divine in its giving in the modality of the agapeic. This is a giving that in giving is never a diminishment but always an augmentation. It is never a zero-sum economy, never ruled by the dominion of serviceable disposability. This is an expenditure that in being spent is never spent, in being used is never used up, in loving is never stopped by conditions that retract its unconditional bestowal.

The endowing of Caesar or the erotic sovereignty means there is a good to the sovereign. The sovereign need not be the tyrant. The sovereign can be king (basileus).⁴⁰ Sovereignty is not necessarily that turn from the divine wherein receiving power seeks to wrest received power from the divine. The agapeics of the divine lets free in giving—and with the letting there is the hazard of freedom. It is for the good of the finite endowed power that the agapeics releases finite being into its being for self, and its being good as for itself. This is not a higher divine instrumentalization. In this being gifted of finitude, there is the promise of the agapeic, and this is the incognito of the intimate universal that slumbers in all things, waking up in the human being to the glory of the endowment given.

Christ’s remark is not a matter of two equiprimordial powers—God’s and Caesar’s. It is the affirmation of God’s and the affirmation of Caesar’s as constituting its realm for itself, though its being for itself is also an endowment, hence never absolutely for itself. The excellences of immanence need not be negated by the agapeics of the intimate universal. Nor is it a question of dualistic opposition of erotics and agapeics, of immanent excellence and transcendent good. It is not a question of one side determining the other, or of one side dialectically sublating the other into a self-determining totality. There is a metaxu in which the two communicate, though since the intimate universal is incognito, the communication can be (mis)taken as the monologue of worldly power with itself, now tolerating the feeble partner of the spiritual side, now dominating it, now extirpating it. The agapeics is not a dialectical sublation (or sublimation) of the erotics. Though it is tempted to do so, the erotics cannot effect the dialectical sublation of the agapeics. The asymmetry of the divine agapeics and the endowed freedom of the finite for itself speak against the model of dialectic self-sublation or self-determination. There is an intimate overdetermination in the erotics that reserves the promise of the agapeics. When the erotics tries to overcome the agapeics, it is claiming for itself the fullness of the promised agapeics, and hence it is mutilating what it claims to take to itself. There is then too much of the conatus overtaking the passio—not enough of the endowing patience, not enough humility before the gifts of the porosity and the communications of the agapeic origin.

I take Nietzsche’s desideratum of a “Roman Caesar with the soul of Christ” to be errant in this direction. One could see here the recognition that something of the erotics and the agapeics is needed, and that they are to be brought into some relation. But here the relation is stated in terms of Caesar; hence this is to give the absolute place to the erotics of immanent excellence, to the appropriation of transcendent good, or its denial. This appropriation from the side of Caesar would be a violation of the agapeic servant were it not itself converted in a direction that already takes it beyond erotic sovereignty. For Caesar to have the soul of Christ would be for Caesar to be or become an agapeic servant, and hence to be Caesar no longer. Caesar, no longer Caesar, with the soul of Christ, would not be the servant of the agapeics of the intimate universal. It is not impossible that a great ruler or political leader would have something of this soul, but all of this is only intelligible if a certain metanoia from the erotics to the agapeics has taken life. This metanoia is not a destruction of the erotic, it is the release of the promise of the agapeics in the erotics. This surpasses the erotics and completes them by bringing to life their hidden promise. This too is true of the idiotics and aesthetics of the intimate universal.

Most ventures of political theology, whether from the Right or the Left, do not wrestle adequately with this asymmetry of the erotics and agapeics, do not often see the agapeics for itself, or see its promise in the idiotics and the aesthetics; they rather assimilate it to the erotics or the aesthetics and hence its exceptionality beyond the sovereign exception is not understood. The truth of the mixture is very important, and I am not just looking at one mixing. It is the agapeic servant after all who says: give to Caesar.

The asymmetry from the other side of the agapeics, likewise, is not either a dualism or a dialectic subsumption. It is not a dualism because there is no irredeemable opposition of the servant and the sovereign. There is tension. There can be an opposition if the sovereign determines the agapeic servant as the enemy—but this opposition is not the opposition of enmity from the side of the agapeics. The agapeic servant looks on the enemy in light of the promise of the agapeics of the intimate universal, and hence he or she is not the enemy simply. This enemy is to be loved. Likewise, it is not dialectical subsumption, since the meaning of the agapeics is the free release into other-being as endowed by surplus generosity. It is a letting be into the truth of the being of the other, and this not for purposes of a planned return to self. The giving away is to make a way; in the name of the good of the other, agapeics is to make way. All of this is another kind of community to the dialectically self-determining one that, in the end, is built on symmetrical reciprocities.

The agapeics of the intimate universal allows for receptivity but receptivity can be enabled in asymmetrical relations. Relations are not necessarily the same one way as the other way. Think of the prime instance of agapeic origination, creation as such. This is an asymmetrical relation of bringing being to be. It does not bring the origin to be. Were there not an other origin bringing to be, there would be nothing. This origin is not what it is in its surplus overdetermination by virtue of what it brings to be. The creating way from the origin to the created is not the same as the created way from the creature to the origin. The origin in this asymmetry can be on both “sides,” though differently on both “sides.” On its own side, it is asymmetrical in surplus; on the other side, it is asymmetrical in the incognito of agapeic enabling that is never a unilateral or dialectical determination, but an enabling letting and companioning. Thus too by being on the side of the other, the agapeics of the origin is there for the good of the other. Only because the divine can be asymmetrical in an absolutely surplus sense can it be on one side and on the other side—enabling the communication of good, not only immanently, but in the created community and in the between space that defines the community between the creation and the divine.

There is no one side to which one can confine the agapeics, and yet there is this primal asymmetry. The asymmetry is just the meaning of agapeic giving as such. This is an asymmetry that does not preclude a conditional symmetry. I mean to refer to the way it is said that the “condescension” of the divine is to be on the same side as the creature—to be a creature and to enter into the mortal place with the compassio essendi marking the agapeic servant. This making symmetrical by the absolutely asymmetrical might even be said to be more radical than any equalization that allows of a balanced reciprocity. For the descent of the divine can be into what is lower than the erotic sovereign, beyond the autonomous human, into the souls of the lost, those who have lost sovereignty, who have lost autonomy, the lost who have also lost themselves. This is entry into the more primal porosity where now the lost and wounded finitude has been driven back into its primal vulnerability, perhaps on the verge of imploding into this porosity as a kind of black hole of lovelessness and despair. The exceptionality of the agapeic servant is not just higher than the sovereign, but lower in compassion for this extremity of subjection and abjection.

The event of forgiveness seems to witness to something of this releasing asymmetry. The agapeics of the divine, forgiveness sets at naught what cannot be set at naught. An act of creation, mutilated by an act of decreation, is offered promise again by an act of re-creation. This is a bringing to be again from a bringing to nothing. This is the offering of a redoing in the face of the undoing of the evil. It cannot be effected by the ones who are undone, or undoing. The undone are caught in the vice of the undoing, and their enabled power has become clogged on itself. Or worse: their enabling power has turned itself to the dark side of disabling creation. This is a kind of virtual asymmetry of evil. The agapeics of the divine is offered to this emptiness of the undoing and the undoing in the done. It is first offered, it is not first merited. We conceive of “merit” as to be calculated on a measure of autonomy or utility but this is beyond utility and autonomy. It is also beyond sovereignty. Forgiveness is an exception beyond the exception of the sovereign. The sovereign might claim to be beyond the law but this “being beyond” remains equivocal about the evil or good nature of the determining act. The act of forgiveness is beyond this equivocity, since it is an act of generous goodness beyond the law. The witness of the agapeics is beyond the exception of the sovereign. Christ is higher than Caesar. Christ can sympathize with Caesar and understand the soul of immanent power but the communication of the agapeics comes from a further dimension beyond immanent power. Often immanent power senses this. It may resent it, it may be alarmed by it, it may try to snuff it out, it may be jealous of it. One recalls the Grand Inquisitor. He recognizes the exception that Christ is, but deems himself higher relative to the worldly needs of vulnerable humankind. The Inquisitor claims to be the exception since he sees that humans need bread, not freedom, and he is the one to give them it. This claim to be the exception is counterfeit, and fails to comprehend the freedom that the agapeics of the intimate universal releases.

Christ has an untouchable freedom that touches everything—and a touchable freedom that lays itself open to violence and death in exposure to the evil of the others. There is asymmetry of goodness in this exposure too. So here from the side of the agapeics there is communication between it and the erotics, but the intermediation is other to what it appears to be from the directionality of the erotics trying to relate itself to the agapeics. There is no self-insistence; there is acceptance of the lowest place; there is willingness to get out of the way, if this is the way to make a way for the good; there is self-relativization, in the willingness not to claim to be absolute. Laughing at oneself is a homely version of this self-relativization. Laughing is touched by the agapeics of being, especially when we laugh with, not at, others. This is festive comedy, and even in pagan wisdom Comus is the god of plenty and harvests. It is true that there is no account of Christ laughing outright, though he weeps twice. Laughter is forgiving. See his forgiveness as laughing—he is not laughing at the one forgiven. (There is an image of Christ laughing above the Cross in one of the Gnostic gospels and this laughter has something of “laughing at” rather than “laughing with.”) Think of the impossible situation of him being asked to judge the woman taken in adultery, and the deftness of his drawing in the sand, the grains of time and the elements of the evanescent. What address were these signs in sand to the lawful accusers of the adulteress and their resentful goodness? Were the signs a kind of divine smile? Traces of redeeming Jewish humor? I cannot picture Christ grim.

Forgiveness and the asymmetry of love that is enabling of releasing symmetries: once again there is no need dualistically to oppose the erotics and the agapeics. There can be differences without dualistic oppositions, for these latter easily turn into antagonisms and so return us to a dialectic of sovereignty and servility. The asymmetry of an embrace that forgives, and in forgiveness frees, frees into the flow of renewed life—this is a new opening of the porosity. The freedom of Christ can let Caesar be Caesar. There is no will to be the dominant erotic sovereignty. Freedom is released beyond that. Religion, thus seen, is in a dimension beyond the political. It can be transpolitical without being apolitical. Liberation theologians do not always mark this enough, if they want a “worldly” theology that helps the poor. Yes, one sees the moral justification but when religion is brought into alliance with politics in certain ways, it is religion that becomes politics rather than politics being opened to the agapeics of the intimate universal, or the hyperbolic God, beyond servility and sovereignty. Religion can be corrupted in its desire to do good politically. The same can happen with morality when religion is reduced to a moral doctrine of earnest self-determination. Finesse for the agapeic hyperboles of God as transcendent is lost in all of this and in the long run consigned to a death of redundancy. Room for an extremity of exposure beyond morality and politics is needed in the religious agapeics of the intimate universal.

This is more like a return to the idiotics in the agapeics: to become a child again, as Christ counsels. The child of Christ is not the child of Nietzsche. Nietzsche is a philosopher of the erotic sovereign and Zarathustra’s image of the sacred child mirrors this (the “sacred yes” is a “self-propelling wheel”). The child of Christ is a child of God. There is a different father, not the father of Heraclitus as Polemos. The sacred “yes” here is not a circle beginning ever anew. There is a more primal giving before all circles—and beyond all self-circling. There are ruptures of the latter circle and reopenings of the porosity—this is divine forgiveness. The first child incarnates the porosity that no circle can close, though circles will come to clog it and harden its vulnerability. The truest child is the pure openness of living trust. The “yes” is what it is. It does not say “yes”; its exposure is its “yes.” Becoming again as children means becoming that “yes”: porous again, beyond negation, beyond revenge. This frightens Caesar. This frightened Nietzsche, though he saw it, even desired it. There is something of jealousy in Nietzsche that Christ might have said it more faithfully than he—with no revenge. Jealousy is a form of love, of course. Alas how much “nay-saying,” sometimes even hatred, in some of the formulations of Nietzsche? He desired to say “yes”—yes. But look at the one who embodies the divine “yes,” the exception of the agapeic servant. This exception, incognito in a more intimate and more universal sense than we realize, proves the rule.

Agapeic Immanences of the Intimate Universal: Porosity to the Divine

Even though the agapeics of the intimate universal is more than the erotics, the “more” of agapeic surplus is already intimate in the erotics, as it is intimate in the idiotics and the aesthetics. The porosity of being is elemental relative to the idiotics, aesthetics, and erotics, but now one might add that it is as endowed by the agapeics that the porosity is made possible as an opening at all. In the idiotics the agapeics is alive but not known as such. It is only lived as such when it is understood to be the already endowed promise of the good of the “to be.” That it is there as endowed at the idiotic level as such is evident in the elemental affirmation of the “to be” as good. All senses of good come out further for us from this. Put theologically, this elemental good is not the good of God but endowed by the goodness of God. The elemental ontological affirmation that being is at all is to be understood as the outpouring of the agapeics. There is a surplus affirmation that cannot be defined in terms of erotic lack, but only in terms of a too muchness that brings to mind something good—not neutral, not indifferent, not hostile either, but good. It is good in a modality of possible equivocity in finitude, since the good of the idiotic particular can turn back into itself and refuse the exposure of the porosity, refuse its promise of the agapeics. This agapeics is itself what possibilizes the gift of free refusal. There is an asymmetry here also between affirmation and refusal, between good and evil, between hospitality and hostility. Hostility is only intelligible on the basis of a more original ontological hospitality. After all, the being there of being at all is the most ultimate testament to this ontological hospitality. Without it there would be nothing at all, and nothing could sustain itself in being, and nothing could be hostile, for even the hostile has first to be in order to be hostile. Hostility is derivative from a more original ontological hospitality—this is the law of life. This is just the gift of life. The agapeics of being in creation is not exhaustive of the agapeics of the divine but they do reflect it and offer signs of it at all ontological levels.

If one were to speak of the agapeics of the idiotic for human beings, one would have to pay special attention to the community of love that constitutes the family. There are those who point to social bondings at other levels in nature and they are not wrong. There is community at all levels of being.⁴¹ This belonging together is not an extrinsic addition to already delimited entities. The entities are what they are in virtue of becoming themselves in an already at work community of being. This community is internal to their own definition, even when that definition allows them to stand over against other beings. This is an element of the idiotics of the agapeic, namely, the internal definition bears the relation to the other, and this is enabling of the self-definition of the being; and it is not obviated even when this self-definition refuses or violates, at the more explicit level, the relation to the other. There is double relativizing in the being but this does not mean self-relation can be separated from being in relation to other. Rather the two are intimately twined together. There is an agapeics in the idiotic self-relation, as much as in the receiving from other beings that enter intimately in the definition of the self-being. The agapeics in the idiotics is beyond internal and external, beyond extraneous and intrinsic, beyond the dualism of particular and universal. This is just why I think we must speak of the intimate universal.

Most richly evident in being in the family,⁴² here there is the intimate yes, but this is never self-defined simply. It is a being together with others and this being together enters the definition of self-being. There are no rigidly fixed boundaries, so something of the universal is immanent in this mutually implicated communication. It may not be immediately evident if the universal can be justified vis-à-vis the other human, since there seems a particularity to this other. The piety of the family, itself an idiotic porosity, is porous to a more universal sense of the agapeic origin. I mean it is in the love of the family that we know of the agapeics of our closest relatives and it is in relation to this that we gain signs and witnesses of an agapeics that is porous to all humans. The family that prays together stays together, yes, but the members of this family are also perhaps more liable to have a piety that extends beyond the family. If the father and the mother witness the agapeics of love in the idiocy of the intimate, then the more likely we will think thus too of the endowing source of all being and all good.⁴³ If, by contrast, we think of the Freudian father and the primal horde, we find an idiotics and erotics that are devoid of the register of the agapeic. How to decide between these views? I find a clue in the promise of the agapeic also in the erotics—I will come again to this. There is no necessity that we acquiesce in Freud’s myth. We might tell a different story, and we must tell a different story, if, in the elemental porosity, there is always at work the incognito generosity of the agapeics.

In the aesthetics the porosity is bound up with the carnal promise of the agapeics. We might speak of pleasure as “being pleased,” for being pleased is an ontological affirmation. What pleases us is good and not only worthy to be affirmed, but between us and it there is a concord or fittingness. I am at home in what pleases me but this is not just my doing. There is something about the other as home that puts me at ease with myself and at home with the other and myself. Such an aesthetic being at home does not preclude loss, unto the tragic. Tragic loss is close to the opposite extreme where suffering and evil are themselves taken into the intimate agapeics. The sign is insinuated of loss mysteriously redeemed in the intimate universal.

Beyond the festive pleasure of ontological affirmation, there is the festive affirmation of artistic creativity. From where does the festive affirmation come? What is affirming, what is being affirmed? The sources of creativity are not in lack but in surplus. Not that we do not lack, but lacking we seek more than lack, and the seeking itself is more than lack and driven by more than lack. We know lack because of the affirmative surplus already at work in promise, and it is this also that impels the urge to go beyond lack. Agapeic origination: bringing to be from surplus, and not a matter of autonomous mastery or sovereignty on our part. There is a source more original than us. As sources we are sourced. We are sourced from beyond ourselves as source. If we are “creative,” we are so in virtue of participating in creation, by cooperating with this agapeic origination.

If agapeic origination is not from lack but from affirmative surplus, the porosity is the empty space to which we have to come back, not to find ourselves as sovereigns, not to bemoan our servility as abject, but to receive ourselves again as an open fecundity beyond sovereignty and servility. The porosity is not itself the source of agapeic creativity, but if we do not unclog it or let it become unclogged, then there is no space into which and through which that energy of origination might stream. The poet has no identity, Keats said. He is trying to remind us of the porosity. But being nothing is not itself creation—creation is the coming to be of something in the nothing. Artistic creativity is the coming to be of a word in the nothing that the human artist is. We as artists are an endowed porosity, an endowed nothing—hence something as there and to be affirmed in agapeic festivity. The danger of Romanticism is that it stresses a sovereignty that is untrue to the porosity: an overdriven conatus, conatus become superject, projecting itself above itself. The danger of premodern mimesis is that it stresses a subordination that risks an untrue servility: a passio not in equilibrium with its own conatus—hence passio become abject, below itself and vanishing into the nothing, and not opening itself in the exposure to the stream of the agapeic surplus.

That said, the porosity that has no determinate boundary is inseparable from a sense of the extremity. Hence the naturalness of the proclivities to sovereignty and servility. The fact that we are at all in its affirmative surplus is inseparable from our being as nothing. We were nothing once, and once again will be nothing. The irrevocability of the words “once” and “never” captures something of the tremendous extremities. The extremities of being and nothing are themselves nonsubjective and nonobjective and are not univocally determinable, and hence are the companions of the porosity. The suffering of absolute loss, the exposure to horror: In this do we find our nakedness to redemption? In this, do we recover our patience, resolved to meet the ultimate in the gift of the ultimate blessing? The artist as creative nothing enters into the most radical intimacy of the human. One thinks of this agapeics of the great artist in terms of someone like Shakespeare: tragedy as a weeping that is blessed, comedy as a laugher that is blessing. A visual artist might enter the nothing, bless or be blessed in communicating the ontological affirmation of the mountain, or the apples and pears, or a field of sunflowers. But this openness to the radical intimacy coexists with exposure of the creatureliness of the being. Its being nothing is its porosity to the festive affirmation of being. It is said that nothing is alien to the great artist. But the spirit of openness is the spirit of a love—and if there is an intimacy, there is also a universality, since in the particular occasion all of life is affirmation. All of affirming life is affirmed in entry even into the intimacy of evil.

What is met is not always comprehended in terms of any determinate explanations. Iago: there seems to be no one clear reason for the insinuation of evil, though there are many reasons. This is another void, and it is not negative capability (in Keats’s sense) but is in undoing, undoing that is the counter spirit to the festive affirmation of agapeic origination.⁴⁴ The artist of great negative capability must be exposed, must expose us to this negative, too. It should be noted here that there is also an agapeic ethics of the aesthetic: respect and care for the body, our own body and the body of the community; we must feed the hungry, clothe the naked, care for the sick, give drink to the thirsty. How intimate our being flesh, how universal the call of this agapeic care! To touch in love and be touched by love: “In boy, go first. I have taken too little care of this” (Lear).

If the agapeics of the intimate universal is promised in the erotic, we cannot dualize the two, with the erotic only self-fulfilling, the agapeic only loving the other. This contrast does have its point but a difference is not necessarily a dualism, a contrast is not necessarily an antithesis. They are both loves, and what at bottom both love is what is good. True self-love is love of the good—good of the self. We need not set one in opposition to the other. It is true that we can so love ourselves that we close ourselves to what is other. A self-insistent conatus buries the passio of being and the porosity to what is beyond itself, even when the conatus surges beyond itself. This is true, too actual. But it does not take away from the still more fundamental point: we love ourselves because there is something good to be loved. And this need not exclude love of the other. It is the good of the other that matters, the good of self. We can love ourselves with due generosity, sometimes with needed agapeic compassion. We can be too cruel to ourselves, too harsh, too hateful. There are occasions when the good of self must be ceded or given up for the other, and then we see a generosity that is more evidently self-exceeding. Such a generosity has been denied or derided, of course, but the derision is blind. If the intimate universal intimates the promise of the agapeic in the erotic, there is surplus generosity at work in the erotic too, something exceeding ourselves that is itself good, and good in the affirmative sense, not to be defined in terms of lack. The contrast of eros as a love seeking to fill a lack and agape as a love expressing a fullness is not at all untrue, but there is more than just this contrast: there is fullness on the side of eros too. Eros is not a self-driving conatus; there is passio but passion that recalls patience and the porosity of being, a tender porosity, not an emptiness merely. Recall poros again at the birth of eros, divine and drunken and festive with penia. At a festive agape of the gods, in divine drunkenness eros is conceived—divine intoxication thus sleeping in the issue of the coupling of poros and penia. And if there is a destitution, poros has the indications of a way, beyond aporia. Poros recalls a way between, or a way across, and one thinks of that focus in Hinduism on those points of transition between gods and mortals. These are crossing points on the Ganges where the divine and the mortal intersect. That these crossing points are connected with water reminds us of the fluid intermedium of the porosity. Water reminds us of the porosity as without a determinate shape, and yet as capable of taking on all shapes: no identity and yet power to be all identities. Water is mother of life, yet also destroyer (as in the Flood). Water is the purifier in initiations into new life or community, as in a baptism. Water is as a streaming, a passing, in process, yes, but in passing, between one and the other, passing and surpassing, self-surpassing and passing between.

In the porosity of eros is reserved the intimate universal, as a love that out of secret intimacy would reach out to all. Love of self in the restricted sense can turn the stream into itself. Think too of the erotic sovereignty of the narcissistic couple. In this something is betrayed of the passing—the passing that is as a passing on. The porosity as a receptivity is what we have received that endows and empowers what we are to give and to give on. In each, the source, the reserve, the treasure of the soul seem to have no bottom, so deep does its mysterious darkness go down, as if into nothing at all—yet everything comes up from it. A person in love momentarily loves everything; but the moment fades and he or she only loves the beloved or himself or herself; and soon even that too often fades. The porosity has been closed once again; or the conatus has zoned itself on this or that; or the patience has become apathetic.

Agapeics of Kenotic Porosity: The Fertile Void and the Intimate Universal

The agapeics of the intimate universal calls to mind a sacrificial passio essendi, or, perhaps better put, a porosity that is kenotic.⁴⁵ The porosity can seem like a kind of void, for it seems to have no fixed determinate boundaries. It is enabling of happening but seems not identical with any determinate happening. The human being is intimate with this porosity in a mindful way—something not quite true of other beings who participate in it but do not come to live it or know it more mindfully. There are signs of some incipient mindfulness of it in other beings of nature—but they do not come to themselves in it, as not only participating in it, but exemplifying it, in a mindful way. This exemplification is most fully realized in love, mindful of both others and oneself. Other beings love being but do not love mindfully, or if they do it is a relatively sleeping mindfulness. We love being in our own being, and indeed in all being when we love. This is not neutral being—it is being itself as an intimate universal. Not being this or not being that can make this porosity seem like a void, a nothing; but given the upsurge of idiotic affirmation in it, given the robust aesthetic thereness of happening, given the festivity of desire that even in lack is beyond lack, we are made to think of this “nothing” as a fertile void. To think of this as a kenotic porosity is to think of a way of love that in making a way makes way.

What is it to make a way in making way? Fertile void: the springs of all origination come out of the surplus of the agapeics in the porosity of being. This seems like a contradiction in terms—for the void seems merely void, while fertility presupposes some positive fructifying power. The language seems equivocal, especially if we are pressed to the outside of univocal determinacy. This is as it should be, since what is amenable to univocal determination has itself come to be determinate out of a source or sources that are determining rather than determinate. In my terms, the sources are overdetermining, in the sense of giving from surplus—this is agapeic origination.

This is not merely equivocal. The constant logic in the passing is not the triadic move from the indeterminate to the determinate to the self-determining. It is rather quadratic in terms of the overdeterminacy as enabling these three and also as exceeding all three. The indeterminate is itself subtended and exceeded by the overdeterminate. The same holds true, mutatis mutandis, for the determinate and the self-determining. Most importantly for the intimate universal, it holds too for mutual determination. Mutual determinations seem appropriate to the description of community; but the agapeic community of the intimate universal exceeds mutual determinations, since this last is itself enabled in its promise by the overdeterminacy of the agapeic surplus. There is something about this that fructifies in mutual exchange but that is not exhausted by mutual exchange. The agapeic surplus points beyond this to the ultimate giving source who is more than all human and indeed natural mutual exchange. Theologically put, this is God as overdeterminate good. Were one to object that there is mutual exchange in the Trinitarian God, one would be right. I would say that the modality of this mutuality is in a hyperbolic dimension and hence better to be named in the language of a mutual overdeterminacy rather than a mutual determination. There is an unconditional, hyper-unconditional release of freedom from surplus goodness of which finite goods, persons, and community are analogies but which never are or can exhaust the exceeding fullness of the divine agapeics.

The fertile void of the kenotic porosity is the giving of a difference that is no fixed determination but an enabling intermediation of giving and receiving between the beings given in the porosity of being—a giving and receiving that image the original giving but cannot be identical with it or exhaust it. This fertile void is evidently connected to the passion of being that marks us as patient to receiving. This patience is ontologically intimate in each and constitutive of all universally. This patience does not sit easily with the dominant modern emphasis on the self-determining human. We think of patience as an inert passivity or feebleness; and of course there are many such kinds of servile patiences. However, we need not think thus of patience, or yet in terms of an opposition to a sovereign conatus essendi—an impatient endeavor that will negate the given conditions of its being. There is an ontological patience in our being received into being of which we always continue to be the recipients. Its mindful counterpart is astonishment and marvel at being at all, and marvel at the good of being. Its way of life is one of praise and gratitude. There is nothing servile about it. Everything is a gift. There is a festivity to all of this—this is the festivity of the agapeics.

This is why I would speak of a sacred passio essendi: the receiving of our being as patient to the divine communication. This can come in many forms. It can come to the child who un-self-consciously prays in adoration. It can come to the lover who cannot quite believe the chance of encounter with the love of his or her life. It can come in the gift of inspiration that an artist will knead into a work of art speaking from deeps beyond determinacy and hinting at mysteries beyond self-determination. It can come in the woo of mystical love. It can come in the liturgies of communion when the agape of the divine dying and rising is commemorated, coming to be again in the form of the elements that sustain daily life.

Nor is the sacred passio a stranger to suffering, sometimes suffering beyond bearing by human beings. Such suffering can break down the encrusted conatus and return us to the elemental porosity in extremity of kenotic emptying. I think of the extremity of tragic suffering where we face a nothing and it does not seem fertile but merely nihilating. Yet there can come to be a pathei mathos—a pathos theos—at the extremity of the undergoing. The going under is not just death but in the death a portal to a porosity to the overdeterminate in its divine reserve. This sacred passio is sacrificial in the literal sense of making sacred—sacer facere. Facere: the sacred patience is not without its making and its activity. The making as agapeic is creative. Beyond just the technical imposition of form on matter, it is the renewing of the promise of the agapeics—it is a re-creation, as if from nothing, of the being whose promise perhaps was betrayed but never destroyed, and now it is offered again in the generosity of new chances to become what it is truly.

Every moment is a happening of the idiocy of being, every moment is gifted into the aesthetics of happening, every moment partakes of the erotics of being in being marked by becoming and self-becoming, every moment participates in the agapeics of the intimate universal in being defined by a double relativity, being both intimately self-relational and relational to what is other to itself. With humans the fourth is promised in the fullest sense but all the other dimensions are partakers of the promise. With us the porosity becomes a spiritual freedom—the patience of receiving is enacted in the promise of a community where the receiving can bring forth praise and thanks or bring forth refusal and self-insistence. Neither of these per se is either servile or sovereign. The drama is not between these two originally. The drama, perhaps polemos, between those two comes to be after the first receiving, the first patience. For this patience is coimplicated with the conatus and this complicates the way it is received as the power to be for ourselves. The conatus is originally a received power to be ourselves. As free for itself, it is not determined in a necessitated way; a certain openness to its own finite sovereignty is offered; but as finite, it is always in relation to what is other to itself, whether the divine giving source or other finite beings. The union of passio and conatus reflects the co- of co-natus. The patience and the endeavor are not quite Siamese twins, for in a way they are one, if we understand that the conatus is a “being born with.” The doubleness is there in it, in its “with,” and this is its own patience of being, its being received into being. This is not its own doing. Rather our power to be as doing comes out of this co-natus as the patience of being revealed as a “being born with” or a coming to be from another in such a way that we are always companioned.

Tragic suffering is one of the highest forms of mindfulness of this being companioned in the patience of being. A hero, a sovereign, let us say, does some deed, for he is a conatus in the sense of exemplifying the endeavor to be—he is not servile—but in so doing there is a fate or providence that companions the conatus and its doing, and something comes to be that is not within the self-determination of the doing. There is a patience in the deed, but this is not servile either. It is the journey of a painful revelation that the compassion of the destiny or the providence has been evaded or recessed in ignorance. This cannot endure indefinitely. The “more” or overdeterminacy of the fate or providence comes home to the hero. And it turns out that the doing of the sovereign is companioned by an incognito providence that cannot be granted or acknowledged without a return to the patience, to the passio. The sovereign comes to nothing, but in the tragic suffering the porosity is reinvigorated with a perplexed but refreshed sense of this incognito companioning power. The coming to nothing is not nothing. The end is not nihilism at all but a strange joy that makes no final sense in terms of finite immanence. When dramas have nothing of this porosity to the joy of the companioning power, they are not sacred tragedies. They are counterfeit doubles that bow their knees before the empty altar of nihilism. No “yes” comes and we bow before broken stones of meaninglessness. Coming to nothing is the sacred passio. In the passio, agapeic festivity offers its rejoicing even in the face of death itself. Death is nothing. “It is nothing”—this can be a nihilistic gesture, but it can also be a redeeming sign of forgiveness and reconciliation. “It is nothing” can come out of the sacred passio because both are in the intimate universal. When the intimation of this intimate universal comes to life again, our being as the love of God comes alive again, though we do not fully know this, or barely grant it with the murmured word that mindfully says “yes” to it.

The sacrificial suffering of the servant of the holy most luminously shows forth the making sacred, the consecration of the passio essendi—in the very desecration of the passio essendi. One is called back through the Golgotha of the hardened self, the exposure of the divine porosity, the enactment of the communication of love that comes in the purged porosity, the doing of the love that is agapeic service. Sacrifice is agapeic service. It asks the purgatory of all counterfeit doubles of selving and the freeing of the promise of selving into communication with the intimate universal from the idiotic to the agapeic. It is the making sacred of the human being in its being loved by God, and its “yes” to this loving, that makes it love more divinely. It is the aesthetic and ethical embodiment of the doing of that love. Aesthetic: not as an aesthete is aesthetic, but as a goodness that with beauty incarnates itself: being touched by the affliction of the suffering others, being afflicted with affliction, but in its own body being the word that communicates the deathlessness, the impossibility of killing love. This love, given its hyperbolic nature, can only be a divine love in whose promise we are honored to share. This is aesthetic, in that the body of the saint is holy—the wounds of divine suffering are witness of the love unto death. This is ethical, in that the deeds of the sacred one are deeds of joy in the face of great affliction, joy in the saint, in the others who come to touch, and be touched, inchoately sensing that there is a marvelous healing beyond finite objectification that streams through the sacrificial suffering.

Not many among the philosophers dare talk of this, and some have grown ashamed of the holy. There is nothing there. What makes thought thoughtless about the holy? It is especially through fetishizing the univocities of rationalistic and positivistic thinking that the philosopher can airbrush out the idiotics, the aesthetics, the erotics, and the agapeics: the singular love, the incarnate love, the seeking love, the celebrating love. The eros-less eros of such thought has lost its intimacy, lost its body, lost the urgency of its desire, lost sight of the generosity of being that sustains all thought, even the most desiccated. It has abstracted itself from the intimate universal, and it is nothing but the skeletal structure of itself. The bare ruined choir of thought is driven out of hearing of the singing of the oceanic porosity.

Surplus Generosity and the Intimate Universal: An Economy of Gifts

The surplus generosity is not a matter of the surplus of things that one has to give and that one might release into circulation so that others might benefit from their use. This is part of it, to be sure, and the release into circulation is a letting go in which the destiny of gifts given is not in any way in the hands of the one who is letting go. Yes, this is true, but more deeply the surplus returns to the destitution of the porosity, such that our manner of describing the latter must be again a paradoxical mixture of poverty and plenty. This is a surprising mirror of the erotics, though the accent is other-related. I mean that the return to poverty seems to leave us with nothing to give, for after all we know again how much we lack, how much we do not possess. And yet this lack, this poverty, puts us on the boundary of a desert condition where it is not a matter of what we have but of what we are, and this is the decisive factor. One might have everything and even give away everything but one might be giving nothing away, if the intimacy of the disinvestment is lacking in the generosity of love. It might then amount to no more than an external transfer from here to there. This is not the agapeics: having everything, giving everything away, one gives nothing away, for one is not oneself giving, and one is not giving because the transfer is not done in love. The structure of the passing over might look exactly the same, but void of the spirit of love, it is more the counterfeit double of agapeics than its truth. Contrariwise, one might have nothing, but yet give everything. For it is one’s “yes” of release that is given in the giving of nothing. Poor people sometimes experience the suffering of this. They have nothing to give and do not always understand that they have everything to give because they have themselves to give—give to others, give to life itself in the modality of the “yes” that thanks. The holy life cultivates the destitution that, being nothing, is able to say “yes” in the modality of releasing goodness as a gift from nothing, from nowhere. Being nothing is becoming again the porosity of being that one is; one is now letting it be the intermedium through which passes the divine affirmation—affirmation even in the undergoing of death. Needless to say, this is agonizing, since at the approach of threat we erect the wall of boundary. We do not want to die, and this is intimate to the affirmation of the “to be,” part of the gift our received being expresses. In dying we have to look differently at this received gift. It is not ours, and we have to cede its giftedness to the mystery of going under that now strikes us as the end that comes to us. One might rather choose a peaceful going out but it is not in our power always to choose the manner of our leaving. Chance circumstances, enigmatic providence, bring us to unexpected places of absolute loss and in the impending of dissolution we can only cry out for help—cry out beyond our cry of being forsaken. This is an appeal of prayer asking trust, in dread before the withdrawal of the good of the “to be.”

We might die many times before we finally die. This can be to the good. There are deaths that crush our spirit and humiliate the soul—I mean deaths prior to death. A soul then drags around its rage, or sulks over its wounds, or looks for redress, or simply goes silent, for the rest of its life. There are deaths that bring down the stockade of the self-encirclement; but then there’s a breach in the self-erected boundary, and a new horizon of promise opens. There are breaches that take us beyond the normalities of the more daily domesticities. One has been so wounded that one can never be fully at home there henceforth. One is a little over the boundary between life and death and there is no seamless return to the first life ever again. Out of joint in time, out of place and displaced, not at home in being at home—and perhaps only now is there a new and truer being at home in not being at home.

A true society will find its way to granting space for these misfits. It might even cultivate the highest forms of such misfits. This is no mad madness perhaps but a sense that the fitting is something that these misfits have undergone—to the degree of a kind of undoing. There are wounded birds that drop on the strand but they have come on long and wearing flights from distant bourns where undreamed magic and horror are to be found. We sluggish, land-locked ones look with fascination and revulsion and struggle to come to know and accept. They will disturb our sleep, will raise in us an insomnia of spirit that no longer can sink back into the sleep of finitude. How can a human society ritualize the porosity of the boundary between finitude and infinity? Can it allow a space in the immanent society that if only for a brief span plays the host to what is beyond? And even though the beyond must be allowed again to depart, perhaps even urged not to stay in its disruptive form and sent away before too much havoc here is done? Yes, one would say—this sacred outside must be welcomed into the inside. Example: the way in Greek tragedy the disruptive power of Dionysus is welcomed into the domestic society, and its outlaw energy revitalizes what is otherwise banalized easily—just as the form of life, its Apollonian constancy, gives a worldly and human shape to this energy from the outside. Exemplary: the Eucharist where the boundary of time and eternity, life and death, the human meal and the sacred feast cross and interpenetrate and are one in the sacrifice of the divine human. What comes from God is consecrated in the ordinary things of everyday life—these do not domesticate it, they do not consecrate themselves, they are transfigured. In this sacrament of the divine agape, the divine is not a mere outside but there in the signs of bread and wine, body and blood of the intimate universal. Religious art (the icon, for instance) and religious liturgies have tried to lay themselves open to this consecrating communication. The mania for univocalization in modernity closes this off; it refuses the equivocity of the porosity; it cannot live with the tension of the two sides, neither of which is reducible to the other, and neither of which for humans can be fully fertile without the other. This consecrated communion is in the world but not of it. It is no unhappy consciousness riven by dualism; it is living on the boundary and the porosity of the between where communications pass up and down, like along Jacob’s ladder. In this passing we live with the doubleness that is not a dualism and not to be converted into an opposition, either to be reduced univocally or to be dialectically subsumed into more total unity. The overdeterminacy of the surplus generosity is there in the incognito of the idiotic but it is there hidden in the more explicit agapeics—there as not subject to either determination or self-determination, there in its surplus as the overdetermination of goodness that loves.

Neighboring and the Intimate Universal: Beside Oneself, Others Beside One

The neighbor is the one beside one, next one—Nachbar. There is a neighborhood of being. The neighborhood is the intimacy of being waking communally to itself with its own idiosyncratic love. The neighbor is our companion in the intimate universal. The neighborhood is the between stressed by love that enlivens us to the particularity of the beings that live beside one. Beside one need not be next door—though the next-door neighbor is the proximate one beside one. The agapeics of the intimate universal reveals a being beside oneself in being beside the others.

A neighborhood is not a neutral space of exchange—it is saturated with worth. It is a space where friend and foe might be found. Instances: We wander into a dodgy neighborhood; we sense threat though we see no one about to attack; we have antennae for the circulation and communication of friend and foe. Humans walk down a street and it gets transformed into this circulation. There is no neutral space we can ever walk through. In the wilderness we see the trace of a human where we thought no man or women had ever stepped and there is a frisson of response to that trace, be it only a piece of dropped garbage. There arises a certain mindful presence even in the absence of others—even unto irritation with the trash left behind. (Agapeics asks that we care even for the trashy neighbors.)

A neighborhood: there is something familial about it; there is something aesthetically inviting or repelling about it; there is something about it alive with erotic hints or dampers; there is something that promises the agapeics of the friendly, perhaps even of friends. City neighborhoods: these can be dangerous to the outsider. The anonymity of the city is sometimes praised or decried but pure anonymity is a limit, and there is something inhuman about it. So we can sense something sinister about wandering through parts of city space that are evacuated of the field of any intimacy. One shudders at a cold emptiness. This can be worse than a deconsecrated church, for this deconsecrating hints at an evacuation of the agapeics of being. This is not simply human evacuation but the feeling that the warmth of ontological love has somehow been withdrawn and the beings before one are somehow nonbeings, or the simulacrum of beings. There is lacking the good of the “to be,” and their “to be” is as if it were nothing. The deconsecration hints at the dreadful thing to come: the desecration of the intimate universal.

There is a peculiar togetherness of sameness and difference in neighboring. The neighbor is the other who is different from me—he or she is himself or herself and irreducible to me; yet the neighbor is the same, in that something that binds us together in community is shown when we are in the relation of neighboring. The differences between the sovereign and the servant dissolve. There is neither king nor slave but all are equal but equal in no leveling sense. This is equality as absolute difference in absolute sameness (communicated most lucidly in the dark light of the agapeic origin). The intimate universal opens to the intimacy of irreducible particularity; it opens to the community that holds such singulars together; but the intimate universal is re-sourced by the endowing companioning power. The agapeic surplus is more than I or thou and is in passing in between us and passing beyond us. The religious see here the gift of the divine in whose light the privileges of immanent sovereignty and its circulation of possessions, honors, and powers fall away. The servant is loved absolutely by the agapeic God—even as is the king—and there is no difference, no difference constituted by human constructions or impotencies. Differences as absolute singularities are loved for themselves and hence as other to all the others. But all the other others are also so loved. The agapeic God has no favorites because all are favored. This is not the neutral universal of a Stoic cosmopolitanism or the singularity of the superior creator destined by Nietzschean fate.⁴⁶ These views do not think through to the intimate universal. When St. Paul speaks of neither Jew nor Gentile, he is inviting us into the neighborhood of the intimate universal. It is not that being Jewish or Gentile does not matter, only that there is a space of the intimate universal where, in relation to the divine, what is not relativized is the unconditional love of the agapeics toward each singular as singular.⁴⁷

I would connect this point with the qualitative rather than quantitative sense of equality I mentioned in Ethics and the Between. This is nonreductive and it is an idea that has some importance for the political—but it can never be fully realized there, and its sources are not in the first instance political. They are in the religious community of the intimate universal, understood in light not of the jealous sovereign, but of bestowing goodness of the agapeic God. The qualitative sense of equality is recognized in ethical form in Kantian ethics and there it is secularized, but it cannot be truly understood in its radicality without reference to the agapeic God as endowing this unconditional worth of the human being as end in self. Kant is right to grant this about humans but in his hands it is a moral surd that is there in the void of valueless nature. Kant reneges on the question of why it might be so at all. It is not enough to say it is so because we are autonomous, first, because we are not quite autonomous in Kant’s sense, though we are free in a number of senses and, second, because reference to autonomy either begs the question or hides it—only to bring it back again at the end of the investigation, exactly as Kant does with reference to the postulate of God. Does Kant hope at the end we have forgotten that he got rid of God at the beginning? In what way do we really need God now? If we really need God in the end, then we need God in the beginning, and we begin to see that the excessive contrast of autonomy and heteronomy that sets off the whole investigation is not tenable. We need to go back to the beginning and think again, and think differently. This would shift us away from the univocalization and absolutization of autonomy toward the plurivocity of endowed freedom. The secularization of unconditional worth is from the outset an evasion of the endowed nature of freedom. The agapeics of the intimate universal does not bring God back in, because God never left.

The agapeics transforms the social space of our between-being, consecrates it into a neighborhood of love wherein neighboring, as a “being beside,” is neither simply passive nor simply active. It is not passive, though it is in receiving, and hence there is a loving patience in it. It is not active, since it is not simply a construction, though we have to constructively engage with others in the neighborhood. We receive and do ourselves in the agapeic neighborhood. Whether patient or engaged, it is dynamic in the sense of being a neighboring—being a neighbor to someone is to be engaged, even if it is only to smile or say “good morning!”⁴⁸ A neighboring act is not done out of lack—it is a courtesy or civility, and while not all acts are the same, there is the trace of the incognito generosity in them all. The neighboring of the neighborhood passes beyond us since we are in it and do not encompass it. We live out of it when we live in it. There is always more going on than we can know is going on. Who can survey it fully? Not the human being, surely. The surveillance society might try, but its intrusive gaze often transmutes the neighborhood into something quite different. At the least, the promise of generosity or good is turned into the occasion of fear and crime. This is a secular form of turning good things into occasions of sin. The eye of surveillance is on the lookout for social evils but it is a potentially evil eye. Looking in the name of good, it finds crime. Perhaps only an agapeic God could look on the neighborhood and not turn it into the occasion of secular sin. We have moments of being at home where we have a sense of this—perhaps they are few and fleeting, but we do have them. The carnival atmosphere lifts the neighborhood into a zone of hospitality. The other beside us, we are beside ourselves—a communal ecstasis, though we only sit on the park bench and watch the dogs frisk and the children battle over a ball.

This love that is a being beside oneself is out beyond itself, not from lack but from surplus, from festive affirmation, attuned to the incognito worthiness of beings. The neighboring love in being beside oneself is beside one. There is a neighborhood in which one grows up, but one lives out of it first and does not first know it. Often only by departure from the neighborhood does one become aware of the intermedium of worth that one took for granted while living from it while in it. Of course, one might never physically leave this or that neighborhood; one might fall more and more asleep to that out of which one’s life is lived, so engrossing is the living that the loving mindfulness of the sourcing of the living does not strike home. One might also fall more deeply in love with the neighborhood. One can stay at home and, admittedly, an internal dislocation can come in which one is not at home in being at home. This can be an internal exile or emigration. One is in the Garden of Eden but one cannot taste its paradisal gift—a hindrance, a blockage in one, cuts one off. One has clogged the porosity, and instead of savoring the surplus of goodness one is as if running against invisible bars that stop one. Eventually one forgets the bars and one no longer has the feeling of hindrance. One is adapted to the prison cell one is. The porosity has been bounded—self-bounded. Then we think we are at home, but we have exiled ourselves from the agapeic neighborhood. This is an internal exile, and sometimes also internal hatred can come. One falls out of the neighborhood while being still in it. There are many mansions in the neighborhood.

One can be driven out by hateful others who do not embody the love of the intermedium. Often we have to go away to come home to the neighborhood. In exile we see there is more there than we could acknowledge before.⁴⁹ Being beside oneself can be an exhilarating ecstasy. It can also be a painful wrenching of one away from one’s own. It can be the chosen expatriation like that of the prodigal son who is overconfident.⁵⁰ Or it can be a forced expatriation in which one finds oneself unwillingly on the outside. (The word “wretch” comes from the old English wrecca, which can mean “outcast” or “exile”—wreccan: “to drive out.”) In any event, we all find ourselves on the outside at some time. We are beside ourselves and there seems no one besides us, no one to extend the hand of intimate solidarity. This can be purgatorial; it can also be shattering; it can also precipitate a new vicious hatred at the powers that are blamed for sending one away. We think that they deprive one of one’s way. They do not allow a way into the agapeic neighborhood of the good. And so we consent—to hatred.

Dispossession and the Intimate Universal: Community of Agapeic Service

We seem to be at the opposite extreme to the political, if we take the political as the circulation of immanent power, seem to be at the opposite extreme to the economic order taken as the immanent circulation of properties, of goods and services, seem even to be at the opposite extreme of the intimacy of the family, one’s own or the human family. While there is a community here, it comes to a threshold defined by the relation of the human and the more than human. The religious speak of the relation of God and the human being, expressed in the great commandments: love God first and above all else, then love your neighbor as yourself. We seem to be in a night—a porosity that cannot be at all defined in terms of a human community, a night whose strain purifies the human community of its own immoderate self-regard. In the night the question comes: What or who are we serving?

If the answer is agapeic service, what would it mean to serve beyond serviceable disposability and the immanent economy of political power? Dispossession cannot be avoided, since there is here nothing to be possessed finally. Every possession is always temporary, as every hold on immanent power is relative. There is no absolute possession of anything—we possess no thing absolutely, we possess no reputation absolutely, no pleasure or happiness absolutely, no other human being absolutely, we do not possess ourselves absolutely. Possession operates by defining a determinate boundary in the porosity, by imposing a mark on it, a mark that is the marking of ourselves on it. The mark of ourselves, the brand of ourselves, is the trace of a sovereignty we want to claim not only over things and persons and processes but also over ourselves and for ourselves. By possessing these others we secure ourselves, and seemingly secure in ourselves we secure sovereignty.

However, we might find a deeper sign here in the way there is a more released “sovereignty” in possessing nothing. Possessing nothing, we might claim to possess ourselves; we need nothing, we say, and hence claiming invulnerability, we claim sovereignty. This is the kind of sovereignty that warriors and philosophers have wanted to have. The warrior: he claims he has overcome the fear of death; he fears nothing and hence is master of himself, for in conquering fear he has conquered his own exposure to vulnerability. In some cases, this can mean the false belief to have conquered the porosity. In the best cases, the porosity does not get denied, only one’s dwelling in it is no longer driven by fear of exposure. One is (relatively) at home with one’s porosity and will fight to defend one’s life if necessary, but if circumstances are such that the life must be given up or sacrificed, one goes to it—so it must be. There is undoubted nobility in this kind of sovereignty.

This is not unlike the philosopher’s desired sovereignty (not a popular thing to say these days). The point is to be a kind of nothing in order to need nothing: a poverty when it comes to the sacrifice of recognition or honor or wealth or pleasure. Think of something like Stoic mastery as the thinker’s variation on the warrior’s overcoming the fear of vulnerability and death. This is to seek to be at home with self in conditions not lending to being at home—master of the mind, the heart, the soul. This is all very well in ideal, we know, in life itself not quite so easy of attainment, perhaps not entirely worthy of attainment, if we seek to falsify the porosity. But a dignity and nobility are possible in this. These here are witnesses to sovereignty that in possessing their soul is dispossessed of what is extrinsic.⁵¹

The agapeic service beyond sovereignty is dispossessed but not in the same way⁵²—dispossessed of wealth and honor and pleasure and true to itself with a dignity and serenity mirroring these others, beyond the fear of death also, and willing to give itself over to a posthumous promise of life beyond life and death. But the dispossession is also dispossessed of itself. It is not that self-mastery holds to itself while it divests itself of what it has or might have. The stripping is of a more intimate nature and in a more hyperbolic dimension. We do not possess ourselves and there is no way we could ever be in possession of ourselves; and this is so, not because one is fixated in a servility that has no true sense of its own sovereignty, fixed thus as a nothing that is abject before its master “big Other,” lacking in any mastery of itself. This last dispossession is beyond servility and sovereignty. It makes no sense in terms of finite goods and their worldly accumulation; it makes no sense in terms of self-realization and the worldly attainment of immanent sovereignty in the consummate actualization of one’s own powers here either. There is something beyond determinate and self-determining goods but as we cannot fixate the first we cannot absolutize the second, for this is in a dimension beyond. It mirrors the freedom beyond the servant and the sovereign, but it transforms the meaning of service and sovereignty.

There is no political theology of erotic sovereignty, while agapeic service is beyond every political theology, if by this we mean to suggest a divine endorsement of a particular order of political power. Yet this transcendence is “immanent” in terms of its transforming power. Not servile, not serviceable disposability, the agapeic service of generosity is available for the others. The generosity for the good of the others is also generosity to ourselves. A gift is passed to us, the promise of its generosity is communicated between us, and it is passed on, and it will be passed back to the endowing source in the end. Not master of itself, not sovereign, but freed with a gifted sovereignty that frees it from care about itself, it is hence given up, given over to what is beyond itself, most itself in being nothing itself but being the porosity to the communication of the originating goodness, the consummating goodness. This is freedom beyond erotic sovereignty that does not determine itself. Beyond self-determination it is a released freedom rather than a self-determining one. It is the dimension of the overdeterminate good that sustains all of this and this cannot be possessed. To participate in it one must be dispossessed. One must be sent to the outside and go outside oneself, outside the self-satisfied evaluation of the cozy human community. One must be open to death in a way even more ultimate than the warrior and the philosopher—open perhaps in the modality of the trust of the saint.

None of this is sustainable in terms of human power alone but puts us in the neighborhood of divine dispensation. This neighborhood is necessarily beyond political sovereignty, but “beyond” here does not mean it is not in communication with what is immanent in the political community. The porous threshold between religious service and political power is always crossed and generous guests come to visit across the threshold. The actuality in time is always one that is mixed. Once touched by the call of this agapeic service, even philosophy has to move into a new space of its own definition and destination and cultivate a poverty that is in the hyperbolic dimension. The guardians, the warriors, have to become other. A guardian, a warrior with the soul of Christ (again with a bow to Nietzsche)? I have asked whether this is impossible, whether this is an abomination. For it is not that Christ is to become a warrior but that the warrior is to be disarmed by Christ. Under heaven the intimate universal leavens the kingdoms of the world. This is not without some noncoercive power—since in the world of threats there are ways of responding that moderate the evil use of violence, and there is a nobility that refrains from war. There is a noble warrior who will not fight unless the circumstance determines a justice to the inescapable war—forced to that reluctantly by the equivocal conditions of life in time. There is a peace of the intimate universal that can grieve that this dark night of tyrannical power descends on us. It is most true then that the blessed are those who weep.

The mixed condition in the between signifies the perplexing mingling of the cities of man and God (to speak with Augustine). We cannot distinguish them univocally. The seeds of time have to be allowed to grow, and the darnel and the wheat allowed to intertwine, since a univocalizing that tries to reduce this intimate equivocity to one side or the other runs the risk of destroying both the good and the promise of good in the evil, by claiming to destroy the evil. Living in the between is living with this equivocity. In a sense, only beyond time will the separation be, when the city of God comes fully into its promise. In time there is always the equivocal realization of the promise, but this equivocity is itself part of the immanent promise: without it there is no open freedom to turn—either to pervert the promise or to convert to the promise again. This is more than a fall, it is a luck (felix culpa?); the lack, the luck, must be affirmed, the mixed condition, because the divine confirms it. It is and is what it is because it is divinely loved.

The consummation of the intimate universal as the religious kononia, or the commons of the divine, is then not a question of the fixed separation of the sacred and the secular. The sources of social power in the general eros point back to the porosity, where in the intimacy a clandestine courting woos us toward the communication between the more ultimate origin and endowed human originality. In the depth of intimacy the divine attracts us, even in the glimmer of the aura of sacredness surrounding the erotic sovereign. (The celebrity is the bargain basement version of this aura; the idol of the network exudes a media spell that is the counterfeit double of true charisma.) Forms of erotic sovereignty equivocally mix with the sacred, sometimes being genuine communications, sometimes idolatrous counterfeits. The companionship of the incognito divinity means that human excellences are mixed with the more than human.

And this mixing is true in many forms. There is an indirect reference to this incognito in the dominion of serviceable disposability. Here the propaganda of images and counterfeit doubles bewitches desire, seducing the porosity to glut itself on products, producing craving for consumer idols. That there is idolatry at all in this dominion means the perversion of the sacred, but it also presupposes the sacred. We think we have exorcised all idols and this is the more subtle spell that bewitchment casts on us, for now we are in idolatrous bondage to ourselves. There is idolatry in politics and this is when the charisma of the between of sacred communication is usurped in, say, the cult of personality.

The incognito divine is mixed in with the family. We have seen here an intimate piety and in this elemental form of sociality, if this piety is not guarded, it is made all the more difficult that proper reverence for divine measure will flourish outside the family in other public commons. The intimate is not only in the familial commons, but if its piety is not there, there are repercussions in other forms of community, social, political, and religious. In religious community there is an intermediation between humans and the ultimate power, though this is often represented in terms available from human communities. The binding of the human and the divine is inseparable from the binding of human communities (binding: re-ligare). The agapeics of the intimate universal is the consummation of that sense of being ultimately bound. Being bound: a bond, not a bondage. The enabling of social power is given but now understood as gifted by a surplus generosity, ultimate in itself and calling human beings to imitate and enact this generosity in finite life. This is not a matter of our erotic self-transcendence, it is a communication of transcendence itself into the midst of our transcending, which now no longer can just circle around itself. We may try to suppress this, but it still breaks out of this circle or something breaks through it: dissident persons or groups, souls tortured because what is most intimate is driven into an autistic privacy and it must communicate itself somehow.

It is important that we cannot oppose the merely private to the public. What is the most intimate is inseparable from the call of a most intensive and extensive communion. If we are called by a vocation, something intimately of ourselves, more intimate still is the call of vocation to convocation. Think of prophetic social movements, or social formations that incarnate a communal mimesis of their sense of the ultimate good. Utopian movements show an intimate expectancy of the coming concretion of ultimate communion. Apocalyptic movements hold that the present world is passing away; it will go under, and the reign of the ultimate divine commons will be inaugurated. Eschatological hope has trust that some present anticipation realizes perhaps something of this ultimate divine commons; but the consummation of time will not simply be of time itself. The agapeics of the intimate universal is transpolitical in one regard, but not entirely beyond politics in another regard. It is transpolitical but not apolitical. A community attentive to it will have a different immanent definition of itself, as trying to enact, to the best extent possible, the charge of this beyond. It calls for an immanent social space hospitable to the communication of the agapeics of the intimate universal.

One is put in mind of Paul’s great hymn to love, agape, along whose hyperbolic way (ὑπερβολὴν ὁδὸν, 1 Cor. 12:31) we are enjoined to go, beyond the best of other great gifts, and even now as we see things in enigma (ἐν αἰνίγματι, 13:12). At issue is not an empty “beyond,” or yet a dualism between the “beyond” and creation now. This “beyond” has everything to do with us. The agapeics of the intimate universal is there in the sufferings, joys, and offerings of immanence. While there is divine transcendence in excess to immanence, this transcendence is intimate with the being of the metaxu, the between. It involves a meta: both a “beyond” and an “in the midst,” both an outside and an inside, both making us at home and making us not at home. Were the universal merely outside, there would be an opposition toward creation and forms of human community, and the divine would be a wrathful judge only condemning, not redeeming. Were it simply inside, we would be tempted to use it as an ideological buttress of the powers of the world, and tyrannical forms of erotic sovereignty would justify themselves by execution of the agapeic servant. We recall the old collusion of King and Priest, Throne and Altar, in the name of God’s power. The revolutionary atheist attacks that collusion but repeats the old story, in the name of his godless god; he is king and priest and god in one. Outside: all our idols come into question but this is a release toward the true God. Inside: agapeic love appeals to us, most intimately and most universally, in the beloved community where goodness gives us to ourselves, goodness that we can pass on to others. The two great commandments call for a faithful enactment of this doubleness. In the agapeics of the intimate universal, the divine gives the world its good, and remains in solidarity with this good, even unto death, even into death. The ancient Egyptians had an image, an enigma of the soul come to judgment: on the scales, the heart is weighed with the feather of truth, and if the feather descends it is not good with the soul. The heart names soul’s seat of deepest intimacy, but if too heavy with itself, it will not pass into the rejoicing exodus. As light as a feather, lighter, almost nothing, purged of its idols, the porosity of the soul is unclogged, its heart ready in death for awakening, and the last passage, into the festivity of the divine.