This is a brief glossary for the convenience of readers new to my work. I offer a guide to some crucial notions that seem to me to be systematically recurrent in this work. Other notions that were developed in other works also appear in this work, for instance, the counterfeit double, the hyperboles of being; but rather than directly gloss them, they can be contextually connected with the entries here offered. These latter are interconnected as to their meaning, as well as shedding light on other notions like erotic sovereignty, agapeic service, idiot wisdom.
Aesthetics: Aesthetics refers us to something more elemental and universal than art considered as a human intervention or construction. It refers us to the fleshed intermedium in which the communication of the intimate universal happens and is formed. The universal as intimate is intimated in the immediacy of the aesthetics of happening. There is a self-surpassing in the sensuous flesh itself—the body in itself goes beyond itself. Aesthetic embodiment refers itself as much to the porosity of being as an open field of interplay as to the determinacy of being enfleshed therein.
Agapeics: There is an incognito generosity or surplus of affirmative “to be” as good that is always at work in the between, the
metaxu. We do not become socially associated; we are what we are in an always already at work association. The meaning of this is something more than ourselves individually. It is participation in something more primal, a community more primal than this or that determinate or self-determinate community—this is the overdeterminate commons. This surplus generosity of the agapeic makes all forms of community possible—though it does not receive the name of the agapeic. A “too muchness” of enabling power—enabling power as letting the good of particulars and communities realize itself in one fashion or another. This agapeics of the intimate universal is beyond the dominion of serviceable disposability, and also beyond the power of erotic sovereignty we find especially in the political realm.
Conatus Essendi: To say we are conatus essendi as well as passio essendi is to say we are an endeavor to be as well as a patience of being. The sense of this striving self-assertion haunts modern political thinking, as well as dominant forms of liberalism and economic capitalism. More truly, self-interest is an inter-esse, derivative from the surplus endowments of the community of being. Thus co-natus is, properly speaking, not an endeavor to be but a being “born with.” Conatus refers us to a more original birth (natus), a being given to be, which is always with or from another (co, cum). The pluralization of relation is there but occluded in the ordinary way of thinking of self-interest and conatus. Without understanding the passio essendi and the porosity of being, the conatus essendi can become deformed into the direction of a tyrannical eros. We stress our self-becoming and forget that it presupposes our coming to be, our being given into being.
Determinacy: In everyday realism we think that things and processes have a more or less fixed and univocal character, and that this constitutes their determinacy. Nevertheless, determinacy cannot be understood purely in itself, but refers us to the outcome of the process of determination, a process not itself just another determinate thing. We tend to separate the determinate outcome from the determining process, and so take what is there as composed of a collection of determinate things. Determinacy is bound up with the fact that things and processes do manifest themselves with an immanent articulation, but whether that immanent articulation can be expressed entirely in univocal terms is an important question. If we put the stress only on univocity, we can cover over the process by which the determinate comes to be. Equivocal, dialectical, and metaxological considerations enter into a fuller account of determinacy.
Dialectic: This refers us to a
process of interplay between same and different, between self and other. Dialectic is etymologically in the same family as “dialogue”: mindful communication between self and other. Dialectic can refer us to a rhythmic process of unfolding, whether of processes or events, thoughtful articulations or communications. There are many forms of dialectic. Socratic-Platonic dialectic, for instance, is bound up with dialogical openness to others. Modern dialectic, of which Hegel is perhaps the master exponent, is shaped by the ideal of autonomous thinking in which the self-determination of a process tends to be given primary place. As a consequence, modern dialectic has tended to be a self-mediating dialectic rather than an open dialogical one. Metaxology is closer to dialogical dialectic as open to otherness as other than the modern form of immanent self-determining dialectic.
Equivocity: This refers us to a plurality that resists reduction to one univocal meaning and one alone. Traditionally, equivocity is often seen as a problem to be overcome by a more original or more inclusive univocity. This negative sense of the equivocal is to be balanced by a more affirmative recognition that equivocity can reveal something more essential. There are ambiguities in the nature of things that are constitutive. The ambiguities are not signs to be reduced to one meaning but surplus significations that require finesse in interpretation. Equivocity can be exploited for questionable purposes, such as deceiving or lying, giving it often a negative reputation. The more affirmative sense of the equivocal is inseparable from finesse for the overdeterminacy of being, for attunement to the metaxological between as offering a plurivocity of possibilities, and not merely a univocity. A good deal of postmodern thinking tries to recuperate the sense of the equivocal over against a too-determining univocity. Whether it attains to the requisite metaxological finesse is a question.
Erotics: Erotics refers us to more than ourselves alone. It awakens us to ourselves as intimately hyperbolic, for we know ourselves as both finite and yet infinitely self-surpassing. We are endowed with transcending power, and yet we come to realize we do not simply endow ourselves. The immeasurable passion of our being is self-exceeding, and yet the self-exceeding exceeds also the selving that we are. The erotics of our selving is hyperbolic to a
conatus essendi that drives itself to its own most complete self-determination in immanence. Our erotics witnesses to a
passio essendi that is marked by a primal porosity to what exceeds all determination and finally our own self-determination. While some thinkers would not associate erotics with the universal, it has been very important in the longer philosophical tradition since Plato. Eros manifests the intimacy of being in a primordial “being with” (
sunousia): to be at all is to “be with.” We must also mark differences of
directions: there can be a
going up to what is beyond us, there can be a
going down into depths of dark intimacy. In more contemporary understandings of erotics, something of the going down has taken hold of us. The energy of transcending up, in the Platonic way, becomes perplexing. Erotics has to be rethought, even as we have to face the temptations of tyrannical eros.
Idiotics: The etymological meaning of “idiot” refers us to the intimate: a reserve of being that is prior to determinacy, and that yet is not entirely incommunicable. Each of us lives idiotically, insofar as each of us is a singular being, whose very singularity seems to verge on being incommunicable in terms of conceptual abstractions and neutral generalities. We live our lives from within out, with this singular stress of self-being. This happening of intimate participation is both presubjective and preobjective. It is a happening of singularity in a field of energy, itself a happening of participation that is neither of the self nor of the other, and relative to which what is objective also comes later to form, just like the subjective itself. This idiocy is not a “what,” not a neutral generality, and is not to be exhaustively defined by formal determinability. As elemental, it is a charged field of thereness, and qua field it is an intermedium of communication. Idiotics also has to do with a certain intimate sense of the good of the “to be.” As happening, the idiocy of the elemental “to be” is not confined to any one thing, or any one self or other, but opens a given ethos of being, a primal ethos that is a charged field of ontological worth.
Indeterminacy: This might seem to be essentially a privative notion, referring us to the absence of determinate characteristics, and so hard to distinguish from what is void. By contrast, a more positive understanding refers us to the matrix out of which determinate beings become determinate. As a kind of predeterminate matrix, this reveals determining power in enabling the determinate things that come to be. This more positive sense makes us think of the idea of
overdeterminacy. Void indeterminacy refers us to an indefiniteness that is only the absence of determination, rather than the more fertile matrix out of which determinacy can come to be. These two senses of the indeterminate are often mixed up. If overdeterminacy is presupposed by indeterminacy, our general tendency to oscillate between the indeterminate and the determinate is shown not to go far enough. If determinacy is often correlated with univocity, and indeterminacy with equivocity, we need further dialectical and metaxological resources to do full justice to what is at play.
Metaxology: This refers us to the fourfold sense of being that constitutes a range of essential orientations to what is given in its fundamental ontological significance. The Greek word for “between” is metaxu. Metaxological philosophy holds that to be is to be between. Nothing is defined purely through itself alone; all that is is in relation; this relatedness encompasses being in relation to other things, as well as self-relation. Metaxology refers us to a logos of the between. The between is hospitable to plural intermediations. There is a given metaxu at work according to its inherent logos; there is our effort to give a logos of the metaxu, true to the more original given metaxu. By contrast with the other senses of being, the metaxological sense is not like a penthouse on top of the other three, but rather brings to truer articulation what is at work in them. The truer account brings the univocal, equivocal, and dialectical into alignment with the metaxological; it does not eliminate them. Metaxological thinking, as openly systematic, is dialectical and transdialectical. It is open to the poetics of the trans-systematic. A univocal “either-or” is not the last word, or the first; nor is a dialectical whole. The promise of the between is transdialectical and, by finessed interpretation of the equivocal, points us toward a metaxology of the intimate universal.
Overdeterminacy: This is related to the notion of the indeterminate, particularly in the more positive sense that refers us to the enabling matrix that makes possible determinacy and self-determination, not to the merely negative sense of the indefinite. There is something prior to the determinate but not a mere indeterminacy. It has an excess more than all determinations, as well as more than what we can subject to self-determination. There is a “too muchness” that has a primordial givenness that enables determinacy, that companions self-determination, yet also exceeds or outlives these. It is not to be equated with overdetermination understood as necessitation by an excess of determining causes. It allows the possibility of the open space of the indeterminate, and hence is not hyperbolic determinism, but hyperbolic to determinism in enabling the endowment of freedom. Hegel’s dialectic tends to be defined by the triad of the indeterminate, the determinate, and the self-determining. Metaxology exceeds this triad in the direction of remaining true to the inexhaustible overdeterminacy. This inexhaustible overdeterminacy is multiply incarnated, for instance, in great artworks, or persons, or communities.
Passio Essendi: This refers to a patience of being more original than the endeavor to be. It is the older twin of the conatus essendi, as it emerges in the original porosity of being, a between-space of receiving in which beings are given to be at all. The ontological patience signaled by the passio essendi means our first being recipients of being, before we flower as being active on the basis of being already received. There is ontological receiving before there is existential acting. As something ontological, the receiving is constitutive of our self-being but it is not self-constituted. To call it passio is not to imply that what is received is a mere chunk of dead thereness, devoid of its own energetic life. It is given to be its own on the basis of a giving that is not its own. The nature of this giving and this receiving is such that the being that is thus received is freed into its own being for itself, though not first so freed by itself alone. The significance of the passio essendi can never be confined to us alone. The passio essendi tells against every autism of being.
Porosity of Being: Porosity often is taken to name a permeable boundary or open access between two (determinate) domains or things. We think of A and B as relatively firm, while between them is some more or less open border, one not absolutely closed to passage. But how to think passage as passage? One must speak of the medium in which passage occurs, but the medium is not a thing but a field in which things and passage eventuate. Porosity suggests a field in passage—itself a passing field, since it is not fixed or determinate. What if A and B are themselves marked by porosity? You would then have things and events, themselves porous, in a field or sea, itself a porosity. What passes would not pass as fixed in itself but as itself passing: passing in passage as such. Here we might connect the porosity with creation: the passage is creative in a porosity that passes between nothing and (finite) being and between being and nothing again—and this passing is renewed, again and again. Arising in being and setting, coming to be and passing out of being, creation brings to be the porosity within whose intermedium all things live and move and have their being. How to get a fix on the porosity? There is no direct way, but it is revealed in human things like the child’s impressionability, the experience of being seen through, the blush, or the experience of music or prayer.
Self-Determinacy: This refers us to a process of determination in which the unfolding recurs to itself and hence enters into self-relation in the very unfolding itself. This is particularly evident in the case of the human being as self-determining. The notion cannot be fully understood without reference to the ideas of the indeterminate and the determinate. Frequently self-determination is seen as the determination of the indeterminate in which a process of selving comes to achieve a relationship to itself. The human being is the most evident example of this, and particularly in modernity the idea of self-determination has received central attention. Both self-determinacy and determinacy refer back to something that cannot be described in the terms of self-determination or determination. This something other is the overdeterminate. Self-determinacy comes to be out of sources that are not just self-determining. Our powers of self-determining are endowed powers. There is a receiving of self before there is an acting of self. This makes the process of selving porous to sources of otherness that exceed selving.
Serviceable Disposability: The dominion of serviceable disposability is particularly evident in the increasing global reign of a more and more univocal instrumental orientation to given being. Things must serve us, be serviceable for us, but once they have served their use for us, they are disposable. Used, they are used up. Persons are also liable to be treated as disposable items. Everything is a means and nothing an end, and because nothing is an end, the means is a means to nothing. The ideology of serviceable disposability colonizes both the intimate and the common. This can be calculated and rationalized but also finds a quasi-sacred shape in the religion of shopping. Commodities are passed from producer to consumer in the porous commerce of serviceable disposability. Serviceable disposability is tempted to present itself as the counterfeit double of agapeic service. Beyond it are the immanent excellences of erotic sovereignty and the transcendent worth of agapeic service.
Univocity: The univocal sense of being is deeply ingrained in the long tradition of philosophy, but there are crucial instantiations of univocity in common sense, in mathematical and scientific thinking. It is motivated by a desire to reduce the manifoldness of given being to one essential meaning. It tends to see plurality of meanings as a problem calling for one stable and precise meaning. It seeks especially for as much determinacy and precision as a matter allows. This is entirely appropriate in areas like mathematical and scientific thinking. In more ambiguous areas of human existence, a wiser tolerance for the equivocities is called for, where we need what Pascal calls
l’esprit de finesse rather than
l’esprit de géométrie. If one were to refer to the relation between the same and the different, self and other, univocity tends to give primacy to the same over the different, to self over the other. Equivocity tends to give primacy to the different over the same, dialectic to the sameness of same and different, metaxology to plurivocal intermediations between same and different.