Giving Birth to Our to Be
Letting happen the ones who we are does not only mean letting our being appear but allowing our ‘to be’1 to exist, opening a place in which it can take place and enter into presence. It is to give back our ‘to be’ to life. This cannot amount to merely inciting it to become apparent but rather asks us to gather our selves together, to be in communion with ourselves in order to remember the ‘to be’ that we are and to ensure a collecting of our selves starting from which this ‘to be’ may become present—also to the other. To be present to one another requires us to let our ‘to be’ be present in each—as a question, a mystery, a life of which we must take care and bring into the world.
Opening out to an encounter with an other is opening up to a meeting between two ‘there is’ in search of their ‘to be’: firstly as ‘he is’ or ‘she is’. The neuter would represent an embodiment of being which can give birth to our ‘to be’ through the event of a meeting between two desires from which a spark flies out which questions us about our being. The neuter would be an inauthentic stage of being which can give rise to the advent of our ‘to be’.
If the end of our past metaphysics can happen thanks to an advent, this of the disclosure of the truth corresponding to our ‘to be’ perhaps grants us the chance of entering into a new universal and transhistorical epoch. Indeed, history and the particularities of being that are embodied in it are only partial, unconscious, thus alienating and preventing the unveiling and entering into presence of our ‘to be’. Wondering about this/our ‘to be’ as such is probably the task which is incumbent on us in our epoch. What can contribute towards its achievement is, no doubt, to interpret the withdrawal of ‘to be’ from past metaphysics, to which Heidegger points, but also to consider the part of this ‘to be’ that metaphysics did not take into account, especially regarding the relationship between us as subjects who are naturally different. The philosophers who criticize our past philosophical tradition do not wonder whether the elusive character of ‘to be’, and even its forgetting, do not result from our neglecting what occurs between us, notably as sexually different. And they do not imagine that it is there that the question concerning ‘to be’ must be asked and something of the enigma of this ‘to be’ has to be both unveiled and kept.
The advent of our ‘to be’ perhaps happens in a meeting between us. What is then unveiled is also veiled again, notably because of the faithfulness to the ontological destiny specific to each which makes our meeting possible. This unveiling and veiling again is the place where ‘to be’ comes into the world and withdraws from the world for those who meet together, but more generally for the world itself.
In reality this unveiling, like this veiling, is triple: with regard to ourselves, to the other and to the event of the meeting and what it incarnates. The advent of ‘to be’ cannot stop with any being, it must remain constantly happening. However, such a happening cannot amount to a projection forward of its potential or to our wandering outside of ourselves; instead, it must correspond to a moving towards reaching our ‘to be’, towards the place of a repose from which we can develop and which represents a stasis in our growing. Such repose and development are both particular and shared. They need a co-belonging of the two components of humanity who desire to find a restful stasis in a union with one another, a union which cannot last. And yet, they cannot find repose only in themselves either, because they long for one another and for uniting with one another. But there where ‘to be’ happens, between them, they cannot dwell. Hence an infinite quest, which sometimes aspires after being kept in abeyance in the beyond as the place of a possible stasis. However, giving up the quest amounts to giving up any ‘to be’.
To be corresponds to an advent which sometimes occurs in a union between two living beings, especially two different incarnations of human being. Each of them longs for their ‘to be’, a ‘to be’ to which they give birth without being truly able to live it, even if their desire to be determines the horizon in which they try to stay, an horizon woven from a tension between two beings, the one that they originally are and the one at which they aim as an achievement from their origin. Desire is that which maintains our striving to forge links between the two. Desire must arise from our origin and open up to the infinite thanks to the finiteness of the ones who desire. Our sexuation is that which enables us to maintain our striving for opening up to the infinite in space and time from our finiteness.
Our sexuate determination can also allow us to combine natural belonging and cultural development. But culture then must take into account our natural belonging. We have to shape ourselves in order that our own nature should develop as such and appear through disclosing what or who it is. Thus substituting idea(s) for flowering, or the fabrication of ourselves as a cultural product for the cultivation of our natural belonging, must be abandoned to carry out the work of moulding our nature so that it should become really human and our life should turn into a human incarnation in faithfulness to its original determinations.
Our impulse to create must be in harmony with the impulse of life itself and we must discover mediations which permit us to become fully human while remaining alive and preserving the immediacy of a living dynamism, in particular thanks to our sexuate desire. It is such a desire which brings energy, determination(s) and limit(s) to our being, and thus makes our spirit able to develop without cutting us off from our nature. It is such a desire which allows our nature to tell itself, to unite the matter of our body with words, in a way our physical element with our meta-physical element, and a natural language with a language of thought (‘Temps et être/‘Time and Being’, Heidegger 1976: pp. 88–89/pp. 50–51).
Natural language arises above all from a desire which remains rooted in our body, but most generally from a vision of the world, which provides the language of thinking with a specific syntax. Our sexuate body acts as a sort of framework which imprints its structure on our saying. Thus patterns, especially linguistic patterns, are not merely imposed from an outside, transforming in this way human being into a sort of automaton, they are supplied by our living nature itself. Our sexuate body operates as what enables us to overcome the split between matter and form—it produces matter with form, and form with matter. It acts as a living intermediary which allows us to develop without a frame which is technically conceived and imposed—Heidegger would say a Gestell. Perhaps I could also suggest that it is the place which leads us to pass from immanence to transcendence, from an ontical to an ontological level—but also from the one to the other.
Dwelling Place Opened by Desire
Our desire questions us about the space and places already existing. It crosses them, makes its way through them towards a potential clearing. It is a call for leaving our past enclosures and confinements, and opens new places in which to dwell. It spaces the space already structured and inhabited. It invites us to enter another abode here and now without having to go abroad to discover this opportunity.
The other as other provides us with a new perspective on the place in which we stay, a place determined by our natural belonging and environment but also by our sociocultural background. The attraction for the other is the first trajectory, the first trail starting from which the possible existence of another world can be sensed, a world in which we would like to live. If the other reciprocates the track that my desire drew, this already supplies a double reference to outline the horizon of a place in which desire can become incarnate. Withdrawing into ourselves furnishes other coordinates towards a spatial architecture, above all if a double withdrawal exists, our own and that of the other, but also our respective coming and going from the outside to the inside of ourselves. In this architecture, our sensory perceptions and our gestures also sketch points, lines, surfaces which contribute to building another space within the space in which we were situated, a place that desire clears, opening to and little by little creating another world.
In order that we should dwell in such a world, a spatial volume is necessary. It is the part of ourselves which is the most extraneous to the voluminous one which enables us to open this space: our sexuate belonging. It makes us capable of building a volume from the void that is opened in each of us, and also between us, by acknowledging that we are not the other, that we are not, and never will be, the whole of the human being. Agreeing to take on this negative, in other words to assume our particularity, we create a void which does not correspond to a lack but to that which allows us to shape a place of our own thanks to which we can open up to the other without relinquishing ourselves. It needs such a void to take place in us, and between us, in order that we should permit the other to appear as other and our presence to one another to happen.
Desire reopens the place which was allocated to us by the world into which we came. This world is not truly ours and we must in a way free ourselves from it in order to discover the place which is suitable for us. We must un-shelter ourselves to sense and build the place which can really shelter us. Desire which reopens the world into which we came by birth must also open places in which it can spread out and make room for a repose from which we can develop ourselves.
Desire, which compels us to gather ourselves together, while leaving a world which was not truly our own, must also build a place in which we can commune with ourselves. It must arise from the void which is opened by our assuming our particularity and arrange a place in which we can take shelter while giving rise to a coexistence with an other who is different from us by nature.
To be presupposes to dwell. Besides, the two words have the same Indo-European etymology: ‘bhû’ or ‘bheu’, which remains the root of words in certain languages—for example, the German ‘bin’, ‘bist’, ‘bis’ have clearly the same root ‘bhû’ as ‘bauen’ (L’introduction à la métaphysique, pp. 80–83; Introduction to Metaphysics, pp. 74–78, Heidegger 1967a). To dwell cannot confine itself to living on earth as a mortal—as Heidegger asserts (in particular in ‘Bâtir, Habiter, Penser’/‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’; Heidegger 1958b, 1993)—which amounts to determining our being and dwelling mainly from an outside, in particular from the world in which we are situated. In order that we should be what first matters is to inhabit our own body. Our sexuate belonging allows us to do that through the morphology and the relational limits with which it provides us. This belonging in a way corresponds to a nothing of flesh which gives us our own flesh and allows our body to take place.
Thanks to our sexuate belonging we can dwell in our body, we can be our body and even enter into relation with another body. Our sexuation enables us to lay out a room which favours the relationships with the other as a natural being. However, these sorts of relations are not the same as those that our sociocultural background has in store for us—they open a new place in the common space. The traditional distinction between private life and public life probably has such significance, the former keeping the linguistic forms of ‘building’ faithful to the Indo-European root ‘bhû’, which means that to be presupposes to dwell.
In what is called a private house, to dwell ought to have as its first aim the preservation and cultivation of life. The home is supposed to shelter such cultivation, to preserve a place within which life can develop while being protected. In this place, each—and firstly the couple who open this space by mutual desire—ought to watch over being possible for the other to dwell in him or herself. That which permits a cultivation of our living beings is then our cohabiting, that is, our sharing a place that is built in accordance with our relational requirements as living beings and in which their cultivation can develop thanks to a mutual concern. Surrounded by the space of the home, such a care also requires each to wrap the body and the words of the other with a space specific to him or to her. Each must both help the other to free him or herself from what cuts them off from their own ‘to be’, so preventing them from returning to it, and be careful about cultivating this ‘to be’ by wrapping around them a space which allows them to be faithful to themselves and their becoming. This mutual care is neither a mere abnegation nor a love extraneous to desire, including an erotic desire and its sharing. It is what builds the place in which a carnal union can occur as a way to fulfil our own ‘to be’. Dwelling in a place, a home, which is so doubly safeguarded, might bring or restore to us the unity of our being, a unity that the relational properties of our natural belonging already grant us.
Such a belonging requires us to respect, but also to build, bridges between the other and ourselves—which means considering and cultivating our desire. It is desire which, while attracting us to one another, collects the one and the other in their own place. If desire clears a passage to the other, it also contributes towards bringing us into the presence of ourselves and of one another. Desire liberates us from the fetters of imposed requirements, habits and limitations, which kept us trapped, and it invites us to appear in accordance with our own limits.
Moreover, because of the non-being that the respect for the difference of the other asks us to assume, desire restores us to the integrity of a not yet being freed from the fetters of past being(s). It also reminds us that any pre-given symbolical requirement has to direct our meeting, apart from that of acknowledging that we correspond only to a component of the symbol that human being represents. It is our conjunction—which does not mean our complementarity—which constitutes this symbol, and it is from such a conjunction that a symbolical order can arise. As humans, we lack roots of our own, and incarnating our union is that which can provide us with a place suitable for our dwelling.
We then enter a space which no longer obeys the system of measurements to which we were accustomed. Expanses, distances, intervals and so on exist, or at least ought to exist, but they are not measurable in a way external to them, nor, what is more, by universal and constant mensurations. Expanses, distances, intervals where we are placed and which exist between us are created by our being in relation, and they change continually. Hence the challenge that the relationship between us represents. It reopens the space allotted to us by our historical and sociocultural belonging and opens up to another space for which estimations are yet lacking. We must build this space and build it together, at least in part.
The Gift of Nothing
Fortunately, by freeing ourselves from the way of inhabiting the world to which we were accustomed, we reopen a space which allows us to return to live in nature as macro- and microcosm. Liberated from an exile partly constructed against our real being, we are given back to our natural belonging—which implies a certain manner of dwelling determined by the place that our body represents, notably through its sexuation. Indeed, a merely physical, and supposedly in the neuter belonging, does not provide us with a dwelling apart from one artificially structured and imposed on us. But we, then, no longer inhabit ourselves and we coexist in a space–time which is historically assessed according to the sciences and the techniques of one epoch only. They are thus predetermined and they are shaped by us more than they allow us to dwell—they attract us outside of us, in search of us, but we do not find in this way a closeness to ourselves again. We are subjected to a device extraneous to our flesh living at present, a device which cuts us off from any self-affection.
Only the flesh of the other, as a flesh present to us, can give us back our self-affection. Self-affection of the other can bring us back to our own self-affection in particular through touch, because in this touch a call of the other already lies. As such it reminds us of the properties of life, in particular of its link with the other. However, if we have not opened in ourselves the void space that the respect for the difference of the other involves, we do not perceive all that their touch tells to us. We are affected, but we can identify neither the other nor ourselves in such a feeling reduced to the neutrality of a ‘there is’, which does not enable us to distinguish an ‘it is me’ from an ‘it is you’. We are thus not capable of recognizing what is perceived as relating to us, to the other or to the union between us. We lack the aptitude for staying in ourselves while perceiving the signs of the presence of the other. To succeed in doing that, we must maintain in ourselves a void, a virgin space thanks to which we gather ourselves together so that we could preserve our own being and be able to welcome the other as other. Acknowledging and being faithful to our sexuate belonging allows us to act in this way. In reality, this belonging is nothing material as such but it gives rise to physical forms. Instead of wondering about these forms, we reduce them either to matter or to abstract forms, unless we use them as a mere tool. Yet we could consider them to be the flowering of our life in its particularity before any division into matter and form(s)—they are a presence of the life in which we become incarnate and manifest the ones who we are, also to the other. They are the shapes thanks to which we can collect ourselves and welcome one another as living beings in the transcendent subjective materiality of our flesh. Our sexuate exchanges ought to take place, including at a carnal level, within the horizon of such transcendence.
By taking on the void created by our difference in order to respect such transcendence, we overcome nihilism, notably by acknowledging the positive value of the nothing itself, instead of letting it become a nothingness which undermines our whole existence. The negative or the void, which entailed the transformation of the truth of beings into essences, through which our becoming had been put on hold, is now assumed as a nothing which ought to originally be a driving force in the evolution of this becoming.
Such a nothing also contributes towards maintaining a place for our gathering ourselves together. Because we are able to take on the nothing, we can also open ourselves up to the other without losing ourselves. We have gathered ourselves together from a nothing of being which allows us to collect together the being that we are so that we could enter into presence of the other as other. The nothing of being grants us an internal horizon thanks to which we can gain an access to our being as such. It is because I am not you—more generally not else—that I can commune both with me and with you. Gathering myself together enables me to gather together with the other. The distance from me, that taking on a non-being creates, makes it possible for me to be close both to myself and to the other through assuming our difference. Distancing me from myself and from the other permits a getting closer without a lack of differentiation, without a confusion or a fusion. Closeness can happen without us being reduced to a juxtaposition, an enumeration, a sum of unities presumed to be the same ones and between which proximity and distance amount to an accounting assessment either. In order that closeness to one another should occur, we must be one another, one for the other, the guardians of the non-being that we are.
This not-being, in a way this void in being, does not contain anything of its own, unlike the thing on which Heidegger comments (cf. ‘La chose’/‘The Thing’, Heidegger 1958a). It only shelters while preserving; that is, it allows the non-being that we are to welcome the being of the other without appropriating it—we can thus give him or her back to it. We even can grant them the perception of what is nothing, the highest gift that we can offer to one another. Such a gift is that which permits us to gather ourselves together while relating to and with the other living and even not living beings, also with consideration for temporality. It prepares us for the happening of a not yet, and gives us back a viewpoint on history—our own but also that in which we took place. The void which is opened by assuming our non-being is what enables us to dwell by dwelling in ourselves and co-existing with the other. To appropriate the other, making the other our own by nullifying its otherness, amounts to breaking into this void and destroying the possibility that the other might be welcome in it, but also to annihilating our own possibility of dwelling, because dwelling needs the capability of staying in oneself. To appropriate someone or something, instead of being appropriate to ourselves, is that which calls into question our human dwelling and the shelter of the not-being that it requires.
Besides, appropriating the other is possible only through its annihilation. Indeed, the other as other cannot stand simply before us as an object, be it material or spiritual, which we could have at hand. Such a hold could take place only as a sort of murder of the other, either by overtly killing him or her or, more indirectly, by depriving them of their breathing, of their life. Relating to and with the other needs our working out an interiority, which allows us to approach him or her while maintaining a material and spiritual distance from them. Entering into the presence of the other can occur only from a distance.
Obviously we can approach one another as belonging to a same already existing world, but such a proximity is not a real closeness, it is determined by other than us. What permits our closeness to one another to occur is desire, an appeal which is aroused in us and longs for uniting with the other. And this desire wants closeness but also distance which makes closeness possible.
It can happen that our desire gets lost in a set of reflections or images, notably of the other, which prevents closeness from being reached and shared. We must avoid these modes of approaching which amount to a refusal to venture to meet the other by giving up any subjection to sameness. Our desire must renounce any approach in which it does not take on a negative, a non-being, which it cannot overcome without running the risk of being itself reduced to nothing.
Assuming Non-being
Assuming our non-being creates a discontinuity in our way of experiencing time. Only a human subjectivity can live through such a discontinuity thanks to its memory and the expectation that desire maintains. The void corresponding to our non-being is the place in which remembrance and anticipation of the future can link together with respect for each other. And this allows us to enter into presence as different—taking on our non-being has opened a place where such a meeting can occur in the present against the background of a continuance, of which it does not tear the becoming, despite being ecstatic in relation to it. This requires a memory of our ‘to be’ and not only of some or other aspect of our being. Only the remembrance of a living being in its whole can contribute to a weaving of time which does not lead astray from the process of becoming. Only by considering this living being and considering ourselves against the background of the unity of our respective lives, can we link together in a lasting way alternations between being and non-being, in ourselves and between us.
The comments of Heidegger on the ‘thing’, as that which is capable of gathering, cannot completely apply to us as living beings (cf. ‘La chose’/‘The Thing’, Heidegger 1958a). Whatever the properties of the ‘jug’, given as an example of thing, it is not truly living and cannot correspond with us while preserving our respective differences as a human is able to do. We can imagine that it acts in this way but it is then a matter of our projections: onto it in the present; about it at the time of its moulding; onto the memory of its use. This does not permit a weaving of time, especially with a jug, at least of a living time. Such a weaving can happen only when we are in relationship with another living being, with which we can really exchange, and we supply time with the space that it needs for its weaving. The fact that a jug can contain, thus also retain, something does not mean its ability to hold a relation to/with each other.
Sexuation is a structure of our being which allows us to gather ourselves as a whole and connect ourselves to one another without any making external to us—as is needed for a thing. This is possible thanks to the non-being and the void with which the specificity and the difference of our sexuate belonging provide us. Alas, the latter is too often used almost as a technique in order to produce pleasure, to release energy or to reproduce human species, which annihilates its power to produce ourselves and leads to ‘the little death’—of which Freud speaks—or to the death of parents according to Hegel.
Why has the potential of our sexuate belonging not been acknowledged, notably as a poietic aptitude of nature itself, even though it can correspond to the four causes at the origin of production defined by Aristotle? If our culture has perceived that the vegetal being has in itself the ability to develop independently of any making up, it has not discovered that our sexuate belonging partly shares such an ability. Perhaps we could then suggest, in Aristotelian terms, that our soma is the material cause, our sexuation the formal cause, our desire the efficient cause, and that the final cause is not the reproduction of the human species but the accomplishment of our humanity, especially by our uniting with one another. Indeed, it is between us and thanks to our sexuate desire that we can disclose to one another something of our being through a perception of ourselves that we have to transform into the ones who we are. Unfortunately, we too often reduce our sexuate belonging to a tool in order to produce a being external to us—that is, to something that our past metaphysics was able to imagine—instead of considering it to be a path towards the blossoming of our being. We have not yet discovered either the way or the truth of this sort of production.
We do not bloom as a flower; blooming for us occurs also thanks to the other. It is the other who contributes towards an un-sheltering of our being which allows us to develop and appear as the ones who we are. However, the other has not to substitute for the becoming of our own being; he or she must not want to subject our flowering to their own making up. The other must help us to blossom without removing us from our natural resources. The other must bring us back to these resources and not take us away from them. And such a gesture leads him or her to return to themselves and to live what results for them from all that.
Human being needs the other for discovering and embodying its own truth, but such a disclosure and accomplishment cannot be the result of a making, in the sense of a fabrication. They require us to let life occur in each. In other words, becoming, for a human, necessitates a dialectical process between activity and passivity in which the other takes part. If each has to develop by itself, it is also incited to develop by and for the other. But this incentive must serve a growing of our own.
Distributing activity and passivity between man and woman has prevented the fulfilment of the one and the other from happening. This also led to the development of a culture in which man himself has been reduced to powerlessness against the exploitation of his energy for which our technical world today calls him. Wanting to be unilaterally active in the production of energy, especially in the sexuate relationship, man henceforth ends up in being a passive fund of energy, which is used for the functioning of a world in which his development can no longer happen as being due to him, as being the result of his own undertaking. He missed linking active with passive, and resorting to the middle voice as the way of preparing a place in which he can dwell and become thanks to his own energy and a coexistence with the other living beings.
The middle voice allows us to connect desire with pathos, sexuate belonging with soma. It supplies us with the stance that the attraction or the projection of desire needs as a measure in order for it to remain incarnate. Sensitivity then provides the impetus of desire with a regulation which inscribes the transcendence of longing in our flesh, where it finds an anchorage really different from that supplied by supra-sensitive ideals.
The work of incarnation can be carried out through the structure that our sexuation represents, a structure which has a share in our body itself, but transcends it as a mere soma, especially by calling for a union with a body which is different and transcendent to ours. Energy can thus be kept for the work of our becoming without being solely used in deeds external to ourselves. Energy is then of use to the development and blossoming of each thanks to a mutual cultivation of our natural belonging. It contributes to the generation of a humanity in which creation and generation take part in a sort of dialogue between the word, that desire is, and the body, between acting and feeling—in each of us and between us.
Balancing acting and feeling requires us to be capable of transcendence with respect to ourselves. Such transcendence can be revealed to us in relating to and with an other who is naturally different from us. This relation can also disclose the transcendental potential of our sexuate belonging and how sexuation, as a structure which is part of us, can contribute to revealing truth—our truth, this of our own being.
Such a frame cannot be simply appropriated by us even though it determines what is particular to us. It also gives to us a margin of freedom with regard to the immanence of our natural belonging, a freedom which is both immanent and transcendent in relation to our bodily existence. It is that which can join and sometimes overcome the ontico-ontological split that Heidegger defines as a specific feature of our traditional metaphysics.
Our sexuate structure in a way has no materiality, but it is inseparable from our physical belonging. Its manner of operating is not completely controllable, visible, representable. It forces us to take into account the non-unveilable part of ourselves in order to appear as the ones who we are. Moreover, this appearing is provoked by or with the other, on the condition that he or she respects the most intimate part of our truth as something which escapes from their mastery and making.
The other contributes towards our being revealed to ourselves if he or she agrees to the fact that what they disclose to us will remain hidden from them. If things are not going this way, our sexuate belonging might act as a technical device being of use to cause a consumption of the ones who we are instead of it contributing to giving rise to, developing and making blossom the ones who we are. Alas, our traditional way of conceiving of sexuality often corresponds to the first tendency. Sexual intercourse is then considered to be an opportunity to spend energy or, at best, to beget children, but not to disclose our being and to expose it towards its cultivation. In the first case, human being finds in sexuality a more or less technically elaborate means to exhaust itself as a fund or a reserve of being, whereas in the second case sexuality can unveil, and even arouse, resources of being that we can obtain only in this way, notably thanks to a return to the ecstasy that our origin represents and a sharing of energy with the other.
Sexuation as First Logos
Our sexual intercourse, more generally our sexuate relations, escapes the risk of being the occasion of an exploitation, which each runs in them, only if they correspond to a link between two transcendences which venture to unite the mystery that ‘to be’ means to each. Those who take part in such a union then assume the ecstasy with respect to their origin that their specific sexuation represents, an ecstasy the sense of which they perpetuate through their search for a conjunction with the sexually different other. This conjunction—or copula—brings them together towards a becoming of their being. Sexual intercourse, more generally sexuate relations, in this way avoids using up the structure, which our sexuation is, by a subjection and an exploitation of the resources of being that a human being has in its care and which it must cultivate, notably through its relationship with the other(s).
Unfortunately, more often than not our sexuation has been reduced to an implement, being the matter of increasing and releasing our energy or of reproducing the human species. And yet its first function ought to be to bring us together, and even to favour how to adjust us to one another as different. Instead of our respective sexuate belongings being of use so that the vigour of our desire should produce an energy that we spend or exhaust in other than what corresponds to its origin and aim, energy awoken by the attraction between us could be used to modify each and each other in order to favour the union in us and between us of the body and soul, of our drives and our spiritual aspirations, of nature and word. Transforming into beauty—in a way into a work of art—the immediacy of our impulses can thus contribute to disclosing what or who we are to each of us and to one another.
That which drove us to urgently spend energy then becomes the opportunity to restrain ourselves in order to let happen something of our being as a particular incarnation standing out against an undifferentiated flow of life. Such an incarnation, besides the fact that it preserves and maintains our energy alive, allows us to cultivate this energy towards its growing and its sharing at a higher level, and without it being altered. This leads us to little by little be revealed to ourselves and to one another. In other words, something of the mystery of our being is so disclosed.
Such a disclosure must contribute neither to exhausting our energy reserves nor to uprooting us from our natural belonging, but to developing and making blossom the ones who we are. It must permit us to preserve, instead of exploiting, what appears of us thanks to the attention and care brought by and to our living fleshes—which provides our being with a shelter different from the permanence of an idea or a word. It is to our carnal memory and our heart that the being of each is now entrusted in order to ensure its remembrance and its becoming. This calls for the one and the other to welcome, in the present, what or who they are, each providing the other with a dwelling and a fleshly mirror thanks to which he or she can gather with themselves or come into presence without taking the risk of being rigidified by forms or appearances extraneous to life, without risking dissipating in appearing a growth of life which only occurs in a secret way, either. The shelter that each brings to the other must respect their mystery and wrap him or her in a presence which remains mysterious too. Two beings, capable of an autonomous self-affection, then, give assistance to each other in their becoming, without intervening in the latter in a manner which leads them astray from their own development. For a moment, each proposes to the other a repose and even a fertilization, in its own flesh—an invaluable stage in pursuing a becoming.
Such a ‘gathering pause’, as Heidegger would say, is different from this that our traditional logos can ensure. Indeed, it does not impose on us any permanence, conformity or homogeneity. It makes room for a stasis in our evolution, which grants a repose where our being sometimes can lie, is gathered in the intimacy of a silent presence. It neither exposes nor tells itself save through an ability to gather itself together thanks to the welcome of another flesh. It is that which can shelter before any articulate language. It is the first logos through which our ‘to be’ can be perceived, can dwell in a gathering pause, before continuing its way amongst beings, a journey in which it may be embodied in a manner through which it could forget itself. The other, then, can bring our being back to itself, give back to it a presence, provided that this other can safeguard its ‘to be’ and preserve this ‘to be’ from freezing in words or images in which it risks being homogenized or homogenizing, so cutting itself off from any living and carnal presence. It is by being faithful to ourselves as a flesh irreducible to any other that we become able to shelter the being of the other while protecting our own from its own forgetting and getting lost.
So returning to the simplest, humblest and most innocent hug means probably returning to the place in which our being can find an origin again—be born or be born again. Indeed, we then go back to that which from the very beginning determined us but we neither perceived nor acknowledged as a determination or a mediation. It acted without our knowing although it intervened in a way in our self-consciousness; which is proved by the particular structuring of our discourses. Nevertheless, we did not know this mediation and we need another mediation, a mediation of mediation, in order to assume it. This mediation of mediation can be provided by an other, who perceives our self, which we cannot immediately perceive by ourselves, or through the result of an analysis of our own productions, for example of our discourse. In this way we can recover an immediacy in the perception of our sensitive being without either mistaking it for what it perceives or forcing it to become insensitive.
Our flesh is neither in the neuter nor lacking in differentiation, especially because of its sexuation. The question is: how can we perceive it as such given that sexuation in a sense is nothing perceptible—at least it is the case in our tradition? And for perceiving it, we have to resort to another logos, another logic in which interaction between two naturally different subjects has a privileged role.
It is not only through the other, and in the other, that our sexuate belonging can be revealed—as Hegel asserts—but also by our desire, more generally our way of desiring; that is, by our manner of entering into relation, the energy and modes of which are proper to our sexuate belonging.
In order to keep its transcendental nature, our desire needs to project itself onto the beyond, a beyond that cannot remain in the neuter or lacking in differentiation. It must correspond with the nature of our desire itself. However, this cannot be fulfilled without the existence of a difference which calls each beyond itself. This difference can neither act without individualizing nor be a mere quantitative one. Desire which aspires after the beyond, also aspires after the absolute, an absolute that it experiences as being truly its own. And yet, such a perception can occur only if we long for the other as a way to fulfil our flesh without losing our longing for the beyond.
Only a sexuate desire can achieve the paradox of becoming incarnate thanks to the other through a sort of dialectical process between finite and infinite, taking place between our longing for the beyond and our experiencing this one in ourselves. Our aspiration after the beyond must long for another living human being, who maintains its longing for an absolute from which its particular origin exiled it.
As it cannot become incarnate only from such an ec-stasis regarding its conception, a human being can reach its incarnation by taking charge of the task that desire drives it to carry out. In this way, it can overcome the feeling of its orphan and powerless finiteness through an experience of the infinite which permits its longing for the absolute to be incarnate in finiteness, an absolute always in becoming. Indeed, experiencing oneself as the source of the absolute can abolish time—can change it into eternity, Nietzsche perhaps would say—but not in a permanent way.
Infinity Arising from Finiteness
Desire has another function regarding the absolute in its connection with the relative. In reality, desire always wants the absolute, and it meets with disappointment when it becomes attached to some or other object, that is, to the relative. Desire is never aspiring after something, or even after someone reduced to an object. Desire wants desire, as a longing for the absolute is inherent to human being.
In a way, the same goes for desire as for consciousness according to Hegel. Is not consciousness, for Hegel, in search of self-consciousness as an absolute and not of the consciousness of some or other thing, reality, being and so on? An accomplished self-consciousness would correspond to an embodiment of the absolute of which subjectivity is in search, an absolute which would have been concealed by the attachment to some or other object or truth. But the other is never some or other one, and I cannot reduce him or her to such a relative reality after which either my desire or my consciousness would aspire. As such the other is the absolute of which I am in search, on the condition that he or she does not resign themselves to being some or other one, not to say some or other thing, for my desire or my consciousness. Escaping such a reduction, the other forces me to modify the surge which drives me towards them, to pursue my becoming by transforming my longing for the beyond. I could say that the other, then, absolves me from seizing him or her as a relative reality, be it appetitive or cognitive, by giving me back to the absolute of which I am in search—a thing that can be carried out only if the other keeps its radical qualitative otherness. Far from hindering my desire, such irreducible difference is that which maintains it alive.
As such, desire, better than knowledge, preserves our relation to the absolute. The other, if it succeeds in protecting its particularity thanks to self-affection, escapes from any knowledge of it. Whilst knowledge aims at appropriating, desire wants non-appropriation because this frees it from relativity.
Besides, desire is never a mere self-desire, as can be the case for consciousness. Desire is always also desire for the other, this other being not only the end but also the origin of desire. Desire never arises merely from the self, the other already plays a part in its springing up.
If consciousness is essentially egoistic, the same cannot apply to desire. Certainly, it is determined by our self, and this must know itself as desiring in order to be really able to desire. And yet, desire for the self cannot content itself with such relativity in its aspiration after the absolute. Desire does not aspire merely after the self and, furthermore, the self who desires is not merely one self. As well originally as in the present, the other intervenes in our desire, an other who cannot truly present itself or be represented but supports, also by this very fact, our longing for the absolute. And it is not by chance that Plato asserts, through the words of Phaedrus, that the one who loves is possessed by a god or by a religious frenzy. Desiring entails us not to completely belong to ourselves if we long for another living being.
More radically than knowledge, desire frees us, but it frees us by a link, and our freedom is effective only if the other gives us back to us as desiring; that is, if the other returns us to the absolute for which we are longing, and so absolves us from taking it as a possible object of our desire.
Our consciousness usurps the aim of our desire, it uses the quality of its energy and deprives us of the freedom that the absolute for which we long grants us. Our consciousness also grasps an energy that our desire is unable to use, because we lack a culture of the experience of desire. We have not yet let desire comes to its absolute, although it is probably that which most originally and after all allows us to be by uniting our body and our soul, our nature and culture, in an indissociable way. Desire corresponds to the real through which we can experience ourselves as being while letting it occur as it is. But the matter is no longer one of experiencing a word or a thought but a feeling—and what, then, occurs about perceiving as such. Moreover, what we have henceforth to perceive is not a thing but an other. And the other can be distinguished from the link that unites us with it less easily than a thing. In order that the other can appear as other, it is important that we distinguish our perception of it from that of ourselves. This can be achieved only by acknowledging and taking on a difference with regard to nature itself. If nature can provide us with a perception of the absolute it is thanks to a natural difference which allows us to perceive the other as the one who he or she is, that is, as absolutely other. No doubt, this perception cannot be immediately that of the other in its absolute, a frame must exist which makes such a perception possible. This operation needs an education—a dialectics?—of perception as a comprehensive phenomenon. We still lack it because we have separated intelligibility from sensitivity.
The Hegelian dialectics too quickly reduce our sensitive consciousness to an immediate process, whereas this consciousness is capable of mediation and self-affection. It can thus deal with an experience of itself and not merely remain at the service of the consciousness, as is imagined by Hegel. The point is that the self-experience regarding our sensitive perception occurs in the most absolute way through the mediation of an other. And if to know oneself knowing can correspond to a progress towards the knowledge of oneself as an absolute knowledge, it does not go the same regarding the experience of oneself as feeling. Experiencing the absolute then happens with difficulty without the other, including as an experience of immediacy.
It still remains for us to perceive and dialectize how immediacy can then correspond with the absolute, and how the becoming of the other can be linked with the becoming of oneself. Indeed, becoming oneself can give up neither experiencing oneself nor experiencing the other. It is the conjunction of these two experiences in immediacy which can grant us an experience of the absolute—which requires a certain progression and a resort to mediations on both sides. This also requires us to accept that the absolute cannot be experienced permanently, which does not mean it being relative. Nevertheless, each must take responsibility for the relative that it is absolutely in order to reach the experience of an absolute which is relative only with regard to an outside of the self but which is not relative in itself.
If in the Hegelian Phenomenology (Hegel 1966/1979) the spirit must appear to itself in order to accomplish itself, must become other to become itself, the same cannot apply to a phenomenology of desire. The question is no longer one of merely appearing to oneself, of appearing before oneself, but also of appearing to the other. And such appearing to the other does not amount to a real contradiction in comparison with appearing to oneself. Appearing to the other is necessary for a personal becoming which does not depend only on oneself, although it needs autonomy and self-affection. However, desire cannot be satisfied with a mere self-desire, but appearing to the other is not becoming the other either, even if it entails a risk of one’s own disappearance in order that one should be recognized by the other.
Nevertheless, our appearing will not be overcome by another appearing, because the dialectical process is henceforth more complex. Appearing now calls for both a recognition by and a union with the other, which stops the motion of a projection onto a forward time or space and sends us back to ourselves, including to a natural belonging and a sensitive immediacy. Appearing amounts to our agreeing to be perceived in order to return to our own being and be born again.
The human being is originally split into two components. A dialectical process, which unfolds between us and an other naturally different from us, then substitutes, at least partly, for this resulting from a split between becoming oneself and becoming other. I am only an element of humanity, and letting myself be perceived by the other does not involve a contradiction between me as same as myself and me as different from myself, but it is a call for the recognition of a particularity which needs the desire of the other to fulfil a union at which I aim to accomplish my being.
In reality, the self-disclosure or turning out of our consciousness to itself only amounts to a partial accomplishment of ourselves. It does not yet correspond to the self-revelation and realization of our comprehensive being—desire better leads us to our complete fulfilment. And if, according to Hegel, reaching an absolute knowledge means the effectuation of both will and knowledge, it is nevertheless true that he subjects our will, or aspiration, to knowledge. Willing does not amount only to knowing, whatever the desire that we then experience. Wanting to be the ones who we are cannot be limited to knowing, including knowing ourselves—fulfilling our being longs for more. Moreover, even at the level of knowledge, such a fulfilment comes up against the impossibility of knowing the other as a knowing oneself. Experiencing the former is different from experiencing the latter and requires the mediation of desire. And this experience, through which our being happens to itself, cannot occur without the other, and the knowledge, which can result from this, is of another nature from the Hegelian knowledge.
Now, what truly corresponds with the absolute for us is not only spirit but a more comprehensive being—the absolute for which we long is to fulfil our own to be. To reach this absolute cannot be gained through a mere experience of ourselves but calls for us to experience being with the other as a condition for our being to come or be disclosed to itself. And this becoming with the other will also partly be a becoming the other, which demands our turning back to ourselves. But becoming other in the effective experience of our desire does not amount to the becoming other that consciousness, especially the Hegelian consciousness, experiences of itself when becoming other. The operation is more complex and asks of us to apply the negative to our being itself and not only to a stage of its appearing, an operation to which the dynamism of our will must make its contribution.