If some philosophers have claimed that our own ‘to be’, as the one of other living beings, corresponds to a will, then they have not really questioned the nature of this will. And they have subjected it to reason without realizing the consequences of this gesture. This is particularly true with regard to Hegel.
And yet, it is possible to interrogate our will—our appetite, our aspiration, our desire—as that which takes over from the moving by itself that Aristotle defines as the characteristic of a living being. Human beings cannot develop only from the origin of their life. This origin does not belong to them because they were born from the conjunction of two human beings, what is more two who are different by nature. This origin is also stolen from them because of their original immaturity and their consequent dependence on others for satisfying their needs. Their will is that which remains of a motion of growing after they reached their physical maturity. But this will has not to be reduced to a mere will of reason, instead of being acknowledged as a will relating to our whole being. Which of the philosophers has taken a real interest in this aspect of our will and in a way that would allow it to become incarnate and blossom? And who has really wondered about a reason suitable for a cultivation of our will to be, instead of subjecting it to the rule of reason itself?
However, the fact that our culture does not support our will to continue growing through our desire keeps alive the resentment that Nietzsche considers to be characteristic of our tradition. Nietzsche speaks of resentment as a sentiment that we experience against the time which passes. Could I suggest that this resentment results from the fact that time passes without we ourselves becoming? Our philosophy made our becoming dependent on timeless ideas or ideals instead of proposing cultural means which could accompany and favour our growing as living beings. Acting in this way, it aroused resentment through paralyzing our will to grow—which amounts to paralyzing our will to live.
Our being as living wants us to become. And the passing character that becoming involves is an expression of our living belonging, to which we are faithful by growing more than by not being. Resentment, even desire for revenge, which prevent us from becoming the new human that we have to be, are the outcome of our incapacity for making blossom our ‘to be’ as living. And is not the solution that Nietzsche suggests in order to overcome resentment a manner of freezing the problem? Does not the eternal return of the same take away from time its remainder of life? Does not the true overcoming of nihilism require another way of conceiving of temporality—one which allows our becoming to unfold through a transformation of the past into the future? Is not our resentment against the time which passes an outcome of the dissociation of temporality from our natural growing, a dissociation that Nietzsche seems in a way to increase more than reduce? How can we become as living beings if temporality amounts to an eternal return of the same? And how could we govern the world without taking into account its and our both natural and cultural evolution? Does not overcoming resentment instead ask us to inhabit time so that it should be the place which permits a continuity in becoming—our own, that of the world and of our relationship with the other, with others?
Time must be a sort of living dwelling which accompanies our becoming. And the same goes for time as for our natural belonging: it needs to be cultivated in order that life should be able to grow, to blossom, to flower and to bear fruit. Indeed, making our becoming continuous does not occur without assuming an original discontinuity—with regard to our origin, but also to the living beings different from ourselves. We have to take on the particularity of our own being and that of the temporality suitable for it, but this temporality cannot cut us off from life, as our culture generally did. We must succeed in cultivating life so that we could remain living without being immersed in a flow which lacks differentiation and individuation. This requires us to be faithful to nature without either subjecting it or being subjected to it. Hence the need for us to overcome a first immediacy in our relating to nature and its temporality while ensuring a continuity to it—which necessitates another dialectics than the speculative dialectics of Hegel. We no longer have the power to handle by ourselves the negative in order to reach an objective absolute which corresponds with our subjectivity. We have to take on the non-being which is from the very beginning our destiny as particular beings.
Starting from such an assumption, we differently perceive the nature of being. We are even attracted by the being which appeals to us by its absence or withdrawal from us, a being the removal of which summons us and after which we aspire. And the matter, henceforth, is no longer one of discovering and showing a being hidden from us in this way, but of uniting with it, without for all that appropriating it. The question is no longer one of perceiving only through spirit either, of being concerned or engaged only with our consciousness in order to unveil something of being, but of also agreeing to be affected and to venture to be touched, even to abandon ourselves to this affection, in order to allow our ‘to be’ to happen in a way that remains hidden from our sight. We can only make ourselves available in order that this ‘to be’ should occur without any seizure on our part.
Wanting to institute a dialectics of sensitivity with our traditional mode of thinking proves thus to be impossible. Indeed, representation, evaluation through a merely intellectual judgement, logic favouring the subject–object(s) relations have been imagined and used from its misapplication, not to say its repression. Contrasting poetry with thought does not solve the problem either. Rather, the matter is one of wondering about what was at stake in our way of thinking and how we can modify it. We must think about what our traditional discourse, about what the logos, is able to say and what it maintains outside its saying, either because it does not aim to tell it or because its way of saying prevents it from perceiving and expressing this non-said. In other words we must wonder about what absence or withdrawal of meaning goes with that which we consider to be the rational way of saying the real and of sharing it.
The real which seems to have been dismissed by our cultural tradition is the one which relates to desire and fire, desire as fire. This crucial aspect of our existence seems to have been neglected by philosophy and left to religion, especially for a sacrificial use, and this from the archaic traditions. The most ancient versions of the Vedas tell that originally fire ought to have been the property of the original waters, sometimes named Mothers, which, by their becoming heated, would have produced the cosmic egg from which the world would have sprung. The god Agni, first born of the ardour of the original waters, would have stolen the fire from the maternal-feminine world to give it to the warlike masculine gods, in particular to the god Indra, who this way would have subjected or won over the feminine original potential. To organize or build what had been generated by the original waters was, then, the role of men. One of their main deeds was to lay out the sacrificial era as a place where the perpetuation of the cosmic order was cared for. The responsibility for the sacrificial rites was entrusted to Agni, as the god of fire, after he had betrayed his own maternal ascendance to swear allegiance to the clan of Indra in exchange for immortality.
The fire seems to have never been shared. After having been a generative potential of the elements, sometimes called Mothers, it has been stolen by men, thanks to their warlike masculine gods, and put at the service of their work of fabrication of a more or less artificial world. It also has been of use to men for making sacrifices to the gods, notably because they felt guilty about having appropriated the fire.
Fire has never been preserved and cultivated through sharing a mutual desire, beginning with a sexuate desire—preservation and cultivation which in a way correspond with those of a non-being. The origin of being, notably through its potential for uniting, the fire arising from our sexuate belonging is nothing by itself. It remains extraneous to what characterizes being in our tradition. Its main property is to unite, but uniting acts without producing itself as being. It happens without appearing, without a specific presence of what unites. The latter does not enter into presence, it is never positioned before the subject, never visible. It operates while holding itself back. It intervenes, in particular between two, without belonging to the one or to the other. It is—but the properties of this ‘to be’ are not those that we traditionally attribute to being and its truth. Its mode of acting is without presence, permanency, even consistency. Nevertheless, it is—both not nothing and not being. And assuming this not being is the condition of its existence, of its being not nothing. It overcomes the dichotomy of being/not being, happening before or beyond such a split.
The fire of our sexuate desire acts as a verb which operates before the final and permanent determination of the substantives that it connects. Indeed, it unites each with itself and with the other(s). It gathers what or who already existed, without truly being by themselves, both within their selves and between their selves. Differently from the logos, which gathers elements which are by themselves and need to be committed to memory and assembled, the fire awoken by our sexuate desire gives meaning to elements by putting them together, by joining them to one another. But this link corresponds to what gives sense to them without bending them to another sense than their own. Indeed, the latter calls for uniting with one another.
Meaning then is the union itself, a union which is both a finality and a means on the condition that we agree that these escape from our mastery. We must answer for our ‘to be’ without being truly capable of making it exist. We can only pave the way to its happening by being faithful to our natural belonging, by listening to its call for uniting with the other, and by letting occur what results from uniting with one another as naturally and transcendentally different. This requires us to renounce appropriating that for which we long.
Without any aim that we could appropriate, our desire is not without truth. Alas, we use the source and the framework—in a way the Gestell—of our most original desire for producing other than truth. We have not really wondered about the truth of our desire as sexuate. We have just transformed our sexuate belonging into a device for producing something. We have made it an instrument of exploitation more than a means of unveiling our truth and cultivating it. We have not acknowledged the transcendental resource and quality of our sexuate belonging. We have used our sexuation to return to a mere ontical destiny, what is more in a frequently destructive manner, without considering its ontological potential. And yet, the latter is crucial for our blossoming as humans, although it is really particular and eludes our usual way of conceiving of our destiny. Desire exists, but we cannot seize it in any way.
Desire operates our gathering ourselves together and our gathering with one another. It prompts our opening and closing up, our blossoming and withdrawing, our becoming and our faithfulness to ourselves. Sexuate desire compels us to abandon ourselves to the other while so revealing to ourselves who we are. Nothing is more dialectical by itself than sexuate desire, but it escapes from any rational domination. We must assume our not being the other without any mastery of this nothingness, if not taking it on as an unsurmountable negative. This assent, one could also say this assumption, allows desire to exist, but this existence remains without being of its own. It corresponds to an aspiration after that which is non-appropriable by anyone—a pure link between us, between all.
Returning to desire its nature—in a way its essence, this term having now a new meaning—extraneous to any appropriable being, we return to ourselves, and also to the word, our destiny. We discover that, as well as desire, our words must serve to unite living beings in the respect for our/their difference(s). To be a human would correspond to be the guardian of a fire which does not consume but gives birth, gives life to each other. A destiny that, I hope, could suit all sorts of divinities.