Of course it was never quite as cut-and-dried as abandoning a word. While disillusioned with the rote forms of worship and the boring forms of talking about God (I was raised in a Lutheran church), I was not inattentive to the workings of grace in my life as they continued even after I began my effort to speak purged of that ominous signifier, and to head in a direction that had already been imposing its will upon me– that is, the direction of poetry. I’m speaking about a time in my life when I was sixteen or seventeen: already my mother had been diagnosed with melanoma, and I was in the middle of my own battle against cancer, my lymphoma. Through the chemotherapeutic haze, and then after I was “cured” and my mother had passed away, I saw how the community around my family (including many wonderful folks from church) helped to lift all of our spirits with their prayers, gifts and kind words. I saw how my father’s attitude toward my mother, toward our family, and toward life itself was transformed by the ordeal of our illnesses. And at her death bed, when my father and I held her two chilled hands, and gripped our own free hands together across her legs, I felt the strength of a bond of love between the three of us that nothing could ever destroy, especially not her death. For nothing can take away the legacy of love: legacy is always, immediately, reality. As I wept and wept on the hospital couch of room 421 that October night, 2003, my father clarified the scenario for me when he, also crying and rubbing my back, said with an obvious sense of uncertainty, “Tim, it’ll be alright, we’ll be okay.” Despite the fact that I was the one huddled up like a baby, I knew right when he said it that inside of me something very confident was burgeoning, something that made his words of condolence almost disappointing in their disavowed doubt. But of course we were going to be okay! God was with us, wherever we had next to go. All we had to do was believe (and this, I tell you, is no more difficult for us than breathing!).

Fast forward a few years to 2006, my first year in college, to another life-changing event. This one was condensed to one short week, and to this day I wonder if anything that intense will ever “dawn” on me again. It marks the beginning of my adult life as such. I had been very sick for about a week, perhaps purging something ugly and deep (and of all things to be reading between sessions of vomiting, there in my hands was Atlas Shrugged!). As my sickness was departing, I visited Barnes and Noble and read Saul William’s book Said the shotgun to the head for the very first time. Well, it was as if one veritable Shotgun of God had gone off in my head, and the reverberations sent me out to teach something with an unheard-of spontaneity of heart. I was both oblivious of everything, absolutely without concern for myself, and yet fully aware of every passing sign, feeling, and intention all around me. While I cannot describe the level of understanding that came over me that day (and again today?), I knew that it was a sudden rapturous enlightenment, something felt only deeply in the bones. It could not have been feigned: I tasted of Buddhamind, Love itself had taken hold of me. You can read what I wrote that initial next morning here, on my old xanga page. I have yet to complete or revise the major document that came out of this episode– a poem of about 80 pages that deals playfully and joyfully with God, life, spirit, nothing, etc. But this moment of dawn came with its pains, as with childbirth. I all but stopped eating and sleeping to focus on prayer and writing (Matthew 4:4). Needless to say, I was scaring the hell out of my family and my girlfriend Maree. I was acting exceedingly strange and definitively “not myself.” My words and my demeanor were sending the ones I loved crying from me, even though I knew that I had not simply lost my mind, and more importantly, that my words were flowing forth from a place of impartial love for them and for all beings. Truth be told: impartial love can hurt. Perhaps that alone dawned on me, is still dawning today…

Long story short, I ended up in the emergency room, where my stream of consciousness insight into the workings of God and the universe landed me a stay in the psych-unit. The next day I was transported to the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics and was released with a diagnosis of bi-polar and schizophrenia (after a rather crazy overnight stay, during which I swear to this day I heard the man on the radio say, “Well everyone, today was the big day: all seven wonders of the world have fallen”; my father was asleep by my side that night).  Later, reading the work of Stanislov Grof, I learned that I had had what he calls a “spiritual emergency” — a very tender time that can easily be misdiagnosed as the onset of something bad by medical professionals who have no way of “detecting” it. Needless to say, the doctor’s reactions, along with my family’s, made me doubt the real status of this event, and sent me into a giant pit of confusion. I regressed back to childhood; I asked my step-mom if I was autistic; and one night, with my head buried on his lap, I asked my dad what we were watching on television. “Basketball,” he said– a game we had played together our whole lives, his and my favorite sport. But the thing was: I knew exactly what I was watching. I knew full well that I wasn’t autistic. And yet I was asking, and watching myself ask, perplexed as could be. I was never trying to fool or hurt anyone. Truth be told, I don’t know. Really. All I can is: something was being fulfilled…

Of course, this giant pit of confusion was also a part of the event, and necessary. I only took the meds they prescribed for about two days and was back in school by the following week. But I was magically back, gratefully back. Nothing has ever felt the same. In the days and weeks that followed, my passions cooled and I got some much-needed rest; but I knew that a fire had been set, and there was no question of pursuing it further or not. After all, it had pursued me, as God’s Love is wont to do! In a certain sense, every word I say henceforth is a footnote to that experience, which is why I say it was the beginning of my adult life; but at the same time, I have come to know that sense of exuberance and joy countless times. I might even say that it’s become normal, become practical, become the very life-bread of my existence, even if it is not as flashy as it was for that one week. Which makes sense: impartial love does not boast in its actions, lest it hurt someone it loves. At any rate, I say with full confidence that God was leading me on in that “emergency,” and that He has continued to do so through all the thousands of emergencies since then that have felt like that first one. He saw to it then that I was surrounded by the most loving bunch of people on the planet: my father, his new wife Susie, and Maree. To this day, I owe these three everything for their patience with me and for their love. Without them, I’m not sure I would have “come back,” especially not without the direct command issuing from Maree to do so. Perhaps everything I do is ultimately in honor of that, of that simple but pure gesture of human love. It meant and will always mean everything.

Nevertheless, the truth is this, and now I know it better than ever: I came back to save everyone. Which only means one thing: I did not come back from that emergency, no more than I survived cancer, for my own well being, nor for my own proclivities in love. I came back because love itself needed me, because it needed me to keep speaking. What infinite grace, what powerful hands of the Almighty, that I am preserved solely for the sake of Love, alive solely on the hope that my measly little life might kindle in your heart some of the Love that God always already has for each and every one of us! This “God” that your heart and my heart and each heart is! And so let me hasten to add that my situation is in no way unique. We are all “still alive” for this very same purpose, to fulfill this very same duty to love and to be loved, and to give thanks all along the way. To say hello to one another and to realize: we are all already saved, if only we live love…

To return to my narrative, about a year later my father was diagnosed with cancer, and one of the most painful types there is: pancreatic. I was still an “undecided” major at college and took the semester of Fall 2007 off to be with him in his final months. This was also a time of deep spiritual growth for me, not necessarily due to an overload of personal study, and perhaps due to the very opposite. I was spending almost all of my time with him or with friends, sometimes meditating, sometimes discussing the ideas of Eastern philosophy and Ken Wilbur, sometimes watching Planet Earth. Whenever I was driving, I would repeat a mantra supposed to bring good health (“Om Shri Dhanvantre Namaha”) and spin my mala beads in my lap, hoping (perhaps a bit superstitiously, I admit) that it would bring help and healing to my dad, or at least to me. In the meantime, I watched my father undergo an almost total transformation from who I remembered as a child. My mom’s death, and then his life with Susie, had already softened him quite a bit; but the idea of his own death brought a halt to the mind that had been dedicated for 25+ years to being a stellar electrical engineer and department manager at Rockwell Collins. He fell in love with a book called Conversations with God, which he said answered many of his questions about the relationship between science and spirituality. (I never read it; despite the fact that he was handing it out like candy to all his family and friends, I knew it was not for me.) He and Susie also read Ken Wilber’s account of his struggle with his own wife’s cancer, Grace and Grit. And so while all of this was an immensely difficult time for us, I felt all along like we were being guided by some unseen hand, like it wasn’t an accident or simply a bad turn of fate. Strange as it sounds, these were some of the best months and moments of my life, sharing tears with my father, seeing this amazingly courageous man face up to the harshest pain without complaint. And then to see him tear and dissolve when he realized that no cure was going to be possible. I didn’t write too much at this time, but when I did, it was usually dedicated to someone, and most often to my father. I wrote to understand myself, but also to bring understanding and comfort to him. It was my long-form of “We’ll be okay,” my own rendering of the Good News.

In the end, I’d never felt as connected with my own personal responsibility and obligation to the living as I did on January 3rd, 2008 and the days following immediately afterwards. Perhaps other men feel the same way when they lose their fathers: now it is time to take it all upon oneself; now, your shoulders are the broadest that there are. For anyone who knew my dad, those are some broad shoulders to take handle of, much broader than my own! But his presence goes with me– my Father’s, I mean– just as his gravestone inscription says (Exodus 33:14). Again, this is not some hypothetical conjecture. I’m telling you this with absolute certainty. My Father goes with me wherever I go.

Where I went after that, however, was no glorious and pretty place. Between these traumatic events and college life at the University of Iowa, my drinking and pot-smoking habits went up considerably (including the addition of regular cigarette smoking). Furthermore, I was torn between what I felt was my duty to myself (which required much time “alone”) and the social activity that I also needed and enjoyed so much. I never felt orphaned, first because of my step-mom, Susie, and second because of the wonderful community of friends that was around me, even if our activities together weren’t always the best thing for my mental, physical, and spiritual health. But this half-decade had truly thrown me back upon myself, me who had always been independent to begin with. I now entered every “social” situation with a new-found sensibility of how it was really affecting my spirit or, in many cases, keeping me from it. And slowly I learned how to navigate both interests. I threw myself into my studies and designed my own major, entitled “Pneumatology: study of the Human Spirit.” This allowed me to take all the courses that I wanted, and so I was able to include courses on trauma and death (which I took the semester of my return), anthropology and literature, as well as all the many religious studies courses, independent studies, and writing workshops that I was diving into headlong. While the balance between public and personal was often difficult for me, I knew that my heart and spirit resided in my work, for if there is one activity that I can do “by myself” that keeps me in communion with God and all of those I love, it is this: reading, thinking, and writing. Of course, for me this forms a continuous bond with all of my living, all my daily speech and conduct, all my love. Today, I can read and write and think at full capacity wherever I am, no matter who I am with. With a little help from sobriety, and a lot of help from God’s guidance, I will continue to do this, and rejoice in it for you, all the way until the end of days.

In sum, my college experience after my father’s death amounted to a perfect mix of despair and delight, sociality and isolation, debauchery and purity. I’d long ago intuited the “need” for self-voidance, and while reality had dealt me enough death-experiences to know that there was no avoiding this voidance, college gave me the chance to pursue this as an adult in every way imaginable. Drugs, including psychedelics, played a part in this; but so did their supplement, works by Aldous Huxley and others. Drinking played a part in this; but so did the poetry of Jack Spicer and Paul Celan. Mediation played a part in this; but so did the words of Sri Aurobindo and Ramana Maharshi. Of course love played a part in all of this, romantic or not, foolish or not, wasted or not. And all along: vast expanses of time filled with uncertainty, anxiety, loneliness, and every breed of feeling helpless and alone that one man can experience. I am not ashamed to admit that it took all I had in me to not give up, and that this time in my life (which extended quite a ways after graduation, and in part up to this very day) was filled with what I can only regard as mistakes, misconceptions, and missteps. But all along, I was sustained by my desire to write and by the duty I knew I had to live up to as a survivor: I had to do with the legacy I inherited from my parents everything I could for the cause of Love. Of course, only now can I articulate it that way; but I believe that this was the underlying factor that kept me from jumping out of my window some nights. The worst thing we can do in life is fail to heed the call to exist, even if we do not know where that existence is headed or what it is making of us. To this very day, I do not know “whither”; and yet, as always, whither itself runs.

And so here I am, again, kneeling before the altar of God, which I tell you unequivocally and without hesitation is the whole of existence in all of its aspects, attributes, avatars, and auras. Am I still afraid to use this word, “God”? Yes and no. But now when I use it, I know for certain that I am not “defining” anything, certainly not setting any restriction on its meaning.  I know that I am and conduct only the fruitfulness of the Spirit. Those who put their stock in arguments will have their arguments. Those who need a reasonable “proof” of God will pursue their (a)theistic ontologies. Those who need God as a guarantee of their unloving motives and as the justification for imposing their own beliefs on others will continue to lie (see Revelation 22:11). And those kind people who can do without any mention of “God,” well, let them go on being kind, never doubting, and never thinking twice about not mentioning Him (thank God they don’t!), since the Art of Kindness is all that any talk of God is meant to each us. Because the truth is, “God” is not a word. “God” is the “name” of and behind everything that is being said insofar as it relates to, or can potentially relate to, everything else that has ever existed, or will exist. For me, “we relate to one another” means “God exists”‘; and so wherever we relate to one another, there God is (Matthew 18:20). Put it as simply as you like: where there is love, God is there, and where there’s no love, there’s no God. This simple axiom, I hope, simplifies whatever dilemma you might have over the usage of this “term.” In my eyes, understood this way, in God there can only be growth, for any liar can be immediately recognized and called out; and that growth can only be the growth of impartial love in the heart, even when it is terribly difficult. Trust me, you will know it when it is working and it will be unavoidable. Do nothing drastic about it, just listen. It is that Higher Voice within you. But we must choose to listen to it, vigilantly. And almost immediately, we can rejoice, give thanks, and move forward…

One can try to run away, one can try to avoid it, and hell, one can even try to die, but existence itself embraces us from before and beyond everything, including the grave. And this embrace has only one characteristic: love. Obviously, from all that I have just told you, this love is not without its suffering; in fact, Christ proclaims to us that true and impartial love for all beings suffers everything for the good. Those of Buddhist inclination will note an exact parallel in the Bodhisattva vow. I write this piece today, kneeling at the altar of God, to confess to you and to my God that I desire to, I will to, and I will will to, suffer everything for the good. No more now than during these trying times of my past do I know exactly where this long-suffering love is leading. But once again, whither runs, and any of us can chose simply to run with it– to “surrender to love” as my good friend Adam often puts it. But who among us doesn’t need reminders, and daily ones at that, of the need to suffer for love impartially, of the need to surrender totally to what existence is bringing to us constantly, to open ourselves to one another as wide as possible without sacrificing our own sense of decency and conscience, and to be patient through whatever is demanded of us, to see everything through to the end with courage and an infinitely forgiving heart? Yes, we all need to remember God… 

Today I stand before you, with a realization that is both timeless and yet revealed only in this moment: I write (live?) because that is how I remember God. That is how it has always been and how it will always be. I have said much, and I have much left to say; but all in all, I can only say the “unsaid” itself– in remembrance of God, done in the remembrance of Him. I can only offer myself up as a kind of mirror for This, or perhaps (with God’s grace and help) set an example of what is possible, of what it can mean to remember God, or rather, to remember that God remembers you. He always has, always does, and always will. God does not forget us, no matter what tribulation we are going through; and He loves us more than we could ever imagine ourselves being loved. Truly, He is everything in this sense, because He loves, and existence is love. And in another sense, He is very simple. For I am He– and after all, I am nothing very much!

Kneel before the altar, no matter what your suffering. Confess what you have done wrong to all people, every day. Let go of whatever ill notions you hold of other people or of other groups of people, for these are the things that breed pain in your heart. Let go of what is merely transitory and hold to what is eternal; then all your conceitedness and hesitation will melt away like dew in the spring. Forgive yourself for how you have harmed yourself and others in thought, word, and deed; immediately you yourself will be and feel forgiven. Pray for the strength to stop doing all these things that bring harm to you and your fellow man. Pray for the strength to do what “God” demands of you. Because of course there is no “God” that demands anything of you; but we are talking about that which exceeds all thought (St. Anselm’s majus quam cogitari possit), about that which is more intimate to me than I am to myself (Augustine’s interior intimo meo), and so about that which is always running ahead of us, within and without– absence and excess in one sense. And so we are talking about what demands everything of us, but in doing so, simply asks us to be our very best and better person. Personally, I can find no better word for this than “God,” even if it turns you off. Surely some will use Santayana, Avalokitesvara, or Christ. I believe that once we cede the reservations in our hearts surrounding these words, reservations which are almost always due to what someone else said or our fear of being put in the same group as those who corrupt these words in rash and unreasonable ways and for perverted purposes– once we seek the proper place of these words, they awaken like a tree already half-grown within our souls (see James 1: 19-25). However you conceive of it– or rather, don’t conceive of it, cannot conceive of it– release yourself to IT, release yourself to love and to your highest Self-esteem. For God is with you, wherever you go. Pray to Him and He will purify everything, right before your very eyes. Be quiet and you will hear Him. Believe in the love that exceeds all things, and all things will be transformed. Seek in all you do the comfort of the Lord our God — this Heart, my Heart, ours, our own.

And at the very least, remember this: the degree to which you forgive others is the very degree to which you are forgiven. I promise: we can feel a sense of the infinite overcome us, and at that point we know, not only that we are “real,” but that we are and participate in something much realer than anything that is “real.” Because when we commune in love, we participate in it not as a “part” of it, but totally, radically, each time “as if” the entire thing. I promise: to taste one moment of love is already to taste the everlasting. Oh my Beloved, I cannot slip away… I am filled with you, and you fill me forever… Thank the Good LORD for YOU!

And so, to conclude, let us be very clear about the purpose behind my current and future usage of the word “God.” The goal is not to convince anyone of anything, nor is it really even to share my ideas. The goal is to give us (myself included) a taste of the everlasting, and to encourage our hearts to maintain themselves within that space, where all is equal and good. We can feel that infinite sense of donation and forgiveness come into our hearts. We know what it means to converse with the flip-side of our “self.” We can feel the outside of the world open up smack-dab in the middle of this world, as Jean-Luc Nancy would say. And I say: “Rejoice! Existence is Love, Hallelujah!” For I believe that God has made us this way– or, if you like, that our Mind has as its highest purpose to learn to feel this way, that the whole design of “evolution” is to lead us to this “involved” point where we feel the whole of existence arising within each of us as love, where we can feel that there is no separating us from it– not even at “death” (which, I promise you, has always already come and been defeated). For He has made us to feel Him within ourselves, as Ourselves, and to share this feeling with others in a spirit of friendship, forgiveness, and compassion. Of course everything is yet to be said, but that itself is to be praised, for “God” is the very act enunciating His joy, the very movement of existence’s self-expression and self-exposition, the very “being” of Our Love. ”God” is no idea, no being, no nothing whatsoever not at all. “God” is what I am before you right now, or your self inside of you instigating this wrenching truth, just as you are “God” in what you are for me, right now and always. In God there is only receptivity to Godself: sharing, beatitude, resonance. And all of this because I love you, because we love each other, and because Love loves us with love eternal– here, right here where I stand, we alone or all together, kneeling before the altar of God.

With love,
Yours, forever and always,
Tim.

(By the way, the logic of “with” often requires a heavy-handed syntax in order to say “being-with-one-another.” You may suffer from it as you read these pages. But perhaps it is not an accident that language does not easily lend itself to showing the “with” as such, for it is itself the address, and not what must be addressed.) –Jean-Luc Nancy

An interesting discussion has come up between me and Levi Bryant over at Larval Subjects (here and here). It seems to get at a genuine differend between Levi and me, which I would like to explore. The topic, broadly speaking, has to do with entities/beings and how they relate, how they are or are not in a world, and additionally, if there is any sense to the expression “the world.” His position is that unless a being is in relation with something, it doesn’t share the world with it; and each things’ “world” is its mass or mesh of relations. My position is that even when something is not related to something else, they still share this world, sharing in the coming of the world, our world. (I might also challenge anyone to show me something that isn’t related to anything else…) If I could have kept my response to the space of a comment, I would have, but since not, I’m posting it here. Insofar as the following piece is part of an on-going discussion (and so partly addressed directly to Levi or those familiar with object-oriented ontology (“OOO”)), I hope my readers will forgive me for writing a bit looser, a bit less fabulously and free than usual.

As a preliminary remark, I am never more challenged in the area of expression than when it comes to these direct questions of ontology. I have no less than five drafts trying to relate my position (informed by Nancy, as you all would guess) to object-oriented ontology. None of them have ever satisfied me; and yet I know the link is there, or I would have long ago given up. Thus, I hope that my words are not reduced to “my position,” insofar as I’m testing waters more than I’m advancing theses. In any case, I don’t wield the kind of theoretical prowess that Levi does; I only hope that this does not betray an immaturity on my part. As Nancy writes, “The strict conceptual rigor of being-with exasperates the discourse of its concept,” and I believe I know this exasperation well. (Perhaps this is what I share with Levi more than anything; but this very exasperation is our being-in-common.) If ontology becomes an explicit theme here, it can only do so at the cost of a kind of general confusion, a general going-haywire in my discourse; and on the other hand, all of my posts have to do with “fundamental ontology,” because ontos is always a question of ethos and praxis. In that sense, the tone of a thing tells us more than anything else what it is, for its tone is its ethic, its practice, its ontology, its rapport.

1 – “co-”

Fundamental to any adequate expression of ontology is the prefix “co-.” We can think what we will of Heidegger, but his philosophy in Being and Time registers a profound shift in our thinking of Being, precisely at the point where he discovers this: to be WITH is not a categorical but an existentiel of being-there. This means that the “with” is not “added on” to a being encased in itself, but that “being-with” [Mitsein] precedes or founds “being-there” [Dasein]. Simply put, to be oneself is eo ipso, precisely thereby, always already to be in-common. In a word, to be-there is already to be-with. But let’s be quick to emphasize that this does not determine anything about whatever being is in question. It is a statement regarding the structure of being-the-there as being-with. Whatever is there is with, with itself and/or with others, even in the absence of all relation (if that is possible), even in utter withdrawal (I’ll return to this).

Where Nancy comes in here is very precise. Heidegger, as we know, never developed his existential analytic into a co-existential analytic, he never developed this Mitsein to its full extent; and where he did return to it, it was always in the form of a “people” [Volk] endowed with destinal qualities, etc. For Heidegger, this would mean that every being is a unique expression of some With that transcends it, a race, a people. But in making this move, Heidegger mistakenly transfers the structure he uncovered (being-there exists in being-with) into a kind of communal substance that each being would then express. This is how Heidegger registers both facism and communism, the whole rupture of his age, an age that felt the demand of the “social” more than any other, but did not know how to think this social without the idea of a common Subject, Substance, Nation, or Group. But we shouldn’t give up on the coexistential analytic or a thinking of being-with because of the mistakes of Heidegger and his age.

While I can’t take much time with it here, Nancy both starts and takes his distance from here, when he first differentiates “common-being” from “being-in-common” (see The Inoperative Community). I can only emphasize that when he and I write “with,” and if I say each thing or being expresses “with” equally, this means that each thing expresses this common structure of being-with as being-in-common simply in its being-(the-)there. It never expresses a common-being, substance, essence, world, etc. There’s nothing behind it, and this “with” is “nothing at all,” “nothing in particular.” This is where we take leave of Leibniz if we take him to mean that each thing is one particular view point of the whole world, or of God. No, I couldn’t agree with Levi more here, because there is no “the world” that each thing expresses. In my view, however, the focus or locus of the matter is on this being-in-common of each thing, which does not take anything away from the fact that each thing is absolute (or withdrawn), but rather makes it so. Each thing is in-common insofar as each thing is “with,” but precisely to the extent that each thing is the origin of the whole world. This is the idea I will try to develop here.

What makes this so difficult to discuss is that this “being-with” does not negate the “ownness” of a thing, but in fact even makes it what it is. This coexistential analytic is only the next step in a long process of being withdrawing into the intimacy of “its own.” All of this talk of withdrawal in objects is not unconnected to the idea that the gods themselves have withdrawn. Furthermore, there is a certain type of theology that says it is only through withdrawal of the gods that something like “the world” or “existence” can begin in the first place. Christianity mobilizes this most radically in the notion of kenosis: God’s absolute withdrawal totally empties Him of absolutely everything; and this emptying-out-of-God literally “is”… “the world.” We won’t get into that, but simply note that the emergence of the “subject” is tied to this withdrawal (and also note in passing: there is a historicity to this emergence). At the heart of any “ownmost” we discover the structure of being-with. The point applies most readily to what we call the subject, ego, or self, but it applies likewise to any object. It is a question of the structure of that ownness, or how ownness is not an egoity but rather a hidden intimacy that draws the thing deeper into itself than it imagined it could go. Object-oriented ontology says: object are withdrawn. The question for me simply has to do with the “with” in this “withdrawn.”

This would be the heart of the differend, perhaps: For me, everything is “related” because we all share this common structure of being-related-to, even if this just means being-related-to-myself. Because we are all there, we are all also with something else, even if that something else is myself! Not “related” in some scheme of interconnection, not “forged together” in some purposeful collaboration between humans and/or nonhumans, but simply being-related-there by dint of the fact that being-there is structured (“internally,” if you want) as being-with — as being-with-its-(other-)self (withdrawn, subtracted, split, divided, etc.). This is a “with” that cannot be destroyed, since its always literally there wherever any being is. The implications are deep (ontologically and politically), because it is only by dint of sharing this common structure (which says nothing about “what” we share but only that we share this structure “in that we are there”…) that we can speak for ourselves as “us,” the only reason we can have a discourse like OOO to begin with, which aims to speak for neutrinos, airplanes, etc. In other words, for me and Levi and OOO general, what’s at stake is this commonly-shared-structure of being. Theoretically, my only stated aim is to inject Nancy and my understanding of him into this discussion and to suggest that others do the same.

2 – “world”

Now to move on to the question of “the” world more specifically. When I say “Right now, I’m in the world, sharing in the world’s coming, etc.,” I’m not saying anything radical. When taken theoretically, however, it’s easy to read that “in the world” as if I meant “in this big container called the universe/world.” I do not mean that. I mean that I am in a place where beings and things touch and depart, come close and separate, obviously without ever making a unity but always doing so commonly, in-common. I am in a place that we all share (even the inanimate, the distant, the dead). As for what “sharing” means, French comes much closer with the verb partager which means “to share,” “to distribute,” but also “to part” or “partition,” or “to set apart.” So when I say that I’m sharing the world with everything and everyone else in the world, I don’t mean that we make “one” or that there are fixed borders, not at all, but that the part of the world apportioned to me is not for all that just a “part.” It is (for me and for each thing) “the whole thing,” “the whole deal,” “the whole world,” each time. But this each time happens in-common. This “it is absolutely there” of each being or thing is what we all share in-common. Strange way to say it, but it is as if each thing is “a part apart” without for all that being “apart,” since each thing nevertheless shares this common structure of with, and so shares in the common coming of (the) “world(s).”

In being “a” world unto itself, each thing or being is “the whole world.” Worlding is what each being does, but not as if it were acting out some essentially or forging relationships. Again, this is not Leibniz insofar as there is not some Something preceding “things themselves” that each thing then expresses. No, it means that each thing is an origin of the whole world, infinitely withdrawn from “the” world and yet in it — but only in it because making it or making it up, as its “one and only” origin, each time. (Strangely enough, it is as if each thing, just by being-itself-there, expressed the Christian motif of “being in the world but not of the world”; again, we have to set this aside for now.) There is only world insofar as everything in it withdraws from it, is subtracted from it, and yet subtracts itself from it “in” it. In this sense, I’m in total agreement with Levi: “the” world is what never takes place and never could take place. If it did, it would simply be another totalizing or transcendent God, Subject, or Nation, fully interpellating its subjects and all things, etc. Levi and I are in total agreement contra any omnipotent common-being of this sort. As I see it, “the” world is only the taking-place of this plurality of origins/worlds/things, and this “that it all takes place”… never itself takes place. “The” world is mediately/immediately a plural articulation of worlds, with no common demoninator save for the “fact” that they “are.” But this facticity, this “are,” means “with,” “are-with.” And so the thought of “the world” is even more demanding, the question of the creation of the world no less enigmatic.

So if I continue to speak of “the” world, it is to address the non-totalizable rather than to define a totality. When I address the world (you, anything), I address it from one outside the world (“me”) to another outside of the world (“you”). Clearly the world is not a container for us outsides, no more than a casket can contain a person. Here, world = spacing, dispersal, deposition. Here, every “thing” is not only withdrawn, but in its withdrawal it is itself an absolute origin of the world. There would be no “the” world that mediates all these origins; but neither would “world” be something added on to “things.” Each thing or being is the origin of the world and thus not related “secondarily.” Worlds don’t come secondary: we might say they are existentiels of objects, not categoricals. This is what we all have “in-common”: we are all equally absolute and priceless origins of the world, so absolute and priceless that the world we seem to take place in never, itself, takes place.

All of these disparate (or disappearing) worlds/things/origins share in the coming of the world, or in the becoming-world of the world (yes, whatever this means, our world). Each outside of the world (each entity, being) divides the world from itself in coming. They each partition the world infinitely, making it a world that is “definitively” there in being not-all, in always being to-come and in never stopping with coming. The very facticity of the “that it is there” of anything whatsoever is its absolute “relationality” (on the one hand, because where there is one thing, there are always many other things also; and on the other, because even when utterly withdrawn and in the absence of all external relations, I am still “with myself”). There is no thing that is not with other things, no world that isn’t exposed to other worlds, exposed as an origin of the world, in-common. This doesn’t mean that relations precede or succeed relata, that interconnectivity precedes or succeeds things, but rather that no matter what, each “relata” instantiates relation as such, each thing instantiates the/a whole world, each time for the first time. We’re all in the same boat in doing this, and we are all singular-plural origins of the world. We “relate” qua our subtraction-from-the-world, which we are (in the verbal sense); and nevertheless this subtraction makes a world, makes it come.

3 – “with-drawn”

In that sense, the question, “Which comes first, being or relating?” can no longer hold up. To be is to relate-to, even if this means to withdraw-utterly-from. There’s no mandate or obligation on relating, but neither is there any escaping it, since to go into exile (or die) is also to relate, even if it means to relate-away. In withdrawing, the “with” is still drawn to it, even if it is drawn to it in drawing away. If I stopped responding, if I turned off my blog, shut off my G+, Facebook, Twitter, and e-mail, this would sever countless relations. But I’d still be relating nonetheless, relating in being absent. Admittedly, some would miss me more than others; but missing isn’t a relation? and what about those who only stumble upon these words years later? If I stopped editing this post, or if you stopped reading it, that’s still relating. I don’t see anyway that anyone can jump out of being-with anymore than one could jump out of being-there. I am (or each instant is) a unique origin of the world in being totally withdrawn from every world (or in being totally withdrawn from every spatio-temporal matrix). To stop reading here changes nothing about the ontological composition of the world. Withdrawal cannot help but open up the world ever more, opening it up to the “outside of the world.” To exist is to go into exile, so go, if you must. From time to time, perhaps instantly, it demands that we stop articulating this ontology, despite the fact, or even knowing that, wherever we go, we are articulating it – with, with-drawn.

Even stranger: I can only “stop” insofar as I’m represented to others or to myself. Death itself only happens in representation, because no one can ever take away the origin of the world that I am. This is a bit like Graham Harmon saying that even when a cotton ball is devoured by flames, the fire only touches the flammable part. Thus even in utter obliviation and death, the fact that “I” am an origin of the world cannot be taken away. And insofar as I am an origin of the world to the very extent that I’m withdrawn from the world, “death” would only seal up the enigmatic nature of me-as-origin even more. Therefore, I am totally unafraid: death has been conquered, vanquished, resurrected insofar as the origin that I am cannot be erased, because it never existed anywhere save in my withdrawal from the world and all things. Paradox of all paradoxes: withdrawal is genesis! 

I am immortal (escaping whatever spatio-temporal matrix) because no one can take away the fact that I am being: “subtracted” (Badiou), “withdrawn” (Heidegger), “inscribed” (Derrida), “exscribed” (Nancy). The uniqueness of “me” is this “immortal” origin. Personally, I am indebted to OOO for bringing to light the fact that what I say here about “me” also applies to any and all things (but trust me, OOOer’s, this is also in Nancy); and that’s all I have been developing here, despite the difficulty I am having. From this perspective, OOO is a discourse about the immortality of objects, or the material immortality in or of all things. Whether or not you jive with that lingo matters little. For all of us, I think it is a matter of giving the respect due to each thing, as it is, before it gets caught up in any “worldly” scheme, including space and time itself.

Immortal: each sentence exscribes a body or a thought that can’t be represented; each paragraph tries to get at what cannot be gotten at; each book reaches toward a common sense of being that cannot be represented but only sensed in the trust of the exasperated thought; our world like an instant of writing such that the writings vanish into cyberspace despite the instants’ going-nowhere; nothing can be represented, the instant is absolute, endless in its never-having-started; for there is only meaning in the sharing of this unshareable, this common ontology; the only meaning of all our words in being-sharing-being, where sharing meaning always shares the fact that each thing or being is co-essential in co-existing, or even in being “coexistence” itself, existing the very “co-” it is; co-origination of meaning, things, and world. –Stress, coffee, backlash, epiphany; origin and/in disappearance; sense, non-sense, absence; laughter, love, loss, separation… isn’t it all there? there in this enigmatic world from which nothing can ever be erased, insofar as it wouldn’t be there as it is without us and what we’re bringing to it, constantly, as inexchangeable origins of this, this world always coming/never coming?

Clearly, there is no outside of the world. Industrialized, technologized, computerized, globalized, increasingly we know that we all share this world, without back-worlds, without afterlife-worlds, etc. And yet in another sense, every thing, every being, is outside the world, removed from it. And absolutely so: to the point that I am withdrawn even from myself, withdrawn from my age, my looks, my words, from everything, withdrawn into the inaccessible origin that I am. Inaccessibly immortal. And that each thing is: the outside of the world that makes the world itself come, without any unified border, without any finality, without any accomplishment in meaning or destiny, but being itself the spacing and spacing-out of all things, and thus never even “being” itself. This is why the world, when we feel it, or when we sense it, is pure gift, gratuity, excess, grace. The feeling of being going far beyond itself, yet going there with itself, subtracting itself from the orders of the world, meaning, sense, perhaps even from being itself…

Let me come to a close with these final remarks and leave this disorderly text as it is, surrendered to your careful or careless reading, in any case, it won’t matter much, since everything about being-with exhausts us, even as it renders us such fine joys. Levi mentions the homeless and other entities that “do not share a world with other entities at all,” by which he means that there are no relations between those entities (homeless people) and the world they could be related to and share (their locale, their city, etc.). But isn’t it true that they are nevertheless in that world? Isn’t it true that they’re excluded from the world only from the viewpoint of the world that excludes them? Isn’t it true that from their point of view, they are still in “the” world, still “in relation” to it, even in the absence of any relation and despite the world’s utter indifference to them? And don’t they talk more than anyone about about how terrible the world is, about how cruel the world is, and about the end of the world as such? Don’t they know “the world” in all its callousness better than anyone?

So, Levi, the crux of our disputatio seems to be that, for you, where there is an absence of relations, there is no world, whereas for me, even where there is no relation at all there is sharing, there is an in-common, even if it is cruel and dispassionate, if only because everything, no matter what, is an equal origin of the world, and “the world” only means the common exposure of origin to origin, world to world, inside and out — not a mediator, but the mediation (with) and dispersal (withdrawal), always juxtaposing, always altered. Both of us want to do justice to the excluded entity, whether they be homeless people or endangered sharks, this is sure. My claim is simply that the biggest reason for this is because each person, each thing, is an absolute origin of the world. Hopefully my remarks have made some sense to you, and that they will sink in despite their admittedly unmanageable length. I am finally publishing a text having to do with OOO, and for me, that is something. Cheers my friend.

Addendum: Although I have drawn, always tangentially, from Jean-Luc Nancy’s work, I would hope that my readers extend him the courtesy of attributing every idea expressed here to me and my articulation of the truth, and not to his. It would kill me if, in reading a response, someone used it to make a statement like “Nancy thinks that…”, etc. For both of us, to read is a matter of experience, not a matter of truth-claims, and my articulation is nowhere near to Nancy’s on many levels, stylistically and substantively. And furthermore, without spending some time immersed in someone’s tone, it’s impossible to converse with them on any relevant level, that is, on any level beyond the merely representational (which amounts to heresay). Those interested in Nancy’s texts on ontology and the world would do best to reference Being Singular Plural, The Sense of the World, and The Creation of the World; or Globalization, and definitely in that order, unless you’re interested in starting at the very beginning with The Inoperative Community on the topic of common-being vs. being-in-common.

I stood as a pupil of death: stood before death’s boundless knowledge and let myself be educated. –Rainer Maria Rilke

Resurrection: not a concept, not a consolation, not a frenzied feeling… but a certitude, a singular certitude, certain only of this: I live. But who says so? “Me”: death.

Initially, these are strange indications; later, they may still be so. What disquiets us about death? Quite simply the dream of no-longer-being, of no more time, of no more relation, of no more beauty, of no more life. Would the certitude of resurrection console these losses? Definitively no; but it would shed light into this darkness, though without removing it. It would make that darkness lighter. And it would surrender life to the intimate relationship life has with life-lost, this loss that we flee from, hoping to engender ourselves as a permanent presence. The certitude of resurrection: to live ones own impermanence or non-presence. To live death: our truth, but only because the end of all truth. To gather, in the flash of a moment, a sense of this end — a sense of the end of “sensing” in general, the truth of the end of sense. Death, resurrected.

Death/truth : but why? No articulation makes it easy; in fact, to articulate “resurrection” is to say nothing, absolutely nothing at all. It is to make a plea: understand death, for she is not foreign to you. Or do we say: she is no more foreign to you than you are to yourself? Of course, death is not something to be understood, no more than you can understand yourself or God. Here is the tight knot that splits our sense of life and the truth of life apart. But this schism is not a loss, it is life. Any old life: coming in contact with the untouchable, crossed there by the infinity of sense. Life, touched by the inappropriable, by death. A plea, not for help, not for assurance, but for this sober recognition, this shared recognition: see, see this, that death opens right here in life, there as our utmost intimacy with life’s truth. 

Death: no more sense, no more sensation, no more being, no more world; but also the no-place deep within “ourselves” toward which every sense of being in the world rushes so as to escape whatever confines “being” or “the world” would put on sense. And so a place more intimate to ourselves than us, holding safe the untouchable, uncognizable: the uniqueness of our world. To think death is to address the beyond-all-sense, the beyond-being, the beyond-the-world — right here. To resurrect death by addressing its solemn place, which is your place — you, where all sense expires, now, where every world withdraws, now, where every construction crumbles, now, where every identity fails, now. To not be afraid of that. To sense its immediacy in you. To become its pupil. To say quite simply: I love that…

I had wanted to discuss a text by Jean-Luc Nancy entitled “The Resurrection of Blanchot”; but who do you want to hear from, Nancy, Blanchot, or me? In truth, however, you hear none of us. No, you read (perhaps it is difficult, perhaps it is joyful), and in this miracle, you yourself preform the most mysterious: you resurrect “me.” Not “me,” the one you may know, the one you have encountered, the one who is your partner in conversation, the one who is your good friend. He is already lost, withdrawn, already fallen away. I myself do not know him either, and don’t need to. He is no longer, so as to be this “me” we’re speaking of, which is “we.” No, not him, you resurrect “me”: death, anonymous, neuter, common. Where “me” becomes “we” in the common exposure to ourselves and to the end of all truth. The thing we share insofar as we share in the expiration of sense, insofar as we share the dropping-away of the whole world. You read me, you hear my call, you bear witness to the emptiness of the tomb. Doing so we share in this anonymity: we resurrect. You experience the dimension of “death” opening right in the middle of life, and you are not afraid, because it looks and feels no different from “life as you knew it” — even if everything is changed, made subtler, shifted, displaced the tiniest bit, sending you out toward this distance-from-self that is the truth of the world in its death. There is nothing to fear, because nothing can happen to you. This is here. Life is this dreadful intimacy with death… becoming innocence, not regret, but blessedness. You perform this miracle, witness “me” dying, not the particular “me,” but “me,” ours: the “me” that we share as beings who die, or rather, who are dying, living-dying, always in-common, yet with no common essence or truth outside this fact. No spectacular other realm awaits. No resurrection.

Resurrection: where life topples in to its “contradiction,” its “nonsense,” so as to traverse this nonsense, while not daring to make sense of it, never even wanting to render its sense complete. Leaving the nonsensical in tact, bounding with courage across the horizontal dimensions of life (time, space, etc.) to touch its vulnerability, to touch the vertical or interstellar which is without time and space, which is stripped bare, now, but divested of the specter of sepulchers. Again, it’s empty. Where it pulls you, we can only all withdraw. We withdraw with you in not being able to go with you. We cannot go with you wherever you are taking us. We are the anonymous in you. You carry us and are us, all — without world. There is the untouchable. Death: this is already inside you, us, deeper than your mind can ever reach. It is your sense of being-more, because you are more. It is your body, struck eternal by God’s glory. Struck dead by the glow of absent sense, which pulls you toward it. Struck by the insignificance of your name.

More, no more, what is there to prove after all? There is nothing but this glory, as we rise together into the lightening of death, the obscurity of light itself, making out of that hard stone sepulcher the transparency in which alone our truth can dwell. Yes, ours. Rilke says:

Life– and we know nothing else– , isn’t life itself dreadful? But as soon as we acknowledge its dreadfulness (not as opponents: what kind of match could we be for it?), but somehow with a confidence that this very dreadfulness may be something completely ours, though something that is just now too great, too vast, too incomprehensible for our learning hearts– :as soon as we accept life’s most terrifying dreadfulness, at the risk of perishing from it (i.e., from our own Too-much!) — : then an intuition of blessedness will open up for us and, at this cost, will be ours.

And then we hear Georges Bataille:

“I imagine myself in a vision and in a halo that transfigures the ecstatic and exhausted face of a dying being, what radiates from that face illuminates with its necessity the clouds in the sky, whose  grey glow then becomes more penetrating than the light of the sun itself. In this vision, death appears to be of the same nature as the illuminating light, to the extent that light is lost once it leaves its source: it appears that no less a loss than death is needed for the brilliance of life to traverse and transfigure dull existence, for it is only its free uprooting that becomes in me the strength of life and time. In this way I cease to be anything other than the mirror of death, just as the universe is only the mirror of life.”

And then we hear Franz Kafka:

So perhaps the best resource is to meet everything passively, to make yourself an inert mass, and, if you feel that you are being carried away, not to let yourself be lured into taking a single unnecessary step, to stare at others with the eyes of an animal, to feel no compunction, in short, with your own hand to throttle down whatever ghostly life remains in you, that is, to enlarge the final peace of the graveyard and let nothing survive save that.

And then we hear the mad Artaud, who spoke death with every breath:

Jesus-christ this human personage came to establish on a spiritual level a rite of the disappearance of things, on the same principle as the Human sacrifices. Only idiots would take the point of all this to be killing, murder, or Suicide. The point, since we are alive, is to live by denying life, to look at things from the place where they rise and not from the place where they lie flat on the ground, to look at them from the place where they are going to disappear and not from the place where they are established in reality. For the true doctrine of christ, the Holy Ghost is the established Bourgeois and christ is the eternal Revolutionary.

But perhaps I have led you astray, perhaps I have led you to believe that these passages exemplify a thinking of death when in fact every passage partakes of it, because what happens in writing — in what you should perhaps instead call “life” — is the incessant taking-away-from-self by which a “self” can first be made as something shared and true. What the self signifies or “means”: this is precisely what falls away and is allowed to fall away in a deep meditation on death-in-common. Perhaps others will call it a spiritual awakening, which comes after a type of “dark night of the soul.” But here we do not appropriate anything, no spiritual meaning, no awakening. Without taking anything in for ourselves — neither knowledge of death nor death itself — we recognize how it articulates itself, how it stammers out the impossible. Do we want to say that all of our saying “articulates” this? I am not sure about that, but I am certain of this: that “death” is nothing solid. Death does not persevere, it does not overtake us. If we say it is our “truth,” this is only because neither death nor the “Truth” ever has power over us. Death is our truth because it is nothing, as we are. It makes room, infinitely, for everything else. This is no spectacular revelation — dare I say it is “natural.” We are those beings who can reflect back upon ourselves to recognize how death is nothing but an “irreality” (Hegel). From this day forward, we have to become pupils of this lesson. For death does but one thing: stand up on its own two legs and walk.

“I am the Resurrection and the Light”: this is not something that only Jesus-christ the human or divine personage can say. No, this is what existence says, because it is existence. Perhaps above all, this is what we must comprehend: “being” is nothing static, nothing present, nothing fixed. “Being” is not presence, or if it is, we have to understand it according to its death, or rather, according to the withdrawal of its present and its presence. Or rather, instead of thinking about a “presence that withdraws” (say, into a tomb or a writing), we have to think of the very presence of a withdrawal, the presence of the “disappearance of all things” in us. The end of the world, each day: that’s us. Which implies that we harbor our own forever-disappearing within ourselves: it is our ownmost. This is what opens being to its own truth, let’s say. Its signature is not inscribed in the universe, but thrown outside of itself (“mirrored,” Bataille says), being itself the whole of the universe in its present state of withdrawal — or excess.

What we have to recognize is the present standing-there of death across all of life, such that we no longer view “death” as some final state or end-point, but rather the very movement of “life” insofar as life is incessantly carried outside of itself and toward its “opposite,” the very movement of being insofar as it steps beside itself so as to actively “be.” This would be the very experience of existence, for where we are freed from our enclosures, freed from whatever “self-presence” we imagine might someday “die,” we not only unite with the whole of the universe, but we experience the freedom of its entire withdrawal, present and forthcoming, the whole manifold of its expression and its dissolution. We experience how it is never roped in to anything.

In other words, the essence of this life is not to live or to die: it is to ex-ist. (And existence has no essence whatsoever, no “truth,” outside of what exists, says the whole of philosophy since Sartre.) In doing so, in ex-isting, it comes to know itself across the continuum life-death, or even subtracted from it, in a sense — and yet still waking, still walking. And there in upright death, it finds the ultimate “Yes” in life, for the death that refuses no one refuses to hold back whoever attains to it, yes, “attains” to death: the impossible, unknowable, unprecedented truth of “us” and “our world.” Here the very being of beings manifests itself as “us” in our singular experience of being-instantly-exposed-to-death, our unique experience of “world.” This we know with certitude. This we resurrect.

Now, obviously, someday I will be “no more”; but I can think this “I’m no more” in life. I can think the other of all life in life. I don’t have to be afraid of this, even if it brings me perpetually toward the possibility of my not-being. This thought begins in fright; it is anxious, dreaded. But the flip-side of this fright is the joy of being the world in the presence of its absolute withdrawal, its safety in being untouchable. And this is the thought that makes us most ourselves: that the whole world is us, that we are the whole world, each time unique. But this means that “my” death is something I cannot share with anyone, not even myself (but so it goes with my world, too, because it is also inaccessible to me: there is no accessing the totality of my solitude); and so I entertain the same relationship with my death as I do with another’s (as well as their world, your world, which I can never access either). The simple point is that death is so far away from us, that both of our deaths are “equally” far away from both of us, and so always “another’s.” That death is always another’s, even when it is my own: this means that to be responsible for myself, for my death and for what I do with my life, is, in a sense, to be responsible for everyone else’s, to be responsible to the absolutely other (this is the sense behind “loving God”) — or even to be responsible for the other’s death, for every other’s death. (Levinas’ thought puts this responsibility into play most explicitly, most rigorously.)

The impasse we need to lay hold of here would be this: on the one hand, if there is anything that is ‘mine’, it is my death; but on the other hand, I have no idea what this is or could be, or if I will ever get there, or if I can ever even experience it. What is most “mine”… I don’t know and can never know. It is absolutely other and inappropriable. “My death” therefore calls in to question every sense of “property,” every sense of “ownership,” every “my.” To think “my” death is think the presence – instant, instantaneous — of my own disappearance. For if “my death” stands for both my most intimate point and that point I can never pass through, I’m left admitting that I myself am impossible.

This needn’t be terrifying — at least not always. And perhaps the intermittence between dread and joy, or rather, their concomittance, is precisely what a thinking of death has to think. There is a passage through this impasse that, of course, never annuls it, but rather outlines or raises up this border, this limit of the possible. We’re not talking about consolations against death, nor are we trying to tell ourselves that those who have died “didn’t really die.” I admit that something remains impenetrable here, something that always remains to be thought. And yet, it seems there is a light to be shed here, albeit a disconcerting one. Perhaps not a light that brings light into the darkness, but one that simply “lightens” the darkness itself: a new way of weighing or weighing up to death as such. A strange light(e)ning that would transform the whole world, “my/our” world, into gift, grace, gratuity. Pure excess over any and all expiration, by becoming its only pupil. This light(e)ning align us along a vertical axis, an ascending axis of sense — a sense that, since it is the sign or the reality of an end of sense being touched upon, can only make sense incessantly topple over in excess of itself. Always. This grace, this gratuitous gift of “death lightened” — resurrected — would be my/the world, responsible for this ascension of sense over itself and the whole world, as such. Responsible for sharing, in a sense, death’s rigorous nonexistence. Responsible for sharing all of this, responsible for giving it. The gift of death.

What carries us to these heights, if not the recognition of this: sense does not stick to itself. On the contrary, we take it with us, into that farthest distance, most proper to us, which is dreadful and yet blessed, our death: again, not some final moment, but the very presence of joy in our lives insofar as we recognize that this joy withdraws infinitely from any essence, meaning, or signification that would register it once and for all — insofar as it withdraws from any “myself.” Paradoxically then, “death” would be the very name for this never once-and-for-all… which I am. The closer we step to it, the closer we see ourselves in it (our impossibility and our highest point, where we are both shared out and where we become responsible), the closer we see that what we see is “death’s constant step toward us,” that there is clarity in its distance from us (no enigma! no crisis! no grim reaper!) which sees nothing in particular, clarity in this experience of freedom that sees no constraint in death, but only this beating heart that’s touched by countless others, dead and alive, across life — a breathing being, constantly inspired, respiring and expiring. For it truly is joy that recounts this, and it is a joy to recount this — it is Rilke’s “Too-much!”, Bataille’s “practice of joy before death” — it is everything that expresses us and exposes us before this fleeting-(sense-of-)self-and-world. It is here that we dissolve, here where there is never anything “absolute” about death, here where this truth is our only “absolute.” There is no sense to death: and this is what frees sense from itself, freeing our being from itself, so as to exist and freely be, to freely experience itself, and to be so as “world,” in fact the only one, this sole and unique world, still “all of ours,” ever withdrawn. This is what makes us living-dead so precious: our inexchangeability, our responsibility, our impossibility. Our world, our life, our death.

What more is there to say? Truly I tell you, I send this out from the bottom of my death, from that place behind me that exceeds me, this place outside of time and the world, this place I choose to make room for in the world, not for myself, not for “death,” not for anything at all, save for the common swerve we share in our inimitable experience of “world,” which outstrips all of our selves. Here where darkness bubbles over in to……, perhaps it is out of place to talk about “clarity.” And yet, some semblance of a clearer sight is there, beckoning us. It exists. Who could deny it? It is there because you resurrect it, resurrecting death itself in you, as it calls out to you, “here,” drawing you deeper into the one thing we share: nothing at all, death, ourselves.

Truth/death/resurrection: the beyond of sense, sensed – here, yes, in life. Where else?

The mild and perfect light in which one no longer suffers from one’s soul, however infested with evil. A light without cruelty or passion in which only a single atmosphere is now revealed, the atmosphere of a serene and pious, of a precious fatality. Yes, coming to you, Madam, I was no longer afraid of my death. Death or life, I saw only a great calm space in which the shadows of my destiny dissolved. I was truly safe, liberated from all misery, for even my misery to come was sweet to me, if by some impossible chance I had misery to fear in my future. –Antonin Artaud

Notes:

Nancy, Jean-Luc. “The Resurrection of Blanchot.” Dis-Enclosure (The Deconstruction of Christianity, vol. 1). New York: Fordham University Press. 2008. pgs. 89-97.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. trans. Stephen Mitchell. New York: Vintage International Press. 1989. p. 317
Bataille, Georges. “The Practice of Joy before Death.” Visions of Excess. University of Minnesota Press. 1985. pgs. 238-239.
Kafka, Franz. “Resolutions.” Complete Stories. Schocken Books. 1971. p. 398.
Artaud, Antonin. Selected Writings. University of California Press. 1976. pgs. 408 & 126

First of all, Fukushima represents the interconnection of levels: technology and nature, politics and military, economics and social life, local and worldwide. A natural tremor in the ocean sets off a catastrophic tsunami; this tsunami causes the catastrophic crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power plant; combined, these natural and technological disasters put a whole region of people at risk (incalculable); this agitates a socio-political crisis in Japan between their centralized power and subjugated peripheral regions; all of this combined disrupts economic markets in Europe and elsewhere and renews the conversation regarding “safe” nuclear power and regulation, etc. Fukushima thus stands for a world increasingly wound up in itself, increasingly bound to the endless proliferation of technologies, strategies, discourses, and “ends.” But it also stands for a world whose human calculations, decisions, and preventative acts no longer safeguard it from the most devastating catastrophes, which needn’t even be sparked by human hands. In other words, it stands for a technologized world that has, in a sense, made every existent of the world, human or otherwise, subservient to it in a mode of generalized catastrophe, the effects of which can never be calculated, even though the system seeks to reign in this incalculable.

The phrase “generalized equivalence” or even “generalized catastrophe” is the hallmark of such a civilization. It is a civilization at war with itself — partisan wars, guerrilla wars, economic wars, etc. It is a world where action requires a reaction: the car is built, and soon highways must be built, speed limits must be set, laws against drunk driving must be written, regulations for emissions must be set, petroleum markets must be created, etc. This circulation of “ends” is endless, such that ends becomes means and means become ends — just as one crisis becomes the unforeseen catalyst for another crisis. This equivalence is what forces every element of our existence to circulate “equally.”

The hallmark of this general circulation, where everything is equal to everything else, is money, which this general interconnection depends on. It makes our world function the way it does, subsuming everything under the regime of fabrication, exchange, distribution, and profitability. Everything is absorbed in to it, from iron ore to pop music. As I see it, it is a world where any and everything gets roped in – and it gets roped in, most generally, to the regime of profitability, accumulation, progress, and advance. To predict the coming ‘alternative’ to all this, in this regime of generalized equivalence there is no room for, or attention payed to, the singularity of each thing; everything is simply evaluated in light of some other end, some accomplishment or goal. For example, oceans are no longer oceans, but simply routes for cruise ships and oil tankers to take, regions to be excavated for oil and fish, nemeses that bring us hurricanes and tsunamis. But the same thing happens to everything: everything enters in to a calculation that makes it measurable and manageable, and therefore fixed — “itself,” but equivalent.

There is no sense in such a world, which now does little more than constantly go to war with itself — even though there are no longer “opposing sides” but simply the generalized manufacture and maintenance of a terror (or competition, rivalry, etc.) that prevents any and all relation between sides. In this erasing of sides and the maintenance of generalized terror, everything is more and more interconnected while also being less and less related in the proper sense of the term, for relation always has to do with the incommensurable — namely, with what in each of the terms of the relation are, no matter what, “inequivalent” to each other. We have to think how this inequivalence-between is what makes them or lets them relate in the first place.

For Nancy, it’s not a question of looking to our civilization to solve the same problems that it has created. In fact, it is perhaps not even a question of “solution-problem” anymore. Nor is it a question of changing this civilization, or of some transformation or regeneration of humanity that Marx once spoke about, according to some model or dream of utopia. Nothing less is at stake than discovering a civilization entirely other than this one, it is true, but only through a “difference” that is absolute, and each time absolute — something totally subtracted from the regime(s) of generalized equivalence, for which the indifference of money gives us the paradigm — some mode of relation proper, which does justice to the singular-inequivalent value of each and every thing. The only way to subtract ourselves from this regime of interminable equivalences is to avoid the regime of “finality” itself — the regime of goals, projects, aims, gain, realization, and accomplishment. We have to learn to look otherwise, to escape from the “look to the future” as such. Only when freed from this regime of “finality” and “projects” will we be able to perceive the singularity of each thing, subtracted from both its technological-economic “ends” and/or its natural “roles.” Stated otherwise, it means liberation from the whole regime of necessity as such, whether it be political, economic, natural, or technological.

Therefore, the keyword in the title — “After” Fukushima — has nothing to do with “what comes next,” in the mode of succession or anticipation of a new civilization that would come from our progress in this one, but rather with the order of an absolute rupture with this one, a suspense of generalized equivalence as such — all of which proceeds from a kind of stupor at the lack of sense of our globalized-monetized world. Again, it has less to do with finding “solutions” for this world, ones that would come from this world, than it does with developing our capacity or sense for a world entirely otherwise in this one — a world utterly incommensurable with the whole regime of generalized equivalence.

It is with this intent that Nancy tells us, “What will be decisive… will be to think in the present and to think of the present… the present as the element of the neighbor, the nearby.”   Now, the “neighbor” here is not merely our human neighbors, but all our neighbors, all nearby presences, in their radical singularity and incommensurability with any order or hierarchy in our technological world; beyond that, it is the “nearness” of the absolutely other within myself, which is what opens my relationship to infinity. So this is not the “immediate” present of some frenzied reason looking for solutions, nor of some headlong desire anticipating later fulfillment, but rather this present without past or future, the present without an “eye” to anything but itself, for the present is always its own end, its own finality, a finality “without end.” This is the present in which something presents itself, where something unheard of occurs, where something utterly foreign comes close and is allowed to come close: the present as or of a singular, “incommensurable” occurance, never to be absorbed by any scheme of value, meaning, representation, or signification, for each is absolutely valuable “in its own right.”

Here, every thing, every moment, every motion, every person, every address, every hour, every wave — is radically “inequivalent” and singular in or as what it is or is happening to be. The singularity of a voice, of a color, a look, a shape or a smell. To think the present is to gain an appreciation for this: the inappropriability of each as the incommensurability of each as the singularity of each. And then, from my own or our own locus of incommensurability within, to relate ourselves to this and to these and to all the singularity about — each, impossible to be absorbed in the regime of generalized equivalence:

Each time, it has to do with one particular consideration, with an attention or a tension, with a respect, or even with what we could go so far as to name an adoration turned toward singularity as such.

What is at stake, therefore, is an esteem that goes infinitely beyond any estimation, where the former has to do with the height of the singular, or the height of a singular mode of coming or presenting, and the latter has merely to do with the regime of generalized equivalence, calculation, and circulation (such that estimation amounts to monetization). Here, the worthiness of each thing and each one is inestimable, the esteem of and due to each. This esteem turns vigiliantly away from any evaluation having to do with past and future time, with the accumulation of social capital or social goods, with the construction of projects and goals. Here, the present, or the present of whatever singular, is not roped in to anything; on the contrary, it is liberated from being a mean or an end, that is, it is liberated in to relation. Here, the present is the approach and point of passage of a singular presence, which is and which remains incommensurable, be it a starfish, a star, or a day of fishing. All in all, it has to do with what is without price, the irreducible value of each thing as it is, valuable simply because it is a present point of passage and presence, or even a present point of the passage of presence.

To sense the world in this way is already to let “another” world enter this world, even if it is a world that “this world” will never be able to recognize – at least so long as it adheres to the regime of valuing-according-to, of estimating-with-an-eye-to, of pricing-in-relation-to – because it implies its incommensurability with it. This is the “radically other” of our civilization that, perhaps, is already “here” in some sense. Perhaps we can already sense it, detect it, feel it coming close. Perhaps it is already “here.” The task of thinking, therefore, would be to think this way, subtracted from projects and goals of consciousness, subtracted from equivocal estimations, turned toward the singularity and the “sans prix” of each and every. To think, quite simply, an unprecedented mode of being-here…

Notes:

Nancy, Jean-Luc. L’Équivalence des catastrophes (Après Fukushima). 2012. Paris: Galilée.
Photos: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/02/27/Sea_Change

AN EXPERIENCE AT HEART
by Jean-Luc Nancy 

Not to deal with Nietzsche here, not even with a theme from his thought, but to respond to the question: “What does Nietzsche tell us, today?”

To respond, I would like to take the attitude that Bataille wanted to take toward Nietzsche and that I, in turn, would like to take toward Nietzsche and toward Bataille himself (from whom I won’t dissociate Blanchot: perhaps you will be able to discern why). Nothing other than the attitude of thought toward any thinker: not to cite, not to study, but to learn by heart, that is, through this organ that, in order to understand, must take in and fall in love with. This is a commonplace, but it demands to be revived: such is also, and first of all, the sense in naming “Nietzsche” today without just naming some field in the history of philosophy. (But to be precise: this is not simply about philosophy.)

Nietzsche tells me nothing without also communicating an experience to me. This contagion between discourse and ordeal thoroughly marks a work that, for this very reason, never ceases to exasperate, to enthuse and to teeter, uncertain, between outrageousness and suffering.

This experience is always that of the death of God. The death of God is always the fact of this immense dethronement of the representation of the principle, and with it of representation in general: because once the principle collapses, it can no longer be a question of representing anything. Everything, after that, puts presence directly in play. Everything makes a game of it and everything plays it out. The evil genius.

1

Nietzsche knew, first, the restlessness that seizes us when presence comes to tremble in the withdrawal of the principle. (“First” is already to say too much: he was the second after Plato, or the fourth after Plato, Augustine, and Kant. But our whole history has known no jolts more potent than these, and since them we tremble always.) Presence is no longer detached from its foundation, nor can it disappear in to it: it’s held there, teetering, on the edge of its appearance in a world where there is no longer any rift between being and appearing. It has become itself, presence, this rift. (There is no longer a rift between being and appearing, or rather: there is no longer anything but the rupture between the two.)

Presence torn, presence tearing. It’s in the world in not being in it. It’s ahead of and stands back from itself. What happens to presence thus happens to the order of the whole world. Without a principle, the world can no longer justify the order that once organized its significations (above and below, known and unknown). Authority, virtue, and value are delivered over to anarchy. They have no more -archy, but are put in play underneath or inside the -archy. The anarchy in question is not some disorganized bombast against any kind of constraint; it’s the power that must kick start everything, and every signification, without any sense given beforehand.

2

Umwerten must be understood in this sense. We must um-werten the Werte: “um” always has the value of “making turn” and, as a prefix, it often indicates the reversal, the resurgence that returns. We must transvalue, reevaluate, counter-evaluate all values. It’s not necessary to overthrow them (to devalorize them), but to reevaluate value itself. We have to reform it (in both senses of the word) or revolutionize it (in all these senses too). Which means: we have to rethink its price, by considering it as an absolute price, no longer dependent on a principle that fixes it.

We have to value value without measurement. Bataille formulated this by calling value “heterogeneous”: the “homogeneous” is the exchange of values, in a general equivalence. To be value proper, value must be heterogeneous to this equivalence. (Speaking like this, we go from Nietzsche to Marx via Bataille, but we also do justice to the contemporaneity of Marx and Nietzsche, who are not by accident contemporaries in their thoughts about value, even if they knew nothing of each other.) The heterogeneous is not in the business of usage or exchange: it’s a matter of experience.

3

Who, then, has the experience of absolute value (that is, value detached from any measure), value absolutely foreign to the order enchained by the world (of usage and exchange)? Who, then, introduces into the world this withdrawal of the heterogeneous — in place of the principle that once grounded and gave the measure?

It is he who saves the world from its absence of value, from this generalized equivalence it appears to be bogged down in. Nietzsche names him the redeemer (1). He gives him the title of Christ, and thus makes the Antechrist the very sign of salvation: for Nietzsche, the Antechrist is he who overturns Christianity so as to make “the redeemer type” emerge from this overturning.

This type is that of the “only Christian who ever was,” he who “died on the cross.” Nietzsche is the only one who knows him, the only one who recognizes him behind the self-interested deformations of the first disciples and the evangelists. Certainly, this is a “decadent type”: but it’s also from decadence that he saves. The redeemer presents one form of departure from nihilism: not the most active, but an outlet, and perhaps this outlet (this is my suggestion) is a weak, bloodless way out, which nevertheless comes in contact with an affirmative and vigorous departure. (The whole question of the exit from nihilism is suspended between a weakness and a vigor, which are both necessary, both perilous.)

He is, this redeemer, he who founds no religion, who proclaims no god, who demands belief in no doctrine or any other kind of belief. He is he for whom faith is a conduct, not the adhesion to a message. He is in the act and not in its signification, or rather, his signification is entirely in his act. He brings about the pardon, he is forgiveness given and received, redemption brought about here as coming from elsewhere, because redemption, or the pardon, truly consists in inscribing the elsewhere in the here. He erases sin, that is, he makes it so that existence is no longer a mistake, a fault. On the contrary, existence consists in having, in this world, the experience of what is not of this world, without however being (in or of) another world.

The opening of the world in the world is the result of a dispossession or a deconstruction of Christianity that brings back up or advances in itself to this extremity where nihilism shatters the presence and the value of God, breaks down the sense of salvation as an escape from the world, effaces every value inscribed in heaven, effaces heaven itself, and leaves this world intact and touched by a strange gap, grace and wound at the same time.

4

In the dissipation of back-worlds and their fog lies the secret of salvation. It saves us from other worlds: it brings us back in to the world, it puts us in the world afresh, as new. It delivers us in to the world according to the novelty of an experience that is not of the world because it is an experience of value : the values of this world are measured, that is, evaluated, by the necessities and interests of this world. But he who does not let himself be measured by this evaluation, he who makes for himself the experience of value, he is withdrawn from the world smack-dab in the middle of it. It’s not at all as if he became the subjective source of a value that would be his own: rather, he becomes the site of an experience that, in itself, is or creates value, absolutely.

This experience is an “inner” experience that is not at all the work [le fait] of an interiority as subjectivity. Here, the “inner” is not a hidden depth that must be retrieved or expressed, a sense buried and in need of interpretation: no, it is without interpretation the literal and simple text of a withdrawal from the homogeneity of equivalent, measurable, and exchangeable values (2). The same goes for «the one who loves, who not only displaces the feeling of values, but who has more value and is stronger» (3). Love («even the love of God,» Nietzsche clarifies in the same fragment) is only an increase of value in itself, without available measure.

Inner experience is the experience of what puts me outside of the outside of equivalent values, even outside the valence of values in general, and thus outside all subjectivity as well as all ownership, whether this involves the property of market goods or spiritual goods (wisdom or virtues).

This outside the outside envelops an “interior” where expectations are disarmed, where knowledge, certitudes, and doubts are upset. For representations and significations, the affirmation of existence itself is substituted. Not some speculation as to its value, but value in itself as the affirmation and exposition of existing — that is to say, in fact, existing such as it exists, nothing more, but above all nothing less.

This affirmation affirms that existence is experience: that it does nothing else — free from goals, projects, and willpower — but be exposed to the unforeseeable and unheard of in its own event. It only “events,” we should say. This “eventing” opens in the world an outside that is not a beyond-world, but the truth of the world.

5

The truth is value reevaluated: devaluation of every measurable value, devaluation of everything given by evaluation. The value of existence that, eventing itself, evaluates itself: it creates a value without equivalents. This is the absolute price of an existence without price. The price that’s given to the existent that won’t let itself be evaluated by anything. It gives itself a price without price, which it can neither measure nor pay up. It has no price to pay: no fault, no debt. It hasn’t sinned or borrowed: it’s redeemed of its being in the world by its withdrawal from the world. But this withdrawal is made in the middle of the world: it is contemporary with existing, it events with it, as it.

The redeemer is therefore an inimitable “type”: it’s not a type, it’s the experience of existing — without anything but this exposition to being nothing that could take on any price, any weight, or any sense from anything except its own step/not [son pas]  inside/outside the world. This brief beat is what’s worthwhile: it is itself an evaluation without measure.

This redeemer is therefore he who saves man from God, from this death mummified in a mausoleum of sense. The divine, henceforth, is the empty tomb: it’s the void of the tomb as an affirmation of the eternal return of that which has no price. Value returns eternally, precisely because it is priceless. The absence of price is what is inscribed and exscribed with each existence as its eternal presence, immediately in the world outside of the world, instantaneously eternal.

This is why the world of the homogeneous can present evaluation as equivalence now as market value, now as a sacrifice of existence to an all-powerful supreme. It’s always a traffic. It’s always a fundamentalism of one value against another: one value valued as principle measure, God or money, spiritual value or stock value. But heterogeneous value is worth nothing, or it’s worth what “valuing” is worth in itself: an ex-position to measure only when this measure is the other of all measurement, or its infinity in act.

6

Nothing other, in this sense, than the Good epekeina tēs ousias: beyond all beingness, thus not being, being neither a being nor a non-being, but existing. Not God, not humanity, but the world as that in which an outside can be opened, and made experience. This experience is “an experience at heart” – eine Erfahrung an einem Herzen (4) : an experience that is made right in the heart, which is this heart’s beating with the beating of the inside/outside through which it ex-ists and, in ex-isting, senses and experiences itself inside/outside the world, senses and experiences itself as the very interval between the inside and the outside, as the non-place of its own most proper taking-place, and as the in(e)valuable value of this absolute property, without any goods of its own.

According to this redeemer, «The “Kingdom of God” is not something you can wait for; it has no yesterday or day-after-tomorrow, it will not come “in a thousand years” — it is the experience of a heart: it is everywhere, it is nowhere…» (5).

Notes:

(1) The background for what follows are paragraphs 28-35 in The Antichrist.
(2) «E.g., “I feel unwell” — such a judgement presupposes a great and late neutrality of the observer –; the simple man always says: this or that makes me feel unwell — he makes up his mind about his feeling unwell only when he has seen a reason for feeling unwell. –I call that a “lack of philology” ; to be able to read off a text as a text without interposing an inter-pretation is the last-developed form of “inner experience” — perhaps one that is hardly possible…» [Rather than translating the French translation provided in La Déclosion, I've restored Walter Kaufmann's translation from The Will to Power, p. 266. --Trans.]
(3) Posthumous fragment, ibid.
(4) The Antichrist, sec. 34
(5) Ibid.

No surprise that after working on this post for an hour or so, the computer reboots and erases most of what I’ve written. What I had drafted was an attempt at describing Simone Weil’s notion of grace in light of this strange encounter. I’m left with the sinking feeling that, like Rauschenberg, all I can do is erase the spiritual masterwork she presents to me, erasing her and myself. After the loss, I’m left wondering, “Isn’t this a signal that sharing insight is not as simple as scratching out all its colors and re-presenting it as your own? Aren’t you making the key mistake Weil warns against: using your imagination to side-step the real ordeal in the void?” Consider me guilty. Again and again I return to this point, conceding to God that all of this writing is superfluous in comparison to the ordeal the likes of which Simone Weil orders up. What good is it to explain it, to order it up myself, to try and say something about it? To do so, it requires words that, free in themselves, carry certain divisive connotations that no precaution of mine will get my readers past. So I force myself to believe that if I confess, they will confess with me: that we use the words without knowing what they refer to. This doesn’t mean we don’t know what we’re meaning when we say things. It’s just that we’re also saying things whose meaning is more than we know:

To be willing to go as far as possible is to pray to be impelled, but without knowing whither. –Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

Simone Weil’s conception of grace is perfect. It conceives of a humanity that is free to choose to live within God’s ambit or not. To choose to live outside of it is to live in the realm of opinions and imagination, of power and will-power. To choose to live within God is to live in the realm of grace, where something very specific happens to me: I accept the void. This puts an end to the religious hope of saving my soul: “I” am precisely the thing who must be thrown off, uprooted. Grace makes this possible, and God is the only thing that can fill this hole in me that I choose to accept. It means that my efforts of intention come to a sudden halt, and that, insofar as I was a conceptual or conscious thing, I’m dead. This saturates us with our proper human humility and shows us our cross. “Withdrawing from our own soul,” we become the pure sensory apparatus of God — like the tip of a blindman’s walking-stick.

These days, we are not easily assuaged by such a story — which, if we paid close attention, proves to be the most perfectly anguished-and-glorious story of no-consolation possible. Personally, I’m attracted to it: don’t all of my writings ultimately point toward this point of self-voidance? I don’t have the faith, really, to assert that God fills the void thus created; but nevertheless I’ve run my voice dry articulating all the spinnings-round that this évidemment du soi (or kenosis) orders up; and I’ve admitted along the way my unsureity regarding it. Perhaps it was God — you? — filling it up all along. Despairing over the consequences of “arguments” (the dead-ends of inspiration) are what have brought me this far intellectually; but in reading Weil, I’m reminded of the fact that there is no getting anywhere. There is no “progress” when it comes to self-voidance, since this can only obscure the paths of grace. God is infinitely far away: to come a step closer is to find oneself one step further away.

A faith stripped of all assurances might establish itself in such a vortex; but what can I attest to? I think many of us writing today feel the heat to rely on what someone else has said. Anxiety forces us away from speaking in our own name — especially on topics such as self-voidance! (Perhaps “God” is the general reference for what fills the void in us without being an object, fulfillment, or purpose, but simply a drive, an impelling…) On my own blog, you can find countless ‘studies’ where I read and re-express what I find to be at issue in a certain author’s work, trusting in their name and their body of work to “back” for my own words. Meanwhile, I freely co-opt and extend their vocabulary, doing what I can to tend to their thought. In this post, free extension is interrupted and I’m summoned to self-confession. I confess that in all my studies, I comes as close to my subject as Rauschenberg comes to de Kooning. Everything has been rubbed out, and what you read are the traces of my eraser. Behind that, God who in your void is further away…

When I’ve spoken on my own behalf, here and elsewhere, — and this is really something I am telling to myself! — one has got to remember that I speak Being, I do not speak on my own behalf alone. Dare I say I speak in God’s name, if only to indicate to you that, in this passage, I have one hope: to recognize how infinitely distant I am from God, how far away my being and my work is from God’s work. Grace is in the fact that, somehow, my work and God’s Being coincide. But to no use: there’s no evidence in our experience of this coincidence anymore. To proclaim such a coincidence is delusion, megalomania, fanaticism. The era of raptures are over: the God’s have withdrawn, along with the reasons for the world. We’re suspended over the nothing that we/God are. And yet, we assert an expression of Being that knows its vacuum and grace. The revolution of the spirit, once having traveled inward, is now erupting in the streets until each voice is heard in all its fumbling. This indicates that the traveling-inward never ceases, or that the surprise of existence always fills us, inevitably.

And this is what we can try to affirm today, including this: turning-inward amounts to opening-up. Jean-Luc Nancy writes, in a moment of great concision, that a “sinner” is something closed in upon itself, a self not open. Divine is the self at its limit, where its suspension-over-nothing is divined. –But once again, we’ve stepped into a de Kooning’s house and asked for the artist’s artwork. We’ve erased to reveal solely a reference to something beyond, whether we’re talking about Nancy, Weil, or God. We are trying to come close to what is real:  to follow Krishnamurti beyond thinking, to follow Adi Da beyond the self-contraction, to follow Weil beyond the imagination and toward grace. How we are going to get there is precisely what withdraws from the consciousness of a self voided in it.

This line packs me in the stomach. I look around my room — the drink containers, the lights that are on, the open books. Someone’s sweater lying there. Feeling in my socks.

***

Below are scraps of thought that correspond to Simone Weil’s conception of grace as I have borrowed it, not after knocking on the door to her room, but after knocking on the door to God’s. Just as I say this, and during my saying of it, I feel the pain and stupidity in this expression: it leads you to believe so many things that I don’t, and can’t, believe. Likewise, the door, and I hope this is obvious, exists nowhere in thought, belief, text, or practice. It’s tradition is either manifest in me as my cross to bear, or it is manifest nowhere. The painting God, or Simone, hands back to us is, come to find out, something of “our own” creation — not in the sense that we as “I” made it, but rather, we as “we” all came to it, together, and it came to us all all at once, even when it comes to just us as “I” in the form of an exchange with some partner “you,” some companion in “art.” But this stealing, this bringing across, does not have to be violent. The erasure can be as soft as a simple correspondence. Patience can come; and open to the interruption of God.

We get nowhere along the paths of grace, since, by definition, grace only draws us away from the specified paths. In this sense, grace individualizes to the very degree it empties. Faith amounts to the belief that, despite all distances, some kind of correspondence will be kept between what is emptied (me) and what comes to fill it (God). I pass from the register of individuated beings into the register of All-Being without losing anything of the individual status of my lone being: abandoned but opened to infinity. By grace, me in my lone being comes to express the All-Being which is in each being and thing, thus expressing knowing Being.

Grace first opens the space in me to choose between what is fake and what is real. Life outside of God is fake: the life of the imagination, opinions, and actions. Life inside of God is real: the life of grace. What does this require? The surrender of everything to nothing, to the point that we are only doing what we cannot stop ourselves from doing: expressing Being. In another register, this means communication with the whole of Being: ecstasy. Continual rupture of the self-enclosure. Breath, touch, movement of something different. To the limit: divine cohabitation of bodies and their vocabularies.

To concede to grace is to accept the void within us. To concede to this void within us is to concede to God, who is the signal of the most different/distant. God is everything that is lost to us, everything that will remain “far away.” Which means, God is everything. God measures the proximity between us and our being, between us and all other beings. God is that measure in me. With you, I cannot share it. I can only choose to recognize that, in handing it to you, I lend it to be erased. This actually starts from the minute I am conscious, and surely from the minute I go to write. The immediacy of this kenosis is what drives you to try and choose your best artwork to have erased. You know that, even erased, the trace shares your name. Without that and the back-story, it would truly be nothing, but not a distinct nothing like a name is. A name as unconventional as God, Nancy, Weil…

To pray is to come into contact with the most distant by detaching oneself, allowing oneself to identify with the lowliest, and so to identify quite literally with nothing. It is to become a vacuum, non-self-created, and to “wait” indefinitely for grace to arise in the heart, the will to act that is then not my will, but God’s. This is where the Being of beings gets expressed in expressing the distance between them, but expressing it as One; one whole-part of Being.

God’s will is not known or realized, quite to the contrary. We think of it wrong if we think of it as having an intention, or a direction, or even a purpose. God’s will, quite simply, is to will perfectly, to be a perfect will. This will is real: not imaginary, not an opinion, not, in the end, “willed.” This perfect will is the will that acts from necessity: “inactive action.” Less a trust in the fortuity of chance (although perhaps this is close), than a trust in God’s freedom from necessity. To be free myself means making necessary my trust in this freedom from necessity. For God’s will does nothing preordained, it heads only in the direction of sharing.

God, in effect, remains absent, most distant. So does God’s will. But then again, aren’t there traces of it? How can we learn to perceive these only spiritual rewards, which we can only expect to the extent that we rely on the surprise of the event in God? Our only hope is to love this distant God to the point of acknowledging God’s inexistence. On the limit, God’s will only comes into existence to the extent that I match my inexistence with his. This double vortex or inexistence makes Weil exclaim:

The abandonment at the supreme moment of the crucifixion, what an abyss of love on both sides!

This kind of effort cannot be summoned from within oneself. Christ’s singularity itself registers the fact that I cannot “match my inexistence” with God’s: only Christ can adequately measure the distance between God and creature. Which also means that only Christ did and could have stared in to this horror. Only Christ was motionless. The Cross is the limit-image of a desire-without-object, impelled-not-knowing-whither, withdrawn and trusting only in the infinitely distant. Weil’s grace is a kind of vigilant receptivity to the sharing of this desire: it is to be exposed to the fullness of the surrounding universe, a fullness whose coming is gauged only in proportion to ones acceptance of this void — including the degree to which one detaches from the products of the imagination, opinion, and the will. Being grace, it comes only where a void has been accepted within you, where a vacuum has been received — a vacuum that grace has created within you. Turning my attention on what cannot be conceived, I disappear altogether.

This vacuum that you are is what makes you human (or divine); but I believe it is also what we have in common with every being and thing. The void-heart withdrawn in each thing is the mark in its present of its present impermanence, which displays the thousandfold traces of permanence as appearances.  Grace means surmounting this materiality by nothing. Grace activates the void that drives the will to life, or if you prefer, expresses Being.

This kind of love, along with the kind of life the void-I corresponds to, in moving toward humility — our natural condition faced with the nudity of others –, thinks in connection with the living and the dead the conditions on which this nudity of existence might be found. And it finds no adequate ground. It finds itself in “substantial emptiness”: the finitude of Being. Whose finitude is exaggerated in that the “how” of God’s infinite has long irrevocably withdrawn (the cry on the cross is an apt analogy). One finds this “no adequate ground” on the body, to be the body. Hoc est enim corpus meum: all of a sudden, I’ve given over my painting to you, my body whose canvas I never bought, whose lines I never once dictated.

If there is one, I’m not sure what the purpose is for ingesting all this, for letting it course through your veins. I assure you, there are not my indications. Today, they’ve seethed from a certain disgust with myself — a certain boredom, during which I’d asked for God to do something with me. As this post closes, I know that nothing has been done in this sense: there’s been no proof of my being-put-to-use. Art looks further away than ever. But perhaps we have, at least, addressed this void at the heart of the world, which you can call God, or death-in-things, or the omnipresence of the Other-in-the-Same, whatever. Perhaps we have drawn it closer to ourselves, and you, and also knowing that this means drawing into the ambit of something still more distant. We are climbing to the highest mountain top, where we make confessions and pledge ourselves beyond our waking, reasonable mind, in the stratosphere where human language articulates the truth of all beings as its own-unique-own — where everything then collapses in one sense. We needn’t be concerned with where we land.

The Utopian form itself is the answer to the universal ideological conviction that no alternative is possible, that there is no alternative to the system. But it asserts this by forcing us to think the break itself, and not by offering a more traditional picture of what things would be like after the break.

A somewhat different picture emerges in the work of Herbert Marcuse: for him, utopia is no longer just “no place,” but rather “that which is blocked from coming about by the power of established societies.” With the advances in science, technology, and food production, utopia — the diminution of basic suffering to the lowest possible levels — is potentially within our grasp. However, the very same forces that make utopia possible now inoculate the masses from the very desire for it, through the mechanisms of mass media and generalized complacency. Such are the symptoms of the affluent society: merchandise, consumerism, satisfaction, competition, complacency, distraction, and profit; which are supported by mostly invisible exploitation in the productive arena: exploitation of resources (including people), mental repression and aggressiveness, and the whole catalog of brutalities waged against marginal populations in the name of corporate capital. Thus, although technology and transport could minimize competition for resources, make basic needs available for all, and free up time for humans to determine themselves according to their own needs (and not those of production, exploitation, etc.), what should be our noblest desires are sabotaged through various mechanisms of mental and cultural control. We unwittingly defend a system that consolidates wealth and power in the hands of the few, and we find our very being defined by the ideals of affluence which sustain the same system that oppresses us all.

Of course, it is easy enough to recognize this, while the question of application, change, and reversal remains tough to handle, both in theory and practice. Marcuse says that the revolutionary strategies employed in the 19th and 20th century — namely, the model of a revolutionary avant-garde seizing power through collective force — can no longer apply. Why? Because the working class is no longer impoverished to the point of heated revolt. Quite to the contrary, the working class, or the middle class, has become the agent for conservativism and stability of the exploitative system (through ideals of consumption, values of work ethic, etc.). Here, we must remember that Marcuse is writing in 1968, when the working class opposed the student revolts in France– and so effectively defended the technocrats and overlords who should have been their common enemy. Of course, Marcuse still affirms that struggles driven by the “underclasses” will continue to be primary in the ghettos and impoverished areas of the world, and that these class driven struggles will always underpin the biggest changes in society (for example, the Arab Spring); but at the same time, he comes to the conclusion that there is a new work of preparation that must be undertaken. These preparations imply the task of producing new cultural subjects, fashioned from within the affluent capitalist society as its internal disintegration. (Note: one could link this disintegration to the idea of introducing entropy into the system, or of making room for everything –  thus of writing, spacing, life, difference in general.)

This is the preparation of a “new historical Subject of change” whose arena of praxis is driven away from picket lines and the streets, toward the slower work of creating new desires for freedom, of tapping into a new sensibilities of human solidarity, and of imagining new aesthetic forms – sensible forms that present us with an image of freedom, and so develop within us an awareness of our desire to be free. The vital need for us, then, is to emphasize the need for a transformation of consciousness that is freed from “conservative interests and aspirations” of the prevailing society and its norms. It means nothing less than the preparatory, prerevolutionary work of radical enlightenment.

I

Preparatory Moves

The goal of this post is to list some of the perogatives this preparatory work implies for Marcuse. Despite his optimism that certain technological advancements make utopia actually possible for us, and that it simply remains for us to make the potential actual, we can still see in his own words and in the form of his thinking the same interdiction mentioned at the beginning: the impossibility of giving a positive conception to utopia or to any tangible alternative to the given Establishment. His effort, for all its positivity, remains “negative,” even if this negativity has a positivity of its own. Culled from Marcuse’s An Essay on Liberation, here is a tentative catalog of moves which ought to guide any preparatory attempt at utopian thinking:

• Qualitative transformation
• Exiting the sphere of divided labor
• Transcending the shame of the past
• Transcending affluent satisfaction 
• Refusal of the Establishment
• Destruction of language
• Revolution in perception itself
• Limits on Freedom
• The priority of Aesthetic Form
• Form as Subject
• Limits on Socio-Political Participation

Qualitative transformation — The means and the end of utopian speculation. It corresponds to the step-by-step, initial leaps out of society as it is, and to the total shift from a quantitative-capitalistic society to a qualitatively different, socialist one — changes also appear to characterize capitalism as a political and economic process as a whole. The ground level operation for this transformation is the active production of new needs and modes of production that radically differ from those associated with capitalist society: the production of new possibilities. (See posts on Peter Osborne & Time and Lefevre on Socialist Action.) Marcuse’s thesis is that affluent society constantly reinforces needs that pattern the behavior of the populace and alienate them from what they really want.  Capitalist society stifles and adjusts our faculties of imagination and consciousness to serve its own exploitative and quantitative purposes. It represses their real urge to break free, exploiting our capacity to adapt to rough circumstances. People become competitive, stylish, or “in the know” because they have been inculcated with these values, such that they become second nature. To undo this knot is tricky, but qualitative transformation requires it: the creation of new needs that are radically heterogeneous with respect to the old system. Paramount in this creation is to reinvigorate, or simply invent for the first time, a longing for free and open spaces.

Exiting the sphere of divided labor — Marcuse tries to think of a necessity that is wedded to freedom such that freedom reveals itself as the true necessity; such that the “freely necessary” begins to assert a causal force in reality unlike any ever seen before — as if one form of freedom were the contagion for the next. Here, free development of my faculties necessarily takes place outside of the division of labor, the sphere of “socially necessary labor,” where I’m forced to be “divided from myself” and sell myself for a wage. To drive possibilities for freedom into conscious awareness (through aesthetic or utopian Forms, as we’ll see) prepares the imaginative soil for larger revolutions. In this new vision of human activity, “creation” and “productivity” would be directly linked to the shared production of images of freedom. In this utopia, freedom and necessity coincide like self-determination and solidarity: “Socialist solidarity is autonomy.” (Note: this is not unlike Wilde’s idea that Individualism could only truly thrive in man’s soul under socialism.)

Transcending the shame of the past – Qualitative transformation implies the rejection of aggressive and brutal practices associated with exploitative societies of the past, both by acknowledging the injustices committed in history and by not allowing these evils to recommence today. In distancing ourselves from our forefather’s practices, we will also distance ourselves from their guilt, thus delivering man from ressentiment and moralizing him through a common sense or sensibility of “biological” solidarity with all other men– a solidarity characterized by the rejection of exploitation, repression, and aggressiveness. Perhaps the limit to the expiation of collective guilt might also show us the limits of this transformation (cf. Benjamin’s Theses on History). Marcuse’s study is oriented toward social expiation, but I would suggest that this transcending of the shame of the past is also required on the personal level: solidarity with a shared sensibility and shared rationality that takes me beyond myself has to be supported by my own transcendence of my past (my reluctance, shame, fear, etc.). But despite not emphasizing it, this “short-circuit” between the universal and the singular is implied– especially since none of this gets off the ground without it.

Transcending affluent satisfaction – Qualitative transformation of perception implies the overcoming of the Pleasure principle altogether, where happiness is thought to be something consumed and not produced (as it must be, if it is really to be happiness); and where there is pleasure in gratification and satisfaction (relaxation of desire), instead of in the endless circling-around-the-impossible (intensification of desire). The former would denote the delusions of contentment in the affluent society, whereas the latter would denote the creation aesthetic or utopian Forms: a new kind of productivity that would never stop transforming the one who produces them (or who at least perceives herself to be at the center of a production coming from within and without).

Refusal of the Establishment – We must reject and disengage ourselves from the rigged game at all costs and on every level; we must deny our reliance on the “Good Will in the Establishment”; we must free words from their subjugation to advertisements, abstract theories, and political propaganda; we must abolish our very existence as consumers and combat the regime of “profitable exchange”; we must transvalue all values (Nietzsche is cited at least twice). Again, this drives right to the heart of our own being and daily practice: “people cannot reject the system of domination without rejecting themselves, their own repressive instinctual needs and values.” This not only means shrugging off the “moral values” condoned by the system of domination, but also its pretension to being totally functional and operational, to being useful and helpful: the myth that the Establishment is good for us, which is only a screen against our fear of social chaos and disorder.

Destruction of Language – Implicit with this qualitative transformation would be a “rupture with the vocabulary of domination.” This includes most notably the vocabulary that, for example, makes heroism out of American tactical strikes and turns violent outbursts of the Iraqi oppressed into “acts of terror.” This is the vocabulary that condones violence against the Enemy while blinding itself to the injustice it distributes, while proclaiming loudly the corruption of anyone who would challenge the prevailing social systems (like OWS). More generally, it includes the destruction of all “instrumentalist language.” Paradoxically, revolutionary language “cannot be… an instrument of revolution.” Marcuse links this to the dada-surrealist project to be as non-conformist as possible, to the point of “a methodical reversal of meaning.” This theme of a non-instrumental, useless, worthless language is a language that cannot enter the chains of exchange as they are. It cannot be commodified: it has attained an absolute value by being intentionally valueless. It can only head toward free and open spaces. (Note: See Jean Baudrillard’s Impossible Exchange, but more importantly, Georges Bataille’s insistence on the need for an insubordinate language that would throw off all hints of servitude in The Absence of Myth. See also Silence-writing. This need manifests itself at every level of Bataille’s discourse, which objects constantly to its own signification and meaning. Incidentally, this need to cast off all forms of servitude and to reject all instrumentalist language is the motivation behind my polemic against theories, their productivity or “use,” systematic closures, the invention of concepts, and definitions in general.)

Revolution in perception itself – Only on the level of perception can the “continuum of repression and domination” be broken once and for all. The cultivation of new possibilities and the emphasis on solidarity freed from aggressiveness can only lead to this revolution in perception itself. This revolution (transformation, intensification) of perception is meant to dissolve the old structures and to make room for the new. But whatever this new “is,” again, we cannot say. Why? Because they very process of the transformation of perception is what gives rise the transformed reality (u-topia). The utopian act cannot be dissociated from the utopian outcome, no more than the aesthetic perception can be dissociated from the aesthetic Form. But right away we must emphasize that this “outcome,” this “form” is never given. ”Reality has to be discovered and projected.” (Note: we could link this to Bloch’s vision of utopia as an “Ontology of the Not-Yet” and the initial idea that “Something’s Missing” — which cannot be overcome by any social outcome or any final closure of Form.)

Limits on Freedom – This is the paradoxical freedom of the senses to share in the imaginative production of new Forms of freedom. But the key word here is share: the exercise of my freedom of imagination is limited, and can only produce new free images when my exercise is invested with this sharing and its truth (which is freedom). (Note: This sharing is what Marcuse is getting at when he discusses the “biological” solidarity of man with man as a species; but we should extend this beyond the human to all things and existents. I share this freedom of imagination with mountains as much as with humans– or at least, everything is infinitely valuable in itself before it’s related to anything else, and so implies the same element of solidarity-in-diversity that Marcuse applies to socialistic autonomy.) Marcuse references Kant to explain the limitations on freedom, which happens on the side of sensibility and reason: (a) my sense contents and their forms are necessarily shared with me by others (on the edge of skin where things touch me and I touch things); and (b) reason itself is the articulation-in-common through concepts, words, ideas, etc. (which is corrupted by the instrumental, competitive, and utilitarian uses to which it is put in the affluent society). The senses provide the (shared) raw material and reason the (shared) order; this takes place within us. The imagination is the “sensuous power” of harmony and unity between these two seemingly heterogeneous levels. (Note: in connection with the limitations on freedom, we should cite Levinas, for whom the “Other-in-the-Same” not only calls my arbitrary freedom into question, but upon welcoming the Other invests its with its true purpose.)

The priority of Aesthetic Form — In all this, Marcuse is led to the position that the “ascent of Form,” of the aesthetic Form alone reaches utopian heights. In the art form, consciousness goes as far as it can possibly go toward the negation of the given reality: “Their time is not the present; they preserve their truth in their hope, in their refusal of the actual.” As with utopia, the object of art is never “given” beforehand: it must be found out. And it is impossible, immeasurable. This “not-given” is always found out in the process of perception, which is an (unending) end-in-itself. As the end-in-itself of art, the process of transforming-perception becomes actual insofar as the process itself becomes an object. And this object is hardly an object: it is the aesthetic form, an aesthetic process in consciousness capable of transcending the actual. The art object, no more than the utopian society, has never become itself, for its attitude toward all of given reality requires that it always be becoming, actively transforming our perceptual apparatus. This is why the transcendence of the art product can be total, for it must develop a language that is totally subtracted from ordinary language and experience. Its meaning transcends its content (or its objectness) through the Form (which in the end is just a shattered and displaced object), since it cannot simply be engaged at the level of contents (this would miss the whole point), but on the level of movement, transformation, and perception: form.

Form as Subject — Art as an end-in-itself, as total transformation of the contents of consciousness through a wholesale revamping of the form of consciousness (pushing it to the very limits of unreality, we should add; but also of sharedness), is a perfect analog for the revolutionary conception of a self-determining humanity. The form of both the artwork and the new revolutionary Subject breaks with the familiarity of known practices (including revolutionary ones) and with the “automatism” of immediate perception: it prolongs and extends the duration of this perception, thus making possible something that was previously impossible in terms of the former system. In this way it attains the utopian point — a point that nevertheless trembles between the former system and the unprecedented new form. This takes place in/on/as the very border between reality and unreality: ”The aesthetic necessity of art supersedes the terrible necessity of reality” and has to “abandon the direct appeal, the raw immediacy of [its] presentations.” The link between the unreal self and the unreal utopian landscape or language asserts itself here most forcefully as both urgent and infinite. More complicated yet is the fact that production is well underway. See, for example, Laura Riding’s Anarchism Is Not Enough, which emphasizes that the rightness of an individual is not in his “reality” (as both nature and history would argue), but in his unreality, his nothing, his impossibility.

Limits on Socio-Political Participation – Marcuse adds that all of this involves a “refusal to mature” and “perform efficiently” in society. This involves the strategies of laziness at work, of indifference to social trends and mores, and a refusal to work in support of the oppressive divisions of labor to the greatest extent possible. It involves satire and irony, laughter and ridicule against the Establishment and its minions. It takes the stance that “the general will is always wrong” insofar as the status quo is something produced by the Establishment. Change is thus always opposed to the “rationalizations of the status quo,” which generally only “reproduce the repressive system.” Therefore, while democratic society is preferred to other forms of repressive society, it is constantly opposed. The radical is forced into anarchic and non-political modes of action and rebellion, forced to be “illegal” in the eyes of Law and Order; but this is because the existing society has invalidated itself. Only the individual, illegal and unsanctioned, can make the judgment call — and the criteria for judgment is lacking, but common: we are never prepared for it. “In radical political practice, the end belongs to a world different from and contrary to the established universe of discourse and behavior.” (Note: Lytotard, “Sensus communis, le sujet à l’ètat naissant.”)

II

Producing Potential in Freedom

By this point, it’s clear that Marcuse comes awfully close to refusing any positive conception of utopia, since it’s obliged to rely on the coordinates of thought and language at its given historical moment. (In another sense, this is the impotence of the dead to speak, of silence to say anything that can be heard by anyone.) By defining utopia as the thing the Establishment represses, Marcuse deepens the necessity of its wholesale negation while trying to maintain its scientific and technological features. . He even goes so far as to say that the external revolution can only take place if the “internal structure and cohesion of the capitalist system begin[s] to disintegrate” — and this disintegration begins with the radical effort of the individual to undermine the Establishment and the repressive ways of society at any and all levels (including the satirical and apolitical). “Negative thinking” is practiced to prevent the bad infinity of society and the perpetuation of its system of definitions and oppositions; and to uncover its inconsistencies, its inaccuracies, and its difference. Interestingly, this rapport to society is not unlike the rapport to the aesthetic or Utopian form: we can never rest content that the object has “become”; we can only pursue the becoming-object of a transformation in perception, imagination, solidarity, freedom, aesthetics…

Marcuse is right to point out that we cannot reject everything that has come along with the affluent society. It’s developments make utopia much more possible in potentia, such that we cannot reject outright any positive speculation. We should advocate and create models for the collective ownership of resources already available. We should advocate that all resources be mobilized for the abolition of poverty (which even Oscar Wilde knew was the goal of socialism). Our society has led us to these possibilities: now it’s time to end its self-propelling productivity for profit’s sake, and reinvent it for our own sake. And nevertheless, affluent society is based on an aggressiveness that will not take kindly to this sharing of resources overnight. As an apparatus in consciousness, it represses the poverty it requires to survive: thus the need to abolish the known forms of consciousness. Which means that, today, we ought to start practicing new forms of creating and sharing new forms of language and consciousness that cannot be swallowed, commodified, sold and consumed complacently. Practicing our new found capacity to give shape to the refusal to take shape for good, thus giving shape to Jameson’s “break” or Nancy’s “suspension,” giving form to the tension and pleasure of the infinite, impossible, u-topic not-yet.

In the end, it is as if the need to be free was the very thing that needed to be produced. Marcuse repeats across his work: “the joy of freedom and the need to be free must precede liberation.” This invention takes place “subjectively” from the get-go. It means the production of a new historical Subject: new aesthetic Forms. It means the abolition of the attitude of private property and the economic-social apparatus that supports it, a practice of collectivization and sharing in work and deed, a constant struggle toward transformed perception, new rationalities, and singular forms of aesthetics (as sensibilities and as arts), all undertaken with one basic question in mind: “what are we going to do now and for whom?” It is an injunction to rethink humanity and its place in all of existence: “the collective practice of creating an environment: level by level, step by step…”

This update from Hell is brought to you as a footnote to Georges Bataille’s book “Erotism.”

The day will come when the measured approach betrays you. You’ll want to do violence to something: violence itself will prove unsuppressible, insufferable. And yet you will not know what it means, or what it looks like, for that violence to break out, for it’s the silence of the immobile, the inert, the fixed. It’s the violence of silence as such. And this day is silence’s day– silence you deem immeasurable to restore a sense of hope to your approach. But to proclaim silence immeasurable is not violent enough. You are not happy with your love.

On that day you will struggle, not for the first time, to say “I” and know what you say. And when you do say it, you won’t only say it without certainty, but with terror. The terror that befalls anyone who says “I” (though we hardly know it). Not only terror at the silence that comes afterwards, but the silence that rides under the words, the silence between syllables. You’ll feel your own enunciation doing violence to you and the others — a violence that you, however, do not wield. A violence you can only call “immeasurable,” because silent. A violence that we not without frenzy and confusion misname “death.”

On such a day, you would not be surprised by Syrian or American violence. You would know precisely what it was after: continuity where none could be applied. All of this you would feel in yourself; and you would feel that, somehow, you yourself were at stake in all struggles. Throughout all of time: this you would know. Silence of the dead, silence of violence, silence of excess and the untouched: these would be your monikers, your exchange. You’d want to lash out against your work and your approach, for seeming to deny these variables, sensing your profound solidarity with all that goes on in America and Syria when you lie to others in such ways — when you use language. But it would lash right back at you with silence either way. All of it would remind you of your own high aspiration: no one cares. Your very intention to assuage the violated would be struck down by the violence of such a message. Your message of love: it would mean nothing but more disorder for them. And yet: this alone you chose to bear.

On this day it would be clear to you: this day is like no other. You’d be convinced of the fact of irrevocable change for the better, which, in terms of your work, your Syria, can only mean turning for the worse. You’d be disgusted by the drama in the voice; but urging it to die down, to be quiet, you would only incite its rage further, until it encroached so deeply into the territory of your individual personality that things themselves crumbled apart. You’d laugh at that god-awful term “entropy” and those who employed it in explanations. What’s worse, you’d sense an overarching order, you’d sense an actual continuity, where to the conscious mind there could only be madness, disruption, war, and “ingenuity.” But when you’d go to share and show that disruption, never doubting that your madness was never to be alleviated or exalted now, you would in fact say nothing, and you would know this. The very productivity of your silence would be negated through the truth it expressed; and the one listening to you — or watching — would be left with one option: to hate you. Not wanting them to hate you, but nevertheless, you would know: this admits of no discussion. The cover of the casket must be closed. Only the peace of the graveyard buries me over; and this, more than anything, is the peace we all must run from. While running helplessly, inexorably toward it. You’d hear a voice say: you can’t run from it, you coward, you tool! Impenetrable, you’d submit. Nothing, I tell you, would happen.

This day of all days annihilates the calender. Unity bears itself out as dissolution, and the dissolution that leads to unity lies just there, beyond your tongue, enticing you to intensity like tears at a funeral. You want unity — that is, you want it to be your funeral, if only because this is the only thing whose meaning you cannot know. Because on this day, swear God to tell it, you are tired of knowing the god-awful meaning of everything. You are tired of knowing that this meaning was never bestowed upon you, it was nothing you learned, it was no gift, and that all along it was just you in your wretched and shameless way who was realizing it for yourself. And you are tired of asserting all this everything, this realization for no one and nothing. And as the level of your voice escalates, the silence that makes your heart stop pumping, the inertia at the center of an unmoved universe, the eagerness that overcomes you from everywhere, would lead you to scream silence, to try to prove silence, and so inanity, and thus to manifest the most absurd of all things: to make desireable the undoing of the subject of desire AND his universe; to make dissolve the unity that would speak, hear, touch, feel, and love; and to do so to degrade this very “everything,” and for the sake of it!, this impure impetus that comes and keeps coming quite literally from nowhere now — this pure impurity that is your DEAD FACE!

Already you can feel the reality of your chemical approaching: it will not be purged away; but already it leaves you silent — indifferent. You can’t regret your own living because, obvious now to say it, you hadn’t — or at least, you hadn’t in any legible way. The joke would be on you and you alone, because somehow, in the stupidity of this silent and final moment, you would have united yourself with “forever,” and “eternal life” will have become yours, but for nothing: you’d no longer be there to have it. You’d realize the eternity of a chemical. But what’s worse: you’d go on living in spite of yourself, hidden underneath your name, retaining some semblance of discourse and meaning, according to the servile calendar yet, and thus submit to the grand farce of “humanity” and its “history,” which inevitably denies its own perilous truths, which you, all in vain, stripped nude to show. And with good cause, too, are their denials, with good intentions. You know your proletarian speech was not suited for this world.

On this day of the end-of-days, you’d realize that the game in which you staked your life had only one outcome: horrid, moribund laughter. You’d realize that learning to play the game well took you square out of it. You’d realize that your superiority at playing the game meant the denial and destruction of your own being; and that it meant the same for whoever could really hear you. You’d realize that only the one who listens — he who has no identity, he who comes ahead – could justify your position and your game; and that he would do so, not just by listening, but by forgetting you — forgetting that you (or anyone else for that matter) had ever played this game before. He’d justify your high stakes by ignoring them and taking up his own. Only in this way was it to be glorious. And what else could you say to him anyway, but go, don’t come back, there’s nothing for you here? “You’ve got to do it all on your own.” –But based on your wry testament, who would want it? Who in their right mind would want this? –Then again, who could be so naive, to think they could avoid it?

On this day-of-last-days, there’d be no room for truth and lies. What else could we do but hide the body away, bury it so none could see? There would be no more room for “me”; and whatever was left would strike terror and send you running. Because of all those who have dared to come this way, believe this: I am the most cunning and contagious. I’ll make you fatally ill if you let me, because I, more than anyone, knew what it was to be afraid. I knew what it was to be prohibited. 

I want to pull away, to forgive the God who breathes life into me for making it so putrid, for hanging His ugly corpse upon my throat. I want to ask for your forgiveness, for making you stammer and decay. I want to apologize for all this controversy, for everything I may have caused. But I cannot, because I cannot live with illusions. Despite it all: I’ve got to take myself seriously. So I don’t dare apologize for my nausea; and I don’t dare take credit for inducing it.

Who are you, anyway? What do you think you’re doing? Don’t tarry, don’t dilly-dally, don’t pray. Don’t be a coward. This voice you hear, you can’t hear it. The nudity I offer you does nothing to denude you. Whatever the phenomenon is, it’s tentative: in the end, it’s but silence, dreadful silence, like the universe itself — and violent like a monkey with no grave. Go figure out something better to say, if you can. Or better yet, do what I do on such days: say nothing. Better yet: go figure.

God isn’t humanity’s limit-point, though humanity’s limit-point is divine. Or put it this way– humanity is divine when experiencing limits. –Georges Bataille.

First Axiom: There is no such thing as a negligible difference. But all differences are, in the end, negligible.

Second Axiom: There can be no end. There can be no end to “difference.”

Third Axiom: Differences do not exist per se. Difference is existing. Existence is its difference — but not “difference from itself.” Follow me closely here: the “itself” of existence differs. The “itself” of existence… is difference.

Fourth Axiom: Difference is the principle of all principles because it effaces all principles, effacing itself in the articulation of its own (non-)principle. To rest on “principle” is not only the primary target of a philosophy of difference; existence itself rules out the very possibility of “principles” – in order to exist.

Fifth Axiom: “Difference” is not negligible because it precedes the possibility of any concept of different and same. Difference precedes the possibility of beginning/end, visible/hidden, present/absent, human/divine, etc. Difference, then, precedes the very possibility of identity, and thus of naming in general. Every name, every identity, every idea or ideality is constituted in contrast to another. And in another sense, deeper sense, another always constitutes it.

Proof for Fifth Axiom: To say “this is red” implies a flexibility, not only in terms of gradiations redness (crimson, vermillion, rose, etc.), but in terms of cases of redness (blood, vehicles, emotions). The unity of the phenomenon “redness” is merely derived from this plurality of graduations and cases. It comes after the reality of the object. This means that “there is no self-same color named red.” Red is “not” red. We have to show how, rather than undermining the name or concept of red, these “inherent,” non-negligible differences, their flexibility or reflexibility, in fact constitute its strength as a signifier. But since its range of application is not infinite — since not everything is red — we have to show, or at least suggest, that is boundedness and its universality go hand-in-hand.

Truth abides in the individual drama. If I suffer authentically, I suffer much more than an individual, I transcend the sphere of my selfhood, I rejoin the essence of others. The only way to proceed toward the universal is to concern ourselves exclusively with what concerns us. — Emile Cioran

Infinite Axiom: There is an other inside of me to whom I address this speech. He is on your side. Imagine me as a womb. Imagine my words as the uterine wall, as the sound of someone great and lovely breathing, the sounds of someone’s blood pumping, the sounds of some father lending his ear to my outer wall and listening closely. Imagine that you are a child. Imagine that you are a child inside of me. But do not imagine me as me. I am your child.

First Imagination: Two doors, one heavy, one light, situated in the same door frame. The first has a brass doorknob, the second, something flimsy. The one has a long plane of glass and is made of metal. The other is plastic– but it’s windows open. Well, almost: they can be shifted so as to expose a mesh netting called a “screen,” which lets air in from the outside. What do I do? I open the first door and say, “I’m not opening the door, I’m just opening the door.” What do you then do?

Sixth Axiom: If we wanted to trace the origins of time and space — whether as “concepts” or as the “constituent structures of existence in general” — we would find that they have their common root in difference. That is to say: we are born different. And from then on – remember this – we are never the same. Give yourself over as a signal to this.

Methodological principle: The hard line often drawn between preparation and performance is effaced in the being of the performer (i.e., in the performance) to the extent that the performance comes to be seen as nothing more than preparation. For there is no “final match.” The being of the performer is effaced in the performance: he discovers he has not even begun yet, that he is not yet. Therefore: excursion coincides with report; investigation with result; draft with final work. Design (sketch, investigation, excursion) with design (intention, meaning, purpose). Let us let our finished products open our eyes to the incompleteness of our work. Let us let our closures be openings. Let us let each death birth.

Seventh Axiom: Self-presence, the sense of being, what I have of “being myself,” the sense of myself as a monad, as self-contained and self-enclosed, as a bodily “thing,” therefore, originates in difference. We are borne unto this presence that is different. We are always original, in this sense. This bearing unto, or birthing, of presence is the essence of what is meant by “being-singular.” It is “being” in the active, not the substantive, sense. We could even say: there is only stability in self-presence insofar as this presence becomes, or rather, is becoming, different. And there’s no instability in difference.

First Note on “Singularity”: In mathematics, a singularity is a point at which a function takes on an infinite value, the exceptional point at which it ceases to behave well. For example, the function, f(x) = 1/x , on the real line, has a singularity at x = 0, where it seems to “explode” to ±∞ and is not defined.

Second Note on “Singularity”: Whenever speaking about it, Jean-Luc Nancy reminds us that the original or common usage of this word in Latin – singuli – meant “one by one,” “one after the other,” as if on a real line. He emphasizes this to remind us of the plurality implied in singularity. This is easily detected in the title of his book on ontology, Being Singular Plural. We come to presence as singulars because we come to presence one presence at a time — that is, through absence. At any one time, we “are” a plurality of presences (absences) that become, and are becoming, different. And if each “moment of presence” involves the birth of “a new one of me,” so too does each birth involve a “moment absence”: the death of the last one. There’s nothing special about singularity– even if it points toward the extraordinary. For these “rules,” this one-by-one, holds true for everyone. Furthermore, it holds true for every thing. Levi Bryant has done some incredible work connected to this topic. See his work on the dynamic life of objects, objects as acts, objects as events, etc.

Eighth Axiom: Since time lies at the origin of self-presence, and since time cannot help but be characterized by the metaphors of — or experienced as — “movement” and “passage” — incessant movement and passage at that — then self-presence is marked by an originary difference. Its origin, then, or its time, is always coming ahead of it. Its origin is its coming-ahead-of-itself. It comes ahead of its difference. This is what makes us lovely: just as we are.

First Note on the Eighth Axiom: We don’t have to wait to die to reach completion or closure because in every moment we are “reaching completion.” Which also suggests to us that death is nothing more than an infinite opening. The tiniest nothing there could be.

Second Note on the Eighth Axiom: In affirming that the self is auto-affective, in affirming that it affects itself, what is questionable is not the affection, but the “autos” that is affected. Can we think of a shared autos? We will forever run into problems if we ask: how does the self stay the same over time? how does is it affected and affect itself while remaining the same? These questions lead us in the wrong direction entirely: they are also somewhat weak questions, since they seek security where no security need be sought. We have to think of affection as a differing that is always coming “ahead” of the autos; which again suggests that the autos is always doubled or somehow multiple. In the passage of time, which is the passage of affects, it is this passage which makes our autos possible — and not vice versa. There is not some same (autos) that then becomes different; there is the movement of difference (which we remember cannot be stopped) from which we (retroactively and always provisionally) deduce sameness. This means that we are a trace of ourselves — that is, we are absent and elsewhere — before we “are” ourselves — and who said we had to “be” anyway? Why constitute something (autos) where there is only passage, affection, build-up and decay? Discontinuity need not constitute. This implies nothing less than that we revamp our whole notion — better yet, our whole practice — of “self-consciousness.”

Summary View: We can see now that we are forever working over the questions of unity and dissolution, of ideality and “realing,” of identity and difference, etc. Perhaps we can learn to extend our insights on “redness” into topics that are a bit less easy to manage, like ‘humanness’ or ‘divinity.’ But even these question boil down to the question of the oneness of the one. Recall the difficulty of bracketing off one moment from another along the continuum of time. Recall how one side of your country seamlessly and without interruption becomes the opposite side. Recall how the photo album teaches you après-coup “who you are.” Recall how you are not surprised by anything… until you are surprised by something. My suggestion is this: any “one” is only more or less one. I can say, at the same time: “I’m not yet who I am” and “I’m already more than I am.” My very being is addressed to this not-yet and this already-more-than. This “not-yet”/”more”… this not-yet-more…  is what I am: I am That. Which, clearly, still means: I am Not. 

Final Meditation, or, “A Prelude to Spiraling Out”: This short treatise began with a quote by Bataille where he says that “divinity” is the experience of humanness at its limits; and that “God” does not necessarily indicate an upper limit. We have written this treatise to affirm that, insofar as difference is always “operative,” we are always experiencing humanness at its limits. We are always more-than-human, not-yet-divine. But on the other hand, this being-on-the-limit is not something to take lightly, or to take for granted.Paradoxically, it would seem, we have to seek the limit, to chase it down, to never let up. Of course, it recedes infinitely, for it indicates that Other-in-the-Same that immemorially takes us hostage (according to Levinas). To this — to him? to her? to it? — we make ourselves vulnerable. Our treatise has therefore been written to remind us of what we cannot be reminded of, to give us access to the inaccessible: being-on-the-limit as the gift that comes from nowhere. For it is not within my power as a self-present being to take myself to the limit. I can only recognize, by a strange torsion between “am” and “am not,” that an “other side” is exposed, and I am exposed to my other side. Writing (– Life?) is a privileged access to this spiraling-out; but it is not everything. “Writing” too is nothing if not different. In the end, like us, it’s nothing. In the end, we will have written many things, we will have exposed ourselves, we will have searched for signifiers and love, we will have become totally and utterly different. And, we will have died. But as I have said time and time again, this death will make no difference it hadn’t already made. Death itself: it makes no difference. And there is no negligible difference.

I

As the title of the video indicates, Botton is interested in “Atheism 2.0,” that is, a new way of being an atheist. This is an atheism for those who are attracted to the “ritualistic, moral, communal side” of religion (as if there were any other side!), but do not jive with the “doctrine.” My initial question is this: has he ever talked to anyone who goes to church regularly? In my experience, the vast majority of church-goers go to church precisely for this ritualistic, moral, communal, and contemplative (or quiet) side of religion. To disagree with the Vatican or religious fundamentalists; to refrain from screaming “Jesus is my Savior” at the street corner; to recognize the violent and “dumb” parts of ones own religion — all of these are found in “believers” too, and not just atheists. This is just one example of what I would call Botton’s spiritual immaturity: it seems beyond his comprehension that “believers” would also be skeptical about their own religion, or that they would engage with doctrines and rituals from a measured distance. Once this is admitted, the “atheism” he is discussing would just be redundant. It seems to me that many (if not most) church-goers have their own personal understanding (relationship, connection) to “God”; and it is this intimate relationship, not doctrine, which keeps them tied to their faith. In other words, being “free from religion” while “picking out its best parts” is something that religious people of all faiths already do. To not understand this means you haven’t ever really gone to church…

But let’s move on. Botton basic thesis is very simple: we have “secularized badly,” there are holes in our secular world, and we ought to go to religion in search of things we can use to plug these holes, to find things we can steal. We need “assistance” since we are “just barely holding it together.” “Of course we need help!” he screams. (The easy retort: “Speak for yourself, Alain!”) Botton wants us to get away from dry, unpersuasive university lectures and return to edifying, rousing, though atheistic, sermons. He wants us to get on our knees, to find rituals, to “synchronize encounters,” to build monuments to the universe, etc. And he wants an atheist morality that could be broadcast to all and “teach us how to live.” Now, I believe strongly that this view misses the entire point of “atheism” as a historical phenomenon, but we’ll get to that later. For now, let’s bring out some other parts of his argument.

Botton’s ignorance about church-goers is shockingly similar to his ignorance about artists. He chastises the notion of ‘art for art’s sake’ and the idea that artists shouldn’t explain their work — as if the absurdities of Dada, the link to the unconscious in Surrealism, the commodity aspects of Pop Art, etc., where somehow politically or socially neutral — as if they were just for the fun of it. As if every true artist weren’t led to art out of a dissatisfaction with the world around them. As if, for example, Van Gogh didn’t start his life out as a pastor, but found the only way to channel his dark passion was through painting. Etc. But Botton wants an art that transforms the world (supposing it hasn’t transformed it already, or isn’t still transforming it). He wants artworks to “cement ideas in our mind,” ideas like love and generosity. In other words, he wants a dumbed-down art that is perfectly communicable to all, which teaches us in a transparent way what is worth loving and hating. He wants it easy. For this to happen, museums ought to explain the art works, reduce their puzzling aspects, and break their spell. He then hits us with this doozy, around minute 12:30:

The people in the modern world… who are interested in matters of the spirit… tend to be isolated individuals. They’re poets, they’re philosophers, they’re photographers, they’re filmmakers, and they tend to be on their own. They are cottage industries. They are vulnerable single people. And they get depressed, they get sad on their own. And they don’t really change much.

I think we are justified asking, “How do you know?” since it is quite curious to assert that such individuals “don’t really change much.” For an artist, every day, every engagement with their art, is for the sake of transformation, not only of themselves but of the world around them. Art proceeds from an internal and external crisis which cannot be dealt with in any other way. The happy-go-lucky idea of “collaborating” is simply not an option for most. Botton goes on to tell us how little power these lone individuals have — as if the rejection of power weren’t intimately intertwined with art’s ‘political’ vocation. He says that we ought to admire the institutional aspect of how religion “sells” and “fights for” the things of the mind — as if art weren’t direly engaged with resisting its institutionalization and sale. He says that lone books are ineffectual (again, speak for yourself!), and that we need to group together if we are ever to change the world — as if group-think were unquestionably superior to individual creativity. Suffice it to say, I hardly know where to begin with such misunderstandings…

Finally, one comment on the hypocritical intention operative in all of these suggestions. Atheists chastise religion because it homogenizes people’s thought. It makes people think the same thing. But while Botton would surely never agree to authority figures or doctrines, he advocates that we “teach people how to live,” that we return to the lessons of morality, that we use multinational institutions or modern culture to spread secular ideas, etc., and thus, in a way, doing the same thing — as if a level of sameness were required for society to be healthy. (Or again: as if it was possible for society to be health, to be improved on a mass scale.) He thinks that it’s okay to do all this, once we’ve found the correct, non-religious ideas — as if agreement were the goal of communication itself. The intention to direct minds and lives along a common horizon is still there. The desire for immersion in a common body is still there, especially in his desire for “atheist temples.” But as I see it, the emergence of philosophical atheism in the specific time we call “modern” denotes precisely this: any and all common horizons are lost. The common body is corrupt. Being itself is cracked and breaking apart. We are abandoned to ourselves. No one can give us answers — and there are none. The world rests on nothing.

II

We have to take leave of Botton now and advance our own “view” of atheism — or rather, since atheism denotes the effacement of all views, we have to show how atheism responds to a crisis that is only made worse by ignoring its source.

It is my view that atheists like Botton simply vulgarize religious ideas while acting, on the whole, like priests (although without the uniform, they are hard to respect…). This is evidenced most clearly when they implicitly affirm “atheism” as a mind-set shared by a group of people. But how does this shared mind-set differ in any way from a religious community of believers? That this group is constituted in opposition to religion — as a community of scientists or secularists, for example — simply indicates that the model of “belief” has been displaced on to another mode of thinking, without undergoing any fundamental change. Belief-for is really not so different from belief-opposed. What I believe is irreversibly outdated is the whole idea that having a shared mind-set is good for us in the first place.

But the failure of mainstream atheism is worse that its innocent reliance on science or culture. This view of atheism entirely misses the fact that deep within religion itself there are mechanisms that imply a fundamental mutation in the structure of belief itself. These deep mechanisms are to be found in the works of theologians, philosophers, poets, mystics, ascetics, and artists across all time and in all faiths; and these works themselves are like “machines” that can change our pattern of thinking. In all, these deep mechanisms teach this: religion teaches “atheism.” Religion teaches the exit from religion. Without understanding this, the latter will never be accomplished, no matter how loud the mainstream atheist screams.

So, what handicaps atheists most is that they have nothing intelligent to say about God. In remaining effectively ignorant about philosophical atheism as it is bestowed to us through various sources — especially through what is called “negative theology” — folks like Botton remains as clueless about “God” as most religious people do. But where religious folks recognize that cluelessness as part of their faith in God — how God’s “mystery” is co-extensive with God’s “being” — atheists jump to the conclusion that any idea that cannot be understood by science or understood rationally is ridiculous. (Let’s note in passing that “God” is not an idea, nor is “God” in any way subject to proof or disproof for reasons we will explain below…)

Botton’s difficulties come to the surface when he’s forced to mince his words — for example, when he tries to differentiate between “having spiritual experiences” and “believing in spirit,” or between “wonderment at the mystery of the universe” (which science evidently shows us) and “mystical experience” (which is evidently too religiony for him to stomach). But his basic fallacy is shared by most mainstream atheists: they toss “God” aside as though they were the first people to doubt the idea of the fairy-God. As if the deep teaching of religion actually had anything to do with this simple notion of God. They seem to think that just by discarding this idea, all mental immaturity suddenly vanishes!

Of course, the vast majority of religious people do not delve into all the complexities that are huddled around God as a word, as an idea, as a historical phenomenon, as a textual operator in theologies and poems, etc. But in religious people, it would be a bit unfair to count this as a fault, even if it frustrates those who affirm the necessity of delving deeper (as I do): for many of them, religion does serve as a regulator of time, as a way to gather with the community, etc., and in this sense, theological questions are somewhat secondary. But for atheists, the omission to delve deeper is more inexcusable. It is an act of intellectual and historical carelessness, “reactionary” in the worst sense. Furthermore, I just don’t see how atheists will ever effectively combat religion if they don’t first grapple with religion’s deep, “atheistic” teachings. (Of course it is regrettable that religions themselves don’t grapple with these deeper structures.) Without engaging the history of philosophy and/or metaphysics on some level – the concepts of presence, Being, etc. — there is really no way to understand what is at stake with “atheism” or “modernity.” Why? Because these concepts have guided us to today. Without engaging them — and I don’t say “understanding” them — it will remain very hard to know where we are headed.

The atheistic core of religion startled society long ago, and the mutation it initiated is far from over. Once upon a time, Greek logos met Jewish exile. The Word was made Flesh. Obviously, this is much more than we could ever cover in a blog post. And yet we will try to say something about God, because we must say something, even in the absence of answers and adequate words. The following assertions are not meant to be proofs, but indications toward a different way of conceiving of God:

Above all, God has to do with the “outside of the world in the world”: the outside of the world that is inside of the world as that which exceeds the world. ”God” has to do with the opening of the world to the outside of the world — i.e., its creation – although without referencing any kind of nether-world or beyond-world. ”God” has to do with upper limits of thought itself, and with thought thinking beyond thought itself. “God” has to do with an address that stretches me beyond myself. “God” is the address I make to your ”beyond yourself.” “God” is the encounter between us, between all beings and things, between what is incomprehensible between us and everything else. And this encounter cannot be conceptualized. It cannot be proven, it cannot be turned into a propositions, it does not indoctrinate us. On the contrary, it opens us to the outside. “God” is this relation of all things to their ownmost other sides. And this relation gives access to what cannot be accessed: the infinitely other, the different, the altered. For God is not dead, but death itself: a name for the immeasureable, the impossible, the inconceivable, the distant. The name for that which absolutely surpasses “me” in me, that which absolutely surpasses “you” in you. “God” is the common name that designates the unnameable, which itself designates the relation of all things to all things. And God speaks to this strange encounter, this enigmatic connection (made possible by “words”; more on that below).

God, the unknown, the terrifying, the uncertain. God, the leap and the blessing. God, the abject, the abandoned, the alone. God, nudity, undressing. All of these expressions gloss the incomprehensible, the rapturous, the passionate. They gloss the abyss of nonmeaning into which God descends so as to be God. 

“God” addresses you from elsewhere (here?). “God” is (the) elsewhere (here?). “God” is (the) nowhere —  which is where we are. ”God” is the opening of the here and now to this elsewhere, which is nowhere else but here. And this opening, right here, is infinite…

Clearly, all of these formulas are ridiculous in themselves, dirty, eccentric. But thinking itself quite clever, mainstream atheism tries to escape the conceptual matrix of God-ideas through mere sleight of hand. In doing so, it only tightens the secular noose around its own neck. What is most “idiotic” about mainstream atheism, in my view, is its narrow definition or conceptualization of the “self” or of “personal consciousness,” precisely to the extent that it looses sight of this dimension of “me in excess of me,” this “absolute outside of me inside of me.” This dimension is not “knowledge,” nor is it strictly “conscious,” and in relying solely on what we can know and cognize, mainstream atheism leaves unquestioned the most hideous biases of secular society. The religious matrix of God-ideas and the secular matrix of self-ideas are, in fact, intimately intertwined. Transforming the one implies a transformation of the other because they came about together. Whether we point to Augustine or Descartes, the existence of God has always underpinned the existence of the subject. Any atheism that does not recognize this not only fails to understand God, but it fails to understand its self. Thus, it comes as no surprise when it goes looking for answers in religion since, in effect, it has never even left religious territory.

I affirm along with the atheists that we must leave religious territory. But we cannot persist in thinking we can do this with a simple disavowal. Otherwise, we will be led to form secular communities whose subjugation to social reality is much worse than religion’s, whereas what we truly need, more than anything, is a resistance to the social reality and its carefully mapped, systematized coordinates. In short, we need to respect the unreality of God– the unreality of myself.

III

This carelessness could frustrate me, but instead I laugh — or write, which exacerbates me to the point of fainting. I inevitably contradict myself, since my words rest on nothing. I’m in a position of powerlessness, too, because the writing produces nonsense by refusing to coalesce into a doctrine or a system. But the crux of this issue has to do with language itself, which I would now briefly like to go over.

Religion as a global institution remains ignorant of this issue in language, but mystics, theologians, and atheists (among many others of course) have understood it throughout history in singular ways that, each in their turn, gave them their unique voices — that is, put them each in a unique relationship with “God,” with the outside-of-time that presented itself to them in their time. It’s hard to parse, and we can only gloss it here, but we have to differentiate between language when it is “used” as an instrument for coercion, persuasion, or sales, and language that adores existence as such.

Language-as-instrument would seek to make a unity out of language and the world, to systematize or totalize beings, to reduce things to their simply identity-with-themselves, to establish some kind of hierarchy of meaning, to “schedule,” etc. In contrast, language-as-adoration opens us to the outside of being, the outside of hierarchy, and in a sense, to the outside of language. It opens us to the outside of our selves (God?), to the outside of this time. Language-as-adoration sings, ecstatic like a sonata or the movement of Van Gogh’s brush. Rather than defining, it addresses — and it address us to the ‘outside’ of any empirical address that could be given in the world. Language-as-adoration seeks out those places that cannot be empirically proven or found. It seeks out, infinitely, another.

One example of language-as-adoration is negative theology, which always had to proceed “negatively” because, at every turn, the words of its discourse had to be turned to their outside, to what exceeded everything given in the world or the discourse, including what is supposedly “given” about God. Every predicate of God is stripped away in negative theology. In Indian thought, this is the idea of neti, neti: God is “not this, not that.” In this way, God was not defined, but addressed. God was pointed to by stressing what God was not.

Quite to the contrary, both secular and “religious” discourse seek to enclose, to encompass, to make an identity out of God (and so too of selves). And in this sense, they are one and the same: whether they affirm or denounce this Ideal Identity or Presence or Being, what matters is that they assume it. Both take this ideality to be something, rather than nothing at all. Both are stances geared toward an accurate representation of reality. But for the “true” atheist — the negative theologian — “God” is not something assured. God’s ideality (reality) is yet to be established, there is no proof. God’s ideality (reality) can be addressed, but this does not guarantee its existence. God’s ideality (reality) is suspended over the abyss of trembling words. This ideality (reality) is constituted in the play between words. So too for the self. Reality is in the reception of these words, which is the undoing of reality as such: the reception of trembling and play, revelation of the unreal. “God” is not: the not that makes a world possible, the minimal difference that lets me breath, fall down, touch, and be free. And I too am this “not”: nothing. To share in this nothing is… to share God.

IV

In the end, “God” is just a word; what matters is the constellation of them, which indicates the space between them and their distance from us. We might be better off talking about the trauma of death, of self-effacement, of disappearance.

In this post, I’ve tried to show what I feel “atheism” is all about. But I am not an atheist — I am not anything – for reasons that must now be explained.

I have tried to show throughout that atheism – insofar as it is a common mind-set, a shared perspective, a group of people (atheists), etc. — is really no different than theism or any other “ism.” Whether nationalism, communism, fascism, all of these are ways of turning many people into a homogeneous mass that might move “together.” Like I said earlier, although Botton would explicitly reject this, he nevertheless calls for a common horizon of morals and culture, a “temple for atheists,” etc., which all seem to me to represent the model of communal immersion that ought to be rejected. Such immersion expresses the desire to neutralize my abandonment — the infinite distance between me and you which constitutes each of us as our own “person” in the first place.

I’ve said that this abandonment is irreversible and “incurable.” To avoid it is to avoid ourselves, our historical predicament, and, in general, the crisis of sense itself. This crisis indicates the need to avoid taking any hard-line positions. This doesn’t mean we ought not take a stand; quite the contrary. But we have to take a stand on nothing. We have to find and lose ourselves over the abyss that we, the world, and all existents are. We’ve got to open ourselves to the “otherwise-than-that.” While there’s no way to prove this, or even to tell you precisely what it means, I can testify for it, and I can attest to its power. It is a kind of transformation that transforms (me into) nothing. From here on out, we need testaments, testaments to nothing–  not proofs. As Jean-Luc Nancy writes,

There’s not even “atheism”; “atheist” doesn’t cut it! It’s the very principle of “position” that must be avoided. It’s not enough to say that God absents himself, withdraws himself or even that he’s incommensurable. It has even less to do with placing another principle at the throne – Man, Reason, Society. It’s a matter of tackling bodily the fact that the world rests on nothing – and that its most lively sense lies therein.

We began with the idea that we are abandoned, that there are no answers, and we end there again. The world rests on nothing.

V

In closing: The idea that someone could tell me how to live or change my life should be the object of any real “atheist” attack. Only I can do that — make a change, live my life. The responsibility for the whole ordeal of existence falls squarely on me. But let’s be clear: this doesn’t mean we figure it all out “on our own.” On the contrary, we have to re-think this “own” starting from an original difference, starting from an initial reach outside. I will continue to read Nietzsche, Cioran, Bataille (some of the greatest atheists to have ever lived), and I will learn a great deal from them each time. But in the end, it’s all just a mirror for “myself” — stretched out.

It is impossible to call yourself an atheist if you still believe that herd-behavior or group-think is in any way still valuable. Communal immersion only leads to us-them thinking, which in turn leads only to war. We are abandoned to ourselves in “isolation” and must grapple with this fact. We have to be strong and accept the fact that a response to our testament may never or will never come. And we have to testify nonetheless.

It is impossible to call yourself atheist if you are still looking for assurances or consolations of any sort, whether in this world or in a beyond world. It’s not to be found in enjoyment or philanthropy or even ‘creativity.’ Death, the fact of our finitude, prevents this outright. Nothing assures sense. We have to risk everything, with no guarantee of reward, accomplishment or compensation. We have to give up the very idea of “end.”

And it’s impossible to call yourself atheist if you still believe in a Reason for existence. Whether you find it in science, religion, sex, or culture, it’s all the same clouded illusion. For there is no reason for existence — at any rate, there is no common one. For existence is its own reason, in and of itself, each time. In ex-isting, existence gives itself its reason. The reason for existence is found in the “not” that existence is.

Life itself is infinite stupidity, unreasonable, without purpose or end in sight. Just like the idea of “God,” just like us. Let us learn how to say that it is so.