Saitya Brata Das

THE PROMISE OF TIME
SAITYA BRATA DAS
The Promise of Time

Towards a Phenomenology of Promise
INDIAN INSTITUTE OF ADVANCED STUDY

RASHTRAPATI NIVAS, SHIMLA
First published 2011
© Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla
All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced
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ISBN: 978-81-7986-
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Indian Institute of Advanced Study
Rashtrapati Nivas, Shimla-171005
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For
My dear father
Who first taught me to love
The love of wisdom: philo-sophia
Acknowledgements
We never come to thoughts. They come to us.

—Martin Heidegger
What does it mean to be thankful, and to say ‘thanks’? This question,

which is at the very heart of an essential thinking, of language and of
our relation to the others, is what has always been a matter of thinking
for me, as if, as it were, to think itself is to thank, to be thankful for
the arrival of thinking. Therefore, thinkers like Martin Heidegger
see the connection, nay, discover at the very heart of thinking—for
thinking too has its heart, it too has its tears and ecstasy—the light
of thankfulness: to think is to thank, to be thankful, thankful for the
advent of thinking, for the event of thinking coming to us. Therefore,
a thinker does not possess thinking, even less knowledge: thinking is
what is gifted to the thinker for which he says, simply, ‘thanks’. There
lies the dignity and nobility of thinking itself.
So I thank, not only for the gift of thinking coming to me, for
this mournful joy of the experience of thinking, but all those and all
that who inspired me have continued to inspire me to open myself
to the joyous coming of thinking; all those who shared the ecstasy
and tears of my thinking. There is Franson Manjali, under whose
inspiration I have written from the day I met him, and I will write
in the days to come, whatever will come to me as gift, this event of
thinking. There is Soumyabrata Choudhury, my loving brother, from
whom I have learnt so much, learning never to lose myself in despair
and hopelessness. Renowned French Philosopher Gérard Bensussan,
who was my mentor during my stay at Université Strasbourg and at
viii • Acknowledgements
Maison des Sciences de L’Homme, Paris where I was a post doctorate

fellow during 2006-2007, the one who has never ceased to be
my mentor, my philosopher and teacher for all these years. From
him I have learnt a great deal, namely, to ‘philosophize’. To him I
acknowledge hereby my deepest gratitude. Thanks to the advent of
Sarita, my beloved wife, who has inspired me to live my life anew;
from whom once more I have learnt to see the open sea and the blue
sky. These people have had hopes in me and this manuscript recounts,
in its own way, the story of such a hope contra all hopelessness, and
the necessity of such an affirmation.
Thanks to this beautiful Shimla and this wonderful Institute that
have both soothed my wounded soul at a difficult period of life; all
the lovely people with whom I lived, joyously; all the local, lovely
friends I have made at Shimla—Mridula and Pankaj above all—who
gave me company in my lonely hours, away from home and away
from Delhi. The Director, Professor Peter D Souza has inspired me
in his own peculiar way, without words, silently, whose language I
felt I understood. I wish to thank hereby Dr. Debarshi Sen for his
patience and professional efficiency with which he brought out this
book in so little time. Mr. Ravi Shankar, the typesetter, has made this
book look so beautiful; thanks goes to him as well!
There is my father who gifted me this life, whom I now gift this
book, which has already been given to me by him. And thanks
goes to the loveliest and sweetest mother of mine, and my siblings
who have silently inspired me all these years, to whom I can return
nothing but love and my infinite gratitude. And, lastly, thanks to this
manuscript itself, which henceforth will have its own life, which will
now onwards live without me, outside and away from me, forget me
and leave me without a name. This book, for some intimate reason, is
dear to me, for somehow in it I have sought to translate the language
of my own soul. But since now it is going out to the world, its
language is no longer the language of my soul but I hope it will
become the language of the world-soul where human beings live,
suffer and hope for redemption.
Beginning at the moment of deepest catastrophe
There exists the chance for redemption.
—Gershom Scholem
The following chapters have been published previously
1. The first chapter of the first part The Open originally appeared in
Kritike http://www.kritike.org/journal/issue_6/das_december2009.
pdf
2. An earlier version of the second part The Lightening Flash
appeared in Philosophical Forum (Willey Blackwell, fall 2010)
vol. 41, issue 3, p. 315-345.
3. The Abyss of Human Freedom is published in Journal of Indian
Council of Philosophical Research, October-December 2010, vol.
XXVII, no 4, p.91-104.
4. Of Pain is published in Journal of Comparative and Continental
philosophy (New York: Equinox Publishers, May 2011), vol. 3: 1.
5. A revised version of the chapter The Metaphysics of Language
is published as The Destinal Question of Language in Kriterion
(Spring 2011, issue 123).
6. The Commandment of Love: Messianicity and Exemplarity in
Franz Rosenzweig is read as paper at the 6th Annual Philosophy
Conference at Athens Institute for Education and Research, held
at Athens, Greece, held during 30 May - 2 June 2011.
7. Fragments in Epilogue section is read as paper called Of Fatigue, Of
Patience – Finitude, Writing, Mourning in a seminar on ‘Levinas
– Blanchot: Penser La Difference’, organized by UNESCO, Paris
from 13-16 November 2006.
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Foreword by Gérard Bensussan xv
Premise 1
PROLOGUE
§ The Promise of Time 5

To Come/The Claim of Redemption and the Question
of History/Truth beyond Cognition/Existence/Messianic/
The Lightning Flash of Language/Wandering, Thinking/
Configuration Saying
§ Radical Finitude 20
The Immemorial/The Mournful Gift/the Logic of the World/
Mortality/Introducing this Work
PART I – CONFIGURATION
§ The Open 39
§ Judgement and History: 51
Of History/ Metaphysics and Violence/The Passion of
Potentiality
§ Transfiguration, Interruption 76
§ The Logic of Origin 87
Of Beginning/Madness/Astonishment
xii • Contents
§ Repetition 108
Repetition and Recollection/ Moment
§ Language and Death 119
The States of Exception/The Facticity of Love and The
Facticity of Language/The Gift of Language
§ Configuration 132
Caesura/The Star of Redemption/ Discontinuous Finitude/
En-framing, Revelation/Lightning, Clearing/ Constellation
of Temporalities/ Transfinitude
PART II – THE LIGHTNING FLASH
§ The Language of the Mortals 161

The Presupposition//Kierkegaard’s Indirect Communication
§ Pain 175
Work and Pain/The Melancholic Gift/ Naming and
Overnaming/Thinking and Thanking
§ Apollo’s Lightning Strike 201
The Lightning Flash/The Divine Violence
§ Revelation 210
The Argument/Synthesis without Continuum/Language as
Revelation in Schelling’s Philosophy of Freedom
PART III – EVENT
§ Of Event 225
The Question of Event and the Limit of Foundation/
Freedom, Time and Existence/Origin, Leap, Event
§ Love and Death 243
§ The Sense of Freedom 251
§ The Irreducible Remainder 267
§ The Abyss of Human Freedom 291
The No-Thing of Freedom and the Finitude of Man/
Causality as a Problem of Freedom/Philosophy as Strife
Contents • xiii
PART IV – MESSIANICITY
§ The Commandment of Love 305

Exemplarity of Translation/the Aporia of Love/Revelation of
Love/The Theologico-Political
PART V – ON PHILOSOPHY
§ Erotic and Philosophic 343

§ On Philosophical Research 354
The Thought of Death/ Philosophical Research/Notes on this
Work
EPILOGUE
Fragments 381
Notes 399
Bibliography 407
Index 415
Foreword
Between End and Beginning:

The Time of Speech
The beautiful book of Satya Das is committed to a phenomenology

of promise and explores manifold ways in it. What animates this
phenomenology of promise is explicitly inspired by a paradoxical
‘phenomenology of the unapparent that the later Heidegger had
named his aspirations. It can be said that the pages you are going
to read contribute to it in a remarkable manner because they lean
towards the exercises of it from a very singular angle and access. The
developments devoted here to the question of the promise have a
force and a flash which come to them from an indisputable source
which supports them: the fecundity of time, the temporality bursting
forth and stratified by waiting, opening to the event, and the finitude
opened to infinity, wherein the idea that appears in us, according to
Descartes, signifies in the final analysis this very opening. Thus the
promise, this astonishing object if one can put it this way, evokes
a style, a writing, a strategy of presentation (Darstellung) about
which Satya Das explicates in the first part, where one sees how the
deployment of this enterprise here is held together with the rigour
of a true philosophical research while also being able to emancipate
oneself from one’s most forceful constraints, which results in the
most remarkable originality.
It is under this double and conflicting exigency according to
which an ‘object’ commands a writing that messianism as such, and
xvi • Foreword
especially its very paradigm, the messianic as the index of time comes
to be of help in the most lively part of this work (I am thinking
particularly of the fourth part of the book) and brings it relief with
its counter-dialectical resources. For this ‘phenomenology of the
promise’ is necessarily a phenomenology of the event and, therefore, a
phenomenology of the impossible, which is not far from signifying (but
that would indeed be a point that could be discussed—as we used to do
together in Strasbourg not long ago!) an impossible phenomenology.
What is really an event if not an affectivity preceding its own
possibility? How, then, can such impossible, impossible before being
real, allows it to be thought, and furthermore, phenomenological
thought? Satya Das does this according to the time of the end and
the time of beginning and he does it again as well on the basis of
language.
The author here explains in particular that the event bears together
and supports the end and the beginning ‘in a monstrous coupling’
which would signify something like a logic of the world. There is,
in fact, between the end and beginning a complex pairing that the
messianism alone can achieve to determine it without elucidating it,
according to a causal knowledge. The end promises. The beginning
begins only from a kind of impossibility; because it promises the
promise. Thus, what messianism names first and foremost is an
experience of temporality of the awaiting and of the decision, and of
the relation to the expected event and its reversal. Thus, messianism
would be an irremissible impossibility of thinking whatever is referred
to as the ‘origin’. ‘The origin’ will always be older than the objects we
want to genealogize by retracing them to their point of departure. It
forbids or interrupts the possibility of linking the beginning and the
end as two ‘moments’, two given ‘points of time’ that are indifferent
and interlinked by virtue of their being having qualitatively similar
presents. Formalized representations of time force us to consider that
what happens in the present at a given ‘point of time’ could also
happen in an ‘other’ present having the same quality of presence,
at a given ‘point of time’ that is anterior and similar. It is against
these representations that messianism has its significance. And that’s
where we grasp its fundamental difference in relation to teleology,
eschatology, progressivism and all types of finalism. Freedom,
existence and experienced time from then on appear as the very
Foreword • xvii
endurance of the unexpected and unconditional of the messianic

arrival and it is Satya Das’ own style of working with this messianic
paradigm that I on my part have tried to elaborate as a novel thought
of the event.
To say that the beginning promises the promise is to say that it
puts it ahead of itself. The beginning is the difference, altogether the
coming of the promise (without beginning, there’s no promise) and
the projection that dismisses its very appearance (without beginning,
the promise would always be accomplished ipso facto). It is the
promise itself that is promised and it is time itself which is structured
like promise.
As the title The Promise of Time suggests, this promising structure
of time is co-originarily associated with the question of language,
a paradisiacal language in which the spoken language of naming is
restrained and reserved. Here the inspiration comes from Rosenzweig
who was able to link time and the waiting for language and
the alterity of the other man, who is speaking and awaiting. The
delinking, or in the final analysis, redemption itself commands the
‘never ultimate’ of the relation to the other, of the speech addressed
to him, of time and of the absolute indetermination of the Messiah.
Rosenzweig’s ‘never ultimate’ intends an arrival but without ever
leaving for the assured departure of a language to be translated. Such
is the fine line along which all speech moves. We always counter pose
the ceaseless overcoming faced with absolute confusion (as many
languages as there are subjects to speak) and the uncertain promise
of absolute comprehension (one language for all subjects). Speaking
is thus caught in the momentum that proceeds from an impossible
origin to an event promised but not yet happened. This promise of
speech, this Versprechen has nothing to do with belief, with values,
with an intention or a reference. It is speech itself, language itself,
das Versprechen spricht, the promise speaking. And as Derrida says
in Monolingualism of the Other, where I see a certain proximity
to Rosenzweig, it is not possible to speak outside or without that
promise.
Language is, therefore, the rare singular power of affect and
of time. It exceeds itself; it is not adequate to the beingness of its
object, and even less to the being that it intends. This power is its
impotence—or rather, simply the opposite: it does not know that
xviii • Foreword
it is power-less to know, that it is the very fragility that gives it the

power to say that it can not say, not what she can not say, but its very
ineffability. Language is self-transcendence par excellence.
It is not that this dense intertwining does not produce a series
of specific philosophical effects which the fifth part of this book
particularly echoes while reflecting upon the link, knotted around
the question of death that passes through so many developments of
Satya Das, between philosophy and what is named called here as the
‘ethics of finitude’. It is possible, I think, to determine its figure while
thinking of the Walter Benjamin’s Angel in Theses on the Philosophy of
History. The Angel of History can’t be allowed to be pushed towards
radiant tomorrows and toward a future where the mechanical storm
of progress drives it. It neither can nor wants to leave without justice
those who are dead and defeated, without providing them a redressal,
whereas pure mechanical progress runs the risk of ignoring disasters
and ruins for the sake of an end, a finality and a conclusion. The
experience to come, the future happiness that is legitimate to wait
for, therefore, must be based on the past failures. The past asserts its
rights; the past, i.e., the dead who were the living. Benjamin links
large chunks of historical time with contents that are not reducible
to historical causality, to progress, to the concept, with experiences
of suffering, I would rather say with passions. In Benjamin, there is
no passion for the past, in the sense of a backward looking pastism,
a politics of nostalgia, but there is an ever passionate past, that is to
say, never dead. As a result, the contents of the three dimensions
of historical time are thereby distorted. The past can’t be reduced
to the thought of its necessity. The present is not exhausted in the
mere significance of my full presence in this present. The future is
not predetermined by historical reason. These torsions are worked
by a thought of the return of time upon itself, no doubt, but it does
not correspond literally to the ‘abyssal thought’ of Zarathustra—
but yet I see here somehow an echo, an attempt to speak in the
somewhat unspeakable language of Nietzsche. This attempt stays
close to the eternal return of the same. What Benjamin thinks
and offers us to think is the tragedy of a past that is irremovable,
surrounded by an absolute immutability or something that would
never return to be identical to the same temporality. He comes up
for and against Nietzsche, with something like a hope of the past,
Foreword • xix
as much as a remembrance of the future. The weakness of the past

waits for a possible rectification, to come, promised by time. The
present is thus never contemporary to itself, purely adequate to
a full presence, heedless of the past and headed for the future. If
all that happens happened in the pure present, time would never
be a surprise, a grasping of the subject. But time is precisely this
dispossession of mastery, the subject seized in the moment. Between
the two allegories, namely the Angel of Benjamin, and Nietzsche’s
Postern, there is a kind of repulsive affinity, both challenging and
difficult.
It seems incontestable to me that the ethics of finitude according to
Satya Das cannot be anything other than an ethics of the temporality
and of the temporalization magnetized by the ever impossible
fulguration of the ethical moment. I see in this one of the richest
areas of this beautiful book and I hope it will have numerous and
diverse readers.
Gérard Bensussan
University of Strasbourg
§ Premise
This mortal called ‘man’ is an open existence, exposed to mortality and

free towards the coming that is revealed to him in lightning flash. Free
towards the ever new possibility of beginning, the mortal is endowed with
the gift of time, as if an eternity that remains beyond his death, a time
always ‘to come’. In this messianic remnant of time alone lies redemptive
fulfillment for the mortals—in the possibility of the ever new beginning
in the time ‘to come’.
It is this question of time to come, the affirmation of a redemptive
future that is pursued in this work. It occurs as and in a configuration of
questions, which is not a system but rather, let’s say, a gesture or style of
pursuing a thought which is repetitively and, therefore, discontinuously
seized as questions. These are the questions of mortality and temporality,
of the lightning flash of language that reveals man, beyond any predica-
tive historical closure, his finitude and the Openness where man finds
himself exposed to the event of coming, to the redemptive fulfilment in this
coming itself, which he anticipates in an existential attunement of hope.
All these questions are introduced in the movement of configuration, or
constellation that affirms the coming time, and feels the requirement of
redemption in hope, beyond all that is given to our historical existence.
These exercises of thinking are to be called: ‘configuration thinking’.
Prologue
§ The Promise of Time
To Come
This is an attempt to elaborate upon the notion of coming time, the
coming into existence, not what has come as ‘this’, or ‘that’, but the
coming itself, the messianic promise of the redemptive arrival. In a
phenomenological and deconstructive manner, which is a gesture
of reading and seizing a truth rather than a method here, I will
attempt to reveal the metaphysical foundation of what is meant in
the dominant sense of ‘politics’, ‘history’, or even ‘logic’, to loosen
this structure—of what Heidegger calls Abbau and Destruktion der
Ontologie in Sein und Zeit—so that outside the closure of the Struktur
to affirm and to welcome the coming, the future Not Yet. This is a
movement towards a messianic affirmation that problematizes the
dominant metaphysical determination of history whose immanence
is guaranteed by an immanent self-grounding subject. This will
be shown in the subtle, extremely complex connection between a
certain metaphysical determination of history and the dominant
determination of logic based upon predicative proposition. In so far
as predicative proposition determines the truth on the basis of what is
already revealed and opened history, understood speculatively, that is
based upon predicative proposition cannot think of any event as event,
this coming into existence itself as coming. Hence, the immemorial
promise of the ‘time to come’, this gift of the taking place of time
is always attempted to be closed in the immanence of self-presence
that often assumes the form of a mythic foundation. If the task of
politics and history is to be thought in a more originary manner, and
6 • T H E P RO M I S E O F T I M E
if politics and history is not to be mere reductive totalization of this

promise in the name of the task of an immanent negativity (since it
must already presuppose the originary promise of their redemptive
fulfilment), then it will be necessary here to think another notion
of history and politics outside this given sense of these concepts that
means, outside their ground in metaphysics—history that opens itself
up to the intensity of the messianic fulfilment, to the redemption of
the violence of history itself.
What is to think ‘to come’, understood in the verbal resonance of
the infinitive ‘to’? What does it mean ‘now’ or, what is this ‘now’?—
to think this ‘to come’ again, to think of the promise and the gift
of event, to think again the remnant of time after the end of time,
after each end and after each completion, after each ‘after’, this hope
for an infinite after only because it is already an infinite before? Is
it necessary now, more than ever before and more than ever after,
precisely here and now, with an urgency of the moment, which is
also urgency of each moment and each place, to be borne with ‘the
principle of hope’—as Ernst Bloch (1995) names this principle—
till and beyond, till and after death when the large-scale devastation
and devaluation of all values seemed to have been accomplished, and
seem to be accomplishing all the time? What, whence, is the necessity
of hope now when all hopes seemed to have vanished from life, and
life appears now more unredeemed and damaged than ever before,
and yet whose claim of redemption has remained, precisely because
of its utter impoverishment, undiminished, whose distant light is not
yet extinguished?
The Claim of Redemption and

the Question of History
The question of ‘to come’ is essentially about the claim of redemption
in our historical destinal existence which is heard in its utmost
intensity and urgency when a certain metaphysical determination of
history seems to have come to its gathering force and to its exhaustion.
As if now the claim of redemption must enter anew, if the above
questions have still retained their sense today, into the thought of
death and exhaustion, outside any thanatology and outside ontology,
and outside death’s service into the metaphysical foundation of
The Promise of Time • 7
politics and history, not to take side of death against life, nor to take
side of life against death, but to take side of future, to take the side from
future which is always coming. This necessity of an ‘after’ after every
‘after’, this ‘not yet’ that must remain ‘not yet’ is a necessity of another
faith, of another promise and another thought of revelation. This faith
is the one that is not satisfied merely being attached as an appendix
to reason, nor merely with positing another being as a transcendental
object somewhere in a transcendental world beyond this ‘world’. It
is, rather, a thought of promise in the not yet which is rescued from
the womb of the damaged present; it is to gather together again those
sparks after the vessel is broken once into thousand pieces.
This thought of the affirmative, which is perhaps the most
urgent task of thinking that we call ‘philosophical’, demands that
the metaphysical foundation of our history and politics be made
manifest and un-worked so that thinking can inaugurate another
history which is not satisfied merely with grasping what has happened
on the basis of its apophansis, but one that ecstatically remains open
to the immemorial and to the incalculable and the unconditional
arrival. This is to envisage an ecstatic history without monuments
or monumentality whose the historical task of inauguration must
accompany the un-working of the closure of immanence of self-
presence. In this sense, this historical task of rescuing the redemptive
possibility of the advent from any immanence of apophantic closure
is inseparable from the question of the possibility of truth, truth
that releases in philosophical contemplation that element of the
immemorial from the violence of cognition.
Truth beyond Cognition

At stake in these labours of thought is an attempt of a discovery, or
un-covery of the moments of the originary event of the historical
when history itself makes momentary pauses. It is to welcome the
event of history during those fleeting moments of lightning flash
that illumine the taking place of history itself as a phenomenon of
unapparent apparition that defines it as the phenomenality of any
phenomenon par excellence. We are concerned here with this taking
place of history itself and not what is ‘presently given’ within the realm
of a given historical totality. Philosophical truth, if it does not have to
be saturated with the knowledge of the phenomenon ‘presently given’,

is only rescued truth, ‘wrested truth’. It is truth that momentarily
advents in the midst of existence, like what Benjamin says of ‘profane
illumination’ that makes its sudden apparition felt when ‘dialectics
comes to a standstill’ (Benjamin 2002, p. 10). This truth, in contrast
to the categorical cognition of ‘given presences’, calls forth an entirely
different notion of temporality and historicality, an entirely different
notion of phenomenality: not the phenomenality that is categorically
grasped in the apophantic judgement but a phenomenality when the
unapparent in a lightning flash makes itself felt, that dispropriates us,
that takes away from us the foundation of language and judgement
and exposes us to the openness of time, opening to the immemorial
and to the Not Yet. This open is not a topological or ontological site
but the monstrous site of history where event arrives as an event, the
coming comes into presence. This coming cannot be predicated on the
basis of what has come, or what would come to pass by. It is a coming
that moves history or better inaugurates history out of a fundamental
finitude of our being.
What, then, does it mean ‘to come’? Let’s say, ‘to come’ is the
occurring of the truth of existence, the truth of the occurring of
existence, the truth of the occurring itself, or still better, the occurrence
of truth itself. It is this occurring, this event before anything that has
occurred is the true and genuine notion of the historical. In this sense
truth is essentially historical, but more originally understood, no
longer as that is assimilable to the periodic breaks belonging to the
accumulative gathering of truth, but truth as this epochal break itself,
which for that matter is to be thought as historical before history,
before memory and before monumentality.
Existence
To come: it is in this infinitive of the verbal lies the resonance of
existence, not as an accidental property of existence, but existence in
its existential character in its ecstasy and exuberance of advent. In this
sense, this infinitive verbal character of existence is more originary
than any categorical predication of existence as ‘given presence’.
Therefore Heidegger at the beginning of his Being and Time (1962)
distinguishes the existential analytic of Dasein from the predicative,

categorial grasp of ‘the given presence’ (Vorhandenheit) in so far as
existence, in the infinitive of its verbal resonance is open to its own
coming to presence, which is at each moment irreducible to what is and
what has become present as ‘given presence’, as ‘constant presence’.
The infinitude of the verbal resonance which is the existentiality
of existence as such, therefore, lies in a more originary manner: in
‘the there’ of the verbal, as ex-sistence, which means, its ecstatic
exceeding of any ‘-sistence’. Existence is essentially excessive. Herein
lies the transcendence of Dasein, the essential non-closure of Dasein,
Dasein which is each time finite and mortal. Here, ‘to come’ is not one
particular mode of the three modes of time, but a ‘to come’ which is at
each time a ‘to come’ without which there is neither past, nor presence,
nor future for Dasein. At each moment of existing, Dasein is to come to
itself, is to come to presence, because at each moment of existing Dasein is
finite and mortal in its innermost ground. Unlike the ‘entities presently
given’ (Vorhandenheit), Dasein ex-sists ecstatically, i.e., as an opening
to the coming whose facticity, its ‘the there’ (Da of Da-sein), must
already always be manifested if there is to be predicative, categorical
grasp of presently given entities. How then, or when its ‘Da’ appears
itself as ‘Da’ to Dasein if not as that which not merely, unlike
‘presently given entities’, is the apparition of the apparent, but of the
unapparent in lightning flash of the immemorial? In his later works,
Heidegger attempts to develop a ‘phenomenology of the unapparent’,
a phenomenology that is more originary than the phenomenology
of consciousness’ self-presence. Such a ‘phenomenology of the
unapparent’ is concerned with phenomenon that, being more
originary than ‘constant presence’ of given present, is the event of
being, the coming to presence, or rather, presencing of the presence of
being, which for that matter, cannot be thought within the reductive
totalization of the dominant metaphysics which is the history of
being as presence. This presencing of presence or, coming to come: ‘the
phenomenology of the unapparent’ precedes and is more originary
than dialectical mediation, and is, in a certain sense, a tautology. The
unapparent is the letting or giving (‘es gibt’) of Being—the open ‘Da’ of
Dasein—where the presencing presences. In his Zähringen seminar of
1973, Heidegger speaks of this ‘phenomenology of the unapparent’:
What is to be thought is ’presencing namely presences’.
A new difficulty arises: this is clearly a tautology. Indeed! This is a

genuine tautology: it names the same only once and indeed as itself.
We are here in the domain of the unapparent: presencing itself
presences.
The name for what is addressed in this state of affairs is: which is
neither being nor simply being, but … :
Presencing presences itself (Heidegger 2003, p.79)
And little later, again,
I name the thinking herein question tautological thinking. It is the
primordial sense of phenomenology. Further, this kind of thinking
is before any possible distinction between theory and praxis. To
understand this, we need to learn to distinguish between path and
method. In philosophy, there are only paths; in sciences, on the
contrary, there are only methods, that is, modes of procedure.
Thus understood, phenomenology is a path that leads away to come
before… and it lets that before which it is led to show itself. This
phenomenology is a phenomenology of the unapparent. (Heidegger
2003, p. 80).
What Heidegger calls ‘facticity’ of existence (of the ‘Da’ of Dasein) with
which ‘the phenomenology of the unapparent’ is concerned, Schelling
calls it ‘actuality’ which is ‘un-pre-thinkable’ (Unvordenkliche) that
must already hold sway beforehand even in order for a ‘speculative
judgement’ which Hegel elaborated dialectically speculatively in
Phenomenology of Spirit (1998). In this way Schelling distinguishes the
‘metaphysical empiricism’ of his positive philosophy from Hegelian
speculative empiricism of negative philosophy (Schelling 2007a).
While negative philosophy can only grasp in a categorial-predicative
manner what is the result of a process by retrogressively recuperating
what has become of it, Schelling seeks the beginning in the ‘un-pre-
thinkable’ actuality (the ‘Da’ of Dasein, the event of ex-sisting) which
must already always manifest itself before thematizing, predicative,
categorical cognition, opening thereby existence to its coming as it were
for the first time. The exposure to the immemorial is what Schelling
calls ‘irreducible remainder’, a ‘not yet’ of a past, an irrecuperable past

that continuously exposes existence to its inexhaustible outside, to its
un-predicative past of promise. What renders existence an ‘irreducible
remainder’—its originary non-closure is nothing but its inextricable
mortality—its radical finitude that refuses to be lifted up unto
thought completely. This fundamental incompletion of existence,
its originary un-accomplishment and non-work refuses Hegelian
Aufhebung, the consolation of the concept, and the concept’s false
promise of infinitude and Absolute. The coming is the advent of time
itself cannot be thought within any reductive historical-metaphysical
totalization, or within the immanence of a self-presencing Subject.
It is the positive beyond any immanence of negativity. Such is the
presencing of presence.
So it is with Rosenzweig. If the concept, the Absolute Concept’s
promise of infinite and immortality is a false, vain consolation for the
mortal beings, it is because philosophy, as the cognition of the All
presupposes—at the same time denying this presupposition—that
death is Nothing for the mortals if it cannot be made into work for the
sake of the universal. In this way, the multiple singularities of mortal
cries will not be heard in the universal pathos of the One Absolute,
for Absolute can only be One and be One only. What would the
value of a system be, a system of philosophy (for it is question of value
and not of knowledge) for the mortal beings who are individuated
and singularized by its mortality, and yet this morality is foreclosed
in order to make possible of a system of categories? Since existence,
which is finite and mortal, is not enclosed within any philosophical
discourse of totality or is not consoled by the vain consolation of
the concept, existence is thereby granted the gift, in its mortality,
of a time to come which Rosenzweig thinks in a messianic manner
as ‘redemption’ that is beyond the concept and beyond any closure,
which is an eternal remnant of time, or a time of remnant that is to
arrive eternally. It is always to come because it is the event of coming
itself.
Schelling, Heidegger, and Rosenzweig—in their irreducibly
singular manners—are thinkers of coming and of mortality, of
promise and of finitude, of future and of the gift. One can name
them as ‘the thinkers of finitude’.
Messianic
The messianic affirmation of the coming has nothing of the theological
messianism about it, at least in the given recognizable form of a
religious tradition. It is, to say with Jacques Derrida, a ‘messianicity
without messianism’, a messianicity that affirms unconditionally the
promise of the other, or opens itself, outside totality or system, to
this promise of the other who is always ‘to come’ in each hic et nunc.
In his Monolingualism of the Other or Prosthesis of Origin, Derrida
writes about the untotalizable promise of future and its prosthetic
origin:
But the fact that there is no necessarily determinate content in this

promise of the other, and in the language of the other does not make any
less indisputable its opening up of speech by something that resembles
messianism, soteriology, or, eschatology. It is structural opening, the
messianicity, without which messianism itself, in the strict or literal
sense, would not be possible. Unless, perhaps, this originary promise
without any proper content is, precisely, messianism. And unless all
messianism demands for itself this rigorous and barren severity, this
messianicity shorn of everything (Derrida 1998, p. 68).
In so far as the task of thinking this messianic promise of the

future demands that the reductive totalization of the dominant
metaphysical tradition be opened up and radically put into question,
this task itself is inseparably bound up with experience of mortality
as mortality. This thinking itself, in this innermost manner, is finite
and mortal. If the dominant metaphysics has made death into the
service of the dialectical-universal history and made death to retain a
mere sacrificial significance, it has its supplement in the theologico-
political totalization that has made death a work, a kind of production
of death through calculative technological manner, that has made our
politics and ethics bereft of the sense of future. This means that our
notions of politics and history derive their metaphysical foundation from
a certain tacit theological determination of death, i.e., the possibility of
foundation without any given foundation. This death does not know
true mourning.
All movement of totalization seeks to denude the future of its
sense and to rob our mortality of its affection. It does not know
true mourning, and knows not the movement of hope. In order to

counter this movement of totalization that is permeating in all aspects
of our lives to such an extent that such a totality today does not
know any totality that has limits, territory or locality, it is necessary
to introduce another movement—without thetic, positing dialectical
violence of concept—the redemptive movement of unconditional
promise and the gift of time where time itself times, or ‘presencing
itself presences’, a promise of coming outside violence of immanence
of self-consuming presences.
To introduce this movement, that means to expose philosophical
thinking to the non-conditional outside, to the promising remnant
of time, is the highest task of thinking today. The task of thinking
today, at the accomplishment of certain metaphysics, is no longer
to constitute epochal historical totality that sublates historical
violence into a form of reconciliation, as a kind of speculative-
tragic atonement. This reconciliatory movement of the speculative-
tragic-historical that founds epochal totality has lost its redemptive
sense today, since this totalizing movement can begin and end its
process only with pure, autochthonous, thetic positing that carries
its violent character (of positing) right to the end in a manner of
circular re-appropriation. The task of thinking is no longer that
of reconciliation, dialectically accomplished, which begins with
the violence of pure positing that in order to reach beyond this
violence, posits its other which—insofar as it is still positing—is once
more mere conditioned, once more mere thetic, and so on and so
forth. The circular movement of the positing never attains to the
unconditional forgiveness beyond the violence of pure positing. It
would be necessary to think of an originary, unconditional promise
before any power of positing, a non-positing positive of coming, a
promise of the unapparent presencing that itself presences, an ecstasy
that ex-tatically escapes the circular re-appropriation of predicates
and conditions. The tautological presencing presences or coming comes
that no phenomenology or ontology of self-consciousness’ self-
presence attains, is essentially a phenomenology of promise. It is on the
basis of this originary promise of a radical futurity which is not an
apparition like other phenomenon, but that advents each time each
hic et nunc, may there arrive an ‘unconditional forgiveness’ beyond
any immanent result of a dialectical-tragic reconciliation.
It is here that Derrida’s (2001) messianic thought of an

‘unconditional forgiveness’, which is to be distinguished from any
immanent result of a dialectical-tragic reconciliation, demands our
careful attention. The ‘messianicity without messianism’ is to be
connected with the possibility of an ‘unconditional forgiveness’ which
demands another thinking of mortality itself, mortality whose refusal
to work clamours for another inception rather than the dialectical. It
is the demand of a redemptive forgiveness beyond reconciliation. The
thinking of forgiveness and the messianic affirmation of the coming must
pass through an experience of non-condition, or mortality on the basis of
which the unapparent appears.
The Lightning Flash of Language

In what sense has the tragic-heroic pathos of reconciliation today
lost its redemptive meaning if not in the sense that the immemorial
promise and gift is only thought within the notion of an epochal
totality? When the notion of promise is appropriated and is sought to
be mastered by inscribing it into a categorical conceptual apparatus,
then language—bereft of remembrance and promise—reifies
what has become of presence, ‘the given presence’, and forgets the
immemorial promise given in the language of naming, in the dignity
of the name. Then the categorical task of cognition, its labour of
predication robs language its linguistic essence, that of welcoming
the advent to arrive that lies outside the predicative proposition. The
movement of configuration that outside the cognitive categorical
totality rescues the promise in saying and welcomes in a messianic
hope the advent to come without violence is what Rosenzweig calls
‘language-thinking’ (Rosenzweig 2000, pp. 109-139). What arrives
in philosophical language, according to Rosenzweig, is not the
universal essence of the One, but the linguistic essence of the finite
singulars which is the multiple singulars’ exposure or abandonment
to their singularly irreducible finitude. The linguistic essence of the
finite beings, who are irreducibly multiple and singulars, is in this
intrinsic intimacy with those beings’ pure exposure to their finitude.
Similarly for Heidegger too, ‘the phenomenology of the
unapparent’ has an essential relation to the naming the language of
man who is essentially this finite being. Thinking too, insofar it comes
to us and that we never go to thinking and is a gift from a site wholly

otherwise than man, arrives on the basis of our finitude that demands
that it is to be thanked. The dignity and nobility of thinking lays in
this recognition. With this thankfulness there is receptivity—in so
far our finitude renders us, like an open wound, being receptive—
welcoming the advent of coming, or to the presencing of the presence.
Language, even before it is categorical cognition of ‘given presences’
in apophansis, is the naming-saying that welcomes the unapparent
apparition, i.e., the letting being as such to appear. With thankfulness
and gratitude, mortals welcome the coming and receive the future.
This promise of future is what the wanderer-thinker, in his path of
thinking, contemplates and is intimated at during sudden lightning
flashes, for the advent of which he must be ready to take a leap,
and open his soul to the future of thinking itself, without making a
system out of it, without totalizing it. Language is this exposure, or
this abandonment to the excessive light of the sudden apparition of
the otherwise that in the lucidity of the coming blinds him with its
brilliancy.
In traditional messianic religions, the coming of Messiah is
something like violence. It is violence unlike any other violence,
violence without the violence of law, of what Benjamin calls ‘divine
violence’ as distinguished from law-positing and law-preserving
violence. It is such a lightning flash that the poet Hölderlin speaks as
the strike of Apollo: in relation to this momentary apparition of the
unapparent, the poet-wanderer or the philosopher is always belated.
Hence he must arrive beforehand, like the Nietzschean philosopher
of heralding, announcing the unapparent apparition, implying the
presencing that itself presences, the coming itself that comes, and not
like the owl of Minerva taking its flight at the dusk of history.
Wandering, Thinking
In philosophy, there are only paths; in sciences, on the contrary, there

are only methods, that is, modes of procedure.
Heidegger (2003, p. 80)
Therefore, sonority or rhythm of wandering is caesural. One who has
the experience of wandering in mountain paths knows the fragmented
joining of those mountain paths. These joints are co-junctions of

the disjointed without any prior principle. One may call such an
experience a constellation or configuration of thinking. The experience
of wandering on the path of thinking refuses gathering, or collecting
into unity, even if it is unity with difference. Thinking moves in
pathways and not in methods, i.e., ‘modes of procedures’ (Ibid.). It
is tempered with its own dispersal and fragmentation, and thereby
refuses to have to do with the unity of a thesis. The temporality of the
wandering is like relation to a time that has already happened, occurred
to which it is joined as a heterogonous assemblage, a constellation of
paths, or a configuration of discontinuous ways. What is to come must
have happened, already always, at a moment of lucid darkness
wherefrom time itself begins its journey, and spacing emerges. This is
to say: ‘presencing itself presences’. Unlike the dialectical-speculative
process of a history leading straight to the Absolute, wandering is not
succession of instants though, because of his finitude and mortality,
the wanderer relates to himself as a point in-between. To exist is to
find oneself in this in-between which is, for that matter, absence of
time’s presence and absence of space’s presence, the in-between that
opens itself on both sides to the indefinite, incalculable lengthening
of time, as if time stretches out without beginning and without end.
Thinking, philosophical thinking is this exposure to this time before
time that advents as lightning flash where the immemorial presents
itself as unapparent apparition.
The wanderer-thinker therefore constantly exposes himself to his
non-condition. It is in this sense that Heidegger speaks of Dasein as
‘the placeholder of nothing’ (Heidegger 1998, p. 91), the placeholder
of the ‘outside’. It is like the caesura of a resonance, which in resonating,
inscribes an interval in the pathway of thinking. Thinking is this great
caesural resonance that astonishes the wanderer-thinker as he moves
along in the great winding paths of solitary mountains. Wandering,
the poet-thinker makes the movement, the movement of infinity
outside the dialectical thesis and anti-thesis. Therefore, wandering
is non-dialectical movement par excellence. This wandering, which
itself is caesural resonance, repeats itself and through this repetition
brings something new that in its advent astonishes him, surprises
him, throws him outside of himself, unto the open, unto that site
of encounter with the advent. Repetition here never mimetically
reproduces the same truth at a different level but welcomes truth

that each time suspends the law of the dialectical. Thinking, if it has
to open itself in its ecstasy to the space of the outside where truth
advents, this manifestation of the unapparent must have a different
logic than the logic of a scientific method.
Configuration Saying
Therefore, the necessity: to repeat the truth of the advent, to repeat
the advent of truth, repetitively, to be seized by the advent this is
coming and always remaining to come. There is always something like
a universality of thinking, not the universality of the concept but the
universality of the ‘singular each time’. Language of thinking bears this
singularity of the universal through its multiple repetitions. The task,
through this differential repetition, and universalizing the singular
‘presencing of presence’, is to preserve each time anew the excess
of this event of unapparent apparition without reducing it to any
immanence of predicates and ‘presently given’ presents. Therefore,
there arises the necessity to say, again and again, each time anew,
in the poetic naming-language of mortals that lets the unapparent
appear, without reducing it to the universality of the categorical
cognitive grasp. Since the advent of the coming in its momentary
apparition discontinues, suspends, interrupts itself, it does not belong
to any discourse of totality or system. It does not find itself as to its
own ground and condition. Such an advent that resonates in every
poetical saying says the whole and yet remains outside of any totality.
It is what the present writer shall call configuration saying, which is
not a method, for it does follow any ‘ism’ as such but a gesture, a
sonority, a resonance of saying that says over and over again, which
is at each moment finite and new, something that heralds rather than
gives the result of a process in the form of predicative propositions.
The configuration saying is an attempt to think the whole without
totality, repetition without recuperation, and universality without
universalism. Each coming is a coming singularly universal, a coming
itself which is promised as gift given to beings mortal and finite. It is
a gift complete, a completed gift in itself and therefore there is in it a
universality whose completeness completes our speech. Silence is the
beatific recognition of this completeness of speech, a silence which is not
defiance nor recalcitrance of speech but the completeness of speech itself

wherein consists the dignity of the language of the mortals. It is not
the silence of the mythic-heroic tragic man as defiance because he
is superior to the God in his mortality, because of his capacity of
death can defy even the God. The ‘divine mourning’ that resonates in
silence is the remembrance of the immemorial gift, remembrance of
the immemorial promise, that is, the promise of the unthought that
is already always given to man as a gift. Therefore, in silence language
itself, at its limit, as it were mourns, or mournfully remembers the
immemorial promise, because it fails itself to name the name. There
is, therefore, always certain mournfulness in silence and a silence in
mournfulness, which is distinguished from the silence of the tragic-
mythic heroic man who asserts at the face of his own death his
solitude and his self denuded of contingent features of his character.1
What follow in the following pages are configuring of sayings
of what the wanderer-thinker is exposed, in his path of wandering,
to the appearing of unapparent, the coming itself. What kind of
appearing is this which is appearing of the unapparent? What kind of
phenomenon is this whose phenomenality lies in its un-apparition?
What is this coming, which is not any ‘this’ or ‘that’ coming, which is
not exhausted in anything that has come to pass, that has appeared
to disappear and that has become a phenomenon so that it no longer
appears to us anymore? Is there a coming that is the appearing of
the non-apparent and phenomena of the non-phenomenal? The
wandering the poet-thinker, wandering in his solitary winding path
of a mountain, is seized by the perplexity, or aporia of this question.
If there is an essential thinking, or if thinking is to attain the essential,
then thinking must not shy away from this aporia, but rather must
allow this aporia to move thinking itself and in this pathway of
thinking, attain the essential. All philosophical thinking is essentially
finite and incomplete. Out of this essential incompleteness, the poet-
thinker repeats himself here and there, as the wanderer must renew
his leaps, because repetition always arises out of an essential finitude
of thinking itself.
What is presented in this work is nothing but the ‘wrested truth’,
spoken in a configuration that emerges out of the experiences of
wandering. Therefore, no claim here been made that the truth is to
be presented as completed truth. Once such a claim is made, the
truth no longer remains the truth but becomes an imbecile, castrated

cognition of given phenomenon commensurable with a settled mode
of existence. Truth is only to be wrested, seized in its movement, in its
becoming by going under, in its point of beginning or starting, but not at
the moment of settled result. That, however, does not mean that truth
in itself is always incomplete, but only the claim of saying the truth—
because of the finitude of the mortal—in its absolute completeness
remains only a false claim. Truth in its absolute presentation and
arrival as an event is the destruction of a language. It ruins language
and abandons it to fainting murmur, or to the lament of music.
Therefore, the attempt to say ‘the wrested truth’ can only be a
regulated form of divine madness which must constantly be solicited
to. There is always the possibility, not merely by going astray, but of
madness itself as far as truth is never of settled mode of cognition but
that which when once seizes the philosopher, it makes him into what
Plato calls a ‘horsefly’.
Truth in itself is never only a totality of the successive moments of
gradated cognition. In other words, there is no method in philosophy
but only constellation of paths. Constellation is an assemblage but
never a totality, a whole that makes sudden, momentary appearance
that in its lightning flash seizes the thinker. It is only on the basis of
this prior seizure, the thinker can seize and wrest truth, for truth is
not property of the mortal called ‘man’ but man belongs to truth, is
claimed by truth and makes him first of all what he is, the one who
seizes and wrests truth from the immemorial that founds him and
dispropriates him in advance. This is the promise of thought itself,
insofar as—to speak with Heidegger—‘we never go to thinking,
thinking comes to us’ (Heidegger 2001, p.6), in its sudden advent,
like a lightning flash.
§ Radical Finitude
If the emergence of modern philosophy is marked by the

materialization of the question of finitude (once it becomes the
matter of recounting the genesis and structure of subjectivity that
has to emerge without any given ground, since no condition is given
in the form of ‘substance’) that is because this finitude is essentially
that of the question of the subject. The question of the subject in its
finitude becomes the question of modernity and its determination of
historical breaks belonging to the accumulative movement of history
itself. In Hegel’s case, therefore, the destinal question of history as
he recounts in Phenomenology of Spirit becomes the metaphysical
question of the subject whose finitude is grasped as the labour of
negativity. At the limit of this metaphysics of history, when the whole
history of that metaphysics of subjectivity comes to a ‘standstill’ (in
the sense of what Benjamin calls ‘dialectics at a standstill’), it reveals
itself to be that where the claim of redemption is not fulfilled. It
then becomes necessary to think of a radical notion of finitude as
the task of inaugurating another thought of history which should at
the same time articulate a radical critique of the violence of history.
The notion of history is bound with the question of finitude where
finitude is seen less as a labour of negativity but as a gift on the basis
of which mortals are placed in the open site of the inauguration of
history itself.
The Immemorial
What would our existence be if its days and months and years are to
pass away in monotonous succession like the Hegelian ‘homogenous
Radical Finitude • 21
succession of empty instants’ (Benjamin 1977, pp. 251-261) which,

like the leaves of trees, appear in Spring only to disappear in Autumn
and return in Spring, or like the infinite nameless waves of the Sea—
without hope, meaning and promise—bringing to us nothing but the
eternal murmur of what is already become finished, accomplished,
when each moment is like any other moments, an eternal Now, like
the eternal Now of the waves, if there is no ‘not yet’ to become, no
‘not yet’ to come, and no hope for the ‘not yet’ to accomplish? If the
great Hegelian dialectical-historical time is none but this eternally
un-redemptive, eternally boring return to the same, without any
ecstatic outside, without the redemptive advent of future outside,
then how despairing and desolate our existence would be? What
would the meaning of our existence, and our being with others, our
politics and our ethics, our mortality and our natality, the meaning
of our history and our fate be if mortals in its history appear only
to earn his recognition through violent life and death struggle and
through a sacrificial, negative relation with other mortals, if not such
a history but be an eternal, eternally unredeemed melancholy, like
sighs of Abraham if he is to lose his faith (imagine Kierkegaard’s sighs
too!), or the melancholic wind of this vast desert of history which
has become of our existence? Our relationship with us, with other
mortals, to the divine and the rest of created existence would only
have the meaning of an un-redemptive negativity.
It would then be necessary, if the sense of mortality of the mortals
not to be exhausted by the meaning that negativity gives to it, to open
up this metaphysically-negatively determined closure of dialectical-
historical time to another notion of a temporality which remains as
a time of hope and fulfilment, of a positive outside negativity, of
an infinity outside totality. If the great metaphysician of the West
thinks the historicity of history as the work of negativity, then one
wonders further: Is the historicity of history for the mortals, who
as mortal existence is in need of a redemptive future, exhausted in
the meaning of history that the dialectic of negativity gives to it?
What would the ‘human’ and the meaning of being ‘human’ be
if he is only the product of his own death and death of the other
mortals, he whose consciousness of his own existence and that of
the Absolute is nothing but his own ‘work of death’ (Hegel 1998, p.
270), accomplished by death’s negative labour? Can the meaning of
being ‘human’ exhaustibly be determined on the basis of death alone,

death which is nothing but negativity? What would the meaning of
his mortality and meaning of his existence be if the mortal were not
open to his own mortality and other created existence, in so far as
the meaning of mortality consists in opening to other mortals, to
the divine and the elemental depth of the sky and to the animals and
the earth and being exposed to the ecstasy of his coming to existence?
Would it not be necessary, then, that the negativity of death to be
opened up to the open which first of all places man in relation to
himself, to the divine, to nature and to the rest of created existence?
What would the meaning of a historical task for a historical man be
if he is not the space which is the space of opening and the beginning
of his own historicity and its destinal fate which, for that matter,
exceeds any closure that is earned through his ‘work of death’ (Ibid.)
and through the labour of his negativity? The negativity of death,
and the meaning of history which the negativity of death gives to
it, would neither be the originary meaning of mortality, nor be the
originary meaning of history. If the sense of mortality for the mortals
is exhausted in the negativity of his death, then death would leave to
nothing of a time to come for him beyond this death. There would
not be then the advent of future outside an enclosed dialectical
historical totality; nor there will have redemption of what remained
unredeemed in the world? There will only be an incessant laments
of unfulfilled hopes and of a past whose injustice is not yet rectified.
These are the questions opened up by Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star
of Redemption. These are also our questions here. There is good deal
of reason—and one does not need to evoke the empirical facts of
history here—to suspect with Rosenzweig that the dialectical-negative
time of history, instead of affirming a redemptive future, is content
to enclose the event of coming into an immanent totalizing process.
Therefore, it would be necessary here is to renew the question already
implicit in Rosenzweig, which is, that of rethinking the question of
finitude.
The thought of future and the messianic, redemptive fulfilment is

always a question of finitude, which is, mortal’s radical openness
in respect to his ground, condition and possibility on the basis of
a freedom which is granted to him in advance, as pure gift, as
pure offering. This gift is without any economy of equivalences and

without any possibility of measurement, the immeasurable par
excellence that dispropriates him in advance, and that lies as a
kind of abyss, an inscrutable, unfathomable secret which, in so
far it is secret, makes at all possible something like manifestation
of the world. This revelation of the secret is that phenomenon
of the unapparent that opens the world for the first time. The
‘presencing that itself presences’ is not an originary presence that
can be apophantically traced back. It is the spacing that is before
any presence-absence; it is what exposes the mortal to his truth,
to his human temporality and inaugurates history. If the mortals
understand anything like what exists in the world on the basis
of temporality, this temporality must already always be revealed
to him in advance so that he understands his being as being, his
existence as existence. This revelation is not the revelation of a given
presence, but a coming to presence which while appearing, conceals
itself. It is this that we call ‘secret’.
Therefore we have this strange feeling within us that we always existed

from eternity. In relation to the coming to presence which, while being
unapparent, opens to us the world—or, the world is opened for us
where for the first time temporality makes itself manifest—in relation
to this originary presencing-presence, it appears as if our existence
is always belated, as if in relation to our existence there always
precedes an immemorial past which cannot be appropriated in our
self presence. Schelling’s The Ages of the World (2002) an eternal past
which has never been present, an immemorial origin is seen precisely
as the source of divine mournful joy that fundamentally attunes
a finite existence. An eternal past which has never been present
opens the world to the mortals, as if for the first time, a past that
can never be appropriated and recuperated in the mortals’ historical
memory only because it is the condition of memory as such. What
opens the world for the mortals is that of an originary forgetting
before any memory since this opening has never come to pass as a
‘passed presence’. Hence, it is the groundlessness of our past, like
our mortality, that opens the pure futurity for us, and makes human
history as such possible. This mortality, beyond the immanence of
self-presenting negativity, is more originary promise of futurity to
which existence is exposed or (to say with Heidegger) ‘thrown’. It is

this exposure to this abyss of forgetting or to the immemorial, this
peril of existence first opens the world and the temporality in its pure
advent makes its unapparent apparition.
In his The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For (2002), Jean Louis
Chrétien attempts to think this gift of the immemorial that first opens
existence to truth, and makes human temporality as such possible. It
is to think that the originary loss that already always departing founds
the world by exposing us to ‘the peril of being’ (Chrétien 2002, p.
22), sending us forward to what is yet to come. ‘The peril of being’ is
at the same time a sending to the pure future, ‘a loss that founds us’.
Forgetting is the dimension according to which being sends us, calls
to us, and promises us, throws us forward...there is indeed a loss that
founds us, and this loss only gives and gives us (Chrétien 2002, p. 37)
This excess of the immemorial in us, this unsaturated past that we

can never return to as an origin is the future of the origin, for it can
only be anticipated, out of forgetting, an origin to come. ‘We can and
must’, says Chrétien, ‘always seek and always learn what is not yet
known, in human time and according to human future, indefinite
and finite at once, by reason of the fact that all seeking is built on to a
past that is absolute and other than human. We are the future of the
absolute past, the future of the immemorial, and it is in this that it
gives us what is ours concerning thought’ (Ibid., p. 12). This excess of
the immemorial in us that can never be returned unto makes each of
us, while giving us time and truth, essentially and irreducibly finite.
This non-contemporaneity and non-co-incidence of the mortal in
relation to his condition and ground defines the mortality of the
mortals which precedes as a non-conditional condition, or even as an
unfathomable past that can only be seen by the mortals who live each
time in-between, as ahead of itself, as not yet. In his Being and Time
Heidegger examines the idle chatter of the inauthentic existence
that covers up the non-conditional character of mortality by making
mortality merely as an event ‘not yet’. Hence, it is a consolation for
a philosopher like Epicurus: ‘if death is there I am not there, if I am
there death is not there’. As if death is already always not there.
The already always is this immemorial gift which is also the
forgetting of other origin. Our finitude is not an immanent finitude
that encloses us in the ever encircling destiny or fate of negativity

where the mortals are exposed to each other’s violence of negativity, to
the force or power of pure positing. Our finitude, on the other hand,
arising out as the immemorial gift, is an excess in us, and that first
of all opens us to the promise of a future not yet. What is excess in us
is not so much excess of a pure positing, thetic presence that we win
by the power of our negativity, but the excess of a loss that we never
keep losing each time, that never keep departing from us and never
keep abandoning us, exposing us at each moment of our existence to
the peril of forgetting, and yet that, while disappropriating us from
ourselves gives, and gives us to ourselves as presence so that we may
come to the presencing of our presence. This gift of presence is the
gift that arises out of an essential loss, what is already always lost
even before memory, even before anything that has been gained, even
before there is anything like ‘being’ or ‘existent’.
The Mournful Gift

Mortality is not that which serves as a ‘work’ of negativity that the
mortals appropriate as the metaphysical foundation of history and
his politics, but an originary opening of time for the mortals on
the basis of which alone something like history and politics make
manifest. The task of philosophy is to open the sense of our history
and politics outside its metaphysical closure to the open-ness of time,
to the originary revelation and disappropriating manifestation of our
ground and condition. In other words, the philosophical thinking
as originary opening to our non-conditional condition is also an
originary opening to the originary gift character of our existence, to
the presencing of presence before any immanence of self-presence, to
the immemorial excess that founds us, which for that matter never
cease disappearing us, departing from us, for it has already always
departed while giving us and exposing us at the same time to the
peril of existence.
This gift character, the originary donation-character of existence
haunts our mortal life, like the spectres of a more ancient past which
does not allow itself to be thought on the basis of the ‘metaphysics
of presence’ (Derrida 1994, p. 74). Since only the mortals hear the
echoes of the past haunting the presence, like the spectres of an
immemorial being haunting our life, it is to such a mortal being

existence comes as gift, as a donation before memory and before time .
This mortal ‘man’ is not the origin and end of his own existence, but
his existence arises as an unsaturated gift from a destination or origin
which is elsewhere, which is not yet ‘human’ and not yet ‘being’. The
thought of the originary gift and the radical finitude of the mortals,
which in so far is gift is outside man’s power of appropriation, can
only be thought at the limit of the ‘metaphysics of presence’ (Ibid.).
For the divine, uncreated being, his existence is not gift, because the
God spaces himself at his own space and times himself at his own
time. Therefore, God is understood to be that being in whom his
essence coincides his existence, and, as the medieval theologians tell
us, his existence is pure actuality without possibility. Only the mortal
whose existence lies in pure donation is belated in relation to his
own ground, his condition and his past; only in the mortal, the
excess of his existence lies in an immemorial gift or in the gift of the
immemorial. Therefore, man has something like a past which is a
past before any passed past, an immemorial past beyond memory
that unconditionally deprives us the foundation of our own being
on the basis of its own self-grounding. It is in this sense existence is
inextricably, in the innermost manner, is finite. Yet it is only on the
basis of the originary finitude mortals are open to something like the
incalculable arrival of future and to his immemorial past, as if here
time itself lengthens itself to the infinity outside any immanence of
self-presence.
The task of the philosophical thinking is, to open us, outside any
metaphysical totalization, to the sudden lightning flashes of the pure
arrival of the future and to the immemorial past without mastery
and without appropriation and to attune ourselves to that beatific
joy inseparable from an attunement of a fundamental mourning,
which Hölderlin speaks as Grundstimmung (1980). In a certain text,
Schelling too speaks of this in-experienciable experience of mortality,
which is the non-conditional condition of experience, itself as the
occasion of the birth of thinking:
He who wishes to place himself in the beginning of a truly free
philosophy must abandon even God. Here we say: who wishes to
maintain it, he will lose it; and who gives up, he will find it. Only he
has come to the ground of himself and has known the whole depth
of life who has once abandoned everything, and has himself been
abandoned by everything. He for whom everything disappeared and
who saw himself alone with the infinite: a great step which Plato
compared to death.
(Quoted in Heidegger 1985, pp. 6-7)
The beatific joy of this ‘divine mourning’ that Schelling speaks of is
not the joy of cognition but participation in the Infinite, a partaking
of the divine joy in the mode of philosophical contemplation without
yet being damaged by the violence of cognition. It is a partaking
in the immemorial from where knowledge itself arises, and yet to
which no knowledge attains its self-fulfilment. It is participation
with an absolute past which only comes to us from an incalculable,
an equally eternal remnant of future, and an eternal remainder of
time. This possibility alone is redemptive when on the basis of an
originary dispropriation mortals partake of the eternity and infinite
in an unsaturated gift, in an excess of promise given beforehand,
beyond being and beyond any time of presence. In a letter after the
death of Caroline, Schelling speaks of this ‘divine mourning’ as what
existence in its inextricably mortal condition is affected with, attuned
with, that is a fundamental attunement, an essential affection: ‘I now
need friends who are not strangers to the real seriousness of pain and
who feel that the single right and happy state of the soul is the divine
mourning in which all earthly pain in immersed’ (Schelling 1975).
Philosophical contemplation, instead of evading the thought
of mortality, must allow itself to be seized by it, to be dispossessed
by it, to be abandoned by it, to be tempered by it, for only then,
at the limit of thinkability and cognitive mastery, thinking opens
itself to the non-condition, and to the unsaturated excess of the
gift. Therefore, philosophical thinking is always a thinking that, in a
necessary manner, by a logic innermost to it, is tempered with its own
impossibility that forever haunts the philosophical contemplation. It
is in the pure state of exception, in pure abandonment, in the nudity
of an abandonment where being is exposed to its peril that something
appears that strikes the philosopher, claiming his entire existence. He
then loses, as Hölderlin speaks, ‘his tongue in a foreign land’, where
lightning strikes him, separates him from himself, throws him outside
of himself, rather than this lightning belonging to him as possession.
Exposed, abandoned, denuded, the mortal is the ‘un-accommodated,
bare being’. One remembers here King Lear in Shakespeare’s great

Storm scene of his great play where being stripped of his veil of false
being-as king, Lear is exposed to the pure humanity of the ‘human’
who is none but a ‘perilous being’ (Chrétien 2002, p.22), whose
being essentially is this exposure to the peril. ‘For us’, to say with
Chrétien again, ‘all truth is exposed to the peril of forgetting and we
relate to it only in and through this same peril. A human being is not
only a being in peril, a perilous being, but also the peril of being, that
in which being risks itself ’ (Ibid.).
The philosopher or the poet—whom Aristotle (1971) calls ‘the
melancholic spirits’—whose task is to articulate the opening of the
world and the polis is, therefore, also the being who is the most
a-polis. He is of all beings the most perilous being, who losing his
‘tongue in a foreign land’, must articulate on the basis of this loss
what is always to come and what is already always the immemorial.
He is thereafter thrown into the search for that which constantly
eludes him, to which his thinking fails to attain, for it has already
always lost in an immemorial time. This failure is not a failure like
any other, but that bestows upon thinking a feeling of sublime awe.
It is the destiny, or fate of thinking, if it seeks the essential that it
must constantly fail to think the unthought of the immemorial, for
it is what is the excess of thought, and for that, is the beginning
of all that is thinkable. Immanuel Kant calls this experience ‘awe’
that elicits from the thinker ‘respect’ (Achtung). This experience, in
its sublimity, is a gift bestowed upon the thinker, which is for that
matter never a possession. Heidegger calls this gift as the gift of the
unthought, the unthought itself as the gift that thinking bears as
its essential failure, in the sense that it is already always departed
from each and every measurement of thought. It is the immeasurable
of the unthought that is the immemorial past of all thought, and
thereby is the beginning of thought, of opening thought to being and
being to thought.
The Logic of the World

Mortality and finitude is neither a component part of a mortal’s
existence in totality, nor an accidental property of existence as such,
but his innermost, essential groundlessness. It is on the basis of this
radical finitude, on the basis of his non-condition, that man is open

to what he himself is and what he is not. The radical finitude of
mortal existence lies in the inscrutable nature of its ground that is
already always, in an immemorial past, fallen outside, diverted itself. If
existence is always already outside its own ground, then it means that
a mortal existence is always in relation (without any relation) to its
outside to which it is open, like an open wound, that de-constitutes,
dispropriates it in advance. This originary ‘irreducible remainder’ is
that immemorial forgetting that while never attaining memory opens
us to being and time. As such, this ‘irreducible remainder’ is also
the principle of pure potentiality that opens up future, that arrives
from future that is already always ahead of itself. The ahead-ness of
the always already cannot be understood dialectically as negativity
of death that converts itself into being and sublates itself into
the Absolute concept. It is rather that, beyond being and beyond
negativity, precedes the speculative memory of the dialectical. It is
the immemorial which never attains the memory of the speculative
history. It is the pure potentiality of future, arising from immemorial
past that never attains complete being without remainder. Unlike the
negativity of death, this pure potentiality of future is not the work of
Aufhebung—that of preservation, elevation and negation. It does not
convert the nothing into being, for this conversion to be possible,
which is negativity’s terrible power, the immemorial must already
always grant a time to come. In other words, there must be the
already always of the immemorial which is not yet negative, and not
yet work. The positivity of the non-work, which is the immemorial
donation of ‘presencing that presences’ precedes the work of the world,
without having itself its own world founded upon its immanent
ground, for it must grant the gift of the world by giving in advance the
world its coming to come to itself.
Therefore, mortality and finitude is essentially historical in a
more originary sense than dialectical-speculative essence of history
constituted by the labour of the negative. The pure facticity of
mortality is not a historical fact which is arrived as a result of the
dialectical historical process at the end, which is also the process of
predication. This facticity, a positive more originary than negative,
and more originary than predication, cannot be sublated into pure
thought bereft of language in the conceptual cognition, but that
already adheres in language in its infancy. Language is our exposure to

the immemorial donation, to the peril of the unapparent apparition
that first of all opens being to language on the basis of which alone
the mortals speak. In speaking this naming-language, the mortals
are touched by the tremor of the unnameable, the immemorial loss
that founds unconditionally the ground of our existence. This pre-
predicative opening of the world in language that hears in speaking
the trembling of the unground is more originary than the language of
negativity and judgement that founds dialectical historical totalities.
Similarly if the notion of the historical is to be opened to a far more
originary sense than the speculative determination of the dialectical,
then it must be seen as opening to the immemorial: a history, as
facticity of spacing that keeps to itself the promise of the immemorial,
that keeps to itself the secret of forgetting, that keeps to itself the gift
of the unapparent. This is the memorial task of history: not to remember
a lost origin that has come to pass by, but to remember the immemorial
that has never come to pass by, that has never been present, that has never
been memorial.
Our world is never contemporary with its immemorial origin.
That there is this world is only basis of the originary separation from
its immemorial origin to which the world never returns, but which
always comes to it from a future incalculable. The coming into existence
of the world is also a moment of separation, or an inscription of
a partition or division that erases itself, that it does not belong to
the world, for it is the world’s condition of its coming into existence,
for it is the founding of the world, or the world presencing itself to its
own presence. The world is born, and has come into existence in a
partition of itself and its immemorial, unapparent ground that is
already always departed, diverted from all memory and lost from all
appropriation. It is because of this world’s departure from its own
origin as its condition of existence that the world cannot be wholly
the world of works, even if it is death’s supreme achievement. It is
rather mortality’s pure gift which is inscrutable and is unfathomable.
What is thought in the thought of finitude and mortality is

the opening of the world, its originary logic of origin, its event
of coming to presence which cannot be thought in terms of the
existing predicates about the world, or in terms of the being of the
world understood in its nominative, which, as such, exceed all our

reductive metaphysical totalization. The finitude of the world, or
rather, the worlding of the world, and its attunement of mourning
for a non-appropriable, non-totalizable, absent, excluded,
expelled, separated, partitioned, departed origin, makes our history
and politics essentially finite and non-totalizable, which, in so far
it is non-totalizable, is at once tempered with the possibility of a
redemptive joy, because this finitude is the condition of the world’s
coming into existence.
Hope and melancholy are not two opposite attunements of the

world. They attune the world in its coming into presence, in the event
of existence as fundamental moods or attunements, bearing the gift
and promise of its coming to come, ‘presencing to presence’. This coming
is not a progressive realization of the past in a successive manner,
nor a kind of result of a process that lifts, elevates unto itself this
process. Thought historically, that means non-dialectically, the world
is to be attuned to melancholy as possible mood of its existence. The
verbal infinitive of the possible is the not yet of the world, which
in its infinitive is an infinitive ‘not yet’. The eternal remnant of the
not yet demands infinite, joyous affirmation of the world that affirms
the advent of future. With the possibility of mourning, joy is too
given at the same time, at the same time when time times and space
spaces, when past, presence and future come together in a momentary
presentation that illumines all that has been, all that is and will be.
This redemptive illumination of the moment that presents eternity
in a momentary, sudden apparition falls outside any reductive
totalization achieved by the negative labour of universal history. The
moment when the unapparent appears, and the ecstasy of eternity
monstrously couples with temporality: this moment does not belong
to any self-presentation of dialectical historical instant, nor is it
accomplished as the absolute concept of universal history. It remains
as the eternal remnant of history that keeps in remembrance the messianic
promise of the advent.
Melancholy and joy are not understood here as psychological
states, nor they are to be anthropologically understood. They are
the fundamental attunements of the world and existence to its own
condition and coming into presence. Therefore one can say: as there
is a hope for the not yet, a future that is already always given in an
immemorial past, so there is a melancholy already given as possibility
to come, a possibility and not yet completely attained actuality.
Therefore, melancholy is an originary attunement of the world to its
own origin. The world attunes itself to its origin in a melancholic song
that has not become a language yet, a mute lament before language
that laments its own mortality. In philosophical contemplation and
in poetic saying that preserves the excess of the immemorial promise
in language, this melancholy is transformed at once into a divine,
paradisiacal joyousness. It reflects, in a weak illumination, the joy of
the animals when Adam first gave their names to them. The world
and existence’s relation to its time is not succession of past and
presence and future of the same banal, monotony of the vacant Now,
but the world’s temporality is ecstatically attuned to melancholy
and hope as moods of the world’s existence, or existence’s mood of
existing in the world in so far as the world opens itself ecstatically and
simultaneously to the abyss of its immemorial past and to the
astonishing arriving of its not yet. Mortality opens the language of
the world to a language before language, and to a language after
language, to a language of an eternal remnant of language that bears
the promise of its fulfilment.
Mortality
A thinking that confronts this mortality, its own mortality,
ecstatically—for thinking itself is finite, disruptive, interruptive of
itself, a finite thinking—must go beyond the closure of dialectical-
speculative philosophy. If thinking has to open itself to its outside,
which is other than the thinkable, to open itself to the advent of
coming into existence, then the transcendence of this advent has to
be thought otherwise than the death’s immanent negative product,
but in relation to a radical finitude as a gift and a promise. This gift
is not a product and, therefore, it does not belong to the economy of
the universal history. This gift is rather the gift of the immemorial.
At the heart of existence, at the depth of the world, thousand
melancholic voices cry out, the cries of an abyssal mortality which
cannot be appeased in a world that is constituted by the negative work
of death. It can only be addressed by keeping open the inaugurating
promise, which has always already opened the world, by transforming

the past of the inauguration unto the future yet to come, by keeping
the promise of the future alive, by constantly renewing that opening in
an ever new present. Therefore, the immemorial promise needs to be
renewed at ever new present as the endless, interminable presentation
of this promise, at each moment, here and now, not so that one
day there will some one come or something will come to pass, but
that at each here and now we affirm there a yet to come. This radical
finitude, this groundless ‘presencing of the presence’ that is beyond any
concept and any cognition, whose imminence ecstatically exceeds
any predication, which by tearing asunder the historical depth of
our existence, it is this radical finitude that welcomes in its lightning
flash that which transforms our historical existence into its messianic,
redemptive fulfilment.
This finitude is that which is beyond the capacity to be or not to
be of man. In each of the mortal existence, in each of a mortal being’s
work, there lies, in advance, a non-work that exposes the totality of our
existence, as a whole, to its outside, to its transcendence. Because the fate
of the works transcends these works—like Oedipus’ destiny whose
fate befalls on him despite the result of his works for him is supposed
to evade this fate—so the historical destiny of the mortals transcends
the accumulated labours of the world and the mortals. What comes
to the world opens in an immemorial transcendence that can never
be enclosed in the immanence of self-presence, for it can never be the
result of the work of immanence of negativity. It is what Schelling
calls the ‘un-pre-thinkable’, the possible, which is the potency of
the world as the world’s incalculable becoming of itself. One can,
therefore, say: the world is possible or existence is possible insofar
as the world is finite and mortal; or, the world is possible because
the possible belongs to mortality. It is the immemorial promise that
incessantly calls us to transform our historical existence by placing
us unto that opening, that inauguration where the future comes to
us incalculably. There lies the necessity of work, to create something
new out of an essential creative freedom, granted to us as gift by
mortality itself. Because the works of the mortals arise out of this
essential freedom (this freedom, because this is freedom, can never
be grounded in a concept of thought), there always remains that
incalculable, un-pre-thinkable character in each work of creative act.
In other words, there always remains the possibility of the otherwise.

To affirm this coming, the possible is the same thing as affirming
the un-pre-thinkable and the un-predicative. The future, in its
incalculability and in its un-predicative character, is not a negation of
finitude but rather that the essence of human freedom insofar as it has
its ground in an immemorial past. Finitude is not the annulment of
freedom, or impossibility of freedom, but an unconditional ground
that grants the mortals in advance the creative task of transformation
of existence.
It is in relation to this non-work of mortality alone there lies the
necessity of a creative work of transformation in a historical world,
for there to be creative work for the historical mortals, mortality
must grant beforehand this revelation of the not yet. This revelation
is not granted to us in predicative thoughts in the form of a logical
judgement, even if it is speculative judgement that Hegel speaks of,
but in the lightning flash that seizes the mortals and make claims upon
his existence as the innermost concern of his existence, by exposing
him to the depth of his existence his own abyss, i.e., his immemorial
forgetting where being risks its being. It is here that begins the task
of a whole life-time, in fear and trembling, and in the astonishment
of the origin: that is, to transform one’s own existence, to transfigure
one’s own existence so that there be ethics, there be politics, and there
be the works of the world, even if they are the works of negativity.
The task of politics derives its sense from its opening to this non-
work at the heart of the world of works, and to transform, out of
this essential abyss of freedom, granted by mortality, this historical
existence as creative work of transformation. Here the sense of ‘work’
itself is transformed: not as a negative labour of death, a work in
relation to death’s negativity and its predication; but it is a positive,
creative task of opening to mortality, which is non-predication par
excellence, out of an essential freedom.
This brings to us the complex relation of the notion of event with
the notion of Abyss. If the creative task of the mortal, finite, historical
being is to welcome the coming, the event of the ‘un-pre-thinkable’,
which is promised and gifted in the immemorial past, then event has
to be thought together with abyss of being which is for that matter is
not a pure void, or a pure Nothing but to be thought as the principle
of pure potentiality.
Introducing this Work

This present volume is divided into five parts. The first part,
called Configuration, presents within a constellation an assemblage
of problems, questions, and stakes and thereby describing this
presentation itself as configuration. In this manner the traditional
academic notions such as methodology, the distinction between form
and content, theory and application (notions that are grounded in
metaphysics) are given over to the praxis of a presentation where the
notion of ‘praxis’ itself is re-thought.
The second part attempts to think the relation of language with
mortality and the possibility of the paradisiacal, redemptive, messianic
language of naming beyond the language of predicative, categorical
at cognitive disposal. The third part attempts to think the notion of
event in its three fold—the event of freedom, the event of existence
and the event of time—to open up these three metaphysically
burdened notions to its affirmation of an unconditional arrival,
which for that matter can never be thought within the predicative,
categorical grasp of the ‘presently given entities’ (Heidegger 1962).
They are thereby released and freed, which is the offering of freedom
itself, from the closure of various immanence of self-consumption
and self-appropriation. Reading the works of Schelling, Heidegger
and Rosenzweig, with Bloch and Kierkegaard behind, the event is
understood here as the messianic leap or spring to an origin not yet,
differential, multiple, singular that does not allow itself to be thought
within the metaphysics of subjectivity or with the help of the apophantic
judgement. Instead, the event is seen as ‘the monstrous copulation’
Hölderlin (1988, p. 96-100) of end and inauguration, completion
and inception, accomplishment and beginning simultaneously. The
event brings together the end as well as beginning, completion and
inception so that the event is each time finite and mortal, inaugurating
something wholly otherwise precisely at the limit, at the end, at the
accomplishment of the presently given mode of a world. ‘Where
there is an end, there lies another beginning’, so a great poet said
once. The question of the event is inseparable from the logic of the
world.
The fourth part takes up the question of messianicity. Taking
Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption as its main concern, it
attempts to think an ethics of exemplarity in Rosenzweig’s messianic

thinking of love’s commandment as irreducible facticity of revelation
that renews the immemorial promise of redemption, and opens the
event of promise to its fulfilment in a messianic coming which is
always coming, an eternity which may come today. This demands
deconstruction of the dominant historical determination of
temporality as merely successive, and accumulative, to open up to
a wholly otherwise notion of temporality and eternity where the
unforeseeable arrival of eternity may disrupt the immanent closure
of historical reason, opening and wounding the veil of immanence to
the pure event of a coming from the extremity of time. The fifth part
is devoted to the question of philosophy itself, where philosophical
thinking is seen to be an existential task that is concerned with
the questions concerning the value and sense of existence rather
than cognition or clarification of the already given world. it not so
much knowledge but existence is seen to be the highest question
of philosophical thinking whose fundamental task consists of its
releasement of the unconditional character of its transcendence from
the immanence of various self-consuming predicates. To exist is to
remain open; to seek to enclose this essential openness of existence to
the immanence of various self-consuming predicates results in radical
evil. The question of existence has essentially an ethical implication
whose meaning and sense arises from the inextricable character of
finitude of existence that defines existence in its existentiality. As
such, an ethics of existence is essentially a finite ethics, or an ethics of
finitude from which the task of philosophical thinking is inseparable.
Part I
Configuration
§ The Open
Thinking means venturing beyond.

Ernst Bloch (1995, p. 5)
This mortal creature called ‘man’, in so far as s/he is mortal, is an
open existence, which means that as an existing being, s/he already
always belongs to his own coming into existence. Here begins our
voyage of thinking, for thinking too is a kind of voyage, which must
venture forth ceaselessly, to what is beyond and Not Yet. Thinking
must affirm this ‘Not yet’, this messianic, redemptive fulfillment, if
it has to affirm this open-ness of existence itself.
In the open darkness and light, remembrance and oblivion, coming
into existence and disappearing in death, all play their originary co-
belonging, or co-figuration. Existence belongs to this opening and
is exposed to its coming to presence. It is on the basis of this originary
opening, this originary historical which is revealed to this mortal
being called ‘man’, on the basis of this revelation, that man founds
something like politics and history. There comes into existence out of
this freedom, out of this ‘play space’1, this field called ‘polis’2, where
there takes place war and festival, where historical revolutions tear
apart history, bring ruptures and discontinuities in the mode of his
existence, where man seeks the foundation of his own foundation
(which is his metaphysical task), where occur the dialectics of
negativity between man and man, where man puts at stake his own
death, his own dissolution, and by the power of his own dissolution
stands in relation to the total world that he seeks to dominate. This
means that man’s attempts to metaphysically found his own political
and historical existence must presuppose a far more originary non-

foundation, the differentiating revealing of the open, the ungrounded
spacing play, or playing space of natality and mortality.
Would a politics and metaphysics, a history and polis be possible
if there would not already hold sway the open? Would such a polis
and man’s metaphysical foundation of his own ground be possible if
there were not already given the promise of the coming, the opening
which thereby is intimated, not in the predicative logic of his
metaphysics and his history, but in the pre-predicative lightning flash
of language, in a poetic saying? This pre-predicative lightning, this
‘un-pre-thinkable’ must have already placed man in relation to his
outside, to the outside of his foundation, exposing him to his finitude
and abyssal mortality, to the immemorial promise of coming into
existence that precedes the negativity of death that man undertakes
on his own behalf. How does one name this historical before history,
this emergence of history, or, the birth of history itself, the open
which is otherwise than and before the ‘meta’ of his ‘metaphysics’?
What would the naming of this time be if this time must already
occur before time (before man come to present himself to himself )
and, therefore, before the name, this time that must already occur
as simultaneity of all times so that the whole eternity of time reveals
to man beforehand, on the basis of which man gives himself his
own time, the time of his history and the time of his politics? As
if already always there must be granted to the mortal a time before
his time, before the time of his own—not ‘this’ or ‘that’ time, nor
another time, but time temporalizing itself—in so far as it is on the
basis of time temporalizing itself, on the basis of this eternity there
manifests for man his historicity and his politics, his metaphysics
and his ethics? As if there occurs before all naming a name which is
itself without the name, and is the event of naming itself, the event
of language itself? Which naming language of the mortal would be
able to name this name outside the name, let alone exhausting it in
the name? As if there occurs a historical opening before history, a
promise beyond metaphysics and beyond politics, a configuration
of coming into existing and mortality that is outside the labour of
death which man undertakes on his own behalf, a revelation to him
of his outside which is outside his domination and mastery, outside
his power and labour, a name which is outside the naming language
The Open • 41
of mortals, yet which while first depriving man his foundation and
power, gives him the task to name the nameless, bestowing upon him
the event of language on the basis of which he knows his world, and
grasps the entities that has become and is given in the world.
The task of the mortal naming language of this linguistic being
called ‘man’ would, then, be the task of the impossible. If that is so,
then the essence of this mortal language is not primarily a categorical-
predicative grasp of what has presently become of the historical world
and entities therein constituting the historical totality, nor would
it be to exhaust the name without name in the signification of the
world. We neither know the open on the basis of history (what we
generally know as history), nor we know the world’s coming into
existence on the basis of predication. We would then have to say
rather that language is the event of the world, this mortal existential
world for this existent ‘man’, or, even better, the event of language—
before any predicative-categorical cognition and before the historical
foundation of the historical world—intimates that coming or birth
(which is to be understood before any biological determination
of it) by throwing mortals to his outside, by exposing him to his
outside, which is outside his presence and power, outside politics
and even outside history. The event of language already always inserts
this mortal being called ‘man’, in an immemorial past, into this co-
figuration of mortality and natality, of past and future and presence
in a simultaneity that is called ‘eternity’. This eternity, which is not
the mere void of time, precedes and follows the historical totalities,
outside the speculative historical time, and remains as an eternal
remnant, irreducibly keeping us open to the promise of coming time
beyond violence and beyond the negativity of historical reason.3
The open is the spacing and timing as play which grants beforehand
the name of this promise or promise of the name. In this way, this
mortal being called ‘man’ is open to the coming where the eternity
of his future, this remnant of time announces itself. Therefore this
mortal called ‘man’ has a relation to that which is more than, outside
of, otherwise than what he has made himself out of his own capacity
and possibility, for he is not only what he has founded on the basis of
his own ground; a basis otherwise his basis must granted to him, or, as
Schelling (1936) says, must be ‘loaned’ to him as pure, incalculable,
non-conditional, non-economic gift. Finding himself in the midst
of the created existence where the entirety of existence and entirety

of time is revealed to him, granted to him in the lightning flash, he
configures, weaves into time the possibility of his existence and waits
for redemption. It is the demand of the non-conditional that there
must be condition for him: hence he has his politics, his history, and
his dialectics.
Thinking too takes place, or presupposes this originary opening,
not the opening of this or that, not the opening of something as this
thing, or someone as this one, but more originary opening where
something or someone arrives. Plato calls this originary experience that
alone enables experience itself, which is the possibility of experience
itself as such, where the beginning begins in the open—as ‘Wonder’,
or ‘Astonishment’ at the origin. There lies the birth of thinking and,
henceforth, is called philosophy. If that is so, philosophy begins a non-
conditional opening of thinking itself. That means philosophy must
already presuppose the holding sway of the open, thinking that must
already be promised to man in the open, out of his finitude, that
means, out of his exposure to the open. For philosophical thinking
finitude or mortality is not one question among others, because
questioning itself begins as a non-conditional experience of finitude
or mortality. Therefore, all the questions that man raises are finite
questions. Man philosophizes not because he is capable of the faculty
of thinking, but because he is first of all mortal and finite that strikes
him, surprises him, astonishes him. This event of thinking attunes
the mortals to a fundamental mood, or fundamental attunement of
astonishment, astonishment at the event of thinking.
The coming of thinking, the event of thinking astonishes the
mortals—since (as Heidegger says)4 we do not go to thinking, but
thinking comes to us—and promises him the gift of time, the time
to come, the future of thinking. It is this promise of future, granted
to us by the event of thinking and that attunes us to the fundamental
mood of astonishment, abandons us, first of all, to abandonment,
to an originary non-condition—which Plato calls ‘death’. It is this
experience, or, non-experience of abandonment, or mortality’s gift
of time, the gift that astonishes us: it is this non-condition that is
the birth of thinking called philosophy. This non-conditional event of
thinking that surprises us, astonishes us and bestows upon us the gift
of thinking, is more originary than the system of that philosophical
The Open • 43
logic that claims to begin with the immediate that immediately

passes into the mediation. It is because the event of thinking, and its
fundamental mood of astonishment exceeds any categorical grasp of
a philosophical logic that is based upon predicative proposition, for
the movement of a predicative proposition can only be a negative,
and hence, an immanent movement ; in itself it is no movement at
all. But the movement of mortality is a movement transcendent and,
therefore, it is movement at all. In this sense, Schelling, preceding
and influencing Kierkegaard denies movement in Hegelian
speculative logic, though the effort of the speculative logic is to
include movement into it. In so far as Hegel understood movement
only as a negative, it can only be an immanent movement, hence
based upon the predicative proposition. The event that begins the
movement is a leap outside, for all coming into presence is transcendence,
and hence is outside of all predication and judgement that constitute the
speculative historical totality. Therefore, it is not surprising that Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit begins its movement, or rather Hegel likens
(which is not mere analogy) this phenomenological movement of the
dialectical-historical to the movement of a speculative proposition,
which is an immanent movement. Nothing surprises, astonishes us
in Hegelian speculative-historical system, for what is missing there is
the ecstasy of the event, the leap of the outside, and the thinking of the
inception which is outside of a logical generation of a monotonous,
dull immediate immediately passing into the mediation.
This is the reason that Franz Rosenzweig, following Schelling,
begins his The Star of Redemption with the complaint that the
philosophical system that claims to be the cognition of the all, is
deaf to the cries of mortality, for in that speculative philosophical
discourse of totality, nothing and nobody dies. The speculative
system for which singulars are reduced to the particular moments of
the One, there is no place for the singulars, the singulars for whom
their deaths are of utmost existential interest that refuses to serve
the interest of the anonymous Universality. What is missing in the
Hegelian speculative-dialectical determination of history is none else
but death, death that is outside and otherwise than the negative,
death which cannot persist while carrying its predicates in the way
that Hegel’s subject carries its own dissolution as its predicate. If
speculative proposition is like the Subject that persists as the same
even in its own dissolution and accidents, then death that does not
persist in its apparition is a proposition without predicate. This
death refuses to work, it refuses to produce its own predicates, if the
meaning of work in Hegelian metaphysics is none but production of
predicates. It is because of this, though it is the effort of a speculative
logic of history to think death or mortality, it has made death only
a result or the process of negativity, a death no longer event but
work that serves the interests of the Universal. Such a speculative
discourse of universality, founded upon the predicative proposition
of a speculative judgement is devoid of the event, for event does not
have the character of persistence of negativity. By taking away the
‘poisonous sting’ of death (Rosenzweig 2005, p. 9), such a speculative
totalization allows itself to forget the immemorial open and the
promise, the non-conditional gift loaned therein. The remembrance
of the immemorial inception, of the open before totality, of the gift of
mortality before the negative work of death and the promise given in
a beginning before any beginning, and therefore given in a historical
coming into existence before history: this remembrance is renewed at
moments when history interrupts itself, pauses itself, or when history
itself claims to have accomplished its own end and to have exhausted
its innermost resources and possibilities.
The questions of promise and gift, of inception and future arise only
in relation to the questions concerning exit from such a metaphysics
that marks the dominant thinking of the Greco-Roman civilization.
The question of the pause of history is, as it is clear, is the question of
mortality and the open, when each time history itself has to leap over
the abyss that is yawning wide open. This history is not the history
what Hegel the metaphysician dreamt of; it is not the history where
abysses are like transitional moments that simultaneously bridge
themselves. The pauses or interruptions of history are not differential
epochal moments belonging to the homogenous, universal unity
of a speculative proposition that tarries with its own dissolutions,
thereby making these dissolutions as moments of the bridge. They
are, rather, in their radical finitude, singular epochal ruptures that
refuse to be gathered into a logical principle of unity. Their logic
of becoming is not the dialectical-speculative logic of speculative
proposition. Their caesural logic is more like what Hölderlin calls
as ‘becoming in perishing’ (Hölderlin 1988, pp. 96-100). They are
The Open • 45
epochal ruptures whose becoming is simultaneous with their own

dissolution so that no self-same subject of universal history carries
its accidents and predicates to the dusk of its process. These epochal
ruptures, which are caesural, do not follow the transitional logic of
generation and therefore unlike the movement of Hegelian concepts;
they do not belong to the undying self-same flow of eternity. They
rather form what both Schelling and Hölderlin already before Hegel
came to constitute the system call Zusammenhang (Schelling 2000):
the caesural configuration, a cohesion, a holding together of what do
not make transition into the other, each rhythm in relative autonomy
from the other, not because each rhythm in itself has its ontological
ground, but each rhythm brings simultaneously its counter thrust,
a counter pressure, its dissolution, in a kind of lightning flash that
arrive simultaneously to bring its disappearance. Such a mortality
of the epochal ruptures is not the negativity of death which the
movement of the speculative proposition brings into. The mortality
of the lightning flash does not maintain its own dissolution within it
and does not make itself into the work of producing universal history.
Much before Hegel came to constitute his system, Hölderlin in
1800 wrote an essay called Becoming in Dissolution. Not the world,
‘this’ or ‘that’ world, but ‘the world of all words’ presents itself in a
time which itself, each time, a beginning of time, or, ‘in the decline,
the instant or more genetically, in the becoming of the instant and in
the beginning of time and world’. ‘This decline... is felt... at precisely
that moment and to precisely that extent that existence dissolves,
the newly entering, the youthful, the potential is also felt’. Each
such moment is this ‘heavenly fire’, is this infinite interweaving of
becoming and dissolution when ‘everything infinitely permeates’
each other ‘the pain and joys, discord and peace, movement and
rest, form and formless’ (Hölderlin 1988, pp. 96-100). Here,
unlike the Hegelian notion of infinity that has finitude within it,
the infinite and finite forms the ‘monstrous coupling’ which is not
‘system’, but Zusammenhang—of mortality and natality, becoming
and dissolution, presentation and the unpresentable, infinite and
finitude, excess and containment, mourning and joy. The open is
the ‘play space’ where there occurs ‘this monstrous coupling’ which
is the event of history itself as disjunctive, caesural, non-conditional
opening, and not events that belong to history as finite, attenuated
figures of discontinuities. Commenting on Hölderlin, Francoise

Dastur writes,
What Hölderlin wants to think is not the development of a thing

from its initial stage to its final stage, even via the intermediary of a
‘qualitative leap’ which would introduce here a relative discontinuity,
but rather the entire reflux of disappearance into appearance and of
death into life. What he wants to understand is not the succession
of epochs and the interval that separates the break but the epochal
break itself and the radical discontinuity of history. (Dastur 2000,
pp. 62-63)
What is at stake is not events that are successive, attenuated, and

relative finite realization of the One, the Universal, like the succession
of differential nows that are the differential and immanent variations
of the Now.5 The Universal, One Now will be then determined as
contraction of the plurality of nows, and is continuous in all through
its relative variations as nows.6 But the epochal ruptures and abysses
of history are not mere relative realization of the Universal history.
They are not merely immanent product of this history nor a result
of that speculative dialectical process. The caesura which Hölderlin
speaks of is the mortality which is outside the immanent negativity
of history. It is the non-conditional condition of history, given as gift
at the inception of that history where inception and finitude, natality
and mortality, becoming and dissolution are united in a ‘monstrous
coupling’. Mortality, which is the non-negative condition, is not a
consequence of that history, but premise whose judgement cannot be
delivered in the name of what is only consequent and the derivative.
In so far as judgement derives its judgement character only from
predication, it is outside any predicative logic. If the question of the
event is to be thought anew here which not mere relative realization
of universal history is, then the event has to be thought outside the
closure of the speculative historical logic of predication. The event
is to be thought, then, in relation the immemorial gift of mortality
itself, in relation to that originary disjunction and caesura, belonging
neither to the economy of work, nor to the work of negativity. To
think of the event is to think not what has become as a result of
the work of negativity, but the not yet inception of a finite history
where mortality and natality, becoming and dissolution occur
The Open • 47
simultaneously. It is here the question of the promise of coming for

the mortal being called ‘man’ is to be posed.
If man is opened towards the coming, if his existence is not to
be consummated by the mere given-ness of what has become, if he
does not end his voyage as an already finished and accomplished
existence—for he exists in the promise of future—it is so far as
his existence already belongs to the originary holding sway of the
opening, which is each time, (that means singularly, without belonging
to universal history) finite and caesural.
How to think of the opening more originary than any genesis and
generation (because it must already be granted to man, as it were a
gift), an in-ception or beginning before any beginning that comes to
pass by, a coming before anything that comes and vanishes? Does this
coming and inception, this opening before genesis and generation,
appear like any other phenomenon in the world that has become,
in so far as this unapparent enables the apparition as such, on the
basis of which mortals constitute their politics and history, their
world and their meanings? In each product of labour that constitutes
the historical artifice and manifests for mortals his field of polis,
polis where he enjoys his feasts and suffers his death, in each such
historical product and in such historical manifestation of the world,
the unapparent phenomenon which we call ‘mortality’ haunts and
an unspeakable mourning watches over. If the world history and its
politics is the product of the negative labour of man who puts at
stake his life and death by making his own death, his own absence,
his own disappearing itself appear as history and manifest as politics,
would this manifestation be possible without the more originary
polemos, a more originary revelation, the unapparent apparition of
mortality, but that is without violence and before any negativity, the
polemos between opening and the exigency of closure that first of
all reveals the mortals the unapparent of all appearing, the event as
such? In what language and naming of the mortals— since for the
mortals the world opens itself to them only on the basis of language
and the name— this opening be named, if this inception makes
manifest first of all something like ‘politics’ and ‘history’, which for
that matter precedes anything like ‘politics’ and ‘history’? In what
language of naming man must address what is outside ‘history’
and outside ‘politics’ if that originary promise of the outside, the
originary opening in non-violence must first of all call mortals to

the task of naming? Or, rather, how not to name if naming is not to
be exhausted only in naming the nameable? If the naming language
of the mortals is not exhausted in naming only the nameable, if the
naming language of the mortals is promised in the opening outside
the activity and the negative labour of history and politics, then this
passivity outside being passive and being active, this inception of time
must precede the temporality that is then predicated and predicted in
the language of logic. Hence, there arrives and comes a temporality
of language without death, a remnant time of language (or a remnant
language of time) that remains after each and every predication, a
faintly fainting away, barely audible, of a mournfulness, which is
more originary than the predicative-apophantic language of logic.
‘The irreducible remainder’ of language is not a consequence to the
predicative-apophantic proposition, and therefore is not a result of a
series of subtractions of predications. In other words, ‘the irreducible
remainder’ is not negative remainder, but a positive given as gift, since
a series of subtraction to begin an affirmative positive must already
always be there, which no predication can apophantically recuperate.
In the same way, there occurs an irreducible caesura of history which
is not a consequence of already realized universal history.
It is the language of naming that is always the outside the language of
judgement and the outside the judgement of history. It is rather what calls
history to fulfill its promise, which happens irreducibly there at the
inception of history, at the inception of anything like politics. The
remembrance of this inception, its finitude, its incessant renewal in
any presencing of presence, and hence fulfillment of this immemorial
promise means that the historical task of politics and the political task
of history is not merely the dialectical-speculative memory of what
has become of the world, but rather to remember the immemorial,
to fulfill in the future and in the not yet what is promised in the past.
To remember the immemorial: this distinction between

remembrance and memory is co-relative to the distinction between
the language of naming and the language of judgement, between
the originary epochal caesura of history and relative epochal
ruptures, in so far as language of the naming remembers, at the
limit of cognition and judgement, at the limit of memory and its
The Open • 49
genesis what is immemorial promise, not yet unimpaired by the

violence of cognition.
This logic of origin and of inception, which is not the logic of

judgement (in so far as it precedes, as it were, any predication and
any predication apophantically recuperating the origin) is, in a
certain sense, outside time, if time is grasped and inscribed in the
speculative logic of a genesis predicated on the basis of an recuperative
apophansis. As if a kind of eternity, an immemorial inception, which
then, renders time itself open wound, tearing open to the coming
and arriving, to a future without horizon and without ground, to
the ‘monstrous coupling’ of infinitude and finitude. The immemorial
inception of time is not recovered in the recuperating labour of a
speculative-dialectical memory, nor is sublated in a speculative-logical
thought. It is there as yet to come, as future origin, as the possibility to
begin anew through renewal of time that is opened in the lightning
flash to which man is exposed.
This time without time, or, rather the timing of time, this inception
of time itself, which is to be rigorously distinguished from the
dialectical-speculative logic of genesis and generation, this eternity
of time itself must be renewed in our historical presence so that our
historical remembrance gives itself the task of the more originary
astonishment at the origin, exposing us to the monstrous event of
history. Remembrance is then nothing but the renewal of the inception.
History must remember not historical memory or memory in history,
but what for history, by a necessary logic, is outside memory that must
have already always erased from memory as a necessary precondition. If
historical remembrance begins with astonishment at the origin, and is
not satisfied with what has arrived, what time has made of a historical
existence—cleared existence, a cleared time which has now sunk into
the banality of knowable and graspable—then remembrance must
have a relation to a time outside memory. While memory is memory
of a past as that what has happened, remembrance, understood
in a profound sense, is simultaneity of past, presence and future.
It is this eternity alone makes a historical being happy. It attunes
us to a certain joyous mourning, of what Schelling once called
‘divine mourning’.7 While memory makes us unhappy, remembrance
is the promise of happiness, because in the possibility of repetition, of
renewal and remembrance, the possibility of future is also given. It is

the happiness in the future alone, in the promise of a coming time,
and not in what has become a past, and what is presently available
as these things, as this world, as this history, as this politics. Instead
of mere tarrying with what has become, and confining himself with
‘the gallery of images’ (Hegel 1998, p. 492), which Hegel thinks
as the memorial task of History—he holds himself ahead towards
the promise of future, gifted to him by time, endowed him with
the immemorial. Time, opening him to the coming and future,
promises redemption. This gift of time is not a historical gift, nor a
gift of history, but rather, man is opened to his history by a time that
redeems history itself, and renders history itself an open existence,
towards its redemption in the coming.
Redemption is then, the originary openness of history itself
towards its ex-tatic outside. Man experiences this outside, but without
being able to appropriate it, in astonishment, in wonder that opens
historical memory to the far more originary remembrance of wonder,
or wonder itself as remembrance. In astonishment man is opened to
his opening: he sails beyond, ventures outside, and begins himself
anew by renewing himself. In astonishment, man remains as what
he is essentially, that means, does not remain as what he already has
made of himself. His is a conditioned, finite and mortal existence, but
because of this finitude, opening to the non-condition, infinite and
free; he is conditioned but also creative, mortal but also open to a time
yet to come. Both at once, united in him in such a monstrous coupling.
He is a historical being, but also open to redemption, temporal but
also open to a time beyond time, arrived but also opening that is yet
to arrive, an incessant beginning of himself but also whose beginning
lies outside his subjective power of appropriation, a realized existence
and yet open to the not yet realized, belonging to the possible,
belonging to the arriving, memorial being but also astonished by the
immemorial origin not yet come. The mortal being is at the limit
of the one, and opening to the other, belonging to the, as it were,
undecidable line where the line constantly limits each from the other.
It is the undecidable between memory and remembrance, history
and redemption, time and eternity, immanence and transcendence.
§ Judgement and History
What concerns us here, once more, is the relationship between the

logical judgement and history. If a certain dominant metaphysical
determination of history dreams the fulfilment of its self-presence
despite the epochal ruptures so that beneath the discontinuities and
ruptures of history the unity of self-presence flows as a discontinuous
self-same, as self-persisting truth in face of its own dissolution, it
thereby derives its ground from the authority of the logical form of
judgement, that is, the apophansis of the predicative proposition.
Hegelian speculative logic of history, which is based upon the
dominant logic of judgement as predicative, constitutes itself as the
judgement of history that subsumes epochal ruptures as its mere
attenuated discontinuities. What is necessary, if epochal ruptures
are to be thought irreducible to the universal, self-persisting logic
of movement, a different logic of origin, a radical re-thinking of the
logic of judgement that enables us to think the event as the event of
history. It is the monstrous site of history the advent of which alone
brings redemptive fulfilment outside the closure of historical violence.
Then the judgement of history would no longer be authoritative and
final, for it is in the name of a redemptive fulfilment that history will
be judged.
*
The deepening of the inner life can no longer be guided by the
evidences of history. It is given over to the risk and to the moral
creation of the I—to horizons more vast than history, in which
history itself is judged.
—Emmanuel Levinas (1969, p. 246)
Of History
For a long time, from the inception of metaphysics, philosophers
have cherished the dream of an origin that is pure, autochthonous
beginning of itself, self-identical and immanent. It is an origin which
releases the movement of history, the history of a community, race,
nation, etc. In its perseverance, in its purity and autochthony, it is such
as to be able to bear its self-identity in its face of its own disjunction
and suffering, its being in the face of its own dissolution, like Phoenix
that arises from its ashes. Beneath the upheavals of history, beneath
the epochal ruptures, beneath the unquiet manifestations of the
various elemental forces of the sky, there is the dream of metaphysics:
it is the dream of the imperturbable serenity, eternal rest, at the
depth of the nourishing earth which maintains itself, as a great
system making philosopher speaks of, in the face of its death. This
metaphysically founded logic of origin is also logic of earth and soil,
of the cunning of a history that fulfils its Parousia despite or through
the unreason, a history that human beings capable of their own
power of death found by toil and sweat. What they found—namely,
the rational institutions that constitute the universal, anonymous
totality called ‘history’—appears to have arrived (or, at least, have this
possibility of ) redemptive fulfilment of the violence that found these
institutions. What then this universal history claims to fulfils itself,
by revealing itself to itself, by coming to presence to itself, is this
Parousia of reason. History appears to be the continuous, immanent
satisfaction of this Parousia of reason which, precisely on account
of achieving this Parousia, assumes the authority of judgement.
History, metaphysically determined, is the gathering of the past into
the Parousia of immanence of self-presence so that nothing essential
really is thought to be lost of the past promise which is not fulfilled,
for everything essential that is past is traced back by the apophansis
of judgement. From this essential metaphysical determination,
history derives its character of judgement. It passes judgement on
those multiple singulars that cannot be enclosed within its totality,
on that immemorial promise of the immemorial past that cannot
be traced back by the memorial authority of apophansis and which
for that matter, cannot be enclosed within the immanence of the
Parousia of reason. This judgement of the anonymous, universal
Judgement and History • 53
history manifests itself in the thetic violence of law that the rational
institutions ensure its execution.
In his Totality and Infinity (1969), Emmanuel Levinas attempts to
think of a more originary ethical responsibility in justice that exceeds
this judgement of history. There is always something excess or surplus
in justice which is not the Parousia of reason, but what is suppressed
in the visibility of the judgement of history. It is the invisible itself
whose passage of manifestation is not the progressive, accumulative
manifestation of history, which is not mere ‘provisionally invisible’
and therefore not mere privation of the visible. It is rather that of the
singularity that escapes totality, which cannot be annihilated by the
power of judgement, by the force of law which the rational institutions
execute. The order where the invisibility of the singularity manifests
itself is the order of infinity in which ‘history itself is judged’ (Ibid.).
It is an infinite judgement because it comes from the infinity (what
Levinas calls ‘diachrony’) of the immemorial promise itself which the
apophansis of the speculative historical memory cannot trace back
to. It is in the name of this immemorial promise that escapes all the
measurement of the economy of judgement that the tyranny of the
universal history is to be judged. This infinite judgement (or, the
judgement of infinity) is not evidenced by the documents of history,
for it passes judgement in the name of an immemorial past that is
already always lost and in the name of that which is always yet to
come. This infinite judgement—infinite in the sense that its exceeds
‘judgement’ itself—this justice in-excess is not, unlike the judgement
of history, the maintenance of the ‘work of death’ (Hegel 1998, p.
270) ensured by the rational institutions on the basis of thetic law
(of what Benjamin calls ‘law preserving violence’ and ‘law positing
violence’). Justice here belongs to the order of the divine1 where man
in his singularity is affirmed, not as mere instantiation of a universal
reason but as the other who cannot be annihilated. Levinas speaks:
Objective judgement is pronounced by the existence of rational
institutions, in which the will is secured against death and against its
own perfidy. It consists in the submission of the subjective will to the
universal laws which reduce the will to its objective signification… it
henceforth exists as though it were dead and signified only in its own
heritage, as though everything that was existence in the first person in
it, subjective existence, were but the after-effect of its animality.
And,
There exists a tyranny of the universal and of the impersonal, an order

that is inhuman though distinct from brutish. Against it man affirms
himself as an irreducible singularity, exterior to the totality into which
he enters, and aspiring to the religious order where the recognition of
the individual concerns him in his singularity, an order of joy which
is neither cessation nor antithesis of pain nor flight before it. (Ibid.,
p. 242)
What Levinas is attempting to think is not that these ‘visible forms’

are to be done away with—the visible forms that ‘tend to form’ a
totality—but rather that these visible forms must not forget the
unforgettable, that is, the immemorial promise that opens time,
that means, the pure future of presencing that alone can redeem
the violence of the visible order of history. Beyond any eidetic
phenomenology of consciousness that makes manifest a reality in
visible forms, justice and truth must evoke a phenomenology of
the invisible and of promise that opens the judgement of history
beyond historical time. The thought of a redemptive justice evokes a
phenomenology of promise and hope that opens itself to the extremities
of time, to a before any before and to a last after the last. ‘The
judgement of consciousness’, says Levinas ‘must refer to a reality
beyond the sentence pronounced by history, which is also a cessation
and an end. Hence truth requires as its ultimate condition an infinite
time, the condition for both goodness and the transcendence of the
face’ (Ibid., p. 247).
The dominant metaphysical determination of history that presents
itself as the continuous manifestation of the Parousia of reason that
progressively, accumulatively unfolds itself belongs to the economy
of the phenomenology of the visible. Hegel’s phenomenology of
history is such a phenomenology of the visible, where reason presents
itself as self-persisting movement of self-present Parousia. Hegel’s
phenomenology of history is this phenomenology of the continuous
upliftment (Aufhebung) of the invisible unto the visible in the straight
line of conversion by ‘the energy of thought’ (Hegel 1998, p. 19)
which is the negativity of judgement where what comes never ceases
to recapture what is already gone, in the manner of apophansis that
traces itself back to its origin, so that for the Absolute of Parousia
nothing essential is really lost. In this speculative-apophantic

determination of history where the end reaches back its own
origin, there remains neither immemorial nor the pure futurity that
cannot be traced back to its origin. Hegel’s speculative-apophantic
determination of history—without the advent of the pure presencing
of the presence and without the promise of the immemorial—is
based upon the predicative proposition whose task is to recapture, by
preserving, what has departed as ‘the gallery of images’ (Ibid., p. 492).
This speculative-apophantic labour of the speculative judgement
enables the Hegelian subject of History to maintain itself as self-
same parousia in the dissolution of its own accidents and predicates
where the predicates and the subject no longer remain in the fixity,
or inertness of their given positions, but passes onto the other, and
yet while passing into the other, in this restlessness, remains eternally
restful (Ibid., § 60), and never giving way to the ‘bad infinity’.
The subject of history is the speculative subject of the predicative
proposition that gives itself to its own perishing. It is as perishing, or
throwing itself to the peril of being that the speculative subject rescues
its Parousia. The discontinuities of the predicates, their dissolutions
and perishing alone enables, unlike a formal predicative proposition,
the unity of the ground, the Parousia of the subject’s satisfaction,
the memorial recapture of the past. Nothing essential is really lost
that the speculative subject would hope for in the coming to come
as unhoped return from a pure future, for there is no immemorial
for it that its apophansis could not preserve and recuperate it. Hegel’s
speculative-apophantic determination of history has remained the
predicative task: that of grasping the ‘presently given presence’ and
not the event of being as manifestation of the invisible that remains
to come, not ‘this’ or ‘that’ coming, but the coming itself.
What cannot be thought within the immanence of the speculative
subject’s Parousia which is based on the predicative form of speculative
judgement, is the radical epochal discontinuities of history which
advents, in lighting flash, as unapparent phenomenon that tears,
or hollows out, wounds the veil of the totality of the visible forms.
The exposure of the speculative determination of history and its
phenomenological visibility to the radical discontinuities or breaks
where the event of unhoped for future erupts, demands the exposure
of apophantic basis of the predicative, speculative judgement to the
event of truth which is the advent of the unapparent. If our dominant

understanding of ‘politics’ and ‘history’ is based upon the metaphysical
foundation of the self-grounding immanence of Parousia that reduces
the advent of the unapparent into the mere attenuated variation of the
apophantic logic of the visible, so that the radical breaks are levelled
off to the already given-ness of the visible forms, then it would be
necessary to open such an apophantic phenomenology of the given-
ness to the more originary phenomenology of exposure at the limit
of self-grounding consciousness.
That the judgement of such a universal history upon the singularity
of the multiple (that reduces such multiplicity and singularity to the
variations of the Subject’s necessary diremption) is derived from the
apophantic basis of the predicative proposition can be shown by an
exposition of what Hegel calls ‘speculative judgement’. The job of the
speculative judgement is the same as the job of history. It is to bear
its accidents, its own dissolutions and epochal ruptures straight right
to the end of this movement, so that beneath the disquietude of its
movement, beneath the sufferings of its finitude, it still sinks down
its teeth into its autochthonous, its immanent pure soil from where
history originates. The ruptures of history will only be then relative
disjunctions by means of which uniform, universal history cunningly
realizes itself. The speculative propositional movement of history has
in its womb such cunning imposture that it realizes its totalization
precisely through its own dissolutions, by sacrificing itself. Just as the
logic of this speculative judgement is a sacrificial logic, so the logic of
history is a sacrificial history. Its logic is the theodicy of a resurrection and
divine embodiment on the profane order, for which death does not and
must not go in vain, that gives itself back the serenity and quietitude of
the earth, of community of historical people who gather together to the
innermost unity of its ground through the relationships of blood and soil.
The logic of copula of the judgement, which is the passage of
death, will then serve the innermost ground of a community’s and
history’s Parousia. The copula is the site, the centre, where history
gathers unto itself, where people bearing swords and cross gather
together to celebrate victory over others, the site where there takes
places celebration of victory and festivity of being-one-with-oneself.
Like the copula that unites the separated, disjoined elements into its
innermost ground of unity, and therefore gives the disquiet, suffering
elements the joyous being with oneself, so the depth of the earth is the
site of history which preserves, and at the same time gives a form of
eternity and unity to the dispersed, disconnected, disjoined elements.
The depth of the earth nourishes in its womb the perishable mortals,
and by denuding the individuals of its accidental, contingent features
of its individuality, bestows upon these perishable mortals the sense
of ‘immortality’ and universality. This denuding or disrobing is the
work of death, which death performs in the interests of the universal.
The name of this deed is called ‘funeral’. In Phenomenology of Spirit,
Hegel writes,
The deed, then which embraces the entire existence of the blood-
relation, does not concern the citizen, for he does not belong to the
family, nor the individual who is to become a citizen and will cease
to count this particular individual; it has as its object and content
this particular individual who belongs to the family, but is taken as
a universal being freed from his sensuous, i.e., individual, reality.
The deed no longer concerns the living but the dead, the individual
who, after a long succession of separate disconnected experiences,
concentrates himself into a single completed shape and has raised
himself out of the unrest of the accidents of life into the calm of
simple universality. But because it is only as citizen that he is actual
and substantial, the individual, so far as he is not a citizen but belongs
to the family, is only an unreal impotent shadow. (1998, pp. 269-70)
Death here is ‘the supreme work’, the ‘supreme achievement’,2
the innermost ground of unity of the individual that sublates the
accidental, dispersed individuals into the concentrated form of
universality, that is, universal history. Death is the copula of the
speculative-apophantic judgement. It is the passage of the speculative,
the threshold that unites in its innermost ground the individual and
universal, the subject and the predicate by denuding, disrobing the
accidental features of the subject and predicates. By denuding and
disrobing what it considers to be the accidental and contingency
of the singulars, it lifts and sublates them unto the universality of
the Concept, just as through the works of death individuals sublate
themselves unto the universality of History. The accomplishment or
the end (Telos) of speculative judgement is the end of History itself:
it is to subsume the singulars unto the totality of history. This speculative
logic of history must pass through death, or must enable death to
traverse through its passage in such a way that the substantiality of

the subject-predicate position of the formal proposition is dissolved,
and there comes into presence the Subject bearing itself as speculative
proposition reaching its Parousia. This Subject of History is a Subject
of predication and is a predicative subject at once who passes through
its own dissolution and yet maintains itself through this passage and
as this passage. This logic of origin enables metaphysically to found
history in so far as it is the question of the historicity of the history
itself, and not what passes as events in history. At the heart of the
speculative logic of history operates certain logic of death, a thana-
onto-theological constitution of metaphysics of history and politics.
The metaphysical essence of history, the metaphysical secret of
the speculative judgement—in so far as the logic of history is based
upon the modality of speculative judgement—is none but death.
Death is the secret of history. Death is that demonic site where history
comes to pass as history, which unites in a terrible fashion what passes
away and what abides, the transitory and the universal, the divine
and the mortal. The supreme work and its supreme achievement
of copula in the speculative judgement is the supreme achievement
of death. It makes judgement possible, it makes history possible;
it makes history itself into a speculative judgement, and makes
speculative judgement into history. The logic of origin, according to
this manner of thinking, would not be stranger to the phenomena
of disappearance and dissolution, to this ‘non-actuality’3 called
‘death’, which is of all names the most terrifying. The speculative
logic of origin is what makes this ‘non-actuality’ into the actuality
of the actual, into the possibility of the possible. The actuality of the
actual out of the ‘non-actuality’ when it realizes itself without any
remainder is called Absolute. As making possible of actuality of the
actual, and possibility of the possible, this logic that feeds upon the
labour of death, is judgement of history, not judgement upon history,
but history as judgement. As such the judgement of history upon the
singularity of individuals is the sentence of death. This judgement is
the speculative truth of history, truth that is told in the form of the
speculative proposition, which says not the fixed, inert, lifeless truth
of substance, but truth as Subjectivity, what has come to be history,
which has passed as history, and preserved itself, in the interior depth
of memory, as a ‘gallery of images’ (Ibid., p. 492). Death will then
appear, as the appearing of the unapparent, the phenomenality of

the non-phenomena, the power of non-power. As such it is supreme
power, the power of judgement. It is the force of law, the eye of
judgement, the gaze of power, for it founds upon nothing given but
upon the work of nothing itself.
One wonders whether this logic of origin, the judgement of history
that passes the sentence of death is the originary logic of origin, or
whether beyond or outside of this logic of origin, outside the dream
of an autochthonous ground, outside this reductive totalization
of a thought of history that celebrates the feast of victory over the
vanquished, there lies a more originary logic of origin, an origin
which is the immemorial promise of the time yet to come. It is this
promise that is the more originary judgement than the judgement
of history. To think this outside it is necessary, without abandoning
the historical-speculative task of dialectical thought altogether, to
introduce another movement than the sacrificial-tragic time of
history, another modality of thinking of mortality that is outside
being the source of power and the force of law. Such a thinking of
the logic of origin is yet to come, not because this future will come
one day to pass, but an eternal remnant of future not yet that is given
originarily as an origin. Such a logic of origin, because it in advance
determines everything what is to come, therefore is more originary
than any passed past; in so far as it would not come to pass but
remain to come, it is more originary than any future. To introduce
this thinking of the logic of origin is neither to think mortality on the
basis of the power and the force of death, nor to think temporality on
the basis of the tragic-sacrificial time of the dialectical.
It will then be necessary to show that the predicative nature of
this speculative history forecloses, and therefore cannot think, by a
necessary logic, the event-ness of history itself, whose advent is not
mere relative ruptures belonging to the universal history but epochal
ruptures whose sudden, momentary advent makes history itself unto
stillness of time, when death does not sublate itself unto the work
of law. This stillness of the advent, in its sudden appearing of the
unapparent, is not the speculative truth of history, for the singularity
of its coming lies outside the universal movement of predicative
proposition. Therefore it is necessary to think the temporality itself
otherwise, no longer on the tragic-sacrificial modality of historical
time, no longer the time of the gaze of law and the time of the work
of power, but temporality in its refusal to gather unto the unity of
the concept, presents itself in a discontinuous presentation, in a con-
figuration, as a kind of assemblage, when time of presentation and
its radical exteriority come-together, simultaneously, in a ‘monstrous
coupling’ (Hölderlin 1988, 96-100).
This Moment when there happens this demonic, monstrous
coupling of time and its radical outside, time and eternity, reason
and its inassimilable other, ground and the abyss, it marks the
tremor of the event, which is the advent of history itself. Thinking
that has borne witness the unspeakable horrors of history and has
felt in its bones and marrow the totalizing power of death, a life
that is ‘damaged’ (Adorno 1984) by the disrobing power of death’s
gaze, such a thinking is now weary of the historical-memorial task
of dialectical thinking, that is, to preserve in its interior depth the
‘victorious’ march its becoming. The task of thinking now, at the
end of such a speculative-dialectical history, supposing such an end
has arrived (when?), is to think the redemptive advent, without the
violence of thetic-sacrificial closure. Such an opening of thought is
possible only on the basis of an exposure to the excess of promise
arising at the moment of the suspension of law, a promise without
judgement and without violence.
Thinking of the end is not the thinking the ‘end’ in the sense that
the ‘end’ is the ‘end’ that manifests itself in a site topological, but
it is the thinking of the advent of the unapparent at the extremity
of time, at the ecstatic limit of time. It is the Eschatos of time that
opens, inaugurates, welcomes the wholly other arrival. Each time an
essential thinker attempts to think essentially, that means historically,
if such a historical task is not recoiled from the terror and violence
of the judgement of history, such thinking must feel in its innermost
depth such violence, so that it must evoke another judgement, in
the name of truth and in the name of justice, a judgement upon
history. But thinking does not have to be that alone. The courage of
thinking needs to be evoked, once again, no longer in the old tragic-
heroic pathos of a totalizing thought, but as hopeful, affirmation
of a messianic, redemptive coming of justice. Perhaps the task of
thinking that must confront now, more than ever before, is to think
the limit of the violence of a totalizing history and to rethink the
notion of event in relation to history. This advent or event must not

be assimilable to totalizing history without remainder. What would
remain as ‘remainder’ is nothing but a redemptive promise of the
immemorial that comes from a future beyond calculations, of a birth
to come. For that, thinking does not have to be satisfied with what
has become of a historical process, but to welcome, in hope, what is
otherwise, and what is the ‘not yet’, noch Nicht (Bloch 1995).
Metaphysics and Violence

In his The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For (2002) Jean-Louis
Chrétien calls us to note the denial of the immemorial and radical
forgetting, of that radical already always loss—which is neither to be
lamented nor to be anguished over—by the dominant metaphysics of
Parousia that totalizes the promise of coming from the immemorial
past within the immanence of a self-presence. According to one of the
dominant modalities of thinking that founds metaphysics of Parousia,
forgetting founds memory as if, as it were, it is the abyssal condition
of possibility of memory. There is, according to this understanding,
no immemorial as such. There is no radical loss in forgetting, in
the sense that there is no forgetting that would not open itself to
memory, that would not serve the memorial recall: nothing essential
is lost, for what is lost and forgotten is the inessential as the structural
opening to the memorial grasp of the essential. This metaphysics of
immanence where the transcendence of the infinity is either mere
privation of an immanent totality in visible forms, or for which the
unapparent promise from an immemorial merely serves the essential
self-foundation of the memorial; this is the secret of the dominant
metaphysical essence of history and politics which is founded upon,
what Chrétien calls, ‘forgetting of forgetting’.
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit exhibits in its utmost profundity
the impossibility of a radical loss in a forgetting beyond memory.
There is no advent that has not been interiorized, assimilated or
subjectified in the innermost subjectivity of the Subject which is
already memorial, for its task is to recall the moment of its origin at
its end. The speculative memory of the dialectical history, grounded
by its apophansis, is the circular re-appropriation of the beginning in
the end. There is no outside beyond the plenitude of the Subject’s
Parousia. There is no immemorial loss that would not manifest itself

in the visible forms of universal history. The logic of Aufhebung is
the memorial logic of the metaphysics of the Subject. It preserves
the essential in the innermost depth of the Subject’s parousia, and
making the mourning for the loss into the mere privation of the
Subject’s self-presence.
In the chapter of Phenomenology of Spirit called ‘Sense-Certainty’,
Hegel expounding the meaning of This in a phenomenological
manner—that means, as the movement of This taking place as such—
shows how in this phenomenological movement of taking place of This,
the This shows on its emphatic self-certainty to be its own impossibility
to maintain itself its This-ness. This phenomenological movement of
the This—that is supposed to be this absolutely irreducible singular
phenomenon—already, immediately (the moment it advents itself,
erupts itself as This) is opened to a loss, not in an accidental manner,
but precisely because the This is This. The moment—here and now—
the This appears, it is already a passed past, it is immediately a This
which is no longer This and therefore an other than This: a lapsed
presence, a presencing that in its advent has annulled itself, and has
become other than itself. What it shows in this phenomenological
appearing of the This is that the phenomenological movement itself
originates on the basis of a loss, a forgetting, a presence that can
never be recounted, a void or emptying away. What it shows is that
the movement of the This appearing is a movement that puts into
its peril of this appearing itself so that This can never be same This
that the phenomenological consciousness will later recall. The This is
essentially a ‘perilous being’, that means, its essence is to perish that
is simultaneous with its advent. The phenomenological movement
of history opens itself to this abyss of disappearance and dissolution,
to the night of annihilation which can never be recalled by memory
to the day of history, for it immediately has fallen outside the
phenomenological movement of history, precisely in order to open
this movement to itself for the first time, as an excess of presencing
that must immediately absent itself, as a forever passed past, as an
excess of loss that opens time and being on the basis of which alone
can there be history, community, politics etc. Hegel writes,
To the question: what is Now? let us answer, e.g. ‘Now is Night.’
In order to test the truth of this sense-certainty a simple experience
will suffice. We write down this truth; a truth cannot lose anything
by written down, anymore than it can lose anything through our
preserving it. If now, this noon, we look again at the written truth we
shall have to say that it has become stale (Hegel 1998, p. 60)
History is based upon a foundational loss, a loss that founds by giving
the gift of the day; but precisely for that very reason, for Hegel, this
loss is not an essential loss, for this night founds the day and gifts us
the speculative truth of history and memory. This day is outside any
this day or that night, a day other than or indifferent to any this or
that. What is lost, though in an ineluctable manner, is only the inessential
which must undergo dissolution so that the essential as such takes place,
which is the realm of essence, the universality immanent which erupts on
the basis of the loss—of the sense-certainty of the This. Hegel continues,
The Now that is Night is preserved, i.e. it is treated as what it professes
to be, as something that is; but it proves itself to be, on the contrary,
something that is not. The Now does indeed preserve itself, but as
something that is not Night; equally it preserves itself in the face of
the Day that it now is, as something that is also not Day, in other
words, as a negative in general. This self-preserving Now is, therefore,
not immediate but mediated; for it is determined as a permanent
and self-preserving Now through the fact that something else, viz.,
Day and Night is not…so it is in fact the universal that is the true
[content] of sense-certainty. (Ibid.)
The Aufhebung of the phenomenological-speculative history—the
power and work of negativity, that ‘energy of thought’ and of the
Subject ‘the pure ‘I’’ (Ibid., p. 19)—is the work of interiorization
through memory that constitutes the Subjectivity of speculative
history for which mourning for the loss is merely privation of a
constitutive process, a process similar to Freudian work of mourning.
This power and force of negativity, which constitutes history in its
inner depth and interiority, lies in this power of pure positing that
converts the loss of the already and immediacy into the profit or
gain of the mediated universal which alone is essence, for this essence
alone is the essential. This work of mourning which is the work of
Aufhebung that drives the phenomenological movement of speculative
history is a violent movement of pure positing that the ‘pure ‘I’’, the
Subject posits. The Speculative concept begins with positing—not
with ‘this’ or ‘that’, for that would already be a mediated beginning,
and hence would not be a beginning without pre-supposition—but

with the pure act of positing itself, presupposing nothing which
is mediated ‘this’ or ‘that’. This is so, in so far as philosophy that
must begin without any presupposition, and therefore must not
begin with ‘this’ or ‘that’, but with a beginning without mediation.
Fichte, at the beginning of German Idealism, calls this pure power
of positing as ‘primordial act’—the power, the energy of the ‘pure
‘I’’—which is primordial in so far as its abyssal beginning begins this
movement of beginning itself. Its beginning does not begin with
what has already began, but beginning with the act of positing this
beginning itself. Hence, the beginning of the speculative-dialectical
history is a thetic beginning. It is the pure power of positing its own
coming out of its non-actuality, out of a foundational loss which is
death if death be the name of this ‘non-actuality’, of this nothing, of
this void that arises as full presence only to pass away immediately
into nothing. The speculative movement of history is the movement
of the Concept founds itself on the basis of loss, the movement of
actualizing the non-actual. From the beginning of the speculative-
dialectical history, concept is the name of the pure power of positing
itself, an autochthonous power of negativity that excludes, and
through this exclusion includes within its totality what is otherwise,
the expelled and excrement outside, either as an immanent loss,
or as an inessential loss that must be expelled so that the essential
essence may take place. Since this positing power of thetic must also
posit, by a necessary logic of dialectical, its own otherwise, it has to
exclude its outside, by its power of negativity, only to include this
outside within its interiority as an essential void of being where the
pure ‘I’ throws itself to its peril only to recover itself as essential,
universal Subject of history. As such it is the speculative Subject of
the speculative proposition that maintains its Parousia through its
own dissolution on the basis of a foundational loss that passes away
only on the condition that it opens itself to the resurrection of being.
This process of the dialectical historical, whose logic of movement
is grasped in the speculative-predicative proposition, is not without
suffering and violence, but must go through violent antagonisms, life
and death struggle and countless useless deaths whose numberless
cries are already always effaced from the memorial speech of history.
The immemorial lamentation from which the Owl of Minerva is
forever in flight refuses ‘the work of mourning’. Is it not the secret

of law and history that it derives its power and force from what
is non-power par excellence; that it derives the foundation of its
force upon the absence of any foundation? Such is the ‘magical’ or
‘tremendous’ power which is more powerful than any power, in that
precisely because it can convert even non-power and non-foundation
into foundation and its force? The force and power of the speculative
proposition that captures the truth of the dialectical-historical task
of totalization is this power and force of death, of this non-power,
of this non-actuality. Hegel the metaphysician, who discovered the
cunning of reason that secretly governs history, gave us the truth
of this history, the truth of the power of non-power, foundational
possibility of non-foundation, totalizing possibility without totality.
This truth begins with the notion of possible and capacity, even if it
is possibility of the impossible. It begins with the power of positing,
even if it is power of the non-power. It begins with the force of the
negative, even if this negative does not have any given foundation of
its own.
Is this truth originary, truth that begins with power and force,
truth that founds law and its work? How the metaphysics of violence
that adheres in the dialectical-historical task be atoned and redeemed
if its truth has to begin and thereby end (for according to this logic
the end must coincide with its beginning, so that the end is nothing
but resulting truth of its beginning) with the power of positing, with
the thetic force of the concept? Here comes the impasse, or dialectical
aporia of speculative dialectics.
The dialectical concept, with its pure power of positing, calls forth
its dialectical opposite, it’s anti-thesis so that the violence of positing
concept is dialectically counter- acted by its anti-thesis. But this
anti-thetic concept, in so far it is concept, must proceed to counter-
act the thetic time with one more positing. Since this anti-thetic too
proceeds by the power of positing, synthetic of this violence of the
thetic and anti-thetic is called forth, which is turn itself is another
thetic, positing power of the negative. As a result—and this is the
irremediable aporia that cannot be resolved within the speculative-
dialectical totality—a remainder of the metaphysical violence of
the speculative concept haunts even at the End of history, even
the Absolute concept. The metaphysical violence of the speculative

proposition that begins with the pure power of positing is not
redeemed even in the Absolute concept, for were this redemption
possible, this possibility must already have been promised in the
beginning before the speculative beginning of conceptual positing;
in other words, this promise must be given in an immemorial past
before all predication and before all positing so that the immanence
of the self-consuming predications and positing be opened to the
immemorial promise, to the unconditioned transcendence of
the unpredicative that arrives from a site of pure future. The
redemption of this metaphysical violence of the dialectical-historical
must already be promised at the beginning, which for that matter
would not be the origin with the pure, autochthonous power of
positing, for it is the impasse, or aporia of dialectical-speculative
history that it proceeds to the atonement of the violence of history
from the beginning which itself is none but that feeds upon the
power of negativity, upon the force of nothing, upon the pure power
of non-foundation. At the very beginning of the thetic which the
speculative concept carries to the end of the process, to the end of
history, the violence of the positing adheres itself, rendering the
reconciliation at the end of history (which Hegel dramatizes upon
the theatrical modality of tragic) insufficient and inadequate. That
is why the dialectical-historical accomplishment of reconciliation
at the end of history, with all its tragic-heroic pathos, remains for
us un-redemptive and inconsolable, demanding an opening up
of a dimension of an ‘unconditional forgiveness’ (Derrida 2001)
beyond the immanent logic of reconciliation.
What would remain, today, of the sense and signification of this

reconciliatory pathos of tragic-historical dialectics, when with the
recognition of its painful insufficiency there comes the necessity that
thinking gives itself another task, that of welcoming the redemptive
possibility of an ‘unconditional forgiveness’ outside the pathos of
reconciliation? How to think of a non-foundation that would not
have to be the origin as autochthonous, auto-engendering pure
positing of ‘the pure ‘I’? This other origin, whose origin must begin
before beginning and hence an immemorial beginning would
therefore not be the dialectical-historical memorial task, but the
immemorial task of the origin that must already always promise of

the redeeming advent that arrives from a site wholly otherwise. The
beginning must already always bear this promise, for otherwise it
would not be promise, for otherwise there would not be fulfilment of
this promise. The failure of speculative historical to bring the melancholy
of historical violence to the redemptive fulfilment is that of the failure to
think of origin in a more originary manner. Instead it mistook its own
beginning, which is derivative, to be something else, by a necessary
logic, which is not an accidental mistake of an eccentric, perishable
thinker with a certain proper name, but the essential failure of a
thought. The essential failure of this thought consists in that it has
already always failed itself, by a necessary logic, even before it begun
its movement, at its beginning or already before beginning. Because
it has already always failed itself, and therefore failed essentially, it
has to fail at its end that means, at its own result. The End of History
does not redeem the violence to the immemorial loss, for it already
always lacks justice to those who have not yet come. The success or
failure of this thought cannot be measured by ordinary standards of
success and failure. Only on the basis of this non-measure of forgiveness,
the essential failure or an essential success of a thought can be measured,
for only according to the measure of this non-measure the profundity of
thought is done justice to.
Out of an essential failure of thought there comes a deep,
profound melancholy. It is the melancholy of a thought that cannot
be understood according to psychological or psycho-analytical make
up of a thinker. There is a melancholy of thought in that thinking is
essentially, in the innermost manner, is finite. But this melancholy,
out of the deep recognition of a failure of thought, demands thinking
of redemption that opens itself to an excess of history, to an excess of
the world-historical ‘politics’. It is in this sense thinking has a future
even when it is touched with an essential failure, even when there
is an apparent success, even when thinking is damaged by violence
and by pain. An essential failure touches us at the deepest depth of
our destinal existence, precisely at that moment thinking claims
to attain the Absolute. It is only in this sense Hegel’s thought is a
failure, but it is an essential failure, precisely because and precisely
at that moment when thought realized itself as Absolute Concept, as
System. Schelling who in his younger days was driven, like his friend
Hegel, by this overwhelming desire to constitute a system, to render

thinking itself attain itself to system, recognized an essential failure of
thought, and who out of this anguished recognition, then attempted
another movement of thinking, one radically distinguished from
Hegel’s. While Hegel’s success at being able to constitute his system
brought him fame and name, the essential failure of Schelling who
could never write system, was relegated to the mere transitory passage
to Hegel. But this common place, ordinary standard of evaluating a
thinker does not touch the essential, as if the depth, the originality and
profundity of a thinker lies in constituting systems. From where and
why so the standard of measuring the depth, originality, profundity of
a thought have to be the extent thinking attains to system or totality?
Perhaps the courage of thinking rather lies in recognizing its essential
failure to attain totality, in that it must fall short of totality at all and
could never constitute, by its own effort and capacity, its system.
But this essential failure is nothing negative, but a departure point
of a new beginning. ‘It is a sign’, says Heidegger about Schelling and
Nietzsche here, ‘of the advent of something completely different, the
heat lightning of a new beginning. Whoever really knew the reason
for this breakdown and could conquer it intelligently would have to
become the founder of the new beginning’ (1985, p.3).
What is the new beginning that Schelling made? It is to initiate a
logic of origin, a movement that opens itself to the immemorial past
and to the unhoped for future which as such does not allow itself to
be thought on the basis of the speculative-predicative proposition; it
is the movement of releasing the unconditional outside the closure
of the speculative-apophantic history. This unconditional outside is
the site where the event of presencing of presence arrives that opens to
a time always to remain, a remnant of time that is after, and outside
all closure. This advent is not mere historical event amongst others
belonging to the homogenous unity of universal history, but the event
of coming as such. The eruption of the advent has its condition the un-
conditional epochal rupture that renders history to an interval. This
interval does not belong to the homogenous logic of the predicative-
speculative proposition, for it does not function in the manner of a
copula in a speculative proposition. This abyss of the interval is not
death that serves the interests of the universal, for it is not the power
of the negative that converts nothing into being, the non-actuality
into actuality. This judgement would not be judgement of history,

then, but a judgement upon history. The task of this judgement is
no longer that of constituting historical totalities, or metaphysical-
historical system-making, but to think radically epochal ruptures and
the advent of the coming whose promise is given in a time preceding
the tragic-sacrificial time of history, and remains, as a messianic
remnant, as promise to come, here and now.
The Passion of Potentiality

Schelling in his later works, however already beginning with his
Inquiries into the Essence of Human freedom, attempts to think the
essence of human freedom no longer on the basis of the predicative
proposition, that means, no longer on the basis of the metaphysical
principle of identity, but unity understood as configuration. Hence is
the origin of the idea of ‘Zusammenhang’ that Schelling later elaborates
in The Ages of the World (2000): co-figuration or constellation that
influenced Heidegger’s (1969) notion of belonging-together, or
constellation of the relation between Being and man. This thinking
of configuration arises at the accomplishment of a certain, dominant
metaphysical constitution of onto-theology. Constellation is, in this
sense, a ‘non-identical thinking’ (Adorno 1973). Constellation is a
thinking of unity without identity, what belongs together without
ontological ground of identity, an assemblage of the incommensurable
disparates. This problematic of thinking as configuration is inseparable
from a radical re-thinking of the notion of event (Ereignis): the event
as a free arising of history, each time anew, on the un-ground of an
irreducible difference. The event pre-supposes freedom as a forever
inappropriable, originary donation from a site or ground forever
ungrounded. This freedom cannot be grounded on the basis of the
apophansis of the predicative proposition; it is rather the difference
that opens the immanent self-grounding presence to the presencing
of presence that alone makes history possible. Such is the task of
Schelling’s thinking in his Freedom essay.
Here without renouncing the systematic task of thinking
freedom—and here rightly with Heidegger (1985) one can pose
the question of the compatibility of the system and the notion of
freedom—Schelling attempts to think again the notion of judgement
and system that does not completely belong to the metaphysical

constitution of an onto-theology, but that opens on the basis
of (un)ground of freedom to the redemptive possibility of a pure
futurity which no apophantic work of predicative proposition can
anticipate. Freedom here works as the principle of pure potentiality
that never ceases to inaugurate the event of history that is opened
to the immemorial and to the excess of the not yet, to the excess
that is always to remain, the eternal remnant of an excess of freedom
over the given. In so far as the question of judgement is inseparable
from the question of the possibility of system, as Heidegger shows
in his lectures on the Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, (1984) the
task is to think in a more originary manner the logical notion of
judgement that founds itself upon the metaphysical principle of
identity and the notion of system as such. This originary manner of
thinking the notion of judgement is introduced with the question
of freedom. This question of freedom is no longer then understood
as the possibility of free will in relation to the question neither of
determination, nor as property (or faculty) of the ‘human’, but as
‘free space’ of the Open where the advent of the coming happens as
finite opening. What at stake is not the task of thinking ‘identity of
the identity and difference as in Hegel, but the question of originary
cision, or caesural opening as the abyssal ground of the de-cision
of good and evil. Freedom here, in Schelling’s thought, is not the
speculative-apophantic movement of the energy of the concept that
founds history, but actuality that manifests itself in the de-cision
between good and evil: the event of history arises out of this abyss of
freedom that first of all must open the mortal existence to the advent
of coming so that there be history. This advent of coming that is
opened by abyss of freedom must already always happen even if there
to be something like apophantic-speculative work of judgement,
which is that of converting nothing into being. Therefore, there is
a potentiality of freedom that inaugurates history as such which is
not, and which is irreducible to the potentiality of the concept that
apophantically recuperates the passed past and converts the nothing
into being. What the potentiality of freedom opens is not a passed
past, but the immemorial past that opens time to truth and being.
This immemorial is not grasped by the speculative proposition, for it
is already always opened by this immemorial.
In so far as the question of freedom is the question of the Open,

the more originary ‘free space’ on the basis of which free will can at
all be posed, and in so far as de-cision, not yet ontologically founded,
is born of the cision, that means, at the limit of predication, the
judgement and the system of freedom can no longer be based on
the onto-theological-predicative principle of identity but can only
be thought when the question of freedom is introduced into the
movement of constellation. This cision, the originary separation
(Scheidung)4 does not function in the manner of copula of the
predicative- speculative judgement. In other words, it does not enable
the subject and predicate to pass into each other in the manner of
speculum, in the manner of mirroring that renders this passing itself
into the eternal truth of passing. This cision which while separating
what is separated and disjoined render belong together (and not
belong-together. We have learnt to distinguish between the two,
after the manner of Heidegger (1969)) is rather the abyss whose
temporality no metaphysics of self-presence based upon the logic of
predication can sublate into itself, in so far as the cision as the non-
conditional void (which for that matter is not pure Nothing, nor the
negativity that converts Nothing into being) is the originary interval
on the basis of which judgement character of judgement arrives. This
place of the cision is this non-place, this monstrous site where there
takes place that demonic encounter with the wholly otherwise where
history as such inaugurates itself. This judgement of freedom, if it
can still be called ‘judgement’, is then a monstrous judgement whose
copula is at once coupe and yet coupling, a cutting away and joining,
a parting and calling what is parted to belong together, withdrawing
and bringing together the withdrawn. The judgement is this
monstrous coupling, which is at once coupe that is, between subject
and predicate, a non-thetic judgement in that it does not begin itself
by its power of pure positing, but with the non-appropriable logic of
origin, which as cision precedes all the logic of positing. The cision
of this monstrous, demonic judgement is the non-place placing, the
non-placed encountering on the basis of which—on the basis of this
encounter—there takes places the exigency for the mortal, finite
being to decide between the good and evil.
The possibility of good and evil which alone must explain
the enigmatic question of human freedom, therefore, belongs to
finitude, finitude that claims upon the mortal being called ‘man’, and
throws him to his destiny. It is on the basis of this non-appropriable
finitude this mortal being called ‘man’ assumes his freedom. It is on
the basis of this more originary monstrosity, on the basis of a non-
appropriable ‘loan’ which must first of all expropriate the mortal,
that something like truth of the ‘human’ manifests itself to ‘man’. It
is this monstrosity of judgement alone explains the possibility of evil
in man, and consequently the essence of human freedom. Therefore,
if Hegel attempts to address the question of the possibility of evil,
and the question of freedom as such, he could only explain it away
as mere diremptive moment, which is due to the finitude which is
necessarily uplifted (Aufheben), resurrected unto Absolute Concept
as infinite negativity. This could only happen like this in so far as
dialectical-speculative judgement cannot explain the ecstasy of the
finitude of man whose ecstasy is the ecstasy of a de-cision (that is,
opening to the possibility of good and evil in an equal measure). This
ecstasy of decision cannot be explained away by the predicative nature
of speculative judgement, in so far as the speculative judgement
already always presupposes the logical principle of identity, as if
ecstasy of decision can only be logical-speculative. What is missing
in speculative judgement is this ecstatic dimension of decision that
arises out of the finitude of man, and that is granted to man by the
abyss of freedom. As a result freedom is explained away without
taking into account its ecstatic dimension, its infinite transcendence,
and its opening to what is otherwise than the mortal.
There is a monstrosity, or madness in all de-cisions, in so far as it
carries in each of the mortal’s forehead the terror of the cision or abyss,
forever non-appropriable to man. The speculative judgement of history
presupposes the more originary monstrous judgement of freedom that first
of all must already always ecstatically place the mortals unto that placing,
to the demonic encountering with the wholly otherwise, to the divine and
the elemental forces of nature, to the immemorial past that forever exceeds
any immanence of self--presence. As such, freedom exposes us, tears
us open, and wounds us to the pure potentiality which is the name
of a radical future. The predicative truth of history which Hegel’s
speculative judgement apophantically seeks to recuperate belongs to
this abyss of freedom, to the monstrous judgement of freedom, to
the pre-predicative revelation on the basis of which ‘man’ decides,
that man seeks conversion of the possibilities into actualities. But the
basis of this decision is always pre-predicative abyss (Abgrund) which
is, born out of the undecidable, at the limit, is solicited both to the
good and evil in an equal measure, since it cannot—because of the
finitude of man—persist eternally in the undecidable. Because of this
finitude of man, because of the non-appropriable outside as ground,
what this mortal actualizes is only a limitation of the possible, only
a limitation of the undecidable. On account of our irreducible
finitude, there remains an eternal remnant of potentiality. In other
words, the potentiality given as gift can never be exhausted in the
acts of actualization which man undertakes on his own behalf, on the
basis of his pure power of negativity.
What man undertakes on behalf of his power of negativity, and
seeks to constitute the foundation of his own historical existence,
belongs to the passion of potentiality that is not exhausted in the
dialectical-historical labour of historical man. What remains, then, as
un-pre-thinkable remnant, but that must be given to man as promise
and gift in the already always, is this pure potentiality itself that does
not completely pass over into actuality. What remains as ‘irreducible
remainder’ (Schelling 1936) is nothing but this potentiality itself,
which may or may not pass over into being. The demonic essence
of freedom lies in its potentiality of it’s ‘perhaps’ and its ‘may be’. If
the speculative judgement must presuppose what must have already
actualized, then potentiality cannot even be a logical category. The
ecstasy of the potentiality will forever overflow what is already
actualized. This ‘forever’ is at once the promise of joy and the source
of the unspeakable melancholy in finite life that is evoked by Schelling
at the end of his Inquiry.
In God, too, there would be a depth of darkness if he did not make
the condition his own and unite it to him as one and as absolute
personality. Man never gains control over the condition, even though
in evil he strives to do so; it is only loaned to him independently
of him; hence his personality and selfhood can never be raised to
complete actuality. This is the sadness which adheres too all finite life,
and in as much as there is even in God himself a condition at least
relatively independent, there is in him, too, a source of sadness which,
however, never attains actuality but rather serves for the eternal joy of
triumph. Thence, the veil of sadness, which is spread over all nature,
the deep unappeasable melancholy of all life. (1936, p. 79)
In not to be able to actualize oneself completely without remainder,

in not to be able to appropriate the ground of one’s existence, in our
never being able to attain actuality to make our condition our own,
to own our condition, to make it our ‘proper’ of the ‘proper’, to make
it our ‘present’ to ourselves: this is the ‘unappeasable melancholy’ of
our finite life. The event of existence does not begin with the pure,
thetic power of positing. It rather begins immemorially with our
non-power, our essential failure, and our non-possibility in relation
to the ground whose eternal remnant can never be appropriated. If
this is the occasion of joy for the finite existence, it is in so far as this
eternal remnant of the never appropriated ground is also the ground
with joyous affirmation of a creative freedom, since this inscrutable
ground is also the ground of the advent. This ‘irreducible remainder’
is at once the promise of joy, and the source of the unspeakable
melancholy of finite life. The Abgrund that eternally remains in the
heart of a finite existence is not therefore negation of our freedom.
Elsewhere I have written,
In other words, Abgrund does not undermine, negate, or even minimize
freedom; rather the other way, Abgrund is what calls for freedom, or rather
calls itself forth in acts of revealing, that calls forth acts of actualizations,
to the infinite possibilities of freedom, to the labour of effective actions.
If an ‘unappeased melancholy’ adheres to all our finite life, being
finite and conditioned being that we are who cannot appropriate our
own condition once and for all, it is this melancholy that calls forth,
each moment and singularity, the joyous acts of creation as infinite,
inexhaustible, never-once-and-for-all actualizable acts of freedom.
(Das 2008, pp. 167-180)
What is then the occasion for joy? The finite freedom of the mortal
which can never appropriate its own condition bears (precisely
because of this finitude) the redemptive fulfilment in this affirmation
of the Not Yet, the passion of infinite potentiality. This passion and
ecstasy of potentiality is the occasion of joy for the finite, mortal existence.
Melancholy and joy for the mortals are not mere opposites: they unite
in man in a monstrous coupling when the dialectics of history comes to
a sudden pause. It is at this sudden pause of the dialectics of history the
monstrosity of freedom makes sudden appearance in lightning flash that
strikes us the mortals. The monstrous logic of this freedom, then, does not
begin, nor end with the pure, thetic power of positing. The meaning of
this judgement is not the pure power of law of the Absolute, or the force
of the dialectics of history. It is the logic of the affirmation of coming into
existence that opens with the passion of potentiality.
The task of thinking history is no longer that of constituting
historical, epochal totalities whose logic of origin would be to
apophantically grasp its story of what is actualized, but that which,
opening to the thought of finitude, opens to the outside, that means,
to the passion of potentiality. This is to realize that this mortal called
‘man’ is not primarily the power of the negative which he uses to
constitute his own historical totalization, and encloses all that is to
come in the logic of this negativity. To realize the finitude of ‘man’
and to abandon the task of metaphysical-historical totalization—
though appears a loss to man—is more salutary task of thinking.
This retreat from, and renunciation from all possible metaphysical-
historical totalizing process is an attempt to make anew the sense
of the historicity of history for this mortal being called ‘man’. If a
fundamental attunement of melancholy adheres to our fundamental
being, essentially, in our retreating historical reflections, this only
attunes us to our damaged historical existence that bears witness the
consequences of various totalizing attempts made in the name of
certain History. The task of thinking is no longer that of judgement
of history on basis of the power of negativity, but we must disclose
at the heart of historical existence logic of judgement in relation to
a non-appropriable finitude. This non-appropriable finitude is the
ground of a freedom on the basis of which man creates his history.
The transcendence of this other time, the wholly otherwise time,
constitutes the ecstasy and passion of a finite existence. This ecstasy
and passion is the ecstasy of a freedom and passion for potentiality
that welcomes the ‘unhoped for’ that foils our expectations, that
does not belong to the logic of accumulative, linear unfolding of
homogeneous instants. This arrival is welcomed on the basis of
loosening the structure of dominant thinking; in other words,
the judgement of history itself has to be rendered monstrous. The
monstrosity of history bears witness the finitude of history itself. But
above all, this bears witness and remembers, and in remembering
prepares the advent of another coming. It is this redemptive fulfilment,
its necessity for mortal existence that pronounces judgement upon
history.
§ Transfiguration, Interruption
The event of coming calls forth two fold tasks: to interrupt what
has acquired the solidity of foundation which is legitimized by the
myth of a foundation (or founding of myth) and to transfigure what
is loosened in the given architecture of foundation into affirmation
of something ‘not yet’. Together they constitute the task of mortality
itself, for what affirms the ‘not yet’ must also affirm the unworking
of foundation so that becoming and dissolution, joyfulness and
mourning are brought together in this monstrous coupling of the two
fold interruption and transfiguration. Placed at this site of encounter,
the Open, which is the monstrous site of history itself, where the
mortal ‘ man’ is placed as the copula, as the abyss of unity between
interruption and transfiguration, man is thereby placed to welcome
the event of coming itself.
*
The demonic site of the open does not belong to necessity but to
the essence of freedom, which—in so far as it is freedom and not
necessity—always carries in itself the possibility of In Vain. In other
words, this freedom can never be completely actualized without a
melancholic remnant because of the finitude of the mortal, which is
to be distinguished from the melancholy of fulfillment, for there is
also a melancholy, albeit paradisiacal, in fulfillment. The melancholy
of In-Vain lies in the fact that the passion of potentiality that is
given in freedom may not pass over into being without reserve, that
there may always remain a remnant of un-fulfillment. This reserve
is the messianic reserve, the withdrawn in offering, the secret in
Transfiguration, Interruption • 77
promise whose fulfillment and communication demands another

event of actualization outside man’s mastery on behalf of his power
of negativity. This reserve is what exceeds the force of law and the
judgement of history. It introduces the Moment of transcendence
in each hic et nunc, rendering each hic et nunc opaque to its own
light, like the mirror that does not see its own light. This reserve
adhering in the ‘darkness of lived presence’ (Bloch 2002) that renders
each hic et nunc opaque to itself because of its excess, is the secret
of time that carries a promise outside communication; or, rather it
communicates itself in a communication that is pure communication,
pure offering, and therefore does not appear itself as communicable
in the given, already accomplished communicability. The pure
actuality of communication is not the potentiality of negativity
realized imperfectly in dialectical-historical world. In each historical
realization or production of himself as dialectical ‘man’ in this
historical world, there is always a reserve of the outside, which is the
reserve of a pure actuality of coming, which is also—paradoxically—
the pure reserve of actuality. The pure actuality cannot be thought
in ontological terms, which is neither Being nor Nothing, but what
Schelling (2000) develops in his later thought as Überseyn which is
above or outside being, and therefore outside nothing. It is beyond
and above being and nothing, and therefore is an excess of being
that opens first of all time to being and being to its time. What is
reserved is neither potentiality of being nor potentiality of nothing
but is the pure advent of actuality without remainder, which for that
matter always remains a remainder in the dialectical-historical world
of negativity. As the pure actuality of the unconditioned presencing,
this presencing in its advent conceals itself, reserves itself in the world
of finite, conditioned presences, and thereby keeps itself open to its
unconditionality that means, to its futurity which no conditioned
presences ever exhaust in any immanence of self-presence. This
reserve is the reserve of the promise of thought. While in respect
to the relation to itself it is pure actuality without remainder, in
respect to the relation to the historical world of negativity it is the
passion of potentiality that is a reserve without force and without
power. Pure giving and yet a reserve at once, simultaneously, each
time and always: such is the thought of promise, and the promise of
thought.
What exists as this finite existence, whose condition for that

matter is always only given, gifted, is never a saturated phenomenon.
Each being, insofar as it comes into existence at all, is un-saturated and
in-excess. Hence is the possibility, not only of In-Vain, but of the
unhoped for fulfillment in the possibility of the eternal remnant of
the reserve (of future and time). If what exists is not saturated merely
with its given form, with what has already arrived and become of it,
but rather ‘ventures beyond’( Bloch1995, p. 5)says, because it loves
the open sea and the blue sky above, then it must also assume the
possibility of In-Vain. The ship that loves the red dawn must traverse
many nights of perils so that the coming of the red dawn appears, and
illumines all that is coming. The abyss of the night is not an objection
that is to be eliminated, since the coming of the dawn must also
know the suffering of the brooding labour which existence undergoes.
Thinking too, in its patient waiting for the coming, undergoes, and
knows the pangs of the night out of which the dawn shines forth. It
is not for nothing that Hegel speaks of philosophy as ‘way of despair’
(1998, p.49). Yet philosophy, at least in its dominant form, also
attempts mastery of this despair, to minimize its abyss, or give itself
the vain consolation of an eternity which the concept represents. For
Hegel, the metaphysician of finitude, absolute concept is eternal, an
eternity which is not a stranger to the finitude, but an eternity that
has traversed the sufferings of finitude, and has lifted up this finitude
unto itself. Absolute concept is Calvary that has carried death to its
own transfiguration, into eternity itself.
It is not for nothing that the dominant metaphysics seeks to
master this abyss, this non-condition, this ground called mortality;
and it is possible to show that this desire of the mastery of mortality,
this thanatology, is constitutive of the dominant metaphysics of the
west. This ‘econo-onto-thanatology’ (Das 2010) constitutes itself
on certain economic figuration of death, and thereby forecloses
the astonishment of the event of the immemorial coming from a
pure future. In such a way this metaphysics, this ‘econo-onto-thana-
ontology’ comes to give itself the task to constitute a world- historical
totality, produced by the labour of the negative through the violence
of the life and death struggle for recognition. This violence consists
not merely life and death war between man against man, the ethos
of war constituting and deconstituting historical epochs one after
another, but mortal being’s metaphysical desire to master his own

ground, his own abyss, and his own mortality. Metaphysics, at least
the dominant metaphysics, bears witness this violence, man’s thetic
violence that seeks to sublate his ground, which is his non-condition,
as if his non-condition is the objection to his own existence. In this
desire for mastery, in this metaphysical violence lies the metaphysical
origin of man’s evil. This evil is the self-abnegation of the finite
creature’s own condition, that is, his finitude.
Schelling’s treatise on the essence of human freedom, which is one
of the profoundest inquiry into the question of evil in the history of
modern philosophy, attempts to think of the mortal task of freedom,
not the mastery or nihilation of abyssal ground, but transfiguration
of this non-conditional gravity into the possibility of joy and grace.
This transfiguration is the creative task of the mortal being that of
opening, or inaugurating on the basis of an inappropriable ground
of freedom ever new possibilities of future. Schelling speaks of the
flight of the Eagle: the Eagle’s flight is not elimination of the force
of gravity, but rather a continuous elevation of it into the possibility
or means to its flight. So it is with the many abysses of the night of
brooding thinking undergoes; so it is with our sorrows and our joys,
our past and future, our memory and our promise, our history and
its redemption. The task of the voyage is therefore not the self-abnegation
of finitude but a continuous elevation or an infinite transfiguration of
our ground into existence, gravity into grace. The night of brooding-
thinking, groping for illumination which is beyond is only a point
of departure—not even the origin, let alone the end—for the great
voyage it undertakes that must, because of the finitude of the mortal,
continuously ‘venture beyond’. Every arriving is always born out of
the night of brooding, groping, and foreboding, the dark night of
the eternal past before all presence which no light of the day ever
completely illuminates without remainder. This night which in itself
is no objection to existence is precisely the immemorial that opens
existence to the time yet to come. The task here is of transfiguring the
night of the immemorial into the light of the dawn, by interminably
bringing to light of hope and into its affirmation the promise that
is given in the immemorial, in the already always, before any self-
presence of presence. Every coming into presence is born out of the
non-condition that places us unto the Open, that releases us to the
welcoming of the gift that bears the mark of our death, a death that
cannot be reduced to the ‘econo-onto-thanatology’ of the dominant
onto-theological totalization, but opens us to the pure potentiality of
presencing of presence.
In order to welcome the shining of the arriving, it is necessary to
confront the abyss of the past, to enter into the concentrated form
of existence that has become (existence thick with ‘the darkness
of presence’), not in order to tarry with it, but rather so that all
that has solidified into the concentrated form of present existence
is melted anew, given away, given to its own worklessness, and is
opened thereby to welcome the coming, to welcome what has not
yet solidified into presence and that has not acquired the darkness of
the past. This mortality is not Calvary of the concept, but the tragic
task of existence itself: every now and then existence is to be given
over to that ‘monstrous coupling’ where becoming and dissolution
are united, where joy is at once touched with that unspeakable
melancholy that spreads over our whole existence. All coming of
the new is essentially an act of transfiguration: what has become of
existence and has acquired the solidity of a foundation through our
objective-historical institutions (this historico-discursive foundation
of our existence that has become of us) and through which we have
known ourselves to have become, through which we have given
ourselves to ourselves as historical being, all that is to be transfigured
into what is not yet, into an affirmation of a ‘becoming through
perishing’, of an opening that at once keeps itself in reserve through
which the promise is kept in secret. But this transfiguration of despair
into hope, of sorrows into joy, of our melancholic existence into the
joyous affirmation of redemption in coming, of what is into what is
not yet is not without interruption. It is rather that transfiguration
demands interruption, as a light requires an already opening and
clearing where it may then shine forth. As mere interruption of
the given without transfiguration—interruption of that which has
become a foundation for us—is nihilism; so transfiguration without
interruption is mere continuity of the what has become of existence
as mere extension: it does not then affirm the eternal ‘Yes’ that
welcomes, in unconditioned hospitality, the unapparent presencing
of the wholly otherwise.
This task of transfiguration through interruption of solidified

past, and reified, this undoing of a sedimented foundation: this is
what finite politics means, not the politics which is performed by
the economic figuration of the work of death, but an opening of
being to the advent of the unapparent that is marked by the gift of
death. It is this that first of all gives us the mortals any sense of the
political and presence ethical at all: that is, as an open existence,
we are thrown, exposed unto the Open by mortality, unto the pure
possibility of the advent of history.. As the Night to be transfigured
into the Dawn, the abyss of the Night is to be interrupted, so
redemptive affirming of the coming time demands that what has
become and has become dead, or those whose death has rendered
our melancholy unredeemed, our sorrows and mourning for the lost
that has pervaded our existence, this mourning and unredeemed
melancholy is to be transfigured into an affirmation of the coming
time, towards a redemption in future always in reserve, for it is
already always in the Open.
So it is with individual existence. The ground of his existence lies in

the irrecuperable abyss of the past where he was not yet there—or, he
was there as not yet, as a kind of possible actual. Each present moment
of existence for the existent is thick with this dark light. Therefore
existence comes too late to us as awareness and when we are aware
of existence, we already are ‘thrown’ to the world, or we have already
arrived to presence, as if something has already passed us—that
opening that is already there in the coming into the light—and has
now become the abyss, has receded into the past, an inscrutable
and unfathomable ground. This belatedness of our arriving makes
us non-contemporary in relation to the ground of our existence.
An irreducible separation, an originary disjunction, a chasm marks
our existence, exposing us for the first time to what is outside all
presence: to the immemorial and to the un-anticipatable. It is on this
space of exposure that spaces us to time, it is in this ‘the-there’ (‘Da’
of Heidegger’s Dasein) that history arrives for us from the destination
of pure futurity.
The being-there of the opening, or clearing that has become the abyss,
is not an objection, nor is it anyway blocking of existence coming to
presence. There lies the interminable, the infinite task for the mortals:
not the mastery, nor appropriation of this non-conditional ground
unto the immanence of self-presence, but continually to elevate,
transfigure the abyss into affirmation of the coming, of darkness
into the light, so as to keep open the possibility of originary opening
once more, that means, infinitely. To transfigure the abyss into an
affirmation of coming is not thereby a negation or a mastery of the
abyss; it is rather to carry, within existence, its own abyss as abyss, and
to render at each moment, our individual and historical existence
un-predicative and incalculable, releasing the unconditioned in us
from what Jean Luc Nancy calls ‘the immanent self-consumption’
(Nancy 1993, p.13). To render our existence un-predicative, and to
release that transcendence from any given totalization is to be, at
each moment, finite and mortal, but it is an unenclosed mortality
and an unenclosed finitude, open to the fear and trembling, to the
astonishment of the event, or even to the madness of the moment
that seizes us, dispropriates us, and opens our given form of existence
into the transcendence of the future. It is in relation to this futurity
that a kind of transcendence is possible for the mortals, an eternity is
granted as a gift from freedom with which history inaugurates itself,
not in relation to its immanent ground, but bearing the promise of
transcendence given in the immemorial. The thought of future of
history is the thought of its redemption itself. Redemption means here
none other than the coming to presence that is kept open in the opening.
Its task is the infinite transfiguration and keeping open of the past
unto the future, unto the possible, unto the coming to presence. This
‘facticity’ of the coming to presence of existence, the ‘that is’ irreducible
to the empirical facts of every particularity of this and that, the being-
there of the Open is intimated in non-predicative disclosure of
language that arrives as lightning flash, exposes us to the astonishing
event of language.
Each time someone arrives, it arrives as this singular presentation
that is non-contemporaneous with itself: it is already always opened
up in the abyss, in that caesural yawning gap where there occurs the
coupling between the immemorial past and the coming. Existence
is always singular each time, belonging never to the logic of the
system, irreducible to the universality of categories, already always
falling away from the order of generality that tends to constitute a
form of totality. It is as if a never grounded interval inscribes itself

between itself and itself. Hence existence can only present itself
to itself as a relation to a never grounded past, as if as it were it is
born out of the disjunction between its ground and its coming into
existence, the non-conditional ground that has now fallen outside
of existence. Schelling calls this originary fall which falls outside
in the immemorial, eternal past as a result of the disjunction or
cision, as Abfall. This character of belatedness of existence, this non-
contemporaneous character carries the latency of its own coming
into future and hence the necessity, in creative freedom, to affirm a
future yet to come. Because of this non-contemporaneous character
of existence, it still has at each moment of arriving, the something of
the not yet of come in itself that has remained as surplus, as excess,
of an un-saturated remnant. To affirm the coming in the not yet, it is
necessary for it to interrupt and transfigure what has come into an
affirmation of future, which demands that the phenomenology of the
visible to open to the phenomenon of the unapparent that cannot be
grasped by the categorical, eidetic acts of consciousness.
If a certain thanatology has governed the dominant metaphysics,
it is thereby unable to open itself, or rather is insufficiently open
towards any affirmation of a coming time. Therefore it is necessary to
expose this thanatology, which is nothing sort of ontology, to open to
the passivity of the inception and the non-predicative redemption of
the coming. This is one way to conceive of a new critique of violence,
not merely of the violence that manifests every now and then as ‘this’
or ‘that’ violent act, but of this metaphysical violence on the basis of
which alone the violence of man can be understood.
Transfiguration demands that something of what has become
be posited as ‘that it has become so’, or ‘it was so’—that means
interrupting the concentrated presence, or solidified past—so that
an opening to ‘that is not yet so’, or ‘that it was not yet so’ is possible.
This opening of the space, between ‘that it has become so’ and ‘that it
is not yet so’, is the space of interruption, the interval of the caesura,
the epochal rupture of history, of which Hölderlin speaks of as the
site of becoming as perishing, where the transfiguration also takes
place as corollary of interruption. One who affirms the possibility
of his own becoming, that is, what is not yet become of him, must
interrupt himself, and interrupt all that has become of him, as if he
has thereby made himself a monster, or rendered himself the play

space where infinite and finitude, joyous mourning and becoming
one, perishing and coming to be are yoked together. As if what has
served hitherto the ground and foundation of his own existing, all
that is now dissolved; as if confronting his own mortality—to which
he is exposed in the opening—he enters there and then into the
darkness of his being and confronts his solidified past, giving over
his solidified foundation to its unworking. He interrupts himself by
rendering himself a past; what seemed to him as clear as the day and
what he is confident about the solidity and substantiality of being
now evaporates. The abyss of the night is transfigured into light
through this interruption, as future transfigures the past, and thereby
redeems it. The entering into the night is also the entering into the
light that shines in the distance, as point of departure into the new
sea—towards the distance more future than any future present—
towards the future, which is not already given.
Since the coming light is not a given truth, it belongs to the
undecidable and the unpredicative. It is the possible which also
includes the possibility of the not coming of the light at all. Each
affirmation of the possible is simultaneously an affirmation of the
non-condition; it at once an impossible where the vertigo of the
undecidable watches over us, where the madness of the non-thought
keeps vigil, where the anguish and despair of the unnamable tempers
with the possible. To the possible belongs not only realizable and
realized, but also the unrealized and the unrealizable. It is on the
non-condition of the possible that possibility and impossibility
makes themselves manifest. To exist is to be tempered with the
non-condition. To render existence open to its non-condition is the
highest effort of thinking. Its logic is not provided by the speculative-
dialectical logic of the predicative proposition.
The demonic essence of possibility is essentially the excess of
freedom. Here the possibility holds that the possible may not pass
into, or pass over to being, since it does not have the self-foundational
character of a logical necessity and identity, so that a releasing, a
freeing and opening remains for the possibility of the otherwise. This
is what we call, in the highest sense, contingency, the possibility of the
otherwise to come, which is also the possibility of the non-arrival. The
logic of the possible is not the dialectical-speculative logic of negativity.
It does not convert the nothingness into being without a remainder.

The possibility of the non-possible does not belong to the traditional
logic, because it defies the logical principle of non-contradiction
and identity. The possibility of the non-possible, instead, belongs
to what call the Open: in the Open the otherwise may come, the
impossibility may arrive, and the possibility may not pass over into
being. Each time the voyage begins and the ship sails, it is inserted
into the undecidable and the incalculable: the incalculability of the
demonic weather, a madness and a certain monstrosity takes its vigil.
This monstrosity, not enough of being human, claims the mortal,
and delivers him to his mortality, for man is the mortal who never
becomes completely ‘human’ enough. Sometimes the monstrosity of
history leads one to stray into the wrong paths, insofar as decisions
are always taken at the limit, insofar man belongs to freedom and not
freedom to man. Hence the voyage into the coming is incalculable
par excellence: the voyage of the possible, since it is in love with the
open sea and blue sky above, with the horizon without horizontality,
it does not yet know its own destination and destiny, whose only
destiny is to be without destination, an affirmation of the incalculable
and arriving of the light without certitude of knowledge. The light
may fall, or the moment arrives without thunders and lightning, but
in a faint murmur of the dawn, or in ‘doves’ feet’ that guides the
world: ‘it is the stillest words which bring the storm, thoughts that
come on doves’ feet guide the world’ (Nietzsche 1992,p. 35). The
destiny of a voyage without destination is in love with the freedom of
the unknown, for the unknown arrives with a freedom whose ground
is not yet given, but that has claimed man and in claiming man,
releases man to the open. Heidegger could write,
Freedom governs the open in the sense of the cleared and lighted up,
i.e., of the revealed. It is to the happening of revealing, i.e., of truth,
that freedom stands in the closest and must intimate kinship... All
revealing comes out of the open, goes into the open, and brings into
the open.
He goes on to say,
Freedom is that which conceals in a way that opens to light, in whose
clearing there simmers that veil that covers what comes to presence of
all truth and lets the veil appear as what veils. Freedom is the realm
of the destining that at any given time starts a revealing upon its way.
(Heidegger 1977, p. 25).
Kant had something like an intimation of this abyssal, inscrutable
ground of freedom that claims the mortals, on the basis of which
mortals are what they come to be. Therefore existence remains for
Kant something un-predicable, which remains as remnant outside all
predication, not as a result of the process of predication, but what is
already always presupposed even the process of predication to begin.
What Kant wanted to think, through freedom as what is inscrutable,
is the dark abyss, which is also the pure offering, the sublime offering,
the gift from a destination wholly otherwise. This un-predicable is
not what would be one day predicated in absolute knowledge, and
therefore existence, because it is the pure gift, sublime offering from
other destination, cannot be included in any system of knowledge,
even if it is absolute knowledge. There can only be pure presentation
(Darstellung) as distinguished from representation of a dialectically
mediated knowledge, which is in appearing as unapparent, elicits
from us respect (Achtung). It is this finitude of the mortals that is
truly tragic, and not the tragic of the dialectical mediation of the
infinite and finitude uplifted (Aufheben) unto unity through which
there occurs atonement of gilt. Life being essentially mortal and
ineluctably finite is a synthesis of the infinite and finitude. But this
synthesis is never a unity for man. It lies outside of mortals as a kind
of abyss, a kind of inscrutable, dark ground. It is the separation from
this synthesis the coming arrives as unknown, out of an unground,
since the foundation of the solidified presence is infinitely interrupted
and given over to the opening.
Should we name this opening as ‘beginning’?
The Logic of Origin • 87
§ The Logic of Origin
We are too late for the gods

And too early for Being.
Being’s poem,
Just began, is man.
Martin Heidegger (2001, p.4)
Of Beginning
The question of beginning is not merely the beginning of questioning
for philosophy; it is also the most difficult one. Does philosophy begin
with something, or someone, with ‘that’ of a beginning or with ‘what’
of a beginning? Where and when is the beginning a ‘beginning’? Is
it that with each beginning, at each single instance opening towards
the coming, must there remain open an already always so that
beginning—multiple and singular each moment—is already to come
in advance, a future that arrives from the past or that is given as
promise in the immemorial past? This will be to think beginning itself
as promise, which is each time the promise of the coming which is always
to come. In that sense Heidegger’s notion of the phenomenology of
the unapparent is a phenomenology of promise, the thought of an
originary promise that first opens time to the being that is essentially
finite and ineluctably mortal. There must already have began a
beginning which is inappropriable, inscrutable and the groundless
opening, therefore an eternal beginning, in relation to which alone
existence comes to presence, and wherein alone lies the creatureliness
of the mortal being: on this account the creature called ‘man’ is who
happens to arrive as this being. In the beginning an opening holds

sway as the possibility of beginning, as the promise of arriving, an
opening with which every voyaging begins, the ship ventures forth,
sallies beyond and welcomes the open sea in its infinite ebb and flows
and the blue sky opening above with the play of lights and darkness
unknown. The beginning is the spacing where there occurs the play,
the play of not yet seen thousand morning rays and thousand not yet
known evening twilight . It is that the beginning, at the same time,
that is yet to come, at each instance, beginning that is never given
in advance so that each beginning is a beginning wholly otherwise,
wholly anew, wholly dawning. Such a past is always to come in future,
a past to come, for which it is necessary that beginning will also always
begin in future, that in the future there may remain the possibility of
the ever new beginning. This ever new possibility of beginning which
is also always to come is the messianic notion of promise par excellence.
Here neither the past is seen as a mere passed past, nor is the future
seen as a future that will come to pass.
The question of beginning is that of opening, of inception that
is to come, an inception that is to be renewed each instance, at each
presentation of presence, so that at each instance that there be an
inception of renewal. Such a thinking of beginning, in order to
distinguish from another notion of beginning—dialectical-speculative
beginning, for example, that follows the logic of generation—shall be
called here as ‘inception’. Heidegger in his lectures on Parmenides
calls such a beginning ‘in-ception’ (An-fang) that is distinguished
from beginning as ‘outset’. The latter is the thinking of beginning at
a definite time, or historical epoch, while inception is the thinking of
beginning itself, where thinking is no more mastering of beings, but
thinking outside a given, dominant metaphysics, thinking that steps
back, or retreats from such a metaphysics. Heidegger says:
In distinction from the mastering from beings, the thinking of
thinkers is the thinking of Being. Their thinking is a retreating in face
of Being… The beginning is not something dependent on the favor
of these thinkers, where they are active in such and such a way, but,
rather, the reverse: the beginning is that which begins something with
these thinkers—by laying a claim on them in such a way that from
them is demanded an extreme retreating in the face of Being. The
thinkers are begun by the beginning: ‘in-cepted’ [An-gefangenen] by
the in-ception [An-fang]; they are taken up by it and are gathered into
it. (Heidegger 1992, pp. 7-8).
This promise of such inception, which is also the promise of coming, is a gift
of thinking that must retreat from the techno-thana-ontological mastery
of entities presently given. The gift of time is that of the possibility of
its renewal in each hic et nunc: such is here the thought of inception
with which the voyage of thinking begins, always anew and always
otherwise, always with a repetition that never repeats as the same.
With the inception the wholly otherwise, and wholly coming is given
as a gift that incalculably arrives from future that endows time with
eternity, since this gift has already always opened the mortal being to
a never passed immemorial past and to the incalculable future, and
thereby redeeming time itself, as if for the first time and each time,
opening time to its transcendence. This eternity is not the eternal
immobility of the empty time, nor the mobility of the monotonous
conceptual generation (for concept to generate, none otherwise than
concepts are necessary) but the eternity of actual beginning to arrive.
This eternity is a finite eternity which presents itself in the lightning
flash of its advent where becoming and perishing strikes the mortals,
seizes them and opens them to the inauguration of a new history.
This is what will be spoken here of as the logic of origin. The logic of
the origin, the scene of the origin, is the originary not yet1. It is the
logic of the future of the past and the past of the not yet. The originary
not yet is the originary gift of time that endows upon the mortals the
task—for all gift brings along with it a task—to renew this gift of
mortality, and thereby delivering this gift to its own transcendence,
in so far as renewal transcends each time what is given and brings
to it what is always and each time new. Such transcendence will be
each moment a finite transcendence that befits this finite being called
‘man’. This finite transcendence opens the finite being to the divine
excess, to the advent of the holy in the separation that holds together
the divine and the mortal.
Man is this openness to its beginning that transcends itself. With
this is given the hope that redeems and rewards the travail which the
voyage undergoes, goes itself under, ex-periences itself (that also means
ex-periences ahead of itself, going beyond of itself, outside of itself,
becoming other of oneself ) as undergoing perils of the tempestuous
sea, yet frolicking forth with energy and passion for the unknown,
living at the edge or limit of the world so that the light of the eye meets
the light of the Sun. Thinking is always, as Ernst Bloch says, ‘venturing
beyond’. In this sense the thought of an immemorial promise is not
alien to ‘perilous being’ that the mortal essentially is. The notion of
experience here is not constitutive of an eidetic consciousness, or of
a transcendental subject’s Parousia. The notion of ‘experience’ here is
to be thought outside of any eidetic phenomenology. It is rather to
name what is unnamable, that of the essential ‘peril of being’ who
is exposed to what arrives from ‘beyond’. The undergoing itself is
thereby going beyond, venturing beyond of itself: these two meanings
are interwoven in the word ‘experience’. What sinks us also elevates us.
Or in Hölderlin’s words: ‘Where the danger grows, there too grows
the saving grace’. The German word for ‘experience’, Er-fahrung,
evokes this experience of traversal or voyaging with the possibility
of perils to be undergone. What is undergone falls upon him who
undergoes and as Heidegger (1982, p. 57) says, transfigures him. The
gift of time with which the possibility of the eternity of ever renewed
and wholly otherwise inceptions are given, transfigures the one who
undergoes the voyage of experiencing and thinking that seeks the
beyond, the furthest and the more distant than any others that are
known in advance, beyond all that is programmable and calculable.
Were there not given this gift of time, nothing new would arrive and
come; the melancholy of the unredeemed presence and past would
lose the meaning of eternity for us, and nothing would remain as
promise for us, for with the gift of time there is also given the gift of
remaining time beyond that has become, beyond that has grown old
and stale and decayed, beyond all entities of the given presence that
make up the world in its given-ness.
The gift of ever new beginning yet to come is always a gift of
eternity of future, a gift of remaining and redemption. The gift of
time must keep—how to keep the gift of time—the remembrance
of this gift and the remembrance of its task, that of the task of
remembering the immemorial. But this remembrance through
which ever new beginning is renewed in thinking, in acting, in our
historical labour and through our historical-discursive formation, is
a remembrance that is not of mere past, therefore not a recollection,
but renewal in presence unto the eternity of future. This means: there
must be a remembrance of which is not yet remembered and has not yet
passed through ‘the gallery of images’, a remembrance that arrives only
at the cost of an essential ‘peril of being’ to which beings are exposed
and which releases these being from the immanence of self-presence.
We forget this future in our absorption in ‘the darkness of the lived
moment’ (Bloch 2000, p. 276), or in the illusion of false eternity,
or in our distraction and drowning in the rumbling monotony of
presents that pass away unredeemed. Therefore the task of remembrance
claims from this historical mortal being an almost insomniac vigilance
and attention. For the eternity of coming to redeem the not yet
redeemed, it is necessary that each single instance of the beginning
is wholly otherwise beginning, wholly opening towards outside,
hollowing inside out, voiding the being of our being so that in the
pure nakedness of exposure, the other may burst forth. There alone,
melancholic time thickened with the unredeemed past, sees the light
coming from wholly other destination and is endowed with eternity.
This wholly otherwise destination cannot be subordinated to any ideology
of finalism in the form of teleology or eschatology. This eternity, this
transcendence comes from the incalculable, non-teleological future
which is not the future as one of the modes of temporality, but
the Moment that illuminates the entirety of existence and redeems
time endowing it with the stamp of eternity. The Moment is the
incalculable advent of the future, of transcendence bursting into that
seizes the mortal, historical existence. Then ‘all that is solid melts
into air’ (Marx & Engels 2002, p. 70) . The Moment is the moment
of fear and trembling, when mortality claims upon our solidified
foundation. Such a moment can be called ‘revolution’, which is the
moment of coming and perishing united in a ‘monstrous coupling’.
It is the possible, the category of which is profounder, vaster than
anything that is presently given, is a form of eternity. ‘Thus understood’,
writes Kierkegaard, ‘the moment is not properly an atom of time,
but an atom of eternity. It is the first reflection of eternity in time,
its first attempt, as it were, at the stopping time’ (Kierkegaard 1980,
p. 88). At the time of revolution, which is the time without time,
because it is the demonic coupling of the beginning of time and end
of time simultaneously, time itself, as if, stops dead, and assumes the
stillness of an eternity. The future from wholly otherwise destination
bursts forth, and bursts into the concentrated thickness of presence,
and tears apart any closure of immanent self-presence. The mortals

experience this form of eternity as death, as an excess that strikes
with violence without violence, when the moment becomes the site
of monstrosity. The entirety of time is then experienced at this single
moment of revolution when the whole of history presents itself in
a Darstellung where the unapparent advents. Such a moment is the
moment of, what Hölderlin speaks as ‘becoming in dissolution’ when
the disappearing of the fugitive gods and the advent of the coming
Holy is experienced with a joyous mourning. This becomes possible
because interruption has opened it, prepared it to the coming of
the otherwise, and to the arriving of transcendence in astonishment
that transfigures and redeems all that has been into the coming by
delivering all that is solid into the peril of its being. Mortals receive
this guest of eternity in a hospitality attuned to a pure seizure, to a
fear and trembling.
The bursting of eternity of future into presence, because it is
experienced as a kind of violence (without violence), it is the peril
of the voyage, more perilous than any others, but there also lies
its saving grace, its redemption. The faint murmur of the coming
redemption is not alien to the tearing apart of the present; likewise
the becoming is not alien to perishing. In the opening voyage lies
an opening to the unpredictability and the incalculability of the
inception. Inception incepts, not the lifeless and harmless pure
Being of empty generation which Hegelian logic dramatizes, but a
coming in astonishment and wonder, in ecstasy and tearing apart,
a sundering inside out. Inception is an exposure to the thunders
and lightning that also bring coming murmurs of redemption. This
tearing apart and exposing to the coming is also an interruption,
but an interruption that requires ever new beginning, ever renewed
voyage on the open sea. Interruption is not blockade of the ever-new
possibility of inception and of ever renewed voyage, but that delivers
and exposes the ship to the demonic weather of the beyond. There
lies the gift of time that rendering the origin into a remnant to come,
endows the voyage with the gift of eternity.
With it, as if, time itself begins anew. This beginning of time
is caesural. The possibility of this beginning of time is inseparable
from the anguish of disjunction and sufferings of waiting. With the
possibility of ever new inception of time through cision and caesura,
the promise of eternity is itself inseparable. In these moments finite

beings partake of the eternity of time, and shares in the divine excess.
The future arrives, eternity bursts into, and there comes redemption
in lightning flashes. This promise is granted to man only on the basis
of his perilous exposure to his mortality, only when man opens his
soul to eternity in anguish of his mortal condition.
One, who learns to wait, also learns to hope.
Madness
If the energy of thinking is not saturated and exhausted in mere
clarification of the given world, or phenomenon that are presently
come, cognized and grasped, but to expose to the event of coming to
the presence of the world and thereby venturing beyond the already
given, then this venturing must be irreducible to the immobile,
vacant, theoretical gaze of the philosopher and of the sober, sterile
scholar who petrifies the event of truth unto mediated determinations
or categorical cognition. Such a theoretical thinker and sober scholar,
who are never touched by the divine madness and creative ecstasy,
can only see what has been presently given state of the affairs of the
world. Aristotle speaks of certain people whose greatness is constantly
touched by certain madness, albeit regulated, for such a joyous, divine
look sees what is not yet given but that constantly lies as the light
and warmth of future within the womb of the dark presence that is
opaque to itself, not because of its lack of presence, but precisely due
to the excess of presencing in it. It is the light that the present does
not contain within itself as the self-contained form, but that threatens
to burst forth from within as the light of grace that escapes the force
of gravity. The seeing that sees the future in matter, the infinity in the
finite and the eternity of the Moment in each his et nunc is touched
by the ecstasy of existence coming to presencing, because in such a
look there appears the unapparent apparition of coming, the event
of future, the infinite appearing in the finite as a kind of excess, as
a kind of non-economic offering or as a sublime gift, immeasurable
in itself precisely because it gives the measure its ‘measure-ness’.
The phenomenology of excess which such a seeing calls forth is a
phenomenology of pure donation where the excess of the invisible
incessantly exposes the domain of the visible from the immanence
of self-presence to what is incomprehensible and unfathomable yet

which alone grants us the gleam of life. For such a phenomenology of
excess language is not an expression of conceptual thought, nor mere
exteriorization of the interior, nor is it a phenomenology of spirit
coming to the immanence of self-consciousness. It is rather exposure
to the excess of the gift which the incomprehensible generously and
exuberantly grants us so that the invisible and unapparent may comes
to presence here and now.
Schelling works towards such an unheard phenomenology of
excess that while opening us to being and truth conceals itself. ‘
whoever has to some extent’ says Schelling, ‘exercised their eye for the
spiritual contemplation of natural things knows that a spiritual image
whose mere vessel is the coarse and ponderable, is actually what is
living within the coarse and ponderable. The purer the image is, the
healthier the whole is. This incomprehensible but not imperceptible
being, always ready to overflow and yet always held again, and which
alone grants to all things the full charm, glint and gleam of life, is
that which is at the same time most manifest and most concealed.
Because it only shows itself amidst a constant mutability, it draws
all the more as the glimpse of the actual being that lies concealed
within all things of the world and which simply awaits its liberation’
(Schelling 2000, pp. 61-2) . The world for such an ecstatic, poetic
look is not yet a finished world, for the promise of its coming is not
yet over, the world has not yet completely become. The world appears
rather as pure donation wherein the enigma of manifestation is not
yet saturated. This phenomenon of manifestation is not the manifestation
of a phenomenon that can be measured by cognitive categories, for what
manifests is the excess itself, the excess of manifestation as such. Such
a look can be called an utopian look, in the sense of ‘utopia’ that
is without ‘topia’, without ‘topos’, a topos that has not yet been
determined as ‘this’ historical place, as ‘this’ geographical territory, as
‘this’ epochal community that is known to us, cognized by us, that
has become the world-historical ‘lived experience’ for us.
For that matter utopian thinking is neither vain thinking, nor
mere fantasizing about a wonderland where everything is beautiful
and harmonious, where being coincides without remainder with its
own time. What is happiness if not being’s unity to its own time? If
one still retains the notion of utopia, it is in the sense of a messianic
promise where the transcendence of the coming is in-dissociably

bound up with the intensity of the here and now, where the plenitude
and the bursting of here and now is not yet finished, cognized, grasped
at any given present instant. The Moment of here and now would
appear then not as presently appearing instant that is destined to pass
away in a successive manner, but as a non-saturated excess which brings
into its gift a donation of its own inexhaustive infinity, its own future.
This is a future in each here and now: a kind of excess of the world, a
kind of ecstasy of time, a kind of vertigo of phenomenon, a kind of
‘dream of the matter’ as Marx says, or a sort of a madness of reason.
This madness is not annihilation of reason but what sustains and
nourishes reason. This future is not an annulment of here and now,
but what bestows upon each here and now the poetry of plenitude, the
darkness of the Moment, the excess of presencing over each and every
given presence. It is ebullience of future, an emblem of eternity, a kiss
of joy. The poet-thinker’s task, which is not dissociable from certain
ecstasy (because it is constantly solicited to a certain madness, unlike
the imbecile theoretician and the sterile scholar), is to see the future
in each here and now, to see the eternity of the Moment that suddenly
arrives, to dream ‘the dream of the matter’, to release the writhing
soul animating the form of things. Therefore a kind of vertigo or even
madness adheres to the poet thinker’s very existence, seizing his soul
to its innermost depth that first dispossessing him, depriving him of
himself, bestows upon him the creative word, his poetic saying. It is
the ‘divine madness’ that enraptures the poet, because this ‘divine
madness’ releases him unto the open where the eternity appears to
him with a mark of happiness.
In all essential thinking that does not seek to annihilate the
phenomenality of phenomenon or to damage phenomenon with
its death like cognition is constantly solicited to a certain madness,
which is a solicitation to the unthought, to a radical exteriority, to an
essential solitude that mortality bestows upon thinking. The solitude
of such a dream, utopian, is not a self-enclosed consciousness shut
within its self-consuming immanence. Solitude, in that sense, is that
moment of being exposed to the not yet, as an essential moment of
peril of the given state of consciousness and which is not yet shared
within the given world of generality. Such a thinking will be called
finite thinking, a finite thinking where finitude and thinking are not
in accidental relationship, but rather a thinking that is, essentially,

inextricably finite. Thinking that is not touched by a certain solicitation
to madness, to its radical exteriority and to the unthinkable is
satisfied with the mere sterile cognition of the presently given world,
or phenomenon. It does not know the ecstasy of the exuberant
future latent in phenomena and existence, the writhing reason in
existence that seeks its coming into existence out of a non-reason, the
unapparent in all that is apparent, ‘the invisible remainder’ in all that
is visible. Like poets, Schelling says, ‘also the philosophers have their
ecstasy. They need this in order to be safe, through the feeling of the
indescribable reality of that higher representation, against the coerced
concepts of an empty dialectic that lacks enthusiasm’ (Schelling
2000, p. xxxviii). Unlike the theoretical and sterile cognition of the
scholar untouched by madness, a poet-thinker is like a pregnant
woman who bears the future in her womb, the exuberant future
whose transcendence is not fixed in the monotonous, immobile gaze
of the theoretician. Schelling speaks of this sterile intellectual as the
one in which:
[T]here is no madness whatsoever. These would be the uncreative
people incapable of procreation, the ones that call themselves sober
spirits. These are the so called intellectuals whose works and deeds
are nothing but cold intellectuals works and intellectual deeds…
but where there is no madness, there is certainly no proper, active,
living intellect (and consequently there is just the dead intellect, dead
intellectuals). (Ibid., p.103)
The moment here and now is like this pregnant woman. Each
apparition carries its invisible, dark source that renders the remote
future nearer to nearness, and its nearness to itself distant than any
distance. Not only the poet but even a thinker has a relation to
certain joyous madness, for an essential thinker sees not only what
has arrived, but the arrived that is pregnant with the unborn, the light
that is dark now—not with lack of presence, but due to the excess
of presencing over the present. But a sterile scholar and an imbecile
theoretician who is not solicited to vertigo of the unthought, to the
abyss of madness, or to pregnancy of exteriority, can only produce
logical categories that can grasp in a reductive totalizing manner
only what is amenable to logical thought, namely, the entities that
has become. Therefore logic gives the theoretical philosopher certain

pretension to totality, or system of visible forms. Since such totality,
or system seeks to include all that has become and presently given,
such totality can only be the most banal, most sterile totality without
ecstasy, without transcendence. It must not know, for that matter,
the exuberant future of each here and now, the bursting Moment
of eternity that overflows the cup of time, the ecstasy of the leap
that steps outside the totality of visible forms, that ‘the dream of the
matter’ which is not mere inert material malleable to the concept.
The invisible poesy of the future which each here and now bears in
its dream has a different logic of origin, a logic that is touched by a
constant solicitation to its inscrutable ground, to the madness of an
unthinkable, to the exuberant future, to the unapparent apparition
of the coming that is promised in it at the inception.
This logic of origin has a different logic than the logical origin
of concepts that generate their own end and beginning. Each here
and now carries the dream of its messianic completion that is outside
time, in a certain sense, in that it does not belong to the time that
is presently given. Therefore a finite thinking is a contemplation
of the timeless promise, not in the sense of the endlessness of time
that is the infinite lengthening of a homogenous instant, nor in the
sense of the pure void of time, but the coming of time itself and its
completion, which for that matter, strikes the mortals as eternity.
Such an eternity that attunes us with a beatific joy is not a dialectical
time of history, nor the mythic time of the a-historical, nor is it self-
positing thetic time of the logical. Neither dialectical time of history
nor mythic-tragic time without time, nor self-positing thetic time of
logic brings us joy and happiness and give us hope, for each of them
is only cognition of presently given entities. As Schelling (Ibid., p.42)
speaks of joy that only future brings, the pure future without any
reduction to self-presence, so only a time that in a messianic hope
anticipates at each here and now and renews the promise of inception
and completion can make us joyous, because such an eternity alone
is an affirmation of future at each hic et nunc, at each presentation
of presence, at each appearing of the unapparent. At each hic et nunc
there must arrive a future, at each presentation of presence there must
arrive an arrival. Each here and now is eternal and at once radically
finite. Its apparition is sudden advent, like a lightning flash, in the
most immediately ordinary here and now that illumines our existence,
because therein eternity itself presents itself in its arrival. We are then
open to eternity, mortal and finite that we are. Such an eternity can
only be a finite eternity, and so its illumination: it disrupts itself,
interrupts itself, suspends itself in its advent so that its recalcitrant
apparition escapes the vacant gaze of the logical-dialectical thinker,
his logical categories, and his predicative concepts, however their
claim for mobility may be.
The apparition of finitude that strikes the mortals with a silence, and
escapes the categories of the logical thinker, is the interest of existence,
according to Constantine Constantius. The finitude is the interest
of existence, if not the interest of a logic (even if it is for Hegelian
speculative version of it), for this logical movement is only an
immanent movement, and therefore does not suffer finitude, for
what at stake in suffering is this not-being-able-to-remain immanent,
this not-being-able-to-be, this outside of itself that writhes in agony
and cannot contain within itself its own movement. All actual
movement begins with pain and suffering, and not with the lifeless,
dull logical category of beginning that begins with the immediate.
It is in this sense one can say that logic does not know suffering
which is the interest of existence, in the sense that Franz Rosenzweig
speaks of philosophy that philosophy does not know mortality. The
logical movement is a false movement; it does not begin with the
actual, real beginning—that is, with sufferings of mortality, with
the transcendence of finitude, with the agony of a beginning. The
agony of the beginning is the agony of thought’s inability to begin
with itself, its inability to retrieve its own condition and ground, its
inability to master its own abyss. This radical finitude of thinking
renders thinking short of any totalization and completion, for this
finitude does not exhaustively acquire the visible forms that constitute
totality. It thereby, ineluctably, falls short of its absolute and systemic
completion. Suffering does not have system; only logic can have
systemic completion. The vertigo that founders and falters thinking,
this impossibility called madness that watches over thinking, this
ecstasy and agony of the beginning shows the fragility of thinking,
as if thinking in order to prosper, must constantly negotiate with its
radical impossibility and a madness, which is not a negotiable other
but the non-negotiable itself. This effort of thinking that thinking
invests its energy in order to begin and to prosper makes all beginning
painful, even despairing. This logic of origin is of a different origin
than the beginning of the logical process that simply, harmlessly and
without agony, begins with the immediate which smoothly passes
into the mediation. This logic that begins with agony is the logic of
existence itself to which existence is thrown and is an agonal being.
For the thinking to begin actually and really, that is, finitely and
mortally, this finitude and mortality must not be the result of a logical
process. The beginning of this movement is the movement that
existence itself makes, of its coming into presence. For existence pain
is the interest, the innermost and profoundest interest of existence,
for it is in suffering that existence makes the first, the beginning
movement of its coming into presence, and it’s disappearance in death.
Therefore, in so far as suffering is concerned, logic founders as soon
as suffering manifests itself in the existent. The apparition of suffering
in existence is not the moment of negativity that is again uplifted
(Aufheben) in the universality of reconciliation. What manifests as
suffering in existence is the element that escapes the reconciliatory
logic of the speculative-dialectical tragedy.
The suffering one, then, makes another movement of beginning
which is irreducible to the movement of the speculative. It is the
movement that opens itself to the divine order where cry of the
singular being is heard, and where the anguish of death is not
vainly consoled in the universal order of generality. Referring to
what Constantine Constantius speaks of repetition as the interest of
metaphysics, Vigilius Haufniensis says:
[This] sentence contains an allusion to the thesis that metaphysics is
disinterested, as Kant affirmed of aesthetics. As soon as the interest
emerges, metaphysics steps to one side. For this reason the word
interest is italicized. The whole interest of subjectivity emerges in real
life, and then metaphysics founders. (Kierkegaard 1957, p.16)
When Constantine Constantius and Vigilius Haufniensis (two of the

pseudonyms of Kierkegaard) refer to the foundering of metaphysics
when repetition becomes the interest of metaphysics, they allude to
the element of suffering in existence. The manifestation of suffering
mocks at the vain arrogance of logic, even if it is the speculative logic
of Hegel that claims to include existence within the visible forms of its
system as a category amongst others. The speculative logic founders

and steps outside of its vain arrogance when suffering itself makes
manifest, and when it manifests itself to be completely other than
‘the agony of the concept’2. The principle of logic and the principle
of metaphysics is the same, which is to say, that the metaphysical
foundation of logic is nothing but the principle of immanence that
begins itself immanently, that engenders its own beginning and its
own end which Hegel gave the name of negativity. It is therefore,
as Franz Rosenzweig complains that nothing really dies in this
system, for the system does not have a place for death, for death
can only be a presupposition for that system, death that is outside
of logic. The language of death is not the language of logic: the tremor
of mortality, its trembling and its cry, its anguish and its abyss is
excluded by the language of logic, that of predication and negativity
in a necessary gesture, for otherwise it would not be able to engender
its own beginning and its own end, it would not be immanent. It
is the interest for the system, for the necessity of its possibility and
constitution, necessity for its own genesis and raison d’art, that it can
only be interested in disinterest, that is, ‘ in the agony of the concept’.
For this matter Hegel’s Science of Logic does not have to begin with
suffering and mortality. It does not have to be shaken in its innermost
depth by the tremor of mortality. It does not have to founder in
the yawning abyss. Therefore Hegel’s Science of Logic has to begin its
movement, conceptually, with pure Being and pure Nothing and not
with its presupposition which is the phenomenon of suffering before
death. Here it is claimed that nothing is presupposed at this instant
of beginning of the system—neither mortality nor birth—which
what Hegel calls ‘Immediate’ that immediately annuls itself into its
opposite. In the beginning of his Science of Logic, Hegel says,
Pure Being and pure Nothing are, therefore, the same. What is the truth
is neither being nor nothing, but that being does not pass over—but
has passed over into nothing, and nothing into being. (Hegel 1969,
p 82)
It is this appearing and pure passing away into the anonymity of

the eternally homogenous Now, the eternally immobile mobility,
eternally restless rest that is without ecstatic transcendence and
without future that Hegelian logic calls movement which begins with
nothing, for it begins only with itself, and ends with nothing, for
it ends only with itself. In this way the presuppositional element of
existence, i.e., its anguish before death is already here foreclosed in
this dialectical logic of visible forms.
The actual beginning begins with something else, and therefore
has its presupposition, its ground and condition outside of it. Such
a reason presupposes the agony of a non-reason out of which it
emerges. Reason is essentially finite; it belongs to a finitude which
it presupposes. Such a beginning is actual beginning, for coming
into existence implies its finitude and its transcendence, its relation
to an outside which is outside of the totality of visible forms and
outside any system of relations. Such an actual beginning is a non-
conceptual beginning which cannot be included within any logical
forms of presupposition-less totality.
This beginning, which Schelling calls ‘actuality’ as distinguished
from Hegelian beginning as mere logical, immanent and potential
beginning, bears the peculiar fate, i.e., the fate of finitude, which is
this: this beginning has a relation to that which is without relation,
a beginning that has already begun before this beginning, a condition
which is without condition, a ground which is without ground and
without foundation. The time of this beginning is in relation to a
time that is outside time, which is to say, an immemorial past which
can only be presupposed, and cannot be thought within the logical
system of visible forms. This abyss of mortality that adheres into each
coming into existence bears the trace of its tremor, as a kind of eternal
remnant, or as ‘irreducible remainder’, in the existence itself. Each
here and now, then, carries the remnant of the eternal, immemorial
past that has already always become an abyss, irreducible to any
concept or name.
The agony of finitude is the very interest of existence and not
mere logical category. This trace of mortality, this eternal remnant
of a beginning before beginning, this anguish and suffering of a
coming, this irreducible remainder of cision is what exceeds the
language of predication, which is that of logic and metaphysics.
Since this ‘irreducible remainder’ carries the immemorial beginning
in each presentation of presence as what is outside of it, as what
is transcendent to it, as what is past of presence, there remains an
eternal remnant of beginning, which is in a sense eternal, because it

does not come to pass. It is this possibility of an outside of presence,
of a transcendence to each presentation of presence, but in a certain
way, heterogeneously co-existing with presence, that makes possible
something like time to manifest itself. The apparition of time timing
itself cannot be thought within the phenomenological ontology of
visible forms. This heterogeneous remnant and eternal remainder is
not a mere passed past, because it does not immediately pass into
becoming. As the eternal beginning, it is also ahead of itself and as
such it is the eternally coming to be beginning in future, a beginning
yet to come, a past yet to come. This beginning is not the pure,
indeterminate being which is equal to nothing, but a principle of
possibility that has the potentiality to inaugurate itself anew. Each
moment, each presenting of presence is a coming that is irreducible
to this or that coming. It is rather a coming as inauguration which
opens the world and time for the first time, and as such it is a
beginning before beginning and future after the last future. We call
them ‘eternal’ beginning and ‘eternal future’.
Therefore past, presence, future are not particular modalities, points
and successive instants belonging to the homogenous scale of the
Now of eternity, where each instance of now generates automatically
and successively, progressively its own successor in such a logical
manner that they need nothing of the transcendence of coming. These
successive, auto-generating instants that presuppose nothing would
then form a logical system, because these homogenous nows would
belong to the universality and generality of One, Same Now. But the
ecstatic coming of the eternal future, past and presence, in so far as
each is coming to presence (that overflows each instants of presence),
is the constellation of ‘the ecstasies of temporalities’. Each coming is
ecstatic in its ahead-ness of itself, since each coming carries its ecstatic
transcendence that does not belong to the universality of cognition
and predication, for they do not form totality of visible, categorical
forms. They rather move in a configuration, or constellation of
ecstasies, that in their sudden apparition as co-figuring, announces,
heralds the advent of the coming. The Moment is the figure (which is
also a dis-figuring) of this eternity when the eternity of past, presence,
future come together, co-figures that can happen suddenly in any
here and now, which momentarily make history pause. In this silence
of the pause the beginning is remembered as a remembrance yet to

begin. The moment is not the figure called ‘instant’, therefore not
a figure of time, but ‘an atom of eternity’, as Kierkegaard says of it:
The moment is not properly an atom of time, but an atom of eternity.
It is the first reflection of eternity in time, its first attempt, as it were,
at stopping time. (Kierkegaard 1980, p. 88)
A finite thinking begins with a beginning that is always a finite

opening, but that opens unto the infinitude of the immemorial
and the incalculable pure future. A logical thinking that constitutes
the dominant metaphysics also claims to begin with the question
of beginning, but it is a false beginning. It is what Schelling speaks
of Hegel as, only a potential beginning, and not- actual, real
beginning, for the actual beginning to come, this beginning has to
be thought outside immanence, which logic does not permit us to
think, by a necessary reason internal to the logic of this logic itself.
Therefore it is necessary to put into question the sovereign claims of
the logic whose metaphysical foundation presupposes, in advance,
as its necessary condition, an abyss which is none but mortality
itself that grants in advance to mortals a time to come. Because
this mortality is not the interest of this metaphysics, metaphysics is
therefore not interested in redemption, for redemption is the interest
only for the mortal existence which is singular (therefore cannot
be included into the system of visible forms), and not for a logical
concept. Logical concept does not need redemption or promise
of coming time, because it claims to have already mastered death.
But a mortal existence whose existence lies in the non-mastery of
death, this question of redemption is of utmost interest, for such a
possibility of redemption alone makes sense of out politics and our
ethics.
Astonishment
Where and when a beginning is beginning? With what beginning
begins? Hegel’s Science of Logic begins with this question of beginning,
since Speculative Logic must not presuppose the given-ness of the
object of thought, and therefore must not presuppose the given-ness
of its beginning either. The beginning, in so far as it is beginning,
must not yet be the mediated one—a ‘this’, or a ‘that’—and therefore

is not a determinate one. A non-determinate and non-mediated
beginning can only be ‘Being Pure and Simple’, since with it nothing
is (supposedly) presupposed yet, since Pure Being, irreducible to
any ‘this’ or ‘that’, rather empty of any ‘this’ or ‘that’, is equal to
Nothing. With this Hegelian speculative logic claims to begin with
the beginning, presupposing nothing else, for it begins with Nothing
equal to ‘Being Pure and Simple’.
Hegelian speculative logic then begins with Concept—with the
most universal, because emptiest of all concepts—the Concept of
Being pure. Yet Hegelian Speculative Logic does not end there, for
it must move out of the beginning of the empty Concept of Being,
it must give this emptiness itself a movement—of negativity—a
generative potentiality. Hence there must emerge out of the emptiest
of all Concepts the movement, not of ‘this’ or ‘that’ coming into
existence, but the movement of the movement itself, out of the empty
Concept, as if out of nothing. With this not only the entirety of the
movement character of speculative logic is deduced subsequently, but
the coming of coming, existence coming to presence is claimed to be
included in the logical system of categories and predicates: be-coming
of existence becomes predicative by being included as a category of
categories. The whole organic character of categories automatically,
in a monotonous manner, generate themselves one after another
in smooth succession—without interruption or cision—leading to
the Absolute Concept, beginning with Nothing and ending with
everything.3
Were there not already a halt, a cision, a disjunction marks this
beginning if there has to come something into existence at all? In
the Hegelian logical system of categories beginning with pure Being
the coming, however, appears only as ineluctably that has to come,
so that in the beginning with the ‘Pure Being and Simple’, nothing
really begins, though according to Hegel’s claim there really comes
something into existence. Would the concept of Being itself come
into existence if Being itself is not already a coming? Therefore
existence is not a concept, but something else entirely which the
concept presupposes? Being here is not really, actually existence in
its existentiality but purely a conceptual construct, a speculative
necessity of beginning which must be pure, indeterminate being.
Already then in the beginning with the Concept—for Hegelian logic

can only speak of transition, or generation from concept to concept,
and not existence to concept—the beginning itself, a more originary
beginning is missed or is diverted (what Schelling calls ‘Abfall’: falling
away, diverting away) from. This unapparent presencing of presence,
which is the beginning more originary, is not included within the
speculative system of visible forms, for the speculative logic can
only recount that phenomenon that exhaustively presents itself
to the categories. For the speculative system is to be possible, this
unapparent phenomenon of the presencing must not be there. Since
in this necessary logic of foreclosure nothing coming must come,
nothing really arrives in the logical system of movement subsequently
either. Everything comes in this system remains a mere conceptual
coming, only a representation of coming.
If the task is to think, not the representation of coming, but the
unconditional coming that cannot be predicated, and then thought
itself must be open to the coming, it must already be exposed to
the open region that lies before any predication, or categorical
grasp. There then precedes a coming in the opening that is always
to come (in the infinitive sense). This event of coming whose coming
is not yet predicated and grasped in the Concept—for ‘Being Pure
and Simple’ is then appears, what Nietzsche calls the ‘last fume of
evaporating reality’—is therefore a non-ontological opening, of what
Schelling is his Berlin Lectures on Positive Philosophy calls ‘Überseyn’,
over or beyond being. The over or beyond being is not an auto-
generative potentiality of the Concept as in Hegel, but an actuality
of the coming as the-there-of-coming, irreducible to the predicative
proposition, a time to come that began already before the immanent
movement of the logical categories. The actuality of the coming, each
time singular, is irreducible to the subsequent predication of it as
essence (for essence only belongs to the order of potentiality, and not
the actuality; it belongs to the order of: if X exists, then it is so and
so), and is the extra-logical, pre-predicative, pre-categorical leap of
the event into presence. It is with the transcendence of the leap that
marks the cision or disjunction that something actually begins and
not in thought. Therefore thinking cannot represent this coming into
existence, because a wholly otherwise, a heterogeneity of the ‘un-pre-
thinkable’ begins here, as an ecstatic leap of the event.
In his Ages of the World (2000), Schelling calls even God’s coming
to presence, or coming to existence as un-pre-thinkable de-cision,
which also means cision, or interruption, event as leap. The coming to
presence is an event. The event of coming is welcomed, received in the
opening that is disclosed, manifested in the eternity of the sudden
flash of lightning, in the holding sway of the open. It is eternity—not
in the sense of pure nothing, or pure void of time—but an ecstatic
transcendence of time, the condition of time as the beginning of
time, the timing of temporalities. This beginning is before beginning,
an immemorial passivity genesis where there occurs bestowal, a pure
giving, and a gift of time upon the mortals, the gift of existing itself
as mortals. This beginning is always an eternal beginning, in a certain
sense, without which there begins nothing and there nothing arrives;
in other words, the beginning is already always disjunctive and
caesural where the beginning falls outside as ground or condition
of what comes to be this historical world, this mortal existence, this
finite presence. There is beginning in the sense that the beginning
that opens the historical world itself does not wholly belong to that
historical world only because it is the beginning of the world. This
‘un-pre-thinkable’ beginning which is stronger than the world elicits
from us astonishment or wonder. Plato calls this experience of the
origin as ‘Wonder’ in Theatetus with which thinking itself is opened
in the opening, welcoming the event of arrival.
If philosophical thinking gives itself the task of thinking its own
beginning, then it is with the question finitude, the un-conditional
opening—and not beginning with ‘Being pure and Simple’—that
thinking must begin if thinking is not to be mere logical-speculative
thought but actual existential opening to the coming. Such an
existence-thinking begins as this ecstatic astonishment at the origin,
which is less because it is a logical generation out of the barren womb
of Concept, but because it is exposure of thought to the-there-of-
the-coming that is stronger than the concept or language. It is rather
the astonishment at the enigma of coming and existence arriving to
presence. The-there-of-the-coming is not already accomplished form
of existence, but an already that is yet to come and yet to-be-visible.
As such existence, each time occurring, is an event. This event marks
the wound of mortality, and bears an originary tremor that precedes
either Being or its opposite, the negativity of Nothing. Then there
comes necessity of thinking neither the event which is neither Being,

nor its negativity, but a coming into existence which is otherwise than
Being, and otherwise than Negativity.
The event of coming is not grasped in the dialectical-historical
memorial task, for it refuses the gathering unity of the innermost
ground of memory. The event does not have the logical principle
of identity as the ground of recollection. Therefore the dialectical-
historical memory cannot discover its own inscrutable, unfathomable
ground. Such an inscrutable, unfathomable ground attunes us with
astonishment at the ‘un-pre-thinkable’ coming to presence out of
unground. In that inscrutable opening, darkness and light play together
as agonal elements in an eternal strife. It is in that open space the
withdrawal of the ground and pure offering of time upon mortals play
their originary polemos. This co-figuration, in so far as it is indissociable
from dis-figuration at the momentary presentation of itself, like the
lightning flash, it therefore refuses to form a system, or totality. Martin
Heidegger attempts to think this originary configuration—which is
non-dialectical, differential play of oblivion and remembrance—as
a polemos of unconcealment and concealment. This originary play,
this originary polemos that Heraclitus alludes to is withdrawal of the
ground and pure giving (through this very withdrawal) that keeps
open history towards its own outside, towards its own epochal
ruptures. These epochal ruptures refuse to be incorporated into the
logical-speculative principle of identity and therefore they do not
belong to the universal history. The event is to be thought as a far
more originary eruption of history into presence, as keeping open
to the Possible, keeping open to the transcendence of mortality. An
anticipative thinking of redemption is not therefore a-historical but
precisely more historical than any history or historicism, for it alone
anticipates—in hope or in astonishment—the event of coming that
alone opens history to itself to come and opens history itself to the
happiness of its fulfillment.
§ Repetition
Repetition and Recollection

The question of repetition is as old as philosophy itself. One
remembers Plato’s notion of anamnesis, recollection that the
mortal is endowed with as a gift. Extending beyond any time of
self-presence and even before birth, anamnesis opens the mortal
existence to the immemorial, to the already always there. As if
there is in man something essential, according to this conception,
something primordial given in an originary manner which he is not
the originator nor the ground of its subsistence, as if, as it were, the
beginning of his beginning is not his beginning, that it has a destinal
inauguration, or destiny of inauguration elsewhere whose past and
futurity lies beyond recuperation in self-presence. Here the mortal
appears to be a passage of traversal where the invisible infinitely passes
through the visible, eternity infinitely crosses through the finitude,
and unapparent infinitely touches the apparent. Man is the spacing of
the undecidable between the visible and the invisible, the play space
where the visible strives itself with the invisible interminably, where
the eternity never ceases wounding the finite existence in its flesh
like a thorn. Recollection will then appear like repetition. It is the
repetition of the unapparent in the apparent, invisible in the visible,
an already always in each hic et nunc as an excess, as an unsaturated
apparition which no eidetic phenomenology ever can thematize in
categorical cognition. It is this that makes repetition an inexhaustible
movement, for it bears away in its advent its own transcendence, and
Repetition • 109
makes, each time there happens repetition, unsaturated, excessive,

overflowing the cup of self-presence.
Man is then not the phenomenon that is saturated in relation to
his own destinal inauguration and telos. He is only the passage of hic
et nunc, the movement in-between where the immemorial something
manifests itself, the unapparent appears, the invisible thickens the
visible. To recollect, then, would not mean anything like ‘learning’,
or ‘acquiring knowledge’. It is rather the movement that welcomes
the transcendence in immanence, the outside in each hic et nunc, the
unapparent in the apparent, and the unnamable in the name. To exist
in this finite manner doesn’t mean to be enclosed and to be saturated
in the finitude. It is rather to repeat, at each hic et nunc what befalls
as transcendence, the unapparent and the destinal occlusion. It is to
bear the immemorial given in our past in each present moment as
promise. It is to welcome the coming what has already always come
immemorially without having passed by, and would never ceasing
coming to us from the extremity of a radical futurity. The movement
of this welcoming is the movement of anamnesis, of recollection.
Søren Kierkegaard in his work called Repetition distinguishes the
Platonic anamnesis which is oriented to the immemorial past from
repetition in future, determining anamnesis and repetition as two fold
symmetrical tasks: one extending to the already always, and the other
extending to the not yet. Yet it is the Moment, where the truth occurs,
happens, is the monstrous site of encounter of the unapparent
apparition, invisible visible, occluded revelation, transcendent
immanence. It is that encounter, bursting out of any totalization,
that bears itself this infinite lengthening of time towards the already
always and the not yet. As such the Moment, but not instant that is
what Kierkegaard calls ‘atom of eternity’, a momentary unsaturated
presentation (as distinguished from representation) of eternity. It is at
this moment which repeats the transcendence in immanence, eternity
in time, infinite in finitude, at this moment history pauses and brings
into itself epochal ruptures where something else, an entirely new
and wholly otherwise inaugurates, something else becomes together,
simultaneously with this dissolution. This Moment as simultaneity,
for repetition is a simultaneity—as distinguished from ‘succession’
of ‘homogenous empty instants’ (Benjamin 1977, pp. 251-61)—is
the truth of the event when language falls silent not because of the
lack of speech but with its completed beatitude, in a kind of what
Rosenzweig calls ‘completed understanding’. Redemptive fulfillment
demands the movement of repetition, which is to bring together, to
bring into simul which the mortals in the historical unfulfilled time
of negativity only experience as succession of instants. Repetition
cannot be thought within the successive representation of the
temporal negativity that constitutes dialectical-historical totality.
Repetition is the non-totalized presentation (Darstellung) of eternity
as Moment in a kind of discontinuous, disjunctive movement of
configuration, and is irreducible to the dialectical-historical totality
constituted by the act of representation of succession of continuous,
homogenous instants.
Only the Moment repeats, instants do not repeat themselves.
Therefore there is no encounter within dialectical-historical
immanent time. It flows itself away and arrives as self-same
differentiation without redemptive fulfillment, but never as
discontinuous, disjunctive simultaneity in configuration. Repetition
is only possible in configuration, in a non-systematic presentation of
the event of arrival where there takes place radical encounter with
the wholly otherwise.
Moment
A finite thinking that begins with the thinking of beginning—the
beginning or inception which is singular and in a certain sense,
eternal—must be able to come again must be able to begin again. The
beginning is not the inert, lifeless beginning, lying as never moving
substance, but—since it is finite—it must move out of itself, out of its
self-presence and yet remain as a beginning. Only then the beginning
would be what it is: an ever begun beginning, an always beginning,
and an eternal remainder of the beginning. Therefore, beginning
thought essentially and not in the logical manner of beginning,
is a beginning that is at once an ever lasting, always remaining a
beginning, and a beginning that is finite. As finite, the beginning
disrupts itself, ecstatically suspends itself, and discontinues itself. As
such it presents itself only by perishing itself in this presentation. It
Repetition • 111
is ‘becoming in perishing’ (Hölderlin 1988), arriving in dissolution

that does not persist, and yet persist as remainder of the beginning.
It is this aporia of beginning that is not lifted up, in Hegel’s word,
sublated into the logical movement, this aporia of the finite beginning
that is at once infinite so that mourning and joy present themselves
in simultaneous poetic tone. Repetition demands this eternity of the
beginning, which is a finite infinity, be repeated in time, in ever new
presentation of presence. As a result, there remains always already an
ever new excess at ever new presentation of presence, an ever new
renewal of the immemorially old promise, the most ancient of the
ancient gift of time. The gift given in the already always immemorial
past must pass through time. It must pass through each presentation
of presence. In this manner it renews itself in this passing from
ever new presence to ever new presence, and through this renewal,
remains eternally old and eternally new at the same time, eternal and
finite at the same moment. It has a Janus-like face looking forward
and backward at the same time so that it does not weave only the
recollection’s sad moments. Unlike recollection, repetition is no mere
‘gallery of images’ (Hegel 1998, P.492) of the shapes that the Spirit
has passed through history, nor is it ever new instants that pass away
in a monotonous succession. In such a monotonous succession of ever
new instants there is no face-to-face encounter of past, presence and
future with each other apart from monotony of the logical principle
of unity that is continuous with each passing instant, rendering each
instant only a relative realization of the same.
Therefore there is no repetition in Hegelian universal order of
history, but only recollection that weaves into song the memory of
its own shapes that came into being. Repetition, on the other hand,
is ecstatic repetition of eternity into presence, of the immemorial
promise into future, without gathering unity of the monotonous,
homogenous logical principle underlying it. Neither recollection of
what has already become and neither dead, nor ever new anticipation
of monotonous instants passing away in banal succession knows that
ecstasy of repetition that co-joins, co-figures and thereby makes
possible ecstatic encounter of past, presence, and future with each
other. It is only on the basis of the ecstatic encounter there appears
something like the event of history. The ecstatic co-figuration of past,
presence and future—without underlying any speculative-logical
principle of unity—is a monstrous, disjunctive configuration, or

assemblage of temporality as finite eternity that seizes the mortals and
delivers him to his fateful, monstrous destiny which is the event of
history that determines in advance what is to come. This in-advance
is that we shall call ‘inception’.
The originary inception before any inceptions, this originary
opening before anything that is open, must repeat itself in time to
come, each time singular and irreducible, because there lays alone
the promise of future. Any philosophical thinking that is thinking
of future is a thinking of repetition. Repetition of the inception alone
opens time beyond death, towards a future remaining after death. With
this is the promise of redemption is also given the gift of time. Repetition
of the inception is never a repetition of the given, for repetition
singularly distinguishes itself from recollection, because the inception
to be repeated is the inception yet to come. Therefore repetition is
always an affirmation of a yet to come. Repetition is always repetition
as remembrance, and not repetition as memory. With each repetition,
a yet to come announces itself as possibility of the beginning anew,
a promise of a time of redemption, which will not come so as to
pass, but remains as an eternal remnant. This announcing is not
the categorical cognition of given entities but a phenomenology of
‘thinking-saying’ that is not distinguished from said, but itself is the
said whose event character cannot be thought within the dominant
metaphysics. This event-character of ‘thinking-saying’ consists of
its welcoming the other beginning by (re)calling together (or better
by repeating), in the manner of what Heidegger calls ‘conversation’
(Gesprach) or dialogue the first decisive beginning with the other
beginning. In a certain important text Heidegger writes of this event
character of ‘thinking-saying’:
[W]e must attempt the thinking-saying of philosophy which comes
from another beginning. This saying does not describe or explain,
does not proclaim or teach. This saying does not stand over against
what is said. Rather, the saying itself is the ‘to be said’ as the essential
swaying of be-ing. (Heidegger 1999a, p. 4).
The repetition of the beginning is not mere recapturing it in relation

to the other beginning. The dialogue which repetition brings is not the
dialogue of the self-same entities. It is rather that the other beginning
Repetition • 113
even demands a ‘relentless turning away’ from the first beginning so

as to inaugurate or welcome the ones to come. Repetition is a leap
in the ‘midpoint’ which is the abyss between these two beginnings
where the event announces itself, not in categorical cognition of
‘presently given entities’ but as the thinking-saying of Da-sein who is
the play space of strife between announcing and concealing.
Thinking in the crossing brings into dialogue what has first been of
be-ing’s truth and that which in the truth of be-ing is futural in the
extreme—and in that dialogue brings to word the essential sway of
be-ing, which has remained unquestioned until now. In the knowing
awareness of thinking in the crossing, the first beginning remains
decisively the first—and yet is overcome as beginning. For this
thinking, reverence for the first beginning, which most clearly and
initially discloses the uniqueness of this beginning must coincide with
the relentlessness of turning away from this beginning to an other
questioning and saying. (Ibid., p. 5)
What Heidegger speaks here of the extremity of future, the Eschatos

of the other beginning should not be understood archè-teleologically,
for the arrival of the other beginning is radically incalculable and
un-programmable. This eternal remnant of future is different from
the every new banal instants that come to pass away, unredeemed,
because it is continuous with the given. Only repetition, because it
occurs on the condition of the non-condition, because it is possible
on the condition of the impossible, only this repetition brings us
redemption, because it faces the abyss of death, that ‘midpoint’ of
an interval that cannot be bridged over by human efforts or human
mastery alone. This radical finitude does not arrive in the categorical
language of metaphysics, but that must already attune the thinking-
saying that welcomes it in being seized by the ‘distress of the
abandonment of being’ (Heidegger 1999a).
The pure event of the future in its radical incalculability is also
announced in Nietzsche’s idea of the Eternal Return of the Same.
The promise of this return is not the promise of the return to the
same in recollection, but redemption of the recollection into
promise, redemption of time into the affirmation of the eternity of
the future, into the affirmation of eternity of the beginning yet to
come. Nietzsche’s thought of the eternal return is the paradoxical
con-junction between the thinking of death, and yet the possibility

of a redemptive future. Therefore a redemptive joy always announces
itself in repetition, for repetition alone—if that is possible—redeems
the melancholy of time that has remained unredeemed. Repetition
and its possibility makes one cheerful and joyous, for on account
of the possibility of future alone existence can be redeeming. ‘To
redeem those who lived in the past and to recreate all ‘it was’ into
‘I willed it’—that alone should I call redemption’ (Nietzsche 1995,
p.139): Zarathustra promises. Repetition is the bringer of joy, were it
be possible, for it loves eternity, by liberating the melancholy of past
into a time yet to arrive. For that it must face death that means, it
must enter or undergo the abysses of nihilism, for only the thought
that faces death in its unavowable tremor transfigures the past into
future and brings redemptive fulfillment. The way down to the abyss is
the same as the way to the summit. This is the secret joy in Zarathustra’s
thought of eternal Return of eternity itself which is also a thought of
death: ‘ All anew, all eternally, all entangled, ensnared, enamored—
oh, then you loved the world. Eternal ones love it eternally and
evermore; and to woe too, you say: go, but return! For all joy wants—
eternity’ (Ibid., p.323).
‘All joy wants eternity’, all joy wants repetition. Kierkegaard too,
in his work on Repetition, sees repetition as an affirmation of future
whose existential mood is joy: ‘Recollection makes us unhappy, but
repetition, if it is possible, will make us happy, provided we give
ourselves time to live and do not immediately, at birth, try to find
some lame excuse (that we have forgotten something, for example)
for creeping out of life again’ (Kierkegaard 2001, p. 116). The gift of
repetition comes with being able to ‘give ourselves time to live’ that
‘will make us happy’. To be able to repeat is to have time beyond death.
To give oneself time to repeat, to give oneself the gift of time, and
to have time to remain after death, or beyond death, which alone
will make us happy in a time yet to come. Repetition is a promise of
happiness, because it is redemptive, because it is the promise of time
that there will always be time. Hence the task in Kierkegaard: to
make inwardness itself into repetition, or to make repetition itself into
the inwardness of freedom. Repetition promises happiness because it
re-casts the remainder of the beginning into the future, and thereby
Repetition • 115
repeats eternity in presence. This possibility of eternity in each finite

presence is the secret of a joyous existence, for what is life if life only
has to repeat what has already become and exhausted its possibility?
What is life if life has only to bring ever new, yet ever banal, ever
monotonous succession of instants? For if it is the Possible—not the
exhausted and sterile—that makes us happy, and joyous, then neither
recollection of what is already exhausted, nor banal, monotonous
succession of instants will make us joyous.
The Possible lies neither in recollection, nor in banal anticipation
of ever new, homogenous, empty instants. It is the possibility of
repetition alone that brings the eternity of the Possible as Moment to
us, and makes us divinely joyful. It is in this sense the Possible is greater
than the actual. While the universal Now of the dialectical-historical is
only the contraction or re-collection of the plurality of homogenous,
vacant instants, repetition occurs on the other hand as the Moment
that strikes us with its lightning, for it is none other than the fullness
of eternity itself. This fullness of eternity is the messianic intensity
of the ‘here and now’ that presents itself like what Hölderlin calls
‘heavenly fire’. This heavenly violence (which is without violence)
of the divine fire bursts open, tears open any immanence of the
universal order, and delivers it to its own mortality and disappearing.
The person who wills repetition is not the adult who sings at the
dusk, neither is he the boy who ‘chases butterflies or stand on tiptoe
to look for the glories of the world’, nor ‘an old woman turning the
spinning wheel of recollection’ (Kierkegaard 1983, p. 132), but the
one who rejoices in his existence, because at each moment, singularly,
eternity presents to himself. Eternity alone makes one joyous. But
this joyousness of repetition is inseparable from the highest suffering,
which is nothing but the suffering of finitude that does not have
Hegelian consolation of the concept. Therefore repetition alone, were
it possible, is ‘actuality and earnestness of existence’:
If God had not willed repetition, the world would not have come
into existence. Either he would have followed the superficial plans
of hope or he would have retracted everything and preserved in
recollection. This he did not do. Therefore the world continues, and
it continuous because it is a repetition, repetition that is actuality and
the earnestness of existence. (Ibid., pp. 132-33)
Repetition, if it were possible, alone would make us joyous, for it gives

us back what is taken from us: it gives us the possibility of inception
again. This repetition is possible only outside the given universal
order, outside the immanent order constituted by recollection, for
recollection is merely the spinning wheel of the old woman that
weaves what has already happened, the given past that is worn out
and has become stale and dead. Only outside the universal order of
the ethical can there be repetition. Repetition is the Archimedean
point, outside the universal. It is the singular Moment, and not the
particular instants of the universal. This repetition is the repetition of
the eternity in the heart of presence that bestows upon the beginning
a meaning, because this beginning has the meaning of a future, a not
yet, a promise of yet to come.
Therefore in Kierkegaard’s text, both the young lover poet and
his adviser Constantius despair of repetition. Repetition is neither
possible in ethical order, nor in the aesthetic sphere. Hence the
need of the third type of repetition that alone enables eternity to
arrive in presence, so that the singular being whose existence is not
completely exhausted in the universal claims of history, confronts,
encounters each moment, ecstatically, what is not yet, the eternity,
and the coming time. The singular existence that wills repetition and
one that is not satisfied by virtue of being enclosed to the immanent,
universal, ethical order, it seeks redemption in an Archimedean point:
a point that is no point, where the ground of the aesthetic and the
ethical disappears, and all that appears solid in that universal order
trembles and melts away. It is the ‘midpoint’ where there must occur
the leap, that ‘quantum leap’ (Kierkegaard 1983) to the order of faith
which singularity affirms and wherein singularity is affirmed. This
is the moment of the epochal ruptures that tears apart history, and
opens itself to the advent to come. Repetition is neither grounded
upon a speculative-logical principle of unity, nor is it supported by
the universal, immanent order of the ethical. Repetition, in the face
of the Absurd, is experience of mortality as mortality that enables
an arriving in perishing, in a monstrous coupling of infinitude and
finitude that does not know Aufhebung. It is the Moment when the
immanent, universal, ethical order comes to a halt and opens itself to
the Abgrund where the Other holds sway, and gives us the direction
of history. If for Kierkegaard repetition is a task of transforming it
Repetition • 117
into the inwardness of freedom, this task then is none but the task
of mortality itself which is to repeat the immemorial that enables the
advent of the coming.
If for Kierkegaard repetition is a task of transforming it into the
inwardness of freedom, Heidegger envisages the task of thinking
at the end of certain metaphysics—a metaphysics wherein Being is
grasped as presence—as the task of repetition of the inception to
come in order to think the coming to presence itself, not of this and
that, nor the totality of beings as history of beings, but to affirm
the coming itself, which is not told in the predicative language of
categories, but as Wink, in poetic Saying as hint that at once shows
. To think inception itself, which is concealed by unconcealment
itself (this is the originary polemos that Heraclitus alludes to), because
it alone enables the coming to come. The task of repetition is to
repeat what has never been present and therefore repetition is beyond
metaphysics that thinks Being as presence whose presence is told in
predicative propositions, for the predicative proposition grasps Being
only as constantly given presence, as what is ‘presently given’. Instead
of the categorical, leading back the apophansis—the ontological
task of the traditional ontology that understands Being as entities
‘presently given’ (Vorhandenheit), hence in terms of a presently
presence (Anwesenheit)—Heidegger’s Being and Time attempts to
think Being in its verbal resonance, its event of coming (Anwesung)
to presence in a hermeneutic of existential disclosure. Da-sein is
not ‘human’ in the sense of ‘animal rational’ but the open-ness of
space where timing times, where this timing manifests itself as strife
between preserving the truth of being and yet opening itself to arrive.
Therefore the task of repetition is to be distinguished from categorical
apprehension and comprehension. To repeat the inception is rather
to welcome the coming to presence itself in the lightning flash of poetic
Saying, or in the thinking-saying of the philosopher who shelter the
truth of being from oblivion. This remembrance has to do with the
other history that Heidegger calls Geschichte which he distinguished
from the memorial of Historische.
The inception, however, can only be experienced as an inception
when we ourselves think inceptively and essentially. This inception is
not the past, but rather, because it has decided in advance everything
to come, it is constantly of the future. (Heidegger 1993, p.13)
To repeat the inception is to open towards the coming that comes,

to welcome the past in the future to come, in the possibility of
beginning again the beginning that in advance enables ‘everything
to come’. Only with this thinking of inception, essential thinking
begins. This beginning has a different history (Geschichte) than
being historical (Historische). It is the astonishment, or wonder, or
marvel of thinking. With the astonishment the coming of thought
itself is welcomed, for ‘we never come to thoughts. They come to us’
(Heidegger 2001, p. 6).
Language and Death • 119
§ Language and Death
Mortals are they who can experience death as death. Animals cannot
do so. But animals cannot speak either. The essential relation between
death and language flashes up before us, but remains still unthought.
—Martin Heidegger (1982, p. 107)
The States of Exception

Arthur Schopenhauer is said to have revealed, as Franz Rosenzweig
(2005, p. 11) reports us, the secret that philosophy has kept for two
and a half thousand years, that death is philosophy’s Musaget. That
this secret of philosophy is revealed to us only at the accomplishment
of the philosophical discourse is significant, as if the secret of
philosophy which is death, may have to do with philosophy’s own
accomplishment (Vollendung); in other words, with philosophy’s
own death, philosophy’s own undoing. In this sense the secret of
philosophy may have to do with the failure of philosophy. Philosophy
has failed, and has not been stopped failing because of its secret,
because of the force and power which this secret gives to it.
This failure is consequence of the discovery that philosophy has
made long time ago about which Hegel tells us a story. It is the
discovery that this strange animal called ‘man’ who alone speaks a
language, who is the only one to be capable of death, is also the
animal who out of a non-foundation, out of an abyss metaphysically
founds all foundation. The one who can discover this secret and
recounts the history of this discovery—namely, the philosopher—
thereby has at his credibility to recount the metaphysical foundation

of the historicity of the historical existence of this historical being
called ‘man’, which is expressed in the history of the political-social-
cultural institutions, all of them being the expression of this peculiar,
this terrible metaphysical secret of man’s power. Such knowledge
will not be the knowledge of this particular thing, but an essential
knowledge, knowledge that knows the foundation of its knowing and
is united with it. Hegel calls it, according to the language of Idealism,
‘Absolute Knowledge’. Language is then man’s metaphysical power,
not this or that power, but the very essence of the power, the power-
ness of power, this power of non-power, what constitutes power’s
secret of being power, the metaphysics of power. As metaphysics of
power, language is capable of death. It is a terrible secret, one whose
sense and value is only now becoming clearer to us—and Nietzsche
is one of the first to reveal and investigate into this metaphysics of
power—so that out of an investigation into the metaphysical essence
of language, at least language of philosophy, an essence of power can
be reached.
In his famous Politics Aristotle says:
Nature, as we often say, makes nothing in vain, and man is the only
animal whom she has endowed with the gift of speech. And whereas
mere voice is but an indication of pleasure and pain and is therefore
found in other animals (for their nature attains to the perception of
pleasure and pain and the intimation of them to another, and no
further), the power of speech is intended to set forth the expedient,
and therefore likewise the just and unjust. And it is characteristics of
man that he alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust,
and the like, and the association of living beings who have this sense
makes a family and a state.(Aristotle 2001, p. 1129).
The power of speech, as distinguished from the cries of animals’ is

not that of the distinction between pleasure and pain, but that of
the distinction of between just and unjust, of the good and evil. As
speaking animal, man is the capacity to transform the pure animalistic
possibility to cry into speech. Language is a negative capacity or,
a capacity of negativity that, being able to negate the cries of the
animal and yet preserving it, posits the possibility of the distinction
between just and unjust, which is the pure possibility of law. As pure
possibility of law, language is the metaphysical power of man, the

power of negation and preservation, power of positing and the power
of preserving. It is on the basis of this possibility given to man who
speaks, which is his metaphysical condition, that man founds his
foundation and expresses this foundation through visible forms, that
is, the historico-political institutions, and becoming truly ‘man’ as
distinguished from animals. It is only then man is a political-historical
animal, only then an animal who has something like history, and who
has something like politics, only then the man who not merely cries
and screams but also speaks. That man has something like history, and
something like politics has its metaphysical condition in this power of
death or negation. This power of positing and preserving law occurs
with language that is distinguished from cries from pleasure and
pain. In language man is exposed to death. In this exposure to death,
man learns to speak ‘I’. This ‘I’ is then born out of anguish, which
however even animals feel, when for example—and this is Hegel’s
famous example of the anguish of the animals—when the beast of
prey sees the utter destructible character of the animal before him.
He then does not wait, but jumps unto the animal and destroys it.
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit brings this discovery of
metaphysics to a dramatic force, and thereby bringing this story to
its accomplishment at its utmost limit when what philosophy has to
do is none but to reveal its own essence to itself, that is, its own secret,
that death is its Musaget. The metaphysical essence of world-history
where ‘man’ for the first time emerges as ‘man’, this metaphysical
occurring of man as man is his history, which is the history of this
occurring. But the metaphysical essence of the historicity of this
history is this death, that is, in being able to say ‘I’, man summons
his own death unto language, looks death in its face and ‘tarries with
it’(Hegel 1998,p. 19). To say ‘I’ is not to recognize the face that cries
in pleasure and pain, but it is to recognize one’s own dissolution,
one’s utter dismemberment, to see death’s face, as if, as it were, in
saying ‘I’ it is death that speaks in its name, that is, in the absence of
a name, in the name of a name that has already perished, and sunk
into nothing. The truth that man rescues from this utter shipwreck,
the utter sinking of his pure being unto nothing is this ability, this
metaphysical capacity to posit one’s own death, and to preserve
one’s own death as pure power. It is through this capacity for death,
power for the first time manifests itself this really real power. It is
from this history acquires for itself the power of a law, a gaze and a
force, a constituting gaze that founds itself, out of this death, out of
the absence of a foundation. As such man, instead of belonging to
sovereignty, himself is this state of exception, that means, ex-ception
in relation to his own state: he ex-cludes himself from himself—in
speaking ‘I’—and through this essential exclusion in-cludes himself,
inserts himself, posits himself and preserves himself. He empowers
himself with law, which is the law of history, and the law of his
politics. As empowerment of oneself, man is this occurring, this
excluding-including state of exception, this logic of sovereignty.
What is happening here? The question that concerns us at this
moment is simply this. What if death is man’s metaphysical power
par excellence, the very essence of power, the power of the non-
power, then what is the relation between language and death, apart
from that both language and death have certain relation to power, or
rather, are the secrets of power, that constitute power as power, as if
power in its positing, in its assertion and negations (and the language
of logic and grammar is, as we know, primarily takes its point of
departure, that means, its analysis of statement, proposition from
this) summons, each time, a death and a language, one and at the same
time. Therefore Nietzsche’s attempt at deconstruction of philosophy
at it metaphysical constitution accompanies a deconstruction of
grammar, for grammar replaces God, even after the death of God. As
the power of positing, or positing of power, grammar and God posit
law as law. This law which is none but the law-ness of law, which
constitutes law as law, is a law for death and law against death in the
enunciation of itself as law, as if each enunciation whose truth and
validity begins with this occurring, there also occurs the enunciation
of death itself. It is not a vain death but is invested in sight of law.
As law for death, law is positing law and as law against death it is
preserving law as ban. They are twofold sides of the same law, for
each time law posits itself as law, it calls forth both assertion and
negation as simultaneous moments of occurring. Law as such is power
of negation and power of assertion which comes to be at the moment of
enunciation. It means that law as such is not a (given) state, nor is it
a presently given entity. It is this occurring, this advent of law as law
that is not amenable to the classical ontological understanding of law

that is, as substance or a categorically graspable entity.
What we are trying to understand here is the connection of
simultaneity of the occurring of law that demands its coming to
presence in a language, of its own enunciation. As a state of exception,
this structurally transcendental condition of the possibility of law,
this moment of enunciation unites at this demonic moment death
and birth, negation and assertion. It annihilates the given nexus of
forces to bring into force new law. As such, law is to be understood
here as partitioning of forces in its verbal resonance. It is, as we have
learnt from Carl Schmitt (2006), the logic of sovereignty. As logic
of sovereignty, language carries death to the power of negation and
assertion, as if out of an abyss, outside the world of general validity and
norms. Or, should we say, as state of exception, death carries language
to the point of its power of negativity, which, precisely because of its
power of negativity is what posits something as something, which
means, it negates something else.
Is there not another state of exception, another exceptional
exception, an immemorial exclusion which must be outside the above
mentioned logic of sovereignty, outside the moment of enunciation
of the positing-negating language of law and power? This true state
of exception which is neither a consequence nor a mere result of
the logic of sovereignty but precedes it, in an immemorial manner,
is the redemptive arrival of the messianic future, only because it is
exceptionally prior, and exceptionally ancient, immemorial that
arrives from the extremity of time, from an Eschatos of the pure future
. This messianic arrival strikes the mortals with lightning flash, a
sudden suspension of the logic of sovereignty, which therefore appears
to mortals to be coming from a radical future, only because time here
is reversed, or experienced as reversed, not as mere instant-in-between
of an irreversible succession of nows, but moment of simultaneity of
the past, present and future where the unhoped arrives, foiling all our
expectations, calculations and predications. In so far as mortal lives,
according to the finitude of his existence, as this time-in-between of
irreversible succession of nows, the ecstasy of the reversed temporality
arrives as that whose excess falls on us like mortality’s lightning flash.
This state of exception does not found the law-positing and law-
preserving violence. What Walter Benjamin (1986, p. 277-300) calls

as ‘divine violence’ which he distinguishes from the law positing and
law preserving violence is a state of exception that does not serve the
logic of sovereignty. This divine violence is the mortal’s immemorial
exposure to the state of exception to which he already always belongs,
which owns him in advance and opens him to the truth and time on
the basis of this belonging. This owning is far more originary and
prior to the capacity of man being able to say ‘I’, that is, prior to
this capacity of man to ex-clude himself from himself and in-clude
himself as this exclusion. It is prior to his non-foundation that by the
energy of thinking he converts it into the foundation of his history;
it is prior to his exposure to this death which gives him back the
power of being. The originary exception is the open where there takes
place encounter with the wholly other, and where Love utters the
redemptive, creative Word.
This Word, which is the word of Love, is already always given to
him as an immemorial promise or gift. This gift of the Word must
first open the tongue of the human so the human must partake the
creative joyousness of the divine, which for that matter precedes
the language of judgement, which is the judgement based upon the
distinction not so much between pleasure and pain, but between just
and unjust, good and evil. Therefore Love is more originary than
the language of good and evil and is truly the state of exception. It is
on the basis of belonging to this exception which is Love that there
manifests for mortals something like politics and history, i.e., the
realm of judgement, which is the language of distinction between
just and unjust that founds those visible forms: the cultural-political
institutions, the state, the nation etc. Following Aristotle if we can
say that man is essentially a political and historical animal, one who
essentially has something like history, and something like politics, it
already always belongs to Love that is more ancient than judgement,
before politics and before history. This does not mean being a-historical
but only this much: that it is the opening of history itself; it is that what
inaugurates history itself. Love in its pure arriving to man is happiness.
This happiness is in being before God, and in being reflected in the
light of the creative Word of the divine which it partakes, shares,
speaks.
The Facticity of Love and the Facticity of Language

As state of exception the creative word of love is prior to evil and
good. The language of this love, this word of love that mortal has its
glimpses in relation to the divine revelation is not the language of
sovereignty. The law of love is not the law of law. It does not posit
and preserve itself. It is what precedes the gaze and force of a decision
of law. Yet there is a de-cision in love, an according discord, a bringing
together in holding-apart where the separation of principles are hold,
as in a constellation. The decision of love is not the decision between
good and evil. It is rather the language that first opens the world,
reveals the world, as a kind of facticity, ‘that there is’. ‘That there is’
love, and ‘that there is language’ is its facticity or actuality before any
potentiality. Since this facticity is not posited (because it is granted
to man beforehand) but can only be affirmed (this Yes saying), this
language is a non-positing affirmation, before assertion and before
negation: that there is love. That there is love: it is not an assertion, but
a Yes before assertion and negation that begins as longing-in-loving.
At the beginning of the world, as the world’s coming to presence,
as the revelation of the world, there is an affirmation before assertion
and before negation, which is ‘that there is’. It is an actuality which
thought cannot reach, where language falls silent, not because it
negates language, but it is language in its pure state of exception,
that is, in its completion, in its actuality without potentiality and
without predicates. The language of love is the language of actuality,
because it is itself actuality, from where thought begins, from
where thought lovingly, exuberantly—like the bellowing Sea with
its pregnant waves—goes forth, longs for its own futurity. Where
the beginning is the beginning with actuality, with the facticity of
love, there language is an affirmation as pure state of exception. It
is precisely this point, the point not of the end but of the beginning
which Hegel’s philosophy of Absolute knowledge fails to reach.
That Schelling affirms love to be the beginning and end of the
very movement of his essential thinking, shows that an essential
thinking has a movement outside system. Unlike Hegel’s assertion of
the completion of his system to be Absolute Knowledge, or Absolute
Concept as Infinite negativity, it rather shows why Schelling makes
the creative Word-language (whose ‘un-pre-thinkable’ actuality,
this exuberant beyond and outside being (Überseyn) precedes mere

conditioned potentiality of the conceptual negativity) into love as
the originary revelation of existence. Hegel’s system of Absolute
Knowledge appears to be bereft of language, because it begins with
the mere negativity and mere potentiality of the concept that means,
with the language of mere assertion and negation, with apophantic
predication. This reductive language of speculative logic is at
complete disposal of the categorical grasp of events already occurred,
or of entities presently given. In this manner the facticity of language
in its movement of longing-loving and in its movement of creative,
exuberant affirmation is sought to be reduced to the categorical
movement, or movement of categories of a speculative logic.
Language that opens with and goes towards love, whose beginning
lies in the ‘un-pre-thinkable’ beginning before beginning, and whose
completion lies in the extremity of future, as Eschatos always to arrive,
this language of promise opens itself to the pure caress of longing
for what is still remained to be attained. It thereby transcends itself
and opens itself to a time yet to come. The language of promise that
is given in love is the language that overflows itself beyond what is
already said. It appears as if in this overflowing of caress, time itself
can no longer be individuated into particularized, atomic instants
that are homogeneous and successive. Time here flows. But it is not
an incessant un-differential murmuring or interminable humming
of waves which Bergson calls ‘duration’. The caress of this time
rather brings into encounter what are past, present and future in
their respective ecstatic character. In this bringing together time
itself is intensified, and yet is extended to the immemorial past
and incalculable future, beyond the immanence of self-presence.
This is the moment of revelation when time spaces open and space
temporalizes itself: a trans-immanent, a trans-finite movement where
language becomes caress, and utters unto the space of revelation the
redemptive word that is to arrive.
The creative word of beginning, at the opening of the world
and creation is like the bellowing Sea, pregnant with infinity that
surges forth, bursts forth, sallies itself beyond. The originary promise
of the word that structurally opens each discourse or conversation
is not ‘pure being passing into nothing’ without language, but the
exuberant unfulfilling fulfilment, the movement of longing-loving
towards the Other, the caress that in its plenitude leaves to itself a
‘not yet’. The remainder of the ‘not yet’ that opens with the promise
is the condition of the possibility of the future yet to arrive that is
latent in each moment of discourse or conversation. This latency is
the driving force which drives each discourse beyond its saturation
with its self-enjoyment and opens itself to the radical otherness
of futurity. Therefore at the heart of loving, the Word carries an
irreducible remnant or a reserve that shelters or preserves a promise
of happiness in a time to come, of bliss that will be renewed in future.
This beatitude of the future is not one particularized mode of time
that will come to pass but an eternal remnant of time. What the
mortal seeks, one for whom death is a facticity before all facticity, is
a beatitude that is truly the pure state of exception. This exception
arrives from beyond the gaze of Law, and outside positing-preserving
violence; it advents from a Yes saying, from an affirmation of a
facticity that can equal to the facticity of death. That is why it is said
that ‘love is equal to death’.
As an immemorial promise love precedes and follows the language
of judgement. This occurring of loving attunes us in our fundamental
attunements to truth and time that affects us in a fundamental
manner. Outside the categorical apparatus of predicative truth
at cognitive disposal and outside the En-framing of calculable,
technological mastery, love is pure affection of time from beyond:
the immemorial and the incalculable. Even before the language of
judgement comes to constitute itself as positing law and preserving
law, love already always opens us to the promise of the other beginning
which love places us by displacing our given mode of existence. It
is the attunements of love whose various modes are understood by
Hölderlin as various poetic tonalities that make the creative word
of love attain that paradisiacal fulfilment which is not that of the
unity of judgement, but the caesural constellation, like the music
of the spheres. The constellation-music of love where love seeks its
messianic fulfilment, in so far language appears here pure movement
of presentation (Darstellung) offers meaning itself in its character of
pure offering. There is a character of giving in the presentation of love,
which is, renouncing of mastery and appropriation, dispropriates
ecstatically the one who gives. In this pure giving in love and in
love’s grateful receiving, which is inseparable from renunciation of
mastery—in so far as there is sadness in any renunciation—there is in

love something like joyous mournfulness. But this melancholy is not
the melancholy as a consequence of law’s violence or as a consequence
of the power of death that one who is subjugated to the sovereign
power of law feels in his veins with fear and trembling. It is rather the
blissful melancholy of a beatific fulfilment which Adam felt when he
named the animals, and they bowed in front of him out of gratitude
of being named. The mournfulness in love’s plenitude, as a condition
of loving, lies in a non-economic giving, a giving of a self to a blissful
knowing, is a condition immanent to God, and transcendent to the
mortals.
In his profound reflection on human freedom, Schelling speaks
of an originary melancholy even in God’s creative Word of love, a
melancholy however to be distinguished from melancholy from evil
out of the essence of human freedom. This originary melancholy
that must have adhered in the creative Word of love precedes the
melancholy that arises from evil, which means love is more ancient
than the possibility of evil. This means that which begins as revelation
as creative Word of love, precisely lays therein the seeds of redemption.
Love is this messianic language of redemption. While the melancholy
of God is immanent to God’s condition and therefore it never
becomes actual in God but remains as mere possibility, in the mortal
on the other hand—who is essentially this linguistic being, whose
essence consists in being able to present to himself—language—
this melancholy becomes actual, which means transcendent. Man is a
creature of an originary melancholy, for unto him alone redemption
becomes the utmost necessity. This redemption arrives only when
man prepares himself to abandon evil, to abandon this particular will’s
all consuming lust for mastery of its own finitude and conditioned-
ness, and thereby, through this abandonment, gives himself over to
love’s creative language, opening himself to the gift of language itself.
The Gift of Language

What, then, is the relationship between mortality and finitude with
language, a mortality that is not reducible to the death’s power of
positing-preserving, to the language of judgement which constitutes
the logic of sovereignty? Is it that with mortality the gift of language
is also given thereby, the gift of the originary revelation that bursts us
open to the entirety of the world, our relation to the others, to the
divine, to the elemental forces of nature and the solitude of the earth?
Who are those mortals who are exposed to the lightning flash of the
coming and opened to the open where light and darkness, presence
and absence play their strife? What language would be without
the gift of time, intimated by finitude, and by a coming time that
endows time with eternity and thereby redeeming time itself? Would
language, then, be conceptual apparatus to grasp through cognition
the ‘entities presently given’ (Vorhandenheit), of things and objects
that have acquired the signification of categories for us, predicative
and predictable, which the business of logic busies itself with? Or
language would rather reveal in an originary manner the not-yet-
predicated and not-yet categorical? Mortal would then be the one
who is revealed to himself in language even before cognizing the
world through his cognitive power and through his rational capacity
for calculation and en-framing predication. Language then reveals
man to himself and endows man with the gift to be present to himself,
gives man the possibility to reveal himself to himself, and makes him:
an open existence, exposed to the presencing that presences and arrival of
a time that remains. The gift of language renders the mortal open to
the claims of the earth and also to the claim of elevation to light, of
gravity into grace, ground into existence. He then hears, in language
that is given to him, the cries of finite creatures waiting in distress for
redemption. In that naming- language loaned to him, he hears the
mortal cries of the vanquished.
Man knows of death from language, from the possibility of lan-
guage, which ties him to his mortality. In language, man is exposed
to the temporality of the advent. This is what Heidegger meant when
he says of man as the one who ‘knows death as death’. Only then man
speaks as created ones, and he encounters in this opening of language
his future, his finitude whose strangeness astonishes him, ungrounds
him, tears him apart from himself, and opens him towards the
entirety of the created existence, to the elemental manifestation of
nature and to his own historical task, which is to create out of his
creative freedom his historical world. It is out of this creative freedom
there comes to be something like politics and history, ethics and log-
ics. Therefore a philosophical thinking of existence, or an existence-
thinking of finitude, which is not mere categorical and predicative, is

also, with the same gesture a language-thinking (Sprachdenken).With
this, the existence-philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig’s philosophical epic
The Star of Redemption begins. The task here is to extract from this
book a fundamental thought, which is this: a philosophical thinking
that claims, through the predicative power of its categories where
language serves the conceptual apparatus of cognition, to make death
itself a work of negativity, and thereby claims to have been able to
redeem death itself into thought, to have been to include existence it-
self into predicative categories—this is a thinking without language.
This is also the thinking without confrontation with the temporality
of the coming time, for it forgets the originary gift of language inti-
mated with finitude and time. Therefore it knows neither the mortal
fear nor the claim of redemption. The lightning flash that reveals the
leap of the event of existing is not intimated in a thinking for which
event and existence are conceptual categories in the function of pred-
ication of what has only been, as the end result of a logical process. Event
leaping into the coming is flashed through the lightning of language,
for language alone opens man to the event. A thinking for which
language itself is none but conceptual apparatus for cognition of the
already available world misses the event and gives itself the illusion
that event. What then is the gift of language given to the mortals?
The gift of language keeps man open to the event and thereby promises
redemption. A philosophical thinking that makes vain of death, for it
gives the illusion of an eternity in the Concept beyond death1, would
render the hope for redemption a mere embellishing necessity. For
there to be hope in the event to come, man must remain open, in the
lightning flash of language, for language alone reveals man his death,
to a time to come. This is the profoundest connection of language
and death. Man knows death in language alone; for language reveals
to man that his existence is existence unto death. But that is not
alone. Language, revealing the finitude of his existence to him, calls
forth creation that is to remain beyond death, calls forth the creative
task to give himself ever new beginning of himself.
It is here the question of origin is posed along with the notion of

event. Event, the possibility of the coming, is a confrontation with
death, but also an encounter to future beyond death. A thinking of
event must take death, and also time seriously, and not to include
it as a mere category in the system of a logical thinking. A non-
predicative thinking of the event is called forth here, along with
a non-generative modality of thinking of a time yet to come, and
also language itself, irreducible to the cognitive system of concepts,
as flash of lightning where the opening reigns for the event to come
forth, to leap into presence. No recollection, but repetition: there
lies the joyous participation in the future as revealed in the opening
shining forth. This joyous repetition of the event in the time to come
which is multiple- singular, does not wholly belong to the order of
generality and essentiality of the Concepts and categories. A wholly
otherwise must begin here with the event that is not yet recollected
in the spinning wheel of categories, for with each beginning there
comes a coming, not this and that, but a coming itself.
The coming comes and the presencing presences: this is already a

venturing, reaching, opening to the beyond. It does not begin with
the logical propositional thought of beginning with empty nothing
equal to Being, for there is a thinking of coming that is neither equal
to Being nor equal to nothing of the negative. It is at once an excess
of being and nothing, but also a lack of their fullness of presence,
either of being or of nothing. The coming comes and presencing
presences: this is the existential facticity of the event, that each time
repeating itself is transfigured into the wholly new beginning, but
whose origination is not with the abstract concept of pure Being, but
with a longing that is itself a moving and becoming without positing
an act of consciousness or a logical concept outside. The facticity of the
coming belongs to the question of existence and not to predication. The
coming into existence is not one category among others. It is intimated
in prophesy that is announced in the open. A wholly new apparatus,
or even otherwise than the notion of apparatus, but a configuration
or constellation of thoughts—seized in the lightning flash of the
open—alone constitutes, or de-constitutes the event of existence,
or the existential facticity of the event. An existential thinking is
always thinking of the event of the future of the arriving, not in
the monotonous generation of the same but as ex-tatic difference of
‘perdurance’ (Heidegger 1969) wherein transcendence bursts into,
and tears open existent to the arrival.
§ Configuration
What we are attempting to think with the notion of configuration,

or constellation is a whole without totality, an assemblage without
system. A conceptually and logically generative principle running
through them does not unite them, nor are they inserted into the
cognitive apparatus of categories where the question is asked about
the essence of them (in its ‘what is’), for it is presupposed there to have
a shared essence, unitary, identical and absolute. The configuration
movement, in so far as this movement inaugurates the singular
coming into existence and not what has already been predicated in
the generalized economy of system, has to be thought outside such
a system. The generalized economy of the categories miss the event-
the event of coming—it is because it subordinates the thought of
configuration to the system and to totality, the lightning flash of
language to concepts, repetition to recollection, transcendence to
the immanent generation, eternity into presence, illumination to
methodological cognition belonging to the universality of essence,
existential constellation to categorical thought, the Naming language
of the mortals to the apophantic, the coming to the overwhelming of
what has been, prophetic intimation to regressive memory into the
Archaic, finitude and mortality to the negativity of death, redemption
and revelation to the categories of future and presence that brings
nothing new and reveals nothing new, ecstatic freedom to ground of
necessity, astonishment of the event to the dialectical march of the
concept, remembrance to memory, possible to the realized.
*
Configuration • 133
Caesura
Configuration is a co-figuration, a kind of caesural whole without
totality, a co-figuring communication where each is hold apart and is
hold towards each other. Their communication lies in the explosive
opening to transcendence without transcendent that ecstatically opens
to the outside. Such a spacing of temporality can neither be represented
as continuum of the underlying Subjectum beneath ruptures, nor as
a generative-immanent principle grasped by the speculative logic.
Configuration is the (dis)figure of bursting out of totality represented by
the econo-geometric figure of the circle that re-appropriates in its self-
same ground what is its other. Transcendence without transcendent is
therefore not circular, but bursting of a non-convergent opening—
let’s say ‘perdurance’ (following Heidegger. See Heidegger 1969)—
where the leap occurs to what is arriving. It is the spacing, the abyss
of the ‘midpoint’ that calls the extremity of distance to nearness and
nearness to distantiate itself. This calling calls forth to conversation
between the ecstatic extremities of time of the immemorial past and
the incalculable future where time is no longer merely passing away
of now after now, but their encounter in a momentary event that
strikes the mortals. It is the encounter when time occurs as time
and space occurs as spacing. This is how communication takes place
in a configuration: communication in this sense is a configuration at
each moment temporal and finite. Configuration itself is a figure of
communication as con-figuring without return to pre-conceived
plane. This notion of configuration as a whole is without totality,
for the notion of totality does not have place for the intermittent
interval—the abyss of the ‘midpoint’—where repetition opens any
recollected closure to transcendence outside. In the open, repetition
baths renewed voyages with new sky and the new sea.
The notion of configuration is therefore intimately bound up
with the question of repetition and the radical epochal break that
inaugurates the other history or otherwise than history that does
not belong to the logic of continuum, i.e., Subjectum underlying
beneath the ruptures of history. Not only that repetition is not
possible without configuration, but without repetition configuration
is reduced to totality or system. Configuration is co-figuration
made possible by repetition multiple and singular, where its caesura
enables figuration a ‘co’—a belonging together without totality—a

hyphenated opening, enabling notes of a musical piece hold-together,
also separating from each other. As it is possible to think of repetition
belonging as con-figuration, perhaps it is also possible to think a
repetition of configuration. Through repetition the advent to come is
always renewed in the future of the past and in the past of the future,
for repetition calls forth, summons the extremities of time to the
destinal conversation that opens history to its essential historicity.
This is, then, the relation between the advent of the event and
language. They occur as configuration, a whole that holds together
the singular multiplicity of repetitive origin or beginning, without
forming a system or totality. As caesura interrupting each note, opens
to the other by inserting a time without present so in the open there
takes place the movement of, or towards transcendence, a coming
to come. That the coming comes in the open: this is to be grasped in the
thought of caesura.
The Star of Redemption
The thought of configuration or constellation is not the formal

method, but the movement of thinking that being irreducible
to representation is the pure movement of presentation where
the unapparent arrives in a ‘thinking-saying’ which is in a sense
‘tautological’. As such it is not a representational process of arriving
at categorical cognition, even if it is Absolute Knowledge, for this
unapparent arriving does not acquire completely those visible forms
that tend to form totality or system. As such it does not belong to
the philosophy of immanence or philosophy of All that moves ‘the
whole venerable brotherhood of philosophers from Iona to Jena’
(Rosenzweig 2005, p. 18).
It is with this question of configuration or constellation that
Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption begins. This book asks
the questions of existence and language, of creation and revelation
and redemption, not from the basis of a representational cognition
of visible forms that form system but from the hither side, from
the point which is denied, excluded, expelled as illegitimate,
indigestible from the philosophical discourse of All. The result comes
to be peculiar. We are introduced into the movement of thinking
that speaks to us because of an excluded All—not just the All that

excludes—as if from an Archimedean point of view, from outside the
system of visible forms, to welcome the unapparent apparition of a
presence from a radical future. The movement of constellation begins
from this point where a movement begins outside the All, where the
All is not All yet all. Such constellation thinking must discover at
the heart of All which is not All, at the heart of an identity a non-
identity, at the heart of a pre-supposition-less-ness of a structure of a
thinking ‘ from Iona to Jena’ a presupposition. What emerges out of
this discovery is irreducibly singular-multiplicity that does not form
a system of visible forms, since it does not originate and end with
the presupposition-less self-identity of the All, but that begins with a
presuppositional differential multiplicity, singular in relation to each
other, which is a constellation.
Therefore for Rosenzweig constellation is not system, for it does
not have its ground in the thinkability of the All, which is thinkability
of an identity. The constellation is rather the non-identical
movement of relation, the movement of a multiplicity of singulars
as a movement of discontinuous simultaneity. Such is the relation
among God, man and World that tempers the temporal relations
among creation, revelation and redemption—the eternal past, the
eternal presence and the eternally arriving messianic Kingdom of the
world—as a discontinuous simultaneity which is distinguished from the
dialectical-speculative System that accounts only the successiveness
of homogeneous, empty instants. As such the constellation or
configuration is not mere conglomeration or aggregate unity of
‘given’ figures, and the configurational composition of the elements
does not take place according to mathematical rules. They are the real
happening whose eventiveness cannot be reduced to the geometrical
or mathematical figuration. Rosenzweig writes,
For configuration is differentiated from figure by the fact that certainly
the configuration could be composed of mathematical figures.
Yet that in truth its composition did not take place according to a
mathematical rule, but according to a supra-mathematical principle;
here the thought furnished the principle of characterizing the
connections of the elementary points as symbols of a real happening
instead of any realizations of a mathematic idea.( Rosenzweig 2005,
p. 275).
God, man and the world, each is not ‘presently given entity’. They
cannot be incorporated into the categorical, cognitive apparatus of
the All. Rosenzweig envisages the ecstatic movement of their arising
as simultaneously discontinuous, therefore singular each in relation the
others, arising and becoming out of an abyss of freedom that begins
outside the categorical apparatus of the Universal One and All.
The messianic movement of constellation is therefore a non-
categorical, non-ontological movement whose movement is not
grounded, gathered in the unity of the logical principle of identity,
for the constellation does not begin nor end with the entities that
are predicated, or that can be thought on the basis of pure being
and pure Universal nothing. God, man and the world are not
therefore predicated entities but each is a discontinuous movement
of coming to presence, of coming into existence, simultaneously and
yet singularly relating to the other in this coming into presence.
Rosenzweig calls this coming into presence ‘existence’.
The Star of Redemption begins with the deconstruction of the
philosophy’s claim of its pre-supposition-less beginning, and its
denial of death. That philosophy has to be thinkable, and that this
thinkability has to have its ground in the unity of Logos—which
defines the character of the ‘whole brotherhood of philosophers from
Ionia to Jena’—therefore this philosophy has to deny, by a necessary
reason, the multiplicity and singularity of the mortal cries in the face
of death. For mortals for whom the ‘poisonous sting’ of death, its
‘pestilential breath’ (Rosenzweig 2005, p.9) is not taken away in the
vain consolation of the concept, in the empty promise of categories,
has then to make another movement, another inauguration outside
the cognition of the All, outside the system of One and Universal
Being that has subsumed its nothing within itself. Such a mortal
thinking which is seized in its veins with such fear and trembling,
which is seized by death’s ‘poisonous sting’ and its ‘pestilential breath’,
begins with presupposition, that is with nothing that is death, with a
nothing which is not pure universal One and which is not a nothing
equal to pure Universal One being, but rather with nothing that is
something, a seizure, a trembling and a cry. Such a thinking—if does
not have to dupe us with empty universals and empty One-ness—has
to be a thinking non-identical, that means, multiple and singular,
for the categorical system of One and All there is no place for the
multiplicity and singularity. That philosophy has to exclude death in
order to be presupposition-less is also the very reason that thereby it
also has to deny multiplicity and singularity, because only singulars
and only multiple die, because for the One and Universal death does
not exist, because for the One and Universal death has been deprived
of its ‘poisonous sting’. If system or the totality of visible forms is
based upon a death that has been rendered sterile and harmless, a
constellation movement, on the other hand, is a finite, discontinuous
movement which, since its begins with the presupposition of the
undeniable ‘facticity’ of death—a ‘facticity’ that cannot be thought
within concept, within System—calls forth the anguish and cries
of the multiple and singulars that have rebelled against the unity of
Logos, and have thereby loosened themselves from the totality of One
and Universal Nothing equal to One and Universal Being.
In other words, the logical principle of unity no longer guarantees
their cohesion. In being loosened from the oppressive unity of Logos,
God and man and world are not entities present already, but events
in their discontinuous simultaneity coming into presence, coming
into existence, in so far as this coming constitutes the event character
of these events, multiple and singular events holding-together -by-
holding-apart so that they can breath besides each other in their
relative autonomy. Instead of One and Universal Nothing of totality
that Hegel conceives of as harmless (by taking away its ‘poisonous
sting’), here there are nothings (in the plural) that are something (that
is, as potentiality for something which is not mere the potentiality of
the concept, but potentiality of existence). What is introduced in and
as constellation is constellation of Nothings, multiple and singulars,
irreducible to the Universal and the One, irreducible to the unity of
Logos. Its logic of origin is not the sterile and harmless nothing but
‘a perpetual derivation from a ‘something’—and never more than a
something, an anything—from the nothing, and not from the empty
nothing in general, but always from ‘its’ nothing, belonging precisely
to this something’ (Ibid., p.27).
What, then, the movement of constellation introduces is a logic of
origin, which is neither a logical deduction of categories nor derivation
of an event from the One and Universal Nothing, but an origin which
is nothing yet pregnant with something, a differential logic of origin
(or a logic of the differential). Rosenzweig attempts to think this logic

of origin that he introduces with its constellation movement with
the help of Hermann Cohen’s use of the mathematical notion of the
differential and the infinitesimal. Rosenzweig writes,
Mathematics does not produce its elements out of the empty nothing
of the one and universal zero, but out of the nothing of the differential,
a definite nothing in each case related to the element it was seeking.
The differential combines in itself the properties of the nothing and
of the something; it is a nothing that refers to a something, to its
something, and at the same time a something that still slumbers in the
womb of the nothing. (Ibid., pp. 27-28).
And little below about Hermann Cohen,

In the place of the one and universal nothing, which, like the zero,
could really be nothing more than ‘nothing’, that genuine ‘non-
thing’, he sets the particular nothing whose fruitfulness refracted
into realities. It was precisely Hegel’s foundation of logic upon the
concept of being that he most critically opposed; and consequently
the entire philosophy that Hegel inherited. For here, for the first time,
a philosopher who still regarded himself as an ‘idealist’—a further
sign of the force of this event in him—knew and acknowledged that
when thinking sets out ‘to beget purely’, it encounters not being—but
nothing. (Ibid., p.28).
The logic of the origin is not a logical deduction from an empty, one
and universal nothing but it is the logic of nothing of the differential,
which is a simultaneously discontinuous, differential coming into
presence, on the one hand as a powerful negation of the nothing and
on the hand, as infinitesimal, a calm affirmation ‘of that which is
not nothing’ (Ibid., p. 28). This is the real existential logic of origin,
and not begetting purely conceptually, where something bursts
forth, erupts, and comes into existence in its strife with nothing.
This differential logic of origin is the play-space of strife between the
potentiality that is latent in nothing and an actuality that bursts forth
as singular. Constellation is a movement of the differential, a holding-
together-by-holding-apart. In other words, it has to begin with the
question of existence, as it has to begin with the question of death,
but not with ‘being pure and simple’. Rosenzweig here, like Kant and
Schelling before, makes the distinction between existence and being,
with the priority given to existence, which is each time coming into
presence, an event, and not a predicate or category. The constellation
thinking is, therefore, an existential-thinking, which means, thinking
existence as event in its coming into presence.
Discontinuous Finitude
In the beginning of his The Origin of German Tragic Drama Walter
Benjamin introduces the idea of constellation as philosophical
contemplation which is distinguished from the categorical cognition
of phenomena. Benjamin calls this philosophical contemplation
‘timeless constellations’, not of concepts at cognitive disposal but
of Ideas, whose concern is not knowledge as it is with concepts,
but with truth. Philosophical contemplation is distinguished
from cognitive possession, as Idea is distinguished from concepts.
Philosophical thinking as constellation or configuration is not concerned
with the cognitive possession of phenomena, but their redemption. This
redemption is the freeing, clearing, releasing of phenomena from the
positing power of the concepts to its originary Idea. It is releasing the
phenomena from the concepts’ gaze of law and from the violence of
cognition unto the dignity of the naming ‘unimpaired by violence’.
As if philosophical contemplation in so far as it is concerned with
truth and not knowledge, rescues phenomena from a categorical
apparatus, from a regime of cognitive mastery, and releases it
from the melancholy of the damaged condition. This melancholy
is not that blissful melancholy of the philosophical contemplation
that bears the beatitude and dignity of the creative naming, but a
melancholy that suffers being at cognitive disposal, damaged and
impaired by the violence of cognitive mastery and the overnaming
language of judgement. Philosophical contemplation therefore is
not conceptual knowledge of objects but redemptive Naming-loving
where the creative gift of language that is given in Adam’s naming—
melancholic because it is paradisiacal—adheres itself. Philosophical
contemplation is more originary and more primordial promise than
the language of judgement, more originary than overnaming that
precedes the evil that arises in overnaming the name. This redemptive
naming, because the world is also revealed to us in the name, arrives in
this blissful philosophical contemplation that shares with the source
of the creative life of the divine. This arrival occurs outside totality,
outside the categorical apparatus, but in a movement of constellation
that brings together the extremities of time—the immemorial past
and incalculable arrival of the other origin.
Without an underlying continuum of Subjectum rendering a
system of phenomena in their visible forms, configuration is rather
like a mosaic where singularity of Idea has a relative independence,
whose relation is dependent less upon a common logical self-
grounding foundation than as ‘the harmony of the stars’. Benjamin
says in his The Origin of the German Tragic Drama:
All essences exist in complete and immaculate independence, not

only from phenomena, but especially, from each other. Just as the
harmony of the spheres depends on the orbit of the stars which
do not come into contact with each other, so the existence of the
mundus intelligibilis depends on the unbridgeable distance between
pure essences... The harmonious relationship between such essences is
what constitutes truth. (Benjamin 1998, p. 38)
As it is with Rosenzweig, configuration does not here form a system,

for it is not a coherence of concepts at the cognitive disposal unified
by a logical self-foundational principle of identity. A configuration is
rather an assemblage of discontinuous, disparate, multiple, repeated
attempts to think anew the same, which is renewed in thinking with
what Benjamin calls ‘a continual pose for breath’.
A configuration thinking is a mosaic of multiple seizure of
thoughts, or experiences through singular repetitions of what in itself
is singular and is in relative independence—like God, man and world
in Rosenzweig—and therefore is discontinuous, interruptive of itself,
caesural and ecstatic. Each singular thought or Idea in relation to the
other forms a new configuration of truth, as each remains thereby
singular, irreducible to the generative principle of particularized
universality of the Concept; each is in multiple relations, as singular
multiple repetition of the origin. It is as if the beginning begins itself
anew each time, ecstatic and in astonishment at the possibility of
the ever anew repetition of itself by interrupting itself, discontinuing
itself. Communication occurs as ‘perdurance’ of the discontinuous.
This discontinuity occurs with the ‘breath’ of a pause. With each
repetition the origin is opened to the coming, or rather, thinking
itself is opened to the ‘origin’ (and not ‘genesis) and is exposed to the
lightning flash of the sudden illumination, which without forming
an underlying continuum, separates itself from the apparatus of
rested cognition of ‘presently given entities’ (Vorhandenheit). With
each repetition in a configuration there arrives, in a discontinuous
seizure, in sudden lightning flash, in ecstatic astonishment, the
arrival of the wholly otherwise. In this sense each repetition is
wholly new, wholly singular existing (that is, it transcends itself )
that transcends each time from the generalized, immanent economy
of the self-consuming predicates. This intermittent, discontinuous
seizure of experiences, thought as ‘configuration’ here, we also call
‘caesural thinking’ in order to emphasize the interval, intermittent
character of the configuration. Benjamin calls such a constellation
or configuration as ‘discontinuous finitude’ (Benjamin 1998, p. 38).
The advent of the arrival can only be told in a pre-predicative
configuration, for configuration is less concerned with cognition
and predication than with its task of redeeming phenomenon from
the violence of cognition. Benjamin calls this arrival as ‘profane
illumination’ when ‘dialectics stands still’ and history comes to a halt.
The task of philosophical contemplation is not cognitive mastery of
phenomena but a linguistic task, that of renewing the act of Naming:
‘Ideas are displayed, without intention, in the act of naming, and
they have to be renewed in philosophical contemplation. In this
renewal as the primordial mode of apprehending words is restored’
(Ibid., p. 37). This renewal is the remembrance of the originary not
yet impaired by the cognitive violence, and is irreducible to historical
memory of the speculative-dialectical.
EN-FRAMING, REVELATION
A thinking that gives itself the task of ‘destruction of ontology’ at
the completion of a certain metaphysics does not ask the question of
Being as ‘constant presence’ but Being understood in the infinitive
of the verbal resonance, as the event of Being, as Being’s coming into
presence. Therefore the existential analytic of Dasein in Sein und
Zeit distinguishes the existential analytic from categorical grasp of
‘entities presently given’ (Vorhandenheit), insofar as the existential
Dasein for whom—who is a ‘who’, and not a ‘what’—its own being
is at stake does not have the character of the ‘entities presently given’,
for in itself existential is each time singular occurring, each time its
coming into presence that distinguishes this existential analytic from
the average-ness of the ‘Das Man’, ‘the They’. As such Being as event
cannot be thought within the categorical grasp of the everyday ‘what’
presently given but as the temporalized constellation of ecstasies of
temporalities, each is each time its own mode of coming to presence.
This thinking of the event of Being—which is also the thinking
of difference as difference (of what Heidegger calls ‘ontological
difference’)—is the task in Being and Time.
In his later writings Heidegger no longer thinks this coming into
presence, this event of Being as the task of constituting a fundamental
ontology anymore but as the advent of the truth of Being presencing
to presence that transforms the history of Being as Metaphysics to
the ‘thinking-saying’ of the other beginning. It is here Heidegger
introduces the two-fold notions of constellation, on the one hand
constellation as En-Framing (das Gestell) where there holds sway
the danger of the oblivion of the disclosing coming into presence of
the truth of Being, wherein this coming into presence is ‘entrapped’
and on the other hand, constellation as disclosing coming into
presence, when there occurs the epochal transformation of man’s
relation to Being, when as a result of danger coming to pass as danger
transforms itself into the coming into presence of the truth of Being.
This constellation of the epochal transformation of man’s relation to
Being which welcomes the coming into presence in its coming, the
coming as such is what Heidegger calls ‘the event of appropriation’ or
‘enowning’ (Ereignis). Therefore constellation as En-framing which
is the danger and the constellation as saving power are not simply
opposites; they are of the differential modes of the coming into presence
as Being’s oblivion and as unconcealment of Being. This differential
modes of coming into presence is thought as belonging together and
belonging together of man and Being where neither man nor Being
is thought as constant presence of ‘entities presently given’ but each
time as coming into presence, and therefore outside the categorical
appropriation into system.
Configuration or constellation in Heidegger’s later thinking is
man’s transformative relation to Being where the configuration is
thought not constituting a system but as belonging-together of man
and Being, open to the advent of the other beginning. The event
itself occurs as configuration or constellation, as a constellation of
man’s relation of ‘belonging-together’ to Being, and not of belonging-
together (as it is reductively understood in the onto-theological
constitution of metaphysics). The latter is the thinking of metaphysics
as what Heidegger calls ‘En-Framing’ where there holds sway the
oblivion of the danger as danger. En-Framing is the appearing of
the configuration, or constellation of man and Being in the world
of technological calculability, and therefore it is only a prelude to
the far more originary configuration or constellation as the ‘event
of appropriation’, that means, event of the arrival and the coming.
Heidegger says:
What we experience in the frame as the constellation of Being and man
through the modern world of technology is a prelude to what is called
the event of appropriation. This event, however, does not necessarily
persist in its prelude. For in the event of appropriation the possibility
arises that it may overcome the mere dominance of the frame to turn
into a more original appropriating. Such a transformation of the frame
into the event of appropriation, by virtue of that event, would bring
the appropriate recovery—appropriate, hence never to be produced
by man alone—of the world of technology from its dominance back
to servitude in the realm by which men reaches truly into the event of
appropriation. (Heidegger 1969, p. 37)
The belonging-together, but not belonging-together of the constellation,

as the event of appropriation, is an exposure of man to what ‘man
alone cannot produce’, what is otherwise than man, an exposure of
man himself to the ‘event of appropriation’. Man is, then, no longer
understood as ‘animal rational’ but Dasein, who is the open space
of strife, ‘the midpoint’ between overwhelming and arriving. In his
Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger writes of this Dasein:
Dasein: The ‘between’ which has the character of a mid-point that is
open and sheltering between the arrival and flight of gods and man,
who is rooted in that ‘between’ Heidegger 1999a, 23).
Dasein belongs to event or enowning (Ereignis) and only insofar as
Dasein belongs to enowning, or event, it is also the creative being
that leaps into be-ing. In this leap or spring, event is an essential
transformation of thinking beyond the given En-Framing towards
the arrival of the beginning: ‘looking towards the present, beyond

the situation of man, thinking sees the constellation of Being and
man in terms of that which joins the two—by virtue of the event of
appropriation’ (Heidegger 1969, p. 40).
Thinking as constellation, or configuration as holding-together, or
belonging-together of Being and man that man encounters, confronts
the strangeness of the coming of Being to man, only in so far as Being
is here near to the nearness of man’s essence. In other words, man
confronts his future, the incalculable coming, only when the event of
appropriation as leap, spring into the arrival is thought as the retreat
from the reductive totalization of a certain dominant metaphysics, the
metaphysics where the truth of Being—which Being is its disclosing
coming-into-presence—is entrapped in oblivion, as if it were, Being
abandons man. What is thought with the constellation as En-
Framing is the experience of abandonment. The constellation where
there Being comes to pass in its disclosing coming into presence is
the event of appropriation of this abandonment, and not at all man’s
mastery of this abandonment, nor it is at all calculative technological
totalization. But for that it becomes necessary for man to undergo
the essential distress of the abandonment of man by being. The event
of appropriation is rather dispropriation, displacement of man and
Being’s place in En-framing, that are turned (Kehre) into their placing
in what is its own. This undergoing the distress of the abandonment
of being is the displacement of man into Dasein, into the abyss
of ‘midpoint’ that un-grounds man where Dasein is enowned (or
appropriated) by being itself. In his Contributions to Philosophy,
Heidegger speaks of this displacement as such:
The awakening of this distress is the first displacing of man into that
between where chaos drives forth at the same time as god remains in
flight. This ‘between’ is, however, not a ‘transcendence’ with reference
to man. Rather, it is the opposite: that open to which man belongs
as founder and preserver wherein as Da-sein he is en-owned by be-
ing itself—be-ing that holds sway as nothing other than enowning.
(Heidegger 1999a, p. 19)
The relation between the constellation as En-Framing and

constellation as epochal transformation of man’s relation to Being
into the event of appropriation is that of turning (Kehre), or displacing

man from established determination into the abyss of the midpoint
which is Da-sein. This turning is not appropriation of Being nor is it
the reductive totalization of Being through technological mastery at
man’s disposal. The event of appropriation, that arrives with the turn,
rather demands that man renounces his claim of mastery and that
man opens himself, placing himself in the Open where the lightning
flash of Being arrives, to the claim of the disclosing truth of Being.
This truth claims man rather than man claiming the lighting flash
of truth so that passing through man, man is placed in its proper
place in the transformative constellation. It is this claim that occurs
as event of appropriation, and not as what man appropriates the
coming of Being as event.
The event of appropriation is differential manifestation of
the coming into presence of Being’s truth, and therefore is a
welcoming of a non-totalized advent, of what is to come only in so
far dispropriation of man’s placing in the En-Framing remembers
man’s originary placing in the Open, in the originary constellation
of man and Being where man is already always dispropriated from
the mastery of Being. In other words, it is where man is originarily
en-owned by being. The event of appropriation is appropriation of
Being’s abandonment of man in En-Framing to place man in the
originary abandonment (by undergoing its distress) in the originary
constellation of the Open. This remembrance occurs only at the end,
at a certain accomplishment of the coming into presence of Being
at its utmost realization when this realization comes to pass as En-
framing, and when the danger of this En-framing passes as danger
which turns this danger of En-Framing into the saving power of a new
destinal beginning, an inauguration of a new constellation, which is
yet to come, whose future suddenly arrives as lighting flash outside
man’s calculation and projection. The En-framing and the saving
power are like the two stars in a constellation whose paths cross each
other which belong, as differential manifestation to the constellation
of truth. It is on the basis of this constellation of truth alone that the
question concerning the essence of technology, its danger and saving
power can be asked in so far as the essence of technology is nothing
technological or technical, but revelation of Being whose coming to
pass is concealed, forgotten as this coming. The constellation of truth

will occur only when the coming into presence—the event—will
come to pass as coming, outside the totalizing En-framing.
Heidegger writes,
The irresistibility of ordering and the restraint of the saving power

draw past each other like the paths of two stars in the course of the
heavens. But precisely this, their passing by, is the hidden side of their
nearness.
When we look into the ambiguous essence of technology, we behold

the constellation, the stellar course of the mystery.
The question concerning technology is the question concerning the

constellation in which revealing and concealing, in which the coming
to presence of truth comes to pass. (Heidegger 1977, p.33)
Configuration is this differential and non-identical, non-totalized

revealing which sends (Schicken) destiny (Geschick) which must
already always holds sway outside man’s mastery. Because of its
‘already always’ character, understood more essentially, it does not
come to pass as mere past but in its arriving, or as fore-shining. This
fore-shining is to be understood in the constellation of a temporality
of an immemorial past (be-fore) and its arriving (in-advance).
Configuration enables the coming to be intimated as fore-shining,
making visible of the distant light, for it is already permeated by the
flash of lightning, by the revelation of the beginning. Configuration is
not the flight of Minerva’s owl when the historical labour of the world
is finished, but that which enables the coming to be said in poetic
Saying, and in artistic creation, in the philosophical contemplation
as configuration of ideas.
Configuration is the differentiating perdurance between the
overwhelming and arrival. Or rather, should we say, the differentiating
perdurance, as happening of the event itself occurs as constellation,
or configuration where thinking undergoes transformation unto the
beginning, unto that originary abandonment. In the configuration
therefore there is always a repetition of beginning. The repetitions
of the beginning are hold together as it were in a constellation, co-
figuration, where each experience or thought is seized anew in their
relative freeing from the other, and thereby relating to each other
as singular relations of non-mastery. As a disjunctive assemblage that

never constitutes a system or totality, each singular interrupts itself
and others at the same time in its coming into existence, and thereby
opens and exposes itself to others. Heidegger attempts to think
this holding-together in configuration as ‘being apart and the being
towards each other’ (Heidegger 1969, p. 65). Configuration sends
man and being away from each other while holding them towards
each other so that man is placed in its proper place in relation to
Being, that means, placing man as properly non-propriating being,
whose propriety and property consists in being non-property and
non-propriety. Only then is he open to the incalculable arrival of the
lightning flash of truth. Configuration is welcoming this incalculable
arrival which man experiences in the stillness of completed language,
in the stillness of an eternity appearing as standing still, when the
unapparent becomes apparent as the dis-figuring figure of mortality
that strikes the mortal, abandoning him to the originary experience
of his abandonment, to the originary strife of darkness and lightning,
of sheltering and exposing of man to the event of being.
Lightning, Clearing
The turning from the danger of En-Framing (das Gestell) to the
constellation where the event of appropriation arrives, this turning
may occur momentarily, suddenly that in it’s like the lightning strikes
the mortals, like what Hölderlin speaks of Apollo striking him. The
mortals then experience this suddenness of the lightning flash in a
‘glance’ of the moment, in a sudden clearing and opening where
language falls silent, because of its fulfillment where saying and said
comes together to welcome the phenomenon of the unapparent. The
stillness of the lightning flash ‘stills Being into the coming to presence
of world’ (Heidegger 1977, p. 49). Heidegger here plays with the
words: blitzen (to flash), blicken (to glance), Einblick (in-sight), and
Augenblick (moment, suddenness). Heidegger writes,
The turning of the danger comes to pass suddenly. In this turning,
the clearing belonging to the essence of Being suddenly clears itself
and lights up. This sudden self-lighting is the lightning flash. It brings
itself into its own brightness, which it itself both brings along and
brings in. When, in the turning of the danger, the truth of Being
flashes, the essence of Being clears and lights itself up. Then the truth
of the essence, the coming to presence, of Being turns and enters in.
(Ibid., p. 44).
This disclosing coming to presence of Being (Ereignis), this event of

Being arrives in a sudden, momentary (Augenblick) lightning flash
(Blitzen). In this flashing glance (Blicken) the truth of coming into
presence of Being enters (Einblick) into the new constellation of the
relation between man and Being. The lightning flash arrives as the
stillness of the still, as if the entirety of the ecstatic temporalities—the
ecstatic past, the ecstatic presence and the ecstatic future—arrives as
simultaneous disjunction, as a simultaneous discontinuity, which is
the eternity of the glance, of the moment.
In German language the word Lichtung means both clearing and
lightening, both opening and lighting. Heidegger in his later writing
no longer understands Aletheia as truth but this lighting-lightening,
clearing-opening where darkness and light, presence and absence
comes into pass. In colloquial German the word Lichtung means
forest clearing, to lighten open, to clear open a site and to open to
the opening—as in the forest clearing and opening—where light
and darkness, appearing and vanishing, and also coming takes place,
happens, occurs. In The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking
Heidegger attempts to translate Aletheia into Lichtung. This opening
precedes any presence and absence, for it alone enables presencing to
take place, for the arriving to arrive. It is the open sea where the sea
opens the voyage to the coming. But this opening is to be far more
primordially thought than beings that have arrived and presented
themselves—as beings, as totality of beings—in a system. The
task of thinking at, what Heidegger calls ‘the end of philosophy’,
philosophy for whose matter of thinking is the question of Being
as presence, is to open the present itself to a coming, to the unapparent
presencing that presences. If the beings as such in their totality whose
Being is grasped as ground of beings, enables Being to be thought
as presencing itself—whose movement Hegelian speculative logic
includes in the system—it has come to itself only in so far as an
originary opening to presence is already hold sway. A configuration
thinking is not a configuration of categories, whose truth is told in
predicative propositions—in other words, it is not the thinking of beings
as totality, or Being as presence—but an astonished exposure, a lightning

opening to the coming, a clearing freeing for the arrival. Only then the
arrival arrives, Being comes to presence in this enabling appearing: ‘The
opening’, says Heidegger, ‘grants first of all the possibility of the path
to presence, and grants the possible presencing of that presence itself ’
(Heidegger 1978, p. 387). Heidegger says,
The beam of light does not first create the opening, openness, it only
traverses it. It is only such openness that grants to giving and receiving
and to any evidence at all what is free, in which they can remain and
must move’. (Ibid., p. 385)
The constellation emits the light of its own, and therefore it does not
have its destiny, for it itself as event of appropriation sends destinal
inauguration to man. But this destinal inauguration arrives from
a site wholly otherwise, from a future incalculable. The experience
of thinking according to Heidegger, like Benjamin’s philosophical
contemplation, is not categorical, cognitive mastery of phenomena
or objects but to enter into the constellation of the lightning flash
where the mortal remembers the immemorial promise, as if it comes
into presence from the site of the yet to come. It arrives as momentary
illumination when all of time as if stands still, and the mortal
experiences this stillness—mortal whose fate is his finitude—as an
eternity. There in that lightning flash man has momentary glance
into the truth and essence of his own origin where the primordial
creative, the divine word is uttered. In this time without time there
is no before absolutely before and no after absolutely after, which
for that matter does not collapse into One indifferent, Universal,
homogenous empty Now, but as a constellation of ecstasies coming
together without totality, without system. The contemplation of this
eternity in philosophical thinking, and the renewal of this eternity in
our primordial remembrance give philosophical thinking a dignity
and nobility that reflects the paradisiacal, blissful creative naming of
Adam who in naming inherited God’s creative Word. Constellation
then has to enter into language where revealing coming to presence is
not impaired by the categorical En-framing in its cognitive mastery
and ordering, in its challenging forth. Heidegger attempts to think
the constellation of the differential revealing by renewing the old idea
of techne: the bringing into radiance, bringing forth unto beautiful,
unto the splendor of the open. Understood, techne of the work of art
is neither technological nor aesthetic enjoyment. As beautiful, it is
rather the letting the grant of revelation to hold sway, which is outside
mastery or calculability but that precisely calls forth man to renounce
the calculability and mastery and to abandon oneself to the ‘distress
of the abandonment of being’.
Before Heidegger, both Schelling and Nietzsche, who already
understood the essence of the apparatus, of En-framing in their own
singular ways, thought of love and beautiful as what radiate forth in
the work of arts, as what lighten up, what shine forth in the works of
art. What shines forth in works of art as fore-shining is the advent, is
the arrival that transfigures man’s existence unto a new future. In the
works of art, in a more originary manner than philosophy, love and
beauty utter their creative breath which arrives to mortals as sudden
apparition. This arrival may not accompany great noises and may
not come in the thunders of great events but in a language faintly
audible, barely a murmur, in the stillness of a breath.
Schelling in his The Ages of the World writes of this event,
In the nocturnal vision where the Lord passed by the prophet, a
mighty storm first came which rent the mountains and shattered the
rocks. After this came an earthquake, and then finally a fire. But the
Lord himself was in none of these, but rather was in a soft murmur
that followed. Likewise, Power, Violence, and Stringency must come
first in the revelation of the eternal so that the eternal itself can first
appear as the Eternal Itself in the soft wafting of Love. (Schelling
2000, p. 83)
CONSTELLATION OF TEMPORALITIES
Configuration, not of categories, but singular multiple opening to
come is essentially a thinking of time, of coming into presence, the
event of arriving, for time-space is the open site where the strife occurs
between the reserve and exposure of man to its futurity. Configuration
is con-figuring of temporalities—multiple and singular—in their
ecstasies and astonishment, hope and anticipation as their existential
fundamental moods, or attunements. As there are attunements of
temporalities, and they are existential, so there are temporalities
of attunements: they are thought as and in configuration, or
constellation, or as caesural perduring. Hence configuration thinking

is to be distinguished from the task of system making. For the
system, or thinking in totality, multiplicity is merely an attenuated
modulation or variation of the logical principle of generation. In
Hegelian system, temporalities are the multiplicity as particulars,
and they hold together only so far as what Hegel calls ‘Presence’ or
‘ Eternity’ traverses them and unites them in the innermost ground
of the One Subjectum. Here then, as Heidegger reminds, the
belonging-together is not thought in an originary manner, that is, as
configuration of belonging-together, but as En-framing of belonging-
together at the accomplishment or end of metaphysics in its onto-
theo-logical constitution (Heidegger 1969).
In the Hegelian system temporalities are not seen as configuration
of ecstatic singularities, but mere particulars that are mastered and
elevated, uplifted unto the Universal. As mere particulars, instances
are only the attenuated modification of the Same universal. The
System, or Totality has place neither for the multiple, nor for the
singulars, since the notion of difference is grasped here on the basis
of the generative principle of variation—that means, the side by side-
ness of indifferent particulars—where ‘each’ (of ecstatic temporalities)
is subordinated to ‘every’ (of a monotonous homogeneity), ecstatic
differentiation to an attenuated particularities. Later is the modality
of time from where certain notion of ‘emanation’ has come as
generative principle, a thinking that is provided by Aristotle’s treatise
on Physics, and whose sovereignty is to be found in the Hegelian
notion of temporality itself as generation.
This notion of generation always presupposes the Universal One
which uplifts (Aufheben) the multiplicities of the singulars in so far
as multiple only there appears as variation of the Same, the Parousia
of the Subjectum. As ‘each’ is only thought as ‘every’—where ‘every’
is understood as every ‘instant’ on the spatial scale of succession,
as a succession of nows, for that alone enables the system to be
accomplished—the thought of totality misses the thinking of the
ecstatic singularities of temporalities and therefore seeks to exclude the
opening to the outside, to the arrival of the event. The event arrives in
the sudden flash of lightning that tears open man to transcendence,
bursting open the ‘every’-ness of the instants into the Moment when
the ecstatic temporalities belong together as an assemblage of eternity.
The sudden flash of lightning to tear open and the transcendence

of the coming to burst into, there must be an ecstatic ‘each’ stepping
out, leaping forth, springing outside the given present instants. Such
lightning flash that appears as momentary illumination must not
be gathered in the re-collected totality of the Universal One. The
moment—and not the instant—is this stepping out of the totality,
in ecstasy and astonishment, but not in an indifferent monotony
and the banality of the same recollected instants in succession. The
moment does not allow itself to be recollected, precisely because it is
stepping out of recollection and collection: each moment, each time,
singular and irreducible, ecstatic and eternal, leaps into the open.
The eternity of the singular is the moment of its irreducibility to the
recollected unity of the instants. It is rather the surplus, the excess,
the transcendence without there being any transcendent waiting
fixed and immobile.
What makes Both Heidegger and Rosenzweig in their critique
and overcoming of Hegelian determination of temporality is their
singular relation to later Schelling’s attempt to think the ecstatic
singularity of temporalities itself as configuration, where the ecstatic
potentialities of the eternal past, the eternal presence and eternal
future are not determined as auto-generative and homogenous
instances of the Universal One, but as irreducible multiplicity of the
singulars, each in relative independence from the other and yet is
an inseparable holding-together as Zusammenhang, as configuration.
not only Heidegger’s three ecstasies of temporalities which are not
grasped as entities ‘presently given’ (Vorhandenheit), and therefore
irreducible to their leveling off to the homogenous succession,
but also Rosenzweig’s Star itself is nothing but a configuration of
temporalities of eternal past, eternal presence and eternal future in
their respective relation to Creation, Revelation, and Redemption,
with God, Man and World as their co-figures that are irreducible to
each other as singular multiple. As such, configuration thinking does
not have sublation (Aufhebung) as the negative speculative principle
of unity. As configuration, each is its stepping out of closure, stepping
towards transcendence, towards the coming and the arriving. Each is,
in this sense, a relation to a coming, to a future.
In this manner the question of the future and its relation to eternity is
thought in the configuration and not in the system. In this sense future
alone is eternal, for each ecstatic temporality is stepping towards the

incalculable, infinite coming, towards transcendence; or, should we
say, each is its transcendence, each affirming the coming and future. In
other words, this ecstatic future alone is truly eternal, and not a mere
modality of Time, for it alone enables each stepping out of itself into
the open, and opens each to the coming. This is what later Heidegger
repeatedly speaks of as ‘time times’: timing of time is that of the
simultaneity as holding-together of the irreducible singular multiple
of the ecstatic temporalities, which alone enables an encounter, in the
disclosure of the opening, with the future:
Time times—which means, time makes ripe, makes rise up and grow.
Timely is what has come up in the rising. What is it that time times?
That which is simultaneous rises up together with its time. And what
is that? We have long known it, only we do not think of it in terms
of timing. Time times simultaneously: that which has been, and the
present that is waiting for our encounter is normally called the future.
(Heidegger 1982, p.106)
While for Heidegger the simultaneity of ecstatically singular

temporalities in the configuration is experienced as stillness of silence,
in Rosenzweig’s constellation of temporalities silence constitutes the
beatitude of completed understanding. Silence is the attunement
of completed understanding to the coming redemption which is
promised, in the already always, in the immemorial gift of language.
But this is so only in so far as constellation, or configuration of
temporalities is always already attuned to the coming so that what
Heidegger calls ‘stillness’, or Rosenzweig’s silence—instead of being
denial of language—brings language, as if for the first time, to its
fullness of completion when language, irreducible to any cognitive
disposal and instrumentality, appears in its unapparent apparition as
language of the name, Adamic, blissful, paradisiacal.
Language is not here the categorical grasp of ‘the presently given

entities’ (Vorhandenheit) which is the mere result of a process,
a predicative proposition about the result of the process, but is
redemptive remembrance of the originary promise, which is
understood in the silence of completed understanding. Language
happens together with the coming as lightning flash, as the ‘time
times simultaneously’, belonging-together, as configured harmony.

That will be the redemption of language itself that is renewed in
what Benjamin calls ‘the act of Naming’. The beatitude of the
completed understanding in silence, rescued and redeemed from
its cognitive instrumentality and serviceability, from reduction of
language to the entities ‘presently given’, is experienced as eternity.
Here alone man, as mortal and finite creature, is endowed with
an eternity beyond transience, and beyond death. Here alone man,
open to mortality is endowed with the beatitude of redemption by
being intimated with the entirety of time coming together, which
manifests itself—a phenomenon of the unapparent—as an ‘atom
of eternity’. It is in the eternity of the holding together of time—
as constellation—that man has a time beyond death, that he is
given the gift of redemption. The eternity of the moment is not
present as Ousia or Parousia of the Subjectum that is present as
permanent enduring, but as coming into presence, as event of time
that simultaneously spaces itself as temporalization.
It is in relation to the question of temporality alone, as configuration,

that the questions of revelation and redemption occur, for the
question of transcendence is posed only when time itself is released
beyond the thetic time of negativity, beyond the predicative grasp of
temporalities. Time does not time itself as positing. Therefore the
questions of revelation and redemption do not have a place in Hegelian
system, for the beginning and the end of Hegelian system is none but
a positing, thetic, predicative one. The unapparent phenomenon of
the extreme future is not to be understood as particular instant of
now that is coming to pass. That there is a past, and presence only in
so far as each is to come that first of all opens to each advent of this or
that coming. Elsewhere I wrote,
…this future is not the future of the specific temporality: there are
singular ecstatic temporalities only to the extent that each one, in its
singular way, is attuned to coming, each one is ahead of itself, and
there lies the ecstases of each one of them. Here it is necessary to
elaborate the notion of attunement of coming as transcendence, which
can be understood as follows: there is no ecstatic past, ecstatic present
or ecstatic future without each one being attuned to the transcendence
of itself. This aheadness, this forward dimension, this opening to the
coming, is the originary of finite existence: ‘this’ futurity, which is not

a future as one of the three dimensions of time, is messianic future, a
futurity and coming other than ‘future’. This futurity therefore does
not arrive, or come in time, let alone some future time: what comes
as coming, this messianic coming, is not this or that coming, but
coming itself. (Das 2008, p.173)
This radical futurity, this extremity of time cannot be included within
the immanent system of visible forms. The system does not have place
for redemption and revelation, for it can only think of temporalities
of the singular multiple as a collection of banal, unredeemed, sterile,
successive instants as nows and is therefore deaf to the anguished cry
of the mortal one, praying for redemption which is to arrive from
beyond the closure of immanent historical time that is lived out in
every self-consuming nows.
What remains to come, the remnant of time is future, the coming
time. It is that which steps out of the given, and ventures beyond
and embarks into the new voyage of hope—hope that there may
remain time after death, so that the remaining time may redeem all
that has been missed fulfillment and happiness. Here the lesson is
drawn from the fundamental task of Levinasian philosophy: that of
thinking, not time on the basis of death, not of thinking death on the
basis of time (Levinas 2000), that means, ‘to have time beyond death,
time to remain after all ends of time, time to remain after every last
time, after all last time’ (Das 2008, p. 173). Each singular-ecstatic
temporality in the configuration by itself is a venturing beyond into
the open that inaugurates a new beginning to come that ‘remaining
ever, redeems death’ (Ibid.). In the configuration of each ecstatic-
singular temporality—in their freeing and opening—a coming is
permeated to arrive, a hope is intimated, a redemption promised, a
future anticipated, a possibility fore-shines in the distant sky, and a
new voyage begins.
With this the notion of a coming time is attempted here to be
elaborated, the coming that is not told in predicative proposition
or in the categories of conceptual apparatus, the coming that is not
grasped in the logical-immanent principle of generation, nor in the
totality of recollected instants as multiple variations of the Same, but
in the explosive configuration, ablaze by the flash of lightning and
hold open in the opening, a configuration where singular multiplicity
of each ecstatic temporalities are hold together in the open, in the

freeing, in the clearing of the open. The holding together, in or
as configuration is essentially a finite relation, which we shall call
henceforth a relation of finitude. Configuration thinking therefore
replaces generation with relation, totality with a new notion of a
finite whole.
Transfinitude
As it is shown above, configuration thinking is not an enclosed
infinitude within the immanence of its self-consuming predicates,
but a finitude that bears the wound of the infinite, that is exposed
to the infinite that affects it from a destination wholly immemorial
past and wholly incalculable future. What is at stake in thinking the
coming time as configuration is this infinite finitude of the coming
time which is always to remain? We shall also call this ‘infinite finitude
of the coming’ as transfinite. The transfinitude of the coming time: the
infinite-finitude of that which is to come and which is to remain to
come. What not here to be missed is the infinitive of the verbal resonance:
‘to’.
Schelling, Heidegger and Rosenzweig: with each of these three
thinkers of the coming, this promise of the advent is sought to be
released from the reductive totalization of the dominant metaphysics.
Since this thought of the promise is inseparable from the problematic
of time and gift, each of these thinkers is also thinker of gift which is
pure donation from a time immemorial. Schelling, Heidegger, and
Rosenzweig: they themselves form a configuration of thinkers here.
Through them and with their help a logic of origin—an inception to
come—and therefore a notion of the promise of time is elaborated
in a constellation, or configuration of repeated seizure of thoughts,
and in a configuration of questions. The intermittent, marked by
interval and discontinuity, coming back again repetitively, but always
singularly and differently to the question of the coming time and
its logic of origin: this is the ‘gesture’ or ‘style’ of thinking here, the
rhythm of the wandering poetizing. What follow are only exercises
of repetition where sobriety of philosophical reflection is not alien to
the phosphorous poetic seizure in lightning flash.
Thinking that knows not, is never touched by the lightning

flash of the coming is never intimated by the bursting open
towards transcendence, or never exploded from within in ecstasy
and astonishment. Such sober thinking is capable of nothing like
venturing beyond. Without venturing beyond, thinking is a sterile
absolute, mere humming monotony of the empty indifference, an
infinite boredom that busies itself with recollection of what has
already happened, like the old woman on the spinning wheel that
Kierkegaard speaks of. Such a sober thinking has long since become
dead like, capable of nothing creative, but busies itself with singing
the song of Minerva’s owl. Such a sterile thinking privileges boredom
over ecstatic, creative transformation of the old into new. It is the
eternal return of boredom: nothing happens, nothing comes anew,
nothing repeats, nothing redeems, but only concept generating
another concept, one category generating other categories—as
Schelling mockingly refers to Hegel here—in a predictable, pre-
calculable, mechanical manner, an auto-engendering and auto-
producing logical generation of the Same. The creative thinking,
on the other hand, must not shy away from the contingencies of a
finite life, the ecstasy and the incalculability of the extremity of the
future that foils our anticipation and our hope, the exuberance of
the unpredictable that can also bring the distress and melancholy
of In-Vain. Instead of returning to the archaic past so that history
can preserve in its ‘the gallery of images’ (Hegel 1998, p. 492) those
shapes which the Spirit has passed through, and preserving the
triumphal march of the victorious, the creative reading must be able
to read—to speak with Walter Benjamin—what is not yet read, and
through this reading, to cipher and to trace the messianic, redemptive
element that were possible but never actualized. Meanwhile countless
deaths of those whose hopes were destroyed and unredeemed in
that dialectical march of history, have remained buried, forgotten
and lost. Therefore it is necessary that thinking may not be content
with the historical memorial task, but gives itself to the demand of
redemption, the requirement of a coming, of a future outside the
historical memory of the past is to be opened up. Thinking itself must
be redeeming, otherwise it is not worthwhile. It must be able to begin
again, venture itself again, forwards, in the front, in the open sea and
under the blue sky.
Thinking must have future. Such a thinking that takes seriously the
question of redemption and the requirement of a coming time is not
content with claiming to sublate death into the concept, and thereby
making death as mere vanity of the mortals. Instead, thinking must
take the finitude of existence seriously: later is thinking that both
Rosenzweig and Schelling pursue. There must arrive a time that is
promised, or intimated that remains beyond the works of death
which universal history undertakes on the behalf of negativity. This
time beyond negativity alone redeems all that has become, all that is
unredeemed, this melancholy of existence. Even God, so Schelling says
towards the end of his Philosophical Inquiry into the Nature of Human
Freedom, would have been sunk into the abyss of melancholy, for he
too had a source of melancholy within him, had he not transfigured
his sadness unto his creation out of his freedom. Creation transfigures
and thereby redeems our melancholic existence. Man partakes this
task of transfiguration with the divine, for he too shares with God
an essential freedom whose ground, however, is unfathomable. Man
partakes of the divine task of transfiguration—of sorrows into joy,
melancholy into hope—out of the freedom that is gifted to him,
loaned to him, endowed upon him as created ones. But this freedom
is ungrounded, or whose ground is inscrutable and unfathomable.
To seek to master this ground constitutes man’s attempt at the self-
abnegation of his own finitude. There lies the mortal’s capacity for
evil. Therefore the task of thinking lays in-letting hold swaying of the
open, and not seeking to master it by the violence of our power of
negativity. In this open region of freedom we are owned to the event
of en-owning.
Man is someone who asks the question of his own existence. This
question is inextricably bound up with the question of his mortality
and his finitude. As a mortal being, he asks what he can do out of his
creative freedom. But what he can do—because he is mortal, finite
being—only on the basis of an inappropriable grant, a non-economic
gift, a non-masterable promise granted to him in advance. It is on the
basis of what is not his capacity, mastery, or possession that mortality
grants the mortals the gift of future. Only on the basis of this non-
power the promise of coming time is gifted to the mortals. While
this makes mortals melancholic, this is also an occasion of his joy. To
remember this gift can be the highest thanking task of the mortals.
Part II
The Lightning Flash

§ The Language of the Mortals
This chapter attempts to think the relation of mortality to language

anew. If language is not to be understood merely in its cognitive
disposal—language as categorical grasp of ‘entities presently given’—
then language in relation to mortality can no longer be determined
on the basis of (Hegelian notion of ) negativity alone. In so far as
Hegel’s dialectical-speculative notion of language subsumes language
in the service of a speculative universal, language here is reduced to its
cognitive disposal. The attempt is made here to think language in a
more originary manner, as non-negative finitude that affirms what is
outside dialectical-speculative closure, what is to come. What arrives,
arrives in its lightning flash. Language is an originary exposure to the
event of language in its lightning flash. This essay reads Heidegger,
Schelling and Walter Benjamin to think language in its non-negative
finitude, as an originary exposure to the messianic arrival of the ‘not
yet’ (Bloch 1995). What at stake is the question of the promise of
language, the messianic promise of what is ‘to come’, understood in
the infinitude of its verbal resonance: ‘to come’.
THE PRESUPPOSITION
There is more than one reason that a philosophical thinking begins
with mortality as its presupposition. A philosophical thinking that
does not make mortality the end result of a dialectical-historical
process begins with mortality as presupposition or as the starting
point. Only that way philosophical thinking keeps open the way of
thinking to the coming time, time that survives death, remains after
death. The way opens itself to time that is to arrive. The way is not
‘way’ if it is to end with death, or if it makes death its end. The way,
then, if does not have to end its ‘way’ character, has to make death as
the point of departure rather than as the end point. That is why the
way of thinking makes death itself as the starting point, not an end. It
addresses death as question, or better, death addresses us as question,
question that seizes us with the tremor of mortality, fascinates and
astonishes us and touches us as destiny.
The question why mortality seizes us as the question of destiny
is the destinal question of language. Language does not make death
the end result of a speculative process and that is why language holds
us essentially in its promise, the promise of language that is at once
the promise of time yet to come. Only he who hears this promise, to
whom this promise is granted first of all, one who is finite and mortal,
is open thereby what the way opens towards, that is—to the coming
time, to the affirmation of the pure future. It will be illuminating
here to discuss the later Heidegger’s thinking of language. Heidegger
here attempts to think the promise of language which is essentially
that of thinking the way, thinking on the way, thinking underway
which is going under, thinking on the way to thinking, for the way
grants to mortals in advance, it gives (es gibt) already—the advent,
the coming to presence but not what has presently come as this or
that coming amenable to the categorical, intelligible gaze of the
knower. Thinking on the way is the promise of thinking that arrives
in advance, before anything else, as immemorial and that is why it
also appears as destinal. What gives in advance is called ‘inception’
(Anfang), which is distinguished by Heidegger from ‘beginning’
(Beginn). In his 1934-35 lectures on Hölderlin’s hymns ‘Germanien’
and ‘Der Rhein’, Heidegger says,
‘Beginn’—das ist etwas anderes als ‘Anfang’. Eine neue Wetterlage, z.
B. beginnt mit einem Sturm, ihr anfang aber ist die vorauswirkende,
völlige Umwandlung der Luftverhältnisse. Beginn ist jenes, womit
etwas anhebt, Anfang das, woraus etwas enspringt. Der Weltkrieg
fing an vor Jahrhunderten in der geistig-politishen Geschichte
des Abenlandes. Der Weltkrieg begann Vorpostengefechten. Der
The Language of the Mortals • 163
Beginn wird alsbald zurückgelassen, er verschwindet im Fortgang

des Geschehens. Der Anfang, der Ursprung, kommt dagagen im
Geschehen allererst zum Vorschein und ist voll da erst an seinem
Ende1 (Heidegger 1980, p.3).
In another lecture on language that is collected as On the Way to

Language, Heidegger says of the promise of this advent, of this
inception: ‘For man is man only because he is granted the promise
of language, because he is needful to language, that he may speak it’
(Heidegger 1982, p.90).
This ‘already’ the-there of promise that is granted to man in advance
so that he may speak a language: how to think this ‘in advance’,
which is not a being among beings, an entity among entities and
that is given to man in a more originary manner than anything
‘presently given’? It is not anything (‘presently given’) nor pure and
simple nothingness of negativity with which Hegel’s Logic begins.
How to think this the-there of the promise, or the gift of language
if not as an essential, originary finitude, which already in advance
grants the mortals the promise of language? The task of thinking
that seeks to hearken, listen to this promise of language begins with
the question of finitude and mortality, which is to be understood
here in its non-negative finitude. The pain of this finitude that adheres
to language is not the pain of the labour of the negative. We are here
trying to think of a finitude and mortality that has another modality,
another dimension than the dimension of negativity. To begin with
death is not to make death a cognitive entity so as to ground the
speculative historical process of a philosophical thinking. It is rather
otherwise. If it is from language alone that we experience death as death,
and that this language of man is already always seized by the tremor of
mortality, then mortality is precisely the non-condition, the unground
that keeps the historical world open, like an open wound, to what is
forever outside of what has come as unground, or as the-there . The event
of language arrives as un-grounded clearing, or, as the un-ground of
a clearing, whose occurring is singular each time and irreducible to
the universality and general order of the conceptual cognition. The
ecstatic occurrence of this event of language is not one being among
beings, not one category among categories, but is the originary
opening, is the more primordial disclosure to what is not yet given.
In the beginning of his Being and Time (1962) Heidegger

distinguishes existential in its originary apophantic dimension of
language from the categorical grasp of ‘presently given’ (Vorhandenheit)
entities. What Heidegger there refers to as ‘Da’ of Dasein, as the there,
the facticity of Dasein—Dasein whose being is being-towards-death—
is also thereby essentially, in the innermost manner, a linguistic
existence whose existentiality is this being-towards-death. Dasein is
that existence whose ‘Da’ lies in the originary apophansis of language,
even before language comes to be categorical and predicative of
‘presently given entities’. In section B of ¶ 7 that belongs to the
Introduction II of Being and Time, Heidegger attempts to understand
the concept of Logos in a more originary manner than as mere locus
of logical truth. Logos is understood here as originary disclosure of
this existentiality of existence called Dasein whose existentiality is this
‘being-towards-death’. It is this intimate connection between the logos
of language with the logos of mortality that precisely makes first of all
Dasein as existence irreducible to the entities ‘presently given’, this
event of language irreducible to the truth of logic in its propositional,
predicative structure. Therefore the task of Destruktion der Ontologie
(as one of the two fold tasks of Being and Time) accompanies the
‘destruction’ of traditional logic in its propositional-predicative
structure in order to reveal, in retrogressive manner, the buried,
originary pre-supposition, which is, the existentiality of a linguistic
existence as being-towards-death. The existence whose existentiality
is this ‘toward-ness’, this ahead-ness (understood in the infinitude of
the verbal resonance of ‘to’) towards its own impossibility, to its own
nothingness and abyss—and in so far as this toward-ness to death
first of all discloses itself in the originary existential-apophansis of
language—existence is therefore already always attuned to language,
essentially, and in the innermost manner. What Heidegger here
attempts to think in the name ‘logos’ to which mortals in their being-
towards-death are attuned to, and yet which cannot be appropriated
by these mortals, is not ‘reason’ of ‘human’ as against the sheer brutal,
instinctive assertion of brute being-among-beings, but the originary
apophansis before the categorical grasp, that lies even before what
Edmund Husserl refers to as ‘categorical intuition’2.
Taking this point from Heidegger as point of departure, we
venture forward to say that language is not primarily predicative
locus of ‘truth’ as the truth of what has appeared, but enabling-

clearing, disclosing-appearing of the unapparent, which is without
name and without concept, which in the midst of existing opens
from the heart of existence like an yawning abyss, which seizes those
mortals who speak with fear and trembling. Language then, if I am
allowed to say this, is the site of this unapparent apparition, which is
the event of existence that is prior to the entities ‘presently given’. It is
as if the event of language is each time born out of an abyss that
remains outside us like an eternal remainder of non-knowledge,
the abyss where language ruins itself while incessantly, interminably
moving towards it as if towards its own essence, that means, towards
its outside. Language of this linguistic existence is this being-towards
its own ruination on the basis of which the unapparent apparition
takes places, erupts in the midst of existing.
The event of language is this event of existence itself whose
existentiality lies in its toward-ness to its un-working-ruination where
the intensity of the moment of ripeness is at once its dissolution
and sinking unto nothing without being converted into being, as
if language in its ripeness and plenitude coincides with its own
dissolution. The simultaneity of the ripeness and its ruination,
fullness and dissolution, arises like lightning which language in its
inability to contain itself, at once points to, indicates to what is
outside all representation, rendering the outside as wholly otherwise
manifestation, the unapparent, the bluish evaporating of death.
Death at once makes manifestation possible, while ruining the works
of any figuration. The intensity of the moment is this dis-figuring
expropriation of language from its own gathering, rendering language
to say the unsayable and to unsay the sayable, to point towards at
once, simultaneously, what language is and what language is not.
Language is this strange monstrous site whereas Kierkegaard says3,
opposing Epicurus—where death is, I am as this linguistic being is
there; in other words, which is to say, ‘ I am there where I am not
there’, where this simultaneity of ‘ where I am’ and ‘where I am not’
is without reconciliation, without synthesis . Language presents this
simultaneity of the disjoining—‘of ‘where I am’ and ‘I am not’—
this discontinuous continuity, or continuous discontinuity as dieresis
where non-being intensifies itself more being insists in itself, like an
infinite debt where the debt increases itself more we pay off, as a
result there never occurs the instant when the debt and pay off is
leveled off, when ‘being and nothing is the same’.
Unlike Hegel’s speculative-logical determination of beginning,
language neither begins with the identity of being and nothing, nor
ends there. This instant when the being and nothing is the same can
happen only in logical system where nothing really happens at all
in so far as all happening here is merely a logical movement but not
the event of existence. The event of existence begins, because of its
inextricable finitude and mortality, as indebted, as—what Schelling
(1936) call—‘loan’. This infinite loan is the presupposition of an
‘already there’, ‘the-there’ as facticity of existence, an immemorial,
infinite past. This facticity and presupposition of language with
which the event of existence begins is unlike Hegel’s system of logic,
for Hegel’s logical system does not need presupposition in order to
constitute itself as system. This presupposition of the event of language,
which is also the event of existence, is nothing but this mortality itself
which Hegel’s system has to exclude in order to be an all inclusive
system, as All. It is because of this exclusion Hegel’s all inclusive
system remains outside language, and outside existence, for the event
of language is essentially pre-suppositional, i.e., it presupposes not
what is ‘presently given’, but the unapparent that strikes language
with its lighting flash. It presupposes, indebted to what it is not in
order to be language, which is its structural condition of possibility,
its opening moment, it’s coming into existence as language.
The structural opening of each discourse—in so far as each
discourse is finite inextricably—begins as gratitude, as thankfulness
for its coming into existence, for the gift of its existence which is never
paid off. The infinitude of this gratitude in so far as this gratitude is
never leveled off with the finitude of this existence, in so far as more
the infinitude increases more finitude of existence expands itself,
transcends itself, ecstatically goes beyond itself—of what Schelling
calls this ‘exuberant being’—the moment in existence itself is never
reached when existence is equal to what it is indebted to, to what is
its presupposition, to what is the condition of its possibility. So it
is with language. Language is never equal to its own presupposition,
never equal to itself, is never equal to—how to say this?—its own
nothing, its own finitude, its own limit and its own mortality that
in a manner of un-apparition, gives to language its open-ness to its
own arrival. The event of language whose existentiality is this 0being-

towards-its-own-nothing never can appropriate this ‘toward-ness’
simply because this ‘toward-ness’ is its presupposition to which it
never attains, from which it already always falls off, more exuberantly
it moves towards this ‘toward-ness’, more ecstatic is this movement,
more and more it affirms itself. Language in this eventive character
is, paradoxically, an infinite impoverishment and infinite plenitude at
once that forever draws it out of its limit and exposes it to the pure
advent of the unapparent. The movement of language is this moving
towards its own essence, its fulfillment as language, its happiness
and its plenitude that is also its ruination. This aporia of language—
its dieresis—is never sublated into speculative reconciliation of the
synthesis; rather, synthesis here is excluded as excluded synthesis,
of what Rosenzweig calls ‘an excluding All’ (Rosenzweig 2005, 19).
The event of thinking that begins with language, therefore, begins
with presupposition, which is this radical finitude, this mortality of
language, and its indebt-ness to what is outside thinkable and outside
system, namely, the unapparent advent of language itself coming into
presence, beyond all the visible, apparent forms of ‘the presently given
entities’.
Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption begins with this question
of presupposition. It begins with the interrogation of that claim which
the system as philosophy of All makes on behalf of thinkable that it
does not presuppose anything. This claim—that it is presupposition-
less—is the presuppositional condition of the possibility of the
system at all, the presupposition that death is nothing, or rather that
death must be thinkable, if at all there be anything like thinkable.
What makes thinkable alone ‘thinkable’ is the presupposition that it
is presupposition-less. This alone makes, by reducing the unapparent
character of the pure arrival of the language into apparent, visible
forms of the ‘categorical intuition’, the system of knowledge, of light
and of its ontological intelligibility. Therefore death is nothing in the
philosophy of All. It has to cast aside death’s ‘poisonous sting’ and
‘its pestilential breath’, the fear and trembling which is heard in each
mortal cry in the face of death. That this philosophy of All has to
deny the presupposition of the event of existence—existential facticity
that the ‘nothing of death is something’—this philosophy also has
to be thereby bereft of language. The presupposition of the event of
language is the unthinkability of death, but an unthinkability which

is for that matter not pure nothing but something, a mortal ‘pitiless
cry’, from where thinking begins, from where language erupts—with
a nothing that is something. Rosenzweig then says:
But when philosophy denies the dark presupposition of all life, when
it does not value death as something, but makes it into nothing, it
gives itself that appearance of having no presupposition. In fact, all
cognition of the All has for its presupposition—nothing. For the one
and universal cognition of the All, only the one and universal nothing
is valid. If philosophy did not want to stop its ears before the cry
of frightened humanity, it would have to take the following as its
point of departure—and consciously as its point of departure—the
nothing of death is a something, each renewed nothing of death is a
new something that frightens anew, and that cannot be passed over in
silence, nor be silenced. (Ibid., p.11).
What cannot be included therefore within the universal representation
of philosophy as the cognition of the All is this facticity of the
nothing that is something, this unthinkable presupposition of the
event of existence, this presuppositional opening that each time
enables language to erupt and ruin itself. It is with this presupposition
that, like Rosenzweig’s text, that we shall begin here. It is this
presuppositional opening that discloses existence its own finitude, its
inextricable, indescribable, unthinkable mortality that ties existence
to its own condition of possibility and impossibility at the same time,
so that one who exists has to say—if he is not duping himself in
the deception of a philosophical promise—that when one is, one is
not. When one says, each time one says, as Kierkegaard—‘when I
am, I am not’—this saying occurs, erupts each time with such fear
and trembling, with such stammering, with such anguish and tremor
chocking one’s throat, which must be the throat of language. The
anguish of language lies in its presuppositional structure in the face
of the unthinkable advent of the un-apparition, which is outside the
presupposition-less, harmless, sterile cognition of the thinkable. The
real event of thinking begins here, with its dark presupposition, with
the anguish and terror of language that means, with the un-thinkable,
with—what Schelling calls—the ‘un-pre-thinkable’ (Unvordenkliche),
with the actuality before mere potentiality of concepts, with the
facticity of the ungrund which precedes all grounding. It is this event
of language from which alone we know death as death, where the

manifestation of the unapparent arrives in lighting flash, opening
this abyss at the heart of all thinkability, of all explication, of all
interpretation, of all grounding acts of reason.
A mortal thinking that begins with its dark presupposition, with
the anguish and terror in the face of pitiless death, has therefore
to be a language-thinking, not language as mere medium of spirit,
as mere means of communication at the cognitive disposal of the
categorical apparatus, but a thinking that is essentially linguistic in
its inextricable presupposition. As death is sought to be domesticated
in the system of visible forms, so language is reduced to its categorical
function of grasping apparent, visible entities ‘presently given’ at its
cognitive disposal4. This language does not primarily belong, without
remainder, to the world of negativity constituted by the work of
synthesis, nor is language primordially in the cognitive function of
the speculative-historical judgement. By not completely belonging
to the dialectical-historical closure, language opens itself to the non-
conditional promise of the inception that is outside synthesis, outside
the reconciliatory pathos of dialectical history. What is bestowed by
language upon man as gift opens in this abyss, which is the Open,
not the ontological or topological site, but the monstrous site
where the unapparent event arrives incalculably. It is in this sense
the early Heidegger too attempted to understand the meaning of
‘hermeneutic’ in conjunction with language beyond its predicative,
categorical function (Heidegger 1999b): the inextricably linguistic
mortal being is that who is abandoned to the open space where
Being itself advents. This advent of Being strikes the language that
welcomes, announces—because it is already always disclosed open
to the event, is enowned (appropriated) to the event—its unapparent
presencing to presence. Only in so far as the gift originates as if from
an abyss that there can be something like gift, that there is gift for
the one who himself is marked by death, has his ground like an abyss
that is outside his mastery, outside his power. This gift is the gift of
language.
Walter Benjamin in his beautiful text called Language as Such
and Language of Man recognizes a touch of melancholy in the acts
of overnaming that forgets this gift of language, when language
becomes for him mere medium of communication, mere medium
of man’s assertion of his power to name, in other words, when

name becomes overnaming, namely, the language of judgement.
As if language itself suffers here by being reduced to inscription, to
that draft at the cognitive disposal, where death, instead of being
that originary finitude which is gift of the creaturely existence,
becomes—in being overnamed—prattle. Benjamin calls the ceaseless
overnaming that has already lost the gift-character of language given
with the paradisiacal Naming of proper names, as prattle. Therefore
the categorical language is bereft of the character of proper name,
for the proper name appears as gift from the wholly other to the
one who is singular, irreducible and who as the irreducible one, is
summoned forth by the gift of this name to face the sign of mortality
that language, in its irreducibility to propositions and predications,
points towards, in the hint of its showing.
Taking this clue from Benjamin, we can go forth to say that
the proper name, therefore, is borne out of the encounter with
the singular, inescapable, inextricable death as death, and out of
this encounter with this death, to be responsible to the others who
are mortals. The proper name is far from property or propriety of
the one who bears the proper name; he can neither appropriate
his own name nor can he bear it like property of his self-identity.
He is already always dispropriated from anything like self-identity
by virtue of being endowed with a proper name, for he is already
always responsible to the other (from where language immemorially
arrives to him as gift) —who is yet to come—a responsibility that has
already always occurred to him, a responsibility that is presupposed
in being endowed with a proper name. To be endowed with a proper
name is not being able to be oneself, a solitary and self-enclosed,
autochthonous entity. It is rather to encounter, on the basis of an
originary dispropriation, the other mortals to whom one is responsible
and to other time, when the time of the meaning of the address is
the not yet. It is to introduce temporality into discourse, the time of
an infinite future at the heart of finitude so that the address to the
others appears as infinite transcendence in relation to the one who
confronts death as death.
This transcendence is the presupposition outside of language
by virtue of which language appears as language, language that
encounters death as death. Since this death appears to mortals in
its imminent uncertainty as advent of futurity, language therefore

can never become self-enclosed autochthonous entity, but constantly
points itself towards, goes ahead to the undecidability of the unknown
advent of the unapparent. This transcendence which does not have a
topos of its own cannot be named, precisely because it is the event of
naming itself.
Kierkegaard’s Indirect Communication

Therefore the gift of language always bears the mark of death. Søren
Kierkegaard knew something of this: that the gift, which is the gift
of death, is also thereby a singular experience of transcendence, an
experience of the-there, which is ‘death’s decision’, a trembling and
a cry. This ‘death’s decision’ (Kierkegaard 1993, pp. 71-102) which
gives ‘earnestness’ to existence, which is the utmost existential
interest of the singular being with a proper name, refuses to serve
the interests of the universal Spirit; it is what does not belong to
the ethical order of the system of visible forms. Its claim is then to
be sought elsewhere, in that Archimedean point where language
presents the un-presentable as discontinuous presentation, as
dis-figuring, momentary advent, whose singularity of occurrence
suspends the universal order of generality. Kierkegaard does not
abandon language as insufficient to express the arrival of the divine,
or, as merely expression of the universal ethical Spirit that dialectically
constitutes the historical-speculative world. What is more interesting
is Kierkegaard’s recognition of language’s insufficiency in relation
to itself, the incommensurability between the singular eruption of
the event of its coming and the universal claims of the Speculative
history in its categorical claims to grasp the result of a becoming,
which is the process of a universal history. Language that is marked
by ‘death’s decision’ (because death is what is unpresentable in the
negative labour of a conceptual language) opens the figuration of
language to the un-presentable apparition of the unapparent, tearing
language from itself in fear and trembling and giving over to its
ruination. Neither this ‘death’s decision’ nor this language at the
limit of cognition is communicable in the generality of the concept,
or within the ethical realm of the universal where each particular
is homogenous with others, exchangeable with others. As such, this
language can only be indirect communication that bears—or cannot

bear—the mark of ‘death’s decision’ which refuses to belong to the
universal ethical realm which is produced by the labour of negativity.
Language neither presents itself as the self-presentation of the spirit of
negativity nor presents its absence. Language rather marks, remarks,
demarks ‘death’s decision’ which renders language irreducible,
incommensurable, non-contemporaneous to the ethical claims of a
universal history. This language is not readable and decipherable in
the universal Book, or in the system of the ethical without remainder.
This remainder is what Kierkegaard calls secret.
If the indirect communication is marked by ‘death’s decision’, it
is because its incommensurable differential places, first of all, the one
who speaks outside of all communication. As Kierkegaard knew, this
alone enables transcendence to arrive, bursting out of closure of the
immanence of self-presence, i.e., from the ethical realm of generality.
This advent of transcendence is neither the plenitude of pure presence
(Parousia of the metaphysics of the Subject) nor impoverishment that
arises out of the need of the subject that needs to be nourished. It
is rather the arrival as the fullness of time that at once darkens the
presencing of presence with the excess of its brilliance. This darkness
of light that suddenly makes its appearance is not the fusion unto
transcendence but a differentiating transcendence, a holding-together-
as-holding-apart. Therefore it does not work like Hegelian speculative
judgement that bears its own dissolution within it, converting its own
dissolution unto the unity of the concept or the Subject. Therefore
unlike the speculative judgement of the dialectical-historical, this
‘death’s decision’ does not form historical-dialectical totalities, but
mark this demonic, monstrous disjunctive co-figuration, which is the
site of more originary historicity than speculative universal history.
It bears the anguishing face of that originary melancholy that is
touched by ‘death’s decision’. It is the melancholic face of the singular
this being who bears a proper name called Søren Kierkegaard, who
bears ‘thorn in the flesh’, because—in so far he is—bears the decision
of ‘is not’, which is ‘death’s decision’.
Indirect communication is nothing negative, but rather it affirms

what is outside the communicable entities of the given world.
What, then, indirect communication affirms is the event of
communication, that moment of eruption of pure communication,

on the basis of which alone the singular individual, being first placed
outside of all given modes of communication—that means being
abandoned in the open—communicates with the transcendent
arrival. That means, the mortal existent communicates and makes
communication the essential of his existence by first of all being
placed outside all communication, first of all being deprived or
being excess of all communication. He names—for man is someone
who is essentially name-giver—by first of all being placed outside
the name, first of all being deprived of the name, or being excess
of the name. One, whose essential being lies in communication,
communicates by being placed outside all communication. One
whose essential being lies in naming, names by being placed
outside all the given names. He then derives communication from
an essential non-communication and naming from an essential
namelessness.
This essential solitude of language renders language irreducible to

any cognitive function of a categorial-logical thinking. This non-
communication of communication, this ecstatic solitude, which for
Kierkegaard is also an intimation of transcendence, is the secret of
language. Secret is not the interiority of an individual consciousness
shut within itself, nor is it the treasure which the isolated self keeps
it for itself as kernel of consciousness, shut from the divine and other
mortals. It is rather the ecstatic solitude of language, bursting out of any
self-enclosure unto an ecstatic transcendence, a non-communicating
communication with the outside, an ecstatic relation to the event of
coming which is not ‘the presently given entities’, which does not
yet exist in the already existing manner of communication. The
language of naming, unlike the categorical language of judgement at
its cognitive instrumentality is ecstatic because it ex-tatically ex-sists
the nameable.
Secret is the name of transcendence, the event that is not yet of
communication, which in order to affirm the arrival of the wholly
otherwise, must step outside communication in ethical terms.
Therefore Abraham keeps silent. He does not speak in ethical terms,
for he has to offer, what is commanded him to offer, is the gift of
death. The secret is the event of language itself that opens and yet
withdraws from any self-presentation, and announcing the advent of

the outside, which is the name of the pure future that belongs to the
entirely heterogeneous order, completely incommensurable to the
order of generality represented by the ethical, universal signification.
If language itself is tied to an originary finitude, to its own ruination,
it is in so far as this originary finitude is the opening of language
from any self-enclosure and self-presence, not at the same time in the
name of an absence opposed to presence, but as oblique coming, as
what Derrida (1995) calls ‘oblique offering’.
This demands that the question of pain is needed to be renewed
here. The completely heterogeneous order where the singularity of the
mortal, with his irreducible suffering and anguish in the face of death
is not evaded in the name of the generality of the ethical signification
is the order where language which the singular mortal speaks must
assume entirety different modality than the modality of signification.
For Kierkegaard such an essential language, more originary than the
language of signification, assumes a form of address, which is prayer
addressed to the unapparent advent of the completely other, the
arrival of the wholly Other that seizes us by its gaze and transfixes us.
In the language of prayer alone the suffering mortal is open to the
redemptive happiness arriving from a wholly otherwise destination,
from an immemorial past and from an incalculable, pure future
beyond the immanence of self-present now instants.
Pain • 175
§ Pain
Work and Pain

Let us say, to begin with, and provisionally, naively, that it is possible
to think of pain in two different manners, entirely heterogeneous,
irreducible of the one to the other. And we will see how this question
of pain in its differential relation to the universal is also the question
of language and communication, and above all, it is the question of
the gift, the gift where language itself is given to the mortals whose
essence is essentially that of being linguistic, i.e., as being-in-language,
being-belonging-to language. Such a being is essentially linguistic in
the sense that he is the being (in his absolute singularity) who is first
of all open to himself and to others—the divine, the elemental forces
of nature and those created beings—on the basis of this language that
he speaks and in speaking, never being able to appropriate it and by
belonging to language already always, immemorially which has never
been his present.
If man is the one who communicates, and speaks language, whose
being is essentially, in the innermost manner, is this linguistic being
(whose linguistic being consists in his being in communication, being
as communicative, being as this opening to itself in communication),
then does this communication, this being able to communicate
enable him to bring to language that the-there (Da), this facticity
of language itself, which first of all already places him outside of
himself, that already tears him apart from himself and dispropriates
him in advance? In other words, can he give to language that what
language itself already gives him, promises him so that he may speak
language itself as such? If language alone enables him to experience

death as death by tearing him, distantiating him, holding him apart
from himself so that he can be near to himself (in language), does
he thereby bring to language of signification this experience of death
itself, this tearing, this trembling and the seizure? If language is this
tearing apart of being from himself, this distantiating of being from
oneself in an originary manner so that there be nearness of being to
oneself and to the other, so that in speaking man addresses to the
other and to himself, so that man prays for the other on the basis
of this language, does he thereby bring to language this distance and
nearness on the basis of his power and capacity to speak? Or rather,
on the other hand, that man speaks on the basis of an originary
given-ness and a donation, a gift outside all conditions and outside
all predicates, which is the very donation of language itself? In what
language of the mortals, language itself is given? If the gift and the
promise of language is marked by death, the gift which first of all
bestows him the possibility to speak at all, is he thereby able to speak
of death, to know death and even to make death the origin of a
process whereby he comes to himself, becomes himself, becomes the
origin and end of his own becoming? Is he able thereby to make this
gift immanent to the process of his own initiation, making death as
his own, his very own possibility and capacity?
If language were the site of mortal’s power to bring to language
his own mortality—and this is our first step, out first consideration
of thinking pain in relation to language—death would then be the
power of the negative that yields the results of his own becoming.
Man would then be, primordially and essentially, that being whose
task, whose work—in so far as it is his possibility, capacity, his
power—is to make the beginning of his becoming his own. Man
would then be that being—in relation to his non-power, which is his
dissolution, his death—he is the only one to discover, at the heart of
his non-power, his power to be that maintains, confronting the horror
of one’s dissolution, his ground so that he can bring to language
that he speaks, this nothingness itself. If man is the one who names,
whose essential being is that he is the name-giver, the descendent of
Adam, then he also must be the one who names first of all, before
all names, what must be the unnamable itself, from which it will
then be confirmed his pure power to name not only the namable but
Pain • 177
the unnamable itself. Only on the basis of this ability to name the
unnamable, the capacity (or the possibility or the power) to name
at all can be derived. In other words, man is the one who names—
death. Man is this one being, the central being who, confronting with
horror his own dissolution, names his own absence, and through this
naming power, bringing near this absence as his very proper to his
presence. Language is then not that which shrinks from horror; rather
the horror of language consists in its being able to bring to man who
speaks this absence into presence, in this being to recount for man
the story of his own birth as an experience of death. Language is here
assumes a terrible, magical power of conjuration that conjures the
absence into presence, death into birth, and through this magical
power, inaugurates another beginning which is man’s destinal history.
This power of language, therefore, neither in itself is the work
of presence, nor that of pure absence, but the movement of absence
becoming presence in signification. In the word ‘Cat’, the cat has
neither (empirical) presence nor its absence, but the absence (of the
empirical) becoming presence (as Idea). It is this movement—of
absence into presence—which Hegel captured with the notion of
Aufhebung. It is the movement of power that has felt in its vein the
pain and horror of dissolution and disappearance, ‘the way of despair’
that Hegel speaks (Hegel 1998, p. 49) of, but it is this pain and
horror does not go in vain since it simultaneously heralds the birth of
man and the beginning of man’s destinal history.
Here Hegel brings out this peculiar connection that language has
in relation to power and death: language’s power to inaugurate and
accomplish history, because it is the power of death, of what Hegel
calls as ‘the work of death’ (Ibid., p. 270). Language is that ‘work
of death’ that conjures even absence into presence, and this process
which inaugurates history is that ‘way of despair’. Hegel’s speculative
dialectical process, shows how this power of the negative constitutes
for man his universal history out of the labour man himself initiates
without any transcendental ground given to him independently.
According to this metaphysics of man’s destinal history, man is the one
who suffers the pain for his own result—the result of his becoming—and
his result redeems his sufferings. Who more than Hegel has provided the
tragic drama of this suffering of finitude and its atonement? Ultimately
for Hegel this redemption or atonement consists of man being able
to assume the origin of his history at the end of history, so that he

appropriates, through the pain and horror of the negativity, his own
beginning at his end; he arrives at the end, because he is already always
there at the moment of inauguration, as the one confronting with
horror his own death as other’s death. As the coinciding of beginning
with end, the atoned consciousness of man is Spirit. Language is seen
here as the manifestation of this metaphysics of Spirit, which is an
externalized interiority, or an internalized exteriority, in so far as it is
a presentation of Sense, the Sense of absence itself. As a presentation
of Sense, language itself work of the negative that is attuned to pain,
but as accomplishment of Sense, language is also atonement of that
grief, of that finitude, since it has subsumed within itself and never
given away to that ‘way of despair’. As an accomplishment of Sense,
language is also accomplishment of time—as the eternity of Absolute
Idea, as ‘the infinite negativity’ that has time within itself—for sense
always appears as time. As absolute presentation of Sense, language is
now co-incident with Spirit, as it is co-incident with eternity. It has
now appropriated its own origin and end as circular reappropriation
of its self-same difference.
Hence Hegelian metaphysics is metaphysics of immanence. It is
the immanent metaphysics of the presentation of Sense that seeks to
bring into its sense its own origin and end, so that there is nothing
originarily given as gift that is given on the basis of an ungrounded
foundation. In other words, language does not appear here as gift,
in its given-ness, out of finitude, out of non-appropriable origin and
non-appropriable end. Instead language is the pain of bringing the
origin into signification that weights upon the laboring Subject; or,
rather, pain here is the metaphysical manifestation of the Subject
that undergoes suffering of its own dissolution so as to appropriate
its own origin and its end unto the unity of its self-presence. Pain
would, then, be thought as a mode of the manifestation of the
Metaphysical Subject in its pathway to this manifestation, in so
far the essence of manifestation has something to do with pain, as
if manifestation already always is attuned to pain. In so far as this
metaphysics of the Subject manifests itself as laboring, and as being
empowered as appropriating, propriating Subject, pain here is the
pain of the violence that Subject inflicts upon itself, in the othering,
dirempting, sundering itself from itself. What Hegel sought to speak
Pain • 179
of pain here is the pain of the labour and the pain of the violence
in the pathway of manifestation of the Subject, which is also the
pathway of powering, appropriating metaphysical Subject. Pain here
is bound up with work and power in its gathering of Subject of itself
to itself, in its nearing of distance, in its presentation of sense, in
its appropriating its own origin and end as eigentlich, its proper, its
own origin. If for Hegel the phenomenological essence of Spirit is
this manifestation where sense presents itself without remainder,
then pain is the pain of this manifestation of the metaphysics of
the Subject, of the Subject’s gathering into its self-presence, which
is grasped by Hegel on the basis of the predicative proposition, i.e.,
that of its speculative judgement.
In his The Question of Being, Heidegger brings out this innermost
connection between work and pain as the motor force of the
dominant metaphysics whose accomplishment arrives in Hegelian
onto-theological dialectics. Heidegger writes:
To be able to trace more clearly the relations that sustain the connection
between ‘work’ and ‘pain’, nothing less would be necessary than to
think through the fundamental trait of Hegel’s metaphysics, the
unifying unity of the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Science of Logic.
The fundamental trait is ‘absolute negativity’ as the ‘infinite force’ of
actuality i.e. of the ‘existing concept’. In the same (not the identical)
belonging to the negation of negation, work and pain manifest their
innermost metaphysical relatedness...And if one ventured to think
through the relations between ‘work’ as the fundamental trait of
beings and ‘pain’ by moving back via Hegel’s Logic, then the Greek
word for pain, namely, άλγος would first come to speak for us.
Presumably άλγος is related to άλξγω, which is the intensivum of
λξγω means intimate gathering. In that case, pain would be that which
gathers most intimately. Hegel’s concept of the ‘concept’ and when
correctly understood, the ‘strenuous effort’, it entails say the Same
on the transformed soil of the absolute metaphysics of subjectivity.
(Heidegger 1998, pp. 305-6)
Perhaps it is possible to think of pain another way, one that man does
not suffer for the end result of a process which his own negativity
initiates. It is not the pain of his labour that seeks atonement of
its violence by means of violence, the violence of positing with
which the movement of the (Hegelian) concept begins. To think
the redemption of this violence which is the violence of the pure

positing of the speculative concept, an outside of the concept must
be thought, for it is not within the capacity of the concept to redeem
itself on behalf of its own possibility and resources. If the way opens
with the abyss and not as the end result, then it must be to open time
itself to come beyond violence. The question of the gift of language
must be inseparable from the critique of violence.
Therefore what comes to come or the unapparent presencing to
presence does not end with death but makes death as the beginning
point for the possibility of redemption. This redemption is redemption
of violence. If here the question arises as to the possibility of thinking
the promise of time that is not annihilated, or made impossible by
negativity, but that is opened up with mortality as its presupposition,
then the question of mortality itself is to be thought anew, no longer
as negativity but in relation to what we are calling the question of
‘origin’—the immemorial past that first of opens time to come. This
logic of origin is not what has become sublated unto concept, and
thereby is mere past, but that arrives from a pure future that bears the
promise of a time to come beyond violence. An origin to come is to
be thought here that is beyond violence only in so far as it is outside
even the opposition between the violence and non-violence, in so far
as the non-violence of the origin cannot even be posited, in concept
or in signification, as non-violent. Language is the site of this origin
to come, outside any power of positing, and outside the pain of the
concept, as if there is a more originary pain of language there which
is outside the labour and power of the concept, which does not allow
the Subject to gather into itself in its metaphysical ground.
The Melancholic Gift

If it is from language alone that we experience death as death, know
death as death, what kind of knowledge is it that language gives,
knowledge that is so originary as to be the origin of knowledge,
the origin of the knowledge of ourselves as such, of our essential
mortality, our intrinsic finitude? As if in an essential manner, one that
is enigmatic, the relationship of the mortal existent to its intrinsic
mortality is at once tied intimately to language. Therefore at the
heart of a linguistic existence a lament, unappeased, resonates in an
Pain • 181
originary manner, in the opening of existence to itself. It is the pain

that inscribes itself at the heart of an origin to come, and renders this
existence a tear and an open wound, exposed to the outside as an un-
enclosed immanence.
To speak is to be attuned to a fundamental mournfulness, given
in speaking itself. Pain is the originary opening of a linguistic
existence beyond closure, beyond immanence. This originary pain
of language, before the pain of the concept, first of all tears open the
naming man to the nameless, to the absence of ground and bestows
upon man the gift of language itself. To name is to mourn.
Mortality, instead of closing mortal existence into an immanence
whose limits would then be predicated and drawn out by the labour
of language, rather exposes the mortal existence to its outside, to
the transcendence of what is not yet arrived, to the future beyond
the linguistic power of predication. It is to this transcendence that
language, at the limit of predication and at the limit of the conceptual
cognition of representative thinking, interminably points towards,
pushes itself as if towards the speech where speech itself falters, trembles
and ruins itself. Language, instead of progressively realizing its own
identity to its own limit—unlike the dialectical march of the concept
as in Hegelian metaphysical Subject—falters into the dissonance in
relation to itself, unto where language as if in an unspeakable lament
abandons itself, delivers itself again and again to the abyss of the
unspeakable and unnamable, from where language itself originates,
as if there occurs, at the origin of language, an abandonment that has
already ruined language to constitute itself as Subject or Spirit. In
other words, and this is the essential anachrony of language, language
keeps open a relation to its own origin by interminably distantiating
from itself, by standing apart from itself, by incessantly exiling itself
from itself, deviating and falling outside of itself, so that this essential
dissonance, this ecstatic solitude of language bears the marks of a
cision that separates language from itself, language from the one who
speaks.
One who speaks is not, is never a master of language, nor language

originates in him as a power, or a law. It is rather a fundamental
mourning that attunes the speaking mortals to his non-power and
non-mastery, outside the power of the concept, outside the labour

of judgement.
Language, then, instead of being predicative power of representing

our finitude for us and giving us the cognition of death, itself is
finite in an essential sense. This is why a touch of melancholy always
resonates at the heart of a linguistic being, even where there is a joy
to be expressed, even when a plenitude of being present to oneself is
affirmed and even when the being- with all of existence is experienced.
This coming together of joy and mournfulness is the moment of
‘becoming in perishing’ that Hölderlin speaks of (Hölderlin 1988,
p. 96-100), the moment of epochal rupture, which is the monstrous
site where history inaugurates itself. It is not because the possibility
of sadness is always there for a finite existence which at any occasion
at any instant of one’s life presents itself. It is rather that a more
originary melancholy lies at the source of a finite existence, because
it belongs to the originary opening, or originary transcendence, the
immemorial past that has lapsed without return, that first opens us
to time, and enables the experience of mortality as mortality, death as
death, and existence as existence.
It is in this essential sense Schelling speaks of a source of melancholy
even in God. For created existence to be possible—where alone there
be revelation to himself—there has to be an opening, or transcendence,
that means an opening of an outside of himself . There must be in God
himself an outside of himself, a transcendence of himself, a rendering
of himself into a past immemorial—which means at the same time
an opening of a future through an originary cut (Scheidung) or a
primordial separation, a tearing disjunction, an anachronic tune—
which is an essential finitude of God’s relation to the created existence
and to himself. But this veil of sadness, while remaining as mere
possibility in God, becomes actual in mortal existence, since for the
mortal the condition of his being remains his outside as the ground
excludes itself as a non-appropriable abyss, a being-there that remains
an outside, since for the mortal his being-present-to-himself is a loan
gifted to him as non-appropriable gift, an offering which he never
gains control over and never masters (Das 2007, pp.111-123). This
is the ‘unappeasable melancholy of all life’, not being able to actualize
oneself completely, for possibility marks his limit, and thereby, at the
Pain • 183
same instance, limitlessly exposes him to infinite possibilities, frees

and releases him to his unnamable possibilities, the possibilities of
the joyous acts of creation, out of this essential freedom that is given
to him ‘independently of himself ’:
In God, too, there would be a depth of darkness if he did not make
the condition his own and unite it to him as one and as absolute
personality. Man never gains control over the condition even though
in evil he strives to do so; it is only loaned to him independent of him;
hence his personality and selfhood can never be raised to complete
actuality. This is the sadness which adheres too all finite life, and
inasmuch as there is even in God himself a condition at least relatively
independent, there is in him, too, a source of sadness which, however,
never attains actuality but rather serves for the eternal joy of triumph.
Thence the veil of sadness, which is spread over all nature, the deep
unappeasable melancholy of all life. (Schelling 1936, p. 79)
This originary melancholy inscribes itself in this gift that forever
remains outside of his mastery and appropriation. Therefore in this
sense both sadness and joy belong in its own way to an originary
melancholy1. Man, in speaking and being endowed with language, is
also endowed with this ‘unappeasable melancholy’ that adheres itself
in the gift, gift that bears the mark of death, gift that bears the traces
the sufferings of unmasterable difference and the pain of separation.
Schelling calls this pain as the pain of ‘cision’ (Scheidung), the cut
that while separating calls the separated to be together. Language
enabling, gifting man to speak, endowing him to present to himself,
to reveal himself to himself, forever and first of all excludes him from
the mastery of this gift. Henceforth he can only speak in a language
that is borrowed, loaned to him, gifted to him from elsewhere, from
another time, from another destination which precedes him, and in
preceding him follows him. What precedes him and what follows
him—that means what remains outside of him—this alone, this
possibility of an outside of an immemorial past and the incalculable
future places man to be in the open space, that opening where man
is exposed to his outside, that free opening where darkness and light
play the originary co-belonging, where he finds himself exposed and
open in relation to the entirety of created existence. It is in this sense
one says that language reveals man to his own mortality. This revelation
precedes all logical categories, and is inaccessible to his cognition.
That man is the one to whom mortality reveals itself in language,

it is this man who is thrown to be, what Schelling calls as ‘central
existence’ (Schelling 1936, p. 79).
If man alone speaks language, it is not because language is the
accomplishment of the metaphysical Subject at the service of its
cognitive disposal; nor because language is the gathering of being to
itself. Language rather throws being in the midst of, at the center of
created existence. This means: he is placed at the limit, at the line that
disjoins him from the others and disjoining, calls the others to his
nearness. The line, as the undecidable difference, as tearing disjunction,
as the chasm of a cision, belongs to the experience of abyss as abyss.
If man is central existence, it means none but that he is the one who
experiences abyss as abyss, to whom mortality reveals itself and places
him in relation to what is outside his power and capacity. Mortality,
revealing itself to man, must already have seized him with a tremor
and an awe, with what Kierkegaard (1980) calls ‘anxiety’. Schelling
speaks of man as constantly fleeing from this center, withdrawing
from this central fire (the fire that both Heraclitus and Hölderlin
(1988) speak of ) only because he is called forth towards it—how to
say this?—by the attraction of a ‘divine violence’, that is, the attraction
of the centre. This experiencing his death as death in this opening
in a lightning flash, man also experiences eternity as eternity—the
entirety of created existence—as that what is outside of him, precedes
him and remains after him. This eternity is non-appropriable gift
of experience which is first of all be there in order for man to speak
language. This originary non-appropriability of his condition, since
it is given to him as an originary gift, makes language resonate with
that ‘unappeasable melancholy’, or an unspeakable anguish.
The melancholy of language is the originary transcendence, or

originary opening of existence, finite and mortal, as that which ex-
sists; which means, language in its essential melancholy, for the first
time, opens existence to its coming to presence, to the transcendence
of the coming. If human existence is essentially transcendence that
is in so far as existence is originary opening up in language to the
coming time that is yet to arrive. This constitutes the messianic
promise of language, intimated with finitude, and holding towards
transcendence, incalculable and infinite beyond any closure.
Pain • 185
It is here the question of history and its ground (or, rather ‘origin’)
in relation to language is to be thought. The ‘origin’ of history holds
itself open in the poetics of the messianic promise of language, which
for that matter, does not itself completely belong to the dialectical-
historical immanence. It is this originary exposure of existence in a
lightning flash to the opening—where history itself comes to presence—
that makes the mortal existence and its historicity an un-saturated
phenomenon, a hetero-affected phenomenon, wholly torn from
within, exposed to the outside. Language in its sudden lightning
advent originarily places the human outside of himself and exposes
him to the otherwise of history. Is this not the experience of death
as death, the originary phenomenon of disclosing the entirety of
existence to himself, which can only be experienced by mortals
as mortality? Language is not simply the property of the one who
speaks, nor is primarily language the source from where he derives
the power of domination to the rest akin to himself and others.
Language is neither the medium through which he grasps his own
existence and existence as such, as if man is the origin and the end
result of his own existence, nor language enables him to be the one
who is saturated by and in speech. Language, rather, already always
placing the mortal outside of himself (or rather displacing him,
tearing him, exposing him to the opening), endows him with the
intimation of his mortality and thereby renders him open to the
historical character of his existence, or, makes his existence historical
the first time, that means before the first, the first before any first his
existence as essentially finite and mortal. This intimation of mortality
or death is not cognition like any other, nor can it be possession of
the human like any entities that he henceforth produces and endows
them with the mark of the ‘human production’. It can only be an
originary revelation to which man is opened—as both Heidegger and
Kierkegaard in entirely different manners and with entirely different
purposes, show—in anguish or in anxiety. Man neither possesses
his death like any other possession, nor possesses the ground on
the basis of which he possesses his historical world, for the ground
of his possession lies in the promise that grants him, beforehand,
his history, his being able to present to himself as the one who is
essentially finite and mortal. The human knows, whatever he knows
of the world and his self-knowledge on the basis of a lightning
flash that already places him outside of himself, outside of all his
possession, outside the claim that henceforth he makes as the maker
or creator of the ‘world’, this historical-discursive world which in
being produced is also posits the producer. That this is his finitude
attunes him to the lament of language that holds him open, like an
open wound, to his historical existence that comes to presence, to the
incalculable event of arriving that wounds him, affects him, touches
him. Henceforth, that means in a time before and after time, history
bears traces of this melancholy of language, rendering his historical
existence as unfinished, incomplete, unaccomplished, and at the same
existence-in-excess, forever unsaturated, welcoming and bearing the
promise of its redemption in the coming time. This promise given in
language arises in an originary dis-possession of the human, on the
basis of which alone something like the origin of history happens
to the mortal, arises up to him, and erupts towards him. The poetics
of the origin traces itself as the un-fulfillment of history, which thereby
points towards a fulfillment outside any dialectical-historical closure, in
the messianic—what Ernst Bloch (1995) calls—‘not yet’.
Therefore language does not completely belong to the world of works
and to the works of the world. At the limit of the world, unsaturated
and in infinite excess, or at the limit of the state of the affairs of
the world, language is the vanishing point of the indiscernible where
language turns the prose of the world into the lament of music. There
language unsays itself in a lament, in the melancholy turned to music.
The one who speaks is not master of the world thereby, nor the possessor
of his existence as the sovereign master of the earth. Language rather
de-territorializes the one who speaks. Or, rather, the one who speaks is
touched by the essential melancholy to which language is thoroughly
attuned at the limit of the world of objects and possessions. In
being touched by this unspeakable lament of language, the one who
speaks is intimated by the intrinsic non-appropriability of language.
The non-appropriable ground of existence itself, as if, precedes the
speaking mortal something like an immemorial past and follows him
something like a future as unfinished, unaccomplished not yet. What
is this experience if not the experience of finitude? The ‘experience’ of
finitude is the essential non-appropriation or non-conditional limit,
the outside that ecstatically calls the power of the negative to the non-
power, the originary experience of non-power on the basis of which
Pain • 187
we make claim of our historical existence, the non-power outside

the dialectical-historical violence. What is the relationship between
this essential non-power of language, and its essential melancholy
that permeates what comes to presence, the essential fragility of
language that starts lamenting at the touch of appropriation precisely
because it has began before any appropriation? Is it not therefore the
poetic language that seeks renunciation of any mastery is thoroughly
attuned with this unspeakable melancholy?
Language appears, for that matter, enigmatic to us, at once
originating in our non-power in relation to it and which for that
matter keeps the historical existence open to redemption without
violence, which is its promise and at the same time it is the ground
on the basis of which the power of the world originates, where
the promise of language may turn into the violence of judgement,
and the originary non-appropriation may turn into the evil of
appropriation. Language appears often to us in its utter poverty and
fragility, whenever it is a matter of speaking the extremes and yet all
too excessive in relation to any presently given world so that language
itself does not appear within it as ‘presently given’ (Vorhandenheit),
for it is itself the more originary offering on the basis of which any
given-ness presently arises, on the basis of which historicity makes
manifest to us, reveals to us in its already holding sway of the lightning
flash. Language itself is not saturated or exhausted in being spoken,
or in our being able to speak. We neither exhaust the world in
speaking about it, nor do we exhaust language in being able to speak
a language. Rather, being able to speak is the trace of the future which
is the inexhaustible offering of language of itself, already open in its
poetics of the origin. This offering is experienced by the mortals in
that lightning flash that precedes our predication and our cognition
of the world and of existence. Unimpaired by the cognitive function,
it is the originary opening, attuned to us in a lament of language,
because it is intimated with our essential finitude that holds us open
to history coming to presence.
Therefore it is necessary to think of an originary language as promise,
as donation beyond any presently given existence, in its relation to a
past to arrive, instead of representing the presently given world in
the conceptual system of cognition and predication. This originary
language as the poetic origin of history, this pre-predicative language
of opening, excess of any cognitive and predicative function, traces

future in the past, because it carries the promise of redemption. There
is no redemption if it is not already always given in the originary
lightning flash of the opening, which is already always given as an
offering or as gift. This however does not mean that it is presently
given.
What is given in advance as the originary offering of language may
not be for that reason be presently given. The coming into presence
rather than presently given is the eternal renewal of this offering and
endowing language itself with the gift of time, a time of future. Such
gift or offering of language must already be given in the already always
of the originary opening. This is the meaning to say that language
traces the future in the past, which means that future is already given
in the originary opening as an opening to the coming future as not-
yet-presently-given. To speak is never merely to speak the ‘presently
given entities’ of the world, nor to make the world as the system of
predicated objects and cognitive relations, but to keep the promise of
time that is given with the offering of language itself by the incessant
renewal of the promise in presence, that is experienced by the
mortals as an originary experience of finitude, disclosed to him in
the lightning flash and which is attuned in him with an unspeakable
lament turning to music. To speak is to keep the promise of time
given in language that welcomes the event of time, which is future.
This offering lies at the origin of history as ungrounded and unfounded
poetic ground; or; this is to say that history begins with the offering
of language. The question of history in relation to language is to be
connected with the question of origin and offering that offers the
time to come. Each time one opens her lips, each time history begins,
it is time itself that is opened up, each time a time to come and each
time she keeps this original promise of language by transferring its
past into future. This transference that happens is itself nothing but the
passage of time that defines the temporality of time as presencing, the
transference of past unto future through renewal of time, for the passage
renews what it transfers. What is renewed is the hope that makes the
transference grow in strength and intensity. This hope is the messianic
hope for the coming time.2
This is so because there is an essential element of hope in the offering
of language, already given in advance in an originary manner. The
Pain • 189
gift that is given is not to be responded by returning to the (giving)

other with the same gift or with another gift. The gift is responded
only by passing this gift itself to still other, the third, who is yet to
come or coming and in this way renewing this gift, strengthening
it with hope, and rendering the gift eternal. The relation of parents
to children or teachers to students is exemplary here. The gift of
learning given by the teacher to the student is not to be returned to
the teacher by remaining a student or by becoming oneself teacher to
the teacher himself, who meanwhile must already have passed away
or is gone. It is rather that the student himself becoming a teacher to
the student yet to come, and passing the gift given to him by other
to the still other yet to come that the gift becomes eternal. Is this not
precisely the meaning of transference that marks the passage of time
as presencing, a threshold each time to be transferred into yet another
time, another destination, another place to traverse and being open
to the still another beyond? Neither the child becomes parent to
her parent, nor the student becomes teacher to her teacher, but she
becomes a parent only to her child, or teacher to her student yet to
come, or coming. This gift passing onto the future alone enables the
gift to be eternal, and keeps alive the promise of redemption given
in the past. The gift does not return to the same destination again
either in progressively regressive manner, or regressively progressive
manner to the originary giver of the gift, for it is the character of the
gift, unlike the investment of the capital that it never has to return
to the same. It keeps the originary promise in the gift by still passing
onto the other still to come, through eternal renewal in presence,
which must be the historical task of existence, that of keeping alive
the promise of its redemption. But is not it that this passing the
gift from past to the future for that matter an originary experience
of finitude or mortality itself, for only he who experiences death as
death passes the gift of time, makes his past into the possibility of a
future by passing on the gift given by the other to still another who
is not yet?
The gift belongs to nobody, which is only to be passed to the other
who in turn will still pass to another. We belong to the gift, the gift
does itself belong to none. Rather the gift belongs to the eternity that
is renewed in each historical presencing, and through this renewal
it exceeds the logic of a ‘restricted economy’. This keeping alive
the originary promise of redemption is on the basis of an essential

finitude, of an essential non-appropriation: as one who does not
own one’s death, does not own thereby the gift. The gift is itself
annulled when it is made into a possession, when it is amenable to
the possibility of use and exchange value, when on the basis of a
possession it is opened to dis-possession, or to another possession
(Derrida 1992). In the economy of possession the gift is never
opened to the originary dis-possession, nor is dis-possession there
only for the sake of, or in the name of the possession still to arrive
in the circular re-appropriation or circular re-possession of it. The
task of receiving the gift is rather to eternalize it, through infinite
renewal in time, and pass it onto the other still to arrive; in other
words, to make this essential non-appropriation, the non-possession,
the essential finitude itself an eternal task of the gift. The thankful
task of the mortal who is endowed with the gift is to be eternally non-
appropriated and non-possessed, to make this mortality itself a task.
This is the meaning of saying that from language alone we
experience death as death. This finitude is not the annihilation or
the end of time but the possibility of time to come, the beginning
or the origin of time that is opened up in an originary being placed
outside of totality, outside the system of relations. To be placed outside
of totality, outside the system of relation is an experience of death as
death. It is also, for that matter experience of eternity as eternity, infinity
as infinity. One who seeks the beginning must first of all be placed
outside totality, outside of all appropriation; in other words, he must
take the great ‘step of death’.
Schelling somewhere speaks,

compared to death. (Quoted in Heidegger 1985, pp. 6-7)
We will call this experience of infinite ‘transcendence’, which is the

unground on the ground of which time is existential, which means
Pain • 191
time that is coming to presence. That the thinking of coming is a question

of experiencing death as death is something that calls for thinking
that would take language seriously. A philosophical thinking that,
therefore, takes seriously the question of existence and death is also
thereby the language-thinking (Sprachdenken). This term (language-
thinking) we take it from Franz Rosenzweig, the philosopher who
takes the question of death neither as mere ‘Naught’ nor time as
the monotonous succession of empty presents. The philosophical
thinking that takes language as mere cognitive apparatus to grasp the
entities that has become, claims that death itself as mere ‘Naught’,
and this philosophical thinking precisely thereby lacks the thought
of the coming time, the messianic event of the wholly otherwise.
Only as existential the coming time is ecstatic, that means opening
in finitude, exposed to mortality. Therefore Schelling, Heidegger and
Rosenzweig—with the help of whom the question of existence is
renewed here—each on his singular manner begins his philosophical
questioning with the question of mortality; with each of them
existence-philosophy is at once language-philosophy, and with each
one of them the philosophical task is to open the philosophical
discourse itself to the thinking of the coming time beyond predicative
closure of the dialectical-speculative thinking.
If the task of thinking pursued here is to think the promise of
time, it must keep the promise of time given in language itself.
Language neither predicates death, nor enables us to cognize it. But
rather language attunes us to our mortality, to our essential finitude,
in the pre-predicative lightning flash, in the poetic Saying, as the
‘fundamental attunement’ of mournfulness. This mournfulness is not
sadness due to a lack of a particular thing or object in the world,
but this mournfulness, touching us at the limit, alone enables our
mortality be experienced as mortality, as an un-appropriable limit, at
the limit of our mastery and at the limit of violence that the world
of cognition posits. By delineating the limit of violence and the limit
of our mastery, touching us at the limit of power, the melancholy of
language keeps alive the promise of redemption, the promise of a time
to come beyond and without violence, where the phenomenon of the
world is redeemed from the violence of cognition. Then melancholy
will not be melancholic anymore. It will, then, be transfigured
into the redemptive joy when the eternity of time presents itself
as simultaneity of past, presence and future. This is what binds the

attunement of joy, as the experience of beatitude, with future: future
makes one joyful, for the sake which the mortal exists as an open
existence, open to the time to come, open to redemption. The joy
is the beatitude which the melancholy of language points towards
as the fulfillment of language in the completed understanding of a
silence, not the silence that mythically posits the law of history and
the violence of appropriation, but a redemptive silence that fulfills
the originary offering of language itself, the stillness of the event
which is divinely experienced in a joyous mourning.
Naming and Overnaming

At the limit of the world, language delineates, traces the limit of our
appropriation and the limit of the dialectical-historical violence. The
intimate, which is often difficult to reveal, connection between the
speculative nature of the dialectical-predicative concept in its thetic
nature of positing and the violence of the historical is painfully,
melancholically communicated in the lament of language, for the
thetic nature of positing seeks to erase the originary non-appropriation
which is the immemorial donation of language itself. In the lament
of language resonates the damaged nature of our historical existence
that cries for redemption outside the dialectical-historical closure.
Is not this unredeemed melancholic cry of numberless mortal
beings—a melancholy that is not consoled and redeemed in the
catharsis of the dialectical- historical concept—the faint murmuring
promise of the world that murmurs faintly the limit of the power of
the negative? The speculative-positing nature of the historical world
itself, then, would not be the originary act, or the primordial act
that posits itself as an act of nothingness. From Fichte’s notion of
the primordial act of self-consciousness to Hegel’s speculative notion
of negativity as the positing act of the concept, the thetic act of
Subject underlies the grounding assumption of German Idealistic
thought. It is in this sense Rosenzweig’s (Rosenzweig 2005) saying
that German Idealism is without language becomes meaningful, for
any philosophy that begins with the positing act of nothingness,
makes death the originary power of a mythic-positing violence, and
therefore forgets the originary non-power of language outside the
Pain • 193
dialectic between thetic and antithetic. If certain metaphysics of

violence underlies in the assumption of an act of positing, it turns
deaf ear to the true mourning of language, the fragile lament of
language that accompanies any act of thetic positing. If that were
so, then the primordial pain of language would not then be to
constitute the innermost unity of a system of categories. It will not
have its atonement in the catharsis of the speculative tragedy. This
mourning adheres in the originary donation of the name, which the
predicative-thetic concept apophantically cannot retrieve. Therefore
the originary donation of the name is never completely inscribed
into the circulation of the predications. The originary donation of
language, since it arrives beforehand, with the inception that begins
before any beginning, is not the song of the owl of Minerva but a
herald that announces in the lightning flash the advent of coming
to presence. Such a language that welcomes the coming to presence is
poetic Saying.
Instead of the positing power of the negative, it is non-power that
opens the historical world to the coming to presence to itself, and
that traces the limit of appropriation. What is it if not otherwise
than the originary offering of language itself? The critique of historical
violence that demands redemption is therefore inextricably intimated
with a radical re-thinking of mortality and language anew, to think
anew how this mortality as non-appropriable is inscribed in the
originary offering of language that attunes us with its indescribable
melancholy. This originary offering of language must, then, precede
the speculative-positing nature of predicative concept. The world-
historical destiny is opened up in that originary revelation; language
is exposed to this ‘heavenly fire’ that first tearing man unto the open,
endows the historical world with the gift of time, with the gift of the
event. Now this event is more originary than any event that occurs in
time, or in history, precisely because it the event of history itself.
To keep this event in attention is also the attention given to the

event of redemption, that is, to keep open the originary opening of
history beyond history. To keep open this opening to which we must
be attentive is the form of remembrance which language carries as
promise. This remembrance is to be distinguished from dialectical-
historical recollection, or speculative memory of the concept that
regressively traces back, at the dusk of the completion of historical

labour, to the past that the speculative concept itself must have
posited. The remembrance unimpaired by positing cognition is
what we have been calling the event.
The relationship between the event and origin, the event and finitude
on the one hand, and with it melancholy and language is to be
articulated: here is an attempt to think the event as the thinking
of the origin and opening of history which is otherwise than the
power of negativity that posits itself. In the dominant metaphysical
determination of language and history, this originary opening is
forgotten and language comes to be at the cognitive disposal of
predication constitutive of the dialectical-historical closure. The
event of history but not historical event, on the otherhand, keeps
remembrance (but not the historical recollection that the Owl of
Minerva sings at the dusk) of the originary opening renewed in
language, by transfiguring the past unto the future event to arrive. This
remembrance is thereby intimated by the melancholy of language, by
the originary non-appropriation beyond violence. This melancholy is
redeemed when there wholly transfiguration of this past into future
happens. The beatitude of redemption then is experienced by mortals
as silence—not the resolute silence of the mythic-tragic hero, nor the
Pure, Absolute Concept of the historically accomplished existence,
bereft of language—but silence of, what Rosenzweig calls, ‘completed
understanding’, silence that arrives with redemptive fulfillment of
language, recognized in its nobility and dignity. It is language in its
messianic happiness.
In his Language as Such and on the Language of Man (1996) Walter
Benjamin thinks of a melancholy at the very paradisiacal, originary
naming language of Adam which is the divine gift from God himself:
a blissful melancholy, for it holds itself to the promise that comes
with the gift of naming, for it promises redemption beyond and
without violence. ‘To be named’, writes Benjamin, ‘even when the
name is godlike and blissful—perhaps always remains an intimation
of mourning’ (Ibid., p. 73). There is a mourning which is blissful
and even divine. The joyous life of free creation, the experience of
beatitude is not alien to this divine mourning, but partakes of the
divine excess. In a letter written after the death of Caroline, Schelling
Pain • 195
speaks of a divine mourning where ‘all earthly pain is immersed’: ‘ I

now need friends who are not strangers to the real seriousness of pain
and who feel that the single right and happy state of the soul is the
divine mourning in which all earthly pain in immersed’ (Schelling
1975). This is the mourning that is blissful and paradisiacal, because
it does not yet know the thetic violence of the concept, of the
dialectical-historical; it is not yet impaired by violence of cognition,
by the violence of the overnaming.
There is, however, other mourning otherwise than the mourning
of the mute lament and otherwise even than the mourning in being
named, the name that redeems the speechlessness of the nameless. It
is not the divine blissful mourning at the heart of a finite existence.
The other mourning is in relation to what Benjamin calls overnaming,
when the name itself withers away, when the name becomes a mere
means of communication which reduces the blissful pure naming into
significance at the service of cognitive disposal, when the immediacy
of the communication is lost in the mediacy of the significance, in
the magic of judgement. There arises the mythic violence of the law:
There is, in the relation of human languages to that of things,
something that can be approximately described as ‘overnaming’—the
deepest linguistic reason for all melancholy and [from the point of
view of thing] for all deliberate muteness.(Benjamin 1996, p.73)
Benjamin speaks of it as fall: the loss of the name in the language of

judgement, in significance when the name occurs as mere instrument,
as mere cognitive means, as mere medium of communication.
Language then becomes mediated in the language of judgement, and
the name is hollowed inside out, becomes hollow and empty in the
bubbling and prattling. Here also takes the mythic birth of law and
force of it, the power of the positing act: the nameless is sought to
be appropriated in overnaming that now assumes the language of
judgement and significance, in the name of law and its force, in the
mythic violence of pure positing. The magic of the prattle is the magic
of evil, the magic of positing violence, which has to be differentiated
from the magic of the pure naming which is the originary donation
beyond violence. Before in the name, the name communicates
nothing but that which communicates itself in the name; but now
name becomes mere cognitive means of positing, and the name itself
falls outside itself, it is made to signify what comes from outside of

itself, namely, knowledge of good and evil, for ‘evil abandons the
name’(Ibid., p. 71)
The abandonment of the name, that abandonment of the offering
of language itself, the promise that is given with that offering, the
abandonment of this originary promise for the sake of predicative
use of language at cognitive disposal where language is mere means:
this is the birth of mythic law and its violence. This violence is the
innermost reason of the lament of language, distinguished from the
blissful melancholy of the paradisiacal naming beyond violence.
Therefore a critique of violence assumes the form of a remembrance
of that originary offering of language, the originary promise of
redemption, that opening beyond any positing act, the essential non-
appropriation that placed into man’s hand first of all the gift of the
naming. To remember, which is otherwise than speculative-cognitive
memory of a recuperative, apophantic process is to be permeated
by a melancholy that comes with a renunciation of power, for all
renunciation brings with it certain mournfulness.
Thinking and Thanking

The mournfulness intimates the one who remembers his originary
finitude—that is his originary non-appropriation of the gift—and
thereby renounces any appropriation of the gift. This mournfulness
is not any ordinary mournfulness about a particular loss, but what
Martin Heidegger calls (1980)—with Hölderlin in mind -‘the
fundamental attunement’ (Grundstimmung) of mourning. With
the welcoming of the coming to presence of the divine, Hölderlin’s
poetry keeps the remembrance of the originary gift and promise of
language which is none but the promise of the coming itself. Therefore
the gift always is attuned to a certain tune of mournfulness. This
tune and attunement of mournfulness is the task of finitude. in his
lectures on Hölderlin’s two poems ‘Germanien’ and ‘Der Rhein’,
Heidegger thinks this fundamental attunement (Grundstimmung) of
mournfulness in Hölderlin’s poetry as an essential endurance of the
gift of language:
… Real renouncement, in other words one which carries itself
authentically, is a power of creation and engendering. By letting go of
Pain • 197
its old possessions it receives a gift, but not after the fact, as a reward:
for within it the mournful endurance of necessary renouncement and
giving away is a ‘receiving’. (Heidegger 1980, p. 94)
What it receives by renouncing the old possessions, by renouncing

mastery and force? It receives the gift of the advent. This gift is
welcomed in the naming. Poetic saying is naming that welcomes the
coming and receives this gift of coming. Therefore poetic saying, like
thinking, is thank-giving activity. In his series of lectures called What
is Called Thinking? Heidegger shows the essential affinity of thinking
(Denken) with thanking (Danken): thinking is thanks-giving for
what comes to be thought, for ‘we never come to thoughts/ They
come to us’ (Heidegger 2001, p. 6). What the gift of thought offers is
the unthought, of what is not presently given as thought but what is
to come, the future of thinking. The advent of thinking is outside the
conceptual, reductive totalizing System making metaphysics. What is
called thinking is calling to come, welcoming this coming:
To call is not originally to name, but the other way around: naming is a
kind of calling, in the original sense of demanding and commending.
It is not that the call has its being in the name; rather every name is
a kind of call. Every call implies an approach. We might call a guest
welcome (Heidegger 1968, p.125).
If the poets and creative artists, creative thinkers and philosophers

are permeated by a melancholy—as Aristotle remarks—it is in so
far as for the poets and the creative thinkers the naming maintains
its relation to the originary non-appropriation, to the opening that
opens with the gift and that is maintained by renunciation of the
violence of all appropriation and power of the positing law. the
poetic Saying—unlike the predicative thinking that arrives at the
thetic, categorial cognition of what is ‘presently given’ on the basis of
the result of a process—renounces such a claim to appropriation in
order to announce, or welcome the coming to presence. Therefore each
poetic Saying itself is renunciation, or rather to say with Heidegger
‘renunciation is in itself a saying’ (1982, p. 150).
The renunciation which is in itself a poetic saying is not therefore
something negative but rather affirmative, since it welcomes the
coming to presence. To this affirmation is owed, what Heidegger
calls, ‘thanks’, thankfulness or gratitude for being able to affirm or
welcome the coming, thankfulness for the gift of being the receiver
of the coming, gratitude for the arrival that language gives to us and
promises us. In his lecture delivered at Vienna with the full title in
German Dichten und Denken. Zu Stefen Georges Gedicht Das Wort,
Heidegger attempts to think the originary event of coming to presence
in language that is welcomed in poetic saying in relation to the
renunciation that adheres in this welcoming, the renunciation of
any claim to appropriation which representational thinking makes.
If non-appropriation alone, if renunciation alone enables the poetic
saying to welcome the coming to presence, this event of arriving, then
a ‘fundamental attunement’ of melancholy that permeates this poetic
saying would be the attunement of language itself that first dis-
appropriating us, opens us to the event of language, to the event of
coming, to which we owe thanks. This gratitude is our gratitude in
recognition, a gratitude born out of an originary non-appropriation
and promise. Heidegger says,
But the more joyful the joy, the more pure the sadness slumbering
within it. The deeper the sadness, the more slumbering the joy resting
within it. Sadness and joy play into each other. The play itself which
attunes the two by letting the remote be near and near be remote is
pain. This is why both, highest joy and deepest sadness, are painful
each in its way. But pain so touches the spirit of mortals that the spirit
receives its gravity from pain. That gravity keeps mortals with all their
wavering at rest in their being. The spirit which answers to pain, the
spirit attuned by pain and to pain, is melancholy. (Ibid., p.153)
If by the renunciation of the claim to appropriation a redemptive
relation to the originary opening is maintained, to that promise and
gift of redemption, it is precisely thereby these creative poets and
thinkers become those who are the excluded and exiled, the homeless
and the lonely. If the works of poets that struggle to articulate the
opening of the world and in this articulation welcome the world
thereby, the world does not have place for these poets. The poets,
seeking to maintain the originary opening of the world forever open,
thereby are excluded from the world that is opened in this opening.
Poets are therefore the strangers to the world, lonely, and homeless,
for to keep the relation to the opening of the world is to renounce all
appropriation and all power of the historical polis. Heidegger says in
the Introduction to Metaphysics:
Pain • 199
The polis is the historical place, the there in which, out of which, and
for which history happens. To this place and scene of history belong
the gods, the temples, the priests, the festivals, the games, the poets,
the thinkers, the ruler, the council of elders, the assembly of people,
the army and the fleet. All this does not first belong to the polis, does
not become political be entering into relation with a statesman and a
general and the business of the state. No, it is political, i.e. at the site
of history, provided there be (for example) poets alone, but then really
poets, priests alone, but then really priests, rulers alone but then really
rulers. Be, this means: as violent men to use power, to become pre-
eminent in historical being as creators, as men of action. Pre-eminent
in the historical place, they become at the same time apolis, without
city and place, lonely, strange, alien and uncanny, without issue amid
the beings as a whole, without stature and limit, without structure
and order, because they themselves as creators must first create all this.
(Heidegger 1999,p. 152)
This dense paragraph from Heidegger problematizes the complex
relationship between the poesis of the opening, the originary promise
that opens the polis and the political ontology of the world, the
political being of the polis, which must already have been opened
by the opening falling outside the polis. This opening of polis, which
cannot be posited within the polis, because it must already be there
for there even to be positing, is the originary promise of redemption
which language offers, and which the poets and creative thinkers,
through renunciation of mastery and appropriation, keeps it open
so that there to remain the possibility of coming redemption above
and beyond the given, beyond violence and beyond the law. With the
poets and creative thinkers language, instead of being mere means at
the cognitive disposal, or being mere language of judgement that over-
names, is the remembrance of the originary naming. This naming is
redemptive, for it renders the offering of language as an enduring
presence for us, the gift of being present to us, and to open us to
the eternity of the gift. The possibility of this redemptive gift given
in language is the endowment of eternity. This is how the mortals,
created and finite, experience eternity as eternity, as he is the one
who experiences death as death. If it is from language alone that we
experience death as death, it is also from language alone, or in it we
experience eternity as eternity, for it promises us redemption beyond
violence. Therefore the poets and creative thinkers, in recognition of
this gift, render the reception of this gift an occasion of thankfulness.

Gratitude must mark the reception and recognition of this gift,
which is none but the gift of eternity itself.
§ Apollo’s Lightning Strike
The tremendous element, the fire of the sky and the silence of the
people, their life within nature and their limitedness and satisfaction
has continually affected me, and as it is said of the heroes, so I may
say that Apollo has struck me.
—Hölderlin (1988a, p. 152)
The Lightning Flash

In a letter to Casimir Ulrich Böhlendorff, this fascinating letter that
demands to be quoted completely, Hölderlin writes to his friend:
The tremendous element, the fire of the sky and the silence of the
people, their life within nature and their limitedness and satisfaction
has continually affected me, and as it is said of the heroes, so I may say
that Apollo has struck me (Hölderlin 1988a, p. 152).
What is the relation between the poetic Saying and the lightning
bolt that Apollo strikes the poet with? Is it that poetic saying itself
is intimated with the lightning flash that first of all places the poet
in the midst of the entirety of existence and therefore places him
in relation to the divine and the tremendous elements of nature, to
the appearance and disappearance of the phenomenon in the open
where the poet finds himself in its midst? There in the open, exposed
to the lightning and thunders, to his mortality as mortality, the poet
encounters ‘face to face’ with, what Heidegger calls the fourfold: the
divine, the mortals, the sky in its tremendous manifestations and the
mournful, solitude of the earth.
What is this open then? The open where the poetic saying is
intimated by the lightning flash: what is it? The open is the place of
encounter, not the place as ‘this’ place or ‘that’ place, but placing of
all places, the place that first of all places any place, where encounter
takes place, happens, occurs. In the open the poet encounters the
tremendous manifestations of the sky, the divine lightning strike, the
mournful solitude of the earth and the mortality of the mortals:
The thunderstorm, not only in its highest manifestation but, precisely

in this sense as force and appearance among other forms of the
sky; light in its effects, forming nationally and mode of destiny—
that something sacred to us—its force in coming and going; the
characteristic element of the woods and coinciding of various
characters of nature in one area; all sacred places of the earth are
gathered around one place, and the philosophical light around my
window. (Ibid., p. 153).
The open is the place of encounter that enables, before all else,
the poetic of a destiny that is in advance free opening of what is
to come, the sacred and the divine. In the open the poet is in the
middle, at the center of these elements and beings. Therefore—
and this is important—himself is outside the center. What is
poetic saying, if not then, born out of the central experience, that
means, out of the experience of his mortality as mortality and his
exposure to the elements—a central saying that first of all enables
the encounter to be told, which first of all any encounter to be told,
for itself is the encounter of all encounters? The open is the place of
encounter and the poetic saying is telling of this encounter, not in
a predicative manner, as about an encounter, but: itself born out of
encounter, the poetic saying is the welcoming the coming to be of
this encounter, to the presencing of this encounter. The encounter has
not become meanwhile a ‘presently given’ truth which will be told
in a predicative manner, but the encounter in its coming to happen
gives itself to a measure of a presentation, which is poetic saying. The
poetic presentation as Saying is pre-predicative, unlike speculative
representation as concepts.
If there is a measure here, if poetic saying must itself be the
measure, it is not the measure of a predicative truth, nor the measure
of what Heidegger refers as ‘parameter’. It is rather the poetic
Apollo’s Lightning Strike • 203
measure of what Hölderlin calls ‘eccentric path’ that introduces, in

its welcoming of the divine coming, the caesura of the eccentric. If
man must be, being finite and mortal, constantly fleeing from the
center—as Schelling speaks of him—being the central being, that
placed him at the abyss of the undecidable limit, then he must also
be—precisely for that matter the most eccentric of all.
The mortal can encounter the coming to presence only with the
measure of an eccentric path, only because what comes to presence
exceeds at each instance any measure. He then must measure what
refuses measure; he must welcome the divine coming to presence on
the way that eccentrically mediates what refuses all mediation. As a
result what remains after all remaining is: the disjunctive space which
first of all enables space to be spacing, time to be timing, distance to
be nearing and nearing of the distance of god to man and man to
being. This disjunctive space first of all to be there, at the limit, for
there alone any encounter takes place, time comes to presence, not
as an eternal monotony of homogenous successions of instants, but
as the lightning flash in the stillness of the event. It is this stillness of
the lightning flash that Hölderlin refers as that which ‘Apollo strikes’
him: the experience of the encounter with the togetherness of all
time in their intensification that welcomes what comes to presence and
what is told in the poetic saying, the experience of being exposed to
the divine elements and experience of mortality as mortality, time as
timing, space as spacing, death as death.
What is then poetic saying? It does not speak about anything—about
something that has happened, about existing system of relations, or
about cognizable state of affairs. It is rather welcoming the coming to
presence, the encounter in the open of what is mortal and the divine.
It refuses the parameter of a predicative truth. Thereby it opens itself
to a time yet to arrive, the incalculable and un-predicated encounter
with the advent of history. The reason why the poetic saying refuses
to be measured by the parameter of a predicative truth is because the
parameter of a predicative truth does not enable the coming to presence,
the un-predicative and incalculable encounter with the presencing
to be welcomed. For the un-predicative and incalculable encounter
with the presencing to be experienced, and the coming to presence be
welcomed, a saying entirely other than the conceptual language of
predicative proposition is to be thought, for the predicative language
can speak only about what has presently become. It demands that the
encounter be undergone by the poets and creative thinkers on the
Abgrund on the basis of which alone there may erupt the welcoming
of the wholly otherwise history for mortals.
In his lecture on The Nature of Language, Heidegger attempts
to think of—beyond the conceptual language of predicative
proposition, beyond the parameters of representational thinking—
the poetic saying that enables the face to face encounter with what
Heidegger calls ‘ the fourfold’, the encounter with time as timing,
and space as spacing. The measure of a predicative thinking that
takes its measure as parameter does not experience time as timing,
and space as spacing, and obstructs any possibility of the encounter
with the advent of time, for time as timing to be experienced, it is
necessary to experience a time otherwise than as eternal vacancy of
a conceptual time, that means, the eternal succession of indifferent,
homogenous instants. In the eternal succession of the indifferent,
homogenous instants, no encounter takes place, because there is no
ecstatic difference there to be the movement in constellation, in so
far only in a movement in constellation can there be encounter of
the ecstasies of past, presence and future; only in the movement of
this ecstatic constellation of temporality can there be distancing of
nearness, and nearing of distance. The encounter is the difference
as together, distance as nearing, holding apart as holding-together,
which is what Heidegger calls simultaneity of ecstatic temporalities.
In the simultaneity of being-together of ecstatic temporalities, as
Zusammenhang, time itself times and this time timing is what strikes
the mortals with the lightning flash in the stillness of the event. The
lightning bolt that strikes the mortals spaces the mortals in the open,
times the mortals to his finitude, to his mortality, exposes him to the
monstrous site where there occurs the advent of history. The shock
of this eternity that tears open the closure of time is the darkness of
excessive illumination, this ‘heavenly fire’ which the mortal cannot
look with his mortal eyes. There alone, at this monstrous site of history,
the mortal struck by the lightning flash of simultaneity of all that has
been, presencing and time to come, experiences this simultaneity as
death, as if the mortal can experience the eternity of all time together
only as his death. Mortality is the intensification of time, an intensity
of time to the point of bursting forth, to the point of burning of a
lightning bolt where becoming and perishing momentarily present

together. Poetic saying is enduring of this intensity. Heidegger says,
Time times—which means, time makes ripe, makes rise up and
grow. Timely is what has come up in the rising. What is it that time
times? That which is simultaneous, which is, that rises up together
with its time. And what is that? We have long known it, only we do
not think of it in terms of timing. Time times simultaneously: the
has-been, presence, and the present that is waiting for our encounter
and is normally called the future. Time in its timing removes us into
it threefold simultaneity, moves us thence while holding out to us
the disclosure of the has-been, presence, and the present waiting the
encounter. In removing us and bringing towards us, time move on its
way what simultaneity yields and throws open to it: time-space. But
time itself, in the wholeness of its nature, does not move; it rests in
stillness. (Heidegger 1982, p. 106).
So it is with space. Space that spaces is the open, the spacing of space
which enables the encounter to take place, striking the mortals with
the stillness of an eternity, as if annihilating, in a divine violence,
of all spaces and all places. This experience of time as eternity is
granted to man on the basis of his originary experience of death as
death that means, on the basis of his non-basis, his impossibility,
his non-presence to-be-there at the origin of his being. Or rather,
should we say it is his coming to presence without his-being-presently
present? Poetic saying, enabling this encounter, enables death to be
experienced as death, and also enables thereby eternity to arrive in the
experience of the encounter where time times and space spaces. This
encounter arrives as the divine violence, in its sudden advent, that
strikes the mortals with stillness, in a kind of beatific joy, a lightning
that lightens, frees and releases man unto the open: this beatific joy of
lightning and lighting is inseparable from what Schelling calls ‘divine
mourning’. Both the beatific joy and the divine mourning, therefore,
in their own ways, make us silent in a sort of, what Rosenzweig calls
‘completed understanding’ and which attune us mortals to eternity
as eternity. In this encounter where we are placed outside the totality
of all successive homogenous instants, this lightning flash of eternity
as simultaneity of timing is Apollo’s striking that exposes us to our
innermost existence as our essential finitude. The lightning flash is
the experience of pure exposure of the abandoned mortal being, the
exposure of ‘experience’ as such to the non-experiential advent of the

unapparent.
The Divine Violence

Is not this lightning flash of Apollo’s striking the ‘divine violence’,
which Benjamin (1986, pp. 277-300) speaks of? If the thetic-
positing nature of the speculative-conceptual language in its
metaphysical violence is inseparable from the mythic origin of law-
positing violence, then divine violence, which is beyond any law-
positing and law-preserving violence, is something like poetic saying
that enables the mortals to encounter the messianic advent, and the
divine, for the poetic saying, at each instance, exceeds the thetic-
positing conceptual and predicative nature of the concept. The poetic
saying, without positing, welcomes what arrives beyond positing, the
phenomenon of the unapparent: the incalculable, un-predicative
arrival of the arriving, the messianic coming of redemption. If this
reading is accepted, then divine violence is none but what is to arrive,
what comes to presence, what is to be encountered as the incalculable
violence without violence, a non-violent violence. Is this non-violent
violence—which does not rob speech from the tragic hero1, nor is
the silence of the resolute tragic man with his defiance confronting
his own death, but the poetic saying of welcoming poet—is this not
what Hölderlin says as that Apollo strikes him? The divine violence
is without any violence, beyond any law-positing and any law-
preserving and therefore beyond and before the law, whose measure
is not the deduced from a dialectical-speculative process, but from
elsewhere, that is, from an originary promise of a coming that is in
advance given in language, in the poetic saying. Such a promise is
kept in the remembrance of a poetic language, in a poetic saying,
which is the messianic promise of an advent beyond any dialectic
of thesis and anti-thesis, beyond any reductive totalization of the
historical-speculative dialectic.
The transcendence of a divine violence, because it is outside all

totality, is that which eternity strikes the mortal as death, since
for the mortals the eternity is outside his capacity and power. At
this sudden apparent of the unapparent, eternity and mortality are
united in the monstrous judgement that shocks the mortals with

its divine violence. Divine violence is experience of the impossible
that has its measure the immeasurable, a violence which is beyond
violence, as if thereby the mortals are exposed to his mortality, to
his death, to the limit of all possibilities on the (non) basis of which
the mortal then must measure his possibility and his mastery, his
history and his politics.
It is this experience of death as death that is excluded by the dialectical-

historical process of what Benjamin calls, ‘the homogenous empty
time’ (Benjamin 1977, pp. 251-261). The speculative-dialectical
thinking which makes death the end-result of a process where each
instance monotonously passes into another indifferent instance
does not experience death as death, insofar as the unitary ground
of these instances are grasped by the self-foundational principle of
immanence and therefore it has no place for the poetic-naming
language that welcomes the coming to presence, for the redemptive
affirmation of future. It thereby evades encountering the question of
the destiny of the origin and the origin of destiny, for this encounter
alone enables the question of the transformation of man’s historical
existence to be addressed, a question that has to be thought outside
of a speculative-regressive process. Divine violence, then, which
the mortal encounters by being spaced in the open, exposed to the
lightning flash of eternity, and exposed to his mortality, is outside
the dialectical-historical process of ‘homogenous empty time’. It is
rather the experience of time in the simultaneity of all that has been,
presence and the time to arrive, a simultaneity whose lucidity blinds
us, whose language renders us silent, and whose coming stills and
intensifies speech that endures this monstrous, demonic presentation
of eternity as presencing.
What then Apollo strikes the poet with? It is the coming of the
holy, the advent of the divine that strikes the poet. Poetic saying
welcomes the coming of the divine. Since the coming of the divine is
not welcomed without renouncing mastery and the mythic violence
of force, therefore a ‘fundamental mood’ of mournfulness attunes
Hölderlin’s poetic saying. For Hölderlin being the poet of welcoming
that welcomes the coming to presence of the divine, he is also thereby
the poet of renunciation.
Language, then, even before being the cognitive means at the service
of representational thinking, is more primordially the name-giving
that calls and welcomes what comes to presence. Walter Benjamin, in
his On Language as Such and on the Language of Man (1996) calls
the pure naming of Adam as blissful, which is given to the mortal
as an immemorial gift. Language, unimpaired by cognitive disposal,
belongs to the movement of constellation which does not serve as mere
medium of communication, but is the redemptive remembrance of
the originary promise. Therefore all thanks-giving for the gift is also
thereby a remembrance of the promise of the coming that prepares for
the event of coming to presence. For Heidegger, therefore, remembrance
is the destinal task of man’s relation to the event of coming to presence.
Such a remembrance of inception (Anfang) demands a step back, a
retreat from the conceptual categories that makes language a mere
cognitive means, or as mere serving the interests of the universal Spirit.
It is poetic saying and thinking at the end of a certain metaphysics
that prepares for the event of coming to presence. Such a preparation
is the remembrance of the inception, or origin which is still to come,
a past which is still to arrive. Since such a remembrance is a step
back from conceptual-categorial thinking, the inception or the origin
cannot be traced back dialectically-historically, for the dialectical-
historical is the categorial cognition of the ‘presently given’, and not
what comes to presence. Since what comes to presence, understood
in its verbal resonance, is the originary temporalizing of time, of what
we have said above as timing of time—and not what is ‘presently
given’—this coming to presence can only be said in the lightning flash
of poetic Saying, and not in the predicative-categorial cognition of
‘presently given entities’.
The lightning flash by striking us mortals, and enabling us to
experience our mortality as mortality, first of all places us to the
temporalizing of time and to spacing of space. The lightning flash is
face-to-face encounter, not with entities that have become and ‘given
presently’, but an encounter with temporalizing of time itself. This
temporalizing of time, as pre-predicative and pre-categorial disclosure,
is attempted to be thought by Heidegger (1962) in his Being and
Time far more primordially as existential, and not tracing back the
apophantic and the predicative of Vorhandenheit. language is not
thought here as categorial predication of ‘presently given entities’ but
more originally in relation to the temporalizing of time as disclosure,

which is for that matter existential, since such temporalizing of time is
not the end result of a process, but the event of time itself.
What is then, the gift of language that man is endowed with? It is
the gift in the naming, —unimpaired by cognitive manipulability—
of being revealed to oneself, of coming to presence to oneself. In the
naming-language man comes to presence to himself, to reveal himself
as mortal and finite being. This revelation is the reward of cognition,
unlike any categorial cognition, of his essential finitude, which
bestows him with the mournful serenity of contemplation, which the
mortal must acknowledge with a joyous gratitude, with thankfulness.
§ Revelation
The question of revelation is of interest to the philosophers of

religion, to theologians as well to the philosophers of language. What
is attempted here, in this little chapter, is to touch on the question
of the relation of revelation with finitude and language. If language,
in its innermost connection with finitude, cannot be reduced to the
categorical, predicative cognition of the ‘presently given entities’,
then the more originary pre-predicative and pre-categorical opening
of the world in its coming can only be thought, without being able
to exhaust in any schematization and thematization, as revelation,
or manifestation, which in its coming to presence and opening of
the world, brings together—in an eschatological manner without any
eschatology—the temporalities of past, present and future. As such,
revelation is the event of time which is bound up with language, in
so far as this event of time manifests itself as Word, in the naming
language, as the logos of the mortal beings. The coming together
of past, presence and future—the constellation of temporalities—
appear like what Hölderlin calls ‘heavenly fire’, Heraclitus calls it
‘fire’, and Bhartrihari, the Indian philosopher calls ‘Sphota’ (which
brings together the two fold senses of ‘bursting’ and ‘manifestation’).
In that case, the thought of revelation is essentially that of event that
brings together, as constellation, of past and presence and future,
and time and eternity. As bringing together of temporalities, it is the
pure presentation of the strife between a messianic destruction and
a promise of an arrival, between dissolution without conservation
and the promise of an arrival, between melancholy and joy. This
simultaneity cannot be thought to belong to a successive period of
Revelation • 211
a continuous history. Language then, even before cognition of the

‘presently given’ world, is opening of the world, and exposure of the
mortals who speaks language to the opening of the world, to that
of the strife where opposites are coupled as what Hölderlin calls ‘
monstrous coupling’.
*
Poetry is the mother- tongue of the human race, as the garden is
older than the ploughed field; painting than writing; song, than
declamation; parables than logical deductions; barter, than commerce.
—Hamann (2007, p.63)
THE ARGUMENT
This originary revelation of language is love that precedes the
distinction between good and evil. It shows, in a paradoxical manner,
that love is an originary form of strife, which is more primordial
than the strife between good and evil, which precisely explains—
since love precedes the distinction between good and radical evil—
the possibility of redemption. This possibility of redemption—
which is the possible arrival of the wholly otherwise Kingdom, of
the possible coming of the impossible, of a future incalculable—this
promise bestows upon the mortals the task of renewing, repeating
the originary form of strife in each instantiation of presencing, so
that each instantiation of presencing itself becoming a form of strife,
which is that of love as revelation. Since this revelation of love in each
instantiation of presencing is only renewed in the mortal naming-
language, therefore, one can go further to argue that the idea of
revelation is that of language in love and of love in language.
One can say, to begin with, that at that beginning before beginning,
at that immemorial past, before anything like signification, or sense,
there revealed love, or love reveals itself. The language of this love,
since it precedes any predication of existence, is nothing less than
announcing of existence coming into presence; in other words, we shall
call this event of existence that is heralded in the language of love as the
language of Word, or Name, before it assumes conceptual categories.
It means Word is Love, or love reveals itself as Word. As revelation,
the Word does not communicate anything apart from this event of
coming itself, on the basis of which, on the basis of its erasure, there
comes to be signification, or categorical grasp of the entities given
there. What is attempted here to be thought, in the word ‘revelation’,
nothing content like signification, but the originary opening of sense,
which is always the sense of the world which is to come, which as
such is prior to signification of the given world. This signification at
the service of the categorical disposal gives itself double illusion: that
it itself is the originary event of truth, while it is merely inverse, like
the mirror image, of the event; and secondly, it claims a totality which
it doesn’t possess, like claims of self-presence, self-identity, while its
claims for self-presence is—to evoke Jacques Lacan (2001, pp. 1-8)
here—only a ‘misrecognition’, that is, it is based on an abyss which
has already always erased itself, or to say—Schelling—fallen (Abfall),
diverted itself and have relapsed itself into an irrecuperable, more
ancient than any ancient past. In the following part of this work, this
question of origin will be posed anew, which should be able to show
the double, incommensurable character of revelation: it welcomes
a presencing while absenting itself, something like what Heidegger
calls the event of Lichtung which allows something to be unconcealed,
while concealing itself. The event of language too has the double,
incommensurable character: it communicates its coming to presence,
and yet withdrawing its event character, so as it shelters itself from
any reduction and totalization, from any predication, signification, or
concept in its thetic positing and preserving. Language that is in love
is an infinite excess, unsaturated phenomenon, which is the essence
of manifestation or revelation. In the revealed entities of the world,
the event of revelation itself is not exhausted; it remains unapparent
in each and every visible forms of the given and thereby infinitely
opens itself to its own excess of presentation.
Therefore the infinitude of the revelation in its verbal resonance,
in any instantiation of presencing, the revelation always appears
as futural, that means opening to the not yet. Revelation promises
redemption, the messianic arrival of the not yet, which is only so far
as the strife of the loving word is renewed in any finite, conditioned,
historical presencing. At the heart of historical presence, an originary
strife of the loving word is to be introduced, in such a way that this
loving disrupts, interrupts, and transfigures any historical-speculative
totalization, or totalization of Sense, or it introduces interval in
Revelation • 213
any continuity of the self-same, introducing like an infinite excess,

or infinite surplus without equivalences of self-presencing instant
of ‘now’. All determination of the political and historical is only
derivative of this originary strife of love, which is that of revelation,
the non-contemporaneous disjunction in language between the event
of coming to presence and what comes to presence as totalities of
revealed entities, so that what remains in excess of the totality of the
revealed signification is nothing other than this event of revelation
itself.
From this follows the following proposition of this work: that the
metaphysical task of man to found, ground its own existence out of
his power, capacity, possibility—for signification—demands to be
opened up to the more originary event of revelation in love, which
language enunciates itself even before language becomes predicative
power at cognitive disposal. This event of love as language, since it
must already reveal the world to man, or expose man to the world
is more originarily political than any political. It is a political—
which means here being in excess of itself, so that it is already
always open to the others—the political before politics, before
anything like man’s attempt to found community on the basis of
power and law. This originary love opens, first of all, time to the
world, on the basis of which man understands phenomenon of the
world as temporal, supra-temporal, or even a-temporal. Similarly
the event of love must originarily open the world, so that on the
basis of love, man understands something like politics, a-politics,
and de-politicization. Love therefore, in its event character of its
revelation, is no more politics than a-politics or even de-politics.
Love’s polemos, love’s strife is more originary than contestation
of power or forces of the given world that defines the juridical-
political closure. What is necessary, as the ethical task of our time,
is to introduce into the closure of the juridical-political, the strife of
love, as an excess of the juridical-political closure.
As excess it is opening up of time itself—the time of signification—
what is its immemorial past, and its messianic arrival to come, for
revelation, as instantiation of presencing co-joins in a disjunctive
manner, past, presence and future. Love, like language, co-joins
what is disparate by introducing originary strife so that this strife
itself exceeds any political-historical-metaphysical totalization. What

exceeds in the form of strife of love is what is prior to what Benjamin
(1986, pp. 277-300) calls the two fold ‘law positing’ and ‘law
preserving violence’. The excess of love and the excess of language
which cannot be posited as such is this revelatory character: outside
all communicability, it is the eschatological reserve or a messianic
withdrawal, in the name of a future and not yet, outside any reductive
totalization.
Synthesis without Continuum

It is Schelling, already before Nietzsche, who introduces the
problematic of the strife of love as the event of revelation. While Hegel
makes the beginning and the end of the process, or, the movement
of Spirit as the movement of concept that becomes, that comes to
itself as this process, a movement that is autochthonous, Schelling on
the other hand sees revelation in love, without positing it as concept
or predicate, as the originary moment of a movement that remains
un-autochthonous, finite but exposed to the infinite. The ‘irreducible
remainder’ of this moment of opening of the world remains, in
respect to the world, as heterogeneous, unconscious, in-excess, the
immemorial past that no apophansis of the predicative judgement
can re-trace. The ‘unappeased melancholy’ that Schelling evokes in
his Freedom essay, a melancholy due to this ‘irreducible remainder’,
is also—in its remnant-character (an idea that Rosenzweig in his
The Star of Redemption, attempts to think in a messianic manner)
an intensification of hope, or an affirmation of future, which is the
possibility of the arrival of redemption from radical evil. If language
of love is the originary opening of the world, its irreducible remnant
makes the idea of a messianic community possible, a community
which is always to come. This idea of community, which is neither
a regulative idea, nor a constitutive one, cannot be thought on the
basis of the metaphysical foundation of the political, which is that
of metaphysics of the Subject. This idea of revelation, which has
promise of redemptive fulfillment, brings together the immemorial
past and incalculable future through continuous disruption of self-
presence, so that this disruption does not found itself on the basis
of a continuum, whether it is Subject, or the logical principle of
Revelation • 215
identity. A community to come does not have as its ground, or basis

a continuum, a community without continuum. This disruption is
the renewal of the strife of love in any given presence so that the
unapparent may advent. Community to come is, however, though
it is not grounded on the principle of continuum, is therefore no
stranger to the idea of synthesis—between finitude and infinitude—
which is not to be understood in the speculative sense, but as a form
of strife. What is sought to be introduced here is another notion of
synthesis, which is that of love, as eternal disruption of any closure,
and yet bringing to proximity, through disruption of the fusion, into
nearness the immemorial past and incalculable future.
Language as Revelation in Schelling’s

Philosophy of Freedom
In his Philosophical Investigation into the Nature of Human Freedom,
Schelling says,
Only man is in God, and through this being- in- God is capable
of freedom. He alone is a central being, and therefore should also
remain in the center. In him all things are created, just as it is also only
through man that God accepts nature and ties it to him. (Schelling
1936, p.92)
‘Man is a central being’. From this Schelling derives the astounding

insight: that, in so far as man alone is the central being—who belongs
to the center, that means, to the limit, to the line that dis-joining
co-joins the divine and the rest of created existence, that dis-figuring
co-figures, the copula of the judgement whose character of being
is the abyss—to him alone, being central being, there belongs the
possibility of evil. If only man is endowed with the gift of language
so that the mediation is possible between the divine and the rest of
the created, that means through him revelation and the redemption
is possible, then would it not be contradictory and even impossible
that to this central being, the mortal as the medium of revelation
and redeemer of nature, belongs the capacity of evil? Does there
not lay the un-thinkability of the possibility of evil in so far as this
possibility renders God as the author of evil, and therefore makes the
God less than the creator of the ‘best possible world’? Yet, since the
possibility and actuality of evil is undeniable, may this possibility not

adhere in the finitude itself that is the revelation and the coming of
redemption itself? If that is so, then the mortal who alone is endowed
with the gift of language, i.e., who alone is the medium through
whom revelation makes manifest creation, and who alone for that
matter redeemer of the rest of creation, only can he be capable of
evil. Because he is the danger, he is also the promise; because he is
the abyss, through him alone there is connection and mediation, of
revelation and redemption; because he is endowed with the gift of
language, he is at once capable of evil, and for that matter, he is the
possibility of redemption. This means: being endowed with the gift of
language, the mortal essentially and in the inmost manner belongs to
the finitude that first of all enables his existence as essentially mortal
and finite. The mortal is the being who, being endowed with the gift
of language, alone experiences his mortality as mortality, for only
such a being is made the medium of revelation and the redeemer of
nature. If language itself is essentially intimated with finitude, for the
mortal who experiences death as death is thereby endowed with the
gift of language, then language is also, for that matter, the promise
for the mortals.
The originary promise of language is the promise of redemption. It is
the mortals’ task to hearken to this promise, and keep this promise
in remembrance so that essential transfiguration and redemption of
his historical existence is possible. Being endowed with the gift of
language, the mortal has not only become the redeemer of nature—
by himself endowing the mute nature, the animals and the birds
with the name, for he is the name-giver what is not yet named—
but he himself becomes open to his own redemption in the time to
come. The blissful naming which the mortal endows the mute nature
and not yet named animals is their redemption. Hence man is the
redeemer of nature; or rather it is he through whom mute nature,
being endowed with name, becomes redeemed. In Philosophical
Investigations into the Nature of Human Freedom, Schelling therefore
calls this central being, endowed with the gift of language, who alone
is capable of evil, as ‘redeemer of nature’:
Man is the beginning of the new covenant through whom, as

mediator, since he himself is connected with God, God (the last
Revelation • 217
division being attained) also accepts nature and takes it to him. Man
is the redeemer of nature towards whom all archetypes strive. The
Word which is fulfilled in man exists in nature as a dark, prophetic
(still incompletely unspoken) Word. Hence the anticipations which
have no exegesis in nature itself and are only explained by man. (Ibid.)
The animals, receiving the names from Adam, leap away from him
in recognition of the blissful nobility with which they are endowed
with. In the On Language as Such and on the Language of Man, citing
from Friedrich Müller’s poem, Walter Benjamin says of the blissful
recognition in the naming language of man: ‘The life of man in pure
language-mind was blissful. Nature, however, is mute. True, it can
be clearly felt in the second chapter of Genesis how this muteness,
named by man, itself becomes bliss, only of lower degree. Friedrich
Müller has Adam say to animals that leave him after he has named
them, ‘ And saw by the nobility with which they leaped away from me
that the man had given them a name’(Benjamin 1986,p. 329). Man
who is the name-giver and the redeemer of the mute, still unspoken
nature is the exegete, not the exegete who masters what he reads, but
the exegete who redeems what is not yet read through his redemptive
reading. He reads and in him the nature finds the redeeming exegesis.
Redemption of nature lies in the linguistic being of the mortals, for in
him alone the whole of the created existence and himself is revealed.
This possibility of revelation, which is granted to man along with, or
by virtue of the gift of language, endows the mortals with Love, which
in turn—with mortals lovingly encountering face-to-face with the
rest of the created, the divine and himself—mournful solitude of the
earth and the tremendous manifestations of the sky above—redeems
his own existence. Therefore the linguistic being of the mortals is
essentially that of love, which in the face of the possibility of the evil,
whose possibility is given along with love in revelation—open the
mortal himself towards his own redemption.
Therefore Schelling in his Philosophical Investigations into the
Nature of Human Freedom thinks language itself, the creative Word in
which the mortal partakes of the divine creativity, as revelation. The
mortal, in whom the divine Word completely articulates itself, must
also be the one in whom the Spirit reveals itself. Therefore the essence
of the linguistic being of the mortal is that of revelation, for it is to the
mortal alone—who as an existence relatively outside him—that God

reveals himself as the image of his own essential being, that is, his
creativity. So that there be revelation and redemption, so that there be
love, the Word is sent to man as the ideal principle of love. Benjamin
calls this endowing the mortal with language as ‘divine gift’: ‘only
in man, then’, writes Schelling, ‘is the Word completely articulate,
which in all other creatures was held back and left unfinished. But
in the articulate word the spirit reveals itself, that is, God as existing,
in act’ (Schelling 1936, p.39). If there is evil as possibility whose
inherent possibility is given in the necessity of revelation, that is so
that there be the light of love, since love demands what is other than
itself to be love, so that it transfigures, subordinates what is other
to itself. This transfiguration happens, if the Word lovingly accords
what is difference—what Schelling calls the principle of light and
the principle of darkness, the vowels and the consonant—then it is
redemptive. The evil is not a lie, in that sense, but a simulacrum,
a simulated accord, a diseased unity of the judgement. The mortal,
being the center, the copula, the spacing, the opening, the limit, itself
the cision—which I call the open—is open to both Good and Evil
in equal measure, both to redemption and falling away, both to (to
use Benjamin’s words) naming and overnaming, both to the blissful
melancholic naming and the melancholic overnaming of judgement,
both to danger and its ‘saving grace’. Since the mortal placed unto
the open is the spacing which is undecidable, the abyss and the limit,
and since the mortal cannot persist in this undecidable: hence,
so Schelling explains of the necessity of decision in relation to the
possibility of evil, there is a constant solicitation to evil, a constant
drawing towards whose source is not discovered, or disclosed within
time, but a time outside time.
Therefore, being gifted with the ideal principle of love in language,
evil is also given to man as possibility, which itself is not evil, but only
a possibility without actuality. Therefore finitude on account of which
there is revelation, and there the possibility of love and evil both are
given, this finitude itself—for that matter—not evil, but is merely
the possibility of evil . Now if that is so and this is our question:
then language—in its intrinsic connection with finitude, for it alone
enables man to experience his mortality as mortality—then language
itself must be intrinsically connected with the possibility of evil. If that
Revelation • 219
is so, then the overnaming must be given as possibility along with the
pure divine naming; the language of judgement arising in evil must
already be given as possibility with the blissful divine gift of language.
Language, then, arising with the pure gift of language, as a principle
of love, as promise in the name, as hope for redemption, a medium of
revelation, may become in man a language of judgement, a simulated
accord of evil, a cognitive medium where language becomes a mere
means and no longer as medium of revelation, a seeking to close
the Open, transforming the originary undecidable of the open to the
decision to evil and subordinating the loving unity to the totalizing
particular will. This is the origin of evil. In Benjamin’s words, it is
the origin of ‘the mythic origin of law’. If this possibility of evil is
given as intrinsic possibility in man, and if the saving grace is called
forth by danger, and if language of judgement calls for redemptive
language beyond the ‘mythic origin of law’, then the Open—which is
the spacing of the undecidable—must remain open. This remaining
open of the Open, keeping the undecidable spacing as an open chasm,
this alone keeps the promise of redemption open to mortals. That
means, this is also what Schelling’s work of Freedom comes to say
towards the end: the possibility of evil remains, but by infinitely
subordinating the evil to redemption, to love and to the promise of
language, by forever and interminably keeping evil as mere possibility,
as mere ground unto the depth (since the mere possibility does not
itself constitute evil), this melancholy in the overnaming can be
transfigured into the beatitude of redemptive name, the danger into
promise in the coming, the abyss into the summit, the darkness into
light, the past into an affirmation of future, the unredeemed death
into redemptive possibility of future.
If the ethico-political task of the historical mortal who creates
history with the gift of language is to remain open the Open, to
keep open the undecidable spacing, then this task is inseparable
from the task of remembrance of the originary promise of language
itself, given with the gift of language immemorially. From this it is
affirmed that the history of the historical man begins with revelation
of love and to renew this originary poetry of love is our historical
task, which itself keeps open history towards its redemption. This
redemptive hope is given to mortals as possibility because though
radical evil is, it is not as originary as love, for evil derives its effect
only as contrast, and not as independent principle of being. This

history, which is remembrance of the originary poetic of love beyond
violence, would not be grasped by the self-foundational immanent
principle as a speculative process. History is then no longer conceived
as homogenous succession of banal instants, but as ecstatic, disruptive
coming to presence, the coming that presents itself in the movement
of constellation or configuration as the simultaneity of ecstatic
temporalities. This configuration of temporalities is otherwise than
mere accumulative unity of the successive, homogenous presents.
The latter is the speculative unity of a dialectical-historical. The
configuration is rather co-figuring of temporalities as simultaneity
that means a discontinuous whole that presents itself in the suddenness
of the lightning flash that strikes the mortals with excessive, blinding
illumination. It makes manifest in the suddenness of a flash the
whole of temporalities together as discontinuous presentation, which
for that matter appears to the mortal as standing still, the very (dis)
figure of mortality.
Understood in this sense, more primordially than understanding
as speculative process, revelation is historical (in the sense that it
inaugurates history as such). In the Philosophical Inquires Schelling
therefore thinks of the two-fold creation: as the principle of light
and darkness belong to the realm of nature, arising out of divine
longing; so the principle of spirit and dark principle of evil belong
to the realm of history arising out of revelation. In this sense evil is
historical. There is no evil where history does not come to presence,
where history does not make manifest the necessity of decision out of
undecidable. But this undecidable itself belongs to the ground which
is groundless, the in-difference of freedom—but not identity—
that remains as, what Schelling calls ‘irreducible remainder’, as the
inscrutable, almost demonic essence of freedom. But this remnant,
this ‘irreducible remainder’ itself for that matter is the occasion of
hope for redemption, even though man decides for evil out of his
abyss of freedom. There remains something in history as remnant outside
history, which does not enable the closure of history in immanence. This
remnant of history is the possibility of its redemption.
It is this possibility of redemption that is given with language
to mortals who comes to presence to himself. He then founds
community, the polis where there takes place the harvest and the
Revelation • 221
feast, the war and reconciliation, the division of the space into
political territories and founding of the Law of the earth. But this
founding, at each time, must keep remembrance of the face-to-face
encounter with the serene mournful earth, the rest of the created,
what he is endowed with the gift, so that the historical man in his
all consummating hunger for appropriation and dominion may not
transform what is merely possible evil into its actuality. For evil is
nothing but the all devouring lust, this all consummating hunger
for being what ought to remain—what Schelling calls ‘non-being’,
which is for that matter is not pure nothing, but non-being of a
particular will striving for being as total, universal dominion. The
consummating claim to appropriation what is to remain non-
appropriation, this destructive fire that is not fire that gives warmth
for the living but consumes it: this evil is nothing but simulacrum of
the event, itself not the event that redeems historical suffering into
messianic happiness. The terrible effect of evil, therefore, does not
derive from its having being, but precisely in its not-having-being, its
non-presence, and its eternal greed for attaining actuality. Therefore
evil is not event but simulacrum of the event, for the event keeps open
the originary Open, the gift in the naming that enables first of all the
encounter with the coming and welcomes the coming to language.
This event is the event of redemption the coming of which possibility
demands renunciation of appropriation and mastery that the mortal,
in his arrogance, seeks. Therefore evil does not lie in the finitude of
man but in the finite being’s self-abnegation of his finitude, though
the possibility of evil is given with this finitude essentially, which
does not itself, however, explain the actuality of evil. Schelling says
in a footnote in his Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human
Freedom: ‘for the same reasons every other explanation of finitude,
for instance by the concept of relations, must be inadequate as an
explanation of evil. Evil is not derived from finitude, but from finitude
which has been exalted to independent being’ (Schelling 1936, p.
46). The historico-political task of the mortal is the attentiveness,
the care that is required to transfigure the possibility of evil into the
event, to keep the originary poetic of history open, and to renew the
naming language of the poetic saying to welcome the coming. In this
open he must be open to what is other, otherwise than man, for what
belongs to man does not belong to him as possession. Man is the
speaker of a language which is not his possession. To renounce this

claim to possession so that he may receive what is infinitely greater
than possession, is to experience mortality, in a difficult and more
profound sense, as if this mortality itself becomes somewhat of a
mortal task of man.
This mortality itself is something like a gift. The task of thinking
is to renew this thinking of mortality. Because thinking has a
certain relation to mortality, thinking of the gift becomes the gift
of thinking. It is this essential relation of thinking with mortality
that makes thinking an essential linguistic ‘activity’ (to use this word
‘activity’ without having better word to say) of man. Thinking that
takes seriously the question of mortality—for what touches the
mortal more than his mortality, or mortality of the other?—must
take seriously the question of language. At stake lies the question
of the goal and purpose of his existence—if this old fashioned
question is not to be renounced—the question of his redemption
and affirmative hope for future. It is on the basis of this affirmative
hope for future alone that any of our ethico-political questions make
sense and will retain their sense.
Part III
Event
§ Of Event
The Question of Event and the Limit of Foundation

For a long time in the history of a predominant thought, a thought that
has determined the destiny and fate of that history and the historicity
of that history itself, the event of coming into existence has always been
subsumed, repressed, subordinated to the thought of Being and time
to the point of oblivion of such a thought of an event. The notion
of the event is thought only conditionally, that means, on the basis
of a being already present, in its ‘given presence’ character. One can
even say that such a thought of event as coming into existence really
never occurred as such, apart from fugitive moments of that history
that has furtively escaped from the memory of that history, or, rather,
they are excluded from that history, moments that have appeared
like lightning flash with an exceptional brilliancy that have made the
source of that history opaque, dark, and deep which the intelligibility
of Being cannot penetrate. This inscrutable abyss of that history is
the event of eruption of that history and not a consequence of that
history’s process of accomplishment. It is the opening or inauguration
of that history which as such—and this is important—is also its end
(an ‘end’ which is without telos).
The thought of the event is that thought which thought itself
refuses, by a necessary logic in the thinkable itself, to confront and
encounter its own abyss. It is what history of the thinkable—of the
conditional event as given presence—refuses or forecloses in order for
the thinkable to emerge into being that constitutes itself as history as
such, memorial and monumental. It emerges itself as the process of
inscription of the grand marches of the metaphysics of subjectivity

from nothingness of its being towards its fulfilled self-presence. In
this manner the unconditional arrival of the other already always
becomes its buried presupposition, or rather its condition of
possibility. To expose this presupposition character of history itself
is to open another inauguration, another inception which is the task
of thinking today. If thinking has been pre occupied itself with the
thought of ‘ends’ today, that is only so far as it is already always and
primarily an attempt to think of inauguration and inception in a
more originary manner, that means unconditionally, affirmatively,
and without any closure. In other words, it is essentially concerned
with the thought of event—not event as thought or as thinkable, but
precisely in its intimate, profound connection with abyss of finitude
wherein this being called ‘mortal’ does not so much appropriates it, or
owns it, but rather that this ‘mortal’ is immemorially, an-anarchically
‘owned’ or appropriated by this event.
This event is immemorially older, more ancient than ancient, and
incalculably younger and newer than any future. It therefore does
not belong to the economic calculation of the time of modernity
wherein each instant, ‘now’ of presenting is instantly vanishing, and
therefore is already going to be old, ineluctably and inevitably. The
event here is rather to be thought in relation to a non-economic
excess of revolutionary time that does not serve the measure of the
capital. The fugitive-character of this excessive moment is unlike the
evanescent, ever-new instants of ‘sensuousness’ that in its departing
enables the capital of sense to emerge in manifold profits. In this sense
this excess of event does not belong to ‘time’ or to ‘history’ as such ;
or rather, it evokes a time or history that is wholly otherwise, for what
at stake here is the gathering of history that at once summons its
very dispersal or dissolution. What remains, out of this revolutionary
excess of presentation, is not self-sameness of what has once been
present, but the remainder of the immemorial not yet.
The fugitive excess of history does not completely belong to
history without remnant. As such it is forever in departure, fleeing
from any immanence of self-presence, and at the same time persisting
in-apparently in each here and now. This inapparition does not so
much constitute the ‘depth’ of history, as if beyond the totality of
history’s visible forms there exists ever the same invisible depth. The
Of Event • 227
task of our ethico-political would, then, consist of ever retrieving

the invisible depth to the visibility of manifestation, which is the
light of history. The excess of the unapparent is to be thought outside
such a phenomenological thought of the nocturnal depth of darkness
and the light of history that makes manifest truth in visible forms.
In this sense, the phenomenon of fugitive is outside the preview of
phenomenology as such, at least in the dominant and strict sense of
what constitutes ‘phenomenology’, for here is the phenomenon of
fugitive that does not belong to the mortal called ‘man’ and to the
light of his consciousness. ‘Man’ belongs to the excess of the fugitive
and to the unapparent: he is owned by it, and on the basis of this
belonging character, man remains open to history and to the outside.
The redemptive fulfillment, whose promise is preserved by the messianic
remnant, cannot occur within any history of self-presence. It occurs
in a lightning flash when the whole of history, in it’s entirely, gathers
itself unto that abyss—where another inauguration, another inception
celebrates its feast. the essential thinking is concerned itself with its
highest task: how to preserve those moments of lightning flash that
are destined to disappear at the moment of their apparition which
no phenomenological ontology that is based upon the categorical
can attain to its grasp? The excess of unapparent event of presencing
remains what Schelling calls ‘un-pre-thinkable’, the outside of
thought, or thinkable, since the event does not constitute the
mere potency of concepts, but pure actuality of presencing without
remainder. To preserve the moments of event which do not belong
to the dominant history of the light of Being is the highest exertion
of our thinking today. To preserve those exceptional moments of
exceptional clarity where the difference between the coming into
existence and Being appear as an unapparent apparition is the highest
exertion of thought, not only because we are no longer nearer to that
‘heavenly fire’ like Empedocles, but because it presents us, exposes
us, abandons us to a thought which is the limit of the thinkable, the
limit of thinking’s power to present itself as sense and presence. To
attain to the thought of event is to be exposed to the difference which
is not so much the difference between categories of being but the
difference between the coming into existence and Being.
When Heidegger speaks of the ‘phenomenology of the unapparent’,
it is precisely the unapparent character of the manifestation of the
event is meant, which in turn is to be thought outside any eidetic

phenomenology. That means the task of philosophical thinking has
changed today; or, rather, we feel the need, now than ever before, to
invent new thinking, no longer the thinkability of Being and Being of
thought; for they (the thinkability of Being and the Being of thinking)
follow the same law of movement, the same logic of origin, which is
origin reductively determined as generation, or emanation—a thought
as old as ‘the history of philosophy’ itself—and movement whose
pure ecstatic transcendence is reductively totalized into the being of
time itself, which is then thought to be a duration as continuous flow,
whose logic a phenomenology of pure transcendence will be able to
discover. It is the logic of time which is none but the idea of being,
or subjectivity itself. It is against this time of subjectivity in its false
transcendence, which takes its inspiration from the idea of origin
as generation or emanation, that we will introduce logic of origin
as differential and multiple, as pure ecstatic transcendence rather
than continuity as flow. Only that way the notion of the event as
event allows itself to be thought, without subordinating itself to the
substantial zed or nominalized determination of being or subjectivity.
What philosophical thinking today, when the idea of philosophy
itself is under question, thinks is its relation to event and thought’s
relation to the difference between the coming into existence and Being as
ground of existence. This abysmal difference is the spacing of philosophy
from its own ground. It is what philosophy’s presupposition is; it is
from where philosophy takes its birth as spacing of a difference that
does not completely allow itself to be represented as the apparent character
of the nominative or substantial. This difference as spacing manifests
itself as unapparent apparition, beyond any phenomenological
horizon of intelligibility, as thing-in-itself, as pure facticity, pure
appearing or revelation, without any constitutive-constituting (self )
consciousness underlying, without any egology, or transcendental
Subjectivity. Instead the self-consciousness’ grasp of itself would
already presuppose the more originary apparition of the unapparent
as the finite opening of the world. This thing-in-itself which does not
allow itself to be thought as subsistence of being nor as constituting
dialectical-speculative-historical subject, is nothing other than
the pure coming into existence which in relation to itself is pure
immanence, but distinguishing from each and every predicate about
Of Event • 229
the available, already happened entities of the world is actuality as

pure transcendence. It is this coming into existence as thing-in-itself and
as pure actuality—unconditional—that is what we call here as event.
Perhaps now, when the logical thinking about the world—which
has assumed the prestigious name called ‘metaphysics’—has come to
an end, philosophy must give itself a new task of a new metaphysics
of facticity without any foundational and systemic pretension,
a thinking of the pure facticity of the thing-in-itself, which is the
thinking of the event of coming, not the coming that comes to
pass away and then predicated on the basis of the intelligibility
of phenomenological consciousness, but this coming itself in the
purely verbal resonance before the nominative or substantive,
in its ecstatic transcendence that precedes, in a certain manner of
speaking, anything that comes to pass away. This demands renewed
inquiry, outside any phenomenological ontology and its systemic and
foundational tasks, into the question concerning ‘the unapparent
apparition’ of the event of coming into existence as pure facticity, as
pure actuality by distinguishing it from such traditional metaphysical
distinctions between actuality and potentiality, between essentia
and existentia etc. What needs to be introduced, then, outside such
metaphysical distinctions, is a new thinking of the event of existence,
and of a thinking of an actuality as pure facticity, which cannot be
thought either as Being or Subject but as disclosive exposure to its
radical futurity. With this we are already under the inspiration from
Schelling’s later works, from his Positivphilosophie of what he calls the
metaphysics of empiricism. Such a transcendental empiricism that we are
introducing here, without positing anything like transcendent being
or subject, ego or transcendental consciousness (with the personal
pronoun ‘I’) and at the limit of the foundational acts of thinking,
should enable us to open ourselves to the unapparent apparition of
the coming and its event character without, however, thematizing it
within a noetic-noematic co-relation.
What Schelling’s Positivphilosophie and its metaphysical
empiricism inspires us is to think the facticity of actuality outside
mere predicative potentiality of the concept, and the question of the
event character of coming outside the philosophy’s project of totality
and foundation on the basis of the intelligibility of Being/ Subject/
Consciousness. In this way thinking is opened up to the more
originary notion of truth no longer on the basis of predication, and

to the more originary event character of coming into existence that
in a certain manner precedes Being or Subjectivity. In this manner
the closure of the metaphysics of subjectivity, and the dialectical-
speculative totality of history is hollowed inside out towards the abyss
where the unapparent apparition of the coming occurs and reveals
itself on the basis of a radical finitude and mortality, and yet without
founding on any positing assertion, or better predication, as truth.
Here thinking confronts and encounters a limit that is not
conquered or mastered within the possibility of the thinkable itself.
If thinking is bound up with Being, then the event of coming into
existence—in so far as it is incommensurable with the thought of
Being—is excluded from thought itself as thought’s failure, if thinking
is satisfied as mere predicative grasp of a phenomena mere potential
and not unconditional affirmation of the pure, unconditional
facticity.
This aporia, which is the aporia of thinking, is simply aporia
between the double demands on thinking: to be exposed to the
consummate fire of the event that seeks to annihilate thought
on the one hand, and at same time to preserve event as event
in memory and history, which means, to make it thinkable and
operative in history and memory, to make the true exception, which
is event, universal. It is this aporia, which is not just the aporia of
a hermetic thought, but an aporia that now defines the destiny of
our political and ethical concerns. This aporia does not allow to
be thought as foundation of ‘political’ and ‘ethical’ legitimacy of
the dominant forces and powers, but rather that the thought of
the event must tirelessly expose, at any given moment, any form of
legitimacy under the force, power of the dominant, whether in the
name of Being, Subjectivity or totality.
To preserve this aporetic demands of a thought which is now, in so
far as it is aporetic, does not allow an unequivocal unity or totality
to emerge, even if is in the form of a cumulative movement that
incorporates within itself the homogeneity of successive instants.
What we have to think of the event of coming now, if it does not have
to sink its teeth into the banal passing of the accumulative, successive
Of Event • 231
instants of dialectical-speculative history, is nothing other than

thought itself as caesural, cisioned, torn asunder, and wholly inside
out towards the open. Existence is not a pre-determined revealed
truth which will then manifest itself as progressive, continuous work
of reason; rather existence itself—understood in the event character
of its coming, and which in so far as it is coming, is not a real predicate
(to speak with Kant)—reveals itself as wholly incommensurable with
itself, as multiple ecstasies that refuses any underlying flow of the same.
This incommensurable multiplicity of the event is what threatens
thought with constant solicitation to a madness, the madness that
consists of thought’s inability to master the difference between event
and Being, between a coming into existence and Being’s thinkability,
between ‘presencing of presence’ and the given constant presence,
between the infinitude of the verbal ‘to’ and the nominative,
substantive. To master this difference, philosophy conjure all its
tricks to think the event on its own terms, attempting to think event
on the basis of generation out of nothing or, an emanation from a
pre-conceived, transcendental substance, being or whatever it is, or
on the basis of the notion of revelation whose truth is manifested
as the work of logos, reason, and on the basis of an auto-generative,
auto-releasing and auto-contracting movement of immanence. As
we will see, such tricks have exhausted their conjuring resources,
and we will see that the exhaustion of their power of conjuration
is the exhaustion of the foundational project of metaphysics, and
the metaphysical foundation of a dominant politics and ethics. The
question of the event arrives here, anew, at the exhaustion of this
foundational project to arrive at the thinkability of the world on the
basis of Being.
Today, more than ever before, with an urgency of a new
millennium that demands new responsibility and new concept of
responsibility, the demand to think the political and the ethical anew,
outside the foundational project of the metaphysics, cannot escape
the problematic, the question of the event of the coming outside
the ontological project of the previous metaphysics. To answer the
question why the question of the event has to be inscribed within
logic of Being and time (and of thought and ground, of sense and
presence that is governed by the necessity of a foundation): this
answer concerns the immense history of the metaphysics itself, one

that cannot be undertaken here. This should be able to show why, and
what manner, how the question of event is seen to belong to ground,
or to foundation, to the giving of a ground and to accounting of a
ground, which is always the question of Being as ground and Being
of ground as ‘given presence’. Instead what is attempted here is the
following: if Being is seen, most explicitly at the accomplishment
of this history of thought, as giving of a ground, or Being itself as
ground—in the two fold senses of permanent ground and most
universal ground (of what Heidegger (1969) calls ‘onto-theo-logy’)—
then the notion of event that is attempted to be introduced outside
this history of thought has to be thought outside or otherwise than
foundation or ground and co-relatively problematizing the relation
of Being to ground and to foundation. In other words, and that is
why we shall begin with Schelling and Heidegger, in our attempt to
think of the event outside foundation and ground (which should be
our point of departure here), we begin with the question of event
as (un)ground of difference (without reducing it to the dialectical
opposition), or rather difference of unground (which is also question
of the limit of foundation and ground) that has the character of
inception always to arrive.
We therefore begin with reading Schelling who already, working
in the tradition of German Idealism, and yet unworking at the same
time, points to the simultaneous demand of ground and system, and
the impossibility of that ground, and thereby hollowing inside out
the immanent logic of mere potentiality based on predication, and
opening itself towards the ecstatic logic of an event of coming whose
pure actuality can only appear at the limit of any pheno-ontological
foundation as unapparent apparition which precedes, for that matter,
any predication. This unapparent apparition can only occur, not as
mere conceptual, predicative generation as an immanent product of
the negativity of Being, but outside the logic of the Being and nothing
as freely coming into existence, prior to Being and its negativity, as de-
cision out of an abyss which can never again be grounded, or totalized in
thinking and its predicates. Therefore—and this would be our point of
departure here—we would begin with the notion of event in relation
to the problematics of (un)ground (Abyss) and decision.
Of Event • 233
Freedom, Time and Existence
(a) Freedom
Taking this point of departure from Schelling, and then proceeding

to Heidegger and Rosenzweig, I should be able to bring to
articulation—under the rubric of three questions: problematics of
freedom, time and existence—the elaboration of the notion of event
as a messianic affirmation of coming into presence, the not yet, which
can only be affirmed at the limit of the metaphysical foundation
of Being as ground or concept. As such, the event of thinking, or
rather the thinking of the event is essentially a finite thinking, by
which we mean an affirmative thinking out of non-ground, which
is the limit of thought, which is the vertigo of thinking that reveals
thought’s inability to posit itself as identity, ground, being, or
subjectivity. Beginning with Schelling’s great work Inquiries into
the Nature of Human Freedom, and then proceeding to his later
philosophical works like The Ages of the World and his Berlin Lectures
on Positivphilosophie (Philosophie der Offenbarung and Philosophie der
Mythologie), we shall examine Schelling’s deconstruction of Hegelian
speculative Idealism, to show how Schelling’s Positivphilosophie seeks
to articulate the notion of event as an unconditional affirmation of
the outside which exceeds the logic of negation and positing; in other
words, an affirmation outside the logic of foundation and the law of
the ground, identity or subjectivity.
What the three problematics of freedom, of existence and of time,
each in its singular manner, and in its singular affirmation of the
unground, allow us is to open before us, as the nothingness of an
abyss, as the spacing of the abyss, to the intensity of the event,
which is the intensity of the event of time, the event of freedom and
the event of existence. we can say here that the thinking of event as
finite thinking—which is thinking of abyss as spacing, as opening—is
thought here as event as freedom, event as time and event as existence.
Each time the event that is affirmed precisely at the abyss and the
limit of foundation is an experience of abandonment and releasing
of the event from any metaphysical notion of ground or Being. This
releasement—in its two fold affirmative (release towards) and negative
(release from) —is thought here as the existence of freedom in its
pure actuality, or facticity whose inscrutable ground—in so far it is

unground (Ungrund)—can neither be apprehended nor be grasped
in concept, but whose experience for the finite, mortal being appears
as pure potentiality, a potentiality which is to be distinguished from
the potentiality of the concept. Here in this manner the thought of
freedom is sought to be opened up to the more originary notions
of actuality and potentiality outside their predicative, reductive
totalization so that the event of freedom releases the mortals from
the closure of signification towards the event of signification without
result or finality, its coming to presence, which for that matter precedes
any signification, or predication about the world.
With this problematic of freedom as facticity and releasement
(Gelassenheit) we shall proceed to examine Heidegger’s
problematization of freedom in relation to truth, thought in a more
originary manner, so that truth in its apophantic disclosure already
places the mortal, finite being to the free ‘play space’ of open, outside
the closure of the categorical, predicative grasp, where the arrival of
the event of appropriation, on the basis of the expropriation of the
mortal Dasein from all appropriation, takes place. What is thought as
event, its taking place, without reducing it to an accumulative process
that appropriates its expropriation, is nothing other than the logic of
movement (but not process) and a logic of origin (but not generation
or emanation) which traverses through, or better accompanies—
as a necessary condition, as a structural moment of opening of a
thought—an experience of abandonment and dispropriation which
opens itself to the future as an eternal remnant of coming without it
being exhausted in what has come and pass by.
(b) Time
The event carries, in its differential origin, as its arrival the two
fold Grundstimmung—fundamental attunements—of joy and
mournfulness. The mournfulness of this—abandonment or
dispropriation is nothing merely negative about it but carries in it a
certain relation to joy, which is joy in the unconditional welcoming
and affirmation of what is to come that demands a simultaneous
work of undoing, unworking, or even destruction of the works of
foundation.
Of Event • 235
This demonic, monstrous experience of time which itself is the

essence of freedom, is truly ecstatic state of exception where the event
arrives, where time itself presents itself as pure leaping into coming,
as time-in-itself (therefore can neither be thought on the basis of
generation, or as emanation) that flashes before the mortal’s eye
in a flash of lightning. It is on the basis of this danger—which
the phenomenon of the fugitive imply—that of being exposed to
mortality as this abandoned, bare being in its pure transcendence
(since it does not pre-suppose any transcendent), that the mortal,
finite in its essential character, has a glimpse of the beatitude of the
eternity, which is always to come, where the event reveals itself as
event (and not merely as representation of the event)—the event as
pure unapparent apparition—which no phenomenological ontology
can thematize. Reading Schelling, and then going to the works of
Heidegger and Rosenzweig, the attempt will be made to illuminate
this event of time and eternity in relation to mortality that does not
allow itself to be thought on the basis of the logic of generation, or
emanation, but in relation to a new logic of origin where the ‘origin’
is neither a logical category, nor a speculative-historical category, but
nevertheless that manifests itself as historical where history does not
allow itself to be totalized in the immanence of an accumulative,
continuous universal process. Instead the epochal breaks themselves
reveal to us their abyss which in rare moments, when history itself
poses, we mortals experience as tragic joy. This is the moment of
revolutionary excess whose unapparent apparition does not present
itself in the phenomenological-speculative history. This abyss that
voids away the given without conversion (and without Hegelian
speculative logic of Aufhebung), does not allow the mortals to master
it as the own subjective property of the ‘human’, because he is already
owned by it immemorially.
The event is not the property of the human, of a free subject but
a work (or better, offering, grant, donation) of freedom which gives
itself to us beforehand out of our originary dispropriation, because
we are already always belong to freedom. In the same way, the event
of time cannot be understood as a continuous, cumulative, additive
movement of Being itself as Concept, Subjectivity or Idea, but rather
as concentration, or intensity of the absolutely singular moments,
as in a constellation, when the whole of time itself as it were pauses,
and which forces us the mortals, in a kind of divine violence, from

the prison house of the banal, secularized mode of Being to the
transcendence of the pure arrival, the advent of the coming of the
divine. But this can be so in so far as these events concern the mortals
in their mortality itself. It concerns the tearing the heart of existence,
opening to the sudden illumination of divine that manifests itself in
the ‘secular’, banal, empty, successive instants as wholly otherwise
illumination.
(c) Existence
The question of the mortality and finitude demands that the notion
of existence itself to be thought anew, no longer on the basis of the
traditional distinction between essentia and existentia, neither on
the basis of (nominalized) Being, nor as consciousness/ego, even
‘the transcendental unity of apperception’. The event of existence—
understood in its ex-sistence character (as Heidegger reminds us) —is
the spacing of the open to its own infinitude of its arrival (‘to come)
which therefore cannot be enclosed within the system of predicates,
but to be thought in a more originary apophantic manner, that
means as finite manifestation out of a non-appropriable condition
outside the system of visible forms of history. Beginning with the
distinction between Being and existence in Schelling, we move to
read Heidegger, Rosenzweig and Kierkegaard, to think with their
help the event of existence in its finite character, where finitude would
mean the exposure to what is to come on the basis of an originary
non(ex)-sistence, a no-thing not posited by these being that exist, but
rather that would mean that these beings themselves erupt, leap into
existence from this nothingness, a non-posited grant, as the surprise
of the origin.
Freedom, time, existence: three questions, but in relation to the
same problematic of event. In each case it is always the question of
the experience of our essential finitude, which means, our open-ness
to the pure taking place of the event to which the finite beings are
thrown. To open to the event means to be abandoned, to be released,
and to be thrown unto this nothing, to be abandoned from the given
structure of mediation and foundation in Being unto the Not Yet.
Therefore the thought of the event, at first appearing to be nihilist
Of Event • 237
and negative, in so far as it is opened towards to the unground, is

precisely because of its condition in a non-condition, is a redemptive
thought of a utopia. This utopia is not to be thought here as an
actualization of an already pre-conceived idea as mere potentiality.
It is not a process which the movement of a universal history in each
of its moments realizes, and reducing the disruptive breaks of history
into the periodic variations of the same. Instead the arrival of utopian
fulfillment as a state of genuine exception, because it is outside law—
either the physical law of motion or the moral law. It has something
incalculable and yet imminence about it, which is the urgency of
concentrated time which is at once freeing, not just negatively, and
eruption of coming into existence that is epochal, which is sudden
dissolution and arrival without conversion of the past into future.
To think such an impossible thought of event is the highest exertion
of philosophical thought today where the limit of the possibility
of philosophy itself is incessantly played out and is touched upon,
where the ‘end’ or ‘accomplishment’ (Vollendung) of philosophy calls
itself of another inauguration, another beginning of thinking, which
is, the ‘sense’ and ‘meaning’ of what is ‘to come’.
Origin, Leap, Event

What is to think of the event—not this or that event that already
belongs to the speculative memory of a historico-dialectical narration
but—the event of coming into existence itself?
The relation of event with finitude cannot be understood on the
basis of the categories of thought but as the originary, pre-predicative
revelation of language as lightning flash. This logic of the event of
origin cannot be discovered, or uncovered merely through regression
into the originary past of the event in a kind of apophantic dialectical-
historical memory, but through anticipation towards the coming
Dawn in the Open, or through repetition of the origin, which is
not the repetition of what has become but what has never ‘been’,
what has never assumed any ontological status implied by ‘be’. This
origin is to be distinguished from the empty logic of generation,
from the dialectical-historical logic of ‘homogenous empty time’ that
Benjamin (1977, pp. 251-261) speaks of. It is here only, for the first
time, the question of beginning is grasped in clearer light: the event
as beginning—or beginning itself as event—which is to come, in

future and in a time that will remain.
In the beginning of his The Origin of German Tragic Drama,
distinguishing the event character of his notion of ‘origin’ as leap
from the cognitive, categorical grasp of coming on the basis of
the temporal modality as generative transition (which elsewhere, as
mentioned above, Benjamin calls ‘homogenous empty time’), Walter
Benjamin attempts to think with the notion of ‘origin’ neither a
logical category, nor a speculative- historical category of coming as
a homogenous process of successive, accumulative instants, but the
differential, disclosive leap into presence, which is more originary than
the violence impaired by cognitive grasp of entities through logical-
historical categories. Therefore for Walter Benjamin, the notion of
‘origin’ is not just a methodological gesture belonging to a well thought
out epistemology, but a gesture that has a redemptive possibility,
which is the messianic fulfillment of mankind that redeems what
has never been, what has been excluded by the violence of historical
consciousness. Only in philosophical contemplation, which is always
the remembrance of the origin as ideas rather than cognitive grasp
of the generative process (which is the process of the ‘homogenous
empty time’), that has an intimation, or rather attunement of the
messianic fulfillment, because it is not yet being impaired by the
violence of cognition. Here is, then, thinking of event, on the other
hand, that is leap or spring into the coming that is not mere transition
and therefore does not belong to the temporal modality of time that
has come down from Aristotle’s Physics onwards to Hegel’s Logic.
The event is not a generative transition. Therefore Walter Benjamin
in his The Origin of German Tragic Drama distinguishes the question
of the origin (Ürsprung) —which is the leap into presence, of what
be-comes and disappears—from the question of genesis thought on
the basis of the notion of generation:
Origin, although an entirely historical category, has nevertheless,
nothing to do with genesis. The term origin is not intended to
describe the process by which the existent came into being, but rather
to describe that which emerges from the process of becoming and
disappearance. Origin is an eddy in the stream of becoming, and in
its current it swallows the materials involved in the process of genesis.
(Benjamin 1998, p.45)
Of Event • 239
The question of the origin and the event of coming therefore do

not become categories serving the system of conceptual knowledge,
or predication for logical proposition. Even for Speculative logic of
Hegel which is not satisfied with the immobility of the things present,
but seeks to present the restless generation of coming to presence
of the concept itself to itself, categories are determined as mobile
that auto-generate themselves. If that is so, the question can come
about as to how the categories themselves generate themselves on
the basis of their own ground? The event is not, therefore, made into
predication for the speculative proposition, but what the proposition
in order to be able to predicate, must be opened towards, is to be
exposed towards—in the lightning flash of language—that reveals to
mortals, in astonishment at the origin, in wonder at the revelation, at
the event leaping forth in joy.
It is therefore Kant thought existence as irreducible to predication.
In the lightning flash of language, man is himself torn open—in
an originary manner—to his origin, to his beginning, to the event
that lies in the eternity of future without result, without finality.
It is therefore Benjamin rigorously distinguishes language as pure
naming from the categorical, predicative, cognitive grasp of entities
where language becomes mere medium of communication. The
possibility of philosophically contemplating, in remembrance, the
origin is, therefore, for Benjamin, inseparable from the possibility of
pure, paradisiacal language before language is submitted at cognitive
disposal.
The possibility of beginning anew and anew and so eternally, the

possibility of giving birth to himself in an always coming time
and being able to be present to himself by the event of future: if
this alone redeems the finite being opened to the opening, exposed
to the coming, then this event of coming demands remembrance
of the origin outside empty generation and empty transition. If
philosophical contemplation alone gives us the possibility of the
remembrance of the origin, not yet impaired by the violence of
cognition, then its truth is not so much the categorical, predicative,
cognitive truth, but truth that is the truth of revelation itself, which
is mortal’s originary opening to the promise of pure, paradisiacal
language and its redemptive, messianic fulfillment.
Similarly, Heidegger, but in a different registrar, thinks this advent of

the arrival as two fold leap and step back from the ‘onto-theological
constitution of metaphysics’. This onto-theological constitution of
metaphysics is none other than the dialectical-historical metaphysics
of ‘homogenous empty time’, of what in Being and Time the young
Heidegger calls ‘vulgar time’. The leap of the event, which Heidegger
calls ‘spring’ is the ‘event of appropriation’, which springs from Being
as ground of beings into the abyss, event that appropriates man and
Being in holding-together, or belonging-together. In his Identity and
Difference, Heidegger speaks of the event as a relation to the arriving:
This principle in the sense of a statement has in the meantime become
a principle bearing the characteristics of a spring that departs from
Being as the ground of beings, and springs into the abyss. But this
abyss is neither empty nothingness nor murky confusion, but rather
the event of appropriation... a spring demanded by the essence of
identity because it needs that spring if the belonging together of
man and Being is to attain the essential light of the appropriation.
(Heidegger 1969, p.39)
This holding or belonging together (but not: belonging together) in

the event of appropriation as spring is a constellation, a differentiating
perdurance between overwhelming and arrival. Heidegger writes,
The difference of Being and beings, as the differentiation of
overwhelming and arrival, is the perdurance of the two in unconcealing
keeping in concealment. Within this perdurance there prevails a clearing
of what veils and closes itself off—and this its prevalence bestows the
being part, and the being towards each other, of overwhelming and
arrival (Ibid., p.65).
This event is outside metaphysics, because it is thinking of event

as difference, which means, event that cannot be thought as ‘given
presence’, in so far as the dominant metaphysics thinks phenomenon
as ‘given presence’, and therefore cannot think difference as difference,
event as arriving and coming to presence. The event is none but
perdurance as opening—the in-between spacing (the Abgrund)—
in relation to the arrival, to the coming to presence wherein there
happens, occurs, takes place a spring, a leap into what comes in the
coming, which occurs only so far as overwhelming of thinking is
Of Event • 241
radically given over, is delivered towards the presencing of presence.

But that happens only when there occurs, at the same time, a retreat
from, i.e., a step back from the totality of the given history of beings.
This means that event is the leap of Being as already given presence
towards the arrival, or the coming which is not yet given—in the
opening as differentiation of Being and beings, as perdurance between
overwhelming and arrival. This happens when the finitude, and
temporality of the coming is opened at the exhaustion of metaphysics
to think the originary beginning, or inception of it as an inception
to come, to arrive so that Being is no longer thought as ground of
beings, nor beings thought as ‘presently given beings’, but rather
presence itself as ground of presents is now opened to the coming
and arriving to presence. This is how the question of temporality
and finitude as coming time or arriving constitutes the question of
the event of appropriation and the question of Being, in which case
it is always the question of a remembrance, far more originary than
dialectical-speculative memory, of the origin that discloses itself to us
on the basis of an originary expropriation.
In one of his most important series of lectures, published as The
Principle of Reason, Heidegger thinks of leap as that which, at the limit
of the thought of Being as ground or reason, inaugurates another—
that of thinking being as Abgrund, as abyss:
The leap remains a free and open possibility of thinking: this so
decisively so that in fact the essential province of freedom and
openness first opens up with the realm of the leap (Heidegger 1991,
p.).
The leap of the event cannot be thought within metaphysics, or

within the classical ontological determination of time and Being as
given presence. Event is the leap from the overwhelming of the given
presence to the arrival of the wholly otherwise that can neither be
thought as being, nor as negativity. The event leaps forth, or leaps
into, not through the empty generation of Being pure and simple
(with which Hegel’s logical movement begins), but through cision,
through (in Heidegger’s words) ‘perdurance’ as opening—making
something of ‘that has been’ into ‘that is to come’. This perdurance is
a cision, a time of distress which the mortal being must undergo, and on
the basis of which transformation occurs in the history of this existence.
This almost nothing (how to think this?) is not negative which Hegel
talks of, for it is not the power that converts nothing into being.
Therefore this perdurance is not a continuous transition into being
that negativity immediately passes into without leap, as smoothly
with which all Hegelian categories mobilize themselves, nor is it
generative nothing equal to Being, with which Hegelian logic begins.
What is attempted both by Benjamin and Heidegger in their
different gestures, is nothing other than the question of the event of
coming into presence in relation to an originary truth (more primordial
than predicative, cognitive truth of entities that has happened as the
result of a process), to a logic of origin which is revealed to us on the
basis of an expropriation, that is, on the basis of an originary finitude,
yet which carries its promise towards its redemptive fulfillment in a
time yet to come.
§ Love and Death
When Walter Benjamin, evoking Plato, conceives of philosophical

contemplation as redemption of phenomena not yet impaired by
the violence of cognition, he is not much distant from the Platonic
discourse on love. In his Symposium, Plato at the beginning of
philosophy speaks of loving and desiring as the movement of the
origin of philosophy itself, as the movement of philosophy’s coming
into itself, which is the movement of procreation or begetting.
Philosophy comes into existence—for philosophy is nothing but this
movement of coming (the verbal resonance here is unmistakable)—in
loving and desiring. In other words, in loving and desiring—which
is not the act of an already fully formed Subject on the dialectically
negative Object (hence a speculative dialectics of negativity that
speaks of desire that initiates action, as in Hegel for example, in terms
of subject and object, does not do justice to this movement)—there
occurs something like ‘coming into existence’, which Plato repeatedly
makes analogy with procreation.
Here at the beginning of philosophy there occurs a moment in a
lightning flash, in a blinding lucidity, in the darkness of a light that
is subsequently forgotten, not the statement itself—for this saying
has become one of the most quoted, discussed, analyzed saying in
the whole subsequent history of philosophy—but something else
that was at stake in this saying, that is not so much the relation
between love and philosophy but the relation between the movement
of loving-desiring with the coming into itself, with the structural
opening of the world, which is each time finite and mortal. What
has remained unthought is the event of ‘facticity’, which is not ‘fact’
of ‘factuality’ (we have learnt from Heidegger to distinguish between

the two), but the event of ‘actuality’ outside mere potentiality of the
concept, this event of facticity and actuality of loving that each time
opens the world—existential world—and welcomes the coming into
existence of this world. ‘Marvelous’: such is the opening of the world,
the event of infinity within the heart of finitude and yet that does
not belong to the finitude, an excess that in its eventive presencing is
irreducible to statement or explanation, as if an eternity has inscribed
itself at this movement of presentation—of philosophy’s emergence
to itself. What has remained unthought is that of this event of coming
that bears in itself the dark fate of mortality, that of its own erasure
and oblivion. It is this con-juncture, jointure, co-figuring of loving
and dying, the monstrous coupling of lightning and darkening: this
constitutes the event of coming into existence in its essential relation
to finitude, that of its inapparition in the predicates of the world. It
thereby essentially conceals itself, not behind the veil of the world
or behind the visible entities that constitute the world as world. It
conceals itself in its presentation from the eyes of the mortals who
are always belated in relation to the emergence of the thought to
itself. What thought cannot present to itself cannot be this or that
attribute of the world or forms of thought that can acquire visibility
of categories or predicates. It is the presentation of this presencing
itself that thought cannot present itself to itself: it shies away from the
sacredness of this fire whose violence is not equivalent to the violence
of the mortals that mortals posit as law. It rather belongs to justice
which erupts in the spacing between eternity and time, or rather, that
which erupts as eternity in time, not as a dialectical synthesis between
eternity and time, but as incommensurable inscription of eternity in
time that at the same time annuls itself, for it has already opened all
spaces, and it has opened its spacing itself. Justice is this pure spacing
that summons, or conjures up the mortal to respond to the divine
address, and he responds: ‘here I am’.
What is the question raised by Plato in his Symposium? It is
simply this: why loving and desiring?, or, closer to Plato’ words,
‘what is this loving and desiring’? After various other interlocutors,
including Aristophanes, having offered their interpretations and
stories, sometimes praising the God of Love, Socrates tells the story
of having met Diotima from whom he has derived insights into the
Love and Death • 245
nature of love. These insights can only be told, again, only in a story
or narrative manner: Diotima’s story this time (for, how else to speak
of the ‘nature’ of love, whose ‘nature’ consists in the non-form of
a ‘form’, a non-natured nature, as if, as it were, there is something
‘monstrosity’ about love and loving). Love is neither ‘human’ nor
‘divine’ but something ‘monstrous’, demonic: for while loving co-joins
both finitude and infinite, time and eternity, poverty and plenitude,
giving and offering, mourning and joy, it in itself is none of these
but an eternal spacing opening between the two, so that, as if, an
irreducible void—in the heart of loving—opens the world. This void
is not empty, pure nothing but the trace of the abandonment of time
where eternity inscribes itself, where eternity of ‘tomorrow’ arrives
‘today’.
Love is, monstrous, daimonic because in its opening and manifesting
of the world, it is without the world of its own. Therefore love, so
Diotima narrates, is immeasurably enriched and yet irreducibly
impoverished at the same time. While it is an interminable subtraction
of itself, love adds itself to itself in this movement of subtraction and
becomes more and more overflowing of itself in its impoverishment.
Love is this eternal giving that receives itself by the cunning of this
giving; an eternal impoverishment of itself that enriches itself by this
cunning of impoverishment. Love is at once giving and receiving,
plenitude and impoverishment, mourning and joy, subtraction and
adding, yet none of these in itself. By being none of those what it
unites and those whose natures therefore do not explain the nature
of this loving, loving is inexplicable in terms of those that it unites.
It excludes itself because it makes any inclusion possible; it does
not itself enter into the relation and yet permeates in the related
elements as a whole while making possible this relation between
impoverishment and plenitude, offering and giving, mourning and
joy, subtraction and adding, finitude and eternity, transcendence and
immanence. Love is, for Socrates, the highest thought of philosophy.
It is the gesture that moves philosophy itself, which is to think not
merely immanence but also transcendence, not merely finitude
but also infinitude, not merely excess but its impoverishment.
In love, the gravity of thought acquires immeasurable grace. Love
communicates itself neither in those communicated terms, because
it itself is pure communication, pure language that refuses itself to
be inscribed in any totality or system of predicates. While the pure

language is the condition of the predicative possibilities of cognitive,
conceptual categories, love itself is without predicates of its own. This
pure language of love that acquires the gesture of grace, for in this
gesture it frees open to the timing of time and spacing of space, this
pure language is the messianic language of fulfillment where silence
completes speech, and time comes to a halt.
It is in this sense love is event, in the sense that Benjamin speaks of
the event of language which is the none but the language of naming,
which is the language as pure communication. The pure communication
is that, in so far nothing communicates in it, communicates the event of
its taking place. Love is this spacing, or unconditional predication.
Irreducible to any signification, love relates neither in those related
terms because it itself is pure relation. Love does not itself come to
pass into and pass away in those related figures because it is itself
what is pure coming into existence, understood in the infinitude of
its verbal resonance ‘to come’, which is, the coming into existence
as eternal remnant as this coming. Love closes itself and conceals
itself in the light of the world because it is the opening of the world.
Therefore the God Eros, according to Socrates, is at once the most
ancient god and at the same time the youngest of all. As such loving
is the event of the world. Because love is not what arises on the
basis of the result or finality of the world, it is pure striving, pure
wanting, and pure movement of becoming; as pure becoming it is
the event of the coming into existence itself, not this or that coming
but ‘to come’, always to come, a promise whose messianic intensity is
experienced each time there takes place loving, not between subject
and object, but in a confrontation with the wholly otherwise. The
site of this confrontation, of this encounter is the demonic site—
for love himself is this daimon, the spirit which is neither human
nor divine but a monstrous synthesis or coupling of becoming and
perishing, mourning and joy, finitude and eternity.
What is then philosophizing? To philosophize is to be placed at
this monstrous site of exposure (it is in this sense philosophy is this
movement of loving-desiring) that opens the world in thought. The
double movement of concealment and unconcealment, inclusion and
exclusion, subtraction and addition at the heart of loving attunes the
lover at once with melancholy and joy. Freud knew something about
this when he locates mournfulness at the movement of loving, as if,

as it were there is a loss, a subtraction of the heart that overflows itself
with love, and in loving this way ecstatically exceeds itself. Therefore
both the figures of the philosopher and the lover—in so far as they
are the figures of the dis-figured—are monstrous, ‘daimonic’, neither
in itself human nor divine, neither in itself temporal nor eternal.
He is a non-place that inscribes itself as placing, a dis-figuring that
inscribes itself a figuring of truth, and thereby conceals its truth.
As such love which is pure communication or pure language that
communicates itself, in its taking place keeps itself secret. It keeps to
itself inexhaustible possibilities while it is itself pure giving. It keeps
to itself ingenuous inventions that weave in the thread of history its
own eternal future. This is the cunning of the event, the cunning of
loving, the secret of its promise that keeps to itself while abandoning
itself to actualization in words of love, in the communication of a
caress, in the work of the world, in the labour of a history.
What is then the loving? To love is to be placed at the structural
opening of communication. It means to be placed outside of the
communicated, to suffer distress and eternal despair of being placed
outside of communicable, and to have to carry the eternal remnant
of the non-communicable, precisely because it is communication
pure and simple. Philosophical contemplation, as Benjamin reminds
us, takes its origin in this pure communication of love, to be
ecstatically placed outside of oneself at the heart of oneself. The trans-
immanence of the movement of love unites within itself plenitude
and impoverishment, procreation and death. Love and death are not
opposites: loving carries within itself the darkness of mortality.
Here Plato’s thought touches a point of limit, a moment of
dizzying abyss: love is only demanded of those who essentially are
finite and mortal, for they alone feel the need of procreation, in the
face of the undeniable ‘facticity’ of death. Love and death, which are
the eternal agonistic elements, one that affirms becoming and other
perishing, one ecstasy and other melancholy, one affirms eternity and
the other insists on finitude and temporality, both are actually united
in a monstrous coupling, which is at once structural opening (and
closing), revelation (and concealment) of the world. The highest task
of philosophy is to think the closure that opens the world, and which,
for that matter is itself without world. As such loving is the event of
existence, for love is opening of our world, the opening of a heart, a

strange place which beats for the other, palpitates and suffers for the
other, welcomes and smiles at the other who is coming towards it.
As such love is the possibility of a pure community without fusion, a
community whose coupling is forged with a demonic hiatus that lies
at the heart of Eros.
This event is the more originary facticity of existence whose facticity
cannot be proved by any facts of the world. It is the more originary
relation to the other, for other here is mere instantiation of the given
genus, or an instantiation of the universal essence of ‘humanity’.
The other who is approached in loving is without attributes. It is the
event of revelation which is presupposed in the relation of dialectical
negativity between man and man, because it promises fulfillment
outside the relation of labour and outside the logic of consumption.
Not belonging to the totality of universal history, it is more originary
political before any politics: it is a-polis is the originary polis, which is
not signification on the basis of the juridico-political determination
of an already achieved co-existence of beings, but rather a more
originary opening of being-towards-other. As such it bears witness,
in each instance of juridico-legal execution of rights, the possibility
or impossibility of justice, which for that matter precedes the realm
of the juridico-political. As such this justice is messianic.
Loving-desiring is the event of existence insofar as it is the event
of procreation. Through its creative acts it welcomes the other in
unconditional hospitality, the other who is to come, the singular other
whose mode of being is not exhausted by the attributes of being. The
facticity of loving cannot be proved in terms of itself but in terms of—
and this is the paradox of loving—death. Loving therefore does not
shrink from death, but looks death in its eyes. Therefore is this saying
that Rosenzweig loves to quote: ‘love is strong as death’. That love
looks death in its eyes and does not shrink from death, is also to say
that love is, if not superior, then equal to death. In the face of death
love seeks eternal renewal of that structural opening, that naming
language, that idea of justice at each hic et nunc. This renewal is what
Plato calls ‘procreation’ that is granted to mortals, which is a finite-
infinity, a temporal- eternity, which is not achieved by the dialectical
acts of reconciliation and synthesis. As against the pure eternity which
Gods enjoy—because, as Schelling says, Gods have their condition
within themselves—mortals are those who must renew their eternity

in presence, their infinitude in finite time, the promise of redemption
at each hic et nunc. Therefore, loving demands that loving itself has
to be renewed in each presentation of presencing, at each hic et nunc,
without which love dies away, or withers away. It then forgets the
originary event of existence and its immemorial promise given in
the immemorial past. It forgets its character as messianic justice for
unredeemed humanity and unfinished world which is always to
come, always coming.
Therefore loving, though it is the originary opening of the world,
though it is the immemorial past event of existence, this immemorial
event can only appear to be anachronistic to the mortals. Insofar as
love appears as pure presencing of presence, pure renewing of the new,
it appears to the finite being as if loving is without past and without
future. Therefore lovers exist immersed in this pure presencing of
presence, in this pure renewal of the ever new, as if neither past, nor
future exists outside this pure presentation of presence, outside the
caress of the ever new ‘this’ and ‘now’. In this renewal of the ever new,
in this presentation of pure presencing, there occurs the possibility of
renewal of the structural opening at the immemorial past in presence:
the past renews itself in this ever new presentation of presence, and
appears as ever new.
To love means to renew the immemorial promise of the past in
presence, that means, to universalize the singularity of the event.
Love co-joins, brings together, in the act of renewing the past
promise, the singularity and universality: love singularizes the
universal, and universalizes the singular, as it temporalizes the
eternal and eternalizes the temporal, or, it makes infinite into
finite and finite into infinite, both at once, and yet in none of them
in themselves.
Therefore love does not subsist in itself. At each moment love ex-
tatically ex-sists of any stasis ; it transcends itself in the insistence
and despite of its insistence in the presentation of itself. In the every
immersion in this pure presentation of hic et nunc, it dis-invests
itself, and thereby eternalizing each hic et nunc, universalizing the
singularity of the event, presenting the immemorial structural
opening here and now. Loving then is the conjunction of the
disjunction, a kind of assemblage of temporality and eternity, finitude

and infinite, transcendence and immanence, and yet, as conjunction
of disjunction it is anachronistic in relation to itself, disjoined from
itself, non-contemporaneous with itself, without any subsistence of
its own, without a name because it must first of all bestow all names,
without language because it is itself pure language. This disjunction at
the heart of loving, which is love’s ecstasy and its madness, constitutes
love’s blissful, almost paradisiacal melancholy. But there is another
melancholy, not this paradisiacal, blissful melancholy of lover’s
beatific, completed communication in silence, but a melancholy in
evil, when language forgets, or seeks to subjugate love’s completed
understanding, when the event gets arrested, hypostatized, and then
sought to be erased from language, and then an abyss opens up,
swallowing love in loveless overnaming, which is called ‘evil’.
Love is then the originary event of the world, the originary promise
of existence, which is the promise of a redemptive fulfillment, the
promise of the messianic coming. This originary promise, this event
of the immemorial demands, because of the finitude of the finite
condition, an act of renewal or procreation in ever new presentation
of presence, since mortals are granted only this form of eternity
and infinitude, that is, in the form of a renewed eternity, which
welcomes at each hic et nunc the coming into existence itself. But
there arises, out of this finitude itself, not so much a counterforce
with so much being, but a simulacrum of the event, a distortion,
a disease, a fetish of the particular that in its over consuming lust
for power and force abandons love, and seeks to subjugate it to its
reductive totalization. Then our politics and our history forget love,
that originary structural opening in communication, that originary
promise that bears a redemptive fulfillment. Love suffers, then, from
melancholy, lamenting its un-fulfillment and its dying, which is not
the paradisiacal, blissful, ecstatic melancholy that has first opened the
heart for the other, at the beginning of history and politics, that has
first beaten for the other who is irreducible to any totality of visible
attributes that are applied to him, but a melancholy that arises out of
malign disease where radical evil manifests its repulsive force.
§ The Sense of Freedom
In this essay we will attempt to think freedom, not as that which is

merely the conditioned realization, in the name of the rights of the
individual or State, or even ‘human’ right (‘natural’ or ‘historical’)
of a necessary presentation of an Idea (regulative or constitutive)
given beforehand as pure Universal, as an a priori principle, nor
will we think freedom as that accomplishment of a reconciliation
undertaken by man’s dialectical power of the negativity where this
negativity appears as law, force, gaze of power. These are, as we shall
see, various forms of necessity, even when they attempt to open
to, in the name of ‘freedom’, something heterogeneous, something
(which is no ‘thing’, Unbedingt, nothing, and also un-conditional)
entirely otherwise which philosophy cannot name. We shall see that
this Unbedingt, this non-thing (or nothing), this un-condition, this
Absolute of freedom is not an attribute of freedom but the occurring,
erupting, arriving, and coming to presence of freedom itself. It is as
Unbedingt, the nothing character of freedom erupts, occurs, arrives
and comes to presence. In other words, as erupting, occurring,
arriving, freedom is Unbedingt—a non-thing, a non-condition, an
‘un-pre-thinkable’ (as Schelling says) on the basis of which there
can be thoughts, philosophy itself—thoughts and works of right
and Idea, law and force, power and gaze. And we shall see that as
Unbedingt the freedom of event, or the event of freedom, is love.
*
We shall begin with love, freedom as love’s coming to presence as free
coming, unconditionally, in a manner of no-thing that arrives and
passes away. We shall begin with love’s joyous, ecstatic (ex-tatic,

love that exceeds any stasis, or installation, or En-Framing) coming
to itself, not in the manner of a self-presence of a given thing, or
available being’s parousia, but coming itself, in its verbal infinitude
‘to come’, in its unenclosed futurity of an interminable ecstasy—of
an always coming itself. Therefore love appears to be so ungraspable
a thing, whether in a concept (which is synthesis of sensibility and
understanding) or in a name, for love never appears as a thing, an
available entity, an already given present, or a sensible-phenomenal
cognitive object to which there can be applied a logical predicate.
Therefore love never appears as a phenomenological entity or thing
in any light of the intelligibility of Subject, because the apparition of
love is that of an apparition of a no-thing, an unapparent apparition,
an unapparent coming that in a manner precedes, not logically
like subject precedes predicate, but the manner that an apparition,
understood in its no-thing character, precedes any available, given
thing. That there is love is a facticity not of the manner of a factuality
(that can be ideal or empirical fact—of a concept or of a thing);
neither concept nor a thing, love is this apparition of a pure coming
to presence, pure event, pure taking place.
There is love. The primordiality of love’s facticity precedes the order
of law’s validity and its suspension. In that sense the primordiality
of love lies in its immemoriality: it is the originary groundless that
precedes the distinction between good and evil, and as such, bears the
promise of redemption of the radical evil that sway over the destiny of
man’s history, when man, forgetting his finitude, seeks to appropriate
the whole of being, and in fact, Being itself. The primordial facticity
of love’s groundless cannot be traced back in the manner of apophansis
of the predicative proposition. Therefore Schelling (1936) calls the
originary groundlessness of love indifference that precedes all predicates
of difference and identity, to which no predicates apply except the
lack of predicates, the exuberant ‘un-pre-thinkable’ (Unvordenkliche)
that elicits from us awe, in relation to which all mortal language
and vanity falls silent, and all egotism is consumed in the fire of
the centre. Yet this fire at once, when the mortals do not seek to
appropriate it within immanence of his ground, is pure donation,
which is the gift of life, arising as free donation, the freedom of the
gift. In this way the mortals can partake, share this eternity of love as
The Sense of Freedom • 253
gift of his life, as this creaturely, finite, mortal life. The mortal being,
therefore, precisely due to his inextricable finitude and mortality, due
to his conditioned existence, shares and partakes something of the
no-thing, the no-condition, the ‘un-pre-thinkable’, the eternity of
love. This sharing and partaking of love, of love’s free offering and
overflowing, of love’s exuberant giving cannot be claimed by the
mortals as their right/ work/ power/ possibility/ capacity/, for these
arise only as a limitation of the all-permeating gaze of love. Therefore
in ancient Greek mythology, the God Eros is thought as the most
ancient of all Gods, for it already always gives even before asked, in
such an exuberant and in such an overflowing plenitude, the gift of
life. If there arises the realm of law as the capacity of the mortal, this
realm of capacity arises only as a limitation of the originary illimitable
gift of love. Therefore there may occur a limited out of unlimited,
measure out of immeasurable, thing out of no-thing, condition out
of no-condition, withdrawal out of giving, and abandonment out of
overflowing. Therefore love’s freedom is both at once: it freely gives in
such a manner that the gifted one (one who is freely gifted with) can
freely decide to abandon this gift itself—of freedom’s loving gaze, of
love’s free gaze. The possibility of the erupting, occurring, arriving of
this decision (to affirm or negate freedom’s gift) is the pure possibility
of freedom, or freedom that appears as pure possibility so that this
possibility appears for the gifted mortal as the possibility to negate
even this possibility itself.
It is this possibility (that includes event the impossibility of this
possibility of freedom)—this pure free possibility—of decision, of
cision, of separating and partitioning, of dis-joining and of non-
hinging between condition and conditioned, frees freedom itself
from all necessity and causality. This is so in so far as freedom itself
is none but joining, nexus, of what Schelling calls Zusammenhang:
belonging together, configuration, or constellation, an assemblage
rather than system, or totality. It is the nexus of freedom in such a
manner as joining freedom can also be dis-jointed, as co-figuration
freedom can also appear as dis-figuration, as co-stellation such that
it can also be dis-installed, as assemblage freedom can also be dis-
assembled, as hinging so that freedom can also be de-hinged by de-
cision, by partitioning, by separation of forces. Freedom frees itself
from itself so that out of this freedom, there may occur un-freedom,
necessity, constriction, causality etc; there may occur evil, hatred,

malice, wrath and disease of the will. There may occurs falsification
of the assemblage, of dis-according of love’s loving separation in such
a manner that mutations may occur in the nexus of forces that seeks
to destroy this freedom itself.
Therefore the thought of freedom is always the thinking at
the limit of the thinkable itself, since no Subject can adequately
measure the immeasurable apparition of freedom. For that to
happen, the Subject of freedom must already always be given by the
immemorial groundlessness of freedom itself. In order to measure
the immeasurable apparition of freedom, the Subject must already
be granted by freedom itself. Therefore to measure freedom, it is
necessary to think something more originary than the metaphysics
of the Subject. To think ‘freedom’ is, to free oneself to the risk of
freedom, to its immeasurable measure, to the irresolvable wager of
freedom. It is to assume the risk that is the necessary precondition of
the tightrope walker who walks over an abyss so that the humanity
of man may be transfigured into the more affirmative futurity by
this leap, which is always the leap in freedom. If there remains for
us now any sense of our very ethico-political at all, it is derived from
this essential leap of freedom which is, as such, a free sense: it is at
once a sense of freedom, and freedom of sense. As a sense of freedom,
such a sense is freedom unto wager, unto the risk of the tightrope
walker over the abyss—of the absence of any given sense. If there still
remains any sense of the political and ethical for us now, it is nothing
other than this sense, which is not only the sense of risk, but the risk
of a sense—of freedom itself, of freedom’s free flowing giving and
withdrawing, of freedom’s generous plenitude and impoverishment,
of freedom’s exuberant affirmation and its own negation.
Freedom is the groundless opening out of which the coming
comes as free advent—a coming that is at once free to come and
free not to come. An affirmation of the coming is the thinking of
freedom whose inscrutable ground is at once pure actuality and pure
possibility, for while it is pure actuality in itself, becomes for mortals
an unsaturated, inexhaustible phenomenon of pure possibility. If ‘to
come’ is the unapparent apparition of the unenclosed futurity, as free
futurity this future is free to come, or not to come. Not to arrive
as future is the possibility of future, the possibility that future may
not redeem what has already be-come in time, possibility that future
may not be possible. It is the possibility that future may not bring
the light into the voyaging ship that sets out in dark in the open
sea, the possibility that the impossibility of freedom, evil, appears
and that the light may sink into the abyss of the night. Therefore
freedom is inseparable from wager, or risk because freedom is the
metaphysics of the possible, for as the principle of pure possibility,
freedom appears as the incalculability of the future that bears witness
the immeasurable measure of freedom itself.
Therefore there always remains in freedom something like what
Ernst Bloch (1995) calls ‘In-Vain’. In each inauguration, in each
inception of the voyage in the open sea—since freedom is this an-
archic principle of inception or inauguration itself—there lies the
possibility of In-Vain. This In-Vain lies in the perilous essence of
freedom itself that is in its radical incalculability to which no measure,
no calculation of reason can attain. This peril of the voyage, voyage
that loves the blue sky above and open sea, is opened at that moment
when this opening is opened, when coming of the redemption is
affirmed at that singular moment, when interrupting the given
foundation of existence one becomes free towards freedom.
To be free is free towards light, but also darkness, to the redemption
in future, but also the arriving of the un-hoped and ‘In-Vain’, since
what arrives is free to arrive, or arrives out of freedom and out of
which freedom it may not arrive. It is free to arrive, and out of
freedom it arrives, and therefore it may not arrive; or what arrives
may not be what ought to have arrived; or what arrives, at each
singular moment, is only limitation of the possibility of arriving
itself.
Freedom as the spacing of the possible—the possible that is
immeasurable, incalculable, interminable—is the spacing for the
play, or strife between arrival or non-arrival, light and darkness,
limitation and illimitation, giving and withdrawing, offering and
abandonment, concealment or unconcealment at the same time, at
the same moment which no phenomenology or ontology of time can
think as presence. Is it this play or strife on the spacing of the possible
that what Heraclitus refers to that of the strife between the darkness
and the light as primordial mystery of the coming and passing away?
Is this strife or is this a play, of what ancient thinkers and mystics in

India call Lila, the originary game of creation, the originary game of
lightness and darkness, of withdrawal and expansion, intensification
and an extensification, of joy and melancholy? Is this what the Greeks
named as Aletheia—of what Heidegger renders as concealment-
unconcealment—as the experience of origination, and coming to
presence in the open? This play, or this strife, this interruption, takes
place in the open. Since this opening enables the coming to come,
we cannot name it with concepts that are at our cognitive disposal to
handle, to possess the world and things that have already become for
us and must have already revealed to us. Only the naming language
that attains to the pure gesture of showing, and which exceeding the
conceptual apparatus at the service of cognitive function, manifests
and reveals—in flash of lightening—what is not yet, what is still
always to come that transfigures the immemorial promise into its
fulfillment unforeseeably, in the desert of hope.
We speak of as Open is none but this spacing of freedom itself as
the logic of origin, as the no-thing like, no-condition like exposure
to the arrival. As logic of origin, freedom is the incalculable releasing
to the immeasurable, unpredictable coming which is risked each time
when freedom sways over being whose being lies in his finitude. If
the messianic fulfillment in redemption is a thought of future and of
the arrival of the wholly other, then this future is a time that remains:
this possibility is the unconditional gift of freedom itself. It is as if
the melancholic existence of our unredeemed humanity can only
redeemed on the basis of a gift that comes from wholly otherwise
destination, from a site of a radical future. But for that to happen, the
mortal being must already always be torn open by the act of freedom,
from the heart of time and history and from the immanence of the
world, to the wound of eternity. It is only on the basis of the tearing
open of immanence by the act of freedom that eternity may arrive
‘today’, here and now. If man is a creative being who is endowed
with the principle of beginning himself anew again and again, this
is because this principle of inauguration or inception is granted to
him by freedom itself. Through such a being as man, it is freedom
itself that each time begins anew. In this manner man is opened up
towards his own possibility of beginning himself out of an essential
opening, that is, as spacing of freedom itself.
It is necessary to think these entire questions again as in a

configuration. The task of thinking of the coming time cannot evade
the question of freedom. Therefore not only Schelling, but Heidegger
and Rosenzweig too—the free thinkers of future—make freedom
as the center stage of their thinking: freedom that opens time to
eternity to arrive here and now that cannot be predicated, grounded,
cognized and conceptualized in categories of available entities. Such
a thinking of freedom that opens us to the radical futurity demands
a different configuration of time and history that is not regressive
apophansis, but anticipative and progressive, a venturing beyond and
opening towards the unforeseeable. Such an idea of freedom that
is other than regulative idea, or other than being an infinite telos
that the immanence of indifferent, homogenous series of successive,
accumulative instants attain to, can no longer be determined here,
as in Hegel, as the grounding act of the historical Subject in the
Absolute Concept. It is rather a questioning of rupturing of such an
immanence where the eternity of the Other may arrive today, against
and for all hope and all anticipation, beyond all calculation and all
measure of a historical, immanent reason.
At each moment time is opened to future, freedom holds sway:
how to name this freedom, this already and yet this yet to come—or,
better, this yet to come of the already, the future of the past, this past
of the future—this opening that is forever excluded from historical
memory of a historical world, and yet that alone enables redemption
to arrive, and transfigures our melancholic memory into joy? How
to name this that alone opens the name to what is to be named—
elsewhere, another time, in a remaining time? It is as if such a name
must be none other than the gift of freedom itself. No speculative
memory and no predicative categories name this originary opening,
this originary origin, this originary gift of freedom. Since our
cognitive grasp of the entities/ objects/ things are only the grasp of
entities that has arrived for us as ‘lived experience’, the event of their
arising and occurring, the event of opening of experience remains
excluded from our categorical, speculative grasp due to the temporal
non-in-difference in relation to this event of taking place as such.
The statements and explanations are already always late in relation
the pure event of presencing. Therefore propositions that attempt
to trace back the event to its origin and thereby include themselves
within the immanence of the systematic unity can grasp entities/ the
world/ objects only on the basis of their available existent character,
not their event of advent. We are too late in relation to the Open that
has, first of all, exposed us to the event.
Therefore we cannot predicate the event on the basis of the available

being of ‘given presence’. Therefore the name to name the event
always touches the limit of the world, or the limit of being, exposing
us thereby our own dispropriation from the event—of naming itself.
Such a name, which is not a name like other names, is a name
that must consume itself, peril itself in the originary violence—the
archè-violence—of the event. It is the name that burns the tongue
of the one who opens his mouth to utter it; it abandons the one who
utters it to the desert of all hope and all meaning. It is the desert
where all time has been annulled and spaces have burst open to the
Other who is nameless, the Unapparent par excellence.
Yet such a risk of peril must be assumed each time one welcomes on
the basis of the gift of freedom the pure event of arrival who redeems
the world. It is on the basis of this finitude of naming and coming
that arrives contra all hope, that arrives contra all anticipation (and
thereby, precisely, demanding from us radical hope, more radical
than hope itself ) is there something like future at all, is something
like sense of existence itself. What appears as sense of existence is
not an accomplished self-presentation, but that arises from the
non-in-difference between event and being. Therefore only for the
mortals future is meaningful, redemption a requirement, opening a
presupposition of existence, let alone a condition for our being able
to have propositions and categories. The mortal thinking or thinking
of mortality is not thereby calmed by a system that claims to have
included the notion of existence and event within it, by making
existence a category within categories. What it demands, instead,
not a category of the thinkable—but a pre-thinkable remaining
time, a pre-predicative redeeming future, a pre-categorical hope
for possibility, a joy in the ever new beginning. In other words, it
demands the act of freedom that abandons its sense to the burning
of the tongue and to the desert of hope where the exemplarity of the
name must risk each time its own peril, its own annihilation.
With this a notion of open process and Possible is introduced. For the
process to remain open to the coming, the configuration of temporalities
must not have the self-foundational character of a logical necessity, or
metaphysical identity, but a contingency, in the highest sense as freedom.
What is possible is the possibility of arising independently from
any given condition in such a way that, due to this independent
character, it can un-hinge, yawn open, dis-figure, dis-join, or dis-
install from its condition, only because freedom is not a system but
a life, a nexus of movements or forces, a constellation of becoming,
an exuberance of existence. As an exuberance of existence, freedom
is an unsaturated phenomenon, forever in-excess, a pure unfolding
of the movement that transcends any immanent self-foundation.
Freedom is, then, the unfinished, un-totalized surging forward of
the bellowing Sea pregnant with future possibilities, which Plato so
beautifully evokes in his Timaeus. Contingency in the highest sense
is the possibility of the otherwise, belonging to Possibility and future
itself in an essential sense, not the random variability of the indifferent
particulars which Hegel calls ‘contingency’, but the possibility of the
otherwise belonging to the open process of the Possible by virtue
of its open-ness. Since the possibility is free to be possible, or since
this possibility essentially belongs to freedom or itself is freedom,
possibility may not pass over into being. Aristotle thinks, in his
Metaphysics, this possibility—as free—which may not pass over into
being, as potentiality of the matter, as dynamic, and not the static,
unfolding towards realizing itself, or coming to be by its ‘nature’:
Now natural comings to be are the comings to be of those things
which come to be by nature; and that out of which they come to be
is what we call matter... for each of them is capable of both of being
and of not being, and this capacity is the matter in each. (Aristotle
2001, p. 791).
Schelling—the most important thinker of potentiality after Aristotle

and Bruno, perhaps Leibniz including—inspired by Bruno, makes
potentiality itself as essential question of freedom, especially in
his The Ages of the World (Schelling 2000). In this work, Schelling
conceives of God’s coming to presence as that infinite becoming. God
passes through the ecstatic potencies—which are also potentialities
of time—of the eternal past, eternal presence, and eternal future,
which hold together in a configuration which is without totality and

is free. This process which in mortal condition is a dissoluble holding-
together, a transfinite relation, is what Schelling re-thinking the
traditional logic, calls ‘judgement’ in his essay on Human Freedom
(1936).
What is happening here? The ground of freedom, or rather its
unground in its essential relation to potencies in Schelling is not
thought on the basis of the logical principle of self-foundational
necessity, nor on the basis of the metaphysical principle of identity,
but as: holding together, a disjoined joining, a caesural belonging of
ecstatic potencies of temporalities—of eternal past, eternal presence,
eternal future—as configuration. This is not a modality of auto-
transitional conceptual generation as in Hegel, but—in the absence
of the self-foundational principle of logical identity and necessity—
event leaps forth, the Possibility is hold open, since the nexus in
freedom between the condition and the conditioned is dissoluble,
dis-joinable. Therefore Schelling, in his later philosophy—in fact
from The Ages of the World (2000) onwards—has felt the increasing
necessity to think the question of the coming and the origin
otherwise than on the basis of the notion of generation as it is
expressed in the negative philosophy. Instead the question of the
coming and the origin is thought as configuration of potencies, in
The Ages of the World, where the relation—but not generation—of
potencies are caesural, of which Schelling calls Scheidung, cision. All
coming to be and coming to presence—out of an essential freedom,
releasing and opening—bears the mark of cision, an originary cut,
or an originary falling away (Abfall). Therefore existence does not
have the self-foundational character of a logical necessity or identity,
but as a configuration of ecstatic potencies of temporalities—born
out of cision, cut, or caesura, out of an originary disjunction and
falling away—that are hold together as dissoluble assemblage without
totality.
The question of freedom has somehow become a sort of aberration
in our contemporary philosophical thought, as if abandoned by the
waves of a great Sea, it has left only marks of a remote thought in the
deserted sea shore, so that the thought of freedom has only become
for us something like vague remembrance of a lost tradition of
thinking, questioning and interrogating which has now abandoned
us, or that which has been abandoned. Not only the thought of
freedom—this great question of philosophy—but the abandonment
of this great question itself has appeared to have abandoned us. As a
result raising again the question of freedom can never escape asking
this question of this abandonment itself: the question of what is stake
in this abandonment of the great question of freedom. For a long
time, somehow it has been dimly perceived by the philosophers that
the thought of freedom is no longer ‘contemporary’ anymore, that
the great question of freedom has become—as what Adorno (1987,
pp. 214-15) calls—‘obsolete’, aged, infertile. Or perhaps the thought
of freedom, by a necessary logic of thought, is abandoned by itself to
necessity. As a result, the question of freedom has been abandoned by
itself, or is subjugated to the thought of necessity by being enclosed
in the great tradition of the metaphysics of subjectivity, of the
ontology of the thinkable. The thought of freedom, in so far as is
made thinkable, is no longer free. It has become bound up, enclosed
within the intelligibility of Being and subjectivity, which is none but
the intelligibility of the necessity itself: we are no longer free to be
free, we are no longer free to freely think freedom, for freedom has
already abandoned the thought of freedom to closure of sense.
Therefore raising the question of freedom would demand from us
the task of releasing, freeing the thought of freedom from all sorts of
necessity, from all sorts of closure—of the juridico-political, of the
metaphysics of subjectivity, of the ontology of the thinkable. That
is, however, not everything. If freedom is not merely to be negative
freedom, but primarily affirmative, then we must allow ourselves to
open the thought of freedom to its un-thinkability, to its abyss, to its
vertiginous limit so that, beyond the closure of the metaphysics of
subjectivity, beyond the systematic, totalizing, foundational attempts
at necessity, the freedom of thinking itself arrive unconditionally—to
thought itself so that thinking can welcome to itself its own condition
of possibility. What is remained to be thought today—which is the
task of thinking freedom—is to release the unconditional character
of freedom, its event-character of eruption in the midst of existing,
its (in)finitude from the closure of all sorts—metaphysical, juridico-
legislative, theologico-political, etc.
One of the rare contemporary, systematic philosophical works
on freedom—that of Jean Luc Nancy’s The Experience of Freedom
(1993)—confronts this task of thinking freedom in an admirable

manner, which is, that of thinking freedom as experience, understood
in the singular manner of the philosopher as the unconditional limit
of thinkable, as the passion of the limit, as perilous, pirated and
therefore illegitimate seizure without foundation. Nancy says:
It is a question of offering human beings to a freedom of being, it
is a question of presenting the humanity of the human being (his
‘essence’) to a freedom as being by which existence absolutely and
resolutely transcends, that is, ex-sists. In all movements of liberation, as
in all vested institutions of freedom, it is precisely this transcendence
which still has to be freed. In and through ethical, juridical, material
and civil liberties, one must free that through which alone these
liberties are, on the one hand, ultimately possible and thinkable and
on the other, capable of receiving a destination other than that of
their immanent self-consumption: a transcendence of existence such
that existence, as existence in- the-world, which has nothing to do
with any otherworld, transcends (i.e., continues to accomplish) the
‘’essence’’ that it is in the finitude in which it in-sists. (Nancy 1993,
p. 13)
It is this same task—that of releasing of the unconditional event—
character from the closure of the realm of ‘the immanent self-
consumption’ and thereby offering the closure of immanence to the
transcendence of the open: it is this same task that guides this present
work, albeit in a different manner, in a different gesture, in a different
style. The eruptive- event character of freedom, in its unthinkable
and abyssal character, cannot be thought within the logic of being
and subjectivity, but at the limit of foundation and its necessity as
freely opening a world to come, in its messianic welcoming on the
basis of a ground which refuses grounding. This opening demands
the repetition of the tradition of the thought of freedom in such a
manner so that the unconditional moments of freedom in thought
leaps out, springs into the arrival as—what Heidegger (1969)
calls—‘the event of appropriation’ on the basis of a dispropriation
or expropriation, that means on the basis of an ungrounded finitude
of existence itself. Later we shall take up this question of finitude
and existence. Here we shall begin, in a gesture of repetition—which
is always here a gesture of reading—the reading of Schelling’s great
treatise on freedom, that of his Philosophical Inquiries Concerning the

Nature of Human Freedom.
If the question of freedom opens for us its radical opening only
at the limit of the metaphysics of subjectivity, or the metaphysical
totalization in the principle of identity reductively understood—in
other words, only at the limit of various reductive totalization of
freedom to necessity—then a radical attempt to open the question of
freedom has to confront again the question of the relation, dialectical
or otherwise, of the supposed compatibility or incompatibility
between freedom and system. This would demand a hollowing out,
an unworking, or loosening, of tearing inside out of the solidified
artifice of the various forms of necessity—necessity that appeals
for its foundation the metaphysical principle of identity, of ground
and reason, of the ontology of subjectivity—so that a difference,
a hiatus, a caesura, a dehiscence, an abyss be inscribed into the
foundational, metaphysical principle of identity. Since various forms
of necessity demand founding, or grounding, and appeal to self-
identity and subjectivity, they thereby in a necessary logic seek to
abnegate the very freedom to constitute themselves as self-founding
mythic totality. To deliver these various forms of necessity to their
unconditional abandonment, it then becomes necessary to release
free a difference that does not belong to its totality. Such was the
deconstructive reading that Schelling performed when he repeats
the very problematic again—of the supposed (in) compatibility
between freedom and system, between difference and identity,
between unground and ground, between the abyss and existence so
that there remains an irreducible, ‘un-pre-thinkable’ remainder of the
system that renders the system of freedom bereft of any innermost of
gathering or speculative unity. Unlike Hegel’s system, the system of
freedom is not an immanent one. Such a system of freedom would not
have its own ground within itself but forever outside, a transcendence
that can never be totalized, since it can never allow itself to be
thought as subjectivity or being. This ‘irreducible remainder’, this
remnant is the difference of system that emerges with the repetition
of the very systemic task of metaphysics. This irreducible non-
being, if not nothing pure and simple, that can never be eliminated,
annihilated without remainder is the very inscrutable, unfathomable
movement of the ground that spaces itself open equally—as the work
and worklessness of freedom—to good and evil. What is released,
in the very system of freedom, is none other than freedom itself, is
none other than the unconditioned ground itself as the space of pure
possibility that includes its abnegation, that is, the possibility of a
radical evil.
Such is Schelling’s greatest contribution to the philosophical
questioning of freedom: that Schelling, without renouncing the
demand of system of freedom, could release, free open from the
heart of the system of freedom a movement of difference, a spacing of
the groundless, the unruly of the abyss, a drunkenness and a certain
divine madness—understood in its radical finitude—that remains
as an eternal, irreducible remnant of ground, of reason and of
subjectivity at a risk of giving over freedom to its extreme possibility,
which is the possibility of freedom’s own negation in evil, that of the
impossibility of freedom itself. Therefore the question of freedom
arises in its extreme urgency, in its extreme possibility only at the
limit of the possibility of freedom itself, and that is only when the
system makes itself feel its strident necessity so that at the limit, out of
this abyss, in this movement of differing and spacing, the possibility
of redemption also arises in love and in unconditional forgiveness,
or in the creative act that affirms a radical future beyond negations.
Freedom is not only the possibility of good and evil—that is, the
possibility that it would not even be possible—but also the possibility
of forgiveness and redemption. Since this possibility arises, happens
unconditionally, that means transcending all immanent closure of ‘
self-consumption’, the happening which arising, leaping, bursting,
overflowing cannot be completely determined by the antecedent
cause, freedom thereby acquires its event-character, which is its
freeing itself from all closure of necessity and causality, of foundation
and ground, of subjectivity and reason. It ex-sists any given-ness of
antecedent causality, so that freedom’s event character is that what
frees, releases the unconditional, that means out of the unruly of
the abyss, out of the drunkenness of the ground, without which
freedom gets tied to necessity, to the ontological closure of
subjectivity, to various determinant causalities. It is Schelling’s
greatest contribution to make the claim of the ground, of system
make felt in its highest, most strident necessity and yet—without
renouncing such a claim of reason, of ground and being—drinking

the wine of the abyss.
It has become common sense knowledge of the students of
the history of philosophy to see Schelling’s place in the history
of philosophy as transitive idealist philosopher between Fichte’s
inauguration and Hegel’s completion of Idealism. What has
remained to be seen is the uniqueness, the singularity of Schelling’s
contribution to thought of the event of freedom, which is not one
question among others but the essential question of philosophy itself:
that of philosophy’s birth itself as freedom, out of the gift of freedom,
and also—and this is important—freedom as opening of existence as
whole, the entirety of what exists as such without making freedom
property of that which exists. What exists belongs to the originary
spacing of freedom, to the essential donation of freedom, and not vice
versa. Already inaugurating along with Fichte what has come to be
called ‘Idealism’, Schelling was already at the same time un-working
the systemic task of Idealism, and thereby already opening to another
inauguration, a more originary beginning of thinking at the limit of
the metaphysics of subjectivity and ground, of reason and its system.
The question of freedom for Schelling is not one question amongst
other, but the question that has already freed, released him from the
necessity unto freedom—which is that of thinking freedom neither
in relation to causality nor to the free will of the metaphysical Subject.
In this manner, outside and beyond the mere formal distinction in
philosophy between sensibility and intelligibility, between nature and
history, there is introduced a more originary thinking of freedom:
Freedom as the event of opening of existence to its own arrival as

such, which as such has to be freed from the categorical, predicative
grasp of the presently given world, so that freedom is no longer
seen as victory over brute sensibility, but free de-cision, out of
finitude—that means, out of unground, unconditionally—the
decision between good and evil. This decision is the vitality, the life
of freedom, for freedom in itself not a system as such but a life. But
this freedom’s vitality is not that of mythic vitality of foundation’s
self-immanence; precisely the otherwise, freedom interrupts the
mythic vitality of ground’s immanence, and opens itself to ever
anew, to ever renewed inauguration of existence.
This whole task of seeing freedom as event of existence as such, and

not predicative, categorical grasp of already present entities demands
difference in repetition be freed, released into the open. Therefore
Schelling repeats what needs to deconstructed: the metaphysical
foundation of the logic of judgement with its law of identity as its
self-foundational principle, and its claim for freedom the possibility
of system. Schelling’s unique, singular repetition demands that the
claim of the logic of judgement not be renounced and abandoned but
precisely be demanded, and thereby releasing from its heart what does
not belong to the metaphysical foundation of judgement, but to—
how to say this—to life. What does not belong to the metaphysics of
predication, but alone to life, is none but the event itself, the free event
of existence coming to presence, the event of freedom that happens,
occurs, erupts as life. Schelling’s treatise therefore beginning with
the discussion about the logic of judgement with its law of identity
ends with an affirmation of life, with the vitality of the principle of
becoming of the creature and of the divine.
The question of freedom is not one question among others. It
is rather the question of the sense of existence itself from which any
such sense of political and ethical be derived. The attempts to think
the sense of the political and ethical in a more originary manner
demand raising again the ‘aged’ question of freedom, to free us for a
renewed youth of freedom’s vitality and life. This is only because the
question of freedom as such, understood in a more originary manner,
has never aged, but only been covered with soot and dust of the
various foundational gestures of the metaphysics of subjectivity and
necessity. To give back freedom its youthful vitality demands that we
give ourselves the task, not merely that of exposing the buried pre-
supposition of our existence by unworking the sedimented structure
of being and subjectivity, of causality and necessity, but also we learn
to say a ‘yes’ to freedom again.
§ The Irreducible Remainder
This chapter, taking Schelling’s Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature

of Human Freedom as chief referent point, attempts to think the
possibility of evil out of abyssal decision, decision that opens up each
time out of the inscrutable, unfathomable abyss of human freedom
that marks each time the finitude of the creaturely existence, and
at the same time the possibility of the creature’s self-abnegation
of this finitude. Since the vitality of freedom each time leaps out,
transcends, ex-sists any form of necessity, causality, or immanent self-
enclosure, this vitality—in decision—is constantly solicited towards
evil in the self-affirmation of its creaturely freedom. Therefore
the eternal possibility of this radical evil, insofar as it arises out of
freedom and out of the self-affirmation of the finite existence, marks
the limit of the metaphysics of subjectivity and all logics of necessity
and causality, which at that limit points towards new inauguration
of redemptive fulfilment no longer on the ground of Subject’s self-
assertion and appropriation of its condition, but in love which, at the
limit of mortal’s power of self-appropriation bestows upon mortals
the gift of a redemptive happiness and beatitude.
*
When one asks the question of the possibility of evil—thereby
understanding evil as ‘radical’ which is distinguished from mere
brutality and accidental ‘human’ mistakes due to the limitation of
human understanding—what at stake there is not merely that of
raising one question amongst others, but the possibility and the
limit of human freedom itself. the question of the possibility of

evil is the most radical question of freedom, and the most radical
question of philosophy itself, as if under the name or the word ‘evil’
not only the terrible images of destruction and malice are conjured
up, but also the powerlessness of thinking itself—of philosophical
thinking—that concerns itself with the limit of its own thought,
thinking that finds itself unable to think the inexplicability of evil’s
terrible power. From where evil draws its devouring malice, malice
that does not abate its cruelty as if the whole world’s tears are not
enough for its all consuming lust? Any essential thinking that is not
satisfied merely with gathering empirical data that only explain the
empirical conditions of evil’s actual manifestation once such events
take place but more essentially concerned with the possibility of evil
as such, the possibility of its very taking place as such, and not merely
explaining away ‘this’ or ‘that’ evil, then it must be connected with the
question of mortal’s existentiality of his existence itself in its intimate
connection with mortal’s intrinsic, radical finitude, and the abyss of
human freedom. Only then ‘evil’ will not be explained away as mere
accidental happenings, aberrations, mistakes, and man’s unfortunate
oblivion or distraction, explanations that are carried with the help of
empirical studies through field works, as if man’s possibility of freedom
can only go as far as bestiality, as the animal like behaviour. If that
were so, evil would not have such terrible, all consuming, malicious
appearance amidst our existence. In other words, evil would not be
so radical. As if, as it were, the mortal’s freedom reaches its utmost
possibility, or its utmost limit only as the limit of bestiality and no
more. when Schelling speaks of Franz Baader that ‘Baader is right in
saying that it would be desirable if the rottenness in man could only
go as far as animality; but unfortunately man can only stand above
or beneath animals’ (Schelling 1936, p.49), what Schelling thereby
seeks to articulate is not merely the radical nature of evil but also the
abyss of man’s freedom which, in its utmost possibility and limit,
touches that point of decision—at the limit of the thinkable—which
concerns the limit of man’s possibility and capacity, not merely of the
terrible evil, but also the paradisiacal, beatific redemptive fulfilment
in forgiveness and love beyond measure.
With the question of freedom, arising out of the finitude of mortal’s
condition touches at the limit of man’s possibility and capacity. This
The Irreducible Remainder • 269
limit is none other than the eruption, occurring, happening of the

immeasurable and the unconditional forgiveness and love in man
who is nevertheless a finite and conditioned being. It is none other
than the enigmatic appearing of the phenomenon of unconditional
forgiveness whose phenomenality no phenomenological ontology
can grasp, the unconditional forgiveness whose necessity is felt
precisely at that limit when evil threatens the condition of freedom,
the basis or ground of existence itself as such. Therefore the question
of freedom is the question of the unconditional as such, unconditional
as the wager—not so much of accidental happening in life but as the
wager—of existence itself as such.
To exist (whose existentiality is this, to borrow this formulation

from Heidegger, ‘ex-sistence’) as finite and mortal is to be thrown by
freedom to freedom’s wager or risk of this existence itself. Freedom
throws existence to its wager. Freedom is not the metaphysical
task of subject’s freely grounding itself on itself on the basis of the
logical, ontological principle of identity, of reason and ground.
Freedom is rather the unconditional wager of existence as such.
To exist is to wager each time out of its thrown-ness that means,
out of the finitude of mortal condition. Out of this wager which
finds manifestation in decision, not the calculable, programmable
decision, but out of the ‘un-pre-thinkable’ (Unvordenkliche), there
arises each time not only the possibility of all consuming evil but
also the unconditional beatitude of redemptive forgiveness and
paradisiacal, blissful loving.
Therefore any dialectically accomplished universal morality of

reconciliation is so inadequate, so insufficient, not merely to explain
the possibility of the radical nature of evil but also the unconditional
demand of a non-programmable, incalculable, un-thinkable
forgiveness, precisely because evil can be so unthinkably radical.
Therefore any conditioned ethics and politics of reconciliation out
of calculative, programmable grounds demand not merely that
they think evil in much more radical way, but that this radical evil
itself calls forth unconditional forgiveness and love that cannot be
calculated and programmed beforehand, that does not have logical
necessity or metaphysical form of causality. Therefore neither logical
principle of necessity, nor any metaphysical principle of causality,

nor any phenomenological ontology of manifestation can explain the
pure taking place of the event of forgiveness, as if it occurs itself out of
no-thing. This in itself demands that we think of freedom in relation
to its inscrutable, unfathomable, unconditional ground in a manner
that delivers, frees, and releases such a freedom from any conditioned
notion of being wherein various determined forms of necessities and
causalities work.
In On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (2001) Jacques Derrida,
without however raising the question of freedom at all, brings out
in an admirable manner the unconditional demand of a forgiveness
and hospitality that cannot be reduced to the universal morality
of reasoned, calculated, programmed acts of reconciliation. What
Jacques Derrida thereby brings out is the necessity of our time to
think at the limit of the thinkable (of the unthinkable unconditional
forgiveness), the event-character of freedom beyond any immanent
closure of subjectivity, causality, necessity, reconciliation etc.
Therefore unconditional forgiveness can only be event itself: it
occurs, happens, and erupts in such a manner that its aleatory
character cannot be thought within the calculable, programmable
self-certainty of a decision on the basis of knowledge. In other words,
it cannot be thought within any metaphysics of necessity, or causality
or subjectivity. It has to arise that which is each time free—to arise
or not to arise. The task of thinking freedom now, more than ever, is
none but this: to free the messianic moments in freedom that is, its
moments of unconditional forgiveness, and affirmation an arrival of
a redemptive fulfilment which alone can redeem the evil so radical.
Evil has not thereby lost the possibility of its appearance; only
that this appearance cannot be grasped by any phenomenological
ontology of appearance. Since it arises out of freedom (a freedom
whose grounds remain inappropriable for the mortals), the possibility
of the eruptive character of evil remains as much as the possibility of
the event-character of the messianic, redemptive fulfilment out of
freedom. Evil is not explained away, but whose possibility remains.
It is this question of an essential remainder that is the difficulty
of thinking freedom, an ‘irreducible remainder’ which does not
allow itself to be thought in relation to the metaphysics of ground,
necessity, or reason. Hence no philosophy, no politics and no ethics
can evade the wager of existence which freedom throws us to, but
that, in so far as this wager, this dice-throw may make the possibility
of evil actual, it precisely thereby makes possible—at that abyss of
the moment—the possibility of unconditional forgiveness and the
beatitude of love, simply because the god Eros is older, and therefore
younger than good and evil. But there is no certitude, no guarantee,
and no calculated knowledge that gives us before-hand the intimation
that the messianic moment is sure to arrive at a destined moment.
This non-certitude of mortals’ calculations and programmes cannot
intimate the imminence and intensity of that arrival, precisely because
this coming itself is free coming, is itself pure donation of freedom.
Perhaps the philosophy and politics of the future will be this politics and
philosophy of wager. Has not always been so? Can there be the sense
of politics and philosophy for us if there is not already freedom at
work, for to deny, to minimize, to close freedom its gift of wager to us
would mean the denial of that divine, blissful love’s redemption, that
beatific forgiveness, that nobility of life that arises out of freedom’s
gift. To deny this gift would itself be the most terrible radical evil.
This chapter again, therefore, attempts to think all these questions as
the urgent questions of our time: the question of the unconditional
event of forgiveness and love, of freedom in relation to its abyssal
condition, and above all, freedom as the originary donation of the sense
of existence itself as such.
Schelling’s great treatise on freedom is one of the rare works in
the history of philosophy that attempts to think freedom essentially,
that means, freedom not as one question amongst others but as the
very question of philosophy and of existence itself at the limit of
the metaphysics of subjectivity. The question of freedom is none
other than the question of the sense of existence as such and as a
whole. It is the question of the sense of existence at the limit of its
condition, question concerning existence as the logic of its origin
and be-coming, the sense of coming to presence to itself. While
working within the dominant metaphysics of the time—which is
the dominant metaphysical tradition of the ‘occident’—that means,
repeating this metaphysics, Schelling’s treatise on freedom allows
freedom as difference of metaphysics, drawing inside out of the heart
of metaphysics, which is to say, to its freedom, to the wager of its
free affirmation, thereby loosening the sedimented artifice of the
metaphysics of the time. In Schelling’s thinking, metaphysics no

longer remains certain of itself regarding its self-constitution and
ground but takes the name of a wager, an infinite wager, an infinite
risk—and also an infinite task—that of its own un-working. In
Schelling’s thinking the system of freedom no longer is that of the
Subject’s act of self-grounding and self-appropriating on the basis of
the power/ force/ gaze/ law of the negative, but precisely becomes an
in-finite logic of be-coming of the sense of existence as a whole at the
limit of the sense, so that freedom frees itself from any act of self-
grounding and self-appropriation. In Schelling’s thinking, system is
that name of the jointure/ nexus/ configuration/ constellation of the
movements, becoming of existence as such which, in so far this jointure
itself is none but free, is therefore free to be dis-joined/ dis-installed/
dis-figured. The possibility of this dis-figuration/dis-installation/dis-
joining of the system is therefore not merely an accidental character
of the system of freedom but it is rather the essential nature of the
Schelling’s system that it is moved by the principle of becoming and
not mechanical, logical, metaphysical principle of repetition. As such
Schelling’s system of freedom is inseparable from the freedom of
life. Surged with life’s inexhaustible movement, freedom continually
opens us to the unconditioned becoming. For Schelling freedom
has never been that of the metaphysics of the Subject’s primordial
act of self-positing and its attempt at self-grounding but rather is
the exuberance of life’s pure affirmation, pre-subjectified and pre-
objectified, which is the movement of longing with which even God
comes to his own existence. Therefore for Schelling the system of
freedom never accomplishes itself as complete but that which carries
an ‘irreducible remainder’, a Not Yet, and a yet to come. Since the
movement of longing which is freedom’s logic of origin never knows
bounds and limit, since longing limitlessly exposes itself to its own
limit, and thereby calls forth new inauguration of the sense of existence
and the joyous acts of its creative freedom, therefore the system of
freedom may interrupt its own foundation, since it is system as life,
and not mere inert, mechanical, emaciated product of spirit. In life’s
limitless exposure of its own limit, life also exposes itself limitlessly to its
own remainder, and hence the Not Yet of the system. System is here the
name of the movement of accomplishment and fulfilment, of life’s
vitality in longing that confronts each moment its own limit and the
demand of a non-limit at the same time. This in-satiety of system

and its exuberance of life is nothing but the infinite wager of freedom
itself which grants the mortals the possibility of its true fulfilment
that arrives from the Eschatos of time.
What Schelling has tirelessly attempted to think is this wager of
existence as the donation of freedom. For him philosophy itself, as the
highest and most joyous creative affirmation, is none but a creative wager
that seizes the existence of the creative thinker. If for the philosophical
task of thinking existence is inseparable from the question of system,
this system can never be a totality ruled by logics of necessity and
causality, but a system that wages itself each time, limitlessly exposing
itself thereby to its own limit. Since the system of freedom must be a
free system—a system that is free to be no longer or not yet system—
such a system of freedom can only be forever (a) tempted, each time
anew, and can never arrive the definiteness and the completion, such
as for example Hegel’s speculative system of metaphysics.
Perhaps this much explains Schelling’s failure, unlike his classmate
Hegel’s success, to constitute a definitive and an accomplished
system of the Absolute. What Schelling has to give way, since he gave
himself to the task of system of freedom and not necessity, to the
constant, endless (a) temptation of system that also demands, ever
new unworking of the system. As a result he constantly has to expose
himself to the vertigo of the abyss which is none but the abyss of
the system that, precisely in order to be constituted, must un-work
itself again and again. the fate of the system of freedom cannot avert
from the yawning gaze of its abyss, which is the abyss of freedom,
its utter groundlessness and un-thinkability. For us who have come
after Schelling it is this failure of Schelling’s system of freedom that
has exposed us to the yawning abyss of freedom—that, what freedom
exposes us to, to our groundlessness—it is this failure and the limit
of the thinkable rather than the success of the constituted system
that interests us more. This failure is none other than the failure of
philosophy’s self-accomplishment and closure out of its own accord,
the exposure of thinking to its own un-thinkability, the constant
withdrawal of freedom from any closure of the system. It is this
failure to which philosophy is interminably led by the movement of
freedom that animates it and animates the philosophical desire for
the Absolute, of what is unconditional at the limit of all concepts
and all thinkable. It is this failure rather than success that alone
frees philosophy for a new inauguration of thinking, which means,
that exposes us to the limitlessness, to the immeasurable, to the
very ground of all being and existence that irreducibly lies outside
all acts of grounding: namely, freedom itself. That is why thinking
which is itself the gift of freedom, though constantly assailed by an
‘unappeasable’ melancholy, is the name of joy, which is the ‘aristocracy
of happiness’ (Bloch 1995a, p. 937).
Perhaps the future philosophy will be joyous philosophy, and not
merely the philosophy of joy. But we do not yet know whether that
philosophy will still be called ‘philosophy’ or by some other name.
Schelling’s treatise on freedom begins with the question of
the incommensurability between system and freedom, with the
question of the possibility of the system of freedom itself as such.
Since the dominant understanding about system as to its genesis and
constitution, it structure and its mobility as system always relegates
system to necessity—since the dominant system takes the logical
principle of identity and judgement to be sovereign—the treatise of
freedom must therefore begin with the examination of the logical
principle of identity and judgement, and the (restricted) notion of
the system itself. The systemic task of thinking freedom that must free
freedom itself from necessity must loosen the sedimented structure of
the system of necessity, of its self-foundational character on the basis
of its predicative, apophantic judgement character. There then emerges
the demand for thinking to re-think the logical principle of identity
and judgement in such a manner so that through this repetition
freedom itself emerges as system—not as system of necessity—but as
free jointure, or constellation, or nexus of forces that is open to the
unconditioned character of freedom, outside causality and outside
necessity.
This task of repetition in Schelling’s carrying out the systemic

task of freedom leads to the unworking of the logical principle
of identity and judgement in such a manner that the sovereignty
of this metaphysics of identity is given itself to freedom, outside
the dominant metaphysics of the ‘occident’. This is so far as in
Schelling’s thought, the principle of judgement and identity is no
longer understood as mere logical principle but as the principle of
the becoming of life, as the logic of the origin of existence itself as

such and as a whole, as a vital principle of freedom’s possibility to be
free and not free, as a logic of movement and of longing with which
created creature and divine life affirms its own existence, and above
all, as the arising of decision out of the abyss of wager of freedom
between good and evil itself. The self-affirmation of the creaturely
being, whose self-affirmative character is to be traced back to the
more originary groundlessness of freedom, and is irreducible to
the apophantic tracing back of the predicative judgement: this self
affirmative character of this creaturely being is distinguished from
‘entities presently given’ and from other beings precisely by virtue of
its freedom, that is, its utter groundlessness and its infinite exposure
to the abyss of its ground. The being that arises as this creaturely
self-affirmative being in the midst of beings as such is born with
the dark fate of this abyss which is the condition of its eruption and
also the very condition of its dissolution.
In this manner the very formal, mechanical, logical principle of

identity and judgement is released to the movement of life, to the
generosity and exuberance of freedom—a freedom whose generosity
may even turn into the most terrible form of violence—so that with
the question of the principle of identity and judgement it is not so
much the formal, logical, predicative truth that concerns us, but the
sense of existence itself and as a whole inasmuch as existence itself is
free, if not according to its genesis, but according to its essence. With
that the dominant metaphysical notion of truth—as predicative,
categorical in its formal, propositional structure—is de-structured,
and released beyond its propositional structure unto the structure
as joining, or constellation, or configuration of the principles of
movements and becoming, the principles of life’s exuberant venturing
itself beyond itself, like the bellowing waves of the pregnant Sea.
In ancient philosophy, the modern logical distinction between
subject and predicate in judgement is thought as the distinction
between antecedent and consequent. The metaphysical foundation of
the logic of judgement is, as we know, the principle of identity which,
when sought to be reductively totalized in a manner metaphysical, is
reduced to the principle of Same. the attempt to think in a more
essential manner the question of freedom as event, in its free eruption-
character, demands unworking of the metaphysical foundation

of judgement, and to think judgement itself in a more originary
manner. In a manner that Heidegger (1969) later deconstructs this
principle of identity as Same in order to think in a more originary
manner this principle of identity as belonging together rather than
belonging together and thereby releasing difference of freedom, or
freedom of difference as the unthought of metaphysics, Schelling too
deconstructs this principle of identity in the logical relation between
antecedent and consequent in judgement in order to release the
event character of freedom as difference from the logic of the Same
by attempting to think identity in a more originary manner, that
means, not in a predicative-categorical manner but existentially.
Schelling grasps such a difference as ‘duality without opposition’ that
holds together (while separating each from the other) the principles of
movement and becoming in a nexus, in a configuration, in a jointure,
in a constellation which is the nexus as freedom. As such the question
of freedom for Schelling touches, not so much the foundational
question of the logic of judgement merely, but the event character of
existence as such. Freedom then, thought in more originary manner,
is essentially question of identity as difference, necessity as freedom,
system that is free for its own dis-joining and dis-installation.
Freedom as such is life: life as nexus of forces, of movements and of
becoming, of overflowing and exuberance, of longing’s limitless exposure
to its own limit.
What would then be thought as ‘life’ for Schelling? It is true
that Schelling thought, in a manner that was prevalent in the
philosophical thinking at that time, life organically, in a vitalistic
manner. But what has remained not so explicitly thought in
Schelling, but remained unthought—at least till the time that he
wrote this text—in this term ‘life’ is something like an attempt to
think in a more originary manner the event-character of existence, its
free happening and occurring, independently of the conditions given
as antecedents: the pre-predicative, pre-categorical, pre-conceptual
truth of the arising and disappearing, of the logic of a movement of
existence, of existence’s eventive apparition in longing and desiring,
its redemptive fulfilment in loving and forgiveness, of the movement
of the appearing of evil as countermovement of good so that life
receives love as pure, unconditional gift, so that life may receive the
movement of its own becoming.
What is ‘life’ for Schelling is this incommensurability, this futurity
present in any hic et nunc, the in-saturation and in excess of this
existence, its finitude that refuses to close itself at any point of
‘immanent self-consumption’ (Nancy 1993,p.13), the transcendence
of a longing that never rests at any given mode of presence but
may extend itself to the extent of desiring evil, the in-finity at the
heart of a finite existence, and the eternal melancholy at the infinite
incompletion of existence’s self-presence. What then Schelling
attempts to think with the question of freedom is this freeing of this
life character of event (or, the event character of life) from various
sorts conditioned mode of self-presence, from any closure of necessity
and causality so that life be free, and freedom may acquire life: that
means, life’s element of surprise and its unpredictable arrival of the
wholly other coming that may redeem life, and give over suffering
to its redemptive happiness. Life in its manifestation of itself is the
event of freedom; it is free to its own future without which life would
only be mechanical product out of necessity but not free occurring
itself.
Let us come back to Schelling’s differential repetition of the
metaphysics in respect to the logic of judgement. If the metaphysical
principle—which is that of the principle of identity, of ground
and reason—is not to be reductively totalized into the principle of
Same, then a belonging together, an ungrounding difference is to be
introduced at the heart of identity. More originarily understood,
the principle of identity will then be the thought of difference as
belonging together, as in a constellation or assemblage, a montage—of
antecedents and consequents. In that sense difference—which is none
but the movement of freedom—would precisely demand identity
and the system, more originarily understood, a system and identity
that is no longer the principle of the Same, but the logic of hiatus,
of a dehiscence, of an originary cut or cision (which later Schelling
calls Scheidung in his The Ages of the World), a spacing—which is none
other than the spacing of freedom, or freedom as spacing. It is this
difference of identity which sets free, releases the consequent from
the antecedent (if not according to its genesis, but according to its
essence), and thereby enabling the consequent, conditioned, finite

existence to have a life of its own essential nature, to have an infinite,
unconditioned freedom of becoming and decision between good and
evil.
As such, the principle of identity—understood in the manner
discussed above as the spacing of freedom—is not same as Same. In the
next chapter while discussing Heidegger’s discussing of the principle
of Identity we shall be able to articulate how identity understood as
jointure is precisely the question of freedom, which thereby cannot
be reductively understood as the principle of Same. Therefore the
logical relation between the antecedent and consequent is no longer to
be thought as that of Same, but rather as that of difference as identity,
differance of identity, as spacing of freedom. Discussing Spinoza’s
logical relation of antecedent and consequent as one that between
infinite substance (=A) and infinite substance as one of its modes,
which is consequent of that infinite substance (= A/a), Schelling
argues,
Then that which is positive in A/a is, indeed, A. But it does not follow
on this account that A/a=A, i.e. that infinite Substance regarded
in its consequences is to be considered exactly the same as infinite
Substance as such. (Schelling 1936, p.16)
Though the consequent as finite, conditioned, creaturely existent is
dependent in regard to its genesis to the antecedent that does not
determine the essential nature of that existent. Therefore in regard to
its own essential being, the conditioned, finite, creaturely existence
is free without condition, for only so far an existent is finite,
conditioned, creaturely (in regard to its genesis) can it be free without
condition, without any pre-given, pre-determined closure of archè-
telos, that its freedom can touch the an-archic.,
But dependence does not exclude autonomy or even freedom.
Dependence does not determine the nature of the dependent, but
merely declares that the dependent entity, whatever else that may be,
can only be as a consequent of that upon which it is dependent; it does
not declare what this dependent is or not. Every organic individual,
insofar as it has come into being, is dependent upon another organism
with respect to its genesis but not at all with regard to its essential
being. (Ibid., p. 18)
There are few things that must be said immediately here. First
there is something like an-archic about freedom that arises from
the spacing-character, in that freedom’s exuberance is precisely
that ex-sists any closure or totality determined by the principle of
archè-logy and teleology. Secondly freedom must be freed from any
genetic condition, or from any metaphysical determination of the
movement of becoming on the basis of ‘emanation’, or ‘generation’.
To understand freedom’s movement in relation to its event character, we
shall use ‘origin’ which is to be distinguished from ‘genesis’, ‘emanation’
and ‘generation’. Schelling, however, never uses the word ‘origin’, but
speaks of ‘becoming’ which he distinguishes from any philosophy
of emanation and generational process as the privation of a full,
perfect being, for they all lead to the concept of immanence. Schelling
says,
First, the concept of immanence is completely to be set aside insofar
as it is meant to express a dead conceptual inclusion of things in God.
We recognize, rather, that the concept of becoming is the only one
adequate to the nature of things. (Ibid., p. 33)
The concept of immanence as the logic of movement is inadequate

enough to express the vitality of freedom’s self-affirmation. This is so
in so far as freedom is life, and life is freedom, the event-character
of its spacing lays in its non-in-sistence in its genesis. This non-in-
sistence of the genesis alone grants or bestows to the freedom of the
creaturely, finite, and conditioned being its life. This alone, according
to Schelling, explains the possibility of the human freedom which is
not one possibility among others but the possibility of life, whose
possibility cannot be explained by any predicates, attributes, properties
or facts, but by that factuality, or facticity alone that existence is that
which ex-sists, that non-in-sists, that transcends from all immanence
of self-consuming predicates, from all closure of necessity and from
the causality of the genesis, from the metaphysical foundation of the
Same. It is this non-insistence of freedom frees the consequent from
the antecedent, not concerning the genesis of consequent in relation to
antecedent, but regarding its essential being, that is, its essential ex-
sistent character from any immanent condition. Freedom, regarded
in this manner, is freedom from all immanence. As such freedom is
trans-immanence; and as trans-immanence, freedom is life.
Schelling never speaks of this non-in-sistence of freedom of life,

and of the life of freedom, but this un-thought that we teased out
of Schelling’s text, out of our repetition of Schelling, grants the
movement of Schelling’s thought its own life. From this un-thought
we allow freedom to come to life in its non-in-sistence, which is life’s
event as coming to presence to itself as life. Life is that which non-in-sists
in its genesis. In this non-in-sistence, life allows itself to feel the tremor of
mortality, of death. It sacrifices itself for the sake of the freedom of this
non-in-sistence, for the sake of this non-in-sistence of freedom. Since
this non-in-sistence alone explains life’s eventive freedom character
and since this non-in-sistence is dear to life more than anything else,
it goes for the sake of non-in-sistence to the point of going against
itself, to the point of negation of this freedom, so that in this extreme
possibility of negating freedom it can assert freedom in its extreme
possibility, which is the possibility of a radical evil. This explains the
possibility and actuality of evil in freedom.
Freedom is the non-insistence in immanence, and it is non-insistence
in the antecedent. As non-insistence in antecedent, the consequent is free,
and not mere ‘consequent’: it now has a life of its own, its free flowing
abundance and plenitude so that as life, it freely calls for itself new
inauguration for itself, new beginning after each end, last after every
and each last. In this sense a free being, even the finite mortal being,
has a relation to a time outside time, to a time outside all presence and
all self-presence of the Subject. In other words, it has an intimation
of a time beyond time1. a free Subject is no Subject, if Subject is
the name for that which grounds itself in its self-presence so that
the Subject can be beside itself. Between the Subject and its ground
there is already always a distance of spacing which is the yawning
abyss of freedom. It is freedom itself that spaces open this distance so
that the Subject can be near to itself. Therefore Subject is the name
not of that which grounds itself on the basis of its self-presence and
autochthony. It is rather the denomination of that which is opened
by the spacing of freedom, the consequent that is freed and is released
by freedom itself from its antecedent, though not according to its
genesis but according to its essence. Therefore judgement—as the
relation between antecedent and consequent—belongs to freedom,
and not vice versa. Only to the extent that judgement is free—to the
disjoining of itself—it is judgement itself. The judgement character
of judgement is its freedom for disjunction, for caesura, for dis-

installation. Here one can see Schelling’s unworking of the system of
freedom from inside. Freedom as irreducible difference, as irreducible
disjunction makes any speculative unity of the metaphysical Subject
impossible. The judgement is already always torn apart by freedom
on the basis of which alone there can be something like—identity,
as holding together of duality, a duality therefore that cannot be
reduced to opposition, but to be understood as jointure or nexus,
of what Schelling (2000) calls Zusammenhang. What is brought
out, in a manner of Hölderlin’s introducing caesura at the heart of
the Speculative unity2 a distinction unheard, a distinction that is
going to set off the whole project of German Idealism in an entirely
different direction, that is its own unworking of itself, the distinction
that has introduced such irreparable, un-sublatable, un-groundable
and inappropriable caesura or dehiscence—in so far as this is the
distinction of freedom and not of necessity—is the distinction
between ‘ Being insofar as it exists, and Being insofar as it is the mere
basis of existence’ (Schelling 1936, p. 31).
Schelling’ distinction between ‘ Being insofar as it exists, and
Being insofar as it is the mere basis of existence’ (Ibid.) is a distinction
of freedom, and not the distinction of necessity in the form of
predicative, propositional truth, insofar as this distinction concerns
life’s eventive character and not of inert, mechanical abstraction.
Since this distinction pertains to existence’ coming to itself as free
coming, there is the possibility of dissolution, of disjunction or dis-
joining of the bond, of the jointure between that which is the mere
basis of existence and the existent itself so that the Being in so far as it
exists, may exist freely, independently of the ground even though it
arises from this ground. Schelling extends this vitality of freedom
even to God in so far this God is not mere postulate, neither mere
logical necessity, nor a conceptual abstraction, but a living God,
longing and loving, suffering and redeeming. within God too there
is an irreducible cision, cut, (Scheidung), a distinction, a difference,
a duality without opposition, a dis-joining of a jointure, a caesura of
an identity, a dehiscence of a hinge, a spacing of an abyss between
God ‘in so as it exists’, and God which is the ‘mere basis of [his]
existence’. Schelling’s God is not the God as mere abstraction of the
Idealists but a free, releasing God who is, for that matter, not abstract
system nor a totality but a life. Only as living God can be free to
his own becoming; similarly, only because he is free, can he become
different, transcendent in relation to the inner basis of his existence.
He is therefore living God, and that he is free for his own coming
to existence. The source of life in God is God’s vital distinction or
difference between God in so far as the inner basis of his existence and
God that coming to presence to himself as this existing, actualized
God. in God himself there is an opening out of himself, a spacing
out of himself, a tearing asunder of himself, an outside of himself
in longing where in this free space God himself give birth to itself
. God’s Freedom also operates as the logic of origin: there in God
himself arises the movement of longing to give birth to himself. It is
the beginning of God’s becoming of himself, ‘the God begotten God’
(Ibid., p. 35).
Schelling sees freedom’s logic of origin as the partitioning of forces
so that out of this differential, out of unhinging, out of (de)cision
something comes to presence. one can say, following Schelling,
that the event of freedom arises as the differential logic of origin
that singularizes, individuates life as this life and no other, which
as this singular for the first time opens itself to itself and to others.
Freedom is that at once differentiating and singularizing of the origin
of the world, of Divine being and created existence. What we call
life is the movement that in existing interminably differentiates and
individuates at the same time. Life is none but movement singular
multiple (or multiple singular). Since the distinction between ground
and existence is a distinction of freedom and not of necessity, where
the distinction is also identity as holding together, joining together
(Zusammenhang), figuring together, the free operation of what
arrives as singular, individuated (Schelling calls particular will) does
not prohibit the eternal remainder of the ground as universal Will
to operate itself freely. All life is Zusammenhang, all life is a nexus
(constellation/configuration/jointure/ holding-together as holding
apart) of principles/wills/forces. God’s life is also a jointure, a bond,
apart from this distinction from the created being: that while this
jointure is indissoluble in God, it is dissoluble in the mortals. It is
this dissolubility of the bond, of the jointure, of the configuration
that explains, according to Schelling, while evil can be actual only in
mortal, but not in divine life.
Since life that manifests itself as becoming, it passes through stages

from nature to Spirit where the jointure/ nexus appears again and
again in new form, ever new jointure as free jointure that is free to
be (free, or) not free. while this jointure appears at the stage of life’s
becoming as nature as the jointure of the principles of darkness and
light, so this jointure appears again in the stage of life’s becoming as
Spirit as the jointure between the Wills—the Will of the Deep as
particular Will and on the other hand, the Universal Will. As jointure
of the two is not speculative unity of the Subject but Spirit’s revelation
as Word which as such is the jointure of vowel and consonant.
jointure—and not (Speculative, conceptual) unity—is not reason’s
/Subject’s self-actualization as Absolute Concept; but this jointure
is revelation of actual God to man that remains inappropriable to
man. With this one stroke of genius Schelling’s already exposes the
System of a Speculative Idealism to its limit, that life’s origin (in so
far it is ‘life’) refers back to an ‘un-pre-thinkable’ (Unvordenkliche)
manifestation, or revelation that reason cannot trace back, cannot
appropriate as its own ground, that no predicate of reason can apply
to it.
This is the very ground of freedom, in so far as this ground excludes
all grounding and appropriation, all predication and foundation, all
subjectivity and objectivity, all categories of reason and irrational.
It is the irreducible outside of all ground, and yet which alone is
the condition of the possibility of any grounding at all. As such the
source of freedom is an irreducible difference: it is the difference of all
difference and difference to all identities. A difference unheard: wholly
otherwise difference that is the spacing of freedom. This difference
is the groundless (Abgrund). It is, preceding all conditions, and
remaining after all condition, is pure actuality without possibility,
pure transcendence without transcendent. It is the unconditioned
that enables all acts of beginning, of all beginning of all existence as
such. Schelling says,
The essence of the basis, or of existence, can only be precedent to
all basis, that is, the absolute viewed directly, the groundless. But, as
has been shown, it cannot be this in any other way than by dividing
into two equally eternal beginnings, not that it is both at the at same
time but that it is in both in the same way, as the whole in each, or a
unique essence. But the groundless divides itself into the two equally
eternal beginnings only in order that the two which could not be in
it as groundless at the same time, or there be one, should become one
through love. (Ibid., pp.88-9)
This ground that precedes all grounds, the abyss that remains
irreducible to whatever comes to exist as conditioned is none other
than the groundlessness of freedom itself, which as such is more
originary than reason or its opposite irrational. Neither reason nor
irrational, is freedom their in-difference. This abyss of freedom first
of all before any first, in a past immemorial, and in a remaining
future un-anticipatable, grants all that arrives the free gift of birth.
As ‘un-pre-thinkable’ basis before all basis, it first of all bestows the
gift of basis and existence and precisely because it is destination from
where gift arrives, it remains inappropriable and unconditional. It is
because this basis before all basis remains as un-thinkable, thought is
always—even the thought of freedom—is indebted thinking.
Thinking in indebted to the unthinkable, for it is the un-thinkable

that first of all bestows upon thinking its nobility and dignity, its
beauty and joy. It is because there always remains this basis before
all basis, there also remains hope for redemptive fulfilment and joy,
however radical evil is, however terrible, devouring and malicious
is evil’s all consuming desire to conquer everything.
With the help of Schelling’s notion of an ‘un-pre-thinkable’

remainder of (non) basis before all basis, what is introduced here
is the unconditional, ever remaining promise of redemption for
mortal which always remains, eternally, because it already always has
dispropriated man from all power, force and the gaze of law. What
ex-sists outside the law, outside appropriation and power, outside
totality and system, outside the force of the negative, and outside all
basis is this pure promise of redemptive fulfilment that exceeds all of
man’s power of actualization and realization. Because it is beginning
prior to all beginning, it is thereby the principle of beginning and
inauguration. Evil is that will of the lawlessness that ceaselessly
attempts to assume the law; it is that will of the non-being which
interminably attempts to attain being; it is that non-yet-actuality that
endlessly attempts to seize actuality. But a basis before evil precedes
and follows evil. This un-groundable, while dispropriating man from
all ground, alone gifts the mortal the most paradisiacal gift, which is
that of redemption itself.
What Schelling discovers, at the heart of the jointure of forces and
of principles is the Abgrund which is the condition of the possibility
of the jointure or system. As a result, as the condition of possibility
of the holding-together, the Abyss remains the outside, the excluded,
which refuses all name, all concepts, all categorical grasp, and all acts
of Aufhebung (sublation). The system of system, then, bereft of any
speculative Unity or centre does not coincide at any point, for the
condition of the possibility of this jointure itself remains outside
of all totality, all system, all recuperation and grounding. Human
freedom consists, therefore, according to Schelling, in that abyss of
the opening, or spacing which cannot be thought as Unity. Out of
this chasm emerges the differentiable and dissoluble nexus which is
freedom’s self-realization in de-cision, for de-cision (between good
and evil) to be possible, the jointure has to be free to be dis-joined;
the system has to be free to give over to the possibility of dissolution.
Out of this decision which cannot be calculated, programmed, or
predicated beforehand, but that arises, erupts, occurs as in a leap over
a yawning abyss, there now emerges the possibility of evil and good.
Schelling speaks of the possibility of good and evil in the finitude
of the mortal condition, as the creature’s self-assertion as particular
Will, which as this particular Will should remain in the Deep, in the
ground as particular. Since human condition is finite—means, its
condition, its source, its origin is outside of itself as inappropriable
transcendence—there remains the possibility of the dissolution of
the Wills. Hence the particular Will in its self-assertion can claim
itself to be total, Universal, Absolute. In this all-consuming lust of
the particular Will to reach Totality, in this all devouring hunger of
non-Being to attain Being, there lies the possibility of the dissolution
of the nexus, the dis-joining of the jointure of Wills. Evil is therefore
neither Being nor non-Being, neither Totality nor particular, but
non-Being’s all consuming hunger for Being, the particular Will’s
endless lust to reach the Totality, which happens out of the finite
freedom, or out of the finitude of freedom, out of the dissoluble
character of the jointure so that there can be inversion of wills, of
forces, of principles. The dark principle which should remain in the
centre as mere basis, as mere possibility, as mere non-Being, lusts to
arrive at totality, at Being, at Actuality so that the nexus, the jointure

is diseased, corrupted. This corruption or disease of will is evil.
What is then evil? Evil is the particular Will’s all consuming

desire to abandon the nameless to attain the Name as Absolute.
It is that all devouring lust to abandon the non-yet-Being to
attain Being as Absolute, to abandon the non-yet-predicative to
attain the Absolute as Absolute Predicate. It is the Will’s desire
to totalize itself completely without remainder, or rather, it is the
lust to include each and every exclusion by naming each and every
Unnameable, by predicating each and every un-predicative. In
other words, evil is particular will’s attempts at self-foundation
and thereby attempting at its own self-abnegation, since its very
condition lies in the non-foundation, in ‘the irreducible remainder’
which as such is without name, without predicate, and without
Being or non-Being. Evil does not have a foundation of its own,
and therefore it is this terrible, malicious, jealous lust to found
itself, to ground itself, while there ought to remain that ‘irreducible
remainder’, that Not Yet, that non-foundation . The task of the act
of creative freedom lies, therefore, in the abandonment of this evil’s
abandonment of the nameless, in the abandonment of the evil’s
abandonment of the un-predicative, unnameable, the not yet, so
that through this abandonment of abandonment there remains—
that non-foundation, that unnameable, that un-predicative, the
Not, the remnant, the groundless (Abgrund), the unconditioned.
This Not Yet as the ‘irreducible remainder’ of finite, human condition

is the highest task of free thinking which is to open itself to the
unconditioned. The whole project of Schelling’s entire life time’s
exhaustion of thought has never been anything other than this:
to think the highest, the utmost, the summit of thinking which is
for that matter its limit. To think each time is to be exposed to a
condition that can never be founded in any conditioned foundation,
that can never be named in any name, that can never be predicated
in any predication, that can never be appropriated in any ground
of reason, simply because it is the event of naming itself, of naming
coming to presence to itself, and it is, above all, the event itself, not
this or that event, but the freedom of event, or, the event of freedom.
Therefore Schelling has to fail, over and over again, to complete any
and each of his systems because what he wanted is none but the
system of freedom itself, the system that is destined to be abandoned
by freedom so that system never reaches at any point an absolute self-
actualization of itself. In Schelling’s thinking not only mortals and
Gods, but even the system itself turns to be veiled by indestructible,
unappeasable, unnameable originary mournfulness. This originary
mournfulness lies in the mortal’s originary non-power/non-
capability/non-possibility to appropriate his own condition, to make
his own ground his ‘own’, his ‘proper’, his ‘property’, since freedom
grants him, loans to him, gifts him beforehand as an inappropriable,
un-foundable origin of a gift.
Freedom can never be a property for man, though man’s particular
Will attempts to appropriate freedom as its creaturely self-assertion,
which is evil. Therefore human freedom is essentially finite freedom
which, while it is the source of man’s ‘veil of sadness’ (Ibid., p.79),
it is also thereby the possibility of the Not Yet redemptive, messianic
fulfilment and acts of joyous creation. The freedom for mortal is that
first of all opens the world for him and reveals him to the rest of the
created existence. Therefore freedom is essentially revelation which as
such is more originary than man’s free power to act and transform the
given world through his power of negation. Therefore Schelling too,
like Heidegger following, thinks freedom in a more originary manner
as spacing-open, or manifesting the world on the (non)basis of which
man founds his historical world. Freedom’s unconditional exposure
of the mortal to the world and language is not to be exhausted by
the language of the world, but this is not a mere limitation, but a
limitation that first of all limitlessly exposes the mortals to name, by
gifting him this possibility to name itself. The originary melancholy
at the heart of finite existent that Schelling speaks of is not due to
a lost origin but to an effaced of origin, a withdrawal of ground, an
abandonment of power/ force/ gaze of mastery. It is on the basis of
this abandonment alone is the mortal free, for as free being alone
may he speak, live, and creates the world.
As possibility of evil, but also the possibility of redemptive
fulfilment, freedom is the wager of existence. Therefore freedom always
appears as event, since all event is a wager, the possibility of deciding,
happening, occurring, erupting something wholly otherwise which
cannot be programmed, calculated, anticipated beforehand. At each

moment of freedom, existence exposes itself to its limit to infinity,
to the whole of the possible at once. The decision of existence arises
therefore not out of calculations and predications but out of the
undecidable, out of an infinite host of wager. To appropriate this
wager and undecidable of freedom itself assumes the terrible faces of
evil and destruction. With this ‘irreducible remainder’ of wager and
the undecidable, the possibility of evil itself remains there as eternal
possibility, but only as possibility; it becomes actualized only when
out of decision existent decides to wholly appropriate the wager and
undecidable character of freedom. Therefore to maintain the wager of
freedom and its undecidable is the highest, at the same time the most
strenuous, the most difficult, the impossible ethico-political task of
our time which itself is task of wagering when each time there arises
out of freedom the necessity to assume decision out of undecidable.
If evil is the decision to appropriate the originary dispropriation,
then the appropriation of this appropriation is an event of decision
which each time demands that we wage, not between one decidable
and another, one name and the other, one predication and another,
one act of foundation and another, but between the decision and
undecidable, between the naming and the unnameable, between
the demands of predication and the unconditional demand of the
un-predictable, between the conditioned realization as this politics
and this ethics and the unconditional, between the conditioned
this or that event and event as such, irreducible to any this or that
conditioned event that is destined to pass away. What the philosopher
Jacques Derrida calls aporia is this thinking itself as decision, and as
waging that each time adheres itself to decision.
What Heidegger calls ‘the event of appropriation’ (1969) is
none but this appropriation of appropriation which appropriating
appropriation, delivers, abandons the mortals to his originary
dispropriation. Then another destiny, another inauguration or
inception, another task for mortals begins on the basis of the
constellation, or configuration, of the belonging-together as
ontological difference. This constellation of ontological difference is
itself the donation of freedom. The ‘event of appropriation’ (Ereignis)
is this attempt to remember that originary dispropriation, withdrawal
of Being, or abandonment on the abyssal basis of which alone there
is for mortals a redemptive future. But this is not the work of man
which man can create out of his own possibility, capacity and power,
but itself must be freely given as pure gift of freedom.
Schelling’s profound influence on Heidegger is marked by acute
thinkers and readers. For Schelling however, unlike Heidegger,
freedom’s principle of inauguration is always love. Love is archè
of freedom, but an archè that arrives after each and every end,
and therefore it is also last of the last. Therefore love is so redeeming.
Permeating all throughout existence, love is the eventive presentation
of freedom in existence. Its redeeming presentation in our existence
is not in the manner of necessity’s closure, not in any manner of
evil’s ‘immanent self-consumption’ (Nancy 1993, p.13), but in a
discontinuous presentation which is the pure transcendence of love.
As discontinuous presentation in each presence, in each hic et nunc
love thereby makes each hic et nunc unconditionally transcend itself,
and makes each hic et nunc eternal, paradisiacal, redemptive, happy,
joyous. Love’s joyous presentation in its loving jointure, in its ever
renewed constellation at each hic et nunc cannot be understood on the
basis of the reductive totalization of the metaphysics of the subject,
but rather as unconditional free giving itself as unity of dualities,
as loving ‘belonging-together’ rather than belonging-together’, as
differential principle of unity. Schelling writes,
This is the secret of love, that it unites such beings as could each
exist in itself, and nonetheless neither is nor can be without the other.
Therefore as duality comes to be in the groundless, there also comes
to be love, which combines the existent (Ideal) with the basis of
existence. (Ibid., p.89).
Love’s differential unity, since it is more ancient than anything, which

is there even before good and evil, is not an arrival as mere consequent
to evil, but rather otherwise. The difference between event and evil
is not just that of the inversion of the principles. It is more radical
than that. While evil borrows its appearance of being from event, the
event does not need to borrow its existent character from evil. Event
is rather that it frees what is still positive in evil and gives it to the
unconditional affirmation of another inauguration, since the event
of freedom is none other than the principle of inauguration. In this
manner the particular Will is transfigured into love; or, rather love
appropriates it and redeems it. If philosophy arises out of freedom,

it is insofar as philosophy is already ‘love of wisdom’ (Philo-Sophia).
As such philosophy always carries when it is not reduced to totalizing
metaphysics, the most ancient promise of a redemptive, messianic
fulfilment. There is no such thing as ‘philosophy of freedom’, for
philosophy is already the gift that arises freely, the gift of thinking
itself. The task of thinking is to listen to this promise in the face of
various totalizing attempts of metaphysics so as to abandon thinking
to its freedom itself.
§ The Abyss of Human Freedom
This chapter attempts to examine Heidegger’s dealing with the

question of freedom in his lecture course on The Essence of Human
Freedom. Taking Heidegger’s destructive reading of Kant as point of
departure, the chapter in a Heideggerian manner attempts to think
freedom in a more originary manner: not as man’s property, but the
unconditional opening, or possibility of existence itself as such. In
this sense freedom is the event of the possibility of existence itself
which breaks through in man who is essentially finite and mortal.
Man grounded in this manner in freedom is open to the ground
of his own existence in so far as he is the ‘most finite of all being’.
Finitude is not an impossibility of freedom but the possibility of
existence itself. Freedom is no longer thought here as man’s will to
determine itself on its own ground, but freedom as the groundless site
of history’s inauguration and is irreducible to any causality, whether
transcendental causality or practical causality of Kantian type. As the
groundless condition of the mortal’s event of existence, freedom is
not one question of amongst others but the question of finitude itself
out of which existence erupts. This event of freedom, understood, is
the event of leap from the grounding principle of reason, even if it is
practical reason and the principle of causality to the un-groundable
event of inauguration of finite history itself.
*
Human freedom now no longer means freedom as a property of man,
but man as a possibility of freedom. Human freedom is the freedom
that breaks through in man and takes him up into itself, making man
possible. If freedom is the ground of the possibility of understanding

being in its whole breath and fullness, then man, as grounded in his
existence upon and in this freedom is the site where beings in the
whole become revealed, i.e. he is that particular being through which
being as such announce themselves.
Heidegger (2005, pp. 94-95)
The No-Thing of Freedom and the Finitude of Man

Any attempt to think freedom essentially must begin with the
spacing, or opening that is opened by the works of Heidegger.
Free from the systemic task of freedom—that means, freedom
understood as the ideal of reason, of ground and foundation of
being (that is, from onto-theology of any type), or freedom in its
own specific, non-phenomenal causality irreducible to any cognitive
or conceptual determination, or even as free will of the ‘human’ (as
if freedom were man’s property)—Heidegger’ deconstruction of the
dominant metaphysics of subjectivity and foundation has freed,
released, opened the space of freedom to that which first of all opens,
manifests, reveals, un-conceals the world and the entirety of existence
to the mortals on the basis of his essential finitude, that means, on
the basis of a non-basis or the groundlessness. For Heidegger freedom
is no longer reason’s self-grounding act or self-unifying act on the basis of
the metaphysics of subjectivity, but rather is the event of existence as such.
The facticity of existence itself is nothing else but arises out of the
ground of the facticity of freedom itself: freedom’s existence is first of
all a fact. This facticity concerns Dasein’s free open-ness towards
its own abyss, to its own nothingness, to its own impossibility and
groundlessness, towards the event of closure that at once releases
this closure to its impossibility, namely, its inalienable finitude.
Therefore for Dasein, as Heidegger recounts in Being and Time, death
always appears as an unenclosed futurity even at the moment of its
imminent arrival, insofar as it presents itself as, or appears itself as
impossibility, as no-thing, as non-phenomenal arriving, a non-present
presentation, precisely because death presents itself purely without
reserve. If the existentiality of Dasein’s existence concerns, not so
much with any ‘given presence’ (Vorhandenheit) but with the event
of a non-phenomenal arriving, then this free opening is none but the
The Abyss of Human Freedom • 293
thought of futurity of existence, of existence’s event character, insofar

as Dasein’s existence is already always a ‘to come’, understanding this
coming in the infinitude of its verbal resonance, and not in the manner
of Vorhandenheit, of entities ‘presently given’. Insofar as Dasein is not
to be understood as the metaphysics of subjectivity and therefore, its
essence is not the essence of acting and positing, Dasein’s no-thing is
to be distinguished from the negativity, for example, of a dialectical,
speculative nature. This non-thing is none other than no-thing of
freedom itself, of freedom’s non-apparent apparition no longer in
terms of ‘this’ or ‘that’ thing, but this coming itself.
Therefore the apparition of freedom does not occur amongst the
entities of the given world. In his lecture on What is Metaphysics?
Heidegger therefore distinguishes the Not of a nothingness from the
Not of negativity (Heidegger 1998, pp. 82-96). The manifestation
of nothing in relation to which alone freedom manifests itself to the
mortal, finite existence which is Dasein, is more originary than the
annihilation-character of the measure of negativity. This means the
abyss of freedom cannot be measured by negativity; only the originary
nothingness can measure up to freedom only so far as the essence of
this measure consists in its transcendence of all measure, or, rather, the
nothingness is already always beyond all measure. This measure is the
measure of transcendence insofar Dasein who is called upon to assume
its existence (out of its finitude) by freedom, itself is that being that
already always transcends. Taking this point from Heidegger we can
further speak of the possibility of existence itself as such—that there
is world, personality, self—only because they are the donation of the
immeasurable where the immeasurable appears itself as nothingness
without annihilating anything. The measure of transcendence—the
measure of freedom—is not something lying outside the beings
as a whole, but that which manifests itself in the appearing of the
beings as a whole in the receding of beings, in their withdrawal and
abandonment. This is only in so far as Dasein itself is not an ‘entity’
(‘presently given’), nor an object with animated freewill at disposal,
a zōo somehow got attached with bio, but because Dasein itself is
the free spacing or opening which opens itself to the Nothing where
beings as a whole manifests itself in the movement of withdrawal and
abandonment. In his What is Metaphysics? Heidegger speaks of this
holding out into the open as transcendence,
Dasein means: being held into the nothing. Holding itself out in the
nothing, Dasein is in each case already beyond beings as a whole.
Such being beyond beings we call transcendence. If in the ground of
its essence Dasein were not transcending, which now means, if it were
not in advance holding itself out into the nothing; then it could never
adopt a stance toward beings nor even toward itself.
Without the original manifestness of the nothing, no selfhood and no
freedom.
(Ibid., p.91, Italics mine in this sentence)
Freedom manifests itself on the basis of the manifestation of

nothing, which is none but the appearing of being in its withdrawal
and abandonment. Heidegger’s thought of this double, agonistic
character of revealing and receding of beings as a whole, its donation
and abandonment, makes manifest to us a deeper, far reaching,
and abyssal thinking of freedom. Freedom is that which granting
the possibility of existence, withdraws or recedes from all phenomenal
appearing. what is implicit in this text of Heidegger, the unthought in
thought is the abyssal, agonistic manifestation of freedom: that arising
of freedom out of the groundlessness of the nothing, agonistically
and in the manner of strife—between Day and Night, life and Death
that Heraclitus speaks of—that gives and withdraws, manifests and
recedes at the same time, and thereby copulating the elements in a
monstrous, agonal copulation that Hölderlin speaks of: the arising
of the wholly otherwise precisely at the moment when history pauses
absolutely; that moment which revealing, manifesting the whole of
history in an absolute presentation, reveals to us the receding of the
whole of history, and thereby yawning open the void precisely at
the moment of its accomplishment, of its plenitude and fulfilment.
If freedom is nothing else but the principle of inauguration, of
inception, then freedom reveals itself here at this moment, each time
as absolutely first before everything else. History inaugurates with
freedom, granted by freedom.
The ethico-political task of thinking of our time therefore must
take the question of finitude seriously, insofar as what remains
for us the sense of ‘ethico-political’ is none but that of finitude of
itself. Our sense of the ethico-political—that means, our sense of
the world—demands that we maintain this impossible tie with the
agony and strife of freedom itself, to assume the risk that freedom
opens us to, and to assume the task of this assumption, that of the
leap from given-ness of immanence to the holding sway of being .
To minimize this wager of freedom, of freedom’s agony and strife
through various programmatic, calculative apparatus of modern
technological reason would be to deny the principle of inauguration
on the basis of which our sense of the ethico-political rests. What,
then, Heidegger’s thought has opened for us and with which we
must begin here, taking care of what is at stake in Heideggerian
thought, is this thought of freedom as event in its intrinsic relation
with the groundlessness of finitude itself. The transcendence of this
finitude is a constant, interminable wager out of which there arises
the possibility of invention of a new ethics and new politics, for what
we want to understand here by ‘politics’ as agonal manifestation of
freedom. This agonal manifestation of freedom, its irreducible strife
cannot be reducible to the dialectical oppositions of principles with
its Aufhebung.
To come to Heidegger, the thought of the care for Dasein now,
after so many years of Heidegger’s speaking of it, makes sense for
us only because it gives us the thought of a freedom free from all
immanent totalization. To understand the sense of freedom as wager
is to understand first of all our ethics and our politics itself as wager.
This is only so far as the wager of freedom is none other than freedom
as strife, as agonal manifestation of differential partitioning of forces.
As such, the question of freedom concerns the possibility of existence
itself as man’s existence who is of all beings the ‘most awesome’,
because he is the most finite of all beings. He is this possibility to
open-ness to the whole of beings only insofar as he is essentially this
being, inextricably finite and inalienably mortal. This mortal’s open-
ness to the world and to the futurity happens not out of mortal’s free
will to determine itself on its own ground, but out of a groundless
essence of freedom itself.
Causality as a Problem of Freedom

Heidegger’s lectures on The Essence of Human Freedom are his most
systematic attempt to understand the enigmatic question of freedom.
Taking Kant’s grounding of freedom as a problematic of causality
as a point of departure—in its twofold transcendental freedom and

practical freedom—Heidegger attempts to think freedom in a more
originary manner: not—freedom as a problematic of causality but
rather—causality as a problematic of freedom.
If Heideggerian attempt to think of causality as a problem of
freedom and not vice versa is taken into account, then freedom
can neither be understood merely as the principle of inauguration
that inaugurates the series of events and occurrences, and as mere
extension of causality, nor freedom be understood as practical reason
of the finite being in relation to his pure will willing itself. Freedom
would then has to be understood in a more originary manner as the
ground of the being, which is Abgrund, which means the possibility
of existence as such on the basis of which alone there may be willing
of the pure will so that this finite being determines itself as self-
determining personality. Freedom is the site where the events occur
as such in their multiple singularities, but this multiplicity of events
does not occur as temporal succession of nows. Following Heidegger,
we are no longer understanding events here as particular occurrences,
homogenous, where the relation of discontinuity between events
belongs to the causal sequence. What we want to think with
Heidegger is something that has remained not so explicitly brought
out in Heidegger himself, in so far as Heidegger’s deconstruction of
Kant’s notion of causality has remained (at least in this lecture course)
in the giving over causality to the site of freedom. What we want to
understand, taking Heidegger’s controversy with Kant as point of
departure is this radical notion of event that does not yet belong to
the temporal, relative succession of occurrences, that is no longer
the relative, sequential, accumulative, homogenous discontinuity of
occurrences that points to the ‘absolute spontaneity’ that begins with
itself only so that it does not have to regress or progress ad-infinitum.
What we want to learn from Heidegger is rather the possibility of the
thought of events that inaugurating absolutely, that means without
ground and foundation, is yet universal, which is thought no longer
as accumulative totality of present particular instances that are to
follow in their letting-follow in a temporal, causal sequence, nor as
will purely determining itself in a time before time, but the universal
that arrives each such letting follow as from an outside, not merely
regulating the sequence as a regulative principle, but de-formalizing

the sequence each time it arrives absolutely.
It is this pure arrival that we want to call event, and not occurrences
that belong to the sequential order of letting follow or just running
ahead of only because it does not adequately express the universality
of the moral law. What we want to call in the name of ‘event’,
neither belongs to the universality of the moral law and to the
universality of the dialectical-speculative history, nor to a mere
instantiation of the universality in the particular eruption of ‘now’
that follows other nows in a sequence forming a uniform procession
or progression. What we call ‘event’ is rather the de-formalization of
any such a sequential progression, which erupting in an irreducibly
singular manner, nevertheless is an inscription of universality. Such
idiomatic universality or singular universality is a disruption of
the immanence of the formal temporality which is accomplished
through visible, apparent forms of phenomenality. Such an event
is to be understood in its exemplarity. This exemplarity of the
event is the inscription of universality in the singular, where the
immanence of particulars instants of eruption forming a causal
chain is hollowed inside out, to welcome the transcendence of the
wholly other.
This thought is already implicit in Heidegger’s deconstruction of

Kant’s notion of freedom when, for example, Heidegger speaks of
freedom as the ground of the possibility of event as such, where it
would have been possible for him to distinguish at that time between
occurrences and the event of arrival. Then it would have been possible
for him to release the thought of the event of arrival from either the
particular occurrences belonging to the temporal sequence in their
letting-follow or from the irreducibility of the universal moral law
in particular instantiation of it in willing this or that. But what has
opened by Heidegger in this work on human freedom is the question
concerning the grounding of the will of man in the finitude of man,
in the Abgrund of the ground so that freedom is seen as the possibility
of existence of Dasein which is irreducible either to transcendental
freedom or to practical freedom. Instead both the transcendental
freedom and the practical freedom are to be opened up to the

Abgrund, to that the abyss of freedom which is the possibility of the
finite existence of man. Causality, as one ontological determination
of beings among others, belongs to freedom which alone is the
condition of the manifestation of beings. Heidegger could say:
Causality is, however, one ontological determination of beings among
others. Causality is grounded in freedom. The problem of causality
is a problem of freedom and not vice versa (Heidegger 2005, p. 207)
Here the inaugurating principle of freedom is no longer merely that

of inaugurating the series of sequences of occurrences in a temporal,
causal succession, nor the inaugurating a series of ethical actions as
the will that purely determines itself, but inauguration of the possibility
of the occurrence of existence as such and of the mortal who arises out of
freedom. Manifestation of beings: the event of freedom. What Heidegger
here attempts to understand is the event character of freedom which
is the manifestation of being on the basis of which alone can there
be the causality, can there be inauguration of the series of sequential
occurrences. That means freedom cannot be understood on the basis
of causality, but that what is presupposed in any causality as the
unconditioned opening and revealing of beings. The event of freedom
is no longer to be understood on the basis of ‘given presence’, or as
‘constant presence’, but coming into presence which is irreducible to
any ‘given presence’ or ‘constant presence’. Heidegger here is clear in
this point:
As a category, causality is a basic character of the being of beings.

If we consider that the being of beings is proximally comprehended
as constant presence—and this involves producedness, producing
finishing in the broad sense of actualizing—it is clear that precisely
causality, in the traditional sense of the being of beings, in common
understanding as in the traditional metaphysics, is the fundamental
category of being as being-present. If causality is a problem of freedom and
not vice versa then the problem of being in general is in itself a problem
of freedom (Ibid., pp. 205-6).
What is presupposed in the dominant, traditional metaphysical

understanding of causality is a certain determination of time as
‘given present’, as ‘constant presence’. What Heidegger here attempts
to problematize by deconstructively reading Kant’s notion of

freedom can be traced back to the concerns of Being and Time. In
Kant as in the traditional, dominant metaphysical determination of
being, being is understood on the basis of the reductive, derivative
understanding of time as ‘constant present’, as ‘given present’ which
has remained unquestioned, un-interrogated. Kant understands
freedom as a problematic of causality. This causality presupposes the
dominant, metaphysical determination of beings as ‘entities given
present’ which in turn tactically presupposes the vulgar notion of
time as ‘constant presence’ which can be categorically grasped in the
predicative determination that means apophantically. What has then
remained unthought is the event of coming itself—not this or that
coming, nor the occurrences that can be arranged in causal, which
is also temporal, succession of homogenous instants, but—that
arises groundlessly out of the abyss of freedom. The event of coming
then can no longer be understood as a conditioned arriving, but since it
occurs freely, that means unconditionally, it can never be thought on the
basis of causality. Therefore the dominant, traditional, metaphysical
understanding of event on the basis of the understanding of time as
‘constant present’ that can be arranged on a causal scale of various
attenuated, accumulative, homogenous instants (nows) is inadequate
to grasp the event of freedom that erupts incalculably, unpredictably
that brings history to a standstill. Here time would then thought in
a disjunctive simultaneity that inaugurates history itself anew which
cannot be reduced to the inauguration of new series of the causal chain
of temporal instants. Since this abyss of the event of time—which is
the event of freedom—does not present itself in any self-presence,
its unapparent apparition can only be that of an infinite coming, a
transcendence without transcendent. This transcendence of freedom is
the moment of history’s coming to presence, as if for the first time,
which defines the historicity of history, which is not the occurrences
within a causal chain of succession, or within a scale that assimilates
the sequential, periodic, attenuated, relative discontinuities, but
the moment of radical arriving when the whole sequence comes to
standstill. What we learn from Heidegger’s deconstructive reading of
the dominant metaphysical determination of freedom is this thought
of the infinite finitude of freedom as the event of pure arrival, of
history’s coming into presence to itself.
Philosophy as Strife
If philosophy is concerned not with this or that mode of ‘presently
given entities’ or, with this or that area of ‘the presently given entities’
but the coming to presence of existence itself as such, then philosophy
cannot be reduced to be one amongst other academic disciplines,
for philosophy as the unconditional thinking erupts out of no-thing
of freedom itself. From where, then, the name ‘philosophy’ is to be
derived? As if, as it were, this strange name ‘philosophy’, erupting,
occurring out of no-thing and no-ground, can only be the name of
a thinking, from such an Archimedean point, of the unnameable
and non-condition itself. Philosophy is such a state of exception in
relation to the presently given mode of existence in the world, in
such a manner that philosophy, instead of merely and only relatively
re-working the presently given mode of existence in the world, seeks
complete transformation of the world as an epochal inauguration,
arising together with the epochal break, of which Hölderlin speaks
as ‘monstrous copulation’. Philosophy, wherever it occurs, appears as
an inauguration of an entirely new relation to the world, or rather,
the world happens there, in the open site of freedom, as if for the
first time. This occurring of the world, or, lets say, the ‘worlding’
of the world from where alone we mortals derive our sense of the
world, constitutes the event of the world. This event of the ‘world
occurrence’ which inaugurates an entirely new relation to the world,
no longer merely re-working the given mode of existence, cannot
be understood as merely an event of causality, but as an event of
freedom itself, arising out of freedom, whose ungrounded condition
is freedom. While referring to Schelling’s notion of philosophy as
an event of freedom, Heidegger refers to philosophy and poetry,
wherever they occur, as ‘world occurrences’:
Where they are essential, thinking and writing poetry are a world
occurrence, and this is not only in the sense that something is
happening within the world which has significance for the world,
but also in the sense in which and through which the world itself
arises itself anew in its actual origins and rules as world. Philosophy
can never be justified by taking over and reworking the realm what
is knowable from some areas or even all areas and delivering things
that knowable from this, but only by opening more primordially the
essence of the truth of what is knowable and discoverable in general

and giving a new path and a new horizon to the relation to the beings
in general. (Heidegger 1985, p. 58)
What is thought as philosophy is what is essential in philosophy:

philosophy that welcomes the pure taking place of the world rather than
merely knowledge of the given world and as such, not being concerned
with this or that conditioned presence, welcomes the unconditional
in pure coming as such. Philosophy, since it is the work of freedom,
does not concern itself with naming the nameable, but naming the
unnameable and the un-naming the nameable. Philosophy in this
manner, again, manifests the strife of freedom: philosophy manifests
itself as agonal manifestation of the nameable and unnameable, the
condition and unconditional, joy and mourning at the same time, in
a disjunctive constellation. Philosophy as such is essentially aporetic:
not between the condition and another condition, not between a
name and another, or even less, between a concept and another
concept, but rather: between conditioned and the unconditioned,
both at once, as wager. Each time there is philosophy is there a risk, a
madness, or even impossibility, in so far as it is demanded as the task of
philosophy which arises out of freedom that, on the one hand it must
the name the unnameable, so that philosophy constantly confronts
the enigma of its own disappearing at the moment of its fulfilment
and other hand, that the unnameable must remain irreducible to
each and everything in the world that is named and predicated so
that it can welcome, unconditionally, what is not yet, and what is
pure taking place of the event. This is so far as freedom itself calls
forth as it’s other in an agonistic manner, in the manner of strife, its
opposing other, which is necessity to which it holds itself by being
separated from the other, like the elements of strife in Heraclitus.
When Schelling (1936) refers to the contradiction of necessity and
freedom, which is a higher form of contradiction than between
spirit and nature, he is alluding precisely to the highest agonistic
elements of philosophy itself: the strife between the condition and
unconditioned, the disappearance and arriving, the unapparent and
the apparition of freedom itself. This agony of strife, while animating
the movement of philosophy each time when philosophy announces
itself, remains unapparent to the eyes of the world. It is, in other
words, secret. Referring to this strife that arises out of philosophy or

philosophy itself as this strife, Heidegger says,
Philosophy is intrinsically a strife between necessity and freedom and
in that it belongs to philosophy as the highest knowledge to know
itself, it will produce from itself this strife and the question of the
system of freedom. (Ibid.)
Philosophy as the system of freedom is essentially and intrinsically
strife and in its form of strife, it articulates the strife character of the
opening of the world. In this way philosophy preserves and reserves
the essential truth of the world while opening the world to the light of
truth. That philosophy has to erupt in the midst of human existence
is not an accidental affair. It has to do with the strife character of
the existence itself and the world to which man is exposed, to which
he is revealed open, in the manner that Kierkegaard calls, in an
entirely different gesture, ‘ the wound of the negative’. Man’s essential
character lies in this pure exposure to the outside, for he is essentially
that being who is free. Or rather, because the mortal is free, he can be
the free site of exposure to the pure taking place, to the eruption of that
which is not mere apparent, but the unapparent apparition. The task
of philosophical contemplation is to preserve this truth of exposure
which is none but the truth of existence itself, and not to lose this
exposure to the conditioned self-consumption in various immanent
closures. The necessity of philosophy for human existence lies in this,
if not elsewhere. If the great Plato thinks of philosophy as anamnesis,
it is in this sense of remembrance that preserves the truth of existence
in thinking. The truth of existence, which is the Eidos or idea of
phenomenon, is its event of coming into existence which cannot be
predicated on the basis of result or finality, which cannot be thought
on the modality of the propositional structural of language but
rather as bursting forth in lightning flash when language for the first
time arrives to itself—as Idea of itself before concepts. Because this
lightning flash exposes us to the event of pure possibility, and since
this pure possibility is unconditional and free, philosophy in itself
only can arise as the free activity of the mortal’s existence in the world.
Part IV
Messianicity
§ The Commandment of Love
What consists in the commandment of love: in the love for the wholly
Other who is absolutely singular, and what this love transforms itself
to, to the love for the others who are the placeholders of Not Yet,
the neighbour who opens us to the radical futurity of a redemptive
fulfilment? Irreducible to the order of law—both the law positing and
law preserving order, the arrival of love is the event of time that opens
the seal of immemorial promise given in the immemorial past to
the absolute singularity of the event of love’s presentation and to the
radicality of the incalculable futurity, that is the coming of Messiah.
In the name of Franz Rosenzweig, this article attempts to think an
ethics of exemplarity which is love’s generosity, an exemplarity that
consists of addressing to the singularity of the event of love and that
of its immemorial promise on the one hand, and yet at the same
time that affirms the necessity of translation of this singular language
of love to the universality that is yet to come. What it demands is
the re-thinking of the sense of our ethico-political that must open
itself to the thought of a promise beyond the violence of a historical
Reason. This sense is the sense of exemplarity which is opened up in
the generosity of love, beyond the dialectic of the autochthony of the
particular and anonymity of the homogenous progress of universal
history. What consists in this commandment of love is the promise
of the messianic fulfilment beyond the violence of the order of law,
the promise that first of all opens the mortals to time and history, to
being and truth so that the messianic community, which is always to
come, may not be enclosed in the autochthony of the given people.
‘Love thy neighbour’: this commandment of love is essentially
the commandment of translation whose exemplarity consists in

the impossible double demands on the lover/beloved—that the
absolutely singularity of the event of love, in its un-translatability,
be opened to translation, to universality on the one hand, and on
the other hand, the singularity of the eventive character of love be
maintained in its un-translatability. If there remains for us any sense
of the ethico-political, when wide spread horror at annihilation of
sense is the prominent mood today, then this sense consists in this
exemplarity of love’s ethical commandment and in the irreducibility
of the aporia of translation, which, as we shall see here, is the aporia
of our ethico-political today.
*
It [redemption] bursts open every space and in this way it annuls
time.
—Franz Rosenzweig (2005, p. 394)
Exemplarity of Translation
In his seminar on Onto-Theology of National Humanism Jacques
Derrida (1992a)dwells extensively on a question that appears to me
the concentration and intensity of his philosophical questioning as
such: how to think, on the one hand, of the absolute singularity
of the idiomatic which as such is untranslatable, irreducible to
anything like the order of universality and translatability, and on
the other hand, without renouncing the universal aspiration which
is the passion of philosophy itself, so that there be translation of
the absolute singularity of the event into the language of new
cosmopolitanism beyond all immanent closures of particularistic,
parochial claims of autochthonous community, people, nations
etc. No doubt, such a community to come—since it is not yet
given—would be exemplary1 in the messianic sense of ‘messianicity
without messianism’ (Derrida 1998, p. 68), an idea of exemplarity
that Derrida has attempted to develop in his later so called ‘ethico-
political’ works. The idea of a ‘messianicity without messianism’ is,
in this sense, an exemplary thought in the sense that it attempts at
an inscription of the transcendence of universality in each idiomatic
and singular, and opening up each singularity and idiomatic beyond
The Commandment of Love • 307
any autochthonous claims to the unconditional, which is the radical

opening to the pure event of future. Therefore Derrida’s ‘messianicity
without messianism’ is not reducible to any system of eschatology
or theological messianism in the sense of belonging to a particular
dogmatic system of thought, but an attempt to think in an exemplary
manner in the name of an uncommon sense of messianicity a more
originary (non) phenomenon of Eschatos: that is, the extremity of
futurity as a site of pure arrival (l’avenir) which is always to come,
precisely because it may even come today, at this moment, hic et nunc.
If the violence of the historical reason—and not merely that but
also the possibility of radical evil—arises in the autochthonous claims
of the particular, whether in the name of a particular community,
nation or other identities, attempting to assume thereby the
transcendence of the universal, then it would necessitate, beyond
such autochthony, the exemplary task of a ‘messianicity without
messianism’. For Derrida, such a task is inseparable from exemplarity
of the act of translation: that of the demand to be faithful to the
absolute singularity of the event in its un-translatability, and yet
without renouncing the task of translation, to give the task of
universalizing the singular and idiomatic as such; on the one hand,
to address the specificity of the particular history and the idiomatic
character of the cultural mode of being, and yet, so as not merely
to be enclosed in the immanence of linguistic, cultural or historical
relativism, not to renounce the task of thinking a transcendental
history or language, to what the passion of philosophy always aspires
in a very exemplary manner, where philosophy itself is transformed
to its own unforeseeable futurity, that of welcoming the others who
are always to come. In his early works, Derrida attempts to think the
question of exemplarit0pas the question of iterability: differance and
the unforeseeable eruption of the absolutely new and the other in act
of repetition so that repetition, like the act of translation, is never
mimetic reproduction of anything like given but the condition of
opening to the Eschatos of the future in the heart of presence which
is always non-self-identical and non-contemporaneous with itself.
Reflecting on this question Derrida says later in an interview,
This expression (‘une fois pour toutes’) states in a highly economical
way the singular event and the irreversibility of what or who only
comes about or come along once, and is repeated no more. But at the
same time it opens up onto all the metonymical substitutions that

would take it somewhere else. The unprecedented arises, whether we
like it or not, in the multiplicity of repetitions. That is what puts on
hold the naive oppositions between tradition and renewal, or memory
and future, or reform and revolution. The logic of iterability wrecks
in advance the certainties of all sorts of discourses, philosophies,
ideologies... (Derrida 2005, pp. 136-37).
The logic of iterability is the logic of exemplarity that un-works in
advance the oppositions between the irreducible singularity of the
idiomatic on the one hand, and on the other hand the universality
in the ‘uncommon’ sense. It consists of ‘the irreplaceable inscription
of the universal in the singular’ which is ‘the unique testimony to the
human essence and to what is proper to man’ (Derrida 1992b). For
Derrida this logic of exemplarity is inseparable from that of ethical
responsibility: that is, welcoming the event of future that is always
an ‘yet to come’ beyond the autochthonous claims of all sorts of self-
consuming immanent politics without, however, disclaiming that
irreducible element of the idiomatic that takes place only once (une
fois) without repetition.
Such a messianic thought of exemplarity or such an exemplary
thought of the messianic that is concerned with the opening of
the verbal resonance of temporality beyond the autochthony
of immanent self-presence to the event of pure future and to the
immemoriality of the past is essentially a question of promise and
redemptive fulfilment. Only in this way the thought of messianicity
that welcomes the incalculability of the advent of eternity in the
midst of time can radically deconstruct the violence of historical
reason’s claim to totality and immanence. Here we shall take up Franz
Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption and some of his other shorter
philosophical and theological essays to show how Rosenzweig’s
notions of immemoriality of promise and its redemptive fulfilment
that consummates history is essentially concerned with the question
of exemplarity that seeks radically to deconstruct the violence of what
he calls ‘the messianic politics’ of the world. Here Rosenzweig takes
up the biblical commandment of love, in the name of an exemplary
universality, to open up ‘the messianic politics’ of the world to the
kingdom to come which is as such always to come, and nevertheless
may arrive just now, today or tomorrow. This exemplarity of
love consists in its infinite act of translation of the extremity of

the immemoriality of the past to Eschatos of the last where alone
originates the pure future. The commandment of love here is, more
of an event of temporality that revelation opens human existence
to its redemptive fulfilment than that of ‘facts’ of existence that can
be cognitively grasped and thematized by the acts of indication and
intentions constituting the totality of knowledge. For Rosenzweig
this inextricable facticity of human existence—that is opened by
the event of revelation to its redemptive fulfilment in the Eschatos of
pure future that may come today—makes existence irreducible to the
reductive totalization of a theodicy of history. If such a theodicy of
history constitutes the ‘messianic politics’ of the world, and reducing
messianic intensity of existence to the immanence of fate, it would
then be necessary to welcome the transcendence of the pure arrival
which as such is without fate, without goal and that is not completely
determined by the intentions of human acts. For Rosenzweig such
an intensity of existence that exposes it to the fateless order of the
messianic transcendence reveals itself in the commandment of love
as pure event that alone is able to strive against the power of death
that seeks to enclose the immemoriality of promise in the immanent
order of fate.
It is with this exemplarity of love that we are concerned here, an
exemplarity that is inseparable from the question of the translation
of promise into its fateless messianic fulfilment arriving from an
extremity of an Eschatos. The event of love here appears to be the
exemplary (non)phenomenon of existence par-excellence. To exist, it
so appears from Rosenzweig’s text, is to be exposed to this event of love
that infinitely translates us and transports us to that phenomenon of
transcendence which cannot be enclosed within the immanent order
of a theodicy of history. If to release this event of transcendence from
the immanent order of fate with which the theodicy of history curves
back into itself as in a circle is the highest task of existence today, then
this task adheres itself in this act of love that arrives as commandment
and not as the order of law. If that is so, then the act of translation
is to be understood less as an intentional act of transmission of a
given knowledge or memory that is oriented by a determinable order
of telos and fulfilled in an immanent historical consummation. It
is rather to be understood as an infinite task of translation of an
immemorial promise that has never originated in the intentional act

and can never appear in the determinable movement of a telos; its
consummation is never immanent to the historically realized Eschatos
but an incalculable consummation that consummates history itself.
Translation is essentially a redemptive, messianic task orienting our
history to its fulfilment in a pure language which for Benjamin, as
we shall see later, is ‘the language of truth’. This ‘language of truth’
never arises in the intentional act of transmission of given element
of history or tradition. It arrives as wholly unforeseen eruption of
something entirely new and radically other that alone consummates
history. It is in this sense the task of translation is exemplary. But we
shall come to Benjamin’s exemplary task of translation little later.
Let’s come back to Rosenzweig’s question of love.
For Rosenzweig, as for Benjamin, the task of translation is
essentially bound up with the messianic conception of redemption
which as such, beyond the violence of historical reason, constitutes
the condition of possibility of opening up what is unforeseeable
eruption of the radically new. For Rosenzweig such a task is essentially
existential in so far as existence—which is irreducibly verbal and
irreducibly singular—is opened by the generosity and exuberance
of love. It is this generosity and exuberance of love that enables the
translation of eternity in time, of an unforeseeable tomorrow to erupt
here and now so that the immemorial promise of the immemorial
past is not remained sealed in the dark abyss of the past but that can
be eternally renewed in each here and now so that through this act of
renewal of love’s pure event of presentation the immemorial promise
can be open to its fulfilment in a futurity which is always to come.
If this interpretation of Rosenzweig is accepted, albeit at this initial
moment, then love appears to be the event of exposure of existence
to eternity that wounds it, that bursts open the immanent closure
of self-presence—to the immemoriality of the promise (given in the
immemoriality of a past) on the one hand and to the incalculable,
infinite, unforeseeable transcendence of pure futurity on the other
hand. Love here appears to be an infinite act of translation, always
passing through the infinite threshold of the event of time—that is, its
pure presentation that is renewed each moment—that translates the
singularity of the event of promise into the universality of a messianic
community which is yet to come, a coming community where the
singularities are not immersed or absorbed into the ‘common’, into

some kind of universality of an ‘essence’ or ‘genus’. Love’s exemplarity
is not the translation, one that is reductively totalized, of particularity
(which is seen as mere instantiation of the universality of ‘essence’
and ‘genus’) into the faceless, anonymous, indifferent universality
through the acts of negativity (of the metaphysics of the Subject). It
is rather an infinite translation of promise that immemorially, already
always founds us, and opens us to truth and time for the first time
before any first, in an already always whose dark abyss no apophantic
act of the Subject’s Parousia can trace back to, and which through the
eternal renewal in each here and now opens us to the extremity of
future coming towards us that cannot be calculated beforehand, for
it has already always been future. This futurity—which is also in a
certain sense eternity for us—must already always have been opened
by the promise in that immemorial past. Only in this sense, there can
be futurity in the extreme sense of the eschatological intensity, that
of, the coming of the Messiah.
The Aporia of Love

What consists in the commandment of love: ‘love thy neighbour’? in
the love for the Other who is absolutely singular, the wholly Other
and what this love transforms itself to, to the love for the others who
are the placeholders of Not Yet, the neighbour who opens the door for
us, unhinges the seal of presence to the radical futurity of a redemptive
fulfilment, which is the futurity of a coming community? Is not this
door the threshold—at the limit between exteriority and interiority,
between the ‘own-most’ or ‘innermost’ and the ‘foreign’, the other—
that translation passes through and never ceases to pass through as
the act of hospitality, welcoming the wholly other to arrive here and
now, the eternity to come today, not today that I inhabit as owner of
a dwelling, but a today which is any today and yet each time singular
that cannot be calculated beforehand? In that sense, the neighbour
is anyone and yet absolutely singular, irreducible to all attributes and is
absolved from genus: to speak with Emmanuel Levinas for whom the
proximity of this ‘anyone’ of the neighbour who first comes to pass
by is precisely for that matter the other of ‘exclusive singularity’,
Absolving himself from all essence, all genus, all resemblance, the
neighbour, the first one on the scene, concerns me for the first time….
in a contingency that excludes the prior. Not coming to confirm
any signalling made in advance, outside of everything, the a prior,
the neighbour concerns me with his exclusive singularity without
appearing … (Levinas 1991, p. 86).
In the commandment: ‘love thy neighbour’, it is not the particular
entity that is mere instantiation of the genus or the empty universality
of essence that is being addressed. The neighbour—who is anyone and
yet singular and each time unlike anyone—is the exemplarity of the
example here: as if the heart of love is divided here—between anyone
and unlike anyone, absolutely unlike anyone, exclusively singular—
and yet in this division of the heart, in this incommensurability
and non-contemporaneity within the heart of heart there arrives
the commandment, love’s commandment which itself is absolutely
singular (since it is irreducible to the order of generality that
constitutes the order of law) on the one hand, and yet universal,
since it is addressed to anyone, anyone who ‘first comes to the scene’,
to love the neighbour. Love’s commandment demands from the
one that the division of the heart of love may remain irreducibly
wounded, exposed, torn open by this division, and yet on the other
hand, the commandment consists of obliging a response, of eliciting
a response from each one of us, and yet each one absolutely singularly
and from ‘me’ before everyone, wholly from me and therefore without
division of my heart, a whole and complete response: ‘here I am’.
For such a response to arrive— ‘here I am’ to the commandment of
love: ‘love thy neighbour’—my response to the other must be wholly
and exclusively singular: there must not be indecisiveness on ‘my’
part, for I am already always summoned by love’s commandment,
and moreover I cannot assume a certain amount to time which
assumption of a decision would require. I don’t have time; I must
respond absolutely now with utmost urgency, without delay and
without procrastination. Later reading Rosenzweig we shall attempt
to articulate this eventive character of temporality that is pure
moment of presentation that makes response to the commandment
of love irreducible to the immanent order of indication or statement,
of intention and thematizing knowledge. love’s commandment: ‘love
thy neighbour’ is neither a statement nor explanation to which I
could have responded posteriori, namely, taking ‘my’ time, evaluating

what at stake in love’s commandment, and what it demands of me.
Love’s commandment is rather an non-economic event that addresses
‘me’ here and now, at this moment and at this place, individuating
and isolating myself, alienating me from the rest of the world. Such
must be the response from ‘me’ that must be immediate, urgent and
that cries loud here: ‘here I am’.
Strange is the commandment or demand of love: it divides the
heart—each one and everyone’s heart—and yet calls forth this
division to give a wholly singular, indivisible, univocal response here
and now, a response for that matter is wholly indivisible, complete
in-itself, like a silence that completes language itself. At the same
time, that means, at the presencing of presence where the event of love
announces itself, this presencing is divided now and here. There is
always a tomorrow today—a hope contra and beyond all hope—
and there is always a today which is wholly otherwise than ‘today’.
Translation is this infinite passing through this division, this
threshold between a today and a tomorrow, time and eternity where
love itself traverses and never ceases to traverse. In this traversal and
through this act of renewal, love bears witness the promise of the
immemorial past which is always yet to be fulfilled, a tomorrow that
may suddenly, incalculably, unforeseeably erupt today, even at this
moment when I am least prepared. For tomorrow to advent today,
for eternity to come here and now, this coming itself must not be
conditioned by the logic of auto-generation of instants interminably
following other instants in the manner of being able to be arranged
on the indifferent, homogenous, vacant scale of time. The act of
translation is infinite, since it always exposes us to what is irreducibly
un-translatable, to what is always to come and the not yet, but that
this eternity of translation may complete itself here and now, or today:
this messianic advent of translation can only be thought if tomorrow
may arrive today, only if the universal ‘kinship’ or ‘harmony’ of
languages, as Benjamin says (Benjamin 1996b., pp. 253-63), may be
able to inscribe itself in the singularity of the event that exists as if
without past and without future. For the absolute singularity of the
promise which is untranslatable—for it has never arrived in time,
for it has already always arrived in a time immemorial—not to be
enclosed in the dark seal of an immemorial past, this event of promise
must be open to time, to history, to truth. In other words, it must be

translated and renewed each time and every time; it must be exposed
to the wound of futurity. It is only on this basis eternity may arrive
today which never arrives in a today that is exhausted or saturated in
its merely following other todays in the indifferent, vacant manner of
linear, accumulative progression. Love’s commandment conjures up
different times at the same time, or two responses at the same time:
not just two different instants belonging to the same, indifferent,
homogenous scale of temporality, but the differance between eternity
and time, between tomorrow which is always to come and a today
which never ceases to arrive here and now when tomorrow may
momentarily advent as in a lightning flash and thereby arresting or
halting the continuity of the entirety of history coming to standstill.
The whole intensity of Jacques Derrida’s work seems to me
to lie in the articulation of what seems to be a fundamental problem-
atic in Rosenzweig’s philosophy as well, which is: the welcoming of
the event of transcendence ‘to come’ today conjures up an impossible
and abyssal experience of incommensurability of temporalities that
does not allow itself to be thought on the basis of an immanent order
of a theodicy of history, an impossibility that on the one hand wrecks
in advance the possibility of a messianic fulfilment on the basis of a
cumulative, quantitative progression of a telos, and yet, at the same
time, is the condition of arrival of a messianic consummation of his-
tory by releasing the event to come from the immanent order of the
homogenous scale of cumulative time of history.
Revelation of Love
1. Constellation of Elements
It is in this context of love’s commandment shall we discuss today

Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption. Franz Rosenzweig’s
The Star of Redemption begins with a radical deconstruction of
the systemic metaphysics of logos. This dominant metaphysics
of logos—Rosenzweig calls it ‘the philosophy of All’—of which
Rosenzweig takes Hegel’s speculative philosophy to be the uttermost
accomplishment is, according to Rosenzweig, a disavowal of the
place of mortality for the individual’s existence. It willingly forecloses

the undeniable, imminent facticity of finitude in mortal’s existence,
for this facticity is the element—which no phenomenology of visible
forms can adequately grasp on the basis of its categorical cognition—
it is this element that isolates the individual in his/her individuality
from any possibility of including it within the universality of genus.
Death appears to be the element or phenomenon which is like an
indigestible remainder of the system that cannot be formalized or
recounted —, death which is not a phenomenon of a telos with
which the destiny of existence curves back into itself, like a circle,
but a facticity that first of all opens thought to its way, to its futurity
which is incalculable, unforeseeable and that, because of its radical
incalculability and purity of its eventive character, does not allow
itself to be curved back into the geometric figure of being or of logos
as circle. What Rosenzweig is concerned above all is the event of being
that cannot be enclosed within the philosophical discourse of totality.
If with this deconstruction of the ‘the philosophy of All’ The Star
of Redemption begins, it is only towards its end the de-formalization
of the geometric figure of the circle of being’s curvature— ‘the
intrigue of being’ as Levinas says from which, one can say, an
intrigue of logos is inseparable (the tradition of ‘the intrigue of being’
that spreads its sovereignty from ‘Ionia to Jena’)—can be explicitly
elaborated. It is only here and now when it has been shown that
creation, revelation and redemption—in relation to God, Man and
World—are elements of reality that has arisen from infinitude and
opening to an infinitude that does not curve back into itself, it is here
that the notion of configuration—which is a deformalization of the
mathematical-geometrical figure of the circle—may be introduced.
This mathematical-geometrical figure of the circle is, as we know, the
speculative figure of the ontology of the historical reason that excludes
the event of being. It is only now when it has been shown that ‘the
absolute magnitude’ of these elements can at best be seen as the
limit-concept of mathematical-geometrical idea where the singularity
of the points do not form the homogeneity of the geometric-
mathematical line curving back into itself, the configuration of the
Star of redemption can be introduced where ‘the new unity’ is not a
totality but an assemblage of paths, each one inaugurating a meta-
historical path towards an infinity of the future. This infinity is not
the infinity of the historical reason that cumulatively moves towards

its telos that will not come today, but at the end of the line curving
back to its origin. It is however a ‘good infinity’ in so far as the Star
is still a configuration. hyperbola of this ‘good infinity’ cannot be the
realization of the mathematical idea, but rather ‘the good infinity’ of
the absolute magnitude according to a ‘supra-mathematical principle’,
the principle for which—unlike the idealist philosophy of totality—
the unity is not here the presupposition but a result that ‘exists only
in becoming’ (Rosenzweig 2005, p. 276). Rosenzweig writes,
For configuration is differentiated from figure by the fact that certainly

the configuration could be composed of mathematical figures.
Yet that in truth its composition did not take place according to a
mathematical rule, but according to a supra-mathematical principle;
here the thought furnished the principle of characterizing the
connections of the elementary points as symbols of a real happening
instead of any realizations of a mathematic idea.(Ibid., p. 275).
The deformalization of the geometric-mathematical figuration of the

curvature—which demands de-structuration of the circle of the logos
of being—is inseparable from Rosenzweig’s de-formalization of the
historical time that is, constituted of discreet unites as instants, forms
a homogenous line curving back into itself where the end touches
and completes the beginning, where each discreet, additive unite
as the instant flees away, irrevocably, with the speed of an arrow.
The messianic intensity with which the arrival of the Messiah who
consummates history is awaited, on the other hand—not allowing
itself to be thought on the basis of speculative-historical time curving
back into itself—is a radical de-formalization of the totality of the
discreet unites of the instants additively constituting the cumulative,
homogenous line of determinable historical progress. The messianic
intensity whose de-formalization of the fabric of time is a violent
disruption, therefore, appears to be the order, or rather disorder of
a ‘perhaps’. ‘Eternity’, says Rosenzweig, ‘must be hastened, it must
always be capable of coming as early as ‘today’; only through it is
it eternity’ (Ibid., p. 306). In order for the eternity to come today,
this absolute magnitude must de-formalize the quantitative infinite
made up of discreet unite of instants, additive and cumulative2.
Configuration for Rosenzweig is not a figure of a quantitative
infinitude but a ‘secret’ pre-history that invisibly operates whose

‘secret’ character constitutes its messianic dimension, contra all
historical determination and calculation, contra all the historical,
autochthonous aspiration of the messianic politics.
2. Fate
It is in this configuration of ‘elements’ that Rosenzweig articulates the

unfolding of the event of revelation as the commandment of love.
Irreducible to the immanent order of the theodicy of history, there
is a messianic dimension that passes through history like a secret
password that constitutes a text of so many disruptive moments of
intensities which the intentional act of historical deciphering cannot
reveal. These intensities are not inscription or codification of law that
arises from the positing power of the intentional act that continually
and progressively—in so far as it is emptied of all content—manifests
itself as history, orienting the historical movement irresistibly to its
telos. if is from this pure power of positing where discreet unites
of instants appear as what Benjamin calls ‘the homogenous empty
time’ (1977, p. 258) that history derives the power of its judgement
character in the profane world, the intensity of messianic advent
on the other hand, in so far as this intensity is irreducible to the
intentional act of law-positing judgement, is a judgement upon
history. This judgement upon history arrives in the name of a fidelity
to an immemorial promise, ethical, of a redemptive fulfilment.
If that is so, then the violence of the historical reason cannot be
justified within the immanence of a historical telos: it demands an
ethical judgement transcending the historical Reason. It is towards
this ethical judgement that arrives as messianic intensity of justice,
without telos—for it may arrive today: it is in this light the question
of exemplarity and love as commandment must be understood.
Therefore Rosenzweig in his The Star of Redemption, like Walter
Benjamin, evokes a wholly otherwise notion of history where the
intensity of the event of revelation does not so much assume the
intentional act of pure law-positing that continually, progressively
manifests as the power of judgement, but rather as commandment
of love, irreducible to law, whose fullness and exuberance of its
pure presencing and pure eruption cannot be thought on the basis
of a temporal and historical determination that is homogenous and

emptied of all content. Therefore for Rosenzweig the intensity and the
exuberance of the commandment of love can only be a translation of
the immemorial promise which is not homogenous and continuous
with settled, sedimented content of given tradition, but disruptive,
discontinuous and infidel in the name of a more originary fidelity
whose secret password is not judgement and law that constitutes the
messianic politics of the world and of history and the autochthonous
aspirations of particular communities, but that of welcoming the
exemplary universality of redemption to which all communities
aspire. Yet this possibility of the incalculable eruption of universal
redemption in the midst of time presupposes that there is an essential
‘kinship’ or ‘harmony’ of all communities to which all communities
and each community in a singular manner aspires. Beyond the
claims of universality by autochthonous particular communities that
constitutes ‘the messianic’ politics, the messianic idea of redemption
is an exemplary idea of universality which is inseparable from the task
of translation. It is here a discussion of Walter Benjamin’s thought of
translation will be most helpful.
In The Task of the Translator (1996b, pp. 253-63) Benjamin attempts
to think of such an exemplary idea of universality, given in the task of
translation, as the messianic end of language. The possibility of this
redemptive, paradisiacal fulfilment of language which for Benjamin
is Adamic language of naming, is based on a ‘suprahistorical kinship
between languages [that] consists in this: in every one of them
as a whole, one and the same thing is meant’ (Ibid., p.257). This
universality of the messianic end of fulfilment, of the fulfilment of
utopian potentialities is not dialectical sublation of singularities of
each language into homogenous consummation of universal history
in so far as the irreducible singularity of each language resists such
a reductive translation as transmission of a communicable content.
There always remains something like a remnant of un-translatability in
each language that constitutes the singularity of each language. While
such remnant of un-translatability makes translation—understood
as translation of a communicable content—into the homogenous
consummation of universal history impossible, it precisely thereby
opens to the possibility of translation in an exemplary sense that is
directed to the messianic realization of the originary, immemorial
promise that consummates history itself, not by the transmission of

a communicable content, but rather as complementation by ‘the way
of meaning it’. the exemplary universality toward the messianic end of
which the task of translation aspires is not the communicative aspect
of language, that is ‘what is meant’, but the symbolizing capacity
of language, that is, ‘by the way of meaning it’. Here co-relative of
Benjamin’s distinction between the intention of ‘what is meant’ and
‘the way of meaning it’ is the distinction between the communicative
aspect of language and the symbolic aspect. While the former exists
‘only in the finite product of language’, the latter does so ‘in the
evolving of the languages themselves’ towards the pure language,
which is the messianic end of all language by ‘the way of meaning it’.
The task of translation for Benjamin consists in the regaining of this
pure language, the original, immemorial ‘language of truth’ through
perpetual renewal, or through perpetual creation of the ever new
‘until the messianic end of their history’ (Ibid.). This pure language
where lies the ultimate essence of all languages is now, being released
from all transmission of the communicable content, ‘no means or
expresses anything but is, as expressionless and creative Word, that
which is meant in all languages’ (Ibid., p. 261).
Such a pure language which, now being released from the
instrumental, functional character of transmitting a communicable
content, is a language which, meaning or expressing nothing but
itself, appears as itself in its purity: language that is given as originary
promise in an immemorial past. This pure language is for Rosenzweig
silence which is not a reticence or defiance of the tragic hero, or the
mute suffering of nature, but the language of redemption where
language completes itself, that is, it universalizes itself in an exemplary
manner. Such universality is the restitution of the immemorial
promise through ever renewed invention of the new, which is never a
mimetic reproduction of the given, but ever new invention that opens
time to the incalculable eruption of the messianic end of history
itself. For Rosenzweig and also for Benjamin such a possibility of
ever renewing invention of the new is essentially related to the event
of revelation that opens up language beyond its medium character of
communication to the pure language of truth.
Such an ever renewed invention of the new that is immersed only in
the ever new presentation of ‘now’ moment, irreducibly singular each
time is also an infidelity to the past or future. For Rosenzweig such is

the event of revelation that love tears open existent from the closure
of the past, and exposes it to the ever new event of pure presentation.
For the beloved who is evoked and invoked by the commandment of
love, existence is wholly presencing, oblivious of past and future. This
infidelity alone releases the event of love from the order of creation
sealed in the past, and also from the order of the violence of law
that presupposes its duration in the future. Only in its infidelity, love
can appear as pure event, as irreducible act of renewal that opens
time beyond the thematizing order of statement and beyond the
order of law-positing violence. Without this infidelity—which is also
the infidelity of translation in that it never mimetically reproduces
the given tradition—to the sedimented past in the name of a more
originary fidelity, the immemorial promise assumes the character of
fate (Moira) that is then sealed off from all messianic realization in
here and now; it then sinks into the immanence of the dark abyss
of the past, and assumes various closures of necessity. To wrest the
immemorial promise from such immanent closures with which death
seals it off requires a work of translation equally powerful as death. It
must be able to struggle against death, against death’s imminence and
necessity, to release the immemorial promise from the character of
fate. Such is the strife of love against death which is also translation of
the immemorial promise in the ever renewing presence here and now.
It is now we can properly begin to read Rosenzweig, at that moment
where Rosenzweig himself begins: with the proverb that says ‘love as
strong as death’.
3. Eruption and Presencing
The task of translation is essentially a messianic task whose secret

password is not history but redemption. Its password is given
as promise immemorially, in an already always of a past that has
never been a phenomenon of history’s immanent Parousia. It is not
the intentional act of the pure power of positing (that posits the
judgement of history as the source of the meaning of events) but an
immemorial promise that first of all opens the world, time and truth,
and its consummation alone can assume the intensity of justice.
Rosenzweig calls this originary opening of the world, the origin
that no memory can ever retrieve and hence can only be a past, an
immemorial past: creation. Here the influence of Schelling’s later work
on Rosenzweig is remarkable. In Schelling (2000) a logic of origin is
thought in relation a past (gewesen) that is already always, a beginning
before any beginning that has receded into the dark abyss of past that
is forever unfathomable, an ‘irreducible remainder’ that cannot be
grounded in the historical reason, or in the theodicy of history. For
Rosenzweig, the abyss of this origin that first of all opens the world
is also the origin of promise. The promise is given already always,
groundlessly, once and for all, in the manner that is absolutely singular
and absolutely heterogeneous in relation to the immanent becoming
of the theodicy of history. Yet that which has occurred only once and
for all, as that singular event that has groundlessly erupted, and that
can never be repeated once again is the secret password of a messianic
history that must be passed on and be eternalized and universalized.
Here continuity of the secret password does not function like the
Hypokeimenon of the Subject of the predicative-speculative universal
history; it is rather the continuity of the immemorial promise that
occurs throughout that other history in an exemplary fashion in the
act of translation that means, through the acts of supplementation
and complementation.
The translation of the absolute singularity of the event of promise is

given only once, and that can never be repeated into the language of
universal, or rather it can only be repeated each time singularly, each
time anew, that means, in an act of infidelity to the tradition that
is founded by, or opened by the immemorial, originary, founding
event of promise. This translation is never mimetic (understood
in a reductive sense) reproduction of the ‘original’ but only occurs
in an exemplary manner, in the act of remembrance that Walter
Benjamin associates with philosophical contemplation, which is
always the remembrance of the immemorial which is each time to
be recovered, and each time through an act that is radically new,
incalculable eruption of the something wholly other. In that way
the immanent order of historical violence, or the immanent order
of tradition based on memorial act of transmission is opened up, by
an infinite act of translation, to the intensity of a messianic justice
whose arrival cannot be anticipated in the innermost ground that
is the gathered by the memorial act of tradition, because it opens up

to a dimension of an immemorial founding event that has already
opened us to truth and to justice, beyond intention, and precisely
thereby, is beyond the order of fate. This opening to the fateless order
of justice is evoked for man by the commandment of love, in the
event of revelation, that turns itself to the affirmation of a universal
community to come, the Kingdom of God as Rosenzweig says. It is
towards this event of coming community, which nevertheless may
erupt today, despite the logic of historical reason, that the infinite
task of translation is oriented.
Here I have taken up the theme of exemplarity that Jacques Derrida

elaborated. The inscription of the universal in the singular, according
to Derrida, is never that of inscription of law in the particular where
the particular (in so far as the particular is the mere instance of
genus), through its negativity—that means, as a ‘work of death’—
passes into the anonymity of the universal foundation. Therefore,
the translation in the exemplary sense where the immemorial promise
invisibly operates throughout meta-history can be renewed only on
the basis of the eruption of the ever new event of love (understood in
the irreducible sense of its verbal resonance)—which is the work of
love—that means, only in the act of infidelity of love which knows
only presence, and none other. The event of love is a commandment
and not law, for it is oriented to the intensity of a justice which as
such is without fate and without goal.
The immemorial promise given in an originary origin must be
translated. This translation for Rosenzweig is translation of the
promise given in creation into the event of love in revelation. This
is the first demand of translation: that the absolute singularity of the
promise given in the irrecuperable past must be renewed in each here
and now, in the event of revelation and as work of love so that the
promise may not be lost in the eternal abyss of the past. Translation
that does not mimetically reproduce the originary promise but
only by the eruption of the event of the new hic et nunc, precisely
through this infidelity of impermanence, invisibly orients that
promise towards redemption of the world. The absolute singularity
of the promise whose absolute eventive character (irreducible to the
language of predicates and explication), if it is allowed to remain
in the absoluteness of singularity, acquires Moira: the fate character

of necessity that remains sealed off from becoming and movement.
Therefore it is necessary in order to open this immemorial promise
be opened to time and the world, a reversal of direction of the
promise that tends to seal itself off in the immanence of creation.
The act that would forcefully open the seal of fate where promise
is imprisoned is itself a violence, an assertion of freedom against
Moira which is an act of love irreducible to ‘law-positing’ and ‘law
preserving’ violence which for Water Benjamin (1986, pp. 277-300)
constitutes ‘the mythic violence’. The absolute singularity of the
immemorial promise is now open to the possibility of renewal in ever
new eruption and presencing, each time making itself reveal as if for
the first time. This eruption and presencing, each time absolutely new
and absolutely promising is an event of pure presencing that cannot be
explicated on the basis of predicative proposition that can arise only
belated to the event. Rosenzweig here distinguishes this event of pure
presencing that erupts as the lightning flash ‘in the blink of the eye’
from the immanent logos of historical reason which manifests itself as
in a continuous, homogenous and cumulative manner moving to a
determined telos. While here for Rosenzweig ‘the blink of the eye’—
where the revelation is the event of eruption and pure presencing—is
wholly ‘word uttered aloud’, for Benjamin this flash is ‘the dialectical
image’ which is the weak, impoverished reflection—as in a mirror—
of eternity. Rosenzweig writes,
[Revelation] can be nothing other than self negation of a merely mute
essence by a word uttered loud, the opening up of something locked,
of a silently reposing permanence by the movement of a blink of the
eye. In the illumination of such a blink of the eye there resides the force
to transform the created-being that is touched by this illumination by
turning the created ‘thing’ into the testimony of a Revelation that has
come to pass’ (Rosenzweig 2005, p. 174).
And,
It is only in this way—when it is no longer a testimony of the
revelation that has occurred in general, but the externalization of a
Revelation that occurs ‘just now’ at this moment—it is only then that
the thing steps out of the past of its essence and enters into its living
light (Ibid., p. 175).
The immemorial, eternal promise—which must always be there,

eternally opening history to its immemorial origin—now entering
into the ‘testimony of revelation’ through the act of translation which
is the event of love is also entering into infidelity, adhering in the
translation itself, only because the highest fidelity to the immemorial
promise demands the act of translation. Love must translate the
untranslatable: this infidelity of translation is for Rosenzweig the
infidelity of love, for only on the basis of infidelity eternity can be
translated in the non-permanence of the here and now, which is not
mere a particular instantiation of the universal history but ‘now’
time—of what Benjamin calls Jetztzeit—of God’s commandment
exposing the past of creation to the event of revelation. The event
of love is here a finite-infinitude—pure presencing of the eternal
here and now—not the infinitude as in Hegel that will have finitude
within it as sublated but an infinitude that exposed to and wounded
by finitude. To translate means each time the task of exposure of the
immanent order of tradition guaranteed by the unifying, internalizing,
totalizing act of memory to the event of the immemorial opening
through each time eruption of the incalculably new; it is to expose
the self-satisfaction of an immanent ground to its own unworking
only to open up the speculative tradition to its consummation by the
arrival of the messianic justice.
There is the translation of the absolute heterogeneity and singularity
of immemorial promise into the universal only on the basis of the
pure exposure to the peril of finitude. This finitude does not function
like the logic of mediation as in Hegelian logic. For Rosenzweig this
finitude is essentially the peril of love where man himself ‘dies in
becoming lover and is reborn as lover’ (Ibid., pp. 176-177). The
exemplarity of translation lies in its essential perilous character: the
profoundest fidelity to the immemorial past promise demands the deepest
infidelity of the non-permanence of eruption and pure presencing.3
The eruption and pure presencing of love that are immersed in the
ever renewing here and now as if ‘every dead yesterday and tomorrow
are one day swallowed into this triumphant today’ (Ibid., p. 178).
This makes the revelation of love an event and not an attribute.
Rosenzweig writes: ‘love is not an attribute, but event, and there
is no place in it for an attribute’ (Ibid., p. 177). Irreducible to the
conditioned order of predicates, indications and explanation where
language appears as mere medium of transmitting given content,

here language of love itself is the pure communication that in ‘the
blink of the eye’ transforms the creational aspect of the created being
into its unconditional eruption and presencing to presence, that is,
to the order of revelation. In revelation therefore nothing is really
revealed—a content that pre-determined and existed in a pre-given
form. In this sense revelation is not a mimetic reproduction of
the given original promise as a simple translation of a pre-existing
content. In the event of revelation the world now, released and
purified from its fate character, becomes wholly language, where
language appears itself in its purity where the lover calls the beloved
in her proper name. This language is not the language of indication
and explanation, of statement and predicative proposition that arises
only after the event of revelation. It is rather language itself erupts
and presences but without summoning itself fate or goal. In this fate-
less and goal-less world, everything becomes word4. Rosenzweig says,
In the world of revelation everything becomes word, and that which
cannot become so is either before or after it (Ibid., 193).
As pure eruption and presencing of language, language itself is an

event of the world that is revealed as essentially linguistic. This event
of language is prior to the language of objectivity and knowledge, of
intentionality of the communicative agent that would then enable
the codification of law. Therefore the event of language can only arise
as commandment that assumes the form of ‘I’ of the proper name,
and that can only appear in the suddenness of eruption, in ‘the blink
of the eye’.
4. The Proper Name
The readers of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit remember that

language of the proper name is essentially an exposure of oneself to
death. One who says ‘I’ exposes himself or herself thereby to the
pure power of annihilation of its sensuous immediacy. It is here the
power of the universal that now assumes the law of judgement arises
as the possibility of annihilation of the sensuous particularity, and
restitution of the universal in its place. For Rosenzweig on the other
hand, the proper name denominates that singularity that irreducibly
places itself outside the universality of genus, and that erupts, as the
pure event of language, in the revelation of the commandment of
love. As such, the proper name denominates for Rosenzweig the event
of being invoked by the commandment of love. It is this eruption
of the being that erupts in the vocative and not as nominative that
irreducibly places such a being outside the philosophical totality. This
being is not the part of the intrigue that by exposing being to death
restitutes the power of law-positing and law-preserving violence, that
is, the universal that posits itself as the power of totality. This event
of being invoked by the commandment of love and which is open to
itself, beyond the order of fate and creatureliness in the proper name,
is first of all denomination of the event that opens it to an universality
in an uncommon sense, in an exemplary sense. This universality
is the order of redemption which is a community always to come,
and therefore that cannot be understood as the order of genus or by
‘common essence’ underlined by the unity of the metaphysics of the
Subject.
The event of revelation in the commandment of love as the
eruption of the name and of language does not constitute the law of
universal history. Outside law, outside the judgement of a theodicy
of history and more originary than the order of the inscription of the
universal in the particular through the intentional act of positing,
is this event of revelation that opens the singular being bearing the
proper name to the call of love that asks this singular being: ‘where
art thou?’ the proper name for Rosenzweig is the gift of love that
arises with the event of revelation addressing the singular being to
respond to the commandment to love. The proper name is not here
the defiant ‘I’ of the tragic hero. Rosenzweig distinguishes here the
defiant ‘I’ of the tragic hero whose decline constitutes, precisely at
the utmost limit of its passivity confronting his fate, his selfication
from the ‘I’ with a proper name here whose defiance is not that of
the tragic hero of fate but that of the one who has entered the fateless
order of love, that is, the linguistic order of commandment of love
where the eruption of love’s commandment tears away the defiance
of the created being enclosed in the immanence of its creativeness.
In this order, unlike the tragic hero, man does not gain immortality
by his death, by assuming the danger of his peril; here man passes
away without fate and reborn as lover, as the one whose entire
being is immersed and absorbed in the in the event of love. The

linguistic order of the proper name consists of being called by love,
of being summoned by the commandment of love. It is the order of
evocation and vocative, and not nominative that exposes being to
transcendence: where are you? Only such a singular individual who
is now aroused to the fateless order of love can be radically open to
the messianic consummation of history arriving from the extremity
of future which is to come. Since this singular individual who is lover
is not a mere instantiation of genus5, he is irreducible to the realm of
the totality of the objects designated by concepts and that is covered
over by the indefinite and definite articles. Only he escapes the order
of violence of the historical reason.
Here the proper name of the lover steps forth, outside the
totality of the predicates, indications and explanations, as a pure
presencing, as pure event of time, as singularity of response to the call
or commandment coming from the wholly other. Proper name is
naming man himself as pure singular who is torn open, exposed and
wounded open by the call of the other. Proper name is a responding
answer which, in its singularity does not belong to the general
order of validity—that is, the intentional, positing realm of law and
cognition—an answer responding to the transcendence of the other.
Revelation is ‘a matter of invoking the name’, the name which is the
transformation of space into the site where Revelation radiates.
In the place of his general concepts ... there appears that which cannot
run and is simply called the particular, that which has no concept
and slips away from the domain which both articles, the definite and
the indefinite... The proper name which exactly not a proper name,
not a name which was given arbitrarily to man, but the name that
God himself took for him and which for this reason only—to be a
creation of the creation—properly belongs to him. To God’s question:
‘where are you?’? a man still remained a you, as a defiant, obstinate
itself ; when called by name twice, with the strongest fixity of purpose
to which one cannot remain deaf, the man, totally open, totally
unfolded, totally ready, totally—soul, now answers: ‘ I am here’.(
Rosenzweig 2005, p. 190).
If for Rosenzweig the proper name does not designate the particular
as mere instantiation of the universal, but the denomination of
that irreducible singularity outside the order of totality constituted
by general concepts and articles, then here for the first time the
question of the possibility of thinking of an exemplarity arises in
an originary manner. The thinking of exemplarity is the question
of a denomination and the verbal, irreducible to the indications
and explanations, of articles indefinite and definite. Exemplarity is
attention to this messianic intensity of denomination and verbal that
marks the event of language erupting in the presencing of revelation,
in the commandment of love. Here it is the question of language as
the event of pure presentation than that of representation that opens
the possibility of translation, oriented to the messianic ‘language of
truth’—as Benjamin used to say—of the immemorial presence to the
event of presencing and to the event of a messianic future always,
eternally to come, which for that matter may arrive even today.
5. Messianicity
Though the event of revelation opens the seal of the immemorial

presence from the dark abyss of creation and hereby translating
the mute, speechless death into the event of language that erupts
in love, the promise is not yet consummated. The world is not yet
completed, history is not yet consummated and redeemed: hence
the necessity, of one more (that means infinite) act of translation
that would transform the pure presencing of revelation into an
affirmation of the pure future, where the love between man and
God, immersed in the exuberance of the here and now, where love
does not reach beyond the plenitude of pure presencing, this love
needs to be opened up beyond presence to the eternity of the future
which is always to come. Here Rosenzweig’s messianic conception of
history, beyond dialectical closure, opens to the messianic event of
pure arrival that is truly exemplary: that is, the notion of messianic
fulfilment as consummation of history coming from an extremity of
time, from an extremity of future that translates the extremity of the
immemorial promise that passes through, as invisible, secret password
of history. Here Rosenzweig combines two different forms of utopian
fulfilment: the possibility of reactivation of the immemorial past on
the one hand, which is just as redemptive as hope in the eruption of
the radically new.
Stéphane Mosès in his The Angel of History (2009) distinguishes

these two tendencies of Jewish messianism: restorative, or
archaeological on the one hand, and utopian or eschatological on the
other hand that constitutes the ambivalence of messianism. While
the restorative messianism is concerned with the re-establishment of
the immemorial, originary promise, the eschatological messianism is
concerned with final consummation of history that can only be radical
upheaval or radical eruption of the absolutely new, heterogeneous
to all that has become, for truth exists only in this eruption of the
new, in the becoming that is never dialectical, for this eruption that
does not close itself up like the geometric figure of the logos as circle.
In his brilliant and remarkable study of the early messianic works
of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, Eric Jacobson (2003)
poses this question as the central question regarding messianism:
does the Messiah initiates or consummates history? Here Jacobson
distinguishes the messianic consummation of history from the telos
of a dialectical historical reason,
[Messianic] that is placed in relationship to creative act is an end that
harbours no worldly telos, no self-generation, no intention, no motor
of history—it is merely the inverse of beginning. Towards creation
it appears messianic, for it alone completes creation. A determinate
end, which is understood in relation to creation and constituted as
messianic, is therefore an end in redemption. (Jacobson 2003, p. 26)
The archaeological, restorative tendency of the messianic is not

incommensurable from the eschatological consummation of history.
This alone makes Rosenzweig’s messianicity—to which above remarks
are applicable—an exemplary thought, for on the basis of this alone
the fulfilment of the immemorial and original promise that initiates
history can arrive from the extremity of future, not as archè that
necessarily, in a determinate manner fulfils itself as telos in the profane
history, but incalculably, in an unforeseen manner, the logic of which
invisibly operates in history whose secret password is redemption.
This exemplarity that brings together in the Now the extremities of
messianic temporality in the act of translation that secretly passes
the immemoriality of the past promise through presencing of the
presence of revelation to the consummation of history (which may
be yet arrive here and now): such is the messianic task of translation
given in the commandment of love.
If that is so, then the commandment of love that Rosenzweig
speaks of can be understood as the commandment of translation:
translate the immemoriality of promise into its redemptive,
messianic fulfilment. Since it is the question concerning translating
the untranslatable, such a messianic demand never finds satisfaction
in the historical realization of utopia, for it speaks in the name of
an absolute that does not recognize its face in any given epochal
manifestation that arises out of historical Reason. It demands of an
arrival of an eternity here and now: a radical rupture or interruption
of the continuity that marks the telos of a historical time. How does,
then, the eternity—which is the extremity of the future—arrive here
and now? This is the question that concerns Rosenzweig in his The
Star of Redemption. For Rosenzweig such an impossible possibility,
or rather the possible impossibility is revealed in the commandment
of love. This is revealed in the fact that love is not satisfied merely
being revealed love that is immersed in the absoluteness of the pure
presencing of presence between God and man; it demands translation
in the world, in the community so that love does not merely remain
between ‘I’ and ‘You’. a step beyond the love between the two and
a step beyond the event of presencing is necessary ; a community, a
Kingdom to come, a futurity whose radicality is not that of a telos,
needs to be opened up beyond the presencing of revelation, for the
world still appears to be incomplete, unfinished, unconsummated.
The event of love is not exhausted in the love between the lover and
beloved, that of, its affirmation of opening time by breaking open
the seal of the past creation; it also demands opening up the seal of
the self, immersed in the exuberance of presencing, to the world,
unfinished, uncompleted, unconsummated: ‘The self had to emerge
from its muteness to become speaking self ’ (Rosenzweig 2005, p.
224).
‘Love thy Neighbour’ is a translation of the commandment of love
revealed in God’s question: ‘where are you?’ where God’s love turns
towards to the world, to the neighbour who is the ‘placeholder’ of
future. It is here the singularity of the pure presencing of presence
where love between man and the wholly other is revealed turns
to the universality and community which is always coming, since

it is not yet completed and not yet finished, a coming community.
Such a coming community or universality, for Rosenzweig, is not
exhausted in the predicates about the world, neither is it defined
by an ontological, ‘common’ essence that autochtonously grounds
that which constitutes the messianic politics of community, states,
etc., nor can it be thought as the general order of validity legitimized
by the a priori of a moral law. Such a world cannot be grasped by
the logical application of cognition. It is in this sense a meta-logical
world, for what Rosenzweig is concerned here with is not so much
an immanent order of necessity or a totality of objects and entities
which can be predicated by apophansis: it is rather the worlding of the
world or opening of the world that as such is not yet finished, and
not yet consummated but always to come. To turn the commandment
of love erupted in revelation to the world of the neighbour who is
absolutely absolved from genus is to turn to a world that advents
from an extremity of future. It is at once absolved from the order of
law, and the violence of immanent historical reason, as it is absolved
from the logical, categorical grasp of cognition. As such it is only an
infinite awaiting for the messianic intensity of justice that alone may
redeem the world. Rosenzweig says,
In the love of the neighbour, it is the rupture, unceasingly begun
over again of the lasting form of the character through the always
unforeseen irruption of the act of love. What this act consists of in the
particular case cannot be told in advance for precisely this reason; it
must be unforeseen; if it could be pointed out in advance, this would
not be an act of love (Ibid., p. 232).
The coming community of redemption is not the universal realization

of the historical telos with which the unfolding of the theodicy of
the profane world curves back into itself, into the immanence of the
Parousia of the historical Subject. It is rather a community that is a
singular universal, or idiomatically universal which can only be non-
autochthonous, the unfolding of which is not the auto-generative
growth of historical time. The growing that moves towards the
messianic end ‘does not have any relationship to time’ but to the
eternity of coming which is not an unattainable, quantifiable length
of time, but an abundance or exuberance of an eternity which may

arrive just tomorrow. This eternity to come tomorrow time must
have a relationship to eternity which not the ripening or growing
of time, but it invokes a time that arrives or unfolds in a reverse
direction, a future that is coming towards us from the extremity of
its site, rather than merely we are going towards it as if we are driven
to a definite goal by the irresistible, irreversible wind of historical
becoming. Eternity is for Rosenzweig not a very long time but,
…[A] tomorrow that just as well could be today. Eternity is a future,

which, without ceasing to be a future, is nevertheless present. Eternity
is a today that would be conscious of being more than today. And to
say that the Kingdom is eternally coming means that its growth is no
doubt necessary, but that the rhythm of this growth is not definite, or
more exactly: that the growth does not have any relationship to time
(Ibid., p. 241).
Such an uncommon understanding of community to come which,

‘without ceasing to be a future’ may nevertheless advent ‘today’
demands a radical deformalization of the notion of historical time
as ‘growth’ or a ‘ripening’ which posits its telos at an unattainable
length which for that matter, because of its irreversibility, cannot be
last today. The messianicity of the coming community on the other
hand, a community where redemption renders the task of translation
complete in the universality of its harmony and in an exemplary
manner, rends each moment that can be the last. for Rosenzweig
the thought of messianicity and exemplarity does not consist in the
inclusion of the finitude of the particular within the universal totality
of being that makes telos into the ripening or growing of time, but
rather the possibility of a radical reversibility of time where eternity
can be the last. This is truly the site from where there occurs the
origin of futurity and not merely as the end or goal of time. It is in
this sense the messianic arrival where translation of the promise here
and now makes eternity to come today is goalless: without entering
into the order of fate, such a time without time can only be thought
as eternal awaiting or anticipation. ‘That every moment can be the
last’ says Rosenzweig ‘renders it eternal. And just the fact that every
moment can be the last makes it the origin of the future, as a series
of which every member is anticipated by the first one’ (Ibid., p. 243).
It is in this sense redemption as the messianic fulfilment of coming

community is an exemplary thought in that without subsuming the
particular within the universal essence of being, makes each time the
universality into singular and singularity into universal affirmation.
This intensity of desire operates as invisible dimension of historical
time, that messiah be arrived before his time, and that other equally
incommensurable demand from where the infinite movement of
anticipation originates, that ‘ at every moment it fails to unite for the
end’ (Ibid.). That eternity of the radical future may arrive today, and
that universality of the community—without being ontologically
grounded in ‘common essence’—may arrive in the singular: the
exemplarity lies in the translation of the commandment of love. It
is in the arriving of the neighbour who is first to come by, always
the singular and yet anyone who is first, there the eternity may
arrive today from the extremity of its future: ‘for all taking action is
projected into the future and the neighbour whom the soul seeks is
always right before it and is only anticipated in the one who in this
moment is there in front of it’ (Ibid., p. 244).
In this sense the figure of the neighbour itself is exemplary: the
place holder of the farthest who may, at any time, unforeseeably
present himself as the nearest, ‘the first to come by’. The neighbour
presents himself less as the universality of the genus but as the
conjunction of redemption denominated as And, which Rosenzweig
rigorously distinguishes from dialectical synthesis of speculative time.
The neighbour here is the example of the bond that consummates
messianic end, which is the covenant between God and man, between
creation and revelation, between eternity and time, between distance
and nearness. In the face of the neighbour—and here Levinas takes
as his point of departure from Rosenzweig—God reveals himself,
in that the commandment of love in his revelation turns to the
commandment of love to the neighbour, an ethical commandment
but now as law. The world that is opened in this ethical obligation
is not the realization of a telos of the immanent profane history; it
is rather a coming community without genus and without ‘common
essence’. The futurity of this coming community cannot think as the
end or goal, as in the Hegelian metaphysical-historical schema of
time as essentially sequential, additive and accumulative. The future
here is rather the caesura of time that advents in the heart of presence
without ceasing itself to be future. The neighbour, as Levinas says,

is anyone who may arrive anytime, and yet always arriving for the
first time, before any first. It is this anonymity of the singular and
singularity of the anonymous that for the first time opens us to the
‘we’ of community and to the indefiniteness of futurity. It is here the
furthest may advent in the nearest and the nearest is seen as far, far
than any further, at the extremity of the remote. The irreducibility of
the neighbour into either ‘I’ and ‘You’ for Rosenzweig—and also for
Levinas who takes the problem into more elaborate articulation—
makes the ‘we’ of community not a community of ‘common’ essence
belonging to genus: it rather denominates the exemplarity that opens
time beyond the event of presencing into the pure event of future,
into the universality of a collective without yet being given as a given
totality or systemic entity; an exemplary universality which is also the
name of the event of pure future. It is the denomination of a site of
unforeseeable, unpredictable occurrence whose time no one knows,
and which is not a result of an intentional act of the one; a site of
occurrence where there may take place the encounter between the
farthest and the nearness, between eternity and the moment; a site
of encounter where eternity ‘must be hastened’ to arrive as early as
today’.
Past and future, otherwise strangers to each other, the one drawing
back when the other’s turn comes—here they grow into one: the
begetting of the future is a direct bearing witness to the past. (Ibid.,
p.317).
Such a coming community for Rosenzweig, understood in the

above mentioned sense of exemplarity is to be distinguished from
autochthony of a community that makes the idea of ‘homeland’ its
common essence, from a community consisting of the ‘peoples of
the earth’ and soil, and that in the name of this self-identification
enters the historical telos of its politics. Such a politics of autochthony
Rosenzweig calls ‘messianic politics’ where the silence of an exemplary
community—which for Rosenzweig Jewish community, not in the
given sense—would not take root in the soil of language. This is the
reason, says Rosenzweig, why for Jewish existence there is such a deep,
profound suspicion of language and such ‘a heartfelt confidence in
the power of silence’ (Ibid., p. 321).
The Theologico-Political
The community that would not take its root in the soil of language, in
the night of territory and in the ground of temporality (that additively,
cumulatively progresses towards its telos), such a community cannot
be understood by any given ‘common essence’, or by the predicates
that constitute the logic of the world. What then for Rosenzweig
constitutes the exemplarity of the community is rather the event of a people
that exists in the vocative and not in the nominative. This is evoked by
Rosenzweig in a paradoxical manner as a community of blood which
he distinguishes from the spiritual communities. This alone explains
for Rosenzweig what it means to be ‘chosen people’, a people—
withdrawn from territoriality that determines the long march of its
history, a non-territorial and non-autochthonous people—is a people
which arises in the pure invocation that constitutes its vocation to be
‘people’, that means without being able to be people in any given
sense: a non-peopled people, if the reader allows me to coin such a
term, in an ‘uncommon’ sense, a people by virtue of not-being-able-
to-be-people in any given sense. This non-peopled people, because
it is withdrawn from all positive predicates that determine ‘people-
hood’: territoriality, language of soil, and temporality of victorious,
triumphant march of historical memory6—in this singularity (and
this is the paradoxical logic of exemplarity) is open to the universality.
Not being a community that is a particular instantiation of the genus
of community as such that constitutes the totality of communities,
the community in an exemplary sense is for Rosenzweig at once
singular and yet universal. Such a community must, says Rosenzweig,
Conceal the polar oppositions in themselves in order to be able to
be singular, definite, something particular, a God, a human, a world
and yet simultaneously everything, God, man, the world (Ibid., 325).
The logic of exemplarity is a paradoxical logic. The thought of

exemplarity is at once excess (of any given predicates that define
community at large) and yet deficit in the sense of its retreat
or withdrawn character. Unlike the triumphant march of other
communities that draws their permanence and also their lively
character from their putting at stake the life and death of their
existence, the Jewish existence is marked by withdrawn from such
stakes of their existence. This marks the deficit character of their

mode of existence: it lacks the spontaneity, freedom, and openness
to express its suffering in a language of its soil, in a language of the
immanence of its self-presence, in a language of the autochthony of
its self-grounding. This makes the proximity of itself in relation to
itself that of an irreducible distance and non-contemporaneous, seen
from the perspective of the world-history and secular chronology.
Yet precisely this deficit and withdrawn mode of its being releases
it from the vain consolation in the illusory character of profane
happiness that the messianic politics of the world-history pursues in
the work of the state, that is, in the incessant founding, un-founding
and re-founding of law from which the lawful violence of the state
is inseparable. the logic of exemplary is at once deficit and yet excess
which, by taking from it its full participation in the triumphant
march of world history that constitutes the messianic politics of
the profane world, releases it towards a full participation in an
universality in an uncommon sense, that ‘of everyone with God’
which one does not need ‘to win in the long march of a world history’
(Ibid., 351).
Therefore for Rosenzweig the idea of ‘choosenness’ does not imply
the merely privileged position of the Jewish community in the name
of which it wages ‘the war of faith’ against other communities or
even exercise supremacy in the name of a territorial autochthony,
even if it is in the name of the universal. For Rosenzweig neither ‘the
war of faith’—which, according to Rosenzweig, lies in the mythic
past of its existence—and nor Augustinian union of the war of faith
and the political war, can denominate the exemplary character of
choosenness. What exists as war is for the Jew is purely political war.
While this separates the Jewish existence for which eternity is present
today in the cycle of liturgical year from the secular chronology of
the world history for which eternity is arrested, masterfully seized
in the violence of law-positing and law preserving act, this non-
contemporaneity between—to speak with Walter Benjamin—the
profane order where happiness is pursued and the messianic order of
justice, alone explains exemplary character of a community which is
singular and yet universal. The ‘choosenness’ is only that of beginning;
that does not yet explain the redemption in the sense of the fulfilment
of all utopian potentialities,
No one knows more exactly than he [the Jewish man] does that to
be God’s well-beloved means only a beginning and that man is still
unredeemed as long as only this beginning is realized. Opposite Israel,
the eternally beloved of God, the eternally faithful one and eternally
complete one, there stands the one who eternally comes, eternally
waits, eternally wanders, eternally thrives, the Messiah (Ibid., p. 326).
Taken in that sense, we can argue that the notion of exemplary in
Rosenzweig is also a radical critique of violence. This is seen not only in
Rosenzweig’s distinction between the community of blood—which
is not to be taken in any organist sense, as Derrida is sensitive to point
towards—and the spiritual community, but also in the distinction
between the two modes of eternity, a distinction that is co-relative to
the former distinction. If for the Jewish community the presencing
of eternity today takes the cyclic form of liturgical enactment, it is
thereby released from the circular intrigue of law that founds, un-
founds and re-founds the messianic politics of the world-historical
communities for which eternity is always at an unattainable end,
but never present today. Therefore it is not so much in the eternity
that seized and enacted in the world-history by the power of law,
but in the ethical commandment of love that opens the ‘we’ to the
messianic intensity of justice that the notion of exemplarity finds it
true vocation. How, then, does the state enacts the eternity in time
by its power of law?
It is in the forceful insertion or inscription of life into law wherein
the metaphysical violence of the state consists. In the work of the
state that continuously solves and resolves the contradiction between
life in its immanent movement of becoming and law that freezes
such a movement as its foundational act: it is this work that turns
the image of law into a violent image. The eternity seized through
law is the metaphysical image of the violence of the world history.
Rosenzweig writes,
Violence gets life brought to its law against the law. Since the State
is violent and not merely lawful, it remains at life’s heels. This is the
meaning of all violence, that it founds new law. It is now a disavowal
of the law, as one probably thinks, fascinated by its revolutionary
conduct, but on the contrary its foundation. But a contradiction is
hidden in the idea of a new law. Law is as regards its essence old law.
Now it shows itself as what violence is: the renewer of old law. In
the violent act law continuously turns into new law. And the State
is therefore equally as much lawful and violent, refuge of the old law
and source of the new; and in this double shape as refuge of law and
source of law the State places itself above the mere flowing off the
life of the people in which custom unceasingly and non-violently
multiplies and law changes…at every moment the State violently
settles the contradiction between preservation and renewal, old and
new law. It is that continuous solution of the contradiction which the
life course of the people constantly only postpones of its own accord
through the flowing on of time: the State takes it in hand; in fact it
is nothing other than this solving, re-solved every moment, of the
contradiction (Ibid., p. 353).
Distinguished from the eternity which is the eruption of the newest

that arises from the violent settlement with the old by the pure
positing power of the law is the other order of messianic justice which
is to come, which is always to come, which may even erupt today.
Rosenzweig’s thought of exemplarity is above all the question of the
eternity of a promise and its fulfilment that cannot be understood
on the basis of the immanence of a world-historical reason. The
ways of the Messiah is not the ways of the world-history. What seems
to me here the basic problematic of Rosenzweig thought is none but
this: that the violence of the world-historical reason that assumes
the forms of the theodicy of history that immanently seeks to atone
itself cannot be justified on the ground of this immanence. Only
the exposure of the forms of the world-history to the transcendence
of the messianic fulfilment of an immemorial promise can redeem
the violence of historical reason. And that exposure happens in the
commandment of love in the two-fold love of God and the love of
the neighbour where the immanence of the world-historical order is
opened to an eternity which is only granted to man as pure gift, and
therefore is not the object of masterful seizure through the violence of
appropriation. To prepare for it, it would be necessary that mankind
learns to renounce violence as such, not ‘this’ or ‘that’ act of violence
but that metaphysical violence that lies in seeking to appropriate and
master the pure gift of eternity. Only then man is opened to the other
and to others and realizes what he essentially is: an essentially finite
existence open to the gift of eternity.
For Rosenzweig,7such a critique of violence is inseparable from a

certain notion of end of philosophy. This philosophical discourse—
the whole brotherhood from Ionia to Jena, as Rosenzweig loves to
say—in its obsession with totality itself is a form of metaphysical
violence, which with its pure power of positing of the concept (that
begins with Thales’ assertion ‘everything is water’), already effaces
the singular being that is exposed to its own irreducible morality.
If such a philosophical discourse of totality reduces the language
of redemption and messianic justice into the immanent language
of historical reason, that means, into the messianic politics of
autochthony, it leads straight into the abyss of evil and totalitarianism
of all sorts. This is the warning that implied implicitly in every page
of The Star of Redemption. Hence, we can argue, the arrival of the
messianic Kingdom cannot adequately coincide with the telos of
the immanent historical reason, that means, with the goal or end
of the messianic politics of the profane world; or, rather, we can say
that such a founding act of the world entirely through and by the
intentions and power of human actions must draw its reason, its
sense and meaning from an obligation that exceeds such intentions
and powers, from an ethical (or rather, ‘meta-ethical’: to be more
precise with Rosenzweig’s idea) transcendence outside the ethico-
philosophical discourse of totality.
Part V
On Philosophy
§ Erotic and Philosophic
What follows is an attempt to think anew the ancient question, as

ancient as the birth of philosophy itself, of the relationship between
erotic and philosophy. Philosophy hereby is no longer thought as
one academic, university discipline amongst others, but as a mode
of being in the world, as a way of life, a certain aesthetic and ethics
of existence. This mode of being is concerned less with the ideal of
intelligibility at cognitive, conceptual disposal, but that is concerned
with the event of thinking, with the truth of phenomenon that has
messianic, redemptive possibilities. Philosophy then, more essentially
understood, is less concerned with cognition of the presently given
phenomenon than with the unconditioned event of existence, with
the unconditioned as such. Taking up Plato’s beautiful dialogue
Symposium, and referring to Walter Benjamin’s certain texts, this
article above all is concerned with re-thinking of the ‘place’, or
‘site’ of university, accompanied by a critical interrogation of the
contemporary knowledge production, in order to open this ‘site’ of
university to the messianic advent of the unthought, or better, to the
event of thought as such in its unconditionality, so that the violence
of instrumental knowledge be given over to the redemptive truth of
phenomenon, which the erotic of the philosophy, as it is conceived by
Plato, Benjamin and Nietzsche has always been primarily concerned
with.
*
It is Eros and the erotic that concerns us here. And we shall see that it
is essentially the question of existence and philosophy par excellence:
philosophy as a way of life, as it is said, as a specific mode of being in

the world. To philosophize is, then, if one understands philosophy
essentially and not as one academic discipline amongst others within
the space called ‘university’, to philosophize is essentially to be
seized by existence even at the limit of life. That is the meaning of
Montaigne’s famous saying (2003, pp.67-81), who paraphrases the
saying of Socrates in Phaedo, ‘that to philosophize is to learn to die’.
To affirm truth at the limit when the philosophical existing itself is
pushed to its limit, to the border of life, to the edge of the world: this
means, to philosophize is to think the limit of thought or thinkable,
which is the dizzying abyss of death or even madness. This is the
meaning, apart from the sacrificial significance it can have for us, of
Socrates’ taking the step of death. To philosophize is to take, ever and
ever again, the step of death. Schelling speaks of this step of death as
necessary beginning of philosophy as follows:

compared to death. (Quoted in Heidegger 1985, pp. 6-7)
Philosophy as a way of life, philosophy as a certain aesthetic and

ethics of existence is always a question of limit, of border, of the edge
of the world. Above all, it is the question of death.
Here we shall take up to read perhaps the most beautiful dialogue
of Plato called Symposium (Plato 2001), to meditate once again on the
essential relation between existence and philosophy as it is thought
at the inception of philosophy. We shall see that at this moment of
the birth of philosophy, philosophy has concerned itself with the
question of birth, of creation, of coming to presence of philosophy
itself. And that philosophy erupts in the midst of human existence,
it comes into being as philosophy, it takes its birth out of love, out of
desire and longing of Eros.
Understood in this sense, we are attempting understand what
we call ‘philosophy’ in a more originary manner: not as one
Erotic and Philosophic • 345
specialized academic discipline amongst others within this space

called university, academic life; and is not that which is concerned
with this or that regional area of inquiry or research, as for example
biology is concerned with ‘biological’ life of animate beings, history
is concerned with historical unfolding of events in human’s historical
life, etc. But, then, which area, or region of beings that is philosophy
concerned with? As if philosophy does not occupy itself with specific
objects, or even with specific areas of beings; as if bereft of objects,
philosophical thinking is concerned with nothing as such, with no-
thing as such. Yet it is precisely the question of no-thing, this nothing
as such that concerns philosophical thinking, which is not yet nothing
pure and simple, but nothingness out of which something comes
to presence unconditionally. Now what comes to presence we call
‘existence’- not ‘this’ or ‘that’ area, nor ‘this’ or ‘that’ specific existent—
but existence as such. Philosophy is a thinking which is unlike any
other thinking: it is what preoccupies itself with the unconditional
as such, with existence as such—with its value and sense—and above
all, philosophy is concerned with this ‘as such’ itself. To philosophize
is not to grasp in the generality of the concept ‘what’ is ‘existence’.
Unlike other regional mode of inquiries, philosophy is not concerned
primordially with concept, and therefore not with knowledge. It is
not the ontic or ontological intelligibility of phenomenon, nor is
it the ideal of knowledge that can be accomplished in the concepts
through categories that is the concern of philosophical thinking.
Rather philosophical thinking is concerned with the truth of the
phenomenon, its event-character. The event-character of phenomena
lies in the coming to presence of something, its erupting character, it’s
arising and taking place; it is the birth and origin of phenomenon.
What erupts, as we said above, is ‘existence’. Existence is therefore an
event par excellence. The philosophical thinking is concerned with
this event of existence.
The philosopher is not a scholar and is rather quite a different
being from a scholar. The scholar is concerned with ‘this’ or ‘that’
specific region of beings following ‘this’ and ‘that’ sophisticated
‘method’ which in a manner accumulative and progressive leads to
the knowledge of phenomena. The philosopher on the other hand,
since he is concerned with truth and not knowledge, is concerned
with the truth of the event, or, better, with the event of truth—of
existence as such. Now, this eruption of existence is always singular,

and yet whose effect—because it does not completely exhaust itself
at any given moment of discursive signification—renews itself each
moment as unsaturated futurity and thereby universalizes itself. Since
concept cannot grasp this singular universal, only idea embodies this
universality in each singular being. Therefore unlike scholars, the
philosopher who is concerned with truth of the event, is less of a
conceptual grasp of already present existent, but rather is ideational
opening to the futurity of the phenomenon. This is the meaning of
Plato’s notion of Eidos, or idea.
In what sense existence and event is singular? In the sense,
negatively speaking, existence in its event-character cannot be
thought either belonging to the order of generality, that means, to
the order of the concept, nor is existence particular instance of that
general species, like apple belongs to the species ‘fruit’. The scholarly
grasp of the given phenomenon is concerned with cognitive,
conceptual determination of that phenomenon within an already
given, presupposed theoretical, metaphysical foundational paradigm;
it does not concern itself with this foundation itself as such.
Therefore all regional inquiries are only conditional. In contrast,
philosophical foundation is concerned with the foundation itself as
such, and as such is unconditional inquiry, because it is not concerned
only with the already given entity, but with the event character of any
being. It is only on the basis of the truth, which is always the truth of
the event, can there be knowledge of any phenomenon.
As we know that what we call ‘academic’ came from Plato’s
founding of ‘academy’ around 385 B.C in a place called Akademeia
near Athens. What is sought in Plato’s academy is not philosophical,
scholarly discourse about things present, but the dialectical that
means ideational grasp of the event character of existence which
for that matter refuses to be grasped in the conceptual language of
discursive signification. This is the reason why for Socrates knowledge
of the event of existence can only be extended to its ignorance.
In his dialogue Theatetus Socrates professes that the only thing
that he knows is that he knows nothing. when in Republic Socrates
was challenged by his interlocutors to give a positive, that means,
the conceptual definition of what is ‘justice’, Socrates confessing
his inability, says that what can be considered as justice can only
be shown, but not said in the conceptual signification of generality,
by Socrates himself in his singular manner of existing as just being.
To philosophize is not to grasp a phenomenon ‘what is justice’
in cognitive, conceptual apparatus and thereby defining in the
intelligibility of knowledge ‘what is justice’, but rather grasping the
singularity of justice in the mode of the philosopher’s existing in
this world as singularly just being, that means by showing justice
as irreducible to any predicates. This means, to philosophize is to
transform one’s own existence, to effect such a transformation in the
very mode of the existence of the philosopher so that he own existing
validates the truth of the event of justice: the philosopher must be
the one whose existence is the site of taking place of justice. This
singularity of the taking place of justice is too rich to be conveyed
in the conceptual language of signification. On other hand, justice
in its event-character must seize the existential of the philosopher’s
innermost heart of existence and transform him, making him other
of himself, to what he is not yet, the heart of the existence of the
philosopher who philosophizes justice. the event-character of justice,
and its unconditional taking place can only be shown at the limit
of the cognitive language of signification, at the limit of the state of
settled affairs of the world; in other words, at the limit of conditioned
knowledge. Since what Socrates is interested is not knowledge, but
the truth of the phenomenon called ‘justice’, it can only be shown as
existential, that means as an aesthetic and ethics of existing and dying
as just existing and just dying.
Philosophical thinking is less concerned with the ontological

intelligibility of the given world than with the event character of
the world’ messianicity; it is concerned with the worlding of the
world, or opening of the world. Outside the reproduction of the
given, accomplished world in the form of discursive intelligibility,
philosophical thinking envisions, intimates the redemptive
possibility by releasing the event character of pure taking place
and arriving. Philosophical thinking is concerned with this pure
possibility and its transcendence in relation to the accomplished
form of the world’s historical process. This concern with the pure
possibility which ecstatically exceeds each moment from each form

of the realized is the concern with the value and sense of existence
itself.
To give an example again, when Glaucon in Republic (Plato 2003,

pp. 40-52) refutes Socrates that his notion of justice self-refutes
itself because such a notion of justice does not have predicates in the
given world, that in this world always the unjust rules and is happy,
Socrates invites Glaucon to think justice without predicates, in its
pure unconditional possibility of taking place, which is demanded in
its utmost urgency precisely at that moment when justice seems to
have lost all meaning and all predicates in the world. Such an event of
justice as pure unconditional possibility of taking place without predicates
is the thought of the messianic.
What the philosopher is primarily concerned with this: the pure

taking place of the messianic justice without predicates and in its
unconditionality. Because the philosopher is concerned with the
pure taking place, in relation to the settled mode of existence, such
a pure taking place only appears as atopic, that means without
dwelling and without place, which is the meaning of utopic or
utopian. That the settled state of affairs of the world does not know
what is just, but has erased any sense of justice does not negate any
urgency or messianic necessity of the pure taking place of justice,
but precisely demands with its utmost urgency, at this moment, hic
et nunc that pure taking place of justice, that justice be existential,
that means without predicates and without condition.
Wherein lies the Eros of the philosophical thinking and existing?

The answer is this: it lies in the desire, or longing to know that one
knows nothing; it is to desire and yearn for the truth of the non-
knowledge, of that which is without predicates, that takes place
purely, that means, unconditionally and yet without having its own
place and dwelling. The erotic of philosophy lies in the philosophical
desire from the state of non-knowing that one knows nothing to
the knowing that one knows nothing. It is this erotic desire that
Socrates inflamed in the heart and existence of the Athenian youths:
to effect that transmutation in the heart of existence of each one,

the transmutation from the non-knowing that one does not know to
knowing that one does not know anything. It is for this erotic appeal,
all Athenian youths, including great Alcibiades; the most beautiful
youth of Athens fell in love with the ugliest man, who is Socrates.
For this is the ambiguity of Eros: because Eros, being the most
ancient God, gives place to everything, for everything is procreated
out of love, he is thereby without a place of his own. Because Love
is that which infinitely gives away riches in abundance, he is also
thereby always poor, without cloth and without shoes. Because Eros
is this ever lasting longing for beauty, Eros himself not beautiful;
he is like the philosopher, neither human nor divine but a daemon.
the ancient philosophers including Plato, who is called beginner of
philosophy, thought philosophy as the erotic activity par excellence,
longing and desiring in love as the creative moment of the origin,
where the world is opened up to the mortals on the basis of which the
mortal understands the world. This is the meaning of philo-sophia:
desire and longing for wisdom. Even before cognitively thematizing
the world in knowledge, even before it is knowledge of the world,
thinking is a movement of loving, an opening of the world in love.
With philosophical contemplation the world opens up before the
gaze of love, of the loving gaze of the one who philosophizes. This
marvellous gaze of love, which Plato calls ‘wonder’ or astonishment,
is more essential and redemptive, unimpaired by the violence
of the gaze of force and power of the one who cognitively grasps
the world. It is in this sense that Walter Benjamin (1998) speaks
of philosophical contemplation as redemptive. Unlike the thetic
violence of the concept which is the metaphysical foundation of the
law-positing violence, in philosophical truth on the other hand, the
phenomenon redeems itself. It is not for nothing that the god Eros
is considered in a certain Greek myth as the oldest God. Therefore
Plato in his Symposium compares philosophers to pregnant women,
linking the idea of creation with procreation, and affirming what
the philosopher is to do, as pregnant women do, is to welcome the
unborn, the not yet, the coming, the redemptive arrival of the future.
Therefore the philosopher must cultivate, so Plato thinks, an ethics
of Eros, an ethics of loving, which is also an ethics of philosophy in
its irreducibility to knowledge, though a confrontation has already

been felt there, that is, the incommensurability between the idea of
creation and procreation.
In the dinner party organized on the occasion of Agathon winning
the prize for the best tragic poet in Athens, Socrates who was there
among others speaks the following story, which he has heard from
Diotima, of the birth of Eros. On the occasion of Aphrodite’s birth,
the god Zeus has organized a banquet which was attended by Poros,
who is the god of efficacy and wealth. Penia, the beggar woman,
finding Poros drunk and lying, devised to have a child by him so that
she can share a bit of his immortal wisdom and wealth. Eros is born,
a child of the immortal father and an impoverished mortal woman,
thereby sharing qualities from both parents. Since Love is this eternal
desire for beauty, and since we desire what we do not yet have, Love
is neither beautiful, but not also ugly. Love gives in abundance but
he himself, like his mother, is poor. This is why Love is always naked
and without cloths. Because he is not yet wise but not yet ignorant
fool, Love eternally desires wisdom and is ingenuous, infinitely bold,
intense, a sorcerer and an enchanter. Neither divine nor mortal, and
yet sharing the qualities of both, Love is the intermediate Spirit,
who is daemon. Neither wise nor fool, neither rich nor poor, neither
beautiful nor ugly, Eros is this demonic philosopher who eternally
fixes his eyes on wisdom and perfect spiritual beauty. He is not the
ignorant one who does not know that he does not know nor is he
the wise who knows that he knows, but the intermediate demon
who knows only this much, that he knows that he knows nothing.
Therefore the demonic and the erotic philosopher is essentially atopic,
the one who is without dwelling but eternally exiled, abandoned and
to whom no predicates apply. The only predicate that is applicable to
the philosopher is that there is no predicate for him. Articulating the
world and opening the world, the polis and the topos or the places, the
philosopher himself does not completely belong to the world, but is
an exiled being, homeless, atopic and excluded. He lives at the edges
of the world, at the limit of knowledge, at the border of all places and
predicates. By being placed at the non-place, by being conditioned in
unconditional, by being predicated in un-predicable, the philosopher
is the demonic figure. He has to be so only because he has to open the
world, to space opens all topos and all predicates. Therefore Aristotle
(1971, pp. 953-7) says that the philosophers and poets are essentially
melancholic spirits.
Why I am evoking the bygone thoughts of the ancient Plato
today? What is symptomatic of the contemporary methodologically
result oriented culture of knowledge production at instrumental
service is this complete absence of the ethics of love and erotic from
the experience of thinking. The philosopher must be the erotic
individual par excellence; this is why Socrates is the paradigm of all
philosophers. Bereft of this erotic experience, academic research and
university studies have become separated from the idea of procreation
and creation, and thereby becoming banal, emasculated products at
the service of instrumental use whose violence we cannot even guess.
The university, now the burial ground of passionate, creative, great
souls, is no longer to be thought like ‘a metaphor, as an image of the
highest metaphysical state of history’ (Benjamin 1996, p.37).
What is to be renewed is a new metaphysics of erotic. Such
a metaphysics is called forth by Walter Benjamin who in one of
his early essays called The Life of Students (Benjamin 1996, pp.
37-47) marks not only the separation of the idea of creation and
pro-creation, but the absence of an erotic outside the bourgeois,
legitimate norm as the condition of the sterile, spiritless condition
of the life of the students now. This life of the students is no longer
capable of assuming that form whose task is to liberate ‘the future
from its deformed existence in the womb of its present’ (Ibid., p.46).
What is lost, in the absence of such an erotic and ethics of desire, is
not only the creative moments of spiritual infinity that is opened up
by the experience of philosophy, in so far as the life of students have
been made to conform to demands of the bourgeois society, but also
that ‘expansive friendship’ that is ‘bereft of greatness and loneliness’:
That expansive friendship between creative minds, with its sense of
infinity and its concern for humanity as a whole even when those
minds are alone together or when they experience yearning in
solitude, has no place in the lives of the university students. (Ibid.)
What Benjamin brings out is valid now more than ever before.
The university now, equipped with the accumulative results of its
knowledge production, with its ideal of intelligibility is at cognitive
disposal, has long lost that ethics of love and with it lost itself as the
site of event, which is its messianic task to liberate, free, release the
unconditional futurity immanent in present condition, but that which
lacks predicates . The university as the site messianic affirmation of
futurity, and the not yet—which Plato grasps with the two fold ideas
of creation and procreation—is replaced with banal, homogenous,
accumulative, sterile knowledge without the existentiality of the
philosopher’s existence being seized. What are an academic and a
student for whom the event of truth is not opened from the very
heart of his singular existence? In order for truth not to be consumed
away in immanent, conditioned self-consumption in knowledge, it
would be necessary to open up the thought of the unconditioned,
without predicates, from the heart of academic life. Therefore it is
necessary to introduce an erotic and an ethics of love that must be
able to seize the existentiality of the existence called ‘student’ and
‘academic’ so that philosophy may become again a passion of life,
where ‘justice’ and ‘truth’ become an Idea, that means ‘event’ which
alone can rescue a deformed, damaged, sterile university life to the
promise of a redemptive possibility of the pure taking place.
It means that the present condition of the university as a site
of producing knowledge at the disposal of the techno-scientific
civilization where the event character and the messianic intensity
of the existential thinking is levelled off to the homogeneity of
instrumental knowledge, is to be replaced with another sense and
value of existence, another sense and value of the form of life which
calls forth a new language of erotic and ethics of event. The university
would then to be seen less a factory of discursive production at the
cognitive disposal than as the site of the event of truth, which in
turn calls forth invention and creation of ever new forms of life, an
aesthetic and ethics of existence. Here a more originary experience
and a more originary saying of existence is called forth, outside the
ideals and telos of knowledge, indicating towards which is irreducible
to the ontological thematization, a more originary experience and
saying that is irreducible to a cognitive disposal, to the apparatus, to
the regime of conceptual truth. This saying and this more originary
experience is, outside such banal distinctions between ‘objective’ and
‘subjective’ knowledge, is the event of thinking, or thinking itself as
event, as an event of saying that occurs, in sudden leap or eruption, as
moments of truth. It is an event of disruption which truth introduces
at the heart of existence, rendering the thinker into what Plato calls
of a philosopher ‘a gadfly’ (Plato 2001, p. 303). Therefore even Kant
makes thinking irreducible to knowledge, the thinker who makes
the ideals of Reason irreducible to cognition and to the concepts,
even to absolute knowledge. This experience of thinking, this event
of thinking coming towards is the messianic state of exception, outside
any law of sovereignty whose intensity is experienced by mortals
abandoned to non-knowledge, for it is on the basis of the Socratic
non-knowledge alone, on the basis of this abandonment, something
like messianic event of thinking reveals itself.
Philosophy has an essential relation to non-knowledge and un-
thought. What is unthought is the not yet thought, the not yet birth
of thinking. At each moment of philosophizing the philosopher is
beholden to the not yet birth of thinking coming to presence. This
beholding is the erotic gaze par excellence, without violence and not
yet damaged. This joyousness of the life of thinking, pregnant with
the unborn, is the experience of hope for the messianic arrival of
the otherwise. Therefore love is experienced in its highest intensity
and beatitude when the whole possible infinity of time opens up
before us, which is the occurring of truth. Only then the thinking
can touch the essential of existence and thereby transform the given
form of existence itself. A thinker, if he is traversed by an essential
thinking at the heart of her existence, experiences this event in a
state of abandonment. This joyous abandonment in love is also a
certain melancholy, in so far as it abandons us to our dispropriation,
and which through this dispropriation, gives us the gift of truth and
time. The melancholy of this experience of abandonment, for it calls
forth renunciation (of cognitive mastery, of the ideals of knowledge);
this melancholy thereby is inseparable from a certain experience of
joyous gratitude for the coming of thinking. It is in this sense Martin
Heidegger (1968) thinks this event of thinking, Denken, inseparably
bound up with Danken, from the experience of thanking for the gift
of thinking. Herein lays the nobility and dignity of a creative thought.
The ethical task of philosophical thinking is to keep open the site
of ‘the university’ to the arrival of the unthought and to attune us
to the attunement of joyous melancholy which is the fundamental
attunement of the creative life.
§ On Philosophical Research
THE THOUGHT OF DEATH

It is the question of mortality that concerns us here. From Socrates
to Heidegger, philosophical contemplation, where the notion of
‘philosophy’ itself is at stake, concerns not merely philosophical
thought as such but the very philosopher’s existence as philosophical
existence. It is in this sense Socrates is thought to be the paradigm
of the philosopher, not in the sense that he is greater than other
philosophers who have come before or after him, but that, in the
very existing of his existence as philosopher; his is this essential
exposure to death. Philosophy, as if, it appears to us, is born out of this
encounter with this border of life, with this edge of the world, with
the limit of thinking. It is this essential exposure to its own limit that
incessantly summons the philosopher’s existence into this exposure.
As if philosophy’s birth, it seems, is inseparable from this necessary
encounter with this peril where thought or the thinkable risks itself,
and yet from this very peril there would need to be resurrection of
truth that is born out of this encounter with its peril.
May be there is a possibility, or rather necessity to think another
thinking of death, a more profound ‘experience’ of death which is at
the limit of philosophy or, rather outside philosophy: not in relation
to the death of the philosopher where the very ‘I’ of the philosopher
is exposed to its peril, and no longer as the question of truth, but
rather that of the exposure to the death of other from which ethical
responsibility, outside dominant ontology, arises. It is in confrontation
with the other’s death that the thinking of death as death inaugurates
On Philosophical Research • 355
itself. Henceforth, since one is exposed, for the first time, to the
other’s death—as the story of Gilgamesh testifies—the thought of
death inaugurates a new life of thought, as if philosophical thinking
has to begin precisely at that moment of utter powerlessness in the
face of death. The question of mortality is no longer one question
among other philosophical questions. It concerns the existentiality
of the philosopher’s existence in relation to the other’s death, as if the
meaning of the ethical, if it does not have to put death into its service
for the sake of cognitive mastery, has to begin with the thought of
an essential finitude that affects us with inconsolable grief, seizes
us with unspeakable fear and trembling. The opening to the world
and our exposure to the other’s face already always is affected by the
grief in the possibility of the other’s disappearance without return. If
philosophical writing by a necessary reason has to assume the form of
the written discourse, no longer the pure ‘draft’ (Heidegger 1968, p.
17) of the spoken, then writing in its essential relation to death and
dying has an ethical dimension, which is that of opening to the world
and to the others in responsibility.
It is none other from Emmanuel Levinas (2000) that we have
come to learn this responsibility, essentially in its ethical affection,
in relation to death, primarily that of the other’s death. Levinas’
ethical thought of responsibility arises out of the recognition that
the dominant ontology as such—which is, the intelligibility of
knowledge and the luminosity of being—encloses the infinity of
the other (the infinity that is beyond all totality of being and its
immanent self-presence) by inscribing the finitude of the other only
as moment of an overarching totality of an anonymous Universal
history. According to Levinas, such an insistence on the intelligibility
of being privileges certain reductive notion of truth over the Good,
the Good that consists of our infinite responsibility to the other as
other. For such a reductive discourse of totality, the other’s death is
only a death of homogenous particulars which, through their death,
works towards the constitution of an anonymous universal historical
totality (Levinas 1969). In this way, that is, by means of sacrificing
the others for the sake of the intelligibility of being that philosophy
as ontology constitutes itself. According to Levinas, philosophy
understood as ontology is the negation of the ethical responsibility
to the infinite other. Such ontology constitutes itself by forgetting
that immemorial loss, that already always disappearance of the other

from any immanence of self-presence that no phenomenological-
memorial works of retention and protension can retrieve.
In Hegel’s philosophical discourse of history, the universal—the
community, the State etc—arises only on the basis of the sacrifice of
the death of the particular individuals, of all particular ‘I’s in so far
each one that belongs to the universal is ‘I’ only to the extent that
this ‘I’, which each one speaks, is also the power of negating of itself,
of its ‘I’-ness. for Hegel the ethical arises precisely at that moment
when this ‘I’ (which is the homogenous, particular ‘I’) effaces itself
from its enclosure of particularity, from its own particularized totality
so that it can thereby open to the universality in which each other
‘I’ can partake, participate in the universal recognition of each one’s
right to dwell on earth. This begins to happen at that moment when
the particular individual confronts his death, death which is the pure
possibility of its annihilation or dissolution. This is also the moment
the philosopher is born when he confronts the vanity and nullity of
one’s own ‘I’. Even the predator animal, so Hegel speaks in a famous
passage in Phenomenology of Spirit, is immeasurably anguished, seeing
the dissolution and annihilation of the prey in his act of eating; it
thus immediately jumps on the prey without delay and destroys it.
In this manner, Hegel recognized death only as annihilation to
which every homogenous, particular existent, by virtue of its mere
existent character, must yield. From this negativity Hegel derives
the possibility of a universal ethics and a universal philosophy of
history on the basis of this recognition of death as annihilation. In
this manner Hegel has already totalized history by excluding the
non-annihilation character of death, which is the non-negativity
of death which does not serve the profit and meaning of universal
history: this is the other’s death, the other who cannot be sacrificed
for the universal history of anonymity. Therefore for Levinas, ethics
does not arise from the recognition of the annihilation character of
death of the homogenous, particular individuals, but precisely other
way, from the non-annihilation character of the other’s death, of the
other who is not ‘I’ like other ‘I’ but infinitely without ‘I’, and which
is thereby without history, at least without the universality of the
dialectical-speculative. The infinitude of the outside history lies in
the finitude of the other who is already always un-sacrificiable and
as such, it bears witness the promise of an eternal remnant of a time

outside the immanence of the anonymous, universal historical time.
This promise of the immemorial comes from the future, in that it is
a promise of a time to come, outside the violence of negativity which
the universal history posits.
This work, as other of my attempts, to a great extent is indebted
to Levinas’ thought. However the responsibility born out of one’s
own finitude, if not so originary ethical as Levinas’, is not to be
abandoned, but to be rethought in a more originary manner than
Hegel’s determination of death as annihilation. In this sense the
ethics here—which is inseparable from the ethics of existing out of
the finitude of each one of us—would mean the opening the heart
of the finite being to the immemorial of the Good beyond being, to
the gift of the Good that is already always there before any presence.
Already in the inception of philosophy, Plato (Plato 2003, p. 234)
recognizes the Good beyond being, the Good that is the excess of
being to which being never attains on the basis of its own luminosity.
The immemorial excess that founds us and gives us being is the Good
that, while giving us the gift of being, blinds the eyes of being with a
light so excessive that being perils itself in its gift. To be finite is not
to enclose into the finitude of one’s own being: it is to open to the
infinitude of the Good that exceeds us, that affects us, wounds us,
and tears us away from ourselves; it is that exposes us to the gift of
the immemorial, and to the ‘peril of being’ (Chrétien 2002, p. 22).
Death is the name of this peril that is neither mere annihilation,
nor mere negativity. It is rather the exposure of being to its own
non-enclosure, to its excess where being is open to the other’s death,
singular each time and un-sacrificiable.
This means, philosophy in its advent bears in itself the promise
of the ethical, an ethical recognition of the Good beyond being, and
which is beyond any onto-thanatology. The philosopher is neither
the one who is enclosed in the narcissistic contemplation of his own
death nor the one who is immersed in the contemplation of the
universal immanent in the particular objects out of his recognition of
the pure annihilation character that immanently lies in the particular,
sensuous objects themselves. Philosophy is essentially ethical in
its essential ‘experience’ of ‘the peril of being’ where philosopher
himself risks his own being—a peril that cannot be enclosed into
any totality of ontology—he is thereby open to what exceeds being,

to the immemorial Good that cannot be annihilated simply because
it founds us, and gives us, already always, this gift of being. If at all
for a philosopher philosophy has become a manner to exist and to
die, it is because to exist philosophically is to expose oneself to ‘the
peril of being’ and through it, to open oneself to the Good beyond
being; it is to let thinking confront its own finitude so that at its
limit it may exceed to that which lies beyond any mastery and self-
appropriation—that is, to the pure event of the Good. This pure
event of the Good presents itself as pure presencing when being
recedes from the immanent task of its self-grounding. It is thrown
to its excess, to its outside, to its essential peril. The pure event of the
Good presents in its presencing itself when being exposed, abandoned
in the open, the finite being is given over to the immemorial. It is in
this sense philosophical thinking is essentially ethical: not because
philosophy, with the power of negativity, exceeds from the sensuous
to the intelligible, but that, in its exposure to ‘the peril of being’, it
opens itself to the excess of being, to the Good beyond being, to
the immemorial that first of all opens truth and time to being and
thereby opens the futurity that is always to come. Only in this sense
philosophical thinking has a redemptive, messianic dimension.
Philosophical Research
Today a vast accumulation of knowledge and learning is produced,
reproduced and consumed at each instant. This work, which my
future reader will be kind enough to read, if there will be any, neither
hopes to be a scholarly academic treatise intended to contribute to
the immense industry of knowledge production that constitutes
our contemporary academic world, nor does it mean itself to be a
systematic treatise of the great history of philosophy. This work has
neither a thesis to prove or disprove (therefore it can hardly even be
called ‘research’, or even an academic work), nor does it have what is
called a ‘method’, since this work does not cherish ‘knowledge’ as its
telos to which research is supposed to be oriented towards. What it
presents are merely manifold pathways of thinking that never cease
to inaugurate ever new paths of thought. This work, in that sense,
hardly even be called a ‘work’, which means, it has hardly any hope
to produce something—a cultural product—for the sake of which

the mind invests the energy of thinking, accumulates datas which are
gathered through field works and analyzes them with the help of the
most sophisticated scientific-technological methods that supposed to
give them ‘objective’ knowledge of the ‘world’. There is something
excessive and demonic about philosophy—since philosophy is a
child of freedom—an excessive and demonic character that prohibits
philosophy to be completely amendable to the economy of the
demand and supply toward which the domain called ‘culture’ tends
to strive.
The questions that are raised in this work, are, therefore, not so
much the questions of knowledge, and therefore ontological is not
what is its ideal, for knowledge, in its metaphysical determination
first and last desires the intelligibility of the ‘ontological’ as its
raison d’art. Whether it is ‘objective’ or ‘subjective’ knowledge, such
knowledge is essentially metaphysical. It is rather the question of
value and sense of existence that this work poses: existence as value and
existence as sense where the meanings of value and sense themselves
are at stake, which means that they are not taken here as ‘presently
given entities’ somehow attached to this ‘objectively’ graspable entity
called ‘existence’. It is rather that they are themselves what need to be
interrogated. Therefore value and sense of existence is not ‘subjective’
any more than ‘objective’. Beyond such ‘subjective’ or ‘objective’
knowledge of given entities which constitutes today’s sciences at
the academy, whether social sciences or physical sciences, it is felt
necessary here to introduce the passion of an existential experience, a
passion of life which is outside the ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ pathos
of the ideal of knowledge, in so far this strange, enigmatic ‘existence’
is neither a ‘presently given entity’ (Vorhandenheit), nor an entity
‘ready to hand’ (Zuhandenheit).
What is sought, in the manner that is deeply influenced by
Heidegger’s Being and Time, is the thought of the existential—in
the sense of its event-character which is more originary than either
the categorical grasp of Vorhandenheit or that of Zuhandenheit. The
question of the sense of existence—which for Heidegger is the question
of ‘meaning’ (at least at that stage of his philosophical career)—can no
longer be thought within the ontology of subjectivity or objectivity,
since such ontology essentially constitutes the metaphysics of the
categorical. Herein lays Heidegger’s critique of Husserl: that even

Husserl’s notion of ‘categorical intuition’ has failed to open itself to
the phenomenon of the ‘presencing that itself presences’ (Heidegger
2003). The existential event of the presencing which is beyond the
categorical grasp of ‘the given presence’ in the apophantic judgement
is irreducible to the eidetic phenomenological consciousness. It must
open itself to the more originary phenomenology of the unapparent;
to the pure event of presencing which is other than any ‘given presence’
or ‘constant presence’.
The question of the knowledge of the world is not the same as the
question of the sense of existence. If philosophical thinking is worthy of
its name, that means essential thinking, and if the question of existence
is the highest concern for philosophical thinking, then philosophy
cannot be thought merely to be one academic subject among others
in our universities, in so far the ideal of knowledge production that
serves the dominant regime of truth (which our university most often
propagates, an ideal of knowledge which presupposes a certain notion
of ‘scientificity’ guided by most sophisticated ‘methodology’, in other
words, an ideal of knowledge that presupposes the intelligibility of
the ontological whose sovereignty is hardly ever put into question)
is precisely under question in philosophical thinking, to open and
release the event of thinking outside the apparatus of the knowledge
production, and outside the closure of the ontological intelligibility.
Thinking is essentially and primarily an event of disclosure, and only
subsequently and derivatively knowledge. There is something about
thinking that is irreducible to any cognitive, categorical grasp of the
world. This ‘something’ is none but the event character of thinking
itself. If existence is not one available entity among other given,
available entities of the given world, and if this strange question of
existence cannot be thought within the normative cognitive apparatus
(dispositif) that orients our academic researches today, it is in so far
as the existence is always to come, not yet impaired by the violence of
cognition. As such, the matter of thinking that welcomes the question
of existence to seize us (particularly the existence of the philosopher
in his very existentiality) has to raise the whole academic question,
not only of ‘method’, but the very status of knowledge in relation
to mankind again and anew, when the methodologically oriented
research at the cognitive disposal is not taken as normative standard
with unquestionable validity, but one that needs interrogation,

deconstruction, questioning, in order to open up thinking itself to
its messianic possibilities, that means, to its redemptive affirmation.
Only then philosophical thinking becomes worthy of its name,
which for ages has never ceased to inspire if not mankind but a few
in each generation to see in a glimpse the marvel of wisdom, which is
to be understood in its messianic transcendence.
What is understood as ‘wisdom’ is nothing other than the excess
character of hearing to the essential that is often covered over by
the dispositif of knowledge production in the service of demand
and supply, use and exchange value. What governs in our academic
existence is a certain ideal of an instrumental knowledge whose
reductive, totalizing metaphysics of subjectivity and objectivity
serves the dominant regime of power. It would then be necessary
to examine the historical origin of the notions like ‘method’ and
‘thesis’ and its co-relating origin of the epistemology and ontology
as the sovereign sciences, not just philosophy but as the originary
ground of modern sciences. It would then be necessary to examine
the thetic, unexamined presuppositions of such an epistemological
and ontological intelligibility, and to question the sovereign status
of such epistemological, ontological intelligibility as to its value and
sense for us.
This important question—the question of value and sense—though
not raised in such thoroughgoing manner in this work, is implicit
not merely in the matter at stake, that of thinking of existence,
of time and death, but in the manner, style, gesture, or rhythm of
thinking that is pursued here, a manner or style of thinking that
does not subordinate the matter of thinking to results at cognitive
disposal nor however, does it think of wisdom as mere ineffable,
mystic intuition of a pure transcendental object lying somewhere in
heaven. Instead of subordinating thinking, philosophical thinking
to the violence of cognition, philosophical thinking needs to be
opened up to its originary event of coming in the intensity of a
creative passion. Shorn of the existential tremor that is the tremor of
mortality, today’s philosophers no longer seem to be concerned with
an existential engagement, and are emptied of any creative passion.
In other words, academic research and existentiality of the existence
of the researcher seem to have fallen apart, and this falling apart is
suitable to the dispositif of cognitive results that would not want true
event of thinking to take place, for in that way the creative passion
of the spirit which is singular, exceptional and unique each time can
be incorporated into the homogeneity of a false universality, which
then can be sociologized, politicized by any parochial, instrumental
ideology. In the name of this false universality there are inspired
ceaseless cultural products that serve the regime of cognitive truth for
the sake of which the human minds invest the energy of thinking,
and that way reducing the utopian, messianic moment in each
singular work of art and philosophy. Therefore it would be necessary
to invent for each individual thinkers in relation to the singularity
of an event of a thought, a singular ethics of the event, the event of
thinking coming to presence that would seize with such tremor,
and transforming the thinker’s mode of existence and his mode of
dying. Such an ethics of singularity can only be approached from its
futurity in the immanent here and now, but not from any reductive
sociologized, historicized understanding of the work as homogeneous
product of a given, totalizable historical epoch.
When Schelling somewhere speaks of truth as that which exists
as such only as ‘wrested truth’, he indicates thereby that redemptive,
untimely, messianic and utopian element that is given in each hic
et nunc that cannot be completely exhausted in the generalized,
homogenized characteristics of a given totality of a historical epoch.
That means a messianic thinker has to be essentially a philologist
whose philological task is devoted not so much to read what is
readable, but rather what is not yet read, what is unreadable in each
reading, rather than merely reworking over and again in ever new
configuration what is already read. Those works that are at the service
of cognitive disposal, these cultural products produced by the human
mind with such an unimaginable amount and speed each day in our
contemporary world, have their values of course, for in their banal
homogeneity they call forth the counter pressure of the messianic
event of thinking. As each movement of universal has its own counter-
pressure, its eccentric path—of diversion and disruption—and this is
true even to the movement of thinking. Therefore each moment the
messianic event of thinking always appears to be untimely, older then
the old and yet younger than the young, for older it grows younger
it becomes, more exuberant, and more youthful, whose timeliness
does not take its parameter from serving the cognitive demands
of the spirit of the age. Each essential thinker inevitably confronts
the task of creating, inventing his eccentric path through which
he invents himself: not only concepts to ‘hammer’ with, but also
laughter, madness, ecstasy and outbursts of wit. Nietzsche is perhaps
the most fascinating example of such eccentricity through which
thinking, through the step back, welcomes the immemorial presencing
of presence.
Therefore Nietzsche envisions his own philosophical
contemplation as ‘untimely’. There is something in philosophy that is
not completely assimilable to the spiritual demands of a passing historical
epoch. In each contemporary historical epoch, philosophical thinking
introduces the moment of an interval, caesura, an excess, a pause that
makes itself non-contemporaneous with its age. This in turn calls
forth another notion of historicity and epochal break that cannot
be recounted in the conventional narrative practices of the historical
periodization, simply because it opens us to the immemorial promise
of presence that has already always escaped from all memory and
all immanence of self-presence. In so far as philosophical thinking
welcomes the event of presencing itself, it must thereby call forth the
very problematic of history anew, for it is time and again confronted
with the question: what is relationship of the event of existence, of
truth and love with the event of history itself? This inevitable and
essential question of the philosophical thinking demands that this
thinking is not to presuppose and accept this presupposition as
sovereign measure of truth the ontological intelligibility, the telos
of knowledge and the cognitive demands of the age. Each historical
epoch, as it has its own cognitive demand, so has its own parameter
to test the timeliness of each cultural product which passes away once
the epochal demands become obsolete. Without renouncing the
demands of the current spiritual- historical epoch—it is necessary, as
is said by Hegel that each one should read the daily newspapers—it
is also necessary, outside such demands that are often imposed upon
a thinker, to rescue from the vast sea of cultural-historical products
moments of utopian elements that exceed each historical epoch. Such
is the truly universal moment in historical specificity peculiar to that
epoch which is the truly historical moment that not yet historicized.
To rescue the moments of wonder from the banality of dead, lifeless
knowledge, and to give such moments a messianic intensity of hope

is the highest task of an essential thinking, which demands the two
fold task of step back and welcoming the arrival of the otherwise.
What is thinking if thinking does not seize us with fear and
trembling, if thoughts were not mortal thoughts? This is the question
that Socrates asks the Sophists and the Rhetoricians of Athens. It
appears that today, when the academic researches have become
devoid of possibility of such experiences, when questions are not
pushed to the limit of their thinkability (to the limit when questions
open their abyss to the questioner in such a way that the questioner,
once exposed to the abyss, no longer remains the same but become
someone else, someone other, someone unknown, a stranger and an
exiled); Socrates’ questioning has become more and more of necessity
now than ever before. The transformation and the transfiguration of
the philosopher’s existence that demands that it traverses through this
essential experience of mortality, which Socrates calls as ‘the step of
death’ (Heidegger 1985, pp. 6-7) is not felt as requirement anymore in
our university life, without which the essential questions of existence
and mortality have remained unasked. It is the incessant interruption
of existence of the thinker, this caesura at the heart of thinkability,
this rendering of existence as un-predicative, and becoming oneself
stranger to oneself, or even monstrous: experience of thinking is this
transformation, from which an academician flees, as if from a central
fire. This academician does not allow, and constantly flees from the
experience of thinking, which is the experience of abandonment, pure
and naked abandonment when existence is touched by the experience
of the non-condition, that is, by the abyss of our mortality. This
experience, in its impossibility to be apparent in thought, this little
thing that washes away the thinker’s existence with tears and prayers,
this little thing does not interest today’s academician. No doubt
today’s university, at least what is near to us, has become the burial
ground of spirit that has long lost even the melancholic longing
for the creative passion of questioning in an essential manner that
transforms the thinker’s individuality, expanding her soul to the
infinite. The academic has become someone who is not transformed
by the figures of his own thought, whose existence is divorced from
his experience of thinking, each one becoming a non-individuated
homogenous mass, where each one resembles every one, a mere
bundle of ideas or concepts without life. The academic scholar has

become what Nietzsche speaks of the Platonic Ideas as ‘the last fumes
of evaporating reality’ (Nietzsche 1968, p. 37) a negation and not
an affirmation of life, when neither existence enriches thinking, nor
thinking enriches existence.
The truth of Nietzsche’s saying has become more visible now than
ever before, when in the realm of knowledge there is taking place
complete mechanization of knowledge at the disposal of cognitive
mastery of given phenomena. Instead of the diversion of positive
knowledge from metaphysics, there is happening a realization of a
certain metaphysical mastery at the extreme limit of its possibility
where this metaphysics appears as a totality that constantly delimits
itself while constituting itself, each time, as a dispositif, as all totalizing
apparatus. An essential vigilant thinking must be able to show the
enigmatic, paradoxical nature of this metaphysics: the simultaneous
forming an apparatus and delimiting of it, and through which the
state of exception becomes included, or the true state of exception
takes a false name, that is, it attempts to exhaust the unnameable in
overnaming. At this moment it is necessary to introduce an eccentric
movement—how to say this?—A movement full of cunning
and ingenuous invention that introduces incessant movement of
diversion, which is not what Hegel meant by ‘diremption’ of a ‘bad
infinity’ (Hegel 1998). It is to introduce at each moment a ‘not yet’
at each hic et nunc: this diversion is the moment of non-thought, or
unthought irreducible to knowledge at cognitive disposal, a moment
of truth not yet impaired by cognition. This hic et nunc is the messianic
moment when history itself comes to a halt or pause, a pause that
cannot be narrated to belong as historical period of an accumulative,
progressive movement of universal history. This hic et nunc is the
paradisiacal messianic moment that enriches thinking itself, without
which existence becomes malicious and acquires resentment against
life. The resentment against life becomes concepts that do not know
anything outside its cognitive functionality. In other words, concepts
that is devoid of the passion of life become mere negativity and loses
their pure potentiality of redemptive fulfilment. They sink themselves
in the violence of their cognitive functionality. Once concepts are
served at mere cognitive disposal, they become amenable to system
or totality. To rescue thinking from such cognitive disposal will be
the redemptive task of experiencing thinking as thinking. It is in this

sense, thinkers like Nietzsche can be highest inspiration for whom
philosophy is less a wrestling with concepts but with existence itself,
not so much with knowledge but with the moments of truth that
erupts something like an abyss at the heart of existing. Here alone
lays the possibility to rescue or wrest such a moment that tastes the
summit of mountains whose freedom Nietzsche loved so much.
Such a thinker like Nietzsche who loves the open blue sky and
height of mountains renounces the ideals of petrified knowledge.
His feet are too light to carry the heavy weight of knowledge that
makes scholars walk with ponderous, languishing gait. He is rather
a wanderer and quite a light footed wanderer is he—for he must be
in readiness at any moment to make leap over abyss—the wanderer
of the winding paths of mountains from where he has a glimpse of
the abyss below. As a wanderer, it is his condition, or better, his non-
condition that he is constantly assailed by the non-condition and the
impossible. Therefore in his laughter there resonates a certain joyous,
cheerful madness, for, as Plato speaks of it (and here Nietzsche
reports): ‘it is through madness that the greatest good things have
come to Greece’ (Nietzsche 1982, pp. 14-16), a divine madness that
loves the demonic weather and the perilous paths to truth. In his
wanderings, he strays away from the other street, well lit up and
thickly populated, that leads to knowledge. ‘Ah, give me madness’,
say these solitary and agitated minds,
You heavenly powers! Madness, that I may at least believe in myself!
Give deliriums and convulsions, sudden lights and darkness, terrify
me with frost and fire such as no mortal has ever felt, with deafening
din and prowling figures, make me howl and crawl like a beast: so
that I may only come to believe in myself ...the new spirit which is
in me, whence is it if it is not from you? Prove to me that I am yours;
madness alone can prove it’ (Ibid.).
Dark is his solitary path where non-knowledge suddenly flashes up

like lightning and sounds like thunders. This imminent undecidable,
or this undecidable imminence of the event, whose arrival is
irreducible to the logical march of a historical necessity, cannot
be incorporated into the homogenous, universal history. At best
what a poet-thinker thinker can do is to wander, at fits and starts,
discontinuously, sometimes even at the risk of being led astray from

the path and allowing out of these discontinuities of wandering in the
solitary mountain paths, repetition to emerge, not the repetition of
what is already the accomplished result of researches, but the not yet
of thought, the unthought. This repetition is like the ruminating of a
cow. Nietzsche’s analogy between the poet thinker and the cow befits
here: a poet thinker is like a cow that ruminates (Nietzsche 1989, p.
23). The thinker is like a wanderer in a strange land where he lost his
tongue: he moves from here to there in search of the land yet to be
known, exposed to the lightning and thunders which through sudden
advent surprises and astonishes him and thereby bestows upon him
this strange gift of non-knowledge of coming, this intimation of
mortality and finitude. This ecstatic experience of the outside makes
his existence an open existence to himself, to others and to the world.
This makes the thinker’s own existence something like an event. To
render one’s own existence into an event: this is the highest task of an
intellectual-spiritual history of a thinker’s existence; its profundity is
proved by the exemplary manner that a thinker has lived and died. The
integrity of such thinking is not an academic affair, but an existential
affair of a life. Such an integrity and dignity of philosophical thinking
constitutes the singular ethics of a singular thinker. It is the way that
a thinker lives and dies as thinker, no longer merely sinking one’s
teeth on settled knowledge, but where thinking and existing together
constitutes an ethics, singular ethics that constantly throws oneself
into the perilous sea of non-knowledge.
Unlike an academic scholar who has its his disposal a prior
methodology or a well formulated thesis in advance, the poet thinker
has to make sudden leaps at undecided moments when he finds
himself in the abyss of the in-between, between the end of a path
and beginning of another path, end of a night and beginning of a
morning. Long is this path, and long is this turning and this twisting.
To take the leap, where the advent of thinking happens is a risk that
the wanderer has to affirm or wager the risk of life and death. The
truth that the thinker rescues comes out of a wager that must be
reaffirmed again and again if truth is not to sink its teeth in the sand
of imbecile knowledge. It is the moment when the thinker walks, like
Nietzsche’s tight rope walker in Zarathustra, as if over an abyss. Here
instead the truth of thinking is validated by the event of existing alone.
Its truth is shown in the movement of the leap itself, and not outside of it.
Such a philosophical thinking can be called existential thinking since
it is concerned less with the cognition of the given world at cognitive
disposal, but with the value and sense of existence itself.
Notes on this Work

This work, while it has never abandoned the necessity of a systematic
presentation (which is a different question than system), has remained
incomplete, un-accomplished. The conclusion could not be reached,
and the path of thought, instead of leading to some kind of result
through a progressive, linear movement, rather opened up ever new,
multitudinous paths, to ever new books to come, to future books
which will perhaps never be written, which can never be written.
What is fascinating that when one sets to work on a book, or that one
has given a certain form, it summons in its dream other books which
will never be written, which could not be written, which could never
have been written: impossible books, books that have already always
erased itself from all actuality. All books seem to share this same
fate: they give the dream of other books which will never be written,
and for that matter will never exist. They are the books of pure
potentiality, the pure possibility. One may call them ‘dream books’
not only in the sense that one only dreams them, but in the sense,
more importantly, that they dream us, they dream in us, they send
us to dream them. Each book which one has just begun, or that one
has just given a certain form, is only a dream of a never book where
a movement of thinking which threatens to become interminable
will finally be reposed, and will have a Sabbath. But such a book,
since it is a never book, is never written and as a result, like our
existence, no book ever attains completion and accomplishment. All
book is unfinished, uncompleted, not because it will be completed
one day or another, but that it is already always uncompleted and
unfinished; yet precisely this opens us to the future of the book as
such, of each and every book which is always to come. The book to
come which will never come to pass away is not only the occasion of
an infinite distress for the writer, but also the very occasion of its joy
and festivity that there will always be books, albeit always incomplete
and already unfinished. Each book arises out of this melancholy of
the immemorial that dreams give us, but for that matter, it is also the
moment of the structural opening of each book that we write, each
being a failed book, uncompleted and unfinished book, especially
those books that we write putting our very existence at stake, where
we allow our own existence to write its own dreams, those infinite and
interminable dreams that never cease coming toward us, whether we
asleep or awake, haunting us, infinitely murmuring within us, within
the eardrum of our soul. These are the dreams that keep vigilance on
us while we are asleep, dreams of books which will—not so much
will enclose our existence in them, but—be one with our existence so
that dream and existence can become one, when a plenitude will be
reached where our being fulfils itself, and then, only a silence would
follow, by erasing this book, each and every book, from all memory
and traces. The completion of the book which fulfils itself in this
co-incidence of being and its dreams, of the book and existence,
will be that book that will result in the cancellation of that book or
erasure of that book from all monumentality and memorial traces.
The future of that book that dreams within us is to attain the no-
book, which like silence fulfilling and completing language, will be
a book of silence, not because the book will not speak anymore, nor
that there is nothing more to speak, for the book has now said the
essential absolutely, without remainder. When such a book will come,
each and every word of it will become ‘citable’: ‘Erst der erlösten
Menschheit ist ihre vergangenheit in jedem ihre Momente zitierbar
geworden . Jeder ihrer gelebten Augenblicke wird zu einer citation a
l’ordre du jour—welcher Tag eben der jügste ist’ (Benjamin 1977,
p.252). Let us translate these words of Benjamin: ‘only a redeemed
mankind receives the plenitude of its past, that is to say, only for
a redeemed mankind its past becomes citable in all its moments.
Each moment it lives becomes a citation a l’ordre du jour—that
day is Judgement day.’ In each book that we write and that sees the
light of the day, another book or rather a never- book invisibly, in
the nocturnal depth of the night, writes itself. Each visible book is
only a partial fulfilment of that invisible book: the task of writing
is to open each and every book to its invisible other book which is
always to come, a promise is given in the immemorial past, which
for that matter exceeds each and every book. It is the Idea of the
book itself.
This work is neither an exegesis nor a commentary on any thinker.

If ‘philosophy’ is understood to be objective cognition of the world,
then this work does not even merit being a work of philosophy.
Instead this peculiar work in which the existentiality of the writer’s
existence is involved, does not claim to bear the status of ‘objective’,
anymore than the ‘subjective’ cognition of the world. It is rather the
question of the value and sense of existence that this work is concerned
with. The writer who raises the question of the sense and value of
existence rather than the question of the cognition of the ‘objective’
world, cannot but ask the question regarding the relation between
the writer and writing itself, which is the following: what happens
to the ‘I’ who bears a proper name, supposing ‘Hegel’, or ‘Kant’,
in so far as the writer ‘I’ seems to have become, precisely by virtue
of the linguistic-thinking exercise called ‘philosophy’, something
other than the empirical, this specific, unique individual bearing a
proper name calling itself ‘I’? It is as if philosophical writing already
in advance tempers the one who says ‘I’ with mortality, so that
one who philosophizes no longer remains the being to appropriate
his own existence, so that displacing his proper name mortality
enables something else to emerge, which is the event of thinking. The
philosopher is nothing but the site of event of thinking that bears,
henceforth, its own singular signature of its coming into presence.
Henceforth mortality will temper each draft of thinking with its

own invisible signature, displacing and de-centring the ‘subject’
philosopher from any possibility of appropriation, abandoning him
to the pure spacing of the event, which is singular and universal at
the same time. In this sense to write is to render oneself non-proper,
not actively, but in passivity beyond being active and being passive.
This pure passivity is the spacing that abandoning the philosopher-
writer to the space of death calls forth the event of thinking to
come to presence. Therefore this ‘I’, who writes this pronoun ‘I’, is
only the name of the nameless, the non-propriety of the ‘proper’,
only the appearing of the unapparent, the manifestation of a non-
manifestation—which is the event of thinking coming to presence.
Therefore the writer knows, with this peculiar knowledge that is

bestowed by mortality itself, that what he is attempting to say is
essentially a failed attempt, an attempt that is destined to be a failure,

which is the failure of dream-thinking to attain actuality. Yet the
‘failure’ of a thought, which is also thought’s open-ness to its own
futurity and its event-character, are precisely what calls thinking forth.
It is what is at stake in thinking, what summons thinking to inscribe
the invisible promise of fulfilment in each and every signature. Like
the greatness of a book that lays in its essential failure, so the greatness
of a thought is also the greatness of its essential failure to accomplish
itself. Failing to accomplish itself, thought interminably calls to
itself that is outside of all thought, which on that event can never be
measured in thought: the immeasurable in relation to which thinking
fails to ground itself, and thereby risks itself ever and again; the peril
of thought that opens thought to the unthinkable, to that which is
the excess of thought, the measurelessness of the unthinkable.
How to name this? The thinker, unlike scholars, is not certain about
this. Unlike the scholar who is guided in the most strict methodology
that step by step, in a manner progressive-accumulative, leads him to
the certitude of knowledge—of what is called ‘objective’ cognition—
the thinker on the pathway of thinking is never sure of his path,
for there to be pathway of thinking, thinking must constantly clear
the way each time anew. Thinking is at once clearing, lightening
the space and presenting at the same time, for the presencing itself
to present there must already be the open. Unlike the telos of the
scholar—which is that of knowledge production—that is given
beforehand and whose pre-supposed foundation is not interrogated,
the philosophical contemplation is concerned with the truth of the event,
which exceeds any teleological or archaeological organization in
objective cognition. If there is anything like ‘truth’ in philosophical
presentations, this truth is not cognition of existence, in the sense
that existence is not proved here, but validity of what is presented in
philosophical presentation will be proved outside the work, by and
in existing itself. So the rhythm of thinker’s thinking in a wandering
path is different from a scholarly treatise. The scholar attempts to
prove a hypothesis or an axiom—of something existing, as possible
or actual—in his research work; but what the poet thinker has to
say is to be validated—by whom?—by existence itself. To think
poetically is to renounce knowledge, and to expose being to that
which exceeds knowledge, to that unapparent apparition of presence
that presences itself as an immemorial presencing before and beyond

being, before and beyond knowledge. To poetize thinking is to make
open that space, from the heart of thinking, that reveals the gift of
the immemorial and also the arriving of the wholly otherwise, the
incalculable advents of the unthought: of what is not yet human
truth and not yet human time.
This manuscript could not be a Book. Perhaps the age of the Book
is over. One no longer writes Book as such these days, not at least
in Hegelian sense of ‘the Book’. This poet writer, who cherished for
long time to write a book, has realized that his thoughts, coming
towards him, refuse by their own accord to be collected and gathered
into the unity of a book where a single logical train of thinking, a
programmatic thesis or hypothesis arrive into a gathering point of
unity. It is not that the writer has a planned and accomplished a
‘failed book’; it is rather otherwise. This (non)work is in fact born
out of despair. Each time (are innumerable times) groundwork for
this work have been prepared, each time it is found frustratingly
unsatisfactory, so that this project is condemned to ever new attempt
from beginning again and again, progressing only to a certain point
that brings its own reversal, dissolution and perishing. This is a book
of disaster, and not a book of completion. Therefore this work does
not know the song of Hegelian Owl of Minerva which sings only
at the dawn. At best, this work is better be seen as ‘becoming in
dissolution’ (Hölderlin 1988, pp. 96-100), or coming in perishing;
which is the unworking or undoing that carries the ashes of Semele
which the God Dionysus has reduced her to. Instead of being able to
be tarrying with the fire which is ‘the energy of thinking’ that Hegel
(1998, p. 19) speaks of that is able to be ‘tarrying with the negative’,
it is the dissolution to ashes that this book has become in perishing.
Therefore the dream of the book is renounced forever, for it is the
character of thinking to arrive only by introducing its own interval,
or moments of suspension that refuse a unitary centre. Instead of
the book singing the song of the Owl, this manuscript only presents
discontinuous, repetitive attempts of ever new beginning, ever new
embarking into new voyages of thinking. Provisionally we shall name
this as constellation, or configuration thinking: discontinuous, non-
identical thinking where thinking not being able to achieve systemic
unity, fragments and repeats itself. It presents as stories of multiple
voyages, none of them is accomplished, but everything is condemned

to ashes. As such this work, in each of its pages, is bearing the agonal
marks of this essential failure. Yet in this worklessness of a death, a
death that refuses to work for the empty Universal, writing spaces itself
open to the arriving of the Other. Each thinker who has undertaken,
even once, such a voyage that seeks what is beyond, the unknown
and has experienced within him this fragility of thinking, its essential
powerlessness that henceforth pervades his existence with a certain
mournfulness, as if thinking itself mourns itself in him. There is
something essential fragility in all thinking, barely a breath that faints
away, especially when it aspires and ventures to essential thinking.
This fragility is such as to resemble what Hegel calls ‘beauty without
strength’ that cannot maintain itself in the face of death (Ibid.). Yet
the fragile suffering has about it something demonic which hardly can
even attain to language. Language of this suffering is almost to the
point of muteness only by a breath. This suffering in writing renders
the philosopher, as Socrates gives it a name, demonic. Suffering either
elevates one beyond the common humanity, or throws us below
where there no pearl shines. Henceforth he is destined to carry this
mournfulness at the depth of his existence, incommunicable to
any other mortals for to others he will only appear as that uncouth
monster whose language falls below signification or meaning.
The figure of the thinker, which is non-figure par excellence,
is the figure of a monster, or demon. Socrates knew something of
this experience himself and carried this demon as an ever lasting
companion. The thinker must carry, in his fragility and non-power,
the monstrosity of the unthought, to which his thought cannot attain
to, in which thoughts founder and falter. The monstrosity of the
unthought renders the thinker as Aristotle speaks of him no longer
belonging to either completely to the human order, nor to the divine
order, for he is the open space where the immemorial appears that
does not yet ‘properly’ belong to the order of ‘ the human’. Or, one
can speak like Nietzsche of this monstrous ‘figure’ of the philosopher
as both animal and God together: ‘to love alone one must be an
animal or a god—says Aristotle. There is yet a third case: one must
be both—a philosopher’ (Nietzsche 1968, p. 23). Like Oedipus who
in his blindness is exposed to the excess, the thinker is the eternally
exiled one, homeless and abandoned, eating his heart out, banished
both by the divine order and the human order. This non-humanity of
the thinker, this monstrosity of the poet-voyager, whose humanity is
robbed by the strange sea and the uncanny manifestation of the sky,
he is that strange coupling of the animal and the divine, possessed by
the excess, and seized by ‘the divine madness’ (Plato 2001, pp.111-
198). By belonging neither to the human, nor to divine, he is fated
to carry that monstrous passion, the passion of the unthought that
transforms his whole existence so that his whole existence may become
the site of the open where the unapparent makes itself manifest and
the immemorial presences in his stammering tongue. The name
of the thinker, the proper name of a thinker is none but what the
unthought transforms him into, so that out of this peril of his being
he may welcome the immemorial and the unapparent. A thinker is
a metamorphosis of the unthought. Thinking that is pursued in the
pathway of thought is already always tempered with the unthought
and the immemorial. If mortality itself is that which exceeds each
time any concept that mortals give to it, this mortality adheres in the
innermost ground of the thinking called ‘philosophical’.
Why to think if the unthought does not transform the thinker? Is
not the whole purpose of painting lies in that the painting transforms
the painter herself? Writing by condemning the writer to the point of a
demonic suffering also frees him from death, at the instant of death, and
opens him to the advent of another time. Writing is the movement—
spacing of space and timing time—that traverses through the
being of the writer, a movement that he cannot appropriate as
constitutive of his self-presence or subjectivity, but that dispropriates
him in advances, disowns him and abandons him. But this non-
appropriation, this intrinsic finitude of the writer is also the promise
of another time, a wholly otherwise of time. This is the time that
heralds the arrival of the wholly otherwise, which is not this or that
particular mode of time, but timing of time, the spacing open of time
where time itself arrives, grows, ripens. The movement of writing is
An awaiting, in distress and in hope, when the fugitive Gods
have abandoned the world, for the advent of another inception,
and another inauguration when history itself momentarily stands
still. Writing is this caesural interval between ending and another
beginning. In this distress of the interval, an advent of the otherwise
is announced and the promise of another coming is renewed, silently,
when the day of History is exhausted and the dusk of the night has just
begun. The movement of writing is this nocturnal movement outside
the completion of history which unites, in a ‘monstrous coupling’
mortality and the advent of the coming dawn, the immemorial
promise and its redemptive fulfilment. The monstrosity of writing
bears this immemorial promise of the advent.
In the writings of an epoch, the whole epoch writes itself. But
more essential writing is more it speaks what could not have belonged
to that epoch, the excess of that epoch, the immemorial promise of
that epoch—the missed fulfilment, the departed gift, the erased hope
and the forgotten dreams. Each epoch has its own logic of movement,
and this logic excludes what it cannot incorporate. More essential
writing is, more essential is poeticizing and thinking, more it speaks
the ruins of history and the limit of that epoch. Philosophical writing,
because it seeks the essential and not merely ephemeral and fashionable,
is the writing at the limit of the world. More this mortality seizes the
movement of writing of an epoch with trembling and fear, more
it announces the advent of the outside, at the limit of that epoch,
namely, its break or discontinuity which, on that event, does not
completely belong to it.
This question of a time always to come was already haunting in
my mind as a thought not yet thought when I was a post doctoral
fellow at University of Marc Bloch in Strasbourg, France, working on
my post Doc manuscript which was then called Travail of Mourning:
Finitude and Intimation of Melancholy. However this question did
not then arrive in the above mentioned formulation and articulation,
but remained as a not-yet-thought in the thought of finitude that
I was trying to elaborate at that time. What, then, I understood as
finitude is nothing other than the in-finite movement of un-working
the solidified, sedimented artifice of metaphysics, a finitude that
is intimated with the more originary melancholy that refuses to
be ‘work’, to be production of self-consciousness, subjectivity, ego
that recuperates its own loss in order to arrive at its self-presence,
in a manner of Odysseus’ voyage. It was a question of thinking an
originary melancholy that is outside the metaphysics of Subjectivity
and work.
The travail of mourning is this worklessness, ruination rather than
‘work’, or effectuation of self-consciousness. In this manner, I wanted
to open up the ‘experience’ of mourning outside the dominant

metaphysics of subjectivity, in a quasi-phenomenological manner,
where—unlike the dominant phenomenological ontology of Eidos,
of noema-noetic co-relation—the ‘experience’ itself to pushed to the
utmost limit, no longer a constitutive-constituting self-consciousness
or transcendental subjectivity, but rather an opening, or spacing
towards a time yet to come. My thought somehow, not being able to
go further this, got stuck up there. After an interval time of despair,
I realized the necessity of introducing another movement, along and
simultaneously with the movement of worklessness, a movement
of affirmation of a time ‘to come’, an originary movement of the
unapparent appearing of a time that first of all opens, manifests,
discloses, reveals the world to the mortals on the basis of which
alone there makes sense of our politics and history, our ethics and
metaphysics. As such, the various closures of our metaphysics and
ethics, of our politics and history need to be opened to this opening-
revelation of the world, which is none but the phenomenon of
temporalization itself, a phenomenon of time that cannot be thought
within any phenomenological ontology, or within any subjective self-
presence of subjectivity, but as a ‘phenomenology of the unapparent.’
This phenomenon of time ‘to come’ is the unconditional affirmation
of the outside which constitutes the messianic event of the world.
The task of our thinking today, if it does not have to be enclosed
within various conditioned and conditional thinking, is to rescue
this phenomenon of the time ‘to come’ its unconditional character of
affirming from closures of various immanent politics and ethics, of history
and metaphysics. The unconditional in us is this event-character—
erupting, arising and disappearing, rupturing and interrupting,
transfiguring and redeeming—which often tends to be enclosed
within various attempts at conditional and conditioned politics of
immanent self-consumption and self-appropriation. To rescue the
unconditional, which is given as gift and promise at the opening of
the world, demands a movement of expropriation or dispropriation
so that we may be abandoned to the unconditional, to the
disclosive-revelatory phenomenon of the world. This movement of
expropriation, or dispropriation is the co-relative ‘concept’ that I am
introducing here with the event of the time to come. What is to come is
not this or that, but a finite coming each time, which—understood in
relation to the unconditional movement of expropriation—is always

a remnant, an ‘irreducible remainder’ (Schelling, 1936), an always
to come. It is the phenomenon of time to come whose unapparent
apparition cannot be grasped by any predicates of time and being,
for it precedes and follows any predicative truth of logic. What has
changed from the previous work, that is, my post doc manuscript, is
that of the change of focus, or perspective. It is no longer the question
of finitude and melancholy in itself as such which is the concern of
this presence work, but the question of the immemorial promise of
time and hope for redemptive fulfilment in relation to which the
question of finitude may arise. The movement of expropriation may
arise, or make sense only in its relation to the event of arrival as such,
without which it remains mere interruption, ruination or unworking
without transfiguration, without event, without the affirmative and
positive. Finitude alone, understood in the above manner, does not
alone affirm the event, even though the event itself is essentially finite
that opens itself to the wounds of the infinite.
When this problem has begun to be clearer to me, I have devoted
myself to the study of those thinkers and philosophers whose concern
is this essential finitude of our existence that opens us, from the heart
of finitude, to the immemorial promise of time yet to come: the
works of Schelling, Hölderlin, Heidegger, Benjamin, Kierkegaard,
Bloch and above all Franz Rosenzweig, teasing out the redemptive,
utopian, messianic moments of their thinking. In this sense, this
work in its reversal, can also be seen as extension, or complement to
the question that I was already pursuing in my post doc manuscript
at Strasbourg during the academic session 2006-2007. As such this
work bears witness to the immense gratitude to both the institutions
where I have been able to carry out my work—the most beautiful
and inspiring institutions like University of Strasbourg, Strasbourg
and Indian Institute of Advanced Study at Shimla.
Epilogue
§ Fragments
If the dominant philosophical discourse is singularly profited from

death, by being able to render death itself a ‘work’, writing—in fatigue
and in patience—point towards experiences beyond the dominant
philosophical discourse, especially in its dialectical-speculative form
assumed in Hegel. If death is determined in Hegel to be constitutive
of Concept, which accomplishes the dialectical-historical closure,
it forgets thereby the true mourning—mourning for the death of
the Other, the mourning that is unredeemed within the dialectical
historical self-presencing. It is therefore necessary to affirm the hope of
a coming time, outside the dialectical-historical closure, the messianic
hope of coming of the Other. This time beyond time, of which
Emmanuel Levinas calls ‘patience of time’, remains inappropriable
in ‘my’ self-presence: this impossibility of self-presencing out of the
inexhaustible freedom that eludes all our manner of grounding, this
groundless finitude is the condition of possibility of our affirmation of
a future to come. This, however, constitutes the task of our freedom,
we who as existence-unto-finitude are born out of abyss, out of the
non-self-present and therefore groundless ground. Writing or Saying
addressed to the Other will, then, not be constitutive of speculative-
dialectical concept, but be a gift to the other and a promise of future.
This poetic-aphoristic writing reads the works of Maurice Blanchot
and Emmanuel Levinas to think finitude and language as gift and the
necessity to affirm a coming time.
*
¶Beginning with Hegel, let us say with him that there is a writing that
is the secret of sense: it is the secret of ‘origin’, of emergence of sense
to itself, of sense’s awakening from itself to itself, of sense’s coming

to light from the slumber of sensuous indulgence. This writing
allows itself to work, as a work of sense and a labour of Concept
that presents itself to itself in a kind of self-originary presentation.
Nothing precedes this self-originary work, since it begins with itself
alone and originates with itself as (self ) sense-presentation to itself,
and also nothing follows it—itself being the first and the last -- it
thereby writes its own pre-face and post-face in which its pre-face and
post-face coincides in a ‘co’ that is immanent to itself. It has the copula
of judgement that joins in an immanent manner, while disjoining,
the pre and the post. To think it in its intrinsic relation to time, this
is writing that persists in the temporality of pre, the middle, and the
post (or Subject, the Copula and Predicate), the writing that is Now
presents itself simultaneously in the non-simultaneities of various
nows, the Now that presents itself as non-now in various nows (by
setting itself into variation of non-nows). The Now differs from itself,
sets itself into variation and into non-simultaneity of non-nows and
in that way, which is the ruse of the negative, it gathers into its self-
present unity as unity of differences, or Now as unity of non-nows
of differences. Since it is not the dead, life-less, mere formal unity
(of mathematical truth, for example) but a speculative unity, this
speculative writing is otherwise than the ‘night where all cows are
black’, (Hegel 1998, p. 9) but presents itself as preserving in its unity
of what is written as truth of the non-simul of nows, of differences
that come to presence and disappear. What such a speculative writing
looks like, which is otherwise than ‘absolute night where all cows are
black’?
¶Hegel (Ibid., pp. 59-60) asks us to write: ‘Now is Night’, which,

in being written, is otherwise than the Day and Night, and is true
even when it is no longer ‘now’ the night, even when the now the
moment it is written itself is lapsed and disappeared without return,
for the written ‘now’, in so far it is ‘written’, is preserved in truth as
the Same that now, even though the now itself has disappeared. To
the extent that every now presents to itself as its own absence, that
means, by becoming stale, waste, pure expenditure and demise of
sense without return, it ruins the self-presence any memory of its
own origin, it forgets to grasp that fainting murmur that has become
Fragments • 383
outside the Now, it misses to sublate that cry outside speech and
outside concept, as if the speculative Concept betrays itself. This is
the great betrayal, the infidelity, the transgression of what presents
itself as truth or knowledge. This cry betrays the Book, falls outside
the Hegelian System, because it does not originate with the Book or
the system and does not end with it either—for the Book in order
to be something, to be itself must originate with itself and end with
itself alone. Therefore the Book always presents itself as the Book of
nothing, since it must begin with nothing (it must not presuppose
anything, since any ‘something’ has a beginning outside of itself )
and ends with nothing (since any ‘something’ is not ‘everything’,
since the system—if it is at all the system, must have everything
within itself ). A peculiar result obtains here, which Schelling’s later
philosophy articulates in its vehement critique of Hegelian attempt
at the completion of the Book with the logical concept alone: in
the Book nothing really is said, or written, the Book that claims to
say everything and write everything and does not merely want to be
‘the absolute where all cows are black’, since the Book has neither
past nor future, neither time not eternity. A system or the Book that
claims to found itself on the basis of negativity alone, this Book itself
has neither past nor future within it, neither something nor nothing
within it. Everything is outside the Book and nothing is outside the
Book: nothing occurs, happens in the Book because the Book itself
must happen, must occur absolutely, completely without remainder,
without leftover so that everything is leftover, everything is remained
apart from the Book, outside the Book. This exhaustion or fatigue
of the Book reduces the Book to its own negativity or nothingness,
of its worklessness. This Book does not know time, nor it knows
death and mourning, for in the Book nobody dies1, nobody writes,
nobody mourns. A true mourning presupposes a non-appropriable
transcendence, a time of the outside and time of the other beyond
self-presence and beyond the self-originating unity of the Now. It
is only in this sense mourning has relation to the Other and is true
mourning, for mourning is always mourning for the Other, which
is not preserved in the unity of a self—foundational ground, or in
the unity of a speculative Now. It is in this sense alone mourning
has a relation to a past forever inappropriable and a future beyond
calculation; it is in this sense writing has a relation to a dying that is
outside the sense of presence and its presence of sense, that does not
preserve the truth of nows in being written Now as ‘Now is Night’.
Not being able to work, not being work, writing is exposed to the
utter abandonment of mourning, inconsolable mourning, infinite
mourning, and interminable mourning. This infinite finitude of
dying is an infinite departure without return, an immeasurable
disappearing without speech and voice. Writing: the murmur of the
departed, the foundering of speech, the stammering fainting of the
elapsed.
¶There is a writing that presents itself as sense of disaster and there

is a writing, which no one writes, is otherwise than sense, that
introduces, in the sense of disaster, a disaster of sense: disaster of
sense and not sense of disaster, even though disaster of sense is that
from which sense as such, even the sense of disaster emerges. This
is the most abysmal ‘origin’ of sense, ‘origin’ outside of sense and
hence without ‘origin’ (since sense must present to itself its origin
as sense). Schelling calls this origin ‘groundlessness’ (Abgrund), or
abyss that gives the possibility of anything like ground at all and
therefore cannot itself in turn be grounded or recuperated in the
immanence of a speculative concept. The transcendence of the
groundless, exceeding any self-presence, extends and lengthens time
itself to infinity, of what Schelling the ‘eternal past’ or ‘the darkness
of the past’ which dialectical-historical memory cannot trace back to
another self-presence. Levinas calls this time before as ‘immemorial
past’, past that has never been present, that has never been a self-
presence, beyond the closure of the Book, abandoning the book to its
fatigue, to its wearing away of itself or tearing away of itself beyond
repair, or its unworking in an already time outside time. There is
something like mourning in all works and in all writings—writing
that constitutes the Book and writing outside the Book: the disaster
of mourning from which Socrates ‘the pure thinker of the West’,
the philosopher who does not write, protects himself by driving
away the mourned women for whom Socrates is the other, the other
who does not return in the immortality of hope, in the hope of the
immortality of soul so that inconsolable mourning traverses whom
the death of the other affects beyond any measure. As if there occurs
two deaths in Phaedo: death of oneself, who is Socrates himself, for
Fragments • 385
whom immortality of the soul is promised through death, for whom

death is only a passage and a promise since he has learnt how to
die (‘Philosophy is to learn how to die’: says Socrates) so as not to
die without return (without the gift of eternity), the invested death
(Philosopher’s death); and then there is another death, for whom
death is always death of the other and without sense, without any
investment of sense, and hence dying without return and without
profit, inconsolable mourning of those who have not learned to die
for other’s death, foolish and non-sense2 of mourning that affects us
by its nonsense, that does not leave them even to hope, disastrous
mourning . Yet, is it not that already in the death of the philosopher,
of the one who learns to know nothing, or better, learns to know that
he does not know (Socrates is this exemplary figure par excellence),
hope already marks an infinite distance, a diachronic distance neither
traversed and nor accomplished, neither measured nor guaranteed by
knowledge even if it is hope for the immortality of the soul? This hope
is the distance from all knowledge, even the philosophical knowledge
of death, as if it is not enough to learn to die, as if knowledge of
death is not enough for death so that hope, beyond the measurement
of knowledge, is only that be borne in a passivity beyond measure,
death that is, as Emmanuel Levinas calls it, ‘the patience of time’.3
Hope itself would have already made Socrates other than himself
(other than a ‘self ’) without recall, the ‘I’ of Socrates who has become
the ‘he’: un-guaranteed dying outside time, disastrous dying whose
remains would be for the other to write, the one for whom the dead
is the other. It is always the other who writes, the other being the
survivor and the mourned. Plato absents himself from the other’s
death so that discourse be possible, so that writing is possible, and so
that writing, in this possibility, also be that of mourning, the remains
of the remaining, the impossibility of writing death, ‘the impossibility
of all possibilities’, as if writing hesitates itself before itself and faints
away in a murmur that refuses the name of an ‘event’ of finitude.
Disaster does not occur; it does not fulfil the requirement of being
the event, even the event of being. Not being able to work, it falls
short of its work, a hesitation before death, a trembling and a cry.
¶‘The work of mourning: The inverse of dying’. (Blanchot 1992, p. 96).
¶In Saying Now would not persist in all nows as contraction of
nows, so that in this non-returned and non-conserved dying of the

Other, time is lengthened to infinity and also differed to the infinite
passivity of patience, which is the patience of infinity itself. It is the
non-negative finitude of the Other that is affection, finitude which
is neither the accomplishment of the end nor the annihilation
of the once-lived. In Saying affection4 affects, or the death of the
other affects, and introduces in ‘me’ a disquietude, an inconsolable
mourning. Levinas speaks of this affection as disquietude of the non-
in-difference in the Same. Would not it then a mourning already
always and in a time yet to come affect Saying and all Said, bestowing
in our speech, in our action, in our existence an infinite responsibility
to the other, to the death of the other? The dialectical-historical task
of constituting the universal world order on the basis of the labour
of the negative and on the basis of the power of death that converts
even non-being into being will, then, be insufficient. The labour of
the negativity that we perform in our ‘mouth swallowing the water
or in cutting the head of a cabbage’,5 and in the ‘tarrying with the
negative’6 which of all must be the most terrible, this power of
death is opened, in an ethical responsibility, to the utter passivity,
to the dying of the other, to a death which is ‘the patience of time’.
If Levinas calls this ‘patience of time’ diachrony, mourning would
be the affection of this diachrony, or rather diachrony is that which
affects us as mourning for the Other. It is a gift without presence,
beyond the simul of self-presence, beyond the labour and power of
the concept.
¶Gift without presence and without measure! Presence measures itself

in the equivalences of nows into Now and measure, being measure
(which is its ‘being’), assumes the time of presence, since only
measure can be present and can be presented and since only presence
can be measured. In the measure of presence and in this presence
of measure, negativity effectuates its production where everything is
exchanged—of being passing into nothing and nothing passing into
being (Hegel 1975, p.134)—where, in pain and as logos, is produced
the world and the Book. Remember Heidegger’s bringing to our
notice the innermost connection of pain and logos in the labour of
the negative as the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics
(Heidegger 1959).But in giving gifts to the Other, where gift is none
Fragments • 387
other than the giving, now would not exchange with all other nows
and hence is without the Now that is sublation of the nows. A gift
without salvation, without Aufhebung in the measurelessness of its
giving, renouncing one’s hunger for the dying of the destitute other,
destitute dying! There is something like mournfulness, in the destitute
dying without solace, in all giving and in renouncing; it’s a sadness
without nostalgia for lost presence, without me assuming power or
force, without the prerogatives of law: the patience of Saying, the
fatigue of writing! Between Levinas (if we are allowed to say that
Levinas is the ‘speaker’ of the patience of Saying) and Blanchot (if we
are allowed to say that Blanchot as ‘writer’ of the fatigue of writing):
mourning beyond measure would separate them from each other,
gift would call them to each other into proximity. Between Levinas
and Blanchot: time without temporality, the excess of exteriority, the
interval of interruption.
¶Yet is not it that language primarily presents itself as work of death,

in being capable of death so as to be capable of language, in being
capable of language so as to be able to die—in other words—so as
to be able to be, to be able to maintain what is not maintainable,
to preserve that which annihilates, to make appear and present
what disappears so that this impotence of nothingness itself brings
to birth what is ‘is’, the universal ‘Being in general’ (Hegel 1998,
p.60)? Death, the impossibility par excellence, would then assume
the source and origin of all possibilities as the power of non-power:
‘the possibility of impossibility’ that Heidegger speaks of. With
this Hegelian philosophy attempts, in the most concentrated form
of a system, to extract from death the possibility of something like
possibility at all, the possibility of being and world, of history and
time. Through nothingness, as nothingness of Hegel, the dead
Hegel is resurrected in the reader’s Sunday reading so as Hegel not
be mere corpse prey to the ‘unconscious appetite’ (Ibid., p. 271) of
the elemental or the arrested fetish of sense. Writing—the pyramid
of Hegel, the nothingness of Hegel—is also the possibility of Easter
Sunday which writing undertakes on his behalf as the work of death,
the fulfilment and completion of the Book, the accomplishment of
sense and its desire. Death of Hegel would, then, be the possibility
of a Hegel who is born out of his nothingness, born out of his ashes
once again, re-born in the reader’s reading his Book . But fatigue—
the disaster of sense—traversing the Book, abandons the Book to the
without Book. This is mourning for the dead Hegel who would not
return and is not resurrected in the reader’s reading, the Good Friday
not redeemed in Good Sunday. This is Hegel ravaged by thought
whose writing is only the wrinkles on Hegel’s face, his infinite fatigue
that is borne in patience. This patience would not be recounted in
the Book, in the System, but outside the Book’s restless negativity,
outside its jurisdiction and outside its force.
¶Blanchot’s writing: writing that, in the name of the proper name

‘Blanchot’, in the naming the disappearing of the ‘I’, would name
excessively or too little of Blanchot, writing that disappears without
return, without resurrecting in the reader’s reading so that infinite
mourning traversing the Book, would not constitute the Book.
Mourning for the departed who is not preserved, who has become the
‘he’ without return, disaster without work, dying without possibility,
even ‘the possibility of impossibilities’—impossible mourning, that
is writing.
¶Between Hegel and Blanchot—Lazarus dead and resurrected;

Lazarus dead without return—writing traverses without crossing, or
rather crossing that is to be crossed once again, that means, infinite
times. Infinite crossing which is impossibility of crossing! The
impossible traversal of writing, or the impossible transgression not
recuperated in the speculative concept, for writing, in not being able
to take charge of transgression against the law, does not even posit its non-
positing as transgressive.
¶Let us say that law posits itself as work of death. All law founds
itself, posits itself as an act of negation and presupposes violence
which is the violence of positing. The Book, which is the totality of
sense, gathered by the labour and the pain of the negative, always
appears as the Book of law. Hegel knew something about this, about
death as ‘the supreme fulfilment of work’7 which is the work of law:
it is the empty sovereignty of law, force without sensible, signification
without existence. Yet mourning, not being able to posit anything, even
the positing of finitude, is the de-positing of the Book in passivity, and
Fragments • 389
exceeding the violence of law, opens itself to justice, understood as de-

positing transcendence: Blanchot calls this non-power as ‘writing’ and
Levinas calls justice the non-related relation to the other’s finitude
that is not posited but is patience and affection, which is the excess
in death, as if death is not enough for the infinity of mourning, as if
the diachrony of affection is not measured on the basis of death. Is
not it then justice must pass through, is itself none but this passing
through, writing? Or that writing, in traversing the Book, attracted
by the outside, is justice, always mourned justice. It is not the justice
as the joining of jointure, but disjointed response to the other without
presence.
¶In the work of mourning, it is not grief that works: grief keeps watch.’
(Blanchot 1995, p.51)
A boy, adolescent, passes through the harvested field of an autumnal

evening. The harvested, golden corns lie gathered here and there
by the farmers who have left for home, and the birds, silently
flying back home in the eternal sky, partake the anguish of the
dying sun, and the sky itself, illumined by the last amber of the
day, has grown mute. The boy came home, and since then, as if
infinity of the days have passed and infinite times the sun has set,
infinite times the birds have come home in autumnal evening in
infinite numbers, and the boy too has passed his adolescence, his
youth and his manhood and himself has become the evening Sun
of the autumnal evening, his birds too have drunk the wine of
youth and have now passed away silently in the sky. But what has
happened that day, that evening in him outside him—with the
sky, with the autumnal field and with birds -- have not stopped
happening in him from then onwards, and has recurred incessantly,
thenceforth, every evening the same evening coming and repeating
with a repetition that is infinitely the same dying Sun, the same
birds mute with anguish, the same harvested field of golden corn.
Henceforth he has carried, without being able to, the impossible
and unnameable: henceforth he speaks and names, incessantly that
has become his obsession, only to speak one and the only thing that
he would have liked to speak to others, the one and the only thing
he would have liked to share with others—that includes not only
humans, but also animals and birds and with the elemental forces
of nature—to name to unnameable, to speak the unspeakable, to
share the un-shareable enigma: the truth of a secret that he cannot
bear, and that he bears it in this impossibility, in a patience of
time from where time takes its patience. Henceforth he speaks,
obsessively and incessantly, in an irremediable compulsion that
comes from elsewhere—and he speaks to the animals and birds, to
the humans and to the silence and thunders of the sky—speaking
everything so as not to speak the only essential he would like to
speak, the single event that has happened without happening, the
only and one important event of his life which he bore witness, and
which he cannot testify. It has thenceforth grown silent within him
more he spoke; it grew more solitary more he bonded with others;
it grew more unnameable more he named all those around him:
animals and birds, things and objects, humans and the divine. He
has henceforth carried a secret of a distressed waiting which has
deprived him of his selfhood, a self without self. Henceforth he is
eternally on the way and his distress is the distress of the eternally
awaiting one, the one who having to await has missed the name
and the word, missed speech and its possibility, as if the secret whose
solitude has no common with any commonality is born precisely
at that moment when awaiting, born with it, gives speech for the
first time its possibility, the possibility of a coming time, when the
speech is not yet, speech yet to be born. It is the speech of the one,
the eternally awaiting one, who is yet to be born. It is awaiting for
birth and revelation, for manifestation and opening. Henceforth he
speaks everything with everyone, but silence grew with every speech,
and in every speech there resonated that humming of that distant
world, nearer than anyone and more distant than anything, there
resonated that melancholy of the Sun and the tears of the golden
corns, as if what has befallen on him, without happening anything
‘this’ and ‘that’, outside time is none but the melancholy of speech
itself, the melancholy of the name.
¶Even if, supposing the time of writing is none other than Now that
seeks to incorporate what has become stale when one writes, ‘Now
is night’, the Now that is the eternal immobility of the coming and
disappearing of every nows; then reading, yet to take place, would not
Fragments • 391
come to pass, but would affirm the future of reading, which means,
the impossibility of reading. This reading, this future would not, then,
belong to the ‘possibility of impossibilities’. To read Hegel, impossible
each time, each time the singular and singularly interrupting would
be to read him outside the Book, outside the system. Hegel’s his
face ravaged by the labour of thinking, as one of his students recalls
his face, would then belong to a future of reading outside his own
system, outside his own Book. This exhaustion, this fatigue not yet
exhausted in an accomplished time, would not be thought within
Hegel’s own system of a certain Hegel, the Hegel bearing anonymous
name of the Book. In that sense, the name of Hegel would be outside
all names, through which names pass through without return, as if
in every naming finitude of the named is announced each time, and
thereby marking and effacing the mark that marks the effacement of
time. Let us remember the early Hegel who not yet having arrived at
the system, suffers the melancholia that threatens to lose the grasp of
entirety of his existence altogether, which is sought to be suppressed,
suspended, surpassed in the System. Yet the same mourning affects
his friend Hölderlin without measure which could not be suspended
or suppressed in the system: inconsolable mourning for an absent
origin outside thought, ‘the violence of the elements’ which as if
‘Apollo strikes’ him (Hölderlin 1988a, p.152). Yet mourning not
being yet recounted in the system in an accomplished time, would
contaminate the system without striking anything and anyone in
particular, introducing the unworking of disaster without destroying
anything, tearing the work and exposing to the limitless that would
not have limit as its limit to actualize itself. This disaster would strike
everything and everyone, every sense and every element in the system,
dispersed, so that nothing is salvaged, saved and resurrected intact,
so that the Book, losing its centre, would allow itself to be hollowed
out, not to be able to say anything, not to be able to do anything. The
powerlessness of the Book: the face of Hegel ravaged by the passion
of thinking. To think is to mourn: in thinking we mourn everything
that is finite, fragile and fainting without recall.
¶‘Ruin of words, demise writing, faintness faintly murmuring: what
remains without remains (the fragmentary).’ (Blanchot 1995, p.33)
¶Not to think of time on the basis of death, which is, not to think of
in-finity of patience on the basis of either negativity in the production

of sense, the sense of History, or on the basis of nothingness in the
‘being-towards-death’: this is what we have learnt to think from
Emmanuel Levinas. But the other death, the dying of the other, from
which time takes patience, irreducible to negativity or nothingness
in annihilation or decomposition is the infinite patience which is
otherwise than retention or protention, otherwise than intentionality
that has the measure as the measure.8 It is more ancient than any
memory and more future than any anticipation. Such a patience
unsays the Said so that Saying overflows sense and Said: the surplus
of Saying, the surplus of mourning. Writing too, dying in not able to
die, as if death is not enough of dying—the non-accomplished fatigue
of writing—would not cease dying in the accomplished death. Such
is writing, the measureless that is the limit without limitations, which
is, the measurelessness of the limits that would not have limitations
as its measure. Yet, is not it that Blanchot invites us to think measure
itself as the limit9? Measure which is the limit without limitations,
would not have negativity as its limits in ‘Being-there-and-then’10,
measure in which nothing is actualized, the non-posited measure
of limits and the non-posited limits of measure; it is the measure
that measures nothing, the non-measured measure, measure that is
non-measure. So it is limit, limit that is not posited, that would not
have any determined, accomplished limit as its limit, the non-limited
limit of measure that would not have measure as its limit. Writing:
the non-measured measure, the non-limited limits.
¶What then remains between Saying and writing, on the dying of

the other when mourning is not measured on the basis of death?
Should we call this non-contemporaneity between contemporaries
‘friendship’? Friendship calls them towards each other to proximity
and separates each from the other. Between friends: gift to the other
in mourning, the gift of mourning.
¶The World is not the totality of self and others, the totality of being
and the beings of others, but rather the world is a gift, non-totalized
and out of finitude, insofar as the world is finite, insofar as gift is
singular each time.
Fragments • 393
¶How to think the gift of the name that announces the finitude of
the named and the name itself, insofar as finitude is not reducible to
negativity of the Concept and Sense? There is, as it were, a note of
melancholy that adheres our finite existence, which also intimates the
gift that is given to other. In the sadness in renouncing the claim to
possess the world for one’s own possibility, even if it is ‘possibility of
impossibilities’ that Heidegger speaks of, there lies nobility. It is the
intimation of a noble joy, because it affirms the joy of future. Each
time one speaks, or better, each time language is spoken in one, there
is opening of time to come, there is freeing time from the seizure of
present, from the closure of positing. Language is not primordially
auto-positing time of negativity, but an address to the coming one.
The other is not posited in my address but is addressed towards, a
towards which is not a calculable anticipation, but an incalculable time
that remains. Language has this profound relationship with future,
with coming, with time that remains, more primordially than time
of negativity and its pure positing work of death. Each time language
is addressed to the other, each time opening to time to come, each
time there is Hope for the coming, Hope that redeems time from
the closure of self-presence, from the seizure of self-present. Hope
redeems time and opens to transcendence. It opens to Love, beyond
the self-positing of the negativity of the mere ‘not not’. The time of
evil, deprived of the time of the remains, does not know redemption.
Evil is destruction of Hope, Hope that bursts forth each time one
opens her lips. Evil is the refusal to know the ecstatic temporality of
non-posited past that murmurs in the lament of language at its limit;
it is the refusal to know the incessant demand of ecstatic finitude that
time itself must be renewed each time in each presence as revelation
of the non-posited past. The impossible experience of mourning for
the other is to be transfigured into the messianic hope for coming of
the other, into a redemptive affirmation.
¶The task of the presence is the one of renewal: mourned renewal

of the unredeemed past. This alone defines the nature of ‘work’ of
the dialectical-historical world. Work is no longer to be seen as the
recuperative labour of memory of what has been, but remembrance of
the never present and renewal of hope yet to arrive. Together they do
not constitute ‘die homogene und leere Zeit’, ‘the homogenous and
empty time’ (Benjamin 1977, p.258), but rather the constellation
of temporalities, marked by unredeemed melancholy for the past
and the messianic hope for the future. They are connected, by that
manner separated, by discontinuous abyss of temporality where
times are joined disjointedly whose condition of jointure remains
outside. Schelling asks us to think the event of temporality as cut,
cision, dehiscence (die Scheidung), which is also de-cision, of presence.
This makes time itself ecstatic, beyond any closure of the dialectical-
historical time, whose ground lies ecstatically in an eternal outside,
the unposited past and whose freedom ecstatically lies eternally
ahead intimated in prophecy. Between them the decision of presence
separates and thereby connects them, making temporalization itself
into a passage of one to the other, past into future, melancholy into
redemptive fulfilment. The heterogeneity of the ecstatic outside
inhabits the self-presence of any world-historical destiny. These
singular ecstasies are not particular instants subsumable to the empty
universal time of the Concept where each birth monotonously passes
into the other in a linear succession. Rather each birth is a surprise;
each birth is a new hope and a renewal of time; each birth is an
inauguration of ever new time, an ecstasy of finitude born out of the
abyss of freedom.
¶Joy is transfiguration of sorrow. According to Schelling, all

transfiguration is an ecstatic decision, a cision and an overcoming.
Unlike God who posits himself in an indissoluble ground, so that
eternal past, eternal present and eternal future are an indissoluble
unity, the finite being is the one whom totality excludes, for whom
unity of time is only a never-actualized whole without totality.
This finitude also makes his freedom ecstatic, abysmal and yet
joyous. Man is this contradiction, this rupture, this cision, this
disjoined jointure who accomplishes unity in a piecemeal fashion
as assemblage. God’s unity is indissoluble, man’s unity is assemblage.
This assemblage of singular ecstasies of temporalities is irreducible
to the uniformity of the homogenous empty time. By emptying out
of these ecstatic singularities of temporalities to the homogeneity of
the empty succession of concepts, the dominant metaphysics also
deprives language its ecstasies, its bursting revelation out of finitude,
Fragments • 395
its surprise of origin. As such, this dominant metaphysics, which has

its highest accomplishment in dialectical-speculative onto-theo-logy,
remains without language and without promise It remains without
the thinking for the advent that enables for the coming to come and
enables one to open to what remains to come.
¶The onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics in its dialectical-

speculative form remains without language. Or rather it remains
the metaphysics of the one who refuses to speak. He pursues the
dream of an autochthonous mythical speech which is addressed to
no one, speech without hope and without language. The time of this
mythical speech is the homogeneity of empty time. Such a speech
lacks the ecstasy of finite existence that each time ecstatically exceeds
all insistence in self-presence. The non-posited existence of the there, the
never-to-sublated of the already past and equally non-posited of what
remains cannot be thought as mere ‘not-not’ of the negativity.
¶Hope is the hope for redemption. This alone redeems the melancholy
by opening to a time yet to arrive, outside the ‘anxiety’ of our ‘being-
towards-death’, and beyond the ‘possibility of impossibility’ of having
one’s time. Beyond anticipation, hope is the hope for having forever,
eternally, the time that remains for the other: not -- possibility,
impossibility, or even ‘possibility of impossibility’ of having one’s
time. Anxiety does not redeem time, it only ecstatically keeps open to
a possibility of not having possibility any more, which means, keeps
open to a possibility of not being open any more, to a possibility of
not having to be anxious any more. Hope is otherwise: it is opened to
the possibility of an infinite opening for what is remaining to come.
Only in relation to hope anxiety is meaningful, or anxiety is only
de-limitation of hope. Anxiety partakes as anticipatable in the non-
anticipatable time of coming of hope. Hope is beyond anticipation;
it does not have the immanence and certainty of the ‘any moment’ of
anxiety over death. In hope time is released from the grasp of presence
for the arriving. This redemption alone is the relation to the infinite
for the finite being which has its resonance of prayer. Man addresses
himself to the infinite in prayer. The dialectical-speculative spirit, ever
imprisoned in the closure of labour and memory, ever imprisoned in
the historical fate that does not know its ecstatic outside, the morose
time, does not know prayer, nor does it know the task of renewal
and revelation. The disjunction that resonates in the songs of prayer,
the disjunction between anticipatable and non-anticipatable coming,
this disjunction permeates our prayer with an unspeakable note of
mourning. In all prayer is there a note of mourning and also a note of
hope. In prayer the mourned soul is opened to hope for redemption.
¶As finite, existence is that is always ‘being-towards-death’ (Heidegger

1962). The very first cry of the new born reveals anew the truth of
the last; the beginning announces its end. Who can take away from
the mortals the hope and fear of this truth, let alone philosophy that
seeks to be the infinite discourse, capable of reaching the Absolute,
for it fear of death being only the vanity of the mortals? Thu begins
Rosenzweig’s critique of philosophy, his meditations on birth and
death, on love that is as strong as death and the eternal future of
redemption. To be finished is mortal, but to be mortal is also to
remain open to eternity that is always to come. This alone makes hope
meaningful for the mortals. Therefore Absolute knowledge which is
attained mere negatively as a logical becoming remains inconsolable
for a being whose existence consists in his ‘being-towards-death’.
¶To come—not this or that coming but the event of coming itself: this is
the highest thought of promise and hope that philosophical thinking
that attempts to think the unconditioned, can aspire to. ‘The
Principle of Hope’ with which Ernst Bloch names this principle, the
unconditioned principle of philosophical thinking par excellence, is
the highest principle of philosophy. It is with hope that philosophy’s
passion of origin begins and in whose messianic, redemptive
fulfilment lays philosophy’s eternal dream. This eternal hope for the
event of remnant cannot be thought on the basis of predication,
finality and result, but rather is the incalculable arrival of the wholly
otherwise, which is always ‘to come’.
¶The principle of hope—because such a principle endows upon

philosophy its unconditional task—while it gives sense to our ethico-
political tasks, it cannot be made itself into the principle of ‘this’ or
‘that’ immanent, conditioned, self-consuming ‘politics’ or ‘ethics’ .
What is thought with this principle of hope is a principle without
Fragments • 397
archè and without telos. It is the name of pure transcendence, pure

potentiality of taking place, and the event of arrival that cannot be
nominalized, substantialized, or predicated. It is a principle that
withdrawing from all apparitions gives sense to apparition, i.e. makes
apparition possible.
§ Notes
PROLOGUE
1
Franz Rosenzweig speaks of the silence of the tragic hero of the mythical world:
‘The hero as such as to succumb only because his demise entitles him to the supreme
‘heroization’, to wit, the most closed-off ‘selfication’ of his self. He yearns for this
solitude of demise, because there is no greater solitude than this. Accordingly, the
hero does not actually die after all. Death only cuts him off, as it were, from the
temporal features of individuality. Character transmitted into heroic self is immortal.
For him, eternity was just good enough to echo his silence (Rosenzweig 1971, pp.
78-79)’.
PART I – CONFIGURATIONS
The Open
1
Günter Figal, following Heidegger, calls this ‘play space’ of the open as freedom,
where freedom is no longer understood as a capacity of the human endowed with
free will, but on the basis of the originary ‘play space’ on the basis of which any
activity of the human is at all carried out (Figal 1998).
2
Here ‘polis’ is no longer understood in its juridico legislative determination
as ‘city state’, but in a more originary manner, as mortal existents’ more originary
opening to each other.
3
Martin Heidegger in his 1942-43 lectures on Parmenides thinks ‘the open’, in an
essential relation to Parmenides’ essential word Aletheia, as the self-disclosing advent
of Being to being that maintains a simultaneous closure of Being. This simultaneous
non-simultaneity of the open that initiates the inception, or beginning, is the very
timing of time or coming on the basis of which man founds his history, his politics
and ethics. The essential task, at the exhaustion of certain metaphysics, is to release
(Gelassenheit), to free unto that ungrounded alethaic opening so that historical man
gives himself the task of the inception anew, that means, to renew the promise of the
inception. ‘Indeed, historical man’, says, Heidegger, ‘in so far as he is, always belongs
within the bestowal of Being. Man, and only he, constantly sees into the open, in the
sense of the free, by which the ‘it is’ liberates each being to itself and on the basis of
this liberation looks at man in his guardianship of the open. Although man and only
he constantly sees in the open, i.e., encounters beings in the free of Being, in order to
be struck by them, yet he is not thereby entitled to bring Being itself explicitly into
its own most, i.e., to being it into the open (the free), i.e., to poetize Being, to think
it, and say it.’(p. 151). No doubt for Heidegger this historical people has remained
to be the Germans. This historical people called ‘German humanity’, who are ‘the
most metaphysical people’ are called upon to sacrifice themselves in this poetizing
task of sacrifice for the sake of ‘preservation of the truth of Being’: ‘The highest form
of suffering is dying one’s death as a sacrifice for the preservation of the truth of
Being. This sacrifice is the purest experience of the voice of Being. What if German
humanity which, like the Greek, is called upon to poetize and think, and what if this
German humanity must first preserve the voice of Being... Thus what if the voice of
the beginning should announce itself in our historical destiny?’ (Heidegger 1992, p.
167). In this way, Heidegger’s crypto-politics of disclosure has remained, even till the
end of his career, even after his dissociation from Nazi politics, intimately bounded
up with—at the least obvious level—a certain historical, metaphysical vision of the
German humanity who is called upon to sacrifice on this purest task of poetizing
and renewing the promise of inception, or the inception of promise itself, like the
Greek. Veronique Fóti (1992) in her book Heidegger and the Poets painstaking brings
out Heidegger’s crypto-politics of the Open, especially in the chapter of the book
that she devotes to Heidegger’s reading of Rilke. The very promise of Heidegger’s
philosophical thinking that has sought to open up thinking outside the reductive
totalization inherent in modern technology is immediately clouded by the archaic
historical-metaphysical vision of a certain archè-crypto-political poetology. This
present writer, acutely aware of the danger of this crypto politics, seeks to rescue the
promise of the Open without the historical-metaphysical vision of Heidegger, and
thereby reading Heidegger, to a great extent, against Heidegger.
4
‘We never come to thoughts; they come to us’, Heidegger writes in ‘The Thinker
as Poet’. (Heidegger 2001, p. 6)
5
Hegel writes in Phenomenology of Spirit, ‘(1) I point out the ‘Now’, and it is
asserted to be the truth. I point it out, however, as something that has been, or as
something that has been superseded; I set aside the first truth.(2) I now assert as the
second truth that it has been, that it is superseded.(3) But what has been, is not; I
set aside the second truth, its having been, its super session, and thereby negate the
negation of the ‘Now’, and thus return to the first assertion, that the ‘Now’ is. The
‘Now’, and pointing out the ‘Now’, are so constituted that neither the one nor the
other is something immediate and simple, but a movement which contains various
moments. A This is posited; but it is rather an other that is posited, or the This is
superseded; and this otherness, or the setting aside of the first, is itself in turn set aside,
Notes • 401
and so has returned into the first. However, this first, thus reflected into itself, is not
exactly the same as it was to begin with, viz., something immediate; on the contrary,
on the contrary, it is something that is reflected into itself, or a simple entity which, in
its otherness, remains what it is: a Now which is an absolute plurality of Nows…
The pointing-out of the Now is itself the movement which expresses what Now is in
truth, viz., a result, or a plurality of Nows all taken together; and pointing-out is the
experience of learning that Now is a universal. (Hegel 1998, pp. 63-64)
6
Hegel writes in Philosophy of Nature: ‘The dimensions of time, present, future,
and past, are the becoming of externality as such, and the resolution of it into the
differences of being as passing over into nothing, and of nothing as passing over into
being. The immediate vanishing of these differences into singularity is the present as
Now which, as singularity, is exclusive of the other moments, and yet at the same time
completely continuous in them, and is only this vanishing of its being into nothing
and of nothing into its Being’. (Hegel 1970,p. 37)
7
Schelling (1975) says in a letter after the death of Caroline: ‘I now need friends
who are not strangers to the real seriousness of pain and who feel that the single
right and happy state of the soul is the divine mourning in which all earthly pain in
immersed.’
Judgement and History

1
Both Franz Rosenzweig and Kierkegaard in their singular ways have attempted
to open up the immanent enclosure of a universal history to the transcendence of
the other order, that is, that of the infinity of the divine where the singularity of the
multiple beings is affirmed, where singular mortals’ cry in the face of their irreducible
mortality is not reduced to the speech of the being as universal and general.
2
‘This universality which the individual as such attains is pure being, death; it is a
state which has been reached immediately, in the course of Nature, not the result of an
action consciously done. The duty of the member of the family is on that account add
this aspect, in order that the individuals ultimate being too, shall not belong solely to
nature and remain something irrational, but shall be something done, and the right
of consciousness be asserted in it… death is the fulfillment and the supreme ‘work’
which the individual as such undertakes on its behalf.’ Ibid.,p. 270.
3
Hegel writes, ‘Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of
all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest
strength…But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself
untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself
in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this
power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we
say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then, having done with it, turn
away and pass onto something else; on the contrary, Spirit is this power only by
looking negative in the face and tarrying with it’ (Ibid, p. 19).
4
‘Cision means ‘cut’, ‘slit’, ‘separation’, ‘disjunction’, or ‘divorce’. Scheidung
means ‘De-cision’, and also ‘cision’ or ‘cut’. In addition Scheide also means vagina,
sheath or opening of the female genitalia that is also separation or cut, the slit of two
lips that opens. Scheidung has the connotation of opening or coming, which is at
once separation and disjunction.’ (Das 2008, p. 176)
The Logic of Origin

1
Ernst Bloch’s great work The Principle of Hope pursues, in a messianic visionary
manner, the question of the origin itself as ‘not yet’. Bloch writes: ‘ The start of the
beginning and the starting point called origin and world ground is to be found
in precisely that Now and Here which has not yet emerged from itself, i.e. which
has not yet moved from its place at all. This origin in the strict sense has itself not
yet arisen, arisen out of itself; its Not is therefore in fact precisely the one which is
ultimately driving history and tailoring historical processes to its requirements, but
which has itself not yet become historical. This origin remains the incognito of the
core which moves throughout all time, but which has not yet moved out of itself.
Every lived moment would, therefore, if it has eyes, be a witness of the beginning of
the world which begins in it time and time again; every moment, when it has not
yet emerged, is in the year zero of the beginning of the world.’ (Bloch 1995, p. 301)
2
In this context, see Schelling’s (1994, pp. 134-163) critique of Hegel in his
lectures On the History of Modern Philosophy.
3
I refer again here to Schelling’s (1994, pp. 134-163) critique of Hegel in his
lectures On the History of Modern Philosophy
Language and Death

1
In his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel says: ‘The natural, simple
self-emancipation of the finite from its finiteness is death. This is the renunciation
of the finite, and here what the natural life is itself implicitly is made explicit really
and actually. The sensuous life of what is individual or particular has its end in death.
Particular experiences or sensations as particular are transient ; one supplants the
other, one impulse or other drives away the another...In death the finite is shown to
be annulled and absorbed. But death is only abstract negation of what is implicitly
negative; it is itself a nullity, it is revealed a nullity. But explicit nullity is at the same
time nullity which has been done away with, and is the return to the positive .
Here cessation, liberated from finiteness, comes in. Death does not present itself to
consciousness as this emancipation from finiteness, but this higher view of death is
found in thought, and indeed even in popular conceptions, in so far as thought is
active in them. (Hegel 1962, p. 182)
Part II – The Lightning Flash

Language of the Mortals
1
I have translated this paragraph as follows: ‘`Begin’—that is something else than
Notes • 403
'Inception’. A new weather condition, for example, begins with a storm; its inception
is, however, is the transformation in advance, the complete transformation of air
conditions . Beginning is each time with which something arises; inception that,
from which something erupts (springs forth). The world war incepted on centuries
ago in the spiritual-political history of the West. The world war began propound
positioning. The beginning is left immediately; it disappears in the continuation of
the happening. The inception, the origin, comes to appearance as fore-shining and
is fully there first of all only at its end’.
2
For Heidegger’s critique of Husserl’s notion of ‘categorical intuition’, I refer to
Heidegger’s seminars in Le Thor (Heidegger 2003).
3
For an illuminating discussion on Kierkegaard’s notion of language and
language’s relation to death, I refer to Geoffrey A. Hale (2002, pp. 73-108).
4
That death cannot be reduced to any programmatic projection of being, insofar
as death is not mere nothingness but the unknown and hence is irreducible to any
ontological mastery or thematization: this thought runs throughout Emmanuel
Levinas’ works. I refer to Levinas’ extraordinary lectures on God, Death and Time
(Levinas 2000). In his early work Time and the Other, Levinas speaks, ‘ The end
of mastery indicates that we have assumed existing in such a way that an event can
happen to us that we no longer assume, not even in the way we assume events—
because we are always immersed in the empirical world—through vision. An event
happens to us without our having absolutely anything ‘a priori’, without our being
able to have the least project, as one says today. Death is the impossibility of having
a project (Levinas 1987, p. 74).
Pain
1
Jacques Derrida, among contemporary philosophers, is most attentive to this
(non)phenomenon of ‘originary mourning’ for an immemorial origin that has never
been present, a mourning that is inextricably tied up with gift that always comes
from the others, and with the proper name that is always given by the others which,
for that matter, can never be appropriated by ‘me’ in the name of self-presence. For
the relationship of gift and the proper name with the ‘originary mourning’ that
escapes the econo-onto-thanatological determination of the metaphysics of presence, see
my article on Derrida (Das 2010).
2
Ernst Bloch’s great work The Principle of Hope pursues, in a grand visionary
manner, this messianic thought of affirmation that is given in our hope for future.
Apollo’s Lightning Strike

1
Rosenzweig writes of the tragic hero, ‘For that is the criterion of the self, the
seal, the seal of its greatness as well as the stigma of its weakness: it keeps silent. The
tragic hero has only one language which completely corresponds to him: precisely
keeping silent. It has thus from the beginning. The tragedy casts itself in the artistic
form of drama just in order to be able to represent speechlessness...by keeping silent’
the hero breaks down the bridges which connect him with God and the world, and
elevates himself out of the fields of personality’ delimiting itself and individualizing
itself from others in speech, into the icy solitude of self ’ (Rosenzweig 1971, p.77).
Part Three – Event

The Irreducible Remainder
1
The time of freedom cannot be reduced to the Self-presence of the Subject, but
it is a time, in certain sense, outside time, which is the time of the beginning of time
itself each time anew. In his Freedom essay, Schelling writes, ‘ Man, even though born
in time, is nonetheless a creature of creation’s beginning. The act which determines
man’s life in time does not itself belong in time but in eternity. Moreover it does not
precede life in time but occurs throughout time (untouched by it) as an act eternal
by its own nature. Through it man’s life extends to the beginning of creation, since
by means of it he is also more than creature, free and himself eternal beginning’
(Ibid., pp. 63-4)
2
See Hölderlin’s Judgement and Being (1988). For an illuminating discussion
of Hölderlin’s relation to the Speculative Idealism, I refer to Lacoue-Labarthe’s The
Caesura of the Speculative (1998)
Part IV – Messianicity
1
I refer here to Dana Hollander’s remarkable discussion of Derrida’s notion of
exemplarity, see (Hollander 2008)
2
For Rosenzweig’s distinction of the qualitative infinitude of messianic intensity
of time from the quantitative infinitude of the historical time, I refer to Stéphane
Mosès’ The Angel of History (2009).
3
Rosenzweig writes: ‘This constant increase is the form of permanence in love, in
that and because it is the most extreme non-permanence and its fidelity is devoted
solely to the present, singular moment: from the deepest infidelity and from this
alone, it can thus become permanent fidelity; for only the non-permanence of the
moment renders it capable of living every moment as new…’ (Rosenzweig 2005, p.
176).
4
‘ For love is completely active, completely personal, completely alive,
completely—speaking language; all true sentences issuing to it must be words that
come from its mouth, words brought forth by the I. This one sentence alone, saying
it is as strong as death, is an exception’ (Ibid., p. 217).
5
The proper name denominates him who is singular without genus. Rosenzweig
writes: ‘In places of articles, there appears the immediate determination of the
proper name. With the call of the proper name, the world of Revelation enters into
a real dialogue…that which has its own name can no longer be a thing or everyone’s
thing; it is incapable of being entirely dissolved into the genus, for there is no genus
to which it could belong; it is its own genus unto itself. It no longer has its place
Notes • 405
in the world, or its moment in the becoming; rather it carried with it its here and
now; the place where it is a center and the moment where it opens its mouth is a
beginning’ (Ibid., p. 201).
6
‘…The Jewish people’, says Rosenzweig, ‘ stands outside the world…by living
the eternal peace, it stands outside of a warlike temporality ; by resting at the goal
that it anticipates in hope, it is separated from the march of those who draw near to
it in the toil of the centuries’ (Ibid., p. 351).
7
Levinas writes: ‘The age of philosophy is one in which philosophy is revealed
on the lips of the philosophers…The end of philosophy is not the return to the age in
which it has not begun, in which one was able not to philosophize; the end of philosophy
is the beginning of an age in which everything is philosophy, because philosophy is not
revealed through philosophers’ (Levinas 1990, p. 185, Italics the author’s). Levinas
carries on: ‘The end of philosophy … The movement that led to the liberation of
man enslaves man within the system which he builds. In the State and nationalisms,
in the socialist statism that emerges from philosophy, the individual experiences the
necessity of philosophical totality as a totalitarian tyranny’ (Ibid., p. 186).
EPILOGUE
Fragments
1
One is here reminded of Franz Rosenzweig’s beginning note on his The Star of
Redemption: philosophy’s disavowal of death in its very claim to presuppose nothing
so that the poisonous sting of death must not bite anyone anymore, so that in the
quietness—even if the restlessness of negativity initiates movement, it reposes in
this very restlessness not to have to presuppose anything—for it promises eternity
of the Concept, as the very accomplishment of the System, in the very annulling
of the singular, for only singular is mortal and solitary. ‘ For indeed, an All would
not die and nothing would die in the All. Only the singular can die and everything
mortal is solitary. Philosophy has to rid the world of what is singular, and this un-
doing of the Aught is also the reason why it has to be idealistic. For idealism, with
the denial of everything that distinguishes the singular from the All, is the tool of
the philosopher’s trade. With it, philosophy continues to work over the recalcitrant
material until the latter finally offers no more resistance to the smoke screen of the
one-and-all concept. If once all were woven into this mist, death would indeed be
swallowed up, if not into the eternal triumph, at least into the one and universal
night of the Nought. And it is the ultimate conclusion of this doctrine that death
is—Nought’ (Rosenzweig 1971, p.4).
2
‘ … Death concerns us by its nonsense’, says Emmanuel Levinas (2000, p.21). If
‘death concerns us by its nonsense’, it is because in death, which is the very patience,
there is the risk of nonsense, which is the nonsense of patience, of passivity that is
patience. Levinas says,’ If patience has a meaning as inevitable is obligation, this
meaning becomes sufficiency and institution if there is not beneath it a glimmer of
nonsense. It is therefore necessary that there be on the egoity of the I the risk of a
nonsense, a madness. If this risk were not there, then patience would have a status,
it would lose its passivity’ (Ibid., p.20).
3
Levinas says, ‘…death is a point from which time takes all its patience; this
expectation that escapes its own intentionality qua expectation; this ‘patience and
length of time’, as the proverb says, where patience is like the emphasis of passivity
…death understood as the patience of time.’ Ibid., pp. 7-8.
4
Affection in mourning the dying of the Other without return affects us
inconsolably beyond knowledge, certitude and excess of every consolation. Levinas
says, ‘ as if there were an excess in death. It is a simple passage, a simple departure and
yet a source of emotion contrary to every effort at consolation.’ (Levinas 2000, p. 9)
5
Hegel writes of the negativity of death as the terrible work of absolute freedom, ‘
the sole work and deed of universal freedom is therefore death, a death too which has
no inner significance or filling, for what is negated is the empty point of absolutely
free self. It is thus the coldest and meanest of all deaths, with no more significance
than cutting off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water.’ (Hegel 1998,
p. 360)
6
‘ … Spirit is the power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying
with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into
being’ (Ibid., p.19).
7
‘…Death is the fulfilment and the supreme ‘work’ which the individual as such
undertakes on its behalf ’ (Ibid., p.270).
8
Levinas says of intentionality and its measure, ‘ Intentionality preserves the
identity of the Same; it is thinking according to its measure, a thinking conceived
on the modal of the representation of what is given, a noetic-noematic correlation.
But being affected by death is affectivity, passivity, a being affected by the beyond
measure, an affection of the present by the non-present …’ (Levinas 2000, pp.14-
15).
9
‘…To think the measure is to think at the limit’ (Blanchot 1992, p. 39).
10
‘In Being-there-and-then, the negation is still directly one with the Being,
and this negation is what we call a Limit (Boundary). A thing is what it is, only in
and by reason of its limit. We cannot therefore regard the limit as only external to
being which then and there. It rather goes through and through the whole of such
existence’ (Hegel 1975, p. 136).
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——, ‘ Between Two Worlds’ in Difficult Freedom, trans. Sean Hand
(London: Athlone Press, 1990), pp. 181-201.
——, Time and the Other, trans. Richard A Cohen (Pittsburgh &
Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 1987).
——, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne

Marx, Karl & Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, trans. Samuel
Moore (London: Penguin Books, 2002).
Mosès, Stéphane, The Angel of History: Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem, trans.
Barbara Harshav (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).
Nancy, Jean Luc, The Experience of Freedom, trans. Bridget Mcdonald
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).
——, The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes and others (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1993a).
——, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New
York: Modern Library, 1995).
——, Ecce Homo, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1992).
——, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann
(New York: Vintage Books, 1989).
——, Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1982).
——, Twilight of the Idols and Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin
Books, 1968).
Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee (Penguin Books, 2003).
——, ‘Apology’ in Selected Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New
York: Modern Library, 2001), pp. 279-323.
——, ‘Phaedo’, in The Trail and Execution of Socrates, trans. Peter George
(London: The Folio Society, MCMLXXII, 1972).
Rosenzweig, Franz, The Star of Redemption, trans. Barbara E. Galli
(Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2005).
——, The Star of Redemption, trans., William W. Hallo (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1971).
——, ‘The New Thinking’ in Philosophical and Theological Writings, trans.
Paul W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis/Cambridge:
Hackett, 2000), pp. 109-139.
Schelling, F. W. J. von, Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of
Mythology, trans. Richey, M. (Albany, NY: State University of New
York Press, 2007).
——, The Grounding of Positive Philosophy: The Berlin Lectures, trans. Bruce
Matthews (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007a).
——, The Ages of the World, trans. Jason M. Wirth (Albany: State University
of New York, 2000).
——, On the History of Modern Philosophy, trans. Andrew Bowie (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1994).
——, System of Transcendental Idealism, trans. Peter Heath (Virginia:
University of Virginia Press, 1993).
——, Philosophie der Offenbarung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977).
——, ‘Brief Über den Tod Carolines vom 2. Oktober, 1809’, ed. Johann
Ludwig Doderlein, Kleine Kommentierte Texte I (Stuttgart Bad
Constatt: Fromann -Holzboog, 1975).
——, Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom, trans. James
Gutmann (La Salle: Illinois, 1936 & 1992).
Schmitt, Carl, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty,
trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
§ Index
Adorno, Theodor 261 99–100, 103–5, 111, 119–21,

Aristotle 28, 93, 120, 124, 151, 197, 125–6, 137–8, 151, 157, 161,
238, 259, 350, 373 163, 166, 177–9, 192, 214, 238–9,
Benjamin, Walter 8, 15, 20, 53, 124, 241–3, 257, 259–60, 263, 265, 273,
139–41, 149, 154, 157, 161, 169, 314, 324–5, 356–7, 363, 365, 370,
170, 194–95, 206–8, 214, 217–9, 372–3, 381–2, 387–8, 391
237–9, 242–3, 246–7, 310, 313, Heidegger, Martin 5, 8–11, 14–6, 19,
317–9, 321, 323–4, 328–9, 336, 24, 27–8, 35, 42, 68–71, 81, 85,
343, 349, 351, 369, 377 87–8, 90, 107, 112–3, 117, 119,
On Language as Such and on the 129, 133, 142–4, 146–53, 156,
Language of Man 208, 217 161–4, 169, 179, 185, 190–91,
The Life of Students 351 196–9, 201–2, 204–5, 208, 212,
The Origin of German Tragic Drama 227, 232–6, 240–42, 244, 256–7,
139, 238 262, 269, 276, 278, 287–9, 291–
Blanchot, Maurice 381, 387–9, 392 300, 302, 344, 353–4, 359–60, 377,
Bloch, Ernst 6, 35, 39, 90, 186, 255, 386–7, 393
375, 377, 396 Being and Time 8, 24, 117, 142, 164,
Chrétien, Jean-Louis 24, 28, 61 208, 240, 292, 299, 359
The Unforgettable and the Unhoped The Question of Being 179
For 24, 61 Hölderlin, Friedrich 15, 26–7, 35, 44–6,
Das, Saitya Brata 142, 198 83, 90, 92, 115, 127, 147, 162, 182,
Dastur, Francoise 46 184, 196, 201, 203, 206–7, 210–11,
Derrida, Jacques 12, 14, 174, 270, 288, 281, 294, 300, 377, 391
306–8, 314, 322, 337 Jacobson, Eric 329
On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness Kierkegaard, Søren 21, 35, 43, 91, 99,
270 103, 109, 114, 116–7, 157, 165,
Onto-Theology of National Humanism 168, 171–4, 184–5, 236, 302, 377
306 Lacan, Jacques 212
Hamann, J.G. 211 Levinas, Emmanuel 51, 53–4, 311,
Hegel, G.W.F. 10, 20, 34, 43–5, 50, 315, 333–4, 355–7, 381, 384–7,
54–7, 61–3, 65–8, 70, 72, 78, 389, 392
Marx, Karl 95 pure 26, 77, 227, 229, 232, 234,

Mosès, Stéphane 329 254, 283
The Angel of History 329 Causality 253–4, 264–7, 269–70,
Nancy, Jean Luc 82, 261–2 273–4, 277, 279, 291–2, 295–6,
The Experience of Freedom 261 298–300
Nietzsche, Friedrich 68, 105, 113–4, problematic of 295, 296, 299
120, 122, 150, 214, 343, 363, Configuration 1, 14, 16–8, 35, 37, 40,
365–7, 373 45, 69, 102, 107, 110, 112, 131–5,
Plato 19, 27, 42, 106, 108, 190, 243–4, 139–44, 146–8, 150–56, 220, 253,
247–8, 259, 302, 343–4, 346, 257, 259–60, 272, 275–6, 282, 288,
348–9, 351–3, 357, 366, 374, 385 315–7, 362, 372
Rosenzweig, Franz 11, 14, 22, 35–6, Death 1, 6–7, 11–2, 18, 21–2, 24, 27,
43, 98, 100, 110, 119, 130, 134–6, 29–30, 32, 34, 39–40, 42–8, 52–3,
138, 140, 152–3, 156, 158, 167–8, 56–60, 64–5, 68, 78, 80–81, 92,
191–2, 194, 205, 214, 233, 235–6, 95, 99–101, 103, 112–4, 119–4,
248, 257, 305–6, 308–10, 312, 127–32, 136–8, 154–5, 158, 162–5,
314–39, 377, 396 167–74, 176–8, 180, 182–5, 189–
The Star of Redemption 22, 35, 43, 92, 194, 199, 203–7, 216, 219, 243,
130, 134, 136, 167, 214, 308, 247–8, 280, 292, 294, 309, 315,
314–5, 317, 330, 339 320, 322, 325–6, 328, 335, 344,
Schelling, F. W. J. Von 10, 11, 23, 354–7, 361, 364, 367, 370, 373–4,
26–7, 33, 35, 41, 43, 45, 49, 381, 383–9, 391–3, 395–6
67–70, 73, 77, 79, 83, 94, 96–7, negativity of 22, 29, 40, 45, 132, 356
101, 103, 105–6, 125, 128, 138, Erotic 343, 348–53
150, 152, 156–8, 161, 166, 168, Event 1, 5–11, 17, 19, 22, 24, 30–31,
182–4, 190–91, 194, 203, 205, 212, 34–6, 40–47, 49, 51, 55–6, 59–61,
214–21, 227, 229, 232–3, 235–6, 68–70, 74, 76–8, 82, 93, 105–7,
248, 251–3, 257, 259–60, 262–8, 110–3, 117, 130–34, 137–9, 141–
271–4, 276–87, 289, 300–301, 321, 51, 154, 158, 161, 163–9, 171–3,
344, 362, 377, 383–4, 394 186, 188, 191–4, 198, 203–4,
Philosophical Investigations into the 208–14, 221, 223, 225–44, 246–53,
Nature of Human Freedom 69, 257–8, 260–62, 264–6, 270–71,
216–7, 221, 263, 267 275–7, 279–80, 282, 286–9, 291–3,
The Ages of the World 23, 69, 150, 233, 295–302, 305–10, 313–5, 317,
259–60, 277 319–28, 330, 334–5, 343, 345–8,
Schmitt, Carl 123 352–3, 358–63, 366–7, 370–71,
Socrates 244–6, 344, 346–51, 354, 364, 375–7, 385, 390, 394, 396–7
373, 384–5 Existence 1, 5–6, 8–11, 19–36, 39–42,
44–5, 47, 49–50, 53, 57, 67, 70,
73–5, 78–84, 86–7, 91, 93, 95–6,
Actuality 10, 26, 32, 58, 64–5, 68–70, 98–9, 101, 103–8, 114–6, 120, 123,
73–4, 77, 101, 105, 115, 125, 138, 126–7, 129–32, 134, 136–40, 147,
168, 179, 183, 216, 218, 221, 227, 150, 155, 158, 164–8, 170–71, 173,
229, 232, 234, 244, 254, 280, 180–87, 189, 191–2, 194–5, 201,
283–4, 286, 368, 371 205, 207, 211, 213, 215–8, 222,
Index • 417
225, 227–33, 236–7, 239, 241, melancholic 180

243–4, 246, 248–50, 253, 255–6, mournful 25
258–60, 262–3, 265–9, 271–9, non-economic 41, 158
281–4, 287–9, 291–8, 300, 302, History 5–9, 12, 15–6, 20–23, 25,
309–10, 315, 320, 334–6, 338, 29–32, 39–72, 74–7, 79, 81–3, 85,
343–9, 351–5, 359–71, 373–4, 377, 89, 92, 97, 102, 107, 109, 111–2,
381, 386, 388, 391, 393, 395–6 116–22, 124, 129, 133–4, 141–2,
mortal 21, 29, 33, 50, 70, 74–5, 103, 157–8, 169, 171–2, 177–8, 182,
106, 108, 181–2, 185 185–8, 192–4, 199, 203–4, 207,
Fate 21–2, 25, 28, 33, 101, 149, 225, 211, 219–21, 225–8, 230–32,
244, 273, 275, 309, 317, 320, 235–7, 241, 243, 247–8, 250, 252,
322–3, 325–6, 332, 368, 395 256–7, 265, 271, 291, 294, 297,
Finitude 1, 8, 11, 14–6, 18–20, 22, 299, 305, 307–10, 314, 316–22,
24–6, 28–34, 36, 40, 42, 44–6, 324, 326–9, 333, 335–8, 345,
48–50, 56, 72–6, 78–9, 82, 84, 86, 351, 355–8, 363, 365–7, 374–6,
95, 98–9, 101, 106, 108–9, 113, 387, 392
115–6, 123, 128–30, 132, 139, 141, dialectical 60–61, 64, 169
149, 156, 158, 161, 163, 166–8, logic of 44, 51, 56–8
170, 174, 177–8, 180, 182, 184, speculative 44, 51, 57–8
186–91, 194, 196, 204–5, 209–10, universal 12, 31, 32, 45–8, 52–3,
215–6, 218, 221, 226, 230, 236–7, 56–7, 59, 62, 68, 107, 158,
241–2, 244–7, 250, 252–3, 256, 171–2, 177, 237, 248, 305, 318,
258, 261–2, 264–5, 267–9, 277, 321, 324, 326, 356–7, 365–6
285, 291–5, 297, 299, 315, 324, Judgement 8, 10, 30, 34–5, 43–4, 46,
332, 355–8, 367, 374–5, 377, 381, 48–9, 51–60, 69–73, 75, 77, 124,
384–6, 388–9, 391–4 127–8, 139, 169–70, 172–3, 179,
discontinuous 139 182, 187, 195, 199, 207, 214–5,
radical 11, 20, 26, 29, 32–3, 44, 98, 218–9, 260, 266, 274–7, 280–81,
113, 167, 230, 264, 268 317–8, 320, 325–6, 360, 369, 382
Freedom 22, 33–5, 39, 69–76, 79, apophantic 8, 35, 57, 274, 360
82–6, 114, 117, 128–9, 132, 136, logical 34, 51
158, 183, 214–7, 219–21, 233–6, logic of 49, 51, 75, 266, 275–7
241, 251–302, 323, 336, 359, 366, notion of 69–70
381, 394 Language 1, 8, 12, 14–5, 17–9, 29, 30,
Gift 1, 5–6, 11, 13–5, 17–8, 20, 22–33, 32, 35, 40–41, 47–8, 82, 94, 100–
41–2, 44, 46–8, 50, 63, 73, 80–82, 101, 106, 110, 113, 117, 119–32,
86, 89–90, 92–5, 106, 108, 111–2, 134, 139, 147–50, 153–4, 161–78,
114, 120, 124, 128–30, 139, 153–4, 180–82, 183–8, 190–96, 198–9,
156, 158, 163, 166, 169–71, 173, 203–4, 206–22, 237, 239, 245–8,
175–6, 178, 180–84, 188–90, 250, 252, 256, 287, 302, 305–7,
193–4, 196–200, 208–9, 215–9, 310, 313, 318–9, 321–2, 325–6,
221–2, 252–3, 256–8, 265, 267, 328, 334–6, 339, 346–7, 352, 369,
271, 274, 277, 284–5, 287, 289–90, 373, 381, 387, 393–5
326, 338, 353, 357–8, 367, 372, conceptual 171, 203–4, 206, 346–7
375–6, 381, 385–7, 392–3 gift of 128–30, 139, 153, 163, 169,
171, 180–81, 196, 209, 215–7, Potentiality 29, 34, 69–70, 72–7, 80,
219 102, 104–5, 125–6, 137–8, 168,
originary 187 229, 232, 234, 237, 244, 259, 365,
predicative 117, 187, 203 368, 397
pre-predicative 187 passion of 69, 73, 75–7
pure 217, 245–7, 250, 310, 319 pure 29, 34, 70, 72–3, 80, 234, 365,
Love 36, 85, 114, 124–8, 150, 211–5, 368, 397
217–20, 243–54, 264, 267–9, 271, Promise 5–7, 11–5, 18–9, 21, 23, 25,
277, 284, 289–90, 305–6, 308–14, 27, 30–33, 36, 40–42, 44, 47–50,
317–8, 320, 322–8, 330–31, 333, 52–5, 59–61, 66–7, 69, 73–4, 77,
337–8, 344, 349–53, 363, 373, 79–80, 82, 87–90, 93–5, 97, 103,
393, 396 109, 111–4, 116, 124, 126–7, 136,
Madness 19, 72, 82, 84–5, 93, 95–8, 139, 149, 153, 156, 158, 161–3,
231, 250, 264, 301, 344, 363, 168–9, 176, 180, 184–94, 196,
366, 374 198–9, 206, 208, 210–11, 214, 216,
Messianic 12, 329 219, 227, 239, 242, 246–7, 249–50,
Metaphysics 61, 79, 142, 198, 259, 293 252, 256, 284, 290, 305, 308–11,
Mortality 1, 11–2, 14, 16, 18, 21–30, 313, 317–25, 328–30, 332, 338,
32, 33–5, 40–47, 59, 76, 78–82, 352, 357, 363, 369, 371, 374–7,
84–5, 89, 91, 93, 95, 98–101, 103, 381, 385, 395–6
106–7, 115–7, 123, 128–9, 132, Recollection 90, 107–9, 111–6, 131–2,
147, 154, 158, 161–4, 166–8, 170, 152, 157, 193–4
176, 180–85, 189–91, 193, 201–4, Redemption 1, 6, 11, 20, 22, 35–6,
206–8, 216, 218, 220, 222, 230, 42–3, 50, 66–7, 79–83, 90, 92–3,
235–6, 244, 247, 253, 258, 280, 103, 107, 112–4, 116, 128–30, 132,
315, 354–5, 361, 364, 367, 370, 134–6, 139, 152–5, 157–8, 167,
374–5 177, 180, 186–94, 196, 198–9,
pure facticity of 29 206, 211–2, 214–22, 243, 249,
Mourning 12–3, 18, 26–7, 31, 45, 252, 255–8, 264, 271, 284–5, 306,
47, 49, 62–3, 65, 76, 81, 84, 92, 308, 310, 314–5, 317–20, 322, 326,
111, 181, 192–6, 205, 245–6, 301, 329–33, 336, 339, 393, 395–6
375–6, 381, 383–9, 391–3, 396 Remembrance 14, 18, 31, 39, 44, 48–50,
Naming 14–5, 17, 30, 35, 40–41, 90–91, 103, 107, 112, 117, 132,
47–8, 129, 132, 139, 141, 149, 154, 141, 145, 149, 153, 193–4, 196,
170–71, 173, 177, 181, 192, 194–7, 199, 206, 208, 216, 219–21, 238–9,
199, 207–11, 216–9, 221, 239, 246, 241, 260, 302, 321, 393
248, 256, 258, 286, 288, 301, 318, Repetition 16–8, 49, 89, 99, 108–17,
327, 388, 391 131–4, 140–41, 146, 156, 237,
Pain 27, 45, 54, 67, 98–9, 120–21, 124, 262–3, 266, 272, 274, 277, 280,
163, 174–81, 183, 193, 195, 198, 307–8, 367, 389
386, 388 Revelation 7, 23, 25, 34, 36, 39–40, 47,
Phenomenology 9–10, 13–4, 20, 43, 54, 72, 109, 125–6, 128–9, 132, 134–5,
56–7, 61–2, 83, 87, 90, 93–4, 108, 141, 145–6, 150, 152, 154–5,
112, 121, 179, 227–8, 255, 315, 182–3, 185, 193, 209–20, 228, 231,
325, 356, 360, 376 237, 239, 247–8, 283, 287, 309,
Index • 419
314–5, 317, 319–20, 322–31, 333, divine 206

376, 390, 393–4, 396 metaphysical 65–6, 79, 83, 206,
Time 5, 8, 24, 50, 117, 126, 142, 153–4, 337–9
164, 205, 208, 233–4, 240, 292, Work 1, 11, 12, 14, 18, 21, 22, 25, 29,
299, 359 32, 33, 34, 35, 44, 45, 46, 53, 57,
Transfinitude 156 58, 59, 60, 63, 65, 70, 81, 109, 114,
Translation 305–7, 309–11, 313, 130, 150, 169, 172, 175, 176, 177,
318–22, 324–5, 328–30, 332–3 178, 179, 212, 213, 219, 231, 233,
exemplarity of 306 234, 235, 247, 253, 259, 262, 264,
Truth 5, 7–8, 17–9, 23–4, 28, 51, 270, 271, 273, 289, 297, 301, 314,
54, 56, 58–60, 62–3, 65, 70–72, 320, 321, 322, 336, 337, 357, 358,
84–5, 93–4, 100, 109–10, 113, 117, 359, 361, 362, 368, 370, 371, 372,
121–2, 124, 127, 135, 139–40, 142, 373, 375, 377, 381, 382, 384, 385,
144–9, 164–5, 202–3, 212, 227, 387, 388, 389, 391, 393
229–31, 234, 239, 242, 247, 275–6, World 7, 22–4, 28–36, 39, 41, 45, 47–8,
281, 301–2, 305, 310–11, 314, 316, 50, 67, 69, 77–8, 81, 85, 90, 93–6,
319–20, 322, 328–9, 343–9, 352–5, 102, 106, 114–5, 121, 123, 125–6,
358, 360, 362–3, 365–8, 371–2, 129–30, 135–7, 139–40, 143,
377, 382–4, 390, 396 146–7, 150, 152, 163, 169, 171–2,
Violence 6–7, 13–5, 20, 25, 27, 41, 185–8, 191–3, 198–9, 210–15,
47–9, 51–4, 60–61, 64–7, 78–9, 228–9, 231, 233–4, 243–50, 256–
83, 92, 115, 124, 127–8, 139, 141, 60, 262, 265, 268, 277, 282, 287,
150, 158, 178–80, 184, 187, 191–7, 292–5, 300–302, 308–9, 313, 315,
199, 205–7, 214, 220, 236, 238–9, 317–8, 320–23, 325, 328, 330–31,
243–4, 258, 275, 305, 307–8, 310, 333, 335–9, 343–4, 347–50, 354–5,
317, 320–21, 323, 326–7, 331, 358–60, 362, 367–8, 370, 374–6,
336–9, 343, 349, 351, 353, 357, 386–7, 390, 392–4
360–61, 365, 388–9, 391 logic of the 28

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THE PROMISE OF TIME

The Promise of Time

INDIAN INSTITUTE OF ADVANCED STUDY

© Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla

All rights reserved.

Typeset at Sai Graphic Design, New Delhi

We never come to thoughts. They come to us.

What does it mean to be thankful, and to say ‘thanks’? This question,

Maison des Sciences de L’Homme, Paris where I was a post doctorate

Foreword by Gérard Bensussan xv

§ The Promise of Time 5

PART II – THE LIGHTNING FLASH

§ The Language of the Mortals 161

PART III – EVENT

§ The Commandment of Love 305

§ Erotic and Philosophic 343

Between End and Beginning:

The beautiful book of Satya Das is committed to a phenomenology

endurance of the unexpected and unconditional of the messianic

it is power-less to know, that it is the very fragility that gives it the

as much as a remembrance of the future. The weakness of the past

This mortal called ‘man’ is an open existence, exposed to mortality and

if politics and history is not to be mere reductive totalization of this

The Claim of Redemption and

Truth beyond Cognition

be saturated with the knowledge of the phenomenon ‘presently given’,

distinguishes the existential analytic of Dasein from the predicative,

What is to be thought is ’presencing namely presences’.

A new difficulty arises: this is clearly a tautology. Indeed! This is a

calls ‘irreducible remainder’, a ‘not yet’ of a past, an irrecuperable past

But the fact that there is no necessarily determinate content in this

In so far as the task of thinking this messianic promise of the

true mourning, and knows not the movement of hope. In order to

It is here that Derrida’s (2001) messianic thought of an

The Lightning Flash of Language

to us and that we never go to thinking and is a gift from a site wholly

In philosophy, there are only paths; in sciences, on the contrary, there

joining of those mountain paths. These joints are co-junctions of

reproduces the same truth at a different level but welcomes truth

defiance nor recalcitrance of speech but the completeness of speech itself

truth no longer remains the truth but becomes an imbecile, castrated

If the emergence of modern philosophy is marked by the

succession of empty instants’ (Benjamin 1977, pp. 251-261) which,

being ‘human’ exhaustibly be determined on the basis of death alone,

The thought of future and the messianic, redemptive fulfilment is

pure offering. This gift is without any economy of equivalences and

Therefore we have this strange feeling within us that we always existed

which existence is exposed or (to say with Heidegger) ‘thrown’. It is

This excess of the immemorial in us, this unsaturated past that we

that encloses us in the ever encircling destiny or fate of negativity

The Mournful Gift

immemorial being haunting our life, it is to such a mortal being

bare being’. One remembers here King Lear in Shakespeare’s great

The Logic of the World

radical finitude, on the basis of his non-condition, that man is open

already adheres in language in its infancy. Language is our exposure to

What is thought in the thought of finitude and mortality is

world understood in its nominative, which, as such, exceed all our

Hope and melancholy are not two opposite attunements of the

promise, which has always already opened the world, by transforming

In other words, there always remains the possibility of the otherwise.

Introducing this Work