Promise of Time.pdf

THE PROMISE OF TIME

SAITYA BRATA DAS 

Th e 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 

or transmitted, in any form or by any means, 

without the written permission of the publisher. 

ISBN: 978-81-7986-091-5 

Published by 

Th e Secretary 

Indian Institute of Advanced Study 

Rashtrapati Nivas, Shimla-171005 

Typeset at Sai Graphic Design, New Delhi 

and printed at Pearl Off set Pvt. Ltd., Kirti Nagar, New Delhi

For 

My dear father 

Who fi rst taught me to love 

Th e love of wisdom: philo-sophia

Acknowledgements 

We never come to thoughts. Th ey come to us. 

—Martin Heidegger 

What does it mean to be thankful, and to say ‘thanks’? Th is 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. Th erefore, 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. Th erefore, 

a thinker does not possess thinking, even less knowledge: thinking is 

what is gifted to the thinker for which he says, simply, ‘thanks’. Th ere 

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. Th ere 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. Th ere 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. Th anks 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. Th ese 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 affi rmation. 

Th anks to this beautiful Shimla and this wonderful Institute that 

have both soothed my wounded soul at a diffi cult 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. Th e Director, Professor Peter Ronald deSouza 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 effi ciency 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! 

Th ere 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 infi nite 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. Th is 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, 

suff er and hope for redemption.

Beginning at the moment of deepest catastrophe 

Th ere exists the chance for redemption. 

—Gershom Scholem

Th e following chapters have been published previously 

1. Th e fi rst chapter of the fi rst part Th e Open originally appeared in 

Kritike http://www.kritike.org/journal/issue_6/das_december2009. 

pdf 

2. An earlier version of the second part Th e Lightening Flash 

appeared in Philosophical Forum (Willey Blackwell, fall 2010) 

vol. 41, issue 3, p. 315-345. 

3. Th e 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 Th e Metaphysics of Language 

is published as Th e Destinal Question of Language in Kriterion 

(Spring 2011, issue 123). 

6. Th e Commandment of Love: Messianicity and Exemplarity in 

Franz Rosenzweig is read as paper at the 6 th 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 Diff erence’, organized by UNESCO, Paris 

from 13-16 November 2006.

Contents 

Acknowledgements vii 

Foreword by Gérard Bensussan xv 

Premise 1 

PROLOGUE 

§ Th e Promise of Time 

To Come/Th e Claim of Redemption and the Question 

of History/Truth beyond Cognition/Existence/Messianic/ 

Th e Lightning Flash of Language/Wandering, Th inking/ 

Confi guration Saying 

5 

§ Radical Finitude 

Th e Immemorial/Th e Mournful Gift/the Logic of the World/ 

Mortality/Introducing this Work 

20 

PART I – CONFIGURATION 

§ Th e Open 39 

§ Judgement and History: 

Of History/ Metaphysics and Violence/Th e Passion of 

Potentiality 

51 

§ Transfi guration, Interruption 76 

§ Th e Logic of Origin 87 

Of Beginning/Madness/Astonishment

xii • Contents 

§ Repetition 108 

Repetition and Recollection/ Moment 

§ Language and Death 119 

Th e States of Exception/Th e Facticity of Love and Th e 

Facticity of Language/Th e Gift of Language 

§ Confi guration 132 

Caesura/Th e Star of Redemption/ Discontinuous Finitude/ 

En-framing, Revelation/Lightning, Clearing/ Constellation 

of Temporalities/ Transfi nitude 

PART II – THE LIGHTNING FLASH 

§ Th e Language of the Mortals 

Th e Presupposition//Kierkegaard’s Indirect Communication 

161 

§ Pain 

Work and Pain/Th e Melancholic Gift/ Naming and 

Overnaming/Th inking and Th anking 

175 

§ Apollo’s Lightning Strike 

Th e Lightning Flash/Th e Divine Violence 

201 

§ Revelation 

Th e Argument/Synthesis without Continuum/Language as 

Revelation in Schelling’s Philosophy of Freedom 

210 

PART III – EVENT 

§ Of Event 225 

Th e Question of Event and the Limit of Foundation/ 

Freedom, Time and Existence/Origin, Leap, Event 

§ Love and Death 243 

§ Th e Sense of Freedom 251 

§ Th e Irreducible Remainder 267 

§ Th e Abyss of Human Freedom 291 

Th e No-Th ing of Freedom and the Finitude of Man/ 

Causality as a Problem of Freedom/Philosophy as Strife

PART IV – MESSIANICITY 

§ Th e Commandment of Love 305 

Exemplarity of Translation/the Aporia of Love/Revelation of 

Love/Th e Th eologico-Political 

PART V – ON PHILOSOPHY 

Contents • xiii 

§ Erotic and Philosophic 343 

§ On Philosophical Research 354 

Th e Th ought 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 

Th e 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. Th e 

developments devoted here to the question of the promise have a 

force and a fl ash which come to them from an indisputable source 

which supports them: the fecundity of time, the temporality bursting 

forth and stratifi ed by waiting, opening to the event, and the fi nitude 

opened to infi nity, wherein the idea that appears in us, according to 

Descartes, signifi es in the fi nal analysis this very opening. Th us 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 fi rst 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 confl icting 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 aff ectivity 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. 

Th e 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. Th ere 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. Th e end promises. Th e beginning 

begins only from a kind of impossibility; because it promises the 

promise. Th us, what messianism names fi rst 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. Th us, messianism 

would be an irremissible impossibility of thinking whatever is referred 

to as the ‘origin’. ‘Th e 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 indiff erent 

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 signifi cance. And that’s 

where we grasp its fundamental diff erence in relation to teleology, 

eschatology, progressivism and all types of fi nalism. 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. Th e beginning is the diff erence, 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 Th e 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. Th e 

delinking, or in the fi nal 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 fi ne 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. Th is 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 aff ect 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. Th is 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 

ineff ability. Language is self-transcendence par excellence. 

It is not that this dense intertwining does not produce a series 

of specifi c philosophical eff ects which the fi fth part of this book 

particularly echoes while refl ecting 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 fi nitude’. It is possible, I think, to determine its fi gure while 

thinking of the Walter Benjamin’s Angel in Th eses on the Philosophy of 

History. Th e 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 fi nality and a conclusion. Th e 

experience to come, the future happiness that is legitimate to wait 

for, therefore, must be based on the past failures. Th e 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 suff ering, 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. Th e past can’t be reduced 

to the thought of its necessity. Th e present is not exhausted in the 

mere signifi cance of my full presence in this present. Th e future is 

not predetermined by historical reason. Th ese 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. Th is attempt stays 

close to the eternal return of the same. What Benjamin thinks 

and off ers 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. Th e weakness of the past 

waits for a possible rectifi cation, to come, promised by time. Th e 

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 affi nity, both challenging and 

diffi cult. 

It seems incontestable to me that the ethics of fi nitude 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 

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

free towards the coming that is revealed to him in lightning fl ash. 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 

fulfi llment 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 affi rmation of a redemptive 

future that is pursued in this work. It occurs as and in a confi guration 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. Th ese are the questions of mortality and temporality, 

of the lightning fl ash of language that reveals man, beyond any predicative 

historical closure, his fi nitude and the Openness where man fi nds 

himself exposed to the event of coming, to the redemptive fulfi lment in this 

coming itself, which he anticipates in an existential attunement of hope. 

All these questions are introduced in the movement of confi guration, or 

constellation that affi rms the coming time, and feels the requirement of 

redemption in hope, beyond all that is given to our historical existence. 

Th ese exercises of thinking are to be called: ‘confi guration thinking’.

Prologue

§ Th e Promise of Time 

To Come 

Th is 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 affi rm and to welcome the coming, the future Not Yet. Th is is a 

movement towards a messianic affi rmation that problematizes the 

dominant metaphysical determination of history whose immanence 

is guaranteed by an immanent self-grounding subject. Th is 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 • THE PROMISE OF TIME 

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 

fulfi lment), 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 fulfi lment, to the redemption of 

the violence of history itself. 

What is to think ‘to come’, understood in the verbal resonance of 

the infi nitive ‘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 infi nite after only because it is already an infi nite 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 

Th e 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

Th e 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. Th is 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. Th is faith 

is the one that is not satisfi ed 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. 

Th is thought of the affi rmative, 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 satisfi ed 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. Th is 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 selfpresence. 

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 fl eeting moments of lightning fl ash 

that illumine the taking place of history itself as a phenomenon of 

unapparent apparition that defi nes 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). Th is truth, in contrast 

to the categorical cognition of ‘given presences’, calls forth an entirely 

diff erent notion of temporality and historicality, an entirely diff erent 

notion of phenomenality: not the phenomenality that is categorically 

grasped in the apophantic judgement but a phenomenality when the 

unapparent in a lightning fl ash 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. Th is 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. Th is 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 

fi nitude 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 infi nitive 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 infi nitive verbal character of existence is more originary 

than any categorical predication of existence as ‘given presence’. 

Th erefore 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 infi nitive 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’. 

Th e infi nitude 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 fi nite 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 

fi nite 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 fl ash 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. Th is 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. Th e 

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 diffi culty arises: this is clearly a tautology. Indeed! Th is 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. 

Th e name for what is addressed in this state of aff airs 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. 

Th us understood, phenomenology is a path that leads away to come 

before… and it lets that before which it is led to show itself. Th is 

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-prethinkable’ 

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 fi rst time. Th e 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 fi nitude that refuses to be lifted up unto 

thought completely. Th is 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 infi nitude and Absolute. Th e 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 infi nite 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 fi nite 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 fi nitude, of future and of the gift. One can name 

them as ‘the thinkers of fi nitude’.


Messianic 

Th e messianic affi rmation 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 affi rms 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. Th is thinking itself, in this innermost manner, is fi nite 

and mortal. If the dominant metaphysics has made death into the 

service of the dialectical-universal history and made death to retain a 

mere sacrifi cial signifi cance, it has its supplement in the theologicopolitical 

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. Th is 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. Th is 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 aff ection. 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. Th e 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 speculativetragic 

atonement. Th is reconciliatory movement of the speculativetragic-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. Th e 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. Th e 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. Th e tautological presencing presences or coming comes 

that no phenomenology or ontology of self-consciousness’ selfpresence 

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. Th e ‘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. Th e 

thinking of forgiveness and the messianic affi rmation 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—reifi es 

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. Th en 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. Th e 

movement of confi guration 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 fi nite 

singulars which is the multiple singulars’ exposure or abandonment 

to their singularly irreducible fi nitude. Th e linguistic essence of the 

fi nite beings, who are irreducibly multiple and singulars, is in this 

intrinsic intimacy with those beings’ pure exposure to their fi nitude. 

Similarly for Heidegger too, ‘the phenomenology of the 

unapparent’ has an essential relation to the naming the language of 

man who is essentially this fi nite being. Th inking 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 fi nitude that demands 

that it is to be thanked. Th e dignity and nobility of thinking lays in 

this recognition. With this thankfulness there is receptivity—in so 

far our fi nitude 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. 

Th is promise of future is what the wanderer-thinker, in his path of 

thinking, contemplates and is intimated at during sudden lightning 

fl ashes, 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 fl ash 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 fl ight 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) 

Th erefore, 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. Th ese joints are co-junctions of 

the disjointed without any prior principle. One may call such an 

experience a constellation or confi guration of thinking. Th e experience 

of wandering on the path of thinking refuses gathering, or collecting 

into unity, even if it is unity with diff erence. Th inking 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. Th e 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 confi guration 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. Th is 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 fi nitude and mortality, 

the wanderer relates to himself as a point in-between. To exist is to 

fi nd 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 indefi nite, incalculable lengthening 

of time, as if time stretches out without beginning and without end. 

Th inking, philosophical thinking is this exposure to this time before 

time that advents as lightning fl ash where the immemorial presents 

itself as unapparent apparition. 

Th e 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. Th inking 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 infi nity 

outside the dialectical thesis and anti-thesis. Th erefore, wandering 

is non-dialectical movement par excellence. Th is 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 diff erent level but welcomes truth 

that each time suspends the law of the dialectical. Th inking, 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 diff erent 

logic than the logic of a scientifi c method. 

Configuration Saying 

Th erefore, 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. Th ere 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. Th e task, 

through this diff erential 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. Th erefore, 

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 fi nd 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 confi guration 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 fi nite and new, something that heralds rather than 

gives the result of a process in the form of predicative propositions. 

Th e confi guration 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 fi nite. 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 

beatifi c recognition of this completeness of speech, a silence which is not


defi ance 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 defi ance because he 

is superior to the God in his mortality, because of his capacity of 

death can defy even the God. Th e ‘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. Th erefore, 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. Th ere 

is, therefore, always certain mournfulness in silence and a silence in 

mournfulness, which is distinguished from the silence of the tragicmythic 

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 confi guring 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? Th e 

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 

fi nite and incomplete. Out of this essential incompleteness, the poetthinker 

repeats himself here and there, as the wanderer must renew 

his leaps, because repetition always arises out of an essential fi nitude 

of thinking itself. 

What is presented in this work is nothing but the ‘wrested truth’, 

spoken in a confi guration that emerges out of the experiences of 

wandering. Th erefore, 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. Th at, however, does not mean that truth 

in itself is always incomplete, but only the claim of saying the truth— 

because of the fi nitude 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. 

Th erefore, the attempt to say ‘the wrested truth’ can only be a 

regulated form of divine madness which must constantly be solicited 

to. Th ere 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 ‘horsefl y’. 

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 fl ash 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 fi rst of all what he is, the one who 

seizes and wrests truth from the immemorial that founds him and 

dispropriates him in advance. Th is 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 fl ash.

§ Radical Finitude 

If the emergence of modern philosophy is marked by the 

materialization of the question of fi nitude (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 fi nitude is essentially 

that of the question of the subject. Th e question of the subject in its 

fi nitude 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 fi nitude 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 fulfi lled. It 

then becomes necessary to think of a radical notion of fi nitude as 

the task of inaugurating another thought of history which should at 

the same time articulate a radical critique of the violence of history. 

Th e notion of history is bound with the question of fi nitude where 

fi nitude 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 infi nite nameless waves of the Sea— 

without hope, meaning and promise—bringing to us nothing but the 

eternal murmur of what is already become fi nished, 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 sacrifi cial, 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 dialecticalhistorical 

time to another notion of a temporality which remains as 

a time of hope and fulfi lment, of a positive outside negativity, of 

an infi nity 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 fi rst 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? Th e 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. Th ere 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? Th ere will only be an incessant laments 

of unfulfi lled hopes and of a past whose injustice is not yet rectifi ed. 

Th ese are the questions opened up by Franz Rosenzweig’s Th e Star 

of Redemption. Th ese are also our questions here. Th ere 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 affi rming a redemptive future, is content 

to enclose the event of coming into an immanent totalizing process. 

Th erefore, it would be necessary here is to renew the question already 

implicit in Rosenzweig, which is, that of rethinking the question of 

fi nitude. 

Th e thought of future and the messianic, redemptive fulfi lment is 

always a question of fi nitude, 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 off ering. Th is 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. Th is revelation of the secret is that phenomenon 

of the unapparent that opens the world for the fi rst time. Th e 

‘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. Th is 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’. 

Th erefore 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 fi rst 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 Th e 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 fi nite existence. An eternal past which has never been present 

opens the world to the mortals, as if for the fi rst 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. Th is 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 fi rst opens the world and the temporality in its pure 

advent makes its unapparent apparition. 

In his Th e Unforgettable and the Unhoped For (2002), Jean Louis 

Chrétien attempts to think this gift of the immemorial that fi rst 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. ‘Th e 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) 

Th is 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, indefi nite 

and fi nite 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). Th is 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 fi nite. 

Th is non-contemporaneity and non-co-incidence of the mortal in 

relation to his condition and ground defi nes 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. 

Th e already always is this immemorial gift which is also the 

forgetting of other origin. Our fi nitude is not an immanent fi nitude


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 fi nitude, on the other hand, 

arising out as the immemorial gift, is an excess in us, and that fi rst 

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. Th is 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. Th e 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. 

Th is 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 . 

Th is 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’. Th e 

thought of the originary gift and the radical fi nitude 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. Th erefore, 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. Th erefore, 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 fi nite. Yet it is only on the 

basis of the originary fi nitude 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 infi nity outside any immanence of 

self-presence. 

Th e task of the philosophical thinking is, to open us, outside any 

metaphysical totalization, to the sudden lightning fl ashes of the pure 

arrival of the future and to the immemorial past without mastery 

and without appropriation and to attune ourselves to that beatifi c 

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 fi nd 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 infi nite: a great step which Plato 

compared to death. 

(Quoted in Heidegger 1985, pp. 6-7) 

Th e beatifi c joy of this ‘divine mourning’ that Schelling speaks of is 

not the joy of cognition but participation in the Infi nite, 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-fulfi lment. 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. Th is possibility alone is redemptive when on the basis of an 

originary dispropriation mortals partake of the eternity and infi nite 

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 aff ected with, attuned 

with, that is a fundamental attunement, an essential aff ection: ‘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. Th erefore, 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.). 

Th e 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. Th is 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). Th is 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 fi nitude 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 fi nitude, on the basis of his non-condition, that man is open 

to what he himself is and what he is not. Th e radical fi nitude 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. Th is 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. Th e 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. Th e 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. 

Th erefore, mortality and fi nitude is essentially historical in a 

more originary sense than dialectical-speculative essence of history 

constituted by the labour of the negative. Th e 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. Th is 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 fi rst 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. Th is prepredicative 

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. Th is 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. 

Th at 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. Th e 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. Th e 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 fi nitude 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. Th e fi nitude 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 fi nite and non-totalizable, which, in so far 

it is non-totalizable, is at once tempered with the possibility of a 

redemptive joy, because this fi nitude is the condition of the world’s 

coming into existence. 

Hope and melancholy are not two opposite attunements of the 

world. Th ey 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’. Th is 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. Th ought historically, that means non-dialectically, the world 

is to be attuned to melancholy as possible mood of its existence. Th e 

verbal infi nitive of the possible is the not yet of the world, which 

in its infi nitive is an infi nitive ‘not yet’. Th e eternal remnant of the 

not yet demands infi nite, joyous affi rmation of the world that affi rms 

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. 

Th is 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. Th e 

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. Th ey are 

the fundamental attunements of the world and existence to its own 

condition and coming into presence. Th erefore 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. 

Th erefore, melancholy is an originary attunement of the world to its 

own origin. Th e 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 refl ects, in a weak illumination, the joy of 

the animals when Adam fi rst gave their names to them. Th e 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 fulfi lment. 

Mortality 

A thinking that confronts this mortality, its own mortality, 

ecstatically—for thinking itself is fi nite, disruptive, interruptive of 

itself, a fi nite thinking—must go beyond the closure of dialecticalspeculative 

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 fi nitude as a gift and a promise. Th is gift 

is not a product and, therefore, it does not belong to the economy of 

the universal history. Th is 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. Th erefore, 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 affi rm there a yet to come. Th is radical 

fi nitude, 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 fi nitude that welcomes in its lightning 

fl ash that which transforms our historical existence into its messianic, 

redemptive fulfi lment. 

Th is fi nitude 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 fi nite 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. Th ere 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 affi rm this coming, the possible is the same thing as affi rming 

the un-pre-thinkable and the un-predicative. Th e future, in its 

incalculability and in its un-predicative character, is not a negation of 

fi nitude 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. Th is 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 fl ash 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 transfi gure 

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. 

Th e task of politics derives its sense from its opening to this nonwork 

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. 

Th is brings to us the complex relation of the notion of event with 

the notion of Abyss. If the creative task of the mortal, fi nite, 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 


Th is present volume is divided into fi ve parts. Th e fi rst part, 

called Confi guration, presents within a constellation an assemblage 

of problems, questions, and stakes and thereby describing this 

presentation itself as confi guration. 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. 

Th e 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. Th e 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 affi rmation of an unconditional arrival, 

which for that matter can never be thought within the predicative, 

categorical grasp of the ‘presently given entities’ (Heidegger 1962). 

Th ey are thereby released and freed, which is the off ering 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, 

diff erential, 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. Th e 

event brings together the end as well as beginning, completion and 

inception so that the event is each time fi nite 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. Th e question of the event is inseparable from the logic of the 

world. 

Th e fourth part takes up the question of messianicity. Taking 

Franz Rosenzweig’s Th e 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 fulfi lment in a messianic coming which is 

always coming, an eternity which may come today. Th is 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. Th e fi fth 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 clarifi cation 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. Th e question of existence has essentially an ethical implication 

whose meaning and sense arises from the inextricable character of 

fi nitude of existence that defi nes existence in its existentiality. As 

such, an ethics of existence is essentially a fi nite ethics, or an ethics of 

fi nitude from which the task of philosophical thinking is inseparable.

Part I 

Configuration

§ Th e Open 

Th inking means venturing beyond. 

Ernst Bloch (1995, p. 5) 

Th is 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. Th inking 

must affi rm this ‘Not yet’, this messianic, redemptive fulfi llment, if 

it has to affi rm 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 cobelonging, 

or co-fi guration. 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. Th ere comes into existence out of 

this freedom, out of this ‘play space’ 1 , this fi eld 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. Th is 

means that man’s attempts to metaphysically found his own political


and historical existence must presuppose a far more originary nonfoundation, 

the diff erentiating 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 fl ash 

of language, in a poetic saying? Th is 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 fi nitude 

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 confi guration 

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

Th e Open • 41 

of mortals, yet which while fi rst 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. 

Th e 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 categoricalpredicative 

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 signifi cation 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. Th e event of language already always inserts 

this mortal being called ‘man’, in an immemorial past, into this cofi 

guration of mortality and natality, of past and future and presence 

in a simultaneity that is called ‘eternity’. Th is 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 

Th e 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. Th erefore 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 fl ash, he 

confi gures, 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. 

Th inking 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. Th ere lies the birth of thinking and, 

henceforth, is called philosophy. If that is so, philosophy begins a nonconditional 

opening of thinking itself. Th at 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 fi nitude, that 

means, out of his exposure to the open. For philosophical thinking 

fi nitude or mortality is not one question among others, because 

questioning itself begins as a non-conditional experience of fi nitude 

or mortality. Th erefore, all the questions that man raises are fi nite 

questions. Man philosophizes not because he is capable of the faculty 

of thinking, but because he is fi rst of all mortal and fi nite that strikes 

him, surprises him, astonishes him. Th is event of thinking attunes 

the mortals to a fundamental mood, or fundamental attunement of 

astonishment, astonishment at the event of thinking. 

Th e 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, fi rst 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. Th is 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


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 infl uencing Kierkegaard denies movement in Hegelian 

speculative logic, though the eff ort 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. Th e 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. Th erefore, 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. 

Th is is the reason that Franz Rosenzweig, following Schelling, 

begins his Th e 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. Th e 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. Th is 

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 eff ort 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. Th e 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. 

Th e 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. 

Th e 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. Th is 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. Th e pauses or interruptions of history are not diff erential 

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. Th ey 

are, rather, in their radical fi nitude, singular epochal ruptures that 

refuse to be gathered into a logical principle of unity. Th eir logic 

of becoming is not the dialectical-speculative logic of speculative 

proposition. Th eir caesural logic is more like what Hölderlin calls 

as ‘becoming in perishing’ (Hölderlin 1988, pp. 96-100). Th ey are


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. Th ese 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 fl ow of eternity. Th ey 

rather form what both Schelling and Hölderlin already before Hegel 

came to constitute the system call Zusammenhang (Schelling 2000): 

the caesural confi guration, 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 fl ash 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. Th e mortality 

of the lightning fl ash 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’. ‘Th is 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 fi re’, is this infi nite interweaving of 

becoming and dissolution when ‘everything infi nitely 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 infi nity that has fi nitude within it, 

the infi nite and fi nite forms the ‘monstrous coupling’ which is not 

‘system’, but Zusammenhang—of mortality and natality, becoming 

and dissolution, presentation and the unpresentable, infi nite and 

fi nitude, excess and containment, mourning and joy. Th e 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 fi nite, attenuated


fi gures 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 fi nal stage, even via the intermediary of a 

‘qualitative leap’ which would introduce here a relative discontinuity, 

but rather the entire refl ux 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 fi nite realization of the One, the Universal, like the succession 

of diff erential nows that are the diff erential and immanent variations 

of the Now. 5 Th e 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. 

Th ey are not merely immanent product of this history nor a result 

of that speculative dialectical process. Th e 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 fi nitude, 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. Th e 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 fi nite history 

where mortality and natality, becoming and dissolution occur


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 fi nished 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) fi nite 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 artifi ce and manifests for mortals his fi eld of polis, 

polis where he enjoys his feasts and suff ers 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 fi rst 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 fi rst 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 fi rst 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. 

‘Th e 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 affi rmative 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 fulfi ll its promise, which happens irreducibly there at the 

inception of history, at the inception of anything like politics. Th e 

remembrance of this inception, its fi nitude, its incessant renewal in 

any presencing of presence, and hence fulfi llment 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 fulfi ll 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


genesis what is immemorial promise, not yet unimpaired by the 

violence of cognition. 

Th is 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 infi nitude and fi nitude. Th e 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 

fl ash to which man is exposed. 

Th is 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 satisfi ed 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 confi ning 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. Th is 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, fi nite and mortal existence, but 

because of this fi nitude, opening to the non-condition, infi nite 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. Th e 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 fulfi lment of its self-presence 

despite the epochal ruptures so that beneath the discontinuities and 

ruptures of history the unity of self-presence fl ows 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 diff erent 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 fulfi lment outside the closure of historical violence. 

Th en the judgement of history would no longer be authoritative and 

fi nal, for it is in the name of a redemptive fulfi lment that history will 

be judged. 

* 

Th e 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 suff ering, 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. Th is 

metaphysically founded logic of origin is also logic of earth and soil, 

of the cunning of a history that fulfi ls 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 fulfi lment of the violence that found these 

institutions. What then this universal history claims to fulfi ls 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 fulfi lled, 

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. Th is 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 Infi nity (1969), Emmanuel Levinas attempts to 

think of a more originary ethical responsibility in justice that exceeds 

this judgement of history. Th ere 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. Th e order where the invisibility of the singularity manifests 

itself is the order of infi nity in which ‘history itself is judged’ (Ibid.). 

It is an infi nite judgement because it comes from the infi nity (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. Th is infi nite judgement (or, the 

judgement of infi nity) 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. Th is infi nite judgement—infi nite 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 divine 1 where man 

in his singularity is affi rmed, 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 perfi dy. It consists in the submission of the subjective will to the 

universal laws which reduce the will to its objective signifi cation… it 

henceforth exists as though it were dead and signifi ed only in its own 

heritage, as though everything that was existence in the fi rst person in 

it, subjective existence, were but the after-eff ect of its animality.


And, 

Th ere exists a tyranny of the universal and of the impersonal, an order 

that is inhuman though distinct from brutish. Against it man affi rms 

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 fl ight 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. Th e 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. ‘Th e 

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 infi nite 

time, the condition for both goodness and the transcendence of the 

face’ (Ibid., p. 247). 

Th e 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). 

Th is speculative-apophantic labour of the speculative judgement 

enables the Hegelian subject of History to maintain itself as selfsame 

parousia in the dissolution of its own accidents and predicates 

where the predicates and the subject no longer remain in the fi xity, 

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 infi nity’. 

Th e 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. Th e 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 fl ash, as unapparent phenomenon that tears, 

or hollows out, wounds the veil of the totality of the visible forms. 

Th e 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 givenness 

to the more originary phenomenology of exposure at the limit 

of self-grounding consciousness. 

Th at 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’. Th e 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 suff erings of its fi nitude, it still sinks down 

its teeth into its autochthonous, its immanent pure soil from where 

history originates. Th e ruptures of history will only be then relative 

disjunctions by means of which uniform, universal history cunningly 

realizes itself. Th e speculative propositional movement of history has 

in its womb such cunning imposture that it realizes its totalization 

precisely through its own dissolutions, by sacrifi cing itself. Just as the 

logic of this speculative judgement is a sacrifi cial logic, so the logic of 

history is a sacrifi cial 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. 

Th e 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. Th e 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, suff ering


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. 

Th e 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. Th is denuding or disrobing is the 

work of death, which death performs in the interests of the universal. 

Th e name of this deed is called ‘funeral’. In Phenomenology of Spirit, 

Hegel writes, 

Th e deed, then which embraces the entire existence of the bloodrelation, 

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. 

Th e 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. Th e 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. Th is 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. Th is 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. Th is 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 thanaonto-theological 

constitution of metaphysics of history and politics. 

Th e 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. Th e 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. Th e 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. Th e speculative 

logic of origin is what makes this ‘non-actuality’ into the actuality 

of the actual, into the possibility of the possible. Th e 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. Th is judgement is 

the speculative truth of history, truth that is told in the form of the 

speculative proposition, which says not the fi xed, 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 sacrifi cial-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-sacrifi cial 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. Th is 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. Th erefore it is necessary to think the temporality itself 

otherwise, no longer on the tragic-sacrifi cial 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 confi 

guration, as a kind of assemblage, when time of presentation and 

its radical exteriority come-together, simultaneously, in a ‘monstrous 

coupling’ (Hölderlin 1988, 96-100). 

Th is 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. Th inking 

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. Th e 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-sacrifi cial 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. 

Th inking 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. Th e courage of 

thinking needs to be evoked, once again, no longer in the old tragicheroic 

pathos of a totalizing thought, but as hopeful, affi rmation 

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. Th is 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 satisfi ed 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 Th e 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. Th ere is, according to this understanding, 

no immemorial as such. Th ere 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. Th is metaphysics of 

immanence where the transcendence of the infi nity 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. 

Th ere is no advent that has not been interiorized, assimilated or 

subjectifi ed 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. Th e speculative memory of the dialectical history, grounded 

by its apophansis, is the circular re-appropriation of the beginning in 

the end. Th ere is no outside beyond the plenitude of the Subject’s


Parousia. Th ere is no immemorial loss that would not manifest itself 

in the visible forms of universal history. Th e 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 Th is in a phenomenological 

manner—that means, as the movement of Th is taking place as such— 

shows how in this phenomenological movement of taking place of Th is, 

the Th is shows on its emphatic self-certainty to be its own impossibility 

to maintain itself its Th is-ness. Th is phenomenological movement of 

the Th is—that is supposed to be this absolutely irreducible singular 

phenomenon—already, immediately (the moment it advents itself, 

erupts itself as Th is) is opened to a loss, not in an accidental manner, 

but precisely because the Th is is Th is. Th e moment—here and now— 

the Th is appears, it is already a passed past, it is immediately a Th is 

which is no longer Th is and therefore an other than Th is: 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 Th is 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 Th is appearing is a movement that puts into 

its peril of this appearing itself so that Th is can never be same Th is 

that the phenomenological consciousness will later recall. Th e Th is is 

essentially a ‘perilous being’, that means, its essence is to perish that 

is simultaneous with its advent. Th e 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 fi rst 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 suffi ce. 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. Th is day is outside any 

this day or that night, a day other than or indiff erent 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 Th is. Hegel continues, 

Th e 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. Th e 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. Th is 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.) 

Th e 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. 

Th is 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 profi t or 

gain of the mediated universal which alone is essence, for this essence 

alone is the essential. Th is 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. Th e 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’. Th is 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. Th e 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 speculativedialectical 

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. 

Th is process of the dialectical historical, whose logic of movement 

is grasped in the speculative-predicative proposition, is not without 

suff ering and violence, but must go through violent antagonisms, life 

and death struggle and countless useless deaths whose numberless 

cries are already always eff aced from the memorial speech of history. 

Th e immemorial lamentation from which the Owl of Minerva is


forever in fl ight 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? Th e 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. 

Th is 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. 

Th e 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 counteract 

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 speculativedialectical 

totality—a remainder of the metaphysical violence of 

the speculative concept haunts even at the End of history, even


the Absolute concept. Th e 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. Th e 

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) insuffi cient and inadequate. Th at 

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 signifi cation of this 

reconciliatory pathos of tragic-historical dialectics, when with the 

recognition of its painful insuffi ciency 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’? Th is 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. Th e 

beginning must already always bear this promise, for otherwise it 

would not be promise, for otherwise there would not be fulfi lment of 

this promise. Th e failure of speculative historical to bring the melancholy 

of historical violence to the redemptive fulfi lment 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. Th e 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. Th e 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. Th e 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. Th ere is a melancholy of thought in that thinking is 

essentially, in the innermost manner, is fi nite. 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 eff ort 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 diff erent, 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. Th is 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. Th is advent is not mere historical event amongst others 

belonging to the homogenous unity of universal history, but the event 

of coming as such. Th e eruption of the advent has its condition the unconditional 

epochal rupture that renders history to an interval. Th is 

interval does not belong to the homogenous logic of the predicativespeculative 

proposition, for it does not function in the manner of a 

copula in a speculative proposition. Th is 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. Th is judgement would not be judgement of history, 

then, but a judgement upon history. Th e task of this judgement is 

no longer that of constituting historical totalities, or metaphysicalhistorical 

system-making, but to think radically epochal ruptures and 

the advent of the coming whose promise is given in a time preceding 

the tragic-sacrifi cial 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 confi guration. Hence is 

the origin of the idea of ‘Zusammenhang’ that Schelling later elaborates 

in Th e Ages of the World (2000): co-fi guration or constellation that 

infl uenced Heidegger’s (1969) notion of belonging-together, or 

constellation of the relation between Being and man. Th is thinking 

of confi guration 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. Th is problematic of thinking as confi guration 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 diff erence. Th e event pre-supposes freedom as a forever 

inappropriable, originary donation from a site or ground forever 

ungrounded. Th is freedom cannot be grounded on the basis of the 

apophansis of the predicative proposition; it is rather the diff erence 

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. Th is originary manner of 

thinking the notion of judgement is introduced with the question 

of freedom. Th is 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 

fi nite opening. What at stake is not the task of thinking ‘identity of 

the identity and diff erence 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 fi rst of all must open the mortal existence to the advent 

of coming so that there be history. Th is 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. Th erefore, 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. 

Th is 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. Th is cision, the originary separation 

(Scheidung) 4 does not function in the manner of copula of the 

predicativespeculative 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. Th is 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 nonconditional 

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. Th is 

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. Th is 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. Th e 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. Th e 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, fi nite 

being to decide between the good and evil. 

Th e possibility of good and evil which alone must explain 

the enigmatic question of human freedom, therefore, belongs to


fi nitude, fi nitude that claims upon the mortal being called ‘man’, and 

throws him to his destiny. It is on the basis of this non-appropriable 

fi nitude this mortal being called ‘man’ assumes his freedom. It is on 

the basis of this more originary monstrosity, on the basis of a nonappropriable 

‘loan’ which must fi rst 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. Th erefore, 

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 fi nitude which is 

necessarily uplifted (Aufheben), resurrected unto Absolute Concept 

as infi nite negativity. Th is could only happen like this in so far as 

dialectical-speculative judgement cannot explain the ecstasy of the 

fi nitude 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). Th is 

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 fi nitude 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 infi nite transcendence, 

and its opening to what is otherwise than the mortal. 

Th ere 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. Th e speculative judgement of history 

presupposes the more originary monstrous judgement of freedom that fi rst 

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. Th e 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 

fi nitude of man—persist eternally in the undecidable. Because of this 

fi nitude 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 

fi nitude, 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. Th e 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. Th e 

ecstasy of the potentiality will forever overfl ow what is already 

actualized. Th is ‘forever’ is at once the promise of joy and the source 

of the unspeakable melancholy in fi nite 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. Th is is the sadness which adheres too all fi nite 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. Th ence, 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 fi nite life. Th e 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 fi nite existence, it is in so far as this 

eternal remnant of the never appropriated ground is also the ground 

with joyous affi rmation of a creative freedom, since this inscrutable 

ground is also the ground of the advent. Th is ‘irreducible remainder’ 

is at once the promise of joy, and the source of the unspeakable 

melancholy of fi nite life. Th e Abgrund that eternally remains in the 

heart of a fi nite 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 infi nite possibilities of freedom, to the labour of eff ective actions. 

If an ‘unappeased melancholy’ adheres to all our fi nite life, being 

fi nite 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 infi nite, 

inexhaustible, never-once-and-for-all actualizable acts of freedom. 

(Das 2008, pp. 167-180) 

What is then the occasion for joy? Th e fi nite freedom of the mortal 

which can never appropriate its own condition bears (precisely 

because of this fi nitude) the redemptive fulfi lment in this affi rmation 

of the Not Yet, the passion of infi nite potentiality. Th is passion and 

ecstasy of potentiality is the occasion of joy for the fi nite, 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 fl ash that 

strikes us the mortals. Th e monstrous logic of this freedom, then, does not 

begin, nor end with the pure, thetic power of positing. Th e 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 affi rmation of coming into 

existence that opens with the passion of potentiality. 

Th e 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 fi nitude, opens to the outside, that means, 

to the passion of potentiality. Th is 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 fi nitude of ‘man’ 

and to abandon the task of metaphysical-historical totalization— 

though appears a loss to man—is more salutary task of thinking. 

Th is retreat from, and renunciation from all possible metaphysicalhistorical 

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 refl ections, 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. Th e 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 fi nitude. Th is non-appropriable fi nitude is the 

ground of a freedom on the basis of which man creates his history. 

Th e transcendence of this other time, the wholly otherwise time, 

constitutes the ecstasy and passion of a fi nite existence. Th is 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. Th is 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. Th e 

monstrosity of history bears witness the fi nitude of history itself. But 

above all, this bears witness and remembers, and in remembering 

prepares the advent of another coming. It is this redemptive fulfi lment, 

its necessity for mortal existence that pronounces judgement upon 

history.

§ Transfi guration, Interruption 

Th e 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 transfi gure what 

is loosened in the given architecture of foundation into affi rmation 

of something ‘not yet’. Together they constitute the task of mortality 

itself, for what affi rms the ‘not yet’ must also affi rm 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 transfi guration. 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 transfi guration, man is thereby placed to welcome 

the event of coming itself. 

* 

Th e 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 fi nitude of the mortal, which is 

to be distinguished from the melancholy of fulfi llment, for there is 

also a melancholy, albeit paradisiacal, in fulfi llment. Th e 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-fulfi llment. Th is reserve 

is the messianic reserve, the withdrawn in off ering, the secret in

Transfi guration, Interruption • 77 

promise whose fulfi llment and communication demands another 

event of actualization outside man’s mastery on behalf of his power 

of negativity. Th is 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. Th is 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 off ering, and therefore does not appear itself as communicable 

in the given, already accomplished communicability. Th e 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. Th e 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 fi rst 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 fi nite, 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. Th is 

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 fi nite 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 fulfi llment 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. Th e 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. Th e abyss of the night is not an objection 

that is to be eliminated, since the coming of the dawn must also 

know the suff ering of the brooding labour which existence undergoes. 

Th inking 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 fi nitude, absolute concept is eternal, an 

eternity which is not a stranger to the fi nitude, but an eternity that 

has traversed the suff erings of fi nitude, and has lifted up this fi nitude 

unto itself. Absolute concept is Calvary that has carried death to its 

own transfi guration, 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. Th is ‘econo-onto-thanatology’ (Das 2010) constitutes itself 

on certain economic fi guration 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-thanaontology’ 

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. Th is 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. Th is evil is the self-abnegation of the fi nite 

creature’s own condition, that is, his fi nitude. 

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 transfi guration 

of this non-conditional gravity into the possibility of joy and grace. 

Th is transfi guration 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 

fl ight of the Eagle: the Eagle’s fl ight is not elimination of the force 

of gravity, but rather a continuous elevation of it into the possibility 

or means to its fl ight. 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. Th e task of the voyage is therefore not the self-abnegation 

of fi nitude but a continuous elevation or an infi nite transfi guration of 

our ground into existence, gravity into grace. Th e night of broodingthinking, 

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 fi nitude 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. Th is night which in itself 

is no objection to existence is precisely the immemorial that opens 

existence to the time yet to come. Th e task here is of transfi guring the 

night of the immemorial into the light of the dawn, by interminably 

bringing to light of hope and into its affi rmation the promise that 

is given in the immemorial, in the already always, before any selfpresence 

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 solidifi ed 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 solidifi ed into presence and that has not acquired the darkness of 

the past. Th is 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 transfi guration: 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 transfi gured 

into what is not yet, into an affi rmation 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 transfi guration of despair 

into hope, of sorrows into joy, of our melancholic existence into the 

joyous affi rmation of redemption in coming, of what is into what is 

not yet is not without interruption. It is rather that transfi guration 

demands interruption, as a light requires an already opening and 

clearing where it may then shine forth. As mere interruption of 

the given without transfi guration—interruption of that which has 

become a foundation for us—is nihilism; so transfi guration without 

interruption is mere continuity of the what has become of existence 

as mere extension: it does not then affi rm the eternal ‘Yes’ that 

welcomes, in unconditioned hospitality, the unapparent presencing 

of the wholly otherwise.


Th is task of transfi guration through interruption of solidifi ed 

past, and reifi ed, this undoing of a sedimented foundation: this is 

what fi nite politics means, not the politics which is performed by 

the economic fi guration 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 fi rst 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 transfi gured 

into the Dawn, the abyss of the Night is to be interrupted, so 

redemptive affi rming 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 transfi gured into an affi rmation 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. Th e 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. Th erefore 

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. Th is 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 fi rst 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. 

Th e 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. Th ere lies the interminable, the infi nite task for the mortals: 

not the mastery, nor appropriation of this non-conditional ground 

unto the immanence of self-presence, but continually to elevate, 

transfi gure the abyss into affi rmation of the coming, of darkness 

into the light, so as to keep open the possibility of originary opening 

once more, that means, infi nitely. To transfi gure the abyss into an 

affi rmation 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, fi nite and mortal, but it is an unenclosed mortality 

and an unenclosed fi nitude, 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. Th e 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 infi nite transfi guration and keeping open of the past 

unto the future, unto the possible, unto the coming to presence. Th is 

‘facticity’ of the coming to presence of existence, the ‘that is’ irreducible 

to the empirical facts of every particularity of this and that, the beingthere 

of the Open is intimated in non-predicative disclosure of 

language that arrives as lightning fl ash, 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. Th is character of belatedness of existence, this noncontemporaneous 

character carries the latency of its own coming 

into future and hence the necessity, in creative freedom, to affi rm 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 affi rm the coming in the not yet, it is 

necessary for it to interrupt and transfi gure what has come into an 

affi rmation 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 insuffi ciently open 

towards any affi rmation of a coming time. Th erefore 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. Th is 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. 

Transfi guration 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 solidifi ed past—so that 

an opening to ‘that is not yet so’, or ‘that it was not yet so’ is possible. 

Th is 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 transfi guration also takes 

place as corollary of interruption. One who affi rms 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 infi nite and fi nitude, 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 solidifi ed past, giving over 

his solidifi ed 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 confi dent about the solidity and substantiality of being 

now evaporates. Th e abyss of the night is transfi gured into light 

through this interruption, as future transfi gures the past, and thereby 

redeems it. Th e 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 

affi rmation of the possible is simultaneously an affi rmation 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 eff ort of thinking. Its logic is not provided by the speculativedialectical 

logic of the predicative proposition. 

Th e 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. Th is 

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. Th e 

logic of the possible is not the dialectical-speculative logic of negativity.


It does not convert the nothingness into being without a remainder. 

Th e possibility of the non-possible does not belong to the traditional 

logic, because it defi es the logical principle of non-contradiction 

and identity. Th e 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. 

Th is 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 affi rmation of the incalculable 

and arriving of the light without certitude of knowledge. Th e 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). Th e 

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. Th erefore 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 off ering, the sublime off ering, 

the gift from a destination wholly otherwise. Th is un-predicable is 

not what would be one day predicated in absolute knowledge, and 

therefore existence, because it is the pure gift, sublime off ering from 

other destination, cannot be included in any system of knowledge, 

even if it is absolute knowledge. Th ere 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 fi nitude of the mortals that is 

truly tragic, and not the tragic of the dialectical mediation of the 

infi nite and fi nitude uplifted (Aufheben) unto unity through which 

there occurs atonement of gilt. Life being essentially mortal and 

ineluctably fi nite is a synthesis of the infi nite and fi nitude. 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 solidifi ed presence is infi nitely interrupted 

and given over to the opening. 

Should we name this opening as ‘beginning’?

§ Th e Logic of Origin 

We are too late for the gods 

And too early for Being. 

Being’s poem, 

Just began, is man. 

Of Beginning 

Martin Heidegger (2001, p.4) 

Th e question of beginning is not merely the beginning of questioning 

for philosophy; it is also the most diffi cult 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? Th is 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 fi rst opens time to the being that is essentially 

fi nite and ineluctably mortal. Th ere 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 infi nite ebb and fl ows 

and the blue sky opening above with the play of lights and darkness 

unknown. Th e 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. Th is 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. 

Th e 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’. Th e latter is the thinking of beginning at 

a defi nite 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. Th eir thinking is a retreating in face 

of Being… Th e 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. Th e 

thinkers are begun by the beginning: ‘in-cepted’ [An-gefangenen] by

Th e Logic of Origin • 89 

the in-ception [An-fang]; they are taken up by it and are gathered into 

it. (Heidegger 1992, pp. 7-8). 

Th is 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. Th e 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 fi rst time and each time, 

opening time to its transcendence. Th is 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. 

Th is eternity is a fi nite eternity which presents itself in the lightning 

fl ash of its advent where becoming and perishing strikes the mortals, 

seizes them and opens them to the inauguration of a new history. 

Th is is what will be spoken here of as the logic of origin. Th e logic of 

the origin, the scene of the origin, is the originary not yet 1 . It is the 

logic of the future of the past and the past of the not yet. Th e 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 fi nite transcendence that befi ts this fi nite being called 

‘man’. Th is fi nite transcendence opens the fi nite 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. Th inking 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. Th e notion of 

experience here is not constitutive of an eidetic consciousness, or of 

a transcendental subject’s Parousia. Th e 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’. Th e 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’. Th e 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, transfi gures him. Th e 

gift of time with which the possibility of the eternity of ever renewed 

and wholly otherwise inceptions are given, transfi gures 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. 

Th e gift of ever new beginning yet to come is always a gift of 

eternity of future, a gift of remaining and redemption. Th e 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. Th is 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. Th erefore 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. Th ere alone, 

melancholic time thickened with the unredeemed past, sees the light 

coming from wholly other destination and is endowed with eternity. 

Th is wholly otherwise destination cannot be subordinated to any ideology 

of fi nalism in the form of teleology or eschatology. Th is 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. Th e Moment is the 

incalculable advent of the future, of transcendence bursting into that 

seizes the mortal, historical existence. Th en ‘all that is solid melts 

into air’ (Marx & Engels 2002, p. 70) . Th e Moment is the moment 

of fear and trembling, when mortality claims upon our solidifi ed 

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. ‘Th us understood’, 

writes Kierkegaard, ‘the moment is not properly an atom of time, 

but an atom of eternity. It is the fi rst refl ection of eternity in time, 

its fi rst 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. Th e future from wholly otherwise destination 

bursts forth, and bursts into the concentrated thickness of presence,


and tears apart any closure of immanent self-presence. Th e 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. Th e 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. Th is becomes possible 

because interruption has opened it, prepared it to the coming of 

the otherwise, and to the arriving of transcendence in astonishment 

that transfi gures 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. 

Th e 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. Th e 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. Th is 

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. Th ere 

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. Th is beginning of time 

is caesural. Th e possibility of this beginning of time is inseparable 

from the anguish of disjunction and suff erings 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 fi nite 

beings partake of the eternity of time, and shares in the divine excess. 

Th e future arrives, eternity bursts into, and there comes redemption 

in lightning fl ashes. Th is 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 

clarifi cation 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 petrifi es 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 aff airs 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. Th e seeing that sees the future in matter, the infi nity in the 

fi nite 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 infi nite appearing in the fi nite as a kind of excess, as 

a kind of non-economic off ering or as a sublime gift, immeasurable 

in itself precisely because it gives the measure its ‘measure-ness’. 

Th e 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. Th e purer the image is, the 

healthier the whole is. Th is incomprehensible but not imperceptible 

being, always ready to overfl ow 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) . Th e world for such an ecstatic, poetic 

look is not yet a fi nished world, for the promise of its coming is not 

yet over, the world has not yet completely become. Th e world appears 

rather as pure donation wherein the enigma of manifestation is not 

yet saturated. Th is 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 fi nished, cognized, grasped 

at any given present instant. Th e 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 infi nity, its own future. 

Th is 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. 

Th is madness is not annihilation of reason but what sustains and 

nourishes reason. Th is 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. Th e 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. Th erefore a kind of vertigo or even 

madness adheres to the poet thinker’s very existence, seizing his soul 

to its innermost depth that fi rst 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. Th e 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 

fi nite thinking, a fi nite thinking where fi nitude and thinking are not


in accidental relationship, but rather a thinking that is, essentially, 

inextricably fi nite. Th inking that is not touched by a certain solicitation 

to madness, to its radical exteriority and to the unthinkable is 

satisfi ed 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. Th ey 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 fi xed 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. Th ese would be the uncreative 

people incapable of procreation, the ones that call themselves sober 

spirits. Th ese 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) 

Th e 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. Th erefore 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 overfl ows 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. 

Th e invisible poesy of the future which each here and now bears in 

its dream has a diff erent 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. 

Th is logic of origin has a diff erent 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. Th erefore a fi nite thinking is a contemplation 

of the timeless promise, not in the sense of the endlessness of time 

that is the infi nite 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 beatifi c joy is not a dialectical 

time of history, nor the mythic time of the a-historical, nor is it selfpositing 

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 affi rmation 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 

fi nite. Its apparition is sudden advent, like a lightning fl ash, 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 fi nite that we are. Such an eternity can 

only be a fi nite 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. 

Th e apparition of fi nitude that strikes the mortals with a silence, and 

escapes the categories of the logical thinker, is the interest of existence, 

according to Constantine Constantius. Th e fi nitude 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 suff er fi nitude, for 

what at stake in suff ering 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 suff ering, 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 suff ering 

which is the interest of existence, in the sense that Franz Rosenzweig 

speaks of philosophy that philosophy does not know mortality. Th e 

logical movement is a false movement; it does not begin with the 

actual, real beginning—that is, with suff erings of mortality, with 

the transcendence of fi nitude, with the agony of a beginning. Th e 

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. Th is radical fi nitude of thinking 

renders thinking short of any totalization and completion, for this 

fi nitude does not exhaustively acquire the visible forms that constitute 

totality. It thereby, ineluctably, falls short of its absolute and systemic 

completion. Suff ering does not have system; only logic can have 

systemic completion. Th e 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. Th is eff ort of thinking that thinking


invests its energy in order to begin and to prosper makes all beginning 

painful, even despairing. Th is logic of origin is of a diff erent origin 

than the beginning of the logical process that simply, harmlessly and 

without agony, begins with the immediate which smoothly passes 

into the mediation. Th is 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, fi nitely and 

mortally, this fi nitude and mortality must not be the result of a logical 

process. Th e 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 suff ering that existence makes the fi rst, the beginning 

movement of its coming into presence, and it’s disappearance in death. 

Th erefore, in so far as suff ering is concerned, logic founders as soon 

as suff ering manifests itself in the existent. Th e apparition of suff ering 

in existence is not the moment of negativity that is again uplifted 

(Aufheben) in the universality of reconciliation. What manifests as 

suff ering in existence is the element that escapes the reconciliatory 

logic of the speculative-dialectical tragedy. 

Th e suff ering 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: 

[Th is] sentence contains an allusion to the thesis that metaphysics is 

disinterested, as Kant affi rmed of aesthetics. As soon as the interest 

emerges, metaphysics steps to one side. For this reason the word 

interest is italicized. Th e 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 suff ering in existence. Th e manifestation of suff ering 

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. Th e speculative logic founders 

and steps outside of its vain arrogance when suff ering itself makes 

manifest, and when it manifests itself to be completely other than 

‘the agony of the concept’ 2 . Th e 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. Th e 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 

suff ering 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. Th erefore 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 suff ering 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. 

Th e 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 fi nite; it belongs to a fi nitude which 

it presupposes. Such a beginning is actual beginning, for coming 

into existence implies its fi nitude 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 nonconceptual 

beginning which cannot be included within any logical 

forms of presupposition-less totality. 

Th is 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 fi nitude, 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. Th e 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. Th is 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. 

Th e agony of fi nitude is the very interest of existence and not 

mere logical category. Th is trace of mortality, this eternal remnant 

of a beginning before beginning, this anguish and suff ering 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. Th e apparition of time timing 

itself cannot be thought within the phenomenological ontology of 

visible forms. Th is 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. Th is 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 fi rst time, and as such it is a 

beginning before beginning and future after the last future. We call 

them ‘eternal’ beginning and ‘eternal future’. 

Th erefore 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. Th ese 

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 overfl ows 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. Th ey rather move in a confi guration, or constellation of 

ecstasies, that in their sudden apparition as co-fi guring, announces, 

heralds the advent of the coming. Th e Moment is the fi gure (which is 

also a dis-fi guring) of this eternity when the eternity of past, presence, 

future come together, co-fi gures 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. Th e moment is not the fi gure called ‘instant’, therefore not 

a fi gure of time, but ‘an atom of eternity’, as Kierkegaard says of it: 

Th e moment is not properly an atom of time, but an atom of eternity. 

It is the fi rst refl ection of eternity in time, its fi rst attempt, as it were, 

at stopping time. (Kierkegaard 1980, p. 88) 

A fi nite thinking begins with a beginning that is always a fi nite 

opening, but that opens unto the infi nitude 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. 

Th erefore 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. Th e 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. Th e 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? Th erefore 

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. Th is 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. Th ere then precedes a coming in the opening that is always 

to come (in the infi nitive sense). Th is 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. Th e over or beyond being is not an autogenerative 

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. Th e 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. Th erefore thinking cannot represent this coming into 

existence, because a wholly otherwise, a heterogeneity of the ‘un-prethinkable’ 

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. Th e coming to 

presence is an event. Th e event of coming is welcomed, received in the 

opening that is disclosed, manifested in the eternity of the sudden 

fl ash 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. Th is 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. Th is 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 

fi nite presence. Th ere 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. Th is 

‘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 Th eatetus 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 fi nitude, 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-ofthe-coming 

that is stronger than the concept or language. It is rather 

the astonishment at the enigma of coming and existence arriving to 

presence. Th e-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. Th is event marks 

the wound of mortality, and bears an originary tremor that precedes 

either Being or its opposite, the negativity of Nothing. Th en 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. 

Th e event of coming is not grasped in the dialectical-historical 

memorial task, for it refuses the gathering unity of the innermost 

ground of memory. Th e event does not have the logical principle 

of identity as the ground of recollection. Th erefore the dialecticalhistorical 

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 off ering of time upon mortals play 

their originary polemos. Th is co-fi guration, in so far as it is indissociable 

from dis-fi guration at the momentary presentation of itself, like the 

lightning fl ash, it therefore refuses to form a system, or totality. Martin 

Heidegger attempts to think this originary confi guration—which is 

non-dialectical, diff erential play of oblivion and remembrance—as 

a polemos of unconcealment and concealment. Th is 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. Th ese epochal ruptures refuse to be incorporated into the 

logical-speculative principle of identity and therefore they do not 

belong to the universal history. Th e 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 fulfi llment.

§ Repetition 

Repetition and Recollection 

Th e 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 infi nitely passes 

through the visible, eternity infi nitely crosses through the fi nitude, 

and unapparent infi nitely 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 fi nite existence in its fl esh 

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, 

overfl owing 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 fi nite manner doesn’t mean to be enclosed and to be saturated 

in the fi nitude. 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. Th e 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 infi nite 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, infi nite in fi nitude, 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. Th is 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 fulfi llment 

demands the movement of repetition, which is to bring together, to 

bring into simul which the mortals in the historical unfulfi lled 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 

confi guration, 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. 

Th erefore there is no encounter within dialectical-historical 

immanent time. It fl ows itself away and arrives as self-same 

diff erentiation without redemptive fulfi llment, but never as 

discontinuous, disjunctive simultaneity in confi guration. Repetition 

is only possible in confi guration, in a non-systematic presentation of 

the event of arrival where there takes place radical encounter with 

the wholly otherwise. 

Moment 

A fi nite 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. Th e 

beginning is not the inert, lifeless beginning, lying as never moving 

substance, but—since it is fi nite—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. Th erefore, 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 fi nite. As fi nite, the beginning 

disrupts itself, ecstatically suspends itself, and discontinues itself. As 

such it presents itself only by perishing itself in this presentation. It


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 fi nite beginning 

that is at once infi nite so that mourning and joy present themselves 

in simultaneous poetic tone. Repetition demands this eternity of the 

beginning, which is a fi nite infi nity, 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. Th e 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 

fi nite 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. 

Th erefore 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-fi gures 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. Th e ecstatic co-fi guration of past, 

presence and future—without underlying any speculative-logical


principle of unity—is a monstrous, disjunctive confi guration, or 

assemblage of temporality as fi nite 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. Th is in-advance 

is that we shall call ‘inception’. 

Th e 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. Th erefore repetition is 

always an affi rmation 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. Th is 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. Th is 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 fi rst 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. Th is saying does not describe or explain, 

does not proclaim or teach. Th is 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). 

Th e repetition of the beginning is not mere recapturing it in relation 

to the other beginning. Th e dialogue which repetition brings is not the 

dialogue of the self-same entities. It is rather that the other beginning


even demands a ‘relentless turning away’ from the fi rst 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. 

Th inking in the crossing brings into dialogue what has fi rst 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 fi rst beginning remains 

decisively the fi rst—and yet is overcome as beginning. For this 

thinking, reverence for the fi rst 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. Th is eternal remnant of future is diff erent 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 eff orts or human 

mastery alone. Th is radical fi nitude does not arrive in the categorical 

language of metaphysics, but that must already attune the thinkingsaying 

that welcomes it in being seized by the ‘distress of the 

abandonment of being’ (Heidegger 1999a). 

Th e pure event of the future in its radical incalculability is also 

announced in Nietzsche’s idea of the Eternal Return of the Same. 

Th e 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 affi rmation of the eternity of 

the future, into the affi rmation 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. Th erefore 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 transfi gures the past into 

future and brings redemptive fulfi llment. Th e way down to the abyss is 

the same as the way to the summit. Th is 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 affi rmation 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 fi nd 

some lame excuse (that we have forgotten something, for example) 

for creeping out of life again’ (Kierkegaard 2001, p. 116). Th e 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


repeats eternity in presence. Th is possibility of eternity in each fi nite 

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. 

Th e 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. Th is fullness of eternity is the messianic intensity 

of the ‘here and now’ that presents itself like what Hölderlin calls 

‘heavenly fi re’. Th is heavenly violence (which is without violence) 

of the divine fi re bursts open, tears open any immanence of the 

universal order, and delivers it to its own mortality and disappearing. 

Th e person who wills repetition is not the adult who sings at the 

dusk, neither is he the boy who ‘chases butterfl ies 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 suff ering, 

which is nothing but the suff ering of fi nitude that does not have 

Hegelian consolation of the concept. Th erefore 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 superfi cial plans 

of hope or he would have retracted everything and preserved in 

recollection. Th is he did not do. Th erefore 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. Th is 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. Th is 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. 

Th erefore 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. Th e singular existence that wills repetition and 

one that is not satisfi ed 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 affi rms and wherein singularity is affi rmed. Th is 

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 infi nitude and 

fi nitude 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


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 affi rm 

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. Th e 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. 

Th erefore 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 fl ash of poetic 

Saying, or in the thinking-saying of the philosopher who shelter the 

truth of being from oblivion. Th is remembrance has to do with the 

other history that Heidegger calls Geschichte which he distinguished 

from the memorial of Historische. 

Th e inception, however, can only be experienced as an inception 

when we ourselves think inceptively and essentially. Th is 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. Th is beginning has a diff erent 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. Th ey come to us’ 

(Heidegger 2001, p. 6).

§ Language and Death 

Mortals are they who can experience death as death. Animals cannot 

do so. But animals cannot speak either. Th e essential relation between 

death and language fl ashes 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. Th at 

this secret of philosophy is revealed to us only at the accomplishment 

of the philosophical discourse is signifi cant, 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. 

Th is 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. Th e 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-socialcultural 

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 powerness 

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 fi rst 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). 

Th e 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

Language and Death • 121 

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. Th at man has something like history, and 

something like politics has its metaphysical condition in this power of 

death or negation. Th is 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’. Th is ‘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. Th e metaphysical essence of world-history 

where ‘man’ for the fi rst 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. Th e 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 fi rst 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? Th e 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 nonpower, 

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. Th erefore 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. Th is 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. Th ey 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? Th is 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 

. Th is messianic arrival strikes the mortals with lightning fl ash, 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 fi nitude 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 fl ash. 

Th is 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. Th is 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. Th is 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. Th e originary exception is the open where there takes 

place encounter with the wholly other, and where Love utters the 

redemptive, creative Word. 

Th is Word, which is the word of Love, is already always given to 

him as an immemorial promise or gift. Th is gift of the Word must 

fi rst 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. Th erefore 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. Th is 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. 

Th is happiness is in being before God, and in being refl ected 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. Th e 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. Th e 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. Th e decision of love is not the decision between 

good and evil. It is rather the language that fi rst opens the world, 

reveals the world, as a kind of facticity, ‘that there is’. ‘Th at 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 affi rmed (this Yes saying), this 

language is a non-positing affi rmation, before assertion and before 

negation: that there is love. Th at 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 affi rmation 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. Th e 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 affi rmation 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. 

Th at Schelling affi rms 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 Infi nite 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. Th is 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 affi rmation 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. Th e language of promise that 

is given in love is the language that overfl ows itself beyond what is 

already said. It appears as if in this overfl owing of caress, time itself 

can no longer be individuated into particularized, atomic instants 

that are homogeneous and successive. Time here fl ows. But it is not 

an incessant un-diff erential murmuring or interminable humming 

of waves which Bergson calls ‘duration’. Th e 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 intensifi ed, and yet is extended to the immemorial past 

and incalculable future, beyond the immanence of self-presence. 

Th is is the moment of revelation when time spaces open and space 

temporalizes itself: a trans-immanent, a trans-fi nite movement where 

language becomes caress, and utters unto the space of revelation the 

redemptive word that is to arrive. 

Th e creative word of beginning, at the opening of the world 

and creation is like the bellowing Sea, pregnant with infi nity that 

surges forth, bursts forth, sallies itself beyond. Th e originary promise 

of the word that structurally opens each discourse or conversation 

is not ‘pure being passing into nothing’ without language, but the 

exuberant unfulfi lling fulfi lment, the movement of longing-loving


towards the Other, the caress that in its plenitude leaves to itself a 

‘not yet’. Th e 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. Th is 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. Th erefore 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. 

Th is 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. Th is exception 

arrives from beyond the gaze of Law, and outside positing-preserving 

violence; it advents from a Yes saying, from an affi rmation of a 

facticity that can equal to the facticity of death. Th at is why it is said 

that ‘love is equal to death’. 

As an immemorial promise love precedes and follows the language 

of judgement. Th is occurring of loving attunes us in our fundamental 

attunements to truth and time that aff ects 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 aff ection 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 fulfi lment which is not that of the 

unity of judgement, but the caesural constellation, like the music 

of the spheres. Th e constellation-music of love where love seeks its 

messianic fulfi lment, in so far language appears here pure movement 

of presentation (Darstellung) off ers meaning itself in its character of 

pure off ering. Th ere 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 beatifi c fulfi lment which Adam felt when he 

named the animals, and they bowed in front of him out of gratitude 

of being named. Th e 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 refl ection 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. Th is 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. Th is 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. Th is redemption arrives only when 

man prepares himself to abandon evil, to abandon this particular will’s 

all consuming lust for mastery of its own fi nitude and conditionedness, 

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 fi nitude 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 fl ash 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 fi nitude, 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 signifi cation 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-yetpredicated 

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. Th e 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 fi nite 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 language, 

which ties him to his mortality. In language, man is exposed 

to the temporality of the advent. Th is 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 fi nitude 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 logics. 

Th erefore a philosophical thinking of existence, or an existence-


thinking of fi nitude, 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 

Th e Star of Redemption begins. Th e 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 itself 

into predicative categories—this is a thinking without language. 

Th is is also the thinking without confrontation with the temporality 

of the coming time, for it forgets the originary gift of language intimated 

with fi nitude and time. Th erefore it knows neither the mortal 

fear nor the claim of redemption. Th e lightning fl ash 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 predication 

of what has only been, as the end result of a logical process. Event 

leaping into the coming is fl ashed 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? 

Th e 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 death 1 , 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 fl ash of language, for language alone reveals man his death, 

to a time to come. Th is 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 fi nitude 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 nonpredicative 

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 fl ash 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. Th is 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. 

Th e 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. Th e coming comes and presencing 

presences: this is the existential facticity of the event, that each time 

repeating itself is transfi gured 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. Th e facticity of the 

coming belongs to the question of existence and not to predication. Th e 

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 confi guration 

or constellation of thoughts—seized in the lightning fl ash 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 diff erence of 

‘perdurance’ (Heidegger 1969) wherein transcendence bursts into, 

and tears open existent to the arrival.

§ Confi guration 

What we are attempting to think with the notion of confi guration, 

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. Th e confi guration 

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. Th e generalized economy of the categories miss the event- 

the event of coming—it is because it subordinates the thought of 

confi guration to the system and to totality, the lightning fl ash 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, fi nitude 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. 

*

Caesura 

Confi guration • 133 

Confi guration is a co-fi guration, a kind of caesural whole without 

totality, a co-fi guring communication where each is hold apart and is 

hold towards each other. Th eir 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. 

Confi guration is the (dis)fi gure of bursting out of totality represented by 

the econo-geometric fi gure of the circle that re-appropriates in its selfsame 

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. Th is 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. Th is is how communication takes place 

in a confi guration: communication in this sense is a confi guration at 

each moment temporal and fi nite. Confi guration itself is a fi gure of 

communication as con-fi guring without return to pre-conceived 

plane. Th is notion of confi guration 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. 

Th e notion of confi guration 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 confi guration, but without repetition confi guration 

is reduced to totality or system. Confi guration is co-fi guration 

made possible by repetition multiple and singular, where its caesura


enables fi guration 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-fi guration, perhaps it is also possible to think a 

repetition of confi guration. Th rough 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. 

Th is is, then, the relation between the advent of the event and 

language. Th ey occur as confi guration, 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. Th at the coming comes in the open: this is to be grasped in the 

thought of caesura. 

Th e Star of Redemption 

Th e thought of confi guration 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 confi guration or constellation that 

Franz Rosenzweig’s Th e Star of Redemption begins. Th is 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. Th e 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. Th e 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 nonidentity, 

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 diff erential multiplicity, singular in relation to each 

other, which is a constellation. 

Th erefore 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. Th e 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 

confi guration is not mere conglomeration or aggregate unity of 

‘given’ fi gures, and the confi gurational composition of the elements 

does not take place according to mathematical rules. Th ey are the real 

happening whose eventiveness cannot be reduced to the geometrical 

or mathematical fi guration. Rosenzweig writes, 

For confi guration is diff erentiated from fi gure by the fact that certainly 

the confi guration could be composed of mathematical fi gures. 

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’. Th ey 

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. 

Th e messianic movement of constellation is therefore a noncategorical, 

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’. 

Th e Star of Redemption begins with the deconstruction of the 

philosophy’s claim of its pre-supposition-less beginning, and its 

denial of death. Th at philosophy has to be thinkable, and that this 

thinkability has to have its ground in the unity of Logos—which 

defi nes 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. Th at 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 fi nite, 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 diff erential logic of origin


(or a logic of the diff erential). 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 

diff erential and the infi nitesimal. 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 diff erential, 

a defi nite nothing in each case related to the element it was seeking. 

Th e diff erential 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 ‘nonthing’, 

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 fi rst 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). 

Th e 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 diff erential, 

which is a simultaneously discontinuous, diff erential coming into 

presence, on the one hand as a powerful negation of the nothing and 

on the hand, as infi nitesimal, a calm affi rmation ‘of that which is 

not nothing’ (Ibid., p. 28). Th is 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. 

Th is diff erential 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 diff erential, a holdingtogether-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. Th e 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 Th e 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 confi guration is not concerned 

with the cognitive possession of phenomena, but their redemption. Th is 

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. Th is melancholy 

is not that blissful melancholy of the philosophical contemplation 

that bears the beatitude and dignity of the creative naming, but a 

melancholy that suff ers 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. Th is 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. Th is 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, confi guration is rather 

like a mosaic where singularity of Idea has a relative independence, 

whose relation is dependent less upon a common logical selfgrounding 

foundation than as ‘the harmony of the stars’. Benjamin 

says in his Th e 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... Th e harmonious relationship between such essences is 

what constitutes truth. (Benjamin 1998, p. 38) 

As it is with Rosenzweig, confi guration does not here form a system, 

for it is not a coherence of concepts at the cognitive disposal unifi ed 

by a logical self-foundational principle of identity. A confi guration 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 confi guration 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 confi guration 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. 

Th is 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 fl ash 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 confi guration there arrives, in a discontinuous 

seizure, in sudden lightning fl ash, 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. Th is intermittent, discontinuous 

seizure of experiences, thought as ‘confi guration’ here, we also call 

‘caesural thinking’ in order to emphasize the interval, intermittent 

character of the confi guration. Benjamin calls such a constellation 

or confi guration as ‘discontinuous fi nitude’ (Benjamin 1998, p. 38). 

Th e advent of the arrival can only be told in a pre-predicative 

confi guration, for confi guration 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. 

Th e 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). Th is 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 infi nitive 

of the verbal resonance, as the event of Being, as Being’s coming into 

presence. Th erefore 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 Th ey’. 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. 

Th is thinking of the event of Being—which is also the thinking 

of diff erence as diff erence (of what Heidegger calls ‘ontological 

diff erence’)—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. 

Th is 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). Th erefore constellation as En-framing which 

is the danger and the constellation as saving power are not simply 

opposites; they are of the diff erential modes of the coming into presence 

as Being’s oblivion and as unconcealment of Being. Th is diff erential 

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. 

Confi guration or constellation in Heidegger’s later thinking is 

man’s transformative relation to Being where the confi guration is 

thought not constituting a system but as belonging-together of man


and Being, open to the advent of the other beginning. Th e event 

itself occurs as confi guration or constellation, as a constellation of 

man’s relation of ‘belonging-together’ to Being, and not of belongingtogether 

(as it is reductively understood in the onto-theological 

constitution of metaphysics). Th e 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 confi guration, or constellation of man and Being in the world 

of technological calculability, and therefore it is only a prelude to 

the far more originary confi guration 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. Th is 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) 

Th e 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: Th e ‘between’ which has the character of a mid-point that is 

open and sheltering between the arrival and fl ight 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). 

Th inking as constellation, or confi guration 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. Th e 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. Th e 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. Th is 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: 

Th e awakening of this distress is the fi rst displacing of man into that 

between where chaos drives forth at the same time as god remains in 

fl ight. Th is ‘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 being 

itself—be-ing that holds sway as nothing other than enowning. 

(Heidegger 1999a, p. 19) 

Th e 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. Th is turning is not appropriation of Being nor is it 

the reductive totalization of Being through technological mastery at 

man’s disposal. Th e 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 

fl ash of Being arrives, to the claim of the disclosing truth of Being. 

Th is truth claims man rather than man claiming the lighting fl ash 

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. 

Th e event of appropriation is diff erential 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. Th e 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. Th is 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 Enframing, 

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 fl ash outside 

man’s calculation and projection. Th e En-framing and the saving 

power are like the two stars in a constellation whose paths cross each 

other which belong, as diff erential 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. Th e 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, 

Th e 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. 

Th e 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) 

Confi guration is this diff erential 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. Th is 

fore-shining is to be understood in the constellation of a temporality 

of an immemorial past (be-fore) and its arriving (in-advance). 

Confi guration enables the coming to be intimated as fore-shining, 

making visible of the distant light, for it is already permeated by the 

fl ash of lightning, by the revelation of the beginning. Confi guration is 

not the fl ight of Minerva’s owl when the historical labour of the world 

is fi nished, but that which enables the coming to be said in poetic 

Saying, and in artistic creation, in the philosophical contemplation 

as confi guration of ideas. 

Confi guration is the diff erentiating perdurance between the 

overwhelming and arrival. Or rather, should we say, the diff erentiating 

perdurance, as happening of the event itself occurs as constellation, 

or confi guration where thinking undergoes transformation unto the 

beginning, unto that originary abandonment. In the confi guration 

therefore there is always a repetition of beginning. Th e repetitions 

of the beginning are hold together as it were in a constellation, cofi 

guration, 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 confi guration as ‘being apart and the being 

towards each other’ (Heidegger 1969, p. 65). Confi guration 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 fl ash of truth. Confi guration 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-fi guring fi gure 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 

Th e 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. Th e 

mortals then experience this suddenness of the lightning fl ash in a 

‘glance’ of the moment, in a sudden clearing and opening where 

language falls silent, because of its fulfi llment where saying and said 

comes together to welcome the phenomenon of the unapparent. Th e 

stillness of the lightning fl ash ‘stills Being into the coming to presence 

of world’ (Heidegger 1977, p. 49). Heidegger here plays with the 

words: blitzen (to fl ash), blicken (to glance), Einblick (in-sight), and 

Augenblick (moment, suddenness). Heidegger writes, 

Th e 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. Th is sudden self-lighting is the lightning fl ash. 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


fl ashes, the essence of Being clears and lights itself up. Th en the truth 

of the essence, the coming to presence, of Being turns and enters in. 

(Ibid., p. 44). 

Th is disclosing coming to presence of Being (Ereignis), this event of 

Being arrives in a sudden, momentary (Augenblick) lightning fl ash 

(Blitzen). In this fl ashing glance (Blicken) the truth of coming into 

presence of Being enters (Einblick) into the new constellation of the 

relation between man and Being. Th e lightning fl ash 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 Th e End of Philosophy and the Task of Th inking 

Heidegger attempts to translate Aletheia into Lichtung. Th is 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. Th e 

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 confi guration 

thinking is not a confi guration 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: ‘Th e 

opening’, says Heidegger, ‘grants fi rst of all the possibility of the path 

to presence, and grants the possible presencing of that presence itself’ 

(Heidegger 1978, p. 387). Heidegger says, 

Th e beam of light does not fi rst 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) 

Th e 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. Th e 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 fl ash 

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 fi nitude—as an 

eternity. Th ere in that lightning fl ash 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 indiff erent, Universal, 

homogenous empty Now, but as a constellation of ecstasies coming 

together without totality, without system. Th e 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 refl ects 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 diff erential 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 transfi gures 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. Th is 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 Th e Ages of the World writes of this event, 

In the nocturnal vision where the Lord passed by the prophet, a 

mighty storm fi rst came which rent the mountains and shattered the 

rocks. After this came an earthquake, and then fi nally a fi re. 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 

fi rst in the revelation of the eternal so that the eternal itself can fi rst 

appear as the Eternal Itself in the soft wafting of Love. (Schelling 

2000, p. 83) 

CONSTELLATION OF TEMPORALITIES 

Confi guration, 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. Confi guration 

is con-fi guring 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 confi guration, or


constellation, or as caesural perduring. Hence confi guration 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 

confi guration of belonging-together, but as En-framing of belongingtogether 

at the accomplishment or end of metaphysics in its ontotheo-logical 

constitution (Heidegger 1969). 

In the Hegelian system temporalities are not seen as confi guration 

of ecstatic singularities, but mere particulars that are mastered and 

elevated, uplifted unto the Universal. As mere particulars, instances 

are only the attenuated modifi cation of the Same universal. Th e 

System, or Totality has place neither for the multiple, nor for the 

singulars, since the notion of diff erence is grasped here on the basis 

of the generative principle of variation—that means, the side by sideness 

of indiff erent particulars—where ‘each’ (of ecstatic temporalities) 

is subordinated to ‘every’ (of a monotonous homogeneity), ecstatic 

diff erentiation 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. 

Th is 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. Th e event arrives in 

the sudden fl ash 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.


Th e sudden fl ash 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 fl ash that appears as momentary illumination must not 

be gathered in the re-collected totality of the Universal One. Th e 

moment—and not the instant—is this stepping out of the totality, 

in ecstasy and astonishment, but not in an indiff erent monotony 

and the banality of the same recollected instants in succession. Th e 

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. 

Th e 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 

fi xed 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 confi guration, 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 confi guration. 

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 confi guration 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-fi gures that are irreducible to 

each other as singular multiple. As such, confi guration thinking does 

not have sublation (Aufhebung) as the negative speculative principle 

of unity. As confi guration, 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 confi guration and not in the system. In this sense future


alone is eternal, for each ecstatic temporality is stepping towards the 

incalculable, infi nite coming, towards transcendence; or, should we 

say, each is its transcendence, each affi rming 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. Th is 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? 

Th at 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 confi guration 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 confi guration 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 fi rst 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 fl ash, as the ‘time


times simultaneously’, belonging-together, as confi gured harmony. 

Th at will be the redemption of language itself that is renewed in 

what Benjamin calls ‘the act of Naming’. Th e 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 fi nite 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. Th e 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 confi guration, 

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. Th erefore 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. Th e unapparent phenomenon of 

the extreme future is not to be understood as particular instant of 

now that is coming to pass. Th at there is a past, and presence only in 

so far as each is to come that fi rst of all opens to each advent of this or 

that coming. Elsewhere I wrote, 

…this future is not the future of the specifi c 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. Th is aheadness, this forward dimension, this opening to the


coming, is the originary of fi nite 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’. Th is 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) 

Th is radical futurity, this extremity of time cannot be included within 

the immanent system of visible forms. Th e 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 fulfi llment 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 confi guration by itself is a venturing beyond into 

the open that inaugurates a new beginning to come that ‘remaining 

ever, redeems death’ (Ibid.). In the confi guration of each ecstaticsingular 

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 confi guration, ablaze by the fl ash of lightning and 

hold open in the opening, a confi guration where singular multiplicity


of each ecstatic temporalities are hold together in the open, in the 

freeing, in the clearing of the open. Th e holding together, in or 

as confi guration is essentially a fi nite relation, which we shall call 

henceforth a relation of fi nitude. Confi guration thinking therefore 

replaces generation with relation, totality with a new notion of a 

fi nite whole. 

Transfinitude 

As it is shown above, confi guration thinking is not an enclosed 

infi nitude within the immanence of its self-consuming predicates, 

but a fi nitude that bears the wound of the infi nite, that is exposed 

to the infi nite that aff ects it from a destination wholly immemorial 

past and wholly incalculable future. What is at stake in thinking the 

coming time as confi guration is this infi nite fi nitude of the coming 

time which is always to remain? We shall also call this ‘infi nite fi nitude 

of the coming’ as transfi nite. Th e transfi nitude of the coming time: the 

infi nite-fi nitude of that which is to come and which is to remain to 

come. What not here to be missed is the infi nitive 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 confi guration of thinkers here. 

Th rough 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 confi guration of repeated seizure of thoughts, 

and in a confi guration of questions. Th e intermittent, marked by 

interval and discontinuity, coming back again repetitively, but always 

singularly and diff erently 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 refl ection is not alien to 

the phosphorous poetic seizure in lightning fl ash.


Th inking that knows not, is never touched by the lightning 

fl ash 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 indiff erence, an 

infi nite 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, precalculable, 

mechanical manner, an auto-engendering and autoproducing 

logical generation of the Same. Th e creative thinking, 

on the other hand, must not shy away from the contingencies of a 

fi nite 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. Th erefore 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. Th inking 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.


Th inking 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 fi nitude of existence seriously: later is thinking that both 

Rosenzweig and Schelling pursue. Th ere 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. Th is 

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 transfi gured 

his sadness unto his creation out of his freedom. Creation transfi gures 

and thereby redeems our melancholic existence. Man partakes this 

task of transfi guration with the divine, for he too shares with God 

an essential freedom whose ground, however, is unfathomable. Man 

partakes of the divine task of transfi guration—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 selfabnegation 

of his own fi nitude. Th ere lies the mortal’s capacity for 

evil. Th erefore 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. Th is 

question is inextricably bound up with the question of his mortality 

and his fi nitude. As a mortal being, he asks what he can do out of his 

creative freedom. But what he can do—because he is mortal, fi nite 

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 nonpower 

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

§ Th e Language of the Mortals 

Th is 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. Th e attempt is made here to think language in a 

more originary manner, as non-negative fi nitude that affi rms what is 

outside dialectical-speculative closure, what is to come. What arrives, 

arrives in its lightning fl ash. Language is an originary exposure to the 

event of language in its lightning fl ash. Th is essay reads Heidegger, 

Schelling and Walter Benjamin to think language in its non-negative 

fi nitude, 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 infi nitude of its verbal resonance: ‘to come’. 

THE PRESUPPOSITION 

* 

Th ere 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. Th e way opens itself to time that is to arrive. Th e way is not 

‘way’ if it is to end with death, or if it makes death its end. Th e 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. Th at 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. 

Th e 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 fi rst of all, one who is fi nite and mortal, 

is open thereby what the way opens towards, that is—to the coming 

time, to the affi rmation 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. Th inking 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 

fi ng an vor Jahrhunderten in der geistig-politishen Geschichte 

des Abenlandes. Der Weltkrieg begann Vorpostengefechten. Der

Th e 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 

Ende 1 (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). 

Th is ‘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 fi nitude, which already in advance 

grants the mortals the promise of language? Th e task of thinking 

that seeks to hearken, listen to this promise of language begins with 

the question of fi nitude and mortality, which is to be understood 

here in its non-negative fi nitude. Th e pain of this fi nitude that adheres 

to language is not the pain of the labour of the negative. We are here 

trying to think of a fi nitude 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 . Th e 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. Th e 

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 fi rst 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. Th erefore 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. Th e existence whose existentiality 

is this ‘toward-ness’, this ahead-ness (understood in the infi nitude 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 

fi rst 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 beingtowards-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 enablingclearing, 

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. 

Th e 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. Th e 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 fi guration. Th e intensity of the moment is this dis-fi guring 

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 says 3 , 

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 intensifi es itself more being insists in itself, like an 

infi nite 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. Th is 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. Th e event of existence begins, because of its 

inextricable fi nitude and mortality, as indebted, as—what Schelling 

(1936) call—‘loan’. Th is infi nite loan is the presupposition of an 

‘already there’, ‘the-there’ as facticity of existence, an immemorial, 

infi nite past. Th is 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. Th is 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 fl ash. 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. 

Th e structural opening of each discourse—in so far as each 

discourse is fi nite inextricably—begins as gratitude, as thankfulness 

for its coming into existence, for the gift of its existence which is never 

paid off . Th e infi nitude of this gratitude in so far as this gratitude is 

never leveled off with the fi nitude of this existence, in so far as more 

the infi nitude increases more fi nitude 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 fi nitude, its own limit and its own mortality that 

in a manner of un-apparition, gives to language its open-ness to its


own arrival. Th e event of language whose existentiality is this beingtowards-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 affi rms itself. Language in this eventive character 

is, paradoxically, an infi nite impoverishment and infi nite plenitude at 

once that forever draws it out of its limit and exposes it to the pure 

advent of the unapparent. Th e movement of language is this moving 

towards its own essence, its fulfi llment as language, its happiness 

and its plenitude that is also its ruination. Th is 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). 

Th e event of thinking that begins with language, therefore, begins 

with presupposition, which is this radical fi nitude, 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 Th e 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. Th is claim—that it is presuppositionless—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. Th is 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. Th erefore 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. Th at 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. Th e 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 fi nitude, 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. Th e 

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. Th e 

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 fl ash, 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 disposal 4 . Th is 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 nonconditional 

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. Th is 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. Th is 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 suff ers here by being reduced to inscription, to 

that draft at the cognitive disposal, where death, instead of being 

that originary fi nitude 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. Th erefore 

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. Th e 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 infi nite future at the heart of fi nitude so that the address to the 

others appears as infi nite transcendence in relation to the one who 

confronts death as death. 

Th is 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. Th is 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 

Th erefore 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. Th is ‘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-fi guring, momentary advent, whose singularity of occurrence 

suspends the universal order of generality. Kierkegaard does not 

abandon language as insuffi cient 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 insuffi ciency 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 fi guration 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. Th is language is not readable and decipherable in 

the universal Book, or in the system of the ethical without remainder. 

Th is remainder is what Kierkegaard calls secret. 

If the indirect communication is marked by ‘death’s decision’, it 

is because its incommensurable diff erential places, fi rst 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. 

Th is 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. Th is darkness 

of light that suddenly makes its appearance is not the fusion unto 

transcendence but a diff erentiating transcendence, a holding-togetheras-holding-apart. 

Th erefore 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. Th erefore 

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-fi guration, 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 fl esh’, 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 affi rms 

what is outside the communicable entities of the given world. 

What, then, indirect communication affi rms is the event of


communication, that moment of eruption of pure communication, 

on the basis of which alone the singular individual, being fi rst placed 

outside of all given modes of communication—that means being 

abandoned in the open—communicates with the transcendent 

arrival. Th at means, the mortal existent communicates and makes 

communication the essential of his existence by fi rst of all being 

placed outside all communication, fi rst of all being deprived or 

being excess of all communication. He names—for man is someone 

who is essentially name-giver—by fi rst of all being placed outside 

the name, fi rst 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. 

Th is essential solitude of language renders language irreducible to 

any cognitive function of a categorial-logical thinking. Th is noncommunication 

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. Th e 

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 affi rm the arrival of the wholly 

otherwise, must step outside communication in ethical terms. 

Th erefore Abraham keeps silent. He does not speak in ethical terms, 

for he has to off er, what is commanded him to off er, is the gift of 

death. Th e 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 signifi cation. 

If language itself is tied to an originary fi nitude, to its own ruination, 

it is in so far as this originary fi nitude 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 off ering’. 

Th is demands that the question of pain is needed to be renewed 

here. Th e completely heterogeneous order where the singularity of the 

mortal, with his irreducible suff ering and anguish in the face of death 

is not evaded in the name of the generality of the ethical signifi cation 

is the order where language which the singular mortal speaks must 

assume entirety diff erent modality than the modality of signifi cation. 

For Kierkegaard such an essential language, more originary than the 

language of signifi cation, 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 transfi xes us. 

In the language of prayer alone the suff ering 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 

Work and Pain 

Let us say, to begin with, and provisionally, naively, that it is possible 

to think of pain in two diff erent manners, entirely heterogeneous, 

irreducible of the one to the other. And we will see how this question 

of pain in its diff erential 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 fi rst 

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 fi rst 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 signifi cation 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 fi rst 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 fi rst step, out fi rst 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 fi rst of all, before 

all names, what must be the unnamable itself, from which it will 

then be confi rmed 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. 

Th is 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 signifi cation. 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 suff ers the pain for his own result—the result of his becoming—and 

his result redeems his suff erings. Who more than Hegel has provided the 

tragic drama of this suff ering of fi nitude 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 fi nitude, 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 infi nite 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 diff erence. 

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 fi nitude, out of non-appropriable origin and 

non-appropriable end. Instead language is the pain of bringing the 

origin into signifi cation that weights upon the laboring Subject; or, 

rather, pain here is the metaphysical manifestation of the Subject 

that undergoes suff ering 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 infl icts 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 Th e 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. 

Th e fundamental trait is ‘absolute negativity’ as the ‘infi nite 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 fi rst 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 eff ort’, 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 suff er 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. Th e question of the gift of language 

must be inseparable from the critique of violence. 

Th erefore 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. Th is 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 fi rst of opens time to come. Th is 

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 signifi cation, 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 fi nitude? 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. Th erefore 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 unenclosed 

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. Th is originary pain 

of language, before the pain of the concept, fi rst 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 fi nitude for us and giving us the cognition of death, itself is 

fi nite in an essential sense. Th is 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 

affi rmed and even when the being- with all of existence is experienced. 

Th is 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 fi nite 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 fi nite existence, because 

it belongs to the originary opening, or originary transcendence, the 

immemorial past that has lapsed without return, that fi rst 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 . Th ere 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 fi nitude 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 off ering which he never 

gains control over and never masters (Das 2007, pp.111-123). Th is 

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 infi nite 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. Th is is the sadness which adheres too all fi nite 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. 

Th ence the veil of sadness, which is spread over all nature, the deep 

unappeasable melancholy of all life. (Schelling 1936, p. 79) 

Th is originary melancholy inscribes itself in this gift that forever 

remains outside of his mastery and appropriation. Th erefore in this 

sense both sadness and joy belong in its own way to an originary 

melancholy 1 . 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 suff erings of unmasterable diff erence 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 fi rst 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 fi nds 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. Th is revelation 

precedes all logical categories, and is inaccessible to his cognition.


Th at 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. Th is means: he is placed at the limit, at the line that 

disjoins him from the others and disjoining, calls the others to his 

nearness. Th e line, as the undecidable diff erence, 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 fl eeing from this center, withdrawing 

from this central fi re (the fi re 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. Th is experiencing his death as death in this opening 

in a lightning fl ash, man also experiences eternity as eternity—the 

entirety of created existence—as that what is outside of him, precedes 

him and remains after him. Th is eternity is non-appropriable gift 

of experience which is fi rst of all be there in order for man to speak 

language. Th is 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. 

Th e melancholy of language is the originary transcendence, or 

originary opening of existence, fi nite and mortal, as that which exsists; 

which means, language in its essential melancholy, for the fi rst 

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. Th is constitutes the messianic 

promise of language, intimated with fi nitude, and holding towards 

transcendence, incalculable and infi nite 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. Th e ‘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 dialecticalhistorical 

immanence. It is this originary exposure of existence in a 

lightning fl ash to the opening—where history itself comes to presence— 

that makes the mortal existence and its historicity an un-saturated 

phenomenon, a hetero-aff ected 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 fi rst time, that means before the fi rst, the fi rst before any fi rst his 

existence as essentially fi nite and mortal. Th is 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 diff erent manners and with entirely diff erent 

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 fi nite and mortal. Th e human knows, whatever he knows 

of the world and his self-knowledge on the basis of a lightning


fl ash 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. Th at this is his fi nitude 

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, aff ects 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 unfi nished, incomplete, unaccomplished, and at the same 

existence-in-excess, forever unsaturated, welcoming and bearing the 

promise of its redemption in the coming time. Th is 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. Th e poetics 

of the origin traces itself as the un-fulfi llment of history, which thereby 

points towards a fulfi llment outside any dialectical-historical closure, in 

the messianic—what Ernst Bloch (1995) calls—‘not yet’. 

Th erefore 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 infi nite excess, or at the limit of the state of the aff airs of 

the world, language is the vanishing point of the indiscernible where 

language turns the prose of the world into the lament of music. Th ere 

language unsays itself in a lament, in the melancholy turned to music. 

Th e 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. 

Th e 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 unfi nished, unaccomplished not yet. What 

is this experience if not the experience of fi nitude? Th e ‘experience’ of 

fi nitude is the essential non-appropriation or non-conditional limit, 

the outside that ecstatically calls the power of the negative to the nonpower, 

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 off ering 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 

fl ash. 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 off ering of language of itself, already open in its 

poetics of the origin. Th is off ering is experienced by the mortals in 

that lightning fl ash 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 fi nitude that holds us open 

to history coming to presence. 

Th erefore 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. Th is 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. Th ere 

is no redemption if it is not already always given in the originary 

lightning fl ash of the opening, which is already always given as an 

off ering or as gift. Th is however does not mean that it is presently 

given. 

What is given in advance as the originary off ering of language may 

not be for that reason be presently given. Th e coming into presence 

rather than presently given is the eternal renewal of this off ering and 

endowing language itself with the gift of time, a time of future. Such 

gift or off ering of language must already be given in the already always 

of the originary opening. Th is 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 notyet-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 off ering of language itself by the incessant 

renewal of the promise in presence, that is experienced by the 

mortals as an originary experience of fi nitude, disclosed to him in 

the lightning fl ash 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. 

Th is off ering lies at the origin of history as ungrounded and unfounded 

poetic ground; or; this is to say that history begins with the off ering 

of language. Th e question of history in relation to language is to be 

connected with the question of origin and off ering that off ers 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. Th is transference that happens is itself nothing but the 

passage of time that defi nes 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. Th is hope is the messianic 

hope for the coming time. 2 

Th is is so because there is an essential element of hope in the off ering 

of language, already given in advance in an originary manner. Th e

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. Th e 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. Th e relation of parents 

to children or teachers to students is exemplary here. Th e 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. Th is gift passing onto the future alone enables the 

gift to be eternal, and keeps alive the promise of redemption given 

in the past. Th e 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 fi nitude 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? 

Th e 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’. Th is keeping alive


the originary promise of redemption is on the basis of an essential 

fi nitude, of an essential non-appropriation: as one who does not 

own one’s death, does not own thereby the gift. Th e 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. Th e 

task of receiving the gift is rather to eternalize it, through infi nite 

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 fi nitude itself an eternal task of the gift. Th e thankful 

task of the mortal who is endowed with the gift is to be eternally nonappropriated 

and non-possessed, to make this mortality itself a task. 

Th is is the meaning of saying that from language alone we 

experience death as death. Th is fi nitude 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, infi nity 

as infi nity. One who seeks the beginning must fi rst of all be placed 

outside totality, outside of all appropriation; in other words, he must 

take the great ‘step of death’. 

Schelling somewhere speaks, 




has come to the ground of himself and has known the whole depth 




compared to death. (Quoted in Heidegger 1985, pp. 6-7) 

We will call this experience of infi nite ‘transcendence’, which is the 

unground on the ground of which time is existential, which means

Pain • 191 

time that is coming to presence. Th at 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). Th is 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. Th e 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 fi nitude, exposed to mortality. Th erefore 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 fi nitude, 

in the pre-predicative lightning fl ash, in the poetic Saying, as the 

‘fundamental attunement’ of mournfulness. Th is 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. Th en melancholy 

will not be melancholic anymore. It will, then, be transfi gured 

into the redemptive joy when the eternity of time presents itself


as simultaneity of past, presence and future. Th is 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. Th e joy 

is the beatitude which the melancholy of language points towards 

as the fulfi llment 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 fulfi lls 

the originary off ering 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. Th e 

intimate, which is often diffi cult 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? Th e 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. Th is 

mourning adheres in the originary donation of the name, which the 

predicative-thetic concept apophantically cannot retrieve. Th erefore 

the originary donation of the name is never completely inscribed 

into the circulation of the predications. Th e 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 fl ash 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 off ering of language itself? Th e 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 off ering of language that attunes us with its indescribable 

melancholy. Th is originary off ering of language must, then, precede 

the speculative-positing nature of predicative concept. Th e worldhistorical 

destiny is opened up in that originary revelation; language 

is exposed to this ‘heavenly fi re’ that fi rst 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. Th is remembrance is to be distinguished from dialecticalhistorical 

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. Th e remembrance unimpaired by positing cognition is 

what we have been calling the event. 

Th e relationship between the event and origin, the event and fi nitude 

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. Th e 

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 transfi guring the past unto the future event to arrive. Th is 

remembrance is thereby intimated by the melancholy of language, by 

the originary non-appropriation beyond violence. Th is melancholy is 

redeemed when there wholly transfi guration of this past into future 

happens. Th e 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 fulfi llment 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). Th ere is a mourning which is blissful 

and even divine. Th e 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). Th is 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. 

Th ere 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 fi nite existence. 

Th e 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 

signifi cance at the service of cognitive disposal, when the immediacy 

of the communication is lost in the mediacy of the signifi cance, in 

the magic of judgement. Th ere arises the mythic violence of the law: 

Th ere 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 signifi cance 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 signifi cance, in the name of law and its force, in the 

mythic violence of pure positing. Th e magic of the prattle is the magic 

of evil, the magic of positing violence, which has to be diff erentiated 

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) 

Th e abandonment of the name, that abandonment of the off ering 

of language itself, the promise that is given with that off ering, 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. Th is violence is the 

innermost reason of the lament of language, distinguished from the 

blissful melancholy of the paradisiacal naming beyond violence. 

Th erefore a critique of violence assumes the form of a remembrance 

of that originary off ering of language, the originary promise of 

redemption, that opening beyond any positing act, the essential nonappropriation 

that placed into man’s hand fi rst 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 

Th e mournfulness intimates the one who remembers his originary 

fi nitude—that is his originary non-appropriation of the gift—and 

thereby renounces any appropriation of the gift. Th is 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. Th erefore 

the gift always is attuned to a certain tune of mournfulness. Th is 

tune and attunement of mournfulness is the task of fi nitude. 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. Th is gift is 

welcomed in the naming. Poetic saying is naming that welcomes the 

coming and receives this gift of coming. Th erefore poetic saying, like 

thinking, is thank-giving activity. In his series of lectures called What 

is Called Th inking? Heidegger shows the essential affi nity of thinking 

(Denken) with thanking (Danken): thinking is thanks-giving for 

what comes to be thought, for ‘we never come to thoughts/ Th ey 

come to us’ (Heidegger 2001, p. 6). What the gift of thought off ers is 

the unthought, of what is not presently given as thought but what is 

to come, the future of thinking. Th e 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. Th erefore each 

poetic Saying itself is renunciation, or rather to say with Heidegger 

‘renunciation is in itself a saying’ (1982, p. 150). 

Th e renunciation which is in itself a poetic saying is not therefore 

something negative but rather affi rmative, since it welcomes the 

coming to presence. To this affi rmation is owed, what Heidegger 

calls, ‘thanks’, thankfulness or gratitude for being able to affi rm 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 fi rst disappropriating 

us, opens us to the event of language, to the event of 

coming, to which we owe thanks. Th is 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. Th e deeper the sadness, the more slumbering the joy resting 

within it. Sadness and joy play into each other. Th e play itself which 

attunes the two by letting the remote be near and near be remote is 

pain. Th is 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. Th at gravity keeps mortals with all their 

wavering at rest in their being. Th e 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. Th e 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 

Th e 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 fl eet. All this does not fi rst 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 preeminent 

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 fi rst create all this. 

(Heidegger 1999,p. 152) 

Th is 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. Th is 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 off ers, 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 overnames, 

is the remembrance of the originary naming. Th is naming is 

redemptive, for it renders the off ering 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. Th e possibility of this redemptive gift given 

in language is the endowment of eternity. Th is is how the mortals, 

created and fi nite, 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. Th erefore 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 

Th e tremendous element, the fi re of the sky and the silence of the 

people, their life within nature and their limitedness and satisfaction 

has continually aff ected 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: 

Th e tremendous element, the fi re of the sky and the silence of the 

people, their life within nature and their limitedness and satisfaction 

has continually aff ected 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 fl ash that fi rst 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 fi nds himself in its midst? Th ere 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? Th e open where the poetic saying is 

intimated by the lightning fl ash: what is it? Th e open is the place of 

encounter, not the place as ‘this’ place or ‘that’ place, but placing of 

all places, the place that fi rst 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: 

Th e 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 eff ects, 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). 

Th e 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. Th erefore— 

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 fi rst of all enables 

the encounter to be told, which fi rst of all any encounter to be told, 

for itself is the encounter of all encounters? Th e 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. Th e 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. Th e 

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 fi nite and mortal, constantly fl eeing 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. 

Th e 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 

fi rst 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. Th is disjunctive space fi rst 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 fl ash in the stillness of the event. It is this stillness of 

the lightning fl ash that Hölderlin refers as that which ‘Apollo strikes’ 

him: the experience of the encounter with the togetherness of all 

time in their intensifi cation 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 aff airs. 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. Th ereby it opens itself 

to a time yet to arrive, the incalculable and un-predicated encounter 

with the advent of history. Th e 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 Th e 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. Th e 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 indiff erent, 

homogenous instants. In the eternal succession of the indiff erent, 

homogenous instants, no encounter takes place, because there is no 

ecstatic diff erence 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. Th e encounter is the diff erence 

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 fl ash in the stillness of the event. Th e 

lightning bolt that strikes the mortals spaces the mortals in the open, 

times the mortals to his fi nitude, to his mortality, exposes him to the 

monstrous site where there occurs the advent of history. Th e shock 

of this eternity that tears open the closure of time is the darkness of 

excessive illumination, this ‘heavenly fi re’ which the mortal cannot 

look with his mortal eyes. Th ere alone, at this monstrous site of history, 

the mortal struck by the lightning fl ash 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 intensifi cation 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? Th at 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. Th is 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. Th is 

encounter arrives as the divine violence, in its sudden advent, that 

strikes the mortals with stillness, in a kind of beatifi c joy, a lightning 

that lightens, frees and releases man unto the open: this beatifi c joy of 

lightning and lighting is inseparable from what Schelling calls ‘divine 

mourning’. Both the beatifi c 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 fl ash of eternity 

as simultaneity of timing is Apollo’s striking that exposes us to our 

innermost existence as our essential fi nitude. Th e lightning fl ash 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 fl ash of Apollo’s striking the ‘divine violence’, 

which Benjamin (1986, pp. 277-300) speaks of? If the theticpositing 

nature of the speculative-conceptual language in its 

metaphysical violence is inseparable from the mythic origin of lawpositing 

violence, then divine violence, which is beyond any lawpositing 

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 theticpositing 

conceptual and predicative nature of the concept. Th e 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 hero 1 , nor is 

the silence of the resolute tragic man with his defi ance confronting 

his own death, but the poetic saying of welcoming poet—is this not 

what Hölderlin says as that Apollo strikes him? Th e divine violence 

is without any violence, beyond any law-positing and any lawpreserving 

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. 

Th e 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 dialecticalhistorical 

process of what Benjamin calls, ‘the homogenous empty 

time’ (Benjamin 1977, pp. 251-261). Th e speculative-dialectical 

thinking which makes death the end-result of a process where each 

instance monotonously passes into another indiff erent 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 

affi rmation 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 fl ash 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 

intensifi es 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. Th erefore 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 dialecticalhistorical 

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 fl ash 

of poetic Saying, and not in the predicative-categorial cognition of 

‘presently given entities’. 

Th e lightning fl ash by striking us mortals, and enabling us to 

experience our mortality as mortality, fi rst of all places us to the 

temporalizing of time and to spacing of space. Th e lightning fl ash is 

face-to-face encounter, not with entities that have become and ‘given 

presently’, but an encounter with temporalizing of time itself. Th is 

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 fi nite being. Th is revelation is the reward of cognition, 

unlike any categorial cognition, of his essential fi nitude, which 

bestows him with the mournful serenity of contemplation, which the 

mortal must acknowledge with a joyous gratitude, with thankfulness.

§ Revelation 

Th e 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 fi nitude and language. If language, 

in its innermost connection with fi nitude, 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. Th e coming together 

of past, presence and future—the constellation of temporalities— 

appear like what Hölderlin calls ‘heavenly fi re’, Heraclitus calls it 

‘fi re’, 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. Th is 

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 fi eld; painting than writing; song, than 

declamation; parables than logical deductions; barter, than commerce. 

—Hamann (2007, p.63) 

THE ARGUMENT 

Th is 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. Th is 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 signifi cation, or sense, 

there revealed love, or love reveals itself. Th e 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 signifi cation, or categorical grasp of the entities given 

there. What is attempted here to be thought, in the word ‘revelation’, 

nothing content like signifi cation, but the originary opening of sense, 

which is always the sense of the world which is to come, which as 

such is prior to signifi cation of the given world. Th is signifi cation 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. Th e 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, signifi cation, or 

concept in its thetic positing and preserving. Language that is in love 

is an infi nite 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 infi nitely 

opens itself to its own excess of presentation. 

Th erefore the infi nitude 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 fi nite, 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 transfi gures any historical-speculative 

totalization, or totalization of Sense, or it introduces interval in


any continuity of the self-same, introducing like an infi nite excess, 

or infi nite 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 signifi cation 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 signifi cation—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. Th is 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. Th is originary love opens, fi rst 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 defi nes the juridicalpolitical 

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 signifi cation— 

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’. Th e 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, fi nite but exposed to the infi nite. Th e ‘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. Th e ‘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 

Th e Star of Redemption, attempts to think in a messianic manner) 

an intensifi cation of hope, or an affi rmation 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. Th is 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. Th is idea of revelation, which has 

promise of redemptive fulfi llment, brings together the immemorial 

past and incalculable future through continuous disruption of selfpresence, 

so that this disruption does not found itself on the basis 

of a continuum, whether it is Subject, or the logical principle of


identity. A community to come does not have as its ground, or basis 

a continuum, a community without continuum. Th is 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 fi nitude and infi nitude— 

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-fi guring 

co-fi gures, 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 fi nitude 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. Th is means: being endowed with the gift of 

language, the mortal essentially and in the inmost manner belongs to 

the fi nitude that fi rst of all enables his existence as essentially mortal 

and fi nite. Th e 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 fi nitude, 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. 

Th e 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 transfi guration 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. Th e 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


division being attained) also accepts nature and takes it to him. Man 

is the redeemer of nature towards whom all archetypes strive. Th e 

Word which is fulfi lled 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.) 

Th e 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: ‘Th e 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 fi nds 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. 

Th is 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. Th erefore 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. 

Th erefore 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. Th e 

mortal, in whom the divine Word completely articulates itself, must 

also be the one in whom the Spirit reveals itself. Th erefore 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 unfi nished. 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 transfi gures, subordinates what is other 

to itself. Th is transfi guration happens, if the Word lovingly accords 

what is diff erence—what Schelling calls the principle of light and 

the principle of darkness, the vowels and the consonant—then it is 

redemptive. Th e evil is not a lie, in that sense, but a simulacrum, 

a simulated accord, a diseased unity of the judgement. Th e 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. 

Th erefore, 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. Th erefore fi nitude on account of which 

there is revelation, and there the possibility of love and evil both are 

given, this fi nitude 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 fi nitude, 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


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. Th is 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. Th is remaining 

open of the Open, keeping the undecidable spacing as an open chasm, 

this alone keeps the promise of redemption open to mortals. Th at 

means, this is also what Schelling’s work of Freedom comes to say 

towards the end: the possibility of evil remains, but by infi nitely 

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 

transfi gured 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 affi rmation 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 

affi rmed 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. Th is 

redemptive hope is given to mortals as possibility because though 

radical evil is, it is not as originary as love, for evil derives its eff ect


only as contrast, and not as independent principle of being. Th is 

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 confi guration as the simultaneity of ecstatic 

temporalities. Th is confi guration of temporalities is otherwise than 

mere accumulative unity of the successive, homogenous presents. 

Th e latter is the speculative unity of a dialectical-historical. Th e 

confi guration is rather co-fi guring of temporalities as simultaneity 

that means a discontinuous whole that presents itself in the suddenness 

of the lightning fl ash that strikes the mortals with excessive, blinding 

illumination. It makes manifest in the suddenness of a fl ash the 

whole of temporalities together as discontinuous presentation, which 

for that matter appears to the mortal as standing still, the very (dis) 

fi gure 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. Th ere 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-diff erence 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. Th ere remains something in history as remnant outside 

history, which does not enable the closure of history in immanence. Th is 

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


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. Th e 

consummating claim to appropriation what is to remain nonappropriation, 

this destructive fi re that is not fi re 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 suff ering into 

messianic happiness. Th e terrible eff ect 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. Th erefore 

evil is not event but simulacrum of the event, for the event keeps open 

the originary Open, the gift in the naming that enables fi rst of all the 

encounter with the coming and welcomes the coming to language. 

Th is event is the event of redemption the coming of which possibility 

demands renunciation of appropriation and mastery that the mortal, 

in his arrogance, seeks. Th erefore evil does not lie in the fi nitude of 

man but in the fi nite being’s self-abnegation of his fi nitude, though 

the possibility of evil is given with this fi nitude 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 fi nitude, 

for instance by the concept of relations, must be inadequate as an 

explanation of evil. Evil is not derived from fi nitude, but from fi nitude 

which has been exalted to independent being’ (Schelling 1936, p. 

46). Th e historico-political task of the mortal is the attentiveness, 

the care that is required to transfi gure 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 infi nitely greater 

than possession, is to experience mortality, in a diffi cult and more 

profound sense, as if this mortality itself becomes somewhat of a 

mortal task of man. 

Th is mortality itself is something like a gift. Th e 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. Th inking 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 affi rmative hope for future. It is on the basis of this affi rmative 

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. Th e 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 fl ash with an exceptional brilliancy that have made the 

source of that history opaque, dark, and deep which the intelligibility 

of Being cannot penetrate. Th is 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). 

Th e 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 fulfi lled 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, affi rmatively, 

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 fi nitude 

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. 

Th is 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. Th e 

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. Th e 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 profi ts. 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. 

Th e fugitive excess of history does not completely belong to 

history without remnant. As such it is forever in departure, fl eeing 

from any immanence of self-presence, and at the same time persisting 

in-apparently in each here and now. Th is 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. Th e

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. Th e 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. 

Th e redemptive fulfi llment, whose promise is preserved by the messianic 

remnant, cannot occur within any history of self-presence. It occurs 

in a lightning fl ash 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 fl ash 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? Th e 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 diff erence 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 fi re’ 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 diff erence which 

is not so much the diff erence between categories of being but the 

diff erence 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. Th at 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 fl ow, 

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 diff erential and multiple, as pure ecstatic transcendence rather 

than continuity as fl ow. 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 diff erence between the coming into existence and Being as 

ground of existence. Th is abysmal diff erence 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 diff erence that 

does not completely allow itself to be represented as the apparent character 

of the nominative or substantial. Th is diff erence 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 fi nite opening of the world. Th is 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


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. Th is 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 dialecticalspeculative 

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 fi nitude 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 satisfi ed as mere predicative grasp of a phenomena mere potential 

and not unconditional affi rmation of the pure, unconditional 

facticity. 

Th is aporia, which is the aporia of thinking, is simply aporia 

between the double demands on thinking: to be exposed to the 

consummate fi re 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 defi nes the destiny of 

our political and ethical concerns. Th is 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


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 fl ow of the same. 

Th is 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 diff erence between event 

and Being, between a coming into existence and Being’s thinkability, 

between ‘presencing of presence’ and the given constant presence, 

between the infi nitude of the verbal ‘to’ and the nominative, 

substantive. To master this diff erence, 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. Th e 

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. Th is 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 diff erence (without reducing it to the dialectical 

opposition), or rather diff erence 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. Th is 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 decision 

out of an abyss which can never again be grounded, or totalized in 

thinking and its predicates. Th erefore—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.

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 affi rmation of coming into presence, the not yet, which 

can only be affi rmed 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 fi nite thinking, by 

which we mean an affi rmative 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 Th e Ages of the World and his Berlin Lectures 

on Positivphilosophie (Philosophie der Off enbarung 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 affi rmation of 

the outside which exceeds the logic of negation and positing; in other 

words, an affi rmation 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 affi rmation 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 

fi nite 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 affi rmed 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. Th is 

releasement—in its two fold affi rmative (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 fi nite, 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 signifi cation towards the event of signifi cation without 

result or fi nality, its coming to presence, which for that matter precedes 

any signifi cation, 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, fi nite 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 

Th e event carries, in its diff erential origin, as its arrival the two 

fold Grundstimmung—fundamental attunements—of joy and 

mournfulness. Th e 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 affi rmation of what is to come that demands a simultaneous 

work of undoing, unworking, or even destruction of the works of 

foundation.


Th is 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 fl ashes before the mortal’s eye 

in a fl ash 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, 

fi nite 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. Th is is the moment of 

revolutionary excess whose unapparent apparition does not present 

itself in the phenomenological-speculative history. Th is 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. 

Th e event is not the property of the human, of a free subject but 

a work (or better, off ering, 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 

Th e question of the mortality and fi nitude 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’. Th e event of existence— 

understood in its ex-sistence character (as Heidegger reminds us) —is 

the spacing of the open to its own infi nitude 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 fi nite 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 fi nite character, where fi nitude 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 fi nitude, which means, our open-ness 

to the pure taking place of the event to which the fi nite 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. 

Th erefore the thought of the event, at fi rst appearing to be nihilist


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. Th is 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 

fulfi llment 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? 

Th e relation of event with fi nitude cannot be understood on the 

basis of the categories of thought but as the originary, pre-predicative 

revelation of language as lightning fl ash. Th is 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 dialecticalhistorical 

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’. Th is 

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 fi rst 

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 Th e 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 

diff erential, disclosive leap into presence, which is more originary than 

the violence impaired by cognitive grasp of entities through logicalhistorical 

categories. Th erefore 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 fulfi llment 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 fulfi llment, 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. 

Th e event is not a generative transition. Th erefore Walter Benjamin 

in his Th e 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. Th e 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)


Th e 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 satisfi ed 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? Th e 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 fl ash 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 fl ash 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 fi nality. 

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. Th e 

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. 

Th e 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 fi nite 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 fulfi llment.


Similarly, Heidegger, but in a diff erent registrar, thinks this advent of 

the arrival as two fold leap and step back from the ‘onto-theological 

constitution of metaphysics’. Th is 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’. Th e 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 

Diff erence, Heidegger speaks of the event as a relation to the arriving: 

Th is 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) 

Th is holding or belonging together (but not: belonging together) in 

the event of appropriation as spring is a constellation, a diff erentiating 

perdurance between overwhelming and arrival. Heidegger writes, 

Th e diff erence of Being and beings, as the diff erentiation 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). 

Th is event is outside metaphysics, because it is thinking of event 

as diff erence, 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 diff erence as diff erence, 

event as arriving and coming to presence. Th e 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


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. 

Th is 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 diff erentiation of Being and beings, as perdurance between 

overwhelming and arrival. Th is happens when the fi nitude, 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. Th is is how the question of temporality 

and fi nitude 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 Th e 

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: 

Th e leap remains a free and open possibility of thinking: this so 

decisively so that in fact the essential province of freedom and 

openness fi rst opens up with the realm of the leap (Heidegger 1991, 

p.). 

Th e 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. Th e 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’. Th is 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.


Th is almost nothing (how to think this?) is not negative which Hegel 

talks of, for it is not the power that converts nothing into being. 

Th erefore 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 

diff erent 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 fi nitude, 

yet which carries its promise towards its redemptive fulfi llment 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 fl ash, 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 fi nite 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 infi nity within the heart of fi nitude and yet that does 

not belong to the fi nitude, 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-fi guring of loving 

and dying, the monstrous coupling of lightning and darkening: this 

constitutes the event of coming into existence in its essential relation 

to fi nitude, 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 fi re 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 off ered 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. Th ese 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 fi nitude and infi nite, time and eternity, poverty and plenitude, 

giving and off ering, 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. Th is 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. Th erefore 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 overfl owing 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, off ering and giving, mourning and 

joy, subtraction and adding, fi nitude 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 fi nitude 

but also infi nitude, 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. Th is 

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 fulfi llment 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. Th e 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 signifi cation, 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 fi gures because it is itself 

what is pure coming into existence, understood in the infi nitude 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. 

Th erefore 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 fi nality 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. Th e 

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, fi nitude 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. Th e 

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 overfl ows itself 

with love, and in loving this way ecstatically exceeds itself. Th erefore 

both the fi gures of the philosopher and the lover—in so far as they 

are the fi gures of the dis-fi gured—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-fi guring that 

inscribes itself a fi guring 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. Th is 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 suff er 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. Th e transimmanence 

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 

fi nite 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 affi rms becoming and other 

perishing, one ecstasy and other melancholy, one affi rms eternity and 

the other insists on fi nitude and temporality, both are actually united 

in a monstrous coupling, which is at once structural opening (and 

closing), revelation (and concealment) of the world. Th e 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 suff ers 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. 

Th is 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’. 

Th e 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 fulfi llment 

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 signifi cation 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. Th rough 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. Th e 

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. Th erefore is this saying 

that Rosenzweig loves to quote: ‘love is strong as death’. Th at 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. Th is renewal is what 

Plato calls ‘procreation’ that is granted to mortals, which is a fi nite- 

infi nity, 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 infi nitude in fi nite time, the promise of redemption 

at each hic et nunc. Th erefore, 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 unfi nished world which is always to 

come, always coming. 

Th erefore 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 fi nite being as if loving is without past and without 

future. Th erefore 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 infi nite into 

fi nite and fi nite into infi nite, both at once, and yet in none of them 

in themselves. 

Th erefore love does not subsist in itself. At each moment love extatically 

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, fi nitude 

and infi nite, 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 fi rst of all bestow all names, 

without language because it is itself pure language. Th is 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 

beatifi c, 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 fulfi llment, the 

promise of the messianic coming. Th is originary promise, this event 

of the immemorial demands, because of the fi nitude of the fi nite 

condition, an act of renewal or procreation in ever new presentation 

of presence, since mortals are granted only this form of eternity 

and infi nitude, 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 fi nitude 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. Th en our politics and our history forget love, 

that originary structural opening in communication, that originary 

promise that bears a redemptive fulfi llment. Love suff ers, then, from 

melancholy, lamenting its un-fulfi llment and its dying, which is not 

the paradisiacal, blissful, ecstatic melancholy that has fi rst opened the 

heart for the other, at the beginning of history and politics, that has 

fi rst 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.

§ Th e 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. Th ese 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 infi nitude 

‘to come’, in its unenclosed futurity of an interminable ecstasy—of 

an always coming itself. Th erefore 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. 

Th erefore 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. Th at 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. 

Th ere is love. Th e 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 fi nitude, seeks to appropriate 

the whole of being, and in fact, Being itself. Th e primordial facticity 

of love’s groundless cannot be traced back in the manner of apophansis 

of the predicative proposition. Th erefore Schelling (1936) calls the 

originary groundlessness of love indiff erence that precedes all predicates 

of diff erence 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 fi re of 

the centre. Yet this fi re 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

Th e Sense of Freedom • 253 

gift of his life, as this creaturely, fi nite, mortal life. Th e mortal being, 

therefore, precisely due to his inextricable fi nitude 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. Th is sharing and partaking of love, of love’s free off ering and 

overfl owing, 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. Th erefore 

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 overfl owing 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. Th erefore 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 

overfl owing. Th erefore 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. Th e possibility of the erupting, occurring, arriving of 

this decision (to affi rm 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 nonhinging 

between condition and conditioned, frees freedom itself 

from all necessity and causality. Th is is so in so far as freedom itself 

is none but joining, nexus, of what Schelling calls Zusammenhang: 

belonging together, confi guration, 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-fi guration 

freedom can also appear as dis-fi guration, as co-stellation such that 

it can also be dis-installed, as assemblage freedom can also be disassembled, 

as hinging so that freedom can also be de-hinged by decision, 

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. Th ere may occurs falsifi cation 

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. 

Th erefore 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. Th erefore 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 transfi gured into the more affi rmative 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 fl owing giving and 

withdrawing, of freedom’s generous plenitude and impoverishment, 

of freedom’s exuberant affi rmation 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 affi rmation 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. Th erefore 

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. 

Th erefore 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 anarchic 

principle of inception or inauguration itself—there lies the 

possibility of In-Vain. Th is 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. Th is 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 

affi rmed 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, off ering 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, intensifi cation 

and an extensifi cation, of joy and melancholy? Is this what the Greeks 

named as Aletheia—of what Heidegger renders as concealmentunconcealment—as 

the experience of origination, and coming to 

presence in the open? Th is 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 fl ash of lightening—what is not yet, what is still 

always to come that transfi gures the immemorial promise into its 

fulfi llment 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 fi nitude. If 

the messianic fulfi llment 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. Th rough 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 

confi guration. Th e task of thinking of the coming time cannot evade 

the question of freedom. Th erefore 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 diff erent confi guration 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 infi nite telos 

that the immanence of indiff erent, 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 transfi gures 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-diff erence in relation to this event of taking place as such. 

Th e statements and explanations are already always late in relation 

the pure event of presencing. Th erefore 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, fi rst of all, exposed us to the event. 

Th erefore we cannot predicate the event on the basis of the available 

being of ‘given presence’. Th erefore 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 fi nitude 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-diff erence between event and being. Th erefore 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. Th e 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 confi guration 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-fi gure, dis-join, or disinstall 

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 unfi nished, 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 indiff erent 

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 Th e Ages of the World (Schelling 2000). In this work, Schelling 

conceives of God’s coming to presence as that infi nite 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 confi guration which is without totality and 

is free. Th is process which in mortal condition is a dissoluble holdingtogether, 

a transfi nite relation, is what Schelling re-thinking the 

traditional logic, calls ‘judgement’ in his essay on Human Freedom 

(1936). 

What is happening here? Th e 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 confi guration. Th is is not a modality of autotransitional 

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. Th erefore Schelling, in his later philosophy—in fact 

from Th e 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 confi guration of potencies, in 

Th e 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). Th erefore existence does not 

have the self-foundational character of a logical necessity or identity, 

but as a confi guration 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. 

Th e 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. Th e 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. 

Th erefore 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. Th at 

is, however, not everything. If freedom is not merely to be negative 

freedom, but primarily affi rmative, 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)fi nitude from the closure of all sorts—metaphysical, juridicolegislative, 

theologico-political, etc. 

One of the rare contemporary, systematic philosophical works 

on freedom—that of Jean Luc Nancy’s Th e 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 off ering 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 fi nitude 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 selfconsumption’ 

and thereby off ering the closure of immanence to the 

transcendence of the open: it is this same task that guides this present 

work, albeit in a diff erent manner, in a diff erent gesture, in a diff erent 

style. Th e 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. Th is 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 fi nitude 

of existence itself. Later we shall take up this question of fi nitude 

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. Th is would demand a hollowing out, 

an unworking, or loosening, of tearing inside out of the solidifi ed 

artifi ce 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 diff erence, 

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 selfidentity 

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 diff erence 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 diff erence 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. Th is ‘irreducible remainder’, this 

remnant is the diff erence of system that emerges with the repetition 

of the very systemic task of metaphysics. Th is irreducible nonbeing, 

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 diff erence, a spacing of 

the groundless, the unruly of the abyss, a drunkenness and a certain 

divine madness—understood in its radical fi nitude—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. Th erefore 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 diff ering and spacing, the possibility 

of redemption also arises in love and in unconditional forgiveness, 

or in the creative act that affi rms 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, 

overfl owing 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. 

Th e 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 

fi nitude—that means, out of unground, unconditionally—the 

decision between good and evil. Th is 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.


Th is whole task of seeing freedom as event of existence as such, and 

not predicative, categorical grasp of already present entities demands 

diff erence in repetition be freed, released into the open. Th erefore 

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 affi rmation of life, with the vitality of the principle of 

becoming of the creature and of the divine. 

Th e 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. Th e 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. Th is 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 presupposition 

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.

§ Th e Irreducible Remainder 

Th is 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 fi nitude of the creaturely existence, and 

at the same time the possibility of the creature’s self-abnegation 

of this fi nitude. Since the vitality of freedom each time leaps out, 

transcends, ex-sists any form of necessity, causality, or immanent selfenclosure, 

this vitality—in decision—is constantly solicited towards 

evil in the self-affi rmation of its creaturely freedom. Th erefore 

the eternal possibility of this radical evil, insofar as it arises out of 

freedom and out of the self-affi rmation of the fi nite 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 fulfi lment no longer on the ground of Subject’s selfassertion 

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 fi nds 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 

satisfi ed 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 fi nitude, 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 fi eld 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, beatifi c redemptive fulfi lment 

in forgiveness and love beyond measure. 

With the question of freedom, arising out of the fi nitude of mortal’s 

condition touches at the limit of man’s possibility and capacity. Th is

Th e 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 fi nite 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. Th erefore 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 fi nite 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 fi nitude of mortal condition. Out of this wager which 

fi nds 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. 

Th erefore any dialectically accomplished universal morality of 

reconciliation is so inadequate, so insuffi cient, 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. 

Th erefore 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. Th erefore 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. Th is 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. 

Th erefore 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. Th e 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 affi rmation an arrival of 

a redemptive fulfi lment 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 fulfi lment out of 

freedom. Evil is not explained away, but whose possibility remains. 

It is this question of an essential remainder that is the diffi culty 

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. 

Th is 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 

beatifi c forgiveness, that nobility of life that arises out of freedom’s 

gift. To deny this gift would itself be the most terrible radical evil. 

Th is 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. Th e 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 diff erence of metaphysics, drawing inside out of the heart 

of metaphysics, which is to say, to its freedom, to the wager of its 

free affi rmation, thereby loosening the sedimented artifi ce 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 infi nite wager, an infi nite 

risk—and also an infi nite 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-fi nite 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 selfgrounding 

and self-appropriation. In Schelling’s thinking, system is 

that name of the jointure/ nexus/ confi guration/ 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-fi gured. Th e possibility of this dis-fi guration/dis-installation/disjoining 

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 affi rmation, pre-subjectifi ed and preobjectifi 

ed, which is the movement of longing with which even God 

comes to his own existence. Th erefore 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 fulfi lment, of life’s 

vitality in longing that confronts each moment its own limit and the


demand of a non-limit at the same time. Th is in-satiety of system 

and its exuberance of life is nothing but the infi nite wager of freedom 

itself which grants the mortals the possibility of its true fulfi lment 

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 affi rmation, 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 defi niteness 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 defi nitive 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. Th is 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. Th at 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. Th e 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. Th ere 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. 

Th is 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’. Th is 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 affi rms its own existence, and above 

all, as the arising of decision out of the abyss of wager of freedom 

between good and evil itself. Th e self-affi rmation of the creaturely 

being, whose self-affi rmative 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 

affi rmative 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 infi nite exposure 

to the abyss of its ground. Th e being that arises as this creaturely 

self-affi rmative 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 confi guration 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. Th e 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 diff erence of freedom, or 

freedom of diff erence 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 diff erence 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 diff erence as ‘duality without opposition’ that 

holds together (while separating each from the other) the principles of 

movement and becoming in a nexus, in a confi guration, 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 diff erence, 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 overfl owing 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 fulfi lment 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 fi nitude 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-fi nity at the 

heart of a fi nite existence, and the eternal melancholy at the infi nite 

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 suff ering 

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 diff erential 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 diff erence is to be 

introduced at the heart of identity. More originarily understood, 

the principle of identity will then be the thought of diff erence as 

belonging together, as in a constellation or assemblage, a montage—of 

antecedents and consequents. In that sense diff erence—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 Th e Ages of the World), a spacing—which is none 

other than the spacing of freedom, or freedom as spacing. It is this 

diff erence 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, fi nite 

existence to have a life of its own essential nature, to have an infi nite, 

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. Th erefore the 

logical relation between the antecedent and consequent is no longer to 

be thought as that of Same, but rather as that of diff erence as identity, 

diff erance of identity, as spacing of freedom. Discussing Spinoza’s 

logical relation of antecedent and consequent as one that between 

infi nite substance (=A) and infi nite substance as one of its modes, 

which is consequent of that infi nite substance (= A/a), Schelling 

argues, 

Th en 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 infi nite Substance regarded 

in its consequences is to be considered exactly the same as infi nite 

Substance as such. (Schelling 1936, p.16) 

Th ough the consequent as fi nite, conditioned, creaturely existent is 

dependent in regard to its genesis to the antecedent that does not 

determine the essential nature of that existent. Th erefore in regard to 

its own essential being, the conditioned, fi nite, creaturely existence 

is free without condition, for only so far an existent is fi nite, 

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)


Th ere 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) 

Th e concept of immanence as the logic of movement is inadequate 

enough to express the vitality of freedom’s self-affi rmation. Th is 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. Th is non-insistence 

of the genesis alone grants or bestows to the freedom of the 

creaturely, fi nite, and conditioned being its life. Th is 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 exsistent 

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 sacrifi ces 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. Th is 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 fl owing 

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 fi nite 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 time 1 . 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. Th erefore 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. Th erefore 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. Th e judgement character


of judgement is its freedom for disjunction, for caesura, for disinstallation. 

Here one can see Schelling’s unworking of the system of 

freedom from inside. Freedom as irreducible diff erence, as irreducible 

disjunction makes any speculative unity of the metaphysical Subject 

impossible. Th e 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 unity 2 a distinction unheard, a distinction that is 

going to set off the whole project of German Idealism in an entirely 

diff erent 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 disjoining 

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, suff ering and redeeming. within God too there 

is an irreducible cision, cut, (Scheidung), a distinction, a diff erence, 

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 

diff erent, 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. Th e source of life in God is God’s vital distinction or 

diff erence 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 diff erential, out of unhinging, out of (de)cision 

something comes to presence. one can say, following Schelling, 

that the event of freedom arises as the diff erential logic of origin 

that singularizes, individuates life as this life and no other, which 

as this singular for the fi rst time opens itself to itself and to others. 

Freedom is that at once diff erentiating 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 diff erentiates 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), fi guring 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/confi guration/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 confi guration 

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. 

Th is 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 diff erence: it is the diff erence of all 

diff erence and diff erence to all identities. A diff erence unheard: wholly 

otherwise diff erence that is the spacing of freedom. Th is diff erence 

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, 

Th e 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) 

Th is 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-diff erence. Th is abyss of freedom fi rst 

of all before any fi rst, 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 fi rst 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. 

Th inking in indebted to the unthinkable, for it is the un-thinkable 

that fi rst 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 fulfi lment 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 fulfi lment 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. Th is 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). Th e 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 diff erentiable 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 fi nitude 

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 fi nite—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 fi nite 

freedom, or out of the fi nitude of freedom, out of the dissoluble 

character of the jointure so that there can be inversion of wills, of 

forces, of principles. Th e 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. Th is 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 . Th e 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. 

Th is Not Yet as the ‘irreducible remainder’ of fi nite, human condition 

is the highest task of free thinking which is to open itself to the 

unconditioned. Th e 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.


Th erefore 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 selfactualization 

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. Th is originary 

mournfulness lies in the mortal’s originary non-power/noncapability/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. Th erefore human freedom is essentially fi nite 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 

fulfi lment and acts of joyous creation. Th e freedom for mortal is that 

fi rst of all opens the world for him and reveals him to the rest of the 

created existence. Th erefore 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. Th erefore 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 fi rst of all limitlessly exposes the mortals to name, by 

gifting him this possibility to name itself. Th e originary melancholy 

at the heart of fi nite existent that Schelling speaks of is not due to 

a lost origin but to an eff aced 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 

fulfi lment, freedom is the wager of existence. Th erefore 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 infi nity, 

to the whole of the possible at once. Th e decision of existence arises 

therefore not out of calculations and predications but out of the 

undecidable, out of an infi nite 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. Th erefore to maintain the wager of 

freedom and its undecidable is the highest, at the same time the most 

strenuous, the most diffi cult, 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. Th en another destiny, another inauguration or 

inception, another task for mortals begins on the basis of the 

constellation, or confi guration, of the belonging-together as 

ontological diff erence. Th is constellation of ontological diff erence is 

itself the donation of freedom. Th e ‘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 infl uence 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. Th erefore 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 

diff erential principle of unity. Schelling writes, 

Th is 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. 

Th erefore 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 diff erential 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. Th e diff erence 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 affi rmation of another inauguration, since the event 

of freedom is none other than the principle of inauguration. In this 

manner the particular Will is transfi gured 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 

fulfi lment. Th ere is no such thing as ‘philosophy of freedom’, for 

philosophy is already the gift that arises freely, the gift of thinking 

itself. Th e 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.

§ Th e Abyss of Human Freedom 

Th is chapter attempts to examine Heidegger’s dealing with the 

question of freedom in his lecture course on Th e 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 fi nite 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 fi nite 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 fi nitude itself 

out of which existence erupts. Th is 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 fi nite 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 specifi c, 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 fi rst of all opens, 

manifests, reveals, un-conceals the world and the entirety of existence 

to the mortals on the basis of his essential fi nitude, 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. 

Th e facticity of existence itself is nothing else but arises out of the 

ground of the facticity of freedom itself: freedom’s existence is fi rst of 

all a fact. Th is 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 fi nitude. 

Th erefore 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

Th e 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 infi nitude 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. Th is 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. 

Th erefore 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). Th e manifestation 

of nothing in relation to which alone freedom manifests itself to the 

mortal, fi nite existence which is Dasein, is more originary than the 

annihilation-character of the measure of negativity. Th is 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. Th is measure is the 

measure of transcendence insofar Dasein who is called upon to assume 

its existence (out of its fi nitude) 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. Th e 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. Th is 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 fulfi lment. 

If freedom is nothing else but the principle of inauguration, of 

inception, then freedom reveals itself here at this moment, each time 

as absolutely fi rst before everything else. History inaugurates with 

freedom, granted by freedom. 

Th e ethico-political task of thinking of our time therefore must 

take the question of fi nitude seriously, insofar as what remains 

for us the sense of ‘ethico-political’ is none but that of fi nitude 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 fi nitude itself. Th e transcendence of this 

fi nitude 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. Th is 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 fi rst of all our ethics and our politics itself as wager. 

Th is is only so far as the wager of freedom is none other than freedom 

as strife, as agonal manifestation of diff erential 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 fi nite of all beings. He is this possibility to 

open-ness to the whole of beings only insofar as he is essentially this 

being, inextricably fi nite and inalienably mortal. Th is mortal’s openness 

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 Th e 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 fi nite 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 fi nite being determines itself as selfdetermining 

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-infi nitum. 

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. Th is 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. 

Th is 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. Th en 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 fi nitude 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 

fi nite 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. Th e 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. Th at 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. Th e 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 

fi nishing 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. Th is 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. Th e 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. Th erefore 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 infi nite coming, a 

transcendence without transcendent. Th is transcendence of freedom is 

the moment of history’s coming to presence, as if for the fi rst time, 

which defi nes 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 infi nite fi nitude 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 

fi rst time. Th is 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. Th is 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 signifi cance 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 justifi ed 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 fulfi lment 

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. Th is 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. Th is 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. Th at philosophy has to erupt in the midst of human existence 

is not an accidental aff air. 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 diff erent 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. Th e 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. Th e 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. Th e 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 fi nality, which cannot be thought 

on the modality of the propositional structural of language but 

rather as bursting forth in lightning fl ash when language for the fi rst 

time arrives to itself—as Idea of itself before concepts. Because this 

lightning fl ash 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

§ Th e 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 

fulfi lment? 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 affi rms 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. Th is 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 fulfi lment beyond the violence of the order of law, 

the promise that fi rst 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-Th eology 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 exemplary 1 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 ‘ethicopolitical’ 

works. Th e 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

Th e Commandment of Love • 307 

any autochthonous claims to the unconditional, which is the radical 

opening to the pure event of future. Th erefore 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 specifi city 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: diff erance 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. 

Refl ecting on this question Derrida says later in an interview, 

Th is 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. Th e unprecedented arises, whether we 

like it or not, in the multiplicity of repetitions. Th at is what puts on 

hold the naive oppositions between tradition and renewal, or memory 

and future, or reform and revolution. Th e logic of iterability wrecks 

in advance the certainties of all sorts of discourses, philosophies, 

ideologies... (Derrida 2005, pp. 136-37). 

Th e 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 selfconsuming 

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 fulfi lment. 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 Th e 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 fulfi lment 

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. Th is exemplarity of


love consists in its infi nite act of translation of the extremity of 

the immemoriality of the past to Eschatos of the last where alone 

originates the pure future. Th e commandment of love here is, more 

of an event of temporality that revelation opens human existence 

to its redemptive fulfi lment 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 fulfi lment 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 fulfi lment arriving from an 

extremity of an Eschatos. Th e 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 infi nitely 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 fulfi lled in an immanent historical consummation. It 

is rather to be understood as an infi nite 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 fulfi lment in a pure language which for Benjamin, as 

we shall see later, is ‘the language of truth’. Th is ‘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 fulfi lment 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, 

infi nite, unforeseeable transcendence of pure futurity on the other 

hand. Love here appears to be an infi nite act of translation, always 

passing through the infi nite 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, indiff erent universality 

through the acts of negativity (of the metaphysics of the Subject). It 

is rather an infi nite translation of promise that immemorially, already 

always founds us, and opens us to truth and time for the fi rst time 

before any fi rst, 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. Th is 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 

fulfi lment, 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 fi rst 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 fi rst one on the scene, concerns me for the fi rst time…. 

in a contingency that excludes the prior. Not coming to confi rm 

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. Th e 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 ‘fi rst 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. Th ere 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 infi nite 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 fulfi lled, 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 indiff erent, homogenous, vacant scale of time. Th e act of 

translation is infi nite, 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 indiff erent, vacant manner of 

linear, accumulative progression. Love’s commandment conjures up 

diff erent times at the same time, or two responses at the same time: 

not just two diff erent instants belonging to the same, indiff erent, 

homogenous scale of temporality, but the diff erance 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 fl ash and thereby arresting or 

halting the continuity of the entirety of history coming to standstill. 

Th e whole intensity of Jacques Derrida’s work seems to me 

to lie in the articulation of what seems to be a fundamental problematic 

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 fulfi lment 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 history 

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 Th e Star of Redemption. Franz Rosenzweig’s 

Th e Star of Redemption begins with a radical deconstruction of 

the systemic metaphysics of logos. Th is 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 fi nitude 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 fi rst 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 fi gure 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’ Th e Star 

of Redemption begins, it is only towards its end the de-formalization 

of the geometric fi gure 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 infi nitude and 

opening to an infi nitude that does not curve back into itself, it is here 

that the notion of confi guration—which is a deformalization of the 

mathematical-geometrical fi gure of the circle—may be introduced. 

Th is mathematical-geometrical fi gure of the circle is, as we know, the 

speculative fi gure 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 geometricmathematical 

line curving back into itself, the confi guration 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 metahistorical 

path towards an infi nity of the future. Th is infi nity is not


the infi nity 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 infi nity’ in so far as the Star 

is still a confi guration. hyperbola of this ‘good infi nity’ cannot be the 

realization of the mathematical idea, but rather ‘the good infi nity’ 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 confi guration is diff erentiated from fi gure by the fact that certainly 

the confi guration could be composed of mathematical fi gures. 

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). 

Th e deformalization of the geometric-mathematical fi guration 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 fl ees away, irrevocably, with the speed of an arrow. 

Th e 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. Th e 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 infi nite 

made up of discreet unite of instants, additive and cumulative 2 . 

Confi guration for Rosenzweig is not a fi gure of a quantitative


infi nitude 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 confi guration 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. Th ese intensities are not inscription or codifi cation 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. Th is judgement upon history arrives in the name of a fi delity 

to an immemorial promise, ethical, of a redemptive fulfi lment. 

If that is so, then the violence of the historical reason cannot be 

justifi ed 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. 

Th erefore Rosenzweig in his Th e 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. Th erefore 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 infi del in the name of a more originary fi delity 

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 Th e 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. Th e possibility of this 

redemptive, paradisiacal fulfi lment 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). Th is 

universality of the messianic end of fulfi lment, of the fulfi lment 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. 

Th ere 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 fi nite 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’. 

Th e 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.). Th is 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. Th is pure language is for Rosenzweig 

silence which is not a reticence or defi ance of the tragic hero, or the 

mute suff ering 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 infi delity 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. Th is 

infi delity 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 infi delity, 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 infi delity—which is also 

the infi delity of translation in that it never mimetically reproduces 

the given tradition—to the sedimented past in the name of a more 

originary fi delity, 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 

Th e 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 fi rst 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 infl uence 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 fi rst of all opens the world 

is also the origin of promise. Th e 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. 

Th e 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 infi delity to the tradition that 

is founded by, or opened by the immemorial, originary, founding 

event of promise. Th is 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 infi nite 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. Th is 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 affi rmation 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 infi nite 

task of translation is oriented. 

Here I have taken up the theme of exemplarity that Jacques Derrida 

elaborated. Th e 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. Th erefore, 

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 infi delity of love which knows 

only presence, and none other. Th e 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. 

Th e immemorial promise given in an originary origin must be 

translated. Th is translation for Rosenzweig is translation of the 

promise given in creation into the event of love in revelation. Th is 

is the fi rst 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 infi delity of impermanence, invisibly orients that 

promise towards redemption of the world. Th e 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. 

Th erefore 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. 

Th e 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’. Th e 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 fi rst time. Th is 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 fl ash ‘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 fl ash is ‘the dialectical 

image’ which is the weak, impoverished refl ection—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).


Th e 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 infi delity, adhering in the 

translation itself, only because the highest fi delity to the immemorial 

promise demands the act of translation. Love must translate the 

untranslatable: this infi delity of translation is for Rosenzweig the 

infi delity of love, for only on the basis of infi delity 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. Th e event 

of love is here a fi nite-infi nitude—pure presencing of the eternal 

here and now—not the infi nitude as in Hegel that will have fi nitude 

within it as sublated but an infi nitude that exposed to and wounded 

by fi nitude. 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. 

Th ere 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 fi nitude. Th is fi nitude does not function 

like the logic of mediation as in Hegelian logic. For Rosenzweig this 

fi nitude is essentially the peril of love where man himself ‘dies in 

becoming lover and is reborn as lover’ (Ibid., pp. 176-177). Th e 

exemplarity of translation lies in its essential perilous character: the 

profoundest fi delity to the immemorial past promise demands the deepest 

infi delity of the non-permanence of eruption and pure presencing. 3 

Th e 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). 

Th is 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 

purifi ed from its fate character, becomes wholly language, where 

language appears itself in its purity where the lover calls the beloved 

in her proper name. Th is 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 fateless 

and goal-less world, everything becomes word 4 . 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. Th is event 

of language is prior to the language of objectivity and knowledge, of 

intentionality of the communicative agent that would then enable 

the codifi cation of law. Th erefore 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. Th e Proper Name 

Th e 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. Th is 

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. Th is 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 fi rst of all denomination of the event that opens it to an universality 

in an uncommon sense, in an exemplary sense. Th is 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. 

Th e 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. Th e proper name is not here 

the defi ant ‘I’ of the tragic hero. Rosenzweig distinguishes here the 

defi ant ‘I’ of the tragic hero whose decline constitutes, precisely at 

the utmost limit of its passivity confronting his fate, his selfi cation 

from the ‘I’ with a proper name here whose defi ance 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 defi ance 

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. Th e 

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 genus 5 , he is irreducible to the realm of 

the totality of the objects designated by concepts and that is covered 

over by the indefi nite and defi nite 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 defi nite and 

the indefi nite... Th e 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 defi ant, obstinate 

itself ; when called by name twice, with the strongest fi xity 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 fi rst time the 

question of the possibility of thinking of an exemplarity arises in 

an originary manner. Th e thinking of exemplarity is the question 

of a denomination and the verbal, irreducible to the indications 

and explanations, of articles indefi nite and defi nite. 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 

Th ough 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. Th e world is not yet 

completed, history is not yet consummated and redeemed: hence 

the necessity, of one more (that means infi nite) act of translation 

that would transform the pure presencing of revelation into an 

affi rmation 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 

fulfi lment 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 diff erent forms of utopian 

fulfi lment: 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 Th e 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 fi nal 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 fi gure 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) 

Th e archaeological, restorative tendency of the messianic is not 

incommensurable from the eschatological consummation of history. 

Th is alone makes Rosenzweig’s messianicity—to which above remarks 

are applicable—an exemplary thought, for on the basis of this alone 

the fulfi lment 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 fulfi ls 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. 

Th is 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 fulfi lment. Since it is the question concerning translating 

the untranslatable, such a messianic demand never fi nds 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? Th is is the question that concerns Rosenzweig in his Th e 

Star of Redemption. For Rosenzweig such an impossible possibility, 

or rather the possible impossibility is revealed in the commandment 

of love. Th is is revealed in the fact that love is not satisfi ed 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, unfi nished, unconsummated. 

Th e event of love is not exhausted in the love between the lover and 

beloved, that of, its affi rmation 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, 

unfi nished, uncompleted, unconsummated: ‘Th e 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 fi nished, a coming community. 

Such a coming community or universality, for Rosenzweig, is not 

exhausted in the predicates about the world, neither is it defi ned 

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 fi nished, 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 

infi nite 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). 

Th e 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 nonautochthonous, 

the unfolding of which is not the auto-generative 

growth of historical time. Th e 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, quantifi able length


of time, but an abundance or exuberance of an eternity which may 

arrive just tomorrow. Th is 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 defi nite 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 defi nite, 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. Th e 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 fi nitude 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. Th is 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. ‘Th at 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 fi rst one’ (Ibid., p. 243).


It is in this sense redemption as the messianic fulfi lment 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 affi rmation. 

Th is 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 infi nite movement of 

anticipation originates, that ‘ at every moment it fails to unite for the 

end’ (Ibid.). Th at 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 fi rst to come by, always 

the singular and yet anyone who is fi rst, 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 fi gure of the neighbour itself is exemplary: the 

place holder of the farthest who may, at any time, unforeseeably 

present himself as the nearest, ‘the fi rst to come by’. Th e 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. 

Th e 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. Th e 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’. Th e 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. Th e future 

here is rather the caesura of time that advents in the heart of presence


without ceasing itself to be future. Th e neighbour, as Levinas says, 

is anyone who may arrive anytime, and yet always arriving for the 

fi rst time, before any fi rst. It is this anonymity of the singular and 

singularity of the anonymous that for the fi rst time opens us to the 

‘we’ of community and to the indefi niteness 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. Th e 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-identifi cation 

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. Th is is the 

reason, says Rosenzweig, why for Jewish existence there is such a deep, 

profound suspicion of language and such ‘a heartfelt confi dence in 

the power of silence’ (Ibid., p. 321).

The Theologico-Political 


Th e 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. Th is is evoked by 

Rosenzweig in a paradoxical manner as a community of blood which 

he distinguishes from the spiritual communities. Th is 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-ableto-be-people 

in any given sense. Th is non-peopled people, because 

it is withdrawn from all positive predicates that determine ‘peoplehood’: 

territoriality, language of soil, and temporality of victorious, 

triumphant march of historical memory 6 —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, defi nite, something particular, a God, a human, a world 

and yet simultaneously everything, God, man, the world (Ibid., 325). 

Th e logic of exemplarity is a paradoxical logic. Th e thought of 

exemplarity is at once excess (of any given predicates that defi ne 

community at large) and yet defi cit 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. Th is marks the defi cit character of their 

mode of existence: it lacks the spontaneity, freedom, and openness 

to express its suff ering 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. Th is 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 defi cit 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 defi cit 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). 

Th erefore 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 noncontemporaneity 

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. Th e ‘choosenness’ is only that of beginning; 

that does not yet explain the redemption in the sense of the fulfi lment 

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. Th is 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, unfounds 

and re-founds the messianic politics of the world-historical 

communities for which eternity is always at an unattainable end, 

but never present today. Th erefore 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 fi nds 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. Th e 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. Th is 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 fl owing 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 fl owing 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 fulfi lment that cannot be understood 

on the basis of the immanence of a world-historical reason. Th e 

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 justifi ed on the ground of this immanence. Only 

the exposure of the forms of the world-history to the transcendence 

of the messianic fulfi lment 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 fi nite 

existence open to the gift of eternity.


For Rosenzweig, 7 such a critique of violence is inseparable from a 

certain notion of end of philosophy. Th is 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 Th ales’ assertion ‘everything is water’), already eff aces 

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. Th is is the warning that implied implicitly in every page 

of Th e 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 ethicophilosophical 

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. Th is 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 specifi c 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. Th at 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 affi rm 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. Th is is the 

meaning, apart from the sacrifi cial signifi cance 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: 




has come to the ground of himself and has known the whole depth 




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 specifi c 

objects, or even with specifi c areas of beings; as if bereft of objects, 

philosophical thinking is concerned with nothing as such, with nothing 

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’ specifi c 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. Th e 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. Th e philosophical thinking is concerned with 

this event of existence. 

Th e philosopher is not a scholar and is rather quite a diff erent 

being from a scholar. Th e scholar is concerned with ‘this’ or ‘that’ 

specifi c region of beings following ‘this’ and ‘that’ sophisticated 

‘method’ which in a manner accumulative and progressive leads to 

the knowledge of phenomena. Th e 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 eff ect—because it does not completely exhaust itself 

at any given moment of discursive signifi cation—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. Th erefore 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. Th is 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’. Th e 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. 

Th erefore 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 signifi cation. Th is is the reason why for Socrates knowledge 

of the event of existence can only be extended to its ignorance. 

In his dialogue Th eatetus 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 defi nition 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 signifi cation 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 defi ning 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. Th is means, to philosophize is to 

transform one’s own existence, to eff ect 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. Th is 

singularity of the taking place of justice is too rich to be conveyed 

in the conceptual language of signifi cation. 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 signifi cation, at the limit of the state of 

settled aff airs 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. Th is 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. Th at the settled state of aff airs 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? 

Th e 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 nonknowledge, 

of that which is without predicates, that takes place 

purely, that means, unconditionally and yet without having its own 

place and dwelling. Th e 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 infl amed in the heart and existence of the Athenian youths:


to eff ect 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 infi nitely 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. Th is 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. Th is 

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. Th erefore 

Plato in his Symposium compares philosophers to pregnant women, 

linking the idea of creation with procreation, and affi rming 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. 

Th erefore 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 effi cacy and wealth. Penia, the beggar woman, 

fi nding 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. Th is 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, infi nitely 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 

fi xes 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. 

Th erefore 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. Th e 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 fi gure. He has to be so only because he has to open the 

world, to space opens all topos and all predicates. Th erefore 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. Th e 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. 

Th e 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 Th e 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. Th is 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 infi nity 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’: 

Th at expansive friendship between creative minds, with its sense of 

infi nity 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. 

Th e 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 . Th e university as the site messianic affi rmation 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. Th erefore 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-scientifi c 

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. Th e 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. Th is 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 gadfl y’ (Plato 2001, p. 303). Th erefore 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. Th is 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 unthought. 

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. Th is 

beholding is the erotic gaze par excellence, without violence and not 

yet damaged. Th is joyousness of the life of thinking, pregnant with 

the unborn, is the experience of hope for the messianic arrival of 

the otherwise. Th erefore love is experienced in its highest intensity 

and beatitude when the whole possible infi nity 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. Th is 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. Th e 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. 

Th e 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 fi rst time, to the 

other’s death—as the story of Gilgamesh testifi es—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. Th e 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 fi nitude that aff ects us with inconsolable grief, seizes 

us with unspeakable fear and trembling. Th e opening to the world 

and our exposure to the other’s face already always is aff ected 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 aff ection, 

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 infi nity of 

the other (the infi nity that is beyond all totality of being and its 

immanent self-presence) by inscribing the fi nitude 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 infi nite 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 sacrifi cing 

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 infi nite 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 phenomenologicalmemorial 

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 sacrifi ce 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’) eff aces 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. Th is begins to happen at that moment when 

the particular individual confronts his death, death which is the pure 

possibility of its annihilation or dissolution. Th is 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 profi t and meaning of universal 

history: this is the other’s death, the other who cannot be sacrifi ced 

for the universal history of anonymity. Th erefore 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 infi nitely without ‘I’, and which 

is thereby without history, at least without the universality of the 

dialectical-speculative. Th e infi nitude of the outside history lies in 

the fi nitude of the other who is already always un-sacrifi ciable and


as such, it bears witness the promise of an eternal remnant of a time 

outside the immanence of the anonymous, universal historical time. 

Th is 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. 

Th is work, as other of my attempts, to a great extent is indebted 

to Levinas’ thought. However the responsibility born out of one’s 

own fi nitude, 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 fi nitude of each one of us—would mean the opening the heart 

of the fi nite 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. 

Th e 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 fi nite is not 

to enclose into the fi nitude of one’s own being: it is to open to the 

infi nitude of the Good that exceeds us, that aff ects 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-sacrifi ciable. 

Th is 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. Th e 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 fi nitude so that at its 

limit it may exceed to that which lies beyond any mastery and selfappropriation—that 

is, to the pure event of the Good. Th is 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. Th e pure event of the 

Good presents in its presencing itself when being exposed, abandoned 

in the open, the fi nite 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 fi rst 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. Th is 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. Th is 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. Th is 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 fi eld works and analyzes them with the help of the 

most sophisticated scientifi c-technological methods that supposed to 

give them ‘objective’ knowledge of the ‘world’. Th ere 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. 

Th e 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 

fi rst 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. Th erefore 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 infl uenced 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. Th e 

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). Th e 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’. 

Th e 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 ‘scientifi city’ 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. 

Th inking is essentially and primarily an event of disclosure, and only 

subsequently and derivatively knowledge. Th ere is something about 

thinking that is irreducible to any cognitive, categorical grasp of the 

world. Th is ‘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 affi rmation. 

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. 

Th is 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 ineff able, 

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. Th erefore 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. 

Th at 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 

confi guration what is already read. Th ose 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 counterpressure, 

its eccentric path—of diversion and disruption—and this is 

true even to the movement of thinking. Th erefore 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. 

Th erefore Nietzsche envisions his own philosophical 

contemplation as ‘untimely’. Th ere 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. Th is 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? Th is 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 specifi city 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? Th is 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. Th e transformation and the transfi guration 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 fl ees, as if from a central 

fi re. Th is academician does not allow, and constantly fl ees 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. Th is 

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 

infi nite. Th e academic has become someone who is not transformed 

by the fi gures 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. Th e 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 affi rmation of life, when neither existence enriches thinking, nor 

thinking enriches existence. 

Th e 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 

infi nity’ (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. Th is 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. Th is hic et nunc is the 

paradisiacal messianic moment that enriches thinking itself, without 

which existence becomes malicious and acquires resentment against 

life. Th e 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 fulfi lment. Th ey 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 petrifi ed 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 noncondition 

that he is constantly assailed by the non-condition and the 

impossible. Th erefore 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 fi re such as no mortal has ever felt, with deafening 

din and prowling fi gures, 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 fl ashes up 

like lightning and sounds like thunders. Th is 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 fi ts 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. Th is repetition is like the ruminating of a 

cow. Nietzsche’s analogy between the poet thinker and the cow befi ts 

here: a poet thinker is like a cow that ruminates (Nietzsche 1989, p. 

23). Th e 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 fi nitude. Th is ecstatic experience of the outside makes 

his existence an open existence to himself, to others and to the world. 

Th is 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. Th e 

integrity of such thinking is not an academic aff air, but an existential 

aff air 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 fi nds 

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 affi rm or wager the risk of life and death. Th e 

truth that the thinker rescues comes out of a wager that must be 

reaffi rmed 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 

Th is work, while it has never abandoned the necessity of a systematic 

presentation (which is a diff erent question than system), has remained 

incomplete, un-accomplished. Th e 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. Th ey 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 fi nally 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 unfi nished, uncompleted, not because it will be completed 

one day or another, but that it is already always uncompleted and 

unfi nished; yet precisely this opens us to the future of the book as 

such, of each and every book which is always to come. Th e book to 

come which will never come to pass away is not only the occasion of 

an infi nite 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 unfi nished. 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 unfi nished 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 infi nite and 

interminable dreams that never cease coming toward us, whether we 

asleep or awake, haunting us, infi nitely murmuring within us, within 

the eardrum of our soul. Th ese 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 fulfi ls itself, and then, only a silence would 

follow, by erasing this book, each and every book, from all memory 

and traces. Th e completion of the book which fulfi ls 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. 

Th e future of that book that dreams within us is to attain the nobook, 

which like silence fulfi lling 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 fulfi lment 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.


Th is 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. Th e 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 specifi c, 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. Th e 

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. 

Th is 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. Th erefore 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 nonmanifestation—which 

is the event of thinking coming to presence. 

Th erefore 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 fulfi lment 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? Th e 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. Th inking 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 diff erent from a scholarly treatise. Th e 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. 

Th is 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’. Th is 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. Th is (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. Th is is a book 

of disaster, and not a book of completion. Th erefore 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 fi re 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. 

Th erefore 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 confi guration thinking: discontinuous, nonidentical 

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. Th ere is 

something essential fragility in all thinking, barely a breath that faints 

away, especially when it aspires and ventures to essential thinking. 

Th is 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 suff ering has about it something demonic which hardly can 

even attain to language. Language of this suff ering is almost to the 

point of muteness only by a breath. Th is suff ering in writing renders 

the philosopher, as Socrates gives it a name, demonic. Suff ering 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 signifi cation or meaning. 

Th e fi gure of the thinker, which is non-fi gure par excellence, 

is the fi gure of a monster, or demon. Socrates knew something of 

this experience himself and carried this demon as an ever lasting 

companion. Th e 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. Th e 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 ‘fi gure’ of the philosopher 

as both animal and God together: ‘to love alone one must be an 

animal or a god—says Aristotle. Th ere 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. Th is 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. Th e 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. Th inking 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 suff ering 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 nonappropriation, 

this intrinsic fi nitude of the writer is also the promise 

of another time, a wholly otherwise of time. Th is 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. Th e 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. Th e 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 fulfi lment. Th e 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 fulfi lment, 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. 

Th is 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 fi nitude that 

I was trying to elaborate at that time. What, then, I understood as 

fi nitude is nothing other than the in-fi nite movement of un-working 

the solidifi ed, sedimented artifi ce of metaphysics, a fi nitude 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. 

Th e travail of mourning is this worklessness, ruination rather than 

‘work’, or eff ectuation 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 affi rmation of a time ‘to come’, an originary movement of the 

unapparent appearing of a time that fi rst 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 openingrevelation 

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 selfpresence 

of subjectivity, but as a ‘phenomenology of the unapparent.’ 

Th is phenomenon of time ‘to come’ is the unconditional affi rmation 

of the outside which constitutes the messianic event of the world. 

Th e 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 

affi rming from closures of various immanent politics and ethics, of history 

and metaphysics. Th e unconditional in us is this event-character— 

erupting, arising and disappearing, rupturing and interrupting, 

transfi guring 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. Th is 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 fi nite 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 fi nitude 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 fulfi lment in relation to which the 

question of fi nitude may arise. Th e 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 transfi guration, without event, without the affi rmative and 

positive. Finitude alone, understood in the above manner, does not 

alone affi rm the event, even though the event itself is essentially fi nite 

that opens itself to the wounds of the infi nite. 

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 fi nitude of our existence that opens us, from the heart 

of fi nitude, 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 profi ted 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 affi rm the hope of 

a coming time, outside the dialectical-historical closure, the messianic 

hope of coming of the Other. Th is 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 fi nitude is the condition of possibility of our affi rmation of 

a future to come. Th is, however, constitutes the task of our freedom, 

we who as existence-unto-fi nitude 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 speculativedialectical 

concept, but be a gift to the other and a promise of future. 

Th is poetic-aphoristic writing reads the works of Maurice Blanchot 

and Emmanuel Levinas to think fi nitude and language as gift and the 

necessity to affi rm 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. Th is 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 fi rst 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). Th e Now diff ers 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 selfpresent 

unity as unity of diff erences, or Now as unity of non-nows 

of diff erences. 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 diff erences 

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. Th is is 

the great betrayal, the infi delity, the transgression of what presents 

itself as truth or knowledge. Th is 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. Th erefore 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. Th is exhaustion or fatigue 

of the Book reduces the Book to its own negativity or nothingness, 

of its worklessness. Th is Book does not know time, nor it knows 

death and mourning, for in the Book nobody dies 1 , 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, infi nite 

mourning, and interminable mourning. Th is infi nite fi nitude of 

dying is an infi nite 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. 

Th ere 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. Th is 

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. Th e transcendence of the 

groundless, exceeding any self-presence, extends and lengthens time 

itself to infi nity, 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 selfpresence, 

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. Th ere 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 aff ects beyond any measure. As if there occurs 

two deaths in Phaedo: death of oneself, who is Socrates himself, for


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 

profi t, inconsolable mourning of those who have not learned to die 

for other’s death, foolish and non-sense 2 of mourning that aff ects 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 fi gure par excellence), 

hope already marks an infi nite 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? Th is 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 fi nitude. 

Disaster does not occur; it does not fulfi l 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. 

‘Th e work of mourning: Th e 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 infi nity and also diff ered to the infi nite 

passivity of patience, which is the patience of infi nity itself. It is the 

non-negative fi nitude of the Other that is aff ection, fi nitude which 

is neither the accomplishment of the end nor the annihilation 

of the once-lived. In Saying aff ection 4 aff ects, or the death of the 

other aff ects, and introduces in ‘me’ a disquietude, an inconsolable 

mourning. Levinas speaks of this aff ection as disquietude of the nonin-diff 

erence in the Same. Would not it then a mourning already 

always and in a time yet to come aff ect Saying and all Said, bestowing 

in our speech, in our action, in our existence an infi nite responsibility 

to the other, to the death of the other? Th e 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 insuffi cient. Th e 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 aff ection of this diachrony, or rather diachrony is that which 

aff ects 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 eff ectuates 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


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! Th ere 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. Th rough 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 fulfi lment 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. Th is 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. Th is is Hegel ravaged by thought 

whose writing is only the wrinkles on Hegel’s face, his infi nite fatigue 

that is borne in patience. Th is 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 infi nite 

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, infi nite 

times. Infi nite crossing which is impossibility of crossing! Th e 

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 nonpositing 

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. Th e 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 fulfi lment of work’ 7 which is the work of law: 

it is the empty sovereignty of law, force without sensible, signifi cation 

without existence. Yet mourning, not being able to posit anything, even 

the positing of fi nitude, is the de-positing of the Book in passivity, and


exceeding the violence of law, opens itself to justice, understood as depositing 

transcendence: Blanchot calls this non-power as ‘writing’ and 

Levinas calls justice the non-related relation to the other’s fi nitude 

that is not posited but is patience and aff ection, which is the excess 

in death, as if death is not enough for the infi nity of mourning, as if 

the diachrony of aff ection 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 fi eld of an autumnal 

evening. Th e harvested, golden corns lie gathered here and there 

by the farmers who have left for home, and the birds, silently 

fl ying 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. Th e boy came home, and since then, as if 

infi nity of the days have passed and infi nite times the sun has set, 

infi nite times the birds have come home in autumnal evening in 

infi nite 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 fi eld 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 infi nitely the same dying Sun, the same 

birds mute with anguish, the same harvested fi eld 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 

fi rst 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


come to pass, but would affi rm the future of reading, which means, 

the impossibility of reading. Th is 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. Th is 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 fi nitude of the named is announced each time, and 

thereby marking and eff acing the mark that marks the eff acement of 

time. Let us remember the early Hegel who not yet having arrived at 

the system, suff ers 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 aff ects 

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. Th is 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. Th e 

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 fi nite, 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-fi nity 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 infi nite 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 overfl ows 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 limit 9 ? 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. 

Th e 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 fi nitude, insofar as the world is fi nite, insofar as gift is 

singular each time.


How to think the gift of the name that announces the fi nitude of 

the named and the name itself, insofar as fi nitude is not reducible to 

negativity of the Concept and Sense? Th ere is, as it were, a note of 

melancholy that adheres our fi nite 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 affi rms 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. 

Th e 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’. Th e 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 fi nitude that 

time itself must be renewed each time in each presence as revelation 

of the non-posited past. Th e impossible experience of mourning for 

the other is to be transfi gured into the messianic hope for coming of 

the other, into a redemptive affi rmation. 

Th e task of the presence is the one of renewal: mourned renewal 

of the unredeemed past. Th is alone defi nes 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. Th ey 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. 

Th is makes time itself ecstatic, beyond any closure of the dialecticalhistorical 

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 fulfi lment. Th e heterogeneity of the ecstatic outside 

inhabits the self-presence of any world-historical destiny. Th ese 

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 fi nitude born out of the 

abyss of freedom. 

Joy is transfi guration of sorrow. According to Schelling, all 

transfi guration 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 fi nite being is the one whom totality excludes, for whom 

unity of time is only a never-actualized whole without totality. 

Th is fi nitude 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. 

Th is 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 fi nitude,


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. 

Th e onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics in its dialecticalspeculative 

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. Th e time of this 

mythical speech is the homogeneity of empty time. Such a speech 

lacks the ecstasy of fi nite existence that each time ecstatically exceeds 

all insistence in self-presence. Th e 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. Th is alone redeems the melancholy 

by opening to a time yet to arrive, outside the ‘anxiety’ of our ‘beingtowards-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 infi nite 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 nonanticipatable 

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. Th is redemption alone is the relation to the infi nite 

for the fi nite being which has its resonance of prayer. Man addresses 

himself to the infi nite in prayer. Th e 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. Th e 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 fi nite, existence is that is always ‘being-towards-death’ (Heidegger 

1962). Th e very fi rst 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 infi nite discourse, capable of reaching the Absolute, 

for it fear of death being only the vanity of the mortals? Th u 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 fi nished is mortal, but to be mortal is also to 

remain open to eternity that is always to come. Th is alone makes hope 

meaningful for the mortals. Th erefore 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. ‘Th e 

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 

fulfi lment lays philosophy’s eternal dream. Th is eternal hope for the 

event of remnant cannot be thought on the basis of predication, 

fi nality and result, but rather is the incalculable arrival of the wholly 

otherwise, which is always ‘to come’. 

Th e principle of hope—because such a principle endows upon 

philosophy its unconditional task—while it gives sense to our ethicopolitical 

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


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: 

‘Th e hero as such as to succumb only because his demise entitles him to the supreme 

‘heroization’, to wit, the most closed-off ‘selfi cation’ 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)’. 

The Open 

PART I – CONFIGURATIONS 

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. Th is 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. Th e 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. Th is historical people called ‘German humanity’, who are ‘the 

most metaphysical people’ are called upon to sacrifi ce themselves in this poetizing 

task of sacrifi ce for the sake of ‘preservation of the truth of Being’: ‘Th e highest form 

of suff ering is dying one’s death as a sacrifi ce for the preservation of the truth of 

Being. Th is sacrifi ce 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 fi rst preserve the voice of Being... Th us 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 sacrifi ce 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. Th e 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. Th is 

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 ‘Th e Th inker 

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 fi rst 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 fi rst assertion, that the ‘Now’ is. Th e 

‘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 Th is is posited; but it is rather an other that is posited, or the Th is is 

superseded; and this otherness, or the setting aside of the fi rst, is itself in turn set aside,

Notes • 401 

and so has returned into the fi rst. However, this fi rst, thus refl ected 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 refl ected into itself, or a simple entity which, in 

its otherness, remains what it is: a Now which is an absolute plurality of Nows… 

Th e 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: ‘Th e dimensions of time, present, future, 

and past, are the becoming of externality as such, and the resolution of it into the 

diff erences of being as passing over into nothing, and of nothing as passing over into 

being. Th e immediate vanishing of these diff erences 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 infi nity of the divine where the singularity of the 

multiple beings is affi rmed, 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 ‘Th is 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. Th e 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 fulfi llment 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 fi nds 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 Th e Principle of Hope pursues, in a messianic visionary 

manner, the question of the origin itself as ‘not yet’. Bloch writes: ‘ Th e 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. Th is 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. Th is 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: ‘Th e natural, simple 

self-emancipation of the fi nite from its fi niteness is death. Th is is the renunciation 

of the fi nite, and here what the natural life is itself implicitly is made explicit really 

and actually. Th e 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 fi nite 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 fi niteness, comes in. Death does not present itself to 

consciousness as this emancipation from fi niteness, 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). Th e world war incepted on centuries 

ago in the spiritual-political history of the West. Th e world war began propound 

positioning. Th e beginning is left immediately; it disappears in the continuation of 

the happening. Th e inception, the origin, comes to appearance as fore-shining and 

is fully there fi rst 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 Th or (Heidegger 2003). 

3 For an illuminating discussion on Kierkegaard’s notion of language and 

language’s relation to death, I refer to Geoff rey A. Hale (2002, pp. 73-108). 

4 Th at 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, ‘ Th e 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 Th e Principle of Hope pursues, in a grand visionary 

manner, this messianic thought of affi rmation 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. Th e 

tragic hero has only one language which completely corresponds to him: precisely 

keeping silent. It has thus from the beginning. Th e 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 fi elds 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 Th e 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. Th e 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. Th rough 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 Th e 

Caesura of the Speculative (1998) 

Part IV – Messianicity 

1I 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 infi nitude of messianic intensity 

of time from the quantitative infi nitude of the historical time, I refer to Stéphane 

Mosès’ Th e Angel of History (2009). 

3 Rosenzweig writes: ‘Th is constant increase is the form of permanence in love, in 

that and because it is the most extreme non-permanence and its fi delity is devoted 

solely to the present, singular moment: from the deepest infi delity and from this 

alone, it can thus become permanent fi delity; 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. Th is one sentence alone, saying 

it is as strong as death, is an exception’ (Ibid., p. 217). 

5 Th e 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 ‘…Th e 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: ‘Th e age of philosophy is one in which philosophy is revealed 

on the lips of the philosophers…Th e 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: ‘Th e end of philosophy … Th e 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). 

Fragments 

EPILOGUE 

1 One is here reminded of Franz Rosenzweig’s beginning note on his Th e 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 undoing 

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 fi nally off ers 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 suffi ciency 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 Aff ection in mourning the dying of the Other without return aff ects 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 eff ort 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 signifi cance or fi lling, 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 signifi cance 

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. Th is tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into 

being’ (Ibid., p.19). 

7 ‘…Death is the fulfi lment 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 aff ected by death is aff ectivity, passivity, a being aff ected by the beyond 

measure, an aff ection 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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§ Index 

Adorno, Theodor 261 

Aristotle 28, 93, 120, 124, 151, 197, 

238, 259, 350, 373 

Benjamin, Walter 8, 15, 20, 53, 124, 

139–41, 149, 154, 157, 161, 169, 

170, 194–95, 206–8, 214, 217–9, 

237–9, 242–3, 246–7, 310, 313, 

317–9, 321, 323–4, 328–9, 336, 

343, 349, 351, 369, 377 

On Language as Such and on the 

Language of Man 208, 217 

The Life of Students 351 

The Origin of German Tragic Drama 

139, 238 

Blanchot, Maurice 381, 387–9, 392 

Bloch, Ernst 6, 35, 39, 90, 186, 255, 

375, 377, 396 

Chrétien, Jean-Louis 24, 28, 61 

The Unforgettable and the Unhoped 

For 24, 61 

Das, Saitya Brata 142, 198 

Dastur, Francoise 46 

Derrida, Jacques 12, 14, 174, 270, 288, 

306–8, 314, 322, 337 

On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness 

270 

Onto-Theology of National Humanism 

306 

Hamann, J.G. 211 

Hegel, G.W.F. 10, 20, 34, 43–5, 50, 

54–7, 61–3, 65–8, 70, 72, 78, 

99–100, 103–5, 111, 119–21, 

125–6, 137–8, 151, 157, 161, 

163, 166, 177–9, 192, 214, 238–9, 

241–3, 257, 259–60, 263, 265, 273, 

314, 324–5, 356–7, 363, 365, 370, 

372–3, 381–2, 387–8, 391 

Heidegger, Martin 5, 8–11, 14–6, 19, 

24, 27–8, 35, 42, 68–71, 81, 85, 

87–8, 90, 107, 112–3, 117, 119, 

129, 133, 142–4, 146–53, 156, 

161–4, 169, 179, 185, 190–91, 

196–9, 201–2, 204–5, 208, 212, 

227, 232–6, 240–42, 244, 256–7, 

262, 269, 276, 278, 287–9, 291– 

300, 302, 344, 353–4, 359–60, 377, 

386–7, 393 

Being and Time 8, 24, 117, 142, 164, 

208, 240, 292, 299, 359 

The Question of Being 179 

Hölderlin, Friedrich 15, 26–7, 35, 44–6, 

83, 90, 92, 115, 127, 147, 162, 182, 

184, 196, 201, 203, 206–7, 210–11, 

281, 294, 300, 377, 391 

Jacobson, Eric 329 

Kierkegaard, Søren 21, 35, 43, 91, 99, 

103, 109, 114, 116–7, 157, 165, 

168, 171–4, 184–5, 236, 302, 377 

Lacan, Jacques 212 

Levinas, Emmanuel 51, 53–4, 311, 

315, 333–4, 355–7, 381, 384–7, 

389, 392


Marx, Karl 95 

Mosès, Stéphane 329 

The Angel of History 329 

Nancy, Jean Luc 82, 261–2 

The Experience of Freedom 261 

Nietzsche, Friedrich 68, 105, 113–4, 

120, 122, 150, 214, 343, 363, 

365–7, 373 

Plato 19, 27, 42, 106, 108, 190, 243–4, 

247–8, 259, 302, 343–4, 346, 

348–9, 351–3, 357, 366, 374, 385 

Rosenzweig, Franz 11, 14, 22, 35–6, 

43, 98, 100, 110, 119, 130, 134–6, 

138, 140, 152–3, 156, 158, 167–8, 

191–2, 194, 205, 214, 233, 235–6, 

248, 257, 305–6, 308–10, 312, 

314–39, 377, 396 

The Star of Redemption 22, 35, 43, 

130, 134, 136, 167, 214, 308, 

314–5, 317, 330, 339 

Schelling, F. W. J. Von 10, 11, 23, 

26–7, 33, 35, 41, 43, 45, 49, 

67–70, 73, 77, 79, 83, 94, 96–7, 

101, 103, 105–6, 125, 128, 138, 

150, 152, 156–8, 161, 166, 168, 

182–4, 190–91, 194, 203, 205, 212, 

214–21, 227, 229, 232–3, 235–6, 

248, 251–3, 257, 259–60, 262–8, 

271–4, 276–87, 289, 300–301, 321, 

344, 362, 377, 383–4, 394 

Philosophical Investigations into the 

Nature of Human Freedom 69, 

216–7, 221, 263, 267 

The Ages of the World 23, 69, 150, 233, 

259–60, 277 

Schmitt, Carl 123 

Socrates 244–6, 344, 346–51, 354, 364, 

373, 384–5 

Actuality 10, 26, 32, 58, 64–5, 68–70, 

73–4, 77, 101, 105, 115, 125, 138, 

168, 179, 183, 216, 218, 221, 227, 

229, 232, 234, 244, 254, 280, 

283–4, 286, 368, 371 

pure 26, 77, 227, 229, 232, 234, 

254, 283 

Causality 253–4, 264–7, 269–70, 

273–4, 277, 279, 291–2, 295–6, 

298–300 

problematic of 295, 296, 299 

Configuration 1, 14, 16–8, 35, 37, 40, 

45, 69, 102, 107, 110, 112, 131–5, 

139–44, 146–8, 150–56, 220, 253, 

257, 259–60, 272, 275–6, 282, 288, 

315–7, 362, 372 

Death 1, 6–7, 11–2, 18, 21–2, 24, 27, 

29–30, 32, 34, 39–40, 42–8, 52–3, 

56–60, 64–5, 68, 78, 80–81, 92, 

95, 99–101, 103, 112–4, 119–4, 

127–32, 136–8, 154–5, 158, 162–5, 

167–74, 176–8, 180, 182–5, 189– 

92, 194, 199, 203–7, 216, 219, 243, 

247–8, 280, 292, 294, 309, 315, 

320, 322, 325–6, 328, 335, 344, 

354–7, 361, 364, 367, 370, 373–4, 

381, 383–9, 391–3, 395–6 

negativity of 22, 29, 40, 45, 132, 356 

Erotic 343, 348–53 

Event 1, 5–11, 17, 19, 22, 24, 30–31, 

34–6, 40–47, 49, 51, 55–6, 59–61, 

68–70, 74, 76–8, 82, 93, 105–7, 

110–3, 117, 130–34, 137–9, 141– 

51, 154, 158, 161, 163–9, 171–3, 

186, 188, 191–4, 198, 203–4, 

208–14, 221, 223, 225–44, 246–53, 

257–8, 260–62, 264–6, 270–71, 

275–7, 279–80, 282, 286–9, 291–3, 

295–302, 305–10, 313–5, 317, 

319–28, 330, 334–5, 343, 345–8, 

352–3, 358–63, 366–7, 370–71, 

375–7, 385, 390, 394, 396–7 

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, 

98–9, 101, 103–8, 114–6, 120, 123, 

126–7, 129–32, 134, 136–40, 147, 

150, 155, 158, 164–8, 170–71, 173, 

180–87, 189, 191–2, 194–5, 201, 

205, 207, 211, 213, 215–8, 222,

225, 227–33, 236–7, 239, 241, 

243–4, 246, 248–50, 253, 255–6, 

258–60, 262–3, 265–9, 271–9, 

281–4, 287–9, 291–8, 300, 302, 

309–10, 315, 320, 334–6, 338, 

343–9, 351–5, 359–71, 373–4, 377, 

381, 386, 388, 391, 393, 395–6 

mortal 21, 29, 33, 50, 70, 74–5, 103, 

106, 108, 181–2, 185 

Fate 21–2, 25, 28, 33, 101, 149, 225, 

244, 273, 275, 309, 317, 320, 

322–3, 325–6, 332, 368, 395 

Finitude 1, 8, 11, 14–6, 18–20, 22, 

24–6, 28–34, 36, 40, 42, 44–6, 

48–50, 56, 72–6, 78–9, 82, 84, 86, 

95, 98–9, 101, 106, 108–9, 113, 

115–6, 123, 128–30, 132, 139, 141, 

149, 156, 158, 161, 163, 166–8, 

170, 174, 177–8, 180, 182, 184, 

186–91, 194, 196, 204–5, 209–10, 

215–6, 218, 221, 226, 230, 236–7, 

241–2, 244–7, 250, 252–3, 256, 

258, 261–2, 264–5, 267–9, 277, 

285, 291–5, 297, 299, 315, 324, 

332, 355–8, 367, 374–5, 377, 381, 

384–6, 388–9, 391–4 

discontinuous 139 

radical 11, 20, 26, 29, 32–3, 44, 98, 

113, 167, 230, 264, 268 

Freedom 22, 33–5, 39, 69–76, 79, 

82–6, 114, 117, 128–9, 132, 136, 

158, 183, 214–7, 219–21, 233–6, 

241, 251–302, 323, 336, 359, 366, 

381, 394 

Gift 1, 5–6, 11, 13–5, 17–8, 20, 22–33, 

41–2, 44, 46–8, 50, 63, 73, 80–82, 

86, 89–90, 92–5, 106, 108, 111–2, 

114, 120, 124, 128–30, 139, 153–4, 

156, 158, 163, 166, 169–71, 173, 

175–6, 178, 180–84, 188–90, 

193–4, 196–200, 208–9, 215–9, 

221–2, 252–3, 256–8, 265, 267, 

271, 274, 277, 284–5, 287, 289–90, 

326, 338, 353, 357–8, 367, 372, 

375–6, 381, 385–7, 392–3 

Index • 417 

melancholic 180 

mournful 25 

non-economic 41, 158 

History 5–9, 12, 15–6, 20–23, 25, 

29–32, 39–72, 74–7, 79, 81–3, 85, 

89, 92, 97, 102, 107, 109, 111–2, 

116–22, 124, 129, 133–4, 141–2, 

157–8, 169, 171–2, 177–8, 182, 

185–8, 192–4, 199, 203–4, 207, 

211, 219–21, 225–8, 230–32, 

235–7, 241, 243, 247–8, 250, 252, 

256–7, 265, 271, 291, 294, 297, 

299, 305, 307–10, 314, 316–22, 

324, 326–9, 333, 335–8, 345, 

351, 355–8, 363, 365–7, 374–6, 

387, 392 

dialectical 60–61, 64, 169 

logic of 44, 51, 56–8 

speculative 44, 51, 57–8 

universal 12, 31, 32, 45–8, 52–3, 

56–7, 59, 62, 68, 107, 158, 

171–2, 177, 237, 248, 305, 318, 

321, 324, 326, 356–7, 365–6 

Judgement 8, 10, 30, 34–5, 43–4, 46, 

48–9, 51–60, 69–73, 75, 77, 124, 

127–8, 139, 169–70, 172–3, 179, 

182, 187, 195, 199, 207, 214–5, 

218–9, 260, 266, 274–7, 280–81, 

317–8, 320, 325–6, 360, 369, 382 

apophantic 8, 35, 57, 274, 360 

logical 34, 51 

logic of 49, 51, 75, 266, 275–7 

notion of 69–70 

Language 1, 8, 12, 14–5, 17–9, 29, 30, 

32, 35, 40–41, 47–8, 82, 94, 100– 

101, 106, 110, 113, 117, 119–32, 

134, 139, 147–50, 153–4, 161–78, 

180–82, 183–8, 190–96, 198–9, 

203–4, 206–22, 237, 239, 245–8, 

250, 252, 256, 287, 302, 305–7, 

310, 313, 318–9, 321–2, 325–6, 

328, 334–6, 339, 346–7, 352, 369, 

373, 381, 387, 393–5 

conceptual 171, 203–4, 206, 346–7 

gift of 128–30, 139, 153, 163, 169,


171, 180–81, 196, 209, 215–7, 

219 

originary 187 

predicative 117, 187, 203 

pre-predicative 187 

pure 217, 245–7, 250, 310, 319 

Love 36, 85, 114, 124–8, 150, 211–5, 

217–20, 243–54, 264, 267–9, 271, 

277, 284, 289–90, 305–6, 308–14, 

317–8, 320, 322–8, 330–31, 333, 

337–8, 344, 349–53, 363, 373, 

393, 396 

Madness 19, 72, 82, 84–5, 93, 95–8, 

231, 250, 264, 301, 344, 363, 

366, 374 

Messianic 12, 329 

Metaphysics 61, 79, 142, 198, 259, 293 

Mortality 1, 11–2, 14, 16, 18, 21–30, 

32, 33–5, 40–47, 59, 76, 78–82, 

84–5, 89, 91, 93, 95, 98–101, 103, 

106–7, 115–7, 123, 128–9, 132, 

147, 154, 158, 161–4, 166–8, 170, 

176, 180–85, 189–91, 193, 201–4, 

206–8, 216, 218, 220, 222, 230, 

235–6, 244, 247, 253, 258, 280, 

315, 354–5, 361, 364, 367, 370, 

374–5 

pure facticity of 29 

Mourning 12–3, 18, 26–7, 31, 45, 

47, 49, 62–3, 65, 76, 81, 84, 92, 

111, 181, 192–6, 205, 245–6, 301, 

375–6, 381, 383–9, 391–3, 396 

Naming 14–5, 17, 30, 35, 40–41, 

47–8, 129, 132, 139, 141, 149, 154, 

170–71, 173, 177, 181, 192, 194–7, 

199, 207–11, 216–9, 221, 239, 246, 

248, 256, 258, 286, 288, 301, 318, 

327, 388, 391 

Pain 27, 45, 54, 67, 98–9, 120–21, 124, 

163, 174–81, 183, 193, 195, 198, 

386, 388 

Phenomenology 9–10, 13–4, 20, 43, 54, 

56–7, 61–2, 83, 87, 90, 93–4, 108, 

112, 121, 179, 227–8, 255, 315, 

325, 356, 360, 376 

Potentiality 29, 34, 69–70, 72–7, 80, 

102, 104–5, 125–6, 137–8, 168, 

229, 232, 234, 237, 244, 259, 365, 

368, 397 

passion of 69, 73, 75–7 

pure 29, 34, 70, 72–3, 80, 234, 365, 

368, 397 

Promise 5–7, 11–5, 18–9, 21, 23, 25, 

27, 30–33, 36, 40–42, 44, 47–50, 

52–5, 59–61, 66–7, 69, 73–4, 77, 

79–80, 82, 87–90, 93–5, 97, 103, 

109, 111–4, 116, 124, 126–7, 136, 

139, 149, 153, 156, 158, 161–3, 

168–9, 176, 180, 184–94, 196, 

198–9, 206, 208, 210–11, 214, 216, 

219, 227, 239, 242, 246–7, 249–50, 

252, 256, 284, 290, 305, 308–11, 

313, 317–25, 328–30, 332, 338, 

352, 357, 363, 369, 371, 374–7, 

381, 385, 395–6 

Recollection 90, 107–9, 111–6, 131–2, 

152, 157, 193–4 

Redemption 1, 6, 11, 20, 22, 35–6, 

42–3, 50, 66–7, 79–83, 90, 92–3, 

103, 107, 112–4, 116, 128–30, 132, 

134–6, 139, 152–5, 157–8, 167, 

177, 180, 186–94, 196, 198–9, 

206, 211–2, 214–22, 243, 249, 

252, 255–8, 264, 271, 284–5, 306, 

308, 310, 314–5, 317–20, 322, 326, 

329–33, 336, 339, 393, 395–6 

Remembrance 14, 18, 31, 39, 44, 48–50, 

90–91, 103, 107, 112, 117, 132, 

141, 145, 149, 153, 193–4, 196, 

199, 206, 208, 216, 219–21, 238–9, 

241, 260, 302, 321, 393 

Repetition 16–8, 49, 89, 99, 108–17, 

131–4, 140–41, 146, 156, 237, 

262–3, 266, 272, 274, 277, 280, 

307–8, 367, 389 

Revelation 7, 23, 25, 34, 36, 39–40, 47, 

72, 109, 125–6, 128–9, 132, 134–5, 

141, 145–6, 150, 152, 154–5, 

182–3, 185, 193, 209–20, 228, 231, 

237, 239, 247–8, 283, 287, 309,

314–5, 317, 319–20, 322–31, 333, 

376, 390, 393–4, 396 

Time 5, 8, 24, 50, 117, 126, 142, 153–4, 

164, 205, 208, 233–4, 240, 292, 

299, 359 

Transfinitude 156 

Translation 305–7, 309–11, 313, 

318–22, 324–5, 328–30, 332–3 

exemplarity of 306 

Truth 5, 7–8, 17–9, 23–4, 28, 51, 

54, 56, 58–60, 62–3, 65, 70–72, 

84–5, 93–4, 100, 109–10, 113, 117, 

121–2, 124, 127, 135, 139–40, 142, 

144–9, 164–5, 202–3, 212, 227, 

229–31, 234, 239, 242, 247, 275–6, 

281, 301–2, 305, 310–11, 314, 316, 

319–20, 322, 328–9, 343–9, 352–5, 

358, 360, 362–3, 365–8, 371–2, 

377, 382–4, 390, 396 

Violence 6–7, 13–5, 20, 25, 27, 41, 

47–9, 51–4, 60–61, 64–7, 78–9, 

83, 92, 115, 124, 127–8, 139, 141, 

150, 158, 178–80, 184, 187, 191–7, 

199, 205–7, 214, 220, 236, 238–9, 

243–4, 258, 275, 305, 307–8, 310, 

317, 320–21, 323, 326–7, 331, 

336–9, 343, 349, 351, 353, 357, 

360–61, 365, 388–9, 391 

Index • 419 

divine 206 

metaphysical 65–6, 79, 83, 206, 

337–9 

Work 1, 11, 12, 14, 18, 21, 22, 25, 29, 

32, 33, 34, 35, 44, 45, 46, 53, 57, 

58, 59, 60, 63, 65, 70, 81, 109, 114, 

130, 150, 169, 172, 175, 176, 177, 

178, 179, 212, 213, 219, 231, 233, 

234, 235, 247, 253, 259, 262, 264, 

270, 271, 273, 289, 297, 301, 314, 

320, 321, 322, 336, 337, 357, 358, 

359, 361, 362, 368, 370, 371, 372, 

373, 375, 377, 381, 382, 384, 385, 

387, 388, 389, 391, 393 

World 7, 22–4, 28–36, 39, 41, 45, 47–8, 

50, 67, 69, 77–8, 81, 85, 90, 93–6, 

102, 106, 114–5, 121, 123, 125–6, 

129–30, 135–7, 139–40, 143, 

146–7, 150, 152, 163, 169, 171–2, 

185–8, 191–3, 198–9, 210–15, 

228–9, 231, 233–4, 243–50, 256– 

60, 262, 265, 268, 277, 282, 287, 

292–5, 300–302, 308–9, 313, 315, 

317–8, 320–23, 325, 328, 330–31, 

333, 335–9, 343–4, 347–50, 354–5, 

358–60, 362, 367–8, 370, 374–6, 

386–7, 390, 392–4 

logic of the 28

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