Tabula Rasa Issue 6 (Claremont Colleges Philosophy Journal)

Tabula Rasa

Tabula Rasa is the undergraduate philosophy journal of the Claremont Colleges, founded in December 2020. Tabula Rasa is published biannually and includes both written pieces and artwork within the realm of philosophy. In creating and publishing Tabula Rasa, we hope to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas and creative work among undergraduate students interested in philosophy.

Etymology: (/’tæbjələ rasə) is the Latin term for “blank slate.” In philosophy, the term is associated with John Locke’s theory that individuals are born without innate mental content, and so knowledge is gained exclusively through sensory experience and perception.

EDITORS-IN-CHIEF

Aaron Morgan (Pomona '25)

Sophie Krop (Pitzer '25)

EDITORS

Felix Kuang (Claremont McKenna, '27)

Gal·la Lopez-Grado Salinas (Scripps, '25)

Sydney Armstrong (Pitzer '25)

Tim Jiang (Pomona, '27)

LAYOUT EDITOR

Aaron Morgan (Pomona '25)

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Claire Zhang (Pomona, '27)

Emilio Esquivel Márquez (Pomona '25)

Mimi Gotbetter (Pitzer '25)

Natalia Ron-Lopez (Carleton '25)

Natalie Pollock (Macalester '25)

Sebastián Amador (Pomona '27)

Sydney Armstrong (Pitzer '25)

RESIDENT ARTIST

Yuhang Xie (Pomona '27)

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

It is an honor to introduce the Fall 2024 issue of Tabula Rasa. While every issue represents a new evolution of the journal and the people who help produce these pages, we are especially proud of the direction this issue has taken.

The essays in this issue are nuanced and thought-provoking pieces of scholarship, offering novel contributions to well-established conversations across disciplines. These authors explore a wide range of topics and traditions with precision and style, from Sylvia Wynter on the human to Velleman on life and death. We would like to thank all of you for sharing your work and your ideas with us.

We are especially excited to present to you the winners of the Fall 2024 Tabula Rasa Essay Prize, a competition we are bringing back for the first time since 2021. Judged by eight professors from across the Claremont Colleges, the prize has three categories: analytic philosophy, continental philosophy, and theory. These categories represent our commitment to an inclusive approach to critical inquiry, welcoming a wide range of methods and disciplinary backgrounds within our definition of philosophy. The winners of each category are featured in the following pages, as well as the overall winner of the prize, a stellar essay by Natalia Ron-Lopez.

We are extremely grateful for all of the submissions we received. A special thank you is also due for the time and support of our judges: Ellie Anderson, James Kreines, Mukasa Mubirumusoke, Amy Kind, Gabbrielle Johnson, Ryan Engley, Jennifer Friedlander, and Michael Green.

Our website, tabularasaclaremont.com, is currently under construction. We hope that by the time you read this, our new online home for will be up and running so that these articles—as well as nine additional online-only features—can be read and shared widely. Until then, you can also follow us on Instagram (@tabularasa.claremont) for any and all updates. We welcome your questions and contributions as we continue to grow this community of philosophical inquiry.

Aaron Morgan and Sophie Krop Co-Editors-in-Chief

OF THE 2024 TABULA RASA ESSAY PRIZE

TITLE: THIS IS THE TITLE

Writer Name, Pomona ’23

NARRANS MEETS THE SLAVE

Natalia Ron-Lopez, Carleton '25

The difference between how two central thinkers in Black Studies theorize anti-blackness can be represented by the slight distinction in these two statements: “A Black being is not a human;” “a Black being is not a Man.” The former statement has been most controversially argued for by Frank B.Wilderson III who, as the father of Afropessimism, has argued that notions such as human, politics, and being are implicated in a logic of anti-blackness.1 The latter has been argued for by Sylvia Wynter who has argued that there has been an overrepresentation of a particular way of being human, of existing in the world, called Man. 2 Wynter, by shifting the term from human to Man, focuses on the ways in which a certain western understanding of what it means to be human has come to dominate all of us. This nominal difference reflects a deeper conceptual difference. Wilderson argues

that the Human tout-court is anti-black and therefore humanism, which centers this concept as the ground of all values, must always be bankrupt. Wynter, on the other hand, argues for the necessity of humanism in order to resist the over-representation of Man. Both thinkers however, agree on the centrality of blackness. For both thinkers it is through the immiseration and negation of Blacks that the norm of the White Western world is sustained. The imposition of a lack of humanity and a lack of life, therefore embodying death, is a necessary condition for the functioning of the Human or Man. This focus on blackness as being denied value allows me to fruitfully read the two authors against and with each other. Against each other insofar as they are theoretically incompatible, but with each other insofar as, in concrete political struggle, they serve as useful correctives

1 For a clear delineation of the central theses of Afropessimism through an auto-theoretical frame, see Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2020).

2 Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Found: Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn, Its Autonomy of Human Agency and the Extraterritoriality of (Self-)Cognition,” in Black Knowledges/Black Struggles: Essays in Critical Epistemology, ed. James R Ambroise and Sabine Broeck (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015).

WINNER

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of each other. Both Wynter & Wilderson converge on the singularity of blackness as the negative concept through which dominant forms of political avatars, like the Human, are able to constitute themselves. In other words, both thinkers see blackness as the embodiment of that which is without value in the eyes of whiteness, but which has the potential for overturning structures of anti-black violence and domination. However, the way in which these thinkers conceive of overturning such structures is diametrically opposed.

Wilderson negates humanism, and its concomitant narratives, as always being already anti-black. He, instead, centers refusal and critique as the only way one can enact liberation. Rejecting a positive vision of the future, Wilderson advocates for a ceaseless negation of the present thereby producing something new, that cannot be known or guaranteed in advance.3 Wynter, on the other hand, affirms humanism through a critique of the development of the Western world after 1492 while turning towards a possible conception of humanity

3 Wilderson, Afropessimism, 250.

that would take up the advancements of that world. She outlines a possible, yet not fully realized, conception of the Human, Homo Narrans, which would finally include all humans.4

A number of articles which engage with both thinkers either side with one thinker and criticize the other.5 Or these articles tend to focus on the similarities between their critical projects.6 Either these thinkers are read as antagonistic in their differing programme of action or they are read as pointing to the same question of the degradation of Black people through the structural position of blackness. The options are mutual incompatibility or metatheoretical similarity. However, there has not been an attempt to read both thinkers as supplementary, each requiring the other in order to bolster their mutual resistance to anti-blackness.

My goal in this paper is to argue that this last reading is necessary for political action. I aim to read Wilderson’s anticommunal theoretical programme alongside Wynter’s inter-communal programme, as

4 The definition of Homo Narrans as including all humans is meant to destroy any intra-Human distinctions, but it could be seen as reinforcing the distinction between the Human and the Animal which other critical theorists have sought to dismantle. Given Wynter’s desire to take up Humanism and the distinction she gives to Humans as being the only creature that operates on the biologically and mythologically realm, this potential criticism is not unfounded.

5 See especially Greg Thomas, “Afro-Blue Notes: The Death of Afro-Pessimism (2.0)?,” Theory & Event 21, no. 1 (2018): 282–317 for a critique of Afropessimism. See David Marriott, “Inventions of Existence: Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon, Sociogeny, and ‘the Damned,’” CR: The New Centennial Review 11, no. 3 (2011): 45–89. for a critique of Wynter.

6 See Sara-Maria Sorentino, “Expecting Blows: Sylvia Wynter, Sociogeny, and Exceeding Marxist Social Form,” Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis 1, no. 2 (May 5, 2022): 1–48, https://doi. org/10.54718/QPFD9625, 47-8n25.

necessarily supplementary to each other. Only by doing so, is it possible to effectively resist structures of anti-blackness.

Blackness and the Making of the Modern Human

Before analyzing the solutions they articulate for overcoming anti-blackness, we must understand their convergence on the centrality of blackness as the historically-produced absolute lack of humanity. Through colonial slavery, blackness itself came to be seen as the paradigmatic example of what it means to be non-human and to be the embodiment of death. Wilderson argues that, before the inception of modern chattel slavery, by the Arabic (and later European) slave trade, there was no such thing as Black people or even Africa as a spatially coherent object, but instead only particular African tribes, conceived of in other terms, such as religion or ethnicity.7 Blackness is produced through slavery such that to be Black is to be a slave.8 Wilderson defines slavery, utilizing Orlando

7 Wilderson, Afropessimism, 217.

Patterson’s theorization of the institution: which defines a slave as a person who does not have power, has been ripped away from their interpersonal relations and does not have inherent value; they are socially an embodiment of death.9 This imposition of social death onto blackness is the way through which humans, which includes not only White straight men but all non-black people,10 are able to conceptualize their own humanity: “Human Life is dependent on Black death for its existence and for its conceptual coherence.”11 For Wilderson, blackness is the necessary condition for the functioning of the non-black human insofar as the only way that the human can produce its own boundary is through the construction of its absolute limit. 12 Wynter argues, through an analysis of the way in which the colonial encounter of 1492 has been narrativized, that people from Africa came to be seen as “the only legitimately enslavable population group” therefore bonding Spanish settlers with indigenous people, albeit on an unequal

8 See Wilderson, Afropessimism, 102 where Wilderson writes “Blackness is coterminous with Slavery.”

9 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, With a New Preface, 2nd edition (Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England: Harvard University Press, 2018), 5-13. For concern of space, a deeper engagement with Patterson’s argument in this work and its relation to Wilderson’s own theorization is not possible.

10 Wilderson, Afropessimism, 94.

11 Wilderson, Afropessimism, 228-9.

12 See Wilderson, Afropessimism, 225 where he writes “I know I am Human because I am not black. I know I am not Black because when and if I experience the kind of violence Blacks experience, there is a reason, some contingent transgression” (emphasis his).

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status.13 This status of Black people as legitimately enslavable also operated within Medieval Islam.14 Blackness, as the symbolic embodiment of absolute lack, operates across distinct understandings of what it means to be human.15 It is not only that the current predominant Western conception of humanity, Man, has blackness as its negative support, but also that blackness is the unspoken support of distinct conceptions of what it means to be human. This operation across distinct conceptions of what it means to be human is incredibly important because it situates blackness, for Wynter, as a unique position of double exclusion that cross-culturally is able to reveal the structures of meaningmaking that Wynter analyzes.

(Post/Anti)Human Solutions to AntiBlackness

It is clear how Wynter and Wilderson converge on the definition of blackness as the central position that is defined as essentially lacking. Blackness is understood by both thinkers as being a modern invention that arose out of chattel slavery, beginning with the Arab slave trade and entering into the European slave trade. The construction

of the modern concept of race, for both thinkers, arises out of this construction of blackness which is seen as analytically distinct from any pre-modern concept of race or ethnicity. Blackness is a structural category that operates as lack that would allow the Human or Man, as structural categories, to operate as plenitude, as being the opposite of lack. Race, in its modern variation, operates with the support of blackness as the extreme position that one can occupy. I will now turn to the solution they articulate to the problem of anti-blackness. I will first present Wynter who articulates an inter-communal vision that centers the possibility of a new humanity, which she calls Homo Narrans. This definition of the human is essentially: we come to be human through the narratives that we enact. Then I will turn to Wilderson’s anti-communal refusal of a vision which denies any positive programme. This is a relentless critique of the present which is nothing but a refusal to affirm. Then I will attempt to argue that these answers, while being theoretically incompatible, are politically supplementary. For Wynter, humans do not merely exist in the biological realm, and therefore are not only subject to biological laws. Wynter argues that humans are the unique

13 Sylvia Wynter, “1492: A New World View,” in Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View, ed. Vera Lawrence, Hyatt Nettleford, and Rex Nettleford (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 11.

14 Wynter, “1492: A New World View,” 20-1.

15 See Wynter, “The Ceremony Found,” 187 for a summary and reiteration of the centrality of slavery in the construction of blackness as the absolute other. See also Sorentino, “Expecting Blows,” 30-1 for an explication of how blackness as the non-identity which grounds all caste identities, including race and class, is a central critical insight of Wynter’s work which continues into “The Ceremony Found.”

creatures who also exist narratively, being subject to the laws of human autoinstitution that structure the ways in which we produce ourselves.16 These laws structure the production of narratives that we cannot pre-exist.17 This means that these narratives condition us such that the laws which guarantee these productions have remained unknown to us; the narratives that enact us have a level of immediacy that makes overcoming them difficult. For example, Wynter attempts to reveal the ways in which the construction of culturally-specific symbolic fields are able to be produced as though they were “natural” or “true.”18 The structure of these symbolic fields is such that it conceives of the dominant mode of being as good and constructs a deviant form of being which is seen as evil or as lacking life. This negative definition is not incidental to the construction of the symbolic field but absolutely necessary for the self-definition of the dominant as good. However, this symbolic field, defined by good and evil, comes to us, not in terms of the critical distance Wynter utilizes, but instead in their immediacy; we feel the attraction towards that which is good and the repulsion from that which is bad which is preconscious. The postcolonial task Wynter lays

16 Wynter, “The Ceremony Found,” 217.

ahead for us is not only to produce an account of how we account of ourselves, but also using this account in order to produce a meta-account of who-we-are. She defines humans as the type of being who is able to give an account, or tell a story, of itself, scientifically and mythologically. Wynters gives an account which confers a level of necessity to the logic of narrative productions. However, though our narratives come to produce who we are, Wynter affirms it is possible to change the narratives we enact.

Wynter argues that it is possible for the laws of human auto-institution to no longer remain opaque to us therefore opening the possibility for the production of Homo Narrans. Wynter wishes to both critique the way in which narratives have functioned in such a way to necessarily require the subordination of—imposition of lack onto—certain humans, and argue that this recognition is itself a liberatory moment from which we can produce a new account of who we are that would be able to fully realize our autonomy of agency. Homo Narrans names the production of a new account of who-we-are where the we in that statement is no longer defined in terms of a specific cultural understanding of what it means to be human, but instead defined

17 Wynter writes “we humans cannot pre-exist our cosmogonies or origin myths/stories/narratives anymore than a bee, at the purely biologically level of life, cannot pre-exist its beehive.” Wynter, “The Ceremony Found,” 213-4.

18 Wynter, “The Ceremony Found,” 213-4. She refers to the culturally-specific symbolic field as the “sociogenic replicator code of symbolic life/death.”

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in terms of every single human. 19 This new answer is not somehow outside of the laws of human auto-institution, but remains subordinated to those very laws. Therefore, this Homo Narrans, while remaining subordinated to the laws which produced the definitions and manifestations of the human that denigrated and subjugated Black people, would go beyond the duality of White/Black and therefore the positioning of blackness as the embodiment of lack.

For Wilderson, on the other hand, any liberatory dream is, even without conscious awareness, always formulated on white terms and therefore anti-black. While Wynter attempts to articulate the conditions for a creation of a new conception of Humanity, Wilderson argues that there is no positive vision which is not already produced within the anti-black paradigm. This inability to articulate a positive vision includes the various black liberation projects like the Black Panther Party or the Black Liberation Army. Wilderson analyzes the “paradox of political engagement” through

the particular example of Assata Shakur, who was part of the BLA during the 70s.20 In this analysis, Wilderson dis-ambuguiates the Marxists discourse which dominated Shakur’s writings from the articulation of the inability to conceive of a solution which would alleviate the real violence she, and other Black people, experienced and the violence that the discourse she engaged in reiterates.

The discourse of Marxism and Postcolonialism reiterate the violence of anti-blackness because they articulate success through a narrative arc of equilibrium-disequilibrium-equilibrium which cannot function for understanding black resistance.21 When he analyzes the narrative of Palestinian Liberation he finds the narrative arc of: the original plenitude of having land, the loss of land because of Zionist occupation, and the future recovery of the original sovereignty of land.22 For Black people, who have come to be positioned as such because of slavery, there is no moment of plenitude, no

19 Wynter, “The Ceremony Found,” 245.

20 Frank B. Wilderson III, “The Black Liberation Army and the Paradox of Political Engagement,” Ill Will, 2014, https://illwill.com/the-black-liberation-army-the-paradox-of-political-engagement

21 Wilderson produces very general notions of Marxist discourse and Postcolonial discourse both of which are defined according to the narrative of restitution. However, he specifically criticizes Gramscian Marxism in his article Frank B. Wilderson III, “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?,” Social Identities 9, no. 2 (June 2003): 225–40, https://doi.org/10.1080/1350463032000101579

22 Wilderson, Afropessimism, 16. In light of the increased genocidal acts of the Zionist entity after October 7th, this argument may seem all the more problematic. However, Wilderson’s distinction between the intra-Human conflicts and the Human antagonism with the Slave that distinguishes Palestinians subjugation from anti-black subjugation is not a statement about the severity of the subjugation, but about the type of subjugation. Wilderson is not claiming that Palestinians do not experience the worst extremes of violence, but that the narrative reserve, arising out of Marxist, Islamic, or Postcolonial thought, which allows for the counter-hegemonic narrative of Palestinian liberation is predicated on anti-blackness.

moment of equilibrium which one would be able to return to. Wilderson argues that Black people have always already been in a position of dispossession. There is nothing to restore.23

Therefore, Wilderson is not concerned with producing a counterhegemonic narration that would detail the way in which blackness could potentially achieve a restoration of human status, which, Wilderson argues, they never really had. Instead, he puts forth a “politics of refusal and a refusal to affirm, a program of complete disorder.”24 This radically negative programme is one which advocates for the dissolution/destruction of the structures of anti-blackness without positing any positive reconstruction. In other words, any affirmation comes too early when Black people are still reproduced as slaves. 25 Wilderson argues that his programme is one which invites white people and their junior partners (non-black people) to the “dance of social death.”26 This invitation is one which would call for everyone to begin to dismantle the system and therefore to become socially dead; they would take

23 See Wilderson, Afropessimism, 199.

24 Wilderson, Afropessimism, 250.

the example of Marilyn Buck who joined up with the BLA.27 The invitation is one of entering into a permanent critique and abolition of the current state of things; this abolition of the social structure would result in the dismantling of the safeties that those deemed socially alive take for granted. The impetus of Wilderson’s programme is entirely negative insofar as any positive vision could, and indeed has, been incorporated into the dominant state of things.

Wilderson’s programme of refusal, his call for complete disorder is still articulated within the text of Whiteness. There is no outside to the anti-black paradigm; Wilderson takes up this condition and by positioning his programme as entirely negative, he situates him antagonistically to the system. This is why Wilderson’s politics may be seen as incoherent; it does not offer up a counter-hegemony or new vision of the world. Wilderson’s programme articulates the necessity to do the impossible, which is to find another mode of politics that would not be humanist and therefore anti-black. However, theoretically, he is only able

25 It is important to remember that slavery, for Wilderson, is a relational position. Just as an actor or doctor is still a worker even if they make more money than a waitress or a carpenter, so too is a Black person, for Wilderson, still a slave even if they are in the President’s seat or a professor, like Wilderson is. See Afro-Pessimism: An Introduction (Minneapolis: racked & dispatched, 2017), 21-2.

26 Wilderson, Afropessimism, 249-50.

27 Wilderson mentions Buck in a citation, see Afropessimism, 245 with regard to the organizational structure of the BLA. I mention her as an example only because Wilderson notes that she was one of the few white people in the organization and is the best example of what fighting for black liberation, as a nonblack person, might look like. It is only an indication, however.

to enact a radical criticism which would not pre-suppose even thinking about the conditions of what liberation would actually look like.28 Wilderson argues that it is not possible to think about what comes about after the end of the current domination of politics and being by the Human.

Theoretically Incompatible, Politically Supplementary

Now that I have laid out the different answers to anti-blackness that Wilderson and Wynter articulate, I will argue that their answers are supplementary to each other. I do not disagree that Wilderon and Wynter’s programmes for political action are theoretically incompatible. However, by shifting this incompatibility into the realm of politics, we can articulate a productive notion of this antagonistic relationship. Wynter and Wilderson might in fact affirm the same concrete movements such as the Black Liberation Army or the Haitian Revolution as real resistance according to their programmes. However, their appraisal and understanding of the successes and failures of the movements would be different. It is this difference in appraisal or strategy for political action which I believe is what supplements one programme with the other. In what follows, I will read one thinker through the eyes of the other in order to reveal this mutual supplementarity.

Wynter has recourse to the position of the Black subject as producing the possibility of seeing the laws of human auto-institution, therefore opening up the possibility for the new definition of the Human as Homo Narrans. However, if blackness is what sustains the possibility of narration, across cultural understandings of the human, and the tools through which it is possible for us to think about narrative are still caught within those manifestations of humanity, given that we have not found ourselves outside of the domination of Man, how is it possible to think positively about liberation? If we are to take seriously the way in which the laws of human auto-institution condition our thought, then how is it possible to begin to think about overturning those conditions? How are we to know whether attempts or manifestations of the possibility of Homo Narrans are actually liberatory or if they are stuck within the anti-black world that gave rise to them? Heeding Wilderson’s call for a program of refusal is necessary for ensuring that we do not fall prey to the satisfaction of having found the solution. The pessimism of Wilderson’s programme defends us from assuming that we have already overcome structures of anti-blackness. It is precisely these moments when one believes that one is no longer conditioned or dominated by anti-blackness that one might fall prey to its logic.

28 This puts him in direct opposition to the thrust of Wynter’s project since Wynters conceives of the condition for liberation through the concept of Homo Narrans.

Wilderson calls for a refusal of politics, a refusal of a positive vision; it is a call for complete disorder. He refers to this programme as a civil war, “a black specter waiting in the wings, an endless antagonism that cannot be satisfied (via reform or reparation), but must nonetheless be pursued to the death.”29 What sustains this endless antagonism? Assuming the position of social death requires a subtraction of value, given that value itself is grounded in the idea of the human. A programme that demands to be followed to the death cannot sustain itself. Wilderson himself admits that Black people are psychically unable to follow the programme.30 Could this not fall into a conservative affirmation of the world insofar as the conclusion might be “nothing can be done”? In other words, would not this result in a programme of quiescence that doesn’t affect the world and therefore leads to its continuation? Heeding Wynter’s call for a Homo Narrans, as a manifestation of the human or of life that is possible but which is to come and therefore not here yet, ensures that Wilderson’s programme of the destruction of civil society does not continue the position of social death which has been imposed on black people. To actually destroy the world that one finds themselves in, it is necessary to conceive of something positive. It is necessary to find life in death, to live in such a way that, while unknowable or unassimilable to the current day, nevertheless produces something

positive. Affirming this positivity as positivity, as a possible community of equal people is then what, in turn, allows for the destruction and resistance of the dominant order.

Wynter attempts to rethink a new humanism that would finally include all humans; Wilderson continually critiques any affirmation, instead pursuing a permanent negation. Though apparently mutually exclusive, reading them as supplements of one another sharpens their critical capacities by highlighting the necessity to rethink their programmes, lest they repeat the violence of anti-blackness. The constant critique of Wilderson’s politics of refusal supplements Wynter’s new answer to who-we-are insofar as it brings to light the continuing legacy that any concrete narration might have to the avatars of anti-blackness that still dominate and subjugate us. Wynter’s concrete positive emancipatory vision supplements Wilderson’s programme of refusal by daring to conceive of what a world without antiblackness would actually look like, thereby avoiding a depressing affirmation of the world. The relentless terror of civil war is balanced by the unrelenting vision of a new humanity. Wynter’s Homo Narrans attempts to incorporate and overcome Wilderson’s Black Slave; Wilderson’s Black Slave reveals the domination hiding in Wynter’s Homo Narrans. This contradiction sustains political action.

29 Wilderson, Afropessimism, 251

30 Wilderson, Afropessimism, 103.

Works Cited

Afro-Pessimism: An Introduction. Minneapolis: racked & dispatched, 2017. Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, With a New Preface. 2nd edition. Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England: Harvard University Press, 2018.

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Sorentino, Sara-Maria. “Expecting Blows: Sylvia Wynter, Sociogeny, and Exceeding Marxist Social Form.” Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis 1, no. 2 (May 5, 2022): 1–48. https://doi.org/10.54718/QPFD9625.

———. “The Sociogeny of Social Death: Blackness, Modernity, and Its Metaphors in Orlando Patterson.” Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, no. 29 (2016). https://doi.org/10.20415/rhiz/029.e04.

Thomas, Greg. “Afro-Blue Notes: The Death of Afro-Pessimism (2.0)?” Theory & Event 21, no. 1 (2018): 282–317.

Wilderson III, Frank B. Afropessimism. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2020.

———.“The Black Liberation Army and the Paradox of Political Engagement.” Ill Will, 2014. https://illwill.com/the-black-liberation-army-the-paradox-of-politicalengagement.

———. “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” Social Identities 9, no. 2 (June 2003): 225–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/1350463032000101579.

Wynter, Sylvia. “1492: A New World View.” In Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View, edited by Vera Lawrence, Hyatt Nettleford, and Rex Nettleford, 5–57. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995.

———. “The Ceremony Found: Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn, Its Autonomy of Human Agency and the Extraterritoriality of (Self-)Cognition.” In Black Knowledges/Black Struggles: Essays in Critical Epistemology, edited by James R Ambroise and Sabine Broeck. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015.

———. “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism.” Boundary 2 12/13 (1984): 19–70. https://doi.org/10.2307/302808.

CONTINENTAL CATEGORY WINNER

LOVING THE UNKNOWABLE

AN

EXPLORATION OF LOVE AS OPENING TO CHANGE, FREEDOM AND INSTABILITY WITH MERLEAU-PONTY

Mimi Gotbetter, Pitzer ’25

1. Introduction

We are often taught that what distinguishes romantic love from other forms of love is a deeper level of understanding. We learn to imagine true romantic love as a kind of fusing of subjects, making way for a unique depth of knowing and being known. In his chapter, “Others and the Human World” from The Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes a key tension that persists within all human relationships. Each of our subjective experiences are interdependent, always being shaped by and shaping a shared world, and at the same time, we never have direct access to another’s experience. When applied to loving relationships, MerleauPonty’s view of human beings as subjectobjects, conditioned by both facticity and transcendence, highlights the potential for emotionally close, caring and authentic loving relationships that do not hinge on a complete knowledge of one’s partner, or even one’s self. Healthy love, with its

propulsion toward change, reminds us of our existential freedom and transformative potential, but in doing so, also reveals a profound instability.

I begin by laying out Merleau-Ponty’s account of ambiguity and intersubjectivity. Next I apply this account to illuminate the underlying structure of loving relationships. Here I draw out the view that love always involves an engagement across different perspectives, and therefore maintains a separation between self and other, despite our potential for meaningful engagement within a shared world. Next, I explore love’s indeterminacy and fluidity, and the way that love reflects the relational nature of each subject’s change. Through an exploration of sustaining love through a partner’s gender transition, I demonstrate how Merleau-Ponty invokes love as a vital source for transformation, including transformation of the self, other, and the relationship. I then apply this account of love as constantly in a state of becoming, to a view of love as the fullest expression of freedom and openness. I demonstrate, however,

that freedom in love is inseparable from an acquaintance with profound instability. For this reason, healthy love requires that we embrace love’s uncertainty, and the unknowability of our romantic partner, which requires a confrontation with grief and a sense of dispossession within love. Lastly, I explain how Merleau-Ponty’s writing helps us formulate a more expansive view of love that challenges the privileged status of romantic love, and the idea that any one relationship can fulfill all of one’s needs. The account of love, which I lay out in what follows, promotes the importance of a diverse and robust network of love, and seeks to reimagine the role of care in loving relationships.

2. Ambiguity, Intersubjectivity, and a Shared World

Loving relationships are rooted in the fundamental human conditions of ambiguity and intersubjectivity. For Merleau-Ponty, to be a person implies having been thrown into a world that is already given long before one’s existence, and yet still, to be free. It is only from the “facticity” of one’s particular situation in the world that one is able to transcend their given constraints. This status of being both contained to immanence and also transcendent is referred to as ambiguity by many existential phenomenologists, like Sartre and Beauvoir. While we lack control over many of the conditions we are born into and which happen upon us, we maintain

agency in how we choose to take up these conditions and create a life for ourselves. As Merleau-Ponty describes, “I am given, which is to say I find myself already situated and engaged in a physical and social world; I am given to myself…I am never actually enclosed in my situation” (Merleau-Ponty 377). Freedom emerges from one’s status as both “given” and “given to oneself.” For Merleau-Ponty, freedom does not persist in spite of one’s embeddedness in the world. Rather, the conditions of the world one lives in serve as the material for possibility in their life. “My freedom, that fundamental power I have of being the subject of all of my experiences, is not distinct from my insertion in the world” (377). We do not exist apart from the world. Instead, we are wrapped up in the world, existing among all other objects in the world, because even as consciousnesses, we are fundamentally embodied.

For Merleau-Ponty, all perception emerges from a shared world, meaning that perception is always intersubjective. Intersubjectivity, for Merleau-Ponty, is foundational to all human relationships by nature of the fact that we as subjects “coexist through a single world” (370). We perceive objects in the world around us that already contain a cultural history, built by, and transformed by generations of people. Our perception is also already rich and laden with social and historical meaning. We are then already engaged in an act of intersubjectivity by interacting with or merely perceiving the world, even before

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making direct contact with another subject. The ambiguity of self and of others is also always implicit as our mode of existence within this shared world. As embodied beings, always situated within a world, we are a part of the landscape of the world, perceived by other consciousnesses, and at the same time we are always perceiving subjects, able to produce new meaning and action in the world. As Merleau-Ponty writes, I am “at once an object for others and a subject for me” (170). This condition of ambiguity, of holding both the status of subject and object within ourselves is foundational to how we relate to other subjects in the world.

The presence of other consciousnesses is already intuitively apparent to us when we perceive and engage with other bodies in the world. We do not perceive other bodies as mere objects in our field of perception, but “just as the parts of my body together form a system, the others’ body and my own are a single whole, two sides of a single phenomenon” (370). The behaviors of another body affect my own body, whether this be because the behavior affects the world in which I am situated, and thus, is taken up by my perception, or, alternatively because the other’s body makes direct contact with my own. When direct contact does occur, the other “perceives his intentions in his body, perceives my body in his own, and thereby perceives my intentions in his body” (368). Through this type of perception, the subject sees themself reflected in the other and recognizes them

as also being an embodied consciousness, who is not only perceived, but who, themself perceives.

Further, our embodiment within a shared world makes way for not only a distanced perception of other subjects, but also an authentic engagement and communication between subjects. Living in a shared world, shaped by cultural and historical meaning enables us to communicate with one another directly through language, gesture and expression. Through shared language and gesture, we can take up what Merleau-Ponty describes as a “shared operation” (370). We are able to synthesize our thoughts and feelings in a dialectic manner, in turn, shaping or producing entirely new meaning. This creation of new meaning highlights the fact that our intersubjectivity goes beyond a mere recognition of another subject as their own perceiving consciousness. Intersubjectivity is presented to us in the way in which our consciousnesses “slip into each other,” where “we coexist through a single world” (370). We then experience other consciousnesses as not merely static objects within our perceptual field, but instead as a dynamic set of behaviors which we actively interact with, revealing to us the presence of another intentionality embodied in the world. However, while we can intuit that the other experiences the world as an intentionality-unto-themself, the precise content of the other’s intentions remain at least partly inaccessible to us.

For Merleau-Ponty, here lies one of the key tensions regarding our relation to other subjects, stemming from our condition of ambiguity. On the one hand, we perceive the world through one another, given our situatedness within a shared world. Our subjectivity is also always intersubjectivity. Yet, at the same time, each subject is also transcendent beyond what the other is able to perceive. The shared world that MerleauPonty describes does not eliminate a distinction between self and other. For “as much as our consciousnesses construct through our own situations a common situation in which they communicate, it is nevertheless from the background of his own subjectivity that each projects this ‘single’ world” (373). Despite living in a “‘single’ world,” we cannot fully grasp the first-person experience of another subject. For me, the other’s experience, as it is lived by them, remains contained within what Merleau-Ponty calls an “indeterminate horizon” (141). In what follows, I will explain how this tension between intersubjectivity and a sustained distinction between self and other lives at the core of loving relationships, and informs healthy love’s inherent freedom and instability.

3. A Merleau-Pontian View of Love

Challenging the ideal of love as a complete understanding between partners, through his account of intersubjectivity, Merleau-Ponty demonstrates our ability to share deeply connected experiences

with other subjects without ever fully entering another’s perspective. All of our interpersonal experiences, both mundane, and those deeply impactful share the same basic structure, that of intersubjectivity. In his chapter, “The Cogito”, Merleau-Ponty illustrates this structure underlying his experience of looking out at a landscape with his friend.

“My friend Paul and I point to certain details of the landscape, and Paul’s finger, which is pointing out the steeple to me, is not a finger-for-me that I conceive as oriented toward a steeple-forme; rather, it is Paul’s finger that itself shows me the steeple that Paul sees…When I think of Paul, I do not think of a flow of private sensations in relation to my own sensations that are mediated through some interposed signs; rather, I think of someone who lives in the same world as I, in the same history as I, and with whom I communicate through this world and through this history”

(Merleau-Ponty 428)

Although Merleau-Ponty and Paul witness the same landscape from an almost equivalent vantage point, standing side by side, there is a fundamental distinction, in that Merleau-Ponty and Paul inhabit different bodies. For Merleau-Ponty, “Paul’s finger, which is pointing out the

steeple to me, is not a finger-for-me.”

Merleau-Ponty can orient his view exactly to where Paul points, but Merleau-Ponty can never experience Paul’s perception as Paul experiences it for himself. There is a sense then, that despite their shared location in space, and their shared history as friends, ontologically, Paul remains an Other for Merleau-Ponty. At the same time, for Merleau-Ponty, Paul is not entirely unreachable; he is still “someone who lives in the same world as I, in the same history as I, and with whom I communicate through this world and through this history.” This closeness built upon a shared world and history is meaningful for Merleau-Ponty and Paul beyond the generalized sense of living in a shared world, because MerleauPonty and Paul have come to intimately know each other throughout the course of a friendship. The fundamental difference in perspective between self and other then does not preclude Merleau-Ponty and Paul from experiencing the landscape together in a meaningful sense.

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In healthy loving relationships, including but not limited to romantic partnerships, we experience the highest potential for intersubjectivity without ever closing the fundamental gap in perspective between self and other. In romantic relationships, there is a particular degree of physical and emotional intimacy and vulnerability that creates a deep sense of understanding and attunement between partners. Often romantic relationships are built upon a shared history, shared

movement through the present, and a shared orientation toward the future. Merleau-Ponty’s view that we engage in a “shared operation” (370) in the world through our relationships is especially salient for romantic partnerships, in which our different perspectives, like that of temporality, most closely align. There is no doubt then that there is a particular degree to which our perspectives “slip into one another” in romantic relationships, allowing for a robust sense of mutual understanding. However, a false assumption occurs when one takes the mutual understanding and closeness of a romantic relationship to signify total knowledge of their loved one’s experience. For Merleau-Ponty, no degree of intersubjectivity, vulnerability, or understanding between romantic partners can collapse the ontological distinction between the experience of self and other, nor can it render all aspects of a subject completely transparent to another. Merleau-Ponty writes “things are transcendent, this signifies that I do not possess them, that I do not encompass them; they are transcendent to the extent that I am unaware of what they are” (388). For Merleau-Ponty, this inability to fully know or possess something outside of one’s self, however, does not mean that we should doubt that these things exist. If we apply this account to our loving relationships, we see the impossibility of knowing the experience of another transcendent consciousness. Not only is another’s consciousness transcendent beyond our

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third person experience of them, but they are also necessarily situated within the world differently than us by the fact of our different social locations and embodiments. A partner’s experiences, needs, and desires live within a body that is not one’s own, and therefore one’s knowledge of a loved one is never that of a determinate fact, as the other person will always be transcendent for them. Yet, a difference in perspective does not entail a need to doubt or deny another perspective. Although other subjective experiences transcend my own, and thus can never be made entirely visible for me, I can still “blindly affirm their bare existence”(388). In this view, one can love a partner, grant them recognition, and even tend to their emotional states without ever experiencing their partner’s situation for themself. Merleau-Ponty’s accounts of ambiguity and intersubjectivity reminds us of our capacity for recognition and connectedness, as well as our inability to fully know or be known by another person, even those we love and choose to share a life with.

4. Love as a Constant State of Becoming

When applied to love, MerleauPonty’s view of ambiguity teaches us that love is never something that can be fully grasped. Rather, love remains in a state of becoming, and is therefore never fully determined. For Merleau-Ponty, love is not a “hidden thing in my unconsciousness, nor

is it for that matter an object in front of my consciousness; rather, it is the movement by which I am turned toward someone” (Merleau-Ponty 400). For Merleau-Ponty, love then is not a “thing.” If love were a static object we might be able to scrutinize it from all angles in order to formulate a fuller picture, in order to know it more clearly. However, as Merleau-Ponty describes, love is a “movement,” it is always unstable, always fluid, and therefore can never fully be known by us. As a “movement,” love should also not be thought of as an action which can be accomplished, because it remains always unfinished, always in motion. Further, love as a “turning toward” another person reemphasizes love’s indeterminacy, in that the lover, who we turn toward in love is themselves indeterminate, unknowable, and ever-changing. Love’s flexibility is conditioned by the fact that each subject in a relationship is undetermined, and remains at least somewhat opaque to the other and to themself. Ellie Anderson underscores the phenomenological view that “selves are not fixed, individual things, but rather are unfinished projects in processes of becoming.” When applied to love, we see that “intimate relationships with other people shape these processes of becoming on every level. Not only am I always changing, but the beloved is in the process of changing as well” (Anderson 95). Under this view, love involves facing another person and bearing witness to the ways they change. This choice to bear witness to another’s change means allowing oneself to be changed as well.

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The experience of embracing change within love, often underscored by mixed feelings of grief, instability, and freedom, is highlighted in the experiences of those who love a partner through gender transition. In supporting a partner through transition, a non-transitioning partner must intimately confront their inability to fully know their loved one. Kathryn Redman writes about the transformation that took place in her marriage as a result of her gender transition. She writes about her partner’s initial grief and anger, and the new dynamic of care, vulnerability, and openness she and her partner built over time as a result of her decision to embrace her own subjectivity1. A non-transitioning partner might experience a profound grief for the change in the relationship’s previous dynamic, the person they once believed their loved one to be, and for the space their imagined partner took up within themself. They must also confront grief in their own misunderstandings of their partner’s experience. One can experience all of these emotions, all while still loving the partner standing there in front of them.

This experience of sustaining love through profound life transitions demonstrates that individual transformation is also always relational. Redman writes, “when one person in a marriage transitions, the partner must also transition.” In addition to redefining one’s knowledge of their trans

partner, and admitting the limitation of this knowledge, a non-transitioning partner must confront their own indeterminacy and non-transparency. First and foremost, they must reckon with their own relationship to gender, sexual orientation, and dominant norms of love. A partner may, for the first time, consider what it means to live out a queer relationship, or on the other hand, experience a straight-passing relationship for the first time. In choosing to re-learn their partner, one has the opportunity to create a new identity for themself. The choice to recognize a loved one through their changes, despite the pain, is a commitment toward freedom for each subject in a relationship, and freedom for the relationship itself.

5. Love as Freedom

Healthy love requires a commitment to affirm a loved one’s transcendence and freedom as a subject-in-themself, despite an attachment to previous ways of relating to or knowing a partner. Merleau-Ponty’s account of ambiguity as it applies to loving relationships shows us that love is not so much the experience of partners fitting into place. Rather, love is a site of expansive possibility, a “lived opening”, as Megan M. Burke describes it (Burke 63)2.

1 Davis, Maria. “Married and Transgender: When One Partner Transitions, the Other Does Too.” PrismNPen, 26 Apr. 2021, medium.com/prismnpen/married-and-transgender-when-one-partner-transitions-the-other-does-too3f2957e198dd.

2 Burke, Megan M. “Love as a Hollow: Merleau-Ponty’s Promise of Queer Love.” Hypatia, vol. 32, no. 1, 2017,

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“We learn from Merleau-Ponty that the institution of love is a lived experience of openness and indeterminacy…what the institution of love promises is the flexibility of one’s reality, of one’s existence, an institution and arousal of new variations” (Burke 63).

This “openness and indeterminacy” is implicit within the dialectic structure of a loving relationship, and is what enables love’s immense creative potential. Where love is one of the most intimate forms of acquaintance with otherness, love can also incite a meaningful exchange of different perspectives, allowing for the creation of new ideas, new meaning, and new gestures in the world. Love, when embraced as a lived freedom, may also involve a rearranging and surfacing of different parts of oneself, making way for entirely new patterns of behavior: new ways of being. However, love’s promise to incite the “flexibility of one’s reality, of one’s existence” requires that each partner embrace their inability to fully know or possess their loved one. In believing one can totally understand the experience of the person they love, they ignore their partner’s transcendence as well as their own. As Anderson describes, “when individuals do not take up the call of assuming ambiguity pp. 54–68. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/45153599. Accessed 5 Dec. 2024.

in this strange perspective of difference, they find themselves painfully oscillating between denials of their own freedom and that of the other” (Anderson 94). This belief in total understanding of a partner is an attempt to grasp—to possess the other. This denial of a partner’s otherness is also a denial of their transcendence, and an attempt at confining the other to immanence. One’s deep enmeshment, and habitual patterns or roles within a relationship can make it challenging to fully acknowledge a partner’s fullness and complexity, beyond one’s own determination of them. Acknowledging a loved one’s ambiguity requires a release of one’s own attachment to fully knowing and being known by the other. Yet, in this release, we find space for newfound agency in a relationship. Love cannot render the other or the self completely knowable, nor can it eliminate any form of distance between partners. However, as a full expression of our intersubjectivity, and an orientation toward an other, healthy love can reorient the subject’s relation to the world and to themself.

A Merleau-Pontian approach to ethical love urges us to orient our imagination of love away from love as a form of knowing, and instead toward love as an ongoing act of freedom.

For Merleau-Ponty, love most clearly reveals the non-transparent nature of the self, in that we cannot always or

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immediately pick out our romantic feelings, or distinguish true from illusory feelings of love. He writes, “If we are situated, then we are surrounded and cannot be transparent to ourselves, and thus, our contact with ourselves must only be accomplished in ambiguity” (Merleau-Ponty 401). On this account, Merleau-Ponty instructs that if we want to know whether we are in love, rather than scrutinizing our inner thoughts, we must turn instead toward “what we are doing” (399). To Merleau-Ponty, love is a present action, something we do, something we create, rather than something we know or discover.

Although there are always external conditions that play a role in shaping our relationships, these constraints do not over-determine love’s potential. We always possess agency in how we respond to the emotions and ever-changing dynamics of our relationships. As Anderson writes, authentic love “will be incumbent upon lovers to craft relational commitments that at least put traditional norms into question” (Anderson 103). Acknowledging this subjectivity is in no way a permission to transgress relational boundaries, or act without integrity and respect for other subjects. As Merleau-Ponty illustrates, subjectivity never resides alone, it is always present within a shared world; it is always intersubjective. This means that all parties’ subjectivity must be centered in the way we act out love. A recognition of ambiguity in a relationship is a call to bring all parties’ actual, present, and living desires into the

relationship. As subjects, then, we are never overdetermined by our facticity, including the relationship blueprints we inherit. Merleau-Ponty’s characterization of love as a continual act, founded on his account of the indeterminate, ambiguous, and nontransparent nature of the self, invites us to reinvent new ways of loving.

6. Love as Grief and Instability

Healthy love, as an openness to change, reminds us of our existential freedom, yet this sense of freedom also exposes us to our fundamental instability. Building on Merleau-Ponty’s characterization of love, Burke describes love as an “absence” and a “hollow” within us (Burke 63), highlighting the simultaneous feeling of liberation and dread generated by love’s openness toward the world. Burke writes,

“For Merleau-Ponty, the beloved is always an absence… this absence or negative reality of love is a fecund opening up of the world and the beloved. The absence becomes an unexpected presence, not in the sense of a possession, but as an amorous yearning. As such, love, MerleauPonty says, is ‘a hollow in us’(37).

This hollow is not emptiness, but an openness that creates space and time for play or variation. It is a ‘lake of non-being’ out of

which seeing and feeling endlessly flow (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 201)”

(Burke 63)

In Burke’s view of love as a “negative reality,” and a “hollowness,” we see that love’s awakening to possibility is also what makes love feel so vulnerable. In its ambiguity, love exposes us to our barest condition of instability. Love is experienced as an “opening up of the world and the beloved,” yet the precise content that love opens us to remains undetermined. As Burke describes, love’s openness “creates space and time for play and variation” in how we love. Yet, healthy love, as one of the fullest expressions of our subjectivity and openness, incites a full range of complex, often uncomfortable and inconvenient emotions. In “opening” ourselves to another person, we open ourselves to unknown possibilities for pleasure and connection, but also to the possibility of experiencing hurt, rejection, or the eventual loss of a relationship.

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Along with love’s inherent instability, love is experienced as a grief and dispossession, where, if one chooses to love authentically, they are forced to confront their partner’s distance and unknowability. As Keith Whitmoyer describes,3 “for Merleau-Ponty, love has less to do with communion and more to

do with the inaccessibility of the beloved in her perpetual flight” (Whitmoyer 3). In love, there is a desire to know another person fully. Yet, in coming to know more of the complexities of a partner, one is forced to encounter the fact that their partner will always contain aspects of themself that remain entirely unseen, unknown, or misunderstood. Love, then, strives to complete knowing, but fails to ever achieve it. For this reason, “what love offers is not possession but dispossession” (Whitmoyer 3). Healthy love’s embrace of freedom requires us to accept our inability to grasp the other person in the way we desire.

In our choice to affirm a partner’s freedom as a subject-in-themself, containing indeterminate horizons, we must also come to terms with our inability to be everything for a partner. Love discloses our inability to fully penetrate a partner’s life, as they themself live it, despite the presence of a deep connection. In this way, love “shows us our exclusion from being everything, and the experience of this exclusion, accordingly, is one of visionary, disclosive grief and pain” (Whitmoyer 9). Likewise, in bearing witness to a partner’s transcendence, reflected back at us, we catch a glimpse of our own impenetrability, and we see that a partner can also never be everything for us. In the realization of our own exclusion from being everything

3 Whitmoyer, Keith. “A Philosophy of Weakness: Merleau-Ponty on Fugitive Love and the Wisdom in Letting Die.” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, vol. 48, no. 1, 2017, pp. 1–15. Taylor & Francis Online, https://doi.org /10.1080/00071773.2016.1181367

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for another, and our partner’s exclusion from being everything for us, we are forced to confront the fact that “to love is to be decentered and destabilized” (Whitmoyer 9). If I choose freedom for my relationships, and face this sense of instability and separation, I am moved to accept that I alone, am not enough for my partner, and my partner alone is not enough for me. This realization may feel like a confirmation of some of our greatest fears, whereas we are taught that either all of our needs are met by the relationship, or the relationship is a failure in some way. However, the fact that the relationship alone cannot fulfill my needs would only signify an insufficiency or failure within a world where love and care is scarce. Luckily, this is not the world we live in.

7. Community Love as a Challenge to Amatonormativity

Despite the necessary confrontation with loss, instability, and fear, there is also a lot to gain in turning toward, rather than away from love’s nature as an “absence” and “dispossession”. In acknowledging that even a deep romantic bond cannot provide a partner with a complete knowledge of our internal experience, we can disrupt the common-place notion that one’s romantic partner can or ought to know best how to care for them. Such a belief relies on the

assumption that, through romantic love, a partner gains access to a privileged form of knowledge regarding their loved one. However, if we take seriously the view that rather than closing the difference in perspectives, “love makes visible that which cannot be possessed, precisely in its ungraspability,” (Whitmoyer 9) we are moved to reject the expectation that romantic partners possess a special ability to understand or anticipate our needs, or to provide us with a superior form of care. By challenging this expectation that romantic relationships provide us with more or better care, we are moved to pursue or strengthen many different outlets for care across our lives.

Merleau-Ponty’s challenge to the idea that romantic relationships provide a privileged knowledge of a loved one disrupts the dominant amatonormative belief that romantic love is a superior form of love. As Elizabeth Brake describes4, amatonormativity refers to “the widespread assumption that everyone is better off in an exclusive, romantic, long-term coupled relationship, and that everyone is seeking such a relationship.” There is no doubt that the vulnerability involved in the creation of a romantic partnership produces a unique feeling of emotional closeness, understanding, and attachment. However, Merleau-Ponty teaches us that all human relationships share the same fundamental

4 Brake, Elizabeth. “Amatonormativity.” Elizabeth Brake, 2012, https://elizabethbrake.com/amatonormativity/

intersubjective structure, founded on our co-existence within a shared world5. Thus, all loving relationships, not just romantic relationships, afford us the same potential for connectedness and care. By eliminating any sort of ontological basis for a privileging of romantic love, we see that romantic love’s privileged status within the social world is based on a cultural fixation, rather than any intrinsic hierarchy between romantic and non-romantic love. This is not to say that the intensity of one’s inner experience of romantic love is somehow false, but rather that one’s emotional life was never private, never shut away from the social world to begin with. As Merleau-Ponty describes, when it comes to love, “many people are “dominated by ‘situational values’ that hide their actual feelings from them” (Merleau-Ponty 399). For him, this means we struggle to fully tell apart true from false or illusory love. I would argue, not that we should be concerned that our romantic feelings might be false, but rather that the hierarchy placed on different forms of loving relationships prevents us from ever distinguishing exactly where the “true” or original drive for a romantic relationship comes from. Amatonormative ideals of romantic love have been so thoroughly inscribed within our social structures that these ideals appear to us as naturally occuring sensations. Many of us grow up in communities where nearly every adult we

encounter is in a monogamous relationship. When we do hear about those outside traditional romantic partnerships, it’s often framed in the context of tragedy or failure. As a result, we tend to elevate traditional romantic relationships while dismissing or undervaluing other forms of love. Our desires and preferences for love appear to us then having already been shaped by cultural ideals of love. This recognition shifts us away from amatonormative expectations of care and allows us to understand care as an abundant source, best shared across a wide range of loving relationships. For many, romantic love can feel as though it eclipses all parts of one’s life. As MerleauPonty writes, describing the experience of true romantic love, “true love summons up all of the subject’s resources and affects him completely” (398). Yet, it is impossible to mark out where this summoning of “all the subject’s resources,” experienced in romantic love, is felt as some intrinsic sensation of love, and where the sense has been produced through amatonormativity, which enforces an unequal distribution of personal resources within our romantic partnerships, as compared to non-romantic ones. The hierarchy of relationships formed around the privileged status of romantic love greatly informs how we tend to distribute our time, affection, intention, and care across relationships. However,

5 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald Landes, Routledge, 2012, p. 337.

Merleau-Ponty teaches us that even while we are situated we retain agency in how we assign value and distribute care and attention in our loving relationships. Given this intrinsic freedom in how we love, and given romantic love’s inability to provide us with superior knowledge and care within a relationship, we are moved instead to seek out varied forms of care across different loving relationships.

For many, this embrace of many forms of loving care looks like a pursuit of ethical non-monogamy or polyamory. At the same time, by giving greater attention to non-romantic modes of love it becomes clear that meaningful, fulfilling love is available in abundance throughout one’s life, even for those adhering to monogamy, or those not engaged in romantic partnerships whatsoever. When we let go of the cultural belief that romantic love is the love, many more valuable love connections, both already realized and potential, come into view.

By embracing love as an abundant potential rather than a limited source, an acknowledgement that love “shows us our exclusion from being everything,” (Whitmoyer 9) does not foreclose a possibility for a deep fulfillment of our needs and desires for care. Rather, it incites us to engage in and value a range of loving partnerships, romantic or non-romantic, where each loving relationship can offer a unique form of care, just as each person we love may know a different part of us. In rejecting the cultural narrative that romantic

love should provide for all the care we need or desire, and through acknowledging the indeterminacy and freedom within the structure of our loving relationships, we are able to ask, what is it that we want love and care to do for us?

Merleau-Ponty’s descriptive account of the indeterminacy and unknowability of all subjects can serve as an ethical guide to care in loving relationships. If subjects are neither determined nor transparent for one another, then our expectations of care must not hinge on one’s ability to infallibly interpret and respond to a partner’s emotion. For Merleau-Ponty, one’s needs are always embodied and responsive to shifting stimuli, and therefore fluid. This makes it impossible for one to perfectly anticipate how best to care for someone, even someone who they maintain an intimate connection to. Instead, we can view care as requiring active communication of one’s needs. In caring for others, even with the best intentions, when giving care, we frequently miss the mark. As the non-transparent nature of the self and other illustrates, we cannot know exactly how to support another person, just as we often do not know what care we want to receive, ourselves. Caring, as one manifestation of love’s propensity toward openness, requires creativity, a willingness to try caring in new ways, and be responsive to feedback. Care, as an engagement with another subject’s indeterminacy, just like love, requires reflexivity, adjustment, and growth in each new relationship. Additionally, where healthy love

discloses our inability to be everything for another person, healthy care is not about giving the most or best care possible, but involves placing limits and boundaries on caregiving. This also means detaching a definition of love from a belief in a hierarchy of care. While we surely can expect a degree of meaningful care from any loving partner, we do not have to expect a primary romantic partner to be the best caregiver, nor should we expect that our caring needs be fulfilled by any one partner. If we embrace our inability to know another’s experience and choose to embrace love across many forms, we are moved toward an ethic of love that better equips us to effectively give and receive care within our loving relationships and our communities.

8. Conclusion

By emphasizing the ambiguous nature of human experience, MerleauPonty challenges the ideal of complete understanding in relationships, suggesting that love does not thrive despite the impenetrability of another’s experience, but rather, the creative and transformative potential of love lies within this fundamental separation between the self and other. This view encourages us to embrace love as a site of openness and change, with an acknowledgement that this freedom is always accompanied by a sense of profound instability and grief. As I have shown, love is not a process of knowing or possessing the other, but an ongoing engagement with

the other’s alterity that opens us up to the world. Through this lens, the practice of love calls us to recognize the necessity of embracing uncertainty and grief as integral parts of the experience of loving another person. Merleau-Ponty’s insights invite us to reconsider the traditional boundaries of romantic love, urging us to cultivate a richer, more diverse web of relational care that supports the flourishing of both individuals and communities. In doing so, we can move beyond the narrow confines of romantic idealism to a more expansive and inclusive understanding of love as a central, lifeaffirming force for human existence.

Works Cited:

Anderson, Ellie. “Hermeneutic Labor: The Gendered Burden of Interpretation in Intimate Relationships between Women and Men.” Hypatia 38.1 (2023): 177–197. Web.

Anderson, Ellie. “Phenomenology and the Ethics of Love.” Symposium, vol. 25, no. 1, 2021, pp. 83–109.

Brake, Elizabeth. “Amatonormativity.” Elizabeth Brake, 2012, https://elizabethbrake.com/ amatonormativity/.

Burke, Megan M. “Love as a Hollow: Merleau-Ponty’s Promise of Queer Love.” Hypatia, vol. 32, no. 1, 2017, pp. 54–68. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/ stable/45153599. Accessed 5 Dec. 2024.

Davis, Maria. “Married and Transgender: When One Partner Transitions, the Other Does Too.” PrismNPen, 26 Apr. 2021, medium.com/prismnpen/ married-and-transgender-when-onepartner-transitions-the-other-does-too3f2957e198dd.

De Jaegher, Hanne. “Loving and Knowing: Reflections for an Engaged Epistemology.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, vol. 20, no. 4, 2021, pp. 847–870. SpringerLink, https://doi.org/10.1007/

s11098-019-01281-z.

Hamington, Maurice. “Caring Imagination: Bridging Personal and Social Morality.” Embodied Care: Jane Addams, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Feminist Ethics, University of Illinois Press, 2012, pp. 105-122. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/ stable/10.5406/j.ctt1xcjd1.7.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald Landes, Routledge, 2012.

Whitmoyer, Keith. “A Philosophy of Weakness: Merleau-Ponty on Fugitive Love and the Wisdom in Letting Die.” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, vol. 48, no. 1, 2017, pp. 1–15. Taylor & Francis Online, https://doi.org/10.1080/00071773. 2016.1181367

ANALYTIC CATEGORY WINNER

THE INTRINSIC VALUE OF LIFE

WHY DEATH IS A HARM

Natalie Pollock, Macalester ’25

One widespread view on the badness of death is as follows: your death is bad if and only if the continuation of your life would add to your accumulation of momentary well-being. I will call this perspective the quality of life view. If this interpretation is correct, then your death would be bad for you only if it robs you of the opportunity to continue living in a state of relative well-being. However, if the continuation of your life would cause you only hardship and suffering, it is not a harm to you to die because you would be unable to accumulate any more momentary wellbeing. Philosopher David Velleman posits an alternative to this view, stating that the decision to die is “rather like deciding when and how to end a story, a decision that cannot be dictated by considerations

of momentary well-being.”1 Whether or not our deaths are harmful to us depends on whether or not the timing of that particular death would contribute to or detract from the overall quality of satisfaction in the narrative of our lives.2 In this paper, I argue that those theories of the badness of death are incomplete. There is a third kind of harm that can be associated with death: the loss of the intrinsic value of a person’s life. I argue for this on the basis of cases where it appears that it can be rational to prefer to avoid death, even though the harms discussed above are absent. When I call a life intrinsically valuable, I mean that it is valuable as an end in itself.3 Unlike the first two types of harm, which treat life as instrumentally valuable, or valuable as a means to an end, I assert that life is precious

1 Velleman, David. “Well-Being and Time”, The Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 72 (1991): 48 – 77, 62.

2 There are many questions about what qualifies as a narratively satisfying life which Velleman does not explore. I do not have the space here to investigate these questions, but wanted to acknowledge their presence and the fact that they might complicate my argument in ways I have not considered.

3 By the loss of something valuable, I mean that there can be other valuable things besides our momentary well-being.

in its own right. We can justifiably wish to continue living in spite of the loss of life’s instrumental value on the grounds that we will still suffer the loss of something valuable when we die. I also aim to defend this view from Epicurean objections to my theory.

I will begin by summarizing Velleman’s argument. According to Velleman, lifetime well-being is not calculated additively, but rather narratively.4 The welfare value of someone’s life depends not on the sum of the momentary well-being it possesses, but on the story that life tells.5 Our lives can go better or worse depending on whether or not they fulfill certain narrative criteria. We might learn from our mistakes or repeat them, overcome hardship or suffer failure, have our efforts rewarded or wasted. How these events affect our well-being will depend on the overall story we are telling. Velleman thinks that we do not care so much about when we encounter particular events in our lives, but how these events contribute to the story of our lives.6 He writes that “an event’s place in the story of one’s life lends it a meaning that isn’t entirely determined by its impact on one’s well-being at the time.”7 An event will be relevant to our well-being based on its ability to contribute positively or negatively to our life story.

4 Velleman 1991, 48-49.

This logic is also applicable to our deaths. In this view, our deaths can be, but are not necessarily, harmful to us in some way. The harmfulness of a particular death will depend on how the timing of that death will affect the narrative of our lives. We care deeply about our life trajectories. An untimely death can utterly derail an otherwise promising life, while a timely death might bring a fitting conclusion to a life well-lived. However, this view seems incomplete. It seems perfectly reasonable to assume that there are many people in the world who prefer not to die, even if their particular death would be narratively satisfactory or their continued life promises only pain.

To illustrate this, let us consider Louisa, a terminally ill cancer patient. Louisa has lived what we would generally consider to be a good life. She had a happy childhood and received a good education which set her up for a successful career, which in turn rewarded the pains of her efforts. Lousia also spent the majority of her adult life happily married to her partner, Kevin, to whom she is still wed. Together, they raised three happy and successful children who now have children of their own. Now in her eighties, Louisa’s life has been long and

5 In this paper, I will utilize Velleman’s basic conception of well-being to understand the term. He defines well-being, or welfare value, simply as what is in a person’s best interest, or what is good for them (Velleman, 71).

6 Velleman 1991, 53.

7 Velleman 1991, 53.

full. However, since her cancer diagnosis and the start of her treatment, Louisa has suffered a good deal. She is in constant pain and her body is deteriorating rapidly. Her momentary well-being has radically decreased, and she has little prospect of accumulating much more well-being in the time she has left. Louisa’s quality of life is bad, on the whole. Her suffering meaningfully outweighs her happiness to the extent that her net momentary wellbeing is negative. The longer she lives, the more negative momentary well-being she will accumulate. Despite the fact that the remainder of her life will be one of suffering (a fact which Louisa understands), she does not want to die. She does not find it comforting that, by narrative accounts, the story of her life has been a good one or that dying of an illness caused by her old age seems a fitting end to her story. Nor does she wish to stay alive for purely altruistic reasons. She simply is not ready nor does she wish to die.

According to the quality of life view, Louisa’s desire to continue living does not affect whether or not her death will be harmful to her.8 Despite her desire to live, the quality of life view posits that her death will not cause her harm. If Louisa were to continue living in her current state, a state which is guaranteed by the terminal nature of her illness, her life would be on the whole

quite painful. She would exist in a state of misery, unable to enjoy more moments of well-being due to the physical and mental suffering caused by her illness. The quality of Louisa’s continued life will be quite low. Therefore, it is better for Louisa’s suffering to be brief than for it to be drawn out over an extended period of time. According to quality of life considerations, Lousia cannot be harmed by her death, as it will alleviate her current suffering and prevent the welfare value of her life from declining further. Although her death will violate her desire to remain alive, it is still better for her to die, for her death, desired or not, will provide an escape from experiencing more moments that would reduce her overall well-being.

Velleman’s narrative view of the harmfulness of death will draw a similar conclusion to the quality of life view, but for different reasons. According to Velleman, “the rationality of the patient’s attitude [toward death] depends on whether an earlier or later death would make a better end to his life story.”9 This rationality depends not on the possible momentary well-being that a patient can expect to experience in their final moments, but rather on whether their death at that time would affect the narrative of their life positively or negatively. Therefore, if an earlier death is more suitable narratively

8 This view assumes that this desire does not have some indirect effect on her momentary well-being. Thanks to Sam Asarnow, for bringing this to my attention.

9 Velleman 1991, 62.

speaking, it might be perfectly rational for a person to be willing to die even though they might still have several more good months left to live. In contrast, it may also be perfectly rational for a person to not want to die, even if the remainder of their life promises only difficulties.10

In order to understand a circumstance in which it may be rational, in Velleman’s view, for a person to not want to die, we might consider the example of the self-sacrificing patient. In many cases of terminal illness, the dying person may wish to continue living, despite the pain it will cause them, because of their obligations to their family, friends, or projects. These individuals may even prefer to die, as a drawn out process of suffering is deeply unappealing. However, they are willing to sacrifice their own well-being because there is something that they care about more, namely, the well-being of other people. Such an individual would be rationally unwilling to die. Remaining alive represents a form of self-sacrifice on their part, embracing their own suffering in order to reduce the suffering of others. This type of self-sacrifice is, in Velleman’s view, an acceptable reason to be unwilling to die, as this reluctance towards death is not the product of an irrational desire, but a form of altruism which is presumably narratively consistent with the rest of their life. It is narratively fitting and therefore rational that such a patient would wish to stay alive

10 Velleman 1991, 62.

for the sake of others even though their net momentary well-being would suffer for it. It is essential for the viability of this example that Louisa does not want to die for her own sake rather than for altruistic purposes. Unlike the self-sacrificing patient, Louisa’s primary motivation for staying alive is self-interested. She may wish to stay alive for the sake of her husband and children, at least to some extent, but this is not the only reason or the dominant reason for her desire to remain alive. She wants to continue living for her own sake despite the fact that she knows that continuing to live will cause her massive amounts of pain. She is not willing to take on this pain for the benefit of her loved ones only; she is willing to suffer for her own sake. Nor is she willing to stay alive simply for the sake of completing a project for the benefit of others. For example, imagine that Louisa runs a non-profit. For some complicated bureaucratic reasons, she alone can complete a particular project which, if finished, will contribute positively to the well-being of a large number of people. While Louisa may wish to stay alive in part to complete this project, her sole motivation for staying alive is not altruistic in this manner. Louisa’s desire to live, although influenced by outside factors such as loved ones and long term projects, does not depend on these factors. Despite being in possession of full knowledge that remaining alive will negatively affect her well-being, she wants to remain alive for herself.

Louisa’s desire does not fit into either of Velleman’s rational categories. She is clearly not rationally willing to die, as she wishes to stay alive. Nor is she rationally unwilling to die, like the selfsacrificing patient. To die now would be a perfectly suitable ending for her life story. Indeed to continue living would arguably offer a less satisfying ending because her final months would be so painful. Her desire to stay alive is, therefore, quite irrational by this account. In Velleman’s view, it is not a harm for Lousia to die. Her desire to continue living is not rational, and therefore would not have a significant effect on her concluding narrative. For Lousia to pass away now, despite her reluctance, would offer a satisfying conclusion to her life. Her resistance can be explained away by Velleman as an irrational desire to continue living despite the obvious narrative dissonance it would create for her to continue living and suffering. It is a better ending to Lousia’s life story for her to die in the early stages of her illness rather than to experience a painful mental and physical deterioration. Her desire is irrelevant. Is Velleman correct that Louisa, and others like her, are irrationally afraid of a harm that will not befall them? I argue that he is not. Before I explain myself, I must first define what I mean by harm. In my view, the loss of life can be harmful even though it may, on the whole, be beneficial. For example, let us consider a future version of Louisa on her deathbed. She can no longer acquire momentary well-being at all, indeed, it

would be overall better for her to die as she is in an extreme state of suffering and any continuation of her life would only prolong her pain. In this case Louisa would, on the whole, benefit from her death, despite the harm she would accrue by losing her life. So, although her death at this time would be on the whole beneficial, we can still associate a harm with her death because dying necessitates the loss of something valuable. Thus, we place worth on our lives beyond their instrumental value. There are things that reasonably matter to us beyond our accumulation of well-being or the narrative flow of our life story. The fact that the remainder of Louisa’s life will be painful should not dissuade us from believing that it will still be valuable to her even though it will not increase her well-being. Nor should we find the fact that a later death would make less narrative sense for Louisa’s story a reason to consider her irrational. It is perfectly rational for Lousia to want to stay alive, because there is something else that matters to her. We also cannot assume that Louisa desires to continue living simply for the sake of others, but that she believes that death would offer a welcome respite from her pain. Louisa wants to live for her own sake, not just the sake of others. If this is true, then her desire to continue living is neither altruistic nor irrational. We can and should believe that Louisa’s death will cause her to lose something valuable. In order to further illustrate this point, I will draw on the writings of Robert Nozick. Nozick describes a device called

the experience machine. A person who plugs into the experience machine would experience a highly personalized array of moments designed to maximize their wellbeing and curate their perfect life story. If our well-being (additive or narrative) is all that matters to us, then we have a good reason to plug into an experience machine. However, Nozick believes that, if given the option, we would not choose to plug in (Nozick 1974). He argues that “we learn that something matters to us in addition to experience by imagining an experience machine and then realizing we would not use it.”11 Beyond just our experiences, who and what we are is important to us. It matters to us that we be in contact with reality rather than a simulation, that we do certain things rather than just experience them, be a certain kind of person rather than just a pleasure driven blob.

I argue that we can understand Louisa’s desire to remain alive in much the same way we can understand a person’s desire not to enter the experience machine. If all that matters to Louisa is the acquisition of momentary well-being, then her desire to stay alive is irrational, because her cancer prevents this. If all that matters to Louisa is the creation of a satisfying life narrative, then her desire to stay alive is irrational, because an earlier death will provide her with a better ending. However, Louisa’s desire is not irrational. These factors are not

the primary motivations behind her desire to stay alive. For Louisa, and for many people, life is valuable for reasons beyond its ability to accumulate momentary wellbeing or to create a good story. Velleman’s view and the quality of life view are wrong, or at best incomplete. They suppose that life is valuable because of its instrumental value, or its ability to contribute to a goal (a high welfare value or good story). However, this is an incomplete picture of what makes life meaningful to us. Life is valuable for its own sake. Louisa’s life is valuable to her beyond its functional purpose. It cannot, therefore, be irrational for her to want to continue living it, even at a cost. Because her life is meaningful beyond its function, Louisa suffers a harm when she is deprived of it. She is losing something of intrinsic value, and this is bad.

If one holds the desire satisfaction theory of well-being to be true, one might argue that Louisa’s death is bad because her desire to live is unsatisfied. Desire satisfaction theory states that your life goes well when your desires are satisfied. A desire satisfaction theorist might argue that death is bad because it makes a person worse off retroactively. A person’s death will be harmful to them because it will prevent them from fulfilling the desires they held in the period immediately preceding their death. Because their desires were not satisfied, their death caused them harm.

11 Nozick, Robert. “Moral Restraints and the State: The Experience Machine.” Anarchy, State and Utopia, Blackwell, 1974, pp. 42-45.

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Like Velleman, I disagree with this position, although I will reject it for a different reason. Velleman believes that the failure to achieve our previous desires cannot make us worse off retroactively because “desire fulfillment per se is not what’s valuable.”12 If it were true that desire fulfillment was per se valuable, then Louisa’s death is harmful because her desire went unfulfilled. However, Velleman rejects this. Rather, he says that “what’s valuable is living out a story of efforts rewarded rather than efforts wasted.”13

In this view, Louisa’s efforts to continue living will be wasted. They will not make a valuable contribution to her life story. Therefore, her desire to stay alive is not one that contributes positively to the narrative of her life. It would be better, in Velleman’s view, for this desire to go unsatisfied.

Unlike Velleman I argue that Louisa’s death produces a harmful deprivation. However, I reject the desire satisfactionist explanation of this harm and instead assert that it is harmful because it causes her to experience the loss of something intrinsically valuable - her life. This argument requires that all deaths entail harm because the death of any person represents the loss of something of intrinsic value.14 Regardless of quality of life and narrative considerations,

12 Velleman 1991, 56.

13 Velleman 1991, 56.

the loss of any person’s life will be in at least some way harmful. This view is a controversial one and faces objections from a variety of different philosophical theories. One such theory, Epicureanism, would adamantly disagree with my evaluation of the harmfulness of Louisa’s death, and the death of persons in general. Epicureanism states “death is nothing to us;” it does us no harm.15 When we are alive, death cannot harm us because we are not yet dead. When we die, it cannot harm us because we do not exist. Thus, the idea that Louisa’s death, or any death, necessarily involves harm is an absurd one in the Epicurean view. In order to answer this objection, I will distinguish between two different types of harm caused by our death. The Epicureans are quite right to say that a nonexistent entity cannot be harmed by its non-existence. Once we are dead, I concede, we are unharmed. Neither can we be harmed by our deaths while we are still alive, because, as the Epicurean states, we are not yet dead. So what, then do I mean when I say death is harmful to us? I believe that death is harmful to a person because it constitutes the loss of something intrinsically valuable to us. We experience the harm of our death as we undergo the

14 I do not attempt to tackle the implications of this view on animal deaths in this paper, but by my theory it would make sense to argue that the death of any living thing entails harm.

15 Epicurus and Bailey, Cyril. “Letter to Menoeceus.” Epicurus: The Extant Remains, Text, Translation and Notes, Oxford, 1926, pp. 83-92.

process of dying. Depending on the person, this process can take weeks, days, hours, or even seconds. I argue that this process, the act of losing something so valuable to us, whether or not we are conscious of it, is the harm of death.

I will conclude with a brief discussion of physician-assisted suicide.16 Objectors to my view will point out that such a position may justify undue amounts of suffering. It seems implausible, for example, that remaining alive in a state of unending agony could be preferable to dying. If, as my view implies, we think that every death is tragic, it follows that my view should oppose practices such as physician-assistant suicide, which take life prematurely. I argue that we can simultaneously recognize something as a harm while acknowledging that it might be a lesser harm than the alternative. For example, let us consider Alison, another terminally ill patient who is on the verge of death. Unlike Louisa, who is presently suffering but has more and greater suffering to come in her future, Alison is entirely bedridden and in constant, excruciating pain. Unlike Louisa, who continues to see value in her life despite its severely diminished quality, Alison longs for death as an escape from her pain. In order to ease her transition from life to death, Alison’s care team has offered her the option of physician-assisted suicide. Does Alison do herself more harm by exercising this option and prematurely

ending her life than by dying a natural death? I allow that she does not. Regardless of the precise moment of death, Alison’s passing is iminent. Her death will be tragic no matter its timing. Alison’s desire to end her suffering seems to me as reasonable as Louisa’s desire to remain alive despite her suffering. Both are entirely natural responses to a confrontation with the inevitable harm associated with death. In Alison’s case, it may indeed be less harmful for her to die an earlier death because of the extreme pain she is experiencing in life. However, this does not negate the fact that death is still harmful to Alison. Despite its deteriorated state, Alison’s life still possesses intrinsic value, and its loss represents a form of harm, although this harm may be outweighed by physical suffering she experienced while alive. The harm caused by the loss of her life does not invalidate her decision to pursue physician-assisted suicide, for in this case the harm of losing her life is surmounted by the pain she experiences. I assert that we can allow for Alison’s death by physicianassisted suicide while still maintaining that her death involves a harm. Life is valuable. Losing it is bad.

16 Thanks again to Sam Asarnow for inspiring this discussion.

THEORY CATEGORY WINNER

ACTUAL FANTASIES

FRANZ FANON, THE ÁVILA RUNA, AND POSTCOLONIAL DREAMING

To dream is to entertain, if for a moment, impossible reshapings of the waking world. A good dream whisks you away to an improvised realm in which even the firmest laws simply melt into air. And yet our fantastic power of imagination sputters out by the morning. Far-flung travels and grand inventions turn into a breakfast curiosity, at best. Building political momentum through our dreams is out of the question: dream-sharing is unserious work, perhaps a useful plot device, but rarely more than conversational tedium. Does it have to be this way? Might the study of dreams somehow tap our inner imaginative potential and help us survive, live, and flourish?

To pursue this question, I compare two approaches to dream interpretation by dreamers from different contexts marked by racial subjugation. In the writings of Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist and revolutionary, I identify a provocative disruption of the psychoanalytic tradition, for he suggests that dreams do not just express, but also partake in, social reality.

I pursue this thought in the dreaminterpretive system of the Ávila Runa, inhabitants of the Ecuadorian Amazon Forest, which I read through the writings of anthropologist Eduardo Kohn. I contend that the Runa, by thinking of dreams as ontologically real and active, find in dreaming ways to reclaim the autonomy of their cultural world under colonial and racial power in ways that Fanon gestures at but does not take up. Thinking the Runa together with Fanon offers a unique way to understand the latter beyond his anticolonial ambitions and into postcolonial possibilities.

I begin, then, with Fanon’s description of dreaming under colonialism. Although in his book Black Skin, White Masks he speaks specifically of black Antilleans and Malagasies, he believes that his findings can extend to “any race subjected to colonization” (9). For him, the dreams of the colonized black man are troubled by the temptations of a “desire to be white” (190). This “hallucinatory lactification” in dreams is symptomatic of

Emilio Esquivel Márquez, Pomona '

42 TR2

the black man’s effort to have his humanity recognized in a society which only ascribes it to white men (80). Crucially, Fanon does not understand the disorder as the product of a childhood or family schema, as a Freudian psychoanalytic might; rather, he proposes that the patient’s context, “a society which makes his inferiority complex possible, … that draws its strength by maintaining this complex” is the essential problem at hand (80). For this reason, his suggestion is to work with the patient to enable them “to choose action (or passivity) with respect to the real source of conflict, i.e., the social structure” (80). The patient should realize that their dream points to a political context that is larger than themselves and be equipped to rise up against it.

In his later and more overtly political work, The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon describes a dreaming subject who has partially reached these conclusions. This dreamer, aware that “the colonial subject is a man penned in,” experiences “muscular dreams, dreams of action, dreams of aggressive vitality” (15). In these powerful dreams, they live the freedom that is denied to them in waking. However, Fanon envisions dreaming as only temporary respite from colonial violence. Although “the colonized subject frees himself night after night,” such dreams do not translate into decolonization at the societal level (15). They remain passively experienced in the interiority of the dreamer. Fanon does suggest that these dreams might indirectly lead to revolutionary action, since they shape a psychic subject who is “always tensed” and “always ready to change his

role,” and who can take up violence as a tool of liberation (16). But even this analysis relegates the dream to a limp expectancy; dreaming is understood as vestibular to a future action that will carry out its insurgent visions in the daytime. With Walter Benjamin, we might understand Fanon’s hope for the “realization of dream elements in waking” as “the textbook example of dialectical thinking” (162). This dialectical thinking takes dreaming to be transformative, but only to the degree that it can spark a process to be rounded out elsewhere. Colonized dreams, for Fanon, require revolutionary violence to be a real part of liberation. Can we think of dreaming beyond this dialectical thought? We might then be able to envision dreams that survive the colonial from within its own “compartmentalized, Manichaean and petrified” world that harshly forbids transcendence (Fanon, Wretched 15). These dreams would be manifestly unthinkable under the Western paradigm of dream interpretation: since Heraclitus, Western thinkers have understood the dream as an individual hallucination, a “private universe” in the depths of each subject, incapable of spilling out beyond them (Spellberg 69). This viewpoint was further re-inscribed by the psychoanalytic and neuroscientific traditions, which see dreams as detached and passive mentation; Freud called them “completely asocial” (69). Dreaming that is severed from the social world can do nothing to change it. Fanon, I argue, gestures toward an alternate

paradigm of dream interpretation with postcolonial implications in his earlier Black Skin, White Masks, even if he does not chase down its liberatory potential. This is thoroughly understandable, as it is far from what he sets out to do in this text. The chapter of the book in which he discusses dreams is first and foremost a refutation of the theory that a psychic ‘dependency complex’ afflicts colonial subjects. His arguments about patient care, such as the call for “combined action on the individual and the group” (BSWM 80), are part of a shift toward institutional psychotherapy in radical psychiatric practice of his time. That movement was spearheaded by the psychoanalyst Francesc Tosquelles, doctor of the clinic at Saint-Alban, where Fanon would find work soon after writing his book (Robcis 304). It is manifestly unreasonable to expect from Fanon an abrupt epistemic rupture with the psychoanalytic tradition within which he works and writes. But Fanon’s contextual limitations need not be ours. His budding efforts toward an anticolonial understanding of dreams are useful starting points for a push into a postcolonial model of dreaming, beyond what Fanon himself might have imagined. He comes nearest to describing this alternate paradigm in his discussion of the ‘actual fantasies’ that haunt colonial dreams. In this passage, he contests Octave Mannoni’s claim that the dreams of colonized Malagasy people exhibit an intrinsic dependency complex. Fanon argues that in the colonial condition dreams cannot be read as mere expressions of

individual pathologies, since their interior aspect is intruded upon, occupied, by the socius:

Freud’s discoveries are of no use to us whatsoever … The Senegalese soldier’s rifle is not a penis, but a genuine Lebel 1916 model. The black bull and robber are not lolos, “substantial souls,” but genuine irruptions during sleep of actual fantasies [phantasmes réels]. (Fanon, BSWM 84–86)

Fanon insists that the social fact of traumatic colonial violence invalidates Mannoni’s symbolistic interpretations of his students’ dreams. Dreams cannot reveal an interiority when the colonial subject is “overdetermined from the outside” (Fanon 95). In this case, the dreams of the Malagasy students are not messages from the unconscious but rather, in Fanon’s unsettling phrase, ‘actual fantasies.’ Such dreams reject the neat distinction between the private and the social and exist in a kind of limbo: they are not symbols, because they are both real and dreamt, both remembered and imagined; they are, says Stefania Pandolfo, the “uncanny double of the external realities of colonial occupation” (Attia 18:30). These uncanny doubles trouble the easy binaries of Mannoni’s interpretation. The extent to which Fanon’s insight disrupts the traditional paradigm of dream interpretation should not be understated. Fanon claims that the manifest content of the colonial dream cannot be placed under

the sign of an ulterior and latent content to be unearthed through processes like psychoanalysis, neuroscience, or divination. Nor is the manifest content an encoded sending from an abstract Other beyond our reach: for Fanon, ‘actual fantasies’ are firmly grounded in the socius and its violent colonialism. He thus begins to outline an approach to the dream that goes beyond the hermeneutic model characteristic of psychoanalysis and the Western tradition. The rifle is not a symbol or an insinuation; it is the rifle, the social trauma ripping into the individual traum. There is no question of whether this actual fantasy will be ‘fulfilled’ in the future, for its violence is already entirely accomplished. The object seen in the dream is real and the dream is a real encounter with it. Dreams, then, can hardly be said to exist only as passive texts to be deciphered. They emerge as sites of real activity, and their reality demands we take seriously the possibility that dreamt events are as actual and as complete as the events of the daytime. It would no longer be absurd to suggest that dreaming a transformed or liberated world is, on some significant level, to really enact it. We might even envision ways to live out, in dreams, new kinds of autonomy that can coexist with waking colonial subjugation.

However, Fanon shies away from the possibilities of this interstitial space. In his later engagements with dreaming, as we saw, he looks away from the promise of an active dreaming and calls for the dialectical eruption of passive dream images into the waking world. Even in Black Skin, White Masks, he struggles to think of the

liberatory potential of actual fantasies. He describes them as obstacles for anticolonial insurgency, since they shroud and misdirect the aggressive vitality of a colonized subject. On his view, when the interior space of dreams is breached by the socius, colonized subjects are afflicted with neurotic and misguided desires, such as the “unconscious desire to change color” (80). These emergent desires hamper liberation, for subjects exhaust themselves in pursuing them rather than deciding to “choose action” (80) and to direct their efforts against colonial social structures. Here, actual fantasies are a vehicle that installs colonial thinking in the depths of the individual, interrupting their original impulse for anti-colonial resistance. The psychiatrist treats patients by helping them “consciousnessize” this unconscious drive so as to make clear its social origin (80). This can be understood as a hermeneutic process: for Fanon, it is necessary to decode actual fantasies as indications of a colonial violence that cannot be addressed within the dream itself. Despite dream images being real, the way we interact with these in the dream is not. Dreams, therefore, misdirect anti-colonial resistance. They are real images, but illusory and inconsequential when it comes to liberation. Even though Fanon develops a conceptual apparatus that can think dreams as irreducibly real, he returns to a hermeneutic of dreams that disavows the liberatory potential of actual fantasies and treats them only as hurdles to waking flourishing. Fanon’s shortcomings, however, prime us to look elsewhere for kinds

of dreaming that develop beyond the dominant mode of hermeneutics, and which sustain engagement with the uncanny ontology of ‘actual phantasms’ he gestures at. Doing so would allow for a thorough reconsideration of what it means to flourish in a world that disallows humanist transcendence. Importantly, such an outlook would be firmly pluralistic. It is no secret that the nightly register into which we slip in dreams is incomprehensible by the bounds and logics of waking life. Recognizing its legitimate reality throws into question our ability to enforce a “one-world world” based on our waking experience; it demands we rethink our world’s ontological authority to discount others (Escobar 14). When space is allowed for incompatible and yet overlapping ontologies, we become able to study “the relationships between worlds, including the conflicts that result when different ontologies or worlds strive to preserve their existence in their interactions with other worlds” (25). Such a ‘political ontology’ does not seek to maintain the authority of one world over another, but to sustain the fragile balance that allows enmeshed, incommensurable worlds to thrive.

A system of dream interpretation that I believe does justice to this tender plurality is that of the Ávila Runa. A key feature of the Runa’s understanding of dreams, in the words of anthropologist Eduardo Kohn, is that “dreams are not commentaries on the world; they take place in it” (140). This attitude radicalizes Fanon’s critique of Freud: dreams are not simple

texts for hermeneutic interpretation, as Fanon noted, but they also reveal a space that is real and enmeshed with the happenings of diurnal living. For the Runa, when a person falls asleep and dreams, their soul leaves Ávila and travels throughout the Amazon to interact with all kinds of other beings. This travel happens in the real world and has real consequences. For example, “if a hunter dreams of killing a domestic pig, he will kill a peccary in the forest the following day” (141). This is not, as a Western model of dream interpretation would have it, because the dream augurs or foreshadows a future to be played out in the real world. Rather, the soul of the peccary has already been killed by the hunter in the dream, when it manifested as a domestic pig; and it is precisely for this reason that the peccary, rendered ‘soul-blind’ by the fatal wound, will be easily findable in the forest as game the following day. In other words, dreaming activity is real, and it enables a negotiation between souls that is just as real as the bodily interactions possible in waking. This understanding of dreaming is inevitably entangled with the colonial history of the Runa. The perspective that hunters take on when they dream—the one from which a peccary appears as a domestic pig and a jaguar as a dog—is considered to be that of the dominant spirit masters of the forest, who own and herd the animals in it (Kohn 141). The Runa understand these masters to be white, and describe them in terms very similar to the ones they use for the priests, ranchers, and estate owners

who live alongside them in the Amazon (168). The echoes between the colonial world and that of the spirit masters runs deep: the masters live in a subterranean city in the depths of the Amazon named Quito, which shares its name with Ecuador’s wealthy capital (154). When dreamers in Ávila slip into the perspective of these spirit masters, so do they inhabit the gaze of colonial power.

The Runa consider the perspective of spirit masters to be more real than their own. The animals of the forest ‘really are’ in the way that spirit masters perceive them, so that when the Runa dream, they can tap into that superior vantage point on reality. For the Runa to up-frame their perspective in this way has nothing of the ‘hallucinatory lactification’ which Fanon decried in his patients’ dreams: it does not show that the Runa desire, consciously or unconsciously, to become white masters “in any sort of acculturative sense” (215). Rather, they understand dreams as a privileged, powerful form of interaction, and they recognize, as Fanon’s patients do, that under a white supremacist social structure that position of power is occupied by whiteness. Identifying the raced dynamic of the social structure is part of how the Runa navigate it. The Runa can slip in and out of the position of power through dreaming. In this way, although waking racialization denies them the power arrogated to whiteness, they reclaim that power in their dreams and deploy it as a tool for hunting and surviving in the forest. The contrast to Fanon is clear. For Fanon,

white supremacy presents the colonized dreamer with a dilemma: “whiten or perish” (BSWM 80). But the Runa can slip in and out of the power position that Fanon understands as ‘whiteness’ through dreams and their interpretation, overflowing the bounds of raced colonial relations. We might say they replace Fanon’s challenge with a different one: ‘dream or perish.’ Dreams of transformation are not a sign of the hallucinatory “desire to change color,” but the instrument by which the Runa can thrive in the oppressive colonial forest. This flexible access to power is well exemplified by a dream retold by Kohn.

“I was visiting my compadre in Loreto,” [Oswaldo] said, referring to the market town and center of colonist expansion half a day’s walk from Ávila, “when suddenly a menacing policeman appeared. His shirt was covered with clippings from a haircut.” Frightened, Oswaldo awoke and whispered to his wife, “I’ve dreamed badly.” (Kohn 193)

They would later realize that Oswaldo had actually dreamed well. The dream enabled Kohn and Oswaldo to successfully hunt a peccary in the forest later that day. The hair clippings on the policeman were traces of the peccary hauled on Oswaldo’s back; the policeman’s fearsome power was Oswaldo’s own. In other words, Oswaldo, in his dream, became the mighty policeman.

Force and menace is not exclusive to the white colonists of Loreto. Rather, Oswaldo can leverage colonial authority through the soul-traveling that his dreaming affords him. While the dream initially appeared to represent an inaccessible power, it in fact granted him the necessary tools to navigate the forest with ease. He remains subjugated under the racial hierarchy, to the point that the mere sighting of the white policeman intimidates him, but his dreams allow him to reclaim the power that is denied to him in waking. In other words, because of the continuity between dreaming and waking life, the Runa can tap into powers that they lack when awake. The ‘actual fantasies’ of the dream, informed as they might be by Oswaldo’s traumatic experiences with police officers, are not psychic binds. They are the key to his empowerment, which is already effective and achieved in the dream. Dismissing the reality of that dream would restrict Oswaldo to only be his waking self. By embracing this flexible position of power, Oswaldo and the Runa survive the colonial. Note that this access to a privileged perspective on the forest exists even when, and in part because, the Runa identify a hierarchy of power in their social structure. While it may seem surprising that they readily accept that spirit masters are part of a racial system under which the Runa themselves are oppressed, the Runa usurp the authority that whiteness establishes for itself to redirect it to their own survival. From within the asymmetric hierarchies of colonial force, then, the Runa find resources

to develop a mode of living that moves against the grain of that force. This defiance of the colonial order is possible because they, unlike Fanon, insist that dreaming and waking states represent modes of being that do not exhaust each other. We might understand the Runa practice of dream interpretation as part of a postcolonial struggle, insofar as it refuses the order imposed by a colonial order, and “bears to the urge to rebel among many communities faced with the ravages caused by a world that has arrogated to itself the right to be ‘the world’” (Escobar 25). Even if their waking life encounters the colonial world as an all-encompassing force, the Runa move outside this dominant arrogation in their dreams and make clear that power is not the exclusive purview of white colonists. Runa dream interpretation identifies and partakes in an order of power that is even more authoritative than the waking racial hierarchy, even if, at first glance, it seems to only reinforce the dominant hierarchy. Racial subjugation is reinscribed through dream reading as part of a system that is navigable by the Runa, too. This subverted hierarchy sustains the worlds of jaguars, peccaries, dogs, spirits, and the Runa.

In sketching the strategy of colonial survival of the Runa, and its enactments through a particular model of dream interpretation, I do not wish to suggest that we should all think of dreams as the domains of white sylvan spirit masters. Rather, I want to emphasize that the ‘actual fantasies’ of dreaming, those which are

inflected by colonial power and which might seem to reinscribe a waking subjection, need not be seen as ‘intrusions’ that disable the genuine flourishing of the colonized. In Ávila, such dreams, simply by being dreamt, produce ambivalent encounters of the Runa with whiteness and of that whiteness with forest hierarchies of power. Runa dream interpretation usefully demonstrates that postcolonial dreams are thinkable and in fact possible. That Fanon stops his analysis at the ‘actual fantasies’ of dreaming is not to be seen as the end of the story; rather, it is a passing of the baton, a boundary at which to begin imagining ways to survive the colonial that he did not imagine. Runa ontology, of course, cannot be simply translated wholesale onto Fanon’s context. Doing so would involve a significant shift in the epistemic ground of what dreams are and can be. But it is also precisely for that reason that it is a system that can look beyond his limitations. Thinking Runa dream interpretation together with Fanon’s, even if they remain incommensurable, allows us to figure the latter’s ‘actual fantasies’ as the beginning of a dream interpretation that moves outside the dominant hermeneutic paradigm. I charted how Runa dream interpretation is one example of what that otherwise can, and does, look like in a specific life configuration. Runa dreams are foundational to a mode of living that allows for multiple worlds to coexist even under the imposing asymmetries of a racist hierarchy. Dream interpretation is, for the Runa, a pathway to postcolonial survival within a colonial reality. Fanon relegates

dreams to a secondary role, unable to participate in liberation. There is no reason for us to do the same.

Works Cited

Attia, Kader, et al. “Panel: Etinosa Yvonne, Joseph Tonda, and Stefania Pandolfo. ‘Hence, We Dream – Dreams in Capitalist Societies.’” Vimeo, uploaded by Berlin Biennale, 20 July 2022, vimeo.com/731625945. Accessed 24 January 2024.

Benjamin, Walter. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. New York: Schocken Books, 1986.

Escobar, Arturo. Pluriversal Politics Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skins, White Masks. London: Penguin Books, 2021.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 2004.

Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think: Toward and Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.

Robcis, Camille. “Frantz Fanon, Institutional Psychotherapy, and the Decolonization of Psychiatry.” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 81 no. 2, 2020, pp. 303-325.

Spellberg, Matthew. “On Dream Sharing and its Purpose.” Cabinet, no. 67, 2019, pp. 69-76.

IDENTIFICATION AS NEGATION

HEGEL AND LACAN ON UN-ALIENATION

Claire Zhang, Pomona ’27

To understand how alienation comes about, we must ask ourselves what constitutes the conditions under which a person is alienated; perhaps more fundamentally, we must also ask what constitutes a person such that under certain conditions, they can be said to be alienated. Hegel suggests we approach this complex question from the standpoint of self-consciousness. As Kojeve writes in his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, “Man is Self-Consciousness.”1 One’s existence becomes clear to oneself as one becomes conscious of one’s thoughts and feelings and the place one occupies in one’s environment. But most such thoughts and feelings rely on a degree of self-consciousness preceding their formation. For example, to say that I like red, I must first be conscious of myself as the ‘I’ having the preference. Desire is an

exception – when I am hungry and crave food, the physiological reaction of hunger does not rely on an awareness of ‘I’ in order to occur. Quite the contrary, hunger in states of preoccupation brings me back to my bodily presence; it makes me aware of my existence. However, such instinctual desires do not yet distinguish humans from animals; human self-consciousness requires a more specific form of desire. To see this, let us trace the relation between selfconsciousness and desire more precisely. “Self-consciousness is thus certain of itself only by superseding this other that presents itself to self-consciousness as an independent life” (§174).2 The desire for an object is not sufficient for selfconsciousness; the object must be acted upon, specifically, it must be negated. The ‘I’ can be thought as an output from a

1 Alexandre Kojève and Raymond Queneau, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (New York: Basic Books, 1969), 3

2 G. W. F. Hegel, Arnold V. Miller, and J. N. Findlay, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).

function that negates the object of desire. It is only in internalizing the positive content of the object, such as eating an apple, and thereby negating the object’s independence that the ‘I’ comes about. As an output from the function of negation, the nature of the ‘I’s’ existence depends on the nature of the negated object; for example, my consumption of a natural object such as an apple only posits my being a natural object, for that is the nature of the positive content I assimilated from the apple. As such, to qualify for human selfconsciousness, one’s object of desire must be a self-consciousness of the like. And as we have seen self-consciousness as a function of its desire, one’s object of desire is really the desire of a self-consciousness –self-consciousness is desire, for the desire of another self-consciousness.

Insofar as the object of negation is another self-consciousness, the attempt at negation occurs from both sides and rises to a “life-and-death struggle” (§187),3 for the negation of a self-consciousness is essentially its murder. Consider two potential outcomes. First, one selfconsciousness indeed annihilates the other. But as self-consciousness is desire for the desire of another self-consciousness, each self-consciousness is for and dependent on another – a self-consciousness only exists when the other remains. The only feasible outcome then, Hegel suggests, is turning

the life-and-death struggle into a dynamic of subjugation, where one becomes the lord and the other the bondsman. The self-consciousness that overpowers the other that is, the lord, succeeds at being for themselves, for they now rule and direct the desire of the bondsman; the bondsman’s own desires are forced out of themselves so that they become in service of and dependent on the lord’s desires. The bondsman is alienated in sublating their consciousness to the lord’s consciousness. However, this unequal dynamic, as a dynamic between people, is not static but progresses through time and, in fact, progresses to be the reverse of the lord’s desire.

Imagine a spoiled child in a household whose parents thought it was good to try their best to meet even the most unreasonable of the child’s demands. The child feels capable, for their desires are always fulfilled; their self-consciousness directs the parents’ desire, it is a selfconsciousness for itself. One day, however, the parents realize that spoiling the child is bad and decide to stop meeting all the demands of the child. For example, the child wakes them up in the middle of the night demanding a smoothie, and they refuse this time. The child, in this instance, realizes that they are not as capable as they thought they were – they had relied on their parents to get what they wanted

3 G. W. F. Hegel, Arnold V. Miller, and J. N. Findlay, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).

all along. Now that the parents refuse to oblige, the child has no way of making a smoothie for themselves, for they simply do not know how. The parents were always the source of productivity, whereas the child does not possess the skills to produce what they desire, so in the end, the parents have control over whether the child’s wants are fulfilled. As the lord depends on the bondsman’s doing, they realize that their domination does not actually grant them the privilege of a self-consciousness sufficient in itself – even if they supersede the bondsman, it is precisely the bondsman that the lord binds themselves to and depends upon to prove the fact that the lord is for themselves.

This twist is crucial, for it opens the possibility for the dynamic of subjugation to undo itself. In the reworking of the dynamic, Hegel wishes to get to an equilibrium, what he calls mutual recognition. On the one hand, the lord’s fantasy of omnipotence breaks down and they lose the motive to dominate. On the other hand, the bondsman, in working to fulfill the lord’s demands, turns the lord’s object of desire, the satisfaction of which fleets due to the lord’s lack of self-sustenance in relentless consumption, into a permanent reference for their own existence – “Work […] is desire held in check, fleetingness staved off” (§195).4 Work reminds the bondsman that they exist in the structure of “being-for-

self,” that there is an entity to be satisfied by their work, but also, importantly, that there is a concrete anchor for their being. Whereas desire simply negates the object to confirm consciousness, work, in order to engage with the object, has to first recognize the object’s existence as an independent being. With this early prototype of recognition, and in the progression of work that is, in negating the lord’s object of desire, the bondsman comes to realize their own independence, and that their “being-for-self” type of existence is really for themselves. They realize that it is they who have the decisive and independent power to produce that the lord relies upon – they had been alienated by imposing on themselves the lord’s desires. The dynamic progresses into a dissolution of the bondsman’s servitude and the lord’s domination thus, and such a dynamic between two self-consciousness in which no one is destroyed nor dominated is mutual recognition.

Lacan, too, holds that “man’s desire is the desire of the Other,” but partly because of this statement, he denies the possibility of a mutual, unalienating reconciliation we have seen in Hegel. There is a phase in child development, what Lacan calls the mirror stage, where an infant sees its reflection in the mirror and identifies it to represent itself. Upon this identification, the infant forms a conception of the symbolic ‘I.’ But this ‘I’ is illusory, for it results from a mismatch – a

4 G. W. F. Hegel, Arnold V. Miller, and J. N. Findlay, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).

misrecognition of the specular image as the subject itself. Think about the mismatch this way: When one attempts to define oneself, it is often easier to start from an image than select at once from an overwhelming amount of information on one’s identity. One may look into the mirror and describe one’s appearance; at some point, one would have exhausted things to say. The relatively exhaustive nature of verbalizing one’s visual features gives us a hint to the limit of using an image to define oneself – it seems infeasible to truly define a person with finite terms. Whatever is perceived by the senses only expresses one side of a whole. But the specular image is temptingly deceptive. As it is an image, it appears to be a lasting, fully visible, and readily graspable unity; it seems to be self-sufficient and represents a whole in the specular world. The infant, on the other hand, experiences frustration having to rely on more mature others to take care of its needs due to its physical limitations and vulnerability. In desperation to compensate for this friction, the infant falls for the image’s promise of unity and assumes it to signify itself.

This false image, Lacan suggests, “will only asymptotically approach the subject’s becoming […] no matter how successful the dialectical syntheses by which he must resolve.”5 This might seem to be a refutation of the Hegelian dialectic against alienation, that we can

only asymptotically approach and never fully reach mutual recognition, but Lacan’s argument is more fundamental than this. The problem of alienation in the mirror stage is the misrecognition itself and the desire towards which it orients the subject. The infant misrecognizing the specular image as itself is not the final stage of identification but an ongoing process that propels future false beliefs. Because of the establishment of an integrated “Ideal-I” in the misrecognition, the infant comes to localize its anticipation about maturation in this false ‘I’ of the specular. “The subject caught up in the lure of spatial identification turns out fantasies that proceed from a fragmented image of the body to what I will call an “orthopedic” form of its totality.”6 In expecting its current physical vulnerability to mature into self-sufficiency, the infant develops the ego. What distinguishes the ego from the Ideal-I? We see the Ideal-I in the infant’s reflection as still outside the infant, it is an ‘ideal,’ not a real; the infant’s mapping of the Ideal-I onto itself remains a mapping with two separate tokens. What constitutes the infant’s leap into alienation is the ego’s confounding nature. The ego is no longer a mapping but a desire for embodiment – by establishing the ego, the infant anticipates and desires to become the Ideal-I in the mirror, thereby unconsciously allowing its interiority to be fully permeated by the exteriority of the specular ideal and

5 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, I-II. (Paris: Editions Du Seuil, 1971), 76.

6 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, I-II. (Paris: Editions Du Seuil, 1971), 76.

takes such exteriority to be itself at its fullest potential. Importantly, because the ego is an “agency,” a dynamic factor in the process of anticipating maturation, it is resistant to current discrepancies between the infant and the Ideal-I and, therefore, identifies the specular other with the infant with more cohesion. In developing the Ideal-I, the infant desires the other, but in developing the ego, the infant desires itself in and as the other. A part of this is intuitive, for when we say we desire an object, what we really desire is the ‘me’ in relation to possessing the object – I want these shoes because they are comfortable to me and look good on me. But what exactly posits me to the desire to be as the other?

This question takes us to our predicament – no form of ‘I’ can arise without identification, even if identification is, really, misidentification. We cannot define ourselves without relying on an image from the senses, such as the one in the mirror. The specular image is not the only example. Growing up, I was often anxious about not being able to grasp just what exactly I am and what I will become, so I looked for archetypes in fiction to identify with and took many personality tests to put myself inside one of the few ‘categories of people.’ None of these archetypes is me; rather, they were others that I identified with in grappling to gain a stable understanding of myself. To attempt to name my identity, I sought to be others.

Another part of the story is that I wanted to be certain others because they did not seem to have my problems, and hence, becoming them appears to be a telos upon the fulfillment of which I will be free from all my fear and anxiety about lack. As I so identified with them and anticipated becoming them as time passed, the anxiety did not fade. For one, I realized that my desire to become another person had been based on an idealization that hid the fact that they, too, experience a sense of lack and desire what they lack. In coming close to how they appeared to me, I no longer desired to be them but desired what they lacked and hence desired. Yet, with a deeper dive into the nature of my desire, I discovered that I longed for even more – I longed for a certain transcendence of space and time, for example, so that I could have known a friend much earlier and have given them a hug when they needed it as a young child, and maybe even so that I could experience their lives as themselves, as others around them, and many other lives distinct from my own. This is a web of the desire of many others known or unknown to me, an omnipotent desire for the desire of all others in the attempt, however futile, to complete myself by being one with the world, the desire of the Other.

In this process of misidentification, one inevitably becomes alienated. But Lacan insists that it does not mean “that the subject is condemned to seeing himself

emerge, in initio, only in the field of the Other.”7 The resolution is what he calls separation. In separation, the subject realizes lack as its common denominator with the Other, and in identifying with the lack in the Other, encounters their own desire. This conversion is crucial because it allows the subject to finally assume its own position in the world.

Lacan’s departure from Hegel is marked by their differing standpoint on whether ‘undoing’ can be an efficacious combat against alienation. Hegel’s mutual recognition relies on literally undoing alienation – the lord withdraws from dominating and the bondsman propels themselves out of subjugation in each of their arrival at an awareness. They exit their original non-self-sustaining dynamic in a motion of “reversal;” they break free from a previous state of fixation. The Lacanian worry about this, I imagine, is that the lordand-bondsman dynamic is an unremovable building block that constitutes one’s entire identification process: insofar as one has an identity, one will always be in a kind of lord-bondsman relationship. The Hegelian self-consciousness always had a positional relation to another self-consciousness. It is not simply that one cannot exist without the existence of another, but that one can only exist when it occupies a particular place in relation to the other. This positional necessity, when considered alongside the

Hegelian claim that desire is negation and thereby self-consciousness is the negation of another self-consciousness, illuminates a larger loophole in Hegel’s argument. Self-consciousness needs sustenance, it is maintained by an ongoing process of negating its objects of desire. As such, one self-consciousness needs another selfconsciousness at all times; as such, the lord needs the bondsman to be constantly working for the lord’s desire. This demonstrates that identities such as a lord consciousness are nothing but phantoms without the unchanging underpinning of the relational structures they are a part of. Again, “Self-consciousness is thus certain of itself only by superseding this other that presents itself to self-consciousness as an independent life” (§174). Therefore, to truly withdraw from dominating, the lord-consciousness not only gets rid of its identity as the lord but loses its selfconsciousness altogether.

Hegelian mutual recognition would have already failed here, for in the dialectical reversal of domination, no selfconsciousness remains. Can the bondsman consciousness survive Hegel’s undoing? As it is capable of productivity, the bondsman is indeed more self-sufficient than the lord. In mutual recognition, we wish for the bondsman consciousness to free itself from the lord’s desire and instead desire for itself. But here we run into a

7 Lacan, Jacques. Seminar XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998. 210.

problem: Regardless of the bondsman’s self-sufficiency, we hold the Hegelian point that a self-consciousness must coexist with another self-consciousness. The question, then, is what is the nature of this self-consciousness with which the bondsman consciousness coexists? It must not be a lord consciousness, for that would force the bondsman back into a place of alienating subjugation. However, if it is also a bondsman consciousness, it would presume that there is a lord consciousness, for a bondsman is only a bondsman insofar as it is in relation to a lord. As we have seen, a lord consciousness cannot undo its domination to escape non-self-sufficiency, so the bondsman in necessarily existing with the lord cannot escape its state of alienation either.

This generalizes into a stronger Lacanian point, that any form of undoing other than identification itself risks undoing the identification that formed the self-consciousness, and therefore, also risks undoing the self-consciousness. The misrecognition of the specular image as ‘I’ in the mirror stage cannot simply be realized as false and discarded, for then the subject would still be in need of an image to identify with; even if the lord or bondsman consciousness is freed from its previous dynamic of domination, it would be searching for a new position to occupy and base its identity upon. The progress in a

Hegelian timeline, to Lacan, is not elevating but leads us back to where we began. This is what Slavoj Zizek calls “retroactive reversal,”8 where the Hegelian dialectic arrives at synthesis not by a leap forward, but by sublating the illusion that it was not already reached. Yet, even if sublation is the way to synthesis, there appears to be a criterion for its success that Hegelian dialectics cannot meet. Lacan seems to buy into misidentification not in the hope of arriving at a dialectical contradiction and elevating the subject to the truth above this contradiction but seeing that the boundary line between two sides of a Hegelian dialectic is not exactly a line, but an absolute negative space of lack, and this is not the place of ideal truths reassuring us of our capacity for reconciliation but a reminder of the unerasable nature of lack that constitutes the human experience. Undoing and negating as reconciliation is an optimistic assumption because it overlooks a dimension that defies the law of dialectic in the spatial structure of contradictions – the dimension of lack. While presence, when negated, becomes absence, lack cannot be negated into positive content. As such, domination, when negated, does not bring us to a symmetrical state of mutual recognition but rather to the very initial stage of human consciousness, and we would have to go over everything again ad infinitum. Since lack lies outside

8 Slavoj Zizek, “Slavoj Zizek - Lacan: At What Point Is He Hegelian?,” www.lacan.com, accessed January 12, 2025, https://www.lacan.com/zizlacan1.htm.

the domain of dialectics, we cannot use dialectics to resolve it, nor does it give rise to higher meanings through the usual dialectical generation of truth. Because Hegelian dialectics is not aware of this lack, it can never reach an unalienated identity. Nevertheless, even though as such Hegelian dialectics remains incomplete and irreconcilable, it does not predetermine the impossibility of un-alienation.

By layering a new (mis)identification on top of every identification realized to be a mistake, I think the Lacanian hope is that one eventually learns that identification as a scheme collapses in its attempt to actualize un-alienation. There is no identity through obtaining which one reconciles one’s state of alienation, but one has to realize this by taking identifications all the way to truly move forward instead of falling into the dialectical abyss. Consider a friend who compulsively runs into toxic relationships one after another. The Hegelian advice would be that, instead of dissuading them by listing out the cons of the relationship, which simply would not work because a relationship that has been allowed to get this bad is usually viewed by the friend as necessary for their survival, and death, literal or metaphorical, is worse than suffering in a relationship, we let the friend carry on with their relationships until the suffering involved escalate to a deathly point. There, our friend has no choice but to decide between death and getting out of the relationship. In this process, Hegel hopes that the friend will recognize their

mistake in thinking relationships can cure their lives and they cannot survive without their partner, however toxic they are, and thus stop the fixation on relationships. Lacan would agree with Hegel that you cannot dissuade the friend by telling them how bad the relationship is, but the concern for him is that upon breaking the fixation on relationships, the friend would still be in need of a holder for their identity and thus begin a new commitment. Such a commitment need not be inherently bad; it could be work, hobbies, or religious beliefs, but in new commitments, or in entering into new relationships, the friend maintains the same toxic pattern of alienation. In a sense, Lacan begins where Hegel ends. It is not the dialectics but the realization of the incompleteness of the dialectics that propel us to non-alienation – the realization that no identity can ever be ‘I’ and perhaps there was never an ‘I’ to begin with. The hope to be a particular ‘I’ is already alienating, for the ‘I’ is always already an ‘Ideal-I,’ that is, an alluring but deceptive promise of unity, a false image. What the friend should really do is not just step out of the cycle of toxic relationships but cease looking up at things in life as telos altogether, and instead look inward, or perhaps rather, not look at all, for it seems that whenever we look, we are looking for a whole.

NIETZSCHE'S GRAMMATICAL SEDUCTION

(RE)READING NIETZSCHE AND THE FEMININE

Sydney Armstrong, Pitzer ’25

“The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.”1

Wallace Stevens employs his own grammatical seduction to sweeten the rim of an idea less digestible than it seems. It certainly sounds beautiful to willingly believe in a fiction, knowing that it is a fiction, there being nothing else - already I am tempted to get lost in the rhythm of the sentence. But this is easier said than done. Won’t this calculated dance of selfdeception slacken my conviction in the belief? Won’t I have to act in accordance with the fiction, whose effects exerts their influence in real life? How can I possibly live in a state of controlled stereoscopy without letting two perspectives converge into one?

Surely my eyes will cross; my vision will blur. Must I act as my own watchman, forever on the lookout for signs of dogmatism, dutifully slapping myself on the wrist when fiction begins to slide into faith? But even a watchman blinks.

Perhaps this is where Nietzsche leaves us, floating precariously in that vast and endless sea of interpretations without a boat or a map. And even amidst its open expanse, we remain tethered to the obstinate God of grammar, whose anchor we cannot seem to loose. Of this paradoxical conclusion, Alexander Nehamas writes, “it is not clear how one can argue for a position, as Nietzsche often clearly wants to do, and yet not suggest that this position is, to use the only possible term in this context, true”; tasking himself with answering the question: “Is Nietzsche, then, trapped in an impasse

1 Stevens, Wallace, and Milton J. Bates. Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose. Faber and Faber, 1990, p. 101

60 TR2

of his own creation?”.2 Nehamas ostensibly proceeds to rescue Nietzsche from his own internal contradictions by arguing that Nietzsche inscribes his subjectivity into the text through his style, which serves “to make his presence as an individual author unforgettable to his readers”3. Yet any rescue mission requires an unimplicated observer to throw down the rope, unlatch the lock. If one finds oneself ensnared in the trap along with Nietzsche, matters become more difficult.

The paradoxical position in which one must believe a fiction whilst knowing that it is only a fiction is underscored by Nietzsche’s even more foreboding blow to certain knowledge; that the only medium we have to express it, or even think of it, itself “behaves as an ‘unconscious tyrant’ over the speaker and writer”4. In an inversion of the presiding causal scheme, for Nietzsche, words do not pin down a preexisting concept or object but create it through their utterance, impel us to “see everywhere deed and doer…projects its belief in the ego-substance onto all things –only thus does it create the concept ‘thing’!”

5. Positing a doer behind the deed masks the performative operation of language by fabricating an illusory subject to function as the deed’s anchoring cause, though “the doer is merely a fiction added to the deed - the deed is everything”6. The spurious causality of this subject-predicate structure both inflates the speaker’s sense of their own agentic deployment of words, and shatters it by cementing an ineradicable ‘I’ at the center of every utterance. An irresistible seductress, language’s impositions extend beyond syntax and into the materiality of words themselves, always accompanied by an unruly flock of rhymes, echoes, associations, unconscious acts of plagiarism and countless other unintended effects. Dethroned from the position of originary author, the speaker or writer becomes a hollow receptacle to be spoken through by the handed-down cadences of others. For Nietzsche, the “seduction of language” 7 poses a potent threat to the philosopher’s flight from mediation, and saddles every subject with a maddening passivity. Grammatical seduction is a site of consternation in Nietzsche’s work, “posed

2 Nehamas, Alexander. Nietzsche, Life as Literature. United Kingdom: Harvard University Press, 1985.

3 Nehamas, Alexander. Nietzsche, Life as Literature. United Kingdom: Harvard University Press, 1985.

4 Riley, Denise. The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony. Stanford University Press, 2000, p. 41

5 Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale, Penguin, 1971, p. 46

6 Nietzsche, Friedrich, and Walter Kauffman. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Vintage Books, 1989, p. 51

7 Nietzsche, Friedrich, and Walter Kauffman. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Vintage Books, 1989, p. 50

with tantalizing ambiguity, indeed like sexual seduction itself, between being active and being passive” and it is no coincidence that “where there is bewitchment and mazy error, then there are, as if mechanically wheeled on, female bodies” 8. Throughout Nietzsche’s work, woman becomes a shapeshifting vessel for language in a myriad of charged permutations: the whipcracking governess, the wily seductress, the crone who lifts her skirt to peals of laughter. His own attitude towards language’s impositions wavers from begrudging acquiescence to indignant repudiation — though, since language’s mode is not erotic but seductive, he has no choice but to submit.

Still, linguistic seduction is rarely unaccompanied by a curt remark of protest: “I shall repeat a hundred times; we really ought to free ourselves from the seduction of words!”9 (BGE 149), or a contemptuous stab at language itself: “‘‘Reason’ in language: oh what a deceitful old woman! I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar…”10. Upon a closer look, these disparagements, and indeed the feminized language of seduction itself, indicate a limit where Nietzsche ought to go further but turns back instead. The fictitious crones and governesses who bear the brunt of his fury are themselves retrospectively

erected as the ‘doers’ behind deeds which, in fact, have no isolable agent. There is no one else to be angry at; no calculated, domineering figure of language stuffing words into mouths like a puppeteer. Even as Nietzsche presents the seduction of language as imposed upon the subject from some external entity, he must reach out for a metaphor; there being nothing else. If language has the performative capacity to shape the way we think, if there truly is no doer behind the deed, then words can never transparently represent. Nietzsche’s slip, in fact, serves to emphasize the radicality of his own insight. It also means that there is no stepping out of language to survey its working from above. Nietzsche himself cannot speak about language, from any position other than within it.

Nor can any speaker or writer. How is it possible, under these conditions, to say anything at all about Nietzsche? About implies a critical distance, an extrinsic relation to the medium and to the text. It also implies an assertion. A reader of Nietzsche likely comes away with a hesitancy to assert: she knows that her claim will bear the trace of an “unconscious memoir”, that she must somehow convey its status as a willingly-believed-fiction within that assertive claim, and that the medium she must use to express it exerts more

8 Riley, Denise. The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony. Stanford University Press, 2000, p. 41

9 Nietzsche, Friedrich, and Walter Kauffman. Beyond Good and Evil . Random House, 1966, p. 149

10 Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale, Penguin, 1971, 45.

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control over her than she does over it. She instinctively recoils at the requisite phrase: “In this essay, I argue” – how presumptuous, how intractably ugly it sounds! But if she attempts to wholly circumvent abouts, she will end up with no essay at all. So long as the grammatical God cannot be killed, the speaker who attempts to renounce her faith is condemned either to the jumbled syntax of psychosis, or to complete and utter silence. Barthes managed to alleviate the hesitancy to assert by positioning the writer as ventriloquist’s doll; “reminding himself that it is language that which is assertive, not he” 11, for it would be an “absurd remedy…to add to each sentence some little phrase of uncertainty, as if anything that came out of language could make language tremble”. Still, a marked unease accompanies this involuntary passivity. Words exit the speaker’s sphere of influence as soon as they tumble out of the mouth or imprint on the page, set free to disperse in any number of unwanted directions, latching onto unintended interpretations. Often, their meaning is discerned only in retrospect. Under Nietzsche’s model of language, saying anything at all incurs the latent threat of misunderstanding, or being misunderstood. A ‘phrase of uncertainty’, if impractical, tacitly preserves a modicum of control.

We find no such uncertainty in

Nietzsche’s writing, rather the oppositeas Nehamas points out, if there is any tonal commonality to Nietzsche’s multifarious styles, it is hyperbole. For all his talk of grammatical seduction, Nietzsche rarely affixes a qualifier to his sentences to remind the reader of their contingency: what Denise Riley would call a “frank self-admission”12, whose self-disclosure is a claim to an exempting self-knowledge. A frank selfadmission reminds us who is holding the reins; that the author is capable of twisting the truth, withholding it, or saying it in such a manner that only he knows what he means. It dutifully checks a box, then proceeds as if box-checking is a sufficient solution. When I utter a self-admission, I mark the limits of my knowledge by claiming to know what I do not. Belying its ostensible frankness, my self-admission inadvertently solicits a response from its listener. Like a tearful confession, a self-deprecation, or an ‘I love you’, it pleads for absolution, or at least an acknowledgment of complicity. Frank selfadmissions are so ubiquitous in the prefaces of academic books (“of course, this account is not comprehensive…”) that they barely register with the reader; forgotten by the time she turns the page. Those who publish on Nietzsche are obliged to include a second self-admission; a perfunctory acknowledgment of his abhorrent comments on women, an expression of

11 Barthes, Roland. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1977, p. 48

12 Riley, Denise. The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony. Stanford University Press, 2000, p. 100

their revulsion toward these comments, making clear that their engagement is not a wholehearted endorsement, followed by an insistence that, despite these regrettable features of the text, Nietzsche’s work can still be salvaged. One gets the feeling that they would prefer to excise these comments from the text altogether, if only it weren’t for that irksome stamp of publication; Rüdiger Bittner’s edition of Nietzsche’s unpublished notebooks does just this, drawing a clean divide between the fragments worthy of “philosophical import”13 and those which “offer no enlightenment.” Constructing a unified body of work by way of excision conveniently alleviates our hesitancy to speak about it, since one of Nietzsche’s most glaring self-contradictions no longer demands to be corralled into coherence. Such selfadmissions reinscribe the boundaries of the text by casting out paradoxes; dismissing what’s deemed irrelevant; making a clear

demarcation between Nietzsche and the writer. Unabated by hesitancy, they engage with the text through a logic of mastery, permitted to make claims about it as a unified whole - though this unity has only been created through excision. Yet Nietzsche’s woman refuses to be excised from the text. Alongside or even within Nietzsche’s snide remarks on her vanity, her frailty, or her subjugation to nature, she emerges, again and again, to satirize or subvert the sterile philosopher’s presumptions. She holds a permanent residence on the page, never absent for more than a few dozen fragments. Even when she is gone, her presence hums in the margins. Nietzsche’s deployment of the feminine is consistent only insofar as it is inconsistent: at once, woman is “indescribably more evil than man”14 and “gentler, more patient, more timid”15; she is “more ‘natural’ than man” 16and more artificial; she “inspires respect”17 and incites “pity”18. Her incarnations span

13 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, and Kate Sturge. Writings from the Late Notebooks. Translated by Rüdiger Bittner, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. xv

14 Nietzsche, Friedrich, and Walter Kauffman. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Vintage Books, 1989, p. 282

15 Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Translated by Josefine Nauckhoff, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 76

16 Nietzsche, Friedrich, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 163

17 Ibid. p. 160

18 Ibid. p. 169

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from language19 to truth20 to life itself 21 . Zarathustra declares that “woman is not capable of friendship: women are still cats and birds22”, yet our last glimpse of the prophet catches him flanked by a lion and a dove, his own favored companions. There is no such thing as “woman” in Nietzsche’s work, for this uncategorizable excess is her only consistent quality.

Nietzsche would, without a doubt, vehemently disagree with this essay’s interpretations. Even as I write, he perches on my shoulder and periodically spits out insults; if I look back on a sentence with satisfaction, he recites a caustic jab at the “literary woman”23:“je me verrai, je me lirai, je m’extasierai et je dirai: Possible, que j’aie eu tant d’esprit?”24 But I want to suggest that there is something distinctly Nietzschean in the act of retorting back. An engagement with Nietzsche’s work that attempts to reach into the text and pull out a firm and compact meaning, washing its hands of the molten excess that

eludes its reach, would certainly negate the author’s own injunction to “beware of systematizers”, who “practice a kind of playacting in as much as they want to fill out a system and round off its horizon”25. Still, the issue isn’t this commentators disobedience, for this too belies the Nietzschean directive to resist dogmatic faith in his own work. My concern is with what lies beyond the circumscribed horizon. Following Derrida, I read Nietzsche against himself in an attempt to arrive at a more satisfying answer to the paradox of language than those offered by Stevens and Nehamas; one that truly allows us to affirm without reservation.

Confronting Nietzsche’s infamously vexed relationship to the feminine resists the temptation towards hesitancy and excision that inevitably accompanies an approach to the text which attempts to retain mastery over language and over its subject. Though Nietzsche’s writings on women are easily glossed over, they also contain some of his most fruitful ideas on the matter. To affirm

19 Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale, Penguin, 1971, p. 45

20 Nietzsche, Friedrich, and Walter Kauffman. Beyond Good and Evil . Random House, 1966, p 19

21 Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Translated by Josefine Nauckhoff, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 193

22 Nietzsche, Frederich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by R.J Hollingdale, Penguin Books, 1969, p.83

23 Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale, Penguin, 1971, p. 88

24 “I shall look at myself, I shall read myself, I shall delight myself and I shall say: Can I really have had so much wit?”

25 Nietzsche, Friedrich. Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. Edited by Maudemarie Clark. Translated by Brian Leiter, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 158

without reservation, we must find a way to look Nietzsche’s woman in the eye, and tell her ‘Yes’.

Where Walter Kaufmann and Rüdiger Bittner brush her off with a frank self-admission, and Heidegger lets her disappear into a gulf of silence, Jacques Derrida asks: “Must not these apparently feminist propositions be reconciled with the overwhelming corpus of Nietzsche’s venomous opposition?26. Derrida’s approach makes no attempt at coherence, which flattens disjunction into a singular whole, or a binary opposition. He aims instead at “congruence”, such that Nietzsche’s “horde of mothers, daughters, sisters, old maids, wives, governesses, prostitutes, virgins, grandmothers, big and little girls”27 are held together in a jostling, discordant family, and permitted to remain paradoxical. To insist otherwise, for Derrida, would bely Nietzsche’s own insight that truth is itself a paradox; an “untruth of truth” for which “woman is but one name.”

The “first psychologist of the eternally feminine”28, for all his spiteful chauvinism, somehow gleaned that:

“old women in their most secret heart of hearts are more sceptical than all men: they believe the superficiality of existence to be its essence, and all virtue and depth to them is merely a veil over this ‘truth’, the very desirable veil over a pudendum.”29

Having aged out of desirability, fertility, and beauty, the crone finds herself caged within a vacant category, emptied of the qualities that once constituted its meaning. She is, at once, tied to a role that she is no longer permitted to occupy, and told that it is inherently linked to her identity. With age comes the recognition that these ‘feminine’ qualities are contingent and fleeting, yet only they furnish the ostensibly eternal, fixed concept of ‘woman’. The old woman’s all-consuming skepticism derives from the fact that she is forced to tolerate this paradox, where others disavow it.

Playing the systematizer, Derrida briefly outlines three categories of women as they appear in Nietzsche’s work: the woman “condemned as…figure or power of lying”, the woman “condemned as figure of power or truth”, and the woman

26 Derrida, Jacques. Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles. Translated by Barbara Harlow and Stefano Agosti, The University of Chicago Press, 2017, p. 57

27 Derrida, Jacques. Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, p. 103

28 Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, 281.

29 Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil, 72.

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“beyond this double negation, affirmed as the affirmative, dissimulating, artistic, Dionysiac…”30. Yet he does so only to demonstrate the futility of such a task. The truth of ‘woman’ does not exist, for she cannot be pinned down as a stable identity any more than she can be slotted into three categories within Nietzsche’s work.

‘Woman’, for Derrida, does not name a positive identity within the symbolic field, but the destabilizing excess which must be radically excluded from the symbolic as the condition of possibility for its internal coherence:

“Because, indeed, if woman is truth, she at least knows that there is no truth, that truth has no place here, and that no one has a place for truth. And she is woman precisely because she herself does not believe in truth itself, because she does not believe in what she is, in what she is believed to be, in what she thus is not.”31

If truth is a woman, this is because truth takes the form of a veil; of supplementing signifiers and displacements; of smoke and mirrors. To ‘believe in what she is’ would be to believe in a fiction

30 Derrida, Spurs.

imposed upon her by a masculine order that is itself fictitious: “woman - a non–identity, a non-figure, a simulacrum – is distance’s very chasm, the out-distancing of distance, the intervals cadence, distance itself, if we could say such a thing, distance itself”32 The appearance of positive identity is made possible by the distance of the veil, thus, this distance is not a mere obstacle or vehicle. Rather, it is productive; it carries a trace of difference which always haunts, as the condition of possibility for any positive identity. The deferral of the absence of a pure present signified term, through the supplementary play of signifiers, always hinting at a meaning beyond them, just around the corner, produces the fantasy of presence. Yet this deferral is all there is; it will never arrive.

There is no truth outside of the text, no final transcendental signified anchoring the play of signifiers. Nietzsche knows this: “for Nietzsche, truth is like a woman. It resembles that movement of feminine modesty”33. Distance produces the appearance of it, rather than being an obstacle to it. Yet Nietzsche warns us to “keep our distance from these multifarious veils and their shadowy dreams of death”, from seeking to uncover the veil, for despite its temptation, it forbodes death.

31 Derrida, Jacques. Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles. Translated by Barbara Harlow and Stefano Agosti, The University of Chicago Press, 2017, p. 53

32 Ibid., 49.

33 Ibid., 51.

For Derrida, “the feminine distance abstracts truth from itself in a suspension of the relation with castration”34. Derrida is quick to note that this suspension is quite distinct from a simple disproval. The whole opposition misses the point that pleasure is not in presence, but in deferred absence, in play. The absence of presence/the lack of a centering principle is the condition of possibility for play. Woman takes joy in this lack. Woman knows this deferral, the supplementing chain of metaphors, keeping one ever at a distance from the pure signifier that these metaphors are supposed to help one express (but which, in fact, doesn’t exist) is wonderfully productive. Woman is that haunting excess of sliding signifiers, giving the lie to representationalist fantasies: “Woman (truth) will not be pinned down. In truth, woman, truth, will not be pinned down. That which will not be pinned down by truth is, in truth - feminine” 35 . If woman is one name for the “untruth of truth”, style is another. Both the feminine and the aesthetic hover in the realm of superficiality and artifice; both have been excised from the bounds of discourse in service of mastery. The customary sterility of philosophical writing, uniform in its withering clarity, attempts to circumvent mediation by encompassing no style at all (of course, sterility is a style as well, if not particularly stylish). Even the “stiff and decorous Tartufferry of the old

34 Ibid., 59

35 Ibid., 55

Kant as he lures us on the dialectical bypaths that lead to his ‘categorical imperative’ really lead astray and seduce”36 ; a notably odd formulation, since Kant seems an unlikely seducer, and because it appears that seduction need not be aesthetically appealing to exert influence over its victim. Kant’s gridlike topology seems to draw the reader through its argument with the mechanical pull of a motorized vehicle, programmed by the omnipresent seductions of grammar even as it plods toward unmediated truths. Yet the fantasy of an absolute truth behind the veil is made possible only by shutting one’s eyes to the mediations of style and of language. Nietzsche, in part, seems to celebrate its absence. Free invention and creativity are enabled when this drive to metaphor, the inescapable fact of interpretation, is embraced rather than retreated from:

“The correct perception–which would mean the full and adequate expression of an object –is something contradictory and impossible; for between two absolutely different spheres, such as subject and object are, there is no causality, no correctness, no expression, but at most an aesthetic way of relating, by which I mean an allusive transference, a stammering translation into

36 Nietzsche, Friedrich, and Walter Kauffman. Beyond Good and Evil . Random House, 1966, p. 13

a quite different language. For which purpose a middle sphere and mediating force is certainly required which can freely invest and freely create poetry.”37

It seems that in some ways, Nietzsche is not simply disappointed, but happy that “human beings themselves have an unconquerable urge to let themselves be deceived”. Contrary, perhaps, to Nehamas’s model (where truth is still mistakenly figured on the model of a transcendent standard which he thinks Nietzsche is stuck appealing to), for Nietzsche, truth itself is organized around the logic of metaphor, in a permanent process of translation/ interpretation - which Derrida embraces as a good thing. What “count[s] as “truth” are sedimented conventions, congealed into abstractions, and the degree to which one’s own use of metaphor aligns with these laws is the degree to which they are deemed true. These truths operate like Procreastean frames, subjects humans to “the rule of abstractions; they no longer tolerate being swept away by sudden impression and sensuous perceptions”. Style, Derrida tells us, operates to protect the fantasy that, behind these metaphors, this style hides a thing-in-itself. It recoils from the “force” of style”, acting as a “spur”, and uses style as a “veil”. Yet if it protects not from presence but a blinding absence,

deferring it to give the fantasy of a presence behind the veil, then the veil functions as a productive trace. Style follows the logic of a trace. An “apotropaic” anxiety wards off this fear of such an encounter with absence, which threatens annihilation, animates a “regul[ation]” of “the play of the sails” (41), but Nietzsche shows us what this regulation looks like - the demand that truth conceals its metaphoric operation. This regulation is, in other words, the expulsion of women. In Cixous’ terms, that threatening excess, the logic of play, which exposes the reality that truth inescapably operates through the logic of metaphor (displacement - veils only ever hint at something behind them), the way that words slip into each other according to logics dictated by the materiality of the signifier as opposed to some fantasy of representationalism: “It is not the figure of the woman precisely because we shall bear witness here to her abduction, because the question of the figure is at once opened and closed by what is called woman” (41), like, as Nietzsche shows, with any thing in itself, no direct access to woman. Instead, the veil conceals no woman behind it, but also another : the question is closed because of the “Regulation of sails”: the demand we treat these abstracts as truth, deviation, and play as falsehoods, radically excludes women, in Cixous’ sense, as its condition of possibility.

37 Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense.” In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism: Second Edition, edited by Vincent B. Leitch. W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. https://books. google.com?id=akU2PwAACAAJ. , 758

While the philosopher regards the veil as an obstruction, nettlesome but ultimately removable, Nietzsche’s woman adorns herself with the veil whilst knowing that no hidden truth lies beneath it; simultaneously creating and imploding the illusion. For Stevens and Nehamas, Nietzsche’s ideal reader comes away with a kind of double vision: the falsity of the veil alongside a kind of provisional conviction in the fantasy erected behind it. Yet the duality implied by this stereoscopy reasserts the very “opposition between reality and appearances” that it attempts to overcome. The veil’s purpose is neither merely decorative nor merely obstructive. That this “untruth of truth” is not grounded in a transcendent foundation does not consign it to a void of meaningless relativity. Though untethered, it functions as truth all the same. It can be removed no more than a woman can unzip her gender like an overcoat and leave it by the door. But dismay is in order only so long as one clings onto the model of truth that Nietzsche seeks to dispel. His own attitude towards the veil is distinctly celebratory, for it preserves a space where knowledge may not infiltrate:

“We no longer believe that truth remains truth when one pulls off the veil; we have lived too much to believe this. Today we consider it a matter of decency not to wish to see everything

naked, to be present everywhere, to understand and ‘know’ everything. ‘Is it true that God is everywhere?” a little girl asked her mother. ‘I find that indecent!’ – a hint for philosophers! One should have more respect for the bashfulness with which nature has hidden behind riddles and iridescent uncertainties. Perhaps truth is a woman who has grounds for not showing her grounds? Perhaps her name is – to speak Greek – Baubo? 38

Here, the absolute truth so sanctified by philosophers is disparaged for its nakedness, the very absence of mediation that supposedly gives it its value. This isn’t a matter of being unable to tolerate a ‘naked truth’, repressed for the reason that it’s too terrible for the soft minds of the general public to handle. Aspiration to a godlike omniscience is ‘indecent’ as a matter of scope. If there is a ‘naked truth’, it isn’t a unified theory of knowledge - it is an old woman’s genitals. The philosopher’s search for truth is analogous to the imprudent desire to strip the “very desirable veil over a pudendum.” Baubo, Kaufman tells us in a footnote, jolted the goddess Demeter out of her grief and “made her laugh again for the first time by lifting her skirts and exposing herself”. When the philosopher strips the cloth to find only a gaping nothingness, he

38 Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Translated by Josefine Nauckhoff, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 8

gasps in horror while she laughs.

The laugh might be productively construed as the difference between assertion and affirmation. An affirmation sends its words into the world with a tidal force, a final heave of agency before letting go completely. It gives without reservation. But an assertion qualified by self-admission or a “phrase of uncertainty” blunts its affirmative claim by predicating it on a false circumscription. It retains a shred of mastery even as it confesses otherwise, much like Nietzsche’s recurrent critique of the woman who “gives herself away”39 only in an attempt to gain something from her lover in return; the commonality being a final grasp at mastery, at warding off deception or the control of an external force:

“The passion of a woman, in its unconditional renunciation of her own rights, presupposes precisely that on the other side there is not an equal pathos, not an equal will to renunciation; for if both should renounce themselves from love, the result would be – well, I don’t know, maybe an empty space? Woman wants to be taken, adopted as a possession, wants to be absorbed in the concept ‘possession’, ‘possessed’; consequently, she wants someone who takes, who does not himself give or give himself

away….Woman gives herself away, man takes more – I do not believe one can get around this natural opposition through any social contracts or with the best will to justice….”

This odd parable of sexual difference reiterates one of Nietzsche’s most frequent and most perplexing qualms with women: the capacity for guile and seduction is valorized when figured as a trope of aesthetic affirmation, but denigrated when woman-as-such employs her wiles to entice a man. When it threatens male self-possession, seduction is a source of ire. Woman orchestrates a union to work in her favor: she sets the stage, performs her role, and does so with such cunning duplicity that her artifice conceals itself. “Inventive at weakness”, she plays up her vulnerability and dependence, and man cannot help but swoop in to protect her - wholly unaware that she has been pulling the strings all along. Even her ‘unconditional renunciation’ is a self interested pursuit. Man can never truly ‘have’ her, but she can never have him either; if he renounces himself in turn, the axis of sexual difference collapses into an ‘empty space’.

Moments like these conjure an image of Nietzsche walking backwards, retreating from the radicality of his own insights. The “gift-that-takes” is only intelligible within Nietzsche’s ‘natural opposition’ between the sexes, which is only intractable so

39 Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Translated by Josefine Nauckhoff, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 228

long as this model of sexual difference and subjecthood is stable and innate. Yet Nietzsche himself gives us the resources to upend the assumed stability of this model. An ‘empty space’ becomes a open space, depending on the eye of the beholder. As Héléne Cixous writes, “Woman is obviously not that woman Nietzsche dreamed of who gives only in order to take. Who could ever think of the gift as a gift-that-takes? Who else but man, precisely the one who would like to take everything?”40. Nietzsche’s gift-that-takes is underwritten by an obstinate logic of mastery; the supposition that to give without reservation poses an intolerable threat to one’s self-possession as a whole and integrated subject. This is not the neutral and universal condition of the subject, rather, it evinces a markedly masculine concern with self-sovereignty. For Cixous,“if there is a ‘propriety of woman’, it is paradoxically her capacity to appropriate unselfishly: body without end, without appendage, without principal “parts”. If she is a whole, it’s a whole composed of parts that are wholes, not simple partial objects but a moving, limitlessly changing ensemble”41. Giving without reserve poses no threat to her ‘wholeness’, for she knows that she has never been ‘whole’ to begin with.

Despite Nietzsche’s ambivalence, affirmation without reserve requires that we embrace this feminine mode of

response. The laugh, Nietzsche’s ultimate figure of affirmation, is only possible when we “laugh from the whole truth”; it leaves no room for excision. Yet in Nietzsche’s figurations, the laugh is almost always accompanied by images of excess: a fracture in the foundation which gives way to “waves of uncountable laughter”, the kind of outpouring that could easily knock someone over and swallow them up in the surge. Perhaps one’s approach to selfhood and sovereignty determines whether one is swept away or joins in with the swell; one can easily imagine Cixous’s “moving, limitlessly changing ensemble” accommodating such an outpouring without falling apart. The woman who knows that a veil is only a veil is not overcome by this destabilizing excess; her laugh comes easily because she expects nothing more and nothing less than an empty center, while the philosopher’s gasp shrinks away from the subverted expectation that to uncover is not to discover. For Hélène Cixous, the affirmative erupts in a distinctly Nietzschean chime of laughter: “the feminine (as the poets suspected) affirms: ‘...And yes, says Molly, carrying Ulysses off beyond any book and toward the new writing; “I said yes, I will Yes’42. The outpouring of excluded excess takes the form of laughter, which rushes in through the self’s porous boundaries,

40 Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Signs, vol. 1, no. 4, 1976, https://doi.org/https://doi. org/10.1086/493306, p. 888

41 Ibid. 889

42 Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa.” 884. [italics mine]

often without reason, and always without reservation. Any attempt to hold it in, like any attempt to excise Nietzsche’s women from the text, is inevitably undermined by such a rupture:

“If woman has always functioned “within” the discourse of man, a signifier that has always referred back to the opposite signifier which annihilates its specific energy and diminishes or stifles its very different sounds, it is time for her to dislocate this “within”, to explode it, turn it around, and seize it; to make it hers, containing it, taking it in her own mouth, biting that tongue with her very own teeth to invent for herself a language to get inside of. And you’ll see with what ease she will spring forth from that “within” –the “within” where once she so drowsily crouched – to overflow at the lips she will cover the foam. Nor is the point to appropriate their instruments, their concepts, their places, or to begrudge them of their position of mastery… For us the point is not to take possession in order to internalize or manipulate, but rather to dash through and to “fly”.43

43 Ibid, 887, emphasis added.

44 Nehamas, Life as Literature, 21.

The kind of writing Cixous has in mind isn’t a radically inaugural act of creation, nor is it a destruction that leaves nothing in its wake. It explodes oppositions from “within”; it does not attempt to ‘get outside of’ the language that oppresses and excludes it. It resists the masculine logic of mastery altogether; instead it attempts ‘to dash through and to fly’ - in other words, to use the very same materials to achieve a radically different aim. Cixous’ model of écriture féminine shares a curious affinity with Nietzsche’s work, offering a response to the paradox of language which affirms its own passivity, for it has no pretension to speaking a certain or unmediated truth in the first place.

If Cixous’s piece provokes indignation at its idealism or its polemical style, these accusations could just as easily apply to Nietzsche’s writing. This affiliation is, I think, worth pursuing, since it indicates a very different approach towards stylistic excess than Nehamas’s. Nehamas’s favored term for Nietzsche’s style is ‘hyperbole’ (the quality of “saying “too much”), which allows him to “present views without presenting them as more than views of his own”, and serves to “distinguish his practice from what he considers the practice of philosophers so far”44. Hyperbole, in serves the same purpose as the self-admission or the phrase of uncertainty: it spares

the assertive claim from taking on the appearance of absolute truth by calling attention to the speaker’s subjectivity. On Nehamas’s account, this allows Nietzsche to avoid self-contradiction, for even though “there are no facts, only interpretations” is phrased in the assertive language of fact, its excessive style reminds the reader that it, too, is an interpretation. Consequently, for Nehamas, we might continue to make claims about the totality of Nietzsche’s work without our own qualifications, since Derrida and Kofman’s approach “refuses even to attempt to attribute a definite interpretation” to a sentence so selfevident as “I have forgotten my umbrella”, and “even if one knows the meaning of the terms constituting a fragment, one still lacks the ability to offer an interpretation of it” - a clearly undesirable position. Indeed, Derrida’s writing on Nietzsche often resembles a dance performed entirely on the tips of his toes, circling around an idea that it never lands on directly. Cixous, however, is more than willing to state her claims directly and without reservation. Like Nietzsche, she plays the oracle, speaking with utter confidence about what ‘will’ transpire in the future; like Nietzsche, her prose is “exaggerated, swaggering, polemical, self-conscious and self-aggrandizing”. But for Nietzsche, as for Cixous, this quality of excess leads us further into the labyrinth rather than out of

45

it. Both writers refuse to circumscribe the bounds of their texts; both aim to add the excess that has been excluded back into the text. Nietzsche’s hyperbole is not a means to an end. It is, as Nehamas recognizes but dismisses too quickly, “essentially hyperbolic” - and as Nehamas cannot seem to accept, it is essentially self-contradictory, and essentially paradoxical.

But a paradox doesn’t need to be solved to be generative. Whereas Nehamas and Stevens treat it as something that must be overcome, Nietzsche and Cixous recognize that it is within these internal contradictions and multiplicities that anything at all comes into being. To pursue another one of Nietzsche’s feminine metaphors, the figure he uses most often to describe the process of his own work is pregnancy: as Derrida notes, “one might well imagine him shedding tears over his swollen belly”45. Pregnancy, for Nietzsche, models a giving without reservation, and offers an alternative to the idea of the work’s inaugurality that is made impossible by his own theories of truth and language. In Daybreak, he asks:

“Is there a more holy condition than that of pregnancy? To do all we do in the unspoken belief that it has somehow to benefit that which is coming to be within us!... Everything is veiled, ominous, we know nothing of what is taking place, we wait and try to be

Derrida, Jacques. Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles. Translated by Barbara Harlow and Stefano Agosti, The University of Chicago Press, 2017, p. 65

ready. At the same time, a pure and purifying feeling of profound irresponsibility reigns in us almost like that of the auditor before the curtain has gone up – it is growing, it is coming to light: we have no right to determine either its value or the hour of its coming. All the influence we can exert lies in keeping it safe. ‘What is growing here is something greater than we are’ is our most secret hope…..It is in this state of consecration that one should live! It is a state one can live in! And if what is expected is an idea, a deed - towards every bringing forth we have essentially no other relationship than that of pregnancy and ought to blow to the winds all presumptuous talk of “willing” and “creating”. This is ideal selfishness: continually to watch over and care for and to keep our soul still, so that our fruitfulness shall come to a happy fulfilment!...”46

The parallel between pregnancy and artistic creation is itself a well-worn metaphor, crowded with the utterances of a legion of long-dead strangers. But, here as elsewhere, a mirrored repetition is never a mere repetition. Nietzsche radicalizes the notion by stretching it to include acts of creation as quotidian as a passing thought

or idea; “every bringing forth” that comes into being. No autonomous “willing” or “creating” begets the unnameable, unspeakable entity; no external insemination plants the seed. Whatever is growing comes entirely from within Yet, like any act of speech, to produce is not merely to re-produce. The internal multiplicity present in any subject allows the seed to exceed its creator; ensures that this ‘offspring’ does not emerge as the maternal figure’s doppelganger. A creator lives in a state of in-betweens: at once the passive receptacle and the active caretaker of the unknown; the auditor witnessing the production and the stage upon which it is performed. Not one, and not-yettwo. Nietzsche’s pregnant person - the sexed body is fungible - becomes a living, breathing, paradox.

Because this pregnancy does not grow within a material body, none of the telltale signs confirm its presence - no swollen belly, no morning nausea forewarns the mother of the coming child. The condition of paradox persists far longer than nine months. Not only is it ‘a state one can live in’, it is, perhaps, the only state one can live in, unless one manages to avoid having ‘ideas’ and performing ‘deeds’ altogether. In this light, the paradox that Nehamas and Stevens try so desperately to elide appears more tolerable and more generative than

46 Nietzsche, Friedrich. Nietzsche: Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. Edited by Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter. 2nd ed. of Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pg. 223.

assumed. Of course, Nietzsche is not so naive as to suggest that this pregnancy is a painless one. While informing his “Higher Men” that they “have to be mothers”, he affixes a warning: “Ask women: one does not give birth for pleasure. The pain makes hens and poets cackle.”47. But perhaps Nietzsche’s pain would subside a little if he turned to the women more often, for I suspect it is not unrelated to the misconstrual of the gift fleshed out earlier in this essay. Woman, as Cixous writes:

“has constituted herself necessarily as that “person” capable of losing a part of herself without losing her integrity… she grows and multiplies, for, on the other hand, she knows far more about living and about the relation between the economy of the drives and the management of the ego than any man. Unlike man, who holds so dearly to his title and his titles, his pouches of value, his cap, crown, and everything connected with his head, woman couldn’t care less about the fear of decapitation (or castration), adventuring, without the masculine temerity, into anonymity, which she can merge with without annihilating herself: because she’s a giver.”48

47 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 308.

48 Cixous, Laugh of the Medusa, 888.

49 Cixous, “Laugh of the Medusa”, 893.

On Nietzsche’s account, the “veiled” condition of pregnancy is an “ominous”, nail-biting exercise in tolerating the unknown, shuddering as the body is increasingly overtaken by a stranger. It is no wonder that a gestation is spent reconciling oneself to a lack of mastery would be a painful one. Yet Cixous’ woman harbors no such fears; this condition only makes visible what she already knows about her position as a subject. While Nietzsche’s “ideal selfishness” is underscored by the assumption that the gift of life is never a purely selfless endeavor, she is past the “paradox of the gift that takes”; past the “illusion of unitary fusion. She drowns out such oppositions, all at once, with a great sweeping laugh. For Cixous, “when I write, it’s everything that we don’t know we can be that is written out of me, without exclusions, without stipulation”49 . This is hardly the begrudged submission of the speaker who concedes that a masterful and self-possessed language is holding the reigns. Rather, there is an euphoria in being untethered.

She knows how to give without giving herself away.

TO BE AND TO OVERCOME

Sebastián Amador, Pomona ’27

I believe that at the center of this circle there is a force keeping it from collapsing into a seamless point: I hope that the force can somehow push us beyond the circling.

The First Half of the Circle: From Hegel to… Heidegger?

What we will progress towards is the true structure of self-consciousness. A consciousness that looks into itself; a self that apprehends its consciousness; the idea of you by you. Any of these formulations try to get at the common experience of self-consciousness. What is it? It is a question that potentially pervades everything, as a question-for-thesource. It drags with it, then, what ultimately, in being precondition, matters to us most: what am I? What do I want? Do I work against myself? Yet this is a matter that cannot be approached so easily. After all, we are caught up in the question so profoundly that any attempt at dealing with it from an outside, as it were, would end in obscuring it completely. And this is usually our first instinct. To take rationality, for example, as a purity, and try

to derive ourselves from axioms, is to naively presume that a logical product could transcend that from which it builds on. This is why the first three formulations proposed are a total failure. Let us use the second: “self-consciousness is when a self apprehends its consciousness.” Is this common experience, which like all others is lived in the moment more as a becoming than as a fact, done justice in omitting what precedes and follows it? Could this stiff axiom hide the movement inherent in what produced it, could it be too close to nonsense? And if an array of axiomatic snapshots were given, would that not lose their precious in-between? How could a response arise to that? Likewise, there is nothing to just believing that Hegel once wrote “self-consciousness is mutual recognition,” and knowing its definitions. An honest effort would have to be concentrated on following our being-ensnared so that any progress can come to pass: this is the genuine force, the momentum, of phenomenology. We will let it take us. But I will not announce where we are headed. Maybe the time has come to embrace surprise. We will go together.

77 TR2

To begin in the midst of it is to do as Hegel does: Self-consciousness points to consciousness in existing as its unity (Hegel, 1977, para. 173). This is a clear starting point, once it is understood as an abstraction; ‘Sebastián Amador’ refers to their ‘I’ by existing as its unity. Further, ‘Sebastián Amador’ refers to their distinct I’s, (as I am at morning, noon, and midnight) by bringing them together. But conversely, consciousness also exists for self-consciousness as a “simple essence” that “has itself as pure ‘I’ for object” (Hegel, 1977, para. 172-173). As we disambiguated, “I” exists for Sebastián Amador as a simple essence for which it is a unity, but what is this “has itself?” This introduction of the ‘has’ is necessary because consciousness must be of something. It is hence an essential ‘I’ when invested in any object whatsoever, even itself; the ‘I’ that is object and the object that is ‘I’ are the simple essence self-consciousness is a unity for... Here is a problem: for this ‘I’, “differences are not differences” in so far as it is “the negative essence of the shaped independent moments” (174); in other words, ”I” is a negative essence because it holds together the difference between moments, (indifference); it is a sort of constant: say, regardless of if “I” am in the morning, afternoon, or midnight, there is “I”. So self-consciousness can only be certain of itself, of the fact of being the true unity of consciousness, by superseding this ‘I,’ considering “it presents itself as an independent life.”

Immediately, “self-consciousness is Desire” (174). The appearance of ’desire’ here is also necessary, since self-consciousness could confirm itself if consciousness were positioned as dependent. That is, existing as a consequence (and there is no way to do this without a very precise relation between the two). “Sebastián Amador wants this object.” And it is exclusively because of what comes after “wants” that there is consciousness: therefore, consciousness, “this object,” here arises only to be negated, for the fulfillment of desire always does away with its object. By abstraction, in desire, self-consciousness attempts to supersede ‘I’ by affirming its negativity (which amounts to a negation): desire is then the relation by which the ‘I’ invested in the object is negated by selfconsciousness, for within this relation the object is something to be destroyed, to be negated. Self-consciousness posits itself as the negator, the source of negativity.

Yet this initial try at supersession must fail. The independence of the object remains even in the advent of ’desire.’ (It should be memorable from any personal involvement with what we are calling simple desire that the object is never quite negated.) This is because even in the negation of desire the object is still required (to be negated), so it persists; selfconsciousness always “produces the object again, and the desire as well”; …what is revealed here is that “it is in fact something other than self-consciousness that is the

essence of Desire” (175). It is suggestive that this failure leads to a revelation, it is educative. Indeed it is the mark of progress! What we learn is that a true supersession needs to account for this otherness, “the independence of the object”; namely, in true supersession, it is “the object itself” which must effect “the negation within itself” so that self-consciousness might be certain (175). Our new sense of another independence forces us to grant this much. But importantly, this is where we are reminded that the object only is because of ‘I,’ and that ‘I’ is invested in it: “since the object is in its own self negation, and in being so is at the same time independent, it is consciousness” (175). (Self-negation here is finding existence in “the negative essence of the shaped independent moments,” as before.) Now, keeping track of this, how will the object effect the negation within itself so that self-consciousness might be certain? The answer lies in the source of this negation-within.

In “the object of desire negation is present… in an other” (175); we cannot lose sight of the fundament that the independent, indifferent, ‘I’ is a negativity, and it is absolutely negated when selfconsciousness affirms that negativity in its unification: the absolute negation in consciousness, as opposed to the mere negative essence, could only be selfconsciousness. Sebastián Amador, my selfconsciousness, is the unity of a negative ‘I,’ so it is always the striving for the next

‘I,’ continuously negating the immediate ‘I,’ a desire of an object that is reproduced indefinitely. Therefore, self-consciousness could only ever supersede the object, and be certain of itself, in another selfconsciousness. We have arrived at the following: “a self-consciousness exists for a self-consciousness. Only so is it in fact self-consciousness” (177). This is the point where the structure of simple desire gives way to a desire of desire, (or alternatively simple negation gives way to negation of negation). This can be taken in two ways that are one: desire of what another desires, and desire of the other’s desire. In the last analysis, self-consciousness needs something that is not just the independent object, and it must turn to what precipitates the negation of this object for the certainty that it could not and at once must find in isolation: it must turn to itself and not itself. So another like itself. “Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged” (178).

The true structure has been reached. You are if an independent being acknowledges it, but their independence just as well requires you. This is mutual recognition. It can be thought of as transcending alienation in so far as the self gains genuine access to its truth, its being-unity; that is, mutual recognition is the condition for its full expression. But an important implication, tacit at best, of the process that brought us here, is lost if we

do not start over with a particular accent in mind. It is a dissonant note. What is desire?

Following Hegel, we had come to the immediate idea that self-consciousness is desire because in it, or through it, there is a compulsory attempt to supersede the object of consciousness by negating it; desire calls you to a negating action, you affirm the negativity of the object in reaching out to it to satiate yourself. As we learned, this is a failure: “because even in the negation of desire the object is still required (to be negated), so it persists (pg. 3).” Since desire requires a determinate point that comes to be its aim, even if any object whatsoever is negated, it will only persist in the form of a new one. This is where I want to focus. Now, consider, desire cannot be of a real referent, even if it may momentarily correspond to some-thing physical. This is because a real referent, such as an apple, would not persist after desire has negated it, it would not persist indefinitely (in the form of an everpresent novelty); put differently, the object of desire could never be physical because if it were not somehow codified it could not be linked to what must succeed it; an apple has no relation to another object in its being purely real, but when desire negates the apple it is revealed to be related to this other object that comes after: they are both desired… Yet desire ultimately could not be of a phenomenological object either, or the “I” invested in it, for its aim is clearly set to a beyond (it). The phenomenological object is instead a trace of this beyond; it is

the experience of a pull forward; Sebastián Amador wants an object, but when this want calls them to action and they attempt to effect a negation, the initial aim of their desire is revealed to have been instead only a trace, as it leads to another, and another, and another, and another…

Although strictly written, the object of desire is a trace of a trace, because there is always an instance, or experience, preceding it, and you could never account for, attest to, the original trace: it is necessarily lost. This is precisely the reason why in desire when self-consciousness attempts to negate one of these traces, its relation to it, there is failure; the object, being a trace of a trace, is already, was always, negated; it is already a novelty. Therefore, and we crossed this before, if self-consciousness finds itself alone with the object of desire, it cannot supersede it and establish the certainty of a unity, a unity that holds this going-along of the trace, for the going-along overcomes the unity: there is always the surprise of what is next. This is why self-consciousness needs another self-consciousness to acknowledge it as independent for it to be so. This “independence” is from the coming trace, so it is in the sense of independent value: if self-consciousness strives for acknowledgement, it desires the other’s desire. Desire of desire is this intersubjective formulation, to want that the other want you. This is in the order of Recognition... If another wanted you, they would have to reckon with the fact that they cannot

negate an independent self-consciousness, since it is a negat-or. To prevail for another, as the trace does not, is to be the finally positive unity of negated negatives, the unity of succeeding I’s. In the small world of this essay, with reader and writer, if James Kreines recognizes Sebastián Amador as more than an object, so something that is not negated, and they do the same, we have a mutual recognition: two unities that have superseded their objectal consciousness.

But it is essential to also salvage the more complicating necessities of this process. Although it merits a careful reply, one prepared since we dared ask, what is desire? To apply resistance to this unstoppable flow that appears to be going somewhere, to mutual recognition, is futile. Let us instead run with it even further by relinquishing the hope for control. Having gone through its motions, we realize that self-consciousness can never be without the object of desire, that is a trace, because it is needed, along with the “I’s” invested in it, to fill the space of the unity. There is no unity without what is united. So of course, when Hegel writes of the independence of self-consciousness, he means something hard-to-grasp: the independent value of the unity is in that it supersedes what it unites, but not that it is free of it. This is more in the way of a synthesis, or sublation. This is what it means to recognize someone as a person; we can put it like this to appeal to common sense. I recognize James Kreines as the unity of, yet as distinct from, the objects of

his consciousness, if he recognizes me so. This is the point where all might fall.

The true object, or even objective, of desire is not, as we have proved, the phenomenological trace of a trace, the object of desire, for it is instead the beyond of it. (This beyond is essential for there to be recurrence or reference, a sustained succession.) The continuation made of traces, the motion of desire, requires this unreachable beyond in being a following of the traces of it; but this means selfconsciousness, as the unitary chain of these succeeding nodes, requires the beyond just as well… So for self-consciousness, “achieving” this beyond, or reaching it, would mean its end. Because unity is made of what is united, if the individual stream of traces, momentary objects of desire, reached the sea, that would be death. There would be nothing more to follow. This ultimate subjection of self-consciousness to its end poses a problem for Hegel’s account of mutual recognition. As soon as self-consciousness desires another, then even if this other is recognized as a unity and henceforth “cannot be negated,” it is subordinated, by its very emergence as an entity or value, to the beyond of the phenomenological trace, to personal death. Could you call this independence? It is the exact place of the object. But this is from the perspective of another. We can find the analog to this dependence in the firstperson. Self-consciousness, in so far as it has not ended, must be an incomplete unity,

one that has not reached the beyond; and what will supply it with the streaming-in of what is united, its very constitution, has to be an outside (an alien source of the alien object); if you were to ask yourself what you are, you would immediately realize that you are not completed, and then it would dawn that any possible answer could not come from you.

We have arrived. Mutual recognition or transcendence of alienation, this is all immortality; it is an attempt to have selfconsciousness take into itself the fact of its own end, since it makes all dependent… And as soon as we came-to, we moved on. To try and derive what will come, can it be more than a fantasy? Has immanent critique attempted to abstract away from the fundamental structure of this phenomenological trace that is tied to a final beyond?...

The Second Half of the Circle: From Heidegger to… Hegel?

What we will orient ourselves towards is the true structure of our condition as subjects to this beyond. If pointing out the comfortable lack of a certain ‘unknowable’, as our orientation towards death, is what could threaten Hegel’s account of authentic self-consciousness, then it is Heidegger who will try and articulate it, as the old story goes. But the Hegelian still has a stake in attending to the development of this

binary between knowable and unknowable; their instinct of course will have informed them that where there is a binary there is the potential for it to overcome itself; for, if what is involved in a binary is the tension between opposing elements, how could such a tension be sustainable for good? How could the tension not be pushing toward resolution? In other words, to understand the relation between knowable and unknowable, is it not to already have given way to their delimitation, and so their mutual knowability? But this would resolve their difference. And so the Hegelian watches on with anticipation… For a while now we have been gesturing at this unknowable in temporarily terming it “a beyond,” but to keep to the language in The Onto-Theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics we will have to complexify this idea: there, it is termed Being. The concrete relations between the clutter we now have (beyond, unknowable, Being) now need disambiguation.

“The sky is blue”... And it is the “is” that remains necessary, or that cannot be stripped away from the sky: because it always is. But how is it for the sky? That is, how is this third-person ‘to be’ related to the sky? These are harder questions, even if they are absolutely fundamental. Immediately, the relation between Being and beings appears concealed. In the first place it is so difficult to differentiate between ‘sky’ and ‘is’, because in some sense they cannot be separated. Yet, “Being means always and

everywhere: the Being of beings… Beings means always and everywhere the beings of Being” (Heidegger, 1974, pg. 61). What is fundamentally in play in the relation between sky and its Being, which after all is the most basic of relations, is always a difference, a separation. Then, this paradox of inseparable-separability is what must be addressed... Then, a contingent and simultaneous problem arises, identical to this paradox: we cannot “think” of Being, as it is beyond any thought, but at the same time we cannot think without unknowable Being, since any thought “is”: “Thinking recedes before its matter, Being… it alone establishes and prepares for this thinking the area of its abode” (Heidegger, 1974, pg. 50). So Being is both always beyond and unknowable, yet necessary: for the knowable sky to be. Such is the trick of the difference between Being and beings: they are inseparable while separated: “that is the oblivion of the difference.” This oblivion manifests in the failure to grasp the inseparable-separability itself:

“If we try to form a representational idea of it, we will at once be misled into conceiving of difference as a relation which our representing has added to Being and to beings. Thus the difference is reduced to a distinction, something made up

by our understanding (Verstand)” (Heidegger, 1974, pg. 62).

So this cannot be a case of a simple difference of identity, or a difference between two ‘things.’1 Representation inevitably produces, creates, and so it cannot get at what originally makes it possible. How to proceed, if the apparent sole approach at our disposal, that of the difference, seems blocked by its own representational character? It is crucial to maintain consistency at this impasse. What instead becomes useful about this approach is asking of it, to what has this representing of the difference contributed to?... The answer is simple, “to beings”; but what else is beings other than “something that is? Thus we give to the supposed contribution, the representational idea of difference, a place within Being. But “Being” itself says: Being which is beings” (Heidegger, 1974, pg. 62). The difference is resolute; it starts to emerge as a necessity, a certainty. A shadow? Any-thing illuminated projects a shadow that contrasts it, opposes it, to the source of illumination. And it is the stickiness of this contrast that is the problem. How do you go about stepping back into your own shadow? This inquiry “may well remain wholly without an object” (Heidegger, 1974, pg. 64); it is important to accept this. There is an arrangement inherent here, of a binary long before representation and so of

1 An alternative to a difference of mere identity would understandably aid an account of the separation as impossible to overcome, contra the Hegelian, though getting there seems to require sacrificing representation.

ultimate nature, that could be more valuable than any conclusive object. The way we might get at it is through an account, not of Being or beings, but of the necessity of their difference. So, what do we owe to this necessity that difference comes to fulfill? Something entirely essential, that “the sky is blue.” Without the separation between ‘sky’ and ‘is’ there would be nothing here to see. Then, what do we owe to this difference being impossible to overcome, irreducible? At this crux in the text there is a change in the language, which becomes almost unyielding. It is this poetry that we have to decipher.

“The Being of beings means Being which is beings. The “is” here speaks transitively, in transition. Being here becomes present in the manner of a transition to beings.” But how are we to incorporate this new language of movement? The idea of transition means to characterize the “is” of Being: that it appears for us only in beings, so only in transitioning, coming over, to beings. This accentuates the difference between Being and beings, since it is separation that allows for the “which is,” the transition to. But this exploration is in the set orientation from Being to beings; it is only with the addition of ‘arrival’ to our movementvocabulary that we start to get at the same idea from beings to Being. “Being transits (that), comes… over (that) which arrives as something of itself” (Heidegger, 1974, pg. 64). So arrival belongs to beings. Beings

are referred to as (that); that which instead becomes present in its arrival. This again accentuates the difference as it is shown to be between transition and arrival. Yet the two-way orientation (from Being to beings and beings to Being) that we have experienced in regards to the difference is also used to account for inseparability. “But Being does not leave its own place and go over to beings, as though beings were first without Being and could be approached by Being subsequently” (Heidegger, 1974, pg. 64). This arises as an apparent contradiction to the separation. He now focuses on the inseparability of Being and beings by adding another axis like his transition-arrival distinction: unconcealedness-concealedness. “Being transits (that), comes unconcealingly over (that) which arrives as something of itself unconcealed only by that comingover.” Arrival means: to keep concealed in unconcealedness” (Heidegger, 1974, pg. 64) Being is un-concealing, and beings are concealed. That is, Being is what unconceals beings in its transition, and beings are what keep concealed in their arrival. But there is no unconcealment without concealment.

Let us pass the poetry through our initial example: “The sky is blue”… When the sky first appears for us, high overhead, it is a mystery. This mystery is what compels us to ask, what is the sky? Alone, as it stands, there is no way of knowing. “It is blue” does not offer much of a gain. It is only when we realize the ‘is’ in our

question, and in all our answers, that beings lie bare for us, that the mystery in some way resolves. But in the lying bare of beings they have also revealed to us their Being. This is because, “Being means always and everywhere: the Being of beings… Beings means always and everywhere the beings of Being.” So in Heidegger’s language: the “is” overwhelms, comes over, the sky, which arrived for us high overhead; in this moment, with the sky in full view, the “is” unconceals the sky, shows it bare, for it initially arrived concealed. Concealment and unconcealment are inseparable, but the difference between overwhelming and arrival still stands. How is this possible?...

Perdurance. “The difference of Being and beings, as the differentiation of overwhelming and arrival, is the perdurance (Austrag) of the two in unconcealing keeping in concealment” (Heidegger, 1974, pg. 65).

Perdurance is the inseparable-separability of Being and beings; Perdurance is this ultimate difference. Its necessity is understood anew and with true force only at this stage in our reasoning. To reveal perdurance is to reveal Being, the unconcealing overwhelming, “as that which allows whatever arrives to lie before us, as the grounding in the manifold ways in which beings are brought about before us” (Heidegger, 1974, pg. 68); it is then to reveal “Beings as what is grounded; so grounded and so generated, it in turn grounds in its own way, that is, it effects, it causes” (Heidegger, 1974, pg. 68). So “not only does Being ground beings as their

ground, but beings in their turn ground, cause Being in their way” (Heidegger, 1974, pg. 69) The poetic device emerges: “Overwhelming and arrival appear in each other in reciprocal reflection… perdurance is a circling, the circling of Being and beings around each other” (Heidegger, 1974, pg. 69) What Heidegger is getting at is only a grounding or a relation of causation in the poetic sense. It is not that Being is the ground or unidirectional cause of beings, literally. To take the idea of circling seriously is to give up a stable ground; Being unconceals beings, in letting them be, but it only appears insofar those same beings are; beings arrive concealed for Being to transit over and unconceal them; their appearing is only possible in “reciprocal reflection.”

We have reached this circling that feels irreducible, the tangled heart, knot by difference. And this goes on and on, by account of the irreducible difference: perdurance… Unlike with Hegel, this does not take us any-where. The force of the argument is not in the momentum, but in the irreducibility. You could not rip this heart out without renouncing that the sky is blue. But that is what we will try. What we would find out is just how necessary this arrangement really is. So let’s begin with it again, with that weighty question: what holds up the sky? How ‘is’ the sky?

The sky is not still. Beings are in flux, this is why they are understood as arrival, arriv-ing. To stare up at the sky is to never

rest on anything, to always find anew; even a fixed point there would re-iterate, would go-through change. If we take only the thing itself, ‘sky’, to concentrate on it is always to realize there is no way of staying. What is ‘sky’? Answering the question, concentrating on the sky, would invoke an ever-expanding series of additional prepositions: take the immediate remark that might lend itself: it is ‘blue’. This is why we must say being(s) “are”; they are in their plurality, in their unrest.2 In perdurance, the calmness to this unrest is the principle of its continuation, the circling by which it propagates: the irreducible difference between Being and beings. But now I reiterate, how was this calmness originally grasped? It was grasped by that same continuation to the unrest, the propagation or the over-coming of the sky: that is to say, the leap from sky to blue: the difference between sky and blue: an apparently smaller, more arbitrary difference than that of perdurance. But if the sky is not still, if it always must be something else, then this little distinction could be constitutive for it…

When you stare at the sky, what makes it appear? The eye can take in, but it cannot discriminate, so what is it that differentiates between the beings sky and blue? Consider, even if we were to exchange all their qualities the difference

would remain, or if they were identical we could still partition them. This difference under-cuts the physical, or the definitional. It emerges as essential for the sky and blue; without it, they would not exist as beings, but as a being; anything else could be subtracted or added to them. And it is the mark of representation upon the difference between beings that allows us to make the dichotomy sky/blue. But this representation, and the difference that came before it, is in turn overcome by the unrest of beings; the original question always yields excess; what is sky? You could also say, and you will eventually say, it is not ‘ground’.

In what way is this difference between beings, then marked by representation, different from perdurance, the case of Being and beings? Part of it is that the case perdures, but another would be that there lies the refutation to Hegel’s mutual recognition. We need an unknowable so as to not fall to the illusion of immortality, as to not disregard our orientation towards death. Heideggerian Being comes in this light. But is putting this Being in a relation of differentiation potentially giving up the whole of its value?... To begin with, is it true that beings are in this Being? As we discovered, it is never that the sky “is” unless the sky “is blue,” the unrest is a given; the sky must be different from something

2 And, importantly only later, this is perfectly reminiscent of the phenomenological object of desire in Hegel, which in its continual negation must always come anew.

to be. It might be that the continuation of this unrest is proof of Perdurance, but did we not realize the little difference between beings is just as fundamental for this unrest? Would it not be possible to say, beings are in their own difference, instead of beings are in Being? After all, beings persist, they are, but they only persist in their continued differentiation. And Heideggerian Being is just as well only in its perpetual difference…

Yet, unlike the sky, Being does stop answering to the question of what is at the immediate answer: the Being of beings. But this could perfectly be a willfull silence. I could easily pretend to stay at “the sky is blue”: the ‘sky’ is of ‘blue’, and ‘blue’ is in ‘sky’: nothing further. The idea starts to seem comical… To believe perdurance to be a primordial difference is to misunderstand what difference entails. This will be bare when we ask again, what are beings? Are they truly what is? It is more like they are through what they are not. At the very least, their “is” is not one of stasis. To be is to overcome: Beings overcome themselves. They will always defer to what differs from them, but that will in turn defer further to what differs. What is revealed is that difference itself predates perdurance. Being is of a being: that is of a being, that is of a being, that is of a being… But then is Being not just another being, since it is only through a continual deferral to what differs? It has been overcome time and time again. The difference between Being and beings is equalized to that of the sky and blue.

There cannot be an ultimate difference. Hegel understands this. How then do we keep from yielding to him? How do we retain Heideggerian Being, the irreducible?... Desire. Without desire, we would have no such irreducible. What Perdurance could never get at, its failure, was in the unasked question: what is it of beings that forces the leap to difference? Why is the sky forced to be through what it is not? That is to say, what is it of a being that necessarily ties it to the next? The experience of this is in desire. Beings ‘are’ insofar as they are different: beings overcome themselves. But what is it that relates them to self-consciousness, to us? We search in them. In our response to Hegel, it was the going-along, the continual overcoming, of the phenomenological object that made the unity of self-consciousness possible. How else is this going-along experienced if not as a search? Insufficiency. Even now as I write this down I cannot stay still: with every comma, every link to the next, a wanting after-taste, pure hunger. And beyond that…? What is beyond the phenomenological object that is a trace of a trace, a deferral to difference, this series of voided, negated, remains? The end. The end that we proposed as what mutual recognition comes to conceal. Heideggerian Being, predicated on a difference, could never articulate it, for it is instead the very necessity of difference. What beings show us in their never-resolving, over-coming, is that the true answer to their question, as

they are an implicit search for the ‘what is’, is beyond. But if this beyond were to come, it would be the end. The perpetuated differentiation would end in non-difference, which is not its opposite but its oblivion. It is not the unknown to the known, not the infinite to the finite, not the nothing as to something, or the Being to the beings, it is beyond these. It is an in-difference at the center of this chase round its border. The ground of beings is this black-hole. And as all progress leads there, it gains its potential energy from the fact of its suspension at that edge…

So what is it that is really meant by that perduring line? “To be or not to be, that is the question.” Is it a question about death, about suicide? We do not need more than what is already there to understand that it cannot ever be about these things, but we can also just recall the continuation: “For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,” here the conditional not-to-be, “When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,” and its onset, “Must give us pause—there’s the respect” and the hesitation before choice! “That makes calamity of so long life…” Whenever difference mediates there is still search, a question. To be or not to be, this is the difference that you are, the question that you are, an over-coming, an unrest. And beyond that…? The irreducible. Where my soul should be. In-difference. Pure Being is less than nothing.