THE PROMISE OF TIME

SAITYA BRATA DAS

The Promise of Time

Towards a Phenomenology of Promise

INDIAN INSTITUTE OF ADVANCED STUDY RASHTRAPATI NIVAS, SHIMLA

First published 2011 Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the written permission of the publisher. ISBN: 978-81-7986-091-5 Published by The Secretary Indian Institute of Advanced Study Rashtrapati Nivas, Shimla-171005

Typeset at Sai Graphic Design, New Delhi and printed at Pearl Offset Pvt. Ltd., Kirti Nagar, New Delhi

For My dear father Who first taught me to love The love of wisdom: philo-sophia

Acknowledgements

We never come to thoughts. They come to us.

Martin Heidegger

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

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Maison des Sciences de LHomme, Paris where I was a post doctorate fellow during 2006-2007, the one who has never ceased to be my mentor, my philosopher and teacher for all these years. From him I have learnt a great deal, namely, to philosophize. To him I acknowledge hereby my deepest gratitude. Thanks to the advent of Sarita, my beloved wife, who has inspired me to live my life anew; from whom once more I have learnt to see the open sea and the blue sky. These people have had hopes in me and this manuscript recounts, in its own way, the story of such a hope contra all hopelessness, and the necessity of such an affirmation. Thanks to this beautiful Shimla and this wonderful Institute that have both soothed my wounded soul at a difficult period of life; all the lovely people with whom I lived, joyously; all the local, lovely friends I have made at ShimlaMridula and Pankaj above allwho gave me company in my lonely hours, away from home and away from Delhi. The Director, Professor Peter Ronald deSouza has inspired me in his own peculiar way, without words, silently, whose language I felt I understood. I wish to thank hereby Dr. Debarshi Sen for his patience and professional efficiency with which he brought out this book in so little time. Mr. Ravi Shankar, the typesetter, has made this book look so beautiful; thanks goes to him as well! There is my father who gifted me this life, whom I now gift this book, which has already been given to me by him. And thanks goes to the loveliest and sweetest mother of mine, and my siblings who have silently inspired me all these years, to whom I can return nothing but love and my infinite gratitude. And, lastly, thanks to this manuscript itself, which henceforth will have its own life, which will now onwards live without me, outside and away from me, forget me and leave me without a name. This book, for some intimate reason, is dear to me, for somehow in it I have sought to translate the language of my own soul. But since now it is going out to the world, its language is no longer the language of my soul but I hope it will become the language of the world-soul where human beings live, suffer and hope for redemption.

Beginning at the moment of deepest catastrophe There exists the chance for redemption. Gershom Scholem

The following chapters have been published previously 1. The first chapter of the first part The Open originally appeared in Kritike http://www.kritike.org/journal/issue_6/das_december2009.
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2. An earlier version of the second part The Lightening Flash appeared in Philosophical Forum (Willey Blackwell, fall 2010) vol. 41, issue 3, p. 315-345. 3. The Abyss of Human Freedom is published in Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research, October-December 2010, vol. XXVII, no 4, p.91-104. 4. Of Pain is published in Journal of Comparative and Continental philosophy (New York: Equinox Publishers, May 2011), vol. 3: 1. 5. A revised version of the chapter The Metaphysics of Language is published as The Destinal Question of Language in Kriterion (Spring 2011, issue 123). 6. The Commandment of Love: Messianicity and Exemplarity in Franz Rosenzweig is read as paper at the 6th Annual Philosophy Conference at Athens Institute for Education and Research, held at Athens, Greece, held during 30 May - 2 June 2011. 7. Fragments in Epilogue section is read as paper called Of Fatigue, Of Patience Finitude, Writing, Mourning in a seminar on Levinas Blanchot: Penser La Difference, organized by UNESCO, Paris from 13-16 November 2006.

Contents

Acknowledgements Foreword by Grard Bensussan Premise

PROLOGUE

vii xv 1

The Promise of Time To Come/The Claim of Redemption and the Question of History/Truth beyond Cognition/Existence/Messianic/ The Lightning Flash of Language/Wandering, Thinking/ Configuration Saying Radical Finitude The Immemorial/The Mournful Gift/the Logic of the World/ Mortality/Introducing this Work
PART I CONFIGURATION

20

The Open Judgement and History: Of History/ Metaphysics and Violence/The Passion of Potentiality Transfiguration, Interruption The Logic of Origin Of Beginning/Madness/Astonishment

39 51

76 87

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Repetition Repetition and Recollection/ Moment

108

Language and Death 119 The States of Exception/The Facticity of Love and The Facticity of Language/The Gift of Language Configuration 132 Caesura/The Star of Redemption/ Discontinuous Finitude/ En-framing, Revelation/Lightning, Clearing/ Constellation of Temporalities/ Transfinitude
PART II THE LIGHTNING FLASH

The Language of the Mortals 161 The Presupposition//Kierkegaards Indirect Communication Pain 175 Work and Pain/The Melancholic Gift/ Naming and Overnaming/Thinking and Thanking Apollos Lightning Strike The Lightning Flash/The Divine Violence 201

Revelation 210 The Argument/Synthesis without Continuum/Language as Revelation in Schellings Philosophy of Freedom
PART III EVENT

Of Event 225 The Question of Event and the Limit of Foundation/ Freedom, Time and Existence/Origin, Leap, Event Love and Death The Sense of Freedom The Irreducible Remainder 243 251 267

The Abyss of Human Freedom 291 The No-Thing of Freedom and the Finitude of Man/ Causality as a Problem of Freedom/Philosophy as Strife

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PART IV MESSIANICITY

The Commandment of Love 305 Exemplarity of Translation/the Aporia of Love/Revelation of Love/The Theologico-Political
PART V ON PHILOSOPHY

Erotic and Philosophic

343

On Philosophical Research 354 The Thought of Death/ Philosophical Research/Notes on this Work
EPILOGUE

Fragments Notes Bibliography Index

381 399 407 415

Foreword

Between End and Beginning: The Time of Speech

The beautiful book of Satya Das is committed to a phenomenology of promise and explores manifold ways in it. What animates this phenomenology of promise is explicitly inspired by a paradoxical phenomenology of the unapparent that the later Heidegger had named his aspirations. It can be said that the pages you are going to read contribute to it in a remarkable manner because they lean towards the exercises of it from a very singular angle and access. The developments devoted here to the question of the promise have a force and a flash which come to them from an indisputable source which supports them: the fecundity of time, the temporality bursting forth and stratified by waiting, opening to the event, and the finitude opened to infinity, wherein the idea that appears in us, according to Descartes, signifies in the final analysis this very opening. Thus the promise, this astonishing object if one can put it this way, evokes a style, a writing, a strategy of presentation (Darstellung) about which Satya Das explicates in the first part, where one sees how the deployment of this enterprise here is held together with the rigour of a true philosophical research while also being able to emancipate oneself from ones most forceful constraints, which results in the most remarkable originality. It is under this double and conflicting exigency according to which an object commands a writing that messianism as such, and

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especially its very paradigm, the messianic as the index of time comes to be of help in the most lively part of this work (I am thinking particularly of the fourth part of the book) and brings it relief with its counter-dialectical resources. For this phenomenology of the promise is necessarily a phenomenology of the event and, therefore, a phenomenology of the impossible, which is not far from signifying (but that would indeed be a point that could be discussedas we used to do together in Strasbourg not long ago!) an impossible phenomenology. What is really an event if not an affectivity preceding its own possibility? How, then, can such impossible, impossible before being real, allows it to be thought, and furthermore, phenomenological thought? Satya Das does this according to the time of the end and the time of beginning and he does it again as well on the basis of language. The author here explains in particular that the event bears together and supports the end and the beginning in a monstrous coupling which would signify something like a logic of the world. There is, in fact, between the end and beginning a complex pairing that the messianism alone can achieve to determine it without elucidating it, according to a causal knowledge. The end promises. The beginning begins only from a kind of impossibility; because it promises the promise. Thus, what messianism names first and foremost is an experience of temporality of the awaiting and of the decision, and of the relation to the expected event and its reversal. Thus, messianism would be an irremissible impossibility of thinking whatever is referred to as the origin. The origin will always be older than the objects we want to genealogize by retracing them to their point of departure. It forbids or interrupts the possibility of linking the beginning and the end as two moments, two given points of time that are indifferent and interlinked by virtue of their being having qualitatively similar presents. Formalized representations of time force us to consider that what happens in the present at a given point of time could also happen in an other present having the same quality of presence, at a given point of time that is anterior and similar. It is against these representations that messianism has its significance. And thats where we grasp its fundamental difference in relation to teleology, eschatology, progressivism and all types of finalism. Freedom, existence and experienced time from then on appear as the very

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

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

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

 Premise

This mortal called man is an open existence, exposed to mortality and free towards the coming that is revealed to him in lightning flash. Free towards the ever new possibility of beginning, the mortal is endowed with the gift of time, as if an eternity that remains beyond his death, a time always to come. In this messianic remnant of time alone lies redemptive fulfillment for the mortalsin the possibility of the ever new beginning in the time to come. It is this question of time to come, the affirmation of a redemptive future that is pursued in this work. It occurs as and in a configuration of questions, which is not a system but rather, lets say, a gesture or style of pursuing a thought which is repetitively and, therefore, discontinuously seized as questions. These are the questions of mortality and temporality, of the lightning flash of language that reveals man, beyond any predicative historical closure, his finitude and the Openness where man finds himself exposed to the event of coming, to the redemptive fulfilment in this coming itself, which he anticipates in an existential attunement of hope. All these questions are introduced in the movement of configuration, or constellation that affirms the coming time, and feels the requirement of redemption in hope, beyond all that is given to our historical existence. These exercises of thinking are to be called: configuration thinking.

Prologue

 The Promise of Time

To Come
This is an attempt to elaborate upon the notion of coming time, the coming into existence, not what has come as this, or that, but the coming itself, the messianic promise of the redemptive arrival. In a phenomenological and deconstructive manner, which is a gesture of reading and seizing a truth rather than a method here, I will attempt to reveal the metaphysical foundation of what is meant in the dominant sense of politics, history, or even logic, to loosen this structureof what Heidegger calls Abbau and Destruktion der Ontologie in Sein und Zeitso that outside the closure of the Struktur to affirm and to welcome the coming, the future Not Yet. This is a movement towards a messianic affirmation that problematizes the dominant metaphysical determination of history whose immanence is guaranteed by an immanent self-grounding subject. This will be shown in the subtle, extremely complex connection between a certain metaphysical determination of history and the dominant determination of logic based upon predicative proposition. In so far as predicative proposition determines the truth on the basis of what is already revealed and opened history, understood speculatively, that is based upon predicative proposition cannot think of any event as event, this coming into existence itself as coming. Hence, the immemorial promise of the time to come, this gift of the taking place of time is always attempted to be closed in the immanence of self-presence that often assumes the form of a mythic foundation. If the task of politics and history is to be thought in a more originary manner, and

T H E P RO M I S E O F T I M E

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

The Claim of Redemption and the Question of History

The question of to come is essentially about the claim of redemption in our historical destinal existence which is heard in its utmost intensity and urgency when a certain metaphysical determination of history seems to have come to its gathering force and to its exhaustion. As if now the claim of redemption must enter anew, if the above questions have still retained their sense today, into the thought of death and exhaustion, outside any thanatology and outside ontology, and outside deaths service into the metaphysical foundation of

The Promise of Time

politics and history, not to take side of death against life, nor to take side of life against death, but to take side of future, to take the side from future which is always coming. This necessity of an after after every after, this not yet that must remain not yet is a necessity of another faith, of another promise and another thought of revelation. This faith is the one that is not satisfied merely being attached as an appendix to reason, nor merely with positing another being as a transcendental object somewhere in a transcendental world beyond this world. It is, rather, a thought of promise in the not yet which is rescued from the womb of the damaged present; it is to gather together again those sparks after the vessel is broken once into thousand pieces. This thought of the affirmative, which is perhaps the most urgent task of thinking that we call philosophical, demands that the metaphysical foundation of our history and politics be made manifest and un-worked so that thinking can inaugurate another history which is not satisfied merely with grasping what has happened on the basis of its apophansis, but one that ecstatically remains open to the immemorial and to the incalculable and the unconditional arrival. This is to envisage an ecstatic history without monuments or monumentality whose the historical task of inauguration must accompany the un-working of the closure of immanence of selfpresence. In this sense, this historical task of rescuing the redemptive possibility of the advent from any immanence of apophantic closure is inseparable from the question of the possibility of truth, truth that releases in philosophical contemplation that element of the immemorial from the violence of cognition.

Truth beyond Cognition

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

T H E P RO M I S E O F T I M E

be saturated with the knowledge of the phenomenon presently given, is only rescued truth, wrested truth. It is truth that momentarily advents in the midst of existence, like what Benjamin says of profane illumination that makes its sudden apparition felt when dialectics comes to a standstill (Benjamin 2002, p. 10). This truth, in contrast to the categorical cognition of given presences, calls forth an entirely different notion of temporality and historicality, an entirely different notion of phenomenality: not the phenomenality that is categorically grasped in the apophantic judgement but a phenomenality when the unapparent in a lightning flash makes itself felt, that dispropriates us, that takes away from us the foundation of language and judgement and exposes us to the openness of time, opening to the immemorial and to the Not Yet. This open is not a topological or ontological site but the monstrous site of history where event arrives as an event, the coming comes into presence. This coming cannot be predicated on the basis of what has come, or what would come to pass by. It is a coming that moves history or better inaugurates history out of a fundamental finitude of our being. What, then, does it mean to come? Lets say, to come is the occurring of the truth of existence, the truth of the occurring of existence, the truth of the occurring itself, or still better, the occurrence of truth itself. It is this occurring, this event before anything that has occurred is the true and genuine notion of the historical. In this sense truth is essentially historical, but more originally understood, no longer as that is assimilable to the periodic breaks belonging to the accumulative gathering of truth, but truth as this epochal break itself, which for that matter is to be thought as historical before history, before memory and before monumentality.

Existence
To come: it is in this infinitive of the verbal lies the resonance of existence, not as an accidental property of existence, but existence in its existential character in its ecstasy and exuberance of advent. In this sense, this infinitive verbal character of existence is more originary than any categorical predication of existence as given presence. Therefore Heidegger at the beginning of his Being and Time (1962)

The Promise of Time

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

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What is to be thought is presencing namely presences. A new difficulty arises: this is clearly a tautology. Indeed! This is a genuine tautology: it names the same only once and indeed as itself. We are here in the domain of the unapparent: presencing itself presences. The name for what is addressed in this state of affairs is: which is neither being nor simply being, but : Presencing presences itself (Heidegger 2003, p.79)

And little later, again,

I name the thinking herein question tautological thinking. It is the primordial sense of phenomenology. Further, this kind of thinking is before any possible distinction between theory and praxis. To understand this, we need to learn to distinguish between path and method. In philosophy, there are only paths; in sciences, on the contrary, there are only methods, that is, modes of procedure. Thus understood, phenomenology is a path that leads away to come before and it lets that before which it is led to show itself. This phenomenology is a phenomenology of the unapparent. (Heidegger 2003, p. 80).

What Heidegger calls facticity of existence (of the Da of Dasein) with which the phenomenology of the unapparent is concerned, Schelling calls it actuality which is un-pre-thinkable (Unvordenkliche) that must already hold sway beforehand even in order for a speculative judgement which Hegel elaborated dialectically speculatively in Phenomenology of Spirit (1998). In this way Schelling distinguishes the metaphysical empiricism of his positive philosophy from Hegelian speculative empiricism of negative philosophy (Schelling 2007a). While negative philosophy can only grasp in a categorial-predicative manner what is the result of a process by retrogressively recuperating what has become of it, Schelling seeks the beginning in the un-prethinkable actuality (the Da of Dasein, the event of ex-sisting) which must already always manifest itself before thematizing, predicative, categorical cognition, opening thereby existence to its coming as it were for the first time. The exposure to the immemorial is what Schelling

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calls irreducible remainder, a not yet of a past, an irrecuperable past that continuously exposes existence to its inexhaustible outside, to its un-predicative past of promise. What renders existence an irreducible remainderits originary non-closure is nothing but its inextricable mortalityits radical finitude that refuses to be lifted up unto thought completely. This fundamental incompletion of existence, its originary un-accomplishment and non-work refuses Hegelian Aufhebung, the consolation of the concept, and the concepts false promise of infinitude and Absolute. The coming is the advent of time itself cannot be thought within any reductive historical-metaphysical totalization, or within the immanence of a self-presencing Subject. It is the positive beyond any immanence of negativity. Such is the presencing of presence. So it is with Rosenzweig. If the concept, the Absolute Concepts promise of infinite and immortality is a false, vain consolation for the mortal beings, it is because philosophy, as the cognition of the All presupposesat the same time denying this presuppositionthat death is Nothing for the mortals if it cannot be made into work for the sake of the universal. In this way, the multiple singularities of mortal cries will not be heard in the universal pathos of the One Absolute, for Absolute can only be One and be One only. What would the value of a system be, a system of philosophy (for it is question of value and not of knowledge) for the mortal beings who are individuated and singularized by its mortality, and yet this morality is foreclosed in order to make possible of a system of categories? Since existence, which is finite and mortal, is not enclosed within any philosophical discourse of totality or is not consoled by the vain consolation of the concept, existence is thereby granted the gift, in its mortality, of a time to come which Rosenzweig thinks in a messianic manner as redemption that is beyond the concept and beyond any closure, which is an eternal remnant of time, or a time of remnant that is to arrive eternally. It is always to come because it is the event of coming itself. Schelling, Heidegger, and Rosenzweigin their irreducibly singular mannersare thinkers of coming and of mortality, of promise and of finitude, of future and of the gift. One can name them as the thinkers of finitude.

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Messianic
The messianic affirmation of the coming has nothing of the theological messianism about it, at least in the given recognizable form of a religious tradition. It is, to say with Jacques Derrida, a messianicity without messianism, a messianicity that affirms unconditionally the promise of the other, or opens itself, outside totality or system, to this promise of the other who is always to come in each hic et nunc. In his Monolingualism of the Other or Prosthesis of Origin, Derrida writes about the untotalizable promise of future and its prosthetic origin:
But the fact that there is no necessarily determinate content in this promise of the other, and in the language of the other does not make any less indisputable its opening up of speech by something that resembles messianism, soteriology, or, eschatology. It is structural opening, the messianicity, without which messianism itself, in the strict or literal sense, would not be possible. Unless, perhaps, this originary promise without any proper content is, precisely, messianism. And unless all messianism demands for itself this rigorous and barren severity, this messianicity shorn of everything (Derrida 1998, p. 68).

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

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true mourning, and knows not the movement of hope. In order to counter this movement of totalization that is permeating in all aspects of our lives to such an extent that such a totality today does not know any totality that has limits, territory or locality, it is necessary to introduce another movementwithout thetic, positing dialectical violence of conceptthe redemptive movement of unconditional promise and the gift of time where time itself times, or presencing itself presences, a promise of coming outside violence of immanence of self-consuming presences. To introduce this movement, that means to expose philosophical thinking to the non-conditional outside, to the promising remnant of time, is the highest task of thinking today. The task of thinking today, at the accomplishment of certain metaphysics, is no longer to constitute epochal historical totality that sublates historical violence into a form of reconciliation, as a kind of speculativetragic atonement. This reconciliatory movement of the speculativetragic-historical that founds epochal totality has lost its redemptive sense today, since this totalizing movement can begin and end its process only with pure, autochthonous, thetic positing that carries its violent character (of positing) right to the end in a manner of circular re-appropriation. The task of thinking is no longer that of reconciliation, dialectically accomplished, which begins with the violence of pure positing that in order to reach beyond this violence, posits its other whichinsofar as it is still positingis once more mere conditioned, once more mere thetic, and so on and so forth. The circular movement of the positing never attains to the unconditional forgiveness beyond the violence of pure positing. It would be necessary to think of an originary, unconditional promise before any power of positing, a non-positing positive of coming, a promise of the unapparent presencing that itself presences, an ecstasy that ex-tatically escapes the circular re-appropriation of predicates and conditions. The tautological presencing presences or coming comes that no phenomenology or ontology of self-consciousness selfpresence attains, is essentially a phenomenology of promise. It is on the basis of this originary promise of a radical futurity which is not an apparition like other phenomenon, but that advents each time each hic et nunc, may there arrive an unconditional forgiveness beyond any immanent result of a dialectical-tragic reconciliation.

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It is here that Derridas (2001) messianic thought of an unconditional forgiveness, which is to be distinguished from any immanent result of a dialectical-tragic reconciliation, demands our careful attention. The messianicity without messianism is to be connected with the possibility of an unconditional forgiveness which demands another thinking of mortality itself, mortality whose refusal to work clamours for another inception rather than the dialectical. It is the demand of a redemptive forgiveness beyond reconciliation. The thinking of forgiveness and the messianic affirmation of the coming must pass through an experience of non-condition, or mortality on the basis of which the unapparent appears.

The Lightning Flash of Language

In what sense has the tragic-heroic pathos of reconciliation today lost its redemptive meaning if not in the sense that the immemorial promise and gift is only thought within the notion of an epochal totality? When the notion of promise is appropriated and is sought to be mastered by inscribing it into a categorical conceptual apparatus, then languagebereft of remembrance and promisereifies what has become of presence, the given presence, and forgets the immemorial promise given in the language of naming, in the dignity of the name. Then the categorical task of cognition, its labour of predication robs language its linguistic essence, that of welcoming the advent to arrive that lies outside the predicative proposition. The movement of configuration that outside the cognitive categorical totality rescues the promise in saying and welcomes in a messianic hope the advent to come without violence is what Rosenzweig calls language-thinking (Rosenzweig 2000, pp. 109-139). What arrives in philosophical language, according to Rosenzweig, is not the universal essence of the One, but the linguistic essence of the finite singulars which is the multiple singulars exposure or abandonment to their singularly irreducible finitude. The linguistic essence of the finite beings, who are irreducibly multiple and singulars, is in this intrinsic intimacy with those beings pure exposure to their finitude. Similarly for Heidegger too, the phenomenology of the unapparent has an essential relation to the naming the language of man who is essentially this finite being. Thinking too, insofar it comes

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to us and that we never go to thinking and is a gift from a site wholly otherwise than man, arrives on the basis of our finitude that demands that it is to be thanked. The dignity and nobility of thinking lays in this recognition. With this thankfulness there is receptivityin so far our finitude renders us, like an open wound, being receptive welcoming the advent of coming, or to the presencing of the presence. Language, even before it is categorical cognition of given presences in apophansis, is the naming-saying that welcomes the unapparent apparition, i.e., the letting being as such to appear. With thankfulness and gratitude, mortals welcome the coming and receive the future. This promise of future is what the wanderer-thinker, in his path of thinking, contemplates and is intimated at during sudden lightning flashes, for the advent of which he must be ready to take a leap, and open his soul to the future of thinking itself, without making a system out of it, without totalizing it. Language is this exposure, or this abandonment to the excessive light of the sudden apparition of the otherwise that in the lucidity of the coming blinds him with its brilliancy. In traditional messianic religions, the coming of Messiah is something like violence. It is violence unlike any other violence, violence without the violence of law, of what Benjamin calls divine violence as distinguished from law-positing and law-preserving violence. It is such a lightning flash that the poet Hlderlin speaks as the strike of Apollo: in relation to this momentary apparition of the unapparent, the poet-wanderer or the philosopher is always belated. Hence he must arrive beforehand, like the Nietzschean philosopher of heralding, announcing the unapparent apparition, implying the presencing that itself presences, the coming itself that comes, and not like the owl of Minerva taking its flight at the dusk of history.

Wandering, Thinking
In philosophy, there are only paths; in sciences, on the contrary, there are only methods, that is, modes of procedure. Heidegger (2003, p. 80)

Therefore, sonority or rhythm of wandering is caesural. One who has the experience of wandering in mountain paths knows the fragmented

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

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reproduces the same truth at a different level but welcomes truth that each time suspends the law of the dialectical. Thinking, if it has to open itself in its ecstasy to the space of the outside where truth advents, this manifestation of the unapparent must have a different logic than the logic of a scientific method.

Configuration Saying
Therefore, the necessity: to repeat the truth of the advent, to repeat the advent of truth, repetitively, to be seized by the advent this is coming and always remaining to come. There is always something like a universality of thinking, not the universality of the concept but the universality of the singular each time. Language of thinking bears this singularity of the universal through its multiple repetitions. The task, through this differential repetition, and universalizing the singular presencing of presence, is to preserve each time anew the excess of this event of unapparent apparition without reducing it to any immanence of predicates and presently given presents. Therefore, there arises the necessity to say, again and again, each time anew, in the poetic naming-language of mortals that lets the unapparent appear, without reducing it to the universality of the categorical cognitive grasp. Since the advent of the coming in its momentary apparition discontinues, suspends, interrupts itself, it does not belong to any discourse of totality or system. It does not find itself as to its own ground and condition. Such an advent that resonates in every poetical saying says the whole and yet remains outside of any totality. It is what the present writer shall call configuration saying, which is not a method, for it does follow any ism as such but a gesture, a sonority, a resonance of saying that says over and over again, which is at each moment finite and new, something that heralds rather than gives the result of a process in the form of predicative propositions. The configuration saying is an attempt to think the whole without totality, repetition without recuperation, and universality without universalism. Each coming is a coming singularly universal, a coming itself which is promised as gift given to beings mortal and finite. It is a gift complete, a completed gift in itself and therefore there is in it a universality whose completeness completes our speech. Silence is the beatific recognition of this completeness of speech, a silence which is not

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defiance nor recalcitrance of speech but the completeness of speech itself wherein consists the dignity of the language of the mortals. It is not the silence of the mythic-heroic tragic man as defiance because he is superior to the God in his mortality, because of his capacity of death can defy even the God. The divine mourning that resonates in silence is the remembrance of the immemorial gift, remembrance of the immemorial promise, that is, the promise of the unthought that is already always given to man as a gift. Therefore, in silence language itself, at its limit, as it were mourns, or mournfully remembers the immemorial promise, because it fails itself to name the name. There is, therefore, always certain mournfulness in silence and a silence in mournfulness, which is distinguished from the silence of the tragicmythic heroic man who asserts at the face of his own death his solitude and his self denuded of contingent features of his character.1 What follow in the following pages are configuring of sayings of what the wanderer-thinker is exposed, in his path of wandering, to the appearing of unapparent, the coming itself. What kind of appearing is this which is appearing of the unapparent? What kind of phenomenon is this whose phenomenality lies in its un-apparition? What is this coming, which is not any this or that coming, which is not exhausted in anything that has come to pass, that has appeared to disappear and that has become a phenomenon so that it no longer appears to us anymore? Is there a coming that is the appearing of the non-apparent and phenomena of the non-phenomenal? The wandering the poet-thinker, wandering in his solitary winding path of a mountain, is seized by the perplexity, or aporia of this question. If there is an essential thinking, or if thinking is to attain the essential, then thinking must not shy away from this aporia, but rather must allow this aporia to move thinking itself and in this pathway of thinking, attain the essential. All philosophical thinking is essentially finite and incomplete. Out of this essential incompleteness, the poetthinker repeats himself here and there, as the wanderer must renew his leaps, because repetition always arises out of an essential finitude of thinking itself. What is presented in this work is nothing but the wrested truth, spoken in a configuration that emerges out of the experiences of wandering. Therefore, no claim here been made that the truth is to be presented as completed truth. Once such a claim is made, the

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

 Radical Finitude

If the emergence of modern philosophy is marked by the materialization of the question of finitude (once it becomes the matter of recounting the genesis and structure of subjectivity that has to emerge without any given ground, since no condition is given in the form of substance) that is because this finitude is essentially that of the question of the subject. The question of the subject in its finitude becomes the question of modernity and its determination of historical breaks belonging to the accumulative movement of history itself. In Hegels case, therefore, the destinal question of history as he recounts in Phenomenology of Spirit becomes the metaphysical question of the subject whose finitude is grasped as the labour of negativity. At the limit of this metaphysics of history, when the whole history of that metaphysics of subjectivity comes to a standstill (in the sense of what Benjamin calls dialectics at a standstill), it reveals itself to be that where the claim of redemption is not fulfilled. It then becomes necessary to think of a radical notion of finitude as the task of inaugurating another thought of history which should at the same time articulate a radical critique of the violence of history. The notion of history is bound with the question of finitude where finitude is seen less as a labour of negativity but as a gift on the basis of which mortals are placed in the open site of the inauguration of history itself.

The Immemorial
What would our existence be if its days and months and years are to pass away in monotonous succession like the Hegelian homogenous

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succession of empty instants (Benjamin 1977, pp. 251-261) which, like the leaves of trees, appear in Spring only to disappear in Autumn and return in Spring, or like the infinite nameless waves of the Sea without hope, meaning and promisebringing to us nothing but the eternal murmur of what is already become finished, accomplished, when each moment is like any other moments, an eternal Now, like the eternal Now of the waves, if there is no not yet to become, no not yet to come, and no hope for the not yet to accomplish? If the great Hegelian dialectical-historical time is none but this eternally un-redemptive, eternally boring return to the same, without any ecstatic outside, without the redemptive advent of future outside, then how despairing and desolate our existence would be? What would the meaning of our existence, and our being with others, our politics and our ethics, our mortality and our natality, the meaning of our history and our fate be if mortals in its history appear only to earn his recognition through violent life and death struggle and through a sacrificial, negative relation with other mortals, if not such a history but be an eternal, eternally unredeemed melancholy, like sighs of Abraham if he is to lose his faith (imagine Kierkegaards sighs too!), or the melancholic wind of this vast desert of history which has become of our existence? Our relationship with us, with other mortals, to the divine and the rest of created existence would only have the meaning of an un-redemptive negativity. It would then be necessary, if the sense of mortality of the mortals not to be exhausted by the meaning that negativity gives to it, to open up this metaphysically-negatively determined closure of dialecticalhistorical time to another notion of a temporality which remains as a time of hope and fulfilment, of a positive outside negativity, of an infinity outside totality. If the great metaphysician of the West thinks the historicity of history as the work of negativity, then one wonders further: Is the historicity of history for the mortals, who as mortal existence is in need of a redemptive future, exhausted in the meaning of history that the dialectic of negativity gives to it? What would the human and the meaning of being human be if he is only the product of his own death and death of the other mortals, he whose consciousness of his own existence and that of the Absolute is nothing but his own work of death (Hegel 1998, p. 270), accomplished by deaths negative labour? Can the meaning of

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

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pure offering. This gift is without any economy of equivalences and without any possibility of measurement, the immeasurable par excellence that dispropriates him in advance, and that lies as a kind of abyss, an inscrutable, unfathomable secret which, in so far it is secret, makes at all possible something like manifestation of the world. This revelation of the secret is that phenomenon of the unapparent that opens the world for the first time. The presencing that itself presences is not an originary presence that can be apophantically traced back. It is the spacing that is before any presence-absence; it is what exposes the mortal to his truth, to his human temporality and inaugurates history. If the mortals understand anything like what exists in the world on the basis of temporality, this temporality must already always be revealed to him in advance so that he understands his being as being, his existence as existence. This revelation is not the revelation of a given presence, but a coming to presence which while appearing, conceals itself. It is this that we call secret. Therefore we have this strange feeling within us that we always existed from eternity. In relation to the coming to presence which, while being unapparent, opens to us the worldor, the world is opened for us where for the first time temporality makes itself manifestin relation to this originary presencing-presence, it appears as if our existence is always belated, as if in relation to our existence there always precedes an immemorial past which cannot be appropriated in our self presence. Schellings The Ages of the World (2002) an eternal past which has never been present, an immemorial origin is seen precisely as the source of divine mournful joy that fundamentally attunes a finite existence. An eternal past which has never been present opens the world to the mortals, as if for the first time, a past that can never be appropriated and recuperated in the mortals historical memory only because it is the condition of memory as such. What opens the world for the mortals is that of an originary forgetting before any memory since this opening has never come to pass as a passed presence. Hence, it is the groundlessness of our past, like our mortality, that opens the pure futurity for us, and makes human history as such possible. This mortality, beyond the immanence of self-presenting negativity, is more originary promise of futurity to

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

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

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

The Mournful Gift

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

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immemorial being haunting our life, it is to such a mortal being existence comes as gift, as a donation before memory and before time . This mortal man is not the origin and end of his own existence, but his existence arises as an unsaturated gift from a destination or origin which is elsewhere, which is not yet human and not yet being. The thought of the originary gift and the radical finitude of the mortals, which in so far is gift is outside mans power of appropriation, can only be thought at the limit of the metaphysics of presence (Ibid.). For the divine, uncreated being, his existence is not gift, because the God spaces himself at his own space and times himself at his own time. Therefore, God is understood to be that being in whom his essence coincides his existence, and, as the medieval theologians tell us, his existence is pure actuality without possibility. Only the mortal whose existence lies in pure donation is belated in relation to his own ground, his condition and his past; only in the mortal, the excess of his existence lies in an immemorial gift or in the gift of the immemorial. Therefore, man has something like a past which is a past before any passed past, an immemorial past beyond memory that unconditionally deprives us the foundation of our own being on the basis of its own self-grounding. It is in this sense existence is inextricably, in the innermost manner, is finite. Yet it is only on the basis of the originary finitude mortals are open to something like the incalculable arrival of future and to his immemorial past, as if here time itself lengthens itself to the infinity outside any immanence of self-presence. The task of the philosophical thinking is, to open us, outside any metaphysical totalization, to the sudden lightning flashes of the pure arrival of the future and to the immemorial past without mastery and without appropriation and to attune ourselves to that beatific joy inseparable from an attunement of a fundamental mourning, which Hlderlin speaks as Grundstimmung (1980). In a certain text, Schelling too speaks of this in-experienciable experience of mortality, which is the non-conditional condition of experience, itself as the occasion of the birth of thinking:
He who wishes to place himself in the beginning of a truly free philosophy must abandon even God. Here we say: who wishes to maintain it, he will lose it; and who gives up, he will find it. Only he has come to the ground of himself and has known the whole depth

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of life who has once abandoned everything, and has himself been abandoned by everything. He for whom everything disappeared and who saw himself alone with the infinite: a great step which Plato compared to death. (Quoted in Heidegger 1985, pp. 6-7)

The beatific joy of this divine mourning that Schelling speaks of is not the joy of cognition but participation in the Infinite, a partaking of the divine joy in the mode of philosophical contemplation without yet being damaged by the violence of cognition. It is a partaking in the immemorial from where knowledge itself arises, and yet to which no knowledge attains its self-fulfilment. It is participation with an absolute past which only comes to us from an incalculable, an equally eternal remnant of future, and an eternal remainder of time. This possibility alone is redemptive when on the basis of an originary dispropriation mortals partake of the eternity and infinite in an unsaturated gift, in an excess of promise given beforehand, beyond being and beyond any time of presence. In a letter after the death of Caroline, Schelling speaks of this divine mourning as what existence in its inextricably mortal condition is affected with, attuned with, that is a fundamental attunement, an essential affection: I now need friends who are not strangers to the real seriousness of pain and who feel that the single right and happy state of the soul is the divine mourning in which all earthly pain in immersed (Schelling 1975). Philosophical contemplation, instead of evading the thought of mortality, must allow itself to be seized by it, to be dispossessed by it, to be abandoned by it, to be tempered by it, for only then, at the limit of thinkability and cognitive mastery, thinking opens itself to the non-condition, and to the unsaturated excess of the gift. Therefore, philosophical thinking is always a thinking that, in a necessary manner, by a logic innermost to it, is tempered with its own impossibility that forever haunts the philosophical contemplation. It is in the pure state of exception, in pure abandonment, in the nudity of an abandonment where being is exposed to its peril that something appears that strikes the philosopher, claiming his entire existence. He then loses, as Hlderlin speaks, his tongue in a foreign land, where lightning strikes him, separates him from himself, throws him outside of himself, rather than this lightning belonging to him as possession. Exposed, abandoned, denuded, the mortal is the un-accommodated,

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

The Logic of the World

Mortality and finitude is neither a component part of a mortals existence in totality, nor an accidental property of existence as such, but his innermost, essential groundlessness. It is on the basis of this

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

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

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world understood in its nominative, which, as such, exceed all our reductive metaphysical totalization. The finitude of the world, or rather, the worlding of the world, and its attunement of mourning for a non-appropriable, non-totalizable, absent, excluded, expelled, separated, partitioned, departed origin, makes our history and politics essentially finite and non-totalizable, which, in so far it is non-totalizable, is at once tempered with the possibility of a redemptive joy, because this finitude is the condition of the worlds coming into existence. Hope and melancholy are not two opposite attunements of the world. They attune the world in its coming into presence, in the event of existence as fundamental moods or attunements, bearing the gift and promise of its coming to come, presencing to presence. This coming is not a progressive realization of the past in a successive manner, nor a kind of result of a process that lifts, elevates unto itself this process. Thought historically, that means non-dialectically, the world is to be attuned to melancholy as possible mood of its existence. The verbal infinitive of the possible is the not yet of the world, which in its infinitive is an infinitive not yet. The eternal remnant of the not yet demands infinite, joyous affirmation of the world that affirms the advent of future. With the possibility of mourning, joy is too given at the same time, at the same time when time times and space spaces, when past, presence and future come together in a momentary presentation that illumines all that has been, all that is and will be. This redemptive illumination of the moment that presents eternity in a momentary, sudden apparition falls outside any reductive totalization achieved by the negative labour of universal history. The moment when the unapparent appears, and the ecstasy of eternity monstrously couples with temporality: this moment does not belong to any self-presentation of dialectical historical instant, nor is it accomplished as the absolute concept of universal history. It remains as the eternal remnant of history that keeps in remembrance the messianic promise of the advent. Melancholy and joy are not understood here as psychological states, nor they are to be anthropologically understood. They are the fundamental attunements of the world and existence to its own condition and coming into presence. Therefore one can say: as there

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is a hope for the not yet, a future that is already always given in an immemorial past, so there is a melancholy already given as possibility to come, a possibility and not yet completely attained actuality. Therefore, melancholy is an originary attunement of the world to its own origin. The world attunes itself to its origin in a melancholic song that has not become a language yet, a mute lament before language that laments its own mortality. In philosophical contemplation and in poetic saying that preserves the excess of the immemorial promise in language, this melancholy is transformed at once into a divine, paradisiacal joyousness. It reflects, in a weak illumination, the joy of the animals when Adam first gave their names to them. The world and existences relation to its time is not succession of past and presence and future of the same banal, monotony of the vacant Now, but the worlds temporality is ecstatically attuned to melancholy and hope as moods of the worlds existence, or existences mood of existing in the world in so far as the world opens itself ecstatically and simultaneously to the abyss of its immemorial past and to the astonishing arriving of its not yet. Mortality opens the language of the world to a language before language, and to a language after language, to a language of an eternal remnant of language that bears the promise of its fulfilment.

Mortality
A thinking that confronts this mortality, its own mortality, ecstaticallyfor thinking itself is finite, disruptive, interruptive of itself, a finite thinkingmust go beyond the closure of dialecticalspeculative philosophy. If thinking has to open itself to its outside, which is other than the thinkable, to open itself to the advent of coming into existence, then the transcendence of this advent has to be thought otherwise than the deaths immanent negative product, but in relation to a radical finitude as a gift and a promise. This gift is not a product and, therefore, it does not belong to the economy of the universal history. This gift is rather the gift of the immemorial. At the heart of existence, at the depth of the world, thousand melancholic voices cry out, the cries of an abyssal mortality which cannot be appeased in a world that is constituted by the negative work of death. It can only be addressed by keeping open the inaugurating

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

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

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Introducing this Work

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

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

Part I

Configuration

 The Open

Thinking means venturing beyond. Ernst Bloch (1995, p. 5)

This mortal creature called man, in so far as s/he is mortal, is an open existence, which means that as an existing being, s/he already always belongs to his own coming into existence. Here begins our voyage of thinking, for thinking too is a kind of voyage, which must venture forth ceaselessly, to what is beyond and Not Yet. Thinking must affirm this Not yet, this messianic, redemptive fulfillment, if it has to affirm this open-ness of existence itself. In the open darkness and light, remembrance and oblivion, coming into existence and disappearing in death, all play their originary cobelonging, or co-figuration. Existence belongs to this opening and is exposed to its coming to presence. It is on the basis of this originary opening, this originary historical which is revealed to this mortal being called man, on the basis of this revelation, that man founds something like politics and history. There comes into existence out of this freedom, out of this play space1, this field called polis2, where there takes place war and festival, where historical revolutions tear apart history, bring ruptures and discontinuities in the mode of his existence, where man seeks the foundation of his own foundation (which is his metaphysical task), where occur the dialectics of negativity between man and man, where man puts at stake his own death, his own dissolution, and by the power of his own dissolution stands in relation to the total world that he seeks to dominate. This means that mans attempts to metaphysically found his own political

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and historical existence must presuppose a far more originary nonfoundation, the differentiating revealing of the open, the ungrounded spacing play, or playing space of natality and mortality. Would a politics and metaphysics, a history and polis be possible if there would not already hold sway the open? Would such a polis and mans metaphysical foundation of his own ground be possible if there were not already given the promise of the coming, the opening which thereby is intimated, not in the predicative logic of his metaphysics and his history, but in the pre-predicative lightning flash of language, in a poetic saying? This pre-predicative lightning, this un-pre-thinkable must have already placed man in relation to his outside, to the outside of his foundation, exposing him to his finitude and abyssal mortality, to the immemorial promise of coming into existence that precedes the negativity of death that man undertakes on his own behalf. How does one name this historical before history, this emergence of history, or, the birth of history itself, the open which is otherwise than and before the meta of his metaphysics? What would the naming of this time be if this time must already occur before time (before man come to present himself to himself ) and, therefore, before the name, this time that must already occur as simultaneity of all times so that the whole eternity of time reveals to man beforehand, on the basis of which man gives himself his own time, the time of his history and the time of his politics? As if already always there must be granted to the mortal a time before his time, before the time of his ownnot this or that time, nor another time, but time temporalizing itselfin so far as it is on the basis of time temporalizing itself, on the basis of this eternity there manifests for man his historicity and his politics, his metaphysics and his ethics? As if there occurs before all naming a name which is itself without the name, and is the event of naming itself, the event of language itself? Which naming language of the mortal would be able to name this name outside the name, let alone exhausting it in the name? As if there occurs a historical opening before history, a promise beyond metaphysics and beyond politics, a configuration of coming into existing and mortality that is outside the labour of death which man undertakes on his own behalf, a revelation to him of his outside which is outside his domination and mastery, outside his power and labour, a name which is outside the naming language

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of mortals, yet which while first depriving man his foundation and power, gives him the task to name the nameless, bestowing upon him the event of language on the basis of which he knows his world, and grasps the entities that has become and is given in the world. The task of the mortal naming language of this linguistic being called man would, then, be the task of the impossible. If that is so, then the essence of this mortal language is not primarily a categoricalpredicative grasp of what has presently become of the historical world and entities therein constituting the historical totality, nor would it be to exhaust the name without name in the signification of the world. We neither know the open on the basis of history (what we generally know as history), nor we know the worlds coming into existence on the basis of predication. We would then have to say rather that language is the event of the world, this mortal existential world for this existent man, or, even better, the event of language before any predicative-categorical cognition and before the historical foundation of the historical worldintimates that coming or birth (which is to be understood before any biological determination of it) by throwing mortals to his outside, by exposing him to his outside, which is outside his presence and power, outside politics and even outside history. The event of language already always inserts this mortal being called man, in an immemorial past, into this cofiguration of mortality and natality, of past and future and presence in a simultaneity that is called eternity. This eternity, which is not the mere void of time, precedes and follows the historical totalities, outside the speculative historical time, and remains as an eternal remnant, irreducibly keeping us open to the promise of coming time beyond violence and beyond the negativity of historical reason.3 The open is the spacing and timing as play which grants beforehand the name of this promise or promise of the name. In this way, this mortal being called man is open to the coming where the eternity of his future, this remnant of time announces itself. Therefore this mortal called man has a relation to that which is more than, outside of, otherwise than what he has made himself out of his own capacity and possibility, for he is not only what he has founded on the basis of his own ground; a basis otherwise his basis must granted to him, or, as Schelling (1936) says, must be loaned to him as pure, incalculable, non-conditional, non-economic gift. Finding himself in the midst

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

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logic that claims to begin with the immediate that immediately passes into the mediation. It is because the event of thinking, and its fundamental mood of astonishment exceeds any categorical grasp of a philosophical logic that is based upon predicative proposition, for the movement of a predicative proposition can only be a negative, and hence, an immanent movement ; in itself it is no movement at all. But the movement of mortality is a movement transcendent and, therefore, it is movement at all. In this sense, Schelling, preceding and influencing Kierkegaard denies movement in Hegelian speculative logic, though the effort of the speculative logic is to include movement into it. In so far as Hegel understood movement only as a negative, it can only be an immanent movement, hence based upon the predicative proposition. The event that begins the movement is a leap outside, for all coming into presence is transcendence, and hence is outside of all predication and judgement that constitute the speculative historical totality. Therefore, it is not surprising that Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit begins its movement, or rather Hegel likens (which is not mere analogy) this phenomenological movement of the dialectical-historical to the movement of a speculative proposition, which is an immanent movement. Nothing surprises, astonishes us in Hegelian speculative-historical system, for what is missing there is the ecstasy of the event, the leap of the outside, and the thinking of the inception which is outside of a logical generation of a monotonous, dull immediate immediately passing into the mediation. This is the reason that Franz Rosenzweig, following Schelling, begins his The Star of Redemption with the complaint that the philosophical system that claims to be the cognition of the all, is deaf to the cries of mortality, for in that speculative philosophical discourse of totality, nothing and nobody dies. The speculative system for which singulars are reduced to the particular moments of the One, there is no place for the singulars, the singulars for whom their deaths are of utmost existential interest that refuses to serve the interest of the anonymous Universality. What is missing in the Hegelian speculative-dialectical determination of history is none else but death, death that is outside and otherwise than the negative, death which cannot persist while carrying its predicates in the way that Hegels subject carries its own dissolution as its predicate. If speculative proposition is like the Subject that persists as the same

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even in its own dissolution and accidents, then death that does not persist in its apparition is a proposition without predicate. This death refuses to work, it refuses to produce its own predicates, if the meaning of work in Hegelian metaphysics is none but production of predicates. It is because of this, though it is the effort of a speculative logic of history to think death or mortality, it has made death only a result or the process of negativity, a death no longer event but work that serves the interests of the Universal. Such a speculative discourse of universality, founded upon the predicative proposition of a speculative judgement is devoid of the event, for event does not have the character of persistence of negativity. By taking away the poisonous sting of death (Rosenzweig 2005, p. 9), such a speculative totalization allows itself to forget the immemorial open and the promise, the non-conditional gift loaned therein. The remembrance of the immemorial inception, of the open before totality, of the gift of mortality before the negative work of death and the promise given in a beginning before any beginning, and therefore given in a historical coming into existence before history: this remembrance is renewed at moments when history interrupts itself, pauses itself, or when history itself claims to have accomplished its own end and to have exhausted its innermost resources and possibilities. The questions of promise and gift, of inception and future arise only in relation to the questions concerning exit from such a metaphysics that marks the dominant thinking of the Greco-Roman civilization. The question of the pause of history is, as it is clear, is the question of mortality and the open, when each time history itself has to leap over the abyss that is yawning wide open. This history is not the history what Hegel the metaphysician dreamt of; it is not the history where abysses are like transitional moments that simultaneously bridge themselves. The pauses or interruptions of history are not differential epochal moments belonging to the homogenous, universal unity of a speculative proposition that tarries with its own dissolutions, thereby making these dissolutions as moments of the bridge. They are, rather, in their radical finitude, singular epochal ruptures that refuse to be gathered into a logical principle of unity. Their logic of becoming is not the dialectical-speculative logic of speculative proposition. Their caesural logic is more like what Hlderlin calls as becoming in perishing (Hlderlin 1988, pp. 96-100). They are

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

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figures of discontinuities. Commenting on Hlderlin, Francoise Dastur writes,

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Judgement and History

What concerns us here, once more, is the relationship between the logical judgement and history. If a certain dominant metaphysical determination of history dreams the fulfilment of its self-presence despite the epochal ruptures so that beneath the discontinuities and ruptures of history the unity of self-presence flows as a discontinuous self-same, as self-persisting truth in face of its own dissolution, it thereby derives its ground from the authority of the logical form of judgement, that is, the apophansis of the predicative proposition. Hegelian speculative logic of history, which is based upon the dominant logic of judgement as predicative, constitutes itself as the judgement of history that subsumes epochal ruptures as its mere attenuated discontinuities. What is necessary, if epochal ruptures are to be thought irreducible to the universal, self-persisting logic of movement, a different logic of origin, a radical re-thinking of the logic of judgement that enables us to think the event as the event of history. It is the monstrous site of history the advent of which alone brings redemptive fulfilment outside the closure of historical violence. Then the judgement of history would no longer be authoritative and final, for it is in the name of a redemptive fulfilment that history will be judged. *
The deepening of the inner life can no longer be guided by the evidences of history. It is given over to the risk and to the moral creation of the Ito horizons more vast than history, in which history itself is judged. Emmanuel Levinas (1969, p. 246)

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Of History
For a long time, from the inception of metaphysics, philosophers have cherished the dream of an origin that is pure, autochthonous beginning of itself, self-identical and immanent. It is an origin which releases the movement of history, the history of a community, race, nation, etc. In its perseverance, in its purity and autochthony, it is such as to be able to bear its self-identity in its face of its own disjunction and suffering, its being in the face of its own dissolution, like Phoenix that arises from its ashes. Beneath the upheavals of history, beneath the epochal ruptures, beneath the unquiet manifestations of the various elemental forces of the sky, there is the dream of metaphysics: it is the dream of the imperturbable serenity, eternal rest, at the depth of the nourishing earth which maintains itself, as a great system making philosopher speaks of, in the face of its death. This metaphysically founded logic of origin is also logic of earth and soil, of the cunning of a history that fulfils its Parousia despite or through the unreason, a history that human beings capable of their own power of death found by toil and sweat. What they foundnamely, the rational institutions that constitute the universal, anonymous totality called historyappears to have arrived (or, at least, have this possibility of ) redemptive fulfilment of the violence that found these institutions. What then this universal history claims to fulfils itself, by revealing itself to itself, by coming to presence to itself, is this Parousia of reason. History appears to be the continuous, immanent satisfaction of this Parousia of reason which, precisely on account of achieving this Parousia, assumes the authority of judgement. History, metaphysically determined, is the gathering of the past into the Parousia of immanence of self-presence so that nothing essential really is thought to be lost of the past promise which is not fulfilled, for everything essential that is past is traced back by the apophansis of judgement. From this essential metaphysical determination, history derives its character of judgement. It passes judgement on those multiple singulars that cannot be enclosed within its totality, on that immemorial promise of the immemorial past that cannot be traced back by the memorial authority of apophansis and which for that matter, cannot be enclosed within the immanence of the Parousia of reason. This judgement of the anonymous, universal

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history manifests itself in the thetic violence of law that the rational institutions ensure its execution. In his Totality and Infinity (1969), Emmanuel Levinas attempts to think of a more originary ethical responsibility in justice that exceeds this judgement of history. There is always something excess or surplus in justice which is not the Parousia of reason, but what is suppressed in the visibility of the judgement of history. It is the invisible itself whose passage of manifestation is not the progressive, accumulative manifestation of history, which is not mere provisionally invisible and therefore not mere privation of the visible. It is rather that of the singularity that escapes totality, which cannot be annihilated by the power of judgement, by the force of law which the rational institutions execute. The order where the invisibility of the singularity manifests itself is the order of infinity in which history itself is judged (Ibid.). It is an infinite judgement because it comes from the infinity (what Levinas calls diachrony) of the immemorial promise itself which the apophansis of the speculative historical memory cannot trace back to. It is in the name of this immemorial promise that escapes all the measurement of the economy of judgement that the tyranny of the universal history is to be judged. This infinite judgement (or, the judgement of infinity) is not evidenced by the documents of history, for it passes judgement in the name of an immemorial past that is already always lost and in the name of that which is always yet to come. This infinite judgementinfinite in the sense that its exceeds judgement itselfthis justice in-excess is not, unlike the judgement of history, the maintenance of the work of death (Hegel 1998, p. 270) ensured by the rational institutions on the basis of thetic law (of what Benjamin calls law preserving violence and law positing violence). Justice here belongs to the order of the divine1 where man in his singularity is affirmed, not as mere instantiation of a universal reason but as the other who cannot be annihilated. Levinas speaks:
Objective judgement is pronounced by the existence of rational institutions, in which the will is secured against death and against its own perfidy. It consists in the submission of the subjective will to the universal laws which reduce the will to its objective signification it henceforth exists as though it were dead and signified only in its own heritage, as though everything that was existence in the first person in it, subjective existence, were but the after-effect of its animality.

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And,
There exists a tyranny of the universal and of the impersonal, an order that is inhuman though distinct from brutish. Against it man affirms himself as an irreducible singularity, exterior to the totality into which he enters, and aspiring to the religious order where the recognition of the individual concerns him in his singularity, an order of joy which is neither cessation nor antithesis of pain nor flight before it. (Ibid., p. 242)

What Levinas is attempting to think is not that these visible forms are to be done away withthe visible forms that tend to form a totalitybut rather that these visible forms must not forget the unforgettable, that is, the immemorial promise that opens time, that means, the pure future of presencing that alone can redeem the violence of the visible order of history. Beyond any eidetic phenomenology of consciousness that makes manifest a reality in visible forms, justice and truth must evoke a phenomenology of the invisible and of promise that opens the judgement of history beyond historical time. The thought of a redemptive justice evokes a phenomenology of promise and hope that opens itself to the extremities of time, to a before any before and to a last after the last. The judgement of consciousness, says Levinas must refer to a reality beyond the sentence pronounced by history, which is also a cessation and an end. Hence truth requires as its ultimate condition an infinite time, the condition for both goodness and the transcendence of the face (Ibid., p. 247). The dominant metaphysical determination of history that presents itself as the continuous manifestation of the Parousia of reason that progressively, accumulatively unfolds itself belongs to the economy of the phenomenology of the visible. Hegels phenomenology of history is such a phenomenology of the visible, where reason presents itself as self-persisting movement of self-present Parousia. Hegels phenomenology of history is this phenomenology of the continuous upliftment (Aufhebung) of the invisible unto the visible in the straight line of conversion by the energy of thought (Hegel 1998, p. 19) which is the negativity of judgement where what comes never ceases to recapture what is already gone, in the manner of apophansis that traces itself back to its origin, so that for the Absolute of Parousia

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

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event of truth which is the advent of the unapparent. If our dominant understanding of politics and history is based upon the metaphysical foundation of the self-grounding immanence of Parousia that reduces the advent of the unapparent into the mere attenuated variation of the apophantic logic of the visible, so that the radical breaks are levelled off to the already given-ness of the visible forms, then it would be necessary to open such an apophantic phenomenology of the givenness to the more originary phenomenology of exposure at the limit of self-grounding consciousness. That the judgement of such a universal history upon the singularity of the multiple (that reduces such multiplicity and singularity to the variations of the Subjects necessary diremption) is derived from the apophantic basis of the predicative proposition can be shown by an exposition of what Hegel calls speculative judgement. The job of the speculative judgement is the same as the job of history. It is to bear its accidents, its own dissolutions and epochal ruptures straight right to the end of this movement, so that beneath the disquietude of its movement, beneath the sufferings of its finitude, it still sinks down its teeth into its autochthonous, its immanent pure soil from where history originates. The ruptures of history will only be then relative disjunctions by means of which uniform, universal history cunningly realizes itself. The speculative propositional movement of history has in its womb such cunning imposture that it realizes its totalization precisely through its own dissolutions, by sacrificing itself. Just as the logic of this speculative judgement is a sacrificial logic, so the logic of history is a sacrificial history. Its logic is the theodicy of a resurrection and divine embodiment on the profane order, for which death does not and must not go in vain, that gives itself back the serenity and quietitude of the earth, of community of historical people who gather together to the innermost unity of its ground through the relationships of blood and soil. The logic of copula of the judgement, which is the passage of death, will then serve the innermost ground of a communitys and historys Parousia. The copula is the site, the centre, where history gathers unto itself, where people bearing swords and cross gather together to celebrate victory over others, the site where there takes places celebration of victory and festivity of being-one-with-oneself. Like the copula that unites the separated, disjoined elements into its innermost ground of unity, and therefore gives the disquiet, suffering

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elements the joyous being with oneself, so the depth of the earth is the site of history which preserves, and at the same time gives a form of eternity and unity to the dispersed, disconnected, disjoined elements. The depth of the earth nourishes in its womb the perishable mortals, and by denuding the individuals of its accidental, contingent features of its individuality, bestows upon these perishable mortals the sense of immortality and universality. This denuding or disrobing is the work of death, which death performs in the interests of the universal. The name of this deed is called funeral. In Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel writes,
The deed, then which embraces the entire existence of the bloodrelation, does not concern the citizen, for he does not belong to the family, nor the individual who is to become a citizen and will cease to count this particular individual; it has as its object and content this particular individual who belongs to the family, but is taken as a universal being freed from his sensuous, i.e., individual, reality. The deed no longer concerns the living but the dead, the individual who, after a long succession of separate disconnected experiences, concentrates himself into a single completed shape and has raised himself out of the unrest of the accidents of life into the calm of simple universality. But because it is only as citizen that he is actual and substantial, the individual, so far as he is not a citizen but belongs to the family, is only an unreal impotent shadow. (1998, pp. 269-70)

Death here is the supreme work, the supreme achievement,2 the innermost ground of unity of the individual that sublates the accidental, dispersed individuals into the concentrated form of universality, that is, universal history. Death is the copula of the speculative-apophantic judgement. It is the passage of the speculative, the threshold that unites in its innermost ground the individual and universal, the subject and the predicate by denuding, disrobing the accidental features of the subject and predicates. By denuding and disrobing what it considers to be the accidental and contingency of the singulars, it lifts and sublates them unto the universality of the Concept, just as through the works of death individuals sublate themselves unto the universality of History. The accomplishment or the end (Telos) of speculative judgement is the end of History itself: it is to subsume the singulars unto the totality of history. This speculative logic of history must pass through death, or must enable death to

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traverse through its passage in such a way that the substantiality of the subject-predicate position of the formal proposition is dissolved, and there comes into presence the Subject bearing itself as speculative proposition reaching its Parousia. This Subject of History is a Subject of predication and is a predicative subject at once who passes through its own dissolution and yet maintains itself through this passage and as this passage. This logic of origin enables metaphysically to found history in so far as it is the question of the historicity of the history itself, and not what passes as events in history. At the heart of the speculative logic of history operates certain logic of death, a thanaonto-theological constitution of metaphysics of history and politics. The metaphysical essence of history, the metaphysical secret of the speculative judgementin so far as the logic of history is based upon the modality of speculative judgementis none but death. Death is the secret of history. Death is that demonic site where history comes to pass as history, which unites in a terrible fashion what passes away and what abides, the transitory and the universal, the divine and the mortal. The supreme work and its supreme achievement of copula in the speculative judgement is the supreme achievement of death. It makes judgement possible, it makes history possible; it makes history itself into a speculative judgement, and makes speculative judgement into history. The logic of origin, according to this manner of thinking, would not be stranger to the phenomena of disappearance and dissolution, to this non-actuality3 called death, which is of all names the most terrifying. The speculative logic of origin is what makes this non-actuality into the actuality of the actual, into the possibility of the possible. The actuality of the actual out of the non-actuality when it realizes itself without any remainder is called Absolute. As making possible of actuality of the actual, and possibility of the possible, this logic that feeds upon the labour of death, is judgement of history, not judgement upon history, but history as judgement. As such the judgement of history upon the singularity of individuals is the sentence of death. This judgement is the speculative truth of history, truth that is told in the form of the speculative proposition, which says not the fixed, inert, lifeless truth of substance, but truth as Subjectivity, what has come to be history, which has passed as history, and preserved itself, in the interior depth of memory, as a gallery of images (Ibid., p. 492). Death will then

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appear, as the appearing of the unapparent, the phenomenality of the non-phenomena, the power of non-power. As such it is supreme power, the power of judgement. It is the force of law, the eye of judgement, the gaze of power, for it founds upon nothing given but upon the work of nothing itself. One wonders whether this logic of origin, the judgement of history that passes the sentence of death is the originary logic of origin, or whether beyond or outside of this logic of origin, outside the dream of an autochthonous ground, outside this reductive totalization of a thought of history that celebrates the feast of victory over the vanquished, there lies a more originary logic of origin, an origin which is the immemorial promise of the time yet to come. It is this promise that is the more originary judgement than the judgement of history. To think this outside it is necessary, without abandoning the historical-speculative task of dialectical thought altogether, to introduce another movement than the sacrificial-tragic time of history, another modality of thinking of mortality that is outside being the source of power and the force of law. Such a thinking of the logic of origin is yet to come, not because this future will come one day to pass, but an eternal remnant of future not yet that is given originarily as an origin. Such a logic of origin, because it in advance determines everything what is to come, therefore is more originary than any passed past; in so far as it would not come to pass but remain to come, it is more originary than any future. To introduce this thinking of the logic of origin is neither to think mortality on the basis of the power and the force of death, nor to think temporality on the basis of the tragic-sacrificial time of the dialectical. It will then be necessary to show that the predicative nature of this speculative history forecloses, and therefore cannot think, by a necessary logic, the event-ness of history itself, whose advent is not mere relative ruptures belonging to the universal history but epochal ruptures whose sudden, momentary advent makes history itself unto stillness of time, when death does not sublate itself unto the work of law. This stillness of the advent, in its sudden appearing of the unapparent, is not the speculative truth of history, for the singularity of its coming lies outside the universal movement of predicative proposition. Therefore it is necessary to think the temporality itself otherwise, no longer on the tragic-sacrificial modality of historical

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time, no longer the time of the gaze of law and the time of the work of power, but temporality in its refusal to gather unto the unity of the concept, presents itself in a discontinuous presentation, in a configuration, as a kind of assemblage, when time of presentation and its radical exteriority come-together, simultaneously, in a monstrous coupling (Hlderlin 1988, 96-100). This Moment when there happens this demonic, monstrous coupling of time and its radical outside, time and eternity, reason and its inassimilable other, ground and the abyss, it marks the tremor of the event, which is the advent of history itself. Thinking that has borne witness the unspeakable horrors of history and has felt in its bones and marrow the totalizing power of death, a life that is damaged (Adorno 1984) by the disrobing power of deaths gaze, such a thinking is now weary of the historical-memorial task of dialectical thinking, that is, to preserve in its interior depth the victorious march its becoming. The task of thinking now, at the end of such a speculative-dialectical history, supposing such an end has arrived (when?), is to think the redemptive advent, without the violence of thetic-sacrificial closure. Such an opening of thought is possible only on the basis of an exposure to the excess of promise arising at the moment of the suspension of law, a promise without judgement and without violence. Thinking of the end is not the thinking the end in the sense that the end is the end that manifests itself in a site topological, but it is the thinking of the advent of the unapparent at the extremity of time, at the ecstatic limit of time. It is the Eschatos of time that opens, inaugurates, welcomes the wholly other arrival. Each time an essential thinker attempts to think essentially, that means historically, if such a historical task is not recoiled from the terror and violence of the judgement of history, such thinking must feel in its innermost depth such violence, so that it must evoke another judgement, in the name of truth and in the name of justice, a judgement upon history. But thinking does not have to be that alone. The courage of thinking needs to be evoked, once again, no longer in the old tragicheroic pathos of a totalizing thought, but as hopeful, affirmation of a messianic, redemptive coming of justice. Perhaps the task of thinking that must confront now, more than ever before, is to think the limit of the violence of a totalizing history and to rethink the

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

Metaphysics and Violence

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

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Parousia. There is no immemorial loss that would not manifest itself in the visible forms of universal history. The logic of Aufhebung is the memorial logic of the metaphysics of the Subject. It preserves the essential in the innermost depth of the Subjects parousia, and making the mourning for the loss into the mere privation of the Subjects self-presence. In the chapter of Phenomenology of Spirit called Sense-Certainty, Hegel expounding the meaning of This in a phenomenological mannerthat means, as the movement of This taking place as such shows how in this phenomenological movement of taking place of This, the This shows on its emphatic self-certainty to be its own impossibility to maintain itself its This-ness. This phenomenological movement of the Thisthat is supposed to be this absolutely irreducible singular phenomenonalready, immediately (the moment it advents itself, erupts itself as This) is opened to a loss, not in an accidental manner, but precisely because the This is This. The momenthere and now the This appears, it is already a passed past, it is immediately a This which is no longer This and therefore an other than This: a lapsed presence, a presencing that in its advent has annulled itself, and has become other than itself. What it shows in this phenomenological appearing of the This is that the phenomenological movement itself originates on the basis of a loss, a forgetting, a presence that can never be recounted, a void or emptying away. What it shows is that the movement of the This appearing is a movement that puts into its peril of this appearing itself so that This can never be same This that the phenomenological consciousness will later recall. The This is essentially a perilous being, that means, its essence is to perish that is simultaneous with its advent. The phenomenological movement of history opens itself to this abyss of disappearance and dissolution, to the night of annihilation which can never be recalled by memory to the day of history, for it immediately has fallen outside the phenomenological movement of history, precisely in order to open this movement to itself for the first time, as an excess of presencing that must immediately absent itself, as a forever passed past, as an excess of loss that opens time and being on the basis of which alone can there be history, community, politics etc. Hegel writes,
To the question: what is Now? let us answer, e.g. Now is Night. In order to test the truth of this sense-certainty a simple experience

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will suffice. We write down this truth; a truth cannot lose anything by written down, anymore than it can lose anything through our preserving it. If now, this noon, we look again at the written truth we shall have to say that it has become stale (Hegel 1998, p. 60)

History is based upon a foundational loss, a loss that founds by giving the gift of the day; but precisely for that very reason, for Hegel, this loss is not an essential loss, for this night founds the day and gifts us the speculative truth of history and memory. This day is outside any this day or that night, a day other than or indifferent to any this or that. What is lost, though in an ineluctable manner, is only the inessential which must undergo dissolution so that the essential as such takes place, which is the realm of essence, the universality immanent which erupts on the basis of the lossof the sense-certainty of the This. Hegel continues,
The Now that is Night is preserved, i.e. it is treated as what it professes to be, as something that is; but it proves itself to be, on the contrary, something that is not. The Now does indeed preserve itself, but as something that is not Night; equally it preserves itself in the face of the Day that it now is, as something that is also not Day, in other words, as a negative in general. This self-preserving Now is, therefore, not immediate but mediated; for it is determined as a permanent and self-preserving Now through the fact that something else, viz., Day and Night is notso it is in fact the universal that is the true [content] of sense-certainty. (Ibid.)

The Aufhebung of the phenomenological-speculative historythe power and work of negativity, that energy of thought and of the Subject the pure I (Ibid., p. 19)is the work of interiorization through memory that constitutes the Subjectivity of speculative history for which mourning for the loss is merely privation of a constitutive process, a process similar to Freudian work of mourning. This power and force of negativity, which constitutes history in its inner depth and interiority, lies in this power of pure positing that converts the loss of the already and immediacy into the profit or gain of the mediated universal which alone is essence, for this essence alone is the essential. This work of mourning which is the work of Aufhebung that drives the phenomenological movement of speculative history is a violent movement of pure positing that the pure I, the Subject posits. The Speculative concept begins with positingnot with this or that, for that would already be a mediated beginning,

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

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

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

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

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

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into actuality. This judgement would not be judgement of history, then, but a judgement upon history. The task of this judgement is no longer that of constituting historical totalities, or metaphysicalhistorical system-making, but to think radically epochal ruptures and the advent of the coming whose promise is given in a time preceding the tragic-sacrificial time of history, and remains, as a messianic remnant, as promise to come, here and now.

The Passion of Potentiality

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

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

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In so far as the question of freedom is the question of the Open, the more originary free space on the basis of which free will can at all be posed, and in so far as de-cision, not yet ontologically founded, is born of the cision, that means, at the limit of predication, the judgement and the system of freedom can no longer be based on the onto-theological-predicative principle of identity but can only be thought when the question of freedom is introduced into the movement of constellation. This cision, the originary separation (Scheidung)4 does not function in the manner of copula of the predicative- speculative judgement. In other words, it does not enable the subject and predicate to pass into each other in the manner of speculum, in the manner of mirroring that renders this passing itself into the eternal truth of passing. This cision which while separating what is separated and disjoined render belong together (and not belong-together. We have learnt to distinguish between the two, after the manner of Heidegger (1969)) is rather the abyss whose temporality no metaphysics of self-presence based upon the logic of predication can sublate into itself, in so far as the cision as the nonconditional void (which for that matter is not pure Nothing, nor the negativity that converts Nothing into being) is the originary interval on the basis of which judgement character of judgement arrives. This place of the cision is this non-place, this monstrous site where there takes place that demonic encounter with the wholly otherwise where history as such inaugurates itself. This judgement of freedom, if it can still be called judgement, is then a monstrous judgement whose copula is at once coupe and yet coupling, a cutting away and joining, a parting and calling what is parted to belong together, withdrawing and bringing together the withdrawn. The judgement is this monstrous coupling, which is at once coupe that is, between subject and predicate, a non-thetic judgement in that it does not begin itself by its power of pure positing, but with the non-appropriable logic of origin, which as cision precedes all the logic of positing. The cision of this monstrous, demonic judgement is the non-place placing, the non-placed encountering on the basis of whichon the basis of this encounterthere takes places the exigency for the mortal, finite being to decide between the good and evil. The possibility of good and evil which alone must explain the enigmatic question of human freedom, therefore, belongs to

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finitude, finitude that claims upon the mortal being called man, and throws him to his destiny. It is on the basis of this non-appropriable finitude this mortal being called man assumes his freedom. It is on the basis of this more originary monstrosity, on the basis of a nonappropriable loan which must first of all expropriate the mortal, that something like truth of the human manifests itself to man. It is this monstrosity of judgement alone explains the possibility of evil in man, and consequently the essence of human freedom. Therefore, if Hegel attempts to address the question of the possibility of evil, and the question of freedom as such, he could only explain it away as mere diremptive moment, which is due to the finitude which is necessarily uplifted (Aufheben), resurrected unto Absolute Concept as infinite negativity. This could only happen like this in so far as dialectical-speculative judgement cannot explain the ecstasy of the finitude of man whose ecstasy is the ecstasy of a de-cision (that is, opening to the possibility of good and evil in an equal measure). This ecstasy of decision cannot be explained away by the predicative nature of speculative judgement, in so far as the speculative judgement already always presupposes the logical principle of identity, as if ecstasy of decision can only be logical-speculative. What is missing in speculative judgement is this ecstatic dimension of decision that arises out of the finitude of man, and that is granted to man by the abyss of freedom. As a result freedom is explained away without taking into account its ecstatic dimension, its infinite transcendence, and its opening to what is otherwise than the mortal. There is a monstrosity, or madness in all de-cisions, in so far as it carries in each of the mortals forehead the terror of the cision or abyss, forever non-appropriable to man. The speculative judgement of history presupposes the more originary monstrous judgement of freedom that first of all must already always ecstatically place the mortals unto that placing, to the demonic encountering with the wholly otherwise, to the divine and the elemental forces of nature, to the immemorial past that forever exceeds any immanence of self--presence. As such, freedom exposes us, tears us open, and wounds us to the pure potentiality which is the name of a radical future. The predicative truth of history which Hegels speculative judgement apophantically seeks to recuperate belongs to this abyss of freedom, to the monstrous judgement of freedom, to the pre-predicative revelation on the basis of which man decides,

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that man seeks conversion of the possibilities into actualities. But the basis of this decision is always pre-predicative abyss (Abgrund) which is, born out of the undecidable, at the limit, is solicited both to the good and evil in an equal measure, since it cannotbecause of the finitude of manpersist eternally in the undecidable. Because of this finitude of man, because of the non-appropriable outside as ground, what this mortal actualizes is only a limitation of the possible, only a limitation of the undecidable. On account of our irreducible finitude, there remains an eternal remnant of potentiality. In other words, the potentiality given as gift can never be exhausted in the acts of actualization which man undertakes on his own behalf, on the basis of his pure power of negativity. What man undertakes on behalf of his power of negativity, and seeks to constitute the foundation of his own historical existence, belongs to the passion of potentiality that is not exhausted in the dialectical-historical labour of historical man. What remains, then, as un-pre-thinkable remnant, but that must be given to man as promise and gift in the already always, is this pure potentiality itself that does not completely pass over into actuality. What remains as irreducible remainder (Schelling 1936) is nothing but this potentiality itself, which may or may not pass over into being. The demonic essence of freedom lies in its potentiality of its perhaps and its may be. If the speculative judgement must presuppose what must have already actualized, then potentiality cannot even be a logical category. The ecstasy of the potentiality will forever overflow what is already actualized. This forever is at once the promise of joy and the source of the unspeakable melancholy in finite life that is evoked by Schelling at the end of his Inquiry.
In God, too, there would be a depth of darkness if he did not make the condition his own and unite it to him as one and as absolute personality. Man never gains control over the condition, even though in evil he strives to do so; it is only loaned to him independently of him; hence his personality and selfhood can never be raised to complete actuality. This is the sadness which adheres too all finite life, and in as much as there is even in God himself a condition at least relatively independent, there is in him, too, a source of sadness which, however, never attains actuality but rather serves for the eternal joy of triumph. Thence, the veil of sadness, which is spread over all nature, the deep unappeasable melancholy of all life. (1936, p. 79)

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In not to be able to actualize oneself completely without remainder, in not to be able to appropriate the ground of ones existence, in our never being able to attain actuality to make our condition our own, to own our condition, to make it our proper of the proper, to make it our present to ourselves: this is the unappeasable melancholy of our finite life. The event of existence does not begin with the pure, thetic power of positing. It rather begins immemorially with our non-power, our essential failure, and our non-possibility in relation to the ground whose eternal remnant can never be appropriated. If this is the occasion of joy for the finite existence, it is in so far as this eternal remnant of the never appropriated ground is also the ground with joyous affirmation of a creative freedom, since this inscrutable ground is also the ground of the advent. This irreducible remainder is at once the promise of joy, and the source of the unspeakable melancholy of finite life. The Abgrund that eternally remains in the heart of a finite existence is not therefore negation of our freedom. Elsewhere I have written,
In other words, Abgrund does not undermine, negate, or even minimize freedom; rather the other way, Abgrund is what calls for freedom, or rather calls itself forth in acts of revealing, that calls forth acts of actualizations, to the infinite possibilities of freedom, to the labour of effective actions. If an unappeased melancholy adheres to all our finite life, being finite and conditioned being that we are who cannot appropriate our own condition once and for all, it is this melancholy that calls forth, each moment and singularity, the joyous acts of creation as infinite, inexhaustible, never-once-and-for-all actualizable acts of freedom. (Das 2008, pp. 167-180)

What is then the occasion for joy? The finite freedom of the mortal which can never appropriate its own condition bears (precisely because of this finitude) the redemptive fulfilment in this affirmation of the Not Yet, the passion of infinite potentiality. This passion and ecstasy of potentiality is the occasion of joy for the finite, mortal existence. Melancholy and joy for the mortals are not mere opposites: they unite in man in a monstrous coupling when the dialectics of history comes to a sudden pause. It is at this sudden pause of the dialectics of history the monstrosity of freedom makes sudden appearance in lightning flash that strikes us the mortals. The monstrous logic of this freedom, then, does not begin, nor end with the pure, thetic power of positing. The meaning of

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this judgement is not the pure power of law of the Absolute, or the force of the dialectics of history. It is the logic of the affirmation of coming into existence that opens with the passion of potentiality. The task of thinking history is no longer that of constituting historical, epochal totalities whose logic of origin would be to apophantically grasp its story of what is actualized, but that which, opening to the thought of finitude, opens to the outside, that means, to the passion of potentiality. This is to realize that this mortal called man is not primarily the power of the negative which he uses to constitute his own historical totalization, and encloses all that is to come in the logic of this negativity. To realize the finitude of man and to abandon the task of metaphysical-historical totalization though appears a loss to manis more salutary task of thinking. This retreat from, and renunciation from all possible metaphysicalhistorical totalizing process is an attempt to make anew the sense of the historicity of history for this mortal being called man. If a fundamental attunement of melancholy adheres to our fundamental being, essentially, in our retreating historical reflections, this only attunes us to our damaged historical existence that bears witness the consequences of various totalizing attempts made in the name of certain History. The task of thinking is no longer that of judgement of history on basis of the power of negativity, but we must disclose at the heart of historical existence logic of judgement in relation to a non-appropriable finitude. This non-appropriable finitude is the ground of a freedom on the basis of which man creates his history. The transcendence of this other time, the wholly otherwise time, constitutes the ecstasy and passion of a finite existence. This ecstasy and passion is the ecstasy of a freedom and passion for potentiality that welcomes the unhoped for that foils our expectations, that does not belong to the logic of accumulative, linear unfolding of homogeneous instants. This arrival is welcomed on the basis of loosening the structure of dominant thinking; in other words, the judgement of history itself has to be rendered monstrous. The monstrosity of history bears witness the finitude of history itself. But above all, this bears witness and remembers, and in remembering prepares the advent of another coming. It is this redemptive fulfilment, its necessity for mortal existence that pronounces judgement upon history.

 Transfiguration, Interruption

The event of coming calls forth two fold tasks: to interrupt what has acquired the solidity of foundation which is legitimized by the myth of a foundation (or founding of myth) and to transfigure what is loosened in the given architecture of foundation into affirmation of something not yet. Together they constitute the task of mortality itself, for what affirms the not yet must also affirm the unworking of foundation so that becoming and dissolution, joyfulness and mourning are brought together in this monstrous coupling of the two fold interruption and transfiguration. Placed at this site of encounter, the Open, which is the monstrous site of history itself, where the mortal man is placed as the copula, as the abyss of unity between interruption and transfiguration, man is thereby placed to welcome the event of coming itself. * The demonic site of the open does not belong to necessity but to the essence of freedom, whichin so far as it is freedom and not necessityalways carries in itself the possibility of In Vain. In other words, this freedom can never be completely actualized without a melancholic remnant because of the finitude of the mortal, which is to be distinguished from the melancholy of fulfillment, for there is also a melancholy, albeit paradisiacal, in fulfillment. The melancholy of In-Vain lies in the fact that the passion of potentiality that is given in freedom may not pass over into being without reserve, that there may always remain a remnant of un-fulfillment. This reserve is the messianic reserve, the withdrawn in offering, the secret in

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

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

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another, but mortal beings metaphysical desire to master his own ground, his own abyss, and his own mortality. Metaphysics, at least the dominant metaphysics, bears witness this violence, mans thetic violence that seeks to sublate his ground, which is his non-condition, as if his non-condition is the objection to his own existence. In this desire for mastery, in this metaphysical violence lies the metaphysical origin of mans evil. This evil is the self-abnegation of the finite creatures own condition, that is, his finitude. Schellings treatise on the essence of human freedom, which is one of the profoundest inquiry into the question of evil in the history of modern philosophy, attempts to think of the mortal task of freedom, not the mastery or nihilation of abyssal ground, but transfiguration of this non-conditional gravity into the possibility of joy and grace. This transfiguration is the creative task of the mortal being that of opening, or inaugurating on the basis of an inappropriable ground of freedom ever new possibilities of future. Schelling speaks of the flight of the Eagle: the Eagles flight is not elimination of the force of gravity, but rather a continuous elevation of it into the possibility or means to its flight. So it is with the many abysses of the night of brooding thinking undergoes; so it is with our sorrows and our joys, our past and future, our memory and our promise, our history and its redemption. The task of the voyage is therefore not the self-abnegation of finitude but a continuous elevation or an infinite transfiguration of our ground into existence, gravity into grace. The night of broodingthinking, groping for illumination which is beyond is only a point of departurenot even the origin, let alone the endfor the great voyage it undertakes that must, because of the finitude of the mortal, continuously venture beyond. Every arriving is always born out of the night of brooding, groping, and foreboding, the dark night of the eternal past before all presence which no light of the day ever completely illuminates without remainder. This night which in itself is no objection to existence is precisely the immemorial that opens existence to the time yet to come. The task here is of transfiguring the night of the immemorial into the light of the dawn, by interminably bringing to light of hope and into its affirmation the promise that is given in the immemorial, in the already always, before any selfpresence of presence. Every coming into presence is born out of the non-condition that places us unto the Open, that releases us to the

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welcoming of the gift that bears the mark of our death, a death that cannot be reduced to the econo-onto-thanatology of the dominant onto-theological totalization, but opens us to the pure potentiality of presencing of presence. In order to welcome the shining of the arriving, it is necessary to confront the abyss of the past, to enter into the concentrated form of existence that has become (existence thick with the darkness of presence), not in order to tarry with it, but rather so that all that has solidified into the concentrated form of present existence is melted anew, given away, given to its own worklessness, and is opened thereby to welcome the coming, to welcome what has not yet solidified into presence and that has not acquired the darkness of the past. This mortality is not Calvary of the concept, but the tragic task of existence itself: every now and then existence is to be given over to that monstrous coupling where becoming and dissolution are united, where joy is at once touched with that unspeakable melancholy that spreads over our whole existence. All coming of the new is essentially an act of transfiguration: what has become of existence and has acquired the solidity of a foundation through our objective-historical institutions (this historico-discursive foundation of our existence that has become of us) and through which we have known ourselves to have become, through which we have given ourselves to ourselves as historical being, all that is to be transfigured into what is not yet, into an affirmation of a becoming through perishing, of an opening that at once keeps itself in reserve through which the promise is kept in secret. But this transfiguration of despair into hope, of sorrows into joy, of our melancholic existence into the joyous affirmation of redemption in coming, of what is into what is not yet is not without interruption. It is rather that transfiguration demands interruption, as a light requires an already opening and clearing where it may then shine forth. As mere interruption of the given without transfigurationinterruption of that which has become a foundation for usis nihilism; so transfiguration without interruption is mere continuity of the what has become of existence as mere extension: it does not then affirm the eternal Yes that welcomes, in unconditioned hospitality, the unapparent presencing of the wholly otherwise.

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This task of transfiguration through interruption of solidified past, and reified, this undoing of a sedimented foundation: this is what finite politics means, not the politics which is performed by the economic figuration of the work of death, but an opening of being to the advent of the unapparent that is marked by the gift of death. It is this that first of all gives us the mortals any sense of the political and presence ethical at all: that is, as an open existence, we are thrown, exposed unto the Open by mortality, unto the pure possibility of the advent of history.. As the Night to be transfigured into the Dawn, the abyss of the Night is to be interrupted, so redemptive affirming of the coming time demands that what has become and has become dead, or those whose death has rendered our melancholy unredeemed, our sorrows and mourning for the lost that has pervaded our existence, this mourning and unredeemed melancholy is to be transfigured into an affirmation of the coming time, towards a redemption in future always in reserve, for it is already always in the Open. So it is with individual existence. The ground of his existence lies in the irrecuperable abyss of the past where he was not yet thereor, he was there as not yet, as a kind of possible actual. Each present moment of existence for the existent is thick with this dark light. Therefore existence comes too late to us as awareness and when we are aware of existence, we already are thrown to the world, or we have already arrived to presence, as if something has already passed usthat opening that is already there in the coming into the lightand has now become the abyss, has receded into the past, an inscrutable and unfathomable ground. This belatedness of our arriving makes us non-contemporary in relation to the ground of our existence. An irreducible separation, an originary disjunction, a chasm marks our existence, exposing us for the first time to what is outside all presence: to the immemorial and to the un-anticipatable. It is on this space of exposure that spaces us to time, it is in this the-there (Da of Heideggers Dasein) that history arrives for us from the destination of pure futurity. The being-there of the opening, or clearing that has become the abyss, is not an objection, nor is it anyway blocking of existence coming to

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presence. There lies the interminable, the infinite task for the mortals: not the mastery, nor appropriation of this non-conditional ground unto the immanence of self-presence, but continually to elevate, transfigure the abyss into affirmation of the coming, of darkness into the light, so as to keep open the possibility of originary opening once more, that means, infinitely. To transfigure the abyss into an affirmation of coming is not thereby a negation or a mastery of the abyss; it is rather to carry, within existence, its own abyss as abyss, and to render at each moment, our individual and historical existence un-predicative and incalculable, releasing the unconditioned in us from what Jean Luc Nancy calls the immanent self-consumption (Nancy 1993, p.13). To render our existence un-predicative, and to release that transcendence from any given totalization is to be, at each moment, finite and mortal, but it is an unenclosed mortality and an unenclosed finitude, open to the fear and trembling, to the astonishment of the event, or even to the madness of the moment that seizes us, dispropriates us, and opens our given form of existence into the transcendence of the future. It is in relation to this futurity that a kind of transcendence is possible for the mortals, an eternity is granted as a gift from freedom with which history inaugurates itself, not in relation to its immanent ground, but bearing the promise of transcendence given in the immemorial. The thought of future of history is the thought of its redemption itself. Redemption means here none other than the coming to presence that is kept open in the opening. Its task is the infinite transfiguration and keeping open of the past unto the future, unto the possible, unto the coming to presence. This facticity of the coming to presence of existence, the that is irreducible to the empirical facts of every particularity of this and that, the beingthere of the Open is intimated in non-predicative disclosure of language that arrives as lightning flash, exposes us to the astonishing event of language. Each time someone arrives, it arrives as this singular presentation that is non-contemporaneous with itself: it is already always opened up in the abyss, in that caesural yawning gap where there occurs the coupling between the immemorial past and the coming. Existence is always singular each time, belonging never to the logic of the system, irreducible to the universality of categories, already always falling away from the order of generality that tends to constitute a

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

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has thereby made himself a monster, or rendered himself the play space where infinite and finitude, joyous mourning and becoming one, perishing and coming to be are yoked together. As if what has served hitherto the ground and foundation of his own existing, all that is now dissolved; as if confronting his own mortalityto which he is exposed in the openinghe enters there and then into the darkness of his being and confronts his solidified past, giving over his solidified foundation to its unworking. He interrupts himself by rendering himself a past; what seemed to him as clear as the day and what he is confident about the solidity and substantiality of being now evaporates. The abyss of the night is transfigured into light through this interruption, as future transfigures the past, and thereby redeems it. The entering into the night is also the entering into the light that shines in the distance, as point of departure into the new seatowards the distance more future than any future present towards the future, which is not already given. Since the coming light is not a given truth, it belongs to the undecidable and the unpredicative. It is the possible which also includes the possibility of the not coming of the light at all. Each affirmation of the possible is simultaneously an affirmation of the non-condition; it at once an impossible where the vertigo of the undecidable watches over us, where the madness of the non-thought keeps vigil, where the anguish and despair of the unnamable tempers with the possible. To the possible belongs not only realizable and realized, but also the unrealized and the unrealizable. It is on the non-condition of the possible that possibility and impossibility makes themselves manifest. To exist is to be tempered with the non-condition. To render existence open to its non-condition is the highest effort of thinking. Its logic is not provided by the speculativedialectical logic of the predicative proposition. The demonic essence of possibility is essentially the excess of freedom. Here the possibility holds that the possible may not pass into, or pass over to being, since it does not have the self-foundational character of a logical necessity and identity, so that a releasing, a freeing and opening remains for the possibility of the otherwise. This is what we call, in the highest sense, contingency, the possibility of the otherwise to come, which is also the possibility of the non-arrival. The logic of the possible is not the dialectical-speculative logic of negativity.

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It does not convert the nothingness into being without a remainder. The possibility of the non-possible does not belong to the traditional logic, because it defies the logical principle of non-contradiction and identity. The possibility of the non-possible, instead, belongs to what call the Open: in the Open the otherwise may come, the impossibility may arrive, and the possibility may not pass over into being. Each time the voyage begins and the ship sails, it is inserted into the undecidable and the incalculable: the incalculability of the demonic weather, a madness and a certain monstrosity takes its vigil. This monstrosity, not enough of being human, claims the mortal, and delivers him to his mortality, for man is the mortal who never becomes completely human enough. Sometimes the monstrosity of history leads one to stray into the wrong paths, insofar as decisions are always taken at the limit, insofar man belongs to freedom and not freedom to man. Hence the voyage into the coming is incalculable par excellence: the voyage of the possible, since it is in love with the open sea and blue sky above, with the horizon without horizontality, it does not yet know its own destination and destiny, whose only destiny is to be without destination, an affirmation of the incalculable and arriving of the light without certitude of knowledge. The light may fall, or the moment arrives without thunders and lightning, but in a faint murmur of the dawn, or in doves feet that guides the world: it is the stillest words which bring the storm, thoughts that come on doves feet guide the world (Nietzsche 1992,p. 35). The destiny of a voyage without destination is in love with the freedom of the unknown, for the unknown arrives with a freedom whose ground is not yet given, but that has claimed man and in claiming man, releases man to the open. Heidegger could write,
Freedom governs the open in the sense of the cleared and lighted up, i.e., of the revealed. It is to the happening of revealing, i.e., of truth, that freedom stands in the closest and must intimate kinship... All revealing comes out of the open, goes into the open, and brings into the open.

He goes on to say,
Freedom is that which conceals in a way that opens to light, in whose clearing there simmers that veil that covers what comes to presence of all truth and lets the veil appear as what veils. Freedom is the realm

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of the destining that at any given time starts a revealing upon its way. (Heidegger 1977, p. 25).

Kant had something like an intimation of this abyssal, inscrutable ground of freedom that claims the mortals, on the basis of which mortals are what they come to be. Therefore existence remains for Kant something un-predicable, which remains as remnant outside all predication, not as a result of the process of predication, but what is already always presupposed even the process of predication to begin. What Kant wanted to think, through freedom as what is inscrutable, is the dark abyss, which is also the pure offering, the sublime offering, the gift from a destination wholly otherwise. This un-predicable is not what would be one day predicated in absolute knowledge, and therefore existence, because it is the pure gift, sublime offering from other destination, cannot be included in any system of knowledge, even if it is absolute knowledge. There can only be pure presentation (Darstellung) as distinguished from representation of a dialectically mediated knowledge, which is in appearing as unapparent, elicits from us respect (Achtung). It is this finitude of the mortals that is truly tragic, and not the tragic of the dialectical mediation of the infinite and finitude uplifted (Aufheben) unto unity through which there occurs atonement of gilt. Life being essentially mortal and ineluctably finite is a synthesis of the infinite and finitude. But this synthesis is never a unity for man. It lies outside of mortals as a kind of abyss, a kind of inscrutable, dark ground. It is the separation from this synthesis the coming arrives as unknown, out of an unground, since the foundation of the solidified presence is infinitely interrupted and given over to the opening. Should we name this opening as beginning?

 The Logic of Origin

We are too late for the gods And too early for Being. Beings poem, Just began, is man. Martin Heidegger (2001, p.4)

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

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happens to arrive as this being. In the beginning an opening holds sway as the possibility of beginning, as the promise of arriving, an opening with which every voyaging begins, the ship ventures forth, sallies beyond and welcomes the open sea in its infinite ebb and flows and the blue sky opening above with the play of lights and darkness unknown. The beginning is the spacing where there occurs the play, the play of not yet seen thousand morning rays and thousand not yet known evening twilight . It is that the beginning, at the same time, that is yet to come, at each instance, beginning that is never given in advance so that each beginning is a beginning wholly otherwise, wholly anew, wholly dawning. Such a past is always to come in future, a past to come, for which it is necessary that beginning will also always begin in future, that in the future there may remain the possibility of the ever new beginning. This ever new possibility of beginning which is also always to come is the messianic notion of promise par excellence. Here neither the past is seen as a mere passed past, nor is the future seen as a future that will come to pass. The question of beginning is that of opening, of inception that is to come, an inception that is to be renewed each instance, at each presentation of presence, so that at each instance that there be an inception of renewal. Such a thinking of beginning, in order to distinguish from another notion of beginningdialectical-speculative beginning, for example, that follows the logic of generationshall be called here as inception. Heidegger in his lectures on Parmenides calls such a beginning in-ception (An-fang) that is distinguished from beginning as outset. The latter is the thinking of beginning at a definite time, or historical epoch, while inception is the thinking of beginning itself, where thinking is no more mastering of beings, but thinking outside a given, dominant metaphysics, thinking that steps back, or retreats from such a metaphysics. Heidegger says:
In distinction from the mastering from beings, the thinking of thinkers is the thinking of Being. Their thinking is a retreating in face of Being The beginning is not something dependent on the favor of these thinkers, where they are active in such and such a way, but, rather, the reverse: the beginning is that which begins something with these thinkersby laying a claim on them in such a way that from them is demanded an extreme retreating in the face of Being. The thinkers are begun by the beginning: in-cepted [An-gefangenen] by

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the in-ception [An-fang]; they are taken up by it and are gathered into it. (Heidegger 1992, pp. 7-8).

This promise of such inception, which is also the promise of coming, is a gift of thinking that must retreat from the techno-thana-ontological mastery of entities presently given. The gift of time is that of the possibility of its renewal in each hic et nunc: such is here the thought of inception with which the voyage of thinking begins, always anew and always otherwise, always with a repetition that never repeats as the same. With the inception the wholly otherwise, and wholly coming is given as a gift that incalculably arrives from future that endows time with eternity, since this gift has already always opened the mortal being to a never passed immemorial past and to the incalculable future, and thereby redeeming time itself, as if for the first time and each time, opening time to its transcendence. This eternity is not the eternal immobility of the empty time, nor the mobility of the monotonous conceptual generation (for concept to generate, none otherwise than concepts are necessary) but the eternity of actual beginning to arrive. This eternity is a finite eternity which presents itself in the lightning flash of its advent where becoming and perishing strikes the mortals, seizes them and opens them to the inauguration of a new history. This is what will be spoken here of as the logic of origin. The logic of the origin, the scene of the origin, is the originary not yet1. It is the logic of the future of the past and the past of the not yet. The originary not yet is the originary gift of time that endows upon the mortals the taskfor all gift brings along with it a taskto renew this gift of mortality, and thereby delivering this gift to its own transcendence, in so far as renewal transcends each time what is given and brings to it what is always and each time new. Such transcendence will be each moment a finite transcendence that befits this finite being called man. This finite transcendence opens the finite being to the divine excess, to the advent of the holy in the separation that holds together the divine and the mortal. Man is this openness to its beginning that transcends itself. With this is given the hope that redeems and rewards the travail which the voyage undergoes, goes itself under, ex-periences itself (that also means ex-periences ahead of itself, going beyond of itself, outside of itself, becoming other of oneself ) as undergoing perils of the tempestuous

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sea, yet frolicking forth with energy and passion for the unknown, living at the edge or limit of the world so that the light of the eye meets the light of the Sun. Thinking is always, as Ernst Bloch says, venturing beyond. In this sense the thought of an immemorial promise is not alien to perilous being that the mortal essentially is. The notion of experience here is not constitutive of an eidetic consciousness, or of a transcendental subjects Parousia. The notion of experience here is to be thought outside of any eidetic phenomenology. It is rather to name what is unnamable, that of the essential peril of being who is exposed to what arrives from beyond. The undergoing itself is thereby going beyond, venturing beyond of itself: these two meanings are interwoven in the word experience. What sinks us also elevates us. Or in Hlderlins words: Where the danger grows, there too grows the saving grace. The German word for experience, Er-fahrung, evokes this experience of traversal or voyaging with the possibility of perils to be undergone. What is undergone falls upon him who undergoes and as Heidegger (1982, p. 57) says, transfigures him. The gift of time with which the possibility of the eternity of ever renewed and wholly otherwise inceptions are given, transfigures the one who undergoes the voyage of experiencing and thinking that seeks the beyond, the furthest and the more distant than any others that are known in advance, beyond all that is programmable and calculable. Were there not given this gift of time, nothing new would arrive and come; the melancholy of the unredeemed presence and past would lose the meaning of eternity for us, and nothing would remain as promise for us, for with the gift of time there is also given the gift of remaining time beyond that has become, beyond that has grown old and stale and decayed, beyond all entities of the given presence that make up the world in its given-ness. The gift of ever new beginning yet to come is always a gift of eternity of future, a gift of remaining and redemption. The gift of time must keephow to keep the gift of timethe remembrance of this gift and the remembrance of its task, that of the task of remembering the immemorial. But this remembrance through which ever new beginning is renewed in thinking, in acting, in our historical labour and through our historical-discursive formation, is a remembrance that is not of mere past, therefore not a recollection, but renewal in presence unto the eternity of future. This means: there

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must be a remembrance of which is not yet remembered and has not yet passed through the gallery of images, a remembrance that arrives only at the cost of an essential peril of being to which beings are exposed and which releases these being from the immanence of self-presence. We forget this future in our absorption in the darkness of the lived moment (Bloch 2000, p. 276), or in the illusion of false eternity, or in our distraction and drowning in the rumbling monotony of presents that pass away unredeemed. Therefore the task of remembrance claims from this historical mortal being an almost insomniac vigilance and attention. For the eternity of coming to redeem the not yet redeemed, it is necessary that each single instance of the beginning is wholly otherwise beginning, wholly opening towards outside, hollowing inside out, voiding the being of our being so that in the pure nakedness of exposure, the other may burst forth. There alone, melancholic time thickened with the unredeemed past, sees the light coming from wholly other destination and is endowed with eternity. This wholly otherwise destination cannot be subordinated to any ideology of finalism in the form of teleology or eschatology. This eternity, this transcendence comes from the incalculable, non-teleological future which is not the future as one of the modes of temporality, but the Moment that illuminates the entirety of existence and redeems time endowing it with the stamp of eternity. The Moment is the incalculable advent of the future, of transcendence bursting into that seizes the mortal, historical existence. Then all that is solid melts into air (Marx & Engels 2002, p. 70) . The Moment is the moment of fear and trembling, when mortality claims upon our solidified foundation. Such a moment can be called revolution, which is the moment of coming and perishing united in a monstrous coupling. It is the possible, the category of which is profounder, vaster than anything that is presently given, is a form of eternity. Thus understood, writes Kierkegaard, the moment is not properly an atom of time, but an atom of eternity. It is the first reflection of eternity in time, its first attempt, as it were, at the stopping time (Kierkegaard 1980, p. 88). At the time of revolution, which is the time without time, because it is the demonic coupling of the beginning of time and end of time simultaneously, time itself, as if, stops dead, and assumes the stillness of an eternity. The future from wholly otherwise destination bursts forth, and bursts into the concentrated thickness of presence,

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

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the promise of eternity is itself inseparable. In these moments finite beings partake of the eternity of time, and shares in the divine excess. The future arrives, eternity bursts into, and there comes redemption in lightning flashes. This promise is granted to man only on the basis of his perilous exposure to his mortality, only when man opens his soul to eternity in anguish of his mortal condition. One, who learns to wait, also learns to hope.

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

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

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

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in accidental relationship, but rather a thinking that is, essentially, inextricably finite. Thinking that is not touched by a certain solicitation to madness, to its radical exteriority and to the unthinkable is satisfied with the mere sterile cognition of the presently given world, or phenomenon. It does not know the ecstasy of the exuberant future latent in phenomena and existence, the writhing reason in existence that seeks its coming into existence out of a non-reason, the unapparent in all that is apparent, the invisible remainder in all that is visible. Like poets, Schelling says, also the philosophers have their ecstasy. They need this in order to be safe, through the feeling of the indescribable reality of that higher representation, against the coerced concepts of an empty dialectic that lacks enthusiasm (Schelling 2000, p. xxxviii). Unlike the theoretical and sterile cognition of the scholar untouched by madness, a poet-thinker is like a pregnant woman who bears the future in her womb, the exuberant future whose transcendence is not fixed in the monotonous, immobile gaze of the theoretician. Schelling speaks of this sterile intellectual as the one in which:
[T]here is no madness whatsoever. These would be the uncreative people incapable of procreation, the ones that call themselves sober spirits. These are the so called intellectuals whose works and deeds are nothing but cold intellectuals works and intellectual deeds but where there is no madness, there is certainly no proper, active, living intellect (and consequently there is just the dead intellect, dead intellectuals). (Ibid., p.103)

The moment here and now is like this pregnant woman. Each apparition carries its invisible, dark source that renders the remote future nearer to nearness, and its nearness to itself distant than any distance. Not only the poet but even a thinker has a relation to certain joyous madness, for an essential thinker sees not only what has arrived, but the arrived that is pregnant with the unborn, the light that is dark nownot with lack of presence, but due to the excess of presencing over the present. But a sterile scholar and an imbecile theoretician who is not solicited to vertigo of the unthought, to the abyss of madness, or to pregnancy of exteriority, can only produce logical categories that can grasp in a reductive totalizing manner only what is amenable to logical thought, namely, the entities that

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has become. Therefore logic gives the theoretical philosopher certain pretension to totality, or system of visible forms. Since such totality, or system seeks to include all that has become and presently given, such totality can only be the most banal, most sterile totality without ecstasy, without transcendence. It must not know, for that matter, the exuberant future of each here and now, the bursting Moment of eternity that overflows the cup of time, the ecstasy of the leap that steps outside the totality of visible forms, that the dream of the matter which is not mere inert material malleable to the concept. The invisible poesy of the future which each here and now bears in its dream has a different logic of origin, a logic that is touched by a constant solicitation to its inscrutable ground, to the madness of an unthinkable, to the exuberant future, to the unapparent apparition of the coming that is promised in it at the inception. This logic of origin has a different logic than the logical origin of concepts that generate their own end and beginning. Each here and now carries the dream of its messianic completion that is outside time, in a certain sense, in that it does not belong to the time that is presently given. Therefore a finite thinking is a contemplation of the timeless promise, not in the sense of the endlessness of time that is the infinite lengthening of a homogenous instant, nor in the sense of the pure void of time, but the coming of time itself and its completion, which for that matter, strikes the mortals as eternity. Such an eternity that attunes us with a beatific joy is not a dialectical time of history, nor the mythic time of the a-historical, nor is it selfpositing thetic time of the logical. Neither dialectical time of history nor mythic-tragic time without time, nor self-positing thetic time of logic brings us joy and happiness and give us hope, for each of them is only cognition of presently given entities. As Schelling (Ibid., p.42) speaks of joy that only future brings, the pure future without any reduction to self-presence, so only a time that in a messianic hope anticipates at each here and now and renews the promise of inception and completion can make us joyous, because such an eternity alone is an affirmation of future at each hic et nunc, at each presentation of presence, at each appearing of the unapparent. At each hic et nunc there must arrive a future, at each presentation of presence there must arrive an arrival. Each here and now is eternal and at once radically finite. Its apparition is sudden advent, like a lightning flash, in the

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most immediately ordinary here and now that illumines our existence, because therein eternity itself presents itself in its arrival. We are then open to eternity, mortal and finite that we are. Such an eternity can only be a finite eternity, and so its illumination: it disrupts itself, interrupts itself, suspends itself in its advent so that its recalcitrant apparition escapes the vacant gaze of the logical-dialectical thinker, his logical categories, and his predicative concepts, however their claim for mobility may be. The apparition of finitude that strikes the mortals with a silence, and escapes the categories of the logical thinker, is the interest of existence, according to Constantine Constantius. The finitude is the interest of existence, if not the interest of a logic (even if it is for Hegelian speculative version of it), for this logical movement is only an immanent movement, and therefore does not suffer finitude, for what at stake in suffering is this not-being-able-to-remain immanent, this not-being-able-to-be, this outside of itself that writhes in agony and cannot contain within itself its own movement. All actual movement begins with pain and suffering, and not with the lifeless, dull logical category of beginning that begins with the immediate. It is in this sense one can say that logic does not know suffering which is the interest of existence, in the sense that Franz Rosenzweig speaks of philosophy that philosophy does not know mortality. The logical movement is a false movement; it does not begin with the actual, real beginningthat is, with sufferings of mortality, with the transcendence of finitude, with the agony of a beginning. The agony of the beginning is the agony of thoughts inability to begin with itself, its inability to retrieve its own condition and ground, its inability to master its own abyss. This radical finitude of thinking renders thinking short of any totalization and completion, for this finitude does not exhaustively acquire the visible forms that constitute totality. It thereby, ineluctably, falls short of its absolute and systemic completion. Suffering does not have system; only logic can have systemic completion. The vertigo that founders and falters thinking, this impossibility called madness that watches over thinking, this ecstasy and agony of the beginning shows the fragility of thinking, as if thinking in order to prosper, must constantly negotiate with its radical impossibility and a madness, which is not a negotiable other but the non-negotiable itself. This effort of thinking that thinking

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invests its energy in order to begin and to prosper makes all beginning painful, even despairing. This logic of origin is of a different origin than the beginning of the logical process that simply, harmlessly and without agony, begins with the immediate which smoothly passes into the mediation. This logic that begins with agony is the logic of existence itself to which existence is thrown and is an agonal being. For the thinking to begin actually and really, that is, finitely and mortally, this finitude and mortality must not be the result of a logical process. The beginning of this movement is the movement that existence itself makes, of its coming into presence. For existence pain is the interest, the innermost and profoundest interest of existence, for it is in suffering that existence makes the first, the beginning movement of its coming into presence, and its disappearance in death. Therefore, in so far as suffering is concerned, logic founders as soon as suffering manifests itself in the existent. The apparition of suffering in existence is not the moment of negativity that is again uplifted (Aufheben) in the universality of reconciliation. What manifests as suffering in existence is the element that escapes the reconciliatory logic of the speculative-dialectical tragedy. The suffering one, then, makes another movement of beginning which is irreducible to the movement of the speculative. It is the movement that opens itself to the divine order where cry of the singular being is heard, and where the anguish of death is not vainly consoled in the universal order of generality. Referring to what Constantine Constantius speaks of repetition as the interest of metaphysics, Vigilius Haufniensis says:
[This] sentence contains an allusion to the thesis that metaphysics is disinterested, as Kant affirmed of aesthetics. As soon as the interest emerges, metaphysics steps to one side. For this reason the word interest is italicized. The whole interest of subjectivity emerges in real life, and then metaphysics founders. (Kierkegaard 1957, p.16)

When Constantine Constantius and Vigilius Haufniensis (two of the pseudonyms of Kierkegaard) refer to the foundering of metaphysics when repetition becomes the interest of metaphysics, they allude to the element of suffering in existence. The manifestation of suffering mocks at the vain arrogance of logic, even if it is the speculative logic of Hegel that claims to include existence within the visible forms of its

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system as a category amongst others. The speculative logic founders and steps outside of its vain arrogance when suffering itself makes manifest, and when it manifests itself to be completely other than the agony of the concept2. The principle of logic and the principle of metaphysics is the same, which is to say, that the metaphysical foundation of logic is nothing but the principle of immanence that begins itself immanently, that engenders its own beginning and its own end which Hegel gave the name of negativity. It is therefore, as Franz Rosenzweig complains that nothing really dies in this system, for the system does not have a place for death, for death can only be a presupposition for that system, death that is outside of logic. The language of death is not the language of logic: the tremor of mortality, its trembling and its cry, its anguish and its abyss is excluded by the language of logic, that of predication and negativity in a necessary gesture, for otherwise it would not be able to engender its own beginning and its own end, it would not be immanent. It is the interest for the system, for the necessity of its possibility and constitution, necessity for its own genesis and raison dart, that it can only be interested in disinterest, that is, in the agony of the concept. For this matter Hegels Science of Logic does not have to begin with suffering and mortality. It does not have to be shaken in its innermost depth by the tremor of mortality. It does not have to founder in the yawning abyss. Therefore Hegels Science of Logic has to begin its movement, conceptually, with pure Being and pure Nothing and not with its presupposition which is the phenomenon of suffering before death. Here it is claimed that nothing is presupposed at this instant of beginning of the systemneither mortality nor birthwhich what Hegel calls Immediate that immediately annuls itself into its opposite. In the beginning of his Science of Logic, Hegel says,
Pure Being and pure Nothing are, therefore, the same. What is the truth is neither being nor nothing, but that being does not pass overbut has passed over into nothing, and nothing into being. (Hegel 1969, p 82)

It is this appearing and pure passing away into the anonymity of the eternally homogenous Now, the eternally immobile mobility, eternally restless rest that is without ecstatic transcendence and without future that Hegelian logic calls movement which begins with

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

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

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of the pause the beginning is remembered as a remembrance yet to begin. The moment is not the figure called instant, therefore not a figure of time, but an atom of eternity, as Kierkegaard says of it:
The moment is not properly an atom of time, but an atom of eternity. It is the first reflection of eternity in time, its first attempt, as it were, at stopping time. (Kierkegaard 1980, p. 88)

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

Astonishment
Where and when a beginning is beginning? With what beginning begins? Hegels Science of Logic begins with this question of beginning, since Speculative Logic must not presuppose the given-ness of the object of thought, and therefore must not presuppose the given-ness of its beginning either. The beginning, in so far as it is beginning,

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must not yet be the mediated onea this, or a thatand therefore is not a determinate one. A non-determinate and non-mediated beginning can only be Being Pure and Simple, since with it nothing is (supposedly) presupposed yet, since Pure Being, irreducible to any this or that, rather empty of any this or that, is equal to Nothing. With this Hegelian speculative logic claims to begin with the beginning, presupposing nothing else, for it begins with Nothing equal to Being Pure and Simple. Hegelian speculative logic then begins with Conceptwith the most universal, because emptiest of all conceptsthe Concept of Being pure. Yet Hegelian Speculative Logic does not end there, for it must move out of the beginning of the empty Concept of Being, it must give this emptiness itself a movementof negativitya generative potentiality. Hence there must emerge out of the emptiest of all Concepts the movement, not of this or that coming into existence, but the movement of the movement itself, out of the empty Concept, as if out of nothing. With this not only the entirety of the movement character of speculative logic is deduced subsequently, but the coming of coming, existence coming to presence is claimed to be included in the logical system of categories and predicates: be-coming of existence becomes predicative by being included as a category of categories. The whole organic character of categories automatically, in a monotonous manner, generate themselves one after another in smooth successionwithout interruption or cisionleading to the Absolute Concept, beginning with Nothing and ending with everything.3 Were there not already a halt, a cision, a disjunction marks this beginning if there has to come something into existence at all? In the Hegelian logical system of categories beginning with pure Being the coming, however, appears only as ineluctably that has to come, so that in the beginning with the Pure Being and Simple, nothing really begins, though according to Hegels claim there really comes something into existence. Would the concept of Being itself come into existence if Being itself is not already a coming? Therefore existence is not a concept, but something else entirely which the concept presupposes? Being here is not really, actually existence in its existentiality but purely a conceptual construct, a speculative necessity of beginning which must be pure, indeterminate being.

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Already then in the beginning with the Conceptfor Hegelian logic can only speak of transition, or generation from concept to concept, and not existence to conceptthe beginning itself, a more originary beginning is missed or is diverted (what Schelling calls Abfall: falling away, diverting away) from. This unapparent presencing of presence, which is the beginning more originary, is not included within the speculative system of visible forms, for the speculative logic can only recount that phenomenon that exhaustively presents itself to the categories. For the speculative system is to be possible, this unapparent phenomenon of the presencing must not be there. Since in this necessary logic of foreclosure nothing coming must come, nothing really arrives in the logical system of movement subsequently either. Everything comes in this system remains a mere conceptual coming, only a representation of coming. If the task is to think, not the representation of coming, but the unconditional coming that cannot be predicated, and then thought itself must be open to the coming, it must already be exposed to the open region that lies before any predication, or categorical grasp. There then precedes a coming in the opening that is always to come (in the infinitive sense). This event of coming whose coming is not yet predicated and grasped in the Conceptfor Being Pure and Simple is then appears, what Nietzsche calls the last fume of evaporating realityis therefore a non-ontological opening, of what Schelling is his Berlin Lectures on Positive Philosophy calls berseyn, over or beyond being. The over or beyond being is not an autogenerative potentiality of the Concept as in Hegel, but an actuality of the coming as the-there-of-coming, irreducible to the predicative proposition, a time to come that began already before the immanent movement of the logical categories. The actuality of the coming, each time singular, is irreducible to the subsequent predication of it as essence (for essence only belongs to the order of potentiality, and not the actuality; it belongs to the order of: if X exists, then it is so and so), and is the extra-logical, pre-predicative, pre-categorical leap of the event into presence. It is with the transcendence of the leap that marks the cision or disjunction that something actually begins and not in thought. Therefore thinking cannot represent this coming into existence, because a wholly otherwise, a heterogeneity of the un-prethinkable begins here, as an ecstatic leap of the event.

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In his Ages of the World (2000), Schelling calls even Gods coming to presence, or coming to existence as un-pre-thinkable de-cision, which also means cision, or interruption, event as leap. The coming to presence is an event. The event of coming is welcomed, received in the opening that is disclosed, manifested in the eternity of the sudden flash of lightning, in the holding sway of the open. It is eternitynot in the sense of pure nothing, or pure void of timebut an ecstatic transcendence of time, the condition of time as the beginning of time, the timing of temporalities. This beginning is before beginning, an immemorial passivity genesis where there occurs bestowal, a pure giving, and a gift of time upon the mortals, the gift of existing itself as mortals. This beginning is always an eternal beginning, in a certain sense, without which there begins nothing and there nothing arrives; in other words, the beginning is already always disjunctive and caesural where the beginning falls outside as ground or condition of what comes to be this historical world, this mortal existence, this finite presence. There is beginning in the sense that the beginning that opens the historical world itself does not wholly belong to that historical world only because it is the beginning of the world. This un-pre-thinkable beginning which is stronger than the world elicits from us astonishment or wonder. Plato calls this experience of the origin as Wonder in Theatetus with which thinking itself is opened in the opening, welcoming the event of arrival. If philosophical thinking gives itself the task of thinking its own beginning, then it is with the question finitude, the un-conditional openingand not beginning with Being pure and Simplethat thinking must begin if thinking is not to be mere logical-speculative thought but actual existential opening to the coming. Such an existence-thinking begins as this ecstatic astonishment at the origin, which is less because it is a logical generation out of the barren womb of Concept, but because it is exposure of thought to the-there-ofthe-coming that is stronger than the concept or language. It is rather the astonishment at the enigma of coming and existence arriving to presence. The-there-of-the-coming is not already accomplished form of existence, but an already that is yet to come and yet to-be-visible. As such existence, each time occurring, is an event. This event marks the wound of mortality, and bears an originary tremor that precedes either Being or its opposite, the negativity of Nothing. Then there

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comes necessity of thinking neither the event which is neither Being, nor its negativity, but a coming into existence which is otherwise than Being, and otherwise than Negativity. The event of coming is not grasped in the dialectical-historical memorial task, for it refuses the gathering unity of the innermost ground of memory. The event does not have the logical principle of identity as the ground of recollection. Therefore the dialecticalhistorical memory cannot discover its own inscrutable, unfathomable ground. Such an inscrutable, unfathomable ground attunes us with astonishment at the un-pre-thinkable coming to presence out of unground. In that inscrutable opening, darkness and light play together as agonal elements in an eternal strife. It is in that open space the withdrawal of the ground and pure offering of time upon mortals play their originary polemos. This co-figuration, in so far as it is indissociable from dis-figuration at the momentary presentation of itself, like the lightning flash, it therefore refuses to form a system, or totality. Martin Heidegger attempts to think this originary configurationwhich is non-dialectical, differential play of oblivion and remembranceas a polemos of unconcealment and concealment. This originary play, this originary polemos that Heraclitus alludes to is withdrawal of the ground and pure giving (through this very withdrawal) that keeps open history towards its own outside, towards its own epochal ruptures. These epochal ruptures refuse to be incorporated into the logical-speculative principle of identity and therefore they do not belong to the universal history. The event is to be thought as a far more originary eruption of history into presence, as keeping open to the Possible, keeping open to the transcendence of mortality. An anticipative thinking of redemption is not therefore a-historical but precisely more historical than any history or historicism, for it alone anticipatesin hope or in astonishmentthe event of coming that alone opens history to itself to come and opens history itself to the happiness of its fulfillment.

 Repetition

Repetition and Recollection

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

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makes, each time there happens repetition, unsaturated, excessive, overflowing the cup of self-presence. Man is then not the phenomenon that is saturated in relation to his own destinal inauguration and telos. He is only the passage of hic et nunc, the movement in-between where the immemorial something manifests itself, the unapparent appears, the invisible thickens the visible. To recollect, then, would not mean anything like learning, or acquiring knowledge. It is rather the movement that welcomes the transcendence in immanence, the outside in each hic et nunc, the unapparent in the apparent, and the unnamable in the name. To exist in this finite manner doesnt mean to be enclosed and to be saturated in the finitude. It is rather to repeat, at each hic et nunc what befalls as transcendence, the unapparent and the destinal occlusion. It is to bear the immemorial given in our past in each present moment as promise. It is to welcome the coming what has already always come immemorially without having passed by, and would never ceasing coming to us from the extremity of a radical futurity. The movement of this welcoming is the movement of anamnesis, of recollection. Sren Kierkegaard in his work called Repetition distinguishes the Platonic anamnesis which is oriented to the immemorial past from repetition in future, determining anamnesis and repetition as two fold symmetrical tasks: one extending to the already always, and the other extending to the not yet. Yet it is the Moment, where the truth occurs, happens, is the monstrous site of encounter of the unapparent apparition, invisible visible, occluded revelation, transcendent immanence. It is that encounter, bursting out of any totalization, that bears itself this infinite lengthening of time towards the already always and the not yet. As such the Moment, but not instant that is what Kierkegaard calls atom of eternity, a momentary unsaturated presentation (as distinguished from representation) of eternity. It is at this moment which repeats the transcendence in immanence, eternity in time, infinite in finitude, at this moment history pauses and brings into itself epochal ruptures where something else, an entirely new and wholly otherwise inaugurates, something else becomes together, simultaneously with this dissolution. This Moment as simultaneity, for repetition is a simultaneityas distinguished from succession of homogenous empty instants (Benjamin 1977, pp. 251-61)is

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the truth of the event when language falls silent not because of the lack of speech but with its completed beatitude, in a kind of what Rosenzweig calls completed understanding. Redemptive fulfillment demands the movement of repetition, which is to bring together, to bring into simul which the mortals in the historical unfulfilled time of negativity only experience as succession of instants. Repetition cannot be thought within the successive representation of the temporal negativity that constitutes dialectical-historical totality. Repetition is the non-totalized presentation (Darstellung) of eternity as Moment in a kind of discontinuous, disjunctive movement of configuration, and is irreducible to the dialectical-historical totality constituted by the act of representation of succession of continuous, homogenous instants. Only the Moment repeats, instants do not repeat themselves. Therefore there is no encounter within dialectical-historical immanent time. It flows itself away and arrives as self-same differentiation without redemptive fulfillment, but never as discontinuous, disjunctive simultaneity in configuration. Repetition is only possible in configuration, in a non-systematic presentation of the event of arrival where there takes place radical encounter with the wholly otherwise.

Moment
A finite thinking that begins with the thinking of beginningthe beginning or inception which is singular and in a certain sense, eternalmust be able to come again must be able to begin again. The beginning is not the inert, lifeless beginning, lying as never moving substance, butsince it is finiteit must move out of itself, out of its self-presence and yet remain as a beginning. Only then the beginning would be what it is: an ever begun beginning, an always beginning, and an eternal remainder of the beginning. Therefore, beginning thought essentially and not in the logical manner of beginning, is a beginning that is at once an ever lasting, always remaining a beginning, and a beginning that is finite. As finite, the beginning disrupts itself, ecstatically suspends itself, and discontinues itself. As such it presents itself only by perishing itself in this presentation. It

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is becoming in perishing (Hlderlin 1988), arriving in dissolution that does not persist, and yet persist as remainder of the beginning. It is this aporia of beginning that is not lifted up, in Hegels word, sublated into the logical movement, this aporia of the finite beginning that is at once infinite so that mourning and joy present themselves in simultaneous poetic tone. Repetition demands this eternity of the beginning, which is a finite infinity, be repeated in time, in ever new presentation of presence. As a result, there remains always already an ever new excess at ever new presentation of presence, an ever new renewal of the immemorially old promise, the most ancient of the ancient gift of time. The gift given in the already always immemorial past must pass through time. It must pass through each presentation of presence. In this manner it renews itself in this passing from ever new presence to ever new presence, and through this renewal, remains eternally old and eternally new at the same time, eternal and finite at the same moment. It has a Janus-like face looking forward and backward at the same time so that it does not weave only the recollections sad moments. Unlike recollection, repetition is no mere gallery of images (Hegel 1998, P.492) of the shapes that the Spirit has passed through history, nor is it ever new instants that pass away in a monotonous succession. In such a monotonous succession of ever new instants there is no face-to-face encounter of past, presence and future with each other apart from monotony of the logical principle of unity that is continuous with each passing instant, rendering each instant only a relative realization of the same. Therefore there is no repetition in Hegelian universal order of history, but only recollection that weaves into song the memory of its own shapes that came into being. Repetition, on the other hand, is ecstatic repetition of eternity into presence, of the immemorial promise into future, without gathering unity of the monotonous, homogenous logical principle underlying it. Neither recollection of what has already become and neither dead, nor ever new anticipation of monotonous instants passing away in banal succession knows that ecstasy of repetition that co-joins, co-figures and thereby makes possible ecstatic encounter of past, presence, and future with each other. It is only on the basis of the ecstatic encounter there appears something like the event of history. The ecstatic co-figuration of past, presence and futurewithout underlying any speculative-logical

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

The repetition of the beginning is not mere recapturing it in relation to the other beginning. The dialogue which repetition brings is not the dialogue of the self-same entities. It is rather that the other beginning

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

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

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

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

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Repetition, if it were possible, alone would make us joyous, for it gives us back what is taken from us: it gives us the possibility of inception again. This repetition is possible only outside the given universal order, outside the immanent order constituted by recollection, for recollection is merely the spinning wheel of the old woman that weaves what has already happened, the given past that is worn out and has become stale and dead. Only outside the universal order of the ethical can there be repetition. Repetition is the Archimedean point, outside the universal. It is the singular Moment, and not the particular instants of the universal. This repetition is the repetition of the eternity in the heart of presence that bestows upon the beginning a meaning, because this beginning has the meaning of a future, a not yet, a promise of yet to come. Therefore in Kierkegaards text, both the young lover poet and his adviser Constantius despair of repetition. Repetition is neither possible in ethical order, nor in the aesthetic sphere. Hence the need of the third type of repetition that alone enables eternity to arrive in presence, so that the singular being whose existence is not completely exhausted in the universal claims of history, confronts, encounters each moment, ecstatically, what is not yet, the eternity, and the coming time. The singular existence that wills repetition and one that is not satisfied by virtue of being enclosed to the immanent, universal, ethical order, it seeks redemption in an Archimedean point: a point that is no point, where the ground of the aesthetic and the ethical disappears, and all that appears solid in that universal order trembles and melts away. It is the midpoint where there must occur the leap, that quantum leap (Kierkegaard 1983) to the order of faith which singularity affirms and wherein singularity is affirmed. This is the moment of the epochal ruptures that tears apart history, and opens itself to the advent to come. Repetition is neither grounded upon a speculative-logical principle of unity, nor is it supported by the universal, immanent order of the ethical. Repetition, in the face of the Absurd, is experience of mortality as mortality that enables an arriving in perishing, in a monstrous coupling of infinitude and finitude that does not know Aufhebung. It is the Moment when the immanent, universal, ethical order comes to a halt and opens itself to the Abgrund where the Other holds sway, and gives us the direction of history. If for Kierkegaard repetition is a task of transforming it

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into the inwardness of freedom, this task then is none but the task of mortality itself which is to repeat the immemorial that enables the advent of the coming. If for Kierkegaard repetition is a task of transforming it into the inwardness of freedom, Heidegger envisages the task of thinking at the end of certain metaphysicsa metaphysics wherein Being is grasped as presenceas the task of repetition of the inception to come in order to think the coming to presence itself, not of this and that, nor the totality of beings as history of beings, but to affirm the coming itself, which is not told in the predicative language of categories, but as Wink, in poetic Saying as hint that at once shows . To think inception itself, which is concealed by unconcealment itself (this is the originary polemos that Heraclitus alludes to), because it alone enables the coming to come. The task of repetition is to repeat what has never been present and therefore repetition is beyond metaphysics that thinks Being as presence whose presence is told in predicative propositions, for the predicative proposition grasps Being only as constantly given presence, as what is presently given. Instead of the categorical, leading back the apophansisthe ontological task of the traditional ontology that understands Being as entities presently given (Vorhandenheit), hence in terms of a presently presence (Anwesenheit)Heideggers Being and Time attempts to think Being in its verbal resonance, its event of coming (Anwesung) to presence in a hermeneutic of existential disclosure. Da-sein is not human in the sense of animal rational but the open-ness of space where timing times, where this timing manifests itself as strife between preserving the truth of being and yet opening itself to arrive. Therefore the task of repetition is to be distinguished from categorical apprehension and comprehension. To repeat the inception is rather to welcome the coming to presence itself in the lightning flash of poetic Saying, or in the thinking-saying of the philosopher who shelter the truth of being from oblivion. This remembrance has to do with the other history that Heidegger calls Geschichte which he distinguished from the memorial of Historische.
The inception, however, can only be experienced as an inception when we ourselves think inceptively and essentially. This inception is not the past, but rather, because it has decided in advance everything to come, it is constantly of the future. (Heidegger 1993, p.13)

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To repeat the inception is to open towards the coming that comes, to welcome the past in the future to come, in the possibility of beginning again the beginning that in advance enables everything to come. Only with this thinking of inception, essential thinking begins. This beginning has a different history (Geschichte) than being historical (Historische). It is the astonishment, or wonder, or marvel of thinking. With the astonishment the coming of thought itself is welcomed, for we never come to thoughts. They come to us (Heidegger 2001, p. 6).

 Language and Death

Mortals are they who can experience death as death. Animals cannot do so. But animals cannot speak either. The essential relation between death and language flashes up before us, but remains still unthought. Martin Heidegger (1982, p. 107)

The States of Exception

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

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

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

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possibility of law, language is the metaphysical power of man, the power of negation and preservation, power of positing and the power of preserving. It is on the basis of this possibility given to man who speaks, which is his metaphysical condition, that man founds his foundation and expresses this foundation through visible forms, that is, the historico-political institutions, and becoming truly man as distinguished from animals. It is only then man is a political-historical animal, only then an animal who has something like history, and who has something like politics, only then the man who not merely cries and screams but also speaks. That man has something like history, and something like politics has its metaphysical condition in this power of death or negation. This power of positing and preserving law occurs with language that is distinguished from cries from pleasure and pain. In language man is exposed to death. In this exposure to death, man learns to speak I. This I is then born out of anguish, which however even animals feel, when for exampleand this is Hegels famous example of the anguish of the animalswhen the beast of prey sees the utter destructible character of the animal before him. He then does not wait, but jumps unto the animal and destroys it. Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit brings this discovery of metaphysics to a dramatic force, and thereby bringing this story to its accomplishment at its utmost limit when what philosophy has to do is none but to reveal its own essence to itself, that is, its own secret, that death is its Musaget. The metaphysical essence of world-history where man for the first time emerges as man, this metaphysical occurring of man as man is his history, which is the history of this occurring. But the metaphysical essence of the historicity of this history is this death, that is, in being able to say I, man summons his own death unto language, looks death in its face and tarries with it(Hegel 1998,p. 19). To say I is not to recognize the face that cries in pleasure and pain, but it is to recognize ones own dissolution, ones utter dismemberment, to see deaths face, as if, as it were, in saying I it is death that speaks in its name, that is, in the absence of a name, in the name of a name that has already perished, and sunk into nothing. The truth that man rescues from this utter shipwreck, the utter sinking of his pure being unto nothing is this ability, this metaphysical capacity to posit ones own death, and to preserve ones own death as pure power. It is through this capacity for death,

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power for the first time manifests itself this really real power. It is from this history acquires for itself the power of a law, a gaze and a force, a constituting gaze that founds itself, out of this death, out of the absence of a foundation. As such man, instead of belonging to sovereignty, himself is this state of exception, that means, ex-ception in relation to his own state: he ex-cludes himself from himselfin speaking Iand through this essential exclusion in-cludes himself, inserts himself, posits himself and preserves himself. He empowers himself with law, which is the law of history, and the law of his politics. As empowerment of oneself, man is this occurring, this excluding-including state of exception, this logic of sovereignty. What is happening here? The question that concerns us at this moment is simply this. What if death is mans metaphysical power par excellence, the very essence of power, the power of the nonpower, then what is the relation between language and death, apart from that both language and death have certain relation to power, or rather, are the secrets of power, that constitute power as power, as if power in its positing, in its assertion and negations (and the language of logic and grammar is, as we know, primarily takes its point of departure, that means, its analysis of statement, proposition from this) summons, each time, a death and a language, one and at the same time. Therefore Nietzsches attempt at deconstruction of philosophy at it metaphysical constitution accompanies a deconstruction of grammar, for grammar replaces God, even after the death of God. As the power of positing, or positing of power, grammar and God posit law as law. This law which is none but the law-ness of law, which constitutes law as law, is a law for death and law against death in the enunciation of itself as law, as if each enunciation whose truth and validity begins with this occurring, there also occurs the enunciation of death itself. It is not a vain death but is invested in sight of law. As law for death, law is positing law and as law against death it is preserving law as ban. They are twofold sides of the same law, for each time law posits itself as law, it calls forth both assertion and negation as simultaneous moments of occurring. Law as such is power of negation and power of assertion which comes to be at the moment of enunciation. It means that law as such is not a (given) state, nor is it a presently given entity. It is this occurring, this advent of law as law

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

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preserving violence. What Walter Benjamin (1986, p. 277-300) calls as divine violence which he distinguishes from the law positing and law preserving violence is a state of exception that does not serve the logic of sovereignty. This divine violence is the mortals immemorial exposure to the state of exception to which he already always belongs, which owns him in advance and opens him to the truth and time on the basis of this belonging. This owning is far more originary and prior to the capacity of man being able to say I, that is, prior to this capacity of man to ex-clude himself from himself and in-clude himself as this exclusion. It is prior to his non-foundation that by the energy of thinking he converts it into the foundation of his history; it is prior to his exposure to this death which gives him back the power of being. The originary exception is the open where there takes place encounter with the wholly other, and where Love utters the redemptive, creative Word. This Word, which is the word of Love, is already always given to him as an immemorial promise or gift. This gift of the Word must first open the tongue of the human so the human must partake the creative joyousness of the divine, which for that matter precedes the language of judgement, which is the judgement based upon the distinction not so much between pleasure and pain, but between just and unjust, good and evil. Therefore Love is more originary than the language of good and evil and is truly the state of exception. It is on the basis of belonging to this exception which is Love that there manifests for mortals something like politics and history, i.e., the realm of judgement, which is the language of distinction between just and unjust that founds those visible forms: the cultural-political institutions, the state, the nation etc. Following Aristotle if we can say that man is essentially a political and historical animal, one who essentially has something like history, and something like politics, it already always belongs to Love that is more ancient than judgement, before politics and before history. This does not mean being a-historical but only this much: that it is the opening of history itself; it is that what inaugurates history itself. Love in its pure arriving to man is happiness. This happiness is in being before God, and in being reflected in the light of the creative Word of the divine which it partakes, shares, speaks.

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The Facticity of Love and the Facticity of Language

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

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this exuberant beyond and outside being (berseyn) precedes mere conditioned potentiality of the conceptual negativity) into love as the originary revelation of existence. Hegels system of Absolute Knowledge appears to be bereft of language, because it begins with the mere negativity and mere potentiality of the concept that means, with the language of mere assertion and negation, with apophantic predication. This reductive language of speculative logic is at complete disposal of the categorical grasp of events already occurred, or of entities presently given. In this manner the facticity of language in its movement of longing-loving and in its movement of creative, exuberant affirmation is sought to be reduced to the categorical movement, or movement of categories of a speculative logic. Language that opens with and goes towards love, whose beginning lies in the un-pre-thinkable beginning before beginning, and whose completion lies in the extremity of future, as Eschatos always to arrive, this language of promise opens itself to the pure caress of longing for what is still remained to be attained. It thereby transcends itself and opens itself to a time yet to come. The language of promise that is given in love is the language that overflows itself beyond what is already said. It appears as if in this overflowing of caress, time itself can no longer be individuated into particularized, atomic instants that are homogeneous and successive. Time here flows. But it is not an incessant un-differential murmuring or interminable humming of waves which Bergson calls duration. The caress of this time rather brings into encounter what are past, present and future in their respective ecstatic character. In this bringing together time itself is intensified, and yet is extended to the immemorial past and incalculable future, beyond the immanence of self-presence. This is the moment of revelation when time spaces open and space temporalizes itself: a trans-immanent, a trans-finite movement where language becomes caress, and utters unto the space of revelation the redemptive word that is to arrive. The creative word of beginning, at the opening of the world and creation is like the bellowing Sea, pregnant with infinity that surges forth, bursts forth, sallies itself beyond. The originary promise of the word that structurally opens each discourse or conversation is not pure being passing into nothing without language, but the exuberant unfulfilling fulfilment, the movement of longing-loving

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towards the Other, the caress that in its plenitude leaves to itself a not yet. The remainder of the not yet that opens with the promise is the condition of the possibility of the future yet to arrive that is latent in each moment of discourse or conversation. This latency is the driving force which drives each discourse beyond its saturation with its self-enjoyment and opens itself to the radical otherness of futurity. Therefore at the heart of loving, the Word carries an irreducible remnant or a reserve that shelters or preserves a promise of happiness in a time to come, of bliss that will be renewed in future. This beatitude of the future is not one particularized mode of time that will come to pass but an eternal remnant of time. What the mortal seeks, one for whom death is a facticity before all facticity, is a beatitude that is truly the pure state of exception. This exception arrives from beyond the gaze of Law, and outside positing-preserving violence; it advents from a Yes saying, from an affirmation of a facticity that can equal to the facticity of death. That is why it is said that love is equal to death. As an immemorial promise love precedes and follows the language of judgement. This occurring of loving attunes us in our fundamental attunements to truth and time that affects us in a fundamental manner. Outside the categorical apparatus of predicative truth at cognitive disposal and outside the En-framing of calculable, technological mastery, love is pure affection of time from beyond: the immemorial and the incalculable. Even before the language of judgement comes to constitute itself as positing law and preserving law, love already always opens us to the promise of the other beginning which love places us by displacing our given mode of existence. It is the attunements of love whose various modes are understood by Hlderlin as various poetic tonalities that make the creative word of love attain that paradisiacal fulfilment which is not that of the unity of judgement, but the caesural constellation, like the music of the spheres. The constellation-music of love where love seeks its messianic fulfilment, in so far language appears here pure movement of presentation (Darstellung) offers meaning itself in its character of pure offering. There is a character of giving in the presentation of love, which is, renouncing of mastery and appropriation, dispropriates ecstatically the one who gives. In this pure giving in love and in loves grateful receiving, which is inseparable from renunciation of

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

The Gift of Language

What, then, is the relationship between mortality and finitude with language, a mortality that is not reducible to the deaths power of positing-preserving, to the language of judgement which constitutes the logic of sovereignty? Is it that with mortality the gift of language

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

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

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event must take death, and also time seriously, and not to include it as a mere category in the system of a logical thinking. A nonpredicative thinking of the event is called forth here, along with a non-generative modality of thinking of a time yet to come, and also language itself, irreducible to the cognitive system of concepts, as flash of lightning where the opening reigns for the event to come forth, to leap into presence. No recollection, but repetition: there lies the joyous participation in the future as revealed in the opening shining forth. This joyous repetition of the event in the time to come which is multiple- singular, does not wholly belong to the order of generality and essentiality of the Concepts and categories. A wholly otherwise must begin here with the event that is not yet recollected in the spinning wheel of categories, for with each beginning there comes a coming, not this and that, but a coming itself. The coming comes and the presencing presences: this is already a venturing, reaching, opening to the beyond. It does not begin with the logical propositional thought of beginning with empty nothing equal to Being, for there is a thinking of coming that is neither equal to Being nor equal to nothing of the negative. It is at once an excess of being and nothing, but also a lack of their fullness of presence, either of being or of nothing. The coming comes and presencing presences: this is the existential facticity of the event, that each time repeating itself is transfigured into the wholly new beginning, but whose origination is not with the abstract concept of pure Being, but with a longing that is itself a moving and becoming without positing an act of consciousness or a logical concept outside. The facticity of the coming belongs to the question of existence and not to predication. The coming into existence is not one category among others. It is intimated in prophesy that is announced in the open. A wholly new apparatus, or even otherwise than the notion of apparatus, but a configuration or constellation of thoughtsseized in the lightning flash of the openalone constitutes, or de-constitutes the event of existence, or the existential facticity of the event. An existential thinking is always thinking of the event of the future of the arriving, not in the monotonous generation of the same but as ex-tatic difference of perdurance (Heidegger 1969) wherein transcendence bursts into, and tears open existent to the arrival.

 Configuration

What we are attempting to think with the notion of configuration, or constellation is a whole without totality, an assemblage without system. A conceptually and logically generative principle running through them does not unite them, nor are they inserted into the cognitive apparatus of categories where the question is asked about the essence of them (in its what is), for it is presupposed there to have a shared essence, unitary, identical and absolute. The configuration movement, in so far as this movement inaugurates the singular coming into existence and not what has already been predicated in the generalized economy of system, has to be thought outside such a system. The generalized economy of the categories miss the eventthe event of comingit is because it subordinates the thought of configuration to the system and to totality, the lightning flash of language to concepts, repetition to recollection, transcendence to the immanent generation, eternity into presence, illumination to methodological cognition belonging to the universality of essence, existential constellation to categorical thought, the Naming language of the mortals to the apophantic, the coming to the overwhelming of what has been, prophetic intimation to regressive memory into the Archaic, finitude and mortality to the negativity of death, redemption and revelation to the categories of future and presence that brings nothing new and reveals nothing new, ecstatic freedom to ground of necessity, astonishment of the event to the dialectical march of the concept, remembrance to memory, possible to the realized. *

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Caesura
Configuration is a co-figuration, a kind of caesural whole without totality, a co-figuring communication where each is hold apart and is hold towards each other. Their communication lies in the explosive opening to transcendence without transcendent that ecstatically opens to the outside. Such a spacing of temporality can neither be represented as continuum of the underlying Subjectum beneath ruptures, nor as a generative-immanent principle grasped by the speculative logic. Configuration is the (dis)figure of bursting out of totality represented by the econo-geometric figure of the circle that re-appropriates in its selfsame ground what is its other. Transcendence without transcendent is therefore not circular, but bursting of a non-convergent opening lets say perdurance (following Heidegger. See Heidegger 1969) where the leap occurs to what is arriving. It is the spacing, the abyss of the midpoint that calls the extremity of distance to nearness and nearness to distantiate itself. This calling calls forth to conversation between the ecstatic extremities of time of the immemorial past and the incalculable future where time is no longer merely passing away of now after now, but their encounter in a momentary event that strikes the mortals. It is the encounter when time occurs as time and space occurs as spacing. This is how communication takes place in a configuration: communication in this sense is a configuration at each moment temporal and finite. Configuration itself is a figure of communication as con-figuring without return to pre-conceived plane. This notion of configuration as a whole is without totality, for the notion of totality does not have place for the intermittent intervalthe abyss of the midpointwhere repetition opens any recollected closure to transcendence outside. In the open, repetition baths renewed voyages with new sky and the new sea. The notion of configuration is therefore intimately bound up with the question of repetition and the radical epochal break that inaugurates the other history or otherwise than history that does not belong to the logic of continuum, i.e., Subjectum underlying beneath the ruptures of history. Not only that repetition is not possible without configuration, but without repetition configuration is reduced to totality or system. Configuration is co-figuration made possible by repetition multiple and singular, where its caesura

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enables figuration a coa belonging together without totalitya hyphenated opening, enabling notes of a musical piece hold-together, also separating from each other. As it is possible to think of repetition belonging as con-figuration, perhaps it is also possible to think a repetition of configuration. Through repetition the advent to come is always renewed in the future of the past and in the past of the future, for repetition calls forth, summons the extremities of time to the destinal conversation that opens history to its essential historicity. This is, then, the relation between the advent of the event and language. They occur as configuration, a whole that holds together the singular multiplicity of repetitive origin or beginning, without forming a system or totality. As caesura interrupting each note, opens to the other by inserting a time without present so in the open there takes place the movement of, or towards transcendence, a coming to come. That the coming comes in the open: this is to be grasped in the thought of caesura. The Star of Redemption The thought of configuration or constellation is not the formal method, but the movement of thinking that being irreducible to representation is the pure movement of presentation where the unapparent arrives in a thinking-saying which is in a sense tautological. As such it is not a representational process of arriving at categorical cognition, even if it is Absolute Knowledge, for this unapparent arriving does not acquire completely those visible forms that tend to form totality or system. As such it does not belong to the philosophy of immanence or philosophy of All that moves the whole venerable brotherhood of philosophers from Iona to Jena (Rosenzweig 2005, p. 18). It is with this question of configuration or constellation that Franz Rosenzweigs The Star of Redemption begins. This book asks the questions of existence and language, of creation and revelation and redemption, not from the basis of a representational cognition of visible forms that form system but from the hither side, from the point which is denied, excluded, expelled as illegitimate, indigestible from the philosophical discourse of All. The result comes to be peculiar. We are introduced into the movement of thinking

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that speaks to us because of an excluded Allnot just the All that excludesas if from an Archimedean point of view, from outside the system of visible forms, to welcome the unapparent apparition of a presence from a radical future. The movement of constellation begins from this point where a movement begins outside the All, where the All is not All yet all. Such constellation thinking must discover at the heart of All which is not All, at the heart of an identity a nonidentity, at the heart of a pre-supposition-less-ness of a structure of a thinking from Iona to Jena a presupposition. What emerges out of this discovery is irreducibly singular-multiplicity that does not form a system of visible forms, since it does not originate and end with the presupposition-less self-identity of the All, but that begins with a presuppositional differential multiplicity, singular in relation to each other, which is a constellation. Therefore for Rosenzweig constellation is not system, for it does not have its ground in the thinkability of the All, which is thinkability of an identity. The constellation is rather the non-identical movement of relation, the movement of a multiplicity of singulars as a movement of discontinuous simultaneity. Such is the relation among God, man and World that tempers the temporal relations among creation, revelation and redemptionthe eternal past, the eternal presence and the eternally arriving messianic Kingdom of the worldas a discontinuous simultaneity which is distinguished from the dialectical-speculative System that accounts only the successiveness of homogeneous, empty instants. As such the constellation or configuration is not mere conglomeration or aggregate unity of given figures, and the configurational composition of the elements does not take place according to mathematical rules. They are the real happening whose eventiveness cannot be reduced to the geometrical or mathematical figuration. Rosenzweig writes,
For configuration is differentiated from figure by the fact that certainly the configuration could be composed of mathematical figures. Yet that in truth its composition did not take place according to a mathematical rule, but according to a supra-mathematical principle; here the thought furnished the principle of characterizing the connections of the elementary points as symbols of a real happening instead of any realizations of a mathematic idea.( Rosenzweig 2005, p. 275).

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God, man and the world, each is not presently given entity. They cannot be incorporated into the categorical, cognitive apparatus of the All. Rosenzweig envisages the ecstatic movement of their arising as simultaneously discontinuous, therefore singular each in relation the others, arising and becoming out of an abyss of freedom that begins outside the categorical apparatus of the Universal One and All. The messianic movement of constellation is therefore a noncategorical, non-ontological movement whose movement is not grounded, gathered in the unity of the logical principle of identity, for the constellation does not begin nor end with the entities that are predicated, or that can be thought on the basis of pure being and pure Universal nothing. God, man and the world are not therefore predicated entities but each is a discontinuous movement of coming to presence, of coming into existence, simultaneously and yet singularly relating to the other in this coming into presence. Rosenzweig calls this coming into presence existence. The Star of Redemption begins with the deconstruction of the philosophys claim of its pre-supposition-less beginning, and its denial of death. That philosophy has to be thinkable, and that this thinkability has to have its ground in the unity of Logoswhich defines the character of the whole brotherhood of philosophers from Ionia to Jenatherefore this philosophy has to deny, by a necessary reason, the multiplicity and singularity of the mortal cries in the face of death. For mortals for whom the poisonous sting of death, its pestilential breath (Rosenzweig 2005, p.9) is not taken away in the vain consolation of the concept, in the empty promise of categories, has then to make another movement, another inauguration outside the cognition of the All, outside the system of One and Universal Being that has subsumed its nothing within itself. Such a mortal thinking which is seized in its veins with such fear and trembling, which is seized by deaths poisonous sting and its pestilential breath, begins with presupposition, that is with nothing that is death, with a nothing which is not pure universal One and which is not a nothing equal to pure Universal One being, but rather with nothing that is something, a seizure, a trembling and a cry. Such a thinkingif does not have to dupe us with empty universals and empty One-nesshas to be a thinking non-identical, that means, multiple and singular,

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for the categorical system of One and All there is no place for the multiplicity and singularity. That philosophy has to exclude death in order to be presupposition-less is also the very reason that thereby it also has to deny multiplicity and singularity, because only singulars and only multiple die, because for the One and Universal death does not exist, because for the One and Universal death has been deprived of its poisonous sting. If system or the totality of visible forms is based upon a death that has been rendered sterile and harmless, a constellation movement, on the other hand, is a finite, discontinuous movement which, since its begins with the presupposition of the undeniable facticity of deatha facticity that cannot be thought within concept, within Systemcalls forth the anguish and cries of the multiple and singulars that have rebelled against the unity of Logos, and have thereby loosened themselves from the totality of One and Universal Nothing equal to One and Universal Being. In other words, the logical principle of unity no longer guarantees their cohesion. In being loosened from the oppressive unity of Logos, God and man and world are not entities present already, but events in their discontinuous simultaneity coming into presence, coming into existence, in so far as this coming constitutes the event character of these events, multiple and singular events holding-together -byholding-apart so that they can breath besides each other in their relative autonomy. Instead of One and Universal Nothing of totality that Hegel conceives of as harmless (by taking away its poisonous sting), here there are nothings (in the plural) that are something (that is, as potentiality for something which is not mere the potentiality of the concept, but potentiality of existence). What is introduced in and as constellation is constellation of Nothings, multiple and singulars, irreducible to the Universal and the One, irreducible to the unity of Logos. Its logic of origin is not the sterile and harmless nothing but a perpetual derivation from a somethingand never more than a something, an anythingfrom the nothing, and not from the empty nothing in general, but always from its nothing, belonging precisely to this something (Ibid., p.27). What, then, the movement of constellation introduces is a logic of origin, which is neither a logical deduction of categories nor derivation of an event from the One and Universal Nothing, but an origin which is nothing yet pregnant with something, a differential logic of origin

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

And little below about Hermann Cohen,

In the place of the one and universal nothing, which, like the zero, could really be nothing more than nothing, that genuine nonthing, he sets the particular nothing whose fruitfulness refracted into realities. It was precisely Hegels foundation of logic upon the concept of being that he most critically opposed; and consequently the entire philosophy that Hegel inherited. For here, for the first time, a philosopher who still regarded himself as an idealista further sign of the force of this event in himknew and acknowledged that when thinking sets out to beget purely, it encounters not beingbut nothing. (Ibid., p.28).

The logic of the origin is not a logical deduction from an empty, one and universal nothing but it is the logic of nothing of the differential, which is a simultaneously discontinuous, differential coming into presence, on the one hand as a powerful negation of the nothing and on the hand, as infinitesimal, a calm affirmation of that which is not nothing (Ibid., p. 28). This is the real existential logic of origin, and not begetting purely conceptually, where something bursts forth, erupts, and comes into existence in its strife with nothing. This differential logic of origin is the play-space of strife between the potentiality that is latent in nothing and an actuality that bursts forth as singular. Constellation is a movement of the differential, a holdingtogether-by-holding-apart. In other words, it has to begin with the question of existence, as it has to begin with the question of death, but not with being pure and simple. Rosenzweig here, like Kant and Schelling before, makes the distinction between existence and being,

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with the priority given to existence, which is each time coming into presence, an event, and not a predicate or category. The constellation thinking is, therefore, an existential-thinking, which means, thinking existence as event in its coming into presence.

Discontinuous Finitude
In the beginning of his The Origin of German Tragic Drama Walter Benjamin introduces the idea of constellation as philosophical contemplation which is distinguished from the categorical cognition of phenomena. Benjamin calls this philosophical contemplation timeless constellations, not of concepts at cognitive disposal but of Ideas, whose concern is not knowledge as it is with concepts, but with truth. Philosophical contemplation is distinguished from cognitive possession, as Idea is distinguished from concepts. Philosophical thinking as constellation or configuration is not concerned with the cognitive possession of phenomena, but their redemption. This redemption is the freeing, clearing, releasing of phenomena from the positing power of the concepts to its originary Idea. It is releasing the phenomena from the concepts gaze of law and from the violence of cognition unto the dignity of the naming unimpaired by violence. As if philosophical contemplation in so far as it is concerned with truth and not knowledge, rescues phenomena from a categorical apparatus, from a regime of cognitive mastery, and releases it from the melancholy of the damaged condition. This melancholy is not that blissful melancholy of the philosophical contemplation that bears the beatitude and dignity of the creative naming, but a melancholy that suffers being at cognitive disposal, damaged and impaired by the violence of cognitive mastery and the overnaming language of judgement. Philosophical contemplation therefore is not conceptual knowledge of objects but redemptive Naming-loving where the creative gift of language that is given in Adams naming melancholic because it is paradisiacaladheres itself. Philosophical contemplation is more originary and more primordial promise than the language of judgement, more originary than overnaming that precedes the evil that arises in overnaming the name. This redemptive naming, because the world is also revealed to us in the name, arrives in this blissful philosophical contemplation that shares with the source

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of the creative life of the divine. This arrival occurs outside totality, outside the categorical apparatus, but in a movement of constellation that brings together the extremities of timethe immemorial past and incalculable arrival of the other origin. Without an underlying continuum of Subjectum rendering a system of phenomena in their visible forms, configuration is rather like a mosaic where singularity of Idea has a relative independence, whose relation is dependent less upon a common logical selfgrounding foundation than as the harmony of the stars. Benjamin says in his The Origin of the German Tragic Drama:
All essences exist in complete and immaculate independence, not only from phenomena, but especially, from each other. Just as the harmony of the spheres depends on the orbit of the stars which do not come into contact with each other, so the existence of the mundus intelligibilis depends on the unbridgeable distance between pure essences... The harmonious relationship between such essences is what constitutes truth. (Benjamin 1998, p. 38)

As it is with Rosenzweig, configuration does not here form a system, for it is not a coherence of concepts at the cognitive disposal unified by a logical self-foundational principle of identity. A configuration is rather an assemblage of discontinuous, disparate, multiple, repeated attempts to think anew the same, which is renewed in thinking with what Benjamin calls a continual pose for breath. A configuration thinking is a mosaic of multiple seizure of thoughts, or experiences through singular repetitions of what in itself is singular and is in relative independencelike God, man and world in Rosenzweigand therefore is discontinuous, interruptive of itself, caesural and ecstatic. Each singular thought or Idea in relation to the other forms a new configuration of truth, as each remains thereby singular, irreducible to the generative principle of particularized universality of the Concept; each is in multiple relations, as singular multiple repetition of the origin. It is as if the beginning begins itself anew each time, ecstatic and in astonishment at the possibility of the ever anew repetition of itself by interrupting itself, discontinuing itself. Communication occurs as perdurance of the discontinuous. This discontinuity occurs with the breath of a pause. With each repetition the origin is opened to the coming, or rather, thinking

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itself is opened to the origin (and not genesis) and is exposed to the lightning flash of the sudden illumination, which without forming an underlying continuum, separates itself from the apparatus of rested cognition of presently given entities (Vorhandenheit). With each repetition in a configuration there arrives, in a discontinuous seizure, in sudden lightning flash, in ecstatic astonishment, the arrival of the wholly otherwise. In this sense each repetition is wholly new, wholly singular existing (that is, it transcends itself ) that transcends each time from the generalized, immanent economy of the self-consuming predicates. This intermittent, discontinuous seizure of experiences, thought as configuration here, we also call caesural thinking in order to emphasize the interval, intermittent character of the configuration. Benjamin calls such a constellation or configuration as discontinuous finitude (Benjamin 1998, p. 38). The advent of the arrival can only be told in a pre-predicative configuration, for configuration is less concerned with cognition and predication than with its task of redeeming phenomenon from the violence of cognition. Benjamin calls this arrival as profane illumination when dialectics stands still and history comes to a halt. The task of philosophical contemplation is not cognitive mastery of phenomena but a linguistic task, that of renewing the act of Naming: Ideas are displayed, without intention, in the act of naming, and they have to be renewed in philosophical contemplation. In this renewal as the primordial mode of apprehending words is restored (Ibid., p. 37). This renewal is the remembrance of the originary not yet impaired by the cognitive violence, and is irreducible to historical memory of the speculative-dialectical.

EN-FRAMING, REVELATION
A thinking that gives itself the task of destruction of ontology at the completion of a certain metaphysics does not ask the question of Being as constant presence but Being understood in the infinitive of the verbal resonance, as the event of Being, as Beings coming into presence. Therefore the existential analytic of Dasein in Sein und Zeit distinguishes the existential analytic from categorical grasp of entities presently given (Vorhandenheit), insofar as the existential Dasein for whomwho is a who, and not a whatits own being

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is at stake does not have the character of the entities presently given, for in itself existential is each time singular occurring, each time its coming into presence that distinguishes this existential analytic from the average-ness of the Das Man, the They. As such Being as event cannot be thought within the categorical grasp of the everyday what presently given but as the temporalized constellation of ecstasies of temporalities, each is each time its own mode of coming to presence. This thinking of the event of Beingwhich is also the thinking of difference as difference (of what Heidegger calls ontological difference)is the task in Being and Time. In his later writings Heidegger no longer thinks this coming into presence, this event of Being as the task of constituting a fundamental ontology anymore but as the advent of the truth of Being presencing to presence that transforms the history of Being as Metaphysics to the thinking-saying of the other beginning. It is here Heidegger introduces the two-fold notions of constellation, on the one hand constellation as En-Framing (das Gestell) where there holds sway the danger of the oblivion of the disclosing coming into presence of the truth of Being, wherein this coming into presence is entrapped and on the other hand, constellation as disclosing coming into presence, when there occurs the epochal transformation of mans relation to Being, when as a result of danger coming to pass as danger transforms itself into the coming into presence of the truth of Being. This constellation of the epochal transformation of mans relation to Being which welcomes the coming into presence in its coming, the coming as such is what Heidegger calls the event of appropriation or enowning (Ereignis). Therefore constellation as En-framing which is the danger and the constellation as saving power are not simply opposites; they are of the differential modes of the coming into presence as Beings oblivion and as unconcealment of Being. This differential modes of coming into presence is thought as belonging together and belonging together of man and Being where neither man nor Being is thought as constant presence of entities presently given but each time as coming into presence, and therefore outside the categorical appropriation into system. Configuration or constellation in Heideggers later thinking is mans transformative relation to Being where the configuration is thought not constituting a system but as belonging-together of man

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and Being, open to the advent of the other beginning. The event itself occurs as configuration or constellation, as a constellation of mans relation of belonging-together to Being, and not of belongingtogether (as it is reductively understood in the onto-theological constitution of metaphysics). The latter is the thinking of metaphysics as what Heidegger calls En-Framing where there holds sway the oblivion of the danger as danger. En-Framing is the appearing of the configuration, or constellation of man and Being in the world of technological calculability, and therefore it is only a prelude to the far more originary configuration or constellation as the event of appropriation, that means, event of the arrival and the coming. Heidegger says:
What we experience in the frame as the constellation of Being and man through the modern world of technology is a prelude to what is called the event of appropriation. This event, however, does not necessarily persist in its prelude. For in the event of appropriation the possibility arises that it may overcome the mere dominance of the frame to turn into a more original appropriating. Such a transformation of the frame into the event of appropriation, by virtue of that event, would bring the appropriate recoveryappropriate, hence never to be produced by man aloneof the world of technology from its dominance back to servitude in the realm by which men reaches truly into the event of appropriation. (Heidegger 1969, p. 37)

The belonging-together, but not belonging-together of the constellation, as the event of appropriation, is an exposure of man to what man alone cannot produce, what is otherwise than man, an exposure of man himself to the event of appropriation. Man is, then, no longer understood as animal rational but Dasein, who is the open space of strife, the midpoint between overwhelming and arriving. In his Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger writes of this Dasein:
Dasein: The between which has the character of a mid-point that is open and sheltering between the arrival and flight of gods and man, who is rooted in that between Heidegger 1999a, 23).

Dasein belongs to event or enowning (Ereignis) and only insofar as Dasein belongs to enowning, or event, it is also the creative being that leaps into be-ing. In this leap or spring, event is an essential transformation of thinking beyond the given En-Framing towards

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

The relation between the constellation as En-Framing and constellation as epochal transformation of mans relation to Being

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

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pass is concealed, forgotten as this coming. The constellation of truth will occur only when the coming into presencethe eventwill come to pass as coming, outside the totalizing En-framing. Heidegger writes,
The irresistibility of ordering and the restraint of the saving power draw past each other like the paths of two stars in the course of the heavens. But precisely this, their passing by, is the hidden side of their nearness. When we look into the ambiguous essence of technology, we behold the constellation, the stellar course of the mystery. The question concerning technology is the question concerning the constellation in which revealing and concealing, in which the coming to presence of truth comes to pass. (Heidegger 1977, p.33)

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

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as singular relations of non-mastery. As a disjunctive assemblage that never constitutes a system or totality, each singular interrupts itself and others at the same time in its coming into existence, and thereby opens and exposes itself to others. Heidegger attempts to think this holding-together in configuration as being apart and the being towards each other (Heidegger 1969, p. 65). Configuration sends man and being away from each other while holding them towards each other so that man is placed in its proper place in relation to Being, that means, placing man as properly non-propriating being, whose propriety and property consists in being non-property and non-propriety. Only then is he open to the incalculable arrival of the lightning flash of truth. Configuration is welcoming this incalculable arrival which man experiences in the stillness of completed language, in the stillness of an eternity appearing as standing still, when the unapparent becomes apparent as the dis-figuring figure of mortality that strikes the mortal, abandoning him to the originary experience of his abandonment, to the originary strife of darkness and lightning, of sheltering and exposing of man to the event of being.

Lightning, Clearing
The turning from the danger of En-Framing (das Gestell) to the constellation where the event of appropriation arrives, this turning may occur momentarily, suddenly that in its like the lightning strikes the mortals, like what Hlderlin speaks of Apollo striking him. The mortals then experience this suddenness of the lightning flash in a glance of the moment, in a sudden clearing and opening where language falls silent, because of its fulfillment where saying and said comes together to welcome the phenomenon of the unapparent. The stillness of the lightning flash stills Being into the coming to presence of world (Heidegger 1977, p. 49). Heidegger here plays with the words: blitzen (to flash), blicken (to glance), Einblick (in-sight), and Augenblick (moment, suddenness). Heidegger writes,
The turning of the danger comes to pass suddenly. In this turning, the clearing belonging to the essence of Being suddenly clears itself and lights up. This sudden self-lighting is the lightning flash. It brings itself into its own brightness, which it itself both brings along and brings in. When, in the turning of the danger, the truth of Being

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flashes, the essence of Being clears and lights itself up. Then the truth of the essence, the coming to presence, of Being turns and enters in. (Ibid., p. 44).

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

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as totality, or Being as presencebut an astonished exposure, a lightning opening to the coming, a clearing freeing for the arrival. Only then the arrival arrives, Being comes to presence in this enabling appearing: The opening, says Heidegger, grants first of all the possibility of the path to presence, and grants the possible presencing of that presence itself (Heidegger 1978, p. 387). Heidegger says,
The beam of light does not first create the opening, openness, it only traverses it. It is only such openness that grants to giving and receiving and to any evidence at all what is free, in which they can remain and must move. (Ibid., p. 385)

The constellation emits the light of its own, and therefore it does not have its destiny, for it itself as event of appropriation sends destinal inauguration to man. But this destinal inauguration arrives from a site wholly otherwise, from a future incalculable. The experience of thinking according to Heidegger, like Benjamins philosophical contemplation, is not categorical, cognitive mastery of phenomena or objects but to enter into the constellation of the lightning flash where the mortal remembers the immemorial promise, as if it comes into presence from the site of the yet to come. It arrives as momentary illumination when all of time as if stands still, and the mortal experiences this stillnessmortal whose fate is his finitudeas an eternity. There in that lightning flash man has momentary glance into the truth and essence of his own origin where the primordial creative, the divine word is uttered. In this time without time there is no before absolutely before and no after absolutely after, which for that matter does not collapse into One indifferent, Universal, homogenous empty Now, but as a constellation of ecstasies coming together without totality, without system. The contemplation of this eternity in philosophical thinking, and the renewal of this eternity in our primordial remembrance give philosophical thinking a dignity and nobility that reflects the paradisiacal, blissful creative naming of Adam who in naming inherited Gods creative Word. Constellation then has to enter into language where revealing coming to presence is not impaired by the categorical En-framing in its cognitive mastery and ordering, in its challenging forth. Heidegger attempts to think the constellation of the differential revealing by renewing the old idea of techne: the bringing into radiance, bringing forth unto beautiful,

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unto the splendor of the open. Understood, techne of the work of art is neither technological nor aesthetic enjoyment. As beautiful, it is rather the letting the grant of revelation to hold sway, which is outside mastery or calculability but that precisely calls forth man to renounce the calculability and mastery and to abandon oneself to the distress of the abandonment of being. Before Heidegger, both Schelling and Nietzsche, who already understood the essence of the apparatus, of En-framing in their own singular ways, thought of love and beautiful as what radiate forth in the work of arts, as what lighten up, what shine forth in the works of art. What shines forth in works of art as fore-shining is the advent, is the arrival that transfigures mans existence unto a new future. In the works of art, in a more originary manner than philosophy, love and beauty utter their creative breath which arrives to mortals as sudden apparition. This arrival may not accompany great noises and may not come in the thunders of great events but in a language faintly audible, barely a murmur, in the stillness of a breath. Schelling in his The Ages of the World writes of this event,
In the nocturnal vision where the Lord passed by the prophet, a mighty storm first came which rent the mountains and shattered the rocks. After this came an earthquake, and then finally a fire. But the Lord himself was in none of these, but rather was in a soft murmur that followed. Likewise, Power, Violence, and Stringency must come first in the revelation of the eternal so that the eternal itself can first appear as the Eternal Itself in the soft wafting of Love. (Schelling 2000, p. 83)

CONSTELLATION OF TEMPORALITIES
Configuration, not of categories, but singular multiple opening to come is essentially a thinking of time, of coming into presence, the event of arriving, for time-space is the open site where the strife occurs between the reserve and exposure of man to its futurity. Configuration is con-figuring of temporalitiesmultiple and singularin their ecstasies and astonishment, hope and anticipation as their existential fundamental moods, or attunements. As there are attunements of temporalities, and they are existential, so there are temporalities of attunements: they are thought as and in configuration, or

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

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

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

While for Heidegger the simultaneity of ecstatically singular temporalities in the configuration is experienced as stillness of silence, in Rosenzweigs constellation of temporalities silence constitutes the beatitude of completed understanding. Silence is the attunement of completed understanding to the coming redemption which is promised, in the already always, in the immemorial gift of language. But this is so only in so far as constellation, or configuration of temporalities is always already attuned to the coming so that what Heidegger calls stillness, or Rosenzweigs silenceinstead of being denial of languagebrings language, as if for the first time, to its fullness of completion when language, irreducible to any cognitive disposal and instrumentality, appears in its unapparent apparition as language of the name, Adamic, blissful, paradisiacal. Language is not here the categorical grasp of the presently given entities (Vorhandenheit) which is the mere result of a process, a predicative proposition about the result of the process, but is redemptive remembrance of the originary promise, which is understood in the silence of completed understanding. Language happens together with the coming as lightning flash, as the time

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times simultaneously, belonging-together, as configured harmony. That will be the redemption of language itself that is renewed in what Benjamin calls the act of Naming. The beatitude of the completed understanding in silence, rescued and redeemed from its cognitive instrumentality and serviceability, from reduction of language to the entities presently given, is experienced as eternity. Here alone man, as mortal and finite creature, is endowed with an eternity beyond transience, and beyond death. Here alone man, open to mortality is endowed with the beatitude of redemption by being intimated with the entirety of time coming together, which manifests itselfa phenomenon of the unapparentas an atom of eternity. It is in the eternity of the holding together of time as constellationthat man has a time beyond death, that he is given the gift of redemption. The eternity of the moment is not present as Ousia or Parousia of the Subjectum that is present as permanent enduring, but as coming into presence, as event of time that simultaneously spaces itself as temporalization. It is in relation to the question of temporality alone, as configuration, that the questions of revelation and redemption occur, for the question of transcendence is posed only when time itself is released beyond the thetic time of negativity, beyond the predicative grasp of temporalities. Time does not time itself as positing. Therefore the questions of revelation and redemption do not have a place in Hegelian system, for the beginning and the end of Hegelian system is none but a positing, thetic, predicative one. The unapparent phenomenon of the extreme future is not to be understood as particular instant of now that is coming to pass. That there is a past, and presence only in so far as each is to come that first of all opens to each advent of this or that coming. Elsewhere I wrote,
this future is not the future of the specific temporality: there are singular ecstatic temporalities only to the extent that each one, in its singular way, is attuned to coming, each one is ahead of itself, and there lies the ecstases of each one of them. Here it is necessary to elaborate the notion of attunement of coming as transcendence, which can be understood as follows: there is no ecstatic past, ecstatic present or ecstatic future without each one being attuned to the transcendence of itself. This aheadness, this forward dimension, this opening to the

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coming, is the originary of finite existence: this futurity, which is not a future as one of the three dimensions of time, is messianic future, a futurity and coming other than future. This futurity therefore does not arrive, or come in time, let alone some future time: what comes as coming, this messianic coming, is not this or that coming, but coming itself. (Das 2008, p.173)

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

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of each ecstatic temporalities are hold together in the open, in the freeing, in the clearing of the open. The holding together, in or as configuration is essentially a finite relation, which we shall call henceforth a relation of finitude. Configuration thinking therefore replaces generation with relation, totality with a new notion of a finite whole.

Transfinitude
As it is shown above, configuration thinking is not an enclosed infinitude within the immanence of its self-consuming predicates, but a finitude that bears the wound of the infinite, that is exposed to the infinite that affects it from a destination wholly immemorial past and wholly incalculable future. What is at stake in thinking the coming time as configuration is this infinite finitude of the coming time which is always to remain? We shall also call this infinite finitude of the coming as transfinite. The transfinitude of the coming time: the infinite-finitude of that which is to come and which is to remain to come. What not here to be missed is the infinitive of the verbal resonance: to. Schelling, Heidegger and Rosenzweig: with each of these three thinkers of the coming, this promise of the advent is sought to be released from the reductive totalization of the dominant metaphysics. Since this thought of the promise is inseparable from the problematic of time and gift, each of these thinkers is also thinker of gift which is pure donation from a time immemorial. Schelling, Heidegger, and Rosenzweig: they themselves form a configuration of thinkers here. Through them and with their help a logic of originan inception to comeand therefore a notion of the promise of time is elaborated in a constellation, or configuration of repeated seizure of thoughts, and in a configuration of questions. The intermittent, marked by interval and discontinuity, coming back again repetitively, but always singularly and differently to the question of the coming time and its logic of origin: this is the gesture or style of thinking here, the rhythm of the wandering poetizing. What follow are only exercises of repetition where sobriety of philosophical reflection is not alien to the phosphorous poetic seizure in lightning flash.

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Thinking that knows not, is never touched by the lightning flash of the coming is never intimated by the bursting open towards transcendence, or never exploded from within in ecstasy and astonishment. Such sober thinking is capable of nothing like venturing beyond. Without venturing beyond, thinking is a sterile absolute, mere humming monotony of the empty indifference, an infinite boredom that busies itself with recollection of what has already happened, like the old woman on the spinning wheel that Kierkegaard speaks of. Such a sober thinking has long since become dead like, capable of nothing creative, but busies itself with singing the song of Minervas owl. Such a sterile thinking privileges boredom over ecstatic, creative transformation of the old into new. It is the eternal return of boredom: nothing happens, nothing comes anew, nothing repeats, nothing redeems, but only concept generating another concept, one category generating other categoriesas Schelling mockingly refers to Hegel herein a predictable, precalculable, mechanical manner, an auto-engendering and autoproducing logical generation of the Same. The creative thinking, on the other hand, must not shy away from the contingencies of a finite life, the ecstasy and the incalculability of the extremity of the future that foils our anticipation and our hope, the exuberance of the unpredictable that can also bring the distress and melancholy of In-Vain. Instead of returning to the archaic past so that history can preserve in its the gallery of images (Hegel 1998, p. 492) those shapes which the Spirit has passed through, and preserving the triumphal march of the victorious, the creative reading must be able to readto speak with Walter Benjaminwhat is not yet read, and through this reading, to cipher and to trace the messianic, redemptive element that were possible but never actualized. Meanwhile countless deaths of those whose hopes were destroyed and unredeemed in that dialectical march of history, have remained buried, forgotten and lost. Therefore it is necessary that thinking may not be content with the historical memorial task, but gives itself to the demand of redemption, the requirement of a coming, of a future outside the historical memory of the past is to be opened up. Thinking itself must be redeeming, otherwise it is not worthwhile. It must be able to begin again, venture itself again, forwards, in the front, in the open sea and under the blue sky.

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Thinking must have future. Such a thinking that takes seriously the question of redemption and the requirement of a coming time is not content with claiming to sublate death into the concept, and thereby making death as mere vanity of the mortals. Instead, thinking must take the finitude of existence seriously: later is thinking that both Rosenzweig and Schelling pursue. There must arrive a time that is promised, or intimated that remains beyond the works of death which universal history undertakes on the behalf of negativity. This time beyond negativity alone redeems all that has become, all that is unredeemed, this melancholy of existence. Even God, so Schelling says towards the end of his Philosophical Inquiry into the Nature of Human Freedom, would have been sunk into the abyss of melancholy, for he too had a source of melancholy within him, had he not transfigured his sadness unto his creation out of his freedom. Creation transfigures and thereby redeems our melancholic existence. Man partakes this task of transfiguration with the divine, for he too shares with God an essential freedom whose ground, however, is unfathomable. Man partakes of the divine task of transfigurationof sorrows into joy, melancholy into hopeout of the freedom that is gifted to him, loaned to him, endowed upon him as created ones. But this freedom is ungrounded, or whose ground is inscrutable and unfathomable. To seek to master this ground constitutes mans attempt at the selfabnegation of his own finitude. There lies the mortals capacity for evil. Therefore the task of thinking lays in-letting hold swaying of the open, and not seeking to master it by the violence of our power of negativity. In this open region of freedom we are owned to the event of en-owning. Man is someone who asks the question of his own existence. This question is inextricably bound up with the question of his mortality and his finitude. As a mortal being, he asks what he can do out of his creative freedom. But what he can dobecause he is mortal, finite beingonly on the basis of an inappropriable grant, a non-economic gift, a non-masterable promise granted to him in advance. It is on the basis of what is not his capacity, mastery, or possession that mortality grants the mortals the gift of future. Only on the basis of this nonpower the promise of coming time is gifted to the mortals. While this makes mortals melancholic, this is also an occasion of his joy. To remember this gift can be the highest thanking task of the mortals.

Part II

The Lightning Flash

 The Language of the Mortals

This chapter attempts to think the relation of mortality to language anew. If language is not to be understood merely in its cognitive disposallanguage as categorical grasp of entities presently given then language in relation to mortality can no longer be determined on the basis of (Hegelian notion of ) negativity alone. In so far as Hegels dialectical-speculative notion of language subsumes language in the service of a speculative universal, language here is reduced to its cognitive disposal. The attempt is made here to think language in a more originary manner, as non-negative finitude that affirms what is outside dialectical-speculative closure, what is to come. What arrives, arrives in its lightning flash. Language is an originary exposure to the event of language in its lightning flash. This essay reads Heidegger, Schelling and Walter Benjamin to think language in its non-negative finitude, as an originary exposure to the messianic arrival of the not yet (Bloch 1995). What at stake is the question of the promise of language, the messianic promise of what is to come, understood in the infinitude of its verbal resonance: to come. *

THE PRESUPPOSITION
There is more than one reason that a philosophical thinking begins with mortality as its presupposition. A philosophical thinking that does not make mortality the end result of a dialectical-historical process begins with mortality as presupposition or as the starting

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point. Only that way philosophical thinking keeps open the way of thinking to the coming time, time that survives death, remains after death. The way opens itself to time that is to arrive. The way is not way if it is to end with death, or if it makes death its end. The way, then, if does not have to end its way character, has to make death as the point of departure rather than as the end point. That is why the way of thinking makes death itself as the starting point, not an end. It addresses death as question, or better, death addresses us as question, question that seizes us with the tremor of mortality, fascinates and astonishes us and touches us as destiny. The question why mortality seizes us as the question of destiny is the destinal question of language. Language does not make death the end result of a speculative process and that is why language holds us essentially in its promise, the promise of language that is at once the promise of time yet to come. Only he who hears this promise, to whom this promise is granted first of all, one who is finite and mortal, is open thereby what the way opens towards, that isto the coming time, to the affirmation of the pure future. It will be illuminating here to discuss the later Heideggers thinking of language. Heidegger here attempts to think the promise of language which is essentially that of thinking the way, thinking on the way, thinking underway which is going under, thinking on the way to thinking, for the way grants to mortals in advance, it gives (es gibt) alreadythe advent, the coming to presence but not what has presently come as this or that coming amenable to the categorical, intelligible gaze of the knower. Thinking on the way is the promise of thinking that arrives in advance, before anything else, as immemorial and that is why it also appears as destinal. What gives in advance is called inception (Anfang), which is distinguished by Heidegger from beginning (Beginn). In his 1934-35 lectures on Hlderlins hymns Germanien and Der Rhein, Heidegger says,
Beginndas ist etwas anderes als Anfang. Eine neue Wetterlage, z. B. beginnt mit einem Sturm, ihr anfang aber ist die vorauswirkende, vllige Umwandlung der Luftverhltnisse. Beginn ist jenes, womit etwas anhebt, Anfang das, woraus etwas enspringt. Der Weltkrieg fing an vor Jahrhunderten in der geistig-politishen Geschichte des Abenlandes. Der Weltkrieg begann Vorpostengefechten. Der

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Beginn wird alsbald zurckgelassen, er verschwindet im Fortgang des Geschehens. Der Anfang, der Ursprung, kommt dagagen im Geschehen allererst zum Vorschein und ist voll da erst an seinem Ende1 (Heidegger 1980, p.3).

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

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In the beginning of his Being and Time (1962) Heidegger distinguishes existential in its originary apophantic dimension of language from the categorical grasp of presently given (Vorhandenheit) entities. What Heidegger there refers to as Da of Dasein, as the there, the facticity of DaseinDasein whose being is being-towards-death is also thereby essentially, in the innermost manner, a linguistic existence whose existentiality is this being-towards-death. Dasein is that existence whose Da lies in the originary apophansis of language, even before language comes to be categorical and predicative of presently given entities. In section B of 7 that belongs to the Introduction II of Being and Time, Heidegger attempts to understand the concept of Logos in a more originary manner than as mere locus of logical truth. Logos is understood here as originary disclosure of this existentiality of existence called Dasein whose existentiality is this being-towards-death. It is this intimate connection between the logos of language with the logos of mortality that precisely makes first of all Dasein as existence irreducible to the entities presently given, this event of language irreducible to the truth of logic in its propositional, predicative structure. Therefore the task of Destruktion der Ontologie (as one of the two fold tasks of Being and Time) accompanies the destruction of traditional logic in its propositional-predicative structure in order to reveal, in retrogressive manner, the buried, originary pre-supposition, which is, the existentiality of a linguistic existence as being-towards-death. The existence whose existentiality is this toward-ness, this ahead-ness (understood in the infinitude of the verbal resonance of to) towards its own impossibility, to its own nothingness and abyssand in so far as this toward-ness to death first of all discloses itself in the originary existential-apophansis of languageexistence is therefore already always attuned to language, essentially, and in the innermost manner. What Heidegger here attempts to think in the name logos to which mortals in their beingtowards-death are attuned to, and yet which cannot be appropriated by these mortals, is not reason of human as against the sheer brutal, instinctive assertion of brute being-among-beings, but the originary apophansis before the categorical grasp, that lies even before what Edmund Husserl refers to as categorical intuition2. Taking this point from Heidegger as point of departure, we venture forward to say that language is not primarily predicative

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locus of truth as the truth of what has appeared, but enablingclearing, disclosing-appearing of the unapparent, which is without name and without concept, which in the midst of existing opens from the heart of existence like an yawning abyss, which seizes those mortals who speak with fear and trembling. Language then, if I am allowed to say this, is the site of this unapparent apparition, which is the event of existence that is prior to the entities presently given. It is as if the event of language is each time born out of an abyss that remains outside us like an eternal remainder of non-knowledge, the abyss where language ruins itself while incessantly, interminably moving towards it as if towards its own essence, that means, towards its outside. Language of this linguistic existence is this being-towards its own ruination on the basis of which the unapparent apparition takes places, erupts in the midst of existing. The event of language is this event of existence itself whose existentiality lies in its toward-ness to its un-working-ruination where the intensity of the moment of ripeness is at once its dissolution and sinking unto nothing without being converted into being, as if language in its ripeness and plenitude coincides with its own dissolution. The simultaneity of the ripeness and its ruination, fullness and dissolution, arises like lightning which language in its inability to contain itself, at once points to, indicates to what is outside all representation, rendering the outside as wholly otherwise manifestation, the unapparent, the bluish evaporating of death. Death at once makes manifestation possible, while ruining the works of any figuration. The intensity of the moment is this dis-figuring expropriation of language from its own gathering, rendering language to say the unsayable and to unsay the sayable, to point towards at once, simultaneously, what language is and what language is not. Language is this strange monstrous site whereas Kierkegaard says3, opposing Epicuruswhere death is, I am as this linguistic being is there; in other words, which is to say, I am there where I am not there, where this simultaneity of where I am and where I am not is without reconciliation, without synthesis . Language presents this simultaneity of the disjoiningof where I am and I am not this discontinuous continuity, or continuous discontinuity as dieresis where non-being intensifies itself more being insists in itself, like an infinite debt where the debt increases itself more we pay off, as a

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result there never occurs the instant when the debt and pay off is leveled off, when being and nothing is the same. Unlike Hegels speculative-logical determination of beginning, language neither begins with the identity of being and nothing, nor ends there. This instant when the being and nothing is the same can happen only in logical system where nothing really happens at all in so far as all happening here is merely a logical movement but not the event of existence. The event of existence begins, because of its inextricable finitude and mortality, as indebted, aswhat Schelling (1936) callloan. This infinite loan is the presupposition of an already there, the-there as facticity of existence, an immemorial, infinite past. This facticity and presupposition of language with which the event of existence begins is unlike Hegels system of logic, for Hegels logical system does not need presupposition in order to constitute itself as system. This presupposition of the event of language, which is also the event of existence, is nothing but this mortality itself which Hegels system has to exclude in order to be an all inclusive system, as All. It is because of this exclusion Hegels all inclusive system remains outside language, and outside existence, for the event of language is essentially pre-suppositional, i.e., it presupposes not what is presently given, but the unapparent that strikes language with its lighting flash. It presupposes, indebted to what it is not in order to be language, which is its structural condition of possibility, its opening moment, its coming into existence as language. The structural opening of each discoursein so far as each discourse is finite inextricablybegins as gratitude, as thankfulness for its coming into existence, for the gift of its existence which is never paid off. The infinitude of this gratitude in so far as this gratitude is never leveled off with the finitude of this existence, in so far as more the infinitude increases more finitude of existence expands itself, transcends itself, ecstatically goes beyond itselfof what Schelling calls this exuberant beingthe moment in existence itself is never reached when existence is equal to what it is indebted to, to what is its presupposition, to what is the condition of its possibility. So it is with language. Language is never equal to its own presupposition, never equal to itself, is never equal tohow to say this?its own nothing, its own finitude, its own limit and its own mortality that in a manner of un-apparition, gives to language its open-ness to its

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

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language is the unthinkability of death, but an unthinkability which is for that matter not pure nothing but something, a mortal pitiless cry, from where thinking begins, from where language eruptswith a nothing that is something. Rosenzweig then says:
But when philosophy denies the dark presupposition of all life, when it does not value death as something, but makes it into nothing, it gives itself that appearance of having no presupposition. In fact, all cognition of the All has for its presuppositionnothing. For the one and universal cognition of the All, only the one and universal nothing is valid. If philosophy did not want to stop its ears before the cry of frightened humanity, it would have to take the following as its point of departureand consciously as its point of departurethe nothing of death is a something, each renewed nothing of death is a new something that frightens anew, and that cannot be passed over in silence, nor be silenced. (Ibid., p.11).

What cannot be included therefore within the universal representation of philosophy as the cognition of the All is this facticity of the nothing that is something, this unthinkable presupposition of the event of existence, this presuppositional opening that each time enables language to erupt and ruin itself. It is with this presupposition that, like Rosenzweigs text, that we shall begin here. It is this presuppositional opening that discloses existence its own finitude, its inextricable, indescribable, unthinkable mortality that ties existence to its own condition of possibility and impossibility at the same time, so that one who exists has to sayif he is not duping himself in the deception of a philosophical promisethat when one is, one is not. When one says, each time one says, as Kierkegaardwhen I am, I am notthis saying occurs, erupts each time with such fear and trembling, with such stammering, with such anguish and tremor chocking ones throat, which must be the throat of language. The anguish of language lies in its presuppositional structure in the face of the unthinkable advent of the un-apparition, which is outside the presupposition-less, harmless, sterile cognition of the thinkable. The real event of thinking begins here, with its dark presupposition, with the anguish and terror of language that means, with the un-thinkable, withwhat Schelling callsthe un-pre-thinkable (Unvordenkliche), with the actuality before mere potentiality of concepts, with the facticity of the ungrund which precedes all grounding. It is this event

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

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

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its imminent uncertainty as advent of futurity, language therefore can never become self-enclosed autochthonous entity, but constantly points itself towards, goes ahead to the undecidability of the unknown advent of the unapparent. This transcendence which does not have a topos of its own cannot be named, precisely because it is the event of naming itself.

Kierkegaards Indirect Communication

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

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

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communication, that moment of eruption of pure communication, on the basis of which alone the singular individual, being first placed outside of all given modes of communicationthat means being abandoned in the opencommunicates with the transcendent arrival. That means, the mortal existent communicates and makes communication the essential of his existence by first of all being placed outside all communication, first of all being deprived or being excess of all communication. He namesfor man is someone who is essentially name-giverby first of all being placed outside the name, first of all being deprived of the name, or being excess of the name. One, whose essential being lies in communication, communicates by being placed outside all communication. One whose essential being lies in naming, names by being placed outside all the given names. He then derives communication from an essential non-communication and naming from an essential namelessness. This essential solitude of language renders language irreducible to any cognitive function of a categorial-logical thinking. This noncommunication of communication, this ecstatic solitude, which for Kierkegaard is also an intimation of transcendence, is the secret of language. Secret is not the interiority of an individual consciousness shut within itself, nor is it the treasure which the isolated self keeps it for itself as kernel of consciousness, shut from the divine and other mortals. It is rather the ecstatic solitude of language, bursting out of any self-enclosure unto an ecstatic transcendence, a non-communicating communication with the outside, an ecstatic relation to the event of coming which is not the presently given entities, which does not yet exist in the already existing manner of communication. The language of naming, unlike the categorical language of judgement at its cognitive instrumentality is ecstatic because it ex-tatically ex-sists the nameable. Secret is the name of transcendence, the event that is not yet of communication, which in order to affirm the arrival of the wholly otherwise, must step outside communication in ethical terms. Therefore Abraham keeps silent. He does not speak in ethical terms, for he has to offer, what is commanded him to offer, is the gift of death. The secret is the event of language itself that opens and yet

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

 Pain

Work and Pain

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

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language itself as such? If language alone enables him to experience death as death by tearing him, distantiating him, holding him apart from himself so that he can be near to himself (in language), does he thereby bring to language of signification this experience of death itself, this tearing, this trembling and the seizure? If language is this tearing apart of being from himself, this distantiating of being from oneself in an originary manner so that there be nearness of being to oneself and to the other, so that in speaking man addresses to the other and to himself, so that man prays for the other on the basis of this language, does he thereby bring to language this distance and nearness on the basis of his power and capacity to speak? Or rather, on the other hand, that man speaks on the basis of an originary given-ness and a donation, a gift outside all conditions and outside all predicates, which is the very donation of language itself? In what language of the mortals, language itself is given? If the gift and the promise of language is marked by death, the gift which first of all bestows him the possibility to speak at all, is he thereby able to speak of death, to know death and even to make death the origin of a process whereby he comes to himself, becomes himself, becomes the origin and end of his own becoming? Is he able thereby to make this gift immanent to the process of his own initiation, making death as his own, his very own possibility and capacity? If language were the site of mortals power to bring to language his own mortalityand this is our first step, out first consideration of thinking pain in relation to languagedeath would then be the power of the negative that yields the results of his own becoming. Man would then be, primordially and essentially, that being whose task, whose workin so far as it is his possibility, capacity, his poweris to make the beginning of his becoming his own. Man would then be that beingin relation to his non-power, which is his dissolution, his deathhe is the only one to discover, at the heart of his non-power, his power to be that maintains, confronting the horror of ones dissolution, his ground so that he can bring to language that he speaks, this nothingness itself. If man is the one who names, whose essential being is that he is the name-giver, the descendent of Adam, then he also must be the one who names first of all, before all names, what must be the unnamable itself, from which it will then be confirmed his pure power to name not only the namable but

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the unnamable itself. Only on the basis of this ability to name the unnamable, the capacity (or the possibility or the power) to name at all can be derived. In other words, man is the one who names death. Man is this one being, the central being who, confronting with horror his own dissolution, names his own absence, and through this naming power, bringing near this absence as his very proper to his presence. Language is then not that which shrinks from horror; rather the horror of language consists in its being able to bring to man who speaks this absence into presence, in this being to recount for man the story of his own birth as an experience of death. Language is here assumes a terrible, magical power of conjuration that conjures the absence into presence, death into birth, and through this magical power, inaugurates another beginning which is mans destinal history. This power of language, therefore, neither in itself is the work of presence, nor that of pure absence, but the movement of absence becoming presence in signification. In the word Cat, the cat has neither (empirical) presence nor its absence, but the absence (of the empirical) becoming presence (as Idea). It is this movementof absence into presencewhich Hegel captured with the notion of Aufhebung. It is the movement of power that has felt in its vein the pain and horror of dissolution and disappearance, the way of despair that Hegel speaks (Hegel 1998, p. 49) of, but it is this pain and horror does not go in vain since it simultaneously heralds the birth of man and the beginning of mans destinal history. Here Hegel brings out this peculiar connection that language has in relation to power and death: languages power to inaugurate and accomplish history, because it is the power of death, of what Hegel calls as the work of death (Ibid., p. 270). Language is that work of death that conjures even absence into presence, and this process which inaugurates history is that way of despair. Hegels speculative dialectical process, shows how this power of the negative constitutes for man his universal history out of the labour man himself initiates without any transcendental ground given to him independently. According to this metaphysics of mans destinal history, man is the one who suffers the pain for his own resultthe result of his becomingand his result redeems his sufferings. Who more than Hegel has provided the tragic drama of this suffering of finitude and its atonement? Ultimately for Hegel this redemption or atonement consists of man being able

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to assume the origin of his history at the end of history, so that he appropriates, through the pain and horror of the negativity, his own beginning at his end; he arrives at the end, because he is already always there at the moment of inauguration, as the one confronting with horror his own death as others death. As the coinciding of beginning with end, the atoned consciousness of man is Spirit. Language is seen here as the manifestation of this metaphysics of Spirit, which is an externalized interiority, or an internalized exteriority, in so far as it is a presentation of Sense, the Sense of absence itself. As a presentation of Sense, language itself work of the negative that is attuned to pain, but as accomplishment of Sense, language is also atonement of that grief, of that finitude, since it has subsumed within itself and never given away to that way of despair. As an accomplishment of Sense, language is also accomplishment of timeas the eternity of Absolute Idea, as the infinite negativity that has time within itselffor sense always appears as time. As absolute presentation of Sense, language is now co-incident with Spirit, as it is co-incident with eternity. It has now appropriated its own origin and end as circular reappropriation of its self-same difference. Hence Hegelian metaphysics is metaphysics of immanence. It is the immanent metaphysics of the presentation of Sense that seeks to bring into its sense its own origin and end, so that there is nothing originarily given as gift that is given on the basis of an ungrounded foundation. In other words, language does not appear here as gift, in its given-ness, out of finitude, out of non-appropriable origin and non-appropriable end. Instead language is the pain of bringing the origin into signification that weights upon the laboring Subject; or, rather, pain here is the metaphysical manifestation of the Subject that undergoes suffering of its own dissolution so as to appropriate its own origin and its end unto the unity of its self-presence. Pain would, then, be thought as a mode of the manifestation of the Metaphysical Subject in its pathway to this manifestation, in so far the essence of manifestation has something to do with pain, as if manifestation already always is attuned to pain. In so far as this metaphysics of the Subject manifests itself as laboring, and as being empowered as appropriating, propriating Subject, pain here is the pain of the violence that Subject inflicts upon itself, in the othering, dirempting, sundering itself from itself. What Hegel sought to speak

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of pain here is the pain of the labour and the pain of the violence in the pathway of manifestation of the Subject, which is also the pathway of powering, appropriating metaphysical Subject. Pain here is bound up with work and power in its gathering of Subject of itself to itself, in its nearing of distance, in its presentation of sense, in its appropriating its own origin and end as eigentlich, its proper, its own origin. If for Hegel the phenomenological essence of Spirit is this manifestation where sense presents itself without remainder, then pain is the pain of this manifestation of the metaphysics of the Subject, of the Subjects gathering into its self-presence, which is grasped by Hegel on the basis of the predicative proposition, i.e., that of its speculative judgement. In his The Question of Being, Heidegger brings out this innermost connection between work and pain as the motor force of the dominant metaphysics whose accomplishment arrives in Hegelian onto-theological dialectics. Heidegger writes:
To be able to trace more clearly the relations that sustain the connection between work and pain, nothing less would be necessary than to think through the fundamental trait of Hegels metaphysics, the unifying unity of the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Science of Logic. The fundamental trait is absolute negativity as the infinite force of actuality i.e. of the existing concept. In the same (not the identical) belonging to the negation of negation, work and pain manifest their innermost metaphysical relatedness...And if one ventured to think through the relations between work as the fundamental trait of beings and pain by moving back via Hegels Logic, then the Greek word for pain, namely, would first come to speak for us. Presumably is related to , which is the intensivum of means intimate gathering. In that case, pain would be that which gathers most intimately. Hegels concept of the concept and when correctly understood, the strenuous effort, it entails say the Same on the transformed soil of the absolute metaphysics of subjectivity. (Heidegger 1998, pp. 305-6)

Perhaps it is possible to think of pain another way, one that man does not suffer for the end result of a process which his own negativity initiates. It is not the pain of his labour that seeks atonement of its violence by means of violence, the violence of positing with which the movement of the (Hegelian) concept begins. To think

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

The Melancholic Gift

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

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

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

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same instance, limitlessly exposes him to infinite possibilities, frees and releases him to his unnamable possibilities, the possibilities of the joyous acts of creation, out of this essential freedom that is given to him independently of himself :
In God, too, there would be a depth of darkness if he did not make the condition his own and unite it to him as one and as absolute personality. Man never gains control over the condition even though in evil he strives to do so; it is only loaned to him independent of him; hence his personality and selfhood can never be raised to complete actuality. This is the sadness which adheres too all finite life, and inasmuch as there is even in God himself a condition at least relatively independent, there is in him, too, a source of sadness which, however, never attains actuality but rather serves for the eternal joy of triumph. Thence the veil of sadness, which is spread over all nature, the deep unappeasable melancholy of all life. (Schelling 1936, p. 79)

This originary melancholy inscribes itself in this gift that forever remains outside of his mastery and appropriation. Therefore in this sense both sadness and joy belong in its own way to an originary melancholy1. Man, in speaking and being endowed with language, is also endowed with this unappeasable melancholy that adheres itself in the gift, gift that bears the mark of death, gift that bears the traces the sufferings of unmasterable difference and the pain of separation. Schelling calls this pain as the pain of cision (Scheidung), the cut that while separating calls the separated to be together. Language enabling, gifting man to speak, endowing him to present to himself, to reveal himself to himself, forever and first of all excludes him from the mastery of this gift. Henceforth he can only speak in a language that is borrowed, loaned to him, gifted to him from elsewhere, from another time, from another destination which precedes him, and in preceding him follows him. What precedes him and what follows himthat means what remains outside of himthis alone, this possibility of an outside of an immemorial past and the incalculable future places man to be in the open space, that opening where man is exposed to his outside, that free opening where darkness and light play the originary co-belonging, where he finds himself exposed and open in relation to the entirety of created existence. It is in this sense one says that language reveals man to his own mortality. This revelation precedes all logical categories, and is inaccessible to his cognition.

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

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It is here the question of history and its ground (or, rather origin) in relation to language is to be thought. The origin of history holds itself open in the poetics of the messianic promise of language, which for that matter, does not itself completely belong to the dialecticalhistorical immanence. It is this originary exposure of existence in a lightning flash to the openingwhere history itself comes to presence that makes the mortal existence and its historicity an un-saturated phenomenon, a hetero-affected phenomenon, wholly torn from within, exposed to the outside. Language in its sudden lightning advent originarily places the human outside of himself and exposes him to the otherwise of history. Is this not the experience of death as death, the originary phenomenon of disclosing the entirety of existence to himself, which can only be experienced by mortals as mortality? Language is not simply the property of the one who speaks, nor is primarily language the source from where he derives the power of domination to the rest akin to himself and others. Language is neither the medium through which he grasps his own existence and existence as such, as if man is the origin and the end result of his own existence, nor language enables him to be the one who is saturated by and in speech. Language, rather, already always placing the mortal outside of himself (or rather displacing him, tearing him, exposing him to the opening), endows him with the intimation of his mortality and thereby renders him open to the historical character of his existence, or, makes his existence historical the first time, that means before the first, the first before any first his existence as essentially finite and mortal. This intimation of mortality or death is not cognition like any other, nor can it be possession of the human like any entities that he henceforth produces and endows them with the mark of the human production. It can only be an originary revelation to which man is openedas both Heidegger and Kierkegaard in entirely different manners and with entirely different purposes, showin anguish or in anxiety. Man neither possesses his death like any other possession, nor possesses the ground on the basis of which he possesses his historical world, for the ground of his possession lies in the promise that grants him, beforehand, his history, his being able to present to himself as the one who is essentially finite and mortal. The human knows, whatever he knows of the world and his self-knowledge on the basis of a lightning

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flash that already places him outside of himself, outside of all his possession, outside the claim that henceforth he makes as the maker or creator of the world, this historical-discursive world which in being produced is also posits the producer. That this is his finitude attunes him to the lament of language that holds him open, like an open wound, to his historical existence that comes to presence, to the incalculable event of arriving that wounds him, affects him, touches him. Henceforth, that means in a time before and after time, history bears traces of this melancholy of language, rendering his historical existence as unfinished, incomplete, unaccomplished, and at the same existence-in-excess, forever unsaturated, welcoming and bearing the promise of its redemption in the coming time. This promise given in language arises in an originary dis-possession of the human, on the basis of which alone something like the origin of history happens to the mortal, arises up to him, and erupts towards him. The poetics of the origin traces itself as the un-fulfillment of history, which thereby points towards a fulfillment outside any dialectical-historical closure, in the messianicwhat Ernst Bloch (1995) callsnot yet. Therefore language does not completely belong to the world of works and to the works of the world. At the limit of the world, unsaturated and in infinite excess, or at the limit of the state of the affairs of the world, language is the vanishing point of the indiscernible where language turns the prose of the world into the lament of music. There language unsays itself in a lament, in the melancholy turned to music. The one who speaks is not master of the world thereby, nor the possessor of his existence as the sovereign master of the earth. Language rather de-territorializes the one who speaks. Or, rather, the one who speaks is touched by the essential melancholy to which language is thoroughly attuned at the limit of the world of objects and possessions. In being touched by this unspeakable lament of language, the one who speaks is intimated by the intrinsic non-appropriability of language. The non-appropriable ground of existence itself, as if, precedes the speaking mortal something like an immemorial past and follows him something like a future as unfinished, unaccomplished not yet. What is this experience if not the experience of finitude? The experience of finitude is the essential non-appropriation or non-conditional limit, the outside that ecstatically calls the power of the negative to the nonpower, the originary experience of non-power on the basis of which

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

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

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

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the originary promise of redemption is on the basis of an essential finitude, of an essential non-appropriation: as one who does not own ones death, does not own thereby the gift. The gift is itself annulled when it is made into a possession, when it is amenable to the possibility of use and exchange value, when on the basis of a possession it is opened to dis-possession, or to another possession (Derrida 1992). In the economy of possession the gift is never opened to the originary dis-possession, nor is dis-possession there only for the sake of, or in the name of the possession still to arrive in the circular re-appropriation or circular re-possession of it. The task of receiving the gift is rather to eternalize it, through infinite renewal in time, and pass it onto the other still to arrive; in other words, to make this essential non-appropriation, the non-possession, the essential finitude itself an eternal task of the gift. The thankful task of the mortal who is endowed with the gift is to be eternally nonappropriated and non-possessed, to make this mortality itself a task. This is the meaning of saying that from language alone we experience death as death. This finitude is not the annihilation or the end of time but the possibility of time to come, the beginning or the origin of time that is opened up in an originary being placed outside of totality, outside the system of relations. To be placed outside of totality, outside the system of relation is an experience of death as death. It is also, for that matter experience of eternity as eternity, infinity as infinity. One who seeks the beginning must first of all be placed outside totality, outside of all appropriation; in other words, he must take the great step of death. Schelling somewhere speaks,
He who wishes to place himself in the beginning of a truly free philosophy must abandon even God. Here we say: who wishes to maintain it, he will lose it; and who gives up, he will find it. Only he has come to the ground of himself and has known the whole depth of life who has once abandoned everything, and has himself been abandoned by everything. He for whom everything disappeared and who saw himself alone with the infinite: a great step which Plato compared to death. (Quoted in Heidegger 1985, pp. 6-7)

We will call this experience of infinite transcendence, which is the unground on the ground of which time is existential, which means

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

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

Naming and Overnaming

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thinking and Thanking

The mournfulness intimates the one who remembers his originary finitudethat is his originary non-appropriation of the giftand thereby renounces any appropriation of the gift. This mournfulness is not any ordinary mournfulness about a particular loss, but what Martin Heidegger calls (1980)with Hlderlin in mind -the fundamental attunement (Grundstimmung) of mourning. With the welcoming of the coming to presence of the divine, Hlderlins poetry keeps the remembrance of the originary gift and promise of language which is none but the promise of the coming itself. Therefore the gift always is attuned to a certain tune of mournfulness. This tune and attunement of mournfulness is the task of finitude. in his lectures on Hlderlins two poems Germanien and Der Rhein, Heidegger thinks this fundamental attunement (Grundstimmung) of mournfulness in Hlderlins poetry as an essential endurance of the gift of language:
Real renouncement, in other words one which carries itself authentically, is a power of creation and engendering. By letting go of

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its old possessions it receives a gift, but not after the fact, as a reward: for within it the mournful endurance of necessary renouncement and giving away is a receiving. (Heidegger 1980, p. 94)

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

If the poets and creative artists, creative thinkers and philosophers are permeated by a melancholyas Aristotle remarksit is in so far as for the poets and the creative thinkers the naming maintains its relation to the originary non-appropriation, to the opening that opens with the gift and that is maintained by renunciation of the violence of all appropriation and power of the positing law. the poetic Sayingunlike the predicative thinking that arrives at the thetic, categorial cognition of what is presently given on the basis of the result of a processrenounces such a claim to appropriation in order to announce, or welcome the coming to presence. Therefore each poetic Saying itself is renunciation, or rather to say with Heidegger renunciation is in itself a saying (1982, p. 150). The renunciation which is in itself a poetic saying is not therefore something negative but rather affirmative, since it welcomes the coming to presence. To this affirmation is owed, what Heidegger calls, thanks, thankfulness or gratitude for being able to affirm or

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welcome the coming, thankfulness for the gift of being the receiver of the coming, gratitude for the arrival that language gives to us and promises us. In his lecture delivered at Vienna with the full title in German Dichten und Denken. Zu Stefen Georges Gedicht Das Wort, Heidegger attempts to think the originary event of coming to presence in language that is welcomed in poetic saying in relation to the renunciation that adheres in this welcoming, the renunciation of any claim to appropriation which representational thinking makes. If non-appropriation alone, if renunciation alone enables the poetic saying to welcome the coming to presence, this event of arriving, then a fundamental attunement of melancholy that permeates this poetic saying would be the attunement of language itself that first disappropriating us, opens us to the event of language, to the event of coming, to which we owe thanks. This gratitude is our gratitude in recognition, a gratitude born out of an originary non-appropriation and promise. Heidegger says,
But the more joyful the joy, the more pure the sadness slumbering within it. The deeper the sadness, the more slumbering the joy resting within it. Sadness and joy play into each other. The play itself which attunes the two by letting the remote be near and near be remote is pain. This is why both, highest joy and deepest sadness, are painful each in its way. But pain so touches the spirit of mortals that the spirit receives its gravity from pain. That gravity keeps mortals with all their wavering at rest in their being. The spirit which answers to pain, the spirit attuned by pain and to pain, is melancholy. (Ibid., p.153)

If by the renunciation of the claim to appropriation a redemptive relation to the originary opening is maintained, to that promise and gift of redemption, it is precisely thereby these creative poets and thinkers become those who are the excluded and exiled, the homeless and the lonely. If the works of poets that struggle to articulate the opening of the world and in this articulation welcome the world thereby, the world does not have place for these poets. The poets, seeking to maintain the originary opening of the world forever open, thereby are excluded from the world that is opened in this opening. Poets are therefore the strangers to the world, lonely, and homeless, for to keep the relation to the opening of the world is to renounce all appropriation and all power of the historical polis. Heidegger says in the Introduction to Metaphysics:

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The polis is the historical place, the there in which, out of which, and for which history happens. To this place and scene of history belong the gods, the temples, the priests, the festivals, the games, the poets, the thinkers, the ruler, the council of elders, the assembly of people, the army and the fleet. All this does not first belong to the polis, does not become political be entering into relation with a statesman and a general and the business of the state. No, it is political, i.e. at the site of history, provided there be (for example) poets alone, but then really poets, priests alone, but then really priests, rulers alone but then really rulers. Be, this means: as violent men to use power, to become preeminent in historical being as creators, as men of action. Pre-eminent in the historical place, they become at the same time apolis, without city and place, lonely, strange, alien and uncanny, without issue amid the beings as a whole, without stature and limit, without structure and order, because they themselves as creators must first create all this. (Heidegger 1999,p. 152)

This dense paragraph from Heidegger problematizes the complex relationship between the poesis of the opening, the originary promise that opens the polis and the political ontology of the world, the political being of the polis, which must already have been opened by the opening falling outside the polis. This opening of polis, which cannot be posited within the polis, because it must already be there for there even to be positing, is the originary promise of redemption which language offers, and which the poets and creative thinkers, through renunciation of mastery and appropriation, keeps it open so that there to remain the possibility of coming redemption above and beyond the given, beyond violence and beyond the law. With the poets and creative thinkers language, instead of being mere means at the cognitive disposal, or being mere language of judgement that overnames, is the remembrance of the originary naming. This naming is redemptive, for it renders the offering of language as an enduring presence for us, the gift of being present to us, and to open us to the eternity of the gift. The possibility of this redemptive gift given in language is the endowment of eternity. This is how the mortals, created and finite, experience eternity as eternity, as he is the one who experiences death as death. If it is from language alone that we experience death as death, it is also from language alone, or in it we experience eternity as eternity, for it promises us redemption beyond violence. Therefore the poets and creative thinkers, in recognition of

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this gift, render the reception of this gift an occasion of thankfulness. Gratitude must mark the reception and recognition of this gift, which is none but the gift of eternity itself.

 Apollos Lightning Strike

The tremendous element, the fire of the sky and the silence of the people, their life within nature and their limitedness and satisfaction has continually affected me, and as it is said of the heroes, so I may say that Apollo has struck me. Hlderlin (1988a, p. 152)

The Lightning Flash

In a letter to Casimir Ulrich Bhlendorff, this fascinating letter that demands to be quoted completely, Hlderlin writes to his friend:
The tremendous element, the fire of the sky and the silence of the people, their life within nature and their limitedness and satisfaction has continually affected me, and as it is said of the heroes, so I may say that Apollo has struck me (Hlderlin 1988a, p. 152).

What is the relation between the poetic Saying and the lightning bolt that Apollo strikes the poet with? Is it that poetic saying itself is intimated with the lightning flash that first of all places the poet in the midst of the entirety of existence and therefore places him in relation to the divine and the tremendous elements of nature, to the appearance and disappearance of the phenomenon in the open where the poet finds himself in its midst? There in the open, exposed to the lightning and thunders, to his mortality as mortality, the poet encounters face to face with, what Heidegger calls the fourfold: the divine, the mortals, the sky in its tremendous manifestations and the mournful, solitude of the earth.

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What is this open then? The open where the poetic saying is intimated by the lightning flash: what is it? The open is the place of encounter, not the place as this place or that place, but placing of all places, the place that first of all places any place, where encounter takes place, happens, occurs. In the open the poet encounters the tremendous manifestations of the sky, the divine lightning strike, the mournful solitude of the earth and the mortality of the mortals:
The thunderstorm, not only in its highest manifestation but, precisely in this sense as force and appearance among other forms of the sky; light in its effects, forming nationally and mode of destiny that something sacred to usits force in coming and going; the characteristic element of the woods and coinciding of various characters of nature in one area; all sacred places of the earth are gathered around one place, and the philosophical light around my window. (Ibid., p. 153).

The open is the place of encounter that enables, before all else, the poetic of a destiny that is in advance free opening of what is to come, the sacred and the divine. In the open the poet is in the middle, at the center of these elements and beings. Therefore and this is importanthimself is outside the center. What is poetic saying, if not then, born out of the central experience, that means, out of the experience of his mortality as mortality and his exposure to the elementsa central saying that first of all enables the encounter to be told, which first of all any encounter to be told, for itself is the encounter of all encounters? The open is the place of encounter and the poetic saying is telling of this encounter, not in a predicative manner, as about an encounter, but: itself born out of encounter, the poetic saying is the welcoming the coming to be of this encounter, to the presencing of this encounter. The encounter has not become meanwhile a presently given truth which will be told in a predicative manner, but the encounter in its coming to happen gives itself to a measure of a presentation, which is poetic saying. The poetic presentation as Saying is pre-predicative, unlike speculative representation as concepts. If there is a measure here, if poetic saying must itself be the measure, it is not the measure of a predicative truth, nor the measure of what Heidegger refers as parameter. It is rather the poetic

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measure of what Hlderlin calls eccentric path that introduces, in its welcoming of the divine coming, the caesura of the eccentric. If man must be, being finite and mortal, constantly fleeing from the centeras Schelling speaks of himbeing the central being, that placed him at the abyss of the undecidable limit, then he must also beprecisely for that matter the most eccentric of all. The mortal can encounter the coming to presence only with the measure of an eccentric path, only because what comes to presence exceeds at each instance any measure. He then must measure what refuses measure; he must welcome the divine coming to presence on the way that eccentrically mediates what refuses all mediation. As a result what remains after all remaining is: the disjunctive space which first of all enables space to be spacing, time to be timing, distance to be nearing and nearing of the distance of god to man and man to being. This disjunctive space first of all to be there, at the limit, for there alone any encounter takes place, time comes to presence, not as an eternal monotony of homogenous successions of instants, but as the lightning flash in the stillness of the event. It is this stillness of the lightning flash that Hlderlin refers as that which Apollo strikes him: the experience of the encounter with the togetherness of all time in their intensification that welcomes what comes to presence and what is told in the poetic saying, the experience of being exposed to the divine elements and experience of mortality as mortality, time as timing, space as spacing, death as death. What is then poetic saying? It does not speak about anythingabout something that has happened, about existing system of relations, or about cognizable state of affairs. It is rather welcoming the coming to presence, the encounter in the open of what is mortal and the divine. It refuses the parameter of a predicative truth. Thereby it opens itself to a time yet to arrive, the incalculable and un-predicated encounter with the advent of history. The reason why the poetic saying refuses to be measured by the parameter of a predicative truth is because the parameter of a predicative truth does not enable the coming to presence, the un-predicative and incalculable encounter with the presencing to be welcomed. For the un-predicative and incalculable encounter with the presencing to be experienced, and the coming to presence be welcomed, a saying entirely other than the conceptual language of predicative proposition is to be thought, for the predicative language

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can speak only about what has presently become. It demands that the encounter be undergone by the poets and creative thinkers on the Abgrund on the basis of which alone there may erupt the welcoming of the wholly otherwise history for mortals. In his lecture on The Nature of Language, Heidegger attempts to think ofbeyond the conceptual language of predicative proposition, beyond the parameters of representational thinking the poetic saying that enables the face to face encounter with what Heidegger calls the fourfold, the encounter with time as timing, and space as spacing. The measure of a predicative thinking that takes its measure as parameter does not experience time as timing, and space as spacing, and obstructs any possibility of the encounter with the advent of time, for time as timing to be experienced, it is necessary to experience a time otherwise than as eternal vacancy of a conceptual time, that means, the eternal succession of indifferent, homogenous instants. In the eternal succession of the indifferent, homogenous instants, no encounter takes place, because there is no ecstatic difference there to be the movement in constellation, in so far only in a movement in constellation can there be encounter of the ecstasies of past, presence and future; only in the movement of this ecstatic constellation of temporality can there be distancing of nearness, and nearing of distance. The encounter is the difference as together, distance as nearing, holding apart as holding-together, which is what Heidegger calls simultaneity of ecstatic temporalities. In the simultaneity of being-together of ecstatic temporalities, as Zusammenhang, time itself times and this time timing is what strikes the mortals with the lightning flash in the stillness of the event. The lightning bolt that strikes the mortals spaces the mortals in the open, times the mortals to his finitude, to his mortality, exposes him to the monstrous site where there occurs the advent of history. The shock of this eternity that tears open the closure of time is the darkness of excessive illumination, this heavenly fire which the mortal cannot look with his mortal eyes. There alone, at this monstrous site of history, the mortal struck by the lightning flash of simultaneity of all that has been, presencing and time to come, experiences this simultaneity as death, as if the mortal can experience the eternity of all time together only as his death. Mortality is the intensification of time, an intensity of time to the point of bursting forth, to the point of burning of a

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lightning bolt where becoming and perishing momentarily present together. Poetic saying is enduring of this intensity. Heidegger says,
Time timeswhich means, time makes ripe, makes rise up and grow. Timely is what has come up in the rising. What is it that time times? That which is simultaneous, which is, that rises up together with its time. And what is that? We have long known it, only we do not think of it in terms of timing. Time times simultaneously: the has-been, presence, and the present that is waiting for our encounter and is normally called the future. Time in its timing removes us into it threefold simultaneity, moves us thence while holding out to us the disclosure of the has-been, presence, and the present waiting the encounter. In removing us and bringing towards us, time move on its way what simultaneity yields and throws open to it: time-space. But time itself, in the wholeness of its nature, does not move; it rests in stillness. (Heidegger 1982, p. 106).

So it is with space. Space that spaces is the open, the spacing of space which enables the encounter to take place, striking the mortals with the stillness of an eternity, as if annihilating, in a divine violence, of all spaces and all places. This experience of time as eternity is granted to man on the basis of his originary experience of death as death that means, on the basis of his non-basis, his impossibility, his non-presence to-be-there at the origin of his being. Or rather, should we say it is his coming to presence without his-being-presently present? Poetic saying, enabling this encounter, enables death to be experienced as death, and also enables thereby eternity to arrive in the experience of the encounter where time times and space spaces. This encounter arrives as the divine violence, in its sudden advent, that strikes the mortals with stillness, in a kind of beatific joy, a lightning that lightens, frees and releases man unto the open: this beatific joy of lightning and lighting is inseparable from what Schelling calls divine mourning. Both the beatific joy and the divine mourning, therefore, in their own ways, make us silent in a sort of, what Rosenzweig calls completed understanding and which attune us mortals to eternity as eternity. In this encounter where we are placed outside the totality of all successive homogenous instants, this lightning flash of eternity as simultaneity of timing is Apollos striking that exposes us to our innermost existence as our essential finitude. The lightning flash is the experience of pure exposure of the abandoned mortal being, the

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exposure of experience as such to the non-experiential advent of the unapparent.

The Divine Violence

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

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united in the monstrous judgement that shocks the mortals with its divine violence. Divine violence is experience of the impossible that has its measure the immeasurable, a violence which is beyond violence, as if thereby the mortals are exposed to his mortality, to his death, to the limit of all possibilities on the (non) basis of which the mortal then must measure his possibility and his mastery, his history and his politics. It is this experience of death as death that is excluded by the dialecticalhistorical process of what Benjamin calls, the homogenous empty time (Benjamin 1977, pp. 251-261). The speculative-dialectical thinking which makes death the end-result of a process where each instance monotonously passes into another indifferent instance does not experience death as death, insofar as the unitary ground of these instances are grasped by the self-foundational principle of immanence and therefore it has no place for the poetic-naming language that welcomes the coming to presence, for the redemptive affirmation of future. It thereby evades encountering the question of the destiny of the origin and the origin of destiny, for this encounter alone enables the question of the transformation of mans historical existence to be addressed, a question that has to be thought outside of a speculative-regressive process. Divine violence, then, which the mortal encounters by being spaced in the open, exposed to the lightning flash of eternity, and exposed to his mortality, is outside the dialectical-historical process of homogenous empty time. It is rather the experience of time in the simultaneity of all that has been, presence and the time to arrive, a simultaneity whose lucidity blinds us, whose language renders us silent, and whose coming stills and intensifies speech that endures this monstrous, demonic presentation of eternity as presencing. What then Apollo strikes the poet with? It is the coming of the holy, the advent of the divine that strikes the poet. Poetic saying welcomes the coming of the divine. Since the coming of the divine is not welcomed without renouncing mastery and the mythic violence of force, therefore a fundamental mood of mournfulness attunes Hlderlins poetic saying. For Hlderlin being the poet of welcoming that welcomes the coming to presence of the divine, he is also thereby the poet of renunciation.

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Language, then, even before being the cognitive means at the service of representational thinking, is more primordially the name-giving that calls and welcomes what comes to presence. Walter Benjamin, in his On Language as Such and on the Language of Man (1996) calls the pure naming of Adam as blissful, which is given to the mortal as an immemorial gift. Language, unimpaired by cognitive disposal, belongs to the movement of constellation which does not serve as mere medium of communication, but is the redemptive remembrance of the originary promise. Therefore all thanks-giving for the gift is also thereby a remembrance of the promise of the coming that prepares for the event of coming to presence. For Heidegger, therefore, remembrance is the destinal task of mans relation to the event of coming to presence. Such a remembrance of inception (Anfang) demands a step back, a retreat from the conceptual categories that makes language a mere cognitive means, or as mere serving the interests of the universal Spirit. It is poetic saying and thinking at the end of a certain metaphysics that prepares for the event of coming to presence. Such a preparation is the remembrance of the inception, or origin which is still to come, a past which is still to arrive. Since such a remembrance is a step back from conceptual-categorial thinking, the inception or the origin cannot be traced back dialectically-historically, for the dialecticalhistorical is the categorial cognition of the presently given, and not what comes to presence. Since what comes to presence, understood in its verbal resonance, is the originary temporalizing of time, of what we have said above as timing of timeand not what is presently giventhis coming to presence can only be said in the lightning flash of poetic Saying, and not in the predicative-categorial cognition of presently given entities. The lightning flash by striking us mortals, and enabling us to experience our mortality as mortality, first of all places us to the temporalizing of time and to spacing of space. The lightning flash is face-to-face encounter, not with entities that have become and given presently, but an encounter with temporalizing of time itself. This temporalizing of time, as pre-predicative and pre-categorial disclosure, is attempted to be thought by Heidegger (1962) in his Being and Time far more primordially as existential, and not tracing back the apophantic and the predicative of Vorhandenheit. language is not thought here as categorial predication of presently given entities but

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

 Revelation

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

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a continuous history. Language then, even before cognition of the presently given world, is opening of the world, and exposure of the mortals who speaks language to the opening of the world, to that of the strife where opposites are coupled as what Hlderlin calls monstrous coupling. *
Poetry is the mother- tongue of the human race, as the garden is older than the ploughed field; painting than writing; song, than declamation; parables than logical deductions; barter, than commerce. Hamann (2007, p.63)

THE ARGUMENT
This originary revelation of language is love that precedes the distinction between good and evil. It shows, in a paradoxical manner, that love is an originary form of strife, which is more primordial than the strife between good and evil, which precisely explains since love precedes the distinction between good and radical evil the possibility of redemption. This possibility of redemption which is the possible arrival of the wholly otherwise Kingdom, of the possible coming of the impossible, of a future incalculablethis promise bestows upon the mortals the task of renewing, repeating the originary form of strife in each instantiation of presencing, so that each instantiation of presencing itself becoming a form of strife, which is that of love as revelation. Since this revelation of love in each instantiation of presencing is only renewed in the mortal naminglanguage, therefore, one can go further to argue that the idea of revelation is that of language in love and of love in language. One can say, to begin with, that at that beginning before beginning, at that immemorial past, before anything like signification, or sense, there revealed love, or love reveals itself. The language of this love, since it precedes any predication of existence, is nothing less than announcing of existence coming into presence; in other words, we shall call this event of existence that is heralded in the language of love as the language of Word, or Name, before it assumes conceptual categories. It means Word is Love, or love reveals itself as Word. As revelation, the Word does not communicate anything apart from this event of

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coming itself, on the basis of which, on the basis of its erasure, there comes to be signification, or categorical grasp of the entities given there. What is attempted here to be thought, in the word revelation, nothing content like signification, but the originary opening of sense, which is always the sense of the world which is to come, which as such is prior to signification of the given world. This signification at the service of the categorical disposal gives itself double illusion: that it itself is the originary event of truth, while it is merely inverse, like the mirror image, of the event; and secondly, it claims a totality which it doesnt possess, like claims of self-presence, self-identity, while its claims for self-presence isto evoke Jacques Lacan (2001, pp. 1-8) hereonly a misrecognition, that is, it is based on an abyss which has already always erased itself, or to saySchellingfallen (Abfall), diverted itself and have relapsed itself into an irrecuperable, more ancient than any ancient past. In the following part of this work, this question of origin will be posed anew, which should be able to show the double, incommensurable character of revelation: it welcomes a presencing while absenting itself, something like what Heidegger calls the event of Lichtung which allows something to be unconcealed, while concealing itself. The event of language too has the double, incommensurable character: it communicates its coming to presence, and yet withdrawing its event character, so as it shelters itself from any reduction and totalization, from any predication, signification, or concept in its thetic positing and preserving. Language that is in love is an infinite excess, unsaturated phenomenon, which is the essence of manifestation or revelation. In the revealed entities of the world, the event of revelation itself is not exhausted; it remains unapparent in each and every visible forms of the given and thereby infinitely opens itself to its own excess of presentation. Therefore the infinitude of the revelation in its verbal resonance, in any instantiation of presencing, the revelation always appears as futural, that means opening to the not yet. Revelation promises redemption, the messianic arrival of the not yet, which is only so far as the strife of the loving word is renewed in any finite, conditioned, historical presencing. At the heart of historical presence, an originary strife of the loving word is to be introduced, in such a way that this loving disrupts, interrupts, and transfigures any historical-speculative totalization, or totalization of Sense, or it introduces interval in

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

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itself exceeds any political-historical-metaphysical totalization. What exceeds in the form of strife of love is what is prior to what Benjamin (1986, pp. 277-300) calls the two fold law positing and law preserving violence. The excess of love and the excess of language which cannot be posited as such is this revelatory character: outside all communicability, it is the eschatological reserve or a messianic withdrawal, in the name of a future and not yet, outside any reductive totalization.

Synthesis without Continuum

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

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

Language as Revelation in Schellings Philosophy of Freedom

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

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

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

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division being attained) also accepts nature and takes it to him. Man is the redeemer of nature towards whom all archetypes strive. The Word which is fulfilled in man exists in nature as a dark, prophetic (still incompletely unspoken) Word. Hence the anticipations which have no exegesis in nature itself and are only explained by man. (Ibid.)

The animals, receiving the names from Adam, leap away from him in recognition of the blissful nobility with which they are endowed with. In the On Language as Such and on the Language of Man, citing from Friedrich Mllers poem, Walter Benjamin says of the blissful recognition in the naming language of man: The life of man in pure language-mind was blissful. Nature, however, is mute. True, it can be clearly felt in the second chapter of Genesis how this muteness, named by man, itself becomes bliss, only of lower degree. Friedrich Mller has Adam say to animals that leave him after he has named them, And saw by the nobility with which they leaped away from me that the man had given them a name(Benjamin 1986,p. 329). Man who is the name-giver and the redeemer of the mute, still unspoken nature is the exegete, not the exegete who masters what he reads, but the exegete who redeems what is not yet read through his redemptive reading. He reads and in him the nature finds the redeeming exegesis. Redemption of nature lies in the linguistic being of the mortals, for in him alone the whole of the created existence and himself is revealed. This possibility of revelation, which is granted to man along with, or by virtue of the gift of language, endows the mortals with Love, which in turnwith mortals lovingly encountering face-to-face with the rest of the created, the divine and himselfmournful solitude of the earth and the tremendous manifestations of the sky aboveredeems his own existence. Therefore the linguistic being of the mortals is essentially that of love, which in the face of the possibility of the evil, whose possibility is given along with love in revelationopen the mortal himself towards his own redemption. Therefore Schelling in his Philosophical Investigations into the Nature of Human Freedom thinks language itself, the creative Word in which the mortal partakes of the divine creativity, as revelation. The mortal, in whom the divine Word completely articulates itself, must also be the one in whom the Spirit reveals itself. Therefore the essence of the linguistic being of the mortal is that of revelation, for it is to the

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mortal alonewho as an existence relatively outside himthat God reveals himself as the image of his own essential being, that is, his creativity. So that there be revelation and redemption, so that there be love, the Word is sent to man as the ideal principle of love. Benjamin calls this endowing the mortal with language as divine gift: only in man, then, writes Schelling, is the Word completely articulate, which in all other creatures was held back and left unfinished. But in the articulate word the spirit reveals itself, that is, God as existing, in act (Schelling 1936, p.39). If there is evil as possibility whose inherent possibility is given in the necessity of revelation, that is so that there be the light of love, since love demands what is other than itself to be love, so that it transfigures, subordinates what is other to itself. This transfiguration happens, if the Word lovingly accords what is differencewhat Schelling calls the principle of light and the principle of darkness, the vowels and the consonantthen it is redemptive. The evil is not a lie, in that sense, but a simulacrum, a simulated accord, a diseased unity of the judgement. The mortal, being the center, the copula, the spacing, the opening, the limit, itself the cisionwhich I call the openis open to both Good and Evil in equal measure, both to redemption and falling away, both to (to use Benjamins words) naming and overnaming, both to the blissful melancholic naming and the melancholic overnaming of judgement, both to danger and its saving grace. Since the mortal placed unto the open is the spacing which is undecidable, the abyss and the limit, and since the mortal cannot persist in this undecidable: hence, so Schelling explains of the necessity of decision in relation to the possibility of evil, there is a constant solicitation to evil, a constant drawing towards whose source is not discovered, or disclosed within time, but a time outside time. Therefore, being gifted with the ideal principle of love in language, evil is also given to man as possibility, which itself is not evil, but only a possibility without actuality. Therefore finitude on account of which there is revelation, and there the possibility of love and evil both are given, this finitude itselffor that matternot evil, but is merely the possibility of evil . Now if that is so and this is our question: then languagein its intrinsic connection with finitude, for it alone enables man to experience his mortality as mortalitythen language itself must be intrinsically connected with the possibility of evil. If that

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is so, then the overnaming must be given as possibility along with the pure divine naming; the language of judgement arising in evil must already be given as possibility with the blissful divine gift of language. Language, then, arising with the pure gift of language, as a principle of love, as promise in the name, as hope for redemption, a medium of revelation, may become in man a language of judgement, a simulated accord of evil, a cognitive medium where language becomes a mere means and no longer as medium of revelation, a seeking to close the Open, transforming the originary undecidable of the open to the decision to evil and subordinating the loving unity to the totalizing particular will. This is the origin of evil. In Benjamins words, it is the origin of the mythic origin of law. If this possibility of evil is given as intrinsic possibility in man, and if the saving grace is called forth by danger, and if language of judgement calls for redemptive language beyond the mythic origin of law, then the Openwhich is the spacing of the undecidablemust remain open. This remaining open of the Open, keeping the undecidable spacing as an open chasm, this alone keeps the promise of redemption open to mortals. That means, this is also what Schellings work of Freedom comes to say towards the end: the possibility of evil remains, but by infinitely subordinating the evil to redemption, to love and to the promise of language, by forever and interminably keeping evil as mere possibility, as mere ground unto the depth (since the mere possibility does not itself constitute evil), this melancholy in the overnaming can be transfigured into the beatitude of redemptive name, the danger into promise in the coming, the abyss into the summit, the darkness into light, the past into an affirmation of future, the unredeemed death into redemptive possibility of future. If the ethico-political task of the historical mortal who creates history with the gift of language is to remain open the Open, to keep open the undecidable spacing, then this task is inseparable from the task of remembrance of the originary promise of language itself, given with the gift of language immemorially. From this it is affirmed that the history of the historical man begins with revelation of love and to renew this originary poetry of love is our historical task, which itself keeps open history towards its redemption. This redemptive hope is given to mortals as possibility because though radical evil is, it is not as originary as love, for evil derives its effect

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only as contrast, and not as independent principle of being. This history, which is remembrance of the originary poetic of love beyond violence, would not be grasped by the self-foundational immanent principle as a speculative process. History is then no longer conceived as homogenous succession of banal instants, but as ecstatic, disruptive coming to presence, the coming that presents itself in the movement of constellation or configuration as the simultaneity of ecstatic temporalities. This configuration of temporalities is otherwise than mere accumulative unity of the successive, homogenous presents. The latter is the speculative unity of a dialectical-historical. The configuration is rather co-figuring of temporalities as simultaneity that means a discontinuous whole that presents itself in the suddenness of the lightning flash that strikes the mortals with excessive, blinding illumination. It makes manifest in the suddenness of a flash the whole of temporalities together as discontinuous presentation, which for that matter appears to the mortal as standing still, the very (dis) figure of mortality. Understood in this sense, more primordially than understanding as speculative process, revelation is historical (in the sense that it inaugurates history as such). In the Philosophical Inquires Schelling therefore thinks of the two-fold creation: as the principle of light and darkness belong to the realm of nature, arising out of divine longing; so the principle of spirit and dark principle of evil belong to the realm of history arising out of revelation. In this sense evil is historical. There is no evil where history does not come to presence, where history does not make manifest the necessity of decision out of undecidable. But this undecidable itself belongs to the ground which is groundless, the in-difference of freedombut not identity that remains as, what Schelling calls irreducible remainder, as the inscrutable, almost demonic essence of freedom. But this remnant, this irreducible remainder itself for that matter is the occasion of hope for redemption, even though man decides for evil out of his abyss of freedom. There remains something in history as remnant outside history, which does not enable the closure of history in immanence. This remnant of history is the possibility of its redemption. It is this possibility of redemption that is given with language to mortals who comes to presence to himself. He then founds community, the polis where there takes place the harvest and the

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feast, the war and reconciliation, the division of the space into political territories and founding of the Law of the earth. But this founding, at each time, must keep remembrance of the face-to-face encounter with the serene mournful earth, the rest of the created, what he is endowed with the gift, so that the historical man in his all consummating hunger for appropriation and dominion may not transform what is merely possible evil into its actuality. For evil is nothing but the all devouring lust, this all consummating hunger for being what ought to remainwhat Schelling calls non-being, which is for that matter is not pure nothing, but non-being of a particular will striving for being as total, universal dominion. The consummating claim to appropriation what is to remain nonappropriation, this destructive fire that is not fire that gives warmth for the living but consumes it: this evil is nothing but simulacrum of the event, itself not the event that redeems historical suffering into messianic happiness. The terrible effect of evil, therefore, does not derive from its having being, but precisely in its not-having-being, its non-presence, and its eternal greed for attaining actuality. Therefore evil is not event but simulacrum of the event, for the event keeps open the originary Open, the gift in the naming that enables first of all the encounter with the coming and welcomes the coming to language. This event is the event of redemption the coming of which possibility demands renunciation of appropriation and mastery that the mortal, in his arrogance, seeks. Therefore evil does not lie in the finitude of man but in the finite beings self-abnegation of his finitude, though the possibility of evil is given with this finitude essentially, which does not itself, however, explain the actuality of evil. Schelling says in a footnote in his Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom: for the same reasons every other explanation of finitude, for instance by the concept of relations, must be inadequate as an explanation of evil. Evil is not derived from finitude, but from finitude which has been exalted to independent being (Schelling 1936, p. 46). The historico-political task of the mortal is the attentiveness, the care that is required to transfigure the possibility of evil into the event, to keep the originary poetic of history open, and to renew the naming language of the poetic saying to welcome the coming. In this open he must be open to what is other, otherwise than man, for what belongs to man does not belong to him as possession. Man is the

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

Part III

Event

 Of Event

The Question of Event and the Limit of Foundation

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

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

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

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

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the available, already happened entities of the world is actuality as pure transcendence. It is this coming into existence as thing-in-itself and as pure actualityunconditionalthat is what we call here as event. Perhaps now, when the logical thinking about the worldwhich has assumed the prestigious name called metaphysicshas come to an end, philosophy must give itself a new task of a new metaphysics of facticity without any foundational and systemic pretension, a thinking of the pure facticity of the thing-in-itself, which is the thinking of the event of coming, not the coming that comes to pass away and then predicated on the basis of the intelligibility of phenomenological consciousness, but this coming itself in the purely verbal resonance before the nominative or substantive, in its ecstatic transcendence that precedes, in a certain manner of speaking, anything that comes to pass away. This demands renewed inquiry, outside any phenomenological ontology and its systemic and foundational tasks, into the question concerning the unapparent apparition of the event of coming into existence as pure facticity, as pure actuality by distinguishing it from such traditional metaphysical distinctions between actuality and potentiality, between essentia and existentia etc. What needs to be introduced, then, outside such metaphysical distinctions, is a new thinking of the event of existence, and of a thinking of an actuality as pure facticity, which cannot be thought either as Being or Subject but as disclosive exposure to its radical futurity. With this we are already under the inspiration from Schellings later works, from his Positivphilosophie of what he calls the metaphysics of empiricism. Such a transcendental empiricism that we are introducing here, without positing anything like transcendent being or subject, ego or transcendental consciousness (with the personal pronoun I) and at the limit of the foundational acts of thinking, should enable us to open ourselves to the unapparent apparition of the coming and its event character without, however, thematizing it within a noetic-noematic co-relation. What Schellings Positivphilosophie and its metaphysical empiricism inspires us is to think the facticity of actuality outside mere predicative potentiality of the concept, and the question of the event character of coming outside the philosophys project of totality and foundation on the basis of the intelligibility of Being/ Subject/ Consciousness. In this way thinking is opened up to the more

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originary notion of truth no longer on the basis of predication, and to the more originary event character of coming into existence that in a certain manner precedes Being or Subjectivity. In this manner the closure of the metaphysics of subjectivity, and the dialecticalspeculative totality of history is hollowed inside out towards the abyss where the unapparent apparition of the coming occurs and reveals itself on the basis of a radical finitude and mortality, and yet without founding on any positing assertion, or better predication, as truth. Here thinking confronts and encounters a limit that is not conquered or mastered within the possibility of the thinkable itself. If thinking is bound up with Being, then the event of coming into existencein so far as it is incommensurable with the thought of Beingis excluded from thought itself as thoughts failure, if thinking is satisfied as mere predicative grasp of a phenomena mere potential and not unconditional affirmation of the pure, unconditional facticity. This aporia, which is the aporia of thinking, is simply aporia between the double demands on thinking: to be exposed to the consummate fire of the event that seeks to annihilate thought on the one hand, and at same time to preserve event as event in memory and history, which means, to make it thinkable and operative in history and memory, to make the true exception, which is event, universal. It is this aporia, which is not just the aporia of a hermetic thought, but an aporia that now defines the destiny of our political and ethical concerns. This aporia does not allow to be thought as foundation of political and ethical legitimacy of the dominant forces and powers, but rather that the thought of the event must tirelessly expose, at any given moment, any form of legitimacy under the force, power of the dominant, whether in the name of Being, Subjectivity or totality. To preserve this aporetic demands of a thought which is now, in so far as it is aporetic, does not allow an unequivocal unity or totality to emerge, even if is in the form of a cumulative movement that incorporates within itself the homogeneity of successive instants. What we have to think of the event of coming now, if it does not have to sink its teeth into the banal passing of the accumulative, successive

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

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

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Freedom, Time and Existence

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

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

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

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

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

Origin, Leap, Event

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

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

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The question of the origin and the event of coming therefore do not become categories serving the system of conceptual knowledge, or predication for logical proposition. Even for Speculative logic of Hegel which is not satisfied with the immobility of the things present, but seeks to present the restless generation of coming to presence of the concept itself to itself, categories are determined as mobile that auto-generate themselves. If that is so, the question can come about as to how the categories themselves generate themselves on the basis of their own ground? The event is not, therefore, made into predication for the speculative proposition, but what the proposition in order to be able to predicate, must be opened towards, is to be exposed towardsin the lightning flash of languagethat reveals to mortals, in astonishment at the origin, in wonder at the revelation, at the event leaping forth in joy. It is therefore Kant thought existence as irreducible to predication. In the lightning flash of language, man is himself torn openin an originary mannerto his origin, to his beginning, to the event that lies in the eternity of future without result, without finality. It is therefore Benjamin rigorously distinguishes language as pure naming from the categorical, predicative, cognitive grasp of entities where language becomes mere medium of communication. The possibility of philosophically contemplating, in remembrance, the origin is, therefore, for Benjamin, inseparable from the possibility of pure, paradisiacal language before language is submitted at cognitive disposal. The possibility of beginning anew and anew and so eternally, the possibility of giving birth to himself in an always coming time and being able to be present to himself by the event of future: if this alone redeems the finite being opened to the opening, exposed to the coming, then this event of coming demands remembrance of the origin outside empty generation and empty transition. If philosophical contemplation alone gives us the possibility of the remembrance of the origin, not yet impaired by the violence of cognition, then its truth is not so much the categorical, predicative, cognitive truth, but truth that is the truth of revelation itself, which is mortals originary opening to the promise of pure, paradisiacal language and its redemptive, messianic fulfillment.

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Similarly, Heidegger, but in a different registrar, thinks this advent of the arrival as two fold leap and step back from the onto-theological constitution of metaphysics. This onto-theological constitution of metaphysics is none other than the dialectical-historical metaphysics of homogenous empty time, of what in Being and Time the young Heidegger calls vulgar time. The leap of the event, which Heidegger calls spring is the event of appropriation, which springs from Being as ground of beings into the abyss, event that appropriates man and Being in holding-together, or belonging-together. In his Identity and Difference, Heidegger speaks of the event as a relation to the arriving:
This principle in the sense of a statement has in the meantime become a principle bearing the characteristics of a spring that departs from Being as the ground of beings, and springs into the abyss. But this abyss is neither empty nothingness nor murky confusion, but rather the event of appropriation... a spring demanded by the essence of identity because it needs that spring if the belonging together of man and Being is to attain the essential light of the appropriation. (Heidegger 1969, p.39)

This holding or belonging together (but not: belonging together) in the event of appropriation as spring is a constellation, a differentiating perdurance between overwhelming and arrival. Heidegger writes,
The difference of Being and beings, as the differentiation of overwhelming and arrival, is the perdurance of the two in unconcealing keeping in concealment. Within this perdurance there prevails a clearing of what veils and closes itself offand this its prevalence bestows the being part, and the being towards each other, of overwhelming and arrival (Ibid., p.65).

This event is outside metaphysics, because it is thinking of event as difference, which means, event that cannot be thought as given presence, in so far as the dominant metaphysics thinks phenomenon as given presence, and therefore cannot think difference as difference, event as arriving and coming to presence. The event is none but perdurance as openingthe in-between spacing (the Abgrund) in relation to the arrival, to the coming to presence wherein there happens, occurs, takes place a spring, a leap into what comes in the coming, which occurs only so far as overwhelming of thinking is

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

The leap of the event cannot be thought within metaphysics, or within the classical ontological determination of time and Being as given presence. Event is the leap from the overwhelming of the given presence to the arrival of the wholly otherwise that can neither be thought as being, nor as negativity. The event leaps forth, or leaps into, not through the empty generation of Being pure and simple (with which Hegels logical movement begins), but through cision, through (in Heideggers words) perdurance as openingmaking something of that has been into that is to come. This perdurance is a cision, a time of distress which the mortal being must undergo, and on the basis of which transformation occurs in the history of this existence.

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This almost nothing (how to think this?) is not negative which Hegel talks of, for it is not the power that converts nothing into being. Therefore this perdurance is not a continuous transition into being that negativity immediately passes into without leap, as smoothly with which all Hegelian categories mobilize themselves, nor is it generative nothing equal to Being, with which Hegelian logic begins. What is attempted both by Benjamin and Heidegger in their different gestures, is nothing other than the question of the event of coming into presence in relation to an originary truth (more primordial than predicative, cognitive truth of entities that has happened as the result of a process), to a logic of origin which is revealed to us on the basis of an expropriation, that is, on the basis of an originary finitude, yet which carries its promise towards its redemptive fulfillment in a time yet to come.

 Love and Death

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

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of factuality (we have learnt from Heidegger to distinguish between the two), but the event of actuality outside mere potentiality of the concept, this event of facticity and actuality of loving that each time opens the worldexistential worldand welcomes the coming into existence of this world. Marvelous: such is the opening of the world, the event of infinity within the heart of finitude and yet that does not belong to the finitude, an excess that in its eventive presencing is irreducible to statement or explanation, as if an eternity has inscribed itself at this movement of presentationof philosophys emergence to itself. What has remained unthought is that of this event of coming that bears in itself the dark fate of mortality, that of its own erasure and oblivion. It is this con-juncture, jointure, co-figuring of loving and dying, the monstrous coupling of lightning and darkening: this constitutes the event of coming into existence in its essential relation to finitude, that of its inapparition in the predicates of the world. It thereby essentially conceals itself, not behind the veil of the world or behind the visible entities that constitute the world as world. It conceals itself in its presentation from the eyes of the mortals who are always belated in relation to the emergence of the thought to itself. What thought cannot present to itself cannot be this or that attribute of the world or forms of thought that can acquire visibility of categories or predicates. It is the presentation of this presencing itself that thought cannot present itself to itself: it shies away from the sacredness of this fire whose violence is not equivalent to the violence of the mortals that mortals posit as law. It rather belongs to justice which erupts in the spacing between eternity and time, or rather, that which erupts as eternity in time, not as a dialectical synthesis between eternity and time, but as incommensurable inscription of eternity in time that at the same time annuls itself, for it has already opened all spaces, and it has opened its spacing itself. Justice is this pure spacing that summons, or conjures up the mortal to respond to the divine address, and he responds: here I am. What is the question raised by Plato in his Symposium? It is simply this: why loving and desiring?, or, closer to Plato words, what is this loving and desiring? After various other interlocutors, including Aristophanes, having offered their interpretations and stories, sometimes praising the God of Love, Socrates tells the story of having met Diotima from whom he has derived insights into the

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nature of love. These insights can only be told, again, only in a story or narrative manner: Diotimas story this time (for, how else to speak of the nature of love, whose nature consists in the non-form of a form, a non-natured nature, as if, as it were, there is something monstrosity about love and loving). Love is neither human nor divine but something monstrous, demonic: for while loving co-joins both finitude and infinite, time and eternity, poverty and plenitude, giving and offering, mourning and joy, it in itself is none of these but an eternal spacing opening between the two, so that, as if, an irreducible voidin the heart of lovingopens the world. This void is not empty, pure nothing but the trace of the abandonment of time where eternity inscribes itself, where eternity of tomorrow arrives today. Love is, monstrous, daimonic because in its opening and manifesting of the world, it is without the world of its own. Therefore love, so Diotima narrates, is immeasurably enriched and yet irreducibly impoverished at the same time. While it is an interminable subtraction of itself, love adds itself to itself in this movement of subtraction and becomes more and more overflowing of itself in its impoverishment. Love is this eternal giving that receives itself by the cunning of this giving; an eternal impoverishment of itself that enriches itself by this cunning of impoverishment. Love is at once giving and receiving, plenitude and impoverishment, mourning and joy, subtraction and adding, yet none of these in itself. By being none of those what it unites and those whose natures therefore do not explain the nature of this loving, loving is inexplicable in terms of those that it unites. It excludes itself because it makes any inclusion possible; it does not itself enter into the relation and yet permeates in the related elements as a whole while making possible this relation between impoverishment and plenitude, offering and giving, mourning and joy, subtraction and adding, finitude and eternity, transcendence and immanence. Love is, for Socrates, the highest thought of philosophy. It is the gesture that moves philosophy itself, which is to think not merely immanence but also transcendence, not merely finitude but also infinitude, not merely excess but its impoverishment. In love, the gravity of thought acquires immeasurable grace. Love communicates itself neither in those communicated terms, because it itself is pure communication, pure language that refuses itself to

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

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

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

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

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

 The Sense of Freedom

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

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passes away. We shall begin with loves joyous, ecstatic (ex-tatic, love that exceeds any stasis, or installation, or En-Framing) coming to itself, not in the manner of a self-presence of a given thing, or available beings parousia, but coming itself, in its verbal infinitude to come, in its unenclosed futurity of an interminable ecstasyof an always coming itself. Therefore love appears to be so ungraspable a thing, whether in a concept (which is synthesis of sensibility and understanding) or in a name, for love never appears as a thing, an available entity, an already given present, or a sensible-phenomenal cognitive object to which there can be applied a logical predicate. Therefore love never appears as a phenomenological entity or thing in any light of the intelligibility of Subject, because the apparition of love is that of an apparition of a no-thing, an unapparent apparition, an unapparent coming that in a manner precedes, not logically like subject precedes predicate, but the manner that an apparition, understood in its no-thing character, precedes any available, given thing. That there is love is a facticity not of the manner of a factuality (that can be ideal or empirical factof a concept or of a thing); neither concept nor a thing, love is this apparition of a pure coming to presence, pure event, pure taking place. There is love. The primordiality of loves facticity precedes the order of laws validity and its suspension. In that sense the primordiality of love lies in its immemoriality: it is the originary groundless that precedes the distinction between good and evil, and as such, bears the promise of redemption of the radical evil that sway over the destiny of mans history, when man, forgetting his finitude, seeks to appropriate the whole of being, and in fact, Being itself. The primordial facticity of loves groundless cannot be traced back in the manner of apophansis of the predicative proposition. Therefore Schelling (1936) calls the originary groundlessness of love indifference that precedes all predicates of difference and identity, to which no predicates apply except the lack of predicates, the exuberant un-pre-thinkable (Unvordenkliche) that elicits from us awe, in relation to which all mortal language and vanity falls silent, and all egotism is consumed in the fire of the centre. Yet this fire at once, when the mortals do not seek to appropriate it within immanence of his ground, is pure donation, which is the gift of life, arising as free donation, the freedom of the gift. In this way the mortals can partake, share this eternity of love as

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gift of his life, as this creaturely, finite, mortal life. The mortal being, therefore, precisely due to his inextricable finitude and mortality, due to his conditioned existence, shares and partakes something of the no-thing, the no-condition, the un-pre-thinkable, the eternity of love. This sharing and partaking of love, of loves free offering and overflowing, of loves exuberant giving cannot be claimed by the mortals as their right/ work/ power/ possibility/ capacity/, for these arise only as a limitation of the all-permeating gaze of love. Therefore in ancient Greek mythology, the God Eros is thought as the most ancient of all Gods, for it already always gives even before asked, in such an exuberant and in such an overflowing plenitude, the gift of life. If there arises the realm of law as the capacity of the mortal, this realm of capacity arises only as a limitation of the originary illimitable gift of love. Therefore there may occur a limited out of unlimited, measure out of immeasurable, thing out of no-thing, condition out of no-condition, withdrawal out of giving, and abandonment out of overflowing. Therefore loves freedom is both at once: it freely gives in such a manner that the gifted one (one who is freely gifted with) can freely decide to abandon this gift itselfof freedoms loving gaze, of loves free gaze. The possibility of the erupting, occurring, arriving of this decision (to affirm or negate freedoms gift) is the pure possibility of freedom, or freedom that appears as pure possibility so that this possibility appears for the gifted mortal as the possibility to negate even this possibility itself. It is this possibility (that includes event the impossibility of this possibility of freedom)this pure free possibilityof decision, of cision, of separating and partitioning, of dis-joining and of nonhinging between condition and conditioned, frees freedom itself from all necessity and causality. This is so in so far as freedom itself is none but joining, nexus, of what Schelling calls Zusammenhang: belonging together, configuration, or constellation, an assemblage rather than system, or totality. It is the nexus of freedom in such a manner as joining freedom can also be dis-jointed, as co-figuration freedom can also appear as dis-figuration, as co-stellation such that it can also be dis-installed, as assemblage freedom can also be disassembled, as hinging so that freedom can also be de-hinged by decision, by partitioning, by separation of forces. Freedom frees itself from itself so that out of this freedom, there may occur un-freedom,

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necessity, constriction, causality etc; there may occur evil, hatred, malice, wrath and disease of the will. There may occurs falsification of the assemblage, of dis-according of loves loving separation in such a manner that mutations may occur in the nexus of forces that seeks to destroy this freedom itself. Therefore the thought of freedom is always the thinking at the limit of the thinkable itself, since no Subject can adequately measure the immeasurable apparition of freedom. For that to happen, the Subject of freedom must already always be given by the immemorial groundlessness of freedom itself. In order to measure the immeasurable apparition of freedom, the Subject must already be granted by freedom itself. Therefore to measure freedom, it is necessary to think something more originary than the metaphysics of the Subject. To think freedom is, to free oneself to the risk of freedom, to its immeasurable measure, to the irresolvable wager of freedom. It is to assume the risk that is the necessary precondition of the tightrope walker who walks over an abyss so that the humanity of man may be transfigured into the more affirmative futurity by this leap, which is always the leap in freedom. If there remains for us now any sense of our very ethico-political at all, it is derived from this essential leap of freedom which is, as such, a free sense: it is at once a sense of freedom, and freedom of sense. As a sense of freedom, such a sense is freedom unto wager, unto the risk of the tightrope walker over the abyssof the absence of any given sense. If there still remains any sense of the political and ethical for us now, it is nothing other than this sense, which is not only the sense of risk, but the risk of a senseof freedom itself, of freedoms free flowing giving and withdrawing, of freedoms generous plenitude and impoverishment, of freedoms exuberant affirmation and its own negation. Freedom is the groundless opening out of which the coming comes as free adventa coming that is at once free to come and free not to come. An affirmation of the coming is the thinking of freedom whose inscrutable ground is at once pure actuality and pure possibility, for while it is pure actuality in itself, becomes for mortals an unsaturated, inexhaustible phenomenon of pure possibility. If to come is the unapparent apparition of the unenclosed futurity, as free futurity this future is free to come, or not to come. Not to arrive as future is the possibility of future, the possibility that future may

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not redeem what has already be-come in time, possibility that future may not be possible. It is the possibility that future may not bring the light into the voyaging ship that sets out in dark in the open sea, the possibility that the impossibility of freedom, evil, appears and that the light may sink into the abyss of the night. Therefore freedom is inseparable from wager, or risk because freedom is the metaphysics of the possible, for as the principle of pure possibility, freedom appears as the incalculability of the future that bears witness the immeasurable measure of freedom itself. Therefore there always remains in freedom something like what Ernst Bloch (1995) calls In-Vain. In each inauguration, in each inception of the voyage in the open seasince freedom is this anarchic principle of inception or inauguration itselfthere lies the possibility of In-Vain. This In-Vain lies in the perilous essence of freedom itself that is in its radical incalculability to which no measure, no calculation of reason can attain. This peril of the voyage, voyage that loves the blue sky above and open sea, is opened at that moment when this opening is opened, when coming of the redemption is affirmed at that singular moment, when interrupting the given foundation of existence one becomes free towards freedom. To be free is free towards light, but also darkness, to the redemption in future, but also the arriving of the un-hoped and In-Vain, since what arrives is free to arrive, or arrives out of freedom and out of which freedom it may not arrive. It is free to arrive, and out of freedom it arrives, and therefore it may not arrive; or what arrives may not be what ought to have arrived; or what arrives, at each singular moment, is only limitation of the possibility of arriving itself. Freedom as the spacing of the possiblethe possible that is immeasurable, incalculable, interminableis the spacing for the play, or strife between arrival or non-arrival, light and darkness, limitation and illimitation, giving and withdrawing, offering and abandonment, concealment or unconcealment at the same time, at the same moment which no phenomenology or ontology of time can think as presence. Is it this play or strife on the spacing of the possible that what Heraclitus refers to that of the strife between the darkness and the light as primordial mystery of the coming and passing away?

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

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

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within the immanence of the systematic unity can grasp entities/ the world/ objects only on the basis of their available existent character, not their event of advent. We are too late in relation to the Open that has, first of all, exposed us to the event. Therefore we cannot predicate the event on the basis of the available being of given presence. Therefore the name to name the event always touches the limit of the world, or the limit of being, exposing us thereby our own dispropriation from the eventof naming itself. Such a name, which is not a name like other names, is a name that must consume itself, peril itself in the originary violencethe arch-violenceof the event. It is the name that burns the tongue of the one who opens his mouth to utter it; it abandons the one who utters it to the desert of all hope and all meaning. It is the desert where all time has been annulled and spaces have burst open to the Other who is nameless, the Unapparent par excellence. Yet such a risk of peril must be assumed each time one welcomes on the basis of the gift of freedom the pure event of arrival who redeems the world. It is on the basis of this finitude of naming and coming that arrives contra all hope, that arrives contra all anticipation (and thereby, precisely, demanding from us radical hope, more radical than hope itself ) is there something like future at all, is something like sense of existence itself. What appears as sense of existence is not an accomplished self-presentation, but that arises from the non-in-difference between event and being. Therefore only for the mortals future is meaningful, redemption a requirement, opening a presupposition of existence, let alone a condition for our being able to have propositions and categories. The mortal thinking or thinking of mortality is not thereby calmed by a system that claims to have included the notion of existence and event within it, by making existence a category within categories. What it demands, instead, not a category of the thinkablebut a pre-thinkable remaining time, a pre-predicative redeeming future, a pre-categorical hope for possibility, a joy in the ever new beginning. In other words, it demands the act of freedom that abandons its sense to the burning of the tongue and to the desert of hope where the exemplarity of the name must risk each time its own peril, its own annihilation.

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With this a notion of open process and Possible is introduced. For the process to remain open to the coming, the configuration of temporalities must not have the self-foundational character of a logical necessity, or metaphysical identity, but a contingency, in the highest sense as freedom. What is possible is the possibility of arising independently from any given condition in such a way that, due to this independent character, it can un-hinge, yawn open, dis-figure, dis-join, or disinstall from its condition, only because freedom is not a system but a life, a nexus of movements or forces, a constellation of becoming, an exuberance of existence. As an exuberance of existence, freedom is an unsaturated phenomenon, forever in-excess, a pure unfolding of the movement that transcends any immanent self-foundation. Freedom is, then, the unfinished, un-totalized surging forward of the bellowing Sea pregnant with future possibilities, which Plato so beautifully evokes in his Timaeus. Contingency in the highest sense is the possibility of the otherwise, belonging to Possibility and future itself in an essential sense, not the random variability of the indifferent particulars which Hegel calls contingency, but the possibility of the otherwise belonging to the open process of the Possible by virtue of its open-ness. Since the possibility is free to be possible, or since this possibility essentially belongs to freedom or itself is freedom, possibility may not pass over into being. Aristotle thinks, in his Metaphysics, this possibilityas freewhich may not pass over into being, as potentiality of the matter, as dynamic, and not the static, unfolding towards realizing itself, or coming to be by its nature:
Now natural comings to be are the comings to be of those things which come to be by nature; and that out of which they come to be is what we call matter... for each of them is capable of both of being and of not being, and this capacity is the matter in each. (Aristotle 2001, p. 791).

Schellingthe most important thinker of potentiality after Aristotle and Bruno, perhaps Leibniz includinginspired by Bruno, makes potentiality itself as essential question of freedom, especially in his The Ages of the World (Schelling 2000). In this work, Schelling conceives of Gods coming to presence as that infinite becoming. God passes through the ecstatic potencieswhich are also potentialities of timeof the eternal past, eternal presence, and eternal future,

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which hold together in a configuration which is without totality and is free. This process which in mortal condition is a dissoluble holdingtogether, a transfinite relation, is what Schelling re-thinking the traditional logic, calls judgement in his essay on Human Freedom (1936). What is happening here? The ground of freedom, or rather its unground in its essential relation to potencies in Schelling is not thought on the basis of the logical principle of self-foundational necessity, nor on the basis of the metaphysical principle of identity, but as: holding together, a disjoined joining, a caesural belonging of ecstatic potencies of temporalitiesof eternal past, eternal presence, eternal futureas configuration. This is not a modality of autotransitional conceptual generation as in Hegel, butin the absence of the self-foundational principle of logical identity and necessity event leaps forth, the Possibility is hold open, since the nexus in freedom between the condition and the conditioned is dissoluble, dis-joinable. Therefore Schelling, in his later philosophyin fact from The Ages of the World (2000) onwardshas felt the increasing necessity to think the question of the coming and the origin otherwise than on the basis of the notion of generation as it is expressed in the negative philosophy. Instead the question of the coming and the origin is thought as configuration of potencies, in The Ages of the World, where the relationbut not generationof potencies are caesural, of which Schelling calls Scheidung, cision. All coming to be and coming to presenceout of an essential freedom, releasing and openingbears the mark of cision, an originary cut, or an originary falling away (Abfall). Therefore existence does not have the self-foundational character of a logical necessity or identity, but as a configuration of ecstatic potencies of temporalitiesborn out of cision, cut, or caesura, out of an originary disjunction and falling awaythat are hold together as dissoluble assemblage without totality. The question of freedom has somehow become a sort of aberration in our contemporary philosophical thought, as if abandoned by the waves of a great Sea, it has left only marks of a remote thought in the deserted sea shore, so that the thought of freedom has only become for us something like vague remembrance of a lost tradition of thinking, questioning and interrogating which has now abandoned

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us, or that which has been abandoned. Not only the thought of freedomthis great question of philosophybut the abandonment of this great question itself has appeared to have abandoned us. As a result raising again the question of freedom can never escape asking this question of this abandonment itself: the question of what is stake in this abandonment of the great question of freedom. For a long time, somehow it has been dimly perceived by the philosophers that the thought of freedom is no longer contemporary anymore, that the great question of freedom has becomeas what Adorno (1987, pp. 214-15) callsobsolete, aged, infertile. Or perhaps the thought of freedom, by a necessary logic of thought, is abandoned by itself to necessity. As a result, the question of freedom has been abandoned by itself, or is subjugated to the thought of necessity by being enclosed in the great tradition of the metaphysics of subjectivity, of the ontology of the thinkable. The thought of freedom, in so far as is made thinkable, is no longer free. It has become bound up, enclosed within the intelligibility of Being and subjectivity, which is none but the intelligibility of the necessity itself: we are no longer free to be free, we are no longer free to freely think freedom, for freedom has already abandoned the thought of freedom to closure of sense. Therefore raising the question of freedom would demand from us the task of releasing, freeing the thought of freedom from all sorts of necessity, from all sorts of closureof the juridico-political, of the metaphysics of subjectivity, of the ontology of the thinkable. That is, however, not everything. If freedom is not merely to be negative freedom, but primarily affirmative, then we must allow ourselves to open the thought of freedom to its un-thinkability, to its abyss, to its vertiginous limit so that, beyond the closure of the metaphysics of subjectivity, beyond the systematic, totalizing, foundational attempts at necessity, the freedom of thinking itself arrive unconditionallyto thought itself so that thinking can welcome to itself its own condition of possibility. What is remained to be thought todaywhich is the task of thinking freedomis to release the unconditional character of freedom, its event-character of eruption in the midst of existing, its (in)finitude from the closure of all sortsmetaphysical, juridicolegislative, theologico-political, etc. One of the rare contemporary, systematic philosophical works on freedomthat of Jean Luc Nancys The Experience of Freedom

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(1993)confronts this task of thinking freedom in an admirable manner, which is, that of thinking freedom as experience, understood in the singular manner of the philosopher as the unconditional limit of thinkable, as the passion of the limit, as perilous, pirated and therefore illegitimate seizure without foundation. Nancy says:
It is a question of offering human beings to a freedom of being, it is a question of presenting the humanity of the human being (his essence) to a freedom as being by which existence absolutely and resolutely transcends, that is, ex-sists. In all movements of liberation, as in all vested institutions of freedom, it is precisely this transcendence which still has to be freed. In and through ethical, juridical, material and civil liberties, one must free that through which alone these liberties are, on the one hand, ultimately possible and thinkable and on the other, capable of receiving a destination other than that of their immanent self-consumption: a transcendence of existence such that existence, as existence in- the-world, which has nothing to do with any otherworld, transcends (i.e., continues to accomplish) the essence that it is in the finitude in which it in-sists. (Nancy 1993, p. 13)

It is this same taskthat of releasing of the unconditional event character from the closure of the realm of the immanent selfconsumption and thereby offering the closure of immanence to the transcendence of the open: it is this same task that guides this present work, albeit in a different manner, in a different gesture, in a different style. The eruptive- event character of freedom, in its unthinkable and abyssal character, cannot be thought within the logic of being and subjectivity, but at the limit of foundation and its necessity as freely opening a world to come, in its messianic welcoming on the basis of a ground which refuses grounding. This opening demands the repetition of the tradition of the thought of freedom in such a manner so that the unconditional moments of freedom in thought leaps out, springs into the arrival aswhat Heidegger (1969) callsthe event of appropriation on the basis of a dispropriation or expropriation, that means on the basis of an ungrounded finitude of existence itself. Later we shall take up this question of finitude and existence. Here we shall begin, in a gesture of repetitionwhich is always here a gesture of readingthe reading of Schellings great

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treatise on freedom, that of his Philosophical Inquiries Concerning the Nature of Human Freedom. If the question of freedom opens for us its radical opening only at the limit of the metaphysics of subjectivity, or the metaphysical totalization in the principle of identity reductively understoodin other words, only at the limit of various reductive totalization of freedom to necessitythen a radical attempt to open the question of freedom has to confront again the question of the relation, dialectical or otherwise, of the supposed compatibility or incompatibility between freedom and system. This would demand a hollowing out, an unworking, or loosening, of tearing inside out of the solidified artifice of the various forms of necessitynecessity that appeals for its foundation the metaphysical principle of identity, of ground and reason, of the ontology of subjectivityso that a difference, a hiatus, a caesura, a dehiscence, an abyss be inscribed into the foundational, metaphysical principle of identity. Since various forms of necessity demand founding, or grounding, and appeal to selfidentity and subjectivity, they thereby in a necessary logic seek to abnegate the very freedom to constitute themselves as self-founding mythic totality. To deliver these various forms of necessity to their unconditional abandonment, it then becomes necessary to release free a difference that does not belong to its totality. Such was the deconstructive reading that Schelling performed when he repeats the very problematic againof the supposed (in) compatibility between freedom and system, between difference and identity, between unground and ground, between the abyss and existence so that there remains an irreducible, un-pre-thinkable remainder of the system that renders the system of freedom bereft of any innermost of gathering or speculative unity. Unlike Hegels system, the system of freedom is not an immanent one. Such a system of freedom would not have its own ground within itself but forever outside, a transcendence that can never be totalized, since it can never allow itself to be thought as subjectivity or being. This irreducible remainder, this remnant is the difference of system that emerges with the repetition of the very systemic task of metaphysics. This irreducible nonbeing, if not nothing pure and simple, that can never be eliminated, annihilated without remainder is the very inscrutable, unfathomable

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movement of the ground that spaces itself open equallyas the work and worklessness of freedomto good and evil. What is released, in the very system of freedom, is none other than freedom itself, is none other than the unconditioned ground itself as the space of pure possibility that includes its abnegation, that is, the possibility of a radical evil. Such is Schellings greatest contribution to the philosophical questioning of freedom: that Schelling, without renouncing the demand of system of freedom, could release, free open from the heart of the system of freedom a movement of difference, a spacing of the groundless, the unruly of the abyss, a drunkenness and a certain divine madnessunderstood in its radical finitudethat remains as an eternal, irreducible remnant of ground, of reason and of subjectivity at a risk of giving over freedom to its extreme possibility, which is the possibility of freedoms own negation in evil, that of the impossibility of freedom itself. Therefore the question of freedom arises in its extreme urgency, in its extreme possibility only at the limit of the possibility of freedom itself, and that is only when the system makes itself feel its strident necessity so that at the limit, out of this abyss, in this movement of differing and spacing, the possibility of redemption also arises in love and in unconditional forgiveness, or in the creative act that affirms a radical future beyond negations. Freedom is not only the possibility of good and evilthat is, the possibility that it would not even be possiblebut also the possibility of forgiveness and redemption. Since this possibility arises, happens unconditionally, that means transcending all immanent closure of self-consumption, the happening which arising, leaping, bursting, overflowing cannot be completely determined by the antecedent cause, freedom thereby acquires its event-character, which is its freeing itself from all closure of necessity and causality, of foundation and ground, of subjectivity and reason. It ex-sists any given-ness of antecedent causality, so that freedoms event character is that what frees, releases the unconditional, that means out of the unruly of the abyss, out of the drunkenness of the ground, without which freedom gets tied to necessity, to the ontological closure of subjectivity, to various determinant causalities. It is Schellings greatest contribution to make the claim of the ground, of system make felt in its highest, most strident necessity and yetwithout

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renouncing such a claim of reason, of ground and beingdrinking the wine of the abyss. It has become common sense knowledge of the students of the history of philosophy to see Schellings place in the history of philosophy as transitive idealist philosopher between Fichtes inauguration and Hegels completion of Idealism. What has remained to be seen is the uniqueness, the singularity of Schellings contribution to thought of the event of freedom, which is not one question among others but the essential question of philosophy itself: that of philosophys birth itself as freedom, out of the gift of freedom, and alsoand this is importantfreedom as opening of existence as whole, the entirety of what exists as such without making freedom property of that which exists. What exists belongs to the originary spacing of freedom, to the essential donation of freedom, and not vice versa. Already inaugurating along with Fichte what has come to be called Idealism, Schelling was already at the same time un-working the systemic task of Idealism, and thereby already opening to another inauguration, a more originary beginning of thinking at the limit of the metaphysics of subjectivity and ground, of reason and its system. The question of freedom for Schelling is not one question amongst other, but the question that has already freed, released him from the necessity unto freedomwhich is that of thinking freedom neither in relation to causality nor to the free will of the metaphysical Subject. In this manner, outside and beyond the mere formal distinction in philosophy between sensibility and intelligibility, between nature and history, there is introduced a more originary thinking of freedom: Freedom as the event of opening of existence to its own arrival as such, which as such has to be freed from the categorical, predicative grasp of the presently given world, so that freedom is no longer seen as victory over brute sensibility, but free de-cision, out of finitudethat means, out of unground, unconditionallythe decision between good and evil. This decision is the vitality, the life of freedom, for freedom in itself not a system as such but a life. But this freedoms vitality is not that of mythic vitality of foundations self-immanence; precisely the otherwise, freedom interrupts the mythic vitality of grounds immanence, and opens itself to ever anew, to ever renewed inauguration of existence.

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

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

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limit of human freedom itself. the question of the possibility of evil is the most radical question of freedom, and the most radical question of philosophy itself, as if under the name or the word evil not only the terrible images of destruction and malice are conjured up, but also the powerlessness of thinking itselfof philosophical thinkingthat concerns itself with the limit of its own thought, thinking that finds itself unable to think the inexplicability of evils terrible power. From where evil draws its devouring malice, malice that does not abate its cruelty as if the whole worlds tears are not enough for its all consuming lust? Any essential thinking that is not satisfied merely with gathering empirical data that only explain the empirical conditions of evils actual manifestation once such events take place but more essentially concerned with the possibility of evil as such, the possibility of its very taking place as such, and not merely explaining away this or that evil, then it must be connected with the question of mortals existentiality of his existence itself in its intimate connection with mortals intrinsic, radical finitude, and the abyss of human freedom. Only then evil will not be explained away as mere accidental happenings, aberrations, mistakes, and mans unfortunate oblivion or distraction, explanations that are carried with the help of empirical studies through field works, as if mans possibility of freedom can only go as far as bestiality, as the animal like behaviour. If that were so, evil would not have such terrible, all consuming, malicious appearance amidst our existence. In other words, evil would not be so radical. As if, as it were, the mortals freedom reaches its utmost possibility, or its utmost limit only as the limit of bestiality and no more. when Schelling speaks of Franz Baader that Baader is right in saying that it would be desirable if the rottenness in man could only go as far as animality; but unfortunately man can only stand above or beneath animals (Schelling 1936, p.49), what Schelling thereby seeks to articulate is not merely the radical nature of evil but also the abyss of mans freedom which, in its utmost possibility and limit, touches that point of decisionat the limit of the thinkablewhich concerns the limit of mans possibility and capacity, not merely of the terrible evil, but also the paradisiacal, beatific redemptive fulfilment in forgiveness and love beyond measure. With the question of freedom, arising out of the finitude of mortals condition touches at the limit of mans possibility and capacity. This

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limit is none other than the eruption, occurring, happening of the immeasurable and the unconditional forgiveness and love in man who is nevertheless a finite and conditioned being. It is none other than the enigmatic appearing of the phenomenon of unconditional forgiveness whose phenomenality no phenomenological ontology can grasp, the unconditional forgiveness whose necessity is felt precisely at that limit when evil threatens the condition of freedom, the basis or ground of existence itself as such. Therefore the question of freedom is the question of the unconditional as such, unconditional as the wagernot so much of accidental happening in life but as the wagerof existence itself as such. To exist (whose existentiality is this, to borrow this formulation from Heidegger, ex-sistence) as finite and mortal is to be thrown by freedom to freedoms wager or risk of this existence itself. Freedom throws existence to its wager. Freedom is not the metaphysical task of subjects freely grounding itself on itself on the basis of the logical, ontological principle of identity, of reason and ground. Freedom is rather the unconditional wager of existence as such. To exist is to wager each time out of its thrown-ness that means, out of the finitude of mortal condition. Out of this wager which finds manifestation in decision, not the calculable, programmable decision, but out of the un-pre-thinkable (Unvordenkliche), there arises each time not only the possibility of all consuming evil but also the unconditional beatitude of redemptive forgiveness and paradisiacal, blissful loving. Therefore any dialectically accomplished universal morality of reconciliation is so inadequate, so insufficient, not merely to explain the possibility of the radical nature of evil but also the unconditional demand of a non-programmable, incalculable, un-thinkable forgiveness, precisely because evil can be so unthinkably radical. Therefore any conditioned ethics and politics of reconciliation out of calculative, programmable grounds demand not merely that they think evil in much more radical way, but that this radical evil itself calls forth unconditional forgiveness and love that cannot be calculated and programmed beforehand, that does not have logical necessity or metaphysical form of causality. Therefore neither logical

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principle of necessity, nor any metaphysical principle of causality, nor any phenomenological ontology of manifestation can explain the pure taking place of the event of forgiveness, as if it occurs itself out of no-thing. This in itself demands that we think of freedom in relation to its inscrutable, unfathomable, unconditional ground in a manner that delivers, frees, and releases such a freedom from any conditioned notion of being wherein various determined forms of necessities and causalities work. In On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (2001) Jacques Derrida, without however raising the question of freedom at all, brings out in an admirable manner the unconditional demand of a forgiveness and hospitality that cannot be reduced to the universal morality of reasoned, calculated, programmed acts of reconciliation. What Jacques Derrida thereby brings out is the necessity of our time to think at the limit of the thinkable (of the unthinkable unconditional forgiveness), the event-character of freedom beyond any immanent closure of subjectivity, causality, necessity, reconciliation etc. Therefore unconditional forgiveness can only be event itself: it occurs, happens, and erupts in such a manner that its aleatory character cannot be thought within the calculable, programmable self-certainty of a decision on the basis of knowledge. In other words, it cannot be thought within any metaphysics of necessity, or causality or subjectivity. It has to arise that which is each time freeto arise or not to arise. The task of thinking freedom now, more than ever, is none but this: to free the messianic moments in freedom that is, its moments of unconditional forgiveness, and affirmation an arrival of a redemptive fulfilment which alone can redeem the evil so radical. Evil has not thereby lost the possibility of its appearance; only that this appearance cannot be grasped by any phenomenological ontology of appearance. Since it arises out of freedom (a freedom whose grounds remain inappropriable for the mortals), the possibility of the eruptive character of evil remains as much as the possibility of the event-character of the messianic, redemptive fulfilment out of freedom. Evil is not explained away, but whose possibility remains. It is this question of an essential remainder that is the difficulty of thinking freedom, an irreducible remainder which does not allow itself to be thought in relation to the metaphysics of ground, necessity, or reason. Hence no philosophy, no politics and no ethics

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can evade the wager of existence which freedom throws us to, but that, in so far as this wager, this dice-throw may make the possibility of evil actual, it precisely thereby makes possibleat that abyss of the momentthe possibility of unconditional forgiveness and the beatitude of love, simply because the god Eros is older, and therefore younger than good and evil. But there is no certitude, no guarantee, and no calculated knowledge that gives us before-hand the intimation that the messianic moment is sure to arrive at a destined moment. This non-certitude of mortals calculations and programmes cannot intimate the imminence and intensity of that arrival, precisely because this coming itself is free coming, is itself pure donation of freedom. Perhaps the philosophy and politics of the future will be this politics and philosophy of wager. Has not always been so? Can there be the sense of politics and philosophy for us if there is not already freedom at work, for to deny, to minimize, to close freedom its gift of wager to us would mean the denial of that divine, blissful loves redemption, that beatific forgiveness, that nobility of life that arises out of freedoms gift. To deny this gift would itself be the most terrible radical evil. This chapter again, therefore, attempts to think all these questions as the urgent questions of our time: the question of the unconditional event of forgiveness and love, of freedom in relation to its abyssal condition, and above all, freedom as the originary donation of the sense of existence itself as such. Schellings great treatise on freedom is one of the rare works in the history of philosophy that attempts to think freedom essentially, that means, freedom not as one question amongst others but as the very question of philosophy and of existence itself at the limit of the metaphysics of subjectivity. The question of freedom is none other than the question of the sense of existence as such and as a whole. It is the question of the sense of existence at the limit of its condition, question concerning existence as the logic of its origin and be-coming, the sense of coming to presence to itself. While working within the dominant metaphysics of the timewhich is the dominant metaphysical tradition of the occidentthat means, repeating this metaphysics, Schellings treatise on freedom allows freedom as difference of metaphysics, drawing inside out of the heart of metaphysics, which is to say, to its freedom, to the wager of its free affirmation, thereby loosening the sedimented artifice of the

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

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demand of a non-limit at the same time. This in-satiety of system and its exuberance of life is nothing but the infinite wager of freedom itself which grants the mortals the possibility of its true fulfilment that arrives from the Eschatos of time. What Schelling has tirelessly attempted to think is this wager of existence as the donation of freedom. For him philosophy itself, as the highest and most joyous creative affirmation, is none but a creative wager that seizes the existence of the creative thinker. If for the philosophical task of thinking existence is inseparable from the question of system, this system can never be a totality ruled by logics of necessity and causality, but a system that wages itself each time, limitlessly exposing itself thereby to its own limit. Since the system of freedom must be a free systema system that is free to be no longer or not yet system such a system of freedom can only be forever (a) tempted, each time anew, and can never arrive the definiteness and the completion, such as for example Hegels speculative system of metaphysics. Perhaps this much explains Schellings failure, unlike his classmate Hegels success, to constitute a definitive and an accomplished system of the Absolute. What Schelling has to give way, since he gave himself to the task of system of freedom and not necessity, to the constant, endless (a) temptation of system that also demands, ever new unworking of the system. As a result he constantly has to expose himself to the vertigo of the abyss which is none but the abyss of the system that, precisely in order to be constituted, must un-work itself again and again. the fate of the system of freedom cannot avert from the yawning gaze of its abyss, which is the abyss of freedom, its utter groundlessness and un-thinkability. For us who have come after Schelling it is this failure of Schellings system of freedom that has exposed us to the yawning abyss of freedomthat, what freedom exposes us to, to our groundlessnessit is this failure and the limit of the thinkable rather than the success of the constituted system that interests us more. This failure is none other than the failure of philosophys self-accomplishment and closure out of its own accord, the exposure of thinking to its own un-thinkability, the constant withdrawal of freedom from any closure of the system. It is this failure to which philosophy is interminably led by the movement of freedom that animates it and animates the philosophical desire for the Absolute, of what is unconditional at the limit of all concepts

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and all thinkable. It is this failure rather than success that alone frees philosophy for a new inauguration of thinking, which means, that exposes us to the limitlessness, to the immeasurable, to the very ground of all being and existence that irreducibly lies outside all acts of grounding: namely, freedom itself. That is why thinking which is itself the gift of freedom, though constantly assailed by an unappeasable melancholy, is the name of joy, which is the aristocracy of happiness (Bloch 1995a, p. 937). Perhaps the future philosophy will be joyous philosophy, and not merely the philosophy of joy. But we do not yet know whether that philosophy will still be called philosophy or by some other name. Schellings treatise on freedom begins with the question of the incommensurability between system and freedom, with the question of the possibility of the system of freedom itself as such. Since the dominant understanding about system as to its genesis and constitution, it structure and its mobility as system always relegates system to necessitysince the dominant system takes the logical principle of identity and judgement to be sovereignthe treatise of freedom must therefore begin with the examination of the logical principle of identity and judgement, and the (restricted) notion of the system itself. The systemic task of thinking freedom that must free freedom itself from necessity must loosen the sedimented structure of the system of necessity, of its self-foundational character on the basis of its predicative, apophantic judgement character. There then emerges the demand for thinking to re-think the logical principle of identity and judgement in such a manner so that through this repetition freedom itself emerges as systemnot as system of necessitybut as free jointure, or constellation, or nexus of forces that is open to the unconditioned character of freedom, outside causality and outside necessity. This task of repetition in Schellings carrying out the systemic task of freedom leads to the unworking of the logical principle of identity and judgement in such a manner that the sovereignty of this metaphysics of identity is given itself to freedom, outside the dominant metaphysics of the occident. This is so far as in Schellings thought, the principle of judgement and identity is no longer understood as mere logical principle but as the principle of

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the becoming of life, as the logic of the origin of existence itself as such and as a whole, as a vital principle of freedoms possibility to be free and not free, as a logic of movement and of longing with which created creature and divine life affirms its own existence, and above all, as the arising of decision out of the abyss of wager of freedom between good and evil itself. The self-affirmation of the creaturely being, whose self-affirmative character is to be traced back to the more originary groundlessness of freedom, and is irreducible to the apophantic tracing back of the predicative judgement: this self affirmative character of this creaturely being is distinguished from entities presently given and from other beings precisely by virtue of its freedom, that is, its utter groundlessness and its infinite exposure to the abyss of its ground. The being that arises as this creaturely self-affirmative being in the midst of beings as such is born with the dark fate of this abyss which is the condition of its eruption and also the very condition of its dissolution. In this manner the very formal, mechanical, logical principle of identity and judgement is released to the movement of life, to the generosity and exuberance of freedoma freedom whose generosity may even turn into the most terrible form of violenceso that with the question of the principle of identity and judgement it is not so much the formal, logical, predicative truth that concerns us, but the sense of existence itself and as a whole inasmuch as existence itself is free, if not according to its genesis, but according to its essence. With that the dominant metaphysical notion of truthas predicative, categorical in its formal, propositional structureis de-structured, and released beyond its propositional structure unto the structure as joining, or constellation, or configuration of the principles of movements and becoming, the principles of lifes exuberant venturing itself beyond itself, like the bellowing waves of the pregnant Sea. In ancient philosophy, the modern logical distinction between subject and predicate in judgement is thought as the distinction between antecedent and consequent. The metaphysical foundation of the logic of judgement is, as we know, the principle of identity which, when sought to be reductively totalized in a manner metaphysical, is reduced to the principle of Same. the attempt to think in a more essential manner the question of freedom as event, in its free eruption-

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character, demands unworking of the metaphysical foundation of judgement, and to think judgement itself in a more originary manner. In a manner that Heidegger (1969) later deconstructs this principle of identity as Same in order to think in a more originary manner this principle of identity as belonging together rather than belonging together and thereby releasing difference of freedom, or freedom of difference as the unthought of metaphysics, Schelling too deconstructs this principle of identity in the logical relation between antecedent and consequent in judgement in order to release the event character of freedom as difference from the logic of the Same by attempting to think identity in a more originary manner, that means, not in a predicative-categorical manner but existentially. Schelling grasps such a difference as duality without opposition that holds together (while separating each from the other) the principles of movement and becoming in a nexus, in a configuration, in a jointure, in a constellation which is the nexus as freedom. As such the question of freedom for Schelling touches, not so much the foundational question of the logic of judgement merely, but the event character of existence as such. Freedom then, thought in more originary manner, is essentially question of identity as difference, necessity as freedom, system that is free for its own dis-joining and dis-installation. Freedom as such is life: life as nexus of forces, of movements and of becoming, of overflowing and exuberance, of longings limitless exposure to its own limit. What would then be thought as life for Schelling? It is true that Schelling thought, in a manner that was prevalent in the philosophical thinking at that time, life organically, in a vitalistic manner. But what has remained not so explicitly thought in Schelling, but remained unthoughtat least till the time that he wrote this textin this term life is something like an attempt to think in a more originary manner the event-character of existence, its free happening and occurring, independently of the conditions given as antecedents: the pre-predicative, pre-categorical, pre-conceptual truth of the arising and disappearing, of the logic of a movement of existence, of existences eventive apparition in longing and desiring, its redemptive fulfilment in loving and forgiveness, of the movement of the appearing of evil as countermovement of good so that life

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receives love as pure, unconditional gift, so that life may receive the movement of its own becoming. What is life for Schelling is this incommensurability, this futurity present in any hic et nunc, the in-saturation and in excess of this existence, its finitude that refuses to close itself at any point of immanent self-consumption (Nancy 1993,p.13), the transcendence of a longing that never rests at any given mode of presence but may extend itself to the extent of desiring evil, the in-finity at the heart of a finite existence, and the eternal melancholy at the infinite incompletion of existences self-presence. What then Schelling attempts to think with the question of freedom is this freeing of this life character of event (or, the event character of life) from various sorts conditioned mode of self-presence, from any closure of necessity and causality so that life be free, and freedom may acquire life: that means, lifes element of surprise and its unpredictable arrival of the wholly other coming that may redeem life, and give over suffering to its redemptive happiness. Life in its manifestation of itself is the event of freedom; it is free to its own future without which life would only be mechanical product out of necessity but not free occurring itself. Let us come back to Schellings differential repetition of the metaphysics in respect to the logic of judgement. If the metaphysical principlewhich is that of the principle of identity, of ground and reasonis not to be reductively totalized into the principle of Same, then a belonging together, an ungrounding difference is to be introduced at the heart of identity. More originarily understood, the principle of identity will then be the thought of difference as belonging together, as in a constellation or assemblage, a montageof antecedents and consequents. In that sense differencewhich is none but the movement of freedomwould precisely demand identity and the system, more originarily understood, a system and identity that is no longer the principle of the Same, but the logic of hiatus, of a dehiscence, of an originary cut or cision (which later Schelling calls Scheidung in his The Ages of the World), a spacingwhich is none other than the spacing of freedom, or freedom as spacing. It is this difference of identity which sets free, releases the consequent from the antecedent (if not according to its genesis, but according to its

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essence), and thereby enabling the consequent, conditioned, finite existence to have a life of its own essential nature, to have an infinite, unconditioned freedom of becoming and decision between good and evil. As such, the principle of identityunderstood in the manner discussed above as the spacing of freedomis not same as Same. In the next chapter while discussing Heideggers discussing of the principle of Identity we shall be able to articulate how identity understood as jointure is precisely the question of freedom, which thereby cannot be reductively understood as the principle of Same. Therefore the logical relation between the antecedent and consequent is no longer to be thought as that of Same, but rather as that of difference as identity, differance of identity, as spacing of freedom. Discussing Spinozas logical relation of antecedent and consequent as one that between infinite substance (=A) and infinite substance as one of its modes, which is consequent of that infinite substance (= A/a), Schelling argues,
Then that which is positive in A/a is, indeed, A. But it does not follow on this account that A/a=A, i.e. that infinite Substance regarded in its consequences is to be considered exactly the same as infinite Substance as such. (Schelling 1936, p.16)

Though the consequent as finite, conditioned, creaturely existent is dependent in regard to its genesis to the antecedent that does not determine the essential nature of that existent. Therefore in regard to its own essential being, the conditioned, finite, creaturely existence is free without condition, for only so far an existent is finite, conditioned, creaturely (in regard to its genesis) can it be free without condition, without any pre-given, pre-determined closure of archtelos, that its freedom can touch the an-archic.,
But dependence does not exclude autonomy or even freedom. Dependence does not determine the nature of the dependent, but merely declares that the dependent entity, whatever else that may be, can only be as a consequent of that upon which it is dependent; it does not declare what this dependent is or not. Every organic individual, insofar as it has come into being, is dependent upon another organism with respect to its genesis but not at all with regard to its essential being. (Ibid., p. 18)

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There are few things that must be said immediately here. First there is something like an-archic about freedom that arises from the spacing-character, in that freedoms exuberance is precisely that ex-sists any closure or totality determined by the principle of arch-logy and teleology. Secondly freedom must be freed from any genetic condition, or from any metaphysical determination of the movement of becoming on the basis of emanation, or generation. To understand freedoms movement in relation to its event character, we shall use origin which is to be distinguished from genesis, emanation and generation. Schelling, however, never uses the word origin, but speaks of becoming which he distinguishes from any philosophy of emanation and generational process as the privation of a full, perfect being, for they all lead to the concept of immanence. Schelling says,
First, the concept of immanence is completely to be set aside insofar as it is meant to express a dead conceptual inclusion of things in God. We recognize, rather, that the concept of becoming is the only one adequate to the nature of things. (Ibid., p. 33)

The concept of immanence as the logic of movement is inadequate enough to express the vitality of freedoms self-affirmation. This is so in so far as freedom is life, and life is freedom, the event-character of its spacing lays in its non-in-sistence in its genesis. This non-insistence of the genesis alone grants or bestows to the freedom of the creaturely, finite, and conditioned being its life. This alone, according to Schelling, explains the possibility of the human freedom which is not one possibility among others but the possibility of life, whose possibility cannot be explained by any predicates, attributes, properties or facts, but by that factuality, or facticity alone that existence is that which ex-sists, that non-in-sists, that transcends from all immanence of self-consuming predicates, from all closure of necessity and from the causality of the genesis, from the metaphysical foundation of the Same. It is this non-insistence of freedom frees the consequent from the antecedent, not concerning the genesis of consequent in relation to antecedent, but regarding its essential being, that is, its essential exsistent character from any immanent condition. Freedom, regarded in this manner, is freedom from all immanence. As such freedom is trans-immanence; and as trans-immanence, freedom is life.

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Schelling never speaks of this non-in-sistence of freedom of life, and of the life of freedom, but this un-thought that we teased out of Schellings text, out of our repetition of Schelling, grants the movement of Schellings thought its own life. From this un-thought we allow freedom to come to life in its non-in-sistence, which is lifes event as coming to presence to itself as life. Life is that which non-in-sists in its genesis. In this non-in-sistence, life allows itself to feel the tremor of mortality, of death. It sacrifices itself for the sake of the freedom of this non-in-sistence, for the sake of this non-in-sistence of freedom. Since this non-in-sistence alone explains lifes eventive freedom character and since this non-in-sistence is dear to life more than anything else, it goes for the sake of non-in-sistence to the point of going against itself, to the point of negation of this freedom, so that in this extreme possibility of negating freedom it can assert freedom in its extreme possibility, which is the possibility of a radical evil. This explains the possibility and actuality of evil in freedom. Freedom is the non-insistence in immanence, and it is non-insistence in the antecedent. As non-insistence in antecedent, the consequent is free, and not mere consequent: it now has a life of its own, its free flowing abundance and plenitude so that as life, it freely calls for itself new inauguration for itself, new beginning after each end, last after every and each last. In this sense a free being, even the finite mortal being, has a relation to a time outside time, to a time outside all presence and all self-presence of the Subject. In other words, it has an intimation of a time beyond time1. a free Subject is no Subject, if Subject is the name for that which grounds itself in its self-presence so that the Subject can be beside itself. Between the Subject and its ground there is already always a distance of spacing which is the yawning abyss of freedom. It is freedom itself that spaces open this distance so that the Subject can be near to itself. Therefore Subject is the name not of that which grounds itself on the basis of its self-presence and autochthony. It is rather the denomination of that which is opened by the spacing of freedom, the consequent that is freed and is released by freedom itself from its antecedent, though not according to its genesis but according to its essence. Therefore judgementas the relation between antecedent and consequentbelongs to freedom, and not vice versa. Only to the extent that judgement is freeto the disjoining of itselfit is judgement itself. The judgement character

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of judgement is its freedom for disjunction, for caesura, for disinstallation. Here one can see Schellings unworking of the system of freedom from inside. Freedom as irreducible difference, as irreducible disjunction makes any speculative unity of the metaphysical Subject impossible. The judgement is already always torn apart by freedom on the basis of which alone there can be something likeidentity, as holding together of duality, a duality therefore that cannot be reduced to opposition, but to be understood as jointure or nexus, of what Schelling (2000) calls Zusammenhang. What is brought out, in a manner of Hlderlins introducing caesura at the heart of the Speculative unity2 a distinction unheard, a distinction that is going to set off the whole project of German Idealism in an entirely different direction, that is its own unworking of itself, the distinction that has introduced such irreparable, un-sublatable, un-groundable and inappropriable caesura or dehiscencein so far as this is the distinction of freedom and not of necessityis the distinction between Being insofar as it exists, and Being insofar as it is the mere basis of existence (Schelling 1936, p. 31). Schelling distinction between Being insofar as it exists, and Being insofar as it is the mere basis of existence (Ibid.) is a distinction of freedom, and not the distinction of necessity in the form of predicative, propositional truth, insofar as this distinction concerns lifes eventive character and not of inert, mechanical abstraction. Since this distinction pertains to existence coming to itself as free coming, there is the possibility of dissolution, of disjunction or disjoining of the bond, of the jointure between that which is the mere basis of existence and the existent itself so that the Being in so far as it exists, may exist freely, independently of the ground even though it arises from this ground. Schelling extends this vitality of freedom even to God in so far this God is not mere postulate, neither mere logical necessity, nor a conceptual abstraction, but a living God, longing and loving, suffering and redeeming. within God too there is an irreducible cision, cut, (Scheidung), a distinction, a difference, a duality without opposition, a dis-joining of a jointure, a caesura of an identity, a dehiscence of a hinge, a spacing of an abyss between God in so as it exists, and God which is the mere basis of [his] existence. Schellings God is not the God as mere abstraction of the Idealists but a free, releasing God who is, for that matter, not abstract

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system nor a totality but a life. Only as living God can be free to his own becoming; similarly, only because he is free, can he become different, transcendent in relation to the inner basis of his existence. He is therefore living God, and that he is free for his own coming to existence. The source of life in God is Gods vital distinction or difference between God in so far as the inner basis of his existence and God that coming to presence to himself as this existing, actualized God. in God himself there is an opening out of himself, a spacing out of himself, a tearing asunder of himself, an outside of himself in longing where in this free space God himself give birth to itself . Gods Freedom also operates as the logic of origin: there in God himself arises the movement of longing to give birth to himself. It is the beginning of Gods becoming of himself, the God begotten God (Ibid., p. 35). Schelling sees freedoms logic of origin as the partitioning of forces so that out of this differential, out of unhinging, out of (de)cision something comes to presence. one can say, following Schelling, that the event of freedom arises as the differential logic of origin that singularizes, individuates life as this life and no other, which as this singular for the first time opens itself to itself and to others. Freedom is that at once differentiating and singularizing of the origin of the world, of Divine being and created existence. What we call life is the movement that in existing interminably differentiates and individuates at the same time. Life is none but movement singular multiple (or multiple singular). Since the distinction between ground and existence is a distinction of freedom and not of necessity, where the distinction is also identity as holding together, joining together (Zusammenhang), figuring together, the free operation of what arrives as singular, individuated (Schelling calls particular will) does not prohibit the eternal remainder of the ground as universal Will to operate itself freely. All life is Zusammenhang, all life is a nexus (constellation/configuration/jointure/ holding-together as holding apart) of principles/wills/forces. Gods life is also a jointure, a bond, apart from this distinction from the created being: that while this jointure is indissoluble in God, it is dissoluble in the mortals. It is this dissolubility of the bond, of the jointure, of the configuration that explains, according to Schelling, while evil can be actual only in mortal, but not in divine life.

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Since life that manifests itself as becoming, it passes through stages from nature to Spirit where the jointure/ nexus appears again and again in new form, ever new jointure as free jointure that is free to be (free, or) not free. while this jointure appears at the stage of lifes becoming as nature as the jointure of the principles of darkness and light, so this jointure appears again in the stage of lifes becoming as Spirit as the jointure between the Willsthe Will of the Deep as particular Will and on the other hand, the Universal Will. As jointure of the two is not speculative unity of the Subject but Spirits revelation as Word which as such is the jointure of vowel and consonant. jointureand not (Speculative, conceptual) unityis not reasons /Subjects self-actualization as Absolute Concept; but this jointure is revelation of actual God to man that remains inappropriable to man. With this one stroke of genius Schellings already exposes the System of a Speculative Idealism to its limit, that lifes origin (in so far it is life) refers back to an un-pre-thinkable (Unvordenkliche) manifestation, or revelation that reason cannot trace back, cannot appropriate as its own ground, that no predicate of reason can apply to it. This is the very ground of freedom, in so far as this ground excludes all grounding and appropriation, all predication and foundation, all subjectivity and objectivity, all categories of reason and irrational. It is the irreducible outside of all ground, and yet which alone is the condition of the possibility of any grounding at all. As such the source of freedom is an irreducible difference: it is the difference of all difference and difference to all identities. A difference unheard: wholly otherwise difference that is the spacing of freedom. This difference is the groundless (Abgrund). It is, preceding all conditions, and remaining after all condition, is pure actuality without possibility, pure transcendence without transcendent. It is the unconditioned that enables all acts of beginning, of all beginning of all existence as such. Schelling says,
The essence of the basis, or of existence, can only be precedent to all basis, that is, the absolute viewed directly, the groundless. But, as has been shown, it cannot be this in any other way than by dividing into two equally eternal beginnings, not that it is both at the at same time but that it is in both in the same way, as the whole in each, or a unique essence. But the groundless divides itself into the two equally

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eternal beginnings only in order that the two which could not be in it as groundless at the same time, or there be one, should become one through love. (Ibid., pp.88-9)

This ground that precedes all grounds, the abyss that remains irreducible to whatever comes to exist as conditioned is none other than the groundlessness of freedom itself, which as such is more originary than reason or its opposite irrational. Neither reason nor irrational, is freedom their in-difference. This abyss of freedom first of all before any first, in a past immemorial, and in a remaining future un-anticipatable, grants all that arrives the free gift of birth. As un-pre-thinkable basis before all basis, it first of all bestows the gift of basis and existence and precisely because it is destination from where gift arrives, it remains inappropriable and unconditional. It is because this basis before all basis remains as un-thinkable, thought is alwayseven the thought of freedomis indebted thinking. Thinking in indebted to the unthinkable, for it is the un-thinkable that first of all bestows upon thinking its nobility and dignity, its beauty and joy. It is because there always remains this basis before all basis, there also remains hope for redemptive fulfilment and joy, however radical evil is, however terrible, devouring and malicious is evils all consuming desire to conquer everything. With the help of Schellings notion of an un-pre-thinkable remainder of (non) basis before all basis, what is introduced here is the unconditional, ever remaining promise of redemption for mortal which always remains, eternally, because it already always has dispropriated man from all power, force and the gaze of law. What ex-sists outside the law, outside appropriation and power, outside totality and system, outside the force of the negative, and outside all basis is this pure promise of redemptive fulfilment that exceeds all of mans power of actualization and realization. Because it is beginning prior to all beginning, it is thereby the principle of beginning and inauguration. Evil is that will of the lawlessness that ceaselessly attempts to assume the law; it is that will of the non-being which interminably attempts to attain being; it is that non-yet-actuality that endlessly attempts to seize actuality. But a basis before evil precedes and follows evil. This un-groundable, while dispropriating man from

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all ground, alone gifts the mortal the most paradisiacal gift, which is that of redemption itself. What Schelling discovers, at the heart of the jointure of forces and of principles is the Abgrund which is the condition of the possibility of the jointure or system. As a result, as the condition of possibility of the holding-together, the Abyss remains the outside, the excluded, which refuses all name, all concepts, all categorical grasp, and all acts of Aufhebung (sublation). The system of system, then, bereft of any speculative Unity or centre does not coincide at any point, for the condition of the possibility of this jointure itself remains outside of all totality, all system, all recuperation and grounding. Human freedom consists, therefore, according to Schelling, in that abyss of the opening, or spacing which cannot be thought as Unity. Out of this chasm emerges the differentiable and dissoluble nexus which is freedoms self-realization in de-cision, for de-cision (between good and evil) to be possible, the jointure has to be free to be dis-joined; the system has to be free to give over to the possibility of dissolution. Out of this decision which cannot be calculated, programmed, or predicated beforehand, but that arises, erupts, occurs as in a leap over a yawning abyss, there now emerges the possibility of evil and good. Schelling speaks of the possibility of good and evil in the finitude of the mortal condition, as the creatures self-assertion as particular Will, which as this particular Will should remain in the Deep, in the ground as particular. Since human condition is finitemeans, its condition, its source, its origin is outside of itself as inappropriable transcendencethere remains the possibility of the dissolution of the Wills. Hence the particular Will in its self-assertion can claim itself to be total, Universal, Absolute. In this all-consuming lust of the particular Will to reach Totality, in this all devouring hunger of non-Being to attain Being, there lies the possibility of the dissolution of the nexus, the dis-joining of the jointure of Wills. Evil is therefore neither Being nor non-Being, neither Totality nor particular, but non-Beings all consuming hunger for Being, the particular Wills endless lust to reach the Totality, which happens out of the finite freedom, or out of the finitude of freedom, out of the dissoluble character of the jointure so that there can be inversion of wills, of forces, of principles. The dark principle which should remain in the centre as mere basis, as mere possibility, as mere non-Being, lusts to

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arrive at totality, at Being, at Actuality so that the nexus, the jointure is diseased, corrupted. This corruption or disease of will is evil. What is then evil? Evil is the particular Wills all consuming desire to abandon the nameless to attain the Name as Absolute. It is that all devouring lust to abandon the non-yet-Being to attain Being as Absolute, to abandon the non-yet-predicative to attain the Absolute as Absolute Predicate. It is the Wills desire to totalize itself completely without remainder, or rather, it is the lust to include each and every exclusion by naming each and every Unnameable, by predicating each and every un-predicative. In other words, evil is particular wills attempts at self-foundation and thereby attempting at its own self-abnegation, since its very condition lies in the non-foundation, in the irreducible remainder which as such is without name, without predicate, and without Being or non-Being. Evil does not have a foundation of its own, and therefore it is this terrible, malicious, jealous lust to found itself, to ground itself, while there ought to remain that irreducible remainder, that Not Yet, that non-foundation . The task of the act of creative freedom lies, therefore, in the abandonment of this evils abandonment of the nameless, in the abandonment of the evils abandonment of the un-predicative, unnameable, the not yet, so that through this abandonment of abandonment there remains that non-foundation, that unnameable, that un-predicative, the Not, the remnant, the groundless (Abgrund), the unconditioned. This Not Yet as the irreducible remainder of finite, human condition is the highest task of free thinking which is to open itself to the unconditioned. The whole project of Schellings entire life times exhaustion of thought has never been anything other than this: to think the highest, the utmost, the summit of thinking which is for that matter its limit. To think each time is to be exposed to a condition that can never be founded in any conditioned foundation, that can never be named in any name, that can never be predicated in any predication, that can never be appropriated in any ground of reason, simply because it is the event of naming itself, of naming coming to presence to itself, and it is, above all, the event itself, not this or that event, but the freedom of event, or, the event of freedom.

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Therefore Schelling has to fail, over and over again, to complete any and each of his systems because what he wanted is none but the system of freedom itself, the system that is destined to be abandoned by freedom so that system never reaches at any point an absolute selfactualization of itself. In Schellings thinking not only mortals and Gods, but even the system itself turns to be veiled by indestructible, unappeasable, unnameable originary mournfulness. This originary mournfulness lies in the mortals originary non-power/noncapability/non-possibility to appropriate his own condition, to make his own ground his own, his proper, his property, since freedom grants him, loans to him, gifts him beforehand as an inappropriable, un-foundable origin of a gift. Freedom can never be a property for man, though mans particular Will attempts to appropriate freedom as its creaturely self-assertion, which is evil. Therefore human freedom is essentially finite freedom which, while it is the source of mans veil of sadness (Ibid., p.79), it is also thereby the possibility of the Not Yet redemptive, messianic fulfilment and acts of joyous creation. The freedom for mortal is that first of all opens the world for him and reveals him to the rest of the created existence. Therefore freedom is essentially revelation which as such is more originary than mans free power to act and transform the given world through his power of negation. Therefore Schelling too, like Heidegger following, thinks freedom in a more originary manner as spacing-open, or manifesting the world on the (non)basis of which man founds his historical world. Freedoms unconditional exposure of the mortal to the world and language is not to be exhausted by the language of the world, but this is not a mere limitation, but a limitation that first of all limitlessly exposes the mortals to name, by gifting him this possibility to name itself. The originary melancholy at the heart of finite existent that Schelling speaks of is not due to a lost origin but to an effaced of origin, a withdrawal of ground, an abandonment of power/ force/ gaze of mastery. It is on the basis of this abandonment alone is the mortal free, for as free being alone may he speak, live, and creates the world. As possibility of evil, but also the possibility of redemptive fulfilment, freedom is the wager of existence. Therefore freedom always appears as event, since all event is a wager, the possibility of deciding, happening, occurring, erupting something wholly otherwise which

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cannot be programmed, calculated, anticipated beforehand. At each moment of freedom, existence exposes itself to its limit to infinity, to the whole of the possible at once. The decision of existence arises therefore not out of calculations and predications but out of the undecidable, out of an infinite host of wager. To appropriate this wager and undecidable of freedom itself assumes the terrible faces of evil and destruction. With this irreducible remainder of wager and the undecidable, the possibility of evil itself remains there as eternal possibility, but only as possibility; it becomes actualized only when out of decision existent decides to wholly appropriate the wager and undecidable character of freedom. Therefore to maintain the wager of freedom and its undecidable is the highest, at the same time the most strenuous, the most difficult, the impossible ethico-political task of our time which itself is task of wagering when each time there arises out of freedom the necessity to assume decision out of undecidable. If evil is the decision to appropriate the originary dispropriation, then the appropriation of this appropriation is an event of decision which each time demands that we wage, not between one decidable and another, one name and the other, one predication and another, one act of foundation and another, but between the decision and undecidable, between the naming and the unnameable, between the demands of predication and the unconditional demand of the un-predictable, between the conditioned realization as this politics and this ethics and the unconditional, between the conditioned this or that event and event as such, irreducible to any this or that conditioned event that is destined to pass away. What the philosopher Jacques Derrida calls aporia is this thinking itself as decision, and as waging that each time adheres itself to decision. What Heidegger calls the event of appropriation (1969) is none but this appropriation of appropriation which appropriating appropriation, delivers, abandons the mortals to his originary dispropriation. Then another destiny, another inauguration or inception, another task for mortals begins on the basis of the constellation, or configuration, of the belonging-together as ontological difference. This constellation of ontological difference is itself the donation of freedom. The event of appropriation (Ereignis) is this attempt to remember that originary dispropriation, withdrawal of Being, or abandonment on the abyssal basis of which alone there

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is for mortals a redemptive future. But this is not the work of man which man can create out of his own possibility, capacity and power, but itself must be freely given as pure gift of freedom. Schellings profound influence on Heidegger is marked by acute thinkers and readers. For Schelling however, unlike Heidegger, freedoms principle of inauguration is always love. Love is arch of freedom, but an arch that arrives after each and every end, and therefore it is also last of the last. Therefore love is so redeeming. Permeating all throughout existence, love is the eventive presentation of freedom in existence. Its redeeming presentation in our existence is not in the manner of necessitys closure, not in any manner of evils immanent self-consumption (Nancy 1993, p.13), but in a discontinuous presentation which is the pure transcendence of love. As discontinuous presentation in each presence, in each hic et nunc love thereby makes each hic et nunc unconditionally transcend itself, and makes each hic et nunc eternal, paradisiacal, redemptive, happy, joyous. Loves joyous presentation in its loving jointure, in its ever renewed constellation at each hic et nunc cannot be understood on the basis of the reductive totalization of the metaphysics of the subject, but rather as unconditional free giving itself as unity of dualities, as loving belonging-together rather than belonging-together, as differential principle of unity. Schelling writes,
This is the secret of love, that it unites such beings as could each exist in itself, and nonetheless neither is nor can be without the other. Therefore as duality comes to be in the groundless, there also comes to be love, which combines the existent (Ideal) with the basis of existence. (Ibid., p.89).

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

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appropriates it and redeems it. If philosophy arises out of freedom, it is insofar as philosophy is already love of wisdom (Philo-Sophia). As such philosophy always carries when it is not reduced to totalizing metaphysics, the most ancient promise of a redemptive, messianic fulfilment. There is no such thing as philosophy of freedom, for philosophy is already the gift that arises freely, the gift of thinking itself. The task of thinking is to listen to this promise in the face of various totalizing attempts of metaphysics so as to abandon thinking to its freedom itself.

 The Abyss of Human Freedom

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

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possible. If freedom is the ground of the possibility of understanding being in its whole breath and fullness, then man, as grounded in his existence upon and in this freedom is the site where beings in the whole become revealed, i.e. he is that particular being through which being as such announce themselves. Heidegger (2005, pp. 94-95)

The No-Thing of Freedom and the Finitude of Man

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

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thought of futurity of existence, of existences event character, insofar as Daseins existence is already always a to come, understanding this coming in the infinitude of its verbal resonance, and not in the manner of Vorhandenheit, of entities presently given. Insofar as Dasein is not to be understood as the metaphysics of subjectivity and therefore, its essence is not the essence of acting and positing, Daseins no-thing is to be distinguished from the negativity, for example, of a dialectical, speculative nature. This non-thing is none other than no-thing of freedom itself, of freedoms non-apparent apparition no longer in terms of this or that thing, but this coming itself. Therefore the apparition of freedom does not occur amongst the entities of the given world. In his lecture on What is Metaphysics? Heidegger therefore distinguishes the Not of a nothingness from the Not of negativity (Heidegger 1998, pp. 82-96). The manifestation of nothing in relation to which alone freedom manifests itself to the mortal, finite existence which is Dasein, is more originary than the annihilation-character of the measure of negativity. This means the abyss of freedom cannot be measured by negativity; only the originary nothingness can measure up to freedom only so far as the essence of this measure consists in its transcendence of all measure, or, rather, the nothingness is already always beyond all measure. This measure is the measure of transcendence insofar Dasein who is called upon to assume its existence (out of its finitude) by freedom, itself is that being that already always transcends. Taking this point from Heidegger we can further speak of the possibility of existence itself as suchthat there is world, personality, selfonly because they are the donation of the immeasurable where the immeasurable appears itself as nothingness without annihilating anything. The measure of transcendencethe measure of freedomis not something lying outside the beings as a whole, but that which manifests itself in the appearing of the beings as a whole in the receding of beings, in their withdrawal and abandonment. This is only in so far as Dasein itself is not an entity (presently given), nor an object with animated freewill at disposal, a zo somehow got attached with bio, but because Dasein itself is the free spacing or opening which opens itself to the Nothing where beings as a whole manifests itself in the movement of withdrawal and abandonment. In his What is Metaphysics? Heidegger speaks of this holding out into the open as transcendence,

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Dasein means: being held into the nothing. Holding itself out in the nothing, Dasein is in each case already beyond beings as a whole. Such being beyond beings we call transcendence. If in the ground of its essence Dasein were not transcending, which now means, if it were not in advance holding itself out into the nothing; then it could never adopt a stance toward beings nor even toward itself. Without the original manifestness of the nothing, no selfhood and no freedom. (Ibid., p.91, Italics mine in this sentence)

Freedom manifests itself on the basis of the manifestation of nothing, which is none but the appearing of being in its withdrawal and abandonment. Heideggers thought of this double, agonistic character of revealing and receding of beings as a whole, its donation and abandonment, makes manifest to us a deeper, far reaching, and abyssal thinking of freedom. Freedom is that which granting the possibility of existence, withdraws or recedes from all phenomenal appearing. what is implicit in this text of Heidegger, the unthought in thought is the abyssal, agonistic manifestation of freedom: that arising of freedom out of the groundlessness of the nothing, agonistically and in the manner of strifebetween Day and Night, life and Death that Heraclitus speaks ofthat gives and withdraws, manifests and recedes at the same time, and thereby copulating the elements in a monstrous, agonal copulation that Hlderlin speaks of: the arising of the wholly otherwise precisely at the moment when history pauses absolutely; that moment which revealing, manifesting the whole of history in an absolute presentation, reveals to us the receding of the whole of history, and thereby yawning open the void precisely at the moment of its accomplishment, of its plenitude and fulfilment. If freedom is nothing else but the principle of inauguration, of inception, then freedom reveals itself here at this moment, each time as absolutely first before everything else. History inaugurates with freedom, granted by freedom. The ethico-political task of thinking of our time therefore must take the question of finitude seriously, insofar as what remains for us the sense of ethico-political is none but that of finitude of itself. Our sense of the ethico-politicalthat means, our sense of the worlddemands that we maintain this impossible tie with the

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agony and strife of freedom itself, to assume the risk that freedom opens us to, and to assume the task of this assumption, that of the leap from given-ness of immanence to the holding sway of being . To minimize this wager of freedom, of freedoms agony and strife through various programmatic, calculative apparatus of modern technological reason would be to deny the principle of inauguration on the basis of which our sense of the ethico-political rests. What, then, Heideggers thought has opened for us and with which we must begin here, taking care of what is at stake in Heideggerian thought, is this thought of freedom as event in its intrinsic relation with the groundlessness of finitude itself. The transcendence of this finitude is a constant, interminable wager out of which there arises the possibility of invention of a new ethics and new politics, for what we want to understand here by politics as agonal manifestation of freedom. This agonal manifestation of freedom, its irreducible strife cannot be reducible to the dialectical oppositions of principles with its Aufhebung. To come to Heidegger, the thought of the care for Dasein now, after so many years of Heideggers speaking of it, makes sense for us only because it gives us the thought of a freedom free from all immanent totalization. To understand the sense of freedom as wager is to understand first of all our ethics and our politics itself as wager. This is only so far as the wager of freedom is none other than freedom as strife, as agonal manifestation of differential partitioning of forces. As such, the question of freedom concerns the possibility of existence itself as mans existence who is of all beings the most awesome, because he is the most finite of all beings. He is this possibility to open-ness to the whole of beings only insofar as he is essentially this being, inextricably finite and inalienably mortal. This mortals openness to the world and to the futurity happens not out of mortals free will to determine itself on its own ground, but out of a groundless essence of freedom itself.

Causality as a Problem of Freedom

Heideggers lectures on The Essence of Human Freedom are his most systematic attempt to understand the enigmatic question of freedom. Taking Kants grounding of freedom as a problematic of causality

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

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regulating the sequence as a regulative principle, but de-formalizing the sequence each time it arrives absolutely. It is this pure arrival that we want to call event, and not occurrences that belong to the sequential order of letting follow or just running ahead of only because it does not adequately express the universality of the moral law. What we want to call in the name of event, neither belongs to the universality of the moral law and to the universality of the dialectical-speculative history, nor to a mere instantiation of the universality in the particular eruption of now that follows other nows in a sequence forming a uniform procession or progression. What we call event is rather the de-formalization of any such a sequential progression, which erupting in an irreducibly singular manner, nevertheless is an inscription of universality. Such idiomatic universality or singular universality is a disruption of the immanence of the formal temporality which is accomplished through visible, apparent forms of phenomenality. Such an event is to be understood in its exemplarity. This exemplarity of the event is the inscription of universality in the singular, where the immanence of particulars instants of eruption forming a causal chain is hollowed inside out, to welcome the transcendence of the wholly other. This thought is already implicit in Heideggers deconstruction of Kants notion of freedom when, for example, Heidegger speaks of freedom as the ground of the possibility of event as such, where it would have been possible for him to distinguish at that time between occurrences and the event of arrival. Then it would have been possible for him to release the thought of the event of arrival from either the particular occurrences belonging to the temporal sequence in their letting-follow or from the irreducibility of the universal moral law in particular instantiation of it in willing this or that. But what has opened by Heidegger in this work on human freedom is the question concerning the grounding of the will of man in the finitude of man, in the Abgrund of the ground so that freedom is seen as the possibility of existence of Dasein which is irreducible either to transcendental freedom or to practical freedom. Instead both the transcendental

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freedom and the practical freedom are to be opened up to the Abgrund, to that the abyss of freedom which is the possibility of the finite existence of man. Causality, as one ontological determination of beings among others, belongs to freedom which alone is the condition of the manifestation of beings. Heidegger could say:
Causality is, however, one ontological determination of beings among others. Causality is grounded in freedom. The problem of causality is a problem of freedom and not vice versa (Heidegger 2005, p. 207)

Here the inaugurating principle of freedom is no longer merely that of inaugurating the series of sequences of occurrences in a temporal, causal succession, nor the inaugurating a series of ethical actions as the will that purely determines itself, but inauguration of the possibility of the occurrence of existence as such and of the mortal who arises out of freedom. Manifestation of beings: the event of freedom. What Heidegger here attempts to understand is the event character of freedom which is the manifestation of being on the basis of which alone can there be the causality, can there be inauguration of the series of sequential occurrences. That means freedom cannot be understood on the basis of causality, but that what is presupposed in any causality as the unconditioned opening and revealing of beings. The event of freedom is no longer to be understood on the basis of given presence, or as constant presence, but coming into presence which is irreducible to any given presence or constant presence. Heidegger here is clear in this point:
As a category, causality is a basic character of the being of beings. If we consider that the being of beings is proximally comprehended as constant presenceand this involves producedness, producing finishing in the broad sense of actualizingit is clear that precisely causality, in the traditional sense of the being of beings, in common understanding as in the traditional metaphysics, is the fundamental category of being as being-present. If causality is a problem of freedom and not vice versa then the problem of being in general is in itself a problem of freedom (Ibid., pp. 205-6).

What is presupposed in the dominant, traditional metaphysical understanding of causality is a certain determination of time as given present, as constant presence. What Heidegger here attempts

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to problematize by deconstructively reading Kants notion of freedom can be traced back to the concerns of Being and Time. In Kant as in the traditional, dominant metaphysical determination of being, being is understood on the basis of the reductive, derivative understanding of time as constant present, as given present which has remained unquestioned, un-interrogated. Kant understands freedom as a problematic of causality. This causality presupposes the dominant, metaphysical determination of beings as entities given present which in turn tactically presupposes the vulgar notion of time as constant presence which can be categorically grasped in the predicative determination that means apophantically. What has then remained unthought is the event of coming itselfnot this or that coming, nor the occurrences that can be arranged in causal, which is also temporal, succession of homogenous instants, butthat arises groundlessly out of the abyss of freedom. The event of coming then can no longer be understood as a conditioned arriving, but since it occurs freely, that means unconditionally, it can never be thought on the basis of causality. Therefore the dominant, traditional, metaphysical understanding of event on the basis of the understanding of time as constant present that can be arranged on a causal scale of various attenuated, accumulative, homogenous instants (nows) is inadequate to grasp the event of freedom that erupts incalculably, unpredictably that brings history to a standstill. Here time would then thought in a disjunctive simultaneity that inaugurates history itself anew which cannot be reduced to the inauguration of new series of the causal chain of temporal instants. Since this abyss of the event of timewhich is the event of freedomdoes not present itself in any self-presence, its unapparent apparition can only be that of an infinite coming, a transcendence without transcendent. This transcendence of freedom is the moment of historys coming to presence, as if for the first time, which defines the historicity of history, which is not the occurrences within a causal chain of succession, or within a scale that assimilates the sequential, periodic, attenuated, relative discontinuities, but the moment of radical arriving when the whole sequence comes to standstill. What we learn from Heideggers deconstructive reading of the dominant metaphysical determination of freedom is this thought of the infinite finitude of freedom as the event of pure arrival, of historys coming into presence to itself.

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Philosophy as Strife
If philosophy is concerned not with this or that mode of presently given entities or, with this or that area of the presently given entities but the coming to presence of existence itself as such, then philosophy cannot be reduced to be one amongst other academic disciplines, for philosophy as the unconditional thinking erupts out of no-thing of freedom itself. From where, then, the name philosophy is to be derived? As if, as it were, this strange name philosophy, erupting, occurring out of no-thing and no-ground, can only be the name of a thinking, from such an Archimedean point, of the unnameable and non-condition itself. Philosophy is such a state of exception in relation to the presently given mode of existence in the world, in such a manner that philosophy, instead of merely and only relatively re-working the presently given mode of existence in the world, seeks complete transformation of the world as an epochal inauguration, arising together with the epochal break, of which Hlderlin speaks as monstrous copulation. Philosophy, wherever it occurs, appears as an inauguration of an entirely new relation to the world, or rather, the world happens there, in the open site of freedom, as if for the first time. This occurring of the world, or, lets say, the worlding of the world from where alone we mortals derive our sense of the world, constitutes the event of the world. This event of the world occurrence which inaugurates an entirely new relation to the world, no longer merely re-working the given mode of existence, cannot be understood as merely an event of causality, but as an event of freedom itself, arising out of freedom, whose ungrounded condition is freedom. While referring to Schellings notion of philosophy as an event of freedom, Heidegger refers to philosophy and poetry, wherever they occur, as world occurrences:
Where they are essential, thinking and writing poetry are a world occurrence, and this is not only in the sense that something is happening within the world which has significance for the world, but also in the sense in which and through which the world itself arises itself anew in its actual origins and rules as world. Philosophy can never be justified by taking over and reworking the realm what is knowable from some areas or even all areas and delivering things that knowable from this, but only by opening more primordially the

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essence of the truth of what is knowable and discoverable in general and giving a new path and a new horizon to the relation to the beings in general. (Heidegger 1985, p. 58)

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

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words, secret. Referring to this strife that arises out of philosophy or philosophy itself as this strife, Heidegger says,
Philosophy is intrinsically a strife between necessity and freedom and in that it belongs to philosophy as the highest knowledge to know itself, it will produce from itself this strife and the question of the system of freedom. (Ibid.)

Philosophy as the system of freedom is essentially and intrinsically strife and in its form of strife, it articulates the strife character of the opening of the world. In this way philosophy preserves and reserves the essential truth of the world while opening the world to the light of truth. That philosophy has to erupt in the midst of human existence is not an accidental affair. It has to do with the strife character of the existence itself and the world to which man is exposed, to which he is revealed open, in the manner that Kierkegaard calls, in an entirely different gesture, the wound of the negative. Mans essential character lies in this pure exposure to the outside, for he is essentially that being who is free. Or rather, because the mortal is free, he can be the free site of exposure to the pure taking place, to the eruption of that which is not mere apparent, but the unapparent apparition. The task of philosophical contemplation is to preserve this truth of exposure which is none but the truth of existence itself, and not to lose this exposure to the conditioned self-consumption in various immanent closures. The necessity of philosophy for human existence lies in this, if not elsewhere. If the great Plato thinks of philosophy as anamnesis, it is in this sense of remembrance that preserves the truth of existence in thinking. The truth of existence, which is the Eidos or idea of phenomenon, is its event of coming into existence which cannot be predicated on the basis of result or finality, which cannot be thought on the modality of the propositional structural of language but rather as bursting forth in lightning flash when language for the first time arrives to itselfas Idea of itself before concepts. Because this lightning flash exposes us to the event of pure possibility, and since this pure possibility is unconditional and free, philosophy in itself only can arise as the free activity of the mortals existence in the world.

Part IV

Messianicity

 The Commandment of Love

What consists in the commandment of love: in the love for the wholly Other who is absolutely singular, and what this love transforms itself to, to the love for the others who are the placeholders of Not Yet, the neighbour who opens us to the radical futurity of a redemptive fulfilment? Irreducible to the order of lawboth the law positing and law preserving order, the arrival of love is the event of time that opens the seal of immemorial promise given in the immemorial past to the absolute singularity of the event of loves presentation and to the radicality of the incalculable futurity, that is the coming of Messiah. In the name of Franz Rosenzweig, this article attempts to think an ethics of exemplarity which is loves generosity, an exemplarity that consists of addressing to the singularity of the event of love and that of its immemorial promise on the one hand, and yet at the same time that affirms the necessity of translation of this singular language of love to the universality that is yet to come. What it demands is the re-thinking of the sense of our ethico-political that must open itself to the thought of a promise beyond the violence of a historical Reason. This sense is the sense of exemplarity which is opened up in the generosity of love, beyond the dialectic of the autochthony of the particular and anonymity of the homogenous progress of universal history. What consists in this commandment of love is the promise of the messianic fulfilment beyond the violence of the order of law, the promise that first of all opens the mortals to time and history, to being and truth so that the messianic community, which is always to come, may not be enclosed in the autochthony of the given people. Love thy neighbour: this commandment of love is essentially

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the commandment of translation whose exemplarity consists in the impossible double demands on the lover/belovedthat the absolutely singularity of the event of love, in its un-translatability, be opened to translation, to universality on the one hand, and on the other hand, the singularity of the eventive character of love be maintained in its un-translatability. If there remains for us any sense of the ethico-political, when wide spread horror at annihilation of sense is the prominent mood today, then this sense consists in this exemplarity of loves ethical commandment and in the irreducibility of the aporia of translation, which, as we shall see here, is the aporia of our ethico-political today. *
It [redemption] bursts open every space and in this way it annuls time. Franz Rosenzweig (2005, p. 394)

Exemplarity of Translation
In his seminar on Onto-Theology of National Humanism Jacques Derrida (1992a)dwells extensively on a question that appears to me the concentration and intensity of his philosophical questioning as such: how to think, on the one hand, of the absolute singularity of the idiomatic which as such is untranslatable, irreducible to anything like the order of universality and translatability, and on the other hand, without renouncing the universal aspiration which is the passion of philosophy itself, so that there be translation of the absolute singularity of the event into the language of new cosmopolitanism beyond all immanent closures of particularistic, parochial claims of autochthonous community, people, nations etc. No doubt, such a community to comesince it is not yet givenwould be exemplary1 in the messianic sense of messianicity without messianism (Derrida 1998, p. 68), an idea of exemplarity that Derrida has attempted to develop in his later so called ethicopolitical works. The idea of a messianicity without messianism is, in this sense, an exemplary thought in the sense that it attempts at an inscription of the transcendence of universality in each idiomatic and singular, and opening up each singularity and idiomatic beyond

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

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same time it opens up onto all the metonymical substitutions that would take it somewhere else. The unprecedented arises, whether we like it or not, in the multiplicity of repetitions. That is what puts on hold the naive oppositions between tradition and renewal, or memory and future, or reform and revolution. The logic of iterability wrecks in advance the certainties of all sorts of discourses, philosophies, ideologies... (Derrida 2005, pp. 136-37).

The logic of iterability is the logic of exemplarity that un-works in advance the oppositions between the irreducible singularity of the idiomatic on the one hand, and on the other hand the universality in the uncommon sense. It consists of the irreplaceable inscription of the universal in the singular which is the unique testimony to the human essence and to what is proper to man (Derrida 1992b). For Derrida this logic of exemplarity is inseparable from that of ethical responsibility: that is, welcoming the event of future that is always an yet to come beyond the autochthonous claims of all sorts of selfconsuming immanent politics without, however, disclaiming that irreducible element of the idiomatic that takes place only once (une fois) without repetition. Such a messianic thought of exemplarity or such an exemplary thought of the messianic that is concerned with the opening of the verbal resonance of temporality beyond the autochthony of immanent self-presence to the event of pure future and to the immemoriality of the past is essentially a question of promise and redemptive fulfilment. Only in this way the thought of messianicity that welcomes the incalculability of the advent of eternity in the midst of time can radically deconstruct the violence of historical reasons claim to totality and immanence. Here we shall take up Franz Rosenzweigs The Star of Redemption and some of his other shorter philosophical and theological essays to show how Rosenzweigs notions of immemoriality of promise and its redemptive fulfilment that consummates history is essentially concerned with the question of exemplarity that seeks radically to deconstruct the violence of what he calls the messianic politics of the world. Here Rosenzweig takes up the biblical commandment of love, in the name of an exemplary universality, to open up the messianic politics of the world to the kingdom to come which is as such always to come, and nevertheless may arrive just now, today or tomorrow. This exemplarity of

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love consists in its infinite act of translation of the extremity of the immemoriality of the past to Eschatos of the last where alone originates the pure future. The commandment of love here is, more of an event of temporality that revelation opens human existence to its redemptive fulfilment than that of facts of existence that can be cognitively grasped and thematized by the acts of indication and intentions constituting the totality of knowledge. For Rosenzweig this inextricable facticity of human existencethat is opened by the event of revelation to its redemptive fulfilment in the Eschatos of pure future that may come todaymakes existence irreducible to the reductive totalization of a theodicy of history. If such a theodicy of history constitutes the messianic politics of the world, and reducing messianic intensity of existence to the immanence of fate, it would then be necessary to welcome the transcendence of the pure arrival which as such is without fate, without goal and that is not completely determined by the intentions of human acts. For Rosenzweig such an intensity of existence that exposes it to the fateless order of the messianic transcendence reveals itself in the commandment of love as pure event that alone is able to strive against the power of death that seeks to enclose the immemoriality of promise in the immanent order of fate. It is with this exemplarity of love that we are concerned here, an exemplarity that is inseparable from the question of the translation of promise into its fateless messianic fulfilment arriving from an extremity of an Eschatos. The event of love here appears to be the exemplary (non)phenomenon of existence par-excellence. To exist, it so appears from Rosenzweigs text, is to be exposed to this event of love that infinitely translates us and transports us to that phenomenon of transcendence which cannot be enclosed within the immanent order of a theodicy of history. If to release this event of transcendence from the immanent order of fate with which the theodicy of history curves back into itself as in a circle is the highest task of existence today, then this task adheres itself in this act of love that arrives as commandment and not as the order of law. If that is so, then the act of translation is to be understood less as an intentional act of transmission of a given knowledge or memory that is oriented by a determinable order of telos and fulfilled in an immanent historical consummation. It is rather to be understood as an infinite task of translation of an

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

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

The Aporia of Love

What consists in the commandment of love: love thy neighbour? in the love for the Other who is absolutely singular, the wholly Other and what this love transforms itself to, to the love for the others who are the placeholders of Not Yet, the neighbour who opens the door for us, unhinges the seal of presence to the radical futurity of a redemptive fulfilment, which is the futurity of a coming community? Is not this door the thresholdat the limit between exteriority and interiority, between the own-most or innermost and the foreign, the other that translation passes through and never ceases to pass through as the act of hospitality, welcoming the wholly other to arrive here and now, the eternity to come today, not today that I inhabit as owner of a dwelling, but a today which is any today and yet each time singular that cannot be calculated beforehand? In that sense, the neighbour is anyone and yet absolutely singular, irreducible to all attributes and is absolved from genus: to speak with Emmanuel Levinas for whom the proximity of this anyone of the neighbour who first comes to pass by is precisely for that matter the other of exclusive singularity,

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Absolving himself from all essence, all genus, all resemblance, the neighbour, the first one on the scene, concerns me for the first time. in a contingency that excludes the prior. Not coming to confirm any signalling made in advance, outside of everything, the a prior, the neighbour concerns me with his exclusive singularity without appearing (Levinas 1991, p. 86).

In the commandment: love thy neighbour, it is not the particular entity that is mere instantiation of the genus or the empty universality of essence that is being addressed. The neighbourwho is anyone and yet singular and each time unlike anyoneis the exemplarity of the example here: as if the heart of love is divided herebetween anyone and unlike anyone, absolutely unlike anyone, exclusively singular and yet in this division of the heart, in this incommensurability and non-contemporaneity within the heart of heart there arrives the commandment, loves commandment which itself is absolutely singular (since it is irreducible to the order of generality that constitutes the order of law) on the one hand, and yet universal, since it is addressed to anyone, anyone who first comes to the scene, to love the neighbour. Loves commandment demands from the one that the division of the heart of love may remain irreducibly wounded, exposed, torn open by this division, and yet on the other hand, the commandment consists of obliging a response, of eliciting a response from each one of us, and yet each one absolutely singularly and from me before everyone, wholly from me and therefore without division of my heart, a whole and complete response: here I am. For such a response to arrive here I am to the commandment of love: love thy neighbourmy response to the other must be wholly and exclusively singular: there must not be indecisiveness on my part, for I am already always summoned by loves commandment, and moreover I cannot assume a certain amount to time which assumption of a decision would require. I dont have time; I must respond absolutely now with utmost urgency, without delay and without procrastination. Later reading Rosenzweig we shall attempt to articulate this eventive character of temporality that is pure moment of presentation that makes response to the commandment of love irreducible to the immanent order of indication or statement, of intention and thematizing knowledge. loves commandment: love thy neighbour is neither a statement nor explanation to which I

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

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

Revelation of Love
1. Constellation of Elements It is in this context of loves commandment shall we discuss today Franz Rosenzweigs The Star of Redemption. Franz Rosenzweigs The Star of Redemption begins with a radical deconstruction of the systemic metaphysics of logos. This dominant metaphysics of logosRosenzweig calls it the philosophy of Allof which Rosenzweig takes Hegels speculative philosophy to be the uttermost accomplishment is, according to Rosenzweig, a disavowal of the

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

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the infinity of the historical reason that cumulatively moves towards its telos that will not come today, but at the end of the line curving back to its origin. It is however a good infinity in so far as the Star is still a configuration. hyperbola of this good infinity cannot be the realization of the mathematical idea, but rather the good infinity of the absolute magnitude according to a supra-mathematical principle, the principle for whichunlike the idealist philosophy of totality the unity is not here the presupposition but a result that exists only in becoming (Rosenzweig 2005, p. 276). Rosenzweig writes,
For configuration is differentiated from figure by the fact that certainly the configuration could be composed of mathematical figures. Yet that in truth its composition did not take place according to a mathematical rule, but according to a supra-mathematical principle; here the thought furnished the principle of characterizing the connections of the elementary points as symbols of a real happening instead of any realizations of a mathematic idea.(Ibid., p. 275).

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

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infinitude but a secret pre-history that invisibly operates whose secret character constitutes its messianic dimension, contra all historical determination and calculation, contra all the historical, autochthonous aspiration of the messianic politics. 2. Fate It is in this configuration of elements that Rosenzweig articulates the unfolding of the event of revelation as the commandment of love. Irreducible to the immanent order of the theodicy of history, there is a messianic dimension that passes through history like a secret password that constitutes a text of so many disruptive moments of intensities which the intentional act of historical deciphering cannot reveal. These intensities are not inscription or codification of law that arises from the positing power of the intentional act that continually and progressivelyin so far as it is emptied of all contentmanifests itself as history, orienting the historical movement irresistibly to its telos. if is from this pure power of positing where discreet unites of instants appear as what Benjamin calls the homogenous empty time (1977, p. 258) that history derives the power of its judgement character in the profane world, the intensity of messianic advent on the other hand, in so far as this intensity is irreducible to the intentional act of law-positing judgement, is a judgement upon history. This judgement upon history arrives in the name of a fidelity to an immemorial promise, ethical, of a redemptive fulfilment. If that is so, then the violence of the historical reason cannot be justified within the immanence of a historical telos: it demands an ethical judgement transcending the historical Reason. It is towards this ethical judgement that arrives as messianic intensity of justice, without telosfor it may arrive today: it is in this light the question of exemplarity and love as commandment must be understood. Therefore Rosenzweig in his The Star of Redemption, like Walter Benjamin, evokes a wholly otherwise notion of history where the intensity of the event of revelation does not so much assume the intentional act of pure law-positing that continually, progressively manifests as the power of judgement, but rather as commandment of love, irreducible to law, whose fullness and exuberance of its pure presencing and pure eruption cannot be thought on the basis

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

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

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time is also an infidelity to the past or future. For Rosenzweig such is the event of revelation that love tears open existent from the closure of the past, and exposes it to the ever new event of pure presentation. For the beloved who is evoked and invoked by the commandment of love, existence is wholly presencing, oblivious of past and future. This infidelity alone releases the event of love from the order of creation sealed in the past, and also from the order of the violence of law that presupposes its duration in the future. Only in its infidelity, love can appear as pure event, as irreducible act of renewal that opens time beyond the thematizing order of statement and beyond the order of law-positing violence. Without this infidelitywhich is also the infidelity of translation in that it never mimetically reproduces the given traditionto the sedimented past in the name of a more originary fidelity, the immemorial promise assumes the character of fate (Moira) that is then sealed off from all messianic realization in here and now; it then sinks into the immanence of the dark abyss of the past, and assumes various closures of necessity. To wrest the immemorial promise from such immanent closures with which death seals it off requires a work of translation equally powerful as death. It must be able to struggle against death, against deaths imminence and necessity, to release the immemorial promise from the character of fate. Such is the strife of love against death which is also translation of the immemorial promise in the ever renewing presence here and now. It is now we can properly begin to read Rosenzweig, at that moment where Rosenzweig himself begins: with the proverb that says love as strong as death. 3. Eruption and Presencing The task of translation is essentially a messianic task whose secret password is not history but redemption. Its password is given as promise immemorially, in an already always of a past that has never been a phenomenon of historys immanent Parousia. It is not the intentional act of the pure power of positing (that posits the judgement of history as the source of the meaning of events) but an immemorial promise that first of all opens the world, time and truth, and its consummation alone can assume the intensity of justice. Rosenzweig calls this originary opening of the world, the origin

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that no memory can ever retrieve and hence can only be a past, an immemorial past: creation. Here the influence of Schellings later work on Rosenzweig is remarkable. In Schelling (2000) a logic of origin is thought in relation a past (gewesen) that is already always, a beginning before any beginning that has receded into the dark abyss of past that is forever unfathomable, an irreducible remainder that cannot be grounded in the historical reason, or in the theodicy of history. For Rosenzweig, the abyss of this origin that first of all opens the world is also the origin of promise. The promise is given already always, groundlessly, once and for all, in the manner that is absolutely singular and absolutely heterogeneous in relation to the immanent becoming of the theodicy of history. Yet that which has occurred only once and for all, as that singular event that has groundlessly erupted, and that can never be repeated once again is the secret password of a messianic history that must be passed on and be eternalized and universalized. Here continuity of the secret password does not function like the Hypokeimenon of the Subject of the predicative-speculative universal history; it is rather the continuity of the immemorial promise that occurs throughout that other history in an exemplary fashion in the act of translation that means, through the acts of supplementation and complementation. The translation of the absolute singularity of the event of promise is given only once, and that can never be repeated into the language of universal, or rather it can only be repeated each time singularly, each time anew, that means, in an act of infidelity to the tradition that is founded by, or opened by the immemorial, originary, founding event of promise. This translation is never mimetic (understood in a reductive sense) reproduction of the original but only occurs in an exemplary manner, in the act of remembrance that Walter Benjamin associates with philosophical contemplation, which is always the remembrance of the immemorial which is each time to be recovered, and each time through an act that is radically new, incalculable eruption of the something wholly other. In that way the immanent order of historical violence, or the immanent order of tradition based on memorial act of transmission is opened up, by an infinite act of translation, to the intensity of a messianic justice whose arrival cannot be anticipated in the innermost ground that

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is the gathered by the memorial act of tradition, because it opens up to a dimension of an immemorial founding event that has already opened us to truth and to justice, beyond intention, and precisely thereby, is beyond the order of fate. This opening to the fateless order of justice is evoked for man by the commandment of love, in the event of revelation, that turns itself to the affirmation of a universal community to come, the Kingdom of God as Rosenzweig says. It is towards this event of coming community, which nevertheless may erupt today, despite the logic of historical reason, that the infinite task of translation is oriented. Here I have taken up the theme of exemplarity that Jacques Derrida elaborated. The inscription of the universal in the singular, according to Derrida, is never that of inscription of law in the particular where the particular (in so far as the particular is the mere instance of genus), through its negativitythat means, as a work of death passes into the anonymity of the universal foundation. Therefore, the translation in the exemplary sense where the immemorial promise invisibly operates throughout meta-history can be renewed only on the basis of the eruption of the ever new event of love (understood in the irreducible sense of its verbal resonance)which is the work of lovethat means, only in the act of infidelity of love which knows only presence, and none other. The event of love is a commandment and not law, for it is oriented to the intensity of a justice which as such is without fate and without goal. The immemorial promise given in an originary origin must be translated. This translation for Rosenzweig is translation of the promise given in creation into the event of love in revelation. This is the first demand of translation: that the absolute singularity of the promise given in the irrecuperable past must be renewed in each here and now, in the event of revelation and as work of love so that the promise may not be lost in the eternal abyss of the past. Translation that does not mimetically reproduce the originary promise but only by the eruption of the event of the new hic et nunc, precisely through this infidelity of impermanence, invisibly orients that promise towards redemption of the world. The absolute singularity of the promise whose absolute eventive character (irreducible to the language of predicates and explication), if it is allowed to remain

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in the absoluteness of singularity, acquires Moira: the fate character of necessity that remains sealed off from becoming and movement. Therefore it is necessary in order to open this immemorial promise be opened to time and the world, a reversal of direction of the promise that tends to seal itself off in the immanence of creation. The act that would forcefully open the seal of fate where promise is imprisoned is itself a violence, an assertion of freedom against Moira which is an act of love irreducible to law-positing and law preserving violence which for Water Benjamin (1986, pp. 277-300) constitutes the mythic violence. The absolute singularity of the immemorial promise is now open to the possibility of renewal in ever new eruption and presencing, each time making itself reveal as if for the first time. This eruption and presencing, each time absolutely new and absolutely promising is an event of pure presencing that cannot be explicated on the basis of predicative proposition that can arise only belated to the event. Rosenzweig here distinguishes this event of pure presencing that erupts as the lightning flash in the blink of the eye from the immanent logos of historical reason which manifests itself as in a continuous, homogenous and cumulative manner moving to a determined telos. While here for Rosenzweig the blink of the eye where the revelation is the event of eruption and pure presencingis wholly word uttered aloud, for Benjamin this flash is the dialectical image which is the weak, impoverished reflectionas in a mirror of eternity. Rosenzweig writes,
[Revelation] can be nothing other than self negation of a merely mute essence by a word uttered loud, the opening up of something locked, of a silently reposing permanence by the movement of a blink of the eye. In the illumination of such a blink of the eye there resides the force to transform the created-being that is touched by this illumination by turning the created thing into the testimony of a Revelation that has come to pass (Rosenzweig 2005, p. 174).

And,
It is only in this waywhen it is no longer a testimony of the revelation that has occurred in general, but the externalization of a Revelation that occurs just now at this momentit is only then that the thing steps out of the past of its essence and enters into its living light (Ibid., p. 175).

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

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

As pure eruption and presencing of language, language itself is an event of the world that is revealed as essentially linguistic. This event of language is prior to the language of objectivity and knowledge, of intentionality of the communicative agent that would then enable the codification of law. Therefore the event of language can only arise as commandment that assumes the form of I of the proper name, and that can only appear in the suddenness of eruption, in the blink of the eye. 4. The Proper Name The readers of Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit remember that language of the proper name is essentially an exposure of oneself to death. One who says I exposes himself or herself thereby to the pure power of annihilation of its sensuous immediacy. It is here the power of the universal that now assumes the law of judgement arises as the possibility of annihilation of the sensuous particularity, and restitution of the universal in its place. For Rosenzweig on the other hand, the proper name denominates that singularity that irreducibly

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

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being is immersed and absorbed in the in the event of love. The linguistic order of the proper name consists of being called by love, of being summoned by the commandment of love. It is the order of evocation and vocative, and not nominative that exposes being to transcendence: where are you? Only such a singular individual who is now aroused to the fateless order of love can be radically open to the messianic consummation of history arriving from the extremity of future which is to come. Since this singular individual who is lover is not a mere instantiation of genus5, he is irreducible to the realm of the totality of the objects designated by concepts and that is covered over by the indefinite and definite articles. Only he escapes the order of violence of the historical reason. Here the proper name of the lover steps forth, outside the totality of the predicates, indications and explanations, as a pure presencing, as pure event of time, as singularity of response to the call or commandment coming from the wholly other. Proper name is naming man himself as pure singular who is torn open, exposed and wounded open by the call of the other. Proper name is a responding answer which, in its singularity does not belong to the general order of validitythat is, the intentional, positing realm of law and cognitionan answer responding to the transcendence of the other. Revelation is a matter of invoking the name, the name which is the transformation of space into the site where Revelation radiates.
In the place of his general concepts ... there appears that which cannot run and is simply called the particular, that which has no concept and slips away from the domain which both articles, the definite and the indefinite... The proper name which exactly not a proper name, not a name which was given arbitrarily to man, but the name that God himself took for him and which for this reason onlyto be a creation of the creationproperly belongs to him. To Gods question: where are you?? a man still remained a you, as a defiant, obstinate itself ; when called by name twice, with the strongest fixity of purpose to which one cannot remain deaf, the man, totally open, totally unfolded, totally ready, totallysoul, now answers: I am here.( Rosenzweig 2005, p. 190).

If for Rosenzweig the proper name does not designate the particular as mere instantiation of the universal, but the denomination of that irreducible singularity outside the order of totality constituted

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by general concepts and articles, then here for the first time the question of the possibility of thinking of an exemplarity arises in an originary manner. The thinking of exemplarity is the question of a denomination and the verbal, irreducible to the indications and explanations, of articles indefinite and definite. Exemplarity is attention to this messianic intensity of denomination and verbal that marks the event of language erupting in the presencing of revelation, in the commandment of love. Here it is the question of language as the event of pure presentation than that of representation that opens the possibility of translation, oriented to the messianic language of truthas Benjamin used to sayof the immemorial presence to the event of presencing and to the event of a messianic future always, eternally to come, which for that matter may arrive even today. 5. Messianicity Though the event of revelation opens the seal of the immemorial presence from the dark abyss of creation and hereby translating the mute, speechless death into the event of language that erupts in love, the promise is not yet consummated. The world is not yet completed, history is not yet consummated and redeemed: hence the necessity, of one more (that means infinite) act of translation that would transform the pure presencing of revelation into an affirmation of the pure future, where the love between man and God, immersed in the exuberance of the here and now, where love does not reach beyond the plenitude of pure presencing, this love needs to be opened up beyond presence to the eternity of the future which is always to come. Here Rosenzweigs messianic conception of history, beyond dialectical closure, opens to the messianic event of pure arrival that is truly exemplary: that is, the notion of messianic fulfilment as consummation of history coming from an extremity of time, from an extremity of future that translates the extremity of the immemorial promise that passes through, as invisible, secret password of history. Here Rosenzweig combines two different forms of utopian fulfilment: the possibility of reactivation of the immemorial past on the one hand, which is just as redemptive as hope in the eruption of the radically new.

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Stphane Moss in his The Angel of History (2009) distinguishes these two tendencies of Jewish messianism: restorative, or archaeological on the one hand, and utopian or eschatological on the other hand that constitutes the ambivalence of messianism. While the restorative messianism is concerned with the re-establishment of the immemorial, originary promise, the eschatological messianism is concerned with final consummation of history that can only be radical upheaval or radical eruption of the absolutely new, heterogeneous to all that has become, for truth exists only in this eruption of the new, in the becoming that is never dialectical, for this eruption that does not close itself up like the geometric figure of the logos as circle. In his brilliant and remarkable study of the early messianic works of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, Eric Jacobson (2003) poses this question as the central question regarding messianism: does the Messiah initiates or consummates history? Here Jacobson distinguishes the messianic consummation of history from the telos of a dialectical historical reason,
[Messianic] that is placed in relationship to creative act is an end that harbours no worldly telos, no self-generation, no intention, no motor of historyit is merely the inverse of beginning. Towards creation it appears messianic, for it alone completes creation. A determinate end, which is understood in relation to creation and constituted as messianic, is therefore an end in redemption. (Jacobson 2003, p. 26)

The archaeological, restorative tendency of the messianic is not incommensurable from the eschatological consummation of history. This alone makes Rosenzweigs messianicityto which above remarks are applicablean exemplary thought, for on the basis of this alone the fulfilment of the immemorial and original promise that initiates history can arrive from the extremity of future, not as arch that necessarily, in a determinate manner fulfils itself as telos in the profane history, but incalculably, in an unforeseen manner, the logic of which invisibly operates in history whose secret password is redemption. This exemplarity that brings together in the Now the extremities of messianic temporality in the act of translation that secretly passes the immemoriality of the past promise through presencing of the presence of revelation to the consummation of history (which may

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be yet arrive here and now): such is the messianic task of translation given in the commandment of love. If that is so, then the commandment of love that Rosenzweig speaks of can be understood as the commandment of translation: translate the immemoriality of promise into its redemptive, messianic fulfilment. Since it is the question concerning translating the untranslatable, such a messianic demand never finds satisfaction in the historical realization of utopia, for it speaks in the name of an absolute that does not recognize its face in any given epochal manifestation that arises out of historical Reason. It demands of an arrival of an eternity here and now: a radical rupture or interruption of the continuity that marks the telos of a historical time. How does, then, the eternitywhich is the extremity of the futurearrive here and now? This is the question that concerns Rosenzweig in his The Star of Redemption. For Rosenzweig such an impossible possibility, or rather the possible impossibility is revealed in the commandment of love. This is revealed in the fact that love is not satisfied merely being revealed love that is immersed in the absoluteness of the pure presencing of presence between God and man; it demands translation in the world, in the community so that love does not merely remain between I and You. a step beyond the love between the two and a step beyond the event of presencing is necessary ; a community, a Kingdom to come, a futurity whose radicality is not that of a telos, needs to be opened up beyond the presencing of revelation, for the world still appears to be incomplete, unfinished, unconsummated. The event of love is not exhausted in the love between the lover and beloved, that of, its affirmation of opening time by breaking open the seal of the past creation; it also demands opening up the seal of the self, immersed in the exuberance of presencing, to the world, unfinished, uncompleted, unconsummated: The self had to emerge from its muteness to become speaking self (Rosenzweig 2005, p. 224). Love thy Neighbour is a translation of the commandment of love revealed in Gods question: where are you? where Gods love turns towards to the world, to the neighbour who is the placeholder of future. It is here the singularity of the pure presencing of presence where love between man and the wholly other is revealed turns

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

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

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of time, but an abundance or exuberance of an eternity which may arrive just tomorrow. This eternity to come tomorrow time must have a relationship to eternity which not the ripening or growing of time, but it invokes a time that arrives or unfolds in a reverse direction, a future that is coming towards us from the extremity of its site, rather than merely we are going towards it as if we are driven to a definite goal by the irresistible, irreversible wind of historical becoming. Eternity is for Rosenzweig not a very long time but,
[A] tomorrow that just as well could be today. Eternity is a future, which, without ceasing to be a future, is nevertheless present. Eternity is a today that would be conscious of being more than today. And to say that the Kingdom is eternally coming means that its growth is no doubt necessary, but that the rhythm of this growth is not definite, or more exactly: that the growth does not have any relationship to time (Ibid., p. 241).

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

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

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

Such a coming community for Rosenzweig, understood in the above mentioned sense of exemplarity is to be distinguished from autochthony of a community that makes the idea of homeland its common essence, from a community consisting of the peoples of the earth and soil, and that in the name of this self-identification enters the historical telos of its politics. Such a politics of autochthony Rosenzweig calls messianic politics where the silence of an exemplary communitywhich for Rosenzweig Jewish community, not in the given sensewould not take root in the soil of language. This is the reason, says Rosenzweig, why for Jewish existence there is such a deep, profound suspicion of language and such a heartfelt confidence in the power of silence (Ibid., p. 321).

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The Theologico-Political
The community that would not take its root in the soil of language, in the night of territory and in the ground of temporality (that additively, cumulatively progresses towards its telos), such a community cannot be understood by any given common essence, or by the predicates that constitute the logic of the world. What then for Rosenzweig constitutes the exemplarity of the community is rather the event of a people that exists in the vocative and not in the nominative. This is evoked by Rosenzweig in a paradoxical manner as a community of blood which he distinguishes from the spiritual communities. This alone explains for Rosenzweig what it means to be chosen people, a people withdrawn from territoriality that determines the long march of its history, a non-territorial and non-autochthonous peopleis a people which arises in the pure invocation that constitutes its vocation to be people, that means without being able to be people in any given sense: a non-peopled people, if the reader allows me to coin such a term, in an uncommon sense, a people by virtue of not-being-ableto-be-people in any given sense. This non-peopled people, because it is withdrawn from all positive predicates that determine peoplehood: territoriality, language of soil, and temporality of victorious, triumphant march of historical memory6in this singularity (and this is the paradoxical logic of exemplarity) is open to the universality. Not being a community that is a particular instantiation of the genus of community as such that constitutes the totality of communities, the community in an exemplary sense is for Rosenzweig at once singular and yet universal. Such a community must, says Rosenzweig,
Conceal the polar oppositions in themselves in order to be able to be singular, definite, something particular, a God, a human, a world and yet simultaneously everything, God, man, the world (Ibid., 325).

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

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stakes of their existence. This marks the deficit character of their mode of existence: it lacks the spontaneity, freedom, and openness to express its suffering in a language of its soil, in a language of the immanence of its self-presence, in a language of the autochthony of its self-grounding. This makes the proximity of itself in relation to itself that of an irreducible distance and non-contemporaneous, seen from the perspective of the world-history and secular chronology. Yet precisely this deficit and withdrawn mode of its being releases it from the vain consolation in the illusory character of profane happiness that the messianic politics of the world-history pursues in the work of the state, that is, in the incessant founding, un-founding and re-founding of law from which the lawful violence of the state is inseparable. the logic of exemplary is at once deficit and yet excess which, by taking from it its full participation in the triumphant march of world history that constitutes the messianic politics of the profane world, releases it towards a full participation in an universality in an uncommon sense, that of everyone with God which one does not need to win in the long march of a world history (Ibid., 351). Therefore for Rosenzweig the idea of choosenness does not imply the merely privileged position of the Jewish community in the name of which it wages the war of faith against other communities or even exercise supremacy in the name of a territorial autochthony, even if it is in the name of the universal. For Rosenzweig neither the war of faithwhich, according to Rosenzweig, lies in the mythic past of its existenceand nor Augustinian union of the war of faith and the political war, can denominate the exemplary character of choosenness. What exists as war is for the Jew is purely political war. While this separates the Jewish existence for which eternity is present today in the cycle of liturgical year from the secular chronology of the world history for which eternity is arrested, masterfully seized in the violence of law-positing and law preserving act, this noncontemporaneity betweento speak with Walter Benjaminthe profane order where happiness is pursued and the messianic order of justice, alone explains exemplary character of a community which is singular and yet universal. The choosenness is only that of beginning; that does not yet explain the redemption in the sense of the fulfilment of all utopian potentialities,

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No one knows more exactly than he [the Jewish man] does that to be Gods well-beloved means only a beginning and that man is still unredeemed as long as only this beginning is realized. Opposite Israel, the eternally beloved of God, the eternally faithful one and eternally complete one, there stands the one who eternally comes, eternally waits, eternally wanders, eternally thrives, the Messiah (Ibid., p. 326).

Taken in that sense, we can argue that the notion of exemplary in Rosenzweig is also a radical critique of violence. This is seen not only in Rosenzweigs distinction between the community of bloodwhich is not to be taken in any organist sense, as Derrida is sensitive to point towardsand the spiritual community, but also in the distinction between the two modes of eternity, a distinction that is co-relative to the former distinction. If for the Jewish community the presencing of eternity today takes the cyclic form of liturgical enactment, it is thereby released from the circular intrigue of law that founds, unfounds and re-founds the messianic politics of the world-historical communities for which eternity is always at an unattainable end, but never present today. Therefore it is not so much in the eternity that seized and enacted in the world-history by the power of law, but in the ethical commandment of love that opens the we to the messianic intensity of justice that the notion of exemplarity finds it true vocation. How, then, does the state enacts the eternity in time by its power of law? It is in the forceful insertion or inscription of life into law wherein the metaphysical violence of the state consists. In the work of the state that continuously solves and resolves the contradiction between life in its immanent movement of becoming and law that freezes such a movement as its foundational act: it is this work that turns the image of law into a violent image. The eternity seized through law is the metaphysical image of the violence of the world history. Rosenzweig writes,
Violence gets life brought to its law against the law. Since the State is violent and not merely lawful, it remains at lifes heels. This is the meaning of all violence, that it founds new law. It is now a disavowal of the law, as one probably thinks, fascinated by its revolutionary conduct, but on the contrary its foundation. But a contradiction is hidden in the idea of a new law. Law is as regards its essence old law. Now it shows itself as what violence is: the renewer of old law. In

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the violent act law continuously turns into new law. And the State is therefore equally as much lawful and violent, refuge of the old law and source of the new; and in this double shape as refuge of law and source of law the State places itself above the mere flowing off the life of the people in which custom unceasingly and non-violently multiplies and law changesat every moment the State violently settles the contradiction between preservation and renewal, old and new law. It is that continuous solution of the contradiction which the life course of the people constantly only postpones of its own accord through the flowing on of time: the State takes it in hand; in fact it is nothing other than this solving, re-solved every moment, of the contradiction (Ibid., p. 353).

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

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For Rosenzweig,7such a critique of violence is inseparable from a certain notion of end of philosophy. This philosophical discourse the whole brotherhood from Ionia to Jena, as Rosenzweig loves to sayin its obsession with totality itself is a form of metaphysical violence, which with its pure power of positing of the concept (that begins with Thales assertion everything is water), already effaces the singular being that is exposed to its own irreducible morality. If such a philosophical discourse of totality reduces the language of redemption and messianic justice into the immanent language of historical reason, that means, into the messianic politics of autochthony, it leads straight into the abyss of evil and totalitarianism of all sorts. This is the warning that implied implicitly in every page of The Star of Redemption. Hence, we can argue, the arrival of the messianic Kingdom cannot adequately coincide with the telos of the immanent historical reason, that means, with the goal or end of the messianic politics of the profane world; or, rather, we can say that such a founding act of the world entirely through and by the intentions and power of human actions must draw its reason, its sense and meaning from an obligation that exceeds such intentions and powers, from an ethical (or rather, meta-ethical: to be more precise with Rosenzweigs idea) transcendence outside the ethicophilosophical discourse of totality.

Part V

On Philosophy

 Erotic and Philosophic

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

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philosophy as a way of life, as it is said, as a specific mode of being in the world. To philosophize is, then, if one understands philosophy essentially and not as one academic discipline amongst others within the space called university, to philosophize is essentially to be seized by existence even at the limit of life. That is the meaning of Montaignes famous saying (2003, pp.67-81), who paraphrases the saying of Socrates in Phaedo, that to philosophize is to learn to die. To affirm truth at the limit when the philosophical existing itself is pushed to its limit, to the border of life, to the edge of the world: this means, to philosophize is to think the limit of thought or thinkable, which is the dizzying abyss of death or even madness. This is the meaning, apart from the sacrificial significance it can have for us, of Socrates taking the step of death. To philosophize is to take, ever and ever again, the step of death. Schelling speaks of this step of death as necessary beginning of philosophy as follows:
He who wishes to place himself in the beginning of a truly free philosophy must abandon even God. Here we say: who wishes to maintain it, he will lose it; and who gives up, he will find it. Only he has come to the ground of himself and has known the whole depth of life who has once abandoned everything, and has himself been abandoned by everything. He for whom everything disappeared and who saw himself alone with the infinite: a great step which Plato compared to death. (Quoted in Heidegger 1985, pp. 6-7)

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

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

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existence as such. Now, this eruption of existence is always singular, and yet whose effectbecause it does not completely exhaust itself at any given moment of discursive significationrenews itself each moment as unsaturated futurity and thereby universalizes itself. Since concept cannot grasp this singular universal, only idea embodies this universality in each singular being. Therefore unlike scholars, the philosopher who is concerned with truth of the event, is less of a conceptual grasp of already present existent, but rather is ideational opening to the futurity of the phenomenon. This is the meaning of Platos notion of Eidos, or idea. In what sense existence and event is singular? In the sense, negatively speaking, existence in its event-character cannot be thought either belonging to the order of generality, that means, to the order of the concept, nor is existence particular instance of that general species, like apple belongs to the species fruit. The scholarly grasp of the given phenomenon is concerned with cognitive, conceptual determination of that phenomenon within an already given, presupposed theoretical, metaphysical foundational paradigm; it does not concern itself with this foundation itself as such. Therefore all regional inquiries are only conditional. In contrast, philosophical foundation is concerned with the foundation itself as such, and as such is unconditional inquiry, because it is not concerned only with the already given entity, but with the event character of any being. It is only on the basis of the truth, which is always the truth of the event, can there be knowledge of any phenomenon. As we know that what we call academic came from Platos founding of academy around 385 B.C in a place called Akademeia near Athens. What is sought in Platos academy is not philosophical, scholarly discourse about things present, but the dialectical that means ideational grasp of the event character of existence which for that matter refuses to be grasped in the conceptual language of discursive signification. This is the reason why for Socrates knowledge of the event of existence can only be extended to its ignorance. In his dialogue Theatetus Socrates professes that the only thing that he knows is that he knows nothing. when in Republic Socrates was challenged by his interlocutors to give a positive, that means, the conceptual definition of what is justice, Socrates confessing

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his inability, says that what can be considered as justice can only be shown, but not said in the conceptual signification of generality, by Socrates himself in his singular manner of existing as just being. To philosophize is not to grasp a phenomenon what is justice in cognitive, conceptual apparatus and thereby defining in the intelligibility of knowledge what is justice, but rather grasping the singularity of justice in the mode of the philosophers existing in this world as singularly just being, that means by showing justice as irreducible to any predicates. This means, to philosophize is to transform ones own existence, to effect such a transformation in the very mode of the existence of the philosopher so that he own existing validates the truth of the event of justice: the philosopher must be the one whose existence is the site of taking place of justice. This singularity of the taking place of justice is too rich to be conveyed in the conceptual language of signification. On other hand, justice in its event-character must seize the existential of the philosophers innermost heart of existence and transform him, making him other of himself, to what he is not yet, the heart of the existence of the philosopher who philosophizes justice. the event-character of justice, and its unconditional taking place can only be shown at the limit of the cognitive language of signification, at the limit of the state of settled affairs of the world; in other words, at the limit of conditioned knowledge. Since what Socrates is interested is not knowledge, but the truth of the phenomenon called justice, it can only be shown as existential, that means as an aesthetic and ethics of existing and dying as just existing and just dying. Philosophical thinking is less concerned with the ontological intelligibility of the given world than with the event character of the world messianicity; it is concerned with the worlding of the world, or opening of the world. Outside the reproduction of the given, accomplished world in the form of discursive intelligibility, philosophical thinking envisions, intimates the redemptive possibility by releasing the event character of pure taking place and arriving. Philosophical thinking is concerned with this pure possibility and its transcendence in relation to the accomplished form of the worlds historical process. This concern with the pure

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possibility which ecstatically exceeds each moment from each form of the realized is the concern with the value and sense of existence itself. To give an example again, when Glaucon in Republic (Plato 2003, pp. 40-52) refutes Socrates that his notion of justice self-refutes itself because such a notion of justice does not have predicates in the given world, that in this world always the unjust rules and is happy, Socrates invites Glaucon to think justice without predicates, in its pure unconditional possibility of taking place, which is demanded in its utmost urgency precisely at that moment when justice seems to have lost all meaning and all predicates in the world. Such an event of justice as pure unconditional possibility of taking place without predicates is the thought of the messianic. What the philosopher is primarily concerned with this: the pure taking place of the messianic justice without predicates and in its unconditionality. Because the philosopher is concerned with the pure taking place, in relation to the settled mode of existence, such a pure taking place only appears as atopic, that means without dwelling and without place, which is the meaning of utopic or utopian. That the settled state of affairs of the world does not know what is just, but has erased any sense of justice does not negate any urgency or messianic necessity of the pure taking place of justice, but precisely demands with its utmost urgency, at this moment, hic et nunc that pure taking place of justice, that justice be existential, that means without predicates and without condition. Wherein lies the Eros of the philosophical thinking and existing? The answer is this: it lies in the desire, or longing to know that one knows nothing; it is to desire and yearn for the truth of the nonknowledge, of that which is without predicates, that takes place purely, that means, unconditionally and yet without having its own place and dwelling. The erotic of philosophy lies in the philosophical desire from the state of non-knowing that one knows nothing to the knowing that one knows nothing. It is this erotic desire that Socrates inflamed in the heart and existence of the Athenian youths:

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

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its irreducibility to knowledge, though a confrontation has already been felt there, that is, the incommensurability between the idea of creation and procreation. In the dinner party organized on the occasion of Agathon winning the prize for the best tragic poet in Athens, Socrates who was there among others speaks the following story, which he has heard from Diotima, of the birth of Eros. On the occasion of Aphrodites birth, the god Zeus has organized a banquet which was attended by Poros, who is the god of efficacy and wealth. Penia, the beggar woman, finding Poros drunk and lying, devised to have a child by him so that she can share a bit of his immortal wisdom and wealth. Eros is born, a child of the immortal father and an impoverished mortal woman, thereby sharing qualities from both parents. Since Love is this eternal desire for beauty, and since we desire what we do not yet have, Love is neither beautiful, but not also ugly. Love gives in abundance but he himself, like his mother, is poor. This is why Love is always naked and without cloths. Because he is not yet wise but not yet ignorant fool, Love eternally desires wisdom and is ingenuous, infinitely bold, intense, a sorcerer and an enchanter. Neither divine nor mortal, and yet sharing the qualities of both, Love is the intermediate Spirit, who is daemon. Neither wise nor fool, neither rich nor poor, neither beautiful nor ugly, Eros is this demonic philosopher who eternally fixes his eyes on wisdom and perfect spiritual beauty. He is not the ignorant one who does not know that he does not know nor is he the wise who knows that he knows, but the intermediate demon who knows only this much, that he knows that he knows nothing. Therefore the demonic and the erotic philosopher is essentially atopic, the one who is without dwelling but eternally exiled, abandoned and to whom no predicates apply. The only predicate that is applicable to the philosopher is that there is no predicate for him. Articulating the world and opening the world, the polis and the topos or the places, the philosopher himself does not completely belong to the world, but is an exiled being, homeless, atopic and excluded. He lives at the edges of the world, at the limit of knowledge, at the border of all places and predicates. By being placed at the non-place, by being conditioned in unconditional, by being predicated in un-predicable, the philosopher is the demonic figure. He has to be so only because he has to open the world, to space opens all topos and all predicates. Therefore Aristotle

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(1971, pp. 953-7) says that the philosophers and poets are essentially melancholic spirits. Why I am evoking the bygone thoughts of the ancient Plato today? What is symptomatic of the contemporary methodologically result oriented culture of knowledge production at instrumental service is this complete absence of the ethics of love and erotic from the experience of thinking. The philosopher must be the erotic individual par excellence; this is why Socrates is the paradigm of all philosophers. Bereft of this erotic experience, academic research and university studies have become separated from the idea of procreation and creation, and thereby becoming banal, emasculated products at the service of instrumental use whose violence we cannot even guess. The university, now the burial ground of passionate, creative, great souls, is no longer to be thought like a metaphor, as an image of the highest metaphysical state of history (Benjamin 1996, p.37). What is to be renewed is a new metaphysics of erotic. Such a metaphysics is called forth by Walter Benjamin who in one of his early essays called The Life of Students (Benjamin 1996, pp. 37-47) marks not only the separation of the idea of creation and pro-creation, but the absence of an erotic outside the bourgeois, legitimate norm as the condition of the sterile, spiritless condition of the life of the students now. This life of the students is no longer capable of assuming that form whose task is to liberate the future from its deformed existence in the womb of its present (Ibid., p.46). What is lost, in the absence of such an erotic and ethics of desire, is not only the creative moments of spiritual infinity that is opened up by the experience of philosophy, in so far as the life of students have been made to conform to demands of the bourgeois society, but also that expansive friendship that is bereft of greatness and loneliness:
That expansive friendship between creative minds, with its sense of infinity and its concern for humanity as a whole even when those minds are alone together or when they experience yearning in solitude, has no place in the lives of the university students. (Ibid.)

What Benjamin brings out is valid now more than ever before. The university now, equipped with the accumulative results of its knowledge production, with its ideal of intelligibility is at cognitive disposal, has long lost that ethics of love and with it lost itself as the

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site of event, which is its messianic task to liberate, free, release the unconditional futurity immanent in present condition, but that which lacks predicates . The university as the site messianic affirmation of futurity, and the not yetwhich Plato grasps with the two fold ideas of creation and procreationis replaced with banal, homogenous, accumulative, sterile knowledge without the existentiality of the philosophers existence being seized. What are an academic and a student for whom the event of truth is not opened from the very heart of his singular existence? In order for truth not to be consumed away in immanent, conditioned self-consumption in knowledge, it would be necessary to open up the thought of the unconditioned, without predicates, from the heart of academic life. Therefore it is necessary to introduce an erotic and an ethics of love that must be able to seize the existentiality of the existence called student and academic so that philosophy may become again a passion of life, where justice and truth become an Idea, that means event which alone can rescue a deformed, damaged, sterile university life to the promise of a redemptive possibility of the pure taking place. It means that the present condition of the university as a site of producing knowledge at the disposal of the techno-scientific civilization where the event character and the messianic intensity of the existential thinking is levelled off to the homogeneity of instrumental knowledge, is to be replaced with another sense and value of existence, another sense and value of the form of life which calls forth a new language of erotic and ethics of event. The university would then to be seen less a factory of discursive production at the cognitive disposal than as the site of the event of truth, which in turn calls forth invention and creation of ever new forms of life, an aesthetic and ethics of existence. Here a more originary experience and a more originary saying of existence is called forth, outside the ideals and telos of knowledge, indicating towards which is irreducible to the ontological thematization, a more originary experience and saying that is irreducible to a cognitive disposal, to the apparatus, to the regime of conceptual truth. This saying and this more originary experience is, outside such banal distinctions between objective and subjective knowledge, is the event of thinking, or thinking itself as event, as an event of saying that occurs, in sudden leap or eruption, as moments of truth. It is an event of disruption which truth introduces

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at the heart of existence, rendering the thinker into what Plato calls of a philosopher a gadfly (Plato 2001, p. 303). Therefore even Kant makes thinking irreducible to knowledge, the thinker who makes the ideals of Reason irreducible to cognition and to the concepts, even to absolute knowledge. This experience of thinking, this event of thinking coming towards is the messianic state of exception, outside any law of sovereignty whose intensity is experienced by mortals abandoned to non-knowledge, for it is on the basis of the Socratic non-knowledge alone, on the basis of this abandonment, something like messianic event of thinking reveals itself. Philosophy has an essential relation to non-knowledge and unthought. What is unthought is the not yet thought, the not yet birth of thinking. At each moment of philosophizing the philosopher is beholden to the not yet birth of thinking coming to presence. This beholding is the erotic gaze par excellence, without violence and not yet damaged. This joyousness of the life of thinking, pregnant with the unborn, is the experience of hope for the messianic arrival of the otherwise. Therefore love is experienced in its highest intensity and beatitude when the whole possible infinity of time opens up before us, which is the occurring of truth. Only then the thinking can touch the essential of existence and thereby transform the given form of existence itself. A thinker, if he is traversed by an essential thinking at the heart of her existence, experiences this event in a state of abandonment. This joyous abandonment in love is also a certain melancholy, in so far as it abandons us to our dispropriation, and which through this dispropriation, gives us the gift of truth and time. The melancholy of this experience of abandonment, for it calls forth renunciation (of cognitive mastery, of the ideals of knowledge); this melancholy thereby is inseparable from a certain experience of joyous gratitude for the coming of thinking. It is in this sense Martin Heidegger (1968) thinks this event of thinking, Denken, inseparably bound up with Danken, from the experience of thanking for the gift of thinking. Herein lays the nobility and dignity of a creative thought. The ethical task of philosophical thinking is to keep open the site of the university to the arrival of the unthought and to attune us to the attunement of joyous melancholy which is the fundamental attunement of the creative life.

 On Philosophical Research

THE THOUGHT OF DEATH

It is the question of mortality that concerns us here. From Socrates to Heidegger, philosophical contemplation, where the notion of philosophy itself is at stake, concerns not merely philosophical thought as such but the very philosophers existence as philosophical existence. It is in this sense Socrates is thought to be the paradigm of the philosopher, not in the sense that he is greater than other philosophers who have come before or after him, but that, in the very existing of his existence as philosopher; his is this essential exposure to death. Philosophy, as if, it appears to us, is born out of this encounter with this border of life, with this edge of the world, with the limit of thinking. It is this essential exposure to its own limit that incessantly summons the philosophers existence into this exposure. As if philosophys birth, it seems, is inseparable from this necessary encounter with this peril where thought or the thinkable risks itself, and yet from this very peril there would need to be resurrection of truth that is born out of this encounter with its peril. May be there is a possibility, or rather necessity to think another thinking of death, a more profound experience of death which is at the limit of philosophy or, rather outside philosophy: not in relation to the death of the philosopher where the very I of the philosopher is exposed to its peril, and no longer as the question of truth, but rather that of the exposure to the death of other from which ethical responsibility, outside dominant ontology, arises. It is in confrontation with the others death that the thinking of death as death inaugurates

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itself. Henceforth, since one is exposed, for the first time, to the others deathas the story of Gilgamesh testifiesthe thought of death inaugurates a new life of thought, as if philosophical thinking has to begin precisely at that moment of utter powerlessness in the face of death. The question of mortality is no longer one question among other philosophical questions. It concerns the existentiality of the philosophers existence in relation to the others death, as if the meaning of the ethical, if it does not have to put death into its service for the sake of cognitive mastery, has to begin with the thought of an essential finitude that affects us with inconsolable grief, seizes us with unspeakable fear and trembling. The opening to the world and our exposure to the others face already always is affected by the grief in the possibility of the others disappearance without return. If philosophical writing by a necessary reason has to assume the form of the written discourse, no longer the pure draft (Heidegger 1968, p. 17) of the spoken, then writing in its essential relation to death and dying has an ethical dimension, which is that of opening to the world and to the others in responsibility. It is none other from Emmanuel Levinas (2000) that we have come to learn this responsibility, essentially in its ethical affection, in relation to death, primarily that of the others death. Levinas ethical thought of responsibility arises out of the recognition that the dominant ontology as suchwhich is, the intelligibility of knowledge and the luminosity of beingencloses the infinity of the other (the infinity that is beyond all totality of being and its immanent self-presence) by inscribing the finitude of the other only as moment of an overarching totality of an anonymous Universal history. According to Levinas, such an insistence on the intelligibility of being privileges certain reductive notion of truth over the Good, the Good that consists of our infinite responsibility to the other as other. For such a reductive discourse of totality, the others death is only a death of homogenous particulars which, through their death, works towards the constitution of an anonymous universal historical totality (Levinas 1969). In this way, that is, by means of sacrificing the others for the sake of the intelligibility of being that philosophy as ontology constitutes itself. According to Levinas, philosophy understood as ontology is the negation of the ethical responsibility to the infinite other. Such ontology constitutes itself by forgetting

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

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

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any totality of ontologyhe is thereby open to what exceeds being, to the immemorial Good that cannot be annihilated simply because it founds us, and gives us, already always, this gift of being. If at all for a philosopher philosophy has become a manner to exist and to die, it is because to exist philosophically is to expose oneself to the peril of being and through it, to open oneself to the Good beyond being; it is to let thinking confront its own finitude so that at its limit it may exceed to that which lies beyond any mastery and selfappropriationthat is, to the pure event of the Good. This pure event of the Good presents itself as pure presencing when being recedes from the immanent task of its self-grounding. It is thrown to its excess, to its outside, to its essential peril. The pure event of the Good presents in its presencing itself when being exposed, abandoned in the open, the finite being is given over to the immemorial. It is in this sense philosophical thinking is essentially ethical: not because philosophy, with the power of negativity, exceeds from the sensuous to the intelligible, but that, in its exposure to the peril of being, it opens itself to the excess of being, to the Good beyond being, to the immemorial that first of all opens truth and time to being and thereby opens the futurity that is always to come. Only in this sense philosophical thinking has a redemptive, messianic dimension.

Philosophical Research
Today a vast accumulation of knowledge and learning is produced, reproduced and consumed at each instant. This work, which my future reader will be kind enough to read, if there will be any, neither hopes to be a scholarly academic treatise intended to contribute to the immense industry of knowledge production that constitutes our contemporary academic world, nor does it mean itself to be a systematic treatise of the great history of philosophy. This work has neither a thesis to prove or disprove (therefore it can hardly even be called research, or even an academic work), nor does it have what is called a method, since this work does not cherish knowledge as its telos to which research is supposed to be oriented towards. What it presents are merely manifold pathways of thinking that never cease to inaugurate ever new paths of thought. This work, in that sense, hardly even be called a work, which means, it has hardly any hope

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

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

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with unquestionable validity, but one that needs interrogation, deconstruction, questioning, in order to open up thinking itself to its messianic possibilities, that means, to its redemptive affirmation. Only then philosophical thinking becomes worthy of its name, which for ages has never ceased to inspire if not mankind but a few in each generation to see in a glimpse the marvel of wisdom, which is to be understood in its messianic transcendence. What is understood as wisdom is nothing other than the excess character of hearing to the essential that is often covered over by the dispositif of knowledge production in the service of demand and supply, use and exchange value. What governs in our academic existence is a certain ideal of an instrumental knowledge whose reductive, totalizing metaphysics of subjectivity and objectivity serves the dominant regime of power. It would then be necessary to examine the historical origin of the notions like method and thesis and its co-relating origin of the epistemology and ontology as the sovereign sciences, not just philosophy but as the originary ground of modern sciences. It would then be necessary to examine the thetic, unexamined presuppositions of such an epistemological and ontological intelligibility, and to question the sovereign status of such epistemological, ontological intelligibility as to its value and sense for us. This important questionthe question of value and sensethough not raised in such thoroughgoing manner in this work, is implicit not merely in the matter at stake, that of thinking of existence, of time and death, but in the manner, style, gesture, or rhythm of thinking that is pursued here, a manner or style of thinking that does not subordinate the matter of thinking to results at cognitive disposal nor however, does it think of wisdom as mere ineffable, mystic intuition of a pure transcendental object lying somewhere in heaven. Instead of subordinating thinking, philosophical thinking to the violence of cognition, philosophical thinking needs to be opened up to its originary event of coming in the intensity of a creative passion. Shorn of the existential tremor that is the tremor of mortality, todays philosophers no longer seem to be concerned with an existential engagement, and are emptied of any creative passion. In other words, academic research and existentiality of the existence of the researcher seem to have fallen apart, and this falling apart is

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suitable to the dispositif of cognitive results that would not want true event of thinking to take place, for in that way the creative passion of the spirit which is singular, exceptional and unique each time can be incorporated into the homogeneity of a false universality, which then can be sociologized, politicized by any parochial, instrumental ideology. In the name of this false universality there are inspired ceaseless cultural products that serve the regime of cognitive truth for the sake of which the human minds invest the energy of thinking, and that way reducing the utopian, messianic moment in each singular work of art and philosophy. Therefore it would be necessary to invent for each individual thinkers in relation to the singularity of an event of a thought, a singular ethics of the event, the event of thinking coming to presence that would seize with such tremor, and transforming the thinkers mode of existence and his mode of dying. Such an ethics of singularity can only be approached from its futurity in the immanent here and now, but not from any reductive sociologized, historicized understanding of the work as homogeneous product of a given, totalizable historical epoch. When Schelling somewhere speaks of truth as that which exists as such only as wrested truth, he indicates thereby that redemptive, untimely, messianic and utopian element that is given in each hic et nunc that cannot be completely exhausted in the generalized, homogenized characteristics of a given totality of a historical epoch. That means a messianic thinker has to be essentially a philologist whose philological task is devoted not so much to read what is readable, but rather what is not yet read, what is unreadable in each reading, rather than merely reworking over and again in ever new configuration what is already read. Those works that are at the service of cognitive disposal, these cultural products produced by the human mind with such an unimaginable amount and speed each day in our contemporary world, have their values of course, for in their banal homogeneity they call forth the counter pressure of the messianic event of thinking. As each movement of universal has its own counterpressure, its eccentric pathof diversion and disruptionand this is true even to the movement of thinking. Therefore each moment the messianic event of thinking always appears to be untimely, older then the old and yet younger than the young, for older it grows younger it becomes, more exuberant, and more youthful, whose timeliness

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does not take its parameter from serving the cognitive demands of the spirit of the age. Each essential thinker inevitably confronts the task of creating, inventing his eccentric path through which he invents himself: not only concepts to hammer with, but also laughter, madness, ecstasy and outbursts of wit. Nietzsche is perhaps the most fascinating example of such eccentricity through which thinking, through the step back, welcomes the immemorial presencing of presence. Therefore Nietzsche envisions his own philosophical contemplation as untimely. There is something in philosophy that is not completely assimilable to the spiritual demands of a passing historical epoch. In each contemporary historical epoch, philosophical thinking introduces the moment of an interval, caesura, an excess, a pause that makes itself non-contemporaneous with its age. This in turn calls forth another notion of historicity and epochal break that cannot be recounted in the conventional narrative practices of the historical periodization, simply because it opens us to the immemorial promise of presence that has already always escaped from all memory and all immanence of self-presence. In so far as philosophical thinking welcomes the event of presencing itself, it must thereby call forth the very problematic of history anew, for it is time and again confronted with the question: what is relationship of the event of existence, of truth and love with the event of history itself? This inevitable and essential question of the philosophical thinking demands that this thinking is not to presuppose and accept this presupposition as sovereign measure of truth the ontological intelligibility, the telos of knowledge and the cognitive demands of the age. Each historical epoch, as it has its own cognitive demand, so has its own parameter to test the timeliness of each cultural product which passes away once the epochal demands become obsolete. Without renouncing the demands of the current spiritual- historical epochit is necessary, as is said by Hegel that each one should read the daily newspapersit is also necessary, outside such demands that are often imposed upon a thinker, to rescue from the vast sea of cultural-historical products moments of utopian elements that exceed each historical epoch. Such is the truly universal moment in historical specificity peculiar to that epoch which is the truly historical moment that not yet historicized. To rescue the moments of wonder from the banality of dead, lifeless

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

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

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

Dark is his solitary path where non-knowledge suddenly flashes up like lightning and sounds like thunders. This imminent undecidable, or this undecidable imminence of the event, whose arrival is irreducible to the logical march of a historical necessity, cannot be incorporated into the homogenous, universal history. At best what a poet-thinker thinker can do is to wander, at fits and starts,

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

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Its truth is shown in the movement of the leap itself, and not outside of it. Such a philosophical thinking can be called existential thinking since it is concerned less with the cognition of the given world at cognitive disposal, but with the value and sense of existence itself.

Notes on this Work

This work, while it has never abandoned the necessity of a systematic presentation (which is a different question than system), has remained incomplete, un-accomplished. The conclusion could not be reached, and the path of thought, instead of leading to some kind of result through a progressive, linear movement, rather opened up ever new, multitudinous paths, to ever new books to come, to future books which will perhaps never be written, which can never be written. What is fascinating that when one sets to work on a book, or that one has given a certain form, it summons in its dream other books which will never be written, which could not be written, which could never have been written: impossible books, books that have already always erased itself from all actuality. All books seem to share this same fate: they give the dream of other books which will never be written, and for that matter will never exist. They are the books of pure potentiality, the pure possibility. One may call them dream books not only in the sense that one only dreams them, but in the sense, more importantly, that they dream us, they dream in us, they send us to dream them. Each book which one has just begun, or that one has just given a certain form, is only a dream of a never book where a movement of thinking which threatens to become interminable will finally be reposed, and will have a Sabbath. But such a book, since it is a never book, is never written and as a result, like our existence, no book ever attains completion and accomplishment. All book is unfinished, uncompleted, not because it will be completed one day or another, but that it is already always uncompleted and unfinished; yet precisely this opens us to the future of the book as such, of each and every book which is always to come. The book to come which will never come to pass away is not only the occasion of an infinite distress for the writer, but also the very occasion of its joy and festivity that there will always be books, albeit always incomplete and already unfinished. Each book arises out of this melancholy of

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the immemorial that dreams give us, but for that matter, it is also the moment of the structural opening of each book that we write, each being a failed book, uncompleted and unfinished book, especially those books that we write putting our very existence at stake, where we allow our own existence to write its own dreams, those infinite and interminable dreams that never cease coming toward us, whether we asleep or awake, haunting us, infinitely murmuring within us, within the eardrum of our soul. These are the dreams that keep vigilance on us while we are asleep, dreams of books which willnot so much will enclose our existence in them, butbe one with our existence so that dream and existence can become one, when a plenitude will be reached where our being fulfils itself, and then, only a silence would follow, by erasing this book, each and every book, from all memory and traces. The completion of the book which fulfils itself in this co-incidence of being and its dreams, of the book and existence, will be that book that will result in the cancellation of that book or erasure of that book from all monumentality and memorial traces. The future of that book that dreams within us is to attain the nobook, which like silence fulfilling and completing language, will be a book of silence, not because the book will not speak anymore, nor that there is nothing more to speak, for the book has now said the essential absolutely, without remainder. When such a book will come, each and every word of it will become citable: Erst der erlsten Menschheit ist ihre vergangenheit in jedem ihre Momente zitierbar geworden . Jeder ihrer gelebten Augenblicke wird zu einer citation a lordre du jourwelcher Tag eben der jgste ist (Benjamin 1977, p.252). Let us translate these words of Benjamin: only a redeemed mankind receives the plenitude of its past, that is to say, only for a redeemed mankind its past becomes citable in all its moments. Each moment it lives becomes a citation a lordre du jourthat day is Judgement day. In each book that we write and that sees the light of the day, another book or rather a never- book invisibly, in the nocturnal depth of the night, writes itself. Each visible book is only a partial fulfilment of that invisible book: the task of writing is to open each and every book to its invisible other book which is always to come, a promise is given in the immemorial past, which for that matter exceeds each and every book. It is the Idea of the book itself.

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This work is neither an exegesis nor a commentary on any thinker. If philosophy is understood to be objective cognition of the world, then this work does not even merit being a work of philosophy. Instead this peculiar work in which the existentiality of the writers existence is involved, does not claim to bear the status of objective, anymore than the subjective cognition of the world. It is rather the question of the value and sense of existence that this work is concerned with. The writer who raises the question of the sense and value of existence rather than the question of the cognition of the objective world, cannot but ask the question regarding the relation between the writer and writing itself, which is the following: what happens to the I who bears a proper name, supposing Hegel, or Kant, in so far as the writer I seems to have become, precisely by virtue of the linguistic-thinking exercise called philosophy, something other than the empirical, this specific, unique individual bearing a proper name calling itself I? It is as if philosophical writing already in advance tempers the one who says I with mortality, so that one who philosophizes no longer remains the being to appropriate his own existence, so that displacing his proper name mortality enables something else to emerge, which is the event of thinking. The philosopher is nothing but the site of event of thinking that bears, henceforth, its own singular signature of its coming into presence. Henceforth mortality will temper each draft of thinking with its own invisible signature, displacing and de-centring the subject philosopher from any possibility of appropriation, abandoning him to the pure spacing of the event, which is singular and universal at the same time. In this sense to write is to render oneself non-proper, not actively, but in passivity beyond being active and being passive. This pure passivity is the spacing that abandoning the philosopherwriter to the space of death calls forth the event of thinking to come to presence. Therefore this I, who writes this pronoun I, is only the name of the nameless, the non-propriety of the proper, only the appearing of the unapparent, the manifestation of a nonmanifestationwhich is the event of thinking coming to presence. Therefore the writer knows, with this peculiar knowledge that is bestowed by mortality itself, that what he is attempting to say is

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

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that presences itself as an immemorial presencing before and beyond being, before and beyond knowledge. To poetize thinking is to make open that space, from the heart of thinking, that reveals the gift of the immemorial and also the arriving of the wholly otherwise, the incalculable advents of the unthought: of what is not yet human truth and not yet human time. This manuscript could not be a Book. Perhaps the age of the Book is over. One no longer writes Book as such these days, not at least in Hegelian sense of the Book. This poet writer, who cherished for long time to write a book, has realized that his thoughts, coming towards him, refuse by their own accord to be collected and gathered into the unity of a book where a single logical train of thinking, a programmatic thesis or hypothesis arrive into a gathering point of unity. It is not that the writer has a planned and accomplished a failed book; it is rather otherwise. This (non)work is in fact born out of despair. Each time (are innumerable times) groundwork for this work have been prepared, each time it is found frustratingly unsatisfactory, so that this project is condemned to ever new attempt from beginning again and again, progressing only to a certain point that brings its own reversal, dissolution and perishing. This is a book of disaster, and not a book of completion. Therefore this work does not know the song of Hegelian Owl of Minerva which sings only at the dawn. At best, this work is better be seen as becoming in dissolution (Hlderlin 1988, pp. 96-100), or coming in perishing; which is the unworking or undoing that carries the ashes of Semele which the God Dionysus has reduced her to. Instead of being able to be tarrying with the fire which is the energy of thinking that Hegel (1998, p. 19) speaks of that is able to be tarrying with the negative, it is the dissolution to ashes that this book has become in perishing. Therefore the dream of the book is renounced forever, for it is the character of thinking to arrive only by introducing its own interval, or moments of suspension that refuse a unitary centre. Instead of the book singing the song of the Owl, this manuscript only presents discontinuous, repetitive attempts of ever new beginning, ever new embarking into new voyages of thinking. Provisionally we shall name this as constellation, or configuration thinking: discontinuous, nonidentical thinking where thinking not being able to achieve systemic unity, fragments and repeats itself. It presents as stories of multiple

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voyages, none of them is accomplished, but everything is condemned to ashes. As such this work, in each of its pages, is bearing the agonal marks of this essential failure. Yet in this worklessness of a death, a death that refuses to work for the empty Universal, writing spaces itself open to the arriving of the Other. Each thinker who has undertaken, even once, such a voyage that seeks what is beyond, the unknown and has experienced within him this fragility of thinking, its essential powerlessness that henceforth pervades his existence with a certain mournfulness, as if thinking itself mourns itself in him. There is something essential fragility in all thinking, barely a breath that faints away, especially when it aspires and ventures to essential thinking. This fragility is such as to resemble what Hegel calls beauty without strength that cannot maintain itself in the face of death (Ibid.). Yet the fragile suffering has about it something demonic which hardly can even attain to language. Language of this suffering is almost to the point of muteness only by a breath. This suffering in writing renders the philosopher, as Socrates gives it a name, demonic. Suffering either elevates one beyond the common humanity, or throws us below where there no pearl shines. Henceforth he is destined to carry this mournfulness at the depth of his existence, incommunicable to any other mortals for to others he will only appear as that uncouth monster whose language falls below signification or meaning. The figure of the thinker, which is non-figure par excellence, is the figure of a monster, or demon. Socrates knew something of this experience himself and carried this demon as an ever lasting companion. The thinker must carry, in his fragility and non-power, the monstrosity of the unthought, to which his thought cannot attain to, in which thoughts founder and falter. The monstrosity of the unthought renders the thinker as Aristotle speaks of him no longer belonging to either completely to the human order, nor to the divine order, for he is the open space where the immemorial appears that does not yet properly belong to the order of the human. Or, one can speak like Nietzsche of this monstrous figure of the philosopher as both animal and God together: to love alone one must be an animal or a godsays Aristotle. There is yet a third case: one must be botha philosopher (Nietzsche 1968, p. 23). Like Oedipus who in his blindness is exposed to the excess, the thinker is the eternally exiled one, homeless and abandoned, eating his heart out, banished

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both by the divine order and the human order. This non-humanity of the thinker, this monstrosity of the poet-voyager, whose humanity is robbed by the strange sea and the uncanny manifestation of the sky, he is that strange coupling of the animal and the divine, possessed by the excess, and seized by the divine madness (Plato 2001, pp.111198). By belonging neither to the human, nor to divine, he is fated to carry that monstrous passion, the passion of the unthought that transforms his whole existence so that his whole existence may become the site of the open where the unapparent makes itself manifest and the immemorial presences in his stammering tongue. The name of the thinker, the proper name of a thinker is none but what the unthought transforms him into, so that out of this peril of his being he may welcome the immemorial and the unapparent. A thinker is a metamorphosis of the unthought. Thinking that is pursued in the pathway of thought is already always tempered with the unthought and the immemorial. If mortality itself is that which exceeds each time any concept that mortals give to it, this mortality adheres in the innermost ground of the thinking called philosophical. Why to think if the unthought does not transform the thinker? Is not the whole purpose of painting lies in that the painting transforms the painter herself? Writing by condemning the writer to the point of a demonic suffering also frees him from death, at the instant of death, and opens him to the advent of another time. Writing is the movement spacing of space and timing timethat traverses through the being of the writer, a movement that he cannot appropriate as constitutive of his self-presence or subjectivity, but that dispropriates him in advances, disowns him and abandons him. But this nonappropriation, this intrinsic finitude of the writer is also the promise of another time, a wholly otherwise of time. This is the time that heralds the arrival of the wholly otherwise, which is not this or that particular mode of time, but timing of time, the spacing open of time where time itself arrives, grows, ripens. The movement of writing is An awaiting, in distress and in hope, when the fugitive Gods have abandoned the world, for the advent of another inception, and another inauguration when history itself momentarily stands still. Writing is this caesural interval between ending and another beginning. In this distress of the interval, an advent of the otherwise is announced and the promise of another coming is renewed, silently,

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when the day of History is exhausted and the dusk of the night has just begun. The movement of writing is this nocturnal movement outside the completion of history which unites, in a monstrous coupling mortality and the advent of the coming dawn, the immemorial promise and its redemptive fulfilment. The monstrosity of writing bears this immemorial promise of the advent. In the writings of an epoch, the whole epoch writes itself. But more essential writing is more it speaks what could not have belonged to that epoch, the excess of that epoch, the immemorial promise of that epochthe missed fulfilment, the departed gift, the erased hope and the forgotten dreams. Each epoch has its own logic of movement, and this logic excludes what it cannot incorporate. More essential writing is, more essential is poeticizing and thinking, more it speaks the ruins of history and the limit of that epoch. Philosophical writing, because it seeks the essential and not merely ephemeral and fashionable, is the writing at the limit of the world. More this mortality seizes the movement of writing of an epoch with trembling and fear, more it announces the advent of the outside, at the limit of that epoch, namely, its break or discontinuity which, on that event, does not completely belong to it. This question of a time always to come was already haunting in my mind as a thought not yet thought when I was a post doctoral fellow at University of Marc Bloch in Strasbourg, France, working on my post Doc manuscript which was then called Travail of Mourning: Finitude and Intimation of Melancholy. However this question did not then arrive in the above mentioned formulation and articulation, but remained as a not-yet-thought in the thought of finitude that I was trying to elaborate at that time. What, then, I understood as finitude is nothing other than the in-finite movement of un-working the solidified, sedimented artifice of metaphysics, a finitude that is intimated with the more originary melancholy that refuses to be work, to be production of self-consciousness, subjectivity, ego that recuperates its own loss in order to arrive at its self-presence, in a manner of Odysseus voyage. It was a question of thinking an originary melancholy that is outside the metaphysics of Subjectivity and work. The travail of mourning is this worklessness, ruination rather than work, or effectuation of self-consciousness. In this manner, I wanted

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

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

Epilogue

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

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to itself, of senses awakening from itself to itself, of senses coming to light from the slumber of sensuous indulgence. This writing allows itself to work, as a work of sense and a labour of Concept that presents itself to itself in a kind of self-originary presentation. Nothing precedes this self-originary work, since it begins with itself alone and originates with itself as (self ) sense-presentation to itself, and also nothing follows ititself being the first and the last -- it thereby writes its own pre-face and post-face in which its pre-face and post-face coincides in a co that is immanent to itself. It has the copula of judgement that joins in an immanent manner, while disjoining, the pre and the post. To think it in its intrinsic relation to time, this is writing that persists in the temporality of pre, the middle, and the post (or Subject, the Copula and Predicate), the writing that is Now presents itself simultaneously in the non-simultaneities of various nows, the Now that presents itself as non-now in various nows (by setting itself into variation of non-nows). The Now differs from itself, sets itself into variation and into non-simultaneity of non-nows and in that way, which is the ruse of the negative, it gathers into its selfpresent unity as unity of differences, or Now as unity of non-nows of differences. Since it is not the dead, life-less, mere formal unity (of mathematical truth, for example) but a speculative unity, this speculative writing is otherwise than the night where all cows are black, (Hegel 1998, p. 9) but presents itself as preserving in its unity of what is written as truth of the non-simul of nows, of differences that come to presence and disappear. What such a speculative writing looks like, which is otherwise than absolute night where all cows are black? Hegel (Ibid., pp. 59-60) asks us to write: Now is Night, which, in being written, is otherwise than the Day and Night, and is true even when it is no longer now the night, even when the now the moment it is written itself is lapsed and disappeared without return, for the written now, in so far it is written, is preserved in truth as the Same that now, even though the now itself has disappeared. To the extent that every now presents to itself as its own absence, that means, by becoming stale, waste, pure expenditure and demise of sense without return, it ruins the self-presence any memory of its own origin, it forgets to grasp that fainting murmur that has become

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outside the Now, it misses to sublate that cry outside speech and outside concept, as if the speculative Concept betrays itself. This is the great betrayal, the infidelity, the transgression of what presents itself as truth or knowledge. This cry betrays the Book, falls outside the Hegelian System, because it does not originate with the Book or the system and does not end with it eitherfor the Book in order to be something, to be itself must originate with itself and end with itself alone. Therefore the Book always presents itself as the Book of nothing, since it must begin with nothing (it must not presuppose anything, since any something has a beginning outside of itself ) and ends with nothing (since any something is not everything, since the systemif it is at all the system, must have everything within itself ). A peculiar result obtains here, which Schellings later philosophy articulates in its vehement critique of Hegelian attempt at the completion of the Book with the logical concept alone: in the Book nothing really is said, or written, the Book that claims to say everything and write everything and does not merely want to be the absolute where all cows are black, since the Book has neither past nor future, neither time not eternity. A system or the Book that claims to found itself on the basis of negativity alone, this Book itself has neither past nor future within it, neither something nor nothing within it. Everything is outside the Book and nothing is outside the Book: nothing occurs, happens in the Book because the Book itself must happen, must occur absolutely, completely without remainder, without leftover so that everything is leftover, everything is remained apart from the Book, outside the Book. This exhaustion or fatigue of the Book reduces the Book to its own negativity or nothingness, of its worklessness. This Book does not know time, nor it knows death and mourning, for in the Book nobody dies1, nobody writes, nobody mourns. A true mourning presupposes a non-appropriable transcendence, a time of the outside and time of the other beyond self-presence and beyond the self-originating unity of the Now. It is only in this sense mourning has relation to the Other and is true mourning, for mourning is always mourning for the Other, which is not preserved in the unity of a selffoundational ground, or in the unity of a speculative Now. It is in this sense alone mourning has a relation to a past forever inappropriable and a future beyond calculation; it is in this sense writing has a relation to a dying that is

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outside the sense of presence and its presence of sense, that does not preserve the truth of nows in being written Now as Now is Night. Not being able to work, not being work, writing is exposed to the utter abandonment of mourning, inconsolable mourning, infinite mourning, and interminable mourning. This infinite finitude of dying is an infinite departure without return, an immeasurable disappearing without speech and voice. Writing: the murmur of the departed, the foundering of speech, the stammering fainting of the elapsed. There is a writing that presents itself as sense of disaster and there is a writing, which no one writes, is otherwise than sense, that introduces, in the sense of disaster, a disaster of sense: disaster of sense and not sense of disaster, even though disaster of sense is that from which sense as such, even the sense of disaster emerges. This is the most abysmal origin of sense, origin outside of sense and hence without origin (since sense must present to itself its origin as sense). Schelling calls this origin groundlessness (Abgrund), or abyss that gives the possibility of anything like ground at all and therefore cannot itself in turn be grounded or recuperated in the immanence of a speculative concept. The transcendence of the groundless, exceeding any self-presence, extends and lengthens time itself to infinity, of what Schelling the eternal past or the darkness of the past which dialectical-historical memory cannot trace back to another self-presence. Levinas calls this time before as immemorial past, past that has never been present, that has never been a selfpresence, beyond the closure of the Book, abandoning the book to its fatigue, to its wearing away of itself or tearing away of itself beyond repair, or its unworking in an already time outside time. There is something like mourning in all works and in all writingswriting that constitutes the Book and writing outside the Book: the disaster of mourning from which Socrates the pure thinker of the West, the philosopher who does not write, protects himself by driving away the mourned women for whom Socrates is the other, the other who does not return in the immortality of hope, in the hope of the immortality of soul so that inconsolable mourning traverses whom the death of the other affects beyond any measure. As if there occurs two deaths in Phaedo: death of oneself, who is Socrates himself, for

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

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nows, so that in this non-returned and non-conserved dying of the Other, time is lengthened to infinity and also differed to the infinite passivity of patience, which is the patience of infinity itself. It is the non-negative finitude of the Other that is affection, finitude which is neither the accomplishment of the end nor the annihilation of the once-lived. In Saying affection4 affects, or the death of the other affects, and introduces in me a disquietude, an inconsolable mourning. Levinas speaks of this affection as disquietude of the nonin-difference in the Same. Would not it then a mourning already always and in a time yet to come affect Saying and all Said, bestowing in our speech, in our action, in our existence an infinite responsibility to the other, to the death of the other? The dialectical-historical task of constituting the universal world order on the basis of the labour of the negative and on the basis of the power of death that converts even non-being into being will, then, be insufficient. The labour of the negativity that we perform in our mouth swallowing the water or in cutting the head of a cabbage,5 and in the tarrying with the negative6 which of all must be the most terrible, this power of death is opened, in an ethical responsibility, to the utter passivity, to the dying of the other, to a death which is the patience of time. If Levinas calls this patience of time diachrony, mourning would be the affection of this diachrony, or rather diachrony is that which affects us as mourning for the Other. It is a gift without presence, beyond the simul of self-presence, beyond the labour and power of the concept. Gift without presence and without measure! Presence measures itself in the equivalences of nows into Now and measure, being measure (which is its being), assumes the time of presence, since only measure can be present and can be presented and since only presence can be measured. In the measure of presence and in this presence of measure, negativity effectuates its production where everything is exchangedof being passing into nothing and nothing passing into being (Hegel 1975, p.134)where, in pain and as logos, is produced the world and the Book. Remember Heideggers bringing to our notice the innermost connection of pain and logos in the labour of the negative as the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics (Heidegger 1959).But in giving gifts to the Other, where gift is none

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other than the giving, now would not exchange with all other nows and hence is without the Now that is sublation of the nows. A gift without salvation, without Aufhebung in the measurelessness of its giving, renouncing ones hunger for the dying of the destitute other, destitute dying! There is something like mournfulness, in the destitute dying without solace, in all giving and in renouncing; its a sadness without nostalgia for lost presence, without me assuming power or force, without the prerogatives of law: the patience of Saying, the fatigue of writing! Between Levinas (if we are allowed to say that Levinas is the speaker of the patience of Saying) and Blanchot (if we are allowed to say that Blanchot as writer of the fatigue of writing): mourning beyond measure would separate them from each other, gift would call them to each other into proximity. Between Levinas and Blanchot: time without temporality, the excess of exteriority, the interval of interruption. Yet is not it that language primarily presents itself as work of death, in being capable of death so as to be capable of language, in being capable of language so as to be able to diein other wordsso as to be able to be, to be able to maintain what is not maintainable, to preserve that which annihilates, to make appear and present what disappears so that this impotence of nothingness itself brings to birth what is is, the universal Being in general (Hegel 1998, p.60)? Death, the impossibility par excellence, would then assume the source and origin of all possibilities as the power of non-power: the possibility of impossibility that Heidegger speaks of. With this Hegelian philosophy attempts, in the most concentrated form of a system, to extract from death the possibility of something like possibility at all, the possibility of being and world, of history and time. Through nothingness, as nothingness of Hegel, the dead Hegel is resurrected in the readers Sunday reading so as Hegel not be mere corpse prey to the unconscious appetite (Ibid., p. 271) of the elemental or the arrested fetish of sense. Writingthe pyramid of Hegel, the nothingness of Hegelis also the possibility of Easter Sunday which writing undertakes on his behalf as the work of death, the fulfilment and completion of the Book, the accomplishment of sense and its desire. Death of Hegel would, then, be the possibility of a Hegel who is born out of his nothingness, born out of his ashes

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once again, re-born in the readers reading his Book . But fatigue the disaster of sensetraversing the Book, abandons the Book to the without Book. This is mourning for the dead Hegel who would not return and is not resurrected in the readers reading, the Good Friday not redeemed in Good Sunday. This is Hegel ravaged by thought whose writing is only the wrinkles on Hegels face, his infinite fatigue that is borne in patience. This patience would not be recounted in the Book, in the System, but outside the Books restless negativity, outside its jurisdiction and outside its force. Blanchots writing: writing that, in the name of the proper name Blanchot, in the naming the disappearing of the I, would name excessively or too little of Blanchot, writing that disappears without return, without resurrecting in the readers reading so that infinite mourning traversing the Book, would not constitute the Book. Mourning for the departed who is not preserved, who has become the he without return, disaster without work, dying without possibility, even the possibility of impossibilitiesimpossible mourning, that is writing. Between Hegel and BlanchotLazarus dead and resurrected; Lazarus dead without returnwriting traverses without crossing, or rather crossing that is to be crossed once again, that means, infinite times. Infinite crossing which is impossibility of crossing! The impossible traversal of writing, or the impossible transgression not recuperated in the speculative concept, for writing, in not being able to take charge of transgression against the law, does not even posit its nonpositing as transgressive. Let us say that law posits itself as work of death. All law founds itself, posits itself as an act of negation and presupposes violence which is the violence of positing. The Book, which is the totality of sense, gathered by the labour and the pain of the negative, always appears as the Book of law. Hegel knew something about this, about death as the supreme fulfilment of work7 which is the work of law: it is the empty sovereignty of law, force without sensible, signification without existence. Yet mourning, not being able to posit anything, even the positing of finitude, is the de-positing of the Book in passivity, and

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exceeding the violence of law, opens itself to justice, understood as depositing transcendence: Blanchot calls this non-power as writing and Levinas calls justice the non-related relation to the others finitude that is not posited but is patience and affection, which is the excess in death, as if death is not enough for the infinity of mourning, as if the diachrony of affection is not measured on the basis of death. Is not it then justice must pass through, is itself none but this passing through, writing? Or that writing, in traversing the Book, attracted by the outside, is justice, always mourned justice. It is not the justice as the joining of jointure, but disjointed response to the other without presence. In the work of mourning, it is not grief that works: grief keeps watch. (Blanchot 1995, p.51) A boy, adolescent, passes through the harvested field of an autumnal evening. The harvested, golden corns lie gathered here and there by the farmers who have left for home, and the birds, silently flying back home in the eternal sky, partake the anguish of the dying sun, and the sky itself, illumined by the last amber of the day, has grown mute. The boy came home, and since then, as if infinity of the days have passed and infinite times the sun has set, infinite times the birds have come home in autumnal evening in infinite numbers, and the boy too has passed his adolescence, his youth and his manhood and himself has become the evening Sun of the autumnal evening, his birds too have drunk the wine of youth and have now passed away silently in the sky. But what has happened that day, that evening in him outside himwith the sky, with the autumnal field and with birds -- have not stopped happening in him from then onwards, and has recurred incessantly, thenceforth, every evening the same evening coming and repeating with a repetition that is infinitely the same dying Sun, the same birds mute with anguish, the same harvested field of golden corn. Henceforth he has carried, without being able to, the impossible and unnameable: henceforth he speaks and names, incessantly that has become his obsession, only to speak one and the only thing that he would have liked to speak to others, the one and the only thing he would have liked to share with othersthat includes not only

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humans, but also animals and birds and with the elemental forces of natureto name to unnameable, to speak the unspeakable, to share the un-shareable enigma: the truth of a secret that he cannot bear, and that he bears it in this impossibility, in a patience of time from where time takes its patience. Henceforth he speaks, obsessively and incessantly, in an irremediable compulsion that comes from elsewhereand he speaks to the animals and birds, to the humans and to the silence and thunders of the skyspeaking everything so as not to speak the only essential he would like to speak, the single event that has happened without happening, the only and one important event of his life which he bore witness, and which he cannot testify. It has thenceforth grown silent within him more he spoke; it grew more solitary more he bonded with others; it grew more unnameable more he named all those around him: animals and birds, things and objects, humans and the divine. He has henceforth carried a secret of a distressed waiting which has deprived him of his selfhood, a self without self. Henceforth he is eternally on the way and his distress is the distress of the eternally awaiting one, the one who having to await has missed the name and the word, missed speech and its possibility, as if the secret whose solitude has no common with any commonality is born precisely at that moment when awaiting, born with it, gives speech for the first time its possibility, the possibility of a coming time, when the speech is not yet, speech yet to be born. It is the speech of the one, the eternally awaiting one, who is yet to be born. It is awaiting for birth and revelation, for manifestation and opening. Henceforth he speaks everything with everyone, but silence grew with every speech, and in every speech there resonated that humming of that distant world, nearer than anyone and more distant than anything, there resonated that melancholy of the Sun and the tears of the golden corns, as if what has befallen on him, without happening anything this and that, outside time is none but the melancholy of speech itself, the melancholy of the name. Even if, supposing the time of writing is none other than Now that seeks to incorporate what has become stale when one writes, Now is night, the Now that is the eternal immobility of the coming and disappearing of every nows; then reading, yet to take place, would not

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come to pass, but would affirm the future of reading, which means, the impossibility of reading. This reading, this future would not, then, belong to the possibility of impossibilities. To read Hegel, impossible each time, each time the singular and singularly interrupting would be to read him outside the Book, outside the system. Hegels his face ravaged by the labour of thinking, as one of his students recalls his face, would then belong to a future of reading outside his own system, outside his own Book. This exhaustion, this fatigue not yet exhausted in an accomplished time, would not be thought within Hegels own system of a certain Hegel, the Hegel bearing anonymous name of the Book. In that sense, the name of Hegel would be outside all names, through which names pass through without return, as if in every naming finitude of the named is announced each time, and thereby marking and effacing the mark that marks the effacement of time. Let us remember the early Hegel who not yet having arrived at the system, suffers the melancholia that threatens to lose the grasp of entirety of his existence altogether, which is sought to be suppressed, suspended, surpassed in the System. Yet the same mourning affects his friend Hlderlin without measure which could not be suspended or suppressed in the system: inconsolable mourning for an absent origin outside thought, the violence of the elements which as if Apollo strikes him (Hlderlin 1988a, p.152). Yet mourning not being yet recounted in the system in an accomplished time, would contaminate the system without striking anything and anyone in particular, introducing the unworking of disaster without destroying anything, tearing the work and exposing to the limitless that would not have limit as its limit to actualize itself. This disaster would strike everything and everyone, every sense and every element in the system, dispersed, so that nothing is salvaged, saved and resurrected intact, so that the Book, losing its centre, would allow itself to be hollowed out, not to be able to say anything, not to be able to do anything. The powerlessness of the Book: the face of Hegel ravaged by the passion of thinking. To think is to mourn: in thinking we mourn everything that is finite, fragile and fainting without recall. Ruin of words, demise writing, faintness faintly murmuring: what remains without remains (the fragmentary). (Blanchot 1995, p.33) Not to think of time on the basis of death, which is, not to think of

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in-finity of patience on the basis of either negativity in the production of sense, the sense of History, or on the basis of nothingness in the being-towards-death: this is what we have learnt to think from Emmanuel Levinas. But the other death, the dying of the other, from which time takes patience, irreducible to negativity or nothingness in annihilation or decomposition is the infinite patience which is otherwise than retention or protention, otherwise than intentionality that has the measure as the measure.8 It is more ancient than any memory and more future than any anticipation. Such a patience unsays the Said so that Saying overflows sense and Said: the surplus of Saying, the surplus of mourning. Writing too, dying in not able to die, as if death is not enough of dyingthe non-accomplished fatigue of writingwould not cease dying in the accomplished death. Such is writing, the measureless that is the limit without limitations, which is, the measurelessness of the limits that would not have limitations as its measure. Yet, is not it that Blanchot invites us to think measure itself as the limit9? Measure which is the limit without limitations, would not have negativity as its limits in Being-there-and-then10, measure in which nothing is actualized, the non-posited measure of limits and the non-posited limits of measure; it is the measure that measures nothing, the non-measured measure, measure that is non-measure. So it is limit, limit that is not posited, that would not have any determined, accomplished limit as its limit, the non-limited limit of measure that would not have measure as its limit. Writing: the non-measured measure, the non-limited limits. What then remains between Saying and writing, on the dying of the other when mourning is not measured on the basis of death? Should we call this non-contemporaneity between contemporaries friendship? Friendship calls them towards each other to proximity and separates each from the other. Between friends: gift to the other in mourning, the gift of mourning. The World is not the totality of self and others, the totality of being and the beings of others, but rather the world is a gift, non-totalized and out of finitude, insofar as the world is finite, insofar as gift is singular each time.

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How to think the gift of the name that announces the finitude of the named and the name itself, insofar as finitude is not reducible to negativity of the Concept and Sense? There is, as it were, a note of melancholy that adheres our finite existence, which also intimates the gift that is given to other. In the sadness in renouncing the claim to possess the world for ones own possibility, even if it is possibility of impossibilities that Heidegger speaks of, there lies nobility. It is the intimation of a noble joy, because it affirms the joy of future. Each time one speaks, or better, each time language is spoken in one, there is opening of time to come, there is freeing time from the seizure of present, from the closure of positing. Language is not primordially auto-positing time of negativity, but an address to the coming one. The other is not posited in my address but is addressed towards, a towards which is not a calculable anticipation, but an incalculable time that remains. Language has this profound relationship with future, with coming, with time that remains, more primordially than time of negativity and its pure positing work of death. Each time language is addressed to the other, each time opening to time to come, each time there is Hope for the coming, Hope that redeems time from the closure of self-presence, from the seizure of self-present. Hope redeems time and opens to transcendence. It opens to Love, beyond the self-positing of the negativity of the mere not not. The time of evil, deprived of the time of the remains, does not know redemption. Evil is destruction of Hope, Hope that bursts forth each time one opens her lips. Evil is the refusal to know the ecstatic temporality of non-posited past that murmurs in the lament of language at its limit; it is the refusal to know the incessant demand of ecstatic finitude that time itself must be renewed each time in each presence as revelation of the non-posited past. The impossible experience of mourning for the other is to be transfigured into the messianic hope for coming of the other, into a redemptive affirmation. The task of the presence is the one of renewal: mourned renewal of the unredeemed past. This alone defines the nature of work of the dialectical-historical world. Work is no longer to be seen as the recuperative labour of memory of what has been, but remembrance of the never present and renewal of hope yet to arrive. Together they do

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not constitute die homogene und leere Zeit, the homogenous and empty time (Benjamin 1977, p.258), but rather the constellation of temporalities, marked by unredeemed melancholy for the past and the messianic hope for the future. They are connected, by that manner separated, by discontinuous abyss of temporality where times are joined disjointedly whose condition of jointure remains outside. Schelling asks us to think the event of temporality as cut, cision, dehiscence (die Scheidung), which is also de-cision, of presence. This makes time itself ecstatic, beyond any closure of the dialecticalhistorical time, whose ground lies ecstatically in an eternal outside, the unposited past and whose freedom ecstatically lies eternally ahead intimated in prophecy. Between them the decision of presence separates and thereby connects them, making temporalization itself into a passage of one to the other, past into future, melancholy into redemptive fulfilment. The heterogeneity of the ecstatic outside inhabits the self-presence of any world-historical destiny. These singular ecstasies are not particular instants subsumable to the empty universal time of the Concept where each birth monotonously passes into the other in a linear succession. Rather each birth is a surprise; each birth is a new hope and a renewal of time; each birth is an inauguration of ever new time, an ecstasy of finitude born out of the abyss of freedom. Joy is transfiguration of sorrow. According to Schelling, all transfiguration is an ecstatic decision, a cision and an overcoming. Unlike God who posits himself in an indissoluble ground, so that eternal past, eternal present and eternal future are an indissoluble unity, the finite being is the one whom totality excludes, for whom unity of time is only a never-actualized whole without totality. This finitude also makes his freedom ecstatic, abysmal and yet joyous. Man is this contradiction, this rupture, this cision, this disjoined jointure who accomplishes unity in a piecemeal fashion as assemblage. Gods unity is indissoluble, mans unity is assemblage. This assemblage of singular ecstasies of temporalities is irreducible to the uniformity of the homogenous empty time. By emptying out of these ecstatic singularities of temporalities to the homogeneity of the empty succession of concepts, the dominant metaphysics also deprives language its ecstasies, its bursting revelation out of finitude,

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its surprise of origin. As such, this dominant metaphysics, which has its highest accomplishment in dialectical-speculative onto-theo-logy, remains without language and without promise It remains without the thinking for the advent that enables for the coming to come and enables one to open to what remains to come. The onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics in its dialecticalspeculative form remains without language. Or rather it remains the metaphysics of the one who refuses to speak. He pursues the dream of an autochthonous mythical speech which is addressed to no one, speech without hope and without language. The time of this mythical speech is the homogeneity of empty time. Such a speech lacks the ecstasy of finite existence that each time ecstatically exceeds all insistence in self-presence. The non-posited existence of the there, the never-to-sublated of the already past and equally non-posited of what remains cannot be thought as mere not-not of the negativity. Hope is the hope for redemption. This alone redeems the melancholy by opening to a time yet to arrive, outside the anxiety of our beingtowards-death, and beyond the possibility of impossibility of having ones time. Beyond anticipation, hope is the hope for having forever, eternally, the time that remains for the other: not -- possibility, impossibility, or even possibility of impossibility of having ones time. Anxiety does not redeem time, it only ecstatically keeps open to a possibility of not having possibility any more, which means, keeps open to a possibility of not being open any more, to a possibility of not having to be anxious any more. Hope is otherwise: it is opened to the possibility of an infinite opening for what is remaining to come. Only in relation to hope anxiety is meaningful, or anxiety is only de-limitation of hope. Anxiety partakes as anticipatable in the nonanticipatable time of coming of hope. Hope is beyond anticipation; it does not have the immanence and certainty of the any moment of anxiety over death. In hope time is released from the grasp of presence for the arriving. This redemption alone is the relation to the infinite for the finite being which has its resonance of prayer. Man addresses himself to the infinite in prayer. The dialectical-speculative spirit, ever imprisoned in the closure of labour and memory, ever imprisoned in the historical fate that does not know its ecstatic outside, the morose

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time, does not know prayer, nor does it know the task of renewal and revelation. The disjunction that resonates in the songs of prayer, the disjunction between anticipatable and non-anticipatable coming, this disjunction permeates our prayer with an unspeakable note of mourning. In all prayer is there a note of mourning and also a note of hope. In prayer the mourned soul is opened to hope for redemption. As finite, existence is that is always being-towards-death (Heidegger 1962). The very first cry of the new born reveals anew the truth of the last; the beginning announces its end. Who can take away from the mortals the hope and fear of this truth, let alone philosophy that seeks to be the infinite discourse, capable of reaching the Absolute, for it fear of death being only the vanity of the mortals? Thu begins Rosenzweigs critique of philosophy, his meditations on birth and death, on love that is as strong as death and the eternal future of redemption. To be finished is mortal, but to be mortal is also to remain open to eternity that is always to come. This alone makes hope meaningful for the mortals. Therefore Absolute knowledge which is attained mere negatively as a logical becoming remains inconsolable for a being whose existence consists in his being-towards-death. To comenot this or that coming but the event of coming itself: this is the highest thought of promise and hope that philosophical thinking that attempts to think the unconditioned, can aspire to. The Principle of Hope with which Ernst Bloch names this principle, the unconditioned principle of philosophical thinking par excellence, is the highest principle of philosophy. It is with hope that philosophys passion of origin begins and in whose messianic, redemptive fulfilment lays philosophys eternal dream. This eternal hope for the event of remnant cannot be thought on the basis of predication, finality and result, but rather is the incalculable arrival of the wholly otherwise, which is always to come. The principle of hopebecause such a principle endows upon philosophy its unconditional taskwhile it gives sense to our ethicopolitical tasks, it cannot be made itself into the principle of this or that immanent, conditioned, self-consuming politics or ethics . What is thought with this principle of hope is a principle without

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arch and without telos. It is the name of pure transcendence, pure potentiality of taking place, and the event of arrival that cannot be nominalized, substantialized, or predicated. It is a principle that withdrawing from all apparitions gives sense to apparition, i.e. makes apparition possible.

 Notes

PROLOGUE
Franz Rosenzweig speaks of the silence of the tragic hero of the mythical world: The hero as such as to succumb only because his demise entitles him to the supreme heroization, to wit, the most closed-off selfication of his self. He yearns for this solitude of demise, because there is no greater solitude than this. Accordingly, the hero does not actually die after all. Death only cuts him off, as it were, from the temporal features of individuality. Character transmitted into heroic self is immortal. For him, eternity was just good enough to echo his silence (Rosenzweig 1971, pp. 78-79).
1

PART I CONFIGURATIONS The Open

1 Gnter Figal, following Heidegger, calls this play space of the open as freedom, where freedom is no longer understood as a capacity of the human endowed with free will, but on the basis of the originary play space on the basis of which any activity of the human is at all carried out (Figal 1998). 2 Here polis is no longer understood in its juridico legislative determination as city state, but in a more originary manner, as mortal existents more originary opening to each other. 3 Martin Heidegger in his 1942-43 lectures on Parmenides thinks the open, in an essential relation to Parmenides essential word Aletheia, as the self-disclosing advent of Being to being that maintains a simultaneous closure of Being. This simultaneous non-simultaneity of the open that initiates the inception, or beginning, is the very timing of time or coming on the basis of which man founds his history, his politics

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and ethics. The essential task, at the exhaustion of certain metaphysics, is to release (Gelassenheit), to free unto that ungrounded alethaic opening so that historical man gives himself the task of the inception anew, that means, to renew the promise of the inception. Indeed, historical man, says, Heidegger, in so far as he is, always belongs within the bestowal of Being. Man, and only he, constantly sees into the open, in the sense of the free, by which the it is liberates each being to itself and on the basis of this liberation looks at man in his guardianship of the open. Although man and only he constantly sees in the open, i.e., encounters beings in the free of Being, in order to be struck by them, yet he is not thereby entitled to bring Being itself explicitly into its own most, i.e., to being it into the open (the free), i.e., to poetize Being, to think it, and say it.(p. 151). No doubt for Heidegger this historical people has remained to be the Germans. This historical people called German humanity, who are the most metaphysical people are called upon to sacrifice themselves in this poetizing task of sacrifice for the sake of preservation of the truth of Being: The highest form of suffering is dying ones death as a sacrifice for the preservation of the truth of Being. This sacrifice is the purest experience of the voice of Being. What if German humanity which, like the Greek, is called upon to poetize and think, and what if this German humanity must first preserve the voice of Being... Thus what if the voice of the beginning should announce itself in our historical destiny? (Heidegger 1992, p. 167). In this way, Heideggers crypto-politics of disclosure has remained, even till the end of his career, even after his dissociation from Nazi politics, intimately bounded up withat the least obvious levela certain historical, metaphysical vision of the German humanity who is called upon to sacrifice on this purest task of poetizing and renewing the promise of inception, or the inception of promise itself, like the Greek. Veronique Fti (1992) in her book Heidegger and the Poets painstaking brings out Heideggers crypto-politics of the Open, especially in the chapter of the book that she devotes to Heideggers reading of Rilke. The very promise of Heideggers philosophical thinking that has sought to open up thinking outside the reductive totalization inherent in modern technology is immediately clouded by the archaic historical-metaphysical vision of a certain arch-crypto-political poetology. This present writer, acutely aware of the danger of this crypto politics, seeks to rescue the promise of the Open without the historical-metaphysical vision of Heidegger, and thereby reading Heidegger, to a great extent, against Heidegger.
4

We never come to thoughts; they come to us, Heidegger writes in The Thinker

as Poet. (Heidegger 2001, p. 6) 5 Hegel writes in Phenomenology of Spirit, (1) I point out the Now, and it is asserted to be the truth. I point it out, however, as something that has been, or as something that has been superseded; I set aside the first truth.(2) I now assert as the second truth that it has been, that it is superseded.(3) But what has been, is not; I set aside the second truth, its having been, its super session, and thereby negate the negation of the Now, and thus return to the first assertion, that the Now is. The Now, and pointing out the Now, are so constituted that neither the one nor the other is something immediate and simple, but a movement which contains various moments. A This is posited; but it is rather an other that is posited, or the This is superseded; and this otherness, or the setting aside of the first, is itself in turn set aside,

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and so has returned into the first. However, this first, thus reflected into itself, is not exactly the same as it was to begin with, viz., something immediate; on the contrary, on the contrary, it is something that is reflected into itself, or a simple entity which, in its otherness, remains what it is: a Now which is an absolute plurality of Nows The pointing-out of the Now is itself the movement which expresses what Now is in truth, viz., a result, or a plurality of Nows all taken together; and pointing-out is the experience of learning that Now is a universal. (Hegel 1998, pp. 63-64) 6 Hegel writes in Philosophy of Nature: The dimensions of time, present, future, and past, are the becoming of externality as such, and the resolution of it into the differences of being as passing over into nothing, and of nothing as passing over into being. The immediate vanishing of these differences into singularity is the present as Now which, as singularity, is exclusive of the other moments, and yet at the same time completely continuous in them, and is only this vanishing of its being into nothing and of nothing into its Being. (Hegel 1970,p. 37) 7 Schelling (1975) says in a letter after the death of Caroline: I now need friends who are not strangers to the real seriousness of pain and who feel that the single right and happy state of the soul is the divine mourning in which all earthly pain in immersed.

Judgement and History

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

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lips that opens. Scheidung has the connotation of opening or coming, which is at once separation and disjunction. (Das 2008, p. 176)

The Logic of Origin

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

Language and Death

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

Part II The Lightning Flash Language of the Mortals

1

I have translated this paragraph as follows: `Beginthat is something else than

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'Inception. A new weather condition, for example, begins with a storm; its inception is, however, is the transformation in advance, the complete transformation of air conditions . Beginning is each time with which something arises; inception that, from which something erupts (springs forth). The world war incepted on centuries ago in the spiritual-political history of the West. The world war began propound positioning. The beginning is left immediately; it disappears in the continuation of the happening. The inception, the origin, comes to appearance as fore-shining and is fully there first of all only at its end. 2 For Heideggers critique of Husserls notion of categorical intuition, I refer to Heideggers seminars in Le Thor (Heidegger 2003). 3 For an illuminating discussion on Kierkegaards notion of language and languages relation to death, I refer to Geoffrey A. Hale (2002, pp. 73-108). 4 That death cannot be reduced to any programmatic projection of being, insofar as death is not mere nothingness but the unknown and hence is irreducible to any ontological mastery or thematization: this thought runs throughout Emmanuel Levinas works. I refer to Levinas extraordinary lectures on God, Death and Time (Levinas 2000). In his early work Time and the Other, Levinas speaks, The end of mastery indicates that we have assumed existing in such a way that an event can happen to us that we no longer assume, not even in the way we assume events because we are always immersed in the empirical worldthrough vision. An event happens to us without our having absolutely anything a priori, without our being able to have the least project, as one says today. Death is the impossibility of having a project (Levinas 1987, p. 74).

Pain
Jacques Derrida, among contemporary philosophers, is most attentive to this (non)phenomenon of originary mourning for an immemorial origin that has never been present, a mourning that is inextricably tied up with gift that always comes from the others, and with the proper name that is always given by the others which, for that matter, can never be appropriated by me in the name of self-presence. For the relationship of gift and the proper name with the originary mourning that escapes the econo-onto-thanatological determination of the metaphysics of presence, see my article on Derrida (Das 2010). 2 Ernst Blochs great work The Principle of Hope pursues, in a grand visionary manner, this messianic thought of affirmation that is given in our hope for future.
1

Apollos Lightning Strike

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

Part Three Event The Irreducible Remainder

1 The time of freedom cannot be reduced to the Self-presence of the Subject, but it is a time, in certain sense, outside time, which is the time of the beginning of time itself each time anew. In his Freedom essay, Schelling writes, Man, even though born in time, is nonetheless a creature of creations beginning. The act which determines mans life in time does not itself belong in time but in eternity. Moreover it does not precede life in time but occurs throughout time (untouched by it) as an act eternal by its own nature. Through it mans life extends to the beginning of creation, since by means of it he is also more than creature, free and himself eternal beginning (Ibid., pp. 63-4) 2 See Hlderlins Judgement and Being (1988). For an illuminating discussion of Hlderlins relation to the Speculative Idealism, I refer to Lacoue-Labarthes The Caesura of the Speculative (1998)

Part IV Messianicity
1 I refer here to Dana Hollanders remarkable discussion of Derridas notion of exemplarity, see (Hollander 2008) 2 For Rosenzweigs distinction of the qualitative infinitude of messianic intensity of time from the quantitative infinitude of the historical time, I refer to Stphane Moss The Angel of History (2009). 3 Rosenzweig writes: This constant increase is the form of permanence in love, in that and because it is the most extreme non-permanence and its fidelity is devoted solely to the present, singular moment: from the deepest infidelity and from this alone, it can thus become permanent fidelity; for only the non-permanence of the moment renders it capable of living every moment as new (Rosenzweig 2005, p. 176). 4 For love is completely active, completely personal, completely alive, completelyspeaking language; all true sentences issuing to it must be words that come from its mouth, words brought forth by the I. This one sentence alone, saying it is as strong as death, is an exception (Ibid., p. 217). 5 The proper name denominates him who is singular without genus. Rosenzweig writes: In places of articles, there appears the immediate determination of the proper name. With the call of the proper name, the world of Revelation enters into a real dialoguethat which has its own name can no longer be a thing or everyones thing; it is incapable of being entirely dissolved into the genus, for there is no genus to which it could belong; it is its own genus unto itself. It no longer has its place

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in the world, or its moment in the becoming; rather it carried with it its here and now; the place where it is a center and the moment where it opens its mouth is a beginning (Ibid., p. 201). 6 The Jewish people, says Rosenzweig, stands outside the worldby living the eternal peace, it stands outside of a warlike temporality ; by resting at the goal that it anticipates in hope, it is separated from the march of those who draw near to it in the toil of the centuries (Ibid., p. 351). 7 Levinas writes: The age of philosophy is one in which philosophy is revealed on the lips of the philosophersThe end of philosophy is not the return to the age in which it has not begun, in which one was able not to philosophize; the end of philosophy is the beginning of an age in which everything is philosophy, because philosophy is not revealed through philosophers (Levinas 1990, p. 185, Italics the authors). Levinas carries on: The end of philosophy The movement that led to the liberation of man enslaves man within the system which he builds. In the State and nationalisms, in the socialist statism that emerges from philosophy, the individual experiences the necessity of philosophical totality as a totalitarian tyranny (Ibid., p. 186).

EPILOGUE Fragments
1 One is here reminded of Franz Rosenzweigs beginning note on his The Star of Redemption: philosophys disavowal of death in its very claim to presuppose nothing so that the poisonous sting of death must not bite anyone anymore, so that in the quietnesseven if the restlessness of negativity initiates movement, it reposes in this very restlessness not to have to presuppose anythingfor it promises eternity of the Concept, as the very accomplishment of the System, in the very annulling of the singular, for only singular is mortal and solitary. For indeed, an All would not die and nothing would die in the All. Only the singular can die and everything mortal is solitary. Philosophy has to rid the world of what is singular, and this undoing of the Aught is also the reason why it has to be idealistic. For idealism, with the denial of everything that distinguishes the singular from the All, is the tool of the philosophers trade. With it, philosophy continues to work over the recalcitrant material until the latter finally offers no more resistance to the smoke screen of the one-and-all concept. If once all were woven into this mist, death would indeed be swallowed up, if not into the eternal triumph, at least into the one and universal night of the Nought. And it is the ultimate conclusion of this doctrine that death isNought (Rosenzweig 1971, p.4). 2 Death concerns us by its nonsense, says Emmanuel Levinas (2000, p.21). If death concerns us by its nonsense, it is because in death, which is the very patience, there is the risk of nonsense, which is the nonsense of patience, of passivity that is patience. Levinas says, If patience has a meaning as inevitable is obligation, this meaning becomes sufficiency and institution if there is not beneath it a glimmer of nonsense. It is therefore necessary that there be on the egoity of the I the risk of a

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nonsense, a madness. If this risk were not there, then patience would have a status, it would lose its passivity (Ibid., p.20). 3 Levinas says, death is a point from which time takes all its patience; this expectation that escapes its own intentionality qua expectation; this patience and length of time, as the proverb says, where patience is like the emphasis of passivity death understood as the patience of time. Ibid., pp. 7-8. 4 Affection in mourning the dying of the Other without return affects us inconsolably beyond knowledge, certitude and excess of every consolation. Levinas says, as if there were an excess in death. It is a simple passage, a simple departure and yet a source of emotion contrary to every effort at consolation. (Levinas 2000, p. 9) 5 Hegel writes of the negativity of death as the terrible work of absolute freedom, the sole work and deed of universal freedom is therefore death, a death too which has no inner significance or filling, for what is negated is the empty point of absolutely free self. It is thus the coldest and meanest of all deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water. (Hegel 1998, p. 360) 6 Spirit is the power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being (Ibid., p.19). 7 Death is the fulfilment and the supreme work which the individual as such undertakes on its behalf (Ibid., p.270). 8 Levinas says of intentionality and its measure, Intentionality preserves the identity of the Same; it is thinking according to its measure, a thinking conceived on the modal of the representation of what is given, a noetic-noematic correlation. But being affected by death is affectivity, passivity, a being affected by the beyond measure, an affection of the present by the non-present (Levinas 2000, pp.1415). 9 To think the measure is to think at the limit (Blanchot 1992, p. 39). 10 In Being-there-and-then, the negation is still directly one with the Being, and this negation is what we call a Limit (Boundary). A thing is what it is, only in and by reason of its limit. We cannot therefore regard the limit as only external to being which then and there. It rather goes through and through the whole of such existence (Hegel 1975, p. 136).

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, One Way Street, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: NLB., 1979). , ber den Begriff der Geschichte in Illuminationen, (Frankfort: Sukhramp, 1977), pp. 251-261. Blanchot, Maurice, The Instant of My Death, with Jacques Derridas Demure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2000). , The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995). , The Athenaeum in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 351-359. , The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992). , La Communaut Inavouable, (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1983). Bloch, Ernst, The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony A. Nassar (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). , The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1995 & 1986), Vol. 1. , The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1995a), Vol. 3. Chrtien, Jean-Louis, The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For, trans. Jeffrey Bloechl (Fordham: Fordham University Press, 2002). Das, Saitya Brata, (Dis)Figures of Death: Taking the Side of Derrida, Taking the Side of Death in Derrida Today (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 3: 1, pp. 1-20. , The Open in Kritike (http://www.kritike.org/journal/issue_6/das_ december2009.pdf ) , Wholly Otherwise, Journal for Cultural Research, (London: Routledge, 2008), 12:2,176. , The Melancholic Name in Journal for Cultural Research (London: Routledge, 2007), 11:2, pp. 111-123. Dastur, Francoise Telling Time: Sketch of a Phenomenological Chrono-logy, trans. Edward Bullard (London& New Brunswick, N J, 2000). Derrida, Jacques, Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). , On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Simon Critchley and Richard Kearney (London: Routledge, 2001). , Monolingualism of the Other or Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1998).

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 Index

Adorno, Theodor 261 Aristotle 28, 93, 120, 124, 151, 197, 238, 259, 350, 373 Benjamin, Walter 8, 15, 20, 53, 124, 13941, 149, 154, 157, 161, 169, 170, 19495, 2068, 214, 2179, 2379, 2423, 2467, 310, 313, 3179, 321, 3234, 3289, 336, 343, 349, 351, 369, 377 On Language as Such and on the Language of Man 208, 217 The Life of Students 351 The Origin of German Tragic Drama 139, 238 Blanchot, Maurice 381, 3879, 392 Bloch, Ernst 6, 35, 39, 90, 186, 255, 375, 377, 396 Chrtien, Jean-Louis 24, 28, 61 The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For 24, 61 Das, Saitya Brata 142, 198 Dastur, Francoise 46 Derrida, Jacques 12, 14, 174, 270, 288, 3068, 314, 322, 337 On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness 270 Onto-Theology of National Humanism 306 Hamann, J.G. 211 Hegel, G.W.F. 10, 20, 34, 435, 50, 547, 613, 658, 70, 72, 78,

99100, 1035, 111, 11921, 1256, 1378, 151, 157, 161, 163, 166, 1779, 192, 214, 2389, 2413, 257, 25960, 263, 265, 273, 314, 3245, 3567, 363, 365, 370, 3723, 3812, 3878, 391 Heidegger, Martin 5, 811, 146, 19, 24, 278, 35, 42, 6871, 81, 85, 878, 90, 107, 1123, 117, 119, 129, 133, 1424, 14653, 156, 1614, 169, 179, 185, 19091, 1969, 2012, 2045, 208, 212, 227, 2326, 24042, 244, 2567, 262, 269, 276, 278, 2879, 291 300, 302, 344, 3534, 35960, 377, 3867, 393 Being and Time 8, 24, 117, 142, 164, 208, 240, 292, 299, 359 The Question of Being 179 Hlderlin, Friedrich 15, 267, 35, 446, 83, 90, 92, 115, 127, 147, 162, 182, 184, 196, 201, 203, 2067, 21011, 281, 294, 300, 377, 391 Jacobson, Eric 329 Kierkegaard, Sren 21, 35, 43, 91, 99, 103, 109, 114, 1167, 157, 165, 168, 1714, 1845, 236, 302, 377 Lacan, Jacques 212 Levinas, Emmanuel 51, 534, 311, 315, 3334, 3557, 381, 3847, 389, 392

416

T H E P RO M I S E O F T I M E

Marx, Karl 95 Moss, Stphane 329 The Angel of History 329 Nancy, Jean Luc 82, 2612 The Experience of Freedom 261 Nietzsche, Friedrich 68, 105, 1134, 120, 122, 150, 214, 343, 363, 3657, 373 Plato 19, 27, 42, 106, 108, 190, 2434, 2478, 259, 302, 3434, 346, 3489, 3513, 357, 366, 374, 385 Rosenzweig, Franz 11, 14, 22, 356, 43, 98, 100, 110, 119, 130, 1346, 138, 140, 1523, 156, 158, 1678, 1912, 194, 205, 214, 233, 2356, 248, 257, 3056, 30810, 312, 31439, 377, 396 The Star of Redemption 22, 35, 43, 130, 134, 136, 167, 214, 308, 3145, 317, 330, 339 Schelling, F. W. J. Von 10, 11, 23, 267, 33, 35, 41, 43, 45, 49, 6770, 73, 77, 79, 83, 94, 967, 101, 103, 1056, 125, 128, 138, 150, 152, 1568, 161, 166, 168, 1824, 19091, 194, 203, 205, 212, 21421, 227, 229, 2323, 2356, 248, 2513, 257, 25960, 2628, 2714, 27687, 289, 300301, 321, 344, 362, 377, 3834, 394 Philosophical Investigations into the Nature of Human Freedom 69, 2167, 221, 263, 267 The Ages of the World 23, 69, 150, 233, 25960, 277 Schmitt, Carl 123 Socrates 2446, 344, 34651, 354, 364, 373, 3845

Actuality 10, 26, 32, 58, 645, 6870, 734, 77, 101, 105, 115, 125, 138, 168, 179, 183, 216, 218, 221, 227, 229, 232, 234, 244, 254, 280, 2834, 286, 368, 371

pure 26, 77, 227, 229, 232, 234, 254, 283 Causality 2534, 2647, 26970, 2734, 277, 279, 2912, 2956, 298300 problematic of 295, 296, 299 Configuration 1, 14, 168, 35, 37, 40, 45, 69, 102, 107, 110, 112, 1315, 13944, 1468, 15056, 220, 253, 257, 25960, 272, 2756, 282, 288, 3157, 362, 372 Death 1, 67, 112, 18, 212, 24, 27, 2930, 32, 34, 3940, 428, 523, 5660, 645, 68, 78, 8081, 92, 95, 99101, 103, 1124, 1194, 12732, 1368, 1545, 158, 1625, 16774, 1768, 180, 1825, 189 92, 194, 199, 2037, 216, 219, 243, 2478, 280, 292, 294, 309, 315, 320, 322, 3256, 328, 335, 344, 3547, 361, 364, 367, 370, 3734, 381, 3839, 3913, 3956 negativity of 22, 29, 40, 45, 132, 356 Erotic 343, 34853 Event 1, 511, 17, 19, 22, 24, 3031, 346, 4047, 49, 51, 556, 5961, 6870, 74, 768, 82, 93, 1057, 1103, 117, 13034, 1379, 141 51, 154, 158, 161, 1639, 1713, 186, 188, 1914, 198, 2034, 20814, 221, 223, 22544, 24653, 2578, 26062, 2646, 27071, 2757, 27980, 282, 2869, 2913, 295302, 30510, 3135, 317, 31928, 330, 3345, 343, 3458, 3523, 35863, 3667, 37071, 3757, 385, 390, 394, 3967 Existence 1, 56, 811, 1936, 3942, 445, 47, 4950, 53, 57, 67, 70, 735, 7884, 867, 91, 93, 956, 989, 101, 1038, 1146, 120, 123, 1267, 12932, 134, 13640, 147, 150, 155, 158, 1648, 17071, 173, 18087, 189, 1912, 1945, 201, 205, 207, 211, 213, 2158, 222,

Index

417

225, 22733, 2367, 239, 241, 2434, 246, 24850, 253, 2556, 25860, 2623, 2659, 2719, 2814, 2879, 2918, 300, 302, 30910, 315, 320, 3346, 338, 3439, 3515, 35971, 3734, 377, 381, 386, 388, 391, 393, 3956 mortal 21, 29, 33, 50, 70, 745, 103, 106, 108, 1812, 185 Fate 212, 25, 28, 33, 101, 149, 225, 244, 273, 275, 309, 317, 320, 3223, 3256, 332, 368, 395 Finitude 1, 8, 11, 146, 1820, 22, 246, 2834, 36, 40, 42, 446, 4850, 56, 726, 789, 82, 84, 86, 95, 989, 101, 106, 1089, 113, 1156, 123, 12830, 132, 139, 141, 149, 156, 158, 161, 163, 1668, 170, 174, 1778, 180, 182, 184, 18691, 194, 196, 2045, 20910, 2156, 218, 221, 226, 230, 2367, 2412, 2447, 250, 2523, 256, 258, 2612, 2645, 2679, 277, 285, 2915, 297, 299, 315, 324, 332, 3558, 367, 3745, 377, 381, 3846, 3889, 3914 discontinuous 139 radical 11, 20, 26, 29, 323, 44, 98, 113, 167, 230, 264, 268 Freedom 22, 335, 39, 6976, 79, 826, 114, 117, 1289, 132, 136, 158, 183, 2147, 21921, 2336, 241, 251302, 323, 336, 359, 366, 381, 394 Gift 1, 56, 11, 135, 178, 20, 2233, 412, 44, 468, 50, 63, 73, 8082, 86, 8990, 925, 106, 108, 1112, 114, 120, 124, 12830, 139, 1534, 156, 158, 163, 166, 16971, 173, 1756, 178, 18084, 18890, 1934, 196200, 2089, 2159, 2212, 2523, 2568, 265, 267, 271, 274, 277, 2845, 287, 28990, 326, 338, 353, 3578, 367, 372, 3756, 381, 3857, 3923

melancholic 180 mournful 25 non-economic 41, 158 History 59, 12, 156, 2023, 25, 2932, 3972, 747, 79, 813, 85, 89, 92, 97, 102, 107, 109, 1112, 11622, 124, 129, 1334, 1412, 1578, 169, 1712, 1778, 182, 1858, 1924, 199, 2034, 207, 211, 21921, 2258, 23032, 2357, 241, 243, 2478, 250, 252, 2567, 265, 271, 291, 294, 297, 299, 305, 30710, 314, 31622, 324, 3269, 333, 3358, 345, 351, 3558, 363, 3657, 3746, 387, 392 dialectical 6061, 64, 169 logic of 44, 51, 568 speculative 44, 51, 578 universal 12, 31, 32, 458, 523, 567, 59, 62, 68, 107, 158, 1712, 177, 237, 248, 305, 318, 321, 324, 326, 3567, 3656 Judgement 8, 10, 30, 345, 434, 46, 489, 5160, 6973, 75, 77, 124, 1278, 139, 16970, 1723, 179, 182, 187, 195, 199, 207, 2145, 2189, 260, 266, 2747, 28081, 3178, 320, 3256, 360, 369, 382 apophantic 8, 35, 57, 274, 360 logical 34, 51 logic of 49, 51, 75, 266, 2757 notion of 6970 Language 1, 8, 12, 145, 179, 29, 30, 32, 35, 4041, 478, 82, 94, 100 101, 106, 110, 113, 117, 11932, 134, 139, 14750, 1534, 16178, 18082, 1838, 19096, 1989, 2034, 20622, 237, 239, 2458, 250, 252, 256, 287, 302, 3057, 310, 313, 3189, 3212, 3256, 328, 3346, 339, 3467, 352, 369, 373, 381, 387, 3935 conceptual 171, 2034, 206, 3467 gift of 12830, 139, 153, 163, 169,

418

T H E P RO M I S E O F T I M E

171, 18081, 196, 209, 2157, 219 originary 187 predicative 117, 187, 203 pre-predicative 187 pure 217, 2457, 250, 310, 319 Love 36, 85, 114, 1248, 150, 2115, 21720, 24354, 264, 2679, 271, 277, 284, 28990, 3056, 30814, 3178, 320, 3228, 33031, 333, 3378, 344, 34953, 363, 373, 393, 396 Madness 19, 72, 82, 845, 93, 958, 231, 250, 264, 301, 344, 363, 366, 374 Messianic 12, 329 Metaphysics 61, 79, 142, 198, 259, 293 Mortality 1, 112, 14, 16, 18, 2130, 32, 335, 4047, 59, 76, 7882, 845, 89, 91, 93, 95, 98101, 103, 1067, 1157, 123, 1289, 132, 147, 154, 158, 1614, 1668, 170, 176, 18085, 18991, 193, 2014, 2068, 216, 218, 220, 222, 230, 2356, 244, 247, 253, 258, 280, 315, 3545, 361, 364, 367, 370, 3745 pure facticity of 29 Mourning 123, 18, 267, 31, 45, 47, 49, 623, 65, 76, 81, 84, 92, 111, 181, 1926, 205, 2456, 301, 3756, 381, 3839, 3913, 396 Naming 145, 17, 30, 35, 4041, 478, 129, 132, 139, 141, 149, 154, 17071, 173, 177, 181, 192, 1947, 199, 20711, 2169, 221, 239, 246, 248, 256, 258, 286, 288, 301, 318, 327, 388, 391 Pain 27, 45, 54, 67, 989, 12021, 124, 163, 17481, 183, 193, 195, 198, 386, 388 Phenomenology 910, 134, 20, 43, 54, 567, 612, 83, 87, 90, 934, 108, 112, 121, 179, 2278, 255, 315, 325, 356, 360, 376

Potentiality 29, 34, 6970, 727, 80, 102, 1045, 1256, 1378, 168, 229, 232, 234, 237, 244, 259, 365, 368, 397 passion of 69, 73, 757 pure 29, 34, 70, 723, 80, 234, 365, 368, 397 Promise 57, 115, 189, 21, 23, 25, 27, 3033, 36, 4042, 44, 4750, 525, 5961, 667, 69, 734, 77, 7980, 82, 8790, 935, 97, 103, 109, 1114, 116, 124, 1267, 136, 139, 149, 153, 156, 158, 1613, 1689, 176, 180, 18494, 196, 1989, 206, 208, 21011, 214, 216, 219, 227, 239, 242, 2467, 24950, 252, 256, 284, 290, 305, 30811, 313, 31725, 32830, 332, 338, 352, 357, 363, 369, 371, 3747, 381, 385, 3956 Recollection 90, 1079, 1116, 1312, 152, 157, 1934 Redemption 1, 6, 11, 20, 22, 356, 423, 50, 667, 7983, 90, 923, 103, 107, 1124, 116, 12830, 132, 1346, 139, 1525, 1578, 167, 177, 180, 18694, 196, 1989, 206, 2112, 21422, 243, 249, 252, 2558, 264, 271, 2845, 306, 308, 310, 3145, 31720, 322, 326, 32933, 336, 339, 393, 3956 Remembrance 14, 18, 31, 39, 44, 4850, 9091, 103, 107, 112, 117, 132, 141, 145, 149, 153, 1934, 196, 199, 206, 208, 216, 21921, 2389, 241, 260, 302, 321, 393 Repetition 168, 49, 89, 99, 10817, 1314, 14041, 146, 156, 237, 2623, 266, 272, 274, 277, 280, 3078, 367, 389 Revelation 7, 23, 25, 34, 36, 3940, 47, 72, 109, 1256, 1289, 132, 1345, 141, 1456, 150, 152, 1545, 1823, 185, 193, 20920, 228, 231, 237, 239, 2478, 283, 287, 309,

Index

419

3145, 317, 31920, 32231, 333, 376, 390, 3934, 396 Time 5, 8, 24, 50, 117, 126, 142, 1534, 164, 205, 208, 2334, 240, 292, 299, 359 Transfinitude 156 Translation 3057, 30911, 313, 31822, 3245, 32830, 3323 exemplarity of 306 Truth 5, 78, 179, 234, 28, 51, 54, 56, 5860, 623, 65, 7072, 845, 934, 100, 10910, 113, 117, 1212, 124, 127, 135, 13940, 142, 1449, 1645, 2023, 212, 227, 22931, 234, 239, 242, 247, 2756, 281, 3012, 305, 31011, 314, 316, 31920, 322, 3289, 3439, 3525, 358, 360, 3623, 3658, 3712, 377, 3824, 390, 396 Violence 67, 135, 20, 25, 27, 41, 479, 514, 6061, 647, 789, 83, 92, 115, 124, 1278, 139, 141, 150, 158, 17880, 184, 187, 1917, 199, 2057, 214, 220, 236, 2389, 2434, 258, 275, 305, 3078, 310, 317, 32021, 323, 3267, 331, 3369, 343, 349, 351, 353, 357, 36061, 365, 3889, 391

divine 206 metaphysical 656, 79, 83, 206, 3379 Work 1, 11, 12, 14, 18, 21, 22, 25, 29, 32, 33, 34, 35, 44, 45, 46, 53, 57, 58, 59, 60, 63, 65, 70, 81, 109, 114, 130, 150, 169, 172, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 212, 213, 219, 231, 233, 234, 235, 247, 253, 259, 262, 264, 270, 271, 273, 289, 297, 301, 314, 320, 321, 322, 336, 337, 357, 358, 359, 361, 362, 368, 370, 371, 372, 373, 375, 377, 381, 382, 384, 385, 387, 388, 389, 391, 393 World 7, 224, 2836, 39, 41, 45, 478, 50, 67, 69, 778, 81, 85, 90, 936, 102, 106, 1145, 121, 123, 1256, 12930, 1357, 13940, 143, 1467, 150, 152, 163, 169, 1712, 1858, 1913, 1989, 21015, 2289, 231, 2334, 24350, 256 60, 262, 265, 268, 277, 282, 287, 2925, 300302, 3089, 313, 315, 3178, 32023, 325, 328, 33031, 333, 3359, 3434, 34750, 3545, 35860, 362, 3678, 370, 3746, 3867, 390, 3924 logic of the 28