With the World at Heart: Studies in the Secular Today [1 ed.] 022661753X, 9780226617534

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With the World at Heart

With the World at Heart Studies in the Secular Today t ho m as a . c a r l s o n

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2019 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2019 Printed in the United States of America 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19

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isbn-13: 978-0-226-61736-7 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-61753-4 (paper) isbn-13: 978-0-226-61767-1 (e-book) doi: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226617671.001.0001 The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the University of California, Santa Barbara, toward the publication of this book. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Carlson, Thomas A., author. Title: With the world at heart : studies in the secular today / Thomas A. Carlson. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2018037840 | isbn 9780226617367 (cloth : alk. paper) | isbn 9780226617534 (pbk. : alk. paper) | isbn 9780226617671 (e-book) Subjects: lcsh: Love. | Love—Religious aspects. | Grief—Religious aspects. | Augustine, of Hippo, Saint, 354 – 430. Classification: lcc bd436 .c375 2019 | ddc 205/.677— dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018037840 This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48 – 1992 (Permanence of Paper).

I dedicate this work, with love and gratitude, To my parents, Rosanne Lee Carlson and Joseph Carlson II To my children, Aura Lee Carlson and Frances Lee Carlson And to the memory of my brother Jay

1. We follow the dead to their graves and our long love follows on beyond, crying to them, not “Come back!” but merely “Wait!” In waking thoughts, in dreams we follow after, calling “Wait! Listen! I am older now. I know now how it was with you when you were old and I was only young. I am ready now to accompany you in your lonely fear.” And they go on, one by one, as one by one, we go as they have gone. 2. And yet are we not all gathered in this leftover love, this longing become the measure of a joy all mourners know, have known, and will know? An old man’s mind is a graveyard where the dead arise. wendell berry Sabbath Poem XII, 2000 For, when we love a place, we dwell there in the heart. augustine

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations of Main Texts Cited xi

Preview: The Demands of the Day

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1

When We Love— A Place: World’s End with Cormac McCarthy

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2

Mourning Places and Time in Augustine

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3

The Conversion of Time to the Time of Conversion: Augustine with Marion

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4 The Time of His Syllables: Dying Together with Derrida and Augustine

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5

110

Thinking Love and Mortality with Heidegger

6 World Loss or Heart Failure: Pedagogies of Estrangement in Harrison and Nancy

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7

164

Ages of Learning . . . the Secular Today with Emerson and Nietzsche

Last Look

197 Bibliography 211 Index 223

Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful to four friends, teachers all, not only for their exceptionally generous, insightful, and illuminating responses to drafts of this work, but also for the confidence, encouragement, and patience they have unfailingly offered me over the long haul: Mark C. Taylor, Jeffrey L. Kosky, Andrew Norris, and Roger Friedland. I express also my deep thanks to Alan Thomas and Randy Petilos at the University of Chicago Press for their longstanding support of my work; for their long patience in waiting for this piece of it; and for the enthusiasm and care with which they have yet again received it and brought it to the light of day. The Press’s two anonymous reviewers provided richly informed and genuinely thoughtful readings of the manuscript, and I thank them both for their constructive criticisms and suggestions. I am also grateful to Susan Olin for her attentive and expert copyediting work, which improved the manuscript considerably. For their valuable research assistance as well as engaging conversation in earlier stages of the project, I thank Steven Barrie-Anthony and Matthew Robertson; and for his generous help in preparing the manuscript and bibliography and creating the index, I thank Luke McCracken. A research grant from the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, afforded me a teaching leave for work on the project, and I happily acknowledge that generous assistance. The students of mine who have shaped and informed the paths of thinking I explore here are too numerous to mention by name, but I hope they know, each and all, how fortunate I feel to work with them and to learn from them. I am exceedingly thankful to acknowledge also, once more, Ashley Tidey, the teacher with whom I am lucky to live and learn each day, in the shared work, and joy, of parenting. It is only right that this book be dedicated

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acknowledgments

to our daughters and my parents together, as well as to the memory of my dear departed brother, for their love means the world to me.

* Portions of this book have appeared in previous contexts, which I gratefully acknowledge here. Chapter 1, “When We Love— A Place: World’s End with Cormac McCarthy,” is a revised version of what appeared originally as “With the World at Heart: Reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road with Augustine and Heidegger,” reprint permission granted by the University of Notre Dame, Religion and Literature 39, no. 3 (Autumn 2007). Chapter 5, “Thinking Love and Mortality with Heidegger,” is derived in part from an article published in Medieval Mystical Theology in 2012, “Notes on Love and Death in Augustine and Heidegger,” available online: https:// www.tandfonline.com /doi / abs/10.1558/mmt.v21i1.9. And brief sections in “Preview: The Demands of the Day,” and in chapter 5, “Thinking Love and Mortality with Heidegger,” derive from material, here revised and significantly resituated, that appeared previously in the essay “Secular Moods: Exploring Temporality and Affection with A Secular Age,” in Working with A Secular Age, edited by Florian Zemmin, Colin Jager, and Guido Vanheeswijck (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2016).

Abbreviations of Main Texts Cited

The following texts are cited parenthetically within the work. Augustine of Hippo C

TJ; PCC

Confessions of St. Augustine, with book and chapter number. I draw variously on the English translations of William Watts, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); of R. S. Pine-Coffin (New York: Penguin, 1961); and of F. J. Sheed (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2006). Latin citations are taken from Augustine, Confessionum Libri XIII, ed. Lucas Verheijen (Turnhout: Brepols, 1981). Tractates on the First Epistle of John, in The Fathers of the Church: Saint Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 112 – 24, trans. John Rettig (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1995). Tractate and section numbers are followed by page number of this English translation. Latin citations, given by column number, come from J. P. Migne, Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina 35 (Paris, 1841). Jacques Derrida

CF

“Circumfession,” with English pagination and period number, followed by French page number. In Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Jacques Derrida, “Circonfession,” in Jacques Derrida (Paris: Seuil, 1991).

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abbreviations of main texts cited

Ralph Waldo Emerson E

“Experience,” Emerson’s Essays: First and Second Series Complete in One Volume, intro. Irwin Edman (New York: Harper and Row, 1926, 1951). Martin Heidegger

PRL; GA 60

BT; SZ

GA 20 GA 83 WPF; WD

The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, in Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, ed. Matthias Jung, Thomas Regehly, and Claudius Strube (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1995), vol. 60. Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1962); Sein und Zeit, Sechzehnte Auflage (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1986). Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, in Gesamtausgabe II. Abteilung: Vorlesungen 1923 – 1944, vol. 20. Seminare Platon-Aristoteles-Augustinus, in Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2012), vol. 83. “What Are Poets For?” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971); “Wozu Dichter?” in Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1950). Jean-Luc Marion

ALS; ISP

Au lieu de soi: L’approche de Saint Augustin (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2008); In the Self ’s Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012); some translations modified. Cormac McCarthy

R

The Road (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006).

abbreviations of main texts cited

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Jean-Luc Nancy A

INT

Adoration: The Deconstruction of Christianity 2, trans. John McKeane (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013); Adoration: Déconstruction du christianisme, 2 (Paris: Galilée, 2010). “L’Intrus,” in Corpus, trans. Richard Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008); originally L’intrus (Paris: Galilée, 2000). Friedrich Nietzsche

SE

“Schopenhauer as Educator,” in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); “Schopenhauer als Erzieher,” in Nietzsche Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Dritte Abteilung (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1972), vol. 1.

Preview: The Demands of the Day

Attempting, for some time now, to write a study of love and mortal temporality that I felt might contribute to discourse concerning the nature of secular experience today, I find myself having written a set of texts that are also at bottom about education. An opening question for the study I anticipated, emerging in and through my previous book The Indiscrete Image: Infinitude and Creation of the Human (2008), was twofold: how might we understand, and experience, the creative roles played by love in opening and sustaining the mortal worlds we inherit, build, inhabit, and pass on; and, reciprocally, what constructive roles do those worlds play in making possible the possibilities of our love? The modern and contemporary thinkers who have proved most compelling to me on these questions surrounding love and our temporal worlds, it turns out, link that question recurrently— and in the end, I think, inextricably— to reflection on the intentions, practices, and consequences of teaching and learning. The question, then, of a love that turns secular, because given to world and time, will prove near its core to be a question also about the experience of education and its relation to the day— the day both in the sense of our present time or age and in the sense of everyday life and its demands in such an age. In retrospect, the question of education shows itself to be already operative within the analysis of experience that framed the explorations of time, language, and desire that I carried out in Indiscretion: Finitude and the Naming of God (1999), which constitutes the first element within a trio whose third part unfolds in the following pages. Taking up from within contemporary post-Heideggerian debate (most notably between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion) the question of whether and how the Christian, and more specifically pseudo-Dionysian, traditions of “negative” or “apophatic” and

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“mystical” theology might be understood as “ontotheological,” Indiscretion comes to draw a contrast between, on the one hand, the existential construal of temporality in Martin Heidegger, the thinker who identifies and elucidates the essence of ontotheology in order to think beyond it, and, on the other hand, the dialectical conception of time in G. W. F. Hegel, the thinker who, for Heidegger, brings the ontotheology of Western Christian tradition to its fullest and most powerful positive expression. Focusing on the question of experience (Erfahrung) in Hegel, or more precisely on the question of a philosophical “science of the experience of consciousness” (the title Hegel first gave to his Phenomenology of Spirit), Heidegger helps us to understand that time for Hegel consists most fundamentally in the existence of the concept that has not yet comprehended itself. As Hegel puts it in the last pages of his Phenomenology of Spirit, which treat “Absolute Knowing,” “time is the concept itself that is there [der da ist] and which presents itself [sich . . . vorstellt] to consciousness as empty intuition; for this reason spirit necessarily appears in time and it appears in time just so long as it has not grasped its pure concept, i.e. has not annulled [tilgt] time.”1 According to that definition of time, the essential work of temporal experience is to educate consciousness to its own concept such that consciousness eventually conceives itself fully and thus fulfills the purpose, or achieves the goal, of its own education; in other words, it completes a necessary movement, from natural consciousness to real knowledge, along a road on which, as Hegel puts it in his introduction to The Phenomenology of Spirit, “the sequence of shapes through which consciousness passes . . . is the detailed history of consciousness’ own education [Bildung] to the level of science.”2 Within such a teleological consummation of temporal experience, the work of time is, in some deep sense, finally and fully realized, and the self-difference of consciousness that Hegel understands to drive time is overcome: human consciousness is reconciled with itself in the self-consciousness of absolute knowing, and its world-historical alienation is thereby resolved. This construal of time undergirds Hegel’s conception of human experience, especially in its world-historical dimensions, as driven and structured by the struggle of human spirit to overcome its alienation both in relation 1. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 487 (translation modified); Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Wolfgang Bonsiepen and Reinhard Heede, in Gesammelte Werke (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1980), 9:429. For a fuller discussion of this understanding of time, see my Indiscretion: Finitude and the Naming of God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), “The Temporal Experience of Consciousness: Hegel’s Difference of Consciousness and Heidegger’s Ontological Difference,” 59 – 63. 2. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 50; Phänomenologie des Geistes, 56.

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to the realm of nature, in which scientific rationality will finally see nothing alien to itself, and in relation to the realm of spirit itself, where likewise even the most extreme forms of apparent otherness, difference, or negativity— such as that of God, or death—finally serve as a path through which human spirit finds a reflection, and realization, of itself. The teleological version of history to which this conception of time is essential understands that history as nothing less than the world-historical education of human thought to its own self-comprehension, an education that by necessity does achieve its goal. The religious expression of this educational process as Hegel understands it reaches its fullness (and its paradigmatic status for Hegel) in the Christian, and more specifically Augustinian, conception of divine providence, according to which the apparent deviations of humanity from God’s intention for humanity— in other words, the negativity of sin in which humanity differs from, or stands at odds with, itself because it turns away from, and stands at odds with, God— in fact serve God’s providential plan that history shall educate humanity back to God and thus back to itself, in this way making use of time in order to achieve the eternal. As Augustine puts it in The City of God against the Pagans (bk. 10, chap. 14) while discussing the subjection of all things to God’s providence, “the right education [recta eruditio] of that part of the human race which consists of the people of God has, like that of a single man, advanced through certain epochs or, as it were, ages [per quosdam articulos temporum tamquam aetatum profecit accessibus], so that it might rise from temporal to eternal things, and from the visible to the invisible.”3 While in Hegel’s concept of experience the (self-) education of consciousness to its full self-consciousness means that experience for Hegel effectively catches up with itself, finally overcoming the self-difference that structures and drives the time of experience, Heidegger’s analysis of the primordial temporality that conditions our finite, and inescapably mortal, Being-in-theworld signals, on my reading, the senses in which the temporality of experience disallows any such consummation of time, or any such overcoming of self-difference. Existing always already as “having-been” and, simultaneously, as ever still yet “to be,” I temporalize my Being-in-the-world, as Dasein, in such a way that I can neither get “behind” or “before” my having-been so as to initiate, control, or contain it; nor ever “catch up” with my to-be, so as to take hold of it in some fully present and finally delimited actuality. In sum, in my temporal, and constitutive, self-difference, I can never stand before 3. Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans 10.14, trans. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Latin text in Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 47 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1955).

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or after myself, and I can therefore never experience, still less comprehend, the actuality of my Being in any consummate plenitude. By contrast to the overcoming of time’s “not yet” in Hegel’s teleological conception, the “not yet” of existential temporality in Heidegger remains insuperable. Dasein exists as the ever self-differing “between” of a having-been and a to-be that are constituted in and through each other, and that both remain, thanks to that reciprocal constitution, essentially open and ongoing, themselves recurrently differing from themselves. It is just this self-difference— mortal in its natality and natal in its mortality—that remains insurmountable in a way that the “difference of consciousness” in Hegelian thought does not. And if that difference of Heidegger from Hegel on the question of temporal difference entails also a thinking beyond Hegel’s ontotheology, Indiscretion conjectures, then perhaps we can read the traditions of negative theology to resist ontotheology in ways analogous to those in which our mortal self-difference resists the consummation and closure of experience in Hegel. We might then consider an “apophatic analogy” between the logic of our Being-toward-God in the traditions of mystical and negative theology and the logic of our Being-toward-death in the existential phenomenology of Heideggerian tradition: in both cases, the possibility of my thinking and language orients me fundamentally in relation to that which thought and language can never bring experientially into the presence of an actuality or the actuality of any presence. Along thanatological as well as theological lines, Indiscretion suggests, our experience of unknowing and impossibility can be in fact generous, or generative: spurring poetic imagination, or indeed giving the ground and condition of creativity itself. A work that opens with questions relating to negative or mystical theology thus leads to a field of reflection concerning negative or mystical anthropology and its potential bearing on the nature of human creativity— the latter taken up, in turn, by The Indiscrete Image: Infinitude and Creation of the Human.4 Building on Indiscretion, The Indiscrete Image sets ground for the present study by tracing lines both of traditional theological and of modern theoretical thinking that link— in strikingly similar ways— human indetermination and unknowing to human creative capacity. From mystical theological conceptions of the human as the incomprehensible image of an incomprehensible God within the traditions of Gregory of Nyssa, John-Scotus Eriugena, Nicholas of Cusa, and Pico della Mirandola; through evolutionary understandings of the human as neotenic in the lineage of Louis Bolk, Georges 4. Thomas A. Carlson, The Indiscrete Image: Infinitude and Creation of the Human (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

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Lapassade, and Stephen J. Gould; to more recent theorizations of human creativity developed, in light of technoscientific postmodernity, by thinkers such as Michel Serres, Mark C. Taylor, and N. Katherine Hayles; one finds an image of the human according to which its relatively unfixed, indeterminate, and hence incomprehensible character yields— by both demanding and allowing— human creativity, and thus change, which in turn feed back into our human indetermination and unknowing. The human as creative creature, and indeed as inherently world-building, has been a central figure in the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries for the humanities broadly and for the field of religious studies more narrowly. Even more pointedly, it has been a central figure in those areas of religious studies and related fields pertaining to the question of “secularization,” from the influential sociological work of Peter Berger to a later study such as Marcel Gauchet’s Disenchantment of the World.5 In his influential and (despite the numerous debunkings and dismissals, including his own) still relevant treatment of secularization in his 1967 study The Sacred Canopy, for example, Peter Berger draws explicitly on neotenic theory in light of philosophers like Hegel, Marx, Max Scheler, and Heidegger to argue that the distinctively human, sociocultural enterprise of world-building stems from the human’s biological incompletion and its lack of fixed instinctual program— from the fact that humans, by contrast to other mammals, are born effectively premature and thus are “curiously ‘unfinished’ at birth.”6 Such prematurity and incompletion place the human, temporally speaking, in delay with respect to itself; coming into the world too early, or “ahead” of itself, in the sense that it is not yet quite finished, the human turns creative in an effort to “catch up” with itself, an effort whose movement remains endless and direction unfixed. “The condition of the human organism in the world is thus characterized by a built-in instability,” Berger writes in the opening pages of The Sacred Canopy. “Man does not have a given relationship to the world. He must ongoingly establish a relationship with it. The same instability marks man’s relationship to his own body. In a curious way, man is ‘out of balance’ with himself. He cannot rest within himself, but must continuously come to terms with himself by expressing himself.”7 Articulating here in biological and social terms an understanding of the human that comes close to what Heidegger signals

5. Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), published originally in French in 1985 as Le désenchantement du monde (Paris: Gallimard, 1985). 6. Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 4. 7. Berger, 6.

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ontologically in his claim (which served as epigraph for The Indiscrete Image) that “man is that inability to remain and is yet unable to leave his place,”8 Berger goes on to highlight the temporal character of this “balancing act” between the human and its world, according to which “man is constantly in the process of ‘catching up with himself.’ It is in this process that man produces a world.”9 An ever-unfinished world, then, reflects, in and through its ongoing creation, the indetermination of its always unfinished creator. As I emphasized in The Indiscrete Image, and as Berger highlights in the dialectic of world-building that informs his theory of secularization, the unfinished character of the human and the human world— which are each open to ongoing re-creation in and through the other— makes of the human a being who requires, and allows, ongoing social and cultural formation. From this perspective, the human is, to the core, a creature of education, a student from premature beginning to never wholly accomplished end. Insofar as the human is born without having, or knowing, a given program or path, these remain ever to be invented and cultivated, recurrently to be learned and recurrently to be taught. Attentiveness to the constructive role of the human subject in opening a world, and in setting the conditions of our engagement with the world, predates modern sociology, no doubt, and is a central theme in modern philosophy at least since Immanuel Kant (if not already a figure like Nicholas of Cusa). Resistance to such a construal of the human subject, both in the modern philosophy that Kant represents and in the human sciences adopting similar principles, has been a hallmark of contemporary thought in the lineage of Heidegger, and especially among thinkers significantly informed, as was Heidegger himself, by forms of religious thought and existence developed in the traditions of Paul, Augustine, and Dionysius that shape the late antique, medieval, and early modern worlds. Among contemporary thinkers, the work of Jean-Luc Marion stands out in this regard, having emerged and developed as it did, along both phenomenological and theological lines, in fairly explicit resistance to what in the human sciences and related philosophy appears to Marion as an effectively idolatrous way of thinking. Marion defines the logic of the idol by contrast to that of the icon, and the distinction between them concerns at bottom two different directions of intentionality

8. Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 365; Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt— Endlichkeit— Einsamkeit (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983), 531. 9. Berger, 6.

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in our seeing or thinking: in the idol, the divine is made to appear according to my intentionality, and it therefore shows up only within the already-given categories and conditions of my thought or vision; whereas in the icon I find that, prior to whatever I manage to see or think, I am already envisaged or intended by a gaze that radically precedes and exceeds the logic and limits of my categories and conditions.10 While his critique of human-scientific understandings of the human as world-building might set Marion’s phenomenology of iconic revelation in real tension or even sharp opposition to central, constructivist, tendencies within the field of religious studies, The Indiscrete Image argues that the world-building human, understood as “indiscrete image,” or as a (self-) creative creature who lacks pregiven model, may better be understood as neither idolatrous nor yet, according to the alternative Marion wants to posit, iconic. It is not idolatrous because it finds in the world that it creates not the comprehension afforded by some discrete and stable reflection of itself and its own pregiven categories, or what Marion would call the “invisible mirror” of the idol, but instead an open and ever-changing counterpart to its own indetermination, instability, and incomprehensibility. But it is not quite iconic either, insofar as it remains decidedly in and of the world, whereas the iconic self in Marion (like the ethical self in Emmanuel Levinas, to which Marion’s iconic thinking is indebted) answers to a decidedly extraworldly intention. If this difference between idolatrous and iconic intentionality may be understood as one between two differing turns of love— insofar as it is finally love’s intentionality that is most fundamental for Marion— the question emerges, in light of my explorations of the human as indiscrete image, whether and how its love, resisting the alternative between idolatrous closure and iconic exteriority, might actually open, structure, and sustain a world. One of the guiding intuitions operative in that question’s emergence, to be explored and developed now in the present work, is that the question of love’s role in our world-building, or likewise the role of our worlds in sustaining our loves, might bear in fundamental ways on discourse and debate surrounding the secular today. Common understandings of secularity within current discourse, both popular and academic, can seem to align it with what Marion can see to be the 10. For an introduction to the differing intentionalities and operations of idolatrous and iconic consciousness, see the first two chapters of Marion’s groundbreaking God without Being, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991, 2012), “The Idol and the Icon” and “Double Idolatry.”

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idolatrous tendencies of modern thought and culture. This would be the case, for example, in the common equation of secularity with the technoscientific modernity whose idolatrous character, in Marion’s sense, Heidegger indirectly suggests when he speaks of the “delusion” that modern humanity suffers within the essence of modern technology, where, as man “exalts himself to the posture of the lord of the earth . . . the impression comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct. This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion: It seems as though everywhere and always man encounters only himself.”11 Within the field of secularization debate among academics, we can note two important voices that inherit and develop a sense of modern humanity as subject to this delusion or idolatry: Karl Löwith, at midcentury, and, at the century’s turn, Charles Taylor. As Heidegger often notes, the delusional posture within which modern humanity sets itself up as lord of the earth— the thought whose abyssal implications Nietzsche makes central to his Zarathustra— goes hand in hand with a construal of nature, typical of modern metaphysics, that reduces nature to a realm of the calculable. This Heideggerian thinking about nature, technology, and the distinctive metaphysics sustaining them in Western modernity bears on secularization theory in any number of ways, not least of which is the contribution to such debate by Heidegger’s student Karl Löwith. The subject who can find itself (or believe itself ) reflected in the realm of nature— insofar as nature is reduced to that which can be calculated, ordered, and taken hold of by the subject— plays a crucial role, indeed, in the secularization thesis that Löwith advances in his 1949 Meaning in History. There, Löwith understands secularization not as a simple decline or disappearance of religion, but much more as an extension— both a continuation and a broadening— of religious thinking in a translated (and illegitimate) form. More pointedly, Löwith argues that the subject of modern Western imperialism, drawing indispensable impetus from Jewish messianic and Christian eschatological energies, finds itself reflected not only in nature, technoscientifically, but also, spiritually, in world-history and culture. Driven by these messianic and eschatological energies, Löwith suggests, our Western, secular modernity assumes a Christian understanding of the human as imago Dei, which turns all of nature and culture alike into a global mirror. “While the spirit of Europe declined,” he asserts, “her civilization rose and conquered the world. The question,” he then continues, on the book’s concluding page, 11. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 27.

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is whether this tremendous sweep of Western activity has anything to do with the nonsecular, religious element in it. Is it perhaps Jewish Messianism and Christian eschatology, though in their secular transformations, that have developed those appalling energies of creative activity which changed the Christian Occident into a world-wide civilization? It was certainly not a pagan but a Christian culture which brought about this revolution. The ideal of modern science of mastering the forces of nature and the idea of progress emerged neither in the classical world nor in the East, but in the West. But what enabled us to remake the world in the image of man? Is it perhaps that the belief in being created in the image of God, and the Christian command to spread the gospel to all the nations for the sake of salvation have turned into the secular presumption that we have to transform the world into a better world in the image of man and to save un-regenerate nations by Westernization and re-education?12

Resonant with any number of more recent critical projects aiming both to elucidate and to counter the imperialistic and totalizing tendencies of globalization today, and notably as these relate to understandings of religion and secularization,13 Löwith’s account of Western modernity’s secularized humanity as closed in on itself and, in effect, idolatrous (not his term) might appear, at first glance, close kin to Charles Taylor’s more recent and much discussed treatment of secularization, where a “closed world system” eclipsing or foreclosing transcendence reflects the pretension to self-possessed closure on the part of the “buffered” modern self. While interpreting what is ostensibly the same technoscientific modernity, however, Löwith and Taylor see markedly different conceptions of time to be operative in that modernity. In its understanding of secularization as the persistence of traditional religious thinking within a modern vocabulary and conceptual frame, Meaning in History is built around the claim that Christianity remains the decisive source for a modern thinking that advances “a systematic interpretation of universal history in accordance with a principle by which historical events and successions are unified and directed toward an ultimate meaning.”14 The modern idea of history as ultimately, and universally, meaningful depends, Löwith argues, on the conviction that history has a goal toward whose realiza-

12. Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 203. 13. See, e.g., Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), and Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 14. Löwith, 1.

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tion history is thought to make progress. Such a view of history as teleological and progressive, he insists, derives from the eschatological consciousness of Christian tradition, whose providential understanding of sacred history finds its exemplary expression in Augustine’s City of God. In both contexts, hope depends on the conviction that the future is one of purpose and fulfillment. “The future is the ‘true’ focus of history,” Löwith writes, “provided that the truth abides in the religious foundation of the Christian Occident, whose historical consciousness is, indeed, determined by an eschatological consciousness. . . . The significance of this vision of an ultimate end, as both finis and telos, is that it provides a scheme of progressive order and meaning, a scheme which has been capable of overcoming the ancient fear of fate and fortune.”15 If such Christian eschatological consciousness, with its providential scheme of history, finds its single most influential expression in Augustine’s City of God, Löwith reasonably suggests, an exemplary translation should be seen in Hegel’s philosophy of history, according to which history as a whole proves meaningful thanks to its progressive realization and final consummation of history’s purpose: the thoroughgoing human freedom that consists in spirit’s rediscovering itself in all otherness, thereby overcoming the (seeming) alienation of its own self-difference. Although, as Löwith points out, Hegel may deviate from Augustine’s intentions by applying Augustine’s transcendent idea of providence to the immanence of human history in this world (which Augustine never intended), he does, we should emphasize, understand meaningful temporal movement according to the same scheme, where history’s anticipated future and goal are eventually and, according to necessity, finally fulfilled— such that historical consciousness in its end fully recollects and comprehends the logic that proves to have been guiding history from the beginning. For Augustine and Hegel alike, the promise of the beginning is realized in the end both fully and necessarily. While Hegel applies to the realm of secular time a providential scheme that Augustine understood as relevant, in its transcendence, only to a sacred history that differs sharply from the secular, what Augustine and Hegel share is the conviction that the human adventure in time proves to be meaningful, and that it warrants hope, only to the degree that we live toward a future whose final realization consummates a plan or a rationality that has been governing that human adventure throughout. In Löwith’s estimation, this illegitimate application to secular history in its immanence of a providential and eschatological scheme that Christianity understood as transcendent yields not only Hegel’s philosophical claims to absolute knowing at the end 15. Löwith, 18.

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of history but also the likewise totalizing impulses of a Western imperialism that can instantiate the logic of idolatry we have signaled. Charles Taylor, by contrast, while troubled also about a form of human closure in modernity that might be construed as idolatrous, understands such closure to result not from a misguided translation of Christian thought but from an experience of time that in fact abandons the coherence of the “higher times” that one would, on his view, find in a religious thinker like Augustine. Against the background of an Augustinian thinking that courses deeply through the Latin Christian West with which Taylor is primarily concerned in his much discussed A Secular Age, one might ask whether the formulation itself of a “secular age” is not redundant, insofar as the “secular” is already a fundamentally temporal category, defined in the Augustinian frame— which takes the saeculum as “the world of men and time”16— less by contrast to the “religious” and more according to some basic distinction between a (created) world we inhabit temporally, under threat of mortality, and a life we might hope for beyond that world and threat. So long as we are speaking of an age, and therefore of temporal passing, are we not speaking at least implicitly already of the secular? And so long as we are speaking of the secular, are we not speaking already of ages in their passing? In his effort to identify and elucidate the distinctive traits of a Western modernity commonly and often confusedly understood as “secular,” Taylor, like Löwith, is quite right to emphasize the question of temporality. However, rather than see the persistence of a Christian, Augustinian time-consciousness in modernity, Taylor sees a “crisis” of modern time consciousness that yields an empty, homogenized time flow quite foreign to the “higher times” of a religious thinking and experience like Augustine’s. The “pervasiveness of secular time” for Taylor is inextricably bound with “the predominance of instrumental rationality” and the “buffered self ” who wields it. “So the buffered identity of the disciplined individual moves in a constructed social space, where instrumental rationality is a key value, and time is pervasively secular. All of this makes up what I want to call ‘the immanent frame.’”17 Organizing much of his discussion around the interrelated (and questionable) distinctions between “belief ” and “unbelief ” and between “transcen16. As R. A. Markus puts it in his classic study Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of Saint Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), xxii. 17. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 524. For a fuller reading of Taylor on the question of time and affection, and in relation to Hegelian and Heideggerian receptions of Augustine, see my “Secular Moods: Exploring Temporality and Affection with A Secular Age,” in Working with A Secular Age, ed. Florian Zemmin, Colin Jager, and Guido Vanheeswijk (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2016).

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dence” and “immanence,” Taylor maps those distinctions with respect to two different temporalities: on the one hand, the elevating and fulfilling relation to “higher times” made possible by traditional religious belief in transcendence, and, on the other hand, our entrapment in the flatness and emptiness of an immanent “secular time”— the price one pays, it seems, for “unbelief.” Taylor associates such “secular time,” furthermore, with the logic and movement of instrumentality and its calculating measurements of a time-flow that has been rendered linear and homogenous. “A purely secular understanding,” he writes, allows us to imagine society “horizontally,” unrelated to any “high points,” where the ordinary sequence of events touches higher time. . . . From this we can measure how inexorably the modern age has led us more and more to understand or imagine ourselves exclusively in secular time. This has partly come about through the multiple changes that we call collectively “disenchantment.” It has been immeasurably strengthened by the legacy of the drive for order which has become part of what we understand by civilization. This has made us take a stance towards time as an instrument, or as a resource to be managed, and hence measured, cut up, regulated. The instrumental stance by its very nature homogenizes; it defines segments for some further purpose, but recognizes no intrinsic qualitative difference. This stance has built the rigid time frame in which we all live.18

Reminiscent of Heidegger’s critique of the calculative rationality and technological power that preoccupy modern thought and culture, Taylor’s understanding of “secular time” likewise clearly inherits and extends the influential analysis of rationalization and disenchantment in Max Weber. When Taylor notes the inability of secular time— in its never-ceasing, flat and empty flow— to “gather” in the way of higher times, he repeats fairly directly the line of thought that leads Weber, in his 1917 lecture “Science as a Vocation,” to take up Leo Tolstoy’s question of what “meaning” life— and death— might have in modern civilization. “What [Tolstoy] brooded about increasingly,” writes Weber, was whether or not death has a meaning. His answer was that it had no meaning for a civilized person. His reasoning for this was that because the individual civilized life was situated within ‘progress’ and infinity, it could not have an intrinsically meaningful end. For the man caught up in the chain of progress always has a further step in front of him; no one about to die can reach the pinnacle, for that lies beyond him in infinity. . . . For [a civilized man] can seize hold of only the minutest portion of the new 18. Taylor, Secular Age, 713 – 14.

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ideas that the life of the mind continually produces, and what remains in his grasp is always merely provisional, never definitive. For this reason death is a meaningless event for him. And because death is meaningless, so, too, is civilized life, since its senseless “progressivity” condemns death to meaninglessness.19

For Weber’s Tolstoy, death and therefore life prove meaningless within modernity’s progressive time because that time simply marches on, or flows away, without preserving— or, as Taylor would put it, without “gathering”— the temporal life and accomplishments of the individual in any culminating fulfillment. By contrast to Abraham or some “peasant in olden times,” for whom it was (perhaps) possible to die fulfilled and satisfied, having accomplished what life had to offer, civilized man’s life and death, the worry goes, are rendered meaningless by an undifferentiated temporal movement of ceaseless dispersal and eventual forgetting. This contrast between dispersal and gathering is crucial to Taylor’s understanding of the difference between secular time, as one of dispersal, and the “higher times” of religion, which on his view allow for the sort of gathering whose ideal form and fulfillment would be eternity. For Taylor, both the march of technoscience, in its calculating and instrumental rationality, and the experience of mortality in modern secular contexts threaten us with meaninglessness because through them the forces of dispersal defeat those of gathering. The modern crisis of time-consciousness and a modern crisis before death go hand in hand for him, and both relate directly to the logic and tempo of instrumental rationality within modern technoscience. A focus on technoscience and its antagonism with “religion” stands at the heart of a narrative that Taylor takes to exemplify thinking about secularity within the “modern humanist culture” where the human circles back upon itself in a “closed world system” inhabited by “buffered” selves. According to that thinking, “modern secularization” amounts to “a recession of religion in the face of science, technology, and rationality.”20 While Taylor interprets this recession to be the result of a “death of God” that he takes (again problematically) to mean “that one can no longer honestly, lucidly, sincerely believe in God,” his larger argument against modern “subtraction” theories does call our attention productively to overlooked affective shifts— relating to ethical 19. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in Max Weber, The Vocation Lectures, ed. David Owen and Tracy B. Strong (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2004), 13; “Wissenschaft als Beruf,” in Max Weber, Gesamtausgabe, Abteilung I: Schriften und Reden, vol. 17, ed. Horst Baier et al. (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1984), 87– 88. 20. Taylor, Secular Age, 573, 574.

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and spiritual life— in our transition to a secular age. Within the “‘subtraction’ story of the rise of modern humanism,” Taylor contends, an “exclusive humanism” is what remains— for a neutral and objective rationality— once we have left behind all of the irrational superstition and fanaticism of religion. Taylor is right, I believe, to argue that secularization and humanism are not well understood in terms of any such simple move to a neutral and objective position freed up by the triumph of reason over misguided forms of religious thought and practice (as some notions of progress might have us think); modernity, he helpfully emphasizes, entails not simply the rise and spread of certain forms of reasoning but a whole web of commitments and inclinations that touch us at other levels and should themselves be understood as ethical or spiritual. This ethical or spiritual sense of modernity— as bound to distinctive forms of culture and the “new understandings of self, agency, time, [and] society which Western modernity has generated”21— is what the various subtraction narratives simply miss. If Taylor is quite right to resist this common (and recently revived) story about some neutral rationality’s rise and displacement of religion, however, Taylor’s characterization of the humanism involved— and of its shortcomings vis-à-vis “religion” as Taylor understands it— does neglect, I think, an important direction for thinking about the secular today in terms of affection and temporality. What Taylor’s thinking about the closure of modern humanism misses stands out in his treatment of death. To his perspective, the shortcomings of modernity’s closed world system and exclusive humanism become clear in the crisis of meaning that he believes death to bring about. In answer to a criticism that religious “yearning for eternity” is a “trivial and childish thing,” Taylor argues that it much rather “reflects an ethical insight, the one expressed in the Nietzschean phrase, which could be put negatively, that death undermines meaning.” “All joy strives for eternity,” Taylor writes, glossing Nietzsche’s suggestion that Alle Lust will Ewigkeit, “because it loses some sense if it doesn’t last.” Putting the point in terms of an essential tie he sees among happiness, meaning, and love, Taylor holds that “the deepest, most powerful kind of happiness, even in the moment, is plunged into a sense of meaning. And the meaning seems denied by certain kinds of ending. That’s why the greatest crisis around death comes from the death of someone we love.”22 Strangely evoking Nietzsche to argue that transience and mortality compromise the meaning of our loves, Taylor seems to frame the matter according to just the nihilistic alternative that Nietzsche energetically struggles against: if there is 21. Taylor, Secular Age, 573. 22. Taylor, Secular Age, 722, 721.

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nothing “beyond” “this” life’s end, the reasoning goes, if a life does not endure past death, and indeed eternally, then the “meaning” of this life is somehow compromised. Within Taylor’s evaluation of temporal transience along these lines, death signals the extreme of time’s dispersal, and in this it seems to threaten the distinctively human work of “gathering” out of, and in resistance to, such dispersal— a work exemplified for Taylor by the movement of love. The religious yearning for eternity, he posits, constitutes an extension of the gathering work that love does already within time: One of the things which makes it very difficult to sustain a sense of the higher meaning of ordinary life, in particular our love relations, is death. It’s not just that they matter to us a lot, and hence leave a grievous hole in our lives when our partner dies. It’s also because just because they are so significant, they seem to demand eternity. A deep love already exists against the vicissitudes of life, tying together past and present in spite of the disruptions and dispersals . . . . By its very nature it participates in gathered time. And so death can seem a defeat, the ultimate dispersal which remains ungathered.23

It is striking, given the themes and figures operative in the mix, that Taylor does not treat at greater length the concern of Nietzsche to argue that we need not (and should not) appeal to the unity and eternity of any “true being” in order to affirm the becoming— which is to say the arising and the passing away— of life. And it is likewise striking that he would give so little attention to Freud’s views on transience and loss, where the beauty and joy of life are not contradicted but indeed conditioned and confirmed by its mortal finitude. Along these lines of difference between Taylor and thinkers like Nietzsche and Freud (or their later heirs such as Jacques Derrida or Mark C. Taylor), one can sense the deep resonance in Taylor of an Augustinian thinking that finds in modern time consciousness not the translation of Christian eschatological and providential thinking that Löwith sees there but the meaningless stream of time that troubles Weber’s Tolstoy. While the modern conception of time in terms of “progress” by means of humanity’s rational self-assertion appears to Löwith as an illegitimate extension of Christian providential thinking, and while Charles Taylor sees in such rational self-assertion rather a construal of time that abandons Christian thinking and leaves us to dwell isolated and unfulfilled in the immanence of our closed world systems, a third important voice within secularization debate offers an important alternative to these two perspectives: that of Marcel Gauchet. While highlighting the human work of world- and self-creation in 23. Taylor, Secular Age, 720.

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technoscientific modernity, Gauchet comes to understand the temporality of such work along lines that defy the idolatrous closure one might see in either of the temporalities that Löwith and Taylor identify as distinctively modern and secularizing. According to the political history of religion that Gauchet writes in his 1985 Disenchantment of the World, the long-term movement of humanity, via monotheism, from a religious existence in which humanity subjects and conforms itself to an order already established, and thus fixed, by the gods in a distant past, to a modernity in which we look instead to the future by creating our own world and, in that way, ourselves, does not in fact yield the closure, or idolatry, of any human self-presence. It rather exposes creative humanity, and its world, to their own inherent and inescapable otherness: “A society subject to itself,” Gauchet writes in a section titled “Living-with-Ourselves: Absorbing the Other,” “points to a very specific type of organization and mode of functioning based on internal difference, and hence is at the opposite remove to both an external religious functioning and the consequent all-inclusive self-presence one might have expected. Thus subjection to the past was replaced not by sovereign freedom conscious of the here and now, but by the relation of self-identity through the other of the future. This is why it is accurate to speak of a transference of the other from outside to inside the human sphere.” While highlighting the human creativity, and self-assertion, operative in the technoscientific modernity whose delusional, idolatrous, imperialistic, or closed inclinations can trouble Heidegger, Marion, Löwith, or Charles Taylor, Gauchet points to an unknowing that he sees as conditioning the temporality of such creativity— and thus to an alterity that conditons and haunts the worlds we create. “When the gods abandon the world,” Gauchet contends, “when they stop coming to notify us of their otherness to it, the world itself begins to appear other, to disclose an imaginary depth that becomes the object of a special quest.”24 For Gauchet, a paradox of modern humanity’s creative self-assertion is that it yields not an idolatrous closure that would reflect us back to ourselves in a discrete and comprehensible image but an ongoing opening to our own recurrently renewed unknowing. “The way in which we work to generate [the future] prevents us from knowing it. And we have no doubt reached the critical point where the very accumulation of the means of change marks the futility of the ideological ambition to predict the in principle unknowable future. The more we try to control the future, the more open-ended it becomes.” Gauchet takes the temporality of our creative and self-creative humanity today to entail a secularization that diverges sharply from the dif24. Gauchet, 203.

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ferent kinds of closure that might define secularization for influential thinkers such as Löwith or Charles Taylor; and while he contrasts that secularization with a certain form of religion, we can note also how deeply its logic resonates with that of the indiscrete image we traced previously not only in technological but also in mystical-theological contexts. Gauchet’s most striking lines in this latter direction are worth citing at length. Writing against the background of his contention that “the revolutionary cause, which promised humanity’s ultimate self-reconciliation” has collapsed, and that “the classic ideological discourses of futurity, whether in the progressivist version of continuity, or radical versions of a revolutionary break, have been exhausted and made obsolete by historical change,”25 Gauchet goes on to read the meaning of our secularization as a looming of the unknown future: The secularization of history is completed as the future becomes unrepresentable. The faceless and nameless future, unconstrained and unaffected by occult determinism, is the pure future, removed from the theological cocoon which concealed it for two centuries. From now on, no more diviners, mediators, and sacrificers. For herein lies the future’s main paradox: the more the order of the invisible comes to light, the more secular it becomes; the more unpredictable it becomes, the less inevitable it is; the more accountable it makes us, the more it teaches us that we create it. The less possible it is for us to consider the future an object of superstition and worship, the more apparent it becomes that the future will be other than we imagine. The more we accept ourselves as the authors of history, the only remaining enigma is we ourselves. The ordeal of otherness has become the reference point forcing freedom on us, as sure sign that we are governed by a logic opposite to the religious one of origins.26

In light of this contention that the secularization of history entails the experience of an unknowing that results from, and also sets the conditions for, the work we ourselves do to create and shape our world and time, Gauchet’s “disenchantment of the world” may seem to differ significantly from what that latter phrase means— or from what people commonly assume it to mean— in its earlier and more famous use, in Max Weber’s “Science as a Vocation.” However, a closer look at Weber’s lecture may show that the belief in scientific calculation and technological control that Weber sees to define the “disenchantment of the world” does not, for all that belief ’s strength, free us in modernity from our unknowing fate— or from the fact, as Weber pointedly asserts, that while the gods whose eternal struggle continues today “have 25. Gauchet, 191, 203, 179, 184. 26. Gauchet, 184 – 85.

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been deprived of the magical and mythical, but inwardly true qualities that gave them such vivid immediacy” in previous worlds, “these gods and their struggles are ruled over by fate, and certainly not by ‘science.’”27 The title alone, “Science as a Vocation,” can seem for many to signal an inextricable tie, or even the equation, between “secularization” (a term Weber does not use in the text) and a “disenchantment of the world” (Entzauberung der Welt) that, according to Weber, has been unfolding for millennia in the West but reaches a high point with the calculating and instrumental rationality of modern science and related technologies. To be sure, within Weber’s definition and analysis of that modern disenchantment, one might well see, at least at first glance, a logic resembling that which supports the delusion of technological humanity in Heidegger, or the idolatry whose analysis in Marion can be read to echo Heidegger, or the closed world system of Charles Taylor. For Weber clearly does hold that the “rationalization” yielding modern disenchantment “means that in principle . . . we are not ruled by mysterious, incalculable forces [in the world we inhabit], but that, on the contrary, we can in principle master all things by calculation [daß es also prinzipiell keine geheimnisvollen unberechenbaren Mächte gebe, die da hineinspielen, daß man vielmehr alle Dinge— im Prinzip— durch Berechnen beherrschen könne]. This means that the world is disenchanted [Das aber bedeutet: die Entzauberung der Welt].”28 While the text is most widely known, or at least referenced, for this thesis on disenchantment, for its related diagnosis of modernity, and for the roles these have played in discourse surrounding the question of “secularization,” its most important contribution to thinking about the secular today may stem more, I believe, from the fact— less commonly highlighted— that the

27. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 23; “Wissenschaft als Beruf,” 100. Among recent revisitations of the meaning of disenchantment, both today and in Weber’s time, see esp. Jeffrey L. Kosky, Arts of Wonder: Enchanting Secularity—Walter De Maria, Diller + Scofidio, James Turrell, Andy Goldsworthy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), which, against the background of modern thinking and its principles of sufficiency and lucidity, explores the places of mystery and wonder, and the questions of dwelling, opened by contemporary art work that many would assume to be secular; and Jason A. Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), which cautions against the “myth of no myth” by richly tracing overlooked and complicated relations between the emergent human sciences and various forms of occult thinking they are often assumed to leave behind. 28. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 12 – 13 (translation modified); “Wissenschaft als Beruf,” 87.

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text is also, fundamentally, about teaching and learning as these relate to what Weber calls “the demands of the day.” An allusion to lines from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre concerning the question of duty—“What is your duty? The challenge of the day”29—Weber’s appeal to the demands of the day or to the challenge of the day (die Förderung des Tages) is integral to his lecture’s preoccupation with the question of time. In fact one could read the entire text as an inquiry into the question of the day: both the day in the sense of the time or age or epoch in which we live, namely, a modernity that Weber works to diagnose; and the day in the sense of our lived temporality— the everyday life that, for reasons Weber identifies and elucidates, can prove indeed to be a challenge to each and all of us in our modernity. This temporal framing, at both levels, relates intimately to the text’s central concerns and claims regarding the question of education. At the proximate level, Weber finds himself (on November 7, 1917, in Munich) addressing students of his day who had invited him to contribute to their series of talks on the question of “‘geistige Arbeit als Beruf ’— intellectual or spiritual work as a calling.”30 Weber perceives in those students, as in the youth of his day more generally, a yearning and seeking for what they believe is denied to them by their everyday life: meaningful experience and, through such experience, a cultivation of “personality.” In their invitation to Weber, he hears a call, likewise common in the day as he sees it, for the kind of leader who, the students believe, might answer such yearning. Weber’s own answer, which he works out in and through a diagnosis of the day in the sense of the age or epoch of modernity, entails near its core not only a discourse on his understanding of education but also a living practice of it. In that practice, as in Weber’s understanding of the proper role of the teacher, and student, we should read him, I think, as close kin both to Freud and to Nietzsche. With respect to the former, we can read Weber to propose and practice something quite close to what Freud had understood, and encouraged, as our “education to reality.” Insofar as such an education is directed toward the wishes governing our illusions, it entails less a (frequently caricatured) theoretical or scientific effort to “get” reality “right” in terms of adequate representation, and more the never finished work of adjusting one’s expectations— affective as much as intellectual— in relation to the real and its unavoidable dissatisfactions. Freud’s explicit analyses of religion in works 29. Goethe, Wilheim Meisters Wanderjahre, in the Weimarer Ausgabe (Weimar, 1907), vol. 42, sec. 2, p. 187, as cited in Weber, Vocation Lectures, 31. 30. David Owen and Tracy B. Strong, eds., introduction to Max Weber, Vocation Lectures, xiii.

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like Future of an Illusion (1927) and Civilization and Its Discontents (1929) are, to be sure, an important element within his thinking about such an education to reality, insofar as he sees in religion the driving wish for a full and final satisfaction that he takes to be at odds both with our social being and with our individual psychic constitution. But the Freud most relevant to our inquiry into the secular here, as related to Weber and others, is the Freud of his short 1915 text “On Transience,” which argues that the transience of life not only does not compromise its beauty or joy; it is one of their fundamental conditions. As I’ll suggest, while Weber’s thinking about time clearly abandons any dream of providential or other teleological consummation or fulfillment, it also rejects the nihilistic alternative of despair. In this regard, the Weber who resonates with Freud and his education to reality seems close kin also to Nietzsche, for Weber’s understanding of the broader context in which such an education is called for aligns significantly with Nietzsche’s thinking about the death of God: lacking any one and final word on the meaning or value of life; lacking any single, stable, and extra-perspectival position from which such ultimate judgments might be securely made and held; the modern context in which Weber and his students find themselves, he insists, is defined by the unavoidable and endless struggle of competing, and irreconcilable, ultimate viewpoints, which operate much like the gods of old, but as impersonal forces within a world that has been disenchanted. This is the context, Weber suggests, that explains both the yearning he senses among the youth of his day and the impossibility of that yearning’s satisfaction within their everyday lives: “Nowadays,” Weber writes, we have the religion of “everyday life” [Heute aber ist es religiöser “Alltag”]. The numerous gods of yore, divested of their magic [entzaubert] and hence assuming the shape of impersonal forces, arise from their graves, strive for power over our lives, and resume their eternal struggle among themselves. But what is hard for us today, and is hardest of all for the young generation, is to meet the challenge of such an everyday life [einem solchen Alltag gewachsen zu sein]. All chasing after “experience” [“Erlebnis”] arises from this weakness. For weakness it is to be unable to look the fate of the age full in the face.31

In light of just this pluralistic and disenchanted everyday life, and in answer to a youthful evasion of it, Weber refuses to give students what they may believe they want, which is not only “experience” but also the kind of leader who might guide them to it, so to reveal the meaning of it all. At the heart of such refusal is the understanding of teaching that corresponds to Weber’s 31. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 24; “Wissenschaft als Beruf,” 101 (Weber’s emphasis).

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understanding of science and its role in modern life. That understanding, we should note, actually places Weber at odds with two different directions of wish: the wish, to be sure, of youth that they might escape the disenchanting force of science and arrive at a kind of meaning that disenchantment forecloses, but also the wish of those who continue to seek in science itself a meaning that the youth at least are astute enough, or spiritually attuned enough, not to seek there. The teacher cannot be the kind of leader these students may crave, Weber argues, because the teacher must be a scientist; but the teacher, as scientist, also cannot deliver the kind of meaning— or happiness— that some might look for in science. (Their number, it seems to me, may be greater today than Weber estimated in his day: “Thus a naive optimism had led people to glorify science, or rather the techniques of mastering the problems of life based on science, as the road to happiness. But after Nietzsche’s annihilating criticism of those ‘last men’ ‘who have discovered happiness,’ I can probably ignore this completely. After all, who believes it— apart from some overgrown children in their professorial chairs or editorial offices?”32) In both cases, the key to Weber’s analysis will be his attentiveness to the limitations of science— and his insistence that whatever value or meaning science may have depends on acknowledging and living with those limitations. His insistence on limitation is at the heart of Weber’s famous and often caricatured discussion of the distinction between fact and value. In no way naive about the ease with which scientific analysis might achieve “objectivity” or “neutrality,” Weber insists that the job of a teacher, as scientist, is to teach facts and logical relations as they operate within any given system (which means not only natural or physical systems but also political, cultural, religious, etc.); the teacher’s job is not to pronounce judgment on the ultimate value or meaning of those facts and relations. To attempt the latter is to confuse the role and competences of teacher with those of leader or advocate, prophet or demagogue. It is also to misunderstand the nature of our ultimate commitments— including, first and foremost, any such commitment to science itself. Despite what might be suggested by the predominant economics and politics of our contemporary university, or of our STEM-obsessed and technoscientifically bewitched culture more broadly (where the overgrown children are perhaps not a minority), scientific reasoning, Weber well contends, not only cannot judge the ultimate value or meaning of whatever systems it studies; it cannot even establish scientifically its own ultimate value or meaning. These must be presupposed. This is a crucial but often overlooked 32. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 17; “Wissenschaft als Beruf,” 92.

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point within the logic of Weber’s position. For to live the life of science as he lucidly confronts it, to commit oneself to it, is to presuppose— without any rational-scientific ground— that such a commitment is somehow ultimately meaningful or valuable; the rational enterprise that ensues from the commitment can never dictate or guarantee that commitment, or its meaning. One must appreciate this insistence in Weber’s analysis on the limitations of science, and on the power that derives only from such limitation, in order to see and understand how scientific enterprise is for him a matter of passion, or even intoxication— and in order to recognize likewise how scientific teaching is, or should be, an ethical undertaking. In noting both the indispensable role of passion in scientific life and the ethical significance of teaching, Weber is responding to a crisis of meaning that relates to the experience of time in the modern culture shaped by science. As we’ve noted, it is a cluster of questions concerning temporality that leads in Weber’s text, as in the modernity it addresses, to the question of whether and how science, or life in a scientific civilization, might or might not be meaningful (above and beyond science’s practical applications). Because the movement of science intends and entails the open-ended possibility of progress, one enjoys within that movement neither any security that one actually will achieve anything worthwhile through the movement (because progress is possible but not necessary) nor any hope that one’s achievements, however great they may be, will constitute something ultimately lasting (because the progress of science is “infinite,” and to participate in it is to will, at least implicitly, that one’s own achievements should contribute to a movement that shall eventually render those achievements obsolete). The latter point is fundamental to the suspicion of Tolstoy, which Weber highlights in framing his discussion, that individual death, and hence life, are meaningless in a civilization whose temporality is modeled on, or defined by, scientific progress. As I read him, however, Weber neither accepts nor ends in this nihilistic despair; but his position likewise abandons the kinds of ultimate meaning or consolation that the youth of his day, or the overgrown children, may seek. (In this sense, Weber is an important source for Hans Blumenberg’s argument, contra Löwith, that Christian eschatology, as a story of necessary and ultimate fulfillment, could never have yielded, by simple translation, the more modest understanding of time that emerges with the experience of progress in early modern science: progress as always possible but not necessary, and as open-ended and hence always provisional.)33 The task as Weber sees it is to live temporally with un33. See Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983); and for a helpful summary of the Blumenberg-Löwith de-

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certainty and disappointment without coming to despair, and the keys for this are passion, the devotion of genuine personality, and a commitment to teaching and learning as ethical tasks. These are all themes that Weber talks about in his discourse on science and scientific teaching, but even more, they are themes enacted by him through that discourse, which constitutes an exercise in the thing about which he speaks. In addressing the students before him, Weber calls their attention to the conditions of university life, wherein chance plays an inescapable role in one’s landing (or not) and keeping (or not) an academic position; highlighting the likelihood that “you,” in your academic life, will need to watch mediocrity after mediocrity pass beyond you, Weber notes that these external conditions demand also a certain inward disposition, and in this he is doing what he takes to be essential work for a teacher: confronting his audience with inconvenient facts, he awakens them to their need to live through disappointment, and he challenges them to ask honestly whether they believe they can do so without coming, as so often and understandably happens, to bitterness and resentment.34 These questions of disposition are decisive not only in relation to the external workings of the university but also in relation to the internal logic of scientific work itself. According to that logic, the ascetic dedication of the scientist— the willingness and ability to specialize, the unrelenting diligence— remains indispensable, but it does not free the scientist from exposure to chance in the work itself. One will surely not, in one’s work, achieve meaningful results without diligence, but diligence alone guarantees in no way that the inspiration for a new idea or insight will ever come. Famous for lamenting the modern age as one of specialists without spirit, Weber soberly accepts the reality that specialization is unavoidable, but he argues also that answering the demand for specialization in science requires,

bate, see Robert M. Wallace’s “Progress, Secularization and Modernity: The Löwith-Blumenberg Debate,” in New German Critique 22 (1981): 63 – 79. An element within Blumenberg’s analysis worth attending to, both with respect to the character of science and with respect to the nature of secularity, is the self-critical modesty he sees come to characterize modern science subsequent to its initially inflated, and then disappointed, expectations of definitive, socially and ethically positive, results. A similar attentiveness to the modesty of secular thinking in early modern political contexts can be found in Julie E. Cooper, Secular Powers: Humility in Modern Political Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 34. For a lucid and timely discussion, in light of Weber and Nietzsche (as well as Erving Goffman, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Alexis de Tocqueville), of the exposure to chance and consequent experience of resentment as increasingly prevalent traits of modern and contemporary life, see Bryan S. Turner, “Max Weber and the Spirit of Resentment: The Nietzsche Legacy,” in Journal of Classical Sociology 11, 1 (Feb. 2011): 75 – 92.

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in fact, a passionate— and personal— investment in the enterprise. We must act, indeed, as if “our soul” itself depends on getting right a conjecture whose real origins and consequences we ourselves may never know or enjoy. In this sense, our work can seem to come from, and give itself to, “the ages.” The cultivation of our passion in relation to this deeper sense of time, which is demanded by the cold, ascetic logic of science, is also what makes of science a vocation— and what renders science a genuinely human undertaking: Nowadays, a really definitive and valuable achievement is always the product of specialization. And anyone who lacks the ability to don blinkers for once and to convince himself that the destiny of his soul depends upon whether he is right to make precisely this conjecture and no other at this point in his manuscript should keep well away from science. He will never be able to submit to what we may call the “experience” [“Erlebnis”] of science. In the absence of this strange intoxication that outsiders greet with a pitying smile, without this passion [Leidenschaft], this conviction that “millennia had to pass before you were born, and millennia more must wait in silence” to see if your conjecture will be confirmed— without this you do not possess this vocation for science and should turn your hand to something else. For nothing has any value for a human being as a human being unless he can pursue it with passion [Denn nichts ist für den Menschen als Menschen etwas wert, was er nicht mit Leidenschaft tun kann].35

Passion, then, which alone for Weber endows science, or anything else, with a genuinely human value, is crucial to his understanding of authentic personality, and he sets his own understandings of passion and personality at odds with the “idols” of experience and personality current among the young of his day. The cult of these idols, which is sustained, Weber worries, by the media of contemporary mass culture, will be countered with the “personality” of the scientist, which is defined solely by his or her devotion, for “the only person to have ‘personality’ is the one who is wholly devoted to his subject [der rein der Sache dient].”36 35. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 8; “Wissenschaft als Beruf,” 80 – 81 (Weber’s emphasis). 36. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 10; “Wissenschaft als Beruf,” 84. In terms of such devotion, the scientist resembles the artist, but these two figures differ notably for Weber in terms of their relation to time, and that temporal difference is crucial to Weber’s entire discussion of meaning in relation to science and modernity more broadly. Whereas the realm of art may undergo, through time, movements of change that do not invalidate a genuine artistic achievement, Weber argues, the experience of time in science, thanks to the movement of progress, demands resignation on the part of the scientific worker to the fact that her results, never guaranteed to occur in the first place, are also always provisional— her achievements, should she manage any, always destined to an obsolescence that she must herself in some sense will. Just

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If the open-ended character of progress in science, and the essentially related movement of ongoing, endless change in modern culture more broadly, generate the suspicion, voiced so well for Weber by Tolstoy, that individual death— and hence life— in modern culture are meaningless, Weber’s response to that suspicion rejects both the hope of ultimate fulfillment and the alternative of nihilistic despair, and it does so by appealing, on the side of scientific work, to passion and devotion, and by appealing, on the side of teaching, to its ethical significance. As we have noted, science and hence the teacher in Weber’s sense cannot rightly make judgments of ultimate value or meaning, nor advocate for party positions— but the teacher’s adhering to this fact is tied essentially for Weber to nothing less than the meaning and value of teaching as an ethical undertaking. While science and its teaching cannot dictate the ends we choose in life, nor estimate their ultimate value or determine their ultimate meaning, science and its teaching can aid us, even compel us, to cultivate clarity concerning the positions we hold— or concerning the “gods” we serve and/or offend— and it can thus enrich our sense of responsibility for the presuppositions and implications of the lives we lead. If we understand the matter correctly . . . we can compel a person, or at least help him, to render an account of the ultimate meaning of his own actions. This seems to me to be no small matter, and can be applied to questions concerning one’s own personal life. And if a teacher succeeds in this respect I would be tempted to say that he is acting in the service of “ethical” forces, that is to say, of the duty to foster clarity and a sense of responsibility [er stehe im Dienst “sittlicher” Mächten: der Pflicht, Klarheit und Verantwortungsgefühl zu schaffen]. I believe that he will be all the more able to achieve this, the more scrupulously he avoids seeking to suggest a particular point of view to his listeners or even impose one on them.37

While the ascetic self-restraint of the teacher might seem a gesture of withholding in relation to the student’s yearning, a niggardly refusal to grant the student’s wish, we should understand it much more as an act of generosity. It may even approximate, I’d venture, a work of love, insofar as it attempts at its core to enable the other to be who she is, and who she will be— a defini-

as the one devoted to science must be resigned to the fact that chance— rather than calculation— determines whether and how inspiration comes, so she must be resigned to the fact that scientific progress is, and intends to be at its core, “infinite” or endless— such that no final or ultimate fulfillment can be achieved or, thus, enjoyed within the temporal movement driven by the logic of scientific progress. 37. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 26 – 27; “Wissenschaft als Beruf,” 104.

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tion of love, we will see in the coming chapters, operative in the theology of Saint Augustine as also, later, in the existential phenomenology of Augustine’s reader Martin Heidegger, and then again in some of Heidegger’s more recent heirs. The restraint or withholding of the teacher, a certain kind of reticence, on this reading, gives room, and time, for the student to be herself and thus to learn and become. “Perhaps the most challenging pedagogic task of all,” Weber states (within passages rightly noting the frequent lack of connection between the quality of teaching and the enrollment numbers in any given course), “is to explain scientific problems in such a way as to make them comprehensible to an untrained but receptive mind, and to enable such a person— and this is the only decisive factor for us— to think about them independently.”38 From this perspective, teaching tends to the capability of the student in her separated being, and insofar as teaching intends to enable the student in that being, to enrich or expand her scope of possibility, its proximity to a work of love suggests itself. The suggestion grows stronger if one reads Weber’s distinction between teacher and leader in light of a distinction that Heidegger makes in Being and Time between two different directions that can be taken by one’s positive care— or solicitude (Fürsorge)— for others, a care whose analysis in Heidegger owes more than a little to Augustine’s understanding of love as a willing that the beloved be. Whereas one direction of solicitude “leaps in” for the other to deal with some concern of hers for her, or “in her place,” then to hand everything back to her as already dealt with or “taken care of ”; the contrasting direction of solicitude consists in a “leaping ahead” of the other— not to take care of her concern for her, or in her stead, but rather to enable her to take up herself, and as distinctively hers, the care thanks to which alone she can ever have the delimited concerns she does have. The person at a lectern who confuses leadership with teaching, we might say, translating the Weberian analysis into Heidegger’s terminology, is one who leaps in when he or she ought to be leaping ahead: the point of teaching, on this view, is not to deliver or to impose, as ready-made or already taken care of, the party positions that a student ought then to hold and pronounce;39 the point is to enable the student more clearly to understand, and on that basis to answer 38. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 6; “Wissenschaft als Beruf,” 79. 39. The extreme of such a logic can be seen in the totalitarian uses of propaganda, as Robert Harrison lucidly notes, drawing on Hannah Arendt, in his Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 136: “It took Hannah Arendt to show how the primary goal of totalitarian regimes was to do our thinking for us, and to make it impossible for ourselves, precisely by filling the silence inside our heads with the constant noise of propaganda.”

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more richly for, the meaning of her own positions and conduct, whatever they happen to be, or become. The genuine teacher does not leap in for the student and take over the work of making for her whatever judgments of value or meaning might be at stake in her life; the teacher rather leaps ahead in the effort to enhance the student’s capacity for such judgment. If the work of teaching might in this sense be understood as one of love, that love is tied intimately, essentially, to the time in and through which the student lives— the day in the sense of the age, and the day in the sense of the everyday life, and time, whose routines become a challenge in the distinctively modern day that Weber diagnoses. That day, as Weber signals in his concluding line, while perhaps not granting the kinds of experience and meaning that students long to find in it, can entail nonetheless an awakening to the passion— or the daemon— that holds and drives the singular life that is one’s own. Teaching, then, would be itself a work of passion that awakens the student, potentially, to her own distinctive passion. As an ethical work, teaching opens and binds the student to a manner of living the everyday in our day. It might thus be understood, and practiced, as a work of love oriented essentially to time, and doubly: helping the student to live the time of her everyday life with a clarity and responsibility that would entail acknowledging, even affirming, one’s being fated to the age, or day, that is hers.40 If we can here read Weber to be encouraging, and practicing, an education to reality that resonates with Freud, we should see that education also as aiming to teach, or to enable, an affective capacity akin to Nietzsche’s amor fati. Weber scholars David Owen and Tracy Strong make this point well in their introduction to “Science as a Vocation,” emphasizing that when Weber is “specifying the fateful character of scientific activity and commitment to science” he is “specifying the conditions of ‘love of scientific fate’ in all its difficulty. From this Nietzschean perspective, Weber’s concern with what it is to have a vocation for science is a concern with what it is to love one’s fate as a scientist, that is, to embrace our condition of being thrown into the world as it is.”41 While suggestively acknowledging here a role for love in Weber, Strong elsewhere argues, along lines that miss what I myself want to empha40. This reading is reinforced by a wonderfully suggestive note that Owen and Strong offer on the term daemon: “The term goes back at least to Socrates in the Symposium, but it was given currency among the educated German public by a poem by Goethe with the title Dämon, which was obviously known to Weber and contains inter alia the lines: ‘Even as the sun and planets stood to salute one another on the day you entered the world— even so you began straightaway to grow and have continued to do so, according to the law that prevailed over your beginning. It is thus that you must be, you cannot escape yourself.’” Vocation Lectures, 31. 41. Owen and Strong, eds., introduction to Max Weber, Vocation Lectures, xxxiv.

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size about Weber’s attentiveness to teaching, that while we find in Nietzsche a rich if often overlooked thinking of love, and of its ties to education (to which we will return), we find in Weber’s construal of scientific vocation a “passionate devotion to a cause” that is not quite love because “for Weber one gives oneself over, not to a person, but to something abstract and conceptual. The dedication is in the realm of thought.”42 This assessment poses a false alternative, I think, between Weber’s passionate devotion to the realm of thought and its demands, on the one hand, and, on the other, the giving of oneself to other persons that is entailed by love; for as Weber makes powerfully clear, the meaning of science as a vocation involves not only the call that one answers in becoming a scientist but also the call that the scientist makes, in turn, to those— persons— she works to teach, something she does within an ethical undertaking whose central aim is to enable others to be, or to become, who they are.43 As Strong rightly notes, Weber’s thinking about responsibility is framed rhetorically by repeated appeal to notions of maturity, and such appeal, we can note in turn, plays an important role not only in this Weberian discourse on disenchantment, or in the related critique of illusion one finds in Freud, but also in secularization discourse more broadly. Such discourse often does seem to associate secularization, especially via modern science, with adulthood, maturity, and rationality, while placing religion on the side of infancy or childhood, immaturity, and the irrational superstition of primitives or premoderns. The rhetoric of maturity, both individual and civilizational, can indeed be striking in Weber (as already, of course, in the Enlightenment thinking typified by Kant). But we should also not forget two important facts. First, the “savages” (die Wilden) of whom he speaks are, in his view, likely to have had a richer and more thorough understanding of their worlds than we moderns do of ours. And second, while he attacks the “overgrown children” he believes one can still find in the natural sciences and a few edi42. Tracy Strong, “Love, Passion, and Maturity: Nietzsche and Weber on Science, Morality, and Politics,” in Confronting Mass Democracy and Industrial Technology: Political Theory and Social Theory from Nietzsche to Habermas, ed. John P. McCormick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 40. 43. Becoming who we are is both the theme and the title of Andrew Norris’s illuminating study of politics and practical philosophy in the work of Stanley Cavell, which in its final chapter, “Receiving Autonomy,” engages Weber, Emerson, and Nietzsche on themes close to our own here, most notably those concerning education and the heart. See Becoming Who We Are: Politics and Practical Philosophy in the Work of Stanley Cavell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

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torial offices, he clearly appreciates the potential of the youth to whom he addresses his teaching— and he will actually posit an essential tie between youth itself and the “passion” he sees to be indispensable for science and any other genuinely human undertaking. While in “Science as a Vocation” Weber claims that “nothing has any value for a human being as a human being unless he can pursue it with passion [Leidenschaft],”44 he ties such passion  in the conclusion of his 1895 inaugural lecture at Freiburg University (“The Nation State and Economic Policy”) to a youth that is not measured by years: “youth,” he posits, “has the right to stand up for itself and its ideals. Yet it is not years that make a man grow old. He is young as long as he is able to feel the great passions [den großen Leidenschaften] nature has implanted in us.”45 The studies in the secular to be pursued through the pages gathered here concern just the kind of youth that even Weber, for all the rhetoric of scientific maturity, counts as essential to undertakings of genuinely human worth, and notably the undertaking of learning. Along these lines, we will trace and call attention to a heritage of modern thinking that repeatedly ties the spirit of learning to youth— and the youthful heart of learning to the creation of worlds and to the essentially related challenge of everyday life. As Weber’s diagnosis of modernity suggests, the task of remaining awake or alive to the day amidst the everyday grows increasingly difficult as modern culture is driven ever more thoroughly and rapidly by scientific rationality and technological power. Along similar lines, Heidegger contends that the reduction of nature within modern thought to the realm of calculation goes hand in hand not only with a homogenized and derivative construal of time as the flowing stream of “nows” but also, in and through this latter, with an effacement of the very difference that makes a day. Heidegger signals the threat of such effacement already in Being and Time, where he notes that “our understanding of the natural clock develops with the advancing discovery of Nature, and instructs us as to new possibilities for a kind of time-measurement which is 44. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 8; “Wissenschaft als Beruf,” 81. 45. Max Weber, “The Nation State and Economic Policy,” in Max Weber, Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 28, cited by Strong, “Love, Passion, and Maturity,” 26. Weber continues along nationalistic lines that would be worth reflecting on in light of the current resurgence of nationalism in the U.S. and elsewhere: “Thus— allow me to conclude here— it is not the burden of thousands of years of glorious history that causes a great nation to grow old. It will remain young as long as it has the capacity and the courage to keep faith with itself and with the great instincts it has been given.”

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relatively independent of the day and of any explicit observation of the sky.”46 If we recall the etymological proximity in Latin of the day (dies) to the god (deus),47 and if we remember likewise that the temple is that which cuts off a space for observation of the sky, we might intuit already the potential religious charge of a clock time and calculation that absolve themselves from any difference between the day and anything else.48 Such an eclipse or effacement of the difference that makes a day threatens inextricably the articulation of a world, or of genuinely worldly places, as Heidegger will suggest repeatedly in subsequent writing— as for example in his 1955 “Memorial Address,” where he laments the “illusion of a world that is no world,” into which we fall thanks to the sway of a calculative thinking so thoroughgoing that we take it as the only thinking, and thanks likewise to the sway of communicational technologies that are “closer to man today than . . . the sky over the earth, closer than the change from night to day.”49 The threat that troubles Heidegger here— of world-loss and its eclipse of the day— proves greatest where that very threat, thanks to the illusion of a world that is no world, goes unseen. Within such illusion, or within the essentially related delusion of a technoscientific humanity that everywhere and always sees only itself, world-loss hides itself, and we feel all too at home in our homelessness; we risk losing our world just when we seem most comfortably and securely to possess, comprehend, and control it. Much as in Augustine, we will see, so in Heidegger we can be most estranged when everything seems most familiar, we can find ourselves most at a loss when we feel ourselves most selfpossessed— and we can be returned to ourselves, renewed and reawakened, through the sudden disruption or suspension of such alienating familiarity. To open the studies of world and heart that unfold in the following chapters, then, I will turn in the first chapter to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which I

46. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1962), 468; Sein und Zeit, Sechzehnte Auflage (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1986), 415. Hereafter cited parenthetically as BT, English page number; SZ, German page number. 47. Dies and deus, along with dieu, Zeus, and Jupiter likely share a root in the Sanskrit dyaúh. See the Oxford Latin Dictionary. 48. For two recent and provocative analyses of the economies and cultures related to our day’s effacement of the day, see Mark C. Taylor, Speed Limits: Where Time Went and Why We Have So Little Left (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014); and Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2014). 49. Martin Heidegger, “Memorial Address,” in Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 48.

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read as staging, in all of its paradox and illuminating power, just the kind of crisis that awakens us to the world through its near-total catastrophe. In that staging, my reading argues, McCarthy works out one of the most powerful meditations we have in contemporary literature on the role played by love in opening and sustaining our worlds— and on the role of world and its mortal temporality in making possible the loves we live. In and through such a reading, we can begin to articulate both a construal of love in the secular register and an understanding of secularity as an orientation of our affection with respect to time. In going on to flesh out such a thinking of love and the secular, I will focus on trajectories of deconstructive and phenomenological philosophy, most notably in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century French context, that, thanks especially to the influence of Heidegger, both inherit and variously revise an understanding of love and temporality that courses through the Christian West from Augustine onward. Our second chapter, thus, will trace in Augustine what seems to me a striking phenomenological insight into the roles played by love and its temporality in opening and sustaining the worldly places we inhabit. He comes to this insight by suffering a world-threatening crisis: the experience of a beloved friend’s death. Having enjoyed all too comfortably the presence of his friend, Augustine suddenly confronts the emptiness and darkness of all the worldly places that he and his friend once shared. In that very darkness and emptiness, Augustine comes to see that it had been the movement, and direction, of his love, and its temporality, that opened and sustained the places of his dwelling. Those places had been made habitable thanks to their shared enjoyment in the friend’s presence and, in the friend’s absence, thanks to the memory that those places had once been shared, and thanks to the anticipation, enabled by such memory, that they would eventually be shared again. Rather, however, than affirm the powerful phenomenological insight that he achieves thanks to his grieving, Augustine decides instead that suffering such grief derives from a misdirection of his love toward a mortal and the life shared with him. Insofar as that mortal and that life are both destined to pass, the love directed to them, Augustine reasons, is ever already implicitly sorrow, and thus, because unhappy, untrue. Because he takes the end of love to be perfect happiness, a rightly ordered love must enjoy a happiness that is indemnified against loss and its suffering— something that a temporal love can do only if it loves the mortal in the eternality of God, where nothing loved is ever lost. Augustine’s construal of sorrow as the result of a sinfully perverted love can seem to place in question whether, and how, his thinking affirms temporality, which he does count, on some level, as good because created by God.

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That question relates in turn to Augustine’s standing with respect to metaphysics, and hence to the destruction or deconstruction of metaphysics in Heideggerian and post-Heideggerian philosophy. To take up these questions, I turn in chapters 3 and 4 to two of the more significant engagements with Augustine among post-Heideggerians. Jean-Luc Marion, I argue, richly demonstrates that Augustine’s confessional discourse does not, in fact, answer to the description of metaphysics if we take metaphysics to be a discourse that offers a (causal) response to the metaphysical question par excellence of why there is being rather than nothing. As a confessional discourse, Marion beautifully argues, Augustinian discourse is a discourse of avowal and praise, whose purpose is not to define or explain God in order thus to explain and comprehend Being, or the world, making them intelligible to us, but rather to place the speaker of this discourse in loving response to the love of God, which alone first calls to us and enables us to be— in and as responsiveness. While Marion’s argument along these lines proves illuminating both with respect to metaphysics and with respect to the distinctiveness of Augustine’s confessional discourse as theological, it proves less convincing, I suggest, in demonstrating an affirmation of time in Augustine that would escape a charge such as Nietzsche’s that Christian metaphysics is characterized by a moralizing objection to the suffering of loss and death (as well as of procreation and birth). Jacques Derrida’s engagement with Augustine stands out in this respect, for while not as deeply engaged with the Augustinian text (or  tradition) as Marion’s reading is, Derrida’s interpretation does productively read Augustine “against” Augustine by reading according to the “time of his syllables”— while at the same time inheriting and developing what might still be read as a fairly Augustinian construal of self. Much like the Augustine who, in his thinking of the interior intimo meo et superior summo meo— the God who is both more inward to me than my innermost and higher beyond me than my outermost— Derrida will understand the self to be constituted, at heart, by an intimate strangeness. In a marked divergence from Augustine, however, Derrida translates the work of such intimate strangeness into a decidedly mortal-temporal register— one that entails an understanding of love, and its joy, as conditioned essentially by the sorrow of death. This inheritance and revision of an Augustinian thinking of the heart in Derrida can be read, chapter 5 argues, as the extension of a similar, perhaps deeper, inheritance of Augustine and his thinking of the heart by Heidegger. While a range of fine recent scholarship allows us to appreciate more fully just how deeply Augustine, and the broader Christian-Augustinian tradition

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(especially Luther), informs the thinking that yields Being and Time,50 many readers of Heidegger, and especially those engaged with Augustine (like Marion) tend to see a failure in Heidegger to give love its due in his philosophy— a failure often linked to Heidegger’s purported preoccupation with death and with anxiety before death, which are thought to eclipse a thinking of love along with any genuinely relational understanding of human existence. Calling into question common understandings both of Heidegger and of love, I argue in this chapter that the singularity of our Being-toward-death as Heidegger understands it can be seen not to compromise but to condition our love relations, just as we might see love as that which attends distinctively to the other in the singularity of her mortal fragility. Such a thinking of love, this chapter further suggests, is not restricted to Being and Time (where the term itself remains, admittedly, relatively scarce) but indeed recurs, at times fragmentarily and at times quite centrally, across the sweep of Heidegger’s writing and teaching, from his early lectures in the late teens and early 1920s, where he claims that “understanding is in love”; through seminars and other writings in the 1930s, where he understands love as a fundamental mood of philosophy and defines that love in the Augustinian terms of a letting or willing that the beloved be; to a text like “Letter on Humanism” in the 1940s, where he claims that thinking entails a letting or enabling of Being that means to favor or to love; and on to his first seminar after the war, in the early 1950s, where he defines thinking itself as a taking-to-heart. Heidegger’s thinking of the heart can be read to entail, I argue, not only a reception and revision of Augustine’s interior intimo meo but also the related understanding of alienation according to which I can be most lost to myself when I feel most familiar, or self-possessed— and where thus I can be returned or reawakened to myself through a crisis of estrangement. I explore the forms of learning that we can undergo through such estrangement in the book’s final two chapters: in chapter 6 investigating with Robert Pogue Harrison and Jean-Luc Nancy the forms of estrangement that may be operative at the heart of our technological existence today, and in chapter 7 taking an historical step back to an American heritage that may well be informing

50. See especially Ryan Coyne’s Heidegger’s Confessions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), as well as Christian Sommer’s Heidegger, Aristote, Luther: Les sources aristotéliciennes et néo-testamentaires d’ Être et Temps (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2005); and Christophe Perrin’s “Les sources augustiniennes du concept d’amour chez Heidegger,” in Revue philosophique de Louvain 107, no. 2 (2009): 240. The foundational earlier work of Thomas Sheehan, Theodore Kisiel, and John Van Buren also remains indispensable.

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already— thanks to Nietzsche’s love for Ralph Waldo Emerson— the Continental lineage I have been engaging in Heidegger and the post-Heideggerians. In both Emerson and Nietzsche, this final chapter argues, a thinking of nature, or life, in their pervasive but therefore also evasive power, is inherent to the nature of thinking as a recurrent awakening to the youth that is essential to learning and to the creation of worlds. Such creation, I suggest in my conclusion, calls today for an intergenerational thinking attuned to love’s essential but fragile temporality.

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When We Love— A Place: World’s End with Cormac McCarthy

To live “with the world at heart,” according to the immeasurably influential turn that Christian thought takes with Augustine of Hippo (354 – 430), to dwell in the world in one’s heart (habitare corde in mundo) rather than merely in one’s flesh (carne), is to be in truth already dead. If I live with the world at heart, I inhabit what Augustine calls in his Confessions a “living death” or a “dead life.” In such a living death— which, so long as we live it, we do not know or even suspect to be a death— we are closed off from the only true life, and thus from the only true happiness, because we are bound in our affections to change, dispersion, and loss. According to Augustine, genuine happiness and its distinctive life suffer, by definition, no loss, and thus we enjoy real life and its happiness only when we are freed of loss, in the one and immutable God. In light of his teleological and eudaemonistic construal of human existence, according to which the end of love is enjoyment, Augustine presents us with a stark decision: “What do you want? To have temporal things and to pass away together with time, or not to love the world and to live forever with God?”1 Through his inheritance of the New Testament writings of John and Paul, Augustine understands “world” not simply as created fabric of the heavens and the earth, or something akin to the “natural world” we might conjure in

1. Augustine, Tractates on the First Epistle of John, tractate 2, sec. 10, p. 152; hereafter cited parenthetically as TJ, tractate and section numbers followed by page number of the English translation, Tractates on the First Epistle of John in The Fathers of the Church: Saint Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 112 – 24, trans. John Rettig (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1995). Latin citations, given by column number, come from J. P. Migne, Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina 35 (Paris, 1841), hereafter cited parenthetically as PCC.

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thinking today of world or creation; “world” here refers more importantly to the distinctive turn of human love in its alienation from God, a misdirected turn of love, or a perversion of the heart that determines our fundamental way of being-in the world as a being-away from God.2 “For the world,” as Augustine writes in his Second Tractate on the First Epistle of John (407), is a designation not only of this structure that God made, the sky and the earth, the sea, the visible and invisible things, but the inhabitants of the world are called the world, as a house is called both the walls and those dwelling in it [Mundus enim appellatur non solum ista fabrica quam fecit Deus, coelum et terra, mare, visibilia et invisibilia: sed habitatores mundi mundus vocantur, quomodo domus vocatur et parietes et inhabitantes]. And sometimes we praise the house and criticize those dwelling in it. . . . And in another way we say, “A good house. No one there suffers wrong.” Now we are praising, not the walls but those who dwell within the walls, yet it is called a house, whether this or that. For all lovers of the world, because they dwell in the world by their loving, as they dwell in heaven whose heart is on high and yet walk by their flesh on the earth— all lovers of the world, then, are called the world [Omnes enim dilectores mundi, quia dilectione inhabitant mundum; sicut coelum inhabitant quorum sursum est cor, et ambulant carne in terra: omnes ergo dilectores mundi mundus vocantur]. (TJ 2.12, 154 – 55; PCC 1995 – 1996)

In making this distinction between world as created fabric of sky and earth and sea, on the one hand, and world as an orientation of our human affection, on the other hand, Augustine signals that love is fundamental to human dwelling, and thus to the opening of those places where we dwell. In the coming pages and chapters, our central concern will be just this question of the role played by love in opening— constituting and sustaining— the worlds we live in, and a central argument will be that one of the most influential and incisive lines of thinking about the nature of world in twentieth-century philosophy— that of Martin Heidegger and his heirs— marks both an inheritance and a critical revision of this Augustinian insight concerning the foundation of dwelling in loving. That revision, I will suggest, offers fertile ground on which to understand the secular today in terms of affection. Crucial to Augustine’s distinction between fabric of creation, or dwelling as structure, and world as a way of being or dwelling that amounts to an orientation of loving, is his often cited contrast between two modes of love that he 2. Heidegger offers, within a broader discussion of the concept’s history, helpful commentary on these Augustinian ways of understanding “world” in Vom Wesen des Grundes, translated into English by Terrence Malick and published within a nice bilingual edition as The Essence of Reasons (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1969). See discussion on p. 53.

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names “use” and “enjoyment” (uti and frui). Enjoyment is love of something in and for itself, according to Augustine, while use is love of something for the sake of something else. Because God alone, he claims, is to be enjoyed, God alone is to be loved for himself, whereas all else should be loved— which is to say used— for the sake of loving God. Thus, love turned toward the world— whether as place or as mode of being (which perhaps in the end cannot be separated)— must be so only in the mode of use. To love the created order in itself (that is, to enjoy it) rather than for the sake of something else (which would be to use it), or to love the creature rather than loving, through the creature, the Creator, is to turn the created world into a region of death. We cannot in a rightly living way, which is to say in a rightly ordered love, love the world in itself, Augustine contends, insofar as such a love— binding us affectively to what is multiple and passing— distracts us from the one and eternal God, in whom alone love would suffer no loss, and in whom alone we are not torn to pieces through distraction. Our temporal existence turns deadly for Augustine insofar as it forgets the true origin, and thus loses any genuine future; and a sure sign of such a deadly turn is the sorrow our love suffers. A truly living future, he holds, can be hoped for only with assurance, and thus only in relation to the sole, unshakable eternity of a God who is without past or future. This is the God who does not know “was” and “will be” but only the pure and constant presence of his eternal Being, as spoken— without syllables— in the divine “I am.” In other words, God is eternal day, without morning or evening, a pure today with neither yesterday nor tomorrow. “For when ‘was’ is said of anything,” as Augustine writes in his Second Tractate on 1 John, it no longer is; and when “will be” is said of anything, it not yet is— he knows only “to be.” In reference to the fact that he is God, he knows “to be,” he does not know “to have been” and “to be going to be.” There is one day there, but an eternal [day]. “Yesterday” and “tomorrow” do not put that day in between themselves, for when yesterday has been ended, today is beginning and will be ended when tomorrow will come. There that one day is without darkness, without night, without intervals, without measurement, without hours [Quod enim dicitur quia fuit, non est; et quod dicitur quia erit, nondum est: ille non novit nisi esse. Secundum quod Deus est, esse novit; fuisse et futurum esse non novit. Dies est ibi unus, sed sempiternus. Non ponunt illum diem in medio hesternus et crastinus: hesterno enim die finito, incipiens hodiernus venturo crastino finietur. Ille unus dies ibi est sine tenebris, sine nocte, sine spatiis, sine mensura, sine horis]. (TJ 2.5, 148 – 49; PCC 1992)

While a fuller treatment of Augustine’s nuanced and often ambiguous thinking about time will be a focus in our next chapter, we can note now already that, whatever affirmation of time Augustine may intend, at least in principle,

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by understanding time as created and thus inherently good, he also associates a genuinely living and happy human time with a love that adheres unfailingly to the nightless day of God, the day without darkness, difference, deferral, or passage; and he binds the experience of our mortal and deadly time— the days that come only with night, those whose beginning means already an ending— to a love torn and dispersed amidst the multiple and fleeting distractions of the world wherein, forgetting God, we lose ourselves. According to a construal of alienation in Augustine that will resonate in Western thought through the likes of Luther, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger, the inherently unreadable sign of this self-loss, when we are in its midst, is our failure to see or experience that loss as a loss; busily and all too comfortably absorbed in the distractions of the world, we enjoy a false sense of security and self-possession, when in fact we are in mortal danger and utterly lost to ourselves— because we are turned away from the God who alone gives us to ourselves. The movement through which human temporality is made deadly, while depriving the sinner of any genuine future by distancing the sinner from God’s eternal and living day, at the same time captures the sinner within a form of temporality that mimics such eternity perversely by closing the sinner within the habit of sin, an ongoing and inescapable repetition of our fall that can seem, in its persistence, timeless. The human temporality that imitates God’s eternity in this way, like the sin from which it derives, wherein we imitate perversely the freedom and independence of God, goes hand in hand with a false security, and related self-satisfaction, in which the self, without knowing it, and indeed while believing itself to be self-possessed, actually loses itself. The sinful time that yields our death at the same time hides that death from us and gives us a deceptive sense of life. For Augustine, thus, we are most in danger when we believe ourselves most secure. In the name of the sinner’s healing, then, Augustine warns against the desire for security in this world and insists that a trembling heart in face of our peril should replace our deluded complacency and self-satisfaction. A complex dynamic thereby emerges such that, on the one hand, God repeatedly relieves me of my trembling heart while, on the other hand, he works first to liberate me from my lack of anxiety. “My heart trembles and strains,” as Augustine writes in Confessions 10.39, “in the midst of all these perils. . . . It is not as though I did not suffer wounds, but I feel rather that you heal them over and over again.”3 Such healing, however, is premised on my being first freed from 3. For translation of citations from the Confessions, I draw variously, in light of the Latin, on the English translations of William Watts, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Har-

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the alienating, and tranquilizing, effect of sin, wherein I do not even see the peril in which I dwell. Hence the importance of John for Augustine, when he “takes this wicked lack of anxiety away from you and implants a useful fear. Wrongfully you wish to be free of anxiety, be apprehensive! For he is faithful and just to forgive us our offenses if you should always be dissatisfied with yourself and undergo change in yourself until you reach perfection [tollit tibi malam securitatem, et inserit utilem timorem. Male vis esse securus, sollicitus esto. Fidelis enim est et justus, ut dimittat nobis delicta nostra, si semper tibi displiceas, et muteris donec perficiaris]” (TJ 1.7, 130; PCC 1983). To live, as fallen, in the world and its temporality, which means to dwell there— rather than in the heavens— in the heart, is to live without hope of any opening to any genuine future— while failing, however, to recognize one’s own despair, or to see that one is already dead. The turn of conversion, which entails a turn of the heart from the sinful closure of a temporal world to the living openness of God’s eternal day, requires then a decisive rupture or disruption of that time and world in which the sinful self finds its overly secure enjoyment. I must be torn out of my secure sense of self-possession, where I am actually losing myself, in order then truly to find myself— as absolutely dependent on, and standing before, the God whose condemning judgment is also a mode of his love, an unsettling of my self that gives me back authentically to myself. Augustine thus inherits and extends the Pauline contention that “law came in, to increase the trespass; but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more” (Romans 5:20), and that “it was sin, working death in me through what is good, in order that sin might be shown to be sin” (Romans 7:13). Hence, following a logic well established in Paul, Augustine highlights the vital role played by those moments of crisis, dispossession, and anxiety— when I can no longer rest secure in relation to the things or persons of the temporal world and must therefore seek true rest in the eternal. This Augustine for whom an unsettled heart proves crucial in opening hope for a genuine life stands among the more influential sources for Martin Heidegger’s analysis of human existence in its inescapably worldly and temporal character. Already in his 1919 – 20 course Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger highlights the shift effected by Christianity, and especially Augustine, toward a thinking of factical life and self-experience that emphavard University Press, 2006); of R. S. Pine-Coffin (New York: Penguin, 1961); and of F. J. Sheed (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2006). Latin citations taken from Augustine, Confessionum Libri XIII, ed. Lucas Verheijen (Turnhout: Brepols, 1981). Hereafter referred to as C, with book and chapter number.

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sizes the unsettled heart. It is above all Augustine who, in the “inquietum cor nostrum . . . saw the great incessant disquiet of life. He gained a wholly original aspect, rather than just a theoretical one. Rather, he lived in it and brought it to expression.”4 Dedicating a seminar to book 10 of the Confessions in the summer of 1921, Heidegger highlights again what will become a central theme of Being and Time: our distinctive capacity to lose ourselves, the human property of openness to dispossession or impropriety.5 Such a capacity for self-loss, in Heidegger’s analysis, involves both the unavoidable subjection of human life to trouble and disquiet, the human self ’s becoming a question to itself, and the tendency of human life to flee just such trouble and disquiet— to flee itself as question— by forgetting itself, along with its troubled and questionable character, through distractions offered up by things and persons of the “world.” In his reading of Augustine along these lines, Heidegger emphasizes that the human experience of the “I am,” by contrast to the constancy of the divine “I am” in Augustine, occurs as trouble and question insofar as the self can experience— paradoxically— its own self-difference or self-absence: its own having-been absent or lost to itself. Augustine finds a notable example of the self ’s experience of its own absence to itself in the transition, or differential movement, from the sleep of a dream I enjoy to the wakefulness in which I regret both that enjoyment and my having-been lost to myself within it. “Especially in the ‘transition,’” Heidegger writes in discussing Augustine’s reflection on the dream he regrets (C 10.30), we have noteworthy experience of ourselves, namely that there is something quod nos non fecimus [that we have not made], which is not enacted by us, quod in nobis factus est [(but) which is made in us], but which nonetheless occurs and proceeds with us and in us, so that we are somehow sad about it, something that is in us, something that “we” ourselves are and yet, that we are not.— Concept of the molestia [trouble].6

4. Martin Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology: Winter Semester 1919/1920, trans. Scott M. Campbell (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 48; Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (1919/20), in Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe (Klostermann, 1993), 58:62. 5. The authenticity that consists in our human capacity for, and openness to, the closedness of inauthenticity is a theme explored also in Heidegger’s later thinking about the human and the animal in Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, and, more recently, in Giorgio Agamben. See, e.g., Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), and “The Passion of Facticity,” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). 6. Martin Heidegger, “Augustine and Neoplatonism,” in The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-

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If we can see emerging here the logic according to which Heidegger will contrast and relate authentic and inauthentic modes of factical existence in Being and Time, then we might suspect also that this latter work, at the heart of its thinking, may well keep something of the Augustinian sense that the trouble and disquiet of our experience have to do fundamentally with the heart. As distinct from Augustine, however, who marks the difference between loss or dispersion of self and the recovery of a continent self by referring to the absolute future, and absolute past, of the one and eternal Father, who is not of this world, Heidegger takes such a difference between dispersion and recovery of self, or between forgetting and awakening, as internal to my Being-in-the world and its temporality. He does this in terms of his much discussed, and often distorted, distinction between inauthentic and authentic modes of my existence— neither of which is more “real” than the other, but which concern instead that which, on the one hand, is distinctively mine, and susceptible to a loss that is mine, and that which belongs more to the anonymous sociality of my being in the “they,” which no one can ever distinctively own, nor thus ever lose. By contrast to Augustine, Heidegger contends that we must not “take the fallenness of Dasein as a ‘fall’ from a purer and higher ‘primal status’” (BT 220; SZ 176). The structure, terms, and sense of the distinction between fall from and return to self, however, remain strikingly similar in the two thinkers, as does— what is key to my concerns here— the understanding of how it appears to me: in both cases, it is some unsettling suspension or eclipse of my world that deprives me of support for my flight from my self and its truth, thereby throwing me back upon myself in an isolation that brings such truth, and my relation with it, to light. Much as in book 4 of the Confessions Augustine finds himself deprived of his habitual preoccupations and pleasures through the abrupt death of a beloved friend, such that he becomes a question to himself as his world and its usual possibilities recede into darkness, so Heidegger’s phenomenological eye will find especially illuminating those forms of world suspension that we experience in moods such as boredom and anxiety, the latter as tied notably to the horizon of our finite Being-toward-death. In the experience of profound boredom, Heidegger points out in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (1929 – 30), finite Being-in-the-world, or Dasein, “finds itself delivered over to beings’ telling versity Press, 2004), 158; Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, in Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, ed. Matthias Jung, Thomas Regehly, and Claudius Strube (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1995), 60:213. Hereafter cited parenthetically as PRL, English page number; GA 60, German page number.

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refusal of themselves as a whole.”7 That is, beings and the possibilities they offer to Dasein are, in boredom, present to Dasein but under conditions of total indifference: they do not call to me or draw me or engage me or offer to me anything that I manage actively to concern myself with. Such a refusal of being, however, as Heidegger brilliantly highlights, is a refusal that nonetheless speaks; it makes manifest, in light of its suspension, the kind of possibility that conditions Dasein’s Being-in-the-world; it thus illuminates both the world (whose possibility is suspended) and Dasein (now thrown back upon itself as Being-in-the-world). “All telling refusal [Versagen],” Heidegger writes, is in itself a telling [Sagen], i.e., a making manifest. What do beings in this telling refusal of themselves as a whole tell us in such a refusal? What do they tell us in refusing to tell? It is a telling refusal of that which somehow could and was to be granted to Dasein. And what is this? The very possibilities of its doing and acting. The telling refusal tells of these possibilities of Dasein. This telling refusal does not speak about them, does not lead directly to dealings with them, but in its telling refusal it points to them and makes them known in refusing them.8

Being made known in being refused, the possibilities of Dasein are in fact announced. Thus depriving me of the various possibilities with which I normally concern and thus busy myself, all the while leaving those possibilities manifest in their indifference to me, where I don’t care whether they are actualized, boredom throws me back upon myself and confronts me with the more fundamental possibility that conditions my existence as such— an ontological possibility opened before and beyond any given ontic possibility for a determinate this or that which might eventually be actualized. Because at the heart of any given possibility is what makes it possible, Heidegger explains, “those beings refusing themselves as a whole do not make a telling announcement concerning arbitrary possibilities of myself, they do not report on them, rather this telling announcement in such a telling refusal is a calling [Anrufen], is that which properly makes possible the Dasein in me.”9 A similar elucidation of the ontological possibility that conditions Dasein’s Being-in-the-world is found in the influential analysis of anxiety in Being and Time, which highlights the linkage of such possibility to Dasein’s mortality. By contrast to fear, which finds its cause and object in a worldly being, a thing or person within the world from which fear can flee, anxiety 7. Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts, 139; Heidegger, Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, 210. 8. Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts, 140; Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, 211. 9. Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts, 143; Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, 216.

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finds no such object or cause among things or persons of the world— and indeed tends to flee toward just those things and persons in its effort to escape itself; such flight, however, can only fail, according to Heidegger, because “what oppresses us [in anxiety] is not this or that, nor is it the summation of everything present at hand; it is rather the possibility of the ready-to-hand in general; that is to say, it is the world itself ” (BT 231; SZ 187). Depriving Dasein of the persons who and things that normally sustain its everyday falling and flight from itself, the “existential solipsism” disclosed by anxiety works thus “to bring Dasein face to face with its world as world, and thus to bring it face to face with itself as Being-in the world” (BT 233; SZ 188)— which is to say, face to face with itself as a “Being-possible” that is such thanks only to its Being-alongside things in their readiness to hand and thanks, inextricably, to its Being-with other Dasein. The work done here by anxiety relates intimately to the horizon of death, which within Being and Time signals most pointedly the difference between, on the one hand, (ontic) possibilities for this or that (which means possibilities that might eventually be rendered actual by and for Dasein) and, on the other hand, the more fundamental (ontological) possibility of Dasein’s Being, which Dasein always has still “to be” (such that the possibility can never be converted into any present actuality, or actual presence, “as such”). Death is thus ever impending but never actually arrives for Dasein in its Being, insofar as death names the possibility of Dasein’s no-longer-being-able-to-be-there. In its character as ever-impending-but-never-actualized as such, Dasein’s death signals the ever-open, ontological possibility of Dasein’s sheer beingable to be, as distinguished from the various ontic possibilities for this or that eventual actuality with which Dasein might concern itself in or as actual experience. As I argued in Indiscretion, one should note here, and contrary to common assumptions, that when seen in this light the horizon of death has in fact a generosity to it; exactly as incommensurate with presence or actuality, the horizon of death gives to Dasein not only a limit but also the openness of its temporal experience. And as “nonrelational,” the horizon of death gives to Dasein also the kind of being that might project itself into its open future as a singular, irreplaceable, and hence potentially responsible— or authentically loving— self. In this direction, to be explored further in subsequent chapters, we might think of Jacques Derrida’s contention that “there is no gift of self, it cannot be thought, except in terms of this irreplaceability.”10 Contrary to 10. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 42.

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common criticisms of Heidegger’s insistence on the nonrelational character of my Being-toward-death,11 the fact that my Being-toward-death, like the other person’s, finally resists any substitution, transfer, or exchange only intensifies the significance of our Being-with one another; indeed, I’ll argue, it proves essential to the authentic care, and love, that we might have for one another and, inextricably, for the world we share. To move in that direction, I want first to engage the sharpest treatment I know within contemporary literature of such interplay of singularity, love, and world— Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. The Road 12 carries out, and it invites, a meditation on the essential interplay of world and heart. It does so as if in a phenomenological experience or experiment akin to those we see in the analysis of anxiety and boredom; or as if in a crisis of heart like that which, in Augustine, foreshadows and informs those analyses in Heidegger. It does so, that is, by staging the suspension of world through a narrative of catastrophe and peril. Deprived of the things and persons in relation with which and with whom one can, more normally, busily forget oneself in one’s multiple and ever shifting concerns, the central figures of The Road find themselves, in their very existence, thrown into absolute question, like Augustine upon the death of his friend, and confronting, like Dasein in its fundamental anxiety, the opaque no-thingness of the world. Without access to the normal, everyday, supports for a flight and falling in which one might by habit dwell comfortably, these figures are thrown back upon themselves, and each other, so as to confront, in light mainly of absence and failure, the most essential, and thus barest, conditions of their worldly existence and its possibility— conditions illuminated now through their darkening. In The Road’s telling, an unnamed but sickly, starving, and struggling father and son walk slowly south toward an unnamed coast across an unnamed but devastated, dying, and deadly landscape, where other people are few, and where those people who do appear present first and foremost the possibility of torment and death. A sense of the radical suspension that structures the entire work, and an evocation of the paradoxes of telling— impossibly— the full story of any such radical suspension, appear in their key elements within

11. See, e.g., Emmanuel Levinas, God, Death, and Time, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); or, in a more humanistic register, Robert Harrison, Dominion of the Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 12. Cormac McCarthy, The Road (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006). Hereafter cited parenthetically as R with page number.

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a passage toward the end of the book, after father and son have reached the coast which stood throughout their journey as the only spoken destination other than death itself, and which now— having been reached— reveals to them an ocean vast, cold, and gray, “like the desolation of some alien sea breaking on the shores of a world unheard of ” (R 181): [The father] got up and walked out to the road. The black shape of it running from dark to dark. Then a distant low rumble. Not thunder. You could feel it in your feet. A sound without cognate and so without description. Something imponderable shifting out there in the dark. The earth itself contracting with the cold. It did not come again. What time of year? What age the child? He walked out into the road and stood. The silence. The salitter drying from the earth. The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to the waterline. At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay moldering. No sound but the wind. What will you say? A living man spoke these lines? He sharpened a quill with his small pen knife to scribe these things in sloe or lampblack? At some reckonable and entabled moment? He is coming to steal my eyes. To seal my mouth with dirt. (R 220)

In stunningly rich spareness, this one passage weaves together the essential elements of an entire reading: a pervasive darkness and its association with the unnameable, imponderable, and singular (from dark to dark . . . sound without cognate); the flattening or undifferentiation of a time, or life, that may in some deep sense have ceased to be a living time, or that persists unmarked and unrecorded and hence unremembered (what time of the year, what age the child); the silence, or the deep low groan, of a world in the midst of its death, both natural and social (the earth itself, the flooded and burned cities); the interplay of memory and anticipation (dolmen stones and spoken bones)— and in light of all this darkening, where anticipation and memory may be deprived of their very conditions by an absolute death, the question of language and story, speaking, telling, writing. What become of time and language, of life and its creative story, in the presence of such absence, in the seeming collapse or eclipse of world itself, or in the deepest withdrawal of the possibility we might take to make a world? What role, above all, would anticipation and memory— the movement and marking of age through the years— have played in sustaining the time and language of a world sufficiently living to bear, and to be borne by, the creation and telling of story? And how might all of this be bound to the heart? The work opens in a night “dark beyond darkness” (R 3) with the man and his sleeping child; they walk together, “each the other’s world entire” (R 5) through days “more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset

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of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world” (R 3). The father “thought that if he lived long enough the world at last would be all lost. Like the dying world the newly blind inhabit, all of it slowly fading from memory” (R 16). In this opening and throughout, the work evokes the paradoxical appearance of the world’s closing or disappearance— an appearance that remains strictly impossible insofar as world itself is the place and condition of any appearance. It narrates the suspension or cessation of narrative time itself, time’s flattening into a monotony that threatens all anticipation and recollection. And it takes, or gives, such closing and disappearance, such cessation and suspension, along with the mortality these signal, as a matter of the heart: “He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone” (R 11). The father still breathes, and his heart beats, but in that beating echo the temporal winds, the scattering of a world in ashes and void, as if unchained from its sun. He wishes his heart, echoing the void, were stone, but it is not; nor is it even his own. The heart in whose light alone any possibility of world or life at all appear to him, and in which thus resound also the cold and silence of the world’s dying, belongs not to him alone. It belongs to his Being-with the fragile and threatened child who himself never knew the world before its devastation, having been born only after the unnamed catastrophe, and thereby opening, or incarnating, the question of what birth and its promise could mean in the ostensible absence of any time for memory or anticipation. The father looks upon the boy—“ghostly pale and shivering,” “so thin it stopped his heart” (R 33)— and he thinks, “So thin. My heart, he said. My heart. But he knew that if he were a good father still it might be as [the mother] had said. That the boy was all that stood between him and death” (R 25). The promise of a birth and its life, appearing within the apparent absence or disappearing of the conditions for any promise or life, is the heart that holds death at bay. Can such a heart still sustain a world? What would it mean to have a world without such a heart? “Not all dying words are true,” the father suggests, “and this blessing is no less real for being shorn of its ground” (R 26). The mother, to whom this passage refers, also recognized, in light of the world’s darkening and of death’s pervasive presence, a tie between her heart and the child. “You talk about taking a stand,” she says to the father in explaining her decision for suicide instead of survival,

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but there is no stand to take. My heart was ripped out of me the night he was born so don’t ask for sorrow now. There is none. Maybe you’ll be good at this. I doubt it, but who knows. The one thing I can tell you is that you won’t survive for yourself. I know because I would never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart. (R 48 – 49)

The mother’s hopelessness, the failure of her heart or the turn of her heart in yearning for the darkness and death in which sorrow itself would be swallowed up, relate fundamentally if negatively to the question of world and time and their founding conditions in the openness of a possibility— a futurity and its past— that simply no longer appears to her. The entry of her child into a world that is not a world, a world appearing only in the light of its eclipse, marks a loss of heart that is in fact not a total loss but an incurable tearing, since she hopes, in fact, with all her heart, for eternal nothingness— which in fact, the world that is not quite a world cannot give her. As if in that hell where the goodness of life persists only just enough for that life to know endless and inescapable suffering, the mother sees only an absolute closure of possibility, where there is not only no life to live or to love but also— what amounts to the same— nothing more to say, no story still to tell. “We used to talk about death,” she says to the man. “We don’t anymore. Why is that?” “I don’t know” [says the man]. “It’s because it’s here [she replies]. There’s nothing left to talk about” (R 48). To have something still to talk about, the mother suggests, giving expression to a central theme of the work, would be to have a life and a world whose temporality could sustain— and be sustained by— a heart. What does it mean to have a world in this sense? The work responds to this question— illuminating for us the essence of world itself— mainly by staging the world’s suspension, which means here the near total collapse or negation of our being-alongside things ready to hand (the tools and networks through which we carry out the projects of daily life); the failure of our being-with others (who alone make sense of such projects by sharing and shaping them from the ground up); and a loss of what would have been the essential coimplication between these two as sustained temporally through the dynamic and open interplay between memory and promise, between the recollection of anticipation and the anticipation of recollection. The scope and significance of the loss entailed in a world’s collapse are lit up with remarkable intensity and in various ways in the work, both in

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terms of absence or decline and in terms of exceptional, almost miraculous, presence. This latter is seen, for example, late in the story when the man and child— starving and at their nearest yet to death— come haphazardly, in a random backyard, upon a hidden underground bunker that holds in store, in seeming abundance, the fruits of a once fertile but now barren earth, along with the implements of a no-longer living sociality. Beholding the array of foods and tools standing there in reserve, outside or beyond or after the world that offered them, the father says in answer to the child’s question, “What did you find?”: “I found everything. Everything. Wait till you see” (R 117). In other words, they come upon “the richness of a vanished world” (R 117). That richness appears in the novel less often through such nourishing and sustaining presence— which, in the scope of things, is perhaps to be lamented insofar as it may only forestall the inevitable13— and more often through vanishing, decline, or decay, through the negative image or trace: newspapers, billboards and advertisements; money and markets and stores; telephones and their books; cars and trains and their now pointless, empty routes: everything seems like a message or a means of exchange or connection now shorn of sender and purpose, bereft of recipient or destination, but nonetheless present, visible, in a telling refusal of possibility. Goods and values, plans and projects, hopes and promises, all still appear— their intentions and means, tokens and aims persist— but in light of their now withdrawn possibility, in the failure of the world, which means above all the failure of the temporal interplay between memory and anticipation that alone sustained them. Recalling the “living death” of worldly time in Augustine, where the genuine future is closed out by the deadly recurrence of sin, the flattened and monotonous time that weighs upon father and son in The Road signals a suspension of living temporality that illuminates, through the suspension, the character of such temporality as living and genuinely open. However, if these travelers in The Road may be already dead, they would be such, I’d emphasize, less because, as in Augustine, they love the world and dwell there in the heart and more because, to the contrary, they have been deprived of the things and persons whose interrelations would form a world where a living temporality— and the love tied to it— could remain viable. At several points, the work evokes this eclipse or closure of worldly memory and anticipation, and of the sociality they entail, in temporal terms that recall, as if in another perverse imitation, the eternity of Augustine’s otherworldly God. “On this 13. “Even now some part of him wished they’d never found this refuge. Some part of him always wished it to be over” (R 130).

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road,” the narrative voice goes, “there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world. Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was?” (R 27). As this passage suggests, the “was” of a living memory would be required by any truly vital “to be,” and these depend on those other people who, in The Road, have taken with them the world. Our memory of ancestors who would have looked toward us in anticipation (while remaining unable to comprehend or picture us through any determinate expectation) and our anticipation of heirs who might one day look back to us (in ways, again, we can never fully foreknow) seem here failing, or gravely threatened, in their essential interplay. The man at one point picks up a phone and dials, knowing by heart, the number of his father “in that long ago” (R 6); he thus looks back to one whose anticipatory future seems now closed in ways that could not have been foreseen. If I have no future, I can no longer receive in a living way, by looking back, the anticipatory hope (and hence temporality) of ancestors. “Do you think your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their ledgerbook? Against what? There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground” (R 165). To live still, in a world, The Road suggests, would mean still to inhabit, or to embody, and breathe, a vital and open interplay between anticipation and memory. In a world-less world, by contrast, a world without possibility of such memory, or such memory of possibility, and hence likewise without anticipation, “the days sloughed past uncounted and uncalendared. Along the interstate in the distance long lines of charred and rusting cars. . . . The incinerate corpses shrunk to the size of a child. . . . Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts. They went on. Treading the dead world under like rats on a wheel. The nights dead still and deader black. So cold. They talked hardly at all” (R 230). The “frailty of everything” in The Road, like the possibility of everything, which its failure illuminates, is seen to be the function of this temporality now closed and of the sociality intimately bound with such temporality. In the first year following the catastrophe, the reader learns, the roads were peopled with refugees shrouded up in their clothing. . . . Towing wagons or carts. Their eyes bright in their skulls. Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland. The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all. (R 24)

“Everything,” the work suggests, fails absolutely, resolves into nothingness and night, insofar as it is consumed in the timeless time of “ever,” the time

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of no time that we might believe operative not only in death “itself ” but also in the living death of a life lacking that shared openness of future and past: a living death wherein one would find “no list of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later” (R 46). A good part of the father’s struggle is to resist the admission— whose possibility he must therefore consider— that there is no later, or that there is no longer any possible inheritance, or transmission, of ancestral anticipations. And here we might note one part of the father’s difference from the mother. The father wants to insist that they— mother, father, and child— are survivors, which would mean that they have some warrant to go on, and to hope, and thus that they inherit still some living memory that they might anticipate passing on. The mother, by contrast, believes that they are not survivors but walking dead, without any such warrant or hope because without any future other than a certain death that is in fact not future but already fully present, thus canceling likewise any and all past. This difference between the two is not unshakable, and the poignancy of the father’s position has everything to do with his capacity to see the mother’s view. The central anticipation of his journey’s time, after all, is the moment when he would have to kill his son so as to spare the son some greater horror. “Can you do it?” he asks himself with an urgency that recalls 1 John’s last hour, “When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die.” (R 96). However, the fact is— and the very telling of the story attests to it— that the father and son do not quite live in a time of no time; and death is not quite wholly, and as the mother says, already here. The reader can see this because the disappearance of worldly things and persons, and the closing of worldly time, are held open here in their appearance, and so still attest to a world and time. The suspension of the world— held up here as story— is not an absolute darkness but the illumination of a darkness, the appearance of a disappearance that itself, the disappearance, serves to highlight a founding possibility and condition of all appearance— and the power of every birth: the fact that, in its essential vulnerability, it well could have not been, and could yet cease to be. If at a certain moment the father realizes that “he could not construct for the child’s pleasure the world he’d lost without constructing the loss as well” (R 129), this realization states in reverse a guiding insight of the work, as expressed pointedly toward the end: “Perhaps in the world’s destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be” (R 230 – 31). The construction or creation and the loss, both in and of this work, and world, are coimplicated.

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What is it whose ceasing would mean the ceasing of things to be? Perhaps above all the forms of anticipation and memory that stem from, even as they sustain, the possibility, or the hope, of a love that would be of and for the world. At any number of points, the novel evokes this play of anticipation and memory, as well as their ties to the heart, by reference to message and signal, to books and stories— including this story itself, as suggested already in our long opening quote from the novel. Along the road, “hopeless messages to loved ones lost and dead” (R 152) appear alongside warnings of death from the long departed. A flare gun appears mainly as weapon, because it seems “there’s nobody to signal” (R 203). We sense the despair when we learn that the child knows his alphabet, but does not work anymore on his lessons; the hope, and heart, essential to learning appear in their fainting. In a nearly, but only nearly, world-less world, and timeless time, where there remains nobody to signal, all of language, any potential sign, any message of warning, or, above all, message of love— which really means all of the world— can be seen, in and through their inoperative persistence, to have been the function of a promise, and memory, likewise vanishing: So little of promise in that country. . . . He tried to think of something to say but he could not. He’d had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors, the names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was already gone? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever. (R 74 – 75)

The world shrinks insofar as promise and memory fade, insofar as the open structure and temporality of being-with-others, thanks to whom alone beings-ready-to-hand remain significant, collapse and threaten to close altogether. This is a possibility we can glimpse but never fully see or understand, because it signals an absolute end of all seeing and understanding. In one key passage along these lines, the man’s “dreams brightened” and “the vanished world returned” and “kin long dead washed up” and he stands by a window watching the street below on a “gray day in a foreign city” and on the table behind him are “books and papers” and at the table “a woman” (R 157). The scene, so far, recalls what elsewhere the father remembers of a night with his wife by the sea, about which he said “if he were God he would have made the world just so and no different” (R 185). But then: “Years later,” the narrative shifts, “he’d stood in the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water. Shelves tipped over. Some rage at the lies

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arranged in their thousands row on row. He picked up one of the books and thumbed through the heavy bloated pages. He’d not thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come” (R 157– 58). The space of this written and once living memory, the library as it appears here in its ruin, was essentially— and the ruin itself illuminates this— a space of anticipation. From the perspective opened by this story of the failure and fall of books and stories and their possibility, to speak of a “world to come” is redundant, insofar as the open anticipation of what is yet to come, sustained only by living memory— which is to say a memory that is not automatic, and remains susceptible to loss— would alone give a world in which one might hope to live and prove able to love. That hope, note, implies also an essential sorrow, a sorrow that is itself condition of hope insofar as the capacity to sorrow would itself require— much as the world and its suspension— the persistence, even if through its negative appearance, of that possibility whose loss sorrows us. This kind of interplay between hope and sorrow is surely tied also to the beauty both achieved by and meditated on within McCarthy’s writing. And here we could perhaps see another difference between the father and the mother. If the mother, as we noted, refuses the possibility of sorrow, she may so refuse because she cannot see the possibility of hope, cannot see any opening for time or world to come. The father, by contrast, in recognition of pervasive danger and the threat of absolute loss, lives in a hope whose possibility is implied by sorrow itself— that is, the hope implied by world and its truth, which is revealed through the negative possibility of its suspension, where it appears not as self-evident but as contingent, and hence like a gift: They scrabbled through the charred ruins of houses they would not have entered before. A corpse floating in the black water of a basement among the trash and rusting ductwork. He stood in a living room partly burned and open to the sky. The water buckled boards sloping away into the yard. Soggy volumes in a bookcase. He took one down and opened it and then put it back. Everything damp. Rotting. In a drawer he found a candle. No way to light it. He put it in his pocket. He walked out into the gray light and stood and saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like groundfoxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it. (R 110)

If following the catastrophic event and the subsequent birth of a child the mother and father differ on the possibility of sorrow, perhaps they do so because they differ on the possibility of hope, or on the hope of possibility. The

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father can sorrow only in light of hope’s possibility, and he can hope only in light of sorrow’s; he sees, thus, the truth spoken elsewhere in McCarthy that “one ought not let sorrow die for it is the sweetening of every gift”14— a way of stating otherwise the insight of Jacob Boehme that serves as epigraph to McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: “It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost as if in sorrow. There is no sorrowing. For sorrow is a thing that is swallowed up in death.” The mother cannot sorrow in the measure that she feels already swallowed up in death, which means also the measure in which she can neither receive the gift of a child nor give herself to it. Love’s life demanded hope, and she finds none. And here, on the question of love, the father and mother may diverge less than appears at first glance. The mother chooses suicide and refuses sorrow, for she sees no life or world; the father decides on survival and accepts the burden of sorrow that still reveals— if through “borrowed eyes”— a possible world. Both, however, may share an understanding of the essential interdependence between living love and a possible world. The mother believes they are walking dead, and not survivors, because they have no world within which to live the anticipatory openness that love demands, and affords. If we are already dead, or if death’s presence has become all-consuming, then love proves impossible, or meaningless, as does any further talk or telling of story (and this is why the father is right to insist as he does that death is not a lover). The father, by contrast, would hold the same belief but differently: life and world are not possible if we do not love, and the hope of life and world, whose appearance is in fact always and only to borrowed eyes, rests in the child, his heart. The hope of promise in the child is tied intimately to a recollection of ancestors— one, to be sure, that the narrative stages, as for example with the long dead father whose phone number the narrator dials, but also one— anticipated— that the son may eventually cultivate, sustain, or inhabit. In this direction, the father can look forward to a future in which the son may recall a father no longer looking or responding, just as he, the father, has in the midst of the narrative recalled the forward, anticipatory look of his now dead father, one no longer looking, anticipating, or responding— but having surely once, for a time, done so. Perhaps the question is whether, at any given time, the time is living enough that we, in our anticipation, both continue to recall the anticipation of those who came before us and anticipate that backward look or recall of those we now hold— without knowing them fully or even at all— in anticipation. The living character of the possibility includes essentially the threat of its eclipse, its lack of assurance or security; in other terms, the dif14. Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 288.

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ference between carrying the fire of life and spreading Lucifer’s destruction is ever at stake, so long as possibility lives. The chance of life implies the danger of death; the possibility and hope of the one imply the possibility and sorrow of the other. The embodiment of this coimplication between chance and danger, hope and sorrow, is the fragile and threatened child who may also be, as the story says, the word of God— one who, in this version, carries the fire, and passes the breath, of life only on the ground of dark, intestate earth, amidst the cold and secular winds. This possibility, that the child is word of God, should be sensed as just that: a possibility, which as possibility comes to light against the darkness of its potential eclipse. On the second page of the book, as the father watches “the ashen daylight congeal over the land,” we learn that “he knew only that the child was his warrant. He [the father] said: If he [the child] is not the word of God God never spoke” (R 4). This possibility that God spoke, or that God now speaks, and breathes, through a child— for whom language and story and world and time might yet survive in their possibility— would have to be read here, I think, in light always of the possibility suggested by Ely (the only character named in the book), who contends later (in what I hear to be an echo of the mother’s insistence that they are not survivors but walking dead), “There is no God and we are his prophets” (R 143). In The Road, as elsewhere, the possibility of the one is conditioned by the possibility of the other— just as the possibility of life and world, time and language, require the possibility of a suspension or a darkening that illumines them. Between the two, those in The Road might dwell, just as they might dwell, if minimally, within an interplay of memory and anticipation that does not come to form, as in Augustine, a temporal image of the eternal present, but rather keeps open the memory of a never fully answered anticipation and the anticipation of a memory that will never be complete. The father glimpses something of this on the verge of his own death, where he cannot take the son— and this due not only to his inability, or unwillingness, “to hold [his] dead son in [his] arms” (R 235), as he explains, but even more, I will argue in what follows, due to the nonrelational character of his Being-toward-death. The fact that his death— like the son’s— remains his in a nontransferable way, does not at all compromise but indeed conditions and gives all of its force to the father’s response, shortly before dying, to the son’s objection, “you said you would never leave me”: “I know,” says the father, “I’m sorry. You have my whole heart” (R 235). Here, where neither one can step in for the other, the other has the heart of the one. And here, before the darkness, that worldly time is illumined in which, as happens toward the end, the father, “filthy, ragged, hopeless [would] stop and lean on the cart and the boy

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would go on and then stop and look back and he would raise his weeping eyes and see him standing there in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in that waste like a tabernacle” (R 230). In this worldly time, along the road, the father may well keep his promise to the son that he will not send the son into the darkness alone. And in that promise, spoken here in a secular tone, we might hear the possible truth of the father’s words that “all things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy, I have you” (R 46).

2

Mourning Places and Time in Augustine

“Every soul is wretched that is bound in the friendship of mortal things [miser est omnis animus uinctus amicitia rerum mortalium]” (C 4.6). So writes Augustine in his Confessions, while confessing both to God and before other men the grief he suffered over the death of a dear but unnamed friend.1 The praise entailed in all confession functions here through admission of— and a grieving over— the fault of grieving itself. Having failed, in the time of that friend’s life, to register the friend’s mortality; having believed or assumed that the friend’s company would never be lost, and thus forever enjoyed; in short, “loving a mortal man as if he were never to die [diligendo moriturum acsi non moriturum]” (C 4.8), Augustine’s love suffers a dark pain over the friend’s parting. This pain henceforth shades as hollow all of Augustine’s familiar dwelling places and ways of being in them— which is to say, his world. These places and ways of being, which amount to a world, once seemingly full and joyful thanks to the friend’s presence— whether actual or anticipated— are now shaped by an emptiness carved out between the friend’s pointed and irrevocable absence and Augustine’s longing for the friend’s presence. In their sudden and pervasive vacuity, Augustine notes, these outward places reflect, and are reflected in, his own self, which has now been made a question to itself because it was tied in friendship, and bound in its heart, to the

1. According to his politics of friendship, Augustine does not, we should note, count this unnamed friend “a friend in the truest meaning of friendship,” which is to say, in the Christian meaning as Augustine understands it: “for there is no true friendship unless You weld it between souls that cleave together through that charity which is shed in our hearts by the Holy Ghost who is given to us” (C 4.4).

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world of passing time, pouring out its soul upon a mortal “like water upon sand” (C 4.8): My heart was black with grief. Whatever I looked upon had the air of death. My native place was a prison-house and my home a strange unhappiness. The things we had done together became sheer torment without him. My eyes were restless looking for him, but he was not there. I hated all places because he was not in them. They could not say, “He will come soon,” as they would in his life when he was absent. I became a great question to myself, and I was forever asking my soul why it was sad and why it disquieted me so sorely. And my soul knew not what to answer me. If I said “Trust in God” my soul did not obey— naturally because the man whom she had loved and lost was nobler and more real than the imagined deity in whom I was bidding her trust. I had no delight but in tears, for tears had taken the place my friend had held in the love of my heart. [Quo dolore contenebratum est cor meum, et quidquid aspiciebam mors erat. Et erat mihi patria supplicium, et paterna domus mira infelicitas, et quidquid cum illo communicaueram, sine illo in cruciatum immanem uerterat. Expectabant eum undique oculi mei, et non dabatur; et oderam omnia, quod non haberent eum, nec mihi iam dicere poterant: “Ecce ueniet”, sicut cum uiueret, quando absens erat. Factus eram ipse mihi magna quaestio, et interrogabam animam meam, quare tristis esset et quare conturbaret me ualde, et nihil nouerat respondere mihi. Et si dicebam: “Spera in deum”, iuste non obtemperabat, quia uerior erat et melior homo, quem carissimum amiserat, quam phantasma, in quod sperare iubebatur. Solus fletus erat dulcis mihi et successerat amico meo in deliciis animi mei.] (C 4.4)

The friend’s death, and Augustine’s subsequent grieving, do here in the Confessions a phenomenological work akin to that done in Heidegger’s philosophy by moods such as anxiety or boredom, or akin to that we’ve just seen in the literary work of Cormac McCarthy: it suspends, or renders inoperative, familiar and comforting modes of Being-in-the-world, and it does so in a manner that actually illuminates— by making conspicuous as otherwise they would not be— the basic structure and temporality of that Being-in-theworld. In Augustine, the present chapter will argue, that structure and temporality are founded in a love whose movement resembles quite closely the interplay of anticipation and recollection that sustains a world in The Road; it does so, however, with this notable difference that “the world to come” for Augustine ultimately transcends the vagaries, and losses, of time. While busily concerned with, or absorbed in, the (ontic) possibilities of my world, Heidegger points out, I tend to forget or to overlook the (ontological) possibility of the care that defines my Being at its core. I overlook, that is, both the world-hood of the world and the singular character of my

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own existence in the world.2 By rendering my normal concerns within the world, for a time, insignificant, or by rendering the various possibilities of my everyday existence fundamentally unappealing, the moment of anxious crisis or of bored suspension can awaken me (when my fleeing falters) to the more fundamental ground of such significance and possibility. In the preceding chapter, we encountered a fictive enactment of this phenomenological experience and effect in McCarthy’s The Road: the dark, nearly total devastation of a world serves there to illumine what proves to have been most essential to that world. Such devastation, we emphasized, along with its darkness, must remain only nearly total, insofar as any staging or presentation of a world’s collapse requires in fact that the basic elements of a world, some minimum of light, remain. In other words, the critical experience of insignificance, or of world loss, is a function of the insurmountable priority, and stubborn persistence, of the significance relations that constitute a world to begin with. In a fashion similar, then, to the phenomenological exercises we can find not only in a philosophy like Heidegger’s but also in a literature like McCarthy’s, the friend’s death in Augustine pulls Augustine out of his complacent but self-deceiving enjoyment of the everyday existence he shared with the friend, and in doing so it shows him what went unseen while nonetheless grounding and shaping that enjoyment all along. Augustine sees retrospectively that his world and time were grounded in, and structured by, his love for a mortal; and he sees that such love was, in turn, conditioned by that world and its passing— in a manner that was radically insecure but unacknowledged as such. He sees, in other words, retrospectively, the alienation that prevented him from seeing his own alienation: the alienation wherein one is most insecure and at risk because one believes or feels oneself to be perfectly secure.3 In the wake of his friend’s death, Augustine’s familiar, habitual, places of dwelling— the family habitation, place of nativity, the place of home [patria  .  .  . paterna domus]— turns strange [mira infelicitas] and painful [supplicium], thus appearing for him, as previously it did not explicitly appear, to have been given to him through anticipation of the beloved’s 2. In the Heideggerian context, I understand “ontic” possibility as that which is amenable to, and oriented toward, conversion of that possibility into some present actuality, whereas, by contrast, I take “ontological” possibility to involve the very possibility of any and all ontic possibilities, the irreducibly open “can be” of the Being I have always still yet “to be,” within an openness that never is, nor can be, converted into the presence of an actuality or the actuality of any presence. 3. For a rich and astute recent exploration of the paradoxes entailed in security, see John T. Hamilton, Security: Politics, Humanity, and the Philology of Care (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).

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presence— and hence through the time sustaining, and sustained by, such anticipation. Likewise, the time of such anticipation, a condition of this love, proves to have sustained, and to have been sustained by, the places that could have welcomed the friend— who now will no longer come, and whose nolonger-coming renders those places, and time itself, empty and mournful, speaking only the friend’s absence. Augustine’s love, in its temporality, here structures, even as it is structured by, this dwelling place. The meaning of such place depends on love’s anticipation and recollection, in their essential interplay, even as love’s anticipation and recollection need such place to live and move and have their being. Love’s temporalizing interplay of anticipation and recollection— where Augustine does not simply remember and look forward but remembers looking forward and looks forward to remembering— is suddenly interrupted and suspended by the beloved’s death. What Augustine had not seen, until the interruption, was that the places given to him through such anticipation and recollection—“I will meet him again in these places that we have shared previously”— while the source of seeming hope and joy, implied also, already, his love’s inescapable but as yet unseen sorrow. Inhabiting the former, a seeming hope and joy, he does not see the latter, a sorrow that, for Augustine, entirely annuls hope and joy— until he actually and explicitly suffers the grief he was already suffering virtually or implicitly. While finding an apparent joy in the thought that “these are the places in which we will meet happily again,” he ignores that “these will have been the places where I suffered your loss.” His world’s reliance on such a temporality becomes clear thanks mainly to the persistence of Augustine’s loving anticipation in face of an absence that now shows the world and its time to be empty because unable to answer or to satisfy that anticipation. The world was given to him through love for this mortal beloved, and the beloved was given to him through temporal engagement with that world’s places. Insofar as those places, along with the beloved, prove to have been temporally dependent and thus passing, constituted through the interplay of an anticipation and recollection that were bound in love to a mortal, they prove to have been, ever already, the places of grief they now become, explicitly, in the dark light of the beloved’s disappearance. This outward emptiness and darkness of the world, which has become the place of the beloved’s obtrusive absence, itself the function of a sorrowful attachment to the temporal, is bound for Augustine to an inward emptiness and darkness of the heart, which finds its only sweetness or enjoyment in tears. What becomes thus clear for Augustine is the misery of any friendship for the mortal as mortal, any such investment of love in the temporal as temporal; for that investment, even before it knows itself to be so, is only, inevi-

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tably, a grieving. To be bound in the affection of mortal things, or to live with the world at heart, is, as Augustine puts it in opening the Confessions, only a living death or a dying life—“a dying life, shall I call it, or a living death? [dico vitam mortalem, an mortem vitalem?]” (C 1.6)—and the dark sign of such death is my incapacity to see it, that is, my mistaking it for life. Bound in the affection of mortal things, I am torn between anticipations and recollections that cannot ever be met or filled out, and hence I am left empty. In this way, the death of the friend makes only especially clear a mourning that already defines the time that cuts itself off from eternity.4 Augustine’s way out of the mournful affection of time and its misery will be a turn of love that loves the mortal and fleeting only within, and only for, the permanence and immortality of his eternal God. In that rightly ordered love, he contends, the friend cannot be lost, nor the temporal world turn empty, nor the self remain for itself the sorrowful dark enigma that temporal affection makes it. The existential implications of this way can be especially striking to a modern reader when Augustine tells us that grief derives from what men “value in friends” (C 4.9), from the things that rejoice one’s soul in the company of friends: namely, “to talk and laugh and do each other kindnesses; read pleasant books together, pass from lightest jesting to talk of the deepest things and back again; differ without rancor, as a man might differ with himself, and when most rarely dissension arose find our normal agreement all the sweeter for it; teach each other or learn from each other; be impatient for the return of the absent, and welcome them with joy on their homecoming; these and such like things, proceeding from our hearts as we gave affection and received it back, and shown by face, by voice, by the eyes, and a thousand other pleasing ways, kindled a flame which fused our very souls and of many made us one” (C 4.8). “This,” he continues, in reference to this sketch of friendship’s enjoyment, “is the root of our grief when a friend dies, and the blackness of our sorrow, and the steeping of the heart in tears for the joy that has turned to bitterness, and the feeling as though we were dead because he is dead [Hoc est, quod diligitur in amicis; et sic 4. As Jean-François Lyotard glosses in his unfinished and fragmentary manuscript on Augustine, the expectation, attention, and memory through which time’s future, present, and past become present to the mind in fact posit the absence of their object insofar as I expect what is not yet, attend to what is only passing, and remember only what is no longer. Thus affected by such temporal passing, the mind bears, as Lyotard puts it, “three times the mourning of its object.” “Time is measured,” Lyotard continues, “by affectio, in the singular mode in which the thing touches us in its eclipse, affectionem quam res praetereuntes in te faciunt” (Lyotard, La confession d’Augustin [Paris: Galilée, 1998], 52, 53; The Confession of Augustine, trans. Richard Beardsworth [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000], 32).

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diligitur, ut rea sibi sit humana conscientia, si non amaverit redamantem aut si amantem non redamaverit, nihil quaerens ex eius corpore praeter indicia benivolentiae. hinc ille luctus, si quis moriatur, et tenebrae dolorum, et versa dulcedine in amaritudinem cor madidum, et ex amissa vita morientium mors viventium]” (C 4.9). The apparent joys of friendship— shared time and undertaking, both playful and serious; argument and accord; the growth of learning and teaching between one and the other; the heartfelt sharing of affection— can seem to be life-giving and uplifting, but they are in fact, because of their inevitable ending, only grief. To avert such grief, one must avert the loss entailed, which demands that one not, to begin with, turn one’s affection to the mortal friend in her mortality. The apparent loss must be seen as only apparent; it must be negated through a sublimation of the temporal within the eternal, where “nothing passes but all is present” (C 11.11). This negation, for Augustine, can give death to the feeling of death that we ourselves suffer upon the death of the beloved. It can turn this current life, which leads to death, into what it more fundamentally is: a death that leads to life. A love thus rightly ordered indemnifies the lover against a loss and suffering like that which his friend’s death had imposed. For “blessed is the man,” Augustine confesses, “who loves you, God, and his friend in you, and his enemy for you. For he alone loses no one who is dear to him, if all are dear in God, who is never lost [beatus qui amat te, et amicum in te, et inimicum propter te. solus enim nullum carum amittit, cui omnes in illo cari, qui non amittitur]” (C 4.9). If through conversion love extends itself— intensively— toward, or into, the eternal, and is thus no longer affected by the passing of time’s moments, then love sees in the world, upon the death of a beloved, not the emptiness that Augustine saw and filled with tears upon the death of his friend but, according to Augustine’s theology of creation, a fullness that abides; for the one who can never be lost is but “the God who made heaven and earth, who fills them up because it is by filling them with Himself that he made them” (C 4.9). To see creation aright is to see that all— including time and all that passes with it— comes from and returns to the eternity of God. Who could not see, Augustine asks, in comparing time and eternity, “that in eternity nothing moves into the past: all is present, whereas time is never all present at once: and that the past is always driven away by the future, and every future follows upon the past, and both past and future are created and flow out of that which is always present? [non autem praeterire quidquam in aeterno, sed totum esse praesens; nullum uero tempus totum esse praesens: et uideat omne praeteritum propelli ex futuro et omne futurum ex praeterito consequi, et omne praeteritum ac futurum ab eo, quod semper est praesens, creari et excurrere?]” In order so to see, he suggests, one would need to still

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the heart, to free it from its dissipation in time: “Who shall now hold fast the heart of man, so that it may stand and see how both past and future times are dictated by ever-standing eternity, which is neither future nor past? [quis tenebit cor hominis, ut stet et uideat, quomodo stans dictet futura et praeterita tempora nec futura nec praeterita aeternitas?]” (C 11.11). Like the sounds and syllables of our speaking, which must arise and pass away while also being recuperated and retained in the meaning of a larger whole, so all transient creatures for Augustine are held by God’s eternity in a greater whole where no part is actually lost as it can seem to be, sorrowfully, when our heart cleaves to it temporally: “Wherever the soul of man turns, unless toward you, it cleaves to sorrow [ad dolores figitur alibi praeterquam in te], even though the things outside you and outside itself to which it cleaves may be things of beauty. For these lovely things would be nothing at all unless they were from you” (C 4.10). Going on to sketch in detail the character of these “things of beauty,” Augustine evokes both what we might understand as a natural and what we might understand as a cultural or linguistic being, highlighting at both levels that what is or has being, naturally or linguistically, has that being only insofar as it both comes into being and passes out of it, such that its birth implies a death, and its appearance a disappearance: They rise and set: in their rising they begin to be, and they grow towards perfection. . . . Therefore, when they rise and tend toward being, the more haste they make toward the fullness of being, the more haste they make towards ceasing to be. That is their law. You have given them to be parts of a whole: they are not all existent at once, but in their departures and successions constitute the whole of which they are parts. Our own speech, which we utter by making sounds signifying meanings, follows the same principles. For there could never be a whole sentence unless one word ceased to be when its syllables had sounded and another took its place. (C 4.10)

Just as one must raise each syllable into a greater whole that saves it, by putting its passing to some more lasting work of meaning, so must one love the transient only in and for the God who alone sustains it. (We might note in passing that this elevation of the permanent, or eternal, over the fleeting and temporal finds a parallel in the elevation of meaning, and spirit, over the pleasures of sense, as for example in Augustine’s treatment of the psalm, in Confessions 10.33, where he warns of the danger that we might be carried away from its meaning by the pleasure we take in its sound.) Such a subjection of the temporal and fleeting to the eternal and permanent is central to the eudaemonism guiding Augustine’s distinction between “use [uti]” and “enjoyment [frui]” within his thinking about the ordering of our

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loves. We can rightly enjoy only that which is to be loved for its own sake, while that which is to be loved for the sake of something else, we can rightly only use. For Augustine, God alone is to be enjoyed, for he is the highest good, and love’s happiness can be found only in that enjoyment, because that enjoyment alone cannot be lost. His sharp premise, as clearly stated as it is strongly held, maintains that happiness is either beyond all possible loss or it is not happiness at all (since happiness is found only in the highest good, and the highest good, on his reckoning, would be the good that cannot be lost). If I seek to enjoy that which is meant only for use (the definition of cupiditas), my love will prove unhappy because bound already to the mourning of its object; if, however, I use all of transient creation toward the enjoyment of a God who does not pass (the definition of caritas 5), then my love will never mourn; its happiness will be safe and sound because found in the unshakable security of God. Augustine’s understanding of temporal affection as mourning helps to make clear his reasoning that in our love for the human, we use the other rather than enjoy her. As he puts it in On Christian Doctrine: among all these things only those are to be enjoyed which we have described as being eternal and immutable; others are to be used so that we may be able to enjoy those.  .  .  . Thus there is a profound question as to whether men should enjoy themselves, use themselves, or do both. For it is commanded to us that we should love one another, but it is to be asked whether man is to be loved by man for his own sake or for the sake of something else. If for his own sake, we enjoy him; if for the sake of something else, we use him. But I think that man is to be loved for the sake of something else. In that which is to be loved for its own sake the blessed life resides; and if we do not have it for the present, the hope for it now consoles us. But “cursed be the man that trusteth in man” [Jer. 17:5].6 5. On these definitions, see On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. Robertson Jr. (New York: Macmillan, 1985), bk. 3, chap. 10, p. 88, which does suggest the possibility of enjoying one’s self and neighbor— but according to the logic of use: “But Scripture teaches nothing but charity, nor condemns anything except cupidity, and in this way shapes the minds of men. . . . I call ‘charity’ the motion of the soul toward the enjoyment of God for His own sake, and the enjoyment of one’s self and of one’s neighbor for the sake of God; but ‘cupidity’ is a motion of the soul toward the enjoyment of one’s self, one’s neighbor, and any corporal thing for the sake of something other than God.” 6. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, bk. 1, chap. 22, p. 18. See also The City of God against the Pagans: “we are said to enjoy that which delights us in itself and without reference to any other end, whereas we make use of something for the sake of some end which lies beyond it. Thus, temporal things are to be used rather than enjoyed, so that we may deserve to enjoy eternal things” (City of God 11.26).

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Augustine is not able to construe, nor to live or experience, any love as happy that binds itself to the temporal in its temporal mutability and transience, and he is unable to construe sorrow as anything but the annulment of joy and of beauty. The acute sense of these passages on the death and grieving of Augustine’s friend stands out even more sharply when we read them in contrast with the account of his beloved mother Monica’s death, itself introduced and framed in the Confessions by the movement that Augustine and Monica make together from their brush with the eternal back into the temporal. Carried together upward by the “weight of love” along three steps of mystical ascent— from the bodily senses and the outward reality they concern, inward to the light of mind, and upward through the soul to the eternal Wisdom of God himself— Augustine and Monica, “talking of His Wisdom and panting for it, with all the effort of [their] heart . . . did for one instant attain to touch it” (C 9.10), Augustine writes; and then, just as suddenly, and sorrowfully, “sighing, and leaving the first fruits of [their] spirit bound to [that Wisdom],” they return “to the sound of [their] own tongue, in which a word has both beginning and ending” (C 9.10). Human language and its temporal, transient character appear here— in their contrast with the ineffable eternity and permanence of God’s Word and Wisdom— as conditions of, and as conditioned by, mourning. Within Augustine’s account, the persistence of a temporal life to which we remain affectionately bound is the deepest source of mourning, while mourning for the passage from such life is itself figured both as ongoing temptation and, given our susceptibility to the temptation, as a mortal and moral failure before the eternal. Following her brush with the eternal, we should emphasize, the return to temporal existence seems to Monica, in Augustine’s recounting, the real death, while her death both from temporal life and to it appears as a most desired passage to life in its truth. In the brief time between her brush with the eternal and the final fainting of her earthly death, Monica makes clear to Augustine her affective relation to the temporal world: “And my mother said: ‘Son, for my part I no longer find joy in anything in this world. What I am still to do here and why I am here I know not, now that I no longer hope for anything from this world. One thing there was, for which I desired to remain still a little longer in this life, that I should see you a Catholic Christian before I die. I now see you His servant to the contempt of all worldly happiness. What am I doing here?” (C 9.10). Augustine himself, upon her death, reiterates Monica’s attitude through his own struggle with the grief he feels, a grief that is itself— because it is a function of attachment to the temporal— a source of deeper grief, a sorrowing for

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his own sorrowing, in a doubling of sorrow that relates intimately to Augustine’s understanding of our alienated condition.7 When we sorrow for temporal loss, he holds, our love is disordered, and we should thus, more rightly, sorrow over that very sorrow. Augustine frames this misdirection of love, furthermore, in terms setting the true heart— which holds tears back— as “manly” and judging as “childish” the tears that flow from such misdirection. The tears of grief are to Augustine, indeed, childish temptation— and unworthy of what he understands to be the “manliness” that would accept God’s truth. “I closed her eyes,” he writes, “and an immeasurable sorrow flowed into my heart and would have overflowed in tears . . .” (C 9.10). While Augustine’s son Adeodatus (given by God through the labor of a woman and lover Augustine is not moved to name) “broke out into lamentation” as Monica “breathed her last,” Augustine and the other adults present “checked him and brought him to silence. But in this very fact the childish element in me [meum quidam puerile], which was breaking out into tears, was checked and brought to silence by the man’s voice, the voice of the heart [iuvenali voce, voce cordis]” (C 9.12). While moaning and weeping and lamentation might befit the irrevocable death of a mortal, as witnessed and suffered by a child, the manly voice that Augustine equates with the heart understands— “by the reality of our faith” (C 9.12)— that Monica did not “wholly die.” The movements of earthly grief— the heart of Augustine’s struggle upon Monica’s death— thus become for him a cause for self-accusation before God: “I accused the emotion in me as weakness; and I held in the flood of my grief [increpabam mollitiam affectus mei, et constringebam fluxum maeroris]. It was for a moment a little diminished, but returned with fresh violence, not with any pouring of tears or change of countenance: but I knew what I was crushing down in my heart [sed ego sciebam, quid corde premerem]. I was very much ashamed that these human emotions could have such power over me— though it belongs to the due order and the lot of our earthly condition that they should come to us— and I felt a new grief at my grief and so was afflicted with a twofold sorrow [alio dolore dolebam dolorem meum et duplici tristitia macerabar]” (C 9.12). While Augustine does finally find release and allow himself to weep before God (though still not before— and even less with— others, like Adeodatus, who might have shared the grief ), he looks back upon that weeping, once his heart is “healed of that wound,” as contain7. Along these lines, we can note the deep Augustinian background to the cultivation of compunction in subsequent Christian tradition, exemplified best perhaps in Bernard of Clairvaux, for whom love of God— to the contempt of self— must pass through the spiritual pain whose deepest form results from our failure to acknowledge our spiritual pain.

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ing “perhaps too much of earthly affection” (C 9.13)— and he replaces it with another weeping, and praying, now not over Monica’s earthly life but over her heavenly life— the eternal Jerusalem— and the worry of obstacles to it. To the dark light shed on his places of habitation by the pain of Augustine’s mourning his friend we should contrast, then, the perspective on place opened through Monica’s approach to death. Just as the singular places of friendship turn dark and mournful in answer to Augustine’s own interior grieving, so, by contrast, Monica’s death— through which she is elevated into the eternal— entails her indifference to any marked, specific, or, especially, native, place of burial. “For on the day she was so soon to be released from the flesh she had no care whether her body was to be buried in a rich shroud or embalmed with spices, nor did she wish to have a special monument or a grave in her own country [aut monumentum electum concupivit aut curavit sepulchrum patrium]. These were not the last wishes she passed on to us. All she wanted was that we should remember her at your altar, where she had been your servant day after day, without fail” (C 9.13). As a citizen of the “eternal Jerusalem,” Monica has little or even no care at all for the singularity of her mortal and natal places on earth; nor thus does she desire that they be marked or remembered. If she is to be held in memory, the place of that memory shall be the altar of the universal church, whose temporal human community turns its face toward the eternal God. In this, one might well read Augustine’s Monica to seek in the church an omnipresent sphere that indemnifies against death through the sublimation of mourning.8 While inhabiting the interim that is our pilgrimage on earth, its citizens sigh for the eternal city, and the time of such longing is itself for Augustine also the time of a third mourning, which we can situate midway between mourning his friend and mourning his mother. The time operative between the mourning of his friend— loved wrongly but unknowingly in his mortal temporality— and the mourning of mourning itself upon the death of Monica, that is, the time operative between the question of sin and the answer of God, is the time of conversion, where Augustine is coming— always belatedly— to his God and thus to himself in his truth. In this time of remorse, through which the self bites back upon itself for its always having come late to itself, Augustine mourns the person he could have been, and should have been— but was not yet. We can read this as Augustine’s belated response to the sorrow that his mother suffered over his own earlier deferral of conversion. Through their interplay these three modes of mourning 8. See Peter Sloterdijk, Globes: Spheres II, trans. Wieland Hoban (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2014), 169 – 76.

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highlight the kind of temporal fulfillment that Augustine believes we lack or miss in our fallen temporality— and that we enjoy in turning temporally toward the eternal: Monica anticipated, in hope, a conversion she has lived to witness, and the actuality of that conversion marks a fulfillment of anticipation that frees her from her ties to any earthly life; Augustine recollects this anticipation that kept her alive, and he finds joy in its having been answered and fulfilled. Anticipation and recollection thus reach here, in relation to one another, and as operative in the interpersonal and intergenerational relation of parent and child, a similar fulfillment, and similar joy, to that which will characterize God’s providential history as a whole: what matters essentially in anticipation will be the fulfillment whose sense of satisfaction makes also, then, the joy of a memory not compromised by sorrow. Augustine’s understanding of time and affection, wherein a thoroughgoing and secure fulfillment alone yields true happiness, governs the logic not only of the individual life, and of intergenerational relations in their intimately personal forms, but also of humanity’s collective history and intergenerational relation on a world-historical level. Augustine makes this direct link while developing one of Confessions book 11’s more telling models for thinking about time via sound and syllable: the singing of a psalm, where a transience of multiple and thus partial sounds and syllables serves— through their being subsumed and sublimated within— the stable meaning of a fuller whole. Within the temporal movement of our singing the psalm, transience serves a superior stability, and partiality serves the greater whole, and they do so only insofar as anticipation is, eventually, fully satisfied, and, correlatively, insofar as memory is filled out, or filled up— completed or consummated in such a way that all partial moments of passage are still held meaningfully in the stable, fuller whole they serve. So long as one is not carried away distractedly by the sensual— and thus fleeting— pleasure one always risks taking in the song, the transience of all parts serves the stability of the whole. The history enabled— divided up and driven and finally consummated— thanks to the difference between anticipation and fulfillment, whether individual and personal or collective and world-historical, is eventually actualized in such a way that the fullness of memory supplants the openness of anticipation (along lines quite close to the recollection of spirit within Hegel’s modern translation of Augustinian thought): I am about to repeat a psalm that I know. Before I begin, my expectation [expectatio] alone reaches itself [tenditur] over the whole: but once I have begun, as much of the psalm as I have removed from the province of expectation and relegated to the past now, over that much memory [memoria] also reaches:

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thus the life of this action of mine is distended both ways: into my memory, so far as concerns that part which I have repeated already, and into my expectation too, with respect to what I am about to repeat now; but all this while my attention [attentio] is present, through which that which is future is conveyed over, that it may become past . . . ; until the whole expectation be exhausted [consumatur], when namely, that whole action being ended, shall be absolutely passed into the memory. And what is now done in this whole psalm, the same is done also in every part of it, and in every syllable of it; the same order holds in a longer action too, of which the recitation of the psalm may be only a part; this holds too for the whole course of a man’s life, of which all his actions are parts; it holds also throughout the whole age of the sons of men [hoc in toto saeculo filiorum hominum], of which each man’s life is a part. (C 11.28)

Driven by the differential interplay of expectation and memory, temporal movement in Augustine is consummated in synthesis and unity; memory closes back upon itself comprehensively in the recollection of now fulfilled anticipation; and satisfaction’s rest consists in just this consummation through memory of all anticipation, which moves ever more toward the fullness of such memory until it is wholly realized, and thus ended, therein. From syllables themselves, through a single man’s life, and that of generations, to the time or age— the saeculum— of mankind as a whole, the consummation of memory through the fulfillment of anticipation allows time to mirror the stability of the eternal. Correlatively, it allows history to follow and fulfill God’s providential plan, from which any deviation is in the end merely apparent, and in whose end we achieve, individually and collectively, perfect rest. Significantly for our interests, Augustine sees this differential movement of time, only an apparent deviation from God’s providential plan, to serve the work of human education; or as he puts it in City of God, “life in this age” is for the family of God “the school of eternity, in which they make use of earthly goods like pilgrims, without grasping after them, and are proved and corrected by evils” (City of God 1.29). This conception of time’s end in the consummation of expectation through memory, worked out individually within the Confessions’ story of one man who stands for every man, is echoed, indeed, in the conception of our collective human history that comes to its world-historically influential expression in the City of God as our temporal education back to the eternal. By contrast to the differential time operative in the singing of a psalm by mortal humans, the immortal divine voice, according to City of God, speaks without beginning or end; it speaks not temporally but eternally. The highest possible creaturely response to that divine voice, the angelic response, while in principle the response of a creature, and thus of a temporal being, is one

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that, by contrast to the response of any mortal human, hears God’s voice in whole and responds without delay. Although the person of God as become “visibly present among men” “spoke in words of human speech, syllable by syllable, giving to each its brief moment of passing time” (City of God 10.16), God “in His own nature” “speaks not in a bodily but in a spiritual way: not perceptibly, but intelligibly; not temporally but, so to speak, eternally, neither beginning to speak nor ceasing” (City of God 10.15). Angelic reception of this eternal speech is one in which there is no gap or delay between the hearing and the responding— nothing, that is, of the differential temporality that attends all human speaking and hearing (as in the recitation of the psalm, which is itself, we might note, a speaking, or responding, based already on a prior hearing).9 Such reception, further, coincides with perfect— full and unshakable— enjoyment of the divine presence, which is in the end, for Augustine, the only real enjoyment: “His ministers and messengers, who are immortally blessed in the enjoyment of His immutable truth, hear the whole of what He says not with the bodily ear, but with the mind; and, without delay or impediment, they execute [incunctanter atque indifficulter efficiunt] in this visible and perceptible world, the commands which they hear in some ineffable fashion” (City of God 10.15). For the angels as for the Word incarnate, no sooner said than done. This difference between the differential time of the humanly sung psalm, on the one hand, and the immediate and full response of angels, on the other, can be understood, and is understood by Augustine, as a version of the Pauline distinction between seeing “in part” and seeing “face to face.” The part for Augustine means the toil and temptation of life “on this earth” (which is emphatically not— one should note— life as such), while the whole, the face to face, means the enjoyment of rest. Such enjoyment is lacking not simply to fallen humanity but even, in fact, and quite strikingly, to Adam in paradise. Augustine goes so far as to contend that the happiness of paradise was a false one akin to the happiness that Augustine believed himself to enjoy with his friend; it was false because it ignored its own coming loss. The only true happiness— Augustine insists as clearly as he does energetically— is the one possessed with certainty and thus security. 9. This construal of speaking in Augustine as hearing, and thus as already response, proves central, we’ll see, to Jean-Luc Marion’s remarkable interpretation of Augustine in In the Self ’s Place, where Augustine’s discourse is construed not as predication about God but as a speaking to God in the mode of a response that means already reception (notably of the scriptural language through which Augustine speaks responsively to God and to others). In our engagement with Marion, we will want to ask how the angelic model of response, in its lack of delay, relates to the structural and temporal delay constituting the self as adonné.

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One of the notable contexts for Augustine’s emphasis on certainty and security is the contrast he wants to draw between cyclic conceptions of time in pagan thought and the linear time of Christianity. Within the latter, the uniqueness of Christ’s coming into the world, along with the unicity of history as a whole, makes possible a freedom from misery— in certainty and security— that pagan time disallows. Both such uniqueness and, hence, such freedom, certainty, and security, are what lack, Augustine emphasizes, in pagan thinking about time. Within his arguments against the construal of time as eternal return (in Plato, Cicero, Virgil, etc.), Augustine asks rhetorically, “For how can the soul be truly blessed when it has no assurance of being so for all eternity, and if it is either unaware of coming misery because ignorant of the truth or most unhappy with foreboding even in its blessedness? [Quo modo enim uera beatitudo est, de cuius numquam aeternitate confiditur, dum anima uenturam miseriam aut inperitissime in ueritate nescit aut infelicissime in beatitudine pertimescit?]” (City of God 12.14). Posing the same question again several chapters later—“For what happiness can be more false and fallacious than that in whose greatest light of truth we nonetheless remain ignorant of the fact that we shall presently be miserable . . . ?”— Augustine then responds that “we are [in Christ] truly promised a true happiness which will be ours to possess forever in assured security, undisturbed by any unhappiness [illa enim nobis ueraciter promittitur uera felicitas, cuius erit semper retinenda et nulla infelicitate rumpenda certa securitas]” (City of God 12.21; my emphasis). Not only must we not be ignorant of misery to come, Augustine reasons, in order to be truly happy; even more, we must be certain and assured that no misery at all remains any longer possible. The principles grounding this insistence in City of God that genuine happiness requires the certainty of its permanence inform already, we can note, Augustine’s thinking about the happiness of angels in the Confessions. The happiness of angels, as he there explains, consists in a love so secure that it actually transcends the danger of loss and thus also the experience of time as fluctuation; hence, while remaining in principle temporal because created, the angel’s love yields a happiness approximating the eternal and immutable. The logic according to which happiness demands both permanence and certainty of that permanence determines Augustine’s thinking not only about endings— in terms of death and mourning— but already, consistently, about origins— in terms of birth: both the pain of birth and the tears of infancy are to his eyes and ears initial signals of the evil whose later sign and consequence is death— all of it moralized and counted as counter to the nature of God. “If anyone were offered the choice of suffering death or becoming a child again, who would not recoil from the second alternative and choose to die? Our

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infancy, indeed, by which we begin this life not with laughter but with tears, seems unknowingly to prophesy the evil upon which we are entering” (City of God 21.15). As if setting the stage for Nietzsche’s attack on the metaphysics that is revolted not only by the change and suffering of death but already that of procreation and birth, Augustine goes on to note in the next line that the sole person to laugh at his birth was Zoroaster. All of this transpires in, and conspires with, Augustine’s conviction that “this mortal life is wholly one of punishment, for it is all temptation, as the Scriptures declare, where it is written, ‘Is not the life of man upon earth a temptation?’” (City of God 21.15). Augustine’s contrast between the punishment of this mortal life, in its endless temptation, instability, and uncertainty, and the happiness achieved only when life finds itself secured and certain in God is foundational to his surprising and noteworthy contention that our happiness even now, in the midst of such punishment, is in fact greater than the happiness that Adam thought he enjoyed in paradise.10 Why, within a punishing life of endless temptation, are we in fact happier than Adam was in paradise? We are happier because we can— and in fact we must, if the happiness is genuine— enjoy that happiness with a certainty and security that were lacking for Adam, who in his innocence and ignorance did not foresee the misery that was to befall him. But it is not only the case for Augustine that a happiness— such as Adam’s— is false if it faces (whether knowingly or not) a coming misery; it is also, even more, the case that a present reality without certain hope is likewise a false happiness and a great misery. It is this latter certainty that makes possible for us now, in the midst of punishment, a happiness that is not false because it is not exposed to loss. The “excellence of a wise and blessed life,” Augustine notes, in contrasting the angels who adhere to God with those who fall from God, “is eternal beyond doubt, and whose eternity is certain and secure [procul dubio non nisi aeterna est aeternitatisque suae certa atque secura]” (City of God 11.11; emphasis mine). In Augustine’s mind, and heart, one cannot be happy in a genuine sense without the assurance that such happiness shall not be lost, and it is just such assurance that Christians, by contrast both to Adam and to the eventually fallen angels, not to mention the pagans, can enjoy even in the present; on par with that of the angels who did not fall, the happiness of the Christian, even within our fallen world, is greater than the— in retrospect false— happiness of paradise: 10. In an exegesis of Augustine that eventually sets his thinking in illuminating contrast with that of Henry David Thoreau, Andrea Nightingale’s Once out of Nature: Augustine on Time and the Body highlights this line of thought in Augustine as well as its implications for embodied existence in relation to nature.

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Accordingly, so far as the enjoyment of present good is concerned, the first man in Paradise was more blessed than any righteous man in this condition of mortal infirmity. As regards the hope of future good, however, every man who not merely believes, but knows as a certain truth, that he is to enjoy without end the most high God in the company of angels and free from every evil; this man, no matter what bodily torments afflict him, is more blessed than he who, even in the great happiness of Paradise, was uncertain of his fate. [Quantum itaque pertinet ad delectationem praesenti boni, beatior erat primus homo in paradiso, quam quilibet iustus in hac infirmitate mortali; quantum autem  ad  spem futuri, beatior quilibet in quibuslibet cruciatibus corporis, cui non opinione, sed certa ueritate manifestum est, sine fine se habiturum omni molestia carentem societatem angelorum in participatione summi Dei, quam erat ille homo sui casus incertus in magna illa felicitate paradisi.] (City of God 11.12)

Happiness alone— even that of Paradise— is not quite enough for Augustine, and indeed it is not even really happiness, without this supplement of the certainty and security of its endless enjoyment. Present reality without certainty is a false happiness and a great misery: The Supreme Good of the City of God, then, is eternal and perfect peace. This is not the peace that mortal men pass through on their journey from birth to death. Rather it is that peace in which they rest in immortality and suffer adversity no more [sed in qua immortales maneant nihil aduersi omnino patiendo]. Who can deny, therefore, that this is the supremely blessed life, or that the life that we now lead, no matter how filled with goods of the soul and bodily and external circumstances, is most miserable in comparison? Nonetheless, if any man uses this life in such a way that he directs it towards that end which he so ardently loves and for which he so faithfully hopes, he may without absurdity be called happy even now, though rather by future hope than in present reality. Present reality without that hope, however, is a false happiness and a great misery, since, in that case, the true goods of the soul are not enjoyed. For no wisdom is true wisdom if it does not direct all its prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice towards that final state where God shall be all in all in a certain eternity and perfect peace [ad illum . . . finem, ubi erit Deus omnia in omnibus, aeternitate certa et pace perfecta]. (City of God 19.20; translation modified)

Hope for the better is not true hope because true hope demands the perfect. Happiness for now, for a time that is passing, is not true happiness because happiness demands, with perfection, the eternal. So it is for Augustine that death is contrary to our nature and its desired happiness; and so it is that life itself can be loved truly only if we will it to be endless:

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Even the righteous man . . . will not live as he wishes unless he arrives at that state where he is wholly free from death, error and harm, and is certain that he will always be free from those things in the future. For this is what our nature desires and it will not be fully and perfectly happy unless it attains what it desires [Hoc enim natura expetit, nec plene atque perfecte beata erit nisi adepta quod expetit]. . . . Again, if it is loved as it deserves to be loved— for a man cannot be happy if he does not love life as it deserves— he who so loves it must necessarily wish it to be eternal. Life, therefore, will be truly happy only when it is eternal. [Porro si tantum amatur, quantum amari digna est (non enim beatus est, a quo ipsa beata uita fion amatur ut digna est): fieri non potest, ut eam, qui sic amat, non aeternam uelit. Tunc igitur beata erit, quando aeterna erit.] (City of God 14.25)

* If Augustine mourns his friend through a time of dispersion, where the deferral of conversion entails the self-difference of a self who poses a problem to itself, a question as weight and burden; that mourning, wherein the soul makes itself suffer, brings the darkness of that question to light. By contrast to this first time of mourning, Augustine’s mourning his mother transpires through a time of conversion, wherein the redirection of love away from temporal dispersion toward the eternal unity of God, wherein there is no loss, while bringing him continence brings also a mourning over that mourning itself: a mourning, that is, over the still inadequate turn of his love from the earthly and temporal to the heavenly and eternal. That mourning over mourning signals yet a third mourning, wherein Augustine grieves over the deferral and slowness of his becoming, through conversion, the person he could have been sooner. This involves Augustine’s retrospective enactment of a mourning that Monica lived prospectively until Augustine’s conversion. After his conversion, when Augustine mourns for the mourning that had counted as a loss that which, if loved aright, would not have been lost, he mourns also that his mother should have mourned for so long that he had not yet overcome such mourning through the conversion of his love. Passage through that “not yet” consists in passage from the dispersion of sin, through the delay of conversion to its consummation. We might characterize this, following Jean-Luc Marion, as a conversion of (fallen) time to the time of (redemptive) conversion, a movement from the dispersive time in which conversion is deferred to the time of the psalm, which, while differential, does gather the self toward God and thus lift and unify multiple and transient moments into the stability of a meaningful whole— wherein the closure of memory answers and fulfills all anticipation.

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In the full outworking of its logic, however, such fulfillment or consummation, and the restful peace it yields, can be read to mean that beyond the differential time of response as exemplified in the psalm analysis stands the quasi-timeless, because whole-hearing and immediate, response of the angels, who approximate the eternal through certain and secure adherence of their love to God. That emphasis on certainty and security determines in a fundamental way Augustine’s hierarchy of happiness and, correlatively, his moral assessment of mourning. According to that moralizing hierarchy, happiness amidst the punishing toil of life on earth is already greater than the happiness of Adam in paradise because he lacked such certainty and security and faced, without knowing it, the misery of loss, whereas we can look with certainty toward the security of a happiness that cannot be lost. But if, from this perspective, loving life means willing that it be eternal, can we still speak, and how, of time’s affirmation in Augustine?

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The Conversion of Time to the Time of Conversion: Augustine with Marion

Whatever the phrase’s historical grounds may be, the “metaphysics of presence,” as treated by deconstructive philosophy and related a/theologies, seems at least a plausible description of a thinking like Augustine’s, insofar as that thinking posits an eternity in which “all is present,” and insofar as it believes true life, and happiness, to demand unity and permanence, an absolute simultaneity, to the exclusion of multiplicity and change, diachrony and dissemination. One finds in Augustine, furthermore, ample textual evidence that such metaphysics bears a moralizing charge: it takes not only the suffering of death but also that of birth, and infancy, or already procreation, as objections against temporal life and as a consequence of its sinful character. As we’ve seen, these objections are strong enough in Augustine that they should make us wish, given the choice, never to have been born at all. Jean-Luc Marion’s rich and nuanced reading of Augustine in his 2008 work Au lieu de soi: L’approche de saint Augustin (translated in 2012 as In the Self ’s Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine) mounts a powerful challenge to interpretations that take Augustine to advance a “metaphysics of presence,” or more precisely a metaphysics of presence understood as “ontotheology.” Marion develops this reading, further, while arguing that Augustine fundamentally affirms temporality as inherent to creation. To move toward a fuller appreciation of such affirmation, both in its character and in its limits, we should begin here with the contrast that Marion draws between ontotheological conceptions of God in philosophy and what he takes to be Augustine’s more properly theo-logical discourse of creation. Because the stakes include not only Augustine’s relation to deconstruction and its a/theological inheritance but also, by extension, his relation to the Heidegger whom deconstruction inherits and extends, we should note that Marion’s argument against

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the reading of Augustine as ontotheologian is a reading that also finds the ontology of Dasein in Heidegger to miss the erotic construal of place worked out by Augustine. As can be seen by reading his 1921 seminar on St. Augustine and Neoplatonism alongside Being and Time, Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis of our finite Being-in-the-world, or Dasein, in his 1927 masterwork is deeply indebted to Augustine’s theological analysis in the Confessions of human life on earth as troubled and restless. Much as Augustine contends in Confessions, book 10, that “no one should be secure in this life [nemo securus esse debet in ista vita]” (C 10.32, 48; cited in PRL 161), or that all human life on earth is “trouble [molestia]” (PRL 190) and “temptation [tentatio]” (PRL 187), inclined toward the falling (cadere, casus, etc.) and dispersion (defluere, defluxus, etc.) of the self, so Heidegger understands anxiety [Angst] as a fundamental mood of our Being-in-the-world, and the possibility of our self-forgetting as inherent to our worldly existence (a self-forgetting that Heidegger associates with our inauthentic flight from anxiety). For both Augustine and Heidegger, such trouble or anxiety, and such openness to the possible forgetting or loss of oneself, signal that the human is characterized in a decisive way by its care (Augustine’s cura, Heidegger’s Sorge), which can take both inauthentic and authentic turns— turns, that is, in which I forget myself though a distracted and dispersed anonymity, and turns in which I am called or torn out of such distraction and dispersion and thus given back to myself in a distinctive way as myself (Augustine’s continentia, Heidegger’s Eigentlichkeit). This indebtedness of Heidegger to Augustine notwithstanding, Heidegger might also at points lead us to believe that Augustinian thought, or at least Christian theology more broadly, amounts to an ontotheological metaphysics—which is to say, a kind of thinking that uses the biblical idea of divine creation to provide an ultimate answer to the metaphysical question par excellence, “Why is there being rather than nothing?” Within such metaphysical thinking, on Heidegger’s account, all beings are conceived as created (or as caused), and the totality of beings is explained and comprehended by reference back to God the Creator, who is taken as the highest being and first cause. In modernity, on Heidegger’s account, this ontotheological model persists while replacing God with the human subject, such that the theological interpretation of all being as created being becomes the demand that all being answer to the logic of our rational calculation and technological production.1 1. See, e.g., in these directions, Heidegger’s 1935 lectures, Introduction to Metaphysics (published in 1953), and his Contributions to Philosophy (written 1936 – 38 but published only post-

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Marion’s In the Self ’s Place contests the reading of Augustine’s thought as a metaphysics by insisting that the language of “creation” in Augustine, as in all genuine Christian theology as Marion understands it, does not in fact aim primarily, if at all, to offer a causal explanation of being or world (in terms of first principles, efficient causality, and the like), nor to predicate anything of God’s Being or nature (by defining him, for example, as such a first cause). The language of creation aims rather to express, by enacting, the creature’s humility before, and praise of, the Creator (whose Being, and even more whose love, the creature will never adequately speak or comprehend). In other words, Marion does here with Augustine the kind of thing he does with Dionysius the Areopagite in earlier works like The Idol and Distance (1977) and God Without Being (1981): he urges us to see that genuine theology is iconic rather than idolatrous. The movement that we can read Marion to trace in Augustine from an idolatrous mode of subjectivity to the iconic mode of selfhood, or from my suffering the self as a great question— due to sin— toward my rejoicing in the mystery of self— through resemblance to God— answers, I’ll show here, to the movement we traced in our previous chapter from the mourning of a dead friend to a mourning over such mourning itself. Idolatrous thinking, on Marion’s definition, can be operative as much in the realm of philosophical discourse as in the realm of religious representation, and it consists at bottom in our attempt to make God answer to, or to make God appear only in light of, our human names and concepts (like the concept of first cause, or the principle of sufficient reason); we thus subject God and his appearance to our intentionality and thereby contradict or eclipse revelation as the radical self-showing of the divine (an understanding of revelation that will be treated in Marion’s phenomenology as saturated phenomenon). In the idol we see less the self-showing of God and more an indirect reflection of ourselves, in what Marion sees to be an invisible mirror. Ludwig Feuerbach’s understanding of religion as projection articulates fairly succinctly this idolatrous logic. By contrast to the idolatrous, iconic thinking entails a pointed reversal of intentionality, such that all of our thinking and language are seen to emerge (and here Marion is deeply indebted to Emmanuel Levinas) only in responsive answer to what radically precedes them and first intends or calls to them. In Augustine, this precedence is the selfshowing of God through the love in which he calls us to be— in excess of any conditions that we might ever set. humously in 1989), as well as my Indiscrete Image: Infinitude and Creation of the Human (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), esp. 40 – 43.

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The iconic thought of creation in Augustine, Marion further argues, resists not only what he takes to be the idolatry operative in metaphysics (which puts some limited concept of God to use within our effort to answer human questions), but also what he takes to be the idolatry of Heidegger’s own attempt to step beyond metaphysics (an attempt that remains idolatrous for Marion insofar as it subjects all appearance— including that of God— to the prior conditions of Dasein as Being-in-the-world: an existential idolatry, as it were). This charge of idolatry against both metaphysics and its critique in Heidegger should be familiar to readers of Marion’s earlier theological texts. Here within the reading of Augustine the criticism of Heidegger highlights the sense in which, from Marion’s perspective, Heidegger’s analysis of our finite existence abandons Augustine’s distinctively erotic and theological horizon in favor of the ontological and existential. By turning from the question of God (perhaps still discernible in Heidegger’s 1921 engagement with Augustine) to the question of Being (the central aim of Being and Time’s existential analysis), Heidegger forgets or occludes, Marion charges, the more fundamental question of love, or the erotic horizon within which Augustine understands human care. “Heidegger rightly cites this text,” Marion notes (in reference to Augustine’s Commentary on Psalm 7.9,2 where Augustine writes that “finis autem curae delectatio est [the end of care is delight]”) “as an outline of factical life, but he fails completely to analyze the delectatio as such, and still less in its intrinsic relation with amor. This allows him, to be sure, to neutralize cura, in order to employ it for the Seinsfrage, but it also makes him lose not only the Augustinian argument but above all the properly erotic horizon of cura (and hence undoubtedly also of Sorge itself ), which thereby becomes unintelligible, or at the least weakened” (ALS 222; ISP 358, chap. 4, n. 20).3 Subsequent chapters will bring us to ask whether Heidegger’s departure from Augustine might be inflected somewhat differently, such that in turning from Augustine’s theological horizon, and from the analysis of delight, or delectatio, as construed theologically, Heidegger may be suggesting less a simple abandonment of love— the word and thought of which are in fact evoked recurrently across the sweep of his career— and more a path for thinking about love that would embrace mortal temporality, and its insurmountable unrest,

2. PRL 153; GA 60, 207. 3. Jean-Luc Marion, Au lieu de soi: L’approche de Saint Augustin (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2008), cited parenthetically as ALS. References to the published English translation of Jeffrey L. Kosky, sometimes modified, are cited parenthetically as ISP: In the Self ’s Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012).

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or insecurity, in a way that Augustine’s theology cannot (insofar as delight, or beatitude, finally requires, on Augustine’s view, the restful certainty and security of our love’s happiness in the permanence of the eternal). To move in this direction, I’ll engage Marion’s treatment of temporality in Augustine as related to what may be seen as the idolatrous and iconic turns of human selfhood. Marion reads the entire Augustinian corpus, to brilliant effect, in light of the Confessions and according to the logic of confession or confessio— which he takes to be (much like the discourse of divine names in Dionysius the Areopagite) a nonpredicative and endlessly open discourse, one that entails for Augustine both avowal of our insurmountable shortcoming, or finitude, in relation to the infinite gift of divine love and praise of that God to whose loving gift we will never be done responding. As I’ve suggested, within this reading, Marion argues (much as he did previously in reading Dionysius) that genuine theology does not have for its task to answer our questions about God and his essence or definition, or to answer by means of God other questions we might have (such as why there is being rather than nothing), but much rather to place us in question ourselves, such that we might then think and speak a truth that Marion takes to be erotic. Beyond the metaphysical conception of truth as adequation or correspondence between mind and thing (operative in Aquinas, Kant, and Husserl), “where I make the truth but it does not make me” (ALS 185; ISP 129); and also beyond the conception of truth as the un-concealment of Being (or aletheia, a Heideggerian alternative to the metaphysical conception of truth), where according to Marion it is Dasein who decides on the truth instead of being itself decided by the truth; Augustine’s erotic understanding of truth holds that we most fundamentally receive ourselves, as creatures, only in loving response to the always prior— and thus the inconceivable and ineffable— distance of God’s creative love. According to this erotic truth, “I myself happen” as Marion writes, or I come to myself, “in the measure that I advance into the distance” (ALS 144; ISP 98) of God’s love. What we can see here, in a theological register, is a conception of self and its truth that Marion develops also in his phenomenology under the name of the adonné: “I happen,” Marion writes in the Augustine book,  putting this phenomenological term to work, “as the one who receives himself in the same moment that he receives, and in order precisely to be able to receive it— the adonné ” (ALS 144; ISP 98). The adonné, which in the common French means “addict” (a fact still underdeveloped in scholarship and commentary on Marion’s work) is translated in the English by Jeffrey Kosky as “the gifted” to suggest this understanding of the self as given to itself most fundamentally in being given over to that which precedes

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the self and gives itself to the self— which in the case of Augustine means God and his love. If confession expresses the erotic truth that I first come to myself only in being given over already, in love, to one who first loves me, then the language of confession is performative. It does not simply describe or define or convey something; it does something, it makes something happen: it carries out my relation with God by giving or referring back to him— notably through biblical citation— that which I first receive only from him (which finally means everything). Such relation consists in a redundancy or regiving that is in Marion’s Augustine, as in his previous discussions of Dionysius, essential to the logic of gift, or of love as gift: I receive the gift, or I receive love, only by giving, or loving, yet again— for what they give most fundamentally is nothing other than the giving or the loving itself. I cannot receive what love gives without already loving in return. When understood in this way, the performative language of confession is not concerned primarily, if at all, with predication about God or with answering my human questions by means of judgments and theses concerning the nature of his divine being. The notion of divine creation in Augustine, on this reading, assumes its distinctive meaning only in and through this language of confession as the enactment of erotic truth. Hence, against Heidegger, Marion argues that the thought of creation does not aim (as an ontotheology does) to account for the Being of beings by tracing them back to a highest being taken as efficient cause; it does not answer the metaphysical question— why is there being rather than nothing?— in order thus to secure, for the thinking human subject, a comprehension of the world. Rather, the thought of creation, spoken only in the mode of confession’s avowal and praise, places and sustains the human creature in its originary mode of response to the creator. To speak the language of creation in Augustine, or to see being as creation, is to acknowledge that our being is given and received only through the movement of love. Indeed, it is only in our loving response to the creative gift of love that creation appears as creation, which means as something we fundamentally receive— and something we make appear as creation only through our response to it. Here in Augustine the phenomenological principle remains operative that givenness appears, in fact, or the call of givenness is heard, only through our response. Within this reading of Augustine on creation, Marion makes two moves I’d like to highlight regarding the temporality of the human creature. First, he aims to establish and elucidate what he takes to be Augustine’s radical affirmation of the temporality, and thus of the mutability, of human being; and second, correlatively, he distinguishes two different ways that the temporal

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human being can for Augustine prove to be a question to itself: either as a burdensome problem or as a joyful mystery. The demonstration of Augustine’s affirmation of temporality, along with the distinction of these two different senses of the human’s becoming a question to itself, should call us to reconsider the grounds that may seem to appear in Augustine for later, modern claims, such as Nietzsche’s, that Christian metaphysics entails a condemnation or denial, or at best a selective embrace, of temporal existence— tending as such metaphysics does to see temporal phenomena like change, suffering, and death, as objections against life and as standing thus in need of excision or exclusion from the domain of what we would then count as “true being.” This would seem to be something shared, in Nietzsche’s view, between Christian metaphysics and the “idolaters of concepts” in philosophy: “When these honorable idolaters of concepts worship something,” as he writes in Twilight of the Idols, “they kill it and stuff it; they threaten the life of everything they worship. Death, change, old age, as well as procreation and growth, are to their minds objections— even refutations. Whatever has being does not become; whatever becomes does not have being.”4 The strength of Marion’s treatment of temporality and its affirmation in Augustine relates to that which in Augustine might indeed be taken to suggest that our temporal condition— as tied notably to our mortality— and our becoming a question or a problem to ourselves5 are not inherent to the original goodness of creation but are instead the secondary and regrettable consequence of humanity’s fall into sin— the consequence, that is, of humanity’s turning its love (through a fatal, self-defeating perversion) away from the eternal and immutable God (to whom we would return through the reverse movement of a conversion that also returns or restores us in a genuine sense to ourselves). Along these lines, one might be inclined to hold that for Augustine we fall “into time” but are not originally or finally temporal.6 4. Friedrich Nietzche, “Reason in Philosophy,” sec. 1, 479 – 80 of Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1977). 5. “Factus eram mihi magna quaestio”; “mihi quaestio factus sum”; as especially in C 4.9, 13, 422 and 10.33, 50, 14, 232. 6. Heidegger might be taken to allude to such a position when he writes in sec. 82 of Being and Time that “spirit does not first fall into time, but it exists as the primordial temporalizing of temporality. . . . ‘Spirit’ does not fall into time; but factical existence ‘falls’ as falling from primordial, authentic temporality” (SZ 436; BT 486, cited ALS 305). Heidegger himself will hold that we are, as Dasein, temporal through and through, a position that he also glimpses in Augustine. However, by contrast to Augustine, Heidegger insists that our inauthentic mode of Being, what

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While there are surely points when Augustine can seem to suggest that “it is through sin that we are made temporal” (TJ 2.10, 152), Marion rejects this reading and insists that Augustine’s attack on fallen modes of time, in which we lose ourselves by forgetting God and growing absorbed in the passing things of this world, is not an attack on time as such, nor on the human’s being, at bottom, a question to itself. The fallen time of distraction, Marion argues, wherein I become a burdensome question, or a problem, to myself through the perversion of my love and absorption in that which passes, marks in Augustine only the negative face of one and the same human mutability whose positive face would be the endless— and still always temporal— movement of conversion toward God, a movement wherein I also prove to be a mystery to myself— not through sin, however, but through resemblance to God. “Not only is man defined by his never fixed resemblance to God rather than by a fixed definition; but he is defined by that very absence of definition: what is proper to man is that he does not appropriate himself to himself and does not resemble himself, because that which he does resemble, God, precisely does not coincide with his essence, nor indeed with any essence, because God resembles nothing of this world, nor does man resemble anything of this world” (ALS 349; ISP 258). Because I am defined by my lack of definition, or because what is proper to me is that I cannot appropriate or own myself, I become a troubling question to myself precisely through the sinful attempt to possess myself (thus actually losing myself ), and I become a joyful mystery to myself by turning and referring myself ever toward that incomprehensible elsewhere of God from which alone I receive myself. It is the avowal operative in confession that turns me from my exile in myself as a land of difficulty— the exile and difficulty that ensue, paradoxically, from my desire to possess myself, to be my own place— and it is the praise operative in confession that turns me toward God as that elsewhere, that illic, that precedes and alone “renders possible, derivatively, an ubi, here, for me” (ALS 331; ISP 243). According to “the aporia of place” which “becomes the very posture of the confessio,” “I am in my place (ubi) only in not remaining in it, as in a closed here, but in passing ceaselessly elsewhere (illic)” (ALS 331; ISP 243). he calls the “falling” in which we forget and lose ourselves, is not secondary or provisional but fundamental and insurmountable. “So neither must we take the fallenness of Dasein as a ‘fall’ from a purer and higher ‘primal status.’ Not only do we lack any experience of this ontically, but ontologically we lack any possibilities or clues for interpreting it” (SZ 176; BT 220, sec. 38, “Falling and Thrownness”). As I’ll signal later, in the early 1930s Heidegger sees and explicates more fully in Augustine a construal of time quite close to his own primordial temporality, one that does not understand spirit as fallen into time but understands our existence as itself essentially temporalizing.

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The critical moment of becoming a great question, magna quaestio, to oneself, which proves negative and painful, is thus associated with a “universal rule” according to which “the place of the creature is not found in the creature itself, but always in God” (ALS 342; ISP 252). In light of that rule, Marion aims to show that “the aporia of the magna mihi quaestio coincides with its solution: the indefinition of man” (ALS 352; ISP 260). We can read the Augustinian turn away from my being a great question to myself (as the function of disordered love) and toward my being undefined through resemblance to God as a turn from an idolatrous to an iconic mode of selfhood, but we must understand such a turn to involve at bottom a conversion of temporalities: from a fallen time of distraction and dispersion (where I lose myself through the illusion of secure self-possession) toward the unified time of conversion itself, in which I receive myself (again, and truly) only from elsewhere (beyond the world). As Marion notes, this Augustinian distinction between a time of perversion and a time of conversion, between a time of dispersion and loss of self (due to the pretense of self-possession) and a time of continence and selfrecovery (by reception of self through the otherness of God), is echoed in Heidegger’s distinction between a common or vulgar conception of time and the more fundamental, primordial temporality of my existence. According to that common conception, time is a flowing stream of “now” points, in which I can distractedly lose myself (through the tranquilizing, if illusory, security of my “falling”), while the more primordial temporality of my existence (in its threefold, ecstatic unity) makes possible both such falling or self-forgetfulness and the “anticipatory resoluteness” in which I might find myself more authentically as the irreplaceable individual I am (alongside beings ready-to-hand and in relations of solicitude with other Dasein who can likewise appear in their ownmost potentiality7). Noting that distinction in Heidegger, Marion interprets the temporal distention of the soul in Augustine (the distentio animi), even in its distracted turns, as that which constitutes the privilege and the excellence of the human among all creatures. “The distentio characterizes what is proper to man as the most radical of creatures, and thus as the creature that is most differant from itself and that is most distracted from itself: ‘Ecce distentio est vita mea.— And see that all my life is only distraction’ (XI, 29, 39, ibid.)” (ALS 308; ISP 225). (Heidegger will cite Confessions 11.26 in SZ 427, n. 3, BT 499, n. 15: “Hence it seemed to me that time is nothing else than an extendedness; but of what sort of thing it is an extendedness I do not know; and it would be surprising if it were not an 7. See BT 344; SZ 297– 98.

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extendedness of the soul itself.”) The creature who differs from itself because it finds its place not in itself but in God and hence in the distance between the creature and God (who is the immemorial outside more intimate to me than I am to myself ), differs likewise from itself temporally, precisely because it dwells in the delay between God’s gift (always already given) and the creature’s response (ever in delay with respect to the gift). From this point of view, the distinctiveness of the human in Augustine has to do with its capacity to differ from itself temporally (which it does because it finds its true place outside itself ) and to be distracted to the point of losing itself. Just as an originary existential temporality in Heidegger opens the possibility both of Dasein’s authenticity and of its inauthenticity, so in Augustine the temporal distentio that characterizes the human as creature par excellence opens both the possibility of being indecisively lost in, because endlessly distracted by, passing things and moments of the world, and the possibility of being found and decided in and by a love that turns toward the permanence of God. It is the same created temporality, Marion argues, that gives the possibility both of fall and of conversion. These differing ways of temporalizing existence correlate with the two different ways in which the human can be a question or mystery to itself. The time of the human as burdensome question or problem to itself is that which tends toward distraction (distractio), the “derived and devastated” time in which, by forgetting God and in wanting to possess myself by myself (rather than to receive myself from elsewhere), I lose myself— leaving myself to be distracted and dispersed among, because absorbed in, the passing things and moments of the world. (This is like the Dasein who loses itself in the anonymous social being of the “they,” das Man, through curiosity, idle talk, and ambiguity— wherein, while forgetting itself as irreplaceable, or singular, Dasein complacently feels most secure with itself.) By contrast, the time of the human as mystery, or as in-definite through resemblance to God, tends toward what Augustine calls extraction [extractio], the time in which through the adherence of my love to the love of God I receive myself (again) from elsewhere, as a lover— which means that I find again, as lover, my proper place, which, in the other, has for its proper character the fact that I can never take hold of it or own it myself. Through this turn or conversion from a fallen and indecisive time of the passing present to the decisive time of conversion itself, where I advance eschatologically toward the God who never passes, I turn from the trial of the magna quaestio toward in-definition through resemblance— or, in other words, from the idol toward the icon. Along these lines Marion contends that such a conversion for Augustine does not mean that I eventually exit time in order to become myself eter-

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nal. Rather, in the conversion of time, and the time of conversion, I advance ever more, and forever, even after “this” life “on earth,” toward the horizon of an eschatological future that remains irreducible to the presence of any future present. “The intentio,” as Marion writes, “can be liberated from (or renounce) the distraction of the distentio, which dissipates in the passing stream of nows, all the while remaining in temporality (which is maintained in the completion after this life), not at all through the illusion of being frozen in eternity (which remains decidedly proper to God), but by stretching out through extensio toward ‘the things that are ahead (emprosthen),’ the things of God, to the point of extracting itself from the variations of the world. The same intentio can turn from distensio toward extensio. And convert temporality from one mode to the other, without ever betraying it, or its finitude” (ALS 310; ISP 227). In the eschatological future, then, resonates, or returns, the immemorial past of God to which Augustine is so deeply attuned in his famous analysis of memory in book 10 of the Confessions. Now, as just suggested, this distinction in Augustine between the distracted time of fallenness, or perversion, and the “extracted” time of confession and conversion finds a close analogy in Heidegger’s distinction between the time of human Dasein’s falling (where Dasein forgets or loses its ownmost, irreplaceable self in the anonymity and indecision of the social “they,” das Man) and the authentic temporality of Dasein (where Dasein is “summoned” out of its lostness in “the they” and finds itself again as a unique self— thanks notably to its anticipatory resoluteness before the horizon of its death, which signals in its own way a futurity irreducible to any future present, and which reveals the possibilities of a given Dasein’s existence as distinctive to that Dasein). In light of such analogy, we see that the temporal horizon of my death in Heidegger can resemble in its fundamental traits the eschatological future of Augustine. Just as in Augustine’s eschatological temporality as according to Marion, “where the future [le futur] would remain always a to-come [un avenir] ahead of all passage, extracted thus from the stream of nows [bande passant]” (ALS 311; ISP 227– 28), so in the temporality of Dasein’s Being-toward its death, the future remains always ahead of any temporal passage for Dasein; my death in Heidegger gives the horizon of a future that never passes, an irreducible “to come” that never yields for me as Dasein the arrival of an actual present; and such a future, the ever open “to be” of my existence, operates within the unity of a primordial temporality (of pastness, the present, and futurity), that likewise never passes so long as I exist, even as it makes possible all temporal passage within my existence. In light of just such proximity between their understandings of time, Marion posits a sharp distinction between Augustine and Heidegger— by

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stigmatizing in Heidegger his abandonment of the distinctly erotic horizon of Augustine, a betrayal that translates a theological understanding of human life (vita humana) into the terms of an existential analysis of Dasein’s Being— thus losing entirely “the aim of the vita beata and the truth of the third order [i.e., the order of charity, or love, which becomes the principle of truth]” (ALS 213; ISP 151).8 Heidegger misses this erotic truth, Marion contends, in his turning away before God, coram Deo, and that turning would be an integral part of the existential idolatry in Heidegger that Marion has been positing and critiquing since The Idol and Distance and God Without Being: an idolatry according to which the “authenticity” of Dasein would consist in Dasein’s “appropriation of the self by itself ” (ALS 234; ISP 169) through a resolute decision of Dasein’s will. From this point of view, Heidegger attributes to the will of Dasein a power over itself, and hence a possession of self, that would be unthinkable within the erotic, and iconic, horizon of Augustinian theology, where “the access of the self to itself does not depend on me, and especially not through the simple return of the will back to itself, where I experience to the contrary the inaccessible monstrum of the magna quaestio that I myself appear to myself ” (ALS 234; ISP 169). In Augustine, indeed, the claim or pretention to possess oneself in deciding oneself characterizes the sin that makes one lose oneself through distraction amidst the things and times of the world (where I forget God, who is within me, and I wander about out there in the world); and the decision to love neither myself nor the things and times of the world but rather the God who alone gives to me the possibility of loving (and thus of receiving myself, from elsewhere) comes from this God alone. The idolatry of appropriation that Marion identifies and critiques in Heidegger, where Dasein would decide through its own will on itself and its truth, is opposed, or undone, Marion argues, by the iconic reversal where my will finds itself decided by the prior will of God. In Augustine just as much as in Heidegger, Marion insists, the trouble and temptation of human life remains universal and permanent, since it signals nothing other than possibility itself, but the two thinkers diverge from one another in their understanding of what is at stake in our factical existence, and concerning also, especially, the manner in which the self is decided. “Temptation becomes indeed the permanent and universal condition of the 8. For the import of the “third order” to the question of modern metaphysics’ “destitution,” see Jean-Luc Marion, On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism: The Constitution and the Limits of Onto-theo-logy in Cartesian Thought, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), sec. 25.

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vita humana, a facticity in which an attunement or mood [intonation] provokes and also results from a decision that is to be made endlessly. But what is at stake for the one who belongs to Christ (pertinens ad Christum) differs essentially from what is at stake for the one who identifies with Dasein. Instead of the self in its attunements or moods (Stimmungen) deciding on itself in deciding with respect to its Being, the self in its temptations decides whether it loves or does not love in deciding with respect to the Christ” (ALS 217; ISP 154). Here, the difference for Marion between the idol of Being and the icon of Christ is crystallized around the difference between Dasein and the pertinens ad Christum, a difference where the decisive thing is the character of decision itself, for “contrary to Dasein, the pertinens ad Christum decides without knowing whether he will be able to decide and how . . . , for that decision does not depend on him, since it is a question of loving and loving must be received” (ALS 217; ISP 155). The contrast— or what Marion deems the frontal opposition— between Augustine and Heidegger here depends on two key premises: first, that Dasein, at the opposite extreme of the pertinens ad Christum, can know if he will be able to decide, and how; and second, that the decision of Dasein thus depends on Dasein, or on its will, in such a way that Dasein would claim a kind of autarchic self-possession that the pertinens ad Christum would never presume, given that his decision does not depend on him. A couple of questions emerge here. The first concerns the failure of decision in which one who potentially could belong to Christ does not: insofar as the non- pertinens ad Christum remains responsible for the failure of his decision in that regard (and such free responsibility seems still operative in the Confessions, if perhaps not later as Augustine comes, largely through his polemic against Pelagius, to see grace as irresistible) would we not have to acknowledge that his decision, or his will, does play a role, perhaps minimal but still active and productive, in the reception (and thus the appearance) of the love that decides him? (Or could it be the case that my nondecision, or my decision not to respond to God’s love, is itself also received from that love? This seems not to be the case.) And from the other side, second: even if the decision of Dasein entails something of the willful activity that Marion sees and emphasizes, would such decision not also have to be understood as bound to, and grounded in, a passivity— and a relational matrix— that Dasein, as Beingin-the-world (which always means being alongside things ready-to-hand and Being-with other Dasein in solicitude), never overcomes or masters— such that Dasein never fully or securely possesses itself and indeed always finds itself as much decided by its Being-in-the-world as deciding on its Being-inthe-world? Along these lines, to which we’ll return, we would need to explore

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the senses in which anticipatory resoluteness does not entail solely a taking of the self by itself in the security or closure of self-possession but rather a finding of the self in, or awakening of the self to, its distinctive existence, which defies the logic of security and possession insofar as existence means for Heidegger coming to oneself, or one’s “place,” only in departing from oneself: finding oneself only by standing out from oneself within the ecstatic (and always insecure) temporality of a world that is inescapably relational. If resoluteness gives Dasein to itself, it does so by calling Dasein out of its irresoluteness (where any one Dasein can and does substitute for another); and Dasein is called in such a way that its resoluteness does not in fact isolate Dasein in self-possession but pushes it authentically into the relations of Being-alongside (things ready-to-hand) and Being-with (other Dasein) that are always already constitutive of— although often forgotten by— Dasein as Being-in-the-world.9 Heidegger’s understanding of existence can seem in fact closer than granted to what Marion signals with the adonné: for Heidegger as much as for Marion, I am given to myself only in being given over to that which gives itself first to me, according to a precedence and excess that I will never surmount. Such precedence and excess are signaled in Augustine by the God more intimate to me than I am to myself, according to an iconic thinking that points beyond the world— with which neither God, nor I, according to my resemblance to God’s in-definition, bear any resemblance. They are signaled in Heidegger, by contrast, by the relational structures and temporality of world-hood itself— which like Augustine’s God constitute me most intimately even as they exceed me and elude any possessive comprehension. If existence in Heidegger means coming to oneself only in standing-out from oneself, within an always in-secure (and for that very reason care-ful) temporality, then the being defined by existence might be seen to resist the closure 9. As Heidegger notes in a passage to whose implications we will return, “resoluteness, as authentic Being-one’s-Self, does not detach Dasein from its world, nor does it isolate it so that it becomes a free-floating ‘I’. And how should it, when resoluteness as authentic disclosedness is authentically nothing else than Being-in-the-world? Resoluteness brings the Self right into its concernful Being-alongside what is ready-to-hand, and pushes it into solicitous Being with Others [Die Entschlossenheit bringt das Selbst gerade in das jeweilige besorgende Sein bei Zuhandenem und stößt es in das fürsorgende Mitsein mit dem Anderen]. . . . What one resolves upon in resoluteness has been prescribed ontologically in the existentiality of Dasein in general as a potentiality-for-Being in the manner of concernful solicitude. . . . ‘Resoluteness’ signifies letting oneself be summoned out of one’s lostness in the ‘they’ [Die Entschlossenheit bedeutet Sich-aufrufen-lassen aus der Verlorenheit in das Man]” (SZ 298 – 99; BT 344 – 45; my emphasis).

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and security of idolatrous self-possession, remaining as it does inherently exposed to the insecurity of temporal self-difference and mortality. In Marion’s reading, Heidegger departs from Augustine in a kind of existential idolatry characterized by an excess of security (however illusory) on the part of a Dasein who would make claims to a willful self-possession, whereas the pertinens ad Christum, as iconic, would lack the (illusory) security of any such self-possession in being given over to a decision of love that never belongs properly to the pertinens ad Christum. This framing of things underplays, I think, the sense in which Dasein remains ever exposed to the insecurity of mortal temporality— which means its own mortal temporality and that of others with whom Dasein always already is in its constitutive solicitude— in a way that the pertinens ad Christum seems not to, and really could not, in the measure that love’s happiness, or delight, requires for Augustine the certainty and security of the eternal and immutable God who does not pass. My intuition here, to be developed subsequently, is that Heidegger’s turn from Augustine may have at stake less an outright abandonment of love and more a different way of construing love’s temporal— and mortal— conditions. Marion argues resourcefully that it is not in Augustine a question for the creature of “overcoming time in order to pass to eternity, but of moving beyond the incoherence of distraction through the love of divine permanence, in a tension that itself remains temporal” (ALS 340). However, in whatever way this tension may remain temporal, the aim of such love is to escape the dangers of mutability entailed in life on earth and thereby to attain immortality. Marion contends that the Augustinian God who definitively exceeds time remains always and radically “to come” for the creature who lives only through time, according to a gap and delay that will never be overcome by the human temporality that is sustained— and kept endlessly open— by that gap and delay. God thus signals for Augustine not only a radical and immemorial past, which resists all re-presentation, but also a future that never passes, a future toward which I move without ever capturing it in the presence of any present. As I’ve suggested, however, such a temporality of the future, construed theologically in Augustine, can also be construed existentially, and mortally, as in Heidegger, such that the self lives ever toward a future that never passes, and that never reaches the presence of any present, for the self whose future it nonetheless remains. In that future, furthermore, resonates the nullity— and insurmountable indebtedness— of my thrown “having-been,” which likewise cannot be reduced to, or recollected as, a

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past present; so it is that “when Dasein is resolute, it takes over authentically in its existence the fact that it is the null basis of its own nullity. We have conceived death existentially as what we have characterized as the possibility of the impossibility of existence— that is to say, as the utter nullity of Dasein. Death is not ‘added on’ to Dasein at its ‘end’; but Dasein, as care, is the thrown (that is null) basis for its death. The nullity by which Dasein’s Being is dominated through and through, is revealed to Dasein itself in authentic Being-toward-death. Only on the basis of Dasein’s whole Being does anticipation make Being-guilty manifest. Care harbors in itself both death and guilt equiprimordially. Only anticipatory resoluteness understands the potentiality-for-Being-guilty authentically and wholly— what is to say, primordially [Entschlossen übernimmt das Dasein eigentlich in seiner Existenz, daß es der nichtige Grund seiner Nichtigkeit ist. Den Tod begriffen wir existential als die charakterisierte Möglichkeit der Unmöglichkeit der existenz, das heißt als schlechthinnige Nichtigkeit des Daseins. Der Tod wird dem Dasein nicht bei seinem ‘Ende’ angestückt, sondern als Sorge ist das Dasein der geworfene (das heißt nichtige) Grund seines Todes. Die das Sein des Daseins ursprüngliche durchherrschende Nichtigkeit enthüllt sich ihm selbst im eigentlichen Sein zum Tode. Das Vorlaufen macht das Schuldigsein erst aus dem Grunde des ganzen Seins des Daseins offenbar. Die Sorge birgt Tod und Schuld gleichursprünglich in sich. Die vorlaufende Entschlossenheit versteht erst das Schuldigseinkönnen eigentlich und ganz, has heißt ursprünglich]” (BT 354; SZ 306). In other words, the “to come” as a future that never passes but remains always ahead of me, can well be thought according to the existential horizon of Being-toward-death, where the possibility of my impossibility is temporalized as the “not yet” that gives every present, and past, as a gift (and which gives, moreover, the possibility of authentic solicitude, or care, of one human Dasein for another). In light especially of the similarity between these two ways of temporalizing futurity, a key difference between them becomes all the more notable: What the eschatological horizon in Augustine gives is not simply a future or a “to come” that never passes, but the possibility of advancing toward that future in the certain, secure enjoyment of beatitude. Marion contends that “life” in Augustine implies “that the living receive it from elsewhere and may lose it, and hence that it live in the intrinsic incompleteness of an opening”; and he emphasizes correlatively that life is thus “deployed within the horizon of a desire” (ALS 129; ISP 85) that, like the epektasis of Saint Paul (Philippians 3:13) or Gregory Nyssa (Life of Moses), does not want the satiety or the (illusory) stability and permanence of a nunc stans but the always growing advance into God; however, while Marion signals the openness of life to loss, and the importance to life of endless movement, it

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remains the case, as our previous chapter showed, that in Augustine beatitude and its enjoyment are finally reached only by overcoming the possibility of loss through the certain and secure adherence of my love to God, whose permanence and immutability alone render such enjoyment possible. As Marion notes, for Augustine “only God can be enjoyed . . . because he alone remains (privilege of immutability) and offers the good without reserve” (ALS 372; ISP 276). To find one’s place no longer in oneself or in the world but in the God who remains beyond the world is to find the fullness and rest of enjoyment. This, indeed, is what is at stake in the thought of creation, as Marion suggests when he writes that “creation, originarily eschatological, consists in nothing other than giving place to this coming of each creature into its place of rest. And this place, for the human without definition, is found in nothing other than the rest of God himself ” (ALS 354; ISP 262). Thus, if the human for Augustine remains always in movement thanks to its temporal condition as creature, the happiness of such movement can be enjoyed only in effacing the danger and disquiet of that fallen time in which I can lose myself by forgetting God; and effacing such danger and disquiet can happen for Augustine only through the unshakable adherence of my love to God. As Marion puts it, citing Augustine, “if truly ‘ibi est locus quietis imperturbabilis, ubi non deseritur amor, si ipse non deserat’ (the place where I might come to rest without any more disturbance is there where love is not abandoned, provided that it itself does not abandon) (C 4.11, 16, 13, 436), then the self finds its place— in other words, itself— only there where it loves” (ALS 383; ISP 284). In this regard we can recall that the very paradigm of creaturely love in Augustine, the angelic realm that Augustine calls the “the heaven of heavens,”10 is defined by an adherence of love to God so thorough that it actually escapes time’s dangers of variation and change: “adhering to the true and truly eternal God, so that without being coeternal with him, it is not undone from him and is not dispersed in any of time’s variation or change” (C 12.15, 19, 14, 370; cited in ALS 339 – 40; ISP 250). This need of the eternal and of the permanent for love’s happiness in Augustine, or the impossibility in Augustine of understanding or, more, of living as happy a love directed to the mortal as mortal and passing, is at the heart, we saw, of that crucial moment when Augustine first becomes a great question to himself, the death of his friend recounted in Confessions book 4. That grief was, in Augustine’s recounting, a function of his love’s misdirection: “O madness that knows not how to love men as men! O foolish man 10. See Psalm 155:16: “The heaven of heaven is the Lord’s: but the earth he has given to the children of men.”

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to bear the lot of men so rebelliously! I had both the madness and the folly. I raged and sighed and wept and was in torment, unable to rest, unable to think. I bore my soul all broken and bleeding and loathing to be borne by me; and I could find nowhere to set it down to rest” (C 4.7). Having “spilt out [his] soul in loving a mortal man as if he would never die” (C 5.8), Augustine upon the death of that man can bear to live neither in himself nor in his surrounding world; his soul is broken and unbearable (but he cannot leave it, C 4.7), and the places of the shared human world— which once were able to say about the absent friend, “he will come soon”— can no longer speak so, and thus Augustine “hated all places because he [the friend] was not in them” (C 4.4). It is precisely in face of these empty and thus hated places that Augustine “became a great question to himself ” (C 4.4), and in turning from those places to his soul, asking the soul why it so troubles Augustine, Augustine finds no answer. And while “the comfort [he] found in other friends— and the pleasure [he] had with them in things of the earth— did much to repair and remake” (C 4.8) Augustine, such comfort and repair and remaking were in fact, he concludes, “all one huge fable, one long lie [et hoc erat ingens fabula et longum mendacium]” (C 4.8) whose “adulterous caressing [adulterina confricatione]” utterly corrupted his soul (C 4.8). The comfort of friends and their shared temporal enjoyments are in fact the very root of grief, Augustine finally holds, while, contrariwise, “Blessed is the man that loves you O God, and his friend in you, and his enemy for you. For he alone loses no one that is dear to him, if all are dear in God, who is never lost [beatus qui amat te, et amicum in te, et inimicum propter te. solus enim nullum carum amittit, cui omnes in illo cari, qui non amittitur]” (C 4.9). Happy love, in short, is solely that love not exposed to loss; and the love that transcends loss is the love that holds every beloved in the God who alone does not pass, he who, in “that final state” “will be all in all in an assured and perfect peace [aeternitate certa et pace perfecta].”11 In light of Augustine’s concern with the assurance of eternity and the perfection of peace and the fullness of rest, I wonder whether Heidegger’s purported turn away before God might be read less as an outright abandonment of the question of love, and more in the direction of a temporal thinking that would call us to understand love, and its possible happiness, or even its very condition, in terms simply at odds with those of Augustine, which is to say terms that see the trouble and restlessness of life— for both lover and beloved alike— as insurmountable. Marion’s interpretation might be read to suggest that Heidegger sees all life as restless without end because he fails to under11. Augustine, City of God 19.20.

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stand love correctly— according to the theological horizon, which gives, or promises, a place of rest without disturbance; it seems to me possible, however, or likely, that Heidegger instead opens for us the question of what love might entail once the assurance and security, the rest and peace, of eternity are let go. This would pertain also to the question of Augustine’s relation to metaphysics— not so much along the lines of ontotheological understandings of creation (Marion is quite compelling on the deeper character of the language and logic of creation in Augustine) but more along the lines of the suspicion, as expressed in Nietzsche, that Christian thought cannot affirm as meaningful, or as happy, a temporal life not finally backed— and transcended— by the eternal, so as thus to be indemnified against sorrow. This seems a basic frame of nihilism: if there is no eternal beyond, then we are, in our temporal existence, without hope. It is not clear to me whether, and how, Augustine’s thinking about love’s hope, and happiness, deviates from such a frame.

4

The Time of His Syllables: Dying Together with Derrida and Augustine

In his reading of Augustine, Marion argues that the radical distance or difference of God might be interpreted along the lines of Emmanuel Levinas’s “immemorial,” or of the radical forgetting that conditions factical existence in Heidegger,1 both of which entail an ever-open futurity akin to what Marion sees in Augustine as a version of Pauline or Nyssan epektasis, the endless straining or stretching of the soul into God. The affirmation of temporal mutability in Augustine, however, and in Marion’s reading of him, can seem in the end to affirm not so much mutability as the mutable creature’s steady adherence, through love, to the God who himself remains immutable. Through such adherence, exemplified in the angels, Augustine hopes to transcend, or even to end, if not time then at least time’s variations; and he views the deepest forms of mutability in human experience on earth— such as procreation, birth, and death— with moralizing objection. The paradigm of angelic constancy—whose achievement, Augustine recurrently emphasizes, is rest without disturbance, a certain and secure enjoyment— appears in that form of created being which Augustine calls the “heaven of the heavens.” This is the realm of the angels who never depart from God, and who in so adhering constantly to God come as close as is possible for a creature to the immutability and eternity that belong properly to God alone: this is “a sublime creature [sublimen quondam esse creaturam],” as Augustine writes in Confessions 12.15, “which is bound to the true God, to the truly eternal God, by so pure a love that, though it is not co-eternal with him, it never parts from him and never falls away to become subject to the fluctuation and succession of time, but remains serene in the sure contemplation of God alone.” This angel’s 1. See Marion, Au lieu de soi, 119 – 23; In the Self ’s Place, 78 – 80.

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dwelling, while in principle mutable, in fact never changes; it remains always, indeed, the dwelling place of God: “This creature is God’s dwelling,” Augustine writes; it is the “heavenly Jerusalem,” the “Heaven of Heavens which belongs to the Lord,” and it remains so constant that “not only is there no time before it [because it “precedes even the creation of time”], but no time in it, because it is fitted to behold your face continually and is never turned away from it. This means that it undergoes no change. Yet mutability is inherent in it, and it would grow dark and cold unless, by clinging to you with all the strength of its love, it drew warmth and light from you like a noon that never wanes” (C 12.15). While Jacques Derrida’s engagement with Augustine in “Circumfession,”2 to which we turn in this chapter, does not, in a direct way, work with (or for) the reader into Augustine’s text with the kind of systematically detailed exegesis that is Marion’s, and while the— fully intended— opacity of Derrida’s writing and interpretation in “Circumfession” can be off-putting to many potential readers, the text is relevant for our concerns here insofar as it opens, above all on the question of temporality, a significant contrast to Marion’s reading (while also pointing us back to key elements of Heidegger’s reception of Augustine, which we will take up in our next chapter). Perhaps most notable straightaway for my interests here, and crucial likewise for any discussion of the theological or the religious in Derrida’s thinking, is that he reads in Augustine “only the time of his syllables” (CF 241, period 45; 223). This will mean, among other things, reading “unlike the angels” who, according to Augustine, read “without temporal syllables, what Thy eternal will desires” (C 13.15, 18, quoted in CF 241, period 45; 223). This is the Augustine we encountered in our second chapter, for whom the angelic, and paradigmatic, relation to God entails no delay between God’s word or speech and the creature’s hearing or response. However temporal the angelic creature may remain in principle, since it falls short of co-eternity with God, it proves to be a creature who enjoys a quasi-eternal simultaneity of God’s word and the angel’s response to that word— which means a perfect simultaneity between love’s giving (from God) and love’s reception (by the angel through regiving). “For they always behold thy face, and there do they read without any syllables measurable by times, what the meaning is of your eternal will. They read, they choose, they love. They are ever reading; and that never passes away which 2. Jacques Derrida, “Circumfession,” in Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Jacques Derrida, “Circonfession,” in Jacques Derrida (Paris: Seuil, 1991). Hereafter cited parenthetically as CF with English pagination and period number followed by French page number.

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they read: because by choosing and by loving, they read the very unchangeableness of your counsel” (C 13.15). To read in Augustine only the time of his syllables means, then, to read Augustine at least in part against Augustine, by insisting that all reading— like all loving— takes time. Insisting thus on the time of any living love, or interpretation, and marking correlatively that he reads Augustine “right on the skin of his language” (CF 241, period 45; 223), Derrida admits that such reading may amount finally to actually “not knowing” either the Saint Augustine (SA) in whom reading and loving aspire to eternal life in the immutable or the absolute knowledge (SA as signaling savoir absolu) that may constitute an Hegelian inheritance of Augustine— where knowing could be read to consummate (or to supplant) love, while bringing learning, in the self-education of spirit, to an end. The question of learning, we should note, is addressed by Augustine within his contrast between the perfect and effectively timeless reading and loving of the angels and the fallen love and language of temporal humanity: human learning, he suggests, along with the time it takes, becomes necessary as a result of our fall; the time of learning thus signals a provisional defect or deviation that shall be overcome by means of the learning itself. In the passage just cited Augustine continues: Their book is never closed, nor is their scroll folded up: for you yourself are their book and you are forever. You allotted them their place above this firmament of ours, which you have established over the infirmity of the lower peoples: where they might gaze up and learn your mercy, which declares in time you who made times. For your mercy, O Lord, is in the heavens, and your truth reaches to the clouds. The clouds pass away, but the heavens remain. Those who preach your word pass on from this life to the next, but your Scripture is outstretched over the peoples of this world to the end of time. . . . Now we see your Word, not as he is, but dimly, through the clouds, like a confused reflection in the mirror of the firmament, for though we are the beloved of your Son, what we shall be hereafter has not been made known as yet. Wearing the tissue of our flesh he turned his eyes to us. He spoke words of love and inflamed our hearts, and now we hasten after the fragrance of his perfumes. But, when he comes we shall be like him; we shall see him, then, as he is. (C 13.15)

Evoking a timeless truth that eventually dissipates the cloudy distortions of temporal existence, Augustine here construes learning and its time, along with their emplacement in nature, on the side of a negativity that shall turn productive and be thus overcome: learning shall achieve its consummation insofar as the driving energy of its love reaches and sees he whom it loves no longer through the distortion and transience of clouds, or in part and through a mirror darkly, but directly and fully as he is.

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The passages that Derrida cites here from Augustine’s Confessions—book 13.15 — concern not only the question of learning but, inextricable to it, the question of inheritance: more specifically, the human inheritance of Scriptures whose authority, according to Augustine, “is all the more sublime because the mortal men through whom you gave them to us have now met the death that is man’s lot” (C 13.15; emphasis added). Like the syllables of a word or the words of a sentence or the sentences of a Psalm— which while all passing away are also retained and redeemed, sublated, in a greater, meaningful whole— so the authors of Scripture, while passing away in their mortality, are raised and redeemed in the everlasting authority of the divine Word that speaks through them. Such for Augustine is the paradigmatic work done by history and tradition, our temporal school to eternity. In his reading, Derrida emphasizes that Augustine ties this question of authority to a distinction he draws between two “skins”: the one, mortal, that men are given, along with fallen time, due to sin; the other, the “skin” of God’s heavenly Book, whose words, speaking the everlasting Word, form a canopy that protects mortals and gives them an imperfect glimpse, within time, of the perfect hereafter beyond time: “You know, O Lord, how you clothed men with skins when by sin they became mortal. In the same way you have spread out the heavens like a canopy of skins, and these heavens are your Book, your words in which no note of discord jars, set over us through the ministry of mortal men. Those men are dead, and by their death this solid shield, the authority of your words delivered to us through them, is raised on high to shelter all that lies beneath” (C 13.15). Augustine here links the sublimity of Scriptural authority, in its firmness and solidity, to the everlasting and saving work done by God through mortal beings: the promise of our seeing, eventually, the everlasting Word beyond distortion and discord will annul— or render fully productive within a saving economy— any mourning for those dead, whose seeming loss through their passing becomes ultimate and everlasting gain. That promise also points to an eventual end— both a cessation and a teleological completion— of the learning entailed by our mortal life amidst the clouds of time. The negative is put finally to work for the good as much in Augustine as in the later Hegelian, or more broadly modern, inheritance of this Christian theodicy. To read Augustine, as Derrida wants, only according to the time of his syllables, and on the skin of his language, would be not only to read otherwise but also to love otherwise than those “angels, on high above the firmament” who “have no need to look up to this firmament of ours or read its text to know your word” (C 13.15, not cited by Derrida). As Derrida highlights, reading for the angels is essentially a form of loving, and their love is turned to

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that which cannot be lost, for they “read there, without temporal syllables, what Thy eternal will desires. They are reading, choosing, and loving; they read forever, and what they read never passes away” (C 13.15, cited by Derrida CF 241– 42, period 45; 224). The fantasy of a reading without time, then, the fantasy of hearing or seeing or receiving immediately and fully, without delay, the word of God (or any other) in the face to face, is repeated, Derrida suggests, in the fantasy of a timeless or eternal love. This would be the fantasy of loving without delay or deferral, and thus without intervals of risk, or exposure to loss. Such a loving and its reading constitute the fantastic core of Augustine’s thinking about the true happiness we find in a rightly ordered love, where love adheres to the eternal and immutable with the immediacy and constancy, bordering on timelessness, of that “sublime creature” of the “heaven of heavens.” By contrast to the Augustine he reads against Augustine, Derrida’s reading in “Circumfession,” like the writing bound with it, as well as the loving, is given over to decidedly mortal times, and skins; it is— like all of life for Derrida— exposed to, and structured by, the imminence of certain but incalculable interruption. The text evokes such imminence repeatedly and from multiple angles, but perhaps most pointedly through reference to the fact that Derrida is writing the text as his mother, at a distance, lies on her deathbed. His mother’s imminent death, which means also her ongoing survival, both of which are signaled by the bedsores on her skin, highlights throughout “Circumfession”— as does the unpredictable operation of the computer program that Derrida has decided to let dictate the cut-off for each period of his periphrastic writing— what the text will suggest about Derrida’s books more broadly: that they “are written first in skin, they read the death sentence held in reserve on the other side of the screen for in the end since the computer I have my memory like a sky in front of me, all the succor, all the threats of a sky, the pelliculated simulacrum of another absolute subjectivity” (CF 228, period 43; 212). Much as in his writing on James Joyce, where Derrida signals the innumerable ways that the incalculable can emerge in and through the programmatic3 (hence undermining figures of absolute subjectivity that haunt the technological), so here in his writing on Augustine (and Hegel) he elicits the resistance to program that we might glimpse even at the extreme of program’s reach. While according to Augustine’s Confessions the firm sublimity of Scrip3. For an exploration of this Joyce, and Derrida’s reading of him, see my Indiscrete Image, chap. 5, “Here Comes Everybody: Technopoetics and Mystical Tradition in Joyce.”

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tural authority puts to productive work and finally sublates the infirmity and mortal passing of those through whom we might inherit Scripture, the text of Derrida’s “Circumfession” turns around the ever open inheritance, and the unforeseeable destination, of what he calls a “sublime scission” (CF 228, period 43; 212) or cutting. Operative already in the text’s title, where circumcision and its traditions are cut or interrupted by confession (and vice versa), the cutting on which the text reflects repeatedly and in various ways relates also to an archive concerning circumcision that Derrida tells us he has gathered in the “sublime” of his attic (CF 59, period 11; 58): . . . documents, iconography, notes, learned ones and naive ones, dream narratives or philosophical dissertations, applied transcription of encyclopedic, sociological, historical, psychoanalytical treatises that I’ll never do anything with, about circumcisions in the world, the Jewish and the Arab and the others, and excision, with a view to my circumcision alone, the circumcision of me, the unique one, that I know perfectly well took place, one time, they told me and I see it but I always suspect myself of having cultivated, because I am circumcised, ergo cultivated, a fantastical affabulation. (CF 59 – 60, period 11; 10 – 11)

In the rather mundane heights of his attic, Derrida has been collecting a body of knowledge, which presumably aims to be, at least in part, scientific, concerning the societies, cultures, and practices of circumcision; but this is a body, at the same time, that touches Derrida himself, in his single body, in a unique manner and according to a happening that he takes, or receives, as resistant to the knowledge of any science or indeed the presence of any experience. The inheritance and destination of the cut indicated by the term and tradition of circumcision, Derrida repeatedly suggests, remain incalculable, uncontainable, incomprehensible, even as they constitute him intimately— yielding “that form of secret, the ‘my life’ which is neither a content to be hidden, nor an inside of the solitary self ” (CF 228, period 43; 212 – 13). In the circumcision of his body he sees the trace of an inscription that never will have come fully into the presence of any knowledge or experience; hence the relation he has to his own circumcision involves an insuperable unknowing, and that unknowing implies the necessity of a learning with which he could never be done. As conditioned thus by unknowing, such learning will in turn prove central to Derrida’s understanding of loving and dying: As with circumcision, the learning entailed both in loving and in dying, he will suggest, binds and exposes the self to an otherness that conditions the self inescapably, and intimately, while remaining always likewise, in some incalculable measure, inaccessible to the self. “The sublime scission,” Derrida writes, “the bottomless bet: to learn how

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to love— that cannot fail to repeat one and many closed-up rents, open again the wound of circumcision” (CF 228, period 43; 212). If loving is a matter of learning, it is, like all learning, also the matter of an unknowing that cuts into, and conditions, all experience; or, equally, it is a matter of the experience of innumerable unknown cuts and conditions. This unknowing of love, which calls for an endless learning, constitutes one of the more notable among countless lines of Derrida’s resistance to any version of providential or theo-logic program (le théo-logiciel), whether religious or technological (the two of which, as he suggests elsewhere, are never really separable4). “I have no doubt never known how to love,” writes Derrida, “other than in the place (double place, with internal partition and essential replaceability, referral toward the absence of the other) of a figure unknown to me” (CF 213, period 40; 198 – 99). Knowing how to love, here, entails referring oneself toward an unknown figure, or a figure of unknowing, according to a logic of referral that Derrida associates also with “negative theology,” where God can be the name of an absolutely indeterminate addressee, or of an incalculable future: “whence the indefinite referral, so-called negative theology, the play with the names of God, the substitution of one bank for another” (CF 44, period 8; 45). The experience of unknowing, or the unknowing condition of experience, which Derrida here associates with love, stands out also in his approach to the question of community or sociality, or what he called (notably in what turned out to be his last public lecture in the United States) “living together.” Like the living together with which it is essentially bound, loving has no fixed or given rule to govern its “how” ahead of time, such that loving might be programmed or produced by some calculating science or technology; the lack of a given program or calculated knowing is indispensable if love is to have the temporality of a genuinely open future, which means also a future toward which responsibility is possible. Underscoring his aversion and resistance to the tendency that all communities display toward exclusionary and violent fantasies of wholeness and closure, Derrida writes that “for the ‘living together’ that I am proposing we think beyond any ‘ensemble,’ there is no ‘how,’ there is, in any case, no ‘how’ that could take the form of precepts, of rules, of norms or previous criteria available to a knowledge. The ‘how’ must

4. On this, see esp. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, trans. David Webb (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); La religion: Séminaire de Capri, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Paris and Bari: Editions du Seuil and Editions Laterza, 1996).

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be invented by each at each moment.”5 To have a future, and thus both the burden and the possibility of responsibility and its freedom, is to inhabit the kind of unknowing that cannot predict or dictate the future’s coming; and the unknowing that is inherent in this way to futurity not only emerges out of but also keeps fundamentally open the unknowing of a past that is itself never fully realized or realizable in the actuality of any experiential present: a having-been that, while constantly repeated, eludes full recollection within a discrete or synchronous self-presence. As a having-been that I never leave behind, my past in Derrida, or my inheritance, is (as already in Heidegger) in fact always still to be; it comes to me constantly from “out of ” the future in which alone I “will have been” whoever and however it is that I will have been (hence the future perfect as a favored tense in Derrida’s thinking and writing). The significance of such unknowing to the experience of love, and of responsibility, has much to do with the limit it marks to any logic of substitution or representation. For in the lack of any complete science, which is a lack that conditions responsibility, love’s “how” must be invented in each moment by each one. One surely has, of course, if one is capable of love, models for loving, or mentors; we learn to love by being loved. But it is also the case that one loves always in the singular and therefore cannot simply follow a pregiven pattern or rule. In “Circumfession,” Derrida appeals to just this logic of love and its essential unknowing in order to resist the theo-logic program of the “G.” whom the text repeatedly addresses, and who may be read as, among others, either a providential God or the Geoffrey (Bennington) who aims to capture Derrida in a program (“Derridabase”) that would, if successful, account for any possible turn of his thinking, past or to come: “for something to happen to me and for me finally to sign something for myself,” Derrida writes, “it would have to be against G., as though he wanted to love in my stead, and to stop him I was finally admitting some perjury that his programming machine couldn’t providentially account for” (CF 33 – 34, period 6; 35). While referring itself always to a place of the unknown that is, because of the unknowing, susceptible to endless replaceability— like so many names referred toward a God who would remain unnameable, a God

5. Jacques Derrida, “Avowing-the Impossible: ‘Returns,’ Repentance, and Reconciliation, A Lesson,” trans. Gil Anidjar, in Living Together: Jacques Derrida’s Communities of Violence and Peace, ed. Elisabeth Weber (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 32; “AvouerL’Impossible: ‘Retours,’ repentir et réconciliation, Leçon,” in Comment Vivre Ensemble? Actes du XXXVIIe Colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue française, ed. Jean Halpérin and Nelly Hansson (Paris: Albin Michel, 2001), 206.

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who might also take the place of death, or vice versa6—“to love” stands here also for that which would disallow “standing for” or standing “in stead” of the other, which is just what the providential or absolute knowing of a theologic program might hope to allow. Such a programming, Derrida suggests, threatens to render indifferent the “who” of love, according to the same kind of logic he elsewhere sees operative in the irresponsibility of any overly automatic implementation of rule or law.7 If I respond to the other, or if I love the other, only in automatic answer to the generality of a law, I respond neither as, nor to, a distinctive “who”; I do not respond in my singularity to the other in her singularity but rather in a mode of anonymity or even irresponsibility— as anyone would respond to anybody. Along these lines we might well read in Derrida something of the Augustinian contention (worked out also by Pascal and, more recently, through Augustine and Pascal both, by Marion) that love makes knowing possible, or, in more Derridean terms, that unknowing alone yields invention, or that an elemental faith, in the mode of pre-predicative affirmation, is always already implied in any linguistic or social relation whatsoever.8 At the same time, while knowing how to love entails always referral to a place and figure of unknowing, and hence while love could never find a science that would produce or govern love ahead of time according to the (dreamed of ) security or guarantee of some calculable program or inescapable law, there can also be a spontaneous, unavoidable, almost automatic character to loving— insofar as I am always already given over to loving in some way or other (and this too a fairly Augustinian principle that can seem operative in Derrida). If, as with 6. See, e.g., Jacques Derrida, Aporias, which speaks of “the indeterminacy of the word ‘death.’ Fundamentally, one knows perhaps neither the meaning nor the referent of this word. It is well known that if there is one word that remains absolutely unassignable or unassigning with respect to its concept and to its thingness, it is the word ‘death.’ Less than for any other noun, save ‘God’— and for good reason, since their association here is probably not fortuitous— is it possible to attribute to the noun ‘death,’ and above all to the expression ‘my death,’ a concept or reality that would constitute the object of an indisputably determining experience,” (trans. Thomas Dutoit [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993], 22). 7. See esp. “Force of Law,” in Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002); Force de loi (Paris: Galilée, 1994). 8. Such is highlighted, for example, throughout Derrida’s “Faith and Knowledge”: “without the performative experience of this elementary act of faith, there would neither be ‘social bond’ nor address of the other, nor any performativity in general: neither convention, nor institution, nor constitution, nor sovereign state, nor law, nor above all, here, that structural performativity of the productive performance that binds from its very inception the knowledge of the scientific community to doing, and science to technics.” Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 44; La religion, 5.

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responsibility, love must in each case, with each one, invent— meaning both find and make up— its “how,” according to the singular or the idiomatic, and hence the secret that cannot be shared; it remains at the same time the most general or even universal given in which all of us share alike, indifferently. Like the pre-predicative “yes” that Derrida sees to be implied universally in all saying or relation, in any linguistic or social bond whatsoever, while also remaining in each case singular and new, always yet to be reinvented and reinstantiated, love on this view entails both that which proves inevitable or self-evident, to a point of seeming automatic and certain, and that which calls each time to be invented from out of incalculable uncertainty. The interplay of inevitable, quasi-automatic transmission, or seemingly programmatic repetition, and the singular cut or interruption, which keeps open a futurity in which the “having been” continues to emerge— repeatedly new and never recollected in the fullness, or discreteness, of any synchronous self-presence— is figured for Derrida in a singular way by circumcision, even as he will insist that circumcision must be taken also as an example, and hence a generalization, of the logic that defines the life, and the mortal exposure, of any tradition or inheritance whatsoever. Derrida makes this point quite lucidly while commenting retrospectively on “Circumfession”: “I insist on the fact that circumcision is not only Jewish. It’s everywhere; it’s an exemplary structure of every human experience, of every living experience, so to speak. I associate circumcision with incision, the cut, the mark— so it has, it wants to have, an exemplary structure.”9 An event that befalls me in my profound passivity (which is in Derrida, as in Levinas, a passivity prior to receptivity), “my” circumcision possesses me more than I possess it, and before I do. In this, it is like my name or my language, or any other mark of my tradition and inheritance; it marks and inscribes me, as this unique one, within a community or a “living together” that can itself never coincide perfectly with itself, never form a discretely closed whole— a community to which I belong, then, only as also not belonging, because neither I nor the community ever achieves self-possession in a fixed or final self-coincidence. Circumcision wounds and marks me as unique, according to the singular event or cut for which I never could have been nor ever will have been 9. Jacques Derrida, in Augustine and Postmodernism: Confessions and Circumfession, ed. John D. Caputo and Michael Scanlon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 89. For a fine study of exemplarity in Derrida’s thought, see Dana Hollander, Exemplarity and Chosenness: Rosenzweig and Derrida on the Nation of Philosophy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). A likewise astute reading relevant to the paradoxes of exemplarity and the question of Jewish identity can be found in Sarah Hammerschlag, The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

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present, even as it brings me into a belonging with others who are likewise marked; in this way it inscribes me, “before me,” in a belonging that requires the cut or interruption that also means nonbelonging. It inscribes, in the life of the skin, what defines the life of any tradition or inheritance: the unavoidable and insurmountably unknowing, anarchic “reception” of a having-been that gives, beyond calculation, a future and hence a responsibility. Absolutely fundamental to Derrida’s analysis, and important likewise to our broader concerns here, is the fact that the constitution of self and community at stake— along with the unknowing and the learning entailed— turns fundamentally and decisively around the child in its infancy and passivity: “If I so much insist on circumcision in this text, it is because circumcision is precisely something which happens to a powerless child before he can speak, before he can sign, before he has a name. It is by this mark that he is inscribed in a community, whether he wants it or not. This happened to him and leaves a mark, a scar, a signature on his body. This happened before him, so to speak. It’s a heritage that he cannot deny, whatever he does or he doesn’t do.”10 Like the God in whom alone Augustine finds himself, my tradition or inheritance, my community— as marked for example by circumcision— is with me before I am with it, in me more than I am in it. I find myself conditioned by the anarchic and asynchronic temporality through which “I” already belong without quite belonging. And as with Augustine’s God according to Marion, so with my tradition or inheritance here in Derrida: because it remains anarchically or immemorially given, I will never have been done with receiving and responding to it. (In this sense, Derrida appeals to an eschatology that never achieves the closure of other providential plans; see CF 75, period 15; 74: “I shall always have been eschatological, if one can say so, in the extreme, I am the last of the eschatologists.”) From this perspective, my inheritance is that which gives to me, in my singularity, and from the foreignness of an incomprehensible “outside”— which is unknown or secret even to myself— the intimate inwardness of my self. “I shall never know the whole of me, nor you, i.e. with whom I have lived, and primarily what ‘with’ means, before ‘whom,’ this remains hidden from myself, more secret than all the secrets with which I know that I shall die without knowing if I shall know how to die” (CF 217, period 41; 202). Living with the other, or living together— a theme Derrida returns to as he himself is dying, perhaps without knowing whether he is, or, if he does 10. Derrida, “Composing ‘Circumfession,’” in Augustine and Postmodernism: Confessions and Circumfession, 21.

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know that, without knowing how to do so, or without knowing whether and how he will know how to do so— is bound in “Circumfession” not only to a loving but also to a dying that likewise resists knowledge and know-how, and therefore remains open in its unknowing. That unknowing conditions the self intimately, forming a secrecy of the self wherein the immeasurably inward or intimate intersects with the incomprehensibly outward or strange, according to a logic that determines both circumcision and confession as Derrida understands these. “And you ask if I write, G., because the Jews know nothing of confession, to which I reply that I am not confessing myself, rather I’m confessing the others for the imponderable and therefore so heavy secrets I inherit unbeknownst to myself, for example Esther or the two Elie’s” (CF 187, period 36; 175). The living together marked by circumcision is spoken also for Derrida in a confession that must always be confession of the other in me, and never the confession of my self as such (in the impossible synchrony or discrete placement of an ensemble): It is always the other in me who confesses. This is something I tried, after having written “Circumfession,” again and again to reaffirm, namely that a decision is always passive and a decision of the other. This is something no philosopher as such can legitimate, can accept, that a decision is passive. That is a scandal in philosophy, a passive decision, but decision is passive. It’s the other who decides in me.11 It’s always the other who makes the decision, who cuts— a decision means cutting. . . . For such a cut to occur, someone must interrupt in me my own continuity. . . . For me to decide, I must have in myself someone else who cuts, who interrupts the possibility. If I do only what I can do, what is possible for me, I do nothing. The decision is the other’s decision in me.12

Derrida makes here a point resonant with (though in the end probably diverging markedly from) that emphasized later in Marion’s reading of Augustine, which argues that decision in Augustine is the function of a will given to me only by God— and this, to Marion’s mind, by contrast to Heidegger, who in Marion’s view understands decision, and will, in light of an authenticity, or appropriation of the self to itself, that ignores this Augustinian (and, according to Marion, also Nietzschean) insight: “By contrast to Heidegger, Saint Augustine sees that the so-called ‘authenticity’ (which one must understand more exactly as the appropriation of the self by the self ) is precisely not realized with the will and resolution; even supposing that it were necessary to appropriate to oneself one’s proper self, such would not in any case be done 11. On this see Marion, Au lieu de soi, 233 – 35; In the Self ’s Place, 168 – 70. 12. Derrida, Aporias, 25.

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through the will, inasmuch as it is characterized precisely by a lack of power over itself ” (ALS 234; ISP 169). As I suggested in my reading of Marion, and as I’ll explore further with Heidegger in the next chapter, the understanding of decision, and of death, that one finds in Heidegger may be closer to the logic that Derrida here analyzes than to the position Marion attributes to Heidegger. With decision and confession alike, it is not simply “I” who confess or decide, as self-coincident and self-possessed individual; my confession and my decision do not, any more than my circumcision, belong to me in any straightforward way— and this not only because an “I” who might “now” confess would differ necessarily from the “I” of some previous doing, but even more because in the very movement of confessing the “I,” as in the moment of decision, the “I” stands to be altered unforeseeably by the truth being made only through the confession. As in Augustine, so in Derrida, the truth of confession does not concern the conveyance of knowledge, or especially self-knowledge, by means of adequate representation or predication; it concerns an alteration of the self through referral to the other, as a place or figure of the unknown. As with decision, so with confession, the “I” is exposed to the incalculable cut that interrupts the continuity of a self, who is both altered and instituted by the cut— much like the historical temporality structured by the messianic, which stands at stark odds with the security of Christian providential schemes or their translation into totalizing narratives of historical progress: “The coming of the other can emerge only as a singular event when no anticipation sees it coming, when the other and death— and radical evil— can come as a surprise at any moment. Possibilities that both open and can always interrupt history, or at least the ordinary course of history. . . . Interrupting or tearing history itself apart, doing it by deciding, in a decision that can consist in letting the other come and that can take the apparently passive form of the other’s decision: even there where it appears in itself, in me, the decision is moreover always that of the other, which does not exonerate me of responsibility. The messianic exposes itself to absolute surprise.”13 This constitutive exposure to alterity through confession or decision— the other in myself— reiterates the exposure of the child to the massive sway of an inassimilable but no less decisive inheritance, whose futurity entails inescapably also exposure to the cut of “the mortality that inheritance primarily means” (CF 285, period 53). And as with inheritance, so with dying, both my own and that of the other: while inevitable and universal, and in this sense shared, dying is at the same time always singular and incalculable, not susceptible to the rule of a knowing or a science that would tell us, ahead of time, 13. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 17, emphasis per original.

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“how” to die, or how to know how to die, as if we each and all would do so in the same manner, according to the same knowledge or program; or as if we would do so just as any other does, such that the “who” of the dying should prove indifferent. Hence, like the living, and the loving, inseparable from it, dying for Derrida is never quite adequately learned, at least if learning ends in knowing; it is never programmed ahead of time in any precise how, and for that reason it remains always yet to be learned (according to the openness and incompletion that we can take as essential to learning, within a heritage, we’ll see, that ties Derrida back to Heidegger, Nietzsche, and even Emerson). Just as decision finds its condition in the undecidable, so dying— along with living and loving—finds the condition of its learning in an irreducible ignorance. And because it takes time, dying and the surviving inherent to it are never finally learned. The possibility and necessity of learning go hand in hand with an ongoing impossibility; and with living and dying alike, or what Derrida comes to call surviving or living-on, the secret of the other, the irreducibly exterior, constitutes also the self in its intimacy. In “Circumfession,” that other more intimate to me than I am to myself, “the other me, the other in me . . . infinitely smaller and bigger than I” (CF 216, period 41; 201), the witness before whom alone confession can be made, is evoked in multiple and various ways; the witness there remains indeterminate, bordering on anonymous, and so open to polyonymy; perhaps most decisively the text evokes that indeterminacy through repeated appeal to the “G.” who may be not only God or Geoffrey Bennington but also Georgette, Derrida’s mother, whose dying, like the inheritance signaled by circumcision, signals the knowing nonknowledge around which Derrida’s text largely turns: never will the man flayed alive that I am have written like this, knowing in advance the nonknowledge into which the imminent but unpredictable coming of an event, the death of my mother, Sultana Esther Georgette Safar Derrida, would come to sculpt the writing from the outside, give it its form and its rhythm from an incalculable interruption, never will any of my texts have depended in its most essential inside on such a cutting, accidental and contingent outside, as though each syllable, and the very milieu of each periphrasis were preparing itself to receive a telephone call, the news of the death of one dying. (CF 206 – 7, period 39; 192 – 93)

The outside that is inside here, the imminent but incalculable and decidedly singular death of the mother who no longer recognizes her son (and who perhaps never did, Derrida wonders and worries, insofar as she never had, he seems to believe, any interest in reading his texts14), figures in terms of 14. “. . . you never heard me, nor read me, nor perhaps saw me . . .” (CF 166, period 32; 156).

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futurity (and mourning) the inassimilable past (and promise) of a cut that conditions the I as living-with by living apart. And just as living is always a living-with or a living-together that can never close in on itself to form a discrete and synchronous whole, so might we say that all dying is a dying-with or a dying-together conditioned, like living, and loving, by insurmountable separation. In its imminence, which we might read as the immanent transcendence of “Circumfession,” his mother’s death, while it is, like every other death, singular and nontransferable, is also inseparable from that of Derrida, and of his brothers, and of his sons, and of countless other dead, past and to come, named and unnamed in the course of a text written by one who wonders “at every moment if she will still be alive, having nonetheless stopped recognizing me, when I arrive at the end of this sentence which seems to bear the death that bears her, if she will live long enough to leave me the time for all these confessions, and to multiply the scenes in which I see myself alone die, pray, weep . . .” (CF 43, period 8; 44). In a writing that can be taken equally well as a faithfulness to and as a betrayal of his mother’s living-dying, one sees not only the character of all writing as both chance and danger, preservation and annihilation, but also the manner in which “my” death, like “my” writing, always singular and nontransferable, is at the same time never fully or wholly mine, never possessed by me, but always given only through its reference to the other, who is innumerable. Dying, in this sense, like living, is always already a dyingtogether. For “my fear of death,” Derrida writes, “will only have reflected her own, I mean my death for her whose anxiety I perceived each time I was ill, and doubtless more subterraneously all the time . . . and if my mother thus carried my fear of death, I fear dying from no longer being scared of death after her death” (CF 211– 12, period 40; 196 – 97). Derrida’s “own” death, or his being-toward-death, is not simply his own, because it is given to him, and never “as such,” through multiple, countless others: pointedly, here, through his mother, but who herself relates to his death in and through the previous deaths of two of his brothers (Paul Moïse and Norbert Pinhas), who themselves, through their mother’s suffering their loss, thus share in giving to Derrida not only his relation to his own death but also his relation to the eventual deaths of his own sons, which he tells us he does not know, or believe, that he could survive. The addressee of Derrida’s confession, like that of Augustine, who confesses both before God and before the innumerable others who might read One can wonder, and probably should, whether it was something other than lack of interest that might have left Georgette reluctant to venture into a reading of her son’s work.

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his text, is multiple beyond reckoning, always more than one, and never brought back to the same. But the God before whom, to whom, and of whom, Derrida’s text speaks is, unlike the God of Augustine, a “mortal god” whose survival— and thus whose life and death both— would be the effect of “the intense relation to survival that writing is” (CF 191, period 36; 178): and for 59 years I have not known who is weeping my mother or me— i.e. you “when he says ‘you’ in the singular and they all wonder, who is he invoking thus, who is he talking to, he replies but you, who are not known by this or that name, it’s you this god hidden in more than one, capable each time of receiving my prayer, you are my prayer’s destiny, you know everything before me, you are the god (of my) unconscious, we all but never miss each other, you are the measure they don’t know how to take and that’s why they wonder whom, from the depth of my solitude, I still address, you are a mortal god, that’s why I write, I write you my god” (9 – 4-81), to save you from your own immortality. (CF 263 – 64, period 49; 243 – 44)

While “Circumfession” suggests that the name of God is the origin of tears, it suggests also that tears are a condition of love, or that love remains love of the mortal and its time. “If this book does not transform me,” he writes on December 23, 1976, of his projected book on circumcision, “if it does not give me a divine smile in the face of death, my own and that of loved ones, if it does not help me to love life even more, it will have failed, whatever signs there may be of its success, I do not want it to fail by playing at success as a failure in which only losing means salvation, a game that’s too well known, I want it to succeed decidedly” (CF 77, period 15; 76). Was the book ever written? Did it succeed? Decidedly? He had wanted to be “the only one really to know it” (CF 77), and we ourselves will surely never know, or never know surely. But we might believe, and he does say in the final lines of the final interview he gave before dying that I am never more haunted by the necessity of dying than in moments of happiness and joy. To feel joy and to weep over the death that awaits are for me the same thing. When I recall my life, I tend to think that I have had the good fortune to love even the unhappy moments of my life, with just one exception. When I recall the happy moments, I bless them too, of course, at the same time as they propel me toward the thought of death, toward death, because all that has passed, come to an end . . .”15

15. Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Hoboken, NJ: Melville House Publishing, 2007), 51– 52; Apprendre à vivre enfin: Entretien avec Jean Birnbaum (Paris: Galilée, 2005), 55.

5

Thinking Love and Mortality with Heidegger

Derrida writes in the midst of a temporality whose traces appear on the body of his dying mother, and he does so while at the same time evoking the interior intimo meo of an Augustine who, with his mother, believed he touched the eternal (where his love will never lose her). Through such writing, Derrida can be read, just as much as Augustine, to understand the self as constituted and sustained by an interweaving of innermost and outermost. Derrida translates the interior intimo meo, however, into the register of a living-together that is always already also a dying together. Thanks to its mortal condition, the interplay between anticipation and memory within such living will never achieve the consummation, fullness, or closure whose logic (or desire) drives influential understandings of temporality in the West from Augustine himself to a latter-day heir such as Hegel. And while the temporality of Derrida’s living-together never achieves or allows the certain and assured fulfillment, the perfection or satisfaction, of Augustinian beatitude, he affirms that temporality no less, in its definitive openness and incompletion, as the condition of a mortal, and natal, life. Even more, as he suggests in the final seminar he taught before dying, he takes enjoyment itself to derive at its core from the mourning inherent to such temporality.1 While love for the 1. In commenting on John Donne (“I run to death and death meets me as fast / And all my pleasures are like yesterday”) and in explicating what it means to be as ever already having-been, Derrida writes that “I do not enjoy a pleasure first present that is immediately past, nostalgic, in mourning: no, the pleasure is born only of the mourning, of enjoyment as mourning. . . . I am from yesterday, I am no longer, I am no longer present, I am already yesterday, I enjoy from yesterday, not because I have enjoyed or have been, or because I was born yesterday, but because only yesterday will have given me, only my death or the feeling of my death, a death that will have taken me by speed, only my death lets me enjoy and take pleasure— in this very moment.”

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mortal is in Augustine a living death, in Derrida the eternality of the absolute would make for a dead life (and in this respect we can read him in the lineage of James Joyce and of the Samuel Beckett for whom Joyce’s work is “purgatorial . . . [i]n the absolute absence of the Absolute”2). Most inwardly, intimately, exposed to and touched by the foreignness of his mother’s death, Derrida speaks to her no longer being able to call his name. She, having been shaped intimately by her exposure, through his brothers, to Derrida’s ever-possible death, thus shaped him, intimately, in turn. In Derrida’s responding, in what is already mournful memory, to the promise of a call that no longer comes (his mother’s calling his name), we can sense an intergenerational binding, not of those who will keep and rejoin each other in the eternal, as Monica and Augustine believe they will, but of mortals who most intimately touch or cut into each other exactly through, and in, their separation. In this, I think, we can see operative in Derrida the intentionality of love as Martin Heidegger already understands it in his reading of poet Rainer Maria Rilke, where “those there are to love” are named “the ancestors, the dead, the children, those who are to come.”3 The question of love, and of heart, in Heidegger’s engagement with Rilke— which is for my interests here one of the more significant discussions of love in Heidegger— is framed in relation to Rilke’s claim that our time is destitute (dürftig: impoverished, meager, shallow, insubstantial). The destitution of our time consists for Rilke not so much in the fact that God is dead but more in the fact that we have grown incapable of our mortality. Central to that incapability is our no longer knowing how death and love, along with pain, belong together. (As we’ll see, Heidegger’s engagement with Rilke along these lines would bear deeply on a more recent effort, like Judith Butler’s, to identify and critique our contemporary “derealization” of death and mourning

Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 2:53. For a helpful full-length study of this last of Derrida’s seminars, see Michael Naas, The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments: Jacques Derrida’s Final Seminar (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015); and for a briefer but far-reaching reading of the seminar’s significance for the questions of gift, death, and legacy, see Mark C. Taylor, Last Works: Lessons in Leaving (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), chap. 5. 2. Samuel Beckett, “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce,” cited and situated within a broader reading of Joyce and Derrida in my Indiscrete Image, 156. 3. Martin Heidegger, “What Are Poets For?” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 128; “Wozu Dichter?” in Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1950), 306. Hereafter cited parenthetically as WPF, English page number; WD, German page number.

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through technoscientific media and related politics. It also bears significantly, or perhaps already draws on, the earlier critical engagement with media and their leveling effects in Søren Kierkegaard’s “The Present Age.”4) In the kind of doubling we’ve seen operative within the alienation of sin as Augustine understands it, or of despair in Kierkegaard, “the destitution is itself destitute because the realm of being withdraws within which pain and death and love belong together [Dürftig ist dieses Dürftige selbst, weil der Wesensbereich sich entzieht, in dem Schmerz und Tod und Liebe zusammengehören]” (WPF 130; WD 308). A thinking that proves open to, or opened by, the linkages among death, love, and pain will resist the logic of calculation, production, and consumption that Heidegger takes to be at work in the modern metaphysics and culture where the security of replication and replacement eclipses the fragility of the singular and the transient. Within the sway of modern man’s rational-technological self-assertion, Heidegger contends, the “thought-contrived fabrications of calculated objects . . . are produced to be used up. The more quickly they are used up, the greater becomes the need to replace them ever more quickly and more readily” (WPF 130; WD 308) and thus “what is constant in things produced as objects merely for consumption is: the substitute—Ersatz” (WPF 130; WD 308). So construed, the temporality, and the tempo, of technoscientific fabrication can seem strangely to transcend the transience of things, and hence the danger of loss, through an endless movement of substitution; and in that way it can seem strangely to resemble, through a perverse imitation, the divine permanence that theological tradition associates with eternity. In contrast to this logic of calculation and production, where nature itself is reduced to the realm of the calculable, and hence to that which man molds and controls, Heidegger evokes with Rilke (and Pascal) a logic of the heart, where heart proves more inward than the interior that belongs to calculating representation and also extends further than the realm of reproducible objects: “In modern metaphysics, the sphere of the invisible interior is defined as the realm of the presence of calculated objects. Descartes described this sphere as the consciousness of the ego cogito. / At nearly the same time as Descartes, Pascal discovers the logic of the heart as over against the logic of calculating reason [entdeckt Pascal gegenüber der Logik der rechnenden Vernunft die Logik des Herzens]. The inner and invisible domain of the heart is not 4. See esp. Judith Butler, “Violence, Mourning, Politics,” in her Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004); and Søren Kierkegaard, “The Present Age,” in his Two Ages: A Literary Review, trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).

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only more inward than the interior that belongs to calculating representation, and therefore more invisible; it also extends further than does the realm of merely producible objects” (WPF 127; WD 305 – 6). While modern metaphysics produces, through the rationality of human self-assertion, calculated and endlessly replaceable objects for the purposes of use and consumption— that is, the “thought-contrived fabrications of calculated objects” (WPF 129; WD 308)— the logic of the heart will attend to things in their fragility and to persons in their mortality. Insofar as it draws explicitly on Pascal and thus implicitly on Augustine, this logic of the heart, while recalling Augustine’s interior intimo meo et superior summo meo, also departs from Augustine in the character of its relation to the transient and mortal; by contrast to the rightly ordered love of Augustine, this heart’s “letting-be” will not aim to recuperate the mortal, who passes, within the eternal where no one dear is lost. And while drawing on Rilke, it will seek to pass also beyond the metaphysics of interiority that Heidegger believes to remain operative in Rilke: the thinking of heart as presence and interiority gives way, in Heidegger, to a thinking of the interplay between interiority and exteriority, and of presence and absence, whose co-constitution precludes their independence and discretion: no innermost without exposure to the outermost, and no outermost except as touching the heart intimately. (We should note here, without being able to decide the matter, that a lucid reading like Michel Haar’s can see in Rilke a thinking of the heart more aligned with Heidegger on this question than Heidegger himself may acknowledge: “Heidegger does not see, or pretends not to see, that the turn back toward the interior, the transformation of the outside into the inside, does not come about as a one-way movement. The discovery of the dimension of the heart implies a transposition and exposition of the interior to the exterior. Or, more radically, exteriority becomes interior. Or, still more radically, the ‘pure space’ of the heart of the world is no longer subjective or objective.”)5 The fact that Heidegger evokes a thinking of the heart as a notable alternative to the calculating rationality of the modern metaphysics he sought throughout his writing and teaching to elucidate and overcome, suggests that love may move within Heidegger’s thought more intimately than many read5. Michel Haar, “Rilke and the Interiority of the Earth,” The Song of the Earth: Heidegger and the Grounds of the History of Being, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), chap. 8; 130. (As we’ll see in chap. 7, this formulation in Haar comes strikingly close to Stanley Cavell’s understanding of the thinking of heart that he finds in Emerson and Heidegger.) See also Eric Santner’s complication of Heidegger’s situating Rilke within the metaphysics of interiority, in the first two chapters of his On Creaturely Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

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ers allow. More than a few interpreters, indeed, might counsel pause, or caution restraint, regarding any effort to read Heidegger as a thinker with something to say about— and still more with— love. Perhaps the most widely cited among those readers, Ludwig Binswanger, charges in his 1942 work Grundformen und Erkenntnis des menschlichen Daseins 6 (Basic Forms and Knowledge of Human Dasein) that Heidegger’s Being and Time, by interpreting the truth of our Being-in-the-world as ever anxious and mortal “care,” somehow “misses love”; love would therefore constitute for Binswanger a needed supplement to the question of care. Even more pointedly, Karl Jaspers asserts— and is often cited for asserting— that Heidegger’s philosophy is “without love [ohne Liebe]” and thus itself “in its style” unlovable.7 A more recent (and more nuanced) version of this charge might be seen to orient Marion’s reading of Heidegger and Augustine in Au lieu de soi, which contends, as we saw, that when Heidegger turns from his seminar on Augustine in 1921 to Being and Time’s 1927 existential analysis and its horizon of mortality, he abandons not only the theological horizon of Augustine but also, thereby, the thought of love and its essential role within the teleological relation between care and enjoyment.8

6. Ludwig Binswanger, Grundformen und Erkenntnis des menschlichen Daseins (Zurich: Niehans, 1942). Given especially the centrality of love in recent phenomenology, it is noteworthy that Binswanger has received relatively little attention. A worthy effort to address this oversight can be found in Joeri Schrijvers’s Between Faith and Unbelief: Toward A Contemporary Phenomenology of Religious Life (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016). Schrijver’s chapters on Binswanger and Binswanger’s relation to Heidegger are informative and productive, though in the end quite at odds with the reading I attempt here insofar as he too readily accepts and perpetuates assumptions both about Heidegger and the role of death in his thinking (such as concerning “the authentic heroism of Dasein that faces (the possibility) of his or her imminent death,” 233) and about love (such as concerning the “timelessness and infinity that are proper . . . to the experience of love,” 233). 7. Karl Jaspers, Notizen zu Heidegger (Munich: Hans Saner, 1978), 34, quoted in Christophe Perrin, “Les sources augustiniennes du concept d’amour chez Heidegger,” in Revue philosophique de Louvain 107, no. 2 (2009): 240. 8. See along related lines Norman Wirzba’s “Love’s Reason: From Heideggerian Care to Christian Charity”: “In any event, I would like to suggest that if Heidegger had not abandoned his project of developing a description of Christian facticity, he might have discovered a conception of reason that, while somewhat at odds with an Aristotelian conception, nonetheless is as rich and deep as the Greek facticity he did eventually develop. / We can locate the point of alteration in the choice Heidegger made to stress care as Bekümmerung and then Sorge, rather than Liebe,” in Postmodern Philosophy and Christian Thought, ed. Merold Westphal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 258. Wirzba’s reading aligns with John Caputo’s earlier and energetic argument organized around a distinction between Heidegger’s overly Greek and philosophical analysis of Sorge and a more biblical and religious thinking of care in terms of heart or kardia; though perhaps overstated, and leaving largely untouched what Heidegger actually

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The charge that Heidegger overlooks, abandons, or otherwise fails on the question of love— saying too little about it and/or affording it no meaningful role in his philosophical work— often takes this failure to be a function of Heidegger’s purported preoccupation with death and thus of the extreme isolation or abandonment, self-involvement, or even solipsistic “autarchy” of Dasein in its “anticipatory resoluteness” [vorlaufende Entschlossenheit] before death. That preoccupation, correlatively, is often contrasted with the attentiveness to birth and beginning, relation, and plurality that are read to distinguish the thinking of Heidegger’s student and lover Hannah Arendt, who is thus taken to succeed in attending to love as Heidegger is said not to.9 Arendt’s biographer Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, for example, writes that “what Arendt owed to Heidegger is not immediately obvious and does not relate to any exposition of the concept of love in his work. Love is mentioned in Being and Time only once, in a footnote. . . . But though no philosophical exploration of love by Heidegger influenced her, she may well have been influenced by his lack of concern. Jaspers had noted what Arendt, in far more personal terms, knew: the Heideggerian philosophy is, as he said, ‘ohne Liebe: Daher auch im Stil unliebenswürdig [without love: hence also in an unloveable style].’ With years of critical distance, Arendt herself pointed to a grave weakness in Heidegger’s early work: ‘The most essential characteristic of this Self is absolute egoism, its radical separation from its fellows.’”10 In the presdoes say about heart and love, Caputo’s critique productively calls our attention to Heidegger’s relative inattention to matters of the flesh and its pain: “[Heidegger] was very responsive to the Sorge, the care for one’s being-in-the-world, but he entirely missed the cura, the healings, the caring for the flesh of the other, the kardia. For cura also means healing the flesh of the other, tending to the other’s pain and afflicted flesh. To put this as ironically as possible, the author of Being and Time never really thought cura all the way through,” in chap. 3, “Sorge and Kardia,” John D. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 72. 9. The reference to Arendt in this regard often seems also to carry with it the suspicion that the moral failure involved in Heidegger’s Nazism would render absent, invalid, or at best highly questionable any role for love in Heidegger’s thought (as if love were a guarantee against evil— itself a thought in no small tension with decisive Augustinian insights). For two deeply thoughtful reconsiderations of Heidegger’s Nazism in relation to his philosophy (and in light of the recently published Black Notebooks), see David Farrell Krell, Ecstasy, Catastrophe: Heidegger from Being and Time to the Black Notebooks (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015), and Elliot R. Wolfson, The Duplicity of Philosophy’s Shadow: Heidegger, Nazism, and the Jewish Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). 10. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 75; Jaspers, Notizen zu Heidegger, 34; Arendt, “What Is Existenz Philosophy?” Partisan Review 8, no. 1 (Winter 1946): 50. See also Arendt’s Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt, 1978), 216 – 17: “According to [Augustine], as we know, God created man as a temporal creature, homo temporalis; time and man were created together, and this temporality was affirmed

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ent chapter I will argue, to the contrary, that the mortality Heidegger elucidates is integral to a love that his writing does in fact repeatedly reference, and his thinking engage, from early seminars like Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1919 – 20) and the first seminar on Augustine (1921); to History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena (1925) and Being and Time itself; through important texts from the 1930s on Schelling,11 Nietzsche,12 and (in a 1930 – by the fact that each man owed his life not just to the multiplication of the species, but to birth, the entry of a novel creature who as something entirely new appears in the midst of the time continuum of the world. The purpose of the creation of man was to make possible a beginning: ‘That there be a beginning man was created, before whom nobody was’—‘Initium . . . ergo ut esset, creatus est homo, ante quem nullus fuit.’ The very capacity for beginning is rooted in natality, and by no means in creativity, not in a gift but in the fact that human beings, new men, again and again appear in the world by virtue of birth”; and Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958, 1998), 177– 78: “Because they are initium, newcomers and beginners by virtue of birth, men take initiative, are prompted into action. [Initium] ergo ut esset, creatus est homo, ante quem nullus fuit (‘that there be a beginning, man was created before whom there was nobody’), said Augustine in his political philosophy. This beginning is not the same as the beginning of the world; it is not the beginning of something but of somebody, who is a beginner himself. With the creation of man, the principle of beginning came into the world itself, which, of course, is only another way of saying that the principle of freedom was created when man was created but not before. . . . The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable. And this again is possible only because each man is unique, so that which each birth something uniquely new comes into the world. With respect to this somebody who is unique it can be truly said that nobody was there before. If action as beginning corresponds to the fact of birth, if it is the actualization of the human condition of natality, then speech corresponds to the fact of distinctness and is the actualization of the human condition of plurality, that is, as living as a distinct and unique being among equals” (177– 78). See along similar lines Simon Critchley: “Philosophy is an art of dying— an art of dying well, ars moriendi, from Socrates to Heidegger. But shouldn’t this obsession with death invite some suspicion? I’ve begun to think so in the last couple of years. Hannah Arendt, in The Life of the Mind, criticizes philosophers, male philosophers, for their persistent obsession with death to the exclusion of the question of birth. For her, the issue is about natality, on the one hand, and the question of love, on the other— her doctoral dissertation was on the question of love in Augustine. Is philosophy capable of thinking the question of love?” in Simon Critchley and Carl Cederström, How to Stop Living and Start Worrying (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 60. 11. “But according to Schelling’s formulation of the concept of freedom, human freedom is the center of philosophy because from it as the center the whole movement of the creature’s becoming as the creator’s becoming and as the eternal becoming of the Absolute becomes visible in a unified way in its opposition, its strife. According to the ancient saying of Heraclitus, strife is the basic law and the basic power of Being. But the greatest strife is love because it arouses the deepest discord in order to be itself in conquering it.” Martin Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985), 162. 12. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: The Will to Power as Art, trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979; from a lecture course, 1936 – 37; reworked and first published

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31 seminar) Augustine again; to “Letter on Humanism” (1946 – 47), “What Are Poets For?” (1946), his last university course, “What Is Called Thinking?” (1951– 52), and his response to Binswanger himself in the Zollikon seminars in the 1960s— to mention just a few key moments.13 From the apprehensive understanding that opens our worlds (where “understanding is in love [In der Liebe ist Verstehen]”14) to the basic work of philosophical questioning (which entails a being on the way of eros15), from our constitutive sociality (where Being-with is irreducible) to its intergenerational tradition or transmission (where we are bound to the dead and those to come)— love, along with heart and its affection, plays a fundamental role that Heidegger not only points to but practices in his philosophy. While not tracing that role fully here (the goal of a larger work to come), this chapter does aim at least to suggest the range of love’s operation in Heidegger while focusing on the contribution his thought can make to my own central inquiry into the interplay of love and mortal temporality. In framing that focus, we should keep in mind both 1) that critics often contend or insinuate that Heidegger’s failure on the

in 1961), 47: “Usually Nietzsche employs the word ‘passion’ interchangeably with ‘affect.’ But if anger and hate, for example, or joy and love, not only are different as one affect is from another, but are distinct as affects and passions respectively, then here too we need a more exact definition. Hate too cannot be produced by a decision; it too seems to overtake us— in a way similar to that when we are seized by anger. Nevertheless, the manner in which it comes over us is essentially different. Hate can explode suddenly . . . only because it has been growing in us for a long time, and, as we say, been nurtured in us. But something can be nurtured only if it is already there and alive. In contrast, we do not say and never believe that anger is nurtured. Because hate lurks much more deeply in the origins of our being it has a cohesive power; like love, hate brings an original cohesion and perdurance to our being.” 13. For a quite helpful accounting of relevant texts, as related especially to Augustine, see Perrin, “Les sources augustiniennes,”239 – 67. Others studies to see in Heidegger an important role played by love include Giorgio Agamben’s “The Passion of Facticity,” in Potentialities, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Valeria Piazza, “L’amour en retrait,” in Agamben and Piazza, L’ombre de l’amour: Le concept d’amour chez Heidegger (Paris: Editions Payot et Rivage, 2003); Françoise Dastur, “Phénoménologie et thérapie dans les Zollikoner Seminare,” in Jean-François Courtine, Figures de la subjectivité: Approches phénoménologiques et Psychiatriques (Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1992); and Pierre-Étienne Schmit, “L’amour en finitude, la question de l’amour dans l’oeuvre de Martin Heidegger,” in Le Philosophoire 2000/1, no. 11. 14. Martin Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Scott M. Campbell (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 129; Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (1919/20), Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1993, 2010), 58:168. 15. See the student notes for the 1930 – 31 seminar on Augustine, in Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe IV. Abteilung: Hinweise und Aufzeichnungen. Seminare: Platon— Aristoteles— Augustinus (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2012), 83:79.

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question of love is somehow a function of his purportedly excessive or distorted preoccupation with mortality and 2) that in his thought of mortality especially Heidegger may deviate from the Augustine whom he also inherits, in nonetheless deep ways, within his construal of selfhood and temporality. A claim like Young-Bruehl’s is at best incomplete, and in the end, I think, just incorrect, that Being and Time mentions love only once, and in a footnote. She is not alone, though, in overlooking a link that Heidegger in fact straightforwardly asserts, in one of the work’s foundational claims, between love and the basic state of Dasein as Being-in-the world. As is well known among readers of Heidegger and his heirs, the kind of Being at the center of analysis in Being and Time— our temporal, finite, and mortal existence, or Dasein, as “Being-in-the-world”— is for Heidegger a “unitary phenomenon” to which “Being-in” belongs essentially. “Being-in,” he posits, is a basic state of Dasein whose two possible turns are “concern” (Besorgen) and “solicitude” (Fürsorge), which is to say Dasein’s dealing with things and Dasein’s relations with other people (see BT 221; SZ 176). Being-in, Heidegger emphasizes, is not at all to be understood as the geometrically construed spatial relation of one-thing-inside-another-thing, like water in a glass, or a body locatable (by GPS, say) within a neutral, geometric grid. Being-in is rather a way or mode of Dasein’s Being. It is inseparable from the basic kind of Being at stake in our Dasein, and thus it is what Heidegger calls an existentiale.16 To elucidate his distinctive take on what Dasein’s “in-ness” or “in-being” means, Heidegger appeals to Jacob Grimm’s short etymological discussions, in the seventh volume of Grimm’s Kleinere Schriften, of the prepositions “in ” and “bei.” Emphasizing that the Being at stake for Dasein is in each case mine, “that entity which in each case I myself am [bin]” (BT 80; SZ 54), Heidegger follows Grimm’s linkage of the expression “bin” (first person singular, present indicative of the verb Sein, to be) to the preposition “bei,” indicating nearness, proximity, or at-homeness. The most basic state, or way, of Dasein’s Being, in other words, is some primordial familiarity or intimacy: “The expression ‘bin’ is connected with ‘bei,’ and so ‘ich bin’ [‘I am’] means in its turn ‘I reside’ or ‘dwell alongside’ the world, as that which is familiar to me in such and such a way. ‘To be’ [Sein], as the infinitive of ‘ich bin’ (that is, when it is understood as an existentiale), signifies ‘to reside alongside . . . ,’

16. “Being-in, on the other hand, is a state of Dasein’s Being; it is an existentiale. So one cannot think of it as the Being present-at-hand of some corporeal Thing (such as a human body) ‘in’ an entity that is present-at-hand. Nor does the term ‘Being-in’ mean a spatial ‘in-oneanother-ness’ of things present-at-hand, any more than the word ‘in’ primordially signifies a spatial relationship of this kind” (BT 79 – 80; SZ 54).

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‘to be familiar with . . .’” (BT 80; SZ 54). What goes largely overlooked and unexplored among critics and even readers of Heidegger is that he, working with the Grimm etymology, here goes on to name Dasein’s familiarity with the world— that is, Dasein’s basic state of Being— in terms of love. The seemingly spatial preposition “in,” Grimm helps Heidegger to see, stems more deeply from a verbal form for dwelling that entails, essentially, a caring diligence, which can well be translated as a mode of loving: “‘In’ is derived from ‘innan’—‘to reside,’ ‘habitare,’ ‘to dwell.’ ‘An’ signifies ‘I am accustomed,’ ‘I am familiar with,’ ‘I look after something.’ It has the signification of ‘colo’ in the senses of ‘habito’ and ‘diligo’” (BT 80; SZ 54). Thus, as he introduces his readers to the most basic state of Dasein’s Being, the very center of his book’s subsequent analyses, Heidegger signals that the enactment of Being as dwelling in the world is a form of loving: through colo, the habito, “I dwell” (or inhabit, in familiarity, habitually) is tied essentially to diligo, “I love” (in care and attentiveness). Drawing on Latin rather than on his more usually preferred Greek, Heidegger appeals to an essential tie between dwelling and the intimacy of a loving care. “Colo” is richly suggestive in just these directions, entailing as it does inhabitation through and thanks to cultivation, keeping, tending, looking after (as in agriculture), or indeed devotion in the sense of the cultus, the religious devotion thanks to which gods dwell in a place and bring it protection. (Though I’ve not come across any reference to them by Heidegger, one finds striking passages in Augustine noting the various senses of colo— to mark the inadequacy of cultus as a name for, and Latin as a language for naming with one word, worship of the one true God, whose worship finds its more appropriate single name for Augustine in the Greek latreia.17) Such appeal to the primal intimacy and caring devotion, or, in short, to the love, that defines Dasein’s “Being-in” does important work within— and is also illuminated by— Heidegger’s rejection of the epistemological, and on17. “Latreia, however, is always— or so frequently as to be almost always— used, by those who have written down the divine eloquence for us, to designate that service which pertains to the worship of God. Such worship cannot simply be called cultus, for this seems to mean a service which is not due to God alone: we frequently ‘cultivate’ men also, either their memory or in person. Also we say that we ‘cultivate’ not only those things to which we subject ourselves in religious humility, but also certain things which are subject to ourselves. For from the verb ‘to worship’ [colere] we derive ‘farmers’ [agricolae], ‘colonists’ [coloni], and ‘inhabitants’ [incoli]; and the gods themselves are called caelicolae for no other reason than that they ‘cultivate’ the heavens [caelum colant]: not, of course, by worshipping them, but by dwelling there, as if they were a kind of celestial colonists,” Augustine, City of God 10.1. It is worth noting that Augustine here associates dwelling with a gesture of subjugation or domination that Heidegger would not.

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tological, grounds on which the problem of skepticism is often formulated. More fundamental than the question of knowing in a theoretical or scientific sense, and deeper than the epistemological question that philosophy might pose, is our being already in the world through a binding intimacy that first yields, structures, and sustains our openness to the very existence wherein alone the question of knowing might eventually be construed as problematic and in need of theoretical, scientific, or philosophical response. The epistemological problem based on a model of consciousness as a kind of cabinet or enclosed interior into which one hopes to deliver “knowledge” asks “how this knowing subject comes out of its inner ‘sphere’ into one which is ‘other and external’” (BT 87; SZ 60).18 Within such a model, the trick is somehow to get “outside” of my (subjective) cabinet of a mind to the (objective) “world” “over there,” “outside” of “me” (as mind), in order then eventually to come back “inside” and report to the mind, more or less adequately, with representations of that objective world, now “known” by and “within” me, the subject; but such an approach, Heidegger convincingly argues, ignores the more fundamental— affective— binds that already tie world and Dasein in such a way that these seemingly fundamental dichotomies of “subject” and “object,” “inside” and “outside,” do not hold. Ignoring “that every act of knowing always already takes place on the basis of the mode of being of Dasein which we call in-being, that is, being-always-already involved with-a-world,”19 it likewise misconstrues the co-constitutive interplay of what we sometimes call— misleadingly— Dasein’s “inside” and “outside”: When Dasein directs itself towards something and grasps it, it does not somehow first get out of an inner sphere in which it has been proximally encapsulated, but its primary kind of Being is such that it is always “outside” alongside entities which it encounters and which belong to a world already discovered. Nor is any inner sphere abandoned when Dasein dwells alongside the entity to be known, and determines its character; but even in this “Being-outside” alongside the object, Dasein is still “inside,” if we understand this in the correct sense; that is to say, it is itself “inside” as a Being-in-the-world which knows. And furthermore, the perceiving of what is known is not a process of returning with one’s booty to the “cabinet” of consciousness after one has 18. See the close parallel worked out already in Heidegger’s 1925 lectures, published in English as History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 160; Heidegger, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, in Gesamtausgabe II. Abteilung: Vorlesungen 1923 – 1944, vol. 20, 216 (hereafter GA 20, page number): “[How] does knowing, which according to its being is inside, in the subject, come out of its ‘inner sphere’ into an ‘other, outer sphere,’ into the world?” 19. Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, 161; GA 20, 217.

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gone out and grasped it; even in perceiving, retaining, and preserving, the Dasein which knows remains outside, and it does so as Dasein. (BT 89; SZ 62)20

Because defined fundamentally as Being-in-the-world, Dasein is— most “inwardly,” or “immanently”— in being always already bound to the world that stands “beyond” it, “outside.” This interplay of inward and outward within the basic state of Dasein’s Being recalls, to my reading, the essential tie within Augustine’s construal of selfhood between the interior intimo meo and the superior summo meo. The “most” intimate (strictly redundant, as intimus is already the superlative “inmost”) and the most distant or outward are coconstitutive within, and of, Dasein’s Being-in-the-world. Heidegger is well underway with this direction of thinking in the late teens and early 1920s, when he is also reading and teaching Augustine. One can see it both in his first extant courses, “The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of Worldview” (War Emergency Semester 1919) and “Phenomenology and Transcendental Philosophy of Value” (Summer Semester 1919), and then in his Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Winter Semester 1919 – 20). In “The Idea of Philosophy,” the interplay of inward and outward is even framed in the terms— so important for Heidegger’s later thinking— of the mineness and event-character of experience: “Lived experience does not pass in front of me like a thing, but I appropriate [er-eigne] it to myself, and it appropriates [er-eignet] itself according to its essence. . . . Event of appropriation is not to be taken as if I appropriate the lived experience to myself from outside or from anywhere else; ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ have as little meaning here as ‘physical’ and ‘psychical.’ The experiences are events of appropriation in so far as they are lived out of one’s ‘own-ness,’ and life lives only in this way.”21 20. Again, parallel passages in Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, 164; GA 20, 221: “In directing-itself-toward and apprehending, Dasein does not first get out of itself, out of its inner sphere in which it is encapsulated. Rather, its very sense is to be always already ‘outside’ in the world, in the rightly understood sense of ‘outside’ as in-being and dwelling with the world, which in each instance is already uncovered in some way. Dwelling with the matter to be known does not involve abandonment of the inner sphere, as if Dasein leaps out of its sphere and is no longer in it but is found only at the object. Dasein in this ‘being outside’ with the object is also ‘inside,’ rightly understood; for it is as being-in-the-world that Dasein itself knows the entity. [And in turn,] the apprehending of what is known is not like returning from an expedition of plunder with its acquired booty back into the ‘housing’ of consciousness, of immanence; for in the very apprehending as well and in having, preserving, and retaining what is apprehended, the knowing Dasein remains ‘outside.’” 21. Heidegger, “The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of Worldview,” in Toward the Definition of Philosophy, trans. Ted Sadler (London: Continuum, 2008), 60; Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, in Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe II. Abteiling: Vorlesungen, 56/57:75. Along related

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It is not by chance that we can hear an Augustinian resonance here, for in his definition and elucidation of Dasein’s diligent being “in,” Heidegger draws explicitly on the Augustinian tradition’s founding of knowledge in love. This line of thinking is explicit in Basic Problems of Phenomenology, which not only cites Augustine’s “believe, so that you may understand [crede, ut intelligas],”22 but also then goes on to suggest that “understanding is in love [In der Liebe ist Verstehen].”23 Even more, while interpreting Augustine’s imperative to say “live your self vitally— and understanding establishes itself only on this ground of experience,”24 Heidegger’s construal of such experiential understanding as love evokes also— fragmentarily but suggestively— the interplay of inward and outward that characterizes both the self in Augustine and Dasein in Heidegger: “Understanding is in love,” Heidegger’s notes read, then elaborating, “to achieve in devotion— not in facts, but rather in meaning, as vital relations of life [in der Hingabe— nicht an Tatsachen, sondern an Sinn, als lebendige Bezüge des Lebens gewinnen].  .  .  . to love the nearness . . . and so to come into the genuine farness of the origin [sondern die Nähe lieben.  .  . und so in die echte Ferne des Ursprungs zu kommen].”25 In subsequent teaching and writing like History of the Concept of Time and then Being and Time itself, Heidegger comments further on this Augustinian ground for the construal of this primordial and affective experience, noting for example that knowing is nothing but a mode of being-in-the-world; specifically, it is not even a primary but a founded way of being in the world, a way which is always possible only on the basis of a non-cognitive comportment. What we have set forth here as the in-being of Dasein and characterized in greater detail is the ontological fundament for what Augustine and Pascal already noted. They called that which actually knows not knowing but love and hate. All knowing is only an appropriation and a form of realization of other

lines, see, among other passages, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 31; GA 58, 39: “Life in this environing-world, being in it, the environmental existence, this unstable circumstantiality determines itself out of a peculiar self-permeating of the environing world, with-world, and selfworld, not out of their mere aggregation. The relations of the self-permeating are absolutely of a non-theoretical, emotional kind. I am not the observer and least of all am I the theorizing knower of myself and my life in the world.” 22. Heidegger, Basic Problems of Pheomenology, 48; GA 58, 62. 23. Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 129; GA 58, 168. 24. Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 48; GA 58, 62. 25. Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 129; GA 58, 168.

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primary comportments. Knowing is rather more likely to cover up something which was originally uncovered in non-cognitive comportment. What Augustine identifies as love and hate and only in certain contexts specifies as Dasein’s authentically knowing mode of being [als eigentlich erkennenden Seinsart des Daseins] we shall later have to take as an original phenomenon of Dasein. . . .”26

By defining and elucidating Dasein’s “being-in” not according to spatialized inside-ness of things present-at-hand but instead as a pretheoretical, interested, and affective mode of being— a diligent familiarity that structures and sustains the very world that structures and sustains my Being— Heidegger is advancing an insight elaborated within Being and Time’s analysis of “state-of-mind” and “mood” as that which always already discloses our world, prior to cognition and volition and beyond, or before, not only the distinction of inside and outside, subject and object, immanence and transcendence, but also, correlatively, activity and passivity. The mood in which Dasein always already finds itself is neither simply passive nor yet wholly active but falls somewhere closer to the middle voice. A mood— such as love, which in his 1930 seminar on Augustine he counts explicitly as a fundamental mood of philosophy— befalls me even as I participate in it. It is neither simply inward nor yet outward. I am “in” a mood, but that mood is also “in” me, exceeding me while also touching and shaping me most inwardly, intimately. Mood thus signals the sense in which the seeming externality of world constitutes, and is constituted by, Dasein’s very core— even as that core is essential, inherent, to the world’s ever opening and appearing at all (see BT 176; SZ 136 – 37). If the fundamental mood treated most famously and most extensively in Being and Time appears on the face to be anxiety and not love, one should note both that mood as such is a form of being-in, and hence already a diligence, and that Heidegger’s analysis of anxiety itself, as grounded in care, draws fairly directly on Augustine’s analysis of his own unsettled heart, the cor inquietum, whose various fears amount to various turns of love.27 As Hei26. Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, 164 – 65; GA 20, 222. See also the passage and note in Being and Time concerning Scheler’s “accepting the challenges of Augustine and Pascal” within a “consideration of how acts which ‘represent’ and acts which ‘take an interest’ are interconnected in their foundations” (BT 178, and n. v; SZ 139, and n. 1). 27. Heidegger’s treatment of mood goes back also fundamentally to Aristotle’s treatment of the pathe in his Rhetoric, to which he also traces Augustine’s treatment of fear. See, e.g., the section “Fear as being afraid of something considered in its four essential moments,” in History of

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degger signals in a response to Binswanger during the Zollikon seminars, the charge that the analysis of care needs a supplemental treatment of love ignores the deeper sense in which care and love remain already inseparable— a point noted and explored already in the late teens and early twenties, where “in ‘inquietum cor nostrum’ [our hearts are restless] Augustine saw the great incessant disquiet of life. He gained a wholly original aspect, not at all just a theoretical one. Rather he lived in it and brought it to expression”;28 and where the “trembling of the heart” in Augustine is “a phenomenon that is constitutive of the concern [Bekümmerung] for oneself. Slipping away from it is a self-removal from the ‘caste timere te’ [chaste fearing of You], the pure fearing of God” (PRL 223; GA 60 294). The ground of fear in love is likewise made clear in Heidegger’s 1925 History of the Concept of Time, where he notes that “theologically, the problem of fear is of special significance in connection with the theory of repentance, penance, love toward God, love of God, which itself substantiates fear.”29 Of course, two years later, in noting the “double meaning of the term ‘cura’ according to which it signifies not only ‘anxious exertion’ but also ‘carefulness’ and ‘devotedness’ [‘Sorgfalt,’ ‘Hingabe’]” (BT 243; SZ 199), Heidegger will make clear the import of the Christian and Augustinian contribution to the heritage of the term: “Even as early as the Stoics merimna was a firmly established term, and it recurs in the New Testament, becoming ‘sollicitudo’ in the Vulgate. The way in which ‘care’ is viewed in the foregoing existential analytic of Dasein, is one which has grown upon the author in connection with his attempts to interpret Augustinian (i.e. Helleno-Christian) anthropology with regard to the foundational principles reached in the ontology of Aristotle” (BT 492, n. vii; SZ 199, n. 1). Just as fear in Augustine can take two different turns, so likewise love; and, in Heidegger’s analysis of solicitude, or Dasein’s “care-for” those others with whom Dasein always already dwells essentially, one can indeed hear significant echoes of the Concept of Time, 284; GA 20, 393: “This phenomenon was first investigated by Aristotle in the context of an analysis of the passions, the pathe, in his Rhetoric. The analysis of fear which Aristotle presents here as well as his analysis of the emotions generally serve to define the interpretation of the Stoics and so that of Augustine and the middle ages.” A few pages later, Heidegger notes also that “It was seven years ago, while I was investigating these structures in conjunction with my attempts to arrive at the ontological foundations of Augustinian anthropology, that I first came upon the phenomenon of care” (302; GA 20, 418). 28. Heidegger, Basic Problems of Pheomenology, 48; GA 58, 62 (my emphasis). 29. Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, 285; GA 20, 393 – 94. Heidegger draws here on A. W. Hunzinger, “Das Furchtproblem in der katholischen Lehre von Augustin bis Luther,” Lutherstudien 2 (1906), first section.

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the distinction Augustine makes between the two different turns that human love can take. The existing caricature is however widespread, coming to recent expression, for example, in Peter Sloterdijk’s charge that a purportedly hasty turn in Being and Time from the “where” to the “who” “leaves behind a lonely, weak, hysterical-heroic existential subject that thinks it is the first to die, and remains pitifully uncertain of the more hidden aspects of its embeddedness in intimacies and solidarities.”30 Despite the caricature, however, Being and Time remains fairly clear that the care according to which Dasein is that being for whom, in its Being that Being itself is an issue, or that being who is affectively interested in its Being and does not simply gaze at it theoretically, always entails also, furthermore, the care of any one particular Dasein not only for itself and its Being (according to the caricature, seen also, for example, in Arendt’s claim concerning Dasein’s egoism and separation) but also for other Dasein and their Being: other Dasein and their Being are from the start inherent to the Being of any one given Dasein: “Being with Others belongs to the Being of Dasein, which is an issue for Dasein in its very Being. Thus, as Being-with, Dasein ‘is’ essentially for the sake of Others [Als Mitsein ‘ist’ daher das Dasein wesenhaft umwillen Anderer]. This must be understood as an existential statement as to its essence. Even if the particular factical Dasein does not turn to others, and supposes that it has no need of them or manages to get along without them, it is in the way of Being-with” (BT 160; SZ 123). If Being-with others belongs ever already to my own Being, then that Beingwith is likewise fundamentally at issue in the Being that is definitively at issue for me as Dasein. In my existence, then, others have always already been disclosed to me, and that disclosedness of others constitutes nothing less than “significance— that is to say, worldhood” (BT 160; SZ 123). The difference between Heidegger and an important critic like Levinas on the question of my relation to the other stems from the role played by the world in such relation: while for Levinas it is the other who first appears unconditionally— prior to and beyond any horizons such as those of culture, history, or world itself— so to make eventually significant any world, for Heidegger the disclosedness of others and the significance that makes for a world are inextricably interwoven. From this latter perspective, the singularity of any other is essentially bound up with her— irreplaceable— place in the world that I share with her, even as the significance of any worldly place to 30. Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Spheres. Vol. 1: Microspherology, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 341.

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me depends on others’ relations to that place. In short, my care for the other is essential to the world’s significance, even as that world and its significancestructures afford and sustain my care for any others.31 As I’ve suggested, important interpreters of Heidegger, like Marion, have seen in the treatment of care and the solicitude inherent to it less an extension of, and more a departure from, the treatment of love in Augustine, which does occupy Heidegger in his summer 1921 seminar “Augustine and Neoplatonism.” However, the pivotal definition of love evoked in that reading of Augustine (and not only recurring in various formulations across the sweep of Heidegger’s career but also evoked by Arendt herself ) does suggest to my reading something deeply akin to what Being and Time understands by our constitutive care for other Dasein [Fürsorge]. This similarity is especially striking in the distinction made between two different turns of love in the Augustine seminar and two different directions of solicitude in Being and Time. In the Augustine seminar, Heidegger notes that for Augustine— here citing from Augustine’s Tractates on the First Epistle of John 8.5, which echoes Aristotle’s understanding of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics32—“we

31. Being-in-the-world is not, then, as Levinas claims, a reduction of the other to the same insofar as that Being always occurs in the singular. On this I agree with Jean-Luc Nancy, who in Heidegger’s treatment of care sees, as I do, a thinking of love. As Nancy writes in “Shattered Love,” in The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 103: “The shared world as the world of care-for-the-other is a world of the crossing of singular beings by this sharing that constitutes them, that makes them to be, by addressing them one to the other, which is to say one by the other beyond the one and the other”; from this perspective, Nancy rightly notes the import of Levinas in calling our attention to Being-with, while also rejecting Levinas’s charge that Being in Heidegger entails a reduction of the other to the same: “I can be in solidarity with Levinas’ distaste for certain accents, shall we say, of dereliction in Heidegger’s discourse. But in the es gibt (‘it gives [itself ]’) of Being, one can see everything except ‘generality.’ There is the ‘each time,’ an-archic in fact (or even archi-archic, as Derrida might say?), of an existing, singular occurrence. There is no existing without existents, and there is no ‘existing’ by itself, no concept— it does not give itself— but there is always being, precise and hard, the theft of the generality. Being is at stake there, it is in shatters, offered dazzling, multiplied, shrill and singular, hard and cut across: its being is there. Being-with is constitutive of this stake— and that is what Levinas, before anyone, understood. But being-with takes place only according to the occurrence of being, or its posing into shatters. And the crossing— the coming-and-going, the comings-and-goings of love— is constitutive of the occurrence. This takes place before the face and signification. Or rather, this takes place on another level: at the heart of being” (Nancy, “Shattered Love,” 105). 32. See Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 8.2: “Now there are three grounds on which people love; of the love of lifeless objects we do not use the word ‘friendship’; for it is not mutual love, nor is it a wishing of good to the other (for it would surely be ridiculous to wish wine well; if one wishes anything for it, it is that it may keep, so that one may have it oneself ); but to a friend

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should not love the human being the way gourmands talk when they say: I love wild game [Krammetsvögel = fieldfare]. The gourmand loves them only to kill them. So he loves them such that they are not (non esse). One may not love human beings in this way, assigning them into one’s aims” (PRL 220 – 21; GA 60, 291). Augustine contrasts genuine love for the human with this love that gives nonbeing to the beloved by subjecting the beloved to one’s own aims. He likewise contrasts it with the related logic of a self-love [Selbst-liebe] or love of oneself [Eigenliebe] that proves in fact to be self-hate insofar as it “has the tendency,” in Heidegger’s gloss, “to secure one’s own being [das eigene Sein zu sichern], but in the wrong way: not as self-care but as the calculation of the experiential complex in relation to one’s self-world [aber in verkehrter Weise, nicht als Selbstbekümmerung, sondern als Berechnung des Erfahrungszusammenhangs in bezug auf die Selbstwelt]” (PRL 221; GA 60, 292; translation modified). Suggesting already Heidegger’s later distinction between the self ’s authentic care and its inauthentic concern with the distracted busyness of the “theyself,” this contrast frames Augustine’s understanding of “authentic love [die eigentliche Liebe],” which he understands to have “a basic tendency toward the dilectum ut sit [being loved so that the beloved may be]. Thus, love is the will toward the being [or the “to be”] of the loved one [Liebe ist also Wille zum Sein des Geliebten]” (PRL 221; GA 60, 291– 92). Understood in these terms, involving the interplay of a genuine self-concern or self-care (by contrast to the deluded security of worldly calculation)33 and a love that wills the other’s authentic being (by contrast to a kind of nonbeing wherein the other simply serves the lover’s calculating aims) “with-worldly love has the sense of helping the loved other toward his existence, so that he comes to himself [Mitweltliche Liebe hat den Sinn, dem geliebten Anderen zur Existenz zu verhelfen, so daß er zu sich selbst kommt]” (PRL 221; GA 60, 292; translation modified). By contrast to forms of love that consume the other and aim to we say we ought to wish what is good for his sake. But to those who thus wish good we ascribe only goodwill, if the wish is not reciprocated; goodwill when it is reciprocal being friendship.” In The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 2:1826. 33. The term translated here as “self-concern,” Selbstbekümmerung, contains the term— Bekümmerung— with which Heidegger translates Augustine’s cura, or care, which in Being and Time becomes Sorge. One could see here, then, in the distinction between “self-concern” and a “calculation of the experiential complex,” what becomes in Being and Time the distinction between the care that gives me authentically to myself, on the one hand, and, on the other, the kinds of busy worldly concern that, through my absorption in them, sustain a falling in which I can lose or forget myself.

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secure the self on its own terms, thus eclipsing the ex-istence or standing-out from herself that gives the other back to herself, genuine love here gives me to myself (as lover) only in giving me over to the existence of the other— who comes to herself, in turn, only in being likewise ex-posed, standing out from herself. Solicitude in Being and Time operates in much the same fashion— with the crucial difference that in Heidegger the other’s existence entails the inescapable insecurity of her temporal Being-in-the-world, whereas in Augustine the other’s existence is referred back to the ultimate security of an eternal God beyond the world. To read in Heidegger as I do the suggestion of such a condition for love in mortality may seem misguided to interpreters like Marion (or Sloterdijk or Harrison or Levinas or Arendt) insofar as my Being-toward-death is said to be nonrelational [unbezüglich], giving me my “authenticity” [Eigentlichkeit] through “anticipatory resoluteness” [vorlaufende Entschlossenheit]— and hence, such interpreters would contend, in an isolated egoism or even in the “autarchy” of a purported self-possession. In resistance to these directions of reading, I question two points that can tend to be variously operative in them: (1) the assumptions made about love’s relational character (for love, I think, as much as relating me to the other, and in the very measure of doing so, also individualizes and isolates me in a manner akin to that of Being-towarddeath) and (2) the understanding of Being-toward-death’s nonrelational character (for that itself should be understood also, I think, as a condition of our genuine solicitude, or of our love, for others: on this view, the separated being, or the noncoincidence of mortals with one another, is essential to the love relation— which requires, as Anne Carson beautifully suggests, the edges or boundaries of selves which keep the space or distance across which love and its desire live34). (1) As I’ve noted in previous readings, an important— Augustinian— construal of love appears in letters that Heidegger writes to his student and lover Hannah Arendt. While one might want to question (as George Pattison does35) the evocation of a personal love letter (and written moreover to a student) within a philosophical discussion of love, we can note that Heidegger’s treatment of love in his letters to Arendt aligns quite closely with discussions of love that appear elsewhere in his writing and teaching both before and

34. Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998; originally Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); see esp. the sweep of chapters treating “the edge,” 30 – 62. 35. See George Pattison, Heidegger on Death: A Critical Theological Essay (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 126, n. 30.

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after the letters to Arendt. For example, much in line with his discussion of Augustinian love in the 1921 seminar, in his 1938 – 39 work Mindfulness (Besinnung, written just after Contributions to Philosophy) Heidegger understands love as a letting-be that refuses to demand or create either ideals or a beloved who would conform to them— and which thus suggests (as we’ll see also in the letters) the lover’s exposure to the beloved’s becoming. “Love,” he writes “is the will that wills the beloved be; the will that wills that the beloved find its way unto its ownmost and sway therein. Such a will does not wish and demand anything. Through honoring, and not by trying to create the loved one, this will lets above all the loved one— what is worthy of loving—‘become.’ The word ‘love’ calls what is worthy to be loved ‘wisdom.’”36 One can be struck by how closely Heidegger’s understanding of nonidealizing or nonidolatrous love in the Arendt letters is echoed here in a philosophical text that not only offers the same definition of love but links that definition of love directly also to the definition of philosophy itself— to the point that one might not only question the distinction Pattison wants to draw between love letter and philosophical writing but indeed wonder whether that epistolary relation is not itself a practice of philosophy (and/or whether philosophy, and teaching, do not involve already an erotics akin to that operative in the epistolary relation37). Thus, describing in his letters to Arendt a love whose definition repeats the Augustinian understanding signaled already in his 1921 Augustine seminar, and then repeated in this and other later texts, where love wills the being of the beloved, Heidegger does so, furthermore, in terms that resonate strikingly also with those that Being and Time deploys to characterize my Being-toward-death. As he writes to Arendt in a letter dated May 13, 1925: Thank you for your letters— for how you have accepted me into your love— beloved. Do you know that this is the most difficult thing a human is given to endure? For anything else, there are methods, aids, limits, and understand36. Martin Heidegger, Mindfulness, trans. Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary (New York: Continuum, 2006), 52; Besinnung (Frankfurt Am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1997), 63. 37. The understanding and practice of philosophy as an erotic movement of love is one Heidegger evokes also in writing to his wife, letter of February 14, 1950. See Martin Heidegger, Letters to His Wife: 1915 – 1970 (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 213: The other thing, inseparable in a different way from my love for you & from my thinking, is difficult to say. I call it Eros, the oldest of the gods according to Parmenides. . . . The beat of that god’s wings moves me every time I take a substantive step in my thinking and venture onto untrodden paths. It moves me perhaps more powerfully & uncannily than others when something long intuited is to be led across into the realm of the sayable & when what has been said must after all be left in solitude for a long time to come.

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ing [Für alles sonst gibt es Wege, Hilfe, Grenzen und Verstehen]— here alone everything means: to be in one’s love = to be forced into one’s ownmost existence [in der Liebe sein = in die eigenste Existenz gedrängt sein]. Amo means volo, ut sis, Augustine once said: I love you— I want that you be what you are [daß Du seiest, was Du bist].38

To be in one’s love, we might interpret, keeping in mind the diligence that defines Dasein’s basic state as Being-in, is to love not only the beloved but also, inextricably, the love itself, to care for it attentively and devotedly; and here Heidegger equates such Being-in with one’s authentic or ownmost existence. And just as existence is always distinctively mine, so this gift of love, which Heidegger’s letter counts the most difficult thing given a human to endure, is in each case unique. We can read Heidegger here to suggest what Nancy will later claim, that “all loves, so humbly alike, are superbly singular.”39 Heidegger repeats the point in a letter to Arendt two months later, where he states that “love as such does not exist [‘Die’ Liebe gibt es ja nicht],” for love means in any case (and in this case Arendt) “your love” (letter 23). As unique in each case, love resists the uniformity and the regularity, the repeatability and calculability of an “as such”; it thus resists and eludes pregiven method, aid, limit, and understanding; like living together, or dying so, as according to Derrida, or like philosophy itself as according already to Heidegger, it must be learned anew each time and in each moment; it thereby gives me in singular fashion to myself through a relation, which cannot be programmed, with the other for whom there can be no substitute.40 Binding or holding me to the (mortal) beloved in her singularity, one irreducibly outside, whom I cannot manage or possess, love gives me thereby to my ownmost, and innermost, existence (which is thus never my own in the sense of a possession). My “authenticity” [Eigentlichkeit], which does not mean my “real” or “true” self (the one behind all the appearances) but rather my existence in its inescapable and nontransferable character, proves here to be not, indeed, a possession, and still less a self-possession, but a gift given in and as relation with another: my existence is most “my own” when I find it— which is to say when I receive it—in the love that gives me to myself in giving me over to one whom 38. Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, Letters: 1925 – 1975, ed. Ursula Ludz, trans. Andrew Shields (New York: Harcourt, 2004), 21; Arendt and Heidegger, Briefe: 1925 – 1975 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2003), 31, letter 15; hereafter cited parenthetically by letter number. 39. Nancy, “Shattered Love,” 99. 40. Nancy captures this beautifully in writing that “the heart does not belong to itself. . . . The heart of the singular being is that which is not totally his, but it is thus that it is his heart. . . . [A]nd all loves, so humbly alike, are superbly singular” (“Shattered Love,” 99).

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I never own or possess. Self and beloved are thus held, or hold each other, both together and apart, together as apart and apart as together, through a distance, or separated being, that is essential to love.41 Such essential separation or distance remains at odds both with fusion (a commonly assumed ideal of love), which denies or eclipses separated being, and with possessive individualism or egoism, which ignores our constitutive being-with. Interpersonal love may thus name in its most intensified form the structure and movement of existence itself, founded, or found, in the diligence of being-in the world, and according to which I come to myself, or have a self, only in departing or standing out from myself, thus giving myself over to the world. In this description of love as that which gives to me my ownmost existence, one should indeed hear resonate the analysis in Being and Time where it is not at first glance love but mortality that gives me my ownmost existence. Rather than attribute such resonance to some unexplained slippage between a personal letter written to a lover in 1925 and a philosophical magnum opus published in 1927, and rather than assume or assert that an emphasis on mortality means a forgetting of love, we should consider both the degree to which mortal existence is given most to itself in love (attuned by love to the mortality of self and beloved alike) and also the degree to which love is conditioned by mortal existence (taking condition in an etymological sense, such that love is spoken only along with mortality). (2) This latter possibility— that the mortality of lover and beloved would condition their relation as lovers by marking their separated being— may never appear a possibility for those preoccupied along certain lines with the nonrelational character of Being-toward-death and with the “anticipatory resoluteness” associated therewith, which can seem to entail a kind of selfpossession, and solipsism, at odds with what one assumes to be the relational logic of love. In what sense, however, (a) is Being-toward-death nonrelational, and what role (b) does that sense play in shaping relations of solicitude (and perhaps also, thus, of love)? (a) Being-toward-death does not, and clearly cannot, mean that I am ever somehow Dasein in utter absolution or abstraction from my relations with other Dasein, or for that matter with other worldly beings not having the character of Dasein (and these too, I hold, are a condition of love, since love, as Being-with, always entails shared projects in living together, a point made clearly in Being and Time as well as much later, in 1965, in the Zollikon Seminars, where Heidegger reminds his interlocutors that my Being-with you “means a way of existing with you in the manner of Being-in-the-world, es41. Arendt’s equation, then, of separation with egoism would appear misguided.

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pecially a Being-with [Mitsein] one another in our relatedness [Bezogensein] to the things encountering us.”42) Dasein is always, and irreducibly “with,” other Dasein. (Heidegger reiterates just this point in refuting Binswanger’s charge that Being and Time’s analysis of care somehow forgot— and therefore needs a supplementary analysis of— love. He there asserts clearly too that “care is never distinguishable from ‘love.’”43) The relational structure of that “with” is ontological-existential; it is fundamental to the Being of any and every Dasein as Being-in-the-world, and it never starts with an isolated ego who first exists and then would face the difficulty of forming intersubjective relations, or of gaining access to the “alter ego,” or of entering social-political forms of life (as if we were by nature free, equal, and independent individuals who only then face the question of entering social or political relations). The nonrelational character of Being-toward-death does not contradict or cancel such Being-with; it rather illuminates and even intensifies such Being-with by suspending it, much as anxiety highlights the significance of the world by rendering it insignificant, or much as boredom illuminates the character of possibility by rendering all possibilities for a time un-appealing and thus inoperative— none of which means that the world ever lacks significance, or that Dasein ever lacks the possibility of Being. Indeed, as the analysis of anxiety in Being and Time is meant to show, or as Heidegger puts the point succinctly in his 1925 History of the Concept of Time, “there is thus the possibility 42. Martin Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars: Protocols— Conversations— Letters, ed. Medard Boss, trans. Franz Mayr and Richard Askay (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 122; Zollikoner Seminare (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1987), 145. 43. For the fuller context, which will deserve further study, see Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars, 190; Zollikoner Seminare, 237: “Because care is merely conceived [by Binswanger] as a basic constitution of Da-sein, which has been isolated as a subject, and because it is seen as only an anthropological determination of Da-sein, care, with good reason, turns out to be a one-sided, melancholic interpretation of Dasein, which needs to be supplemented with ‘love.’ / But correctly understood (i.e., in a fundamental-ontological sense), care is never distinguishable from ‘love’ but is the name for the ecstatic-temporal constitution of the fundamental characteristic of Da-sein, that is, the understanding of being. / Love is founded on the understanding of being just as much as is care in the anthropological [psychological] sense. One can even expect that the essential determination of love, which looks for a guideline in the fundamental-ontological determination of Da-sein, will be deeper and more comprehensive than the one seeing love as something higher than care.” See also Françoise Dastur’s illuminating discussion of “phenomenology and therapy in the Zollikon seminars,” which, relating the solicitude that leaps ahead in Being and Time to the definition of love as “letting be” in “Letter on Humanism,” contends that “love is therefore nothing else than the liberating solicitude par excellence.” See “Phénoménologie et thérapie dans les Zollikoner Seminare,” in Figures de la subjectivité: Approches phénoménologiques et psychiatriques, ed. Jean-François Courtine (Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1992), 173.

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in the very moment of departing from the world, so to speak, when the world has nothing more to say to us and every other has nothing more to say, that the world and our being-in-it show themselves.”44 This illumination of our love relations, and their world-sustaining role, as well as the illumination of world’s role in giving place and structure and time for love, were among the central stakes in our reading of McCarthy. My Being-toward-death proves nonrelational in the sense that no other Dasein, nor my Being-with other Dasein, nor any other beings in the world, can ever take it over for me and thus disburden me of it (as in the movement of solicitude where we can— and do, necessarily and often quite fortunately—“leap in” for one another to deal with various of another’s delimited concerns). “Death is a possibility-of-Being which Dasein itself has to take over in every case. With death, Dasein stands before itself in its ownmost potentiality for Being. This is a possibility in which the issue is nothing less than Dasein’s Being-in-the-world. Its death is the possibility of no-longer beingable-to-be-there. If Dasein stands before itself as this possibility, it has been fully assigned to its ownmost potentiality-for-Being. When it stands before itself in this way, all its relations to other Dasein have been undone. This ownmost non-relational possibility is at the same time the uttermost one” (BT 294; SZ 250). Unless Heidegger simply contradicts what he has already said about Being-with as fundamental, the nonrelational character of my Beingtoward-death would need to signal a possibility of existence from which no relation could remove me. This is exactly what Heidegger seems already to have explained just pages earlier in contending that death gives a limit to the kind of “representability [Vertretbarkeit]” (BT 283; SZ 239) that is “not only quite possible but . . . even constitutive for our being with one another” (BT 283 – 84; SZ 239 – 40). With respect to a certain range of concerns “one Dasein can and must, within certain limits, ‘be’ another Dasein” (BT 284; SZ 240). With respect to its death, however, where Dasein’s very possibility of Being is at stake (and hence its defining, fundamental, care by contrast to some determinate, relative concern), “No one can take the Other’s dying away from him. Of course, someone can ‘go to his death for another.’ But that always means to sacrifice oneself for the Other ‘in some definite affair.’ Such ‘dying for’ can never signify that the Other has thus had his death taken away in even the slightest degree” (BT 284; SZ 240).45 If one doubts this nontransferable 44. Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, 291; GA 20, 403. 45. See this same point in History of the Concept of Time, 310; GA 20, 428 – 29: “I can replace the other precisely in the everyday kind of being or concerned absorption in the world. In what then?— in what he does, in the world in which he is concerned and in this very concern. . . . In

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character of death, perhaps one need only think of the dying beloved whose death one would in fact willingly, even eagerly, or desperately, take as one’s own; what I learn in my desire to take on the beloved’s death as my own is, simply and inevitably, that I cannot. Especially in my relation with the dying beloved, the nonrelational character of our Being-toward-death, the undeniable limit of our capacity to represent or stand in for one another, not only becomes acutely clear; it also, through that lucidity, highlights and intensifies the singular character, and thus the weight and meaning, of our relations with one another. That singularity of relation does not cancel but founds the possibility of authentic solicitude. (b) Indeed, in this gap where Being-toward-death proves nontransferable, the possibility of authentic solicitude may be seen to open— the hence the possibility of a care-full love between my irreplaceable self and others who are likewise irreplaceable. This seems clearly among the stakes of Heidegger’s analysis of anticipatory resoluteness— which, far from giving me over to myself in a solipsistic self-possession, pushes me authentically into the Being-with that always already conditions my existence in any case: Resoluteness, as authentic Being-one’s-Self, does not detach Dasein from its world, nor does it isolate it so that it becomes a free-floating ‘I’. And how should it, when resoluteness as authentic disclosedness is authentically nothing else than Being-in-the-world? Resoluteness brings the Self right into its concernful Being-alongside what is ready-to-hand, and pushes it into solicitous Being with Others [this last my emphasis]. In the light of the “for-the-sake-of-which” of one’s self-chosen potentialityfor-Being, resolute Dasein frees itself for its world. Dasein’s resoluteness towards itself is what first makes it possible to let the Others who are with it ‘be’ in their ownmost potentiality-for-Being and to co-disclose this potentiality in the solicitude that leaps forth and liberates. . . . Only by authentically Beingtheir-Selves in resoluteness can people authentically be with one another. (BT 344; SZ 298) this being of everyday absorption with one another in the world, we can in a certain way mutually replace one another, the one can within limits take over the Dasein of the other. But such a substitution always takes place only ‘in’ something, which means that it is oriented to a concern, to a specific what. / For all that, this possibility of replacing someone fails utterly when it comes to replacing the being of what constitutes the end of Dasein and thus gives it its wholeness in time. That is to say: no one can relieve the other of his own dying. It is true that he can die for another, but this is always for the sake of a definite cause, in the sense of concern for the beingin-the-world of the other. Dying for the other does not mean that the other has thus had his own death taken away, abolished. Every Dasein must take dying upon its very self, as Dasein. More precisely, every Dasein, insofar as it is, has already taken this way of being upon itself. Death is in each instance and in its time my own death; it belongs to me insofar as I am.”

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If a passage like this can seem to support the charge of critics that Heidegger construes Dasein’s Being-with others starting only from the self who then moves toward others, one should read it against the background of Heidegger’s clear assertion earlier in Being and Time that “the kind of Being which is closest to us” is “Being-in-the-world as Being-with” (BT 161; SZ 124), and indeed that “knowing oneself [Sichkennen] is grounded in Being-with, which understands primordially” (BT 161; SZ 123 – 24); or one could read it again in light of the much later criticism, in the July 8, 1965, Zollikon seminar, that thinking about “I-Thou and We relationships” remains inadequate insofar as they “still have their origin in a primarily isolated Ego.”46 An even more pointed version of this take on things, two years after Being and Time, concludes The Essence of Reasons (Vom Wesen des Grundes)— while highlighting, moreover, the interplay of nearness and distance that informs our thinking of the heart in these pages: And so man, as existing transcendence abounding in and surpassing toward possibilities, is a creature of distance. Only through the primordial distances he establishes toward all being in his transcendence does a true nearness to things flourish in him. And only the knack for hearing into the distance awakens Dasein as self to the answer of its Dasein with others. For only in Dasein with others can Dasein surrender its individuality in order to win itself as an authentic self [Und nur das Hörenkönnen in die Ferne zeitigt dem Dasein als Selbst das Erwachen der Antwort des Mitdaseins, im Mitsein mit dem es die Ichheit darangeben kann, um sich als eigentliches Selbst zu gewinnen].47

One can see in Being and Time’s linkage between resoluteness and solicitude the connection Heidegger sees earlier, in Augustine, between “genuine selfcare” and a “communal worldly” love that authentically wills the being of the beloved. Just as in the Augustinian context genuine self care (by contrast to worldly calculation— a precursor to Being and Time’s “falling”) opens me to the authentic being of the beloved, so in Being and Time, resoluteness does not remove me from relations with others but awakens me to them in their singular character— by contrast to those relations that fall more fully under the sway of the they and its “irresoluteness,”48 wherein any one Dasein can well substitute for another. Thus, “‘resoluteness’ signifies letting oneself be 46. Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars, 111; Zollikoner Seminare, 145. 47. Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Reasons: A Bilingual Edition, Incorporating the German Text of Vom Wesen des Grundes, trans. Terrence Malick (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 131. 48. “Irresoluteness” is Heidegger’s term for the phenomenon of “Being-surrendered to the way in which things have been prevalently interpreted by the ‘they.’ Dasein, as a they-self, gets ‘lived’ by the common-sense ambiguity of that publicness in which nobody resolves upon any-

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summoned out of one’s lostness in the ‘they’” (BT 345; SZ 299), and only in being so summoned does one care, as oneself, for the other as herself.49 If in this passage concerning the relation of resoluteness to solicitude Heidegger deploys the Augustinian definition of love without using the name, he does speak explicitly of love while making the same linkage between authenticity and solicitude in a letter to Arendt dated June 22, 1925. Consistent with his thinking on resoluteness, that letter affirms, furthermore, love’s essentially temporal character, and in such manner that love’s joy must be open to possibility’s danger— so that self and other alike are touched by that danger, and through a “faith” that is “shared.” Understanding love as a “faith in the other” [Glaube an den Anderen] which alone can “accept the ‘you’ completely [vermag einzig das ‘Du’ wirklich zu nehmen],” Heidegger speaks of the great and growing joy that he feels in her: “When I say my joy in you [meine Freude an Dir] is great and growing, that means I also have faith in everything that is your story [dann heißt das, daß ich all das mitglaube, was Deine Geschichte ist]. I am not erecting an ideal,” he continues, “— still less would I ever be tempted to educate you [Dich . . . zu erziehen], or anything resembling that. Rather, you— just as you are and will remain with your story— that’s how I love you” (letter 20). His feeling, note, is in her, the beloved, his inwardness grounded outwardly in her, as something received relationally rather than possessed solipsistically. The joy that is relational to its core is bound with a shared faith in the happening of Arendt’s story, her history [Geschichte]— which means, Heidegger makes clear, not a fixed ideal (or an idol) that he has erected and would have her conform to, but the singular story that remains distinctively hers, and that exposes beloved and lover alike, then, to the inevitable but unforeseen crises and struggles [Krisen und Kämpfe] to come. Not as an ideal, either already or still to be achieved or accomplished, but as the open temporality of story’s happening (something fundamental, note, to Arendt’s political conception of action in The Human Condition), the bething but which has always made its decisions. ‘Resoluteness’ signifies letting oneself be summoned out of one’s lostness in the ‘they’” (BT 345; SZ 299). 49. It is important to note here that “resoluteness as authentic truth” does not remove me from the “untruth” of irresoluteness but rather “appropriates untruth authentically” (BT 345; SZ 299), just as authenticity is but an existentiell modification of inauthenticity. And for clarity on the question of solipsism, see Heidegger’s insistence, in relation to anxiety, that “anxiety individualizes Dasein and thus discloses it as ‘solus ipse.’ But this existential ‘solipsism’ is so far from the displacement of putting an isolated subject-Thing into the innocuous emptiness of a worldless occurring, that in an extreme sense what it does is precisely to bring Dasein face to face with its world as world, and thus to bring it face to face with itself as Being-in-the-world” (BT 233; SZ 188).

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loved is received and held and thus never possessed. “That’s how I love you,” he writes. “Only then is love strong for the future [stark auf die Zukunft], and not just a moment’s fleeting pleasure— only then is the possibility of the other also moved and strengthened for the crises and struggles that never fail to arise [dann ist die Möglichkeit des Anderen mitergriffen und stark gegen Krisen und Kämpfen, die nicht ausbleiben]. But such faith is also kept from misusing the other’s trust in love. Love that can be happy into the future has taken root [Liebe, die sich in die Zukunft hinein freuen kann, hat Wurzel geschlagen]” (letter 20). By contrast to the Augustine for whom love’s exposure to the temporal insecurity of a beloved would negate love’s happiness, or enjoyment, Heidegger here suggests that my joy in another, and our love’s happiness, are found only in and through the faith we share in the shared possibility of a story that remains always unfinished and ever exposed in its temporality to the insecurity, and thus the care, of crisis and struggle. One should note likewise the connection he suggests, in Being and Time, between joy and the mortal insecurity that gives us uniquely to ourselves: “Along with the sober anxiety which brings us face to face with our individualized potentiality-for-Being, there goes an unshakable joy in this possibility” (BT 358; SZ 310).  Neither mortal insecurity nor authenticity would here compromise the logic of love and its joy. Dasein receives itself through love— and that reception is itself already a giving. As Heidegger writes to Arendt on June 22, 1925, “And that love is— that is its cheering bequest to Dasein, that it [i.e., Dasein] can be [Und daß die Liebe ist, das ist das beglückende Vermächtnis an das Dasein, daß es sein kann].” Dasein receives its existence— Heidegger says it— thanks to love, or through love, and this means that existence— in its authenticity— is not the function of possession but of our capacity for giving: “We have an effect,” he writes, “only insofar as we are capable of giving. . . . And we have only as much right to exist as we are able to care about. For we can give only what we ask of ourselves [Wir wirken nur soweit, als wir zu geben vermögen. . . . Und wir haben nur soviel Recht zu sein, als wir es vermögen, achtzugeben. Denn wir selbst können nur geben, was wir von uns selbst uns abverlangen]” (letter 20). Our giving of self to the other, then, and our having the self in its ownmost, are not at odds, for to exist means already to be in love50; such love,

50. A striking expression of this same point appears in a letter Heidegger writes to his wife Elfride, dated August 23, 1920: “And what I give you— without talking much— in the way of real love is yours. And one becomes oneself strong in such love— a giving that is not a giving-away, in the very act of which one first finds oneself & returns to oneself from the sphere of constant distraction & estrangement” (Heidegger, Letters to His Wife, 77).

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however, in its joy, is conditioned by its anxious, mortal exposure— wherein love, or the love that lets love be, sustains, and is sustained by, a world and time of memory and anticipation. “And what can we do,” Heidegger writes to Arendt in a letter dated May 8, 1925, “but only— open ourselves— and allow what is to be. Let it be so that it is pure joy to us and the wellspring of every new living day. / Elated about being who we are. And still one would like to ‘say’ something and to offer oneself to the other, but we could say only that the world is now no longer mine and yours— but ours— only that what we do and achieve belongs not to you and me but to us” (letter 14). Love, in other words, is the truth in its luminosity that the world is always already a with-world, and Being-in-theworld always already Being-with. Our places in the world are opened and sustained by that Being-with named love, even as our loves call for those places to welcome and hold them. Such interplay of love and place is essentially temporal, binding memory and promise; and so he can write from Marburg toward the end of winter semester 1928, “I am looking forward to the Black Forest, which has become even dearer to me since I learned you love it so” (letter 39). The lover’s presence, both giving and given by worldly place and time, entails, as Heidegger emphasizes, the temporality of waiting and guarding. Love would not be the “great faith” it is, Heidegger says, “if waiting and guarding were not part of the experience of love [wenn ihr nicht gerade das aufbehalten bliebe, zu warten und zu behüten]” (letter 13). Like the Augustine whose world gave— and was given by— his love’s recollective anticipation of the friend, so here Heidegger ties the waiting— and thus the guarding— of love to worldly place and time. But unlike the Augustine who believes he must indemnify love’s happiness from the sorrow of our anxious mortal exposure, Heidegger here affirms that exposure as love’s condition— as if accepting, while translating into the secular, Augustine’s claim that when we love a place, we dwell there in the heart. The darkness of grief in Augustine— where he hates all familiar places because they can no longer answer love’s anticipation with the possibility that “he will come”— illuminates a phenomenological truth that Augustine sees but does not quite accept: that our places of dwelling are given to us, our world— and the Beingin without which world is not— are given to us, through the love in which we anticipate, and are exposed to, the beloved; the capacity for such anticipation requires time, and such exposure cannot escape mortality. In recounting his grief, Augustine only makes clear the sorrowful condition of Heidegger’s claim to Arendt that “being allowed to wait for the beloved— that is what is most wonderful— for it is in that waiting that the beloved is ‘present’ [Dieses Wartendürfen dem Geliebten zu— ist das Wundervollste— denn in ihm ist

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das Geliebte gerade ‘Gegenwart’]” (letter 13). The presence of the beloved— always both anticipated and remembered, and each thanks to the other, each in and through the other— thus takes, even as it gives, time; and that time alone sustains, even as it is sustained by, our worldly places of living and dying. For the waiting, and the guarding, in which alone the beloved can be present are but the forward movement, joyful and anxious, of what is also already, sorrowfully but no less joyfully, remembrance. At the heart of our joyful anticipation pulses already the sorrowful memory, even as in sorrowful memory can live still a joyful anticipation: the joy all mourners know.

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World Loss or Heart Failure: Pedagogies of Estrangement in Harrison and Nancy

Rainer Maria Rilke’s thinking of the heart remains metaphysical, Heidegger contends, in that it still moves “within the sphere of subjectivity as the sphere of inner and invisible presence” (WPF 129; WD 307). Challenging what he takes to be this metaphysical remainder, Heidegger calls us to understand and experience the innermost or intimate as constituted essentially by its bind with, and exposure to, the outermost or alien; and he calls us thereby to understand, and experience, presence in terms of its structuring absence, or life and its love in essential relation with death. In this sense he extends Rilke’s worry that we have become incapable of our mortality, and he calls on us to learn it. Within this line of thinking and teaching, the inwardness of heart, or its intimacy, is not separable from, or even other than, its exposure to the outermost alterity; the structure and temporality of heart, then, remain irreducibly relational and differential— and would be eclipsed or effaced by any pure (and finally impossible) presence. Much as in Being and Time, where Dasein emerges only in and through a world, and temporality, that likewise open only in and through Dasein, so in this later thinking of Heidegger, the inwardness of heart lives only through its interweaving with the outward; to have a heart means to feel the intimate touch of that which exceeds me.1 From this perspective, we can understand how both the absolute privacy of an untouchable interiority (an impermeable closing of the self back upon itself ) and the unrestricted exposure of absolute openness or publicity (amounting to a bottomless superficiality) would amount to heartlessness. To have a heart 1. Though we’ll not pursue the question here, it would be worthwhile asking whether and how we might see in Heidegger’s thinking of heart something closer than many might expect to Levinas’s ethical thinking of interiority as inescapable exposure to the other’s alterity.

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in this sense means to be touched inwardly, to be constituted intimately, by the outward and alien— while also guarding and living both the undeniable distinction and the inescapable bind (in short: the indiscretion of the heart). As I’ve signaled, Heidegger’s 1946 text “What Are Poets For?” draws on Rilke and Pascal to suggest a thinking of the heart that deviates from the rationality of a technoscientific modernity that frames nature as calculability and that, in doing so, yields reproducible objects amenable to endless replacement; in its distinctive resistance to the calculating logic of reproduction and replacement, the heart attends rather to things in their (singular) fragility and to persons in their (singular) mortality. Bearing in mind that Heidegger appeals to a logic of the heart in such resistance to this modern rationality, and recalling that these questions of inward and outward, presence and absence, darkness and light, life and death, are questions relevant in fundamental ways to the analysis of technoscience and nature, we turn in the present chapter to two recent thinkers who suggest two different ways of inheriting Heidegger on the questions of heart, of nature, and of their relation to the experience of technoscience. A central tension or paradox organizing both this chapter and our larger work can be glimpsed, both in its logic and in its existential weight, through the example of human birth as we might approach it within the technoscientific apparatus of modern Western medicine. On the one hand, out of a sense of responsibility, or indeed of love, and their concern to ensure so far as possible the safety, health, and well-being of mother and child in the course of conception, pregnancy, labor, and delivery, we might feel inclined or even impelled to make use of whatever available scientific knowledge and technological power would seem best able to assist us— while to ignore such knowledge and to forego such power could well be judged irresponsible and unloving. On the other hand, if we were actually and fully to achieve that toward which such science and technology seem to tend in their basic logic; if we were to attain a scientific knowledge that was unshakably clear and complete, and a corresponding technological power that was absolutely certain and secure, such that we might calculate or program precisely ahead of time, and subsequently execute— without any possible danger, deviation, defect, or other surprise— the full course of conception, pregnancy, labor, and delivery, then we would have transformed human birth into something more like industrial or mechanical (re)production. The same sort of paradox can show itself, for essentially related reasons, in the technoscientific treatment of death, where the logic of calculation and control can seem to threaten (or hope for) either an overcoming of death (an overcoming whose dream remains notable among contemporary technophiles) or a management so

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thoroughgoing that death turns industrial. Through these examples, we can well intuit how our sense of the human implies an affirmation, however difficult and however often (and understandably) overlooked or disavowed, of our exposure to the incalculable; in the absence of such exposure, human life would be excepted from the possibility both of surprise and of danger; it would be handed over to the automatic or the programmatic in a way that contradicts the character of the human, or of life, as containing within their nature, and nativity, an irreducible element of the strange. From this perspective, our deepest estrangement might actually transpire through our ignoring or forgetting or otherwise neglecting the strange within the natively human. Such an estrangement recalls the alienation that determines our fallen human condition according to Augustine’s Confessions, arguably the single most influential model for Western Christian understandings of the role played by transcendence in the constitution and experience of human selfhood. And such estrangement plays a decisive and related role also, we’ve noted, in shaping Heidegger’s analysis in Being and Time of our mortal-temporal Being-inthe-world. This latter analysis resonates, furthermore, in Heidegger’s subsequent thinking, where we find what remains one of the most insightful lines of philosophical response to the question of technology in modernity, and one whose influence is evident among recent heirs of Heidegger such as contemporary French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy and the American thinker Robert P. Harrison, to whom we turn in this chapter. As I’ve been suggesting, Augustinian thinking about human estrangement is slippery: it claims that I am most lost to myself, or most distant from myself, when I actually feel most at home with myself and my world, most secure in the self-possession I seem to enjoy amidst my normal, or habitual, forms of engagement with the world.2 An excessive sense of familiarity with self and world thus yields my estrangement without my even knowing or recognizing such estrangement. Inability to recognize one’s alienation is alienation’s effect and condition. For Augustine and the Western Christian traditions shaped by him (and this becomes decisive in the likes of Luther and Calvin), this form of alienation is what typifies humanity’s fallen, or sinful, condition: one of the first signs that I am bound by sin is that I do not even sense or suspect my bondage— and hence the sign of sin is a sign that I can, while in it, neither see nor read.3 2. This resonates in its logic with a difficulty Heidegger signals in framing his analysis of Dasein: what for Dasein is ontically closest remains ontologically most distant. 3. This logic is crucial to the reception of Paul in Augustine or, later, Luther, and notably in the Pauline approach to the question of law, whose purpose is not first to be fulfilled but first to

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In Augustine, this way of understanding human alienation— according to the paradox that I am, without realizing the fact, losing myself when I feel perfectly self-possessed— derives from his understanding of the role played by transcendence in the basic constitution of human self-hood. The reason that I lose myself when feeling self-possessed, according to Augustine, the reason I am actually estranged when most deeply immersed in feelings of familiarity, is that my self, in its very life and truth, is not something I possess, as a discrete or self-contained individual; it is something I receive— through relation with a God who precedes and exceeds me in ways that I can never comprehend. What is most fundamental to me as a self, then, my deepest interior, is also that which remains most incomprehensibly beyond me; it is only in standing out from myself in response to the otherness or distance of God that I receive or come to myself in my most inward truth. The fundamental structure of the self for Augustine, then, is a structure— and a movement— of transcendence. It is important to emphasize here that I do not, on this view, first have a self, only then to stand out in relation to that which stands beyond me (in this case, God). Rather, to be a self for Augustine means always already to stand out beyond, or to exceed, oneself, such that my relation with the outward is, in my basic constitution as a self, always already interwoven with my innermost interior. Augustine expresses this take on the role of transcendence in the constitution and life of the self when he confesses to God in book 3 of The Confessions that “you [God] were more inward than my innermost and higher than my uppermost [tu autem eras interior intimo meo et superior summo meo]” (C 3.6). Augustine can make this confession, we should recall, only in retrospect, after God has shown to him, and thus freed him up from, the estrangement he could not see on his own, the alienation wherein his sinful sense of selfpossession prevents him from seeing that the self ’s innermost ground is the outermost transcendence of God. Such a God gives the self to itself in calling the self to God. As we noted earlier, the path toward such liberation entails furthermore the experience of a crisis— the death of Augustine’s beloved friend in Confessions book 4 — that rips Augustine out of the estrangement he suffers (unknowingly) in the all-too familiar and all-too comfortable places of habit and habitation, such that he will return to himself only by becoming “a great question” to himself: “At the grief of ” his friend’s sudden death, Augustine writes, “my heart was clouded; and wherever I looked I saw only death. My own country [patria] was a torment to me, and my father’s house show the sinner his or her inability to fulfill it, in a work of grace that, through the law, breaks the sinner down and shakes him or her out of sinful self-deception.

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[paterna domus] an extraordinary unhappiness. . . . I hated all the places we had known together, because he was not in them, and they could no longer say, ‘Look, he is coming,’ as they would have done when he was alive but absent for a while. I had become a great question to myself [factus eram ipse mihi magna quaestio]” (C 4.4). Both Augustine’s understanding of the self (as coming to itself only in standing out from itself, as finding its inwardness through a bind to the most outward) and his understanding of estrangement (where the self can lose itself through the feeling of familiarity, and come back to itself through some interruption of that familiarity) are directly relevant to contemporary thinking about technology as shaped especially by Heidegger, whose debts to Augustine along these lines are deep. Those debts are notable already in Being and Time, where his thinking both about human sociality and about tradition are shaped by these Augustinian understandings of selfhood and alienation, and along lines that will resonate later in his influential analyses of modern science and technology. An important contention of Being and Time’s existential analysis is that any given tradition, in its understanding of itself and of the human condition, always runs the risk of turning overly automatic (and hence overly secure, or careless) in the expression and the transmission of such understanding; to the degree that a tradition’s self-understanding and its related take on the human condition hand things over to such self-evidence, or to the degree that the tradition’s teaching grows overly automatic, the tradition risks growing thoughtless and lifeless— and thus estranged from the existential truth of its own concepts and categories. The life and survival of a tradition thus face this tension: in order to establish, keep, and transmit its identity, it must be able to reproduce and recognize itself with some consistency through time, it must be able to repeat its teaching in order to transmit it; at the same time, however, in order to remain vital, a tradition cannot fall into sheer rote; it must keep itself open to the unforeseeable and thus the strange, remain for itself an open question, amenable to ever renewed response and revision. There is no life or identity without such repetition and replication, but repetition and replication without question or alteration, the purely automatic transmission of the same without revision, and hence without the possibility of suspension or loss, can threaten a tradition with death just as much as would an alteration of tradition beyond recognition. (This direction of thinking about tradition and its potential for alienation through excessive familiarity involves, we might note, insights that Heidegger inherits in no small part from Luther, who sought to free the existential truth of Christian teaching from what seemed to him the rigidified concepts of scholastic theology— insights that prove decisive, in turn, for Derrida, whose

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deconstructive thinking reworks the project of destruction that Heidegger inherits from Luther.)4 Heidegger’s worry about the kind of self-evidence and automaticity toward which every tradition will tend governs also his analyses of our social existence and the sort of estrangement or dispossession that it often yields. As participants in the curiosity, idle talk, and ambiguity5 of what Heidegger terms the “they-self ” (das Man)— the diffuse and anonymous form of sociality essential to everyday existence— we are all carried along by ways of thinking and speaking and doing that are so thoroughly expected and habitual that they do not really belong to any one of us in our distinctive individuality; rather, we think and say and do what “they” think and say and do under given circumstances— according to an unquestioned self-evidence that makes it seem as if nothing is closed off to us (in our curiosity) and as if we can readily speak about anything (in our idle chatter), such that we dwell in an ambiguity where it “becomes impossible to decide what is disclosed in a genuine understanding and what is not”(BT 217; SZ 173). To the degree that we are immersed and absorbed in this feeling that all is accessible and familiar, we forget or lose ourselves as the singular individuals that we nonetheless always also remain (without, for the most part, realizing it). Just as in Augustine, where I can be most lost to myself when feeling most self-possessed, so here in Heidegger, I am estranged from my own unique existence when I feel altogether at-home and secure within the pervasive but anonymous— and tranquilizing— discourse of the they-self. And much as for Augustine it will be a moment of crisis that rips me out of my alienated sense of self-possession and returns me to myself and my God, so for Heidegger it will be the sudden interruption or suspension of my familiar ways of thinking and speaking and doing that returns me to myself and my 4. See the discussion of tradition in Heidegger, Being and Time’s sec. 6, “The Task of Destroying the History of Ontology,” and especially the claim that “when tradition thus becomes master, it does so in such as way that what it ‘transmits’ is made so inaccessible, proximally and for the most part, that it rather becomes concealed. Tradition takes what has come down to us and delivers it over to self-evidence; it blocks our access to those primordial ‘sources’ from which the categories and concepts handed down to us have been in part quite genuinely drawn” (BT 43; SZ 21). For a fine study treating Heidegger’s debts to Luther, see Christian Sommer, Heidegger, Aristote, Luther: Les sources aristotéliciennes et néo-testamentaires d’ Être et Temps (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2005). 5. All themes that Heidegger takes fairly directly from Augustine’s thinking about the condition of fallen humanity, as one can see in his 1921 seminar “Augustine and Neoplatonism,” in The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gossetti-Ferencei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). For their analysis in Being and Time, see esp. sec. 35 – 37.

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world in a renewed or awakened manner. The classic moment of such crisis in Augustine is the death of his beloved friend, which makes Augustine a great question to himself and likewise renders the familiar, and familial, places of his habitation (once shared comfortably with the friend) places of torment and estrangement; the classic moment of such interruption in Heidegger is the crisis of anxiety, where the normally functioning and all-too familiar significance of my world are suddenly, for a time, rendered inoperative, thus making my world, and my Being-in-the-world, fundamentally questionable— and thus all the more conspicuous.6 As we’ve seen, though, in the previous chapter, if the moment of awakening crisis in Heidegger is most widely known as anxiety, he himself, both in his experience and in his thinking, found love to do a similar work. The shared insight of Augustine and Heidegger along these lines is that I am given back to myself— from out of the estrangement of familiarity— in and through relation with that which resists or exceeds my ready understanding and comprehension, and which through such resistance awakens me to the fundamentally questionable character both of my existence and of the world in which I find myself. The worry about modern technology that Heidegger expresses and explores in a sweep of writings from “Age of the World Picture” (1938) and Contributions to Philosophy (written in the decade after Being and Time) through later essays like his much quoted “The Question Concerning Technology” (1955) are guided in large part by this same basic principle that we lose, or we forget, something distinctive about our existence when our world and our way of being in it grow overly familiar, habitual, or automatic. To dwell in distinctively human ways, for Heidegger, is to find oneself in relation to some margin of opacity that one never quite comprehends or overcomes, but that one sees, paradoxically, in its character as opacity. The seemingly pervasive light of our technoscientific modes of being can threaten to eclipse such opacity in the measure that such light can seem to reduce all of reality— and perhaps most notably nature— to that which can be calculated, ordered, produced, and exploited (in Weber’s terms: the world seen as disenchanted). “Man,” Heidegger thus writes, articulating in terms of modern technological existence a logic that Marion associates with the idol, “exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth. In this way the impression comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct. This illu-

6. On anxiety’s power to illuminate the significance structures of the world by suspending them, see esp. Heidegger, Being and Time, sec. 40.

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sion gives way to one final delusion: It seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself.”7 Among more recent figures working to think with Heidegger about our technological modernity and postmodernity, Robert Harrison stands out for his emphasis on the importance to our humanity of the strangeness that nature reveals to us— a strangeness that may be eclipsed by the (seemingly) all-consuming light of a technoscientific gaze and related social and cultural forms. Critiquing both the metaphysics of modern technoscience as Heidegger understands it and the kinds of holism that one might witness fighting against the subject-object dichotomy around which such a metaphysics is organized, Harrison argues that relation with nature, wherein alone we find, or create, our distinctively human abode, is “one of estrangement from, as well as domestic familiarity with” nature as it appears through the density of earth, the darkness of forest, and the like. This relation is maintained, Harrison elaborates, in and through forms of human logos— forms of language and art, or more broadly forms of relation— that always speak our finitude and hence also our mortality. For Harrison, that abode— and thus our humanity— are threatened most today by our forms of technoscientific existence and related systems, processes, and institutions associated with globalization (“the international hegemony” of “metropolis, economy, media, ideology”) that efface the distinctiveness of place, and hence human dwelling, by ignoring or eclipsing— through a seeming excess of light— nature’s darkness. That eclipse is tied intimately, in turn, to a denial of, or a flight from, our finitude and mortality— a denial or flight that Harrison understands to be typical of modernity’s technoscientific thinking and being. In response to such flight, Harrison ties the pedagogical estrangement we can undergo in our relation with nature to a teaching of mortality. To access this latter, and its role in the former, Harrison evokes a distinction that Henry David Thoreau draws between facts of science and facts of life, the latter bound intimately to death. While facts of science, in their universality, lend themselves readily to repetition, and hence dissemination, without regard for the uniqueness of the one speaking the fact, facts of life pertain to a singular, and mortal, existence. In Thoreau, Harrison emphasizes, I can be awakened to a fact of life-— and thus to the uniqueness of my mortal existence— through a relation with nature that differs from the modern-scientific relation insofar as nature serves less to reflect my scientific reason or its comprehensive scope 7. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper, 1977), 27.

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and more to awaken me, through its resistance, from the estrangement of an excessive familiarity. Harrison brings this dynamic of opacity to light in a passage worth citing at length: The woods do not contain the knowledge that Thoreau seeks by going there; they do, however, uncover the habitual hiding places of the self, leaving it exposed to the facts of life. . . . In his exposure Thoreau presumes to discover his irreducible relation to nature. What he discovers is that this relation remains opaque. We are in relation to nature because we are not within nature. We do not intrinsically belong to the natural order (if we did we would not need to discover the facts of life) but find in our relation the terms of our destiny as excursioners on the earth. Thoreau’s allusion to a “next excursion” implies that the experiment at Walden, as well as life in its essence, are also excursions— excursions into a world where we are at once estranged and alive, or better, alive in our estrangement. Those who have never gone to the woods to “live deliberately,” or who merely drift on the stream of institutional history, never get to the bottom of what life is (and Walden affirms that life does have a bottom). . . . Thoreau’s excursion to the woods of Walden, then, seeks to reduce life to the essentiality of its facts, in other words to reduce life to the fact of death. A fact of life is not so much something to live with but to die with. It is a self-knowledge that is either in you or not in you when you “come to die,” depending on your choice, while alive, to live or not to live what is life. Unlike a fact of science, it is nontransferable and nonreiterative. It escapes the circuit of rumor. . . . No one else can live for you your capacity to die, and life does not assume the status of a fact until you discover within yourself this innermost capacity. In this sense a fact of life amounts to a personal fatality: “If you stand right fronting and face to face with a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality” (II: 18).8

As with rumor, so with facts of science, the unique individual does not speak, and things are handed over to a kind of self-evidence. Everything risks coming to seem overly familiar or recognizable. And for Harrison and his Thoreau, when everything seems familiar, thanks to the all-too comfortable habits of our social being, we risk losing ourselves in our singularity. Thus losing ourselves through excessive familiarity, we can be returned to ourselves through the experience of estrangement. This is what is at stake for Harrison in Thoreau’s move to the woods: the loss of his familiar social world and exposure to the strangeness of nature, which reawakens him to his genuine freedom and 8. Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 222.

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his uniqueness as an individual. By contrast to the nature in which scientific or calculating reason recognizes itself, nature here is that to which we relate essentially, and from which we learn, as something strange— as that which is not us but which enlivens us, awakening us from our estranged familiarity. Like Heidegger, who clearly informs Harrison’s reading of Thoreau here, Harrison worries that when we lose our sense of the strangeness of nature, when we lose our relatedness to an edge or outside of the light and vision of human civilization, and especially its scientific knowing and technological power, then we lose, in fact, the kind of clearing from out of which alone a distinctively human— mortal— dwelling can take place. To dwell humanly, from this perspective, is to dwell in the finitude of a bounded place; it is to abide in a clearing that is kept open as clearing (or as a lighting: Lichtung in Heidegger’s German) only so long as we stand out from that place in relation to the opacity that conditions both it and our mortal finitude. In such dwelling, which requires a familiarity or intimacy with the strangeness of nature— in resistance to the estrangement of an excessive familiarity— Harrison sees a finite and mortal transcendence that technoscience and related forms of modern existence threaten to eclipse by dint of too much light. If human logos calls nature into our presence, or us into its presence, he insists, it speaks always also the distance without which such logos would be neither needed nor possible; and it is just such distance that the technoscientific mind, and its calculating logic, can tend to forget or erase. As I argued in The Indiscrete Image, this Heideggerian analysis of technology, taken up and developed by Harrison, while surely touching on decisive tendencies within our modern experience of the technological, perhaps also underplays or overlooks the senses in which technological innovation may also call forth, or already derive from, humanity’s fundamental strangeness to itself, its lack of definition or discretion, and hence the unknowing or incomprehension both of itself and of its world. It may well be that we turn technological because, and to the degree that, we can, in our indiscretion, never contain or grasp just who or what we are. And it may well be likewise that our technological experience, rather than simply and always eclipsing, also highlights, at times, this human indetermination and incomprehension. We find a wonderfully suggestive case study for this latter take on the technological in contemporary French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s “The Intruder,”9 a brief but remarkable text that explores the perspectives opened 9. In Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. Richard Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008); originally Jean Luc-Nancy, L’intrus (Paris: Galilée, 2000); cited hereafter parenthetically as INT, English page number; French page number.

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to Nancy about the human self and community, and about our technological engagement with nature, through the experience of his failing heart and its surgical transplant. I turn here to “The Intruder” because it resonates quite deeply with the understanding of human selfhood and estrangement I have signaled in Augustine, Heidegger, and Harrison, while also departing markedly both from Augustine (in its insistence on the mortally temporal and worldly conditions of the self ’s constitutive transcendence) and from the likes of Heidegger and Harrison (by seeing in our technological existence not only or even primarily an eclipse of opacity, or a denial of our mortal finitude, but rather our incalculable, and perhaps ever increasing, exposure to forms of alterity and alteration, and hence to figures of danger and death, that prove inherent to our life and being). It relates also, in turn, to a thinking of love in Nancy that resonates in significant ways with the construal of love I am advancing in the present work. Much as in Augustine and Heidegger, where I can lose myself when feeling most securely at home with myself, and where I am thus returned anew to myself through some alienating interruption of the overly automatic and familiar, so in Nancy, the most inward and indispensable condition of life— his very heart— remains for a time (as with most of us) so thoroughly familiar, and so automatic in its functioning, that he is entirely estranged from it; he sees and knows almost nothing of it explicitly or reflectively— until the critical interruption of that functioning, the failure of his heart, which makes what was once almost wholly alien because so thoroughly familiar into something that is newly familiar, and calling for attention, because it has grown alien, and threatening, to the life it once spontaneously and automatically sustained. The heart becomes intrusive and conspicuous, it stands out, in the measure that it departs from its normal functioning and calls for extraction and replacement: A gentle sliding separated me from myself. I was there, it was summertime, we had to wait, something broke away from me, or this thing surged up inside me, where nothing had been before: nothing but the “proper” immersion inside me of a “myself ” never identified as this body, still less this heart, watching itself. . . . A heart that only half beats is only half my heart. I was already no longer inside me. I’m already coming from somewhere else, or I’m not coming any longer at all. Something strange is disclosed “at the heart” of the most familiar— but “familiar” hardly says it: at the heart of something that never signaled itself as “heart.” Up to this point, it was strange by virtue of not being even perceptible, not even being present. From now on it fails, and this strangeness binds me to myself. (INT 163; 16 – 18)

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Through the heart’s crisis, a familiarity so thorough that it goes unseen, unremarked, unknown even as familiar— remaining thus strange, but not recognized as such— yields to a new strangeness that intrudes, interrupting the foreign familiarity and making it a suddenly familiar foreignness. Through the crisis of a heart, and through the consequent slippage among ambivalent forms of familiarity and strangeness, Nancy wakes up as bound anew to himself in his body— as a self under threat and fundamentally in question. Much as the crisis of anxiety in Heidegger brings the basic structure of world to light by interrupting or suspending its normal, or habitual, significance, and thus our everyday ways of understanding, so the complex processes attendant to Nancy’s heart transplant will bring to light the innumerable ways that his own life, at its very heart, is no longer— and really never was— simply his own, self-contained and clearly located: his life, to the degree that he survives, will come— has come, and always will come— from elsewhere and from others. These others include the one who must die in order to “donate” his or her heart; the uncounted others who, like Nancy, themselves need a heart but will not receive this one; the team of doctors who must decide that Nancy is the fitting and single recipient for this heart at this time; the ethicists who will have debated and established criteria in light of which such decisions are made; the technological system that, once a decision elects Nancy rather than another, will keep blood circulating through his body during its brief lack of any heart at all; the pharmacological system that will suppress Nancy’s immune system so that his embodied life may welcome this foreigner, and threat, in order thus to remain “itself,” while also having, then, to encounter the foreigners within who awaken thanks to a suppressed immune system (yielding for example the cancer that does come); the intersection of personal history and the history of technology that means survival now by these means (unavailable in years past, surely different in years to come); the intersection, thus, of personal history and economic and cultural circumstances (the chance of survival available to this one but denied to countless others for economic and cultural reasons); and so on. “From the very outset,” he writes, “my survival is inscribed in a complex process interwoven with strangers and strangeness” (INT 164; 21), and that survival is the function of innumerable forms of giving— and taking— that institute “the possibility of a network where life/death is shared by everyone, where life is connected with death, where the incommunicable is in communication” (INT 166; 30). In surviving through this network of “chemical, institutional, and symbolic connections” (INT 169; 40 – 41) Nancy comes to recognize that he is, himself, “indissociable from a polymorphous dissociation” (INT 169; 41). He is bound, thanks to the

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technological, among other things, to an insurmountable and incomprehensible strangeness at the heart of his being. Thus echoing both Augustine and Heidegger in the construal of self as constituted by the strange or the distant within, Nancy also diverges markedly from them both— from Augustine thanks to a notably different appreciation of mortality and from Heidegger thanks to a notably different sense of the technological. As I’ve emphasized in previous chapters, for Augustine my heart is given to me insofar as I am given over, in the movement of love, to a God beyond the world and time, a God in turning to whom I am turned toward the promise of an eternal life. For Nancy, by contrast, my heart, like the embodied self it sustains, is constituted only in and through worldly, temporal, and inescapably mortal relations. These relations weave together the inward and the outward so intimately that, while they cannot be equated, they also cannot be sharply delimited; highlighting such lack of discretion between inward and outward, Nancy’s aligns with my own treatment of the human as indiscrete image and with related trajectories of posthuman critique directed at modern liberal assumptions about the individual. As a theorist like Katherine Hayles emphasizes, I am not, as liberal thought may want to hold, first an individual who “by nature” possesses itself and its freedom— instantiated originally in the body as first property— only then, after the fact, to enter by consent and contract into social and political relations (intended to protect life and property); I am constituted relationally from the beginning. Along similar lines Nancy argues that I do not possess a living heart, nor a body, nor a self, closed in on itself, only then, subsequently, to enter into relations that expose me to otherness and, at this latter’s extreme, to the possibility of death; rather, the living self, at heart, and as embodied, already consists in such relation and exposure. Diverging in this way from the Augustine who seeks liberation from mortally temporal relations, Nancy parts ways also with thinkers like Heidegger and Harrison, insofar as he learns that the strangeness of the self to itself, its opacity to itself, can be awakened by— and prove to be a function of— the technological condition in which Heidegger and Harrison see more the threat of an effectively idolatrous mirror and hence the estrangement of an excessive familiarity. Nancy’s experience yields a different sense of nature than that operative in modern metaphysics according to Heidegger and his heirs— nature as calculability—and a different sense of the technological human as relating to, or being-with, nature. These variant and interrelated senses of nature and of technological humanity, furthermore, unfold in conjunction

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with Nancy’s explicit evocation both of Augustine’s interior intimo meo and of a “death of God” that binds Christian thought to its own deconstruction. This bind, he suggests, can open us to a technological transcendence whose sense might be construed both as religious and, without contradiction, as secular in the senses to which I am appealing in the present work. On the final page of “The Intruder,” Nancy gathers together several key elements of the thinking and feeling that arise from his reflections: “Corpus meum and interior intimo meo, the two being joined, in a complete configuration of the death of god, in order to say very precisely that the subject’s truth is its exteriority and its excessiveness: its infinite exposition. The intruder exposes me to excess. It extrudes me, exports me, expropriates me” (INT 170; 42). If taken in relation to the understanding of technological humanity’s creativity that Nancy signals a few lines later, this “death of God” would need to be seen in its difference from the death of God as conceived in Hegelian philosophical currents. For Hegel and nineteenth-century heirs like Feuerbach and Marx, the death of God means humanity’s overcoming of estrangement and its entry into the light of an absolute knowing, the fullness and freedom of human self-consciousness. Within such a light, neither natural nor socialhistorical reality can finally offer any insurmountable resistance, any margin of opacity, to the rational comprehension of the human subject— beginning and ending with its rational self-comprehension. The whole of history, on this account— which plays a notable role in secularization theory— entails at bottom the self-education of humanity to its own self-comprehension, and thus to its liberation from the negativity of estrangement. This death of God we could well understand also, then, to be realized or instantiated in the essence of modern technology as Heidegger interprets it— where man can be deluded enough to think he encounters everywhere and always only himself. By contrast, the death of God that Nancy finds to be embodied and enacted in his experience of technological survival does not yield the fullness of self-recognition or self-knowledge so much as it confronts the human self with its own incapacity finally or fully to define or comprehend either itself or the nature in whose ongoing and open-ended creation the human participates, both individually and collectively. Such incapacity is for Nancy the generative ground or condition of technological being. “Man begins again by passing infinitely beyond man,” he writes. “(This is what ‘the death of god’ has always meant, in every possible way.) Man becomes what he is: the most terrifying and the most troubling technician, as Sophocles called him twenty-five centuries ago, who denatures and remakes nature, who recreates

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creation, who brings it out of nothing and, perhaps, leads it back to nothing. One capable of origin and end” (INT 170; 43 – 44).10 Like Thomas J. J. Altizer well before him, Nancy’s thinking here about the death of God takes the self-effacement of God as inherent to a Christian thought of incarnation as kenosis, but in Nancy’s interpretation, that selfeffacement yields not the “total presence” of Altizer but a more differential construal of self and world— brought to light through our technological recreation— wherein the self finds (by never quite finding) its deepest interior not in turning away from the world, as in Augustinian conversion, but through its constitutive relation with the world. Much as in Being and Time, where world shows up nowhere else than in the Being of Dasein, and where Dasein is nothing other than Being in-theworld, and just as world for Heidegger consists in the totality of reference relations that constitute significance [Bedeutsamkeit], so for Nancy I “am” the world and the world “is” me within a construal of world as a totality of references or sendings. These are what Nancy signals with the term and concept of “sense,” which he takes in the senses not only of meaning or significance but also, correlatively, of sensibility and sentiment, thus evoking both the feeling of significance and the significance of feeling. Through his emphasis on the interweaving of significance and sensibility in his construal of sense, Nancy brings to the Heideggerian understanding of world an embodied and affective dimension while simultaneously understanding the incarnation of sense as the death or self-effacement of God that plays out within Christian thought and culture. As the kenotic self-effacement of God, incarnation is God “with” or God “among” us— meaning, in the (now endless) end nothing other than the “with” or “among” that yields world itself. In this respect, incarnation is tied inextricably to the sense of world as sense itself. If the relational totality of “world” embodies the self-effacement or death of God, Nancy argues, it entails also the death or failure of all those names and concepts that would pretend to replace God or to stand in the God-place. These include, notably, the Reason (or rational subject) that amounts to a God for Enlightened atheists (and their latter day mimics11), and whose dis10. For further discussion of these Sophoclean lines in relation to modern and contemporary understandings of technological existence, see Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics, my own Indiscrete Image, and, along lines concerning the neotenic that had also framed my discussion there, Robert Harrison’s more recent Juvenescence. 11. For a lucid recent treatment of the effectively fundamentalist position of self-proclaimed atheist approaches in the study of religion, see the introduction and first two chapters of Tyler Roberts, Encountering Religion: Responsibility and Criticism after Secularism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).

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enclosure the death of God finally demands. In this regard, Nancy’s thinking about the death of God resembles quite closely (without engaging or acknowledging) the deconstructive insight that Mark C. Taylor brought to the question more than three decades ago (in many ways before Derrida himself saw the religious significance of deconstruction). To say that God is dead is not to replace God with some other term or figure— such as a certain modern human subject and its would-be sovereign Reason— but to realize that there is no longer any place for the sovereign position and perspective once named God, and to draw the endless implications. Contrary, however, to the recently much discussed work of Charles Taylor— which does not really engage the deconstructive thinking of Nancy or an earlier deconstructive atheology such as Mark Taylor’s, and which remains on the whole rather thin in its reading of deconstructive thought— this line of thinking involves neither buffered selves nor closed world systems (nor autarchy nor idolatry, in the idiom of Marion) but an interweaving of human and world that defies just such buffering (or autarchy) and closure (or idolatry)— along with the selfpossession to which these might pretend. While the interweaving of human and world can be taken as a realization of God’s self-effacement, it can be read also with Nancy as an outworking, rethought, of creation and salvation that locates transcendence, or the beyond, or the “more,” nowhere else than in a world now received without reference to the assurance or fulfillment once sought in some “other” world standing always and stably “beyond” or behind this one. Reference to a “this” world, indeed, no longer makes sense insofar as such reference was framed by the Platonic and Christian metaphysics whose logic Nietzsche well signaled and attacked— within a thinking, note, that rejects as much the utter desolation as the ultimate consolation to whose strict alternative nihilism holds. The death of God in Nietzsche rejects the despairing response to such death, which is the response of a thinking whose premises were themselves already nihilistic in positing the need for a world beyond (itself a form of suspicion, resentment, or vengeance toward this, the only, world); an absolute loss or despair is ruled out just as much as the— essentially related but simply inverse— hope or demand for an absolute security. Nancy extends this Nietzschean insight as he pointedly refuses the alternative— taken by many as exhaustive— between despair and consolation. To say that there is no place for God is to say there is no first or final place — because place, like time, is differential to the core. This is why “world” can be neither traced back to the discrete presence of any one unified origin, nor finally consummated in the fullness of a return to, or restoration of, such unity. This is also why we can no more represent the absolute end

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of the world than we can represent its absolute origin. In the absence of any discretely present, unified, self-identical origin, all creation is creation ex nihilo, which is to say, differential and thus ever ongoing. Likewise, in this context, “salvation” means not the achievement of any final plenitude or the enjoyment of its satisfied rest (such as the beatific state in a thinker like Augustine) but the open, creative, disseminating movement of reference and address. “Salvation” for Nancy— that is, salut— means “salutation,” and hence it means a salvation without salvation, or a salvation from salvation, or the salvation (liberation) of salvation (address) from salvation itself (as a stasis of satisfaction).12 As within central lines of traditional Christian thinking, so here creation and salvation are coimplicated, the second repeating the first, but the first already marking the second; unlike that operative in such traditional thinking, however, the coimplication between creation and salvation to be thought with Nancy entails a differential movement— which means a world and time— that bar, or that save, us from any understanding or experience of salvation as full restoration and final rest. The “ex” of “ex nihilo” here means that neither I nor the world— whose entirety I touch as participant in its ongoing creation— can be gathered in the closure of any full or final “presence,” because presence itself is differentially constituted. “In the beginning” there is no beginning as identifiable, or self-identical, origin. This amounts for Nancy to a truth both of the West— which is “without ground . . . the invention of the absence of grounds as an initial given”13— and of its outworking in modern man’s self-engendering, where “‘modern’ has always meant: that for which nothing is given, not even itself ” (A 45; 68). Hence, the continuing openness of world-creation entails, essentially, ongoing human self-creation. And hence the intersection of creation ex nihilo and salvation without salvation, for “if the whole of ‘creation’ is indeed at stake in the economy said to pertain to ‘salvation’ [salut] (some theologians have argued that the ‘mystical body of Christ’ would incorporate all of nature), we must affirm that I touch the world in its entirety, in the totality of its force and expansion” (A 72; 106). In this, my touching world and its touching me, any sharp distinction between the inward and the outward no longer pertains, 12. This seems to me quite close to Elliot Wolfson’s contention that “there is nothing from which to be delivered but the expectation that one will be delivered,” in A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination (New York: Zone Books, 2011), 268. 13. Jean-Luc Nancy, Adoration: The Deconstruction of Christianity 2, trans. John McKeane (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 72. Originally, Jean-Luc Nancy, Adoration: Déconstruction du christianisme 2 (Paris: Galilée, 2010), 106; hereafter cited parenthetically as A, English page number; French page number.

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even as the difference between me and the world I touch cannot be effaced or overcome: This touching engages neither interiority nor exteriority; it allows me neither to possess the world (by grasping or containing) nor to lose myself within it (dissolving in some fusion); it establishes between “me” and “the world” a coincidence that is essentially that of the initial opening, of the ex nihilo, of its surprised start [sursaut] and jolt [soubresaut]. I come into the world with the world itself, and, in the history of nature, man is he who takes up and puts back into play all appearing. This is language. This is also technology, second nature, the supplementing— and then the supplanting— of nature. The indefinite multiplication of beginnings and ends: new eras constantly come to pass, whether with vaccines, steam, electricity, atomic energy—fission and perhaps one day fusion— cybernetics, and new ends are constantly dispersing and dissolving the very idea of an end to nature and to mankind. (A 72; 106)

With the term and movement of “adoration,” Nancy evokes a death of God and an interplay of human and world that both re-create creation and thus save (us from) salvation by saving salut as the movement, and time, of referential address. The affirmative play of sense as endless reference continues to make sense only in that it reaches neither assurance nor fulfillment, which would in fact arrest and suffocate sense. Resonant in some sense with the “saying” of Levinas, itself echoed in Derrida’s pre-predicative affirmation, the endless reference of salutation in Nancy also differs from Levinas insofar as it involves not simply the human but all the beings of the world. A similar contrast would hold in relation to the Augustine we encountered with Marion, for whom confession refers endlessly, through praise and avowal, to an infinite God beyond the world rather than playing endlessly among all beings of the world. Salutation in Nancy, by contrast, opens and inhabits the infinite not beyond but in and through the finite: But in “adoration,” the voice chimes. Which is to say speech or song do, and in them, before or beyond signification, sense as call, address, and therefore also as relation. The relation of a “salut!” For there is relation, there is only that  .  .  . and only the relation that is divided/shared, in both senses of the word partage, between all the world’s existents, matters. An infinite relation that does not relate anything— no senses caught in a net— and that opens everything and everyone. An infinite relation that only finitude knows. (A 87; 126)

From this perspective, the death of God entails not the closure of subjectivity, or of world, in the idolatrous mirror of a closed world system or technological delusion, but an infinite opening in and through the finite (much like

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that we’ve traced previously in Joyce, and that we will encounter in our next chapter with Emerson), an opening of the beyond not in some other-world but right here and now in the world, which is itself, inherently, always still to come. Much as we can remark here two different directions for understanding, or undergoing, the death of God— one more Hegelian, one more postHeideggerian—so we can mark two paths for construing religion and myth—the first tending toward a closure that can amount to idolatry, and a second that defies such idolatrous closure while remaining bound inextricably to our human world and existence. On the one hand, the construal of religion as observance— which on Nancy’s historical view is the norm prior to monotheism— tends toward a closure and satisfaction, a complacency or immobility that amounts to an idolatry or, at the extreme, to an evil that “can consist in such a completion—satisfaction, assuagement, contentedness, solution. Here one turns away from the infinite, one becomes complacent in immobility. This is what it means to condemn ‘idols.’ An idol is an idol when its worshipper [adorateur] is satisfied with worshipping it [l’adorer]: any God or devil can become an idol in this way and perhaps always has the tendency to do so” (A 66; 98). To this logic of the idol corresponds at least one kind of myth (to be contrasted, we’ll see, with another) that aligns with religion as observance, and that resonates with ontotheology, insofar as it entails “the observance of behaviors and representations that respond to a claim for sense as a claim for assurance, destination, accomplishment” (A 39; 58). What makes for myth or idol in this critical sense, and hence what stands at the (heartless) heart of a religion closed through observance, “has to do with the assurance that each one— the mythical tale [récit] or the figure of the idol— assures a presence and responds to a demand. In other words it ‘gives reasons for’ [rend raison de] existence. In a paradoxical way, it is its desire to ‘rationalize,’ to provide a ground or account, to ‘give reasons’ that religion can exhaust itself, becoming nothing more than mythology and idolatry” (A 39; 59). The idolatrous and mythological closure of religion, and the resonance of these that we might sense in ontotheology and in the technoscientific modernity where Heidegger sees ontotheology’s extension, is within Nancy’s work not the only possible path for religion or for myth (or technoscience). This latter can take a more deconstructive turn in which the god does not serve as idolatrous mirror, grounding and guiding world and humanity in or to the assurance of their self-presence or identity; the god names instead “the inequality or inequivalence of being to itself, or its difference and its différance ” (A 50; 74). Rather than as mirror reflecting us clearly back to ourselves, the

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god here figures the enigma both of the human and of its world; the gods are “advocates or representatives of humans’ relation to the enigma that they are for themselves and, through this first enigma, to the enigma that the world in itself is” (A 49; 74). We can read Nancy to suggest here an apophatic anthropology akin to that I traced in The Indiscrete Image, where an in-definition, and incomprehension, of the human is read not only to reflect the incomprehensibility of God (as in the mystical theology of Gregory) but also (as in Eriugena or Cusa) to reflect, or to be reflected in, the incomprehensibility of world. Received or referenced in this differential sense, the gods, in their enigmatic character, signal the opening of world and of human existence— and in such a way that world and existence, as differentially constituted, elude the closure of the idol or of the myth that assures, fulfills, and completes. Rather than remaining simply absent, Nancy suggests, the divine transpires as present-absent in every here and now, as the enabling difference of worldly and temporal existence. In this sense, the gods name not a truth or being “in itself ” somewhere “beyond” the world, nor an originary intuition of the world, but the difference that alone gives a world, and time, and hence our existence. This differential sense of the god is operative also in the linkage Nancy highlights of the god (deus) to the day (dies), or to that founding difference of day and night that we can (and must) recall and pass through but never represent as such, or in itself (insofar as there is no difference as such or in itself ). The suddenness of light in the “fiat lux” is in this sense not the “blaze of apocalypse” as figure of total presence but the “renewal of dawn” (A 46; 69), a reawakening to “the separation of light from darkness whereby a world begins” (A 46; 70). For Nancy— as earlier, we’ll see, for Emerson—“the ‘divine’ does not refer to anything but this separation between day (dies/divus) and night. The opening of the world is the first mystery, and doubtless the only one, or the one that contains all others” (A 46; 70). Insofar, then, as the god names such difference, we in relation to the god find not any closed mirror of our discrete self-presence but the openness and indetermination of our own enigmatic existence, itself reflected in, or given by, or through, the likewise enigmatic world whose totality we touch, and cocreate. What we see here in Nancy’s deconstruction of Christianity is an outworking, in and through world, of the indiscrete relation between God and human as explored in The Indiscrete Image; just as the human there, in looking to God, sees reflected its own indetermination or indiscretion, and vice versa, so here the god names the self-differing of human and world alike, each in and through the other; for human self-difference is a function of world, just as world appears, and differs/defers, in and through the human.

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If in relation to the god the human encounters the self-difference of its own indeterminate existence, which means also then the self-difference, and infinite openness, of the (no less finite) world, then this god’s religion— resistant to idolatrous closure but abandoning likewise all “other-worlds” beyond— participates in a pulsation of the drives in which Nancy can find, with Freud, a sense of myth that likewise deviates from the logic of observance and representation. The Freud to whom Nancy points answers little, if at all, to the role of the arrogant and scientistic critic who would claim to replace religious illusion (as childish and primitive) with a rational knowing (as modern and mature). This Freud is rather a thinker and writer whose critique of illusion opens us to an always greater ignorance that constitutes and carries us— through the movement of drives that he calls our “new mythology.” Myth here names everything but the clarity and certainty of unified origins and ends, archetypes and their instantiation; and in this sense such myth is for Nancy distinctively modern. It names something closer to a learned ignorance, an acknowledgment that knowing escapes us with regard to that which, in our drives, shapes and sustains us: “the knowledge of human experience, the knowledge of mankind insofar as it ‘infinitely surpasses mankind’ or as it ‘ek-sists,’ insofar as it is a ‘dancer above the abyss.’ It does not involve secularizing,” Nancy continues (we’ll come back to this question of the secular), “converting, or transposing, but rather opening ourselves up to what bears us, what pushes us, what stems from what, for man, is the experience of what is the most profound, most deeply buried, and yet most to come: man insofar as he has engendered himself as ‘modern.’ For ‘modern’ has always meant: that for which nothing is given, not even itself ” (A 45; 68). The Freudian take on drives as myths, which repeats for Nancy a movement already underway in Kant, where drive is the thrust of reason and its conditions beyond themselves toward the unconditioned, advances not the closure of an idolatrous science but the dis-enclosure of reason. Freud’s drives touch “on what, in the psyche, infinitely surpasses any psychology. This is why he said, ‘the drives are our myths,’ meaning both, on the one hand, that they are not observable physical forces and, on the other hand, that they index our condition of being thrown, thrust, propelled without origin or end, in a movement that arrives at no ‘sense’— neither of life, of death, of civilization, nor of love” (A 49; 73). Evoking this resonance between Freud’s drive and Heidegger’s thrownness [Geworfenheit] and e-motion [Bewegtheit], all of which deviate as much from the program of instinct as from the intention or aim of any would-be sovereign subject or buffered self, Nancy opens us to a Freud who differs notably from the figure resisted by Charles Taylor. Rather than voice an arrogant scientism

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that pretends to rational comprehension and mastery of the human condition, this Freud authors a new telling of the human story, which is “resolutely nonreligious” only in the measure that it also stands at odds with any science, or desire for knowledge, as “desire for power and mastery in general” (A 101; 143). The “illusion” whose future demise Freud calls for is in fact the illusion of salvation as promised both by religion of a certain kind and by a modern science that in essential ways repeats or mimics the religion it believes itself to abandon: salvation as completion, or satiety, the illusion of some end— through fulfillment— of analysis, whether in patient life or in the work of science itself. Nancy well contends that “there is no ‘scholar’ or ‘scientist’ not only more modest than [Freud], but above all more sincerely open to uncertainties and to what is incomplete, even to the powerlessness of his knowledge” (A 101; 143). As if inheriting the early modern tradition of learned ignorance, Freud aims not to know scientific objects but to give “new expression to our existence as subjects” (A 101; 144)— which means as subjects constituted and carried by a thrust that precedes and exceeds us even as it proves intimate to our being. Neither simply immanent, because coming from an indiscrete elsewhere (and hence proving resistant to the closed rationalities of scientistic atheism, itself a simply inverted theology), nor yet transcendent in an apparently traditional theological sense (such as that evoked by Charles Taylor), because opening up the “elsewhere” nowhere else than in ourselves and our world, the Freudian drives yield a thinking of the infinite as emergent in and through the finite— a thinking of our rootedness in the world as resistant both to the discrete localizations of identitarianism and to the clear distinction between the “natural” and the “cultural” in our human-worldly existence: The Trieb— or the constellation of the Triebe— is a movement that comes from elsewhere, from the non-individuated, the buried, dispersed, proliferating, confused, archaic nature of our provenance— nature, the world, humanity behind us, and, behind it, all that makes it possible, the emergence of the sign and of the gesture, the call from one to the other and from all to the elements, the forces, the possible and the impossible, the sense of the infinite lying before, behind, and among us, the desire to respond to it and to expose ourselves to it. (A 102; 145)

If Freud is not the scientistic figure so often associated with “secularization,” how might his mythical thinking of drive contribute to a different sense of the secular? In his construal of the modern as that for which nothing is given, Nancy sets pointedly aside any notion of “secularization” as translation or transposition of an already given religious or theological tradition— thus effectively

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siding, against a position like that of Karl Löwith, with Hans Blumenberg (whose Legitimacy of the Modern Age Nancy counts as a definitive work on the question). Like Blumenberg, Nancy rejects the claim that “religious” concepts are in their substance somehow converted to “secular” forms and operations, as according, for example, to Carl Schmitt’s thesis that the modern concept of political sovereignty is fundamentally a secularization of the theological idea of divine sovereignty, or Löwith’s argument that modern conceptions of progress are secular translations of Christian eschatology. Distinguishing his “dis-enclosure” from “secularization” taken as “a process supposed to convert religious values, rules, and configurations into secular values, rules, or configurations” (A 44; 66), Nancy’s argument on secularization resonates with, and expands, his insistence that the death of God should mean not simply that another figure— Reason or its sovereign human subject— takes the place of God, leaving the logic and function of that place largely untouched, but more that there is no longer any place for God, in the sense of an ultimate Sense to life or world found somewhere outside the world. But while not an extension of some translated or transposed Christian substance, this death of God is no less for Nancy an effect of Christian thinking about creation and salvation: This proliferating, unordered, overabundant signification, forms the effect or rather the remainder of Christian “creation” and “salvation”: the effect or rather the remainder of the extreme withdrawal of “god” that forms the ground of “monotheism.” The same is true of the dis-enclosure of reason that opens onto the extreme withdrawal of any “given reason.” In other words, onto the extreme withdrawal of what we most often think we designate when speaking of “sense,” the sense of life or the sense of the world. (A 44; 66)

The self-effacement of God demands the dis-enclosure of Reason, whereas “secularization” as conversion maintains the god-place and its correlates while simply marking their reoccupation. Furthermore, Nancy contends, such reoccupation is based on an optical illusion within which “the thought of secularization in fact presupposes the reverse of what it proposes: it has already preinterpreted the world of the beyond in terms of this world, for instance by representing God as a King” (A 45; 67). From this perspective, “secularization” fails as much as any ontotheology to think— that is, to open itself to, to be touched by— the irreducible “beyond” or “elsewhere” inherent to sense itself. Instead, it has always already arrested the open play of sense through the limitation of a concept— derived from the world, projected beyond the world, and then reapplied to the world (according to the very logic and movement that Feuerbach sees as the essence of religion). Secu-

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larization in this sense, like the religion of observance and representation, misses the knowledge— operative “here and there in spirituality and mysticism” (A 45;  68), and renewed in the deconstruction of Christianity and the dis-enclosure of reason— of an experience that eludes such delimitation, completion, and closure. Along lines quite suggestive for a different sense of the secular today, openness to such experience, or the experience of such openness, transpires at the intersection, or through the coincidence, of the modern, for which nothing is given, and the archaic, whose inheritance remains without limit. Nancy’s appeal to that which is most profound and still to come, most buried and archaic while also cutting-edge and just now, his appeal to the drive or pulsation that constitutes and carries us according to a precedence and excess that we will never comprehend or arrest, while thus posed in opposition to one version of the secularization thesis, evokes a sense of the secular to which we now turn with Nietzsche and his American kin, Emerson, who appeals to a “secularity of nature” that teaches us “to disuse our dame-school measures, and exchange our Mosaic and Ptolemaic schemes for her larger style.”14 14. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” in Essays: First and Second Series, with an introduction by Irwin Edman (New York: Harper and Row, 1926, 1951), 388.

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Ages of Learning . . . the Secular Today with Emerson and Nietzsche . . . but in the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations, which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him. Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart! e m e r s o n , “Experience” Come on, old heart! n i e t z s c h e , Thus Spoke Zarathustra He simply does not know how old he is already and how young he is still going to be. n i e t z s c h e , Twilight of the Idols

The intimate interplay between our immeasurable, archaic inheritance and our modern openness to novelty and its freedom— a freedom, as Ralph Waldo Emerson once put it, with respect even to the meaning of freedom— was already a theme in The Indiscrete Image. It begins to emerge in that work’s early pages through a reading of Julio Cortázar’s short 1956 text “Axolotl,” named after a fresh water salamander native to Mexico. Unbeknownst both to Cortázar at the time of his writing and to me at the time of that reading, the axolotl today stands on the edge of extinction within its sole wild habitat— an uncannily suggestive fact, given that this very same salamander, through the persistence of its infantile traits throughout adulthood, gave to modern science an important clue about our human being’s originary character as neotenic or pedomorphic. According to neotenic theory, as discussed in The Indiscrete Image and noted in the introductory chapter here, the human is born effectively premature and maintains its unfinished, indefinite character throughout its life. For this reason it both needs and proves capable of sociality, language, and the open-ended education and world building that are entailed in our linguistic and social being. Our power to learn and create, on this view, is grounded in a lack or poverty. We become and remain— each and all of us— students and poets because we find ourselves from the beginning at a bit of a loss. And while, as we also noted, the figure of the human as world-builder has played a central role both in religious studies broadly and in secularization debate more narrowly, a strikingly similar understanding of

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human creative capacity as grounded in our incompletion and lack of definition finds suggestive expression also in theological traditions of mystical thought from Gregory of Nyssa through John Scotus Eriugena to Nicholas of Cusa— where the creativity of an indefinite and therefore incomprehensible humanity is thought to mirror the creative power of an indefinable and incomprehensible God. As I worked to show in The Indiscrete Image, these traditional theological paths of thinking about creativity reappear in the late modern writing and thinking of figures like James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges.1 Borges’s two-page 1958 text “Everything and Nothing,” for example, imagines a meeting between the creator God and the poet Shakespeare that to my reading recalls the literary encounter between neotenic human and salamander in Cortázar: in coming face to face with that creator God, Shakespeare finds not the clear light of a first cause in relation to which all other beings are explained and made intelligible; he encounters, rather, a dark abyss of creative capacity that mirrors the indeterminate ground of Shakespeare’s own creativity: Shakespeare “found himself in the presence of God,” Borges writes, and said to him: “‘I, who have been so many men in vain, want to be one and myself.’ The voice of God answered him from a whirlwind: ‘I, too, am not I; I have dreamed the world as you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like I are many and no one.’”2 Much as this mirror relation between creator God and creative poet proves abyssal in Borges, so in Cortázar, the meeting of human narrator and axolotl involves a relation of such strange intimacy that each being slips almost imperceptibly into the other. In Cortázar’s text, the story’s narrator repeatedly and obsessively visits the axolotls who live in a glass tank in Paris’s Jardin des Plantes (where they can still be found today), and in his face-to-face with this creature the narrator finds that they, human and salamander, are pulled together, made deeply familiar or intimate to one another, by “something infinitely lost and distant.” The eyes of the axolotl speak to the narrator “of the presence,” as Cortázar writes, “of a different life, of another way of seeing”; and while looking out “from an unfathomable depth which made me dizzy,” 1. On relations between Jorge Luis Borges and mystical thought, and attending to Jewish traditions that I have not, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “In the Mirror of the Dream: Borges and the Poetics of Kabbalah,” Jewish Quarterly Review 104, no. 3 (Summer 2014): 362 – 79. 2. Jorge Luis Borges, “Everything and Nothing,” from El Hacedor (1960), in Borges, Obras Completas 2: 1952 – 1972 (Barcelona: Emecé Editores, 1996), 182. English translations available in Borges, Everything and Nothing, trans. James Irby (New York: New Directions, 1999), 77– 78, and in Borges, Collected Fictions (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 32. Cited and discussed in my Indiscrete Image: Infinitude and Creation of the Human, 34.

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the narrator notes, while gazing at him from their “infinitely slow and remote world,” the childlike creatures prove nonetheless disturbingly “close.” A proximity or intimacy of the animal axolotl to the human narrator, then, and the inescapable claim that the axolotl makes upon him, are felt to be the function of distance and strangeness. “They were not human beings,” the narrator says, “but I had found in no animal such a profound relation with myself.”3 Against this background, and keeping in mind Nancy’s Freudian reflections on the inheritance of drives in our modernity, I turn in the present chapter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, for whom the logic of our relation with nature resembles quite deeply that signaled by our human relation (both scientific and literary) to the neotenic salamander. Such a resemblance, we note, may have not only conceptual but also suggestive literary-historical dimensions, given that a good century before Cortázar writes “Axolotl,” Emerson himself, on July 13, 1833, visits the same Parisian garden, the Jardin des Plantes, and in its Cabinet of Natural History the science of his day opens to Emerson an eye for which, as he writes in his lecture on “The Uses of Natural History” (1833, 1835), “the limits of the possible are enlarged, and the real is stranger than the imaginary.”4 As in “Axolotl,” where we can read the adult, human narrator to find through his face-to-face with the childlike salamander an indiscrete image of his own neotenic indetermination, so Emerson finds in nature, as “face to face in a glass,” not only an “image of the human Mind” but also the reminder of an essential youth: “In the presence of nature,” Emerson writes, “man is a child.” And the spirit of the child, he posits, in its incompletion and unknowing, is “the essential condition of all learning.”5 While still not read as widely as he should be among scholars and philosophers of religion,6 Stanley Cavell does more than any other thinker in the 3. Julio Cortázar, “Axolotl,” in End of the Game and Other Stories, trans. Paul Blackburn (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 4, 6, 7. 4. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Uses of Natural History,” in The Selected Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 4. 5. Emerson, “Uses,” 14, 13. 6. A full study of the significance of religion in Cavell for continental philosophy, with an informative schematization of positions that have been taken on the question, can be found in Espen Dahl, Stanley Cavell, Religion, and Continental Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). See also Tyler Robert’s fine chapter “Criticism as Conduct of Gratitude,” in Encountering Religion: Responsibility and Criticism after Secularism (New York: Columbia Uni-

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twentieth century not only to claim, as living and constructive philosophical resources, the distinctively American heritage of thought that he finds in Emerson and Henry David Thoreau but also to hear and to amplify the resonance between that heritage and the European, or so-called “continental,” traditions of Heidegger and Nietzsche. In doing that invaluable work, Cavell helps us to appreciate in Emerson a thinking of the heart deeply akin to that which I have been tracing in these pages from Saint Augustine through his reception and revision in Heidegger to the world of French thinkers deeply shaped by Heidegger, such as Marion, Derrida, and Nancy. It is the author— and teacher— of Heidegger’s “What Is Called Thinking?” whom Cavell engages in one of his most important essays on the resonance he hears between Heidegger and Emerson, “Thinking of Emerson.”7 In the 1951– 52 course from which that published text derives, Heidegger contends that the heart and its ground are essential to genuine thinking, and that such thinking entails at its core a thanking, and hence a form of memory. In response to his guiding question “What does the word ‘to think’ mean?” and in recalling the essential proximity he senses between denken and danken, to think and to thank, Heidegger writes that “the thanc means man’s inmost mind, the heart, the heart’s core, that innermost essence of man which reaches outward most fully and to the outermost limits, and so decisively that, rightly considered, the idea of an outer and an inner world does not arise [Der Gedanc bedeutet: das Gemüt, das Herz, den Herzensgrund, jenes Innerste des Menschen, das am weitesten nach Außen und ins Äußerste reicht und dies so entschieden, daß es, recht bedacht, die Vorstellung eines Innen und Außen nicht aufkommen läßt].”8 Such a thinking of the heart in Heidegger, Cavell suggests, places the great German philosopher in a line of thought that ties versity Press, 2013), and his brief but productive engagement with Cavell in Contesting Spirit: Nietzsche, Affirmation, Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); as well as Hent de Vries, “Stanley Cavell on Saint Paul,” in Modern Language Notes 126, no. 5 (December 2011): 979 – 93, and “From Ghost in the Machine to Spiritual Automaton: Philosophical Meditation in Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Levinas,” in International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 60, nos. 1– 3 (December 2006): 77– 97; and Ludger Viefhues-Bailer, Beyond the Philosopher’s Fear: A Cavellian Reading of Gender, Origins and Religion in Modern Skepticism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). For a theologically oriented Christian treatment, see Peter Dula, Cavell, Companionship, and Christian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 7. Stanley Cavell, “Thinking of Emerson,” in The Senses of Walden: An Expanded Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); the essay was first published in 1979 but delivered as a talk in 1978. 8. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 144; Was Heißt Denken? Fünfte, durchgesehene Auflage (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag,

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him to the American thinker for whom the “genius” we each and all possess entails the belief about which Emerson speaks in “Self Reliance”: that “what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men,” a belief bound in turn to the imperative to “speak your latent conviction and it shall be the universal sense; for always the inmost becomes the outmost.” In calling attention in this way to a similar thinking of the heart in Emerson and Heidegger, Cavell interprets both thinkers to approach the work of thinking as a “task of onwardness,” a work of being on the way, and of beginning anew, recurrently, without ever finally arriving. Not beyond tragedy, but demanding also our abandonment of despair, such a thinking aspires, as Cavell emphasizes, to “the sacred affirmative” from Emerson’s “The Preacher,” which Cavell glosses as the “heart for a new creation”— a heart whose thinking, and living, constitute an alternative to “the fixated conflict between solipsism and realism . . . or between subjectivity and objectivity, or the private and the public, or the inner and the outer.”9 In underscoring this proximity between a thinking of the heart in Heidegger and a thinking of the heart in Emerson, and in understanding such thinking to involve an interplay between inward and outward so intimate that one could finally represent neither the one nor the other discretely, Cavell does not himself signal the proximity of this thinking to the claim of Augustine that the interior intimo meo, or that which is more interior to me that my most interior, is equally superior summo meo, or higher, more outward, than my highest or outermost. While abandoning, perhaps, or at least in altering, the theological reference that remains decisive for Augustine, both Heidegger and Emerson are attuned to the senses in which I receive myself, as a self, only through relation to the outward and the strange, which thus constitute and condition me intimately. While the names for this strangeness will vary— God for Augustine; world, Being, or death for Heidegger; nature, life, or vast-flowing vigor for Emerson— the core logic, and experience, of an intimate strangeness, or strange intimacy, can be strikingly similar from one thinker to the other. The degree to which this construal of self is shared among these thinkers comes into greater focus if we notice their similar understandings of the self ’s alienation, that tendency we all have to lose or to forget ourselves: much as we’ve noted already in Augustine and Heidegger, where I can be most at risk of losing myself when I feel most comfortable in the habit and haste of my so1997), 157; Cavell abbreviates the passage in his citation— ending with “outermost limits”— in his “Thinking of Emerson,” 138. 9. Cavell, “Thinking of Emerson,” 138, 133, 138.

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cial being, so in Emerson the danger of a forgetting or loss of self often threatens me the most— imperceptibly— when in my busyness and conformity I feel all too at home. As Heidegger suggests in Being and Time’s oft-referenced analysis of das Man, or “the they,” and its falling— whose resemblance to Emerson’s analysis of conformity in modern social life is striking— the threat of our being alienated from ourselves through the familiarity of a routine that grows thoughtless is a threat inherent to everyday life; and at stake in that everyday threat for Emerson is in fact the day itself, whose recurrent novelty and ever renewed possibility we tend in our thoughtlessness to forget. Along these lines, the challenge of the everyday in Emerson— the challenge of “making the day,” or of renewing time creatively and thus awakening to the day, each day— is central to the task of genuine thinking, and it is tied intimately for him to the challenge of thinking nature, in which, as he puts it, “all is nascent, infant.”10 An answer to the threat in our day, or age, to the singular time of each day— a threat to the “Deity” by virtue of which “thought renews itself inexhaustibly every day”11— cannot simply bypass the age but must work creatively with and through it. Such is a work that Emerson sees Shakespeare to do in exemplary fashion, renewing his day, and defining our age, through a genius that entails not the radical novelty of a romantically isolated individual, nor the kind of amnesiac “innovation” of today’s TechCrunch disrupters, but instead the deepest temporal indebtedness of one whose genius consists in making the old new again (according to a definition of genius that Emerson inherits from Goethe, “the faculty of seizing and turning to account every thing that strikes us . . . every one of my writings has been furnished to me by a thousand different persons, a thousand different things”12). Like the creative God or poet in Borges who, as everyone and no one, is capable 10. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Method of Nature,” in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 1: Nature, Addresses, and Lectures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 126. 11. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Literary Ethics,” in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 1: Nature, Addresses, and Lectures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 108 – 9. 12. Goethe, cited in Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 100. See also Richardson’s discussion at 172: “Far from feeling a need to do nothing except what is completely original and novel, Goethe actually defines genius as ‘the faculty of seizing and turning to account every thing that strikes us.’ He protested that he himself would have got nowhere ‘if this art of appropriation were considered as derogatory to genius.’ It was enormously helpful to Emerson to hear Goethe committing himself so clearly to the extensive and frank use of others’ material. This method Emerson already found congenial. ‘Every one of my writings,’ said Goethe, ‘has been furnished to me by a thousand different per-

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of becoming all, the poetic genius exemplified by Shakespeare is for Emerson far more the function of openness and reception than of grasping or imposition. A marked lack of egoism makes for creative expression that proves singular— because so seemingly universal. “Great genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at all,” Emerson writes in “Shakespeare, or the Poet”; it consists “in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind.”13 Blessed with a “new joy” in the passing times and in the public mind, the creative genius is attuned to the details of the day and hour, while also indebted to a temporal immensity of human experience and experiment. “All originality is relative,” Emerson asserts. “Every thinker is retrospective.” The most private reality of the writer and thinker, the singularity of his or her genius, draws from the fountain of other minds and books; in a striking alternative to the thoughtless and sterile anonymity that can seem to define the “they” in Heidegger or the “public” in Kierkegaard, Emerson can see in and with Shakespeare that “what is best written or done by genius in the world, was no man’s work, but came by wide social labor.” As with the Bible, Emerson notes, or with liturgy, both of which collect long periods and comprise their anthology of the ages, so with genuine writing and thinking, “there never was a time when there was not some translation exisiting.” In the “world books” that issue from the indebted originality of genius, it is the time itself that thinks, and the world—“the market, the mason, the carpenter, the merchant, the farmer, the fop.” The one receptive to this thinking of the world and its times, however, does not only inherit; he also, inextricably, bestows (and in both cases more than he can comprehend). For just as to receive is already to respond or to give, so to inherit means already to pass on: “the generic catholic genius who is not afraid or ashamed to owe his originality to the originality of all, stands with the next age as the recorder and embodiment of his own.”14 Emerson’s Shakespeare “wrote the text of modern life,” for he “drew the man and described the day, and what is done in it,”15 and from this angle we might say that his writing constitutes a secular power— not so much, however, because it turns in notable ways from church to world, but more because sons, a thousand different things. . . . My work is that of an aggregation of beings taken from the whole of nature: it bears the name of Goethe.” 13. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Shakespeare, or the Poet,” in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 4: Representative Men: Seven Lectures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 110. 14. Emerson, “Shakespeare,” 114, 115. 15. Emerson, “Shakespeare,” 121.

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it is attuned both to modern life in its transience and everydayness and to the indeterminate temporal depths and human masses that yield such life. In this, the poetic genius of a Shakespeare resembles, in the register of culture, the nature in which all human creation already participates, the nature whose creative immensity Emerson figures explicitly in terms of the secular. For Emerson “it is a mischievous notion that we are come late into nature; that the world was finished a long time ago,”16 and if men are “ready to believe that the best age is gone,” “the youth of Nature which astounds the imagination repudiates the thought.”17 But if indeed it is “the perpetual admonition of nature to us . . . [that] ‘the world is new, untried. Do not believe the past. I give you the universe a virgin to-day,’”18 it proves also the case for Emerson that the astounding youth of nature, its recurrent birth, and thus the perpetual infancy, or virginity, of today, issue (much like the renewing genius of a Shakespeare) from temporal depths, and hence from an age, that remain also beyond our clear grasp— a temporal immensity that exceeds the measures of our experience, of our thinking, and of our traditions (which themselves, in fact, always already exceed themselves). Attending to what Nietzsche later evokes as “the ancient deep,” Emerson explicitly associates such a temporal immensity with “secularity,” noting in his essay “Nature” (1844), for example, that the science of geology teaches us the “secularity of nature” by exposing us to temporalities unimagined within the “dame school measures” of Ptolemaic and Mosaic tradition.19 This sense of secularity, accessed and experienced by Emerson thanks notably to modern science and its institutions, entails nothing of the arrogantly self-assured 16. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 1: Nature, Addresses, and Lectures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 64. 17. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), 6:112. 18. Emerson, “Literary Ethics,” 105 – 6. 19. See also a more recent inheritance of this Emersonian attunement, in Annie Dillard’s “Life on the Rocks,” where she recalls the Charles Darwin who “gave us time. Before Darwin (and Huxley, Wallace, etc.) there was in the nineteenth century what must have been a fairly nauseating period: people knew about fossils of extinct species, but did not yet know about organic evolution. They thought the fossils were litter from a series of past creations. At any rate, for many, this creation, the world as we know it, had begun in 4004 B.C., a date set by Irish Archbishop James Ussher in the seventeenth century. We were all crouched in a small room against the comforting back wall, awaiting the millennium which had been gathering impetus since Adam and Eve. Up there was a universe, and down here would be a small strip of man come and gone, created, taught, redeemed, and gathered up in a bright twinkling,” in Teaching a Stone to Talk (New York: Harper Perennial, 2013), 121.

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and calculating scientism so often conjured under the heading of the secular and related terms. Indeed, it calls our attention instead to an unknowing condition of our thinking nature, whose experience for Emerson opposes the logic, and pretense, of expertise. If the expert is known by the claim to effectiveness, itself the function of a calculative precision and its power to grasp and control, experience is grounded for this American thinker in a measureless reception thanks to which we always think without fully knowing or controlling, and surely without containing, the grounds and conditions of our thinking. To see the role that is played in such thinking by the intimate strangeness of nature is to see that, and how, Emerson deviates from influential modern conceptions both of nature (as realm of the calculable) and of thinking (as self-positing and calculating certainty). Nature hates calculators, Emerson contends, and we both misunderstand the nature of thinking and fail in our thinking of nature when we demand to see too quickly and too clearly our thinking’s effects. “It is pitiful,” Emerson contends in “Experience” (1844), “to demand a result” of one’s thinking and writing “on this town and county, an overt effect on the instant month and year,” and it is thus a “fruit” “that I should not ask for a rash effect from meditations, counsels, and the hiving of truths.”20 Much like Heidegger, Emerson takes genuine thinking— as reception and response and wonder more than as positing and grasping and controlling— to stand at odds with the calculating rationality that dominates modern metaphysics from Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason and Descartes’s self-certain cogito through today’s research universities and schools of engineering. The dream of a self-founding and self-certain thinking, like the dream of giving sufficient reasons, is countered by Emerson’s contention (citing Sophocles’s Antigone) that “neither now nor yesterday began these thoughts . . . nor yet can a man be found who their first entrance knew” (E 312). While many today assume that “the secular” is fundamentally aligned or even identical with the calculating rationality and technological power that are fetishized in our cultures and cults of expertise, Emerson contradicts that assumption through his appeal to a secular thinking, and to a thinking of the secular, not characterized by effectiveness and control so much as conditioned by unknowing and the incalculable. It is pitiful to demand results, he contends, and a “hankering after an overt and practical effect” of thinking amounts to “apostasy” because “the effect” of thinking “is deep and secular 20. Emerson, “Experience,” in Emerson’s Essays: First and Second Series Complete in One Volume, intro. Irwin Edman (New York: Harper and Row, 1926, 1951), 321. Hereafter cited parenthetically as E, page number.

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as the cause. It works on periods in which mortal lifetime is lost” (E 321). Far, then, from the self-assertive, scientistic, or even idolatrous arrogance of a closed world system with its buffered selves, the sense of the secular to which Emerson here appeals is the sense of a natural, temporal immensity and hence of an immeasurable strangeness in which we, living a mortal lifetime, nonetheless participate intimately— through movements, which we ourselves never fully comprehend, of reception and of bestowal. Resistant as much to providential fulfillments and world-historical recollections (from Augustine to his “secular” translation in Hegel) as it is to the masterful aspirations of modernity’s calculating rationality and technoscience (secularity as science, and vice versa), this thinking of the secular in Emerson is rooted in an experience of our finitude that involves not simply our inevitable unknowing but the recurrent trial and acknowledgment of such unknowing as a condition of thought. “I know better than to claim any completeness for my picture,” Emerson writes in opening the paragraph from “Experience” where he treats the cause and effect of thinking as secular. “I am a fragment, and this  is a fragment of me. I can very confidently announce one or the other law, which throws itself into relief and form, but I am too young yet by some ages to compile a code” (E 321). By ages (saecula) I am too young, Emerson suggests, because, and insofar as, I receive and transmit, through my thinking, temporal depths and currents that I neither ground nor ever catch up with. While framed in these temporal terms of a secular nature, the unknowing that Emerson here signals involves also gestures of thought and expression that are reminiscent of mystical theology and its attentiveness to the paradoxes of “unsaying” or apophasis. Within Emerson’s apophatic secularity, the “baffled intellect,” “kneeling before this cause, which refuses to be named,” must pass, just because of such refusal, through an open multiplicity of names and symbols—“Fortune, Minerva, Muse, Holy Ghost,” water, air, thought, fire, love— eventually to arrive at “Being.” The name of Being, Emerson holds, amounts not to an idol of the cogitating ego, nor to some highest because most adequate name where essence and existence coincide, but to an avowal wherein we “confess that we have arrived as far as we can go” before the “vast-flowing vigor” (whose naming in this latter case Emerson borrows from Mencius) (E 313). If the name of Being involves a confession, however, such confession is less the admission of a morally charged shortcoming or failure, and it is more the expression— and experience— of a finite being’s wonder and joy before the immeasurable power that gives, by invisible channels, ever more life: “Suffice it for the joy of the universe,” he writes, “that we have not arrived [with our confession of unknowing] at a wall, but at inter-

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minable oceans. Our life seems not present, so much as prospective; not for the affairs on which it is wasted, but as a hint of vast-flowing vigor” (E 313). The coimplication of (kataphatic) naming and of (apophatic) unnaming, or of dissemination and erasure, corresponds in Emerson— as well before him in the traditions of Dionysius, Eriugena, Eckhart, and Cusa— to a coimplication of immanence and transcendence, according to which the infinite proves to be transcendent, or distinct, thanks to its incomprehensible immanence, or absolute indistinction. It is always elsewhere, never captured here, because so excessively present everywhere. “The method of nature,” Emerson writes, in his address of that title to the Society of Adelphi at thenWaterville (now Colby) College, who could ever analyze it? We can never surprise nature in a corner; never find the end of a thread; never tell where to set the first stone. The bird hastens to lay her egg: the egg hastens to be a bird. The wholeness we admire in the order of the world is the result of infinite distribution. Its smoothness is the smoothness of the pitch of the cataract. Its permanence is a perpetual inchoation. Every natural fact is an emanation, and that from which it emanates is an emanation also, and from every emanation is a new emanation.21

In a nature where all is nascent and infant, “all seems just begun; remote aims are in active accomplishment. We can point nowhere to anything final.”22 A perpetual birth and infancy, then, an ever open anticipation, are tied to the immemorially profound age, or secularity, of nature; and just as the effect of my thinking is “deep and secular as the cause,” so I am constituted by, and recurrently refashioned through, movements of receiving and transmitting, of recollecting and anticipating, that are conditioned by insurmountable unknowing. In the “secret of our being,” as Emerson signals in his “Literary Ethics,” we issue from “secular darkness.”23 Neither wholly active nor wholly passive, the human self here is, as Branka Arsić puts it in her illuminating reading of Emerson, “medial.” 24 Like the human as indiscrete image, the medial self in Emerson inherits, and passes on, both more and less than it can ever determine or delimit. The self ’s unknowing of its own ground, which unknowing itself we ignore in our tendency toward the estrangement of familiarity, involves a coincidence of excess and indetermination that falls

21. Emerson, “Method of Nature,” 124. 22. Emerson, “Method of Nature,” 124. 23. Emerson, “Literary Ethics,” 110. 24. See Branka Arsić, On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

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between the intimately strange and the strangely intimate. Construed in temporal terms, this coincidence recalls the neoteny wherein our deepest age and endless youth coincide. The child in Emerson (as in Nietzsche) is never simply young without being, through its secular inheritance, always already immeasurably aged. Or as Emerson writes, “an individual man is a fruit which it cost all the foregoing ages to form and ripen. The history of the genesis or the old mythology repeats itself in the experience of every child.”25 Emerson appeals recurrently to the child, and the spirit of the child is essential to his understanding of the student, whose capacity for learning— something inherent to thinking itself for Emerson— depends on the student’s indetermination and incompletion. As Cavell emphasizes in “An Emerson Mood,” the 1980 Scholar’s Day address that he delivered at Kalamazoo College, and which he frames in relation to the address Emerson himself delivered— as “The American Scholar”— to an audience of graduating Harvard students that included Thoreau, the “young scholar or student” constitutes for Emerson both “his immediate and constant audience” and the “best part, even the essential, of the human being.” The condition of the student, in her youth, is not a stage we pass through, in order eventually to exit; it is rather “a capacity residing in each human being,”26 a potentiality integral to our nature, which means our ongoing birth. However, while we are each and all by nature students and children, we can, and we do, tend at the same time to flee or to forget that nature and its openness. Emerson describes and understands such a tendency most notably in terms of our loss or failure of heart. The fainting heart of men seems clearly for Emerson one of the spreading ailments of modern life in its tendency toward the busy habits of mass society. A loss of heart, and thus of the individual, in the crowd, furthermore, leaves at stake nothing less than the world and its ongoing renewal or recreation, for “we see young men who owe us a new world,” as Emerson writes in “Experience,” “so readily and lavishly they promise, but they never acquit the debt; they die young and dodge the account: or if they live, they lose themselves in the crowd” (E 297). We who are students, and young, the suggestion seems to be, owe to our teachers and elders a new world, or the new-

25. Emerson, “Method of Nature,” 122, cited in Graham Parke’s illuminating essay, “‘Floods of Life’ around ‘Granite of Fate’: Emerson and Nietzsche as Thinkers of Nature,” in Emerson/ Nietzsche, ed. Michael Lopez, a number of ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance (Pullman, WA, 1998): 237, n. 9. 26. Stanley Cavell, “An Emerson Mood,” in The Senses of Walden: An Expanded Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 159.

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ness that makes for a world; and if we have not met or even acknowledged our debt, instead losing ourselves in the crowd, this likely stems from our lack or failure of heart (which can surely burden or break a teacher’s heart). And we who are teachers, and older, holding such an expectation of the young (if we still have the heart to do so), also owe them a teaching that might quicken and lift the heart that a new world calls for—“the sacred affirmative” (as Emerson calls it), “the heart for a new creation” (Cavell).27 Emerson speaks on these matters of student and teacher, significantly, in contexts of address to actual college and divinity students, perhaps most famously in “The American Scholar” (1837) and “Divinity School Address” (1838) at Harvard but also in multiple other texts such as “Literary Ethics” (Dartmouth, 1838), “Method of Nature” (Waterville, 1841), “Address to the Adelphic Union of Williamstown College” (1854), and “Address to the Social Union of Amherst College” (1855). In these relations of address Emerson speaks not only on or about the heart, and not only from it, but also to the heart. Because our flight from the student in us is a matter of the heart, Emerson takes the fundamental work of a true teacher as identical to that of a true preacher: not to instruct but to provoke, not to impart information but to raise and to cheer, literally to encourage “the waiting, fainting hearts of men with new hope and new revelation.”28 Such work of encouragement, while put into textual operation here in the academic context, is for Emerson a work that can, and should, take place most anywhere; and the assumption that such work is limited to recognizable schools, or pulpits, is not only misguided, but it can tend toward just the thoughtlessness that the work in question is meant to avert. Hence Emerson frames the matter of the teacher in the form of a question, and the question of the teacher as one of seeking; for if we knew too fully ahead of time just who the teacher is, where the teacher is to be found, and what he or she has to teach, then we would have fallen short already of what learning entails. “What hinders that now, everywhere, in pulpits, in lecture-rooms, in houses, in fields, wherever the invitation of men or your own occasions lead you, you speak the truth, as your life and conscience teach it, and cheer the waiting, fainting hearts of men with new hope and a new revelation . . . I look for the new Teacher.”29 If such an effort to cheer and raise the heart is for Emerson a fundamental task of teaching, such teaching

27. Cavell, “Thinking of Emerson,” 133. 28. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Divinity School Address,” in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 1: Nature, Addresses, and Lectures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 92. 29. Emerson, “Divinity School Address,” 92.

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is called for exactly because the heart is prone to loss or failure, especially in a modernity whose principles of management can leave the young in disgust (itself, perhaps, at least a small sign of hope, and heart). This is why Emerson will insist that colleges serve us “highly” only “when they aim not to drill but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and, by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame.”30 This work of teaching, we should note, is for Emerson one that nature also can do, if we can hear its “perpetual invitation to the study of the world.”31 While the scholar “in the right state” is “man thinking,”32 it is first of all nature that calls to him— through its beauty and its mystery, and thereby through its “perpetual admonition to us” that “the world is new, untried,”33 and hence ever still unknown and to be learned. Nature thus speaks in Emerson much like the call of God in Dionysius, which operates in and through the beauty of a cosmos that paradoxically reveals that God’s concealment (Dionysius plays in this direction on the resonance in Greek between the beautiful, to kalon, and the verb to call, kaleō, kalein). Thus reminding us that we are by nature students, nature thereby opens us anew to the mystery that we also remain to ourselves. Reminiscent too, then, of the interplay between mystical theology and mystical anthropology in the traditions of Gregory, Eriugena, and Cusa, the mystery of nature in Emerson can serve as the luminously obscure mirror of our own mystery: In this view of him, as Man Thinking, the whole theory of his office is contained. Him nature solicits, with all her placid, all her monitory pictures. Him the past instructs. Him the future invites. Is not, indeed, every man a student, and do not all things exist for the student’s behoof ? . . . The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun; and, after sunset, night and the stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows. Every day, men and women, beholding and beholden. The scholar must needs stand wistful and admiring before this great spectacle. He must settle its value in his mind. What is nature to him? There is never a beginning, there is never an end to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself. Therein it resembles his own spirit, whose beginning, whose ending, he can never find— so entire, so boundless. Far too, as her splendors shine, system on system shooting like rays, upward, downward, without center, without circumference,— in the 30. Emerson, “American Scholar,” 58. 31. Emerson, “Uses,” 2. 32. Emerson, “American Scholar,” 52. 33. Emerson, “Literary Ethics,” 105.

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mass and in the particle nature hastens to render account of herself to the mind.34

“And, in fine,” Emerson writes a page after this evocation of mystical tradition’s infinite sphere,35 “the ancient precept, ‘Know thyself,’ and the modern precept, ‘Study nature,’ become at last one maxim.” The thinker’s mind, to draw out the implication, finds its image or mirror in nature (or vice versa) only insofar as the mind thinks its own incomprehensible character. And in the degree that the thinker is able to think his own boundless spirit in a thinking of nature, he is “the world’s eye. He is the world’s heart.” Nothing less than the world is at stake in this thinking of the heart; and such thinking calls for the kind of heart— or self-trust— for which “the deeper he dives into his privatest secretest presentiment— to his wonder he finds, this is the most acceptable, most public, and universally true.”36 To be a student calls for readiness to be born or to feel a new heart beating, and we therefore confront a threat to the student dwelling essentially in all of us through that loss of heart we can suffer in the weariness (or jadedness or disappointment or despondency) not simply of age but of the routine, and the crowd, and their expert management, whatever one’s age. Much like Weber after him, Emerson clearly sensed in the students of his day, and no doubt suffered himself, a loss of heart in face of the “principles by which the world is managed,” a faintness that deprives one of the energy— and the time— to resist, or to interrupt, the automatic march, and thereby to keep open or to reopen the time we’d need for the reticence and quiet, patience and unknowing, not to mention the stumbling and self-doubt and the trouble of heart that learning and thinking entail. And like the Weber who will highlight a scientist’s need for the passion that alone will carry him through

34. Emerson, “American Scholar,” 54. 35. Along lines resembling Umberto Eco’s reading of Finnegans Wake, Cavell takes the infinite circle (which he misattributes to Augustine) to be a self-image for the Emersonian essay as such: “a something ‘whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere’. . . . a finite object that yields an infinite response”; in Stanley Cavell, “Finding as Founding,” in This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein (Albuquerque: Living Batch Press, 1989), 101. For informative studies of the infinite sphere’s history, see Dietrich Mahnke, Unendliche Sphäre und Allmittelpunkt (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1966; Faksimile-Neudruck der Ausgabe Halle, 1937), and Georges Poulet, Les Métamorphoses du cercle (Paris: Plon, 1961); and for my own take on its relation to theological and technological perspectives on creativity, broadly, and in Finnegans Wake, specifically, see my Indiscrete Image. 36. Emerson, “American Scholar,” 55, 62, 63.

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the countless hours and inevitable disappointment, Emerson understands well the prices paid by the scholar, for he, in his private observatory, cataloguing obscure and nebulous stars of the human mind, which as yet no man has thought of as such,— watching days and months, sometimes, for a few facts; correcting still his old records;— must relinquish display and immediate fame. In the long period of his preparation, he must betray often an ignorance and shiftlessness in popular arts, incurring the disdain of the able who shoulder him aside. Long must he stammer in his speech; often forego the living for the dead. Worse yet, he must accept— how often! poverty and solitude. For the ease and pleasure of treading the old road, accepting the fashions, the education, the religion of society, he takes the cross of making his own, and of course the self-accusation, the faint heart, the frequent uncertainty and loss of time which are the nettles and tangling vines in the way of the self-relying and self-directed; and the state of virtual hostility in which he seems to stand to society, and especially to educated society.37

A crucial mediator between Emerson and Weber (who are not all that often mentioned in the same breath) is surely Nietzsche, who as Cavell convincingly suggests, is a decisive link also between Emerson and Heidegger. And the indebtedness and kinship of Nietzsche to Emerson are perhaps nowhere more striking than in the role that both attribute to the heart in education and, hence, in genuine thinking. This thinking about the heart’s role in education, furthermore, is developed by Nietzsche as much as by Emerson from within a worry that in the habit and haste of our age, we tend to lose the singularity of our time and life: our essential youth, and its openness to the new day, or dawn, and to their creative possibility. For Nietzsche and Emerson both, indeed, a signal danger of our modern time is its tendency not to see that “this time, like all times, is a good one, if we but know what to do with it.”38 Can it be that our heart’s education to time, or to the day, today, will have been foremost among the stakes of Nietzsche’s thinking about the death of God, and subsequently in our experience of the secular today? Much as Weber’s “Science as a Vocation,” in its diagnosis of modernity and its theses surrounding “disenchantment,” is a text central to secularization debate while proving to be also, fundamentally, a text about teaching and learning, so Nietzsche’s early text on education, “Schopenhauer as Educator,” is one whose critical diagnosis of modern secularization [Verweltlichung] frames a treatment of education’s affective stakes— while doing so 37. Emerson, “American Scholar,” 62. 38. Emerson, “American Scholar,” 67.

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along lines bearing fundamentally on later texts concerning the death of God. The symptoms to which “Schopenhauer as Educator” points in its diagnosis of a modern secularization— not only that the “waters of religion are ebbing away and leaving behind swamps or stagnant pools” but also that the sciences are being “pursued without any restraint and in a spirit of the blindest laissez faire” and that “the educated classes and states are being swept along by a hugely contemptible money economy”39— are understood by Nietzsche, as by Emerson before him, in terms of the heart’s orientation. Even more pointedly, Nietzsche sees in this modernity a thoughtlessness that stands in equivalence with a poverty of love: “The world has never been more worldly,” he writes, “never poorer in love and goodness [nie ärmer an Liebe und Güte]. The educated classes are no longer lighthouses or refuges in the midst of this turmoil of secularization; they themselves grow daily more restless, thoughtless, and loveless [sie selben werden täglich unruhiger, gedanken- und liebeloser]” (SE 148; 362). A paradox of this restless age’s haste, Nietzsche contends, is that the age “kills time,” and in doing so, it stifles the youthful heart in its singularity, or what Emerson and Nietzsche both might call its genius. A fundamental work of the educator, then, will be to liberate, or awaken, or enliven, that youthful heart of genius: And if it is true to say of the lazy that they kill time, then it is greatly to be feared that an era which sees its salvation in public opinion, that is to say private laziness, is a time that really will be killed: I mean struck out of the history of the true liberation of life. . . . On the other hand, how right it is for those who do not feel themselves to be citizens of this time to harbour great hopes; for if they were citizens of this time they too would be helping to kill their time and so perish with it— while their desire is rather to awaken their time to life and so live on themselves in this awakened life. (SE 128; 334 – 35)

In sharp distinction from the Augustine for whom life is truly life only if lived in the present assurance of a future security in eternal beatitude, and by contrast likewise with the Tolstoy who may despair before modern time’s never-ending forward passage, Nietzsche affirms here the singularity of a lifetime precisely in its finitude and transience. For “even if the future gave us no cause for hope— the fact of our existing at all in this here-and-now must

39. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as Educator,” in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 148; “Schopenhauer als Erzieher,” in Nietzsche Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Dritte Abteilung (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1972), 1:362. Hereafter cited parenthetically as SE, English page number; German page number.

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be the strongest incentive to us to live according to our own laws and standards,” he writes, then elaborating along lines that resonate with Emerson’s thinking both about our emergence from secular darkness and about our transience: “the inexplicable fact that we live precisely today, when we had all infinite time to come into existence, that we possess only a shortlived today in which to demonstrate why and to what end we came into existence now and at no other time” (SE 128; 335). The singular wonder of our existence, bound to this time and no other, and threatened by the thoughtless haste and habit of a loveless modernity that kills time, calls, then, for a sense of responsibility in just the measure that we are attuned to its inevitable passing and loss: “We are responsible to ourselves for our own existence; consequently we want to be the true helmsman of this existence and refuse to allow our existence to resemble a mindless act of chance. One has to take a somewhat bold and dangerous line with this existence: especially as, whatever happens, we are bound to lose it” (SE 128; 335). Our awakening to the inevitable loss of a singular, finite, and transient existence is for Nietzsche, or at least should be, not a threat to the fullness and meaning of life but instead a liberation from the chains of fear and convention, an awakening to, and from, our flight from ourselves. “The man who does not wish to belong to the mass needs only to cease taking himself easily; let him follow his conscience, which calls to him: ‘Be your self! All you are now doing, thinking, desiring, is not you yourself ’” (SE 127; 334). We can note here that the voice of conscience speaking to the alienated self speaks the intention of love as we saw Augustine define it: that the self be itself. And likewise the alienation to which that voice speaks is a matter of the heart’s misdirection. The alienation to which Nietzsche here points recalls, indeed, and notably in its doubled character, both the alienation we’ve explored in precursors like Emerson and Augustine and the alienation of an heir like Heidegger— for all of whom the bind of alienation is, exactly, that it does not recognize itself. For Nietzsche, it is not simply that in my busy haste and conformity I hide from myself, but also that I hide that very haste, in which I give my heart away to that which is not my self: In individual moments we all know how the most elaborate arrangements of our life are made only so as to flee from the tasks we actually ought to be performing, how we would like to hide our head somewhere as though our hundred-eyed conscience could not find us out there, how we hasten to give our heart away to the state, to money-making, to sociability or science merely so as no longer to possess it ourselves, how we labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because to us it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal

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because everyone is in flight from himself; universal too the shy concealment of this haste . . . (SE 158; 375; translation modified)

Just as our hasty flight-from-self appears here as a function of the heart’s giving itself too quickly away, so the heart and its love will play a critical role in returning the self to itself, for “in his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that no imaginable chance will for a second time gather into a unity so strangely variegated an assortment as he is: he knows it but he hides it like a bad conscience— why? From fear of his neighbor, who demands conventionality and cloaks himself with it” (SE 127; 33). Articulating inchoately the life test that might be occasioned by thought of the eternal return, Nietzsche notes that for the self to acknowledge itself and eventually discover its “law,” the self ’s youthful soul should reflect upon the course of its loves, from within the agedness of whatever life it has lived: “Let the youthful soul look back on life with the question: what have you truly loved up to now, what has drawn your soul aloft, what has mastered it and at the same time blessed it? Set up these revered objects before you and perhaps their nature and their sequence will give you a law, a fundamental law of your own true self ” (SE 129; 336). Far from a simple return to the closed interior of an authentic self discretely possessing itself, the return to self that may be prompted by this inquiry of the youthful soul into the past of its loves, and hence into its age, is a return only to a movement that defines the self as self, a movement of love through which the self finds or becomes itself only by passing or standingout beyond itself, in a kind of exposure to the outward that alone gives one inwardly to oneself here and now. Nietzsche’s formulations on this interplay of inward and outward, while presaging his later understandings of the overman, recall strikingly also the logic of heart we’ve been tracing from Augustine through Heidegger and his readers: “Compare these objects one with another, see how one completes, expands, surpasses, transfigures another, how they constitute a stepladder upon which you have clambered up to yourself as you are now; for your true nature lies, not concealed deep within you, but immeasurably high above you or at least above that which you usually take yourself to be” (SE 129; 336 – 37). While my true nature is to be found high above— beyond and outside— myself, my self-loss can also entail a bind to the outside, but in the mode of addiction to the superficiality of public opinion. “There exists no more repulsive and desolate creature in the world,” Nietzsche writes, “than the man who has evaded his genius and who now looks furtively to left and right, behind him and all about him. In the end such a man becomes impossible to get

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hold of, since he is wholly exterior, without kernel” (SE 128; 334). While my preoccupation with the externality of public opinion leaves me “in” myself without kernel, the liberation of self at stake in education for Nietzsche is a liberation that gives me some kernel, or a genuine interiority, only insofar as it binds me to an outside and beyond that cuts across me in a singular way. It frees me up from the “I” that I all too easily accept as myself, under the pressure and opinionated gaze of others: “there are moments and as it were bright sparks of the fire of love in whose light we cease to understand the word ‘I,’ there lies something beyond our being which at these moments moves across into it, and we are thus possessed of a heartfelt longing for bridges between here and there” (SE 161; 378 – 79). If it is the heart that presses me toward, and binds me inwardly to, what is high above me, the educator, as liberator, speaks fundamentally to that heart, and thus does the work both of nature and of culture. For while my “nature” stands high above me, it is “culture” that provokes and sustains the dissatisfaction that drives me beyond myself— but in what is, again, strikingly, a movement of love. To have a self is to move beyond oneself, and the liberation of self to itself is liberation to the self ’s own self-surpassing. “And the young person,” Nietzsche writes in a tone rather foreign to dominant trends of education today, should be taught to regard himself as a failed work of nature but at the same time as a witness to the grandiose and marvelous intentions of this artist: nature has done badly, he should say to himself; but I will honour its great intentions by serving it so that one day it may do better. By coming to this resolve he places himself within the circle of culture; for culture is the child of each individual’s self-knowledge and dissatisfaction with himself. Anybody who believes in culture is thereby saying: “I see above me something higher and more human than I am; let everyone help me to attain it, as I will help everyone who knows and suffers as I do: so that at last the man may appear who feels himself perfect and boundless in knowledge and love, perception and power, and who in his completeness is at one with nature, judge and evaluator of things.” (SE 162 – 63; 381)

If we read these couples in apposition— knowledge and love, perception and power—then the key to power is less knowledge than love. Increase in power, from this perspective, would mean above all increase in love, itself understood, and lived, as involving essentially our creative, and growing, capacity for self-surpassing or recurrent birth. Much as Emerson holds that the teacher can only provoke, not instruct, Nietzsche suggests that it remains “impossible to teach” love— because learning already requires love; for it is “love alone” that “can bestow on the soul, not only a clear, discriminating

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and self-contemptuous view of itself, but also the desire to look beyond itself and to seek with all its might for a higher self as yet still concealed from it” (SE 163; 381). The claim that love plays a singular and indispensable role in the educative work of liberation and creative self-surpassing is one we can read also, practically word for word, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, whose chapter on “The Way of the Creator” has Zarathustra tell the “lonely one” or “solitary” that “you are going the way of the lover: yourself do you love, and therefore you despise yourself, as only the lover can despise. The lover wants to create because he despises! What does he know of love who has not had to despise precisely what he loved! With your love go into your isolation, and with your creating, my brother . . . With my tears go into your isolation, my brother. I love him who wants to create beyond himself and thereby perishes.”40 The one famous for pronouncing the death of God in Thus Spoke Zarathustra is one who speaks as teacher and lover. Indeed, while perhaps most famous as one of Nietzsche’s richest and the most extended explorations of the untimely news that God is dead, Thus Spoke Zarathustra is also, along lines tied essentially to that news, fundamentally a treatment of awakening to the day through teaching, learning, and their ground in love. Zarathustra’s teaching, we should note, entails a love speaking to love, and thus a wanting to create that speaks to, or awakens, a wanting to create. And if the self-surpassing entailed in creation demands a measure of self-despising, such despising, as Nietzsche understands it already in “Schopenhauer as Educator,” involves little of the suffocating, paralyzing, or castrating feelings of self-hatred— or judgmental no-saying— that he associates with Christianity’s metaphysics of the hangman. The despising intends not to distress the self, or the beloved other, but to encourage;41 it draws one out of one’s own narrowness, and into 40. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Graham Parkes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 205. 41. “Thus only he who has attached his heart to some great man receives thereby the first consecration to culture; the sign of that consecration is that one is ashamed of oneself without any accompanying feeling of distress, that one comes to hate one’s own narrowness and shriveled nature, that one has a feeling of sympathy for the genius who again and again drags himself up out of our dryness and apathy and the same feeling in anticipation for all those who are still struggling and evolving, with the profoundest conviction that almost everywhere we encounter nature pressing towards man and again and again failing to achieve him, yet everywhere succeeding in producing the most marvelous beginnings” (SE 163; 381). Emerson seems surely to have been such an educator for Nietzsche, as he was also, we might note, for James A. Garfield, perhaps here appearing for the first time in such proximity to the great German thinker: as Garfield remarked after hearing Emerson speak on “the scholar” at Williamstown College, this “most startlingly original thinker” that Garfield had ever heard made him “feel small and insig-

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sympathy with the spirit of openness, hope, and awakening to the new that Nietzsche, like Emerson, understands as genius (and as something we are all endowed with). As Cavell puts it with respect to the world, so we can put it with respect to the self: the perfectionism shared by Nietzsche with Emerson both wants the self and wants it to change.42 If one can be struck here in Nietzsche by the intimate interplay— found also in Emerson— of nature and culture in the movement whereby self comes to itself, or becomes itself, in passing beyond itself, or comes to itself by passing toward another instantiation of its own ongoing self-surpassing, one can be struck in similar ways by the resonance of this thinking with a construal of nature— or more exactly phusis— that one finds in Heidegger and his reading of Aristotle. Much like the Dasein who comes to itself or has itself only in ex-isting, and thus only in standing out beyond itself toward a possibility of itself, so phusis, Heidegger suggests in a text from 1939, “is a ‘going’ in the sense of a going-forth towards a going-forth, and in this sense it is indeed a going back into itself, i.e., the self to which it returns remains a going-forth. The merely spatial image of a circle is essentially inadequate because this going-forth that goes back into itself precisely lets something go forth from which and to which going-forth is in each instance on the way [Die phusis ist Gang als Aufgang zum Aufgehen und so allerdings ein In-sich-zurück-Gehen, zu sich, das ein Aufgehen bleibt. Das nur räumliche Bild des Kreisens reicht wesenhaft nicht zu, weil dieser in sich zurückgehende Aufgang gerade aufgehen läßt Solches, von dem, zu dem der Aufgang je unterwegs ist].”43 While Heidegger signals elsewhere that “being on the way” finds an essential name in love, or eros, he suggests here that being on the way— toward a being on the way— is named also by phusis, which he reads in turn as another name for the Being of beings. Such a proximity of Being and loving Heidegger

nificant to hear him”— but from that feeling “he dated his intellectual life”; editors’ introduction to Emerson, “An Address to the Adelphic Union of Williamstown College, 15 August 1854,” in The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 1: 1843 – 1854, ed. Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 348. 42. See Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 18: “What I call Emersonian perfectionism I understand to propose that one’s quarrel with the world need not be settled, nor cynically set aside as unsettlable. It is a condition in which you can at once want the world and want it to change.” 43. Martin Heidegger, “On the Essence and Concept of Phusis in Aristotle’s Physics B, I,” trans. Thomas Sheehan, in Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 224; Wegmarken, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2013), 293.

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himself highlights within the Heraclitean thought that phusis/Being “loves to hide” or loves to conceal itself (phusis kruptesthai philei). The self-hiding of Being, he will say in reading the famous Heraclitean fragment, is not to be overcome, as if behind or beyond the hiding we would somehow find Being in itself; instead, self-hiding is inherent to the self-disclosing movement of phusis/Being, and that movement belongs to what Heidegger calls the predilection or the fore-love, that is, the Vor-liebe, of Being.44 Like the culture, then, that realizes nature in Nietzsche, or that brings us more truly into nature in Emerson, the culture, that is, whose basic movement is one of love; so phusis for Heidegger, which brings the mystery of Being to light, includes the anticipatory movement of love at its core. If nature consists in the things to be born (natura, future participle of nasci, to be born) it remains essentially pregnant (likely from prae-, before, and, gnasci, to be born), and the love that ever anticipates such birth is a predilection. Are such a love and its anticipation not inherent to the work and movement of education? Nietzsche and Heidegger both give us ground to think so (as does already, I’d insist, any genuine experience of education). Much as in Nietzsche, where the education essential to culture liberates me to be myself— by passing to my own self-surpassing— so in Heidegger teaching will be understood as a “letting” or enabling whose logic seems equivalent to that of the letting-be that Heidegger also names, following Augustine, love. Noting the sharp difference between the famous professor and the genuine teacher (a difference whose analogues we can note already in Emerson’s distinction between the pedant and the scholar as man thinking, or Nietzsche’s between the philosophy professor and the philosopher), Heidegger emphasizes— in his first course taught after his engagement with Nazism— that the real difficulty of teaching has to do not with the accumulation, retention, and transmission of information, or knowledge as “content” (about which

44. “Self-hiding belongs to the predilection [Vor-liebe] of Being; i.e., it belongs to that wherein being has secured its essence” (Pathmarks, 229; Wegmarken, 300). In Mindfulness (Besinnung), a text from the same period (1938 – 39), Heidegger makes, within a discussion of philosophy as love of wisdom, a similar appeal to the fore-loving of Being: “‘Wisdom’ is foundational knowing-awareness [das wesentliche Wissen]; is in-abiding the truth of be-ing [die Inständigkeit in der Wahrheit des Seyns]. Hence that ‘love’ loves be-ing in a unique ‘fore-loving’ [Vor-liebe]. This: that be-ing ‘be’ is this love’s beloved. What matters to this beloved, to its truth and its grounding, is the will to foundational knowing-awareness” (Mindfulness, 52; Besinnung, 63). For an excellent study of the long, rich history of reflection on the self-hiding of nature, see Pierre Hadot, Le voile d’Isis: Essai sur l’histoire de l ’idée de nature (Paris: Gallimard, 2004); The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

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educators today can speak with as little irony as the entrepreneurs), but with the capacity of the teacher to learn. If, as Heidegger claims, “to learn” means, and calls us, “to make everything we do answer to whatever essentials address themselves to us at a given time [Lernen heißt: das Tun und Lassen zu dem in die Entsprechung bringen, was sich jeweils an Wesenhaftem uns zuspricht],” then the essential task of the teacher is to learn one thing: to let learn. “Teaching is even more difficult than learning,” he writes. “We know that; but we rarely think about it. And why is teaching more difficult than learning? Not because the teacher must have a larger store of information, and have it always ready. Teaching is more difficult than learning because what teaching calls for is this: to let learn. The real teacher, in fact, lets nothing else be learned than— learning [Das Lehren ist noch schwieriger als das Lernen. Man weiß das wohl; aber man bedenkt es selten. Weshalb ist das Lehren schwerer als das Lernen? Nicht deshalb, weil der Lehrer die grössere Summe von Kenntnissen besitzen und sie jederzeit bereit haben muß. Das Lehren ist darum schwerer als das Lernen weil das Lehren heißt: lernen lassen. Der eigentliche Lehrer läßt sogar nichts anderes lernen als— das Lernen].”45 If teaching entails at bottom a learning that is itself a learning to let learn, we should read in the logic— and practice— of such a “letting” that form of care, or love, analyzed in Being and Time as the solicitude, or care for others, that “leaps ahead.” Such solicitude, recall, does not leap in for the other, to take over her position and deal with her concerns for her, in order then to hand them back to her as already dealt with and thus as readily available or on hand; the solicitude that leaps ahead aims not to put at the other’s disposal some actuality that she might readily use or exploit. Rather it aims to enable in the other her own possibility, a being-able that the other might take up and inhabit as distinctively her own; such enabling aims to cultivate in the student the possibility of her own existence, according to which she comes to herself, as herself, by standing out beyond herself, in relation to a further possibility of herself, or to another being-able that is (or can be) distinctively hers. While the existential weight of Heidegger’s distinction between leaping-in and leaping-ahead can be intuited especially well in relation to teaching— as seen both here in Heidegger and also, as we noted in our introduction, in Weber— it can likewise be sensed in especially illuminating ways with respect to parenting. And it is surely Emerson the parent, as much as Emerson the teacher, preacher, or writer, who speaks to us of the heart’s education. More pointedly, it is Emerson the bereaved parent. 45. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, 14, 15; Was Heißt Denken?, 49, 50.

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Cavell has richly underscored the senses in which thinking, for Emerson, means being at a loss, such that the essential awakening, or morning, to which thought aspires would be tied intimately to mourning as grieving. Insofar as thinking is for Emerson inseparable from learning, this tie Cavell suggests between thinking and grieving would be deeply consistent with Emerson’s two claims that the spirit of the child is the spirit of all learning and that “sorrow makes us all children again,— destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest knows nothing.”46 At one level we might first see in Emerson’s grief a resistance to thinking, and precisely in its tie to learning, insofar as Emerson grieves “that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature” (E 296), or insofar as he grieves chiefly that he cannot grieve (as he suggests in a letter written shortly after son Waldo’s death). At another level, and on the closer consideration that Cavell encourages, the not of Emerson’s inability to grieve, or the nothing he grieves that grief can teach him, or the nothing that the wisest knows when sorrow makes him again a child, is exactly what calls for thinking— in the sense that Heidegger gives to this question (Was heißt Denken?) when he emphasizes that what is most worthy of thought, or most thought provoking (bedenklich, which means also “troubling” or “worrisome”), is that we are not yet thinking. This “not yet,” Heidegger leads us to see, is inherent to thinking; it is not to be annuled or overcome by thinking.47 Hence, when we too readily or too clearly or too assuredly assume ourselves to be thinking (as we might tend to do, for example, in the busyness of our university research programs, or in our TED talks), then we are not— because we have missed the effectively apophatic logic (not Heidegger’s terminology) that defines that thinking of the heart which grieving surely must be. Some readers find the coldest of claims in Emerson’s suggestion that grief can teach him nothing, or in his preceding assertion that in the death of his son Emerson seems to have lost no more than “a beautiful estate” and that, “not touched or scarred by the calamity,” he “cannot get it nearer” to himself (E 295). Rather than as a sign of some shocking coldness or deplorable lack of tragic sense, however, we can well read this claim according to the (apophatic) 46. Emerson, Journals, 6:153. 47. This is central to Heidegger’s construal of thinking as a being “on the way,” itself a decisive element of Heidegger for Cavell. See, e.g., What Is Called Thinking?: “The assertion says, what is most thought-provoking is that we are still not thinking. The assertion says neither that we are no longer thinking, nor does it say roundly that we are not thinking at all. The words ‘still not,’ spoken thoughtfully, suggest that we are already on our way toward thinking, presumably from a great distance, not only on our way toward thinking as a conduct some day to be practiced, but on our way within thinking, on the way of thinking” (30).

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logic of heart— and of nature— that we’ve been tracing in these pages. For what, to the loving parent, could be more inward, more piercingly evident and unavoidable, what could be more intimate, than his or her grieving the beloved child now lost? And yet, at the same time, and for the same reasons, what must remain more terribly strange, more inaccessible, unbelievable, or simply unthinkable, than the child’s death? As the matter of heart that it surely is (“you have my whole heart,” the father says in McCarthy), the child’s death would thus prove inexpressibly intimate and penetrating, piercing and marking the parent more deeply and inwardly than could be measured, conceived, or spoken (which it does, in fact, from the moment of birth, or even conception, itself ); and that death would thus prove also, in that measureless measure, inaccessibly distant. An interpretation of Emerson’s troubling (and thought-provoking) lines on grief according to this paradoxical logic of the heart is enhanced by Sharon Cameron’s astute and influential reading of the whole text of Emerson’s “Experience”: while it can seem that the text opens with a shocking disavowal of grief, Emerson’s setting the son and his mourning apart, as if they touch Emerson no more than some lost property, grief fails to appear distinctly in the text much rather because it is so pervasively, and thus indistinctly, present; it generates— like the indistinct God his world— all of the essay, in its each and every topic. Reading “Experience” as elegy, Cameron argues that “grief is the essay’s first cause,” the begetter of all its other subjects. The perception and subsequent charge that grief does not register in it, then, stem in fact from grief ’s ubiquity. The overwhelming and pervasive grief that does befall Emerson upon Waldo’s death— which his journals poignantly attest— thus actually yields “the perception of all experience” as marked by loss and grief, a feeling so extensive that it “overwhelms the bounds of the personal” to the point that grief and experience appear equivalent, and death teaches us “our relation to every event.” 48 Both less and more than the mind could have expected, the death of such a beloved touches me more inwardly, and remains more terribly strange and inaccessible, than I might ever conceive or imagine beforehand (or after the fact). In this, my grieving obeys well that logic according to which what is more interior to me than my innermost (interior intimo meo) is at the same time, in the same sense, more outward than my most outermost (superior summo meo). So discerning our logic of the heart in the logic of grief, we can not only register a condition of sorrow in love, and of love in sorrow, but also 48. Sharon Cameron, “Representing Grief: Emerson’s ‘Experience,’” in her Impersonality: Seven Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 65, 69, 58, 68.

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appreciate the strangeness and unsettled character of the heart to which one often appeals for the assurance of intimacy. Like Augustine with his God, but in the inescapably mortal register, Emerson attests that we can be, and are, “in [the] presence [of grief ] without feeling our relation to it,” and, because we are so, “we must imagine even it.”49 Our “contact” with grief is its “absolute inseparability from every conceivable aspect of experience,” and thus what is closest to us, most deeply “within” us, or pervasively “around” us in our grieving, proves most strange and elusive— inconceivable, unintelligible, and hence demanding that we somehow imagine it. “The essay is,” Cameron elucidates, “a testament to the pervasiveness of a loss so inclusive that it is inseparable from experience itself.”50 In light especially of our engagement in previous chapters with the question of love and mortal singularity in McCarthy, Heidegger, and Heidegger’s readers, I imagine that this inseparable character of Emerson’s grief— its pervasiveness to, or even its in-distinction from, experience itself— may best be understood as stemming from the fact of his child’s insurmountably separated being, a separation that no dialectic overcomes, and which we should see to condition what Emerson describes as the child’s “generous” nature. “The child cannot now be experienced apart from his death,” Cameron lucidly notes, “and, as the essay in its entirety is at pains to inform us, it is just in his death that he cannot be experienced at all.”51 The child is accessible now only through that which is not accessible. Were it possible to stand in for the child in her dying; or were it possible to stand with the child, united, in one and the same death; then things might be otherwise. But as we saw earlier in light as much of McCarthy as of Heidegger, and as Emerson learns through experience and recounts through “Experience,” our access to the mortal and now lost beloved, here the child Waldo, is an access without access. “I have no skill,” Emerson writes to Sarah Clarke a month or two after Waldo’s death, “no ‘nearness’ to the power which has bereaved me of the most beautiful of the children of men. I apprehend nothing of the fact but its bitterness. . . . It is nothing to me but the gloomiest sensible experience to which I have no key, and no consolation, nothing but oblivion and diversion.”52 Referencing the deeply sensible, indeed bodily strain that mourning entails, Emerson’s noting his failure to achieve any nearness to the bitter fact of Waldo’s death signals emphatically the insuperable separation of his own child. Such an emphasis 49. Cameron, 59. 50. Cameron, 57. 51. Cameron, 270. 52. Emerson, quoted in Richardson, 369.

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on the separated being of the child, crucial to Cameron’s interpretation and illuminated well, in its ineffaceable opacity, by the analysis of mortal singularity that we’ve carried out in our previous chapters with McCarthy and Heidegger, resonates also with Cavell’s insightful effort to make sense of Emerson’s shocking claim— that Waldo’s death is caducous— by suggesting that it stems from Emerson’s learning, to his shock, that the child can die and the parent survive. Like Derrida, or any other parent, who thought that he (or she) could not survive the death of his son (or daughter), so perhaps thought Emerson. Had Waldo been who Emerson thought Waldo was, the thinking goes, then surely Waldo’s death would have meant also Emerson’s own. But Waldo died, and Emerson survived, and the fact of his writing attests to that second, unbelievable, fact.53 In light of this latter fact, we might further imagine that the present absence or absent presence of Waldo in the text of “Experience” involves a response to the impossible question (a version of which is posed also by Derrida, in relation to his mother’s dying, while he is writing “Circumfession”) concerning whether and how such writing might betray, or convey, the father’s faithfulness to the child in the child’s death. How, after all, in my faithfulness to what the child’s life meant and to what her death thus now means, could I go on to write or say anything at all about either— as if I could make the inaccessible accessible, the inconceivable conceived, or the measureless measured? By writing or speaking anything at all about losing the child whose life and love meant more to me that I could say, do I not thus obscure, by dint of too much (apparent) light, the thing I should have meant to communicate— something incommunicable? But an opposite question presses with equal validity: given all that the child meant and thus what her death now means, how could I not write or speak about it? How could I write or speak about anything else? To what else of more significance or weight could I possibly give my words— and my time? Much as in the paradoxical bind of the apophatic theologian, so here, my response to the loss seems to demand expression or imagination, even as any word or image falls far short of the omnipresent excess of the loss; every word and image betrays or conceals as much as it conveys or reveals. I must answer responsibly to the loss— and to the person I’ve become through the loss— even as responsibility must acknowledge the shortcoming of every response. This apophatic demand of grief, both to speak and to keep silent, or in Cameron’s language to avow and disavow, can be read to correspond fairly directly to Emerson’s sense of the child’s generosity of nature. “It seems as if 53. See Cavell, “Finding as Founding,” 106.

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I ought to call upon the winds to describe my boy, my fast receding boy, a child of so large and generous a nature that I cannot paint him by specialties, as I might another.”54 Naming in its multiple and varied detail the everyday world that he shared with Waldo, Emerson at the same time appeals to the wind, whose resistance to containment or location suggests not only the expansive character of the boy’s generous nature but also thereby the pervasiveness of the grief answering to that nature. In this, Emerson’s grief, like the love at its source, follows the logic of power such as Emerson, like Nietzsche, understands it, insofar as power “comes from the inability to nail it down anywhere” (Cameron, 73). Like the vast-flowing vigor that we name faithfully only in avowing the betrayal spoken by its every name, including the final or first name of Being, so too our grief is spoken only as unspoken— because it, along with the death and love at its heart, is inherent to that vigor. The boy whose description in specialties would amount to a betrayal proves generous in the measureless measure of Emerson’s world, and he does so in death as much as in life. By contrast, however, to the Augustine for whom the beloved’s death either (as with his friend) wholly darkens and empties the world or (as with his mother) renders its singular places indifferent or insignificant (thanks to a love turned toward God beyond the world), Emerson comes to find the world illuminated and rendered handsome wherever, and insofar as, his beloved son lived his life and spent his time there. “What he looked upon is better,” Emerson writes just two days after Waldo “ended his life,” and “what he looked not upon is insignificant.”55 From the everyday details of home economics and the toy house that Waldo (with Thoreau) built and lived in imaginatively, to heavenly measures and the day itself, the world and its time— in all their transient and shaded light— appear to Emerson, and are beautiful, for having been shared with this child: For this boy, in whose remembrance I have both slept and awaked so oft, decorated for me the morning star, the evening cloud, how much more all the particulars of daily economy; for he had touched with his lively curiosity every trivial fact and circumstance in the household, the hard coal and the soft coal which I put into my stove, the wood, of which he brought his little quota for grandmother’s fire; the hammer, the pincers and the file he was so eager to use; the microscope, the magnet, the little globe, and every trinket and instrument in the study; the loads of gravel on the meadow, the nests in the henhouse, and many and many a little visit to the dog-house and to the barn.56

54. Emerson, Journals, 6:153. 55. Emerson, Journals, 6:150. 56. Emerson, Journals, 6:151.

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The day itself, then, along with the world, both in its broad sweep and in its fine detail, with its equipment and projects and people, the home of daily life and the toy house within— all appear for Emerson, as world and domus did for Augustine, in light of the beloved’s present absence and absent presence. They do so for Emerson, however, more in terms of beauty and affirmation than in terms of a darkness or emptiness that pushes one to some other world beyond. For, as Emerson comes to hold, “there is no other world; here or nowhere is the whole fact.”57 The world-illuminating power of grief— along with that power’s essential tie to the day— appears at the heart of Emerson’s lamentation in “Threnody.” The child there appears, in his absence, through the emptiness of the house, the revival of spring, and the now unmet eye of a loving day that was once answered by that child: I see my empty house, I see my trees repair their boughs; And he, the wondrous child, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The hyacinthine boy, for whom Morn might well break and April bloom,— The gracious boy, who did adorn The world whereinto he was born, And by his countenance repay The favor of the loving Day,— Has disappeared from the Day’s eye; Far and wide she cannot find him; My hopes pursue, they cannot bind him (lines 9-23)

Much as with the dark and empty world of the bereaved Augustine in Confessions book 4, or as with the devastated world of The Road, the appearance of world and time here in the child’s absence is grounded in a hope not only disappointed but disrupted at its core, shorn of its ground. Emerson construes that deprivation, however, in terms not of an ownership or an authorship violated but in terms of a love that must finally receive even loss and its grief as inherent to the gift that had been received. In resonance, I think, with his contention in “Experience” that from the first day our debt outruns the merit, Emerson highlights that the loss is inflicted on love, not on any possession: 57. Emerson, quoted in Richardson, 382.

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Not mine,— I never called thee mine, But Nature’s heir,— if I repine, And seeing rashly torn and moved Not what I made, but what I loved, Grow early old with grief that thou Must to the wastes of Nature go,— ‘T is because a general hope Was quenched, and all must doubt and grope. (lines 126 – 33)

Grounded in love, and never owned or authored by him, the singular hope of which Emerson finds himself bereft entails at bottom not a determinate expectation of this or that eventual actuality but the anticipation, opened by the child, of more life and a world to come. Because the hope at stake is hope of and for a new world within this, the only world, a hope for world’s renewal or rebirth or re-creation in and through the child, the death of the child can seem a failure of the world itself: It was not yet ripe to sustain A genius of so fine a strain, Who gazed upon the sun and moon As if he came unto his own. And pregnant with his grander thought, Brought the old order into doubt (lines 140 – 46)

The child’s eyes had opened the promise, or pregnancy, of a new world such as that which the young are said, in “Experience,” to owe us. The child had opened a time to come, the possibility of new possibility, a birth to new birth, and the loss therefore demands the world’s resignation, both in the sense of giving up and in the sense of a resignification. The parent undergoes, in the losing— the “largest part of me” taken (l. 161)— a “true dying” that is world’s resigning. (“For this losing is true dying; / This is lordly man’s down-lying. / This his slow but sure reclining, Star by star his world resigning,” ll. 162 – 65). The father’s home had been made dear by the eyes in which “men read the welfare of the time to come” (l. 170), and what is thus lost is not an object or possession, not this or that discrete actuality, but the singular coming of a time, and a world, opened and sustained by the anticipation of the child— which means both the child’s own anticipation of her coming world and our anticipating in and through, for and with, the child, which includes our anticipating the child’s anticipation. A poignant material expression of this lost anticipation appears in Emerson’s journals, immediately before Emer-

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son writes that he “comprehend[s]s nothing of this fact but its bitterness”: “The chrysalis which he brought in with care and tenderness and gave to his mother to keep is still alive, and he the most beautiful of the children of men, is not here.”58 The loss thus makes evident— at least experientially— the mortal asynchrony that lends to love’s pregnant anticipation its poignancy. In suffering the loss of the child, or any beloved, I experience the impossibility of sharing with her the loss itself and the transformations— of self and world— that the loss brings about. In Emerson’s writing, and surely in his experience, these transformations are figured in the temporal terms of age and aging— which can tend in two seemingly different directions. On the one hand, as “Threnody” notes, the parent grows “early old” when his child to the wastes of nature goes. The parent, who has surely hoped, anticipated, that he would grow old in company with the child, and die before him, now undergoes an aging, intensified, that the child will never know. But on the other hand, like nature, grief makes us all children again; Emerson thus becomes, through his child’s death, himself a child that his own child will never know, and never could have. In either direction, whether growing old too soon or becoming again a child, Emerson in his grieving lives through the poignant asynchrony that marks all of our mortal loves. We can thus read in Emerson’s loss of Waldo the unsettling mirror of the love relations, and temporality, that structure Wendell Berry’s 2000 Sabbath Poem XII, where the younger, still living, calls out to the elder, now dead, “wait, I am older now.” We cannot meet one another— we cannot catch up to, or slow down for, one another— in the alterations of time and the transformations of age, and world, that we undergo through the beloved’s death.59 The beloved’s death transforms me, in my age and time, in my world, in ways the beloved will never witness. I lose thus not only the beloved but also the possibility of sharing with her the transformation itself, the person I’ve become, and the experience of bearing, and surviving, these. Growing old too soon, or becoming unexpectedly again a child, or doing both simultaneously and holding the two in tension, appear to be for Emerson at the heart of mortal, as of secular, experience. While Emerson can experience the tension in terms of a disappointment, he seems also to live the tension affirmatively, coming to receive grief as inherent to life’s gift and its love. 58. Emerson, Journals, 6:166. 59. This is also a central theme of Derrida’s Aporias, whose subtitle is “Mourir— s’attendre aux ‘limites de la vérité,’” or “To die— to await one another (or oneself ) at the ‘limits of the truth.’”

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Line 175 of “Threnody”—“Born for the future, to the future lost!”— is often said to mark a break in the chronology of the poem’s composition as well as a change in its voice, suggesting both that the writing of the poem, or of grief, required time for its completion and, according to some readings, that we find in the second half of the poem a refutation of the grief and mourning that determine the first half.60 It seems equally possible, however, that the affirmative voice in the second half does not “come to terms” with grief by overcoming it, but only highlights what the first half already entails, and what the journals can be read to signal only days after Waldo’s death: that the loss must be affirmed as inherent to this exact life and its singular, inherently mortal, birth. Light is light which radiates, Blood is blood which circulates, Life is life which generates, And many-seeming life is one,— Wilt thou transfix and make it none? (lines 242 – 46)

The “deep Heart” that speaks from line 176 forward to these concluding lines can be read not as marking a change, in which grief is resolved or overcome, but as speaking the affirmation Emerson himself already voices in his journals, just days after the death, when he notes that “the boy had his full swing in this world; never, I think, did a child enjoy more.”61 The heart reminds the grieving voice of what its eyes already knew through the eyes of the child: that beauty and joy are not canceled but conditioned by transience and loss. In this light, the second half, and the poem’s conclusion, can be read to acknowledge and affirm that tomorrow is necessarily watered with tears, that hope and sorrow share the same root. Rainbow and sunset are “built of tears and sacred flames” (l. 278), Emerson writes, and love’s “tidal flow” lives only by circulation. Life’s generation, which, by nature, includes the loss, is itself lost if and when we try to fix it. 60. For an astute reading that sees refutation of mourning in Emerson (and Nietzsche), see Mark Edmundson, Towards Reading Freud: Self-Creation in Milton, Wordsworth, Emerson, and Sigmund Freud (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), chap. 4. 61. Emerson, Journals, 6:152; January 30, 1842.

Last Look

5 If one day it happens you find yourself with someone you love in a café at one end of the Pont Mirabeau, at the zinc bar where wine finds its shapes in upward opening glasses, and if you commit then, as we did, the error of thinking, one day all this will only be memory, learn to reach deeper into the sorrows to come— to touch the almost imaginary bones under the face, to hear under the laughter the wind crying across the black stones. Kiss the mouth that tells you, here, here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones. The still undanced cadence of vanishing. 6 In the light the moon sends back, I can see in your eyes the hand that waved once in my father’s eyes, a tiny kite wobbling far up in the twilight of his last look:

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and the angel of all mortal things lets go the string. 7 Back you go, into your crib. The last blackbird lights up his gold wings: farewell. Your eyes close inside your head, in sleep. Already in your dreams the hours begin to sing. Little sleep’s-head sprouting hair in the moonlight, when I come back we will go out together, we will walk out together among the ten thousand things, each scratched in time with such knowledge, the wages of dying is love. g a l way k i n n e l l From “Little Sleep’s-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight”

* “Every lament is a love-song,” asserts philosophical theologian Nicholas Wolterstorff in the final two lines of the preface to Lament for a Son, a rending meditation on the loss of his beloved son Eric, who died at age twenty-five while mountain climbing in the Kaisergebirge. But then he asks, “Will lovesongs one day no longer be laments?”1 The Augustinian line of Christian thinking that I have explored in the studies here reaching their end seems fairly clearly to hold that our love-songs, if true, not merely will be but must be, one day, or even already, no longer laments. That one day will be, and already is, and ever was, the day that never passes, the one about which Augustine can say to his God, “your day does not come daily but is always today, because your today does not give place to any tomorrow nor does it take the place of any yesterday” (C 11.13). Only in that day, Augustine insists, only in the “eternal present” where “both the past and the future have their beginning and their end” (C 11.11), is our love true, and happy, because then it suffers no loss or sorrow; with assured security, it reaches its end and fulfillment. 1. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1987), 6.

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The power and radiance of Wolterstorff ’s meditation stem in no small part from its resistance to the Augustinian thinking and sensibility that take our sorrow to signal a perverse misdirection of our love. In his lament, Wolterstorff evokes a Jesus who says— quite unlike the Augustine who chastises his own son for weeping over grandmother Monica’s death—“be open to the wounds of the world, mourn humanity’s mourning, weep over humanity’s weeping.”2 Elsewhere, in a more academic essay, “Suffering Love,” he differs pointedly from what he sees, in ways coming close to those I’ve worked out here, to be Augustine’s condemnation of our love’s temporal suffering: “In short,” he writes, what one finds in Augustine and in that long tradition of Christian piety which he helped shape is a radical and comprehensive lowering of the worth of the things of this world. In the presence of all those griefs which ensue from the destruction of that which we love, Augustine pronounces a “No” to the attachments rather than a “No” to the destruction— not a “No” to death but a “No” to love of what is subject to death. Thereby he also pronounces a “Not much” concerning the worth of the things loved. Nothing in this world has worth enough to merit an attachment which carries the potential of grief— nothing except the religious state of souls. The state of my child’s soul is worth suffering love; the child’s company is not.3

What Wolterstorff learns through parental experience sets him at odds with the Augustine who condemns the mortal sorrow of our love, and it opens him to the truth conveyed in a letter of consolation from his friend (and Dutch Catholic priest) Henri Nouwen, which is worth citing here at length for its acknowledgment of death’s inherence to life and hence of the loss inherent to life’s gift: Mortification— literally, “making death”— is what life is all about, a slow discovery of the mortality of all that is created so that we can appreciate its beauty without clinging to it as if it were a lasting possession. Our lives can indeed be seen as a process of becoming familiar with death, as a school in the art of dying. I do not mean this in a morbid way. On the contrary, when we see life constantly relativized by death, we can enjoy it for what it is: a free gift. The pictures, letters, and books of the past reveal life to us as a constant saying of farewell to beautiful places, good people, and wonderful experience. . . . All these times have passed by like friendly visitors, leaving [us] with dear memo-

2. Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son, 86. 3. Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Suffering Love,” in Augustine’s Confessions: Critical Essays, ed. William E. Mann (New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2006), 137.

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ries but also with the sad recognition of the shortness of life. In every arrival there is a leavetaking; in each one’s growing up there is a growing old; in every smile there is a tear; and in every success there is a loss. All living is dying and all celebration is mortification too.4

We can be struck by how well these words might fit among even those of a thinker like Derrida in his speaking— as in Learning to Live Finally, for example— of how he is “never more haunted by the necessity of dying than in moments of happiness and joy,” and Nouwen articulates well the reasons for which Derrida might say that “to feel joy and to weep over the death that awaits are . . . the same thing.”5 Like the Derrida who notes during the final course he teaches before dying that “to become mortal” is “the great lesson to be learned, for the deaf, like me, who keep trying to learn how to become immortal,”6 Nouwen appreciates the deep sense in which life is a school in dying, the study of becoming familiar with the strangeness of death. To the perspective I have worked to open in the pages gathered here, the core curriculum of such a school adheres to a pedagogy of estrangement; this involves a learning, and a teaching, that cannot end, or reach completion, because they entail our becoming familiar with what is finally an ineradicable strangeness at the heart of our existence: our being touched ever more inwardly by that which remains insurmountably outward. If we ever come to believe that our learning is done, then we have not quite learned— much as in Heidegger, where what is most to be thought, or most thought provoking, is that we are not yet thinking. The not yet is inherent to a thinking and learning of the heart; it is not to be overcome by them. This is true also for the experience of grief, and the grief of experience. In such experience, as Emerson might teach us when he writes, “I grieve that I cannot grieve,” the not (yet) of our grieving, our never being done with it— because it is never fully or exhaustively within our grasp or capability— expresses in its negative mode the anticipation inherent to the love from which grief stems. All love, we might say, is also fore-love, or predilection: the anticipation in which love loves the beloved only in also loving the love still to be shared. In a similar way, and contrary to common assumption, birth does not end pregnancy but gives birth to it: to be born is to enter pregnancy (prae-, before, gnasci, to be

4. Henri Nouwen, “A Letter of Consolation,” cited in Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son, 95. 5. Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Hoboken, NJ: Melville House Publishing, 2007), 51– 52; Apprendre à vivre enfin: Entretien avec Jean Birnbaum (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2005), 55. 6. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 2, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 186.

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born) because we are born to the open and ongoing possibility of birth; birth is, by nature, birth to yet more birth (for natura, the future participial form of nasci, to be born, means the things to be born; it therefore lives through the not yet of all birth). The stunning proximity of birth and death, which we learn through experience, has everything to do with the possibility signaled by this not. The joyful tears we shed at a moment of birth, for example, have the power they do because death is so clearly present as a possibility inherent to, and threatening, the birth itself;7 and to witness the labor of dying can overwhelm us, and often likewise with tears, in just the measure that it resembles the labor of birth— but is not. The poignancy of my beloved’s death may be just this: it is here that I see her birth coming finally to its end; for she is no longer yet to be born, she no longer has the possibility of being still yet to be. The end of her birth thus means that I can no longer anticipate her anticipation; I can anticipate only that I will remember it. By contrast to the interplay of anticipation and memory that we traced in Augustine, where, as with the recitation of a psalm, anticipation is realized or fulfilled (or exhausted, consumed) in the plenitude of memory and the closure of a meaningful whole, the movement of a secular love as we have sketched it here entails the impossibility that anticipation and memory should ever fully meet thus to consummate one another, thereby overcoming or annuling through some fully present actuality the not yet, through which anticipation and memory live, and love. And here we might note, despite the shared resistance to Augustine, a significant difference that likely arises between the understanding of mortality, love, and learning that I have worked to develop with thinkers and writers such as Derrida, Heidegger, Emerson, and McCarthy, and the understanding of these being worked out by Wolterstorff or Nouwen: for at the end of the day, the school of which Nouwen speaks, and which Wolterstorff seems to attend, is not like ours a secular one; it is rather one that offers— through “the third day”— an education to the peace that is promised, after all, in Augustine’s eternal day: a “something more,” without which “this” life and world, with their inevitable death, seem hopeless. While Wolterstorff affirms, in resistance to Augustine, our mortal loves in “this” world, his love wants to say “yes” to the child but not to the death, as if the death were not inherent to the child’s life; his love wants, therefore, the “something more” that another epistolary passage from Nouwen points to, suggesting that our hope, finally, must be a resurrection to life beyond “this” inevitably short life: 7. For an insightful treatment of this and related issues, see Colleen Windham-Hughes, “The Horizon of Birth,” PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2010.

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If the God who revealed life to us, and whose only desire is to bring us to life, loved us so much that he wanted to experience with us the total absurdity of death, then— yes, then there must be hope; then there must be something more than death; then there must be a promise that is not fulfilled in our short existence in this world; then leaving behind the ones you love, the flowers and the trees, the mountains and the oceans, the beauty of art and music, and all the exuberant gifts of life cannot be just the destruction and cruel end of things; then indeed we have to wait for the third day.8

The heritage of learning to which a sorrowfully joyful love like Derrida’s belongs, and which I have essayed to trace constructively in these past pages, from Emerson and Nietzsche through Heidegger to Cavell and McCarthy, is one that, while affirming that “here or nowhere is the whole fact,” and while thereby letting go of hope for the peace of an eternal day, does not for all that fall into the despair implied by Nouwen’s “just” (destruction and cruel end). For this “just” suggests that our mortal finitude is a failure to be corrected and overcome rather than the gift itself. In a school of secular studies, it is an error to think (as one does in light of the third day that yields an eternal day) that “one day this will only be memory,” for it is a mortal love, in the anticipation of memory, and in the reach of sorrow, whose kiss gives to me, here, the world. A question that I have explored in other work concerning Jean-Luc Marion’s compelling construal of the self as adonné— given to itself as a self only in being given over first, in and as response, to that which it receives as given— is whether and how he may end up counting finitude itself as failure, which can seem to be the case at points in his characterization of the inevitable limitation and delay of my every response to the givenness that gives me to myself. While that limitation and delay are constitutive and insurmountable, they appear often to be couched in a language or logic of inadequacy, humiliation, and remonstration.9 While Marion intends, even in his reading of Augustine, to affirm the temporality of deferral as inherent to selfhood, one can sense in the language of failure something of the ideal that Augustine associates with the angels whose response to God’s Word, recall, is full and immediate (rather than inescapably partial and delayed). The logic of this angelic ideal surely stands behind Augustine’s own sorrow over the delay of his conversion— as if he had learned to love a bit too late, or as if we are not always, in some sense,

8. Nouwen, 87. 9. For a fuller development of this question, worked out prior to Marion’s book on Augustine, see my “Blindness and the Decision to See: On Revelation and Reception in Jean-Luc Marion,” in Counter-Experiences: Reading Jean-Luc Marion, ed. Kevin Hart (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007).

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late in our learning. But if love and its learning call necessarily, inevitably, for time, then delay in itself is no failure but a condition of their experience. In the poem of Galway Kinnell that I have excerpted in opening these concluding pages, he recalls the last look of his now-dead father while speaking to his daughter, who cannot yet hear or understand what he is saying— not only because she is an infant or toddler, and sleeping, but also because she has not yet followed her father to his grave. Within the mortal asynchrony that punctuates all of our love, and here especially the intergenerational, he anticipates walking out together with his daughter to find in the world, and thus to learn, a knowledge: that dying is not a payment we earn for sin but rather that through which, or thanks to which, we receive our loves as we do.10 We should note a slight but significant revision within the poem’s history: in its first appearance in 1971, within The Book of Nightmares,11 the “ten thousand things” that teach us are scratched “too late” with the knowledge that the wages of dying is love. In the version I have cited, as it appears in 2001, the learning, though inherently delayed, is no longer “too late” but has become “in time.”12 The revision seems to me right, for what else does love do, or learn, if not to receive our being ever too late as being also just in time? (Is there anything, after all, more fundamental, or more challenging, for the teacher, parent, or lover to give to the student, child, or beloved, than time?) While thus diverging sharply from the angelic ideal of Augustine, the secular studies I have pursued in these pages, in their thinking about the world at heart, owe no less a decisive debt to Augustinian thinking about the constitution of the self through a movement of love that binds me inwardly to the outward, and so intimately that the inward and the outward prove indiscrete. Building on the heritage traced, I have proposed an understanding of secular existence in terms of the love that bears it, and likewise an understanding of world and time as opened and sustained, carried, by love. Heidegger himself, whose analysis of worldly existence remains among the singular achievements of twentieth-century philosophy, learned fairly directly from Augustine to understand the temporalizing of our existence as a form of affection, and from out of such temporalizing, he was able to see love as a fundamental mood of philosophy.

10. Contrast Augustine, citing Paul (Romans 6:23): “and death is evil because it is the wages of sin” (City of God 13.5). 11. Galway Kinnell, The Book of Nightmares (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971). 12. Galway Kinnell, A New Selected Poems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000; First Mariner Books edition, 2001).

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This debt to Augustine can be seen, among other places, in a seminar that Heidegger dedicates in 1930 – 31 to the question of time as explored by Augustine in book 11 of his Confessions.13 Much as Being and Time attends to the world-disclosing role both of mood and of practical life, which Heidegger takes to precede and found any (hence derivative) theoretical or scientific cognition of the world and its various ontic regions, so this 1930 – 31 seminar on time in Augustine highlights the priority of affection and everyday life in grounding our experiential understanding of time, which is an understanding that we successfully deploy prior to— and despite the eventual stumbling of— our theoretical attempt to define time. As Heidegger emphasizes in the seminar, Augustine works toward this affective construal of time through a mode of questioning that is itself driven by affection, in at least two senses. First, Augustine feels that he knows what time is insofar as, in the practices of his everyday life, he does effectively, and indispensably, measure it, even though he is at a loss when, upon reflection, he cannot define time theoretically. Augustine’s questioning into time is driven by the “and yet” that persists in the gap between his failure to define time theoretically when he reflects upon it and the feeling he has that he already understands time in his practical everyday life. The central paradox that checks Augustine when he reflects upon time is its seeming nonbeing and, hence, the question of what we measure when we measure, as we seem in fact to do, various durational spans or intervals of time. The paradox appears when, in his reflective effort to define time, Augustine notes that its main modes or tenses— past, present, and future— are all marked by some not or negation. For the future time is defined, precisely, as the time that is not yet. The past time is defined as the time that is no longer. And the present time, which by definition now is, can be— as time— only insofar as it passes away or tends toward not being. For if the present time, now, did not pass away and cease to be, if it persisted forever in the present presence of its being, then it would not be time but eternity. What, then, do we measure when we measure times, if the future is not yet, and past is no longer, and the present in its definitive passing has no duration? Augustine’s famous response to this question, itself already driven by feeling, is found likewise in the realm of affection. Because the times themselves seem in fact not to provide the durational length or stretch that any measurement of “longer” and “shorter” time periods would require, Augustine reasons, 13. Martin Heidegger, Seminare Platon-Aristoteles-Augustinus, in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 83 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2012). Hereafter cited parenthetically as GA 83, page number.

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temporal measurement must consist in a stretching out or distention of his own mind or soul, a distentio animi. As he writes in book 11, “it seems to me that time is nothing else than a stretching out in length, but of what, I know not . . . if it be not of the mind itself ” (C 11.26). Because it is affected by things in their passing, the mind can register or retain such passing in memory, even as it anticipates what will come to pass from the future and as it attends to the present in its definitive coming and going. Stretching out in this way through the interplay of anticipation, attention, and retention, it is, at bottom, the mind in its affection that temporalizes— in a manner, as Heidegger makes clear, closely akin to the threefold ecstasy of Dasein’s primordial temporality in Being and Time (where I stand out temporally both from myself and in relation to myself through the inextricable interplay of my having-been or past-ness, my futurity as the yet-to-be or not-yet, and the presence of my present, which emerges in and through these two). Attentive to the confessional character of Augustine’s text, according to which its main aim is not to convey knowledge but to turn the one who writes and speaks through it toward God, Heidegger highlights the fact that Augustine’s persistence in a questioning driven by feeling not only leads to an insight about the affective ground and character of lived temporality; it also, along the way, turns Augustine affectively toward the God he is addressing in and through the questioning. Underscoring the role of affection both in Augustine’s questioning about the nature of time and in his response to that questioning, wherein he comes to suspect that time is affection, Heidegger arrives with Augustine at an understanding both of time and of philosophical questioning— which unavoidably takes time— as movements not only of affection but indeed of love, which Heidegger will thus name and understand as a fundamental mood of philosophy. If Augustine’s asking after time, his questioning, is driven by the persistence of a feeling in the face of theoretical enigma, that feeling turns him affectively toward God in a movement where questioning coincides with requesting, a movement of (Augustine’s) love for (God’s) love. That questioning itself, Heidegger rightly notes, and the request it entails, both stem, furthermore, from the experience of the self itself as question— Augustine’s famous mihi quaestio factus sum, “I have become a question to myself.” Augustine does not really begin to question until he becomes a question to himself; and thus the questioning movement of loving affection is conditioned by the self ’s opaqueness to itself. The centrality of questioning to Heidegger’s interpretation of Augustine on time is set into relief by Heidegger’s judging at several points in his seminar notes that chapter 22 of Confessions book 11 is the book’s most decisive

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chapter. This judgment is significant because that chapter actually says little, or even nothing, explicitly about time; it involves instead one of Augustine’s requests to God that God aid Augustine in his questioning. Heidegger describes the chapter as yielding a “new expression of the fundamental experience as such [der Grunderfahrung schlechthin], not in relation to the timerelation, but now with regard to myself as questioning” (GA 83, 54), here citing, as a gloss on chapter 22, Augustine’s request to God in chapter 18, “sine me [ . . . ] amplius quaerere,” “let me question more fully,” which Heidegger translates to mean “let me be a real questioner [laß mich ein wirklicher Fragender sein]” (GA 83, 54). The request as it actually comes to expression in chapter 22, however, which Heidegger’s notes go on to point out, is phrased more explicitly in terms of love than of questioning: “Amare,” Heidegger himself writes, and then, quoting Augustine from chapter 22, “da quod amo: amo enim” (GA 83, 55), “give what I love, for I do love”: “‘give me what I love,’ give that to me to know—as revealed [als Offenbares] (not so that thereby I should no longer need to love, but exactly the amandum)” (GA 83, 55). “Let me question more fully” Heidegger takes to be a petition equivalent to that which says “Give me what I love”— and he glosses the “give me what I love” with the single word: “ex-tentio.”14 The experience of oneself as questioning, wherein one is ex-tended in a movement beyond oneself, is here also the experience of a requesting that is a movement of love toward love. Such a questioning, in and through love, Heidegger goes on to suggest, belongs inherently to the time about which, and through which alone, we question. As a “way of existing,” time and our seeking after time, inquiring into it, belong together (GA 83, 70). The reference to love here may help us see, about questioning, that which, without the reference, we might not see: just as love, in coming toward what it seeks— the one to be loved, the amandum— does not end but indeed finds its very life and growth, its endless opening to ever more life; so questioning, at heart, does not aim to end or come to a close through definitive answers, or solutions, but rather finds its very life in a recurrent renewal or rebirth. This belonging together of time and love in the ecstatic movement of questioning and requesting goes both ways: time is, Heidegger posits, “the possibility of

14. Then referencing Confessions, book 11, chaps. 29 and 30, where Augustine sketches out his distinction between temporal distentio as dissipating distraction by the multiple and fleeting pleasures of the world— the perverse temporality of sin— and temporal distentio as the ex-tentio and intentio of a gathering attraction to the one and eternal God, or the temporality of conversion: a difference in Augustine clearly influential for the much discussed distinction in Being and Time between inauthentic and authentic modes of existence.

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the standing and holding, where what I love gives itself ” (GA, 83, 73), and “my asking-after-time,” as he continues to explain, is “the possibility of the gathered stretching-out-from-oneself [des gesammelten Sichhinaustreckens] toward the one and eternal that love itself is (amor amoris tui)” (GA 83, 78). Heidegger here goes on to cite the favored understanding of love that he attributes to Augustine— thus (for the record) addressing the question not only in a private love letter to one student but also in a public teaching addressed to a world of students: “Amo . . . volo ut sis,” he writes in his notes, and then immediately glosses: “the letting-be of being gives me the being that is, that authentically is [Volo ut sis: Seinlassen des Seienden gibt mir das Seiende, das ist, das eigentlich ist]” (GA 83, 78). Able to see in and through Augustine that a questioning about and through time amounts to a movement of love for love—“amore amoris tui facio istuc,” as Augustine writes in Confessions, chapter 1 (cited in GA 83, 78), “I do (or make) this (confession) out of love for your love”— Heidegger takes the “authentic meaning” of such questioning, and its requesting, to be, as he puts it in his concluding notes for the seminar, that we miss the essential, and “we are mistaken about the essence of being” insofar as “in philosophizing we do not intend and let rule the fundamental mood” (GA 83, 80 – 81). And he goes on to sum up “this fundamental mood of philosophizing out of the essence of man: letting-be, questioning releasement, gathered restraint of the heart [Seinlassen, fragende Gelassenheit, gesammelte Verhaltenheit des Herzens], which does not roam about through meager questions and always available ready-made chatter” (GA 83, 81). The restraint or reserve Heidegger speaks of here, the reticence of the heart— what we might even translate as its discretion— entails the heart’s keeping quiet or holding back so as to give place and time for what, and who, are yet to come. While an Hegelian inheritance of Augustine’s thinking about time may share with Augustine the conviction that human experience does, or even must, eventually catch up with itself in the fullness, and fulfillment, of time, and hence in a completion of the educational work we undergo through time, the Heideggerian inheritance of this thinking of time— which is also, he clearly holds, a thinking of the heart— would foreclose the possibility that human experience ever catch up fully with itself so as to complete or close down its learning. In and through such learning we never fully or finally catch up with ourselves: we ourselves, both individually and collectively, live creatively between the ever evolving and never fully consummated anticipation of who we (and those we love) will be and, then, the recurrently revised and never completed remembrance of who we (and those we love) have been. Individually, collectively, and also thus generationally, we never turn out to

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be exactly or fully who we anticipated, or who we remembered, and thus we are likewise never done revisiting and revising what our having-been means and will have meant. The interplay of anticipation and remembrance, within the life of one individual, between the lives of many individuals, and across generations, is kept both alive and irreducibly open by the ex-tensions of love that give us to ourselves by giving us to others. In the openness of that interplay, our questioning, and its learning, can know no end; and in this sense, the heart of thinking, or a thinking of the heart, as interior intimo meo et superior summo meo, does follow an apophatic logic, according to which, if we believe our questioning and learning are done, then we have not learned or questioned. Whatever, and whomever, I manage to reach through my learning, there will remain something still yet more interior, and yet more distant; or, if I have definitively reached it, it is not the intimate. Jean-Luc Nancy suggests something close to this in Adoration: “All intimacy is ‘interior intimo meo.’ Being the most profound, it is also what, for its part, is bottomless. For Augustine and in the long tradition beginning with him, ‘God’ will have been the name of what is bottomless.”15 While diverging from it in some regard, what I understand here by the intergenerational movement of anticipation and remembrance comes quite close to Robert Harrison’s analysis of inheritance, especially in his recent turn to the role of love in world-formation. While Harrison’s emphasis on continuity, preservation, perpetuation, and permanence within the logic of inheritance may lead him both to understate the excessive, unsettling, disruptive, and even violent dynamics that inheritance surely also entails, and while his aversion to the thoughtless chatter of the overly self-assured citizens of the “Borg collective” may, though understandable, involve a nostalgia that forecloses the more creative possibilities that could be opened by new media and other technology, I do find myself in deep agreement with Harrison’s central contention that “it takes a great deal of love— what Hannah Arendt, borrowing a phrase from Saint Augustine, called amor mundi— to take the wellbeing of the world to heart and commit oneself to assuring its continuity through the generations. It is that love, and that love alone, that takes custody of the world’s future.”16 Today, the question of the world’s future, and hence of a love that might 15. Jean-Luc Nancy, Adoration: The Deconstruction of Christianity 2, trans. John McKeane (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 75. 16. Robert Pogue Harrison, Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 117.

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take the world’s well-being to heart, is surely inseparable from those technoscientific forces whose radical and rapid development and spread rightly trouble Harrison, as they did the Heidegger on whom Harrison draws deeply. To answer the demands of the day today will surely mean reckoning not only with the ways that technology now shapes inescapably the time and the tempo of our everyday life, or the historical work of memory, but also the ways in which our technology, along with our growing numbers, now shapes even our geological age (which some would rename the anthropocene). As Harrison’s close friend and colleague Michel Serres has richly shown, our technoscientific humanity today reshapes even such global realities as the weather (in French, le temps) in such a way that we reshape also, fundamentally, the time (temps) of our living— and dying. And while the technological and scientific aspects of such global human work might lead one to assumptions about its nonreligious character, I would contend that it involves rather a secularity— a bind both to the days in their passing and to the ages in their depth— that should be counted also fundamentally religious. For as Serres convincingly holds, the work of shaping and sustaining the time of our existence may be understood as a defining trait of religious life itself— exemplified for him in the ongoing work of the monks who do not simply follow or find themselves “within” the flow of some neutral, pregiven time, but who rather themselves open and weave, punctuate and sustain their shared life-time through the ordering, within a tradition, of their work and study, prayer and liturgy: their being together, across generations, in the world. Binding themselves faithfully to their life practices, the monks weave or tie together the time and tempo of their living within a practice of religion as the attentive gathering, a reading and rereading, whose opposite, Serres reminds us, is not atheism or unbelief, nor the rationality of technoscience, but negligence: a deficit of care or of love— of our diligence— not only for the social but also for the natural contracts that bind us to our worlds, and one another, by weaving their times and ages.17 If we come to see that the opposite of religion is not unbelief or atheism, nor the scientific reason and technological power with which these are often associated, but rather negligence, then perhaps we might begin to see a work of religion in those forms of diligence that, by countering our negligence, awaken recurrently to the demands of the day each day. These begin with the everyday demand of making a day, but they also ask our acknowledgment 17. Giorgio Agamben likewise finds religion’s opposite in negligence within an analysis of profanation. See “In Praise of Profanation” in Agamben, Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2007).

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that such a day, today, thanks to an intergenerational being-with now materially incarnate in our climate, is inseparable from days yet unknown, and from those still to be born— those, that is, to recall Rilke, there are to love. But just as the everyday demand of making a day often goes, in its very everydayness, unnoticed and untended, because too familiar, so too do we ignore our own neglect of a future whose automatic coming we too often too securely assume. As our preceding analyses have repeatedly suggested, if we grow attentive to the logic and life of negligence, we can see that a blindness to our negligence, a forgetting or neglect of it, is inherent to the negligence itself. Its logic follows that of the alienation from which we can, sometimes, awake through the pedagogy of estrangement: a reawakening or rebirth, to and by, the strangeness and fragility that are learned through a thinking of the heart. If in Augustine the questioning movement of love for love transpires between the temporal soul and its eternal God, who promises the soul a today when time— and its losses— will in some deep sense cease, so to yield eternal life in its assured security, the temporality and thinking that we have explored in these pages not only with McCarthy and Heidegger but also with forebears like Nietzsche or his teacher Emerson, and heirs like Derrida and his students, suggest an intergenerational stretching-out of love toward love that is a stretching out of mortal fragility toward mortal fragility. It is also, in the generational play of love between the dead, the living, and those to come, a movement of time speaking to time: our time or age, our day, speaking to (and from) times and ages and days we cannot fully know or comprehend, even as we both inherit and bestow them. But if we cannot in that movement securely know or comprehend, we can, or we must, learn. And in that learning we can ask what it might mean, today, to answer negligence with diligence, or to convert our love, in all its unknowing, into love for another day, and for those, unknown, still to be born.

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Index

abandonment, 78, 89 – 92, 115, 168 absorption, 38, 57, 82, 84, 127, 145 adonné, 20, 79, 88; addiction, 79, 182 adoration, 157– 58, 193, 208. See also love: in Nancy affection, 14, 31, 35 – 36, 60 – 67, 114, 203 – 6 affirmation: of becoming, 15, 157, 180; of death, 196, 201; of exposure, 138, 142; of love, 102, 138; the sacred affirmative, 168, 176; of temporality, 31– 32, 37, 74 – 75, 80 – 81, 93 – 94, 110, 202; yes, 103, 201– 2 Agamben, Giorgio, 40n5, 117n13, 209n17 alien, 3, 45, 140 – 41, 150. See also alterity; otherness alienation, 210; in Augustine, 33, 36, 38, 58, 112, 142 – 44; in Emerson, 168; in Hegel, 2, 10; in Heidegger, 33, 144 – 45, 150; in Nancy, 150; in Nietzsche, 181. See also estrangement; falling; familiarity; “they” alterity, 16, 106, 140, 150. See also otherness always already, 3, 84, 89, 102, 120 – 25, 134, 143, 171, 175. See also having-been amor fati, 27. See also affirmation ancestry, 49 – 53, 111; elder, 175, 195 anonymity, 76, 85, 102, 170 anticipation: expectation, 19, 49, 67– 68, 156, 176, 194; and memory, 31, 48 – 54, 67– 68, 73, 110, 138 – 39, 201, 205; patience, 178; prospection, 73, 174. See also resoluteness: anticipatory anxiety, 33, 38 – 44, 57, 76, 108, 123, 132 – 37, 146, 151 apocalypse, 159. See also suspension: of the world; world: -loss apophasis, 173; apophatic analogy, 4 appropriation, 86, 105, 121– 22, 169 Arendt, Hannah, 26, 115 – 16, 125 – 30, 136 – 38, 208 Aristotle, 123n27, 185 Arsi , Branka, 174 art, 147, 199, 202

Asad, Talal, 9n13 assurance, 37, 53, 70 – 71, 92 – 93, 155 – 58, 180, 190. See also certainty; security asynchrony, 104, 195, 203 attachment, 59, 64, 199 Augustine of Hippo, 6, 10, 26, 31– 44, 48, 54 – 130, 135, 138, 142 – 57, 167– 68, 173, 178 – 86, 190, 198 – 210 autarchy, 87, 115, 128, 155. See also egoism; solipsism authenticity, 24, 39 – 44, 76, 83 – 90, 105, 123, 127– 37, 182, 207; mineness, 121. See also continence; inauthenticity; ownmost avowal, 32, 79 – 82, 157, 173; dis-, 189. See also confession axolotl, 164 – 66. See also neoteny beatitude, 79, 90 – 91, 110, 180 Beckett, Samuel, 111 Being-in, 118, 120 – 22 Being-in-the-world, 3, 41– 42, 57, 76, 78, 87– 88, 114, 119, 120 – 22, 128, 131– 35, 146. See also world: -hood Being-toward-death, 4, 33, 41, 44, 54, 85, 90, 108, 115, 128 – 29, 131– 34. See also death, in Heidegger; resoluteness Being-with, 43 – 47, 51, 87– 88, 117, 125 – 26, 131– 38, 152, 210. See also love, in Heidegger; solicitude Bekümmerung, 124, 127; Selbst-, 127 bereavement, 187, 190, 193 Berger, Peter, 5 – 6 Berry, Wendell, 195 Binswanger, Ludwig, 114n6, 117, 124, 132n43 birth: in Heidegger, 115; and mortality, 32, 50, 55, 62, 70 – 75, 94; as ongoing, 5, 171, 174 – 75, 183; as promise, 46, 50, 52, 186, 194, 200 – 201; as reproduction, 141. See also neoteny; pregnancy

224 Blumenberg, Hans, 22 – 23n33, 162 body, 5, 47, 66, 99, 104, 110, 118, 150 – 52, 156; embodiment, 54, 170 Bolk, Louis, 4 boredom, 41– 44, 57, 132; killing time, 180 – 81 Borges, Jorge Luis, 165, 169 burden, 53, 73, 81– 84, 101, 133, 176 busyness, 127, 169, 188. See also distraction; haste Butler, Judith, 111 calculation, 17– 18, 29 – 30, 76, 104, 112, 127, 135, 141; calculability, 130, 141, 152 call, 28, 80, 161, 177; of conscience, 176, 181– 82; of genius, 168 – 71, 177, 180 – 85. See also response; vocation Cameron, Sharon, 189 – 92 Caputo, John D., 103n9, 114 – 15n8 care: for god, 78; lack of, 42, 66, 114, 132, 144, 209; for oneself, 90, 123, 125, 127, 133 – 35; for others, 26, 44, 90, 124, 126, 135, 187, 195; of the world, 57, 76, 119, 130, 135 Carson, Anne, 128 Cavell, Stanley, 28n43, 113n5, 166n6, 167– 68, 176, 178n35, 188, 191 certainty, 23, 70 – 74, 79, 89, 103, 160, 172, 179. See also assurance; security; uncertainty cheer, 137, 176 Christ, 70, 87, 156; pertinens ad Christum, 87, 89 circumcision, 99, 100, 103 – 7, 109 commitment, 21– 23, 27. See also decision community, 66, 100 – 104, 126, 150; belonging, 103 – 4. See also sociality completion, 85, 97, 158, 161, 163, 196, 200, 207. See also incompletion concealment, 79, 177, 182. See also mystery; secret concern, 26, 118, 124, 127, 135 confession, 57, 79 – 85, 99, 105 – 8, 143, 157, 173, 207. See also avowal; praise conformity, 16, 129, 136, 169, 181 consciousness, 2 – 4, 10 – 11, 13, 15, 112, 120, 153 consolation, 22, 155, 190, 199 consummation, 2 – 4, 10, 20, 68, 73 – 74, 96, 110. See also fulfillment consumption, 49, 112 – 13, 127, 201. See also economy; home: economics continence, 41, 73, 76, 83. See also authenticity continuity, 17, 105 – 6, 177, 208 conversion, 39, 58, 61, 66 – 67, 73, 81– 85, 154, 162, 202. See also perversion Cooper, Julie E., 23n33 corpus meum, 153 Cortázar, Julio, 164 – 66 Coyne, Ryan, 33n50 Crary, Jonathan, 30n48 creation: ex nihilo, 156 – 57; of god, 36, 61, 63, 75 – 81, 91, 93, 162; of the human, 6, 153 – 56, 168, 171;

index self-, 15, 168, 184; of the world, 29, 34, 45, 50, 156, 168; re-, 6, 153 – 54, 157, 194 creativity, 4 – 5, 16, 153, 165, 178 creator, 6, 37, 76 – 77, 80, 165, 184 creature, 5 – 7, 37, 68, 77– 84, 89 – 91, 94 – 98, 135, 165, 182 Critchley, Simon, 116n10 culture, 8, 125, 171, 183 – 86; Christian, 9, 154; of circumcision, 99; mass, 24; modern, 8, 12 – 14, 22, 25, 29, 112; our, 172; technoscientific, 21 cura, 76 – 77, 115n8, 124, 127n33 Dahl, Espen, 166n6 Dasein, 3 – 4, 41– 43, 76 – 90, 114 – 42, 154, 185, 205 Dastur, Françoise, 132n43 day, 19, 27, 29, 30, 38, 50, 159, 169 – 70, 179, 184, 192 – 93, 198; demands of the, 19, 209; the eternal, 37, 39, 201– 2 death: in Augustine (see death, in Augustine); in Derrida (see death, in Derrida); dying-together, 108, 110; in Emerson, of his son, 188 – 96; in Hegel, 3; in Heidegger (see death, in Heidegger); in McCarthy, 44 – 48, 50 – 51, 53 – 54; mortification, 199 – 200; in Nancy, 151– 60, 62; in Nietzsche, 71, 81; in Thoreau, 147– 48; in Weber, 12 – 13 death, in Augustine: dead life, 35, 111; denial of, 72 – 73, 81, 199; dying life, 60; of his friend, 31, 41, 44, 56 – 66, 73, 77, 91– 92, 143, 146, 192; living death, 35, 48, 50, 60, 111; of his mother, 64 – 67, 111, 199; and sin, 37– 39, 70, 72; transcendence of, 97, 201– 2 death, in Derrida: of his brothers, 108; of his mother, 98, 107– 8, 111; his own, 108 – 9, 111, 200; of his sons, 108 death, in Heidegger: denial of, 111, 140 – 42, 150; the possibility of, 43, 85, 90, 111– 12, 133; someone else’s, 128, 133 – 34 debt, 175 – 76, 193. See also guilt decision, 35, 46, 86 – 89, 105 – 7, 151 deconstruction, 32, 75, 153, 155 – 59, 163 defluxus, 76. See also distraction delight, 57, 78 – 79, 89 Derrida, Jacques, 1, 15, 32, 95 – 111, 130, 144, 155, 167, 191, 200 – 201, 210 desire, 1, 38, 64, 66, 72 – 73, 82, 90, 95, 98, 110, 128, 134, 158, 202 despair, 20 – 25, 39, 51, 112, 155 – 56, 168, 180, 202. See also disappointment; hopelessness; resignation devotion, 23 – 28, 119, 122 diligence, 23, 119, 122 – 23, 130 – 31, 209 – 10 diligo, 119. See also diligence; dwelling Dionysius the (Pseudo-) Areopagite, 6, 77, 79 – 80, 174, 177 disappearance: of the beloved, 59; of religion, 8; of the world, 46, 50

index disappointment, 23, 178 – 79, 193, 195 disenchantment, 12, 17– 18, 21, 28, 174 dis-enclosure, 154 – 55, 160, 162. See also openness dispersion, 35, 41, 73, 76, 83 distance: between human and god, 79, 84, 94, 143; between lover and beloved, 98, 128, 131, 135; from oneself, 84, 94, 149, 166. See also alienation; existence: standing-out distraction, 37– 40, 67, 76, 82 – 89, 127 Donne, John, 110 Dula, Peter, 167n6 dwelling: of god, 95; of the human, 36, 147, 149; as loving, 36, 119; place of, 31, 36, 56, 58 – 59, 95, 138. See also Being-in; diligence earth: as distinguished from world, 35 – 36, 45, 48, 52, 54; mastery of the, 8, 30, 146 – 48, 172; as “region of death,” 61, 66, 69, 71, 74, 85, 89, 94. See also nature: mastery of Eckhart, Meister, 174 economy, 97, 147, 156, 180, 192 Edmundson, Mark, 196n60 education, 1– 3, 6, 9, 19 – 20, 27– 28, 68, 96, 153, 164, 179, 183 – 87, 207 educator, 180, 183 – 84, 187; leader, 19 – 21, 26 ego, 112, 132, 135, 173 egoism, 115, 124 – 28, 131, 170, 175; individualism, 131. See also autarchy; solipsism Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 34, 107, 113, 158, 164 – 96, 200 – 202, 210 emptiness, 12, 31, 57– 61, 193 end: of birth, 201; of care, 78; of the day, 201; -lessness, 5, 20, 25, 47, 71, 82, 94, 157; of love, 31, 35; of time, 96. See also teleology Entzauberung der Welt, 18, 20 Eriugena, John Scotus, 4, 159, 165, 174, 177 eschatology, 9, 22, 104, 162 estrangement, 33, 142 – 50, 152 – 53, 174, 200, 210. See also alienation eternity, 13 – 15, 37– 38, 48, 62 – 75, 85 – 97, 112, 204; eternal return, 70, 182 everyday, 19, 27, 29, 58, 169, 192, 209 – 10; everydayness, 171, 210 existence: of the beloved, 127– 28, 187; Dasein’s, 85, 90, 137; everyday, 58, 145; factical, 41, 86, 94; finite, 78; the heart of, 200; human, 33, 35, 39, 158 – 59, 161; mortal, 118, 131, 147; my own, 83, 85, 125, 130 – 31, 134, 145 – 46; our, 146, 159, 161, 181, 200, 203, 209; religious, 6, 16; secular, 203; standing-out, 88, 128; technological, 33, 146 – 50; temporal, 37, 64, 81– 84, 88, 93, 96, 159; worldly, 44, 76, 146, 161, 203 experience, 103; of boredom, 41; of consciousness, 2; of a crisis, 143, 150; of education, 1, 186; of estrangement, 148, 163, 168; of grief, 173, 200; of joy, 173; of love, 101, 138; of meaninglessness,

225 58; of mortality, 13, 31, 38, 173, 195; of progress, 22; of salvation, 156; of self, 39 – 40, 142, 205 – 6; of technoscience, 141, 149, 153; of thinking, 171; of time, 11, 22, 70; of unknowing, 4, 17, 100 exposure: to alterity, 106, 113, 140, 148 – 52, 182; to the incalculable, 23, 129, 137– 38, 142; to loss, 98, 111, 138 exteriority, 7, 113, 153, 157. See also superior summo meo facts: inconvenient, 23; of life, 147– 48; of science, 21, 147– 48 faith, 65, 102, 108, 136 – 38, 191. See also trust falling, 43 – 44, 76, 83, 85, 135, 169; fallenness, 41, 85 familiarity, 30, 118 – 19, 123, 142 – 49, 151– 52, 169, 174. See also alienation; estrangement father: in Augustine, 41, 143; in Emerson, 191– 94; in Kinnell, 197, 203; in McCarthy, 44 – 55, 189 fear, 10, 39, 42, 108, 124, 181– 82 forgetting, 13, 40 – 41, 82 – 84, 91, 94, 131, 169, 210; oblivion, 51, 190; self-, 76, 84 fragility, 33, 34, 46, 51, 54, 112, 113, 141, 210; vulnerability, 50 freedom, 10, 16 – 17, 38, 70, 101, 148 – 53, 164 Freud, Sigmund, 15, 19 – 20, 27, 28, 160 – 61, 166 friend: friendship, 56, 59, 126 – 27; joy in a, 31, 56, 58 – 61, 69; love of a, 56, 59 – 60, 66, 138 fulfillment, 10 – 13, 20 – 25, 67– 68, 74, 110, 155 – 61, 173, 198, 207 fullness, 3, 61– 62, 67– 68, 91– 92, 103, 110, 153 – 55, 181, 207; plenitude, 4, 156, 201 Fürsorge, 26, 118, 126 futurity, 17, 47, 85, 90, 94, 101– 8, 205; not-yet, 4, 73, 90, 188, 201, 204 – 5; onwardness, 168; to-be, yet-, 3 – 4, 205; to-come, 85 Gauchet, Marcel, 5, 15 – 17 generation, 20, 68, 196, 208 genius, 168 – 71, 177, 180, 182, 184 – 85, 194 gift, 43, 52 – 53, 79 – 84, 90, 130, 193 – 95, 199 – 202 givenness, 80, 202 God: Being-toward-, 4; death of, 13, 20, 153 – 58, 162, 179 – 80, 184; image of, 4 – 5, 7, 9, 17, 152, 166, 174; love of, 32, 84, 124 Gould, Stephen J., 5 grace, 39, 87 Gregory of Nyssa, 4, 165 grief, 31, 55 – 61, 64 – 66, 91– 92, 138, 143, 188 – 200 Grimm, Jacob, 118 – 19 guilt, 90; Being-guilty, 90 Haar, Michel, 113n5 habit, 38, 44, 143, 168, 179, 181; habituation, 41, 58, 119, 142 – 51. See also routine habitation, 58, 66, 143, 146; habitat, 164. See also dwelling; home

226 Hadot, Pierre, 186n44 Hamilton, John T., 58n3 Hammerschlag, Sarah, 103n9 happiness, 14, 21, 31, 35, 63 – 75, 79, 89 – 93, 98, 109, 137– 38, 200. See also joy; unhappiness Harrison, Robert Pogue, 26, 33, 128, 142, 147– 54, 208 – 9 haste, 62, 96, 124, 168, 174 – 82. See also busyness; tempo hate, 57, 92, 117, 122 – 23, 127, 138, 144, 172, 184; despisal, 184. See also resentment having-been, 3 – 4, 40, 89, 101, 104, 205, 208. See also always already; pastness Hayles, N. Katherine, 5, 152 heart: cor inquietum, 40, 123 – 24; darkness of, 59 – 60; dwell in the, 35, 39, 48, 138; encouragement, 19, 176, 184, 188; heart failure, 47, 150, 175 – 78; logic of the, 112 – 13, 141, 189; matter of the, 46, 176, 181; perversion of the, 36, 39; reticence of the, 207; taking-to-, 33; trembling of the, 38 – 40, 124; the unsettled, 38 – 40, 123 – 24, 190; the voice of the, 65, 187; with the world at, 35, 60; world and, 30, 44, 46; youthful, 29, 180 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 2 – 5, 10 – 11, 67, 98, 110, 153, 173 Heidegger, Martin, 2 – 12, 26 – 44, 57, 75 – 95, 101, 105 – 7, 111– 40, 167– 91, 200 – 210 heritage, 29, 33, 104, 107, 124, 167, 202 – 3; heir, 110, 181, 194. See also inheritance history: the authors of, 17; of consciousness, 2; the horizon of, 125; institutional, 148; the interruption of, 106; of nature, 157, 166; personal, 136, 151; of religion, 16; the secularization of, 17; of technology, 151; as teleological, 2 – 3, 8 – 10, 67– 70, 97, 153 Hollander, Dana, 103n9 home, 57, 193 – 94; -coming, 60; economics, 192; at homeness, 30, 118, 142, 145, 150, 169; -lessness, 30; unhomeliness, 58. See also dwelling; habitation hope: for a beyond, 11, 201– 2; and certainty, 37, 59, 71– 72, 141, 155; for fulfillment, 10 – 11, 25, 67; of love, 51– 53; and sorrow, 52 – 54, 193, 196. See also despair; disappointment; hopelessness hopelessness, 22, 39, 47, 51, 54, 64, 93, 190, 194, 201. See also despair; disappointment; hope Hunzinger, A. W., 124n29 icon, 6, 7, 84, 87 idle talk, 84, 145 idol, 6 – 7, 77, 84 – 87, 136, 146, 158 – 59, 173 ignorance, 71, 107, 160 – 61, 179 image, 4 – 9, 16 – 17, 48, 54, 152, 166, 174, 178, 185, 191. See also God: image of; indiscrete image imitation, 48, 112 immanence, 10, 12, 15, 121, 123, 174

index immemorial, 84 – 85, 89, 94. See also forgetting; memory immutability, 35, 63, 69 – 70, 81, 89, 91, 94 – 96. See also mutability impossibility: of consummation, 201; of existence, 90; of happiness, 91; of satisfaction, 20; of sharing, 195. See also distance: between lover and beloved; secret inauthenticity, 41, 76, 84, 127, 136. See also authenticity; falling; “they” incompletion, 5, 107, 110, 165 – 66, 175. See also completion; indetermination indetermination, 4 – 7, 149, 159, 166, 174 – 75. See also creativity; incompletion; neoteny indiscrete image, 7, 17, 152, 166, 174. See also God: image of; image indiscretion, 113, 141, 149, 152, 159 infancy, 28, 70 – 71, 75, 104, 171, 174; infant, 169, 174, 203 inheritance, 50, 99, 101– 7, 163 – 64, 166, 175, 207– 8; of Augustine, 32, 36, 75, 96 – 97, 207; of Freudian drives, 166; of scripture, 35, 97 innermost, 32, 110, 113, 130, 140, 143, 148, 167, 189 innovation, 149, 169. See also novelty insecurity, 22, 53, 88 – 89, 93. See also restlessness; security intention, 3, 7, 160, 181 interior intimo meo, 32 – 33, 110, 113, 121, 143, 153, 168, 189, 208 interiority, 113, 140, 157, 183. See also privacy; secret Jaspers, Karl, 114 – 15 John, 35 – 37, 39, 50, 126 Josephson-Storm, Jason A., 18n27 joy, 14 – 15, 20, 32, 59 – 60, 64, 67, 109, 136 – 39, 170 – 73, 196, 200 Kierkegaard, Søren, 38, 112, 170 Kinnell, Galway, 203 Kisiel, Theodore, 33n50 knowledge: absolute, 96; a body of, 99; the conveyance of, 106 – 7, 120, 183, 186, 205; the desire for, 161; know-how, 105, 107; and love, 122, 183, 203; scientific, 99, 141; self-, 106, 148, 153 Kosky, Jeffrey L., 18n27, 79 Krell, David Farrell, 115n9 labor, 65, 141, 170, 201. See also pregnancy; work language, 4, 45, 51, 54, 64, 77, 96 – 97, 103, 147, 157, 164 Lapassade, Georges, 4 – 5 leaping-ahead, 26 – 27, 132, 134, 187 leaping-in, 26 – 27, 133, 187 learning, 1, 19, 23, 29, 33 – 34, 51, 61, 96 – 100, 104, 166, 175 – 79, 185 – 87, 200 – 210 letting-be, 33, 113, 127– 29, 132, 135, 137– 38. See also love, in Augustine: amo, volo ut sis

index Levinas, Emmanuel, 7, 77, 94, 103, 125, 126n31, 128, 140n1, 157 liberation, 143, 152 – 56, 180 – 84 Liebe, 112 – 17, 122, 127, 130, 137– 38, 180. See also Vor-liebe life: dead, 35, 111; the end of, 15; everyday, 1, 19 – 20, 27, 29, 169, 204, 209; individual, 25, 67; the meaning of, 11– 15, 20, 22, 181; modern, 21, 170 – 71, 175; the problem(s) of, 21, 73, 81– 84; of science, 22; the transience of, 20; true, 35, 75 living-together, 100, 103 – 5, 108, 110, 130, 131. See also Being-with love: in Augustine (see love, in Augustine); in Derrida, 32, 96 – 98, 100 – 103, 109; in Emerson, 34, 173, 189 – 96; in Heidegger (see love, in Heidegger); the logic of, 101, 131, 137; in Marion, 77– 84, 94; in McCarthy, 47, 48, 51, 53; in Nancy, 150; in Nietzsche, 34, 180 – 84; the temporality of, 34, 128, 136 – 39, 186; in Weber, 26 – 27; the work of, 25 – 26, 27– 28; and worldhood, 119, 122, 130 – 33, 138 love, in Augustine: amo, volo ut sis, 26, 130, 207; caritas, 63; cupiditas, 63; the end of, 31, 35, 72, 94, 96; enjoyment (frui), 37, 63; of god, 37– 39, 60 – 63, 65, 73 – 74, 91– 92, 94 – 95; loss of, 31, 60 – 64, 70, 92, 143; the misdirection of, 36 – 38, 65 – 66, 91; of a mortal, 37, 41, 57– 60, 63, 73, 91; of a place, 59; true, 37, 60 – 63, 72 – 73, 98; use (uti), 37, 62 – 63; the weight of, 64; of the world, 35 – 37, 59 love, in Heidegger: the absence of, 114 – 18; forelove, 186, 200 (see also diligence; predilection); as fundamental mood, 33, 117– 23, 130 – 32, 137, 146; and mortality, 33, 44, 111, 128, 131– 32, 134, 140 Löwith, Karl, 8 – 11, 15 – 17, 22, 162 Lyotard, Jean-François, 60n4 Mahnke, Dietrich, 178n35 Marion, Jean-Luc, 1, 6 – 8, 16, 18, 32 – 33, 69, 73 – 95, 102 – 6, 114, 126, 146, 167, 202 Markus, R. A., 11n16 Masuzawa, Tomoko, 9n13 McCarthy, Cormac, 30 – 31, 52 – 53, 57– 58, 133, 190 – 91, 201– 2, 210 meaning: of death, 12, 14; of freedom, 184; lack of, 15, 22; of life, 12, 15, 20 – 21, 27, 122, 181; of love, 59, 62, 134, 207; of secularization, 17; ultimate, 9 – 10, 20 – 22, 25, 62, 67; of the world, 154 media, 24, 112, 147, 208 memory: and anticipation, 31, 48 – 54, 67– 68, 73, 110, 138 – 39, 201, 205; living, 49 – 52; -loss, 46, 51– 52; of others, 49, 111, 139; of place, 31, 66; and promise, 47, 51, 138; and sorrow, 67, 111, 139, 202 metaphysics, 8, 32, 40, 71, 75 – 81, 93, 112 – 13, 147, 152 – 55, 172, 184; of presence, 75, 112 mihi quaestio factus sum, 57, 83 – 84, 86, 144, 205

227 mirror, 7– 8, 68, 77, 96, 152, 157– 59, 165, 177– 78, 195. See also idol misery, 53, 59 – 60, 70 – 74 Mitsein, 125, 132, 135 modernity: disenchanted, 17– 18; post-, 5, 147; secular, 8, 11, 14; technoscientific, 8, 9, 16, 22; Western, 8, 11, 14 mood, 33, 41, 57, 76, 87, 123, 203 – 7; attunement, 87; disposition, 23; state-of-mind, 123 mortality: affirmation of, 111, 138, 141, 147, 152, 199; the condition of, 11, 46, 81, 97, 114, 138; flight from, 13, 15, 60 – 61, 72, 81, 89, 97, 138, 141, 147; and futurity, 4, 42, 89, 106, 131; and love, 14, 56, 61, 111, 113, 116, 118, 128, 131, 201 mother: in Augustine, 64 – 73, 199; and birth, 141; in Derrida, 107– 11, 191; in Emerson, 192, 195; in McCarthy, 46 – 54 mourning, 60 – 66, 70, 73 – 77, 97, 108 – 11, 188 – 90, 196, 199 mutability, 64, 80, 82, 94 – 95. See also immutability mystery, 77, 81– 84, 159, 177, 186 myth, 158 – 60 Naas, Michael, 111n1 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 33, 126, 130, 142, 149 – 67, 208 narrative, 13 – 14, 44, 46, 49, 51, 53, 99, 106 natality, 4, 66, 110, 116 nature: estrangement from, 147– 49, 152 – 53, 172, 183; the generosity of, 190 – 92; mastery of, 3, 8 – 9, 29, 112, 141, 146, 149, 157, 172 – 73; as nasci, 186, 201; as teacher, 163, 166, 169, 174 – 78. See also birth negligence, 209 – 10 neoteny, 4 – 5, 154, 164 – 66, 175 Nicholas of Cusa, 4, 6, 159, 165, 174, 177 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 8, 14 – 23, 27– 32, 71, 81, 93, 107, 116, 155, 163, 171– 92, 196, 202, 210 Nightingale, Andrea, 71n10 nihilism, 14, 20, 22, 25, 93, 155; denial, 81, 147, 150; negation, 47, 61, 204; nothingness, 47, 49 Norris, Andrew, 28n43 Nouwen, Henri, 199 – 202 novelty, 164, 169. See also innovation ontotheology, 2, 4, 75, 80, 158, 162. See also metaphysics: of presence; theology openness: the capacity for, 40, 76, 107, 120, 156, 159, 170, 208; of love, 53, 90, 140, 175, 185; openended, 16, 22, 25, 153, 164; of temporality, 39, 43, 47, 50, 67, 110, 160, 163, 179 origin, 37, 109, 122, 135, 154 – 56, 160; originality, 170 otherness, 3, 10, 16 – 17, 83, 99, 143, 152. See also alien; alterity outermost, 32, 110, 113, 140, 143, 167– 68, 189. See also superior summo meo

228 Owen, David, 27n40 ownmost, 83, 85, 129 – 34, 137. See also authenticity parent, 67, 187– 203 passion, 22 – 29, 178; sympathy, 185 passivity, 87, 103 – 4, 123; receptivity, 103 pastness, 85. See also thrownness Pattison, George, 128 – 29 Paul, 6, 35, 90, 142n3 pedagogy, 26, 147, 200, 210 perfection, 39, 62, 72, 92, 110; perfectionism, 185 permanence, 60, 64, 70, 74, 79, 84, 89 – 92, 112, 174, 208 Perrin, Christophe, 33n50, 114n7, 117n13 perversion, 36, 81– 85. See also conversion; love, in Augustine: the misdirection of phusis, 185 – 86 Piazza, Valeria, 117n13 Pico della Mirandola, 4 place, 6, 26, 30 – 32, 36 – 37, 46, 56 – 59, 66, 76, 82 – 84, 92 – 93 possibility: Being-able, 187; of birth, 201; of Dasein’s Being, 43, 57, 132 – 33, 185; of death, 43 – 44, 90 – 91, 133, 144, 151– 52; of hope, 52; of love, 86, 90, 134, 137, 195, 206 – 7; of memory, 49; of progress, 22; of responsibility, 101; of self-forgetting, 76, 84; of sorrow, 44, 52; of thinking, 4; of world, 46, 49, 52, 54 potentiality, 83, 90, 133 – 34, 137, 175 Poulet, Georges, 178n35 poverty, 164, 179 – 80 praise, 32, 36, 57, 77– 82, 157. See also confession predilection, 186, 200. See also diligence pregnancy, 141, 194, 200 presence: of absence, 45, 140, 191, 193; -at-hand, 123; of the beloved, 31, 56 – 59, 138 – 39; of death, 43, 46, 53; of the future, 85, 89; of god, 37, 69, 165; of grief, 190, 199; of nature, 149, 166; of the present, 204 – 5; self-, 16, 89, 101, 103, 158 – 59; total, 154, 156, 159; of the world, 47– 48, 155. See also metaphysics: of presence privacy, 140, 168, 170, 178 – 80, 207. See also interiority procreation, 32, 71, 75, 81, 94. See also creation; pregnancy program, 5 – 6, 98 – 102, 107, 141, 160; automaticity, 145; method, 170, 174 progress, 9 – 15, 17, 22, 25, 106, 162 promise, 10, 46 – 55, 97, 108, 111, 138, 152, 175, 194, 202 providence, 3, 10, 15, 20, 50, 67– 68, 100 – 106, 173 publicity, 140, 168, 170; public opinion, 180 – 83. See also sociality; “they” purpose, 2, 10, 12, 32, 48, 113 rationality, 3, 10 – 14, 18, 28 – 29, 113, 141, 172 – 73, 209; rationalization, 12, 18

index readiness-to-hand, 43, 51, 83, 87– 88, 134 reason, 14, 112, 147, 149, 154 – 55, 160 – 63, 209 reawakening, 30, 33, 148, 159, 210 recollection, 46 – 47, 53 – 59, 67– 68, 101 religion, 8 – 9, 13 – 20, 28, 77, 158 – 63, 166, 179 – 80, 209 remembrance, 139, 192, 207– 8 repetition, 38, 103, 144, 147 replacement, 112, 141, 150 replication, 112, 144 representation, 19, 77, 101, 106, 112 – 13, 120, 158 – 63 reproduction, 141 resentment, 23, 155. See also disappointment; hate resignation, 24, 194. See also despair; disappointment; hopelessness resoluteness, 88, 134 – 36; anticipatory, 83, 85, 88, 90, 115, 128, 131, 134; ir-, 135. See also anticipation response, 32, 54, 66 – 69, 74, 79 – 80, 84, 95, 143 – 44, 172, 191, 202. See also call responsibility, 25 – 28, 87, 101– 6, 141, 181, 191 rest, 39, 68 – 72, 91– 94, 156. See also restlessness restlessness, 5, 39, 57, 76, 92, 124, 180. See also heart: cor inquietum; heart: the unsettled reticence, 26, 178, 207. See also secret retrospection, 1, 71, 143 Richardson, Robert D., 169n12 Roberts, Tyler, 154n11 routine, 27, 169, 178. See also habit saeculum, 11, 68 salutation, 156 – 57. See also salvation salvation, 9, 109, 155 – 62, 180; messianic, 8, 106. See also call; salutation Santner, Eric, 113n5 satisfaction, 20, 38, 67– 68, 110, 156, 158; dis-, 19, 183; satiety, 90, 161 Schmit, Pierre-Étienne, 117n13 scholar, 161, 175 – 77, 179, 186 Schrijvers, Joeri, 114n6 science, 9, 18 – 30, 99 – 102, 106, 141– 48, 160 – 66, 171– 73, 181 secret, 99, 103 – 7, 174, 178. See also impossibility: of sharing secularity, 7, 8, 18, 31, 163, 171, 173 – 74 secularization, 5 – 10, 13 – 18, 28, 153, 161– 64, 179 – 80 security: and certainty, 69 – 74, 79, 89; desire for, 38, 102, 155, 180; false sense of, 38, 83, 89, 127; of god, 63, 106, 128, 198, 210. See also assurance; certainty; insecurity; rest self, 32, 38, 40, 60, 66, 73 – 99, 105 – 7, 122, 127– 40, 148 – 54, 168, 174, 181– 86, 202 – 5 Serres, Michel, 5, 209 Sheehan, Thomas, 33n50 sin, 3, 38 – 39, 48, 66, 73, 77, 81– 82, 86, 97, 112, 142, 203. See also conversion; love, in Augustine:

229

index cupiditas; love, in Augustine: the misdirection of; perversion singularity, 33, 44, 66, 102 – 4, 125, 130, 134, 148, 179; of genius, 170, 180; isolation, 41, 115, 184; of one’s death, 33, 190 – 91; of one’s life, 44, 66, 104, 148, 179 – 80; of the other, 125, 130, 134; of responsibility, 102 Sloterdijk, Peter, 125, 128 sociality, 41, 48 – 49, 100, 117, 144 – 45, 164. See also community; publicity solicitude, 26, 124 – 28, 130 – 31, 135, 187. See also Being-with; love, in Heidegger solipsism, 43, 115, 131– 36, 168 solitude, 99, 109, 164, 179, 184 Sommer, Christian, 33n50, 145n4 Sorge, 76, 78, 90 sorrow, 31– 32, 37, 47, 52 – 54, 59 – 67, 93, 138, 188, 196 – 202 speech, 62, 69, 95, 157, 179 spirit: of the child, 166, 175, 188; in Hegel, 2, 3; of the hour, 170; of learning, 29, 188; of openness, 185 story, 14, 22, 44 – 48, 50 – 54, 68, 136 – 37, 161 Strong, Tracy, 27 student, 6, 8, 19 – 27, 115, 128, 164, 175 – 78, 187, 203 – 10 subject, 6, 8, 76, 80, 120, 123, 125, 147, 153 – 55, 161 substitution, 44, 100 – 101, 112, 134 suffering, 31– 32, 47, 61, 71, 75, 77, 81, 195, 199 superior summo meo, 32, 113, 121, 143, 168, 189, 208 surprise, 106, 141– 42, 157, 174 survival, 47, 53, 98, 109, 144, 151– 53 suspension: of familiarity, 30, 145; of temporality, 46, 48; of tradition, 144; of the world, 41– 42, 44, 47, 50, 52, 54

time: of anticipation, 59, 138; of conversion, 66, 73, 83 – 85; of dispersion, 73, 82 – 83; of experience, 3; fallen, 85; of learning, 27, 96; -lessness, 49 – 50, 74; of life, 27, 57, 96, 209; linear, 70; of longing, 66; of mourning, 66, 73; narrative, 46; of his syllables, 32, 95 – 97 tradition, 97, 103, 117, 144 – 45; the Augustinian, 32, 199, 208; authority, 97, 99; the Christian, 2, 10, 32, 112, 199; of circumcision, 99, 103, 104; the Heideggerian, 4; of learned ignorance, 161; the Mosaic, 171; religious, 161, 209; the Western, 2 tranquilization, 39, 83, 145 transcendence, 9 – 12, 108, 123, 135, 142 – 43, 149 – 55, 174 transience, 14 – 15, 20, 64, 67, 96, 112, 171, 180 – 81, 196 transmission, 50, 103, 117, 144, 186 trust, 57, 137, 178. See also faith Turner, Bryan S., 23n34

Taylor, Charles, 8 – 9, 11– 18, 155, 160 – 61 Taylor, Mark C., 5, 30n48, 111n1, 155 teacher, 19, 21– 27, 167, 175 – 76, 183 – 87, 203, 210. See also educator tears, 57– 61, 65, 70 – 71, 109, 184, 196, 200 – 201 technology, 8, 13, 28, 100, 141– 53, 157, 208 – 9 technoscience, 13, 141, 147– 49, 158, 173, 209 teleology, 2 – 3, 10, 20, 35, 97, 114 tempo, 13, 112, 209 temptation, 64 – 65, 69, 71, 76, 86 – 87 thanking, 167 theology, 2, 4, 26, 61, 75 – 80, 86, 100, 144; a-, 75, 155; mystical, 2, 4, 153, 177; negative, 4, 100. See also ontotheology “they,” 85, 135, 145, 169. See also conformity; falling; inauthenticity Thoreau, Henry David, 71, 147– 49, 167, 175, 192 thrownness, 160; facticity, 87. See also havingbeen; pastness

Weber, Max, 12 – 13, 15, 17– 29, 146, 178 – 79, 187 weight, 64, 73, 134, 141, 187, 191. See also burden will, 86, 105 – 6, 127– 29 Windham-Hughes, Colleen, 201n7 Wirzba, Norman, 114n8 Wolfson, Elliot R., 115n9, 156n12, 165n1 Wolterstorff, Nicholas, 198 – 99, 201 wonder, 172 – 73, 178, 181 work, 15 – 28. See also labor world: -building, 5 – 7, 164; -hood, 57, 88, 125; -loss, 30, 58. See also Being-in-the-world writing, 45, 98, 107– 9, 170 – 72, 191; book, 49, 96 – 97, 109; reading, 95 – 98

uncertainty, 71, 103, 179. See also certainty; insecurity unhappiness, 57, 70, 144. See also misery uniqueness, 70, 147, 149. See also singularity unknowing, 4 – 5, 16 – 17, 99 – 105, 149, 166, 172 – 74, 178, 210. See also apophasis value, 11, 20 – 29, 48, 52, 60, 162, 177 Van Buren, John, 33n50 Verweltlichung, 179 Viefhues-Bailer, Ludger, 167n6 vocation, 24, 27– 28. See also call; response Vor-liebe, 186. See also Liebe de Vries, Hent, 167n6

Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth, 115, 118 youth, 19 – 22, 29, 34, 166, 171, 175 – 79; youthful heart, 29, 180; youthful soul, 182