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The Sorrow of Being

Nicola Masciandaro

Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, Volume 19,

Number 1, Fall/Winter 2010, pp. 9-35 (Article)

Published by University of Nebraska Press

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/qui/summary/v019/19.1.masciandaro.html

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The Sorrow of Being

The root of all pure joy and sadness is that the world is as it is.

Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community

Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

We now know the location of this narrow passage through which

thought is able to exit from itself—it is through facticity, and through

facticity alone, that we are able to make our way towards the absolute.

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude:

An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency

Whan I saw His shewing continuid, I understod that it was showid

for a grete thyng that was for to come . . . But what this dede shuld

be, it was kept privy to me.

Julian of Norwich, The Shewings

The “Is-ness” or the Existence of Light is Darkness . . . That is,

Darkness is the body of the “Is-ness” of Light.

The Intelligence Notebooks

Such a lot the gods gave to me—to me.H. P. Lovecraft, “The Outsider”


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qui parle fall/winter 2010 vol.19, no.110

Double

Sorrow is double.1 The doubleness of sorrow is more than its mani-

festation, like everything else subject to duality, in alternate formsof good and bad, pleasurable and painful, healthy and unhealthy,

and so forth. Rather, it has to do with a deeper ambivalence within

the structure and experience of sorrow itself, such that the task

of defining sorrow seems inherently to demand distinguishing be-

tween opposite forms of sorrow. Sorrow is never simply good or

bad, but always good or bad in a way that involves the possibility

of its opposite. This doubleness is especially evident within the me-

dieval discourse on sorrow, which, rooted in St. Paul’s distinctionin 2 Corinthians 7:10 between tristitia secundum Deum (sorrow

according to God) and tristitia saeculi (worldly sorrow), both cel-

ebrates sorrow as a spiritual virtue and obsesses over its dangers to

a degree that modernity does not. Where modernity views sorrow

by and large as a problem to be fixed, even as premodern, and/or

the inverse, as its own general condition, medieval culture typi-

cally understood sorrow as a task to be faced, a work of mourning

to be taken up, and therefore also a labor under which one could

not only collapse, but fail.2 “Today these people would be treated

in hospitals. But Dante considered them sinners,” comments Cur-

tius on the sullen damned: “Fitti nel limo dicon: ‘Tristi fummo /

ne l’aere dolce che dal sol s’allegra, / portando dentro accidïoso

fummo’” (Inferno 7.121–23) (Fixed in the slime they say: “We

were sad in the sweet air which is gladdened from the sun, carrying

within ourselves the slothful fumes”).3

On the one hand, sorrow,in the form of contrition, is an absolute necessity. Only contrition

can crush (contritio, from conterere, to crush, grind) the hardness

of will that constitutes sin.4 On the other hand, excessive sorrow is

itself sinful and may lead to despair, a transition traditionally fig-

ured as being swallowed by sorrow.5 As these metaphors suggest,

sorrow’s ambivalent power is all about its blurring of the boundar-

ies between being and affect (the wordplay of Dante’s fummo), its

belonging to a mysterious dimension of extreme desire where howone feels and what one is intersect in the will’s utmost self-consti-

tuting and self-dissolving negativity.


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Masciandaro: The Sorrow of Being 11

This ambivalence is contained in an essential way within the me-

dieval definition of contrition as the greatest of sorrows on the ba-

sis of its relationship to the will’s final end.6 Contrition, as perfect

sorrow, is governed by the paradox of being a maximum intensitythat requires moderation, a kind of an emotional volume control

that must be turned all the way up without blowing the system.

This paradox could be resolved intellectually by distinguishing be-

tween the rational aspect of contrition, which has no proper limit,

and the sensible aspect of contrition, which does.7 Yet from an

experiential perspective, this distinction, which runs the risk of re-

ducing contrition to a kind of subjunctive act or deferrable pos-

sibility of itself, only accentuates the paradox in that it requiressorrow precisely as an unbounded disproportion between the in-

tention and the expression of sorrow, between its innermost reality

and its outer manifestation.8 How many tears are enough? How

many are too much? The impossibility of positive answers here, of

measuring intrinsically sorrow’s proper bounds, only points back

to the fact that sorrow is all about the unquantifiable, that it con-

cerns a dimension of experience that is fundamentally incommen-

surable with representation and expression—a fact that is played

out in the familiar rhetoric of tears, circling forever between the

one and the many, between the immeasurable significance of the

nearly insubstantial single tear and the never sufficient ad infinitum

of unstoppable, innumerable tears.9 One tear is already too much.

Many tears are never enough.

Definition

Sorrow seems universally related to the principle of evil or priva-

tion. This relation is expressed most absolutely in the variety of

ancient traditions for which the former derives from the latter, for

instance, in Genesis 3, where sorrow apparently enters the world

via sin, or in the Buddhist concept of dukkha, the fundamental dis-

ease, original to desire, through which the first of the Four Noble

Truths, all life is sorrowful , is true. More locally, sorrows of love,of loss, of pain, of disappointment, of conscience—all are barely

thinkable without reference to some problematic object, the nega-


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tive thing that one sorrows over. This referentiality is exemplified

in Augustine’s definition of sorrow as counter-volition or refusal:

“cum . . . dissentimus ab eo quod nolentibus accidit, talis volun-

tas tristitia est” (sorrow is the will’s disagreement with somethingthat happened against our will).10 And yet this definition, which

would give us what sorrow is, only does so by exposing its essen-

tial relationality, its being nothing other than a volitional intensity

of the negativity of difference. Emil Cioran, philosophical intimate

of sorrow extraordinaire, says: “We define only out of despair. We

must have a formula, we must even have many, if only to give jus-

tification to the mind and façade to the void.”11 So in Augustine’s

definition of sorrow we can peer into the problem of being revealedas a cross-section cut by definition as an act of sorrow. Note how

the definition, after all, throws me back into my own disagreeable-

ness, toward the irresolution of my acceptance or refusal of my

own will, into the problem of my being. This problem (being’s be-

ing a problem for itself) concerns above all the split between quid-

dity and haecceity, the what and the that , as the irresolvable terms

through which being both appears and remains inconceivable in

itself or as a whole. Heidegger explains:

The distinction does not happen to us arbitrarily or from time

to time, but fundamentally and constantly. . . . For precisely in

order to experience what and how beings in each case are in

themselves as the beings that they are, we must—although not

conceptually—already understand something like the what-be-

ing [Was-sein] and the that-being [Dass-sein] of beings. . . . We

never ever experience anything about being subsequently or af-

ter the event from beings; rather beings—wherever and however

we approach them—already stand in the light of being . In the

metaphysical sense, therefore, the distinction stands at the com-

mencement of Dasein itself. . . . Man, therefore, always has the

possibility of asking: What is that? and: Is it at all or is it not?

(FC, 357)

Sorrow and definition trace contrary movements across this fun-damental distinction. They toss, with symmetrical trajectories, the

same coin of this always possible double-sided question. Where


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definition gives the what of a that (the bird is a robin), sorrow ex-

periences the that of a what (the robin is dead). Accordingly, defi-

nition entails a kind of sorrow, elicits a refusal of something that

happens against our will, namely, of the substance of the definitionthat, however proper, we disagree with as not providing the thing

defined. That definitions are habitually critiqued as empty is from

this perspective simply the actualization of the voidal aura that

surrounds all definition. “All these philosophical explanations,”

writes Meher Baba, “are creations of the mind that has never suc-

ceeded in passing beyond itself.”12 Similarly, sorrow is definitional,

a feeling constituting a statement about the nature of a thing that

provokes, often through the impulse to console, contrary defini-tions and/or new perceptions of the indefinable. “Kaspar Hauser:

Well, it seems to me . . . that my coming into this world . . . was

a terribly hard fall! Professor Daumer: But Kaspar! That . . . No,

that’s not . . . How should I explain it to you?”13 Or, I weep over

my imprisonment, but a woman with burning eyes, more penetrat-

ing than those of ordinary men, appears in my cell and convinces

me I have wandered, indeed driven myself from my homeland.14

Let us stray, then, into the place where sorrow and definition

perfectly meet, purely intersect. This place would be at once an

absolutely sorrowful definition and an absolutely definitional sor-

row, the site of a definition of sorrow so sorrowful that it provides

the one who understands it with a sorrow defining his or her very

being, a sorrow, in other words, that coincides with one’s under-

standing of its definition so purely as to constitute self-understand-

ing. In light of the what/that distinction, this definition can onlybe fulfilled by a sorrow that is simultaneously a kind of empty or

contentless or undetermined sorrow, a sorrow over a pure that ,

and a sorrow over an absolute what , a something so unmistakably

unfortunate, so plenitudinously negative, that it cannot be coun-

termanded from any outside or external perspective, by no god or

emperor. Only thus will we arrive at the intersection of a most sor-

rowful definition and a most definitional sorrow, the definition of a

sorrow our sorrow for which gives us the sorrow it defines as ourown being : in short, a sorrow as inconceivable as it is inconsolable,

a sorrow of being.


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In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant explains that properly

philosophical work concludes with definition, produces it as its

end, rather than beginning from definition in the manner of math-

ematics. The reason: “philosophical definitions are brought aboutonly as expositions of given concepts, but mathematical definitions

as constructions of concepts made originally. . . . mathematical

definitions themselves make the concept, whereas philosophical

definitions only explicate it.”15 I want, contrarily, a definition of

sorrow from which philosophy can properly and poetically begin,

a definition of sorrow that makes its concept and produces phi-

losophy by means of its explication. Not a definition of sorrow for

the sake of an ultimate understanding or study of sorrow’s nature,but a sorrow for the sake of the ultimate definition of our own. A

mathematical definition of sorrow that is philosophically poetic,

as it were.

Into the Void

Is there a form of sorrow that remains or emerges when all pos-

sible objects of sorrow are taken away, when there is nothing left,

or ever was, to sorrow over? In the context of the tradition of

philosophical thought experiments known as the “flying man” or

“man in the void,” in which the reality of a rational essence is logi-

cally demonstrated by imagining the self-awareness of a human be-

ing created in empty space, this would imply that the flying man

might weep—something the thought experimenters are not con-

cerned with, that is, how this floating being feels about being. ForAvicenna, as Daniel Heller-Roazen explains in The Inner Touch:

Archaeology of a Sensation, the speculative experience of being in

a void produces the certain perception of one’s own existence as

something independent of any corporeal determination or content.

Incapable of feeling anything other than “the existence of his own

being,” the man in a void is a being who cannot avoid the reality

of his spiritual essence, the knowledge of himself in the mode of a

soul.16 What does it feel like to be soul, to be purely oneself, aloneprior to all aloneness, without any other content or relation than

the fact of one’s own being? To acknowledge a sorrow of being in


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this context is to allow that the flying man’s self-awareness would

primordially include, or only be possible through, a negation or

refusal of his own existence, that he would only know his being

by not being it in some fashion. Floating safely beyond all sensa-tion and specific experience, the voidal creature would yet be the

subject of a certain dis-ease. And in the strongest sense, for lacking

consciousness of any object outside of himself, he would necessar-

ily himself be this negativity.

In the comparable context of Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, the re-

ality of such sorrow would require a fundamental counter-support

or flying buttress for this philosophical phrase, a kind of gothic

supplement: ego sum ergo doleo, I am therefore I sorrow. Not anextension or second-order deduction from the fact that I think, but

an equally essential component of consciousness or being’s being

before itself, as if the two phrases were inscribed in one ambivalent

string around the boundary of every entity. In fact this makes per-

fect and plenty of sense if we remember the deeply negative context

of Descartes’ realization of rational self-certainty, if we do not di-

vorce it from his own articulated experience:

And finally, considering the fact that all the same thoughts we

have when we are awake can also come to us when we are asleep,

without any of them being true, I resolved to pretend that all the

things that had ever entered my mind were no more true than

the illusions of my dreams. But immediately afterwards I noticed

that, while I wanted thus to think that everything was false, it

necessarily had to be the case that I, who was thinking this, was

something. And noticing this truth—I think, therefore I am—

was so firm and so assured that all the most extravagant sup-

positions of the skeptics were incapable of shaking it, I judged

that I could accept it without scruple as the first principle of the

philosophy I was seeking.17

Being part and parcel of a will to know that is grounded in the neg-

ativity of existence, the cogito is here realized only through the ne-

gation of all experience. The self-certifying procedure is the prod-uct of a fundamental disorientation, the thesis of a being happening

against its will. The problem is how this against , this relation to


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something exterior or otherwise, is present inside being from the

beginning. Thinking Descartes’ cogito as expressing rather than

dispelling this problem brings its affiliation with its Augustinian

precedent (si fallor, sum) into relief. Jean-Luc Marion writes,

Saint Augustine does not use the certainty of Being that thought

assures in order to set up the mind as a ground, but to convince it

that it bears the traces of a prior image, the sole ground, one that

is intimately other than it. Certainty refers the mind to a distant

ground, far from setting it up as a principle subsisting in itself.18

In these terms the cogito is possible only through the presence of

an absence, an essential negativity or darkness that, precisely by

being constituted by nothing in particular, hangs over everything.

From this more essentially aporetic and open perspective, ac-

cording to which one exists only on the grounds of a vertiginous

exposure, where one actually is the question of oneself (Augustine’s

quaestio mihi factus sum), the “man in the void” experiment works,

not merely as an inductive mechanism, but as a truly speculative re-

ality, a total image in the mirror of intellect of what it means to be.That is, by placing my being in a void I arrive at the perception that

I really am, in both senses at once, namely, that I do in fact exist and

that I exist in a void. The image actualizes the sense in which an en-

tity is essentially something suspended, something whose being only

happens through immersion in a strange dark space. This in fact is

the definitional perception with which Heller-Roazen’s study of the

flying man experiment through its more body-centric post-medieval

permutations concludes. Here we arrive, via Maine de Biran’s em-bodied “feeling of existence” (“le sentiment de l’existence”), similar

to what Jean-Luc Nancy calls “the cave-body . . . the space of the

body seeing itself from within,” at our modern animate being as

reincarnation of Avicenna’s flying man:19

this unlimited expanse is the element of all sensitive existence. It

is the invisible air that every animal always breathes, and on ac-

count of which even the most terrestrial of creatures may alwaysfind itself, within itself, much like the medieval man: suddenly

suspended in an unknown and impenetrable space. (IT , 236)


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Might this inner sense already be, or be something becoming,

a form of sorrow? It turns out that de Biran’s discovery of this

sense was intimately bound to what Michel Henry identifies as his

“conscious[ness] of his own life as one of a malevolent fate.”20 Of this de Biran writes: “The power of fate, which is one of our

most powerful dramatic motives, is perhaps only the expression

of the fact of the intimate sense which manifests at the very foun-

dation of our being a sort of organic necessity opposed to moral

freedom.”21 And as Merleau-Ponty explains, the movement of de

Biran’s thought from the concrete to the reflective, “from the For

Us to the In Itself,” is a movement into a spiritual substance known

through the essential negativity of the fact of being: “This belief inthe noumenal self represents . . . the excess of our existence over

what we know of it, the fact that we are given to ourselves, and

that we did not create ourselves ex nihilo. The noumenal self is

certain, precisely because it is unknowable.”22 Following so much

contemplation of this intimate sense of being, de Biran’s last work,

Nouveaux essais d’anthropologie (1823–24), becomes mystical,

taking aim at “L’absorption en Dieu, la perte du sentiment du moi”

(absorption in God, loss of the feeling of self ).

Do we have other words for what happens to a being that feels

as far as possible the fact of its being, that does not only consid-

er, but actually finds in the real space of its substance, or as this

substance itself, the fact of its existence? Somehow, somewhere,

such an entity has realized the identity of what and that , touched

where they touch. For Bataille, such impossible touching, or touch-

ing of the impossible, is ecstasy: “THE OBJECT OF ECSTASYIS THE ABSENCE OF AN OUTSIDE ANSWER. THE INEX-

PLICABLE PRESENCE OF MAN IS THE ANSWER THE WILL

GIVES ITSELF, SUSPENDED IN THE VOID OF UNKNOWABLE

NIGHT.”23 That is: “Being is dying by loving.”24

Being in a Cloud

The idea of a sorrow of being, a sorrow at once over and belong-ing to being itself, seems both obvious and absurd. Existence both

absolutely is and totally is not the ultimate “something that hap-


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pened against our will.” This is interesting. It involves me deeply,

implicates me in something I do not know, that I am able to sense

in one stroke the inevitability and the impossibility of such a sor-

row. What does it signify that we do? What is entailed or followedin the exercise of this faculty that sinks so lightly, with no mass at

all, within the inescapable gravity of such profound refusal? A pure

sorrow, a perfect sorrow, a sorrow whose meaning is infinite?

The definition of sorrow I desire, the one that works, is not

found in a void, but in a cloud. Nor is a cloud not a void of its

own. Or that is exactly what a cloud is, a void of one’s own. A

cloud is what we are already being in by imagining the man in a

void. The man in a void himself, itself, that utopic self-aware thing,is not in anything at all, not in place, which Aristotle beautifully

named the “innermost boundary of what contains” (Physics 212a).

He is rather precisely the being from whom this boundary, like the

subtlest skin, is peeled away to the point of never having been, not

by any hand, but by his total unending dip in nothingness. And not

even peeled away, which is still to think from the outside, but born

into a situation he does not touch. And not even born, which is still

to think the event of being as a form of emplacement. Void is what

one can never get into, whether by universal subtraction from the

outside or ontological air-drop from the inside, because the mo-

ment one is in it it is no longer void, but something substantial,

a darkness, a cloud. Void is like the ungraspable principle of the

Heraclitean river into which one cannot step twice, an empty thing

evoked and elided in every touch, the merest imagination of which

already shapes into “the face of the deep” (Genesis 1:2), or “givesto airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.”25

Here we chance upon another channel to deep tears: the sense

that things never really touch. This sense exceeds, but also fulfills,

the problem of touch’s radically poetic subjectivity, the truth of the

mistake of Pygmalion’s caress, which confounds the softness of his

own flesh for the statue’s, for hers: “He didn’t know whether she

was alive or dead. Softly he took her in his hands; he thought that

she was like putty, that the flesh gave way under his touch, butit was only his hand which pressed her.”26 The sense that things

never really touch, or its twin, that things only excessively and su-


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perficially and constantly touch, goes into the deeper impossibility

of two bodies being in the same place, to the unrealizable essence

of gravity, or love. So Averroes’s commentary on Aristotle’s defini-

tion of place as a “non-portable vessel” (Physics 212a) suggests anoriginary relation to eros: “place is that towards which something

moves or in which something rests. If something were to move

toward a term which is itself in movement, the thing would be

moving in vain.”27 The strong feeling of such vain movement is a

form of sorrow, the sorrow of flux, of beings passing each other

and themselves by, incapable of stopping. NoMeansNo has a good

song about this named “The River” on the album Why Do They

Call Me Mr. Happy? (Alternative Tentacles, 1993):

When I speak the words I repeat

Are lost within this roaring

And when I call your eyes turn to me

But what are they exploring?

. . .

Mothers tell your children the truth

Don’t hide the fate that’s waiting

When you’re born you start to drown

There’s no help, no safety

First a gift of love is given

Then the winds rise, the sails are riven

On the river.

These are Cratylean beings who fail, in the very medium of sharedpresence, to touch or talk. Cratylus is the radical fluxist who, as

Aristotle explains in the Metaphysics, “finally did not think it right

to say anything but only moved his finger, and criticized Heraclitus

for saying that it is impossible to step twice in into the same river;

for he thought one could not do it even once” (1010a). Heraclitus’s

antique epithet, “the weeping philosopher,” is built upon the Pla-

tonic dialogue in which Socrates, conversing with a still-speaking

Cratylus, criticizes his teacher’s flux doctrine by comparing its fol-lowers to people with catarrh, a condition whose symptoms are a

flowing nose and weepy eyes. “Thus Heraclitus, his theory, and fol-


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lowers,” explains Ava Chitwood, “are all humorously dismissed,

likened to men crying.”28 The joke brings to a barb Socrates’ broad

dismissal of philosophers who subject the world to their own dis-

orientations, those “who, in their search after the nature of things,are always getting dizzy from constantly going around and around,

and they imagine that the world is going round and round and

moving in all directions” (Cratylus 411b). The critique also works

to police the boundary of the reality of tears and the world seen

through them, to define a veil/vale on the other side of which sit

pathetic dissolving creatures, some once talented philosophers,

who now only point at the world and cry. As if to say: it cannot be

that tears well up perpetually and de profundis (Psalm 129:1); ifthey appear to, that can be cured. The same is now argued about

St. Francis’s unstoppable weeping.

We might distinguish, then, between a being that would grasp

itself before the clarity of void, be certain of itself, and know its

bearings before nothing, and a different kind of being who sees

that void is another kind of cloud, maybe even an especially dan-

gerous kind, because it demands fidelity as an absolute term of un-

reality, poses as not a cloud, with nothing to hide, being nothing.More suspicious than God are the not-Gods that definitions of God

set up. The distinction runs parallel to that charted in Agamben’s

essay “Bartleby, or On Contingency” between the theologians for

whom the nothing out of which the world is created operates as a

limit on divine potentiality and the mystics for whom “the obscure

matter that creation presupposes is nothing other than divine po-

tentiality.” For the former, the nothing, as the implacable place of

origin of all that is non-eternal, works like a negative guarantorfor God as a regular operator of being, ensuring that his own will

and being are absolutely without potentiality (i.e., God is bound

by his own will and being). For the latter, the nothing is the pure

potentiality out of which God creates the world and himself, or the

illusion that sustains Reality. Where the former sense of nothing

functions within an observational frame of knowing, the latter is

bound to the experiential sphere. “Only when we succeed in sink-

ing into this Tartarus and experiencing our own impotentiality,”

Agamben writes, “do we become capable of creating, truly becom-

ing poets.”29


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The history of the flying man thought experiment might be

traced across this distinction as an increasingly haptic recogni-

tion of the void as cloud, as a movement into the substantial and

dark space of potentiality within which the event of self and worldtakes place, the impossibly actual site where being itself is put to

the proof. The voidal experiment points, on the one hand, toward

ever more complex forms of theoretical clarity, more and more

detailed mappings of the spaces of being, and on the other hand

toward more concrete realizations of radical unknowing, of fac-

ing the deep and being in a cloud. That is where Maine de Biran,

after his books, finds himself , pointing to an absent point: “Time

carries away all my opinions, engulfs them in a perpetual flux. . . .And now, here I am, already well on in years, but still uncertain

and vacillating in the way of truth. Is there a point of support,

and where is it?”30 The moment of apophatic indication brings us

to a threshold where the experiment of thought restores itself to

experience, the laboratory re-becomes life, and more specifically,

where the subtractive procedures of rationalist discourse (defini-

tion of terms, isolation of subject, theoremic demonstration, etc.)

bottom out in a total situation of unknowing. Now we are close to

the twilight Cioran embraces in Tears and Saints:

The only interesting philosophers are the ones who have stopped

thinking and have begun to search for happiness. . . . They are

more comforting than religions because they free us from au-

thority. . . . The twilight philosophers—so full of shadows that

they no longer believe anything—embrace you like a sea cradling

your drowned body.31

And if this marine embrace feels akin to sorrow’s self-cradling, its

ways, evidenced in so many gestures of incommensurability (e.g.,

head in hands), of touching across the boundary of what we are and

are not, then we are close to the strange feeling I am following.

That One IsThe forty-fourth chapter of The Cloud of Unknowing describes

the final, deconstructive act of the work of contemplation, wherein


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evaporates in the heat of its own gaze or literally exhausts itself

in self-mourning. The wholly sorrowing being, having being itself,

its own being, as the exclusive and pure object of sorrow, appears

as nothing other than sorrow. Is this ontologically out-of-bounds?Surely the sorrowing self remains as subject and witness to its own

sorrowful self-experience, just as the ravished self, joyfully blind

to its own being, still touches itself, if only by feeling what takes it

beyond itself, remains as that most unique and privileged witness

to its own self-blinding?

It is intellectually more responsible to say, following the pat-

tern of Heidegger’s understanding of the unconcealment (aletheia)

of being as truth’s event in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” that

the sorrow that one is unveils or presences the being of the sor-

rower by concealing it.33 The negativity that one is is something

one passes away into only to become, paradoxically, more present.

The relevance of Heidegger’s unconcealment of being increases in

the context of the Cloud ’s consistent understanding of contempla-

tion as work, the work that is the original and ultimate task of hu-

man being: “For this is the werk . . . in the whiche man schuld havecontynowed yif he never had synned, and to the whiche worching

man was maad, and alle thing for man, to help him and forther

him therto, and by the whiche a man schal be reparailed agein”

(4.340–43). The work of contemplation is not only a practice but a

making, a contemplative production, in the ancient sense of techne

and poiesis as a bringing into presence.34 The work that refashions

the human to its original divine likeness is the work of pro-ducing

God, of causing the appearance of the divine. What passes away

into this work, what withdraws into concealment in the presence it

makes, is the individuated being of the worker, who is, so to speak,

the material out of which God is produced. As a relation between

creature and creator, a working for which the human is made, or

which is the proper work of human being itself,35 the work of con-

templation thus appears as the production (or presencing) of the

unmade via the destruction (or concealment) of the made, as if thecreature, subtracting from itself the fact of its own createdness,

its ex nihilic that , is restored to an originary co-presence with the


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creator. What makes this self-restoration possible is precisely an

identity or intersection between being and work, between the being

of the contemplative worker as divine work and the work of con-

templation that works on that being. Here being works, does whatit is worked to do, so that its working is itself its self-restoration, or

even self-creation, in the sense of a making of itself as it is created,

as it primordially is. But a being works this restoration or return

exactly through a forgetting or concealment of its own createdness,

the dark concealment that reveals whatever being is, being as such,

that is, as neither possible nor impossible, wholly beyond the fact

that anything is happening at all. Here being works, not to unbe,

but to be without its being worked, to undo the being-with-itselfthat is its gnawing actuality.36

The Cloud ’s perfect sorrow thus offers the prospect, at once sim-

ple and impossible, of a non-dualistic real experience in which the

distinction between subject and object is undone, where something

like the place of the original identity of I and me, the one who sor-

rows and the one who is sorrowed over, is found and found to be

the place of God. In terms of the text’s sources, this moment corre-

sponds to the description in Pseudo-Dionysius’s Mystical Theology

of the contemplative finding of that here, typified by Moses’ ascent

of Sinai, where, “being neither oneself nor someone else, one is su-

premely united by a completely unknowing inactivity of all knowl-

edge, and knows beyond the mind by knowing nothing.”37 And

this moment can thus also be understood as an ultimate escape or

breakout from the prison of individuated being, following Levinas,

who writes:

escape is the need to get out of oneself, that is, to break that

most radical and unalterably binding of chains, the fact that the I

[moi] is oneself [soi-même]. . . . It is being itself or the “one-self”

from which escape flees, and in no wise being’s limitation. In es-

cape the I flees itself, not in opposition to the infinity of what it is

not or of what it will not become, but rather due to the very fact

that it is or that it becomes.

38

So we are returned, like failed escapists, to the power of that as a

deixis of being, something that points not to a thing but to a thing’s


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existence, its esse. What finger points to being? What eyes see it?

How does being point to itself? And why does it cry?

The Point

The most beautiful thing about the Cloud ’s definition of sorrow,

the part that catches my eye, is that it gives itself as an object of

sorrow. It is a definition one sorrows over, sorrows toward, a defi-

nition of sorrow that sorrow recognizes: “And whoso felid never

this sorow, he may make sorow, for whi he felid yit never parfite

sorow.” A singular perfect sorrow is named, standing above all

others, but standing so wholly open that to perceive it is alreadyto participate. This element of the definition is what Roland Bar-

thes calls the punctum, a term designating a prick or puncture, as

on a page, but also deeply associated with sorrow, for example,

com-punction, prick of conscience, and so forth: “it is this element

which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and

pierces me.”39 This is the tiny opening of the space of response, the

piercing nothing wherein the text calls me to sorrow that I am and

sorrow over my lacking this sorrow, where it gives its significance

as its reader’s missing of it, and thus paradoxically presents itself,

even its very textuality, as most inviting object of mourning. Not a

mourning of something lost, but a mourning excessively available,

the too close to see. On the one hand, the sorrow that one is is

perfectly obvious and accessible, an existential negativity so basic

it only needs pointing to, requires only the elementary distinction

between what and that . On the other hand, the very availability ofthis sorrow, our being prepared (and so unready) for it by simply

being, presents us with the spectacle of our own blindness to it,

points to a fact seemingly impossible to face.

The meaning of the Cloud ’s sorrow has everything to do with

the irreducible tension between these two dimensions of it, the in-

tersection between its inevitability and its impossibility. This ten-

sion is inherent not only to the nature of the sorrow being indi-

cated but also to the essentially negative nature of indication itselfas the form of signification through which language to the utmost

degree both means beyond itself and means itself:


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[T]he significance of the This is, in reality, a Not-this that it con-

tains; that is, an essential negativity. . . . The problem of be-

ing—the supreme metaphysical problem—emerges from the very

beginning as inseparable from the problem of the significanceof the demonstrative pronoun, and for this reason it is always

already connected with the field of indication . . . Deixis, or in-

dication . . . is the category within which language refers to its

own taking place.40

The autodeixis or self-pointing through which one sorrows that

one is is coincident with the self-pointing of the language of the

sorrower. Sorrowing that one is is not only sorrowing over some-thing that may be signified in language, but sorrowing at the liv-

ing intersection of language’s and being’s taking place, in the that

that constitutes language as the very means and content of being’s

experiential having of itself, which is precisely what sorrow, as a

taking of that to its ontological limit, here works to erase. Deixis

is this intersection, in the sense of being an instance of language

as wholly constituted by what is outside of it, in other words, lan-

guage emptied of any intrinsic what and therefore signifying mostfully and purely its own event, its being/coming-to-be. In these

terms, sorrowing that one is is also sorrowing over the very fac-

ulty whereby one does sorrow that one is, or rather such sorrow is

itself the intensification in consciousness of this faculty, the strong

feeling of the foundational self-disagreement within individuated

being that language in every instance enacts, the non-originable I

am of the being who occurs without its will. In a correlative fash-

ion Agamben defines metaphysics as “that experience of language

that . . . in all speech, experiences above all the ‘marvel’ that lan-

guage exists” (LD, 25). Here and elsewhere, the text of the Cloud

revolves around the wonderful/terrifying encounter with actuality

that language does not merely allow but in a fundamental way al-

ways is, above all within those elemental spaces of language, what

the Cloud calls the “lityl schort preier of o litil silable” (37.1386),

where words are endlessly, heartbreakingly close to being what

they say. In the space of the word, there is no longer any question

of which reader you are, the one who feels this sorrow or the one

who does not. Here it is impossible not to be . . . both.


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Postscript

In the final scene of After the Fox (1966), starring Peter Sellers,

criminal mastermind Aldo Vanucci, aka The Fox, escapes prisondisguised as a doctor, also played by Peter Sellers, whom he leaves

tied up in his cell. A crucial element of Vanucci’s disguise is a fake

beard. After clearing the prison gates, he tries to remove it, but it

will not come off. He, whoever he now is, exclaims, “My God, the

wrong man has escaped!”

Notes

1. These opening remarks duplicate some of my comments on the am-

bivalence of sorrow in “Eros as Cosmic Sorrow: Locating the Limits

of Difference in Julian of Norwich’s Divine Shewings and The Cloud

of Unknowing ,” Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures (forthcom-

ing 2010). The concept of a “double sorrow” is traceable through

Chaucer’s “double sorwe of Troilus” (Troilus and Criseyde, line 1,

The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson [Boston: Houghton Mif-

flin, 1987]), Dante’s “doppia trestizia di Giocasta” (The Divine Com-edy, ed. Charles S. Singleton [Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1973], Purgatorio 22.56), and Augustine’s description of his grief for

his mother’s death: “I was very much ashamed that these human emo-

tions could have such power over me . . . and I felt a new grief at my

grief and so was afflicted with a twofold sorrow [duplici tristitia]”

(Augustine, Confessions, 2nd ed., trans. F. J. Sheed [Indianapolis:

Hackett, 2006], 9.12). This suggests that the trope of double sorrow

(cf. “for a twofold grief possessed them, and a groaning of the mem-

ory of what had occurred,” Wisdom 11:12) is grounded in the way

sorrow is factically folded by its own refusal, i.e., the way sorrowing

is always also sorrowing that one sorrows. This is analogous to what

Heidegger discovers in boredom: “we may not make boredom into an

object of contemplation as some state that arises on its own, but must

consider it in the way that we move within it, i.e. the way that we seek

to drive it away” (Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of

Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and

Nicholas Walker [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995], 91;hereafter cited as FC).

2. The proverbial causelessness of modern melancholia—“Sorrow . . .


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without any evident cause” (Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy,

ed. Holbrook Jackson [New York: New York Review Books, 2001],

389)—is the perfect index of this difference, causelessness being the

reverse of instrumentality. “In modern thought every effort is madeto overcome melancholy by ‘rationalization’. That is, by finding its

cause and defining its lost reality, an attempt is made to assimilate

it to the otherwise endlessly interlinked field of representations. But

the reverse, in fact, has taken place. . . . For modern society, indeed,

melancholy alone has ‘depth’, and it is its ‘presence’ which lends ex-

pression to the profound unease within, if not disease of, existence”

(Harvie Ferguson, Melancholy and the Critique of Modernity: Søren

Kierkegaard’s Religious Psychology [New York: Routledge, 1995],

xiv). The medieval definition of sorrow that this essay will become

concerned with, by contrast, provides a specific, determined, and

wholly functional sense for existential sorrow.

3. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages,

trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper & Row, 1953), 596.

4. “Contrition implies the crushing of something hard and whole. Now

this wholeness and hardness is found in the evil of fault, since the will,

which is the cause thereof in the evil-doer, sticks to its own ground,

and refuses to yield to the precept of the law, wherefore displeasure ata suchlike evil is called metaphorically contrition” (Thomas Aquinas,

Summa theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province

[New York: Bezinger Brothers, 1947], Supplement, Q.2, Art.1). Cf.

OE thrǣstednes. Hereafter cited as ST .

5. As Aquinas explains, “those who are sorrowful fall the more eas-

ily into despair, according to 2 Cor. ii.7: Lest . . . such an one be

swallowed up [absorbeatur] by overmuch sorrow” (ST , Pt.2-2, Q.20,

Art.4). Cf. “Now cometh wanhope, that is despeir of the mercy ofGod, that comth somtyme of to muche outrageous sorwe” (Geoffrey

Chaucer, Parson’s Tale X.692). The intersection between excessive

sorrow and despair is exemplified by Judas, in whom, as a limit case

for the ever-present opportunity to repent, the proportion between

the severity of sin and the degree of sorrow over it is maximized to

the point where the sense of proportion between them becomes lost.

In Aquinas’s commentary on Judas’s despair, this loss of proportion

is figured as Judas’s reception of extra sorrow provided by the Devil:

“Origen: ‘But when the Devil leaves any one, he watches his time

for return, and having taken it, he leads him into a second sin, and

then watches for opportunity for a third deceit. So the man who had


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married his father’s wife afterwards repented him of this sin, [1 Cor

5:1] but again the Devil resolved so to augment this very sorrow of

repentance, that his sorrow being made too abundant might swallow

up the sorrower.’ Something like this took place in Judas, who afterhis repentance did not preserve his own heart, but received that more

abundant sorrow supplied to him by the Devil, who sought to swal-

low him up, as it follows, ‘And he went out, and hanged himself.’

But had he desired and looked for place and time for repentance, he

would perhaps have found Him who has said, ‘I have no pleasure in

the death of the wicked’ [Ezek 33:11]” (Thomas Aquinas, Catena Au-

rea: Gospel of Matthew, trans. William Whiston [London: J.G.F. and

J. Rivington, 1842], Matt. 27:1–5).

6. “According to Augustine (De civ. Dei, xiv. 7, 9), all sorrow is based

on love. Now the love of charity, on which the sorrow of contrition

is based, is the greatest love. Therefore the sorrow of contrition is

the greatest sorrow. . . . there is a twofold sorrow in contrition: one

is in the will, and is the very essence of contrition, being nothing else

than displeasure at past sin, and this sorrow, in contrition, surpasses

all other sorrows. . . . The other sorrow is in the sensitive part, and is

caused by the former sorrow” (ST , Supplement, Q.3, Art.1).

7. “Contrition, as regards sorrow in the reason, i.e. the displeasurewhereby sin is displeasing through being an offense against God, can-

not be too great; even as neither can the love of charity be too great,

for when this is increased the aforesaid displeasure is increased also.

But, as regards the sensible sorrow, contrition may be too great, even

as outward affliction of the body may be too great. In all these things

the rule should be the safeguarding of the subject, and of that gen-

eral well-being which suffices for the fulfillment of one’s duties” (ST ,

Supplement, A.3, Art.2).8. On this paradox, Margery Kempe’s “boistous sobbying” is instruc-

tive. Not only can it not be kept in, but “the more that sche wolde

labowryn to kepe it in er to put it awey, mech the more schulde sche

cryen and the mor lowder” (The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Lynn

Stanley [Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 1996], ch. 28,

lines 1611–12; hereafter cited as MK). In effect, Margery’s handling

of her sorrow (which includes but also exceeds sorrow over sin) both

fulfills and destroys (like the new law to the old) the authority of the

contrition doctrine. Adherence to the principle of measure in expres-

sion of sorrow breaks the principle. Hence the reception of Margery’s

sobbing as “slander” by some persons: “ower mercyful Lord vysytyd


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this creature wyth plentyuows teerys of contricyon day be day, in so

mech that sum men seyden sche mygth wepen whan sche wold and

slawndered the werk of God” (prologue, lines 31–34). Furthermore,

Margery’s volume points to an important aspect of sorrow, namely,that its intensity is not only a relation between the will and what dis-

pleases it but also a relation between that displeasure and its expres-

sion, an expression that experiences and an experience that expresses.

In other words, there is a phenomenal place in sorrow where pain and

the expression of pain coincide, where the holding-on of the will to

its missing or violated object meets the holding-in of the voice of that

will. Hence the “otherness” of sorrow’s voice, on which see Jeffrey

Jerome Cohen, “The Becoming-Liquid of Margery Kempe,” chapter

5 of Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis: University of Minne-

sota Press, 2003), 154–87.

9. For example, in Dante’s Commedia, Buonconte di Montefeltro is

saved, as a devil complains, for “una lagrimetta” (one little tear) (Pur-

gatorio 5.107). The power of the single tear was a motif frequently

employed by medieval preachers. As Giordano da Pisa put it, “Or

vedi grande cosa! Or ti vo’ mostrare la virtù de penitenzia come passa

tutte le virtudi dei tutte le cose di questo mondo, che non si potrebbe

dire: non dico mare, no, ma una sola lagrima di dolore del peccato,che venga di buon cuore, sola una, vedi vertù c’hae?” (Now see a

great thing! Now I want to demonstrate to you how the power of re-

pentance surpasses all the forces of worldly things: not a sea, no, but a

single tear of grief for sin, that comes from a good heart, only one, do

you see the power that it has?) (Quaresimale fiorentino, 1305 – 1306,

ed. Carlo Delcorno [Florence: Sansoni, 1974], 80). Of the endlessness

of tears, St. Francis provides a good example: “Truly, even though

he had attained purity of heart and body, and in some manner wasapproaching the height of sanctification, he did not cease to cleanse

the eyes of his soul with a continuous flood of tears. He longed for

the sheer brilliance of the heavenly light and disregarded the loss of

his bodily eyes” (Bonaventure, The Minor Legend of Saint Francis,

3.3 , Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, ed. Regis J. Armstrong, J. A.

Wayne Hellmann, and William J. Short, 3 vols. [New York: New City

Press, 2000], 2:695). In these terms the unquantifiability of tears be-

longs to their being a inverse relation between inner and outer sight.

Cf. “Than had sche so meche swetnes and devocyon that sche myth

not beryn it, but cryid, wept, and sobbyd ful boitowsly. Sche had

many an holy thowt of owr Lordys passyon and behld hym in hir gos-


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tly syght as verily as he had ben aforn hir in hir bodily syght” (MK,

ch. 78). Derrida explains this inverse relation as an unveling of eye

itself: “Now if tears come to the eyes, if they well up in them, and if

they can also veil sight, perhaps they reveal, in the very course of thisexperience, in the coursing of water, an essence of the eye, of man’s

eye, in any case, the eye understood in the anthropo-theological space

of the sacred allegory. Deep down, deep down inside, the eye would

be destined to weep. For at the very moment they veil sight, tears

would unveil what is proper to the eye” (Jacques Derrida, Memoirs

of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne

Brault and Michael Naas [Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1993], 126).

10. De civitate Dei, ed. Bernard Dombart and Alphonse Kalb, 5th ed.

(Stuttgart: Teubner, 1981), 14.6.

11. E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay, trans. Richard Howard

(New York: Arcade, 1975), 48.

12. Meher Baba, Beams (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), 7.

13. Werner Herzog, dir. 1974. The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser.

14. “Haec dum mecum tacitus ipse reputarem querimoniamque lacrima-

bilem stili officio signarem, adstitisse mihi supra uerticem uisa est

mulier reuerendi admodum uultus, oculis ardentibus et ultra com-munem hominum ualentiam perspicacibus . . . ‘Sed tu quam procul a

patria non quidem pulsus es sed aberrasti; ac si te pulsum existimari

mauis, te potius ipse pepulisti’” (Boethius, Consolation of Philoso-

phy, [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973], I.1–5)

15. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar

(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), 681.

16. See Daniel Heller-Roazen, “Of Flying Creatures,” chapter 21 of The

Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation (New York: Zone: 2007),hereafter cited as IT ; and Richard Sorabji, “Infallibility of Self-Knowl-

edge: Cogito and Flying Man,” chapter 12 of Self: Ancient and Mod-

ern Insights about Individuality, Life, and Death (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 2006).

17. René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Phi-

losophy, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 18.

18. Jean-Luc Marion, On Descartes’s Metaphysical Prism: The Constitu-

tion and the Limits of Onto-theo-logy in Cartesian Thought , trans.

Jeffrey L. Kosky (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 132.

19. Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. Richard A. Rand (New York: Ford-

ham, 2008), 67.


25/28


26/28


ness. The clearing in which beings stand is in itself at the same time

concealment” (Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,”

in Poetry, Language, Thought , trans. Albert Hofstadter [New York:

Harper & Row, 1971], 53).34. Agamben explains: “τέχνη meant for the Greeks ‘to cause to appear,’

and ποίησις meant ‘pro-duction into presence’; but this production

was not understood in connection with agere, doing, but with γνϖσις,

knowing. Conceived in a Greek fashion, pro-duc-tion (ποίησις τέχνη)

and praxis are not the same thing. . . . In other words, the way the

Greeks thought of production and the work of art was the inverse

of the way in which aesthetics has accustomed us to think of them:

ποίησις is not an end in itself and does not contain its own limit,

because it does not bring itself into presence in the work, as acting

(πράξις) brings itself into presence in the act (πρακτόν); the work of art

is not the result of a doing, not the actus of an agere, but something

substantially other (έτερον) than the principle that has pro-duced it

into presence” (The Man Without Content , trans. Georgia Albert

[Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999], 73).

35. In the Book of Privy Counselling , the ability to experience the actual-

ity of one’s being, that one is, is an excellence of rationality, but not an

absolute distinction of the human vis-à-vis animals. Reason thus ap-pears as a perfection of a more general, rather than a unique, kind of

consciousness. And this goes to ensure the universal availability of this

work: “For I holde him to lewyd and to boistous that kan not thenk

and fele that himself is, not what himself is bot that hymself is. For

this is pleynli proprid to the lewdist kow or to the moste unresonable

beest (yif it might be seide, as it may not, that one were lewder or more

unresonable then another) for to fele the owne propre beyng. Moche

more than it is proprid to man, the whiche is singulerly endowid whithreson aboven alle other beestes, for to thenk and for to fele his owne

propre beyng” (English Mystics of the Middle Ages, ed. Barry Wind-

eatt [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994], 80).

36. This struggle against actuality from within it may also be traced

from the concept of work itself, as the German word for actuality,

Wirklichheit , would suggest. Actuality, which takes the intellectual

form of the fact that something is and the perceptual form of the pres-

ence of something (such that it can be indicated, deictically, as that ),

coincides with work in the sense that to work is to make something

actual, both work’s material, which working must engage with as

it is, and work’s product, which working realizes or makes present


27/28


through its material. Whence factum (something made) becomes the

word for something recognized as true or real. Wirklichkeit (actual-

ity) is similarly rooted in work and is accordingly used by Heidegger

to explicate the scholastic concept of existence as a concept of beinggrounded in enactment: “Being is actualitas. Something exists if it is

actu, ergo, on the basis of an agere, a Wirken, a working, operating

or effecting (energein). Existence (existere) in this broadest sense . . .

means Gewirktheit , enactedness, effectedness, or again, the Wirklich-

keit , actuality, that lies in enactedness (actualitas, energeia, entelech-

eia)” (Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology,

trans. Albert Hofstadter [Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

1988], 87). Caputo explains, “As a translation of the Latin existentia,

Wirklichkeit refers to the fact ‘that’ a thing is. This in turn is distin-

guished from ‘what’ a thing is, which is a mere ‘possibility’” (John D.

Caputo, Heidegger and Aquinas: An Essay Overcoming Metaphysics

[New York: Fordham University Press, 1982], 83). Put simply, be-

ing, as existence, is labor, work, action, prior to but also necessarily

through any and all specific forms of labor, work, and action that

existence involves. The distinctions Hannah Arendt draws between

these categories in The Human Condition may be appropriate to the

phenomenal, symbolic, and social differences between them, but todivide them ontologically, with regard to their being, does violence to

the actuality of human existence. Against such divisions, which serve

to uphold and exploit the alienation of labor from life, should be set

Bruno Gullì’s demonstration that “‘labor’ is to political and social

ontology (or poetic metaphysics) what ‘being’ is to pure ontology,”

which arrives at an understanding of a foundational relation between

work and actuality from within the concept of labor (Labor of Fire:

The Ontology of Labor between Economy and Culture [Philadelphia:Temple University Press, 2005], 1). For Gullì, labor is essentially “liv-

ing labor,” something that has life as “the most essential constituent

of its ‘what,’ of it substance,” which means that “labor is real labor

in the same way in which, in Scotus’s metaphysics, the concept of be-

ing is real being and not a logical universal” (2). In this real universal

sense, as “a production that spans the range of human activity from

economy to culture: a poetic praxis, a practical poiesis,” labor is the

actuality that makes doing being and being doing, or as Gullì says,

“labor is being as sensuous human activity” (11). This understanding

of labor points back to the place where work is known not as some-

thing added to being but as an unfolding of being’s actuality. Work is


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not merely something beings do because they have or want to. Work

is the playing out in intentional action, the enactment, of the hav-

ing or wanting of itself which is the very structure of being as actual

existence, in short, an enactment of actuality. Explicating a similarrelation between work and being, Levinas derives labor from embodi-

ment as dwelling, as the having of body that is consciousness: “Labor

comes from a being that is a thing among things and in contact with

things, but, within this contact, coming from its being at home with

itself. Consciousness does not fall into a body—is not incarnated; it is

a disincarnation—or, more exactly, a postponing of the corporeity of

the body. This is not produced in the ether of abstract but as all the

concreteness of dwelling and labor” (Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and

Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis [Pittsburgh:

Duquesne University Press, 1969], 165–66). So the negativity of labor

should be situated not merely in labor’s affects, nor in its social struc-

tures, but in the situation of being’s having of itself as an imposition,

as the burden of having to be, of not being at home with itself, the

situation of being as originless exile and self-refusal. Derrida passes

through a similar point: “Mourning always follows a trauma. . . . the

work of mourning is not one kind of work among others. It is work

itself, work in general, the trait by means of which one ought perhapsto reconsider the very concept of production—in what links it to trau-

ma, to mourning, to the idealizing iterability of exappropriation, thus

to the spectral spiritualization that is at work in any tekhnē ” (Jacques

Derrida, Specters of Marx: the State of Debt, the Work of Mourning,

and the New International , trans. Peggy Kamuf [New York: Rout-

ledge, 1994], 97).

37. Mystical Theology, 1.3, my emphasis, cited from Pseudo-Dionysius,

The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem (NewYork: Paulist Press, 1987), 137.

38. Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stan-

ford University Press, 2003), 55.

39. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans.

Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wand, 1982), 126.

40. Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity,

trans. K. E. Pinkhaus and M. Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Min-

nesota Press, 1991), 14–25. Hereafter cited as LD.